Generating Successful Solutions with Design Thinking

Generating successful solutions with Design Thinking depends on balancing three tests at once, namely whether people want the solution, whether the business can sustain it and whether the company can build it. A process that respects all three, from discovering the problem to testing a prototype, turns ideas into products customers adopt.

A product committee reviews a proposal that everyone in the room likes. The concept is elegant, the engineers say it can be built and the presentation promises a launch in six months. Then the chief financial officer asks a question nobody has answered: who exactly will pay for this, and how much? The meeting ends with a vote to "refine the business case", which is how many promising ideas begin to die. Behind that moment lies a common pattern. Companies invest heavily in generating ideas and very little in discovering which of them deserve to survive. Design Thinking is a methodology, and a way of thinking, that guides teams to create creative and innovative solutions, products and services while keeping that survival question in view from the first day.

Today's market is dynamic and competitive, and it is common to hear about strategies to strengthen companies, from improving the quality of goods and services to reducing operating costs, exploring blue oceans or even using neuromarketing to catch the attention of consumers. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to take a step back and ask different questions. What do we need to stand out? How can we generate a new idea? And what makes an idea successful instead of letting it die in the attempt? This article is a guide to how Design Thinking answers those questions and what a leadership team should do to make it work.

What is Design Thinking and what is it for?

IDEO, the design consultancy that did the most to popularize the approach, quotes its chief executive Tim Brown in defining it as "a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can turn into customer value and market opportunity." That sentence already contains the whole logic of the approach. (See the Design Thinking Defined resource for more.)

In essence, then, it is a process centered on understanding the end user in order to design a unique, customized solution that meets that person's wants and needs. A wide variety of tools and techniques supports each stage, helping designers discover important information and use it to make the solution successful. The approach was conceived for complex situations, which means it can be applied to the simplest and the most difficult problems alike. It was developed initially to design new products, but today it is used to design services, processes, business models, value propositions, systems, customer experience and organizational cultures, and to approach educational, food and health challenges. IDEO describes design as an integrated process able to reshape products, services, processes and strategy, not a layer of polish on a decision already made (IDEO Design Thinking resources).

The financial case is easier to appreciate than many executives expect. Forrester's Total Economic Impact study of IBM's Enterprise Design Thinking practice, commissioned by IBM, reports that design and alignment time fell by 75 percent and development and testing time by 33 percent for a composite organization, which is what one would predict if flawed ideas are discarded before they absorb engineering effort (Forrester Total Economic Impact of IBM's Design Thinking). Because the study was commissioned by the vendor and rests on a model, it indicates direction rather than a guarantee. The direction, though, is consistent with the logic of the method.

What are the stages of Design Thinking?

Like any process, Design Thinking is composed of activities developed to meet a specific objective. The methodology divides into two phases, the discovery of a problem and the design of a solution, and each contains its own activities. The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process article from the Interaction Design Foundation offers a complementary description.

Discovering the problem

The first phase has two activities. The first is empathy generation, in which the team identifies the stakeholders affected by the solution and tries to put itself in their shoes in order to understand their pains, desires and needs. Interviews, observation, focus groups, buyer personas and customer journey maps are the usual instruments. The second is problem definition. Here the team organizes, filters and analyzes what it found in order to identify the problems that offer an opportunity for a unique and innovative solution, using tools such as empathy maps, Ishikawa diagrams and impact and effort matrices.

Imagine a hotel group whose occupancy is stable while the loyalty program stagnates. The commercial team could spend a quarter designing a richer points scheme. A discovery phase would instead follow guests through the stay, from the booking to the check-out, and might find that frequent travelers value a predictable late checkout and a room ready on arrival more than any points. The problem is now defined as a lack of reliability in the moments guests care about, and the solution space has changed entirely.

Designing the solution

The second phase has three activities. Ideation concentrates on generating ideas that answer the defined problem, with brainstorming as the tool par excellence. It does not matter whether an idea is complicated or simple, because the objective is to put creativity to work and obtain as many options as possible. Prototyping selects some of those ideas and builds a tangible version of them, such as a mock-up, a storyboard or a minimum viable product, so that interested parties can respond and the design can be improved. Testing validates the solution by taking the prototype to stakeholders and focusing on what their feedback teaches. This can become an iterative process, since the solution is refined until the team can say it has reached the one it was looking for.

How do you make Design Thinking work in an organization?

Every Design Thinking project goes through the stages above, but several conditions determine whether the process moves forward. The first is materials. A creative design process needs physical or virtual materials to visualize and communicate ideas, from cardboard, paper, sticky notes and colored pencils to cameras or, in the virtual mode that became common, digital whiteboards such as Mural where many of the same tools can be used remotely.

The second is the working team. It should be multidisciplinary and as diverse as possible, with people of different backgrounds and training whose points of view complement and strengthen one another. It also needs an expert to lead the project, someone who guides the process and helps it flow. The third is the space. In person, a spacious room with tables or boards that invite creative thinking is preferable, while in a virtual setting video conferencing tools with breakout rooms allow the team to split into subgroups and encourage every participant to take part.

The fourth condition is the hardest for senior leaders, because it concerns attitude. A designer's attitude means opening the mind to curiosity and observation. It is why Design Thinking is described as a way of thinking as much as a method: it promotes empathy to care about and engage with others, it encourages collaboration, the transformation of ideas and the integration of feedback, and it asks participants to trust the process. Good ideas do not flourish in an environment where criticism arrives first, so keeping a positive mindset is part of the work. For a broader argument about why this approach succeeds, the Harvard Business Review article Why Design Thinking Works is worth reading.

What is the key to a successful Design Thinking solution?

It is useless to have an excellent process, the necessary resources, the perfect team, an inspiring space and a designer's mentality if the three pillars that make a solution achievable are not clear. The sweet spot lies where the three overlap, and failing to meet one of them can lead to failure or to a solution that cannot be reached.

Human desirability means designing something people really want or need, something that generates value for them, relieves a pain and helps them solve a problem. Business viability means building a sustainable model in which people are willing to pay, with enough impact that the model can start, grow and survive on its own. Technical feasibility means the solution can actually be built with the resources available, since proposing something the company cannot achieve makes no sense.

The discipline lies in testing the three together instead of in sequence. Many organizations validate desirability with a customer survey, then ask finance to build a business case, and finally ask engineering whether the idea is possible. By then the idea has a sponsor, a budget request and an audience, and each new objection is experienced as an attack. Design Thinking compresses the sequence. A simple prototype is shown to customers in the same week in which a finance analyst estimates unit economics and an engineer identifies the hardest technical assumption. The conversation changes from defending an idea to learning which of its parts is weakest.

Consider how the three tests play out in a regional insurer that wants to launch a mobile app for claims. Desirability is easy to confirm, because customers say they would like to report a claim from their phone. Viability is less obvious, since the app only pays for itself if it reduces calls and shortens settlement time rather than adding a channel to maintain. Feasibility depends on whether the claims system can expose its status in real time. A prototype shown to a dozen policyholders, a spreadsheet of call-center costs and a two-day technical review would have answered the three questions in a month. Without them, the company would have discovered the missing integration after paying for the interface.

The method also has costs that deserve to be named. Testing three dimensions early slows the excitement of the first weeks, and a sponsor who has already promised a date to the board may resist it. Some ideas will be stopped that a bolder leader might have pushed through successfully, and the company will never know. The trade is deliberate. The organization accepts a small number of false negatives in exchange for fewer expensive failures, and a leadership team should decide consciously whether that exchange suits its industry and its appetite for risk.

What does this mean for the C-level?

The chief executive's role is to protect the conditions under which the three tests are applied honestly. That means asking for evidence of desirability before approving a launch, refusing to let an enthusiastic sponsor skip the viability question, and rewarding teams that retire a weak idea early. A company that celebrates only launches will teach its people to hide doubts, and doubts are precisely the information the process needs.

For commercial and customer experience leaders, the sweet spot is a practical tool for choosing where to invest in order to convert, retain and serve. A new service feature that customers love but nobody will pay for is a cost, and a profitable feature nobody wants is a churn risk. For the chief financial officer, the approach turns product development into a sequence of inexpensive bets with explicit assumptions about willingness to pay, cost to serve and payback, so capital is released as evidence accumulates. For operations and technology leaders, early involvement in prototyping reduces the cost of discovering late that a promising concept does not fit existing systems or processes.

There is a decision here that only the executive team can make: who has the authority to stop a project. In many companies, stopping an initiative is treated as a personal defeat for its sponsor, so projects continue long after the evidence has turned against them. If the three tests are to mean anything, the governance of the company must make it normal, and even admirable, to close an idea early and redeploy the people and the budget. That norm is set by the way executives react the first time a team brings them a negative result.

How can a leadership team start next week?

Choose one initiative already on the roadmap, preferably one that has been approved on enthusiasm more than on evidence. Gather a small team that includes someone from commercial, finance, operations and customer service, and name a facilitator who is not the project's sponsor. Ask the team to write the three questions the initiative must answer, one for desirability, one for viability and one for feasibility, and to identify the riskiest assumption behind each.

Then design the cheapest experiment that could disprove each assumption. It may be five customer conversations, a landing page that measures interest before anything is built, a spreadsheet that models the margin under conservative pricing, or a technical spike of two days. Schedule the review within three weeks and decide in advance what result would cause the team to change course. When the review arrives, resist the urge to explain the results away. If the idea survives the three tests, it has earned the budget it is asking for. If it does not, the company has saved a great deal of money and learned something it can use on the next idea.

Return, finally, to the product committee and its unanswered question about who will pay. Three months after adopting the practice, the same committee reviews a proposal that arrives with five customer conversations, a margin model under conservative pricing and a note from engineering identifying the hardest technical assumption. The chief financial officer asks her question and finds the answer already on the page, along with the doubts the team itself raised. The proposal may still be rejected, but it is rejected in an afternoon and with evidence, rather than dying slowly in a vote to refine the business case.

All this leaves one idea worth keeping. Design Thinking is used more and more in business because it was developed on empathy, sensitivity and collaboration, and because it helps generate a competitive advantage through products that differ from the rest. It does not help a company design to solve a single need. It invites the organization to create real value, so that people who seek a solution to a problem also find something unique that leaves them with a good memory of the business.

Read more: Art and science in Design Thinking

How ICX helps

ICX Consulting, headquartered in Miami, helps companies apply Design Thinking to commercial strategy and customer experience, and ties each concept to a business case that finance can evaluate. Our work often combines it with service design and customer journey maps. To test the viability pillar with your own team, begin with our value proposition toolkit and the business model canvas toolkit.

Frequently asked questions

How is Design Thinking different from traditional product development?

Traditional development tends to specify a solution first and validate it late. Design Thinking reverses the order, studying the people and the problem first and validating cheap prototypes early, so that the costly commitments of engineering and marketing come after the evidence.

Do we need a specialist to run a session?

A specialist is strongly recommended for the first projects. A trained facilitator keeps the divergent and convergent phases separate, ensures that every voice is heard and prevents the most senior person from steering the group toward a preferred answer.

What makes a prototype good enough?

A prototype is good enough when it lets a user react to the idea in a realistic way and lets the team learn something decisive. A sketch, a script or a clickable mock-up often suffices. Polishing it further usually delays the learning it exists to produce.

What if desirability, viability and feasibility conflict?

Conflict is the signal the process is designed to reveal. The team can change the concept, serve a narrower segment, adjust the price or revisit the technology, and it should test the revised version again. If no combination satisfies all three, stopping early is a legitimate and valuable outcome.

The ideas that reach the market and thrive are the ones that were questioned hardest before anyone built them. If your next big initiative deserves that scrutiny, get expert advice from ICX and we will help you test it against all three pillars before you commit your budget.