helping business managers discover their appetite for design thinking

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K E Y N OT E

Jeanne Liedtka, Professor of Management, Darden Graduate School of Business, University of Virginia

Tim Ogilvie, CEO, Peer Insight

Hungry for organic growth? These authors have devised a simple set of tools to help practicing managers taste early success.

7© 2012 The Design Management Institute

innovation and growth. Yet much of the dialogue around design thinking seems mired in theory, polemics, and arguments about nomenclature. Is it possible to de-mystify design think-ing for managers as Julia Child did French cuisine for amateur chefs? We believe it is—by offering a simple process and tool-based approach to make design thinking more accessible to them.

Our audience for this project is

it did nothing to diminish Ameri-cans’ interest in, and appreciation for, fine French restaurants—actually, it enhanced it.

The same kind of unfulfilled appetite exists today among business-people hungry for new approaches to help them deal with their increas-ingly complex challenges. We believe that what Mastering the Art of French Cooking did for French cuisine, design thinking can do for managers seeking

In 1961, a book with the inauspi-cious title Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published. Rejected by its initial publishing house for being “too much like an encyclopedia,” the 734-page work by then-unknown Julia Child became an unexpected bestseller. With its detailed illustra-tions and attention to detail, the book made fine cuisine accessible to Ameri-can households with an appetite for new culinary horizons. In doing so,

Helping Business Managers Discover Their Appetite for Design Thinking by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie

Design Collaboration

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of new ideas. What wows? helps managers to prioritize possibilities and then prototype the most attrac-tive ones. What works? translates ideas into action in the form of small marketplace bets.

All designers will recognize these questions. Although each set of ex-perts uses different labels to describe them, they are the core questions em-bedded in a design thinking approach.

What is?

Since the goal of innovation is to envision and implement an improved future state, it is always tempting to jump right to it—the future, that is. Indeed, many businesspeople believe that innovation starts with brain-

nizes that these managers are flying blind without access to the richness of what design brings.

To that end, based on our many collaborations and conversations with designers, we have created a simple linear model of a design-thinking process, accompanied by a set of design tools we believe will benefit managers. It is easily conveyed in the form of four questions and ten tools.

Four questions

What is? argues that all successful innovation begins with an accurate assessment of the current reality. It’s a data-based, exploratory ques-tion. What if?, on the other hand, is focused on the creative generation

operating managers, not designers (who don’t need this). We do not in-tend to challenge designers’ expertise, any more than Julia Child intended to put three-star Michelin chefs out of business. Instead, we simply wish to borrow some of the tools designers use to develop a deeper understand-ing of their customers’ needs, and use those tools to help managers create better value for their customers. In our experience, managers who are not in R&D or marketing or working for Apple or P&G—places in which real designers are part of the every-day landscape—do not have access to design-thinking skills. Writing a design-thinking cookbook for them doesn’t replace designers—it recog-

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1Visualization

What is? What if? What wows? What works?

Helping Business M anagers Discover Their Appetite for Design Think ing

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chain analysis, and mind-mapping.

1. Visualization uses imagery to envision possibilities and bring them to life. This skill can be challenging for business people coming from text- and number-intensive environments. We suggest they start by posting

pictures or drawings on the wall, sketching out what a customer using their product or app might look like, and thinking about the stories they want to tell.

2. Journey-mapping, as noted ear-lier, assesses the existing experi-ence through the customer’s eyes, noting the steps a customer has to take when using the technol-ogy or service being replaced or improved. It pays particular attention to the emotional highs and lows accompanying these steps. These are the blind spots often overlooked during an ana-lytical and data-driven decision-making process.

3. Value-chain analysis reviews the current value chain that supports

There is a lot packed into the What is? phase. This is where the framing takes place and, in fact, where many innovation projects are won or lost. We ask managers to think of the frame as if it were the foundation of a house. Every elegant flourish on the upper floors depends on it. Our approach is to have managers frame

What is? using the metaphor of a customer journey, and to formally map it (drawing upon their familiarity with process maps). This is how we instill the discipline of user-centered design, and it is crucial for getting managers outside their narrow organizational view and into the minds and hearts of real customers.

Tools for What is?

What is? starts with the creation of a design brief (a tool familiar to every designer, but a revelation to most business managers) and ends with the identification of design criteria. In between, there are four important design-thinking tools we believe will be of significant value to managers: visualization, journey-mapping, value-

storming; some even think it ends there! But the innovation process, designers know, starts squarely with the here and now.

This is often difficult for busy, hard-pressed managers to accept. Businesspeople tend to be intensely solution-driven and want to jump to answers very early in the process of

looking for new ideas. Unfortunately, those top-of-mind solutions are often based on their own preconceived notions about what customers want or about what competitors are doing. Innovative ideas that provide the best opportunity for differentiation and superior profitability, however, are generated from insights about the current reality—without those insights, the imagination has little to work with. What ideas would a band of managers come up with, unin-formed by the kind of research and insight that comes out of this first phase of examining current reality? We can’t know for sure, but we sus-pect they would be the kind of ideas that have given brainstorming a bad name in management circles.

Innovative ideas that provide the best opportunity for differentiation and superior profitability, however, are generated from insights about current reality—without those insights, the imagination has little to work with.


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the customer’s journey. How does a solution engage value-chain partners to deliver the value a customer will pay real money for? Good design thinking doesn’t ignore business realities; rather, it factors them into a more creative process.

4. Mind-mapping generates insights from exploration activities and uses them to create design criteria. Drawing a diagram to record your thinking and the analysis you have been doing sets the framework for a design and helps to create visual order from visual chaos.

When these tools are used successful-ly, they point the way toward a set of design criteria. These feed the imagi-nation for the next stage: What if?

What if?

Having thoroughly explored and documented What is?, we can look toward the future and ask, What if? If this sounds a bit like brainstorm-ing, you are right. The What if? stage is inherently creative and generative, but it must go well beyond simplis-tic expressions of new possibilities (the kind of output a brainstorming session might produce) and arrive at robust concepts that can be evalu-ated, prototyped, and (if promising enough) developed. While the topic

of brainstorming alone is the subject of many books, it is notorious among managers as a waste of time. Manag-ers need to view brainstorming as merely a stepping-stone on the way to developing concepts.

The What if? stage happens when designers take creative leaps forward, while most businesspeople step back in dread. But there is good news for people who see themselves as more architect than artist. This process depends more on structured protocols than on pure leaps of imagi-nation. As Larry Keeley of Doblin advised us, “Creating new concepts depends a lot more on discipline than on creativity. You take the 10 most creative people you can find any-where. Give me a squad of 10 marines and the right protocols, and I promise we’ll out-innovate you.”

One of the disciplines Keeley and his squad of marines know is the discipline of stepping away from traditional critical reasoning, which breaks down ideas and finds the flaws in them instead of building them up into something new. Managers are trained in this kind of thinking throughout their business lives—it is often their strongest professional habit. As an executive once told us, “We are much better at poking holes than we are at filling them.” Part of asking What if? involves putting

those hole-poking skills on hold and exploring a wide range of possibilities. Successful design thinkers use clever mental tools and tricks to get out of the habit of breaking things down.

Tools for What if?

The What if? stage includes brain-storming and concept development tools. It ends with another project management aid, the napkin pitch. The napkin pitch is as simple as it sounds—it uses a single piece of paper to summarize the main attri-butes of any concept in order to begin working on them. Brainstorming (and its trendier synonym, ideation) causes many business people to recoil, but we share Larry Keeley’s confidence that the results depend more on disciplined execution than on blue-sky creativity. The key is to approach brainstorming the right way and couple it with concept development to translate ideas into concrete, fully developed concepts.

5. Brainstorming generates new possibilities and new alternative business models. It avoids work-ing in a vacuum by bouncing ideas off a small group of trusted friends or co-workers—letting insights generate more insights.

6. Concept development assembles innovative elements into a coher-


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ent alternative solution that can be explored and evaluated. How does the puzzle fit together? Can you take it apart and put it together differently in a way that adds more value?

What wows?

Through the exploration of What is?, managers have learned a great deal about the lives of the people they hope to serve. Through brainstorming and concept development in What if? they have homed in on some concepts they believe have real potential to cre-

ate value for their intended customers while meeting organizational objec-tives. Now they must make some hard choices, identifying the best concepts—those that wow—in order to guide further investment decisions. To do this, they need a clear-eyed view of the key assumptions that must hold true for the concepts to succeed and a plan for testing them—either using data they’ve already got, or going out and getting new data from customers.

Typically, the “wow zone” for a business concept occurs at the intersection of three criteria: custom-

ers have to want it, the firm has to be able to produce and deliver it, and doing so has to allow the organiza-tion to achieve its business objectives. To determine what wows, business people must learn to test the future in the present—a tricky business. But consider that we do this all the time. When we test-drive a new car, when we hold a suit in front of ourselves and look in a mirror, and when we write a preliminary agenda for a meeting, we are testing future pos-sibilities without leaving the present.

Unearthing key assumptions

and then subjecting them to tests is the emphasis in the What wows? stage. The process first tests these assumptions, to the extent possible, in thought experiments. After exhaust-ing this approach, the remaining critical assumptions must be tested through physical experiments, con-ducted in the marketplace, in which actual customers interact with a prototype of a new offering.

A thought experiment, like a physical experiment, starts out with a clearly stated hypothesis and uses data to determine whether it is likely true or not. Unlike a physical experiment,

however, which involves moving into the marketplace and acting, a thought experiment uses logic and existing data in a mental process that involves only thinking. And so thought experi-ments look more like the analytics we normally do in business.

Physical experiments, on the other hand, necessitate finding an ef-ficient means to express the new con-cepts to others so that they can help us in the assumption-testing process. Because thought experiments (which use existing data) are usually more economical to conduct than physical

ones (which involve going out and getting new data), we try to do as much assumption testing as possible using thought experiments.

Of course, hypotheses about the future can never be tested directly until we move into the marketplace. Without doing that, the only place to look for evidence is the past. Yet under conditions of uncertainty, data from the past often do not have much predictive power. That is the problem with the traditional business approach—using analytical data from the past to try to predict the success of any new idea.

To determine what wows, business people must learn to test the future in the present—a tricky business. But consider that we do this all the time.


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final stage What works? It represents this key difference between invention and innovation. Invention means to do something in a novel way; innova-tion requires that the invention create economic value. Invention doesn’t produce revenue growth or profit growth—only innovation does that.

It is too expensive to keep all options open and try everything. Yet developing just one “best” concept (the usual managerial practice) risks leaving a lot of money on the table if the customer is not interested in that masterpiece. It is common practice for teams to envision multiple concepts and then choose a single one to move into market testing. The methods of choice always have an air of analytical rigor about them—usually involv-ing decision matrices or dot-voting schemes—but these approaches are fraught with biases. They open the door for team members to express their fears and risk aversion, and what emerges is often the lowest common denominator concept, the safe bet that has little chance of igniting a customer’s passions. There is only one person capable of getting teams out of this spot intelligently—the customer.

In the same spirit in which we observed potential customers as they navigated the world of What is?, we now ask customers to take a walk with us into several possible

just as easily occur as part of What wows? or even What if?) interact in an iterative dance as managers create and refine their concepts.

7. Assumption testing isolates and tests the key assumptions that will drive the success or failure of a concept. What are the must-have components of a new value proposition? (In other words, what are the elements that must work in order to succeed?) Then determine which data are needed to test those design elements and figure out where to get it.

8. Rapid prototyping expresses a new concept in a tangible form for exploration, testing, and re-finement. It insists that we build it or sell it to see how the idea really works in the marketplace, and make adjustments on the fly.

What works?

Figuring out how to move promis-ing new concepts forward in the least expensive way isn’t always straight-forward. The preceding stage, What wows?, checked the most crucial underlying assumptions and ex-pressed the concept in a prototype. But there is another, steeper challenge just ahead where the exciting high-potential concept intersects with the marketplace. We call this fourth and

Tools for What wows?

The two tools in this section begin to transform napkin-pitch concepts into actual marketable offerings, and both of them, we find, are surpris-ingly difficult for managers to master. Assumption testing identifies and begins to test, using thought experi-ments, key assumptions upon which a concept’s success hinges. This is chal-lenging because, although business is intensely data-driven, managers are taught to extrapolate the historical data they have rather than to figure out what data they need and where to find it. Prototyping works to express a proposed concept in the most ef-ficient form for further exploration, testing, and refinement. It can be similarly challenging. For designers, the role of prototyping is obvious. But ask a businessperson to prototype something that isn’t a product and you will likely get a blank stare.

The overarching goal of What wows? is to teach managers how to express new concepts in ways that showcase the elements that are strong while iterating to improve the weaker ones. Of course, the life of a growth project is far less linear than the lineup of our tools suggests. Espe-cially in this stage, assumption testing, prototyping, and even customer co-creation (which we’ve placed in the next stage, What works?, but could


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ence that many managers need this kind of clear, straightforward struc-ture and easily understood tools to give them the confidence to enter the often ambiguous and seemingly risky world of design thinking. This is not because they are less intelligent than designers. They are smart in a different way. But their educations, experiences, and current toolkits too often prepare them only for a predict-able and unambiguous world.

Businesspeople who apply a design-thinking approach will not cease to need or value designers any more than Americans who read Mastering the Art of French Cooking stopped patronizing French restau-rants or thought less of French chefs. The tools described here are intended to make the design-thinking process accessible in the many “business kitchens” where design thinking is unknown and real design expertise is not readily available. And when man-agers meet initial success, as we have seen them do using these tools, they will have discovered their appetite for design. n Reprint #12231LIE06

with unfinished rough prototypes to collaborate on a solution that re-ally meets their needs. During the learning launch, managers take an improved prototype into the market for an extended experiment, designed to test the remaining key assumptions that stand between their solution and full commercial development.

9. Customer co-creation enrolls customers to participate in creat-ing the solution that best meets their needs. This involves asking and listening. What do custom-ers feel and think about the con-cept? What do they think would make it even more valuable?

10. Learning launches create af-fordable experiments that let customers experience the new solution over an extended period of time and test key assump-tions with market data. We find that drawing managers’ attention specifically to what disconfirming data would look like is critical to success here.

Not French chefs, just good cooks

And so we conclude our tour of a simple process and a step-wise set of tools for applying it. More than one designer has called our approach oversimplified and artificially linear. But we have learned through experi-

futures—and engage them in co-cre-ating a solution. This means putting prototypes in their hands and refining them on the basis of their input until a version that is ready for proof-of-concept testing in the marketplace can be devised. This step of the journey provides enough information to make solid data-based investment decisions.

Managers tend to find What works? to be closer to their natu-ral comfort zone than a lot of the design-y work, such as brainstorming and prototyping. In many ways, they equate What works? with running a pilot. But that isn’t the case. They are not piloting a line extension for an existing product (that is, exploit-ing known certainties); rather, they are co-creating a new offering with customers (exploring unknown pos-sibilities). This first contact between a new concept and the market is still a design work in process. And we remind managers that they may yet decide that none of the new offerings they have envisioned are feasible—they must retain our design thinking mind-set regardless.

Tools for What works?

Now we arrive at the final tools in the manager’s simple design-thinking tool kit. Customer co-creation involves meeting with a few potential cus-tomers, one at a time, and playing

helping business managers discover their appetite for design thinking

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