We've been talking about strategy formulation.
And specifically, I've been describing several different approaches
that an organization can take to strategy formulation.
So we started by talking about sort of the typical formal strategic
planning exercise that can be part of an annual budgeting cycle, for example.
And then we started to talk about some alternatives to that,
that might prompt some better strategic thinking.
So we talked about the strategic War Room, we talked Rapid Prototyping.
And so now, I want to talk about a few others.
So, let's talk about design thinking.
So what is design thinking?
Design thinking is as you might guess,
it's an approach that takes a different starting point to
bring a different perspective to the strategy formulation process.
And in thinking differently about strategy,
it attempts to do something very specific.
Instead of approaching strategy formulation from sort of a scientific
standpoint, for example, trying to be analytical and reach some consensus about
all of the assumptions that you're making about the future and then go from there.
Design thinking, instead approaches it from the perspective of design.
Essentially, the question here is, how would we approach this if managers,
instead of thinking, like typical managers,
approached the formation of strategy like designers,
attempting to design a new product or work environment or something.
So, this is a systematic approach to problem solving
that begins from that design perspective.
And again, the key question is what can we do differently if we approach it that way?
Well, if we approach it that way, we'll essentially be enacting
three core beliefs and the first of those has to do with empathy.
What we would first be doing is establishing insights based on sort
of a deep understanding of the human experience with our product or
service or with our organization.
And so instead of sort of planning everything out from sort of a board room,
we want to understand in a very specific and sort of thick way.
We want to understand, what's people's experience like
as they interact with our products or with our services or there
are ways that we can serve them in a way that we haven't thought of in the past.
So, let me illustrate with an example.
Let say, you are a company that makes appliances for
the kitchen to be used in cooking and baking and that sort of thing.
So instead of just starting with a sketches or
ideas that might come out of an R&D department,
a lot of times designers will actually simply just go and observe people.
So in this this case,
they would ask a bunch of folks if they could just go watch them in their kitchen.
They'd watch how families interact in the kitchen, how the parents are preparing
meals and they would try to take note of things that they might not notice if they
were just starting with existing products and iterating from there.
So again, this first core belief is about empathy and sort of deeply understanding
the human experience with your particular product or service or with the world.
And is there a way that we can serve those human customers better?
So, that's the first core belief.
I think the second thing you would do if you approached
strategy from a design thinking standpoint, is you would then hopefully,
that observation and that empathy would lead to invention.
This is where we hope to discover new possibilities.
Not just incremental changes to existing products or services, but
we might push beyond sort of the conventional view of those things and
see things that we didn't see before.
Do we see higher order solutions and do we see opportunities
to improve people's lives in way that we might not have thought of on our own?
Michael LenoxSenior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer
Jared HarrisSamuel L. Slover Research Chair in Business Administration
Scott SnellE. Thayer Bigelow Research Professor in Business Administration
