The best 37 minutes you can spend — with the CEO of IDEO, Tim Brown, from a March 2006 presentation. But for those of you too busy to sit still for 37 minutes, here’s all the important stuff…

…what’s resonating with business today is actually that design is a really valuable way of tackling a lot of different business and creative issues. And that it can be a way into tackling problems that organizations have struggled with, often for a long time.

For many companies, design and design thinking is more of a way that they tackle thinking about their future. It’s a way that they move intentionally into their future in many different ways. We certainly are finding many organizations using design thinking as a way to embark on strategy — or a way to think about their future and where their future may lead them. Strategy is no longer the domain only of the management consultant, but today is also a space in which a designer plays an important role.

Service organizations are about, ‘How do we relate to customers in ways such that we deliver value?’, and design is a great way of thinking about that.

I think there’s a difference between design thinking and design. Designers use design thinking, but lots of other people use design thinking too. There are components of design thinking, there are pieces of design thinking which are highly applicable in many different places.

In the work that I do it’s the relationship between design thinking and design & innovation that’s incredibly important. It’s been a really large piece of what’s brought design to business in new ways.

We can’t, as designers, assume that we ‘own’ innovation. We’re not the only people that innovate.

[see diagram below] Essentially that whole space is available for innovation.

[Note the similarity to the diagram I had in presentations 8 years ago — attempting to get technologists to stop looking just at the technology]

…back to Tim…

I think what we do as designers that’s relatively unique…is we come at the world through thinking about people and what their needs are…. We see a problem, we see an issue, we try and uncover some insights about an issue and we see ‘that’ as an opportunity.

There’s something unique about the way designers go out into the world…unlike most marketing folks, unlike most business folks, we use the world as a source of inspiration, not just validation… Great designers, design thinkers, go out looking at the world to see how it could be different — or what they can learn from the world as a source of inspiration as to what they might do creatively.

And yet, what most folks do…is to use the world to test the ideas they already have. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s quite useful later on in the process. But it’s not what you need to do right at the beginning.

What’s unique about what we do is that we kind of go out there with an open mind — beginner’s mind — and look for possibilities. We tend to think about people and what they do as a source of ideas. We’re interested in research as generative research, rather than evaluative research.

What a lot of conventional market research is designed to do is to be predictive…. To use conventional market research techniques…to generate ideas is the wrong piece of the process.

We can’t be designers unless we’re able to be empathic; unless we’re able to look at the world through other people’s points of view and not our own.

Marketers…tend to look at the world in bell curves…’we need to hit the center of that bell curve.’ As designers we are most often inspired…when we go out to the edges of these bell curves…when we go out and look at extreme users.

It’s mostly about getting ‘out there’ and actually looking and actually listening, and actually trying things for ourselves.

Building to think: Our ‘design’ process is inherently related to our ‘making’ process. We have to make things tangible in order to think, as designers.

The value of prototypes is you build them as part of design thinking, as part of the design process. Prototypes don’t have to be physical, but they certainly have to be tangible. They have to ‘do’ something. You can create new experiences through continuous prototyping of your business…keep trying out new things, seeing whether or not they work and scale them once they do work.

Three categories of prototypes: inspire, evolve, validate

Methods: scale models, scenarios, labs, pilots

One distinction of service design…you really have to do most of your prototyping live.

Implementation: The place where most good ideas fail

It’s not always that they’re not great ideas…often it’s because we weren’t capable of navigating what essentially is a political process.

We have one tool to use that’s extremely powerful…storytelling. As designers we need to be extremely good as storytellers. We need to use all the powers of persuasion that we have to make our ideas as compelling as they can be. And that they live in organizations in such a way that they create the kind of momentum that they need…

They’re often the framework for the way which you create ideas in the first place. If you can tell a story about where the idea came from, then that story becomes very powerful as a justification for where it should go to and why…

Stories are often extremely important…for holding all the stakeholders together…explaining why this idea is important…why this idea is complete.

Stories often have to be quite experiential…to make our ideas come alive, such that they have the impact and influence that they need to have.

Design thinking at its simplest level is a human-centered approach to innovation.