www.hbr.org Thinking like a designer can transform the way you Design Thinking develop products, services, processes—and even strategy. by Tim Brown Reprint R0806E Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy. Design Thinking by Tim Brown Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb rect observation, of what people want and and then wrapped an entire industry around need in their lives and what they like or dislike it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his about the way particular products are made, signature invention, but Edison understood packaged, marketed, sold, and supported. that the bulb was little more than a parlor Many people believe that Edison’s greatest trick without a system of electric power gener- invention was the modern R&D laboratory ation and transmission to make it truly useful. and methods of experimental investigation. So he created that, too. Edison wasn’t a narrowly specialized scientist Thus Edison’s genius lay in his ability to con- but a broad generalist with a shrewd business ceive of a fully developed marketplace, not sense. In his Menlo Park, New Jersey, labora- simply a discrete device. He was able to envi- tory he surrounded himself with gifted tinker- sion how people would want to use what he ers, improvisers, and experimenters. Indeed, made, and he engineered toward that insight. he broke the mold of the “lone genius inven- He wasn’t always prescient (he originally be- tor” by creating a team-based approach to in- lieved the phonograph would be used mainly novation. Although Edison biographers write as a business machine for recording and replay- of the camaraderie enjoyed by this merry ing dictation), but he invariably gave great con- band, the process also featured endless sideration to users’ needs and preferences. rounds of trial and error—the “99% perspira- Edison’s approach was an early example of tion” in Edison’s famous definition of genius. what is now called “design thinking”—a meth- His approach was intended not to validate odology that imbues the full spectrum of inno- preconceived hypotheses but to help experi- vation activities with a human-centered design menters learn something new from each iter- ethos. By this I mean that innovation is pow- ative stab. Innovation is hard work; Edison ered by a thorough understanding, through di- made it a profession that blended art, craft, OPYRIGHT © 2008 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. OPYRIGHT © 2008 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. C harvard business review • june 2008 page 1 Design Thinking science, business savvy, and an astute under- nicating and collaborating—exactly the kinds standing of customers and markets. of human-centered activities in which design Design thinking is a lineal descendant of thinking can make a decisive difference. (See that tradition. Put simply, it is a discipline the sidebar “A Design Thinker’s Personality that uses the designer’s sensibility and Profile.”) methods to match people’s needs with what Consider the large health care provider Kai- is technologically feasible and what a viable ser Permanente, which sought to improve the business strategy can convert into customer overall quality of both patients’ and medical value and market opportunity. Like Edison’s practitioners’ experiences. Businesses in the painstaking innovation process, it often en- service sector can often make significant inno- tails a great deal of perspiration. vations on the front lines of service creation I believe that design thinking has much to and delivery. By teaching design thinking tech- offer a business world in which most manage- niques to nurses, doctors, and administrators, ment ideas and best practices are freely avail- Kaiser hoped to inspire its practitioners to con- able to be copied and exploited. Leaders now tribute new ideas. Over the course of several look to innovation as a principal source of dif- months Kaiser teams participated in work- ferentiation and competitive advantage; they shops with the help of my firm, IDEO, and a would do well to incorporate design thinking group of Kaiser coaches. These workshops led into all phases of the process. to a portfolio of innovations, many of which are being rolled out across the company. Getting Beneath the Surface One of them—a project to reengineer Historically, design has been treated as a nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser hospi- downstream step in the development process— tals—perfectly illustrates both the broader the point where designers, who have played nature of innovation “products” and the value no earlier role in the substantive work of inno- of a holistic design approach. The core project vation, come along and put a beautiful wrap- team included a strategist (formerly a nurse), per around the idea. To be sure, this approach an organizational-development specialist, a has stimulated market growth in many areas technology expert, a process designer, a union by making new products and technologies representative, and designers from IDEO. This aesthetically attractive and therefore more de- group worked with innovation teams of front- sirable to consumers or by enhancing brand line practitioners in each of the four hospitals. perception through smart, evocative advertis- During the earliest phase of the project, the ing and communication strategies. During the core team collaborated with nurses to identify latter half of the twentieth century design be- a number of problems in the way shift changes came an increasingly valuable competitive occurred. Chief among these was the fact that asset in, for example, the consumer electron- nurses routinely spent the first 45 minutes of ics, automotive, and consumer packaged each shift at the nurses’ station debriefing the goods industries. But in most others it re- departing shift about the status of patients. mained a late-stage add-on. Their methods of information exchange were Now, however, rather than asking designers different in every hospital, ranging from re- to make an already developed idea more at- corded dictation to face-to-face conversations. tractive to consumers, companies are asking And they compiled the information they them to create ideas that better meet consum- needed to serve patients in a variety of ways— ers’ needs and desires. The former role is tacti- scrawling quick notes on the back of any avail- cal, and results in limited value creation; the able scrap of paper, for example, or even on latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new their scrubs. Despite a significant investment Tim Brown ([email protected]) is the forms of value. of time, the nurses often failed to learn some CEO and president of IDEO, an innova- Moreover, as economies in the developed of the things that mattered most to patients, tion and design firm with headquarters world shift from industrial manufacturing to such as how they had fared during the previous in Palo Alto, California. His designs have knowledge work and service delivery, innova- shift, which family members were with them, won numerous awards and been ex- tion’s terrain is expanding. Its objectives are and whether or not certain tests or therapies hibited at the Museum of Modern Art no longer just physical products; they are new had been administered. For many patients, the in New York, the Axis Gallery in Tokyo, sorts of processes, services, IT-powered inter- team learned, each shift change felt like a hole and the Design Museum in London. actions, entertainments, and ways of commu- in their care. Using the insights gleaned from harvard business review • june 2008 page 2 Design Thinking observing these important times of transition, the patient rather than at the nurses’ station. the innovation teams explored potential solu- In only a week the team built a working proto- tions through brainstorming and rapid proto- type that included new procedures and some typing. (Prototypes of a service innovation will simple software with which nurses could call of course not be physical, but they must be tan- up previous shift-change notes and add new gible. Because pictures help us understand ones. They could input patient information what is learned through prototyping, we often throughout a shift rather than scrambling at videotape the performance of prototyped ser- the end to pass it on. The software collated the vices, as we did at Kaiser.) data in a simple format customized for each Prototyping doesn’t have to be complex and nurse at the start of a shift. The result was both expensive. In another health care project, higher-quality knowledge transfer and reduced IDEO helped a group of surgeons develop a prep time, permitting much earlier and better- new device for sinus surgery. As the surgeons informed contact with patients. described the ideal physical characteristics of As Kaiser measured the impact of this the instrument, one of the designers grabbed change over time, it learned that the mean in- a whiteboard marker, a film canister, and a terval between a nurse’s arrival and first inter- clothespin and taped them together. “Do you action with a patient had been more than mean like this?” he asked. With his rudimen- halved, adding a huge amount of nursing time tary prototype in hand, the surgeons were able across the four hospitals. Perhaps just as im- to be much more precise about what the portant was the effect on the quality of the ultimate design should accomplish. nurses’ work experience. One nurse com- Prototypes should command only as much mented, “I’m an hour ahead, and I’ve only time, effort, and investment as are needed to been here 45 minutes.” Another said, “[This is generate useful feedback and evolve an idea. the] first time I’ve ever made it out of here at The more “finished” a prototype seems, the the end of my shift.” less likely its creators will be to pay attention Thus did a group of nurses significantly to and profit from feedback.