Design Thinking: Risks and Rewards

Design thinking sits underneath some of the best products you own. Uber, Apple, and organizations like +Acumen and New York Cares have used it to build experiences people actually want.

Which is exactly why it gets adopted badly.

This piece is the honest version. Design thinking is a five-phase approach that flexes by team and organization, but the mindset is constant: understand the people and the problem, then act. What it is not is a guarantee. It's an open-ended, genuinely meandering process, and I've watched teams commit to it without understanding what they signed up for.

So before the rewards, I lay out the risks. What happens when a practitioner doesn't grasp the method. What happens when leadership expects a linear timeline from a nonlinear process. What happens when you talk to users and then quietly build what you'd already decided to build.

I'm a genuine advocate. I've written a fair amount about applying it in L&D. But advocacy without the caveats produces disappointment, and disappointment is how good methods get discarded after one bad attempt.

The risk I'd flag hardest is that design thinking surfaces problems you weren't looking for. That's the point, and it's also why it fails politically. If your organization isn't prepared to hear that the actual problem is different from the assigned one, don't start.

For anyone considering design thinking, and anyone whose first attempt didn't go the way they hoped.