The newest management mantra floating around the boardroom in time for 2010 is the idea of ‘design thinking’. Tim Brown, a leader in the field, calls it “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” The goal is to have staff think outside the box and experience the deliverables from the customer’s perspective. They turn their creative design ideas into functional products, spaces, or procedures to positively influence the customer.
GE, P&G, and Philips have all embraced this new way of thinking and more resources are used on design thinking today than Lean or Six Sigma. For example, GE managers attending the company Technical Leadership Development Course start by reading a comic book and then describe their toughest problem in a haiku and draw workflow and patient experience maps. Philips found that their customers cared greatly about personalized lighting ambiance, and they provided the bulbs and software to enable customers to become their own lighting designers. In the hospitality arena, Tim Brown’s company, IDEO, touted their recent completion of a full-scale prototype of the new Marriott Townplace Suites using design thinking.
However, haven’t savvy general managers and corporate folks been doing ‘design thinking’ for a long time? It has been a longstanding practice that property managers and staff stay overnight in a hotel room, eat at the restaurant, or park their cars with the valets to experience the hotel from the guest perspective. Westin debuted their Heavenly line through intense guest experience research and design prototypes. Corporate brand folks, heck, even mystery shoppers, have experienced the deliverables from the customer’s perspective, finding newer and better ways to design and execute the guest experience.
So is ‘design thinking’ just a fancier way of calling something we’ve been doing for ages? Have companies like IDEO, GE, P&G, and Philips realized that the hospitality industry is on to something and have rebranded the concept as a whole new management mantra. Regardless of who is the chicken or the egg, staff from all industries can pay attention to what new ideas are springing up from design thinking, and maybe we can all learn a bit from each other. The end result: a better client/customer/passenger/diner/buyer/patron/shopper/consumer/purchaser/guest experience.
Read the BusinessWeek article here.
