What is often overlooked when people think about Stanford’s Design Thinking methodology is that it was intended for application to the business in areas far beyond product development. The methodology can also be applied to the customer experience, organizational processes, corporate strategy and more as a way to drive innovation throughout the organization.

As an example of an “outside the box” application of this methodology, Wronski Associates recently delivered a three-day Design Thinking Bootcamp for a financial services company. The participants were challenged to rethink the relationship between Information Services (IS) and their Business Partners so that greater levels of trust would be achieved.

The workshop introduced the five steps of Design Thinking to the participants:

1. Gain empathy with the client/users (understanding their unmet and unstated needs)

2. Clarify the users/clients point of view

3. Ideate potential solutions

4. Build prototypes for selected solutions

5. Test the prototypes (build, test, refine, test, refine test cycle)

During the workshop, the participants were broken into three teams as they quickly worked through the stated business partner relationship challenge using design thinking’s five-step process. Each team developed solutions and prototypes which were then presented to the organization’s CIOs on the final day. The CIOs gave tremendous feedback to the teams and proceeded to give several solutions the greenlight for implementation.

In addition to developing feasible ideas to build trust between IS and their business partners, the participants were empowered to utilize the newly learned methodology in their daily roles for use with their own projects teams. Feedback from the client has been tremendous and in the words of one stakeholder, “Design Thinking has been a huge hit!”

Please contact us for more information on how we can help your organization utilize this powerful and transformative methodology.

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