Nick Leon doesn’t like the term “design thinking”. The former business development director for IBM’s Global Services Division in Europe who is the new director of Design London, a multidisciplinary educational initiative launched recently by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London, prefers a term that is more serious and in his opinion better suited for boardrooms. He suggest the use of the phrase “design method”.

You have to talk about something with more rigor. ‘Design method’ is how you organize multidisciplinary teams, how you exploit technology or what processes and practices you might apply. These are all things that are as natural as breathing to a designer—but which aren’t regularly used in a business sense. To start talking about ‘design thinking’ in the boardroom or in the business school doesn’t seem strong enough. It seems a little conceptual—I want to get deeper than that.

I am able to relate that it might be difficult to convice executives to “think about design” when they would rather prefer to apply some “design method” to solve their problems. A “design method” also has the benefit that you can suddenly become really busy with planning projects, calculating business cases and setting milestones which is all very complicated when you are talking about something conceptual as “design thinking”.

Nevertheless it is essential to differentiate between actual design methods and the philosophy behind these methods: the way of identifying problems, seeing potential solutions and the focus on fulfilling customer needs. These are just some areas within design thinking and they can’t be substituted with design methods.

If the use of “design method” instead of “design thinking” is what it takes to spread the word, then this is what we should use. Yet we should not forget, that we have to “design think” as well and not just apply “design methods”.

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