Jeneanne Rae observes in a recent article in BusinessWeek that “Design Thinking” is receiving increasing attention in the corporate world to crack difficult business problems where current approaches to innovation don’t deliver results. After Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), is Design Thinking yet another fad or is there truly something fundamental behind the “way designers think”?

First of all, I don’t think that all these are simply random management fads. Many companies have applied TQM, Six Sigma or BPR to increase operational efficiency and increase profits (See this post from Prof. Tom Davenport on the sustainability of these “Next Big Things”) . Nevertheless corporations are still struggling with innovation and a set of “design thinking” methods and tools will not do the job.

This quote from A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter&Gamble , summarizes the challenge:

“Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence),” he writes. “Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.”

Procter&Gamble might become the case study how organizations, the leadership team, managers and employees can adopt and introduce design thinking into their organization. At least this sounds interesting:

“It has been transformative for our leadership teams,” says Cindy Tripp, marketing director at P&G Global Design, as she describes her work rolling out the company’s Design Thinking Initiative. With a cadre of 100 internal facilitators, more than 40 design thinking workshops have been held in P&G business units across the globe during the past year. The design thinking facilitation team comes from every function at P&G (such as marketing, research and development, info tech, and product supply as well as design). Perhaps most important, half of the workshops focused on something other than new product initiatives to include other types of pressing business issues such as strategy, retail relationship building, and matters of operational excellence.

I haven’t read A.G.Leafley’s book “The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation” yet, but I already ordered it. Check back for a review in a few weeks.

Read the full article in BusinessWeek.

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