Has Design Thinking gone “wrong”?

Has the lustre come off Design Thinking, the current “golden child” of innovation and transformation? The MIT technology review considers the prospect in a good piece: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/09/1067821/design-thinking-retrospective-what-went-wrong/

The headline is a little alarmist, but reading the whole piece, the takeaway is fairly clear.

It isn’t an argument against Design Thinking - it’s an argument to connect these very effective mechanisms to domain and vertical expertise, in order to ensure the outputs are valuable and sustained.

What does this mean?

It means that teams who understand the sum total of:
i. how your company works (governance, workflow, org chart)
ii. how business works (CPL, cost to serve, CAC, cohort value)
iii. how the experience works (Brand, Behavioural Science, MA, CRM, CDP)
… are better placed to extract the most value out of the Design Thinking process.

IDEO et al may still lead the process, but clients should be pushing for the inclusion of the smartest strategic (and execution-minded! importantly!!) brains from their extended partner landscape - Accenture, WPP, IPG, Publicis, Deloitte…