Challenges Of Implementing Design Thinking In Established Organizations: An Essay.

At the start of term, you are required to join a team (3-5 students per team). Throughout the term, teams will undertake the following activities:

1.identify a problem that could be addressed/improved through Design Thinking (the problem may be of a social, service, commercial or digital nature);

2.use Design Thinking tools, techniques and mind-set to develop ideas for innovations that address/improve the problem you have identified;

3.consider future steps to launch the innovative solution;

4.present the Design Thinking process that you have applied to identify the problem and achieve the innovative solution; and

5.develop a written report critically discussing the challenges of implementing Design Thinking in established organisations. 

Activities of teams in Design Thinking

Design thinking is a critical thinking method that handles problems by the use of tactics. This tactic usually assumes a particular process that try to find solution for the problem in a systematic way (Filatro & Muckenberger,2017). Organizations are now adapting to design thinking as an upcoming trend. This has enabled may businesses around Australia and also other countries to always use this approach whenever they face organizational problems.  As a student I am able to solve various personal situations and challenges with the various design thinking tools. For example, when a problem arises outline the problem, cultivate a number of ideas then execute the best ideas. These design thinking tools helps the student to come up with the best ways of handling any challenge efficiently by applying any of the techniques and the most suitable technique as per the challenge. The student is able to learn the optimum concentration level for the visualization technique.  It enables the student to always try to make solution appealing to the parties interested, always stay up to date with latest technological changes and have good inter personal skills in order to create a relationship with your customers or during journey mapping.

The first challenge is evident in the visualization stage. Various companies usually try to visualize a particular problem that their customers may face and try to come up with a solution. The challenges at this stage include overlying with visualization (Welles & Xu,2018). When various companies are used to visualization, they may assume that every solution they rely on is always correct. This usually causes a problem because you may visualize a wrong answer to a problem and at the end, you find that you have not solved your problem. This will make the visualization to fail in implementing the desired outcome. This is due to the reason that in the process of visualizing, you were not at the required level of total concentration. The group members also encountered this problem. This would be seen in the fact we were having the problem of coming up with the best idea of solving the problem as we visualized. This because at times we were not concentrating fully.

Journey mapping process involves getting into close contact with your customer. Journey mapping process in design thinking usually encounters a number of challenges (Marquez, Downey & Clement,2015). There is the problem of knowing where your customer mapping is supposed to begin for efficient design thinking. If you start at the wrong place or wrong stage, you may not find a solution to a particular problem your organization is facing. There is also the problem of interviewing various participants in customer mapping as you try to gather information about customer experiences. The participants may be unwilling to be interviewed, and this will be a challenge without knowing their experiences you may not be able to solve the problem.

Challenges of Design Thinking

Another problem is people you interview at the design thinking stage may give you false information; this false information leads you to implementing the wrong solution to a challenge that you are encountering. This is because you have developed your answer based on false customer experiences. As we were design thinking on our problem we experienced this problem. This is because some people we ask questions were not being open about their experiences, this caused a challenge for the group as we were trying to solve the problem of missing your bus in the morning as you go to work.

The importance of this is now developing an idea of how a problem will be solved. Problems encountered at this stage is often generating the wrong idea for problem solving (Crilly,2015). If you had gathered the wrong data, you might face the problem of developing the wrong concept. Another challenge that organizations face at this stage is that they lack individuals of developing the right skills for concept development. This results in formulating a concept that does not help you achieve the desired solution. The outcome of this is coming up with a theory that does not help in solving the problem. This was also faced in our design thinking process as we were developing a solution for how to handle with missing the bus in the morning. We were often unable to come up with the most suitable concept to deal with the problem. This was because we did not have the expertise in developing the best theory of solving the problem. 

Design thinking usually takes a process as it tries to solve the problem in a systematic way(Whyte,2015). Due to the design thinking process a design team is usually required to evaluate each stage and come up with the desired outcome. This brings the challenges of group members not being able to become critical thinkers. This is because any idea that is brought up by the group is assumed to be the best. This usually poses a challenge because of the fact the idea is not evaluated critically in order to find out if it actually solves the problem according to Lockwood (2010). We also faced this problem in our design thinking pursuit. We were assuming any idea that the group members decided was the right one. This was leading to development of wrong ideas at times. 

Visualization Challenges

Technological advancement is happening day by day. It has also helped the field of design thinking (Chatfield, 2018). Technology has helped in that computers help to store information collected. It also maintains records of activities carried out at different stages. Design thinking team of companies usually face challenges with using this technological means of storing data. This is due to cyber criminals can hack your stored data and sell it to your unethical competitors. Your data can also face virus attacks and it gets corrupted. We also encountered this problem. This was because some of our data we stored on our computers was corrupted and unreadable due to virus attacks. This was causing us to analyses the information again.

Prototyping is usually a significant step in design thinking. The purpose of this particular step is to make sure your solution helps your client in solving or reduce the problem they are facing according to Chua & Leong (2014).The challenge usually faced encountered here include it wastes a lot of time. This is because when you give clients the prototype solution they assume it’s the final solution. This causes them to waste a lot of time before they give you back their feedback. This is comparable to our study, as we were developing a solution that should be given out to individuals who face the problem of missing the bus to test it. It was very time consuming, and this posed a challenge.

This is usually the last step of design thinking in organizations. The significance of this particular stage is to convince your client to pick your solution to a problem over your competitors according to Robin (2015). The problem at this stage if your design team does not present the scenario that you’re your solution is working in an interesting way. The problem of apathy also was faced in our design thinking problem of solving problems. The challenge faced was failing to present the answer compellingly. This caused some of our clients not to pick our

Conclusion

This are all the challenges that organization faced in trying to find solutions for design thinking. Businesses should therefore try to come up with solutions to avoid these barriers that make design thinking a challenges. Once this challenges are avoided. The outcome of the design thinking process will be efficient and it will solve the problem that your organization is facing 

References

Chatfield, C. (2018). Statistics for technology: a course in applied statistics. Routledge

Chua, C. K., & Leong, K. F. (2014). 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing: Principles and Applications (with Companion Media Pack) of Rapid Prototyping Fourth Edition. World Scientific Publishing Company.

Crilly, N. (2015). Fixation and creativity in concept development: The attitudes and practices of expert designers. Design Studies, 38, 54-91.

Filatro, A., Cavalcanti, C. C., & Muckenberger, E. (2017). Design Thinking and Online Education.

Lockwood, T. (2010). Design thinking: Integrating innovation, customer experience, and brand value. Skyhorse Publishing, Inc..

Marquez, J. J., Downey, A., & Clement, R. (2015). Walking a mile in the user's shoes: Customer journey mapping as a method to understanding the user experience. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 20(3-4), 135-150.

Robin, B. R. (2015). The effective uses of digital storytelling as a teaching and learning tool. Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts, 2, 429-440.

Welles, B. F., & Xu, W. (2018). Network visualization and problem-solving support: A cognitive fit study. Social Networks, 54, 162-167.

Whyte, G. (2015). Groupthink. Wiley Encyclopedia of Management, 1-2.