Design Thinking Has Big Advantages for Small Businesses: Here’s How To Start

Enter: Design Thinking

Whether you’re tackling major business challenges or coming up with ideas for a new marketing campaign, creativity is key. Design thinking—a methodology used for generating new, customer-centric ideas and solutions—can help.

In fact, Jennifer Kilian, a partner at the global consulting firm, McKinsey, put it this way: Design thinking is “the single biggest competitive advantage that you can have… if you solve for [your customer’s] needs first, you’ll always win.”

Never heard of it? Familiar with the term but have exactly zero idea how to get started with design thinking? Here’s a crash course:

How to do design thinking at your small business

Design thinking is, by definition, a creative process. You can approach it in whatever way makes the most sense for your business and the problems you're solving for.

However, you can’t customize a process you’ve never tried or don’t know where to start. Here’s an overview:

• Identify the problem. Start with defining what, exactly, brings you to the design thinking process. What’s not working that you want to fix? Where could your company use some more innovation and fresh thinking? Get as clear and focused as possible.
  
• Qualify the problem. Gather as much qualitative intel on the problem, and the people it touches as you can. If you’re looking to address high rates of attrition, then take a close, objective look at your employees and what’s really driving them out the door. If you’re concepting a new marketing campaign targeted at stay at home moms in your city, gather as much information on their lives and experiences as you can. The key is to ask a lot of questions.
  
• Clarify and ideate. Are there any themes, patterns, or major pain points emerging? Building on what you’ve learned from the first two steps of the process, start ideating potential solutions. The goal here is to let creativity flow. Don’t judge or write off ideas at this stage.
  
• Develop and experiment. Are there overlaps or themes emerging across the ideas? Which ones can be most easily implemented? Which ones seem to meet multiple needs and pain points? Develop the best ideas into full-blown solutions and experiment with them. Test them in small, safe ways to see if they produce the results you thought they would.
  
• Iterate. Once you have feedback about their efficacy, go back to the previous step. How can the ideas you tested be tweaked or even overhauled to work better? Perhaps some of them should be scrapped altogether. Iteration is a critical element of the design thinking process—it’s about coming back to the drawing board as many times as necessary to get to the best solution possible.
  

Examples of success derived from design thinking

What should design thinking outcomes look like? What kind of benefits can you expect? Harvard Business Review rounded up a couple of excellent examples.

One is GE Healthcare, which used design thinking to make its MRI machines more child-friendly after realizing that pediatric patients struggled with the lengthy procedures in often cold, dark rooms.

After observing kiddos go through the processes in different environments, learning from experts, and interviewing hospital staff, they launched an Adventure Series. The series transforms exam rooms into fun settings like a pirate shipwreck. As a result, patient satisfaction went up by a whopping 90 percent.

Another is Oral B. When designers were brought on to add more functionality to Oral B’s electric toothbrushes, they discovered that toothbrushing was already making users feel like they weren't doing a good enough job.

Instead of adding more feedback functionality, the designers suggested making the experience an easier and more stress-free one by removing barriers to charging and ordering replacement heads.

These are good examples of design thinking in action and how keeping the end user at the heart of the process is key.