Whatever Happened to Design Thinking?
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Thanking our guest host this week, Sheev Dave! See more in his guest series in the coming weeks on the CX Pod. Thanks, Sheev!
The Template Is Not the Work
Design thinking arrived in the C-suite around 2015 with the fanfare of a management consulting firm announcing a rebrand. Harvard Business Review declared it had found its rightful place in strategy. Executives nodded thoughtfully. Airbnb and Uber were cited. Everyone went to a workshop.
The workshops multiplied; the facilitators proliferated; the sticky notes flew. And somewhere in all that productive bustle, the rigor of the methodology quietly dissolved into its own artifact.
Maura Shea, Co-Director of the Food Systems Action Lab at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech and a veteran of almost a decade at IDEO, watched it happen in real time. What began as robust, integrative, genuinely empathic practice — the kind that required synthesis, judgment, and the nerve to sit with ambiguity — thinned into templates. There were (and still are, sometimes) empathy maps. Journey maps are still pinned up on office walls. Service maps are researched and delivered promptly. These items are checked off, as boxes are meant to be.
What these assets share is not failure but a specific kind of success: they are approachable enough to learn quickly, effective enough to gain converts, and superficial enough to seem harmless. But while the human-centered foundations of this methodology require years of practice to wield well, the asset-trappings of it can be summarized, packaged, and sold as a two-day workshop.
Could it be that in some cases accessibility is a trap?
This is not to entertain the idea of gate-keeping, but rather to point out that the opposite of gate-keeping is not a panacea. The moment a rigorous practice becomes legible to a broad audience, the market incentive to simplify it arrives. Simplification, pursued far enough, leaves only vocabulary and visuals. They persist. The judgment they once required does not.
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What the templates leave out
Maura is right that the methodology has thinned. We built the HCD Guide Series to put the judgment back — the parts of the practice that don't fit on a sticky note. It is the working version of human-centered design, written for practitioners who already suspect their journey maps are doing less than their organizations hoped.
The Series is available as a set for less than the cost of a business dinner, or individually at the price of your lunch salad. Each one walks through one phase of the methodology, with the synthesis, judgment, and ambiguity-tolerance the templates left out.
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When the workshop didn't take
If your organization has run the workshops, hired the facilitators, and pinned the journey maps on the wall — and the underlying operational problems are still there — the issue is rarely that the methodology was wrong. The issue is that it was implemented at the level of asset, not at the level of governance.
Start drawing the map of your digital estate. The Introductory SaaS Audit shows you, on one page, what an organization of your size and sector typically carries in unaccounted-for software, applied against three categories of operational hidden cost. Free. No follow-up unless you want one.
What we're into this week
Scott
Okay, Maura’s interview makes it necessary to surface this talk with Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of AI company Replika. In it, she provides a fascinating and very surprisingly down-to-earth investigation of how we use apps, and AI, while also being very aware of who it’s for: us. She touches on AI safety, limitations, and tangible utility of the software we use.
Aaron
Oh I’m going to have to check that one out, Scott. I find the idea of Replika so…creepy. And yet that’s where I see us all going, for better and worse. I have a similar is-this-new-thing-good-or-bad? article I dug for after Maura’s interview: The Council on State Governments is looking into how AI can both help and completely obviate the utility of public comments. I can’t help but feel that people like Eugenia and Maura started out in their fields because they really wanted the rigor of their work to help people, but producing any technology or methodology at scale seems to favor the superficial use of it.
Ana
I wonder why that’s so, Aaron? Do you think it’s inherent to humans or do you think it’s just habit or hobbyism or boredom? If we do the same thing 1000 times, say a journey map or whatever, does it become less or more superficial? Andy Warhol would say that’s the beginning of understanding: to go so deep into something superficial that we begin to see the depth in it. Or to create it. Maybe that’s how we break out of management and tech superficiality: keep going with it until it turns itself inside out.
Scott
Do you think you could get a CEO to do a journey map 1000 times just to see the newness in it, if any?
Ana
I’m the CEO and I would do that.
Aaron
Yeah but you went to art school, like exactly none of the other CEOs.
Ana
I’m sure there are a few of us!
Scott
Maybe….(says the other art school grad in this company).
Aaron
Lol! The MBA stands alone.
Credits
Guest: Maura Shea
Host: Sheev Dave
Line Producer: Aaron Meyers
Producer: Ana Monroe
Article: A. Adams
Artwork: Sheet of Studies. Jon Flaxman. Artist, British, 1755 - 1826. Via the National Gallery
Why this artwork?: Organizations should constantly study themselves. Even if a service has been mapped, it changes so frequently that remapping is often needed. Much like the basic figure studies in Flaxman’s sketches, organizations don’t have to go into great detail to meaningfully learn about the figure they cut in the world, but they do need to do the exercise over and over again.
📮 If this issue made you think of someone specific, forward it to them. The list grows almost entirely through one professional handing it to another. 📮
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