solving complex problems with design thinking

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How to solve problems using the design thinking process

The design thinking process is a problem-solving design methodology that helps you develop solutions in a human-focused way. Initially designed at Stanford’s d.school, the five stage design thinking method can help solve ambiguous questions, or more open-ended problems. Learn how these five steps can help your team create innovative solutions to complex problems.

As humans, we’re approached with problems every single day. But how often do we come up with solutions to everyday problems that put the needs of individual humans first?

This is how the design thinking process started.

What is the design thinking process?

The design thinking process is a problem-solving design methodology that helps you tackle complex problems by framing the issue in a human-centric way. The design thinking process works especially well for problems that are not clearly defined or have a more ambiguous goal.

One of the first individuals to write about design thinking was John E. Arnold, a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford. Arnold wrote about four major areas of design thinking in his book, “Creative Engineering” in 1959. His work was later taught at Stanford’s Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design (also known as d.school), a design institute that pioneered the design thinking process. 

This eventually led Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon to outline one of the first iterations of the design thinking process in his 1969 book, “The Sciences of the Artificial.” While there are many different variations of design thinking, “The Sciences of the Artificial” is often credited as the basis. 

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A non-linear design thinking approach

Design thinking is not a linear process. It’s important to understand that each stage of the process can (and should) inform the other steps. For example, when you’re going through user testing, you may learn about a new problem that didn’t come up during any of the previous stages. You may learn more about your target personas during the final testing phase, or discover that your initial problem statement can actually help solve even more problems, so you need to redefine the statement to include those as well. 

Why use the design thinking process

The design thinking process is not the most intuitive way to solve a problem, but the results that come from it are worth the effort. Here are a few other reasons why implementing the design thinking process for your team is worth it.

Focus on problem solving

As human beings, we often don’t go out of our way to find problems. Since there’s always an abundance of problems to solve, we’re used to solving problems as they occur. The design thinking process forces you to look at problems from many different points of view. 

The design thinking process requires focusing on human needs and behaviors, and how to create a solution to match those needs. This focus on problem solving can help your design team come up with creative solutions for complex problems. 

Encourages collaboration and teamwork

The design thinking process cannot happen in a silo. It requires many different viewpoints from designers, future customers, and other stakeholders . Brainstorming sessions and collaboration are the backbone of the design thinking process.

Foster innovation

The design thinking process focuses on finding creative solutions that cater to human needs. This means your team is looking to find creative solutions for hyper specific and complex problems. If they’re solving unique problems, then the solutions they’re creating must be equally unique.

The iterative process of the design thinking process means that the innovation doesn’t have to end—your team can continue to update the usability of your product to ensure that your target audience’s problems are effectively solved. 

The 5 stages of design thinking

Currently, one of the more popular models of design thinking is the model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design (or d.school) at Stanford. The main reason for its popularity is because of the success this process had in successful companies like Google, Apple, Toyota, and Nike. Here are the five steps designated by the d.school model that have helped many companies succeed.

1. Empathize stage

The first stage of the design thinking process is to look at the problem you’re trying to solve in an empathetic manner. To get an accurate representation of how the problem affects people, actively look for people who encountered this problem previously. Asking them how they would have liked to have the issue resolved is a good place to start, especially because of the human-centric nature of the design thinking process. 

Empathy is an incredibly important aspect of the design thinking process.  The design thinking process requires the designers to put aside any assumptions and unconscious biases they may have about the situation and put themselves in someone else’s shoes. 

For example, if your team is looking to fix the employee onboarding process at your company, you may interview recent new hires to see how their onboarding experience went. Another option is to have a more tenured team member go through the onboarding process so they can experience exactly what a new hire experiences.

2. Define stage

Sometimes a designer will encounter a situation when there’s a general issue, but not a specific problem that needs to be solved. One way to help designers clearly define and outline a problem is to create human-centric problem statements. 

A problem statement helps frame a problem in a way that provides relevant context in an easy to comprehend way. The main goal of a problem statement is to guide designers working on possible solutions for this problem. A problem statement frames the problem in a way that easily highlights the gap between the current state of things and the end goal. 

Tip: Problem statements are best framed as a need for a specific individual. The more specific you are with your problem statement, the better designers can create a human-centric solution to the problem. 

Examples of good problem statements:

We need to decrease the number of clicks a potential customer takes to go through the sign-up process.

We need to decrease the new subscriber unsubscribe rate by 10%. 

We need to increase the Android app adoption rate by 20%.

3. Ideate stage

This is the stage where designers create potential solutions to solve the problem outlined in the problem statement. Use brainstorming techniques with your team to identify the human-centric solution to the problem defined in step two. 

Here are a few brainstorming strategies you can use with your team to come up with a solution:

Standard brainstorm session: Your team gathers together and verbally discusses different ideas out loud.

Brainwrite: Everyone writes their ideas down on a piece of paper or a sticky note and each team member puts their ideas up on the whiteboard. 

Worst possible idea: The inverse of your end goal. Your team produces the most goofy idea so nobody will look silly. This takes out the rigidity of other brainstorming techniques. This technique also helps you identify areas that you can improve upon in your actual solution by looking at the worst parts of an absurd solution. 

It’s important that you don’t discount any ideas during the ideation phase of brainstorming. You want to have as many potential solutions as possible, as new ideas can help trigger even better ideas. Sometimes the most creative solution to a problem is the combination of many different ideas put together.

4. Prototype stage

During the prototype phase, you and your team design a few different variations of inexpensive or scaled down versions of the potential solution to the problem. Having different versions of the prototype gives your team opportunities to test out the solution and make any refinements. 

Prototypes are often tested by other designers, team members outside of the initial design department, and trusted customers or members of the target audience. Having multiple versions of the product gives your team the opportunity to tweak and refine the design before testing with real users. During this process, it’s important to document the testers using the end product. This will give you valuable information as to what parts of the solution are good, and which require more changes.

After testing different prototypes out with teasers, your team should have different solutions for how your product can be improved. The testing and prototyping phase is an iterative process—so much so that it’s possible that some design projects never end.

After designers take the time to test, reiterate, and redesign new products, they may find new problems, different solutions, and gain an overall better understanding of the end-user. The design thinking framework is flexible and non-linear, so it’s totally normal for the process itself to influence the end design. 

Tips for incorporating the design thinking process into your team

If you want your team to start using the design thinking process, but you’re unsure of how to start, here are a few tips to help you out. 

Start small: Similar to how you would test a prototype on a small group of people, you want to test out the design thinking process with a smaller team to see how your team functions. Give this test team some small projects to work on so you can see how this team reacts. If it works out, you can slowly start rolling this process out to other teams.

Incorporate cross-functional team members : The design thinking process works best when your team members collaborate and brainstorm together. Identify who your designer’s key stakeholders are and ensure they’re included in the small test team. 

Organize work in a collaborative project management software : Keep important design project documents such as user research, wireframes, and brainstorms in a collaborative tool like Asana . This way, team members will have one central source of truth for anything relating to the project they’re working on.

Foster collaborative design thinking with Asana

The design thinking process works best when your team works collaboratively. You don’t want something as simple as miscommunication to hinder your projects. Instead, compile all of the information your team needs about a design project in one place with Asana. 

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How to solve problems with design thinking

May 18, 2023 Is it time to throw out the standard playbook when it comes to problem solving? Uniquely challenging times call for unique approaches, write Michael Birshan , Ben Sheppard , and coauthors in a recent article , and design thinking offers a much-needed fresh perspective for leaders navigating volatility. Design thinking is a systemic, intuitive, customer-focused problem-solving approach that can create significant value and boost organizational resilience. The proof is in the pudding: From 2013 to 2018, companies that embraced the business value of design had TSR that were 56 percentage points higher than that of their industry peers. Check out these insights to understand how to use design thinking to unleash the power of creativity in strategy and problem solving.

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A complete guide to the design thinking process

Learn the five stages of the design thinking process, get practical tips to apply them, and get templates to seamlessly run design thinking exercises.

How many projects have you worked on that stalled because your team couldn’t align on the best path forward? How many more got shelved because they didn’t meet user needs or expectations? And how many got delayed in rounds and rounds of never-ending feedback? 

Thankfully, you don’t have to keep repeating those experiences month after month. The (not so) secret weapon: design thinking .

Design thinking gives teams a new way to approach their projects and overcome some of those well-known challenges. It can help teams understand their users' needs and challenges, then apply those learnings to solve problems in a creative, innovative way. Understanding design thinking can transform your team’s problem-solving approach — and how you work together.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative process where teams seek to understand user needs, challenge assumptions, define complex problems to solve, and develop innovative solutions to prototype and test. The goal of design thinking is to come up with user-focused solutions tailored to the particular problem at hand.

While often used in product design, service design, and customer experience, you can use design thinking in virtually any situation, industry, or organization to create user-centric solutions to specific problems.

Design thinking process 101: Definitions and approaches

The design thinking process puts customers’ and users’ needs at the center and aims to solve challenges from their perspective.

Design thinking typically follows five distinct stages:

Empathize stage

The first stage of design thinking lays the foundation for the rest of the process because it focuses on the needs of the real people using your product. At this stage, you want to get familiar with the people experiencing the problems you’re trying to solve, understanding their point of view, and learning about their user experience. You want to understand their challenges and what they need from your product or company to address them.

The goal of this stage is for your team to develop a user-centered vision of the core problem you need to solve. The idea is to challenge any assumptions or biases teams have, instead using their customer perspective as a guiding source. This is important because it aligns the team on what needs to be considered during the rest of the design thinking process. 

To help you get a solid understanding of the problems you’re solving, you can ask a lot of questions to build empathy with your users. These will invite people to share their experiences and observations to help your team better understand the problem. Then, you can move on to some specific exercises for the empathy stage of the process.

As you build up your understanding of your users, it's helpful to visualize their experience. A common way to do this is to assemble a customer journey map . This helps identify areas of friction and understand customer preferences.

Learn more: 7 types of questions to build empathy for design thinking

Ideate stage

Your priority here is to think outside the box and source as many ideas as possible from all areas of the business. Bring in people from different departments so you benefit from a wider range of experiences and perspectives during ideation sessions. Don’t worry about coming up with concrete solutions or how to implement each one — you’ll build on that later. The goal is to explore new and creative ideas rather than come up with an actual plan.

Key steps in the ideation phase:

• Define your problem : Creating a problem statement ensures that your team can focus on solving the right problem and staying aligned with your end-user or customer’s problem
• Start ideating : Choose a brainstorming technique to help organize team participation that fits your goal (More on that in the next section.)
• Prioritize your ideas : Once you have several ideas, prioritize them based on how well they take into account the customer’s needs‍ ‍
• Choose the best solution : Choose the best ideas to move forward to either the define stage or the prototype stage

Learn more: The ideation stage of design thinking: What you need to know

Your priority here is to generate as many ideas as possible, without judging or evaluating them. This step encourages designers to think creatively and push the boundaries of what's possible. We’ve put together a list of different brainstorming techniques to help your teams come up with creative new ideas. 

Put it into practice: How to facilitate a brainstorming session

Prototyping stage

At this stage, your team’s goal is to remove uncertainty around your proposed solutions. This is where you start thinking about them in more detail, including how you’ll bring them to life. Your prototypes should help the team understand if the design or solution will work as it’s intended to. 

Here, the focus is on speed and efficiency — you don’t want to invest a ton of time or resources into these solutions yet because you’re not sure they’re the best ones for the problem you’re trying to solve. You just need a functional, interactive prototype that can prove your concept. These are learning opportunities to help you spot any issues or opportunities before you take it any further.

Learn more: A guide to prototyping: the 4th stage of design thinking

Testing stage

The testing stage is normally one of the last stages of the design thinking process. After you’ve developed a concept or prototype, you need to test it in the real-world to understand its viability and usability. It’s where your product, design, or development teams evaluate the creative solutions they’ve come up with, to see how real users interact with them. 

Testing your concepts and observing how people interact with them helps you understand whether or not the prototype solves real problems and meets their needs, before you invest in it fully.

However, design thinking is an iterative process: You may go through the ideation, prototyping, and testing phases multiple times to improve and refine your solutions as you learn more from your users.

Read the guide: Testing: A guide to the 5th stage of design thinking

The relationship between human-centered design and design thinking

These two terms are often used together, because they complement one another. However, they’re two different things, so understanding their differences is important. 

Simply put, design thinking is a working process, while human-centered design is a mindset or approach.

The first step in finding success with design thinking is to foster a culture of human-centered design within your team. This is because design thinking focuses so heavily on the users and customers — the people using your product or service.

To inspire your team, we’ve put together four human-centered design examples — and explain why they work so well.

Benefits of design thinking

For organizations who’ve never run a design thinking workshop before, it can feel like a big change in how you approach the design process. But it can offer many benefits for your business.

Foster a true design culture within your organization

Design thinking is an iterative process — it’s not something you do once and call it done. The more you do it, the more you’ll see a design-focused culture emerge within your organization, which is much more effective than going to one-off creative retreats or setting up expensive innovation centers that no one ever uses.

This mindset and cultural shift can help scale design thinking within the business. But it’s important to know how to avoid  some of the pitfalls companies can face when trying to create a design culture internally.

Learn more: How to use the LUMA System of Innovation for everyday design thinking

Encourage collaboration across departments

Design thinking isn’t just for the designers on the team. The earlier stages of the process — Empathize, Define, and Ideate — are perfect for bringing in people from across the business. In fact, bringing in varied viewpoints and perspectives can help you come up with more creative or effective solutions.

You can use the design thinking process to get more people involved, and help everyone contribute ideas.

Improve understanding of user needs

So many companies say they’re “customer focused,” but lack a clear understanding of what really matters most to their customers in the context of their product or service. Design thinking puts the user front and center, with the Empathize stage dedicated to understanding and discovering user needs.

Learn more: How to identify user needs and pain points

Skills and behaviors needed for successful design thinking

To get the most out of a design thinking exercise, you’ll need a collaborative and creative mindset within your team. The team needs to be willing to explore new ideas, and laser-focused on customer or user needs. 

Here are some specific skills to help your design thinking process run smoothly.

Divergent and convergent thinking

Divergence and convergence is a human-centered design approach to problem-solving. It switches between expansive and focused thinking, giving you a process that balances understanding people’s problems and developing solutions. 

It focuses on understanding a user's needs, behaviors, and motivations, to help you develop empathy for their problems. Then, it encourages experimentation and iteration to help you effectively design solutions to meet those needs.

Collaborative working

Design thinking isn’t a solo activity. You’ll bring in people from different teams or business areas. To get the most out of the process, everyone needs to collaborate and communicate effectively. Teams that are good at collaborating drive the best outcomes, while also making it an enjoyable experience working together.

There are several core collaboration skills your team needs to succeed:

• Open-mindedness
• Communication
• Adaptability
• Organization
• Time management

Learn more about why these skills are so important and how you can improve them individually or as a team: 7 collaboration skills your team needs to succeed

Participatory or collaborative design

For many design teams and creative folks, the idea of designing something with other people can be enough to make them shudder. “Design by committee” is their idea of a nightmare. But the design thinking process isn’t about “making the logo 10% bigger” or “using a different shade of blue.” It’s user- and solution-focused.

You’ll get the best outcomes if you bring insights, perspectives, and expertise from multiple stakeholders. That includes at the Prototype and Test stages, as everyone will have ideas to contribute to help you bring solutions to life.

Learn more: What is co-design? A primer on participatory design

Common challenges in design thinking

If your team hasn’t mastered or fully committed to each one of the design thinking steps, you may encounter problems that make it harder to reap the benefits of design thinking.

Here are 4 common challenges that teams face when implementing design thinking practices.

• A company culture that doesn't foster collaboration
• An inability to adjust to non-linear processes
• A lack of in-depth user research
• Getting too invested in a single idea

Learn how to address these in Mural's guide on design thinking challenges .

Design thinking tools and templates to help you get started

Using mural for design thinking.

There are lots of tools you can use to run design thinking workshops — including Mural. We help designers work as effectively as possible, so they can get to better solutions quicker. We’ve incorporated some design thinking shortcuts and “hidden” features into our application, making it perfect for in-person or remote (or even asynchronous) collaborative sessions. These include:

• Use the C-key shortcut to quickly connect ideas with arrows
• Seamlessly import existing information from spreadsheets
• Duplicate elements you already created for faster visualization
• Fit your canvas to your screen and zoom in
• Get even more options using the right-click menu

And to help you get started, we’ve hand-picked some Mural templates relevant to each stage of the design process below.

Templates for the Empathy stage

The empathy map template helps you visualize the thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customersto help you develop a better understanding of the their experiences. The map is divided into four quadrants, where you record the following:

• Thoughts: the customer’s internal dialogue and beliefs
• Feelings: the customer’s emotional responses
• Actions: the customer’s actions and behaviors
• Observations: what the customer is seeing and hearing.

Try Mural’s empathy map template

Templates for the Define stage

This exercise helps you understand a situation or problem by identifying what’s working, what’s not, and areas for improvement. You start by listing out the problem, then identifying the positive aspects (the rose), negatives (thorn), and possible solutions for improvement (the buds).

You can use this template to run the exercise individually or in groups. It gives you a way to gather new ideas and perspectives on the problem you’re solving in real-time.

Try Mural’s Rose, thorn, bud template

Templates for the Ideate stage

The round robin brainstorming exercise is a collaborative session where every person contributes multiple ideas. This is a great way to come up with lots of different ideas and solutions in the ideation stage of design thinking, where you’re focusing on quantity and creativity. 

Bringing in ideas from every team member encourages people to share their unique perspectives, and can also help you avoid groupthink. 

Try Mural’s Round robin template

Templates for the Prototype stage

This template helps you map out how an idea will work in practice, as a functional system. Schematic diagramming is very flexible, so it can be used in many types of projects to make sure your idea is  structurally sound. It can help you map out workflows and identify any decisions you need to make to bring your idea to life.

Try Mural’s Schematic diagramming template

Templates for the Test stage

In think aloud testing, users test out a product or prototype and talk through the relevant tasks as they complete them. You can use this template to record the feedback, insights, and experiences of your testers, and identify the success and failure points in your proposed solution.

Try Mural’s Think aloud testing template

Design thinking examples: What it looks like in practice

Design thinking is a very flexible approach that works for companies of any size, from large enterprises to small startups. 

Here are some examples of how companies use design thinking, for many types of creative projects.

IBM uses design thinking to design at scale

IBM was traditionally an engineering-led organization, but now it's shifting its focus onto design, working to spread a design culture throughout the business. One of the main ways of doing that is by launching IBM Design Camps.

These camps are comprehensive educational programs that help people understand the concept of design thinking and how it specifically works at IBM. 

Learn more about how IBM runs design thinking workshops with remote or distributed teams .

Somersault Innovation uses design thinking to transform its sales process

Somersault Innovation has used design thinking methods to help their sales team co-create solutions with their customers. It’s helped sellers become more customer-centric. 

Now, their sellers can create mutual success plans with their prospects, making it easier for them to find a path forward together.

Mural uses design thinking to drive growth

At Mural, our marketing team is constantly following new trends, evaluating metrics, and working to deliver the best experiences for our customers. Design thinking helps us adopt a customer-centric approach by ensuring that we're focused on the right problems. This helps us have the biggest impact on the company’s long-term growth while creating the most value for our users.

David J. Bland planned a book using the design thinking methodology

It’s not just visual creative projects that can benefit from the design thinking process. Founder, speaker, and author David J. Bland used the methodology to plan out his book and collaborate with other team members in the process. In addition to helping him refine and adjust the structure, Bland also used it to gather feedback from early readers and target audiences, which helped get the final product just right.

Support design thinking with tools that facilitate creative collaboration

While we’ve covered some of the skills and behaviors you need to successfully run design thinking exercises, having the right tools can help a lot, too. A collaborative platform helps teams communicate, share ideas, and turn those ideas into solutions together.

Mural helps teams visualize their ideas in a collaboration platform that unlocks teamwork . This helps everyone stay on the same page, while giving them the ability to add their own ideas freely and easily. Mural facilitates effective collaboration both in person and remotely, making it ideal for design thinking workshops for co-located and distributed teams. Plus, it has tons of ready-to-use templates (like the ones we listed above) to help you get started.

Ready to give it a try? Start your Free Forever account today, and run your next design thinking workshop in Mural.

About the authors

Bryan Kitch

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What Is Design Thinking? A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide

Design thinking is both an ideology and a process, concerned with solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way.

In this guide, we’ll give you a detailed definition of design thinking, illustrate exactly what the process involves, and underline why it matters: What is the value of design thinking, and in what contexts is it particularly useful?

We’ll also analyze the relationship between user experience design and design thinking and discuss two real-world case studies that show design thinking in action.

All sound a little overwhelming? Don’t worry—we’ve broken the guide down into digestible chunks.

If you want to skip to a certain section, just click on the relevant menu heading and you’ll go straight there.

• What is Design Thinking?
• What is the Design Thinking process?
• What is the purpose of Design Thinking?
• How do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?
• What are the benefits of Design Thinking at work?
• Design Thinking methodology in action: Case studies
• What is the relationship between Design Thinking and UX Design?

Ready to explore the fascinating world of Design Thinking? Let’s go!

1. What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an approach used for practical and creative problem-solving. It is based heavily on the methods and processes that designers use (hence the name), but it has actually evolved from a range of different fields—including architecture, engineering and business. Design thinking can also be applied to any field; it doesn’t necessarily have to be design-specific.

For an audio-visual introduction, watch this video from design expert and CareerFoundry mentor, Camren Browne:

It’s important to note that design thinking is different from user-centered design . Learn more about this other approach to design here: Design Thinking vs. User-Centered Design .

Design thinking is extremely user-centric. It focuses on humans first and foremost , seeking to understand people’s needs and come up with effective solutions to meet those needs. It is what we call a solution-based approach to problem-solving.

What does this actually mean? Let’s take a look.

What’s the difference between Solution-Based and Problem-Based Thinking?

As the name suggests, solution-based thinking focuses on finding solutions; coming up with something constructive to effectively tackle a certain problem. This is the opposite of problem-based thinking, which tends to fixate on obstacles and limitations.

A good example of these two approaches in action is an empirical study carried out by Bryan Lawson, a Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. Lawson wanted to investigate how a group of designers and a group of scientists would approach a particular problem.

He set each group the task of creating one-layer structures from a set of coloured blocks. The perimeter of the structure had to use either as many red bricks or as many blue bricks as possible (we can think of this is as the solution, the desired outcome), but there were unspecified rules regarding the placement and relationship of some of the blocks (the problem or limitation).

Lawson published his findings in his book How Designers Think , in which he observed that the scientists focused on identifying the problem (problem-based thinking) whilst the designers prioritized the need to find the right solution:

“The scientists adopted a technique of trying out a series of designs which used as many different blocks and combinations of blocks as possible as quickly as possible. Thus they tried to maximise the information available to them about the allowed combinations. If they could discover the rule governing which combinations of blocks were allowed, they could then search for an arrangement which would optimise the required colour around the layout.”

The designers, on the other hand:

“…selected their blocks in order to achieve the appropriately coloured perimeter. If this proved not to be an acceptable combination, then the next most favourably coloured block combination would be substituted and so on until an acceptable solution was discovered.”

Lawson’s findings go to the heart of what Design Thinking is all about: it’s an iterative process which favours ongoing experimentation until the right solution is found.

To learn more, check out this video introduction to design thinking , led by expert designer Camren Browne. For now, let’s take a look at the design thinking process and what that entails.

2. What is the Design Thinking process?

As already mentioned, the Design Thinking process is progressive and highly user-centric . Before looking at the process in more detail, let’s consider the four principles of Design Thinking as laid out by Christoph Meinel and Harry Leifer of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford University, California.

The Four Principles of Design Thinking

• The human rule: No matter what the context, all design activity is social in nature, and any social innovation will bring us back to the “human-centric point of view”.
• The ambiguity rule: Ambiguity is inevitable, and it cannot be removed or oversimplified. Experimenting at the limits of your knowledge and ability is crucial in being able to see things differently.
• The redesign rule: All design is redesign. While technology and social circumstances may change and evolve, basic human needs remain unchanged. We essentially only redesign the means of fulfilling these needs or reaching desired outcomes.
• The tangibility rule: Making ideas tangible in the form of prototypes enables designers to communicate them more effectively.

The Five Phases of Design Thinking

Based on these four principles, the Design Thinking process can be broken down into five steps or phases, as per the aforementioned Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford (otherwise known as d.school): Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Let’s explore each of these in more detail.

Phase 1: Empathise

Empathy provides the critical starting point for Design Thinking . The first stage of the process is spent getting to know the user and understanding their wants, needs and objectives.

This means observing and engaging with people in order to understand them on a psychological and emotional level. During this phase, the designer seeks to set aside their assumptions and gather real insights about the user. Learn all about key empathy-building methods in our guide .

Phase 2: Define

The second stage in the Design Thinking process is dedicated to defining the problem. You’ll gather all of your findings from the empathise phase and start to make sense of them: what difficulties and barriers are your users coming up against? What patterns do you observe? What is the big user problem that your team needs to solve?

By the end of the define phase, you will have a clear problem statement . The key here is to frame the problem in a user-centered way; rather than saying “We need to…”, frame it in terms of your user: “Retirees in the Bay area need…”

Once you’ve formulated the problem into words, you can start to come up with solutions and ideas — which brings us onto stage three.

Phase 3: Ideate

With a solid understanding of your users and a clear problem statement in mind, it’s time to start working on potential solutions. The third phase in the Design Thinking process is where the creativity happens, and it’s crucial to point out that the ideation stage is a judgement-free zone!

Designers will hold ideation sessions in order to come up with as many new angles and ideas as possible. There are many different types of ideation technique that designers might use, from brainstorming and mindmapping to bodystorming (roleplay scenarios) and provocation—an extreme lateral-thinking technique that gets the designer to challenge established beliefs and explore new options and alternatives.

Towards the end of the ideation phase, you’ll narrow it down to a few ideas with which to move forward. You can learn about all the most important ideation techniques in this guide .

Phase 4: Prototype

The fourth step in the Design Thinking process is all about experimentation and turning ideas into tangible products. A prototype is basically a scaled-down version of the product which incorporates the potential solutions identified in the previous stages. This step is key in putting each solution to the test and highlighting any constraints and flaws.

Throughout the prototype stage, the proposed solutions may be accepted, improved, redesigned or rejected depending on how they fare in prototype form. You can read all about the prototyping stage of Design Thinking in our in-depth guide .

Phase 5: Test

After prototyping comes user testing, but it’s important to note that this is rarely the end of the Design Thinking process. In reality, the results of the testing phase will often lead you back to a previous step, providing the insights you need to redefine the original problem statement or to come up with new ideas you hadn’t thought of before. Learn all about user testing in this guide .

Is Design Thinking a linear process?

No! You might look at these clearly defined steps and see a very logical sequence with a set order. However, the Design Thinking process is not linear; it is flexible and fluid, looping back and around and in on itself! With each new discovery that a certain phase brings, you’ll need to rethink and redefine what you’ve done before—you’ll never be moving in a straight line!

3. What is the purpose of Design Thinking?

Now we know more about how Design Thinking works, let’s consider why it matters. There are many benefits of using a Design Thinking approach—be it in a business, educational, personal or social context.

First and foremost, Design Thinking fosters creativity and innovation. As human beings, we rely on the knowledge and experiences we have accumulated to inform our actions. We form patterns and habits that, while useful in certain situations, can limit our view of things when it comes to problem-solving.

Rather than repeating the same tried-and-tested methods, Design Thinking encourages us to remove our blinkers and consider alternative solutions. The entire process lends itself to challenging assumptions and exploring new pathways and ideas.

Design Thinking is often cited as the healthy middle ground of problem-solving—it is not steeped wholly in emotion and intuition, nor does it rely solely on analytics, science and rationale; it uses a mixture of both.

Another great benefit of Design Thinking is that it puts humans first. By focusing so heavily on empathy, it encourages businesses and organizations to consider the real people who use their products and services—meaning they are much more likely to hit the mark when it comes to creating meaningful user experiences. For the user, this means better, more useful products that actually improve our lives. For businesses, this means happy customers and a healthier bottom line.

What’s a “wicked problem” in Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is especially useful when it comes to solving “wicked problems”. The term “wicked problem” was coined by design theorist Horst Rittel in the 1970s to describe particularly tricky problems that are highly ambiguous in nature.

With wicked problems, there are many unknown factors; unlike “tame” problems, there is no definitive solution. In fact, solving one aspect of a wicked problem is likely to reveal or give rise to further challenges. Another key characteristic of wicked problems is that they have no stopping point; as the nature of the problem changes over time, so must the solution.

Solving wicked problems is therefore an ongoing process that requires Design Thinking! Some examples of wicked problems in our society today include things like poverty, hunger, and climate change.

If you’d like to learn more about them, and how Design Thinking can help tackle them, check out our full guide to wicked problems .

4. Design Thinking in the workplace: How do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

Now we know what Design Thinking is, let’s consider how it fits into the overall product design process. You may be familiar with the terms “lean” and “agile”—and, as a UX designer, it’s important to understand how these three approaches work together.

What are lean and agile?

Based on the principles of lean manufacturing, lean UX focuses on streamlining the design process as much as possible—minimizing waste and maximizing value. Some core tenets of lean UX are:

• Cross-functional collaboration between designers, engineers, and product managers.
• Gathering feedback quickly and continuously, ensuring that you’re constantly learning and adapting as you go.
• Deciding as late as possible and delivering fast, with less focus on long-term deliverables.
• A strong emphasis on how the team operates as a whole.

Lean UX is a technique that works in conjunction with agile development methods. Agile is a software development process that works in iterative, incremental cycles known as sprints. Unlike traditional development methods, agile is flexible and adaptive. Based on the Agile Development Manifesto created in 2001, agile adheres to the following principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

Combining Design Thinking with lean and agile

Design Thinking, lean, and agile are often seen as three separate approaches. Companies and teams will ask themselves whether to use lean or agile or Design Thinking—but actually, they can (and should!) be merged for optimal results.

Why? Because applying Design Thinking in a lean, agile environment helps to create a product development process that is not only user-centric, but also highly efficient from a business perspective. While it’s true that each approach has its own modus operandi, there is also significant overlap.

Combining principles from each can be crucial in keeping cross-functional teams on the same page—ensuring that designers, developers, product managers, and business stakeholders are all collaborating on one common vision.

So how do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

As Jonny Schneider, Product Strategy and Design Principal at ThoughtWorks , explains: “Design Thinking is how we explore and solve problems; Lean is our framework for testing our beliefs and learning our way to the right outcomes; Agile is how we adapt to changing conditions with software.”

That’s all well and good, but what does it look like in practice?

As we’ve learned, Design Thinking is a solution-based approach to exploring and solving problems. It focuses on generating ideas with a specific problem in mind, keeping the user at the heart of the process throughout. Once you’ve established and designed a suitable solution, you’ll start to incorporate lean principles —testing your ideas, gathering quick and ongoing feedback to see what works—with particular emphasis on cross-team collaboration and overcoming departmental silos.

Agile ties all of this into short sprint cycles, allowing for adaptability in the face of change. In an agile environment, products are improved and built upon incrementally. Again, cross-team collaboration plays a crucial role; agile is all about delivering value that benefits both the end user and the business as a whole.

Together, Design Thinking, lean, and agile cut out unnecessary processes and documentation, leveraging the contributions of all key stakeholders for continuous delivery and improvement.

5. What are the benefits of Design Thinking at work?

As a designer, you have a pivotal role to play in shaping the products and experiences that your company puts to market. Integrating Design Thinking into your process can add huge business value, ultimately ensuring that the products you design are not only desirable for customers, but also viable in terms of company budget and resources.

With that in mind, let’s consider some of the main benefits of using Design Thinking at work:

• Significantly reduces time-to-market: With its emphasis on problem-solving and finding viable solutions, Design Thinking can significantly reduce the amount of time spent on design and development—especially in combination with lean and agile.
• Cost savings and a great ROI: Getting successful products to market faster ultimately saves the business money. Design Thinking has been proven to yield a significant return on investment; teams that are applying IBM’s Design Thinking practices , for example, have calculated an ROI of up to 300% as a result.
• Improves customer retention and loyalty: Design Thinking ensures a user-centric approach, which ultimately boosts user engagement and customer retention in the long term.
• Fosters innovation: Design Thinking is all about challenging assumptions and established beliefs, encouraging all stakeholders to think outside the box. This fosters a culture of innovation which extends well beyond the design team.
• Can be applied company-wide: The great thing about Design Thinking is that it’s not just for designers. It leverages group thinking and encourages cross-team collaboration. What’s more, it can be applied to virtually any team in any industry.

Whether you’re establishing a Design Thinking culture on a company-wide scale, or simply trying to improve your approach to user-centric design, Design Thinking will help you to innovate, focus on the user, and ultimately design products that solve real user problems.

6. Design Thinking methodology in action: Case studies

So we’ve looked in quite some detail at the theory behind Design Thinking and the processes involved — but what does this look like in action? Let’s explore some case studies where Design Thinking has made a huge real-world impact .

Healthcare Case Study: How Design Thinking transformed the Rotterdam Eye Hospital

Executives at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital wanted to transform the patient experience from the typically grim, anxiety-riddled affair into something much more pleasant and personal. To do this, they incorporated Design Thinking and design principles into their planning process. Here’s how they did it:

First, they set out to understand their target user — patients entering the hospital for treatment. The hospital CEO, CFO, managers, staff and doctors established that most patients came into hospital with the fear of going blind.

Based on their findings from the empathise stage, they determined that fear reduction needed to be a priority. Their problem statement may have looked something like the following: “Patients coming into our hospital need to feel comfortable and at ease.”

Armed with a deep understanding of their patients and a clear mission statement, they started to brainstorm potential solutions. As any good design thinker would, they sought inspiration from a range of both likely and unlikely sources. They looked to flagship airline KLM and supermarket chain Albert Heijn to learn about scheduling, for example, while turning to other medical organizations for inspiration on operational excellence.

In the prototyping stage, the team presented the most promising ideas they had come up with so far to those in charge of caregiving at the hospital. These teams of caregivers then used these insights to design informal, small-scale experiments that could test a potential solution and see if it was worthy of wide-scale adoption.

The testing phase consisted of running the aforementioned experiments and seeing if they took off. As Dirk Deichmann and Roel van der Heijde explain , the “transition to formal adoption of these ideas tended to be more gradual. If an idea worked, sooner or later other groups would ask if they could try it too, and the best ideas spread organically.”

The outcome

By adopting a Design Thinking approach, the Rotterdam Eye Hospital were able to get to the heart of their users’ needs and find effective solutions to fulfil them. In doing so, they have greatly improved the user experience: patient intake has risen 47%, and the hospital has since won several awards for safety, quality and design.

Business Case Study: How Design Thinking helped financial service provider MLP regain consumer trust

After the financial crisis hit, financial service provider MLP found that consumer trust was at an all-time low. They needed to re-engage with their target users and come up with new ways of building trust. In search of innovation, they decided to test out a Design Thinking approach. Here’s what they learned:

By focusing on their users and making a conscious effort to understand their needs first-hand, MLP learned that the assumptions they’d been going on were not so accurate after all. As Thomas Freese, division manager for marketing at MLP, explains :

“We always used to speak to customers about the goals they want to achieve. But they do not want to commit to a certain goal, as they often do not know themselves what that is. Rather, they want to talk about their ideas as it is more open and flexible regarding their financial planning.”

With this newfound empathy for their users, MLP were able to reframe their mission statement. They knew that they needed to rebuild consumer trust, and that the way to do this would be to speak to the customer in their own language and become a more relatable brand.

Ideate and Prototype

During the ideate and prototype phases, they decided to experiment with a completely new image. Instead of the formal business attire typically associated with the financial sector, the MLP team members went out in casual clothing. They tested Lego prototypes and homemade posters in designated hotspots — including a university campus and train stations.

By testing this new approach, they learned some extremely valuable lessons about their users and how to communicate with them. They found that even something as simple as dressing more casually had a huge impact in reducing the negative connotations associated with financial services. They also learned the value of asking open questions; rather than trying to sell their prototype, Design Thinking taught them to ask questions that focus on the user’s needs.

The Outcome

Their first foray into Design Thinking proved to be a huge learning curve for MLP. Taking the time to speak to their users gave them the insights they needed to redesign their messaging, allowing them to start marketing much more effectively.

In light of their findings, MLP opened up a new office space in a student district, putting their editorial and social media teams in close proximity to their customer base. Of course, Design Thinking is an iterative process, so this is just one way in which MLP hopes to continue learning to speak their customers’ language.

7. What is the relationship between Design Thinking and UX Design?

At this point, you’ve no doubt noticed lots of similarities between Design Thinking and user experience design , and may be wondering how they relate to one another. Both are extremely user-centric and driven by empathy, and UX designers will use many of the steps laid out in the Design Thinking process, such as user research , prototyping and testing.

Despite these similarities, there are certain distinctions that can be made between the two. For one, the impact of Design Thinking is often felt on a more strategic level; it explores a problem space—in the context of understanding users, technological feasibility, and business requirements—to discover possible solutions. As we have seen from the Rotterdam Eye Hospital and MLP case studies, Design Thinking is embraced and implemented by all different teams across the business, including C-level executives.

If Design Thinking focuses on finding solutions, UX design is concerned with actually designing these solutions and making sure they are usable, accessible and pleasant for the user.

You can think of Design Thinking as a toolset that UX designers dip into, and if you’re operating within the UX design field, it is one of many crucial methodologies you’ll rely on when it comes to creating fantastic user experiences. You can learn more about UX Design and Design Thinking in our UX Design Course , as well as earn a design thinking certification by completing a course in it.

Further reading

Want to see what design thinking looks like in practice? Here’s an article for you: 5 Game-Changing Examples of Design Thinking .

And if you’re new to the design field and wondering what all these newfangled terms mean, you may well be interested in the following guides:

• Learn How To Run Your Very Own Design Thinking Workshop!
• What Are Design Sprints?
• A Brief Guide To The Steps And Principles Of The Design Thinking Process
• How To Learn UX Design And Become A UX Designer

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Ideas Made to Matter

Design thinking, explained

Rebecca Linke

Sep 14, 2017

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an innovative problem-solving process rooted in a set of skills.The approach has been around for decades, but it only started gaining traction outside of the design community after the 2008 Harvard Business Review article [subscription required] titled “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO.

Since then, the design thinking process has been applied to developing new products and services, and to a whole range of problems, from creating a business model for selling solar panels in Africa to the operation of Airbnb .

At a high level, the steps involved in the design thinking process are simple: first, fully understand the problem; second, explore a wide range of possible solutions; third, iterate extensively through prototyping and testing; and finally, implement through the customary deployment mechanisms. 

The skills associated with these steps help people apply creativity to effectively solve real-world problems better than they otherwise would. They can be readily learned, but take effort. For instance, when trying to understand a problem, setting aside your own preconceptions is vital, but it’s hard.

Creative brainstorming is necessary for developing possible solutions, but many people don’t do it particularly well. And throughout the process it is critical to engage in modeling, analysis, prototyping, and testing, and to really learn from these many iterations.

Once you master the skills central to the design thinking approach, they can be applied to solve problems in daily life and any industry.

Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Understand the problem 

The first step in design thinking is to understand the problem you are trying to solve before searching for solutions. Sometimes, the problem you need to address is not the one you originally set out to tackle.

“Most people don’t make much of an effort to explore the problem space before exploring the solution space,” said MIT Sloan professor Steve Eppinger. The mistake they make is to try and empathize, connecting the stated problem only to their own experiences. This falsely leads to the belief that you completely understand the situation. But the actual problem is always broader, more nuanced, or different than people originally assume.

Take the example of a meal delivery service in Holstebro, Denmark. When a team first began looking at the problem of poor nutrition and malnourishment among the elderly in the city, many of whom received meals from the service, it thought that simply updating the menu options would be a sufficient solution. But after closer observation, the team realized the scope of the problem was much larger , and that they would need to redesign the entire experience, not only for those receiving the meals, but for those preparing the meals as well. While the company changed almost everything about itself, including rebranding as The Good Kitchen, the most important change the company made when rethinking its business model was shifting how employees viewed themselves and their work. That, in turn, helped them create better meals (which were also drastically changed), yielding happier, better nourished customers.

Involve users

Imagine you are designing a new walker for rehabilitation patients and the elderly, but you have never used one. Could you fully understand what customers need? Certainly not, if you haven’t extensively observed and spoken with real customers. There is a reason that design thinking is often referred to as human-centered design.

“You have to immerse yourself in the problem,” Eppinger said.

How do you start to understand how to build a better walker? When a team from MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program together with the design firm Altitude took on that task, they met with walker users to interview them, observe them, and understand their experiences.  

“We center the design process on human beings by understanding their needs at the beginning, and then include them throughout the development and testing process,” Eppinger said.

Central to the design thinking process is prototyping and testing (more on that later) which allows designers to try, to fail, and to learn what works. Testing also involves customers, and that continued involvement provides essential user feedback on potential designs and use cases. If the MIT-Altitude team studying walkers had ended user involvement after its initial interviews, it would likely have ended up with a walker that didn’t work very well for customers. 

It is also important to interview and understand other stakeholders, like people selling the product, or those who are supporting the users throughout the product life cycle.

The second phase of design thinking is developing solutions to the problem (which you now fully understand). This begins with what most people know as brainstorming.

Hold nothing back during brainstorming sessions — except criticism. Infeasible ideas can generate useful solutions, but you’d never get there if you shoot down every impractical idea from the start.

“One of the key principles of brainstorming is to suspend judgment,” Eppinger said. “When we're exploring the solution space, we first broaden the search and generate lots of possibilities, including the wild and crazy ideas. Of course, the only way we're going to build on the wild and crazy ideas is if we consider them in the first place.”

That doesn’t mean you never judge the ideas, Eppinger said. That part comes later, in downselection. “But if we want 100 ideas to choose from, we can’t be very critical.”

In the case of The Good Kitchen, the kitchen employees were given new uniforms. Why? Uniforms don’t directly affect the competence of the cooks or the taste of the food.

But during interviews conducted with kitchen employees, designers realized that morale was low, in part because employees were bored preparing the same dishes over and over again, in part because they felt that others had a poor perception of them. The new, chef-style uniforms gave the cooks a greater sense of pride. It was only part of the solution, but if the idea had been rejected outright, or perhaps not even suggested, the company would have missed an important aspect of the solution.

Prototype and test. Repeat.

You’ve defined the problem. You’ve spoken to customers. You’ve brainstormed, come up with all sorts of ideas, and worked with your team to boil those ideas down to the ones you think may actually solve the problem you’ve defined.

“We don’t develop a good solution just by thinking about a list of ideas, bullet points and rough sketches,” Eppinger said. “We explore potential solutions through modeling and prototyping. We design, we build, we test, and repeat — this design iteration process is absolutely critical to effective design thinking.”

Repeating this loop of prototyping, testing, and gathering user feedback is crucial for making sure the design is right — that is, it works for customers, you can build it, and you can support it.

“After several iterations, we might get something that works, we validate it with real customers, and we often find that what we thought was a great solution is actually only just OK. But then we can make it a lot better through even just a few more iterations,” Eppinger said.

Implementation

The goal of all the steps that come before this is to have the best possible solution before you move into implementing the design. Your team will spend most of its time, its money, and its energy on this stage.

“Implementation involves detailed design, training, tooling, and ramping up. It is a huge amount of effort, so get it right before you expend that effort,” said Eppinger.

Design thinking isn’t just for “things.” If you are only applying the approach to physical products, you aren’t getting the most out of it. Design thinking can be applied to any problem that needs a creative solution. When Eppinger ran into a primary school educator who told him design thinking was big in his school, Eppinger thought he meant that they were teaching students the tenets of design thinking.

“It turns out they meant they were using design thinking in running their operations and improving the school programs. It’s being applied everywhere these days,” Eppinger said.

In another example from the education field, Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor hired design consulting firm IDEO to redesign every aspect of the learning experience in a network of schools in Peru. The ultimate goal? To elevate Peru’s middle class.

As you’d expect, many large corporations have also adopted design thinking. IBM has adopted it at a company-wide level, training many of its nearly 400,000 employees in design thinking principles .

What can design thinking do for your business?

The impact of all the buzz around design thinking today is that people are realizing that “anybody who has a challenge that needs creative problem solving could benefit from this approach,” Eppinger said. That means that managers can use it, not only to design a new product or service, “but anytime they’ve got a challenge, a problem to solve.”

Applying design thinking techniques to business problems can help executives across industries rethink their product offerings, grow their markets, offer greater value to customers, or innovate and stay relevant. “I don’t know industries that can’t use design thinking,” said Eppinger.

Ready to go deeper?

Read “ The Designful Company ” by Marty Neumeier, a book that focuses on how businesses can benefit from design thinking, and “ Product Design and Development ,” co-authored by Eppinger, to better understand the detailed methods.

Register for an MIT Sloan Executive Education course:

Systematic Innovation of Products, Processes, and Services , a five-day course taught by Eppinger and other MIT professors.

• Leadership by Design: Innovation Process and Culture , a two-day course taught by MIT Integrated Design and Management director Matthew Kressy.
• Managing Complex Technical Projects , a two-day course taught by Eppinger.
• Apply for M astering Design Thinking , a 3-month online certificate course taught by Eppinger and MIT Sloan senior lecturers Renée Richardson Gosline and David Robertson.

Steve Eppinger is a professor of management science and innovation at MIT Sloan. He holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and has a PhD from MIT in engineering. He is the faculty co-director of MIT's System Design and Management program and Integrated Design and Management program, both master’s degrees joint between the MIT Sloan and Engineering schools. His research focuses on product development and technical project management, and has been applied to improving complex engineering processes in many industries.

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What is design thinking and why does it matter?

Solving problems is a pivotal part of product development. But some issues that come up during product development are more complex than others, and it can be difficult to find the right solution—or even know where to start looking.

That's where the concept of design thinking comes in, keeping users at the center of every process by combining problem-solving with deep empathy.

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This guide gives you a comprehensive overview of design thinking as a problem-solving approach. In this first chapter, you'll gain a strong understanding of what design thinking is, why it’s relevant, and how it helps you design products that you’re proud to bring into the world—and that your users will love.

Design better products with empathy

Use Hotjar to understand your customer’s habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants—so you can design a frictionless, user-centric experience.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach to product development that places an emphasis on the user to help teams identify issues, reframe them, and generate creative solutions.  

It’s a solution-based ideology, process, and collection of hands-on methods to solve complex problems in a user-centric way . Design thinking is most useful for addressing problems that are either ill-defined or unknown, by helping you:

Redefine the problem with a user-centric mindset

Identify the challenge worth solving

Develop ideas in brainstorming sessions

Adopt a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing

Who is design thinking for?

Despite its name, design thinking is not exclusively used by designers. Instead, it’s a human-centered approach to innovation practiced across science, art, engineering, and business.

In the world of product development, design thinking has been incredibly successful in showcasing relevant solutions for real problems. With it, teams can do better UX research, prototyping, and usability testing to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs.  

Design thinking helps you focus on achieving practical results and solutions that:

Meet and solve a real human need

Can be developed into functional products or processes

Are economically viable

It also aims to turn ideas into tangible, testable products as quickly as possible, and make changes and improvements before building the real thing.

💡 Pro tip: don’t base your entire product on assumptions. Use design thinking to go beyond what you already know about your users and product. 

Engage with your users as much as possible; run interviews, watch screen recordings to see what your users see and identify their pain points, and use Hotjar Surveys and Feedback widgets to send out a mix of full-scale surveys and quick questions.

Understand what users really think about your site with Feedback

5 things you need to know about design thinking

Design thinking has long been considered the holy grail of innovation. But before you incorporate it into your own workflows, you need to understand what it is and why it’s so popular. 

1. Design thinking came about as a way to teach engineers how to approach problems creatively—like designers do.

The concept of design thinking was fathered by John E. Arnold, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. From there, it began to evolve as a way of creative thinking and problem-solving, leading to IDEO’s iconic 90s run and Stanford University’s d.school design thinking course as an approach to technical and social innovation.

Today, design thinking gives us the opportunity to reimagine the world and the products, systems, or institutions that reinforce the ways people relate to each other. Some of the world’s leading brands are using design thinking to drive innovation and results—from Apple to Google, and from Samsung to IBM and GE. 

Dive into the Design Thinking Examples chapter of this guide to learn what actions your product team can take related to design thinking.

2. Design thinking means approaching a problem with a designer’s mindset, from the user’s perspective.

As a designer, you have this amazing power of wide-eyed curiosity. What does the world—or even just one person—need in terms of product, user experience, strategy, or complex systems? Can design help achieve it?

A designer is uniquely equipped to deal with these complex problems, with an inquisitive approach that embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity.

As a solution-based approach to innovation, design thinking draws techniques from the designer’s toolkit to solve problems in a creative and innovative way . The designer’s mindset helps you observe and develop empathy with the user—it asks about what they want and need from your product, and how you can use design to bring that to life.

💡 Pro tip: combine quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback to inform designs and keep users at the center of your work. 

Hotjar’s Feedback widget and Surveys give you clear voice of the customer (VoC) data to back up your discoveries, and Recordings and Heatmaps give you quantitative metrics on where customer issues lie with your current products.

Collect actionable product feedback so you can identify what needs to change—and how to change it

3. There are 5 principles that are pivotal to design thinking. 

The five principles of design thinking are reflected in the design thinking methodology; here they are in summary:

User-centricity and empathy: human-centered design thinking keeps people at the center of every process. A good designer knows that when you stay focused on the people you're designing for—and listen to them directly—you can arrive at optimal solutions that meet their needs.

Collaboration: design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business. Innovation comes from diverse perspectives and ideas, and should involve colleagues from various departments to create a cross-functional team.

Ideation: design thinking is a solution-based framework, so the focus is on coming up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible. These are not necessarily new (or good) ideas, but they can become the foundations of new solutions to be tested with prototypes.

Experimentation and iteration: the early and frequent testing of your solutions is inherent to the design thinking process; this way, you can gather feedback and make any necessary changes long before the product is fully developed .  

A bias towards action : design thinking is an extremely hands-on approach to problem-solving. That means turning ideas into tangible prototypes and testing them in real-world contexts—an essential way to assess new ideas and identify the changes needed to make them work.

Learn more about these five principles in the Design Thinking Methodology chapter of this guide.

💡 Pro tip: in design thinking, prototyping is carried out on far-from-finished products, to understand users’ iterative experiences with a work in progress. 

Getting your product ideas in front of real users for feedback can be daunting, but the basis for prototyping early and often is intended to keep you from forming attachments to ideas that may or may not be worthwhile.

Sometimes the key to user empathy is sharing or co-creating a prototype with your users and getting their feedback. By testing your prototypes with real users in context, observing their reactions , and getting feedback , you can refine your point of view, learn more about your users, and make the next iteration of the product that much better.

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Source: Hotjar 

4. Design thinking is a solution-based framework, not a problem-focused approach. 

The way you look at a problem can dictate the way you solve it. Design thinking offers an alternative to problem-focused approaches by highlighting what is working (or could work), rather than emphasizing deficits, limitations, and weaknesses.

A problem-focused approach helps to identify the problem , why it exists, and when and where it becomes a pain point for your users. The approach lets you analyze a situation and figure out where the breakdown is occurring—but you still need to figure out what comes next.

A solution-focused approach, on the other hand, helps you solve the problem. Beyond identifying the problem, and when and where it occurs, this approach lets you identify strategies to resolve the issues that are causing the problem in the first place. 

In product development, solution-based approaches tend to yield more positive results and better products. A user-first approach like design thinking simplifies everything across product teams, marketing, sales, and client services, because customer goals and success metrics are the centerpiece.

A solutions-driven organization does everything from the users’ perspective first, allowing you to:

Gain empathy with users’ habits, behaviors, and needs: discover new opportunities to improve the user experience by empathizing with users and seeing an unbiased view of their experience

Design a frictionless user experience: identify pain points in the user experience and design a solution that balances both user and business needs

The focus is on coming up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible, thinking ‘outside the box’, looking for alternative ways to view the problem, and identifying innovative solutions to the design thinking problem statements you’ve created.

For a closer look, read the Design Thinking Process and Framework chapter of this guide.

5. Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that encourages constant experimentation.

The design thinking process fosters creativity, innovation, and user-centricity, and helps you come up with actionable solutions. As noted above, the process outlines a series of principles, or stages, that bring this ideology to life: 

Empathize : getting to know your users and their challenges

Define : homing in on what problem needs to be solved

Ideate : outside-the-box thinking about solutions and angles

Prototype : creating something tangible that users can then try-out

Test : exposing your prototype to real users to determine if your solution is valid or needs some work.  

You can carry out these five-stages in parallel, repeat them, and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process. 

For example, even once you’ve defined your problem statement, you should keep building empathy with users—use design thinking tools like surveys and feedback software to validate your problem statement and update your assumptions.

The purpose of the process is to allow you to work dynamically to develop and launch innovative ideas. Regardless of how you choose to implement the design thinking process, the goal remains the same: to approach complex problems from a human perspective.

💡 Pro tip: design thinking embraces the principles of continuous discovery to evolve, adapt, and refine ideas and turn them into valuable solutions for your users.

Don’t be afraid to hop back and forth between different stages of the design thinking process to start thinking out of the box. If the creative juices aren’t flowing, go back to your users. Teams can always benefit from building more user empathy with tools like Hotjar Feedback or Surveys .

Intuitive and simple Hotjar Surveys are perfect for capturing all types of feedback

How design thinking helps teams build better products

Design thinking is a tool for creativity, innovation, and problem-solving:

It helps designers gain an understanding of user habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants.

It allows managers to foster a culture of user-centricity at every level of business.

Most importantly, it helps teams create ground-breaking products that users actually want.

Design thinking empowers teams to get their ideas out and share them. It holds the space for you to be ambiguous and messy, knowing you're moving in the direction of the outcomes you're looking for. It’s a way to start , and be willing to have 100 sketches on the floor that won’t work, before finding the one that does—from ambiguity to clarity, refinement, and launch. 

Design thinking can impact and provide innovative solutions to issues product teams truly care about:

Tackling complex challenges

Design thinking encourages creative problem-solving. It pushes you further into the process of questioning: questioning the problem, the assumptions, and the implications. 

A good design thinking framework will give you new perspectives on the lives of your users—including the challenges they face in your product, and the moments that delight them. Having this empathy can give you the insights you need to solve hard, worthwhile problems.

This is especially useful in a product development context—whether it’s designing a competitive product, optimizing internal processes, or reinventing an entire business model.

Moving faster, with iterative speed

Design thinking stops you from falling into assumptions and designing patterns out of habit. Instead, it shifts the focus from your problem to the solution that works best for your users. 

Designing a product with insights from user observation is much more productive than starting from scratch. This shortens the development process by helping you design better products that your users actually want, from the get-go.

Design thinking also helps scale the design process through large organizations. It keeps the team and stakeholders on the same page and improves efficiency with an agile design thinking approach to early-stage feedback that stops you wasting resources on unpromising ideas. 

Meeting and exceeding customer expectations to ensure customer delight 

Empathy is at the heart of design. It connects you—the designer—to the people who will benefit from your work, empowering you to create products that ultimately meet real human needs.

Design thinking revolves around a deep interest to understand the people you're building for, creating the conditions for innovation to happen over and over again .

With design thinking, teams have the freedom to generate real solutions. It’s not just about coming up with ideas—it’s about turning them into prototypes, testing them, and making changes based on user feedback.

🔥 How we use the design thinking framework at Hotjar

At Hotjar , we ‘live and breathe’ design thinking and use this framework to deliver work in any part of our company—from Marketing to Product Teams.

Here are the four key product experience insights tools we use to produce granular insights that help our designers empathize with users:

Heatmaps : see where users click, navigate, and scroll to discover which elements attract attention and which get overlooked.

Feedback widgets : gather on-site user feedback to hear from customers in the wild.

Recordings : watch playbacks of users navigating your product to zero-in on issues, pain points, and bugs.

Surveys : gather VoC data both on- and off-site by sending out either short- or long-form surveys.

Minimizing uncertainty and improving confidence in design decisions

Product development can be fraught with obstacles. Your team either collects a lot of backward-looking data, which doesn’t tell you what current or future users really want, or you make risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence. 

Design thinking is a strategy-making tool that shifts the focus to human behavior. By using imaginative, human-centered problem solving, you can identify new strategies and unlock new markets. Design thinking also plays a key role in reducing assumptions for product teams, and ultimately enables you to better understand users and deliver products that delight them . 

Developing this type of deep empathy with your target users means you’ll be able to design products they really want, and will use and come back to.

Put users at the center of your designs, every time

Faqs about design thinking:.

Design thinking is a popular ideology and process that focuses on solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way. 

It’s a creative approach to innovation and problem-solving that takes design perspectives and processes and applies them to a variety of industries to help strengthen their services, products, policies, or design processes. 

The design thinking process outlines a series of steps that bring this ideology to life—starting with building empathy for the user, through to coming up with ideas and turning them into prototypes.

Why is design thinking important for product development?

Design thinking has become closely associated with innovation and the creation of ground-breaking products and services. It can be used to develop solutions for end-users, but can also help organizations boost creativity and innovation to implement new strategies across every business level.

Design thinking allows teams to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.

The iterative and non-linear nature of the design thinking process allows product teams to work dynamically to develop and launch innovative ideas.

How can I practice design thinking?

The goal of the design thinking process is to come up with solutions, products, or services that are desirable for the user, economically viable from a business perspective, and technologically feasible. 

To do that, start by Empathizing with your users, being more open to the user experience and seeing things from their perspectives. This will help you Define your problem statement, which helps you reframe your point of view and see a problem from a different angle. 

Then, your team can start to Ideate , which may spur new approaches to your problem and bring you closer to an innovative solution that puts your users at the center. Based on this, you can start to build a Prototype to answer critical questions quickly.

When you Test your prototype, it opens you to both the many possible directions of your design and the ways it might address real human needs. Each step along the way affords the opportunity to rethink, relearn, and reboot as needed. The design process is rarely linear.

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Design Thinking, Essential Problem Solving 101- It’s More Than Scientific

The term “ Design Thinking ” dates back to the 1987 book by Peter Rowe; “Design Thinking.” In that book he describes the way that architects and urban planners would approach design problems. However, the idea that there was a specific pattern of problem solving in “design thought” came much earlier in Herbert A Simon’s book, “The Science of the Artificial” which was published in 1969. The concept was popularized in the early 1990s by Richard Buchanan in his article “ Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”.

Ralph Caplan, the design consultant, sums up the need for design thinking with; “Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.”

Author/Copyright holder: Christine Prefontaine. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

A simple overview of design thinking as a problem solving process.

Problem-Solving and Two Schools of Thought

Design thinking is concerned with solving problems through design. The idea being that the future output of the process will provide a better answer than the one already available or if nothing is available – something entirely new.

It is an unconstrained methodology where it is possible that the designer (or design team) will work on many possible solutions at once. It enables designers to consider the problem in many different ways and speculate on both the past and future of the problem too.

This is in contrast to the scientific method of problem solving which requires a highly-defined problem which focuses on delivering a single solution.

This difference was first noted by Brian Lawson, a psychologist, in 1972. He conducted an experiment in which scientists and architects were asked to build a structure from colored blocks. He provided some basic rules for the project and observed how they approached it. The scientists looked to move through a simple series of solutions based on the outcome and entire rule set. The architects, in contrast, simply focused on the desired end-state and then tested to see if the solution they had found met the rules.

This led to the idea that scientists solve problems by a process of analysis, whilst designers solve problems by synthesis. However, later evidence suggests that designers apply both forms of problem solving to attain “design thinking”.

They do this via a process of divergent thinking . A designer will examine as many possible solutions at the beginning of a process as they can think of – then they will apply the scientific side ( convergent thinking ) to narrow these solutions down to the best output.

Design thinking can be as simple or as complex as the business and users require. This IDEO process can be seen as a 3 part process or a 9 part process .

The Design Thinking Process

Design thinking is essentially a process which moves from problem to solution via some clear intermediate points. The classic approach, as proposed by Herbert A Simon, is offered here:

• Definition – where the problem is defined as best as possible prior to solving it
• Research – where the designers examine as much data as they feel necessary to be able to fully contribute to the problem solving process
• Ideation – where the designer commences creating possible solutions without examining their practicality until a large number of solutions has been proposed. Once this is done, impractical solutions are eliminated or played with until they become practical.
• Prototyping – where the best ideas are simulated in some means so that their value can be explored with users
• Choosing – where the best idea is selected from the multiple prototypes
• Implementing – where that idea is built and delivered as a product
• Testing – where the product is tested with the user in order to ensure that it solves the original problem in an effective manner

There are many other design thinking processes outlined in literature – most of which are a truncated version of the above process combining or skipping stages.

Here we see a more complex interpretation of the design thinking process and how it fits into the larger business sphere.

The Principles of Design Thinking

In the book, Design thinking: Understand, Improve Apply, Plattner and Meinel offer four underlying principles for design thinking:

• Human – all design is of a social nature
• Ambiguity – design thinking preserves and embraces ambiguity
• Re-design – all design processes are in fact re-design of existing processes
• Tangibility – the design process to make something tangible will facilitate communication of that design

It is also worth noting that design thinking functions independently of the design methods employed in any given design process. Design methods are the tools employed (such as interviews, user research , prototypes, etc.) and the assumption is that there are many paths that may be used (e.g. different sets of methods applied) to reach the same “best” result.

Visuals and Design Thinking

Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that design thinking is not about graphic design per se. However, designers are often used to communicating their thinking visually and drawings, sketches , prototypes, etc. are often used to convey the ideas created within a design thinking process.

In fact, ideas which are hard to express easily in words are often given shape in the form of visual metaphors. Design thinking thus easily incorporates abstract thought processes – something that scientific thinking may find more challenging to accommodate.

Visual representations of how those involved in the design process might be thinking about a problem.

The Take Away

Design thinking is a process by which designers approach problem solving. It incorporates analytical, synthetic, divergent and convergent thinking to create a wide number of potential solutions and then narrow these down to a “best fit” solution. There are many ways to use a design thinking process to incorporate different methodologies to still reach the same end point. Designers must solve problems in order to add value through design.

Richard Buchanan’s original article "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking," was published in Design Issues , vol. 8, no. 2, Spring 1992.

Peter Rowe’s book from 1987 Design Thinking was published byCambridge: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-68067-7.

Herbert A Simon’s book from 1969 The Sciences of the Artificial . Was published by Cambridge: MIT Press.

Plattner, Hasso; Meinel, Christoph; Leifer, Larry J., eds. (2011). Design thinking: understand, improve, apply . Understanding innovation . Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. pp. xiv–xvi.doi:10.1007/978-3-642-13757-0. ISBN 3642137563.

This fascinating case study looks at how IBM plans to bring design thinking to large scale businesses - http://www.wired.com/2016/01/ibms-got-a-plan-to-bring-design-thinking-to-big-business/

See how Pepsi’s CEO, Indra Nooyi, implemented design thinking in her organization - https://hbr.org/2015/09/how-indra-nooyi-turned-design-thinking-into-strategy

Harvard Business Review examines design thinking and how it translates into action here - https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-for-action

Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

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Solving Complex Problems: Structured Thinking, Design Principles, and AI

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How do you solve important, large-scale challenges with evolving and contradictory constraints? In this 5-day course, transform your approach to large-scale problem solving, from multi-stakeholder engineering projects to the online spread of misinformation. Alongside engineers and leaders from diverse industries, you’ll explore actionable innovative frameworks for assessing, communicating, and implementing complex systems—and significantly increase your likelihood of success.

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Participants in Design Thinking and Innovation are eligible for a Certificate of Completion from Harvard Business School Online.

Participants are expected to fully complete all coursework in a thoughtful and timely manner. This will mean meeting each week’s course module deadlines and fully answering questions posed therein. This helps ensure participants proceed through the course at a similar pace and can take full advantage of social learning opportunities. In addition to module and assignment completion, we expect you to offer feedback on others’ reflections and contribute to conversations on the platform. Participants who fail to complete the course requirements will not receive a certificate and will not be eligible to retake the course.

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Description: Design Thinking and Innovation is a 7-week, 40-hour online certificate program from Harvard Business School. Design Thinking and Innovation will teach you how to leverage fundamental design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to address business challenges and build products, strategies, teams, and environments for optimal use and performance.

The program was developed by leading Harvard Business School faculty and is delivered in an active learning environment based on the HBS signature case-based learning model.

What is the project?

Beginning in Module 2 of Design Thinking and Innovation, you will apply the tools you learn in the course to an innovation problem that is important or interesting to you, or you can use a provided scenario. In subsequent modules, you will use your earlier responses to build on your innovation project and make each phase of design thinking relevant to your own work.

Do I need to collaborate with others to complete the project?

No, each individual submits their own work in Design Thinking and Innovation, and all project work can be submitted without sharing it with others in the course. You are encouraged to share with others and ask for feedback, but collaboration isn’t necessary to advance through the course.

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How to solve complex problems with design thinking (with case studies).

The online world has changed the way we solve problems. Instead of one person in charge, we now have a range of individuals from different backgrounds that can solve problems in their communities. Yet, when looking at big problems, finding a process to keep everyone accountable is important. In this article, I’m going to outline how (and why we think) design thinking is the perfect process for solving the worlds biggest problems. 

We’ve talked about what design thinking is , and the human-centered approach of design thinking. So today let’s look at practical solutions to problems by using design thinking. 

Design thinking means starting with observation, rather than a problem, and learning by making.

When you start with observation, you give yourself the flexibility to make sure that you’re asking the right questions. The traditional method for problem solving involves a lot of guesswork. For example, if you want to help marathon runners perform better at a race, you can look at race statistics, observe practice schedules, and watch athletes on race day. All this can be done without actually talking to a runner.

Design thinking aims to include community members in the process. The first step would be to actually talk to the runners. Spend time with them and ask them questions. Engage in a real and thoughtful conversation about their problems and be a good listener. Many designers stop here, but the best design projects take this a step further. After interviewing the runners, they would invite them to help brainstorm and design their product. This ensures they really understand the people they are trying to help. For example, I can tell you how hard it is to run a marathon, but you don’t really understand until you are out there doing it. This helps to take innovation out of the hands of designers and CEO’s and put it into the hands of everyone. 

We also want to use prototypes to speed up the process of innovation. You can do all the research you want. But you can’t understand the strengths and weaknesses of a product or service without putting it out into the world. 

A great way to get in touch with the design process is to answer the following questions:

_1. What is - what is the current reality in the community you are trying to help. 

• What if - what could the solution be? Brainstorm and generate ideas. 
• What wows - which ideas stand out from the crowd? Prototype those ideas. 
• what works - test and experiment with your prototypes to discover what works and what doesn’t._

Let’s take a look at how the following organisations used design thinking to solve big challenges in their communities:

Asili . A sustainable community-owned health, agricultural, and water business in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The problem: One out of every five children don’t live to their fifth birthdays in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). 

The process: The first step for the team was to observe the communities in the DRC and understand which factors were leading to the 20% mortality rate among children. They found that many die preventable deaths from diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. Yet, after spending time interviewing residents they discovered one of the main barriers to accessing healthcare was a lack of communication and transparency from the current healthcare clinics. The team then invited some of the community members to a 2-day workshop so that they could be full participants in designing the program. This was integral to design products and programs that could actually be integrated into the community. 

The solution: Asili now offers agricultural services, clean water, and a health clinic to its members. This has vastly improved the healthcare and health outcomes for children under 5. 

Brilliance by D-Rev . Combatting Jaundice in the Developing World

The problem:   Worldwide, jaundice affects millions of newborn babies. Though the illness isn’t specific to developing countries, factors such as rates of premature birth, insufficient prenatal care, and limited hospital resources mean that children born into poverty suffer disproportionately from the severe consequences of delayed or inadequate treatment.

The process: The team visited hospitals and clinics in the developing world and talked to as many doctors as they could to better understand the problem. After these interviews, they realised they did not need to create a new technology, but needed to re-design the current technology to be more sustainable. They quickly made prototypes to test internally and sent the best ones to the doctors they had interviewed, along with follow up questions. Once they found the best solution, they partnered with a medical manufacturing company to create the product on a larger scale.

The solution: D- Rev has now sold their sustainable devices to a number of hospitals and clinics in the developing world. Their designers are busy studying how many babies are being treated each year, and how many lives are being saved that would not have been possible without the new machines. 

The Strengthening Participatory Organization(SPO) . Aid distribution after monsoon flooding in Pakistan

The problem: The 2011 monsoon flooding in Sindh, Pakistan’s southernmost province, affected an estimated 5.5 million people. The floods compounded the damage caused by flooding in 2010, and the lack of clean drinking water, food, healthcare and shelter resulted in communicable and non-communicable diseases across the province. It also destroyed agricultural land and livestock which resulted in a loss of livelihoods. Aid organisations needed a way to monitor their distribution of supplies and get feedback from local communities. 

The process: They first researched the access that citizens had to mobile phones and how they could use them by sending out surveys. They found that while most people would have access to mobile phone, literacy rates in the country were low so it was important to build accessibility into the solution. 

The solution: SPO partnered with FrontlineSMS, an open source messaging software. They set up a numbering feedback system which they were then able to distribute to local communities on cards in the local language. They focused on building relationships in the community so that the solution was used to give feedback about aid distribution. 

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The Six Systems Thinking Steps to Solve Complex Problems

A quick overview of common problem solving techniques indicates that most of these methods focus on the problem rather than the whole eco-system where the problem exists. Along with the challenges of global economy , problems turn out to be more complicated and sometimes awakening problems. Climate change, traffic problems, and organizational problems that have developed through the years are all complex problems that we shouldn’t look at the same way as simple or linear problems. Part of the problem of thinking about a complex problem is the way we approach it, which may contribute to making the problem even more complex. As stated by Albert Einstein, “The problems cannot be solved using the same level of thinking that created them.” Systems thinking tends to focus on the broader ecosystem rather than the problem itself.

Systems thinking was developed by Jay Forrester and members of the Society for Organizational Learning at MIT. The idea is described in his book, The Fifth Discipline , as follows: “Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots.’” A common example of the systems thinking method is the life around us where multiple systems interact with each other and are affected by each other. This wide perspective of systems thinking promotes it to solve complex problems that are dependent on external factors. Below are some of the stations that system thinking may contribute to solve.

• Complex problems that involve different factors, which require understanding the big picture in order to be efficiently solved
• Situations that are affecting, are being affected by, or affect the surrounding systems
• Problems that have turned more complicated by previous attempts to solve them

Concepts of Systems Thinking

In order to understand systems thinking, a number of concepts should be highlighted in order to define the relation between the problem and the other elements in the system and how to observe this relation in order to reach an effective solution. These principles include the following.

• All systems are composed of interconnected parts, and changing one part affects the entire system, including other parts.
• The structure of a system determines its behavior, which means that the system depends on the connection between parts rather that the part themselves.
• System behavior is an emergent phenomenon. System behavior is hard to predict due its continuously changing, non-linear relations and its time delay. It can’t be predicted by simply inspecting its elements or structure.
• Feedback loops control a system’s major dynamic behavior. The feedback loop is a number of connections causing an output from one part to eventually influence input to that same part. The number of feedback loops are larger than the system parts, which contributes to increasing system complicity.
• Complex social systems exhibit counterintuitive behavior. Solving complex problems can’t be achieved through everyday problem solving methods. They can be solved only through analytical methods and tools. Solving complex problems can be achieved through systems thinking, a process that fits the problem, and system dynamics , which is an approach to model systems by emphasizing their feedback loops.

Systems Thinking in Six Steps

In their paper Six Steps to Thinking Systemically , Michael Goodman and Richard Karash introduced six steps to apply systems thinking principles while solving complex problems. These steps were part of their case study to Bijou Bottling company’s problem of getting their orders shipped on time.

Set 1: Tell the Story

The first step in solving the problem is to understand it, and this can be achieved through looking deeply at the whole system rather than individual parts. This step requires meeting with the stakeholders to share their vision about the situation. One of the common tools to build this understanding is to utilize Concept Maps, which are graphical tools used to represent the organization or a structure of knowledge. Concept Maps visually present the system’s elements, concept links, proposition statements, cross-links, and examples.

Step 2: Draw Behavior Over Time (BOT) Graphs

When thinking about a problem, we are influenced with the current situation that is reflected in our analysis, yet the problem follows a time dimension, which means that it should be tracked through the time. The Behavior Over Time graph draws a curve that presents a specific behavior (Y) through the time (X). This graph helps us to understanding whether or not the current solution is effective.

Step 3: Create a Focusing Statement

At this point, there should be a clear vision about the problem solving process, which is defined in the from of a statement that indicates the team’s target and why the problem occurs.

Step 4: Identify the Structure

After having clear vision about the problem through the proposed statement, the system structure should be described, including the behavior patterns. Building these patterns helps in understanding more about the problem, and it can be formed as a system archetype.

Step 5: Going Deeper into the Issues

After defining the problem and the system structure, this step tends to understand the underlying problems through clarifying four items: the purpose of the system (what we want), the mental models, the large system, and personal role in the situation.

Set 6: Plan an Intervention

The previously collected information is used to start the intervention phase, where modifications to the current problem relate parts to connections. This intervention attempts to reach the desirable behavior.

Practice Example of Systems Thinking

One of the direct examples of adopting the systems thinking method was presented by Daniel Aronson highlighting insects who caused damage crops. Traditional thinking to solve crop damage is to apply more pesticides to reduce the number of insects and subsequently reduce the crop damage. However, this solution solves the problem for a short term. In the long run, the problem isn’t truly solved, as the original insect eating the crops are controlling the population of another species of insect in the environment either by preying on it or competing with it. Subsequently, the crop damage increases again due to the increasing numbers of other insect species.

Observing the ecosystem that includes both the insects and the crops, systems thinking suggests exploring a solution that ensures reducing the crop damage in the long run without affecting the environmental balance, such as deploying the Integrated Pest Management that has proven success based on MIT and the National Academy of Science. This solution tends to control the number of an insect species by introducing its predators in the area.

Unlike everyday problems, complex problems can’t be solved using traditional problem solving methods due to the nature of the problems and their complexity. One of the theories that attempts to understand complex problems is systems thinking, which is defined by a number of characters. Six steps are to be used to explore and solve complex problems under the umbrella of systems thinking, which help us to observe and think in a whole eco-system rather than individual parts. Systems thinking can be deployed in multiple domains to solve organization problem, or global problems such as energy, pollution, and poverty.

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Dr Rafiq Elmansy

As an academic and author, I've had the privilege of shaping the design landscape. I teach design at the University of Leeds and am the Programme Leader for the MA Design, focusing on design thinking, design for health, and behavioural design. I've developed and taught several innovative programmes at Wrexham Glyndwr University, Northumbria University, and The American University in Cairo. I'm also a published book author and the proud founder of Designorate.com, a platform that has been instrumental in fostering design innovation. My expertise in design has been recognised by prestigious organizations. I'm a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), the Design Research Society (FDRS), and an Adobe Education Leader. Over the course of 20 years, I've had the privilege of working with esteemed clients such as the UN, World Bank, Adobe, and Schneider, contributing to their design strategies. For more than 12 years, I collaborated closely with the Adobe team, playing a key role in the development of many Adobe applications.

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3 thoughts on “ the six systems thinking steps to solve complex problems ”.

“Systems thinking was developed by Jay Forrester and members of the Society for Organizational Learning at MIT. The idea is described in his book, The Fifth Discipline, as follows:” Peter Senge is the author of The Fifth Discipline

Thank you so much Misi for the helpful information.

Thank you for the valuable information. I believe that systems thinking can be applied to every aspect of our lives. When you teach yourself to spot patterns, cycles, and loops instead of individuals elements. You see behind the scenes. Understand what actually needs addressing to move forward and make progress faster with less damage.

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