Companies that embed design thinking would do well to evaluate their current culture.
They can identify which of the company’s shared patterns of perception, thinking and acting may be at odds through leveraging design thinking principles ....and which ones are in harmony with design thinking’s key principles of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and refining.
If an organization is to embed design thinking, it must reveal, confront and take responsibility for all aspects of its current culture.
Then it must design a culture that leverages design thinking for success in the marketplace of the future. (Not coincidentally, the application of design thinking can enable this step.)
Finally, the firm must rapidly make the needed changes. Any other process risks simply dressing up the old culture without changing it.
And that can result in the new culture unwittingly inheriting aspects of the old culture—aspects that undermine the advantages of design thinking.
