Book summary “Design thinking”: summary

Introduction

You face constant pressure to deliver breakthrough innovations while managing risk-averse corporate cultures trapped in traditional operational silos. Traditional product-centric models fail when rapid technological shifts and changing consumer expectations demand human-centered problem solving and agile collaboration.

Thomas Lockwood presents Design Thinking as a comprehensive framework for shifting organizational cultures toward empathy, co-creation, and sustainable innovation. The book guides you through the strategic necessity of design, the navigation of corporate culture types, the mechanics of scaling design initiatives, and the rigorous practice of finding the right problems.

You will discover answers to several core challenges as you read:

• How do you measure innovation success in global organizations?
• What culture keys determine whether design methods thrive or fail?
• How do you transition from top-down mandates to employee-driven pull factors?
• What methods uncover truly wicked problems instead of surface symptoms?

1. Better Innovation and Design Organizations

Global CEOs view innovation as a top strategic priority, yet most organizations struggle with technological speed and cultures that inhibit risk-taking. While executives recognize that rapid technological changes make current products obsolete within years, very few feel their corporate cultures encourage a safe-to-fail environment or embed innovation thoroughly.

Global CEOs recognize innovation as a top strategic priority, yet most corporate cultures inhibit risk-taking until companies deliberately embed human-centered design thinking and collective imagination.

KPMG's 2016 Global CEO survey titled Now or Never and studies by Fortune, IBM, and PwC show that two-thirds of CEOs believe the next three years will outweigh the last fifty years in critical transformation. Seven out of ten CEOs say it is important to include innovation in business strategies. Eight out of ten CEOs are concerned that existing products and services may become irrelevant in three to five years.

Less than a third of respondents believe their organizational cultures encourage risk-taking or safe-to-fail environments. Only one out of four says innovation is embedded in everything they do. Thirty-six percent of CEOs say their organization's approach to innovation is ad hoc, reactive, or silo-based.

Companies that heavily integrate design and design thinking significantly outperform traditional market benchmarks and competitors. Data from the Design Management Institute and other institutions demonstrates that design-driven companies achieve massive financial superiority over the S&P 500.

A 2015 study by the Design Management Institute demonstrates that larger design-driven companies including Apple, Starbucks, Disney, and Nike outperform the S&P 500 by 211 percent.

Major consulting firms and large enterprises have engaged in a massive wave of acquisitions and hiring sprees to secure design thinking competencies. Starting around 2013 and accelerating dramatically between 2015 and 2016, top-tier consulting firms and global corporations acquired numerous design agencies and began hiring designers in large quantities.

Between 2004 and 2016, more than 70 notable design and creative consulting firms were acquired, with major consulting firms like Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, McKinsey, and Boston Consulting Group buying top agencies, and firms like Accenture, Deloitte, GE, and IBM rumored to hire 1,000 designers each.

Ten Core Attributes of Design Organizations

Highly innovative organizations share ten core attributes rooted in human-centered design principles and organizational culture. New Zealand Trade and Enterprise utilized Edgar's True Alignment framework and design thinking principles at a leadership summit named The Hillary Step to align their global culture.

The ten specific cultural attributes that empower design thinking organizations provide the operational ingredients for innovation:

• Design Thinking Scale: apply design thinking as a function, spread it across the organization, or integrate it top-down or bottom-up
• The Pull Factor: leverage the emotional momentum of people naturally wanting to engage in innovation
• The Right Problems: focus on identifying and solving root causes and customer needs rather than low-hanging fruit
• Cultural Awareness: assess and align organizational culture so design thinking implementation matches the environment
• Curious Confrontation: use design thinking as a platform to constructively manage diverse viewpoints, ambiguity, and conflict
• Co-Creation: invite inclusion across boundaries, silos, and external customers to produce mutually valued outcomes
• Open Spaces: creatively use physical environments, virtual spaces, technology, and visual tools to encourage open dialogue
• Whole Communication: communicate through contextual inquiry, storytelling, and visual information rather than dry reports
• Aligned Leadership: ensure leaders at all levels role-model, trust, and actively advocate the design thinking process
• Purpose: integrate an external customer focus with an internal cultural focus around a shared set of ideals

Human motivation and the pillars of collective imagination are driven by three fundamental psychological desires identified in FIRO-Theory. Will Schutz's FIRO-Theory deconstructs human behavior into three core needs—feeling significant, competent, and liked—which directly map to the pillars of participation, pursuit of knowledge, and free expression.

Design has evolved through four distinct historical orders ranging from visual communication to complex social systems. Richard Buchanan categorized design into four developmental orders: communication, products, interactions, and systems, showing how design scope expands from objects to human interactions and wicked problems.

Apple filed for and was granted a design patent in 2012 for its specific pursuit of rounded corners in product design.

Design thinking organizations can advance into a Fifth Order of Design focused on the intentional design of culture and awareness. While the Fourth Order addresses systematic interactions, the Fifth Order moves beyond process improvement into the psychological and emotional deconstruction and intentional redesign of organizational cultures and learning.

2. Designing Culture and Culture Types

Culture is the ultimate determining factor for organizational success, requiring leaders to navigate twelve culture keys and tailor design thinking approaches to expertise, participation, or authenticity environments.

Transforming a culture requires changing everyday working behaviors and navigating the tension between the predictability offered by standard systems and the ambiguity necessary for change. Because humans naturally favor control to avoid risk, traditional management practices often inadvertently dampen creativity. Louis Gerstner realized during his time at IBM that culture is the game itself.

Large enterprises combat internal silos and attract creative talent by physically moving into vibrant urban ecosystems and shifting toward a user-experience focus. To transition from being engineering-driven and product-centric to design-driven and customer-centric, GE relocated its headquarters to downtown Boston, staffing it predominantly with designers, developers, and product managers. GE CEO Jeff Immelt initially thought the creative class trend was questionable, but after moving to Boston and embedding the company in an active urban ecosystem, he recognized the value of being surrounded by ideas. This new headquarters housed 800 total positions, with 600 positions dedicated to designers, developers, and product managers, just six weeks after moving to Boston at the time of Jeff Immelt's interview. At the time, GE generated $123 billion in 2016 revenue and supported more than 330,000 employees operating in over 180 countries.

Culture as the Operating Environment

Twelve specific human elements and strategic tools known as culture keys influence how an organization functions and determines how it accepts design thinking. These keys include power and influence, planning and goal-setting, problem-solving, decision-making, conflict management, incentive and reward, hiring, role definition, customer interface, teamwork, structure, and aligned values. Understanding them allows leaders to intentionally design innovative cultures.

You can apply the culture keys through specific organizational actions:

• Assess power and influence origins based on expertise, inclusion, or authentic values.
• Align planning and goal-setting processes to provide an emotional anchor for change.
• Ensure clarity in problem-solving and decision-making to prevent mistrust and lack of engagement.
• Manage conflict constructively to test values and foster mutual benefit.
• Align incentives and rewards with stated goals while acknowledging diverse human motivations.
• Hire for cultural fit and brand affinity through employee referrals.
• Define roles to provide personal achievement, autonomy, and team belonging.
• Recognize that internal culture directly or indirectly influences customer interfaces.
• Structure teamwork through functional focus, cross-functional collaboration, or shared idealistic values.
• Design structures from the customer experience outward rather than strictly inside-out.
• Relentlessly communicate, role-model, and reinforce aligned values rather than merely hanging them on walls.

Expertise, Participation, and Authenticity Cultures

Organizational cultures fall into three distinct preferences—expertise, participation, and authenticity—requiring tailored approaches for implementing design thinking. Because one size does not fit all, leaders must first assess their current culture baseline, remain open to unexpected changes, and apply the culture keys appropriately. Misalignment between subcultures can create friction, whereas proper alignment maximizes performance. More than 70 percent of organizations in the author's 15-year consulting history feature expertise cultures.

You navigate these environments by following practical steps:

• Recognize and understand the current culture of the organization to establish a baseline.
• Engage the culture change journey with an open and curious mind.
• Apply the culture keys to support the integration of design thinking.

Expertise cultures motivate employees through mastery and individual capability, relying on top-down direction and analytical rigor to solve problems. In this culture type, power is derived from ranking among the best in a specialty, and rewards are tied to individual performance, promotions, and competency. People enjoy intellectual arguments based on facts and logic rather than emotion. You leverage individual competency for high achievement, utilize functional or ad hoc project teaming, rely on functional experts and top-down decision-making, and hire strictly based on competency and skill aptitude.

Participation cultures operate as family-like communities prioritizing inclusion, collaboration, and shared group decision-making. Employees are motivated by involvement, teamwork, and social celebrations. Disagreements are resolved through consensus, and physical workspaces often feature open layouts to encourage free-flowing communication. You leverage broad involvement in planning, reinforce cross-functional teaming, engage group involvement in the hiring process, and maintain flat hierarchies.

Authenticity cultures derive influence from a deep commitment to shared values, higher ideals, and the psychological and physical well-being of customers. Employees are motivated by intrinsic purpose, personal growth, and self-actualization. Decisions are filtered through moral and ethical considerations, and conflicts are managed openly to deepen trust and relationships. You encourage personal self-actualization, empower everyone to provide customer service, hire intentionally based on connection to the company purpose, and promote open expression of thoughts and feelings.

3. Design Thinking at Scale and the Pull Factor

Any organization, regardless of size, can scale design thinking to influence culture and drive higher levels of innovation. Adoption paths vary across enterprises. Some companies start top-down from the chief executive officer, others bottom-up through human resources, and others via specialized functions or acquisitions. Widespread training embeds problem-solving capabilities into the organizational culture.

Organizations scale design thinking by moving away from top-down mandates toward the emotional momentum of the pull factor, engaging employees through immersive training and problem-finding frameworks.

Intuit trained nearly all of its 10,000 employees in design thinking. Other scale examples include Kaiser Permanente with 15,000, GE Healthcare with 6,000, Marriott with 5,000, Honeywell with 3,000, P&G with 1,300, Deutsche Telekom with over 5,500 trained in 2016, and SAP with more than 20,000 trained between 2015 and 2017.

Scaling Across the Enterprise

Intuit transformed its expertise culture into a design-driven culture over a nine-year journey centered on customer empathy and employee empowerment. Beginning around 2006 under founder Scott Cook and chief executive officer Steve Bennett, the company introduced 10 percent unstructured time, developed the Design for Delight framework, trained internal innovation coaches called Innovation Catalysts, and integrated design thinking into leadership performance reviews.

An Intuit team working on TurboTax used a two-day workshop to test selling single seats instead of sets of five, resulting in a $10 million increase in sales in the first year. In another case, the finance team recovered $8 million annually by improving customer communication regarding credit card updates.

SAP scaled design thinking by sending executives to the Stanford d.school boot camp and establishing a formula where innovation equals problem finding multiplied by problem-solving. Founder Hasso Plattner challenged the company in a 2004 keynote to reconnect with customer needs, leading to the creation of a design services team led by Sam Yen, who held a doctor of philosophy degree in design theory and methodology from Stanford.

Marriott International successfully integrated design thinking by inviting customers to co-create experiences through digital platforms and on-site labs. Led by chief executive officer Arne Sorenson and the board, the company identified innovation as a major risk and shifted its focus from a hotel company to a hospitality company. By implementing an online initiative called Progress and setting up a design thinking lab hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, they captured real-time guest feedback.

Marriott developed mobile apps allowing check-in, room key access, and direct service chats, alongside redesigned public community spaces and in-residence bartenders to increase guest engagement.

The Power of the Pull Factor

The pull factor is the emotional momentum generated when people naturally want to engage in design thinking because they feel empowered and included. Unlike top-down push strategies that require heavy change management and financial incentives, design thinking creates an intrinsic desire to participate across all employee generations. It engages hearts, minds, and hands, democratizing voices and spreading organically.

Visa design leader Kevin Lee described how employees get evangelized and converted once they experience design thinking, wanting to get involved through the pull rather than the push.

Wells Fargo uses design thinking, termed Experience Strategy, to foster conscious collaboration and holistic problem-solving. Led by Robin Beers, senior vice president of design and research, the bank shifted from industrial-era efficiency to holistic visual sense-making, setting agendas where teams frame customer problems using structured reframing and prototyping techniques.

In design thinking sessions with corporate clients, Wells Fargo workshops saved large customers millions of dollars in time savings per day by leveling hierarchies and preventing senior leaders from speaking first.

You can apply these specific collaboration methods in your own workshops:

• Ask how might we deliver the best experience for the customer?
• Act like a designer today by reframing the problem, collaborating with the customer, conceptual prototyping, and refining.
• Never let the most senior person in the room speak first to level the playing field.

4. The Right Problems and Cultural Awareness

Sustainable business success depends on rigorous problem finding and organizational empathy to solve wicked problems rather than executing fast fixes for surface issues.

SAP defines this balance through a specific mathematical formula: innovation equals problem finding multiplied by problem-solving. Organizations often waste money by applying quick fixes to surface issues instead of exploring the broader context to find the root cause. Effective design thinking begins with a deep focus on the customer and human experience to frame the true problem.

In the late 1940s, Helsinki's public pool usage dropped because the city altered the bus schedule to end at 6 p.m., preventing commuters from reaching it after work. The city initially planned to build a whole new pool until an architect discovered this transit root cause.

Complex social or organizational problems, known as wicked problems, resist definitive solutions because their framing and stakeholder dynamics constantly shift. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber established the criteria for wicked problems in the early 1970s while working at the University of California at Berkeley.

Problem Finding Versus Problem Solving

Reframing a product category around the user's actual physical frustration rather than standard marketing statistics can create multi-billion-dollar product lines. P&G hired Continuum to study kitchen floor cleaning, discovering that U.S. kitchens are cleaned weekly for up to 45 minutes, with sponge mops used 42 percent, string mops 26 percent, and cloth mops 17 percent of the time. P&G researchers discovered that traditional mopping involved cleaning the floor only to create and clean up mud with a dirty mop. By replacing water use with a chemical on a disposable pad, they invented the Swiffer and disrupted a $300 million per year sales category for mops and brooms prior to Swiffer. Claudia Kotchka hired 350 design managers, helping drive P&G to $65 billion in revenue today, with 22 brands generating more than $1 billion in annual sales and 19 brands generating approximately $500 million or more in annual sales.

Human-centered design can resolve critical operational breakdowns by engaging all stakeholders to redesign internal communication processes. Kaiser Permanente addressed the dangerous care gaps occurring during hospital shift changes by shifting the information exchange process directly to the patient's bedside, standardizing formatting via software, and including patients in the dialogue. Kaiser Permanente created the Nurse Knowledge Exchange, affecting nearly 8,000 nurses engaging with patients every 24 hours across their 38 hospitals, with more than 200,000 employees and 10.6 million members generating $64.6 billion in annual operating revenue in 2016, and 15,000 people trained in design thinking over 10 years, replacing a typical delay of 45 minutes or more for old shift exchanges.

Organizational Empathy and Awareness

Organizational empathy enables employees across different silos to experience each other's emotions, breaking down barriers to cross-functional collaboration.

Differentiated from sympathy, which involves feeling pity or sorrow, empathy requires putting oneself in another person's shoes to genuinely understand how they feel and what motivates their actions. Kaiser Permanente's Nurse Knowledge Exchange demonstrated organizational empathy by addressing the emotional and operational challenges faced by nurses during handoffs.

Design thinking must be tailored to match the specific culture type of an organization—whether expertise, participation, or authenticity—to succeed. Expertise cultures value measurable return on investment and structured competencies, participation cultures focus on inclusion, and authenticity cultures value personal actualization. Success depends heavily on leadership awareness and active alignment.

GE Healthcare named its design thinking initiative Menlo after Thomas Edison's lab and patterned its font after Edison's handwriting. Robert Schwartz started the initiative in 2009, training between 5,000 and 6,000 people globally, with 1,200 trained in the final year alone, reaching across 330,000 total employees at GE, 56,000 employees in GE Healthcare, and 5,000 employees in customer hospitals. While it produced product innovations, 90 percent of its outcomes focused on solving business problems and creating new operational models, compared to 10 percent product and service innovations.

Expertise cultures like GE Healthcare and Deutsche Telekom utilize design thinking as an internal specialized function in service to the rest of the enterprise to prove its value through metrics. After CEO Timotheus Höttges attended a d.school workshop and brought 80 top executives with him, Deutsche Telekom integrated design thinking through HR development tools, creating a centralized function that makes training accessible to every employee. Telekom Design, its Design Academy, and the Customer Lab gave 220,000 employees access to training tools, running 5,500 design thinking sessions in 2016 alone and winning 142 international design awards.

10 Key Ideas

1. Global CEOs recognize innovation as a top strategic priority, yet most corporate cultures inhibit risk-taking until companies deliberately embed human-centered design thinking and collective imagination.
2. A 2015 study by the Design Management Institute demonstrates that larger design-driven companies including Apple, Starbucks, Disney, and Nike outperform the S&P 500 by 211 percent.
3. Richard Buchanan categorized design into four developmental orders: communication, products, interactions, and systems, while design thinking organizations can advance into a Fifth Order of Design focused on the intentional design of culture and awareness.
4. Twelve specific human elements and strategic tools known as culture keys influence how an organization functions and determines how it accepts design thinking.
5. Organizational cultures fall into three distinct preferences—expertise, participation, and authenticity—requiring tailored approaches for implementing design thinking.
6. Organizations scale design thinking by moving away from top-down mandates toward the emotional momentum of the pull factor, engaging employees through immersive training and problem-finding frameworks.
7. Sustainable business success depends on rigorous problem finding and organizational empathy to solve wicked problems rather than executing fast fixes for surface issues.
8. Organizational empathy enables employees across different silos to experience each other's emotions, breaking down barriers to cross-functional collaboration.
9. You can communicate through contextual inquiry, storytelling, and visual information rather than dry reports to foster whole communication across the enterprise.
10. Leaders integrate an external customer focus with an internal cultural focus around a shared set of ideals to align purpose across the organization.