How design thinking doesn’t work (and how it does)

In the early 2000s, as the dot-com bubble burst, IDEO rebranded parts of the preliminary research designers ususually did as as “design thinking”, a step‐by‐step process. The core premise was to take the creative problem-solving methods used by designers and make them accessible to non-designers. This move allowed IDEO to monetize their concept through training, workshops, and consulting, commoditizing preliminary designerly research into a formula everyone could follow.

This repackaging into a one-size-fits-all process instantly appealed to business consultancies, known until then mostly for long Excel sheets and tedious Powerpoint presentations. Now they could sell cool workshops and colorful sticky-note exercises with the promise that they could solve even the most “wicked” problems in just days.

Let’s look at some examples:

Gainesville, Florida: Design thinking workshops were hald to transform the image of Gainesville. The solution—a new logo, rebranding, and the creation of a “Department of Doing”—failed to engage with systemic problems including poverty and racial issues. Instead, the approach focused on surface-level changes that missed the mark for the community’s real needs.

Kaiser Permanente Health Records: In another instance, a design thinking workshop led to a solution where nurses were instructed to relay patient information orally in front of patients during shift changes. This ignored many of the nuances of patient confidentiality and practical workflow, producing problematic outcomes.

Healthcare.gov Launch (2013): Early workshops employed design thinking, but the site’s catastrophic rollout revealed a glaring gap between ideation and execution.

Sears’ Innovation: The retailer’s design thinking workshops generated ideas but the company was unable to adapt its outdated business model, leading to a continued decline. Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018.

Other examples and reports from practitioners reveal that many workshops culminate in ideas that either never leave the ideation phase or, when implemented, fail to yield measurable results.

Design thinking exercises in healthcare organizations struggled because they separated the innovation process from clinical expertise. Teams might generate ideas for improving patient communication or waiting room experiences, but without integration with medical workflows and regulatory requirements they remain speculative.

Design thinking exercises in government agencies frequently can’t survive contact with bureaucratic realities because they don’t account for the complex regulatory environment and multi-stakeholder approval processes required for actual implementation.

Also private sector companies struggled to translate design thinking exercises into actual organizational change. For example, companies in the banking sector have used design thinking to reimagine their customer experience. However, these ideas failed to account for regulatory constraints, legacy technology systems, and internal resistance to change. Workshops produced presentations and journey maps, but the actual customer experience remained largely unchanged.

Design without designers, thinking without knowledge

A common pattern emerges: Organizations bring in consultants for multi-day workshops, generating initial excitement and ideas. These initiatives typically fade within 3-6 months, and the ideas generated never make it past the prototype stage.

Why is that? Short-tems exercises often neglect the complexity of real world problems and lack the depth of user research and prototyping required for meaningful innovation. They often generate ideas that conflict with existing systems, processes, or regulations, and ignore technical constraints, business realities, or cultural contexts.

Sure, exercises with colorful post-it notes and journey maps can be a fun distraction from the daily routines in cubicle-filled offices. But design thinking as a short-term exercise has to strip away the very essence of what makes innovation and design work: Expertise, critical thinking, contextual sensitivity and domain knowledge.

And it’s quite a bit of domain knowledge: A deep understanding of social and organisational realities, systemic analysis, knowledge of materials and technical constraints, aesthetic literacy, technical craft knowledge, iterative prototyping skills, implementation expertise, and of course practiced judgment. Years of training and practical experience that create domain knowledge and inform good design decisions can’t be acquired in a few days.

Short-term design thinking as it is sometimes practiced today is primarily a speculative exercise, divorced from practicality, integration, production, or sustainability. This can be a “theater of innovation”, a performance that creates an illusion of creativity without the insight required to address real issues. This lack of depth is the reason that short-term design thinking exercises often can’t bridge the gap between ideas and implementation.

Design thinking is a journey, not a destination

“Design thinking without design making – skillfully integrated and properly managed– easily becomes hollow and meaningless. Design excellence requires knowledge, as well as end-to-end management, of the resources and the creative energy that go into development and change processes. Design thinking – made up of the acknowledgment of design skills, of methodological choices, the right mindset, and a conducive culture–is dynamic and adaptable to the project itself and the people involved. Design thinking is a framework developed to ensure C-suite endorsement, strategic coherence, stakeholder engagement, and design excellence in all actions undertaken by the organization. Design management is a rigorous and strategically anchored mechanism to capitalize on the investment in design as intellectual capital. And design – as we’ve always known it – is the skills and methods and creative capabilities needed to embody ideas and direction. Design thinking inspires, design management enables, design embodies. Only when the three play together as a team, the result is design excellence.”
(In Design: A Business Case: Thinking, Leading, and Managing by Design, Brigitte Borja de Mozota, Steinar Valade-Amland, ISBN-13: 978-1-95253-826-1)

For organizations to benefit, they must recognize that design thinking is not a quick fix, but a journey. Successful innovation requires balancing empathy with feasibility, ensuring ideas evolve into actionable, context-aware solutions.

Design thinking is not, as it is unfortunately sometimes still promoted, the magic formula to solve any problem in just a few days. But it can be a bridge to connect the disciplines of management, innovation and design.

Design thinking is a human-centric, iterative and intuitive, collaborative and engaging process, involving design methodologies such as visualisations, framing and re-framing, prototyping and user journeys.

Design thinking is a journey, not a destination. If design thinking is implemented as short-term diversion, it will likely fail to deliver impact. However, when organizations use design thinking as a way to experience designerly approaches, as a journey of exploring, understanding and continuous learning, it can lead to a renewed, more open organisational mindset and effective innovation capability.