Fostering a Design Thinking Culture

Design Thinking is gaining momentum at a speed—perhaps faster—than the Lean Six Sigma impetus in sourcing. This empathetic and iterative approach to defining and solving problems is fast becoming a behavior that organizations are enthusiastic to nurture. Its full potential is only realized, however, when it is induced into the veins of an organization.

HfS is observing more executive leaders are driving design thinking—not just as an initiatives, but as a cultural change.  

An initial assessment of our research that we will share through a forthcoming study unveils that a number of sourcing service providers are on the path to realize what HfS Research highlights in a recent blog on how Design Thinking Can Save The Outsourcing Industry.

Here are a few themes we see in the emerging “Design-Centric Culture”:

• Innovation can be managed across products and services: Every organization strives to create new products, services, and customer experiences. Companies such as Apple, Slack, and Google have developed standard innovation approaches due to their product focus and desire to enhance end-to-end user experience. Sourcing service providers are also increasingly standardizing innovation as a process rather than a rare occurrence that happens through “eureka” moments. For example, Sutherland Healthcare Solutions leverages the customer experience research team, part of Sutherland Labs, for providing innovative and improved processes to its clients. As part of it, this team has successfully helped one of its healthcare clients recast the patient billing experience.
   
• Design thinking starts at the top: When design thinking philosophy is led by the executive team, it has staying power. In our recent Ideals of As-a-Service Survey, 40% of senior executives said they believed design thinking could have a significant impact on their organization. Infosys CEO, Vishal Sikka, launched a program to train every one of the 170,000 employees; over 40,000+ employees from multiple functions including sales, marketing, delivery, HR, legal, and IT have already been trained.
   
• Design thinking improves employee engagement: Design thinking fosters creativity and interactions by engaging employees in new ways. Accenture, for example, is building an ecosystem of Design Thinking that spans across groups and initiatives within the company, as well as externally with its clients, partner universities and corporate R&D departments. This cross organization internal and external activity provides opportunities to step outside the “everyday” and challenge the status quo, keeping work interesting and engaging.
   
• Actions speak louder than words: As with any broad change, it takes time, and it takes getting used to. It also takes experimentation, and bold moves. A team at Cognizant sensed that a client would benefit from improved ways of assimilating information, and created an app to demonstrate the mobilization of discreet business processes, which exposed the client to a new way of working.
   
• Design thinking fosters an intuitive mindset: The design process is intuitive; organizations move into effective and proactive problem finding rather than being reactive in solving highly defined problems. Due to this intuitive mindset that has empathy as the cornerstone, Genpact has integrated Design Thinking in it’s new approach, Lean Digital, which enables large companies to re-architect their middle and back office operations.

As the As-a-Service Economy takes shape, buyers have increasing choices and less time to make decisions. Service providers will need to be increasingly nimble and proactive. HfS believes that fostering a Design Thinking culture, which has empathy at its core and also encourages trial and error through iterative solution design processes enables organizations to reinvent themselves and stay relevant under competitive circumstances.