Leverage Design Thinking to Steer the Journey of Digital Transformation

A digital transformation is an overarching approach that has to dig underneath the surface of businesses, leverage design thinking and many other thought processes to make a strategic move and take a holistic approach.

Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. The purpose of going digital is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of organizational performance and maturity. The forward-thinking leaders need to understand how things like design thinking can fundamentally change organizations to become more customer-centric and amplify societal impact. Design Thinking turns to be a management discipline with strategic and cultural implications which make transformative change delightful and solve critical issues radically. Organizational leaders need to keep in mind though, the overall design of the organization that matures itself requires deliberate thoughts, systematic planning, and step-wise actions, much like at all stage of the business life cycle, with the goal to run a high-performance and high-innovative digital organization.

Design becomes the strategic business driver at higher level maturity: Successful organizations perceive changes coming, reach the design point with pre-planning and architectural framing. Design becomes a strategic business driver equal to business and technology. Fundamentally, running a business is an iterative problem-solving continuum. With an unprecedented level of uncertainty and velocity, business leaders try to predict and plan for the future by envisioning and applying a range of techniques. Design thinking is an important problem-solving methodology, technique, and practice which evolves a lot of ground, irrespective of different professional domains, and intuition. Design thinking is a collection of principles and methodologies which can be applied to steer transformative changes. There are multiple starting points from which individuals or teams can apply logic to design-led problem-solving. For example, design in product/service development is a full cycle of research, defining, designing, prototyping, iterating, and testing. Design, in fact, becomes the strategic business driver at higher level maturity. In reality, very few companies can arrive at the top level of design maturity. There is very little emphasis or consideration is placed on design philosophy or methodologies across-industrial boundaries. To improve the organizational maturity from functioning to firm to delight, organizations should leverage design thinking to open the strategic perspective of the business and navigate the journey of digital transformation effortlessly.

Leverage design thinking to maintain strong adherence of the business brand: Organizations are different, they have different strategic goals, different cultures, different structures, different products, services or business models, they compete in different markets, they have a different scale, and they need to build their unique brand based on their organizational competencies. The foundation in which the business brands are built is how customers have impressions on their experiences on the products or services which can create meaningful, relevant and compelling differentiation in their mind or touch their heart amazingly. There is a logical scenario for leveraging design thinking to maintain strong adherence of the business brand such as, identify what the brand stands for; how the business wants its stakeholders to perceive its brand name - the brand connotation, or the primary activities through which the brand name get communicated and enforced. As the organization’s maturity about design increases, design moves from a superficial afterthought to a practical branding scenario - branding through design. These organizations are on the right track of digital transformation.

Discover the ways to make people feel involved in the design and implementation of changes: Leveraging digital mindset such as design thinking is about embedding art into science to explore the “art of possible.” Design thinking is a type of creative thinking involving divergent thinking and convergent thinking, exploring multiple options, and come up with fresh ideas or intuitive solutions. From the problem-solving perspective, encourage people thinking out-of-the-box, make people feel involved in the design and implementation of changes, learn and share, enjoy fresh ideas and experiment with alternative solutions. The true power and beauty of high mature digital organization come from the innate appeal of interacting socially and intellectual stimulation that people are inspired to change and feel comfortable to be different. Design thinking becomes a mainstream digital mindset which is applied in strategy management, process management, change management, and talent management. Business leaders can envision the future of the business, identify core competencies, leverage design thinking to develop organizational structures, build robust business processes, embed change and feedback mechanism into every aspect of the business. The digital transformation will happen naturally to move up the organizational maturity from functioning to delight.

A digital transformation is an overarching approach that has to dig underneath the surface of businesses, leverage design thinking and many other thought processes to make a strategic move, take a holistic approach to integrate all important elements into differentiated business competencies, build a strong company brand, and make a seamless digital paradigm shift.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Maturity,Mindshift,Thinkingaire