Revolutionise Corporate Learning with Design Thinking

Managing a company can get complicated. Some of the most challenging obstacles include skills development, corporate learning, managing business dynamics, stakeholders, and customer needs. Is it any wonder then that many businesses are resigned to an uncertain future for not being able to cope with the rapid tempo of change?

Luckily, there’s design thinking that you can adopt to control your business operations. Some of the most well-known companies, including Pepsi, Nike, and Google, have been practising this strategy, and there’s no reason to think that much smaller businesses can’t follow suit and enjoy many of the same benefits. It can help you with your company’s organization, communication, and goals

Take a look for yourself at the process of design thinking and how you can use it to run your business more efficiently.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking aims to understand customer needs and embrace the use of creative thinking to resolve customer problems. In practice, design thinking can involve any number of human-centered innovation processes applicable to design activity, be it for a product, service, or the entire business.

The use of design thinking helps you address any concerns by putting customer needs first. The discipline centers on observing with empathy how users interact with their environment and it employs a direct approach to the development of solutions.

One of the critical components of these processes is visualizing concepts. In many cases, even vague concepts can spawn the brightest ideas, though it would require your team to think visually and your business to simplify a particular concept and make it tangible and much easier to understand.

Design thinking can comprise many stages, and one of the most common is a five-phase process:

• Empathizing with customers
• Defining your insights and customer needs and problems
• Ideating to develop ideas for creative solutions
• Prototyping to start developing solutions
• Testing the solutions

Why Should Businesses Adopt Design Thinking?

The modern business landscape can be harsh and difficult to navigate. If companies can’t keep up, they won’t be able to adapt to the present state of affairs, let alone what the future holds.

Including design thinking in your corporate training can help you overcome these obstacles. Here are some of the reasons that make design thinking one of the best business training solutions:

It Helps You Make Plans

There are many distractions in today’s technology-driven world. Business leaders have to stay on top of changes and lead their company in the right direction. This is where design thinking can be immensely helpful.

It helps you visualize any aspect clearly and create a roadmap for the future. For instance, a visualized goal can give you an edge over your competition. In light of the constantly evolving business environment, having a well-thought-out objective at any moment in time can be crucial.

Team Innovation and Collaboration

A large part of design thinking concerns interactions, brainstorming, and eliciting contributions from all team members. This makes for an excellent method to obtain inputs and develop new ideas for products or services together. It promotes collaboration with the customer at its centre. In this fashion, you can use design thinking to align your employees with a common goal.

Problem Identification

Design thinking won’t build your products or services directly. What it does is offering solutions to real-life problems.

It requires posing relevant questions and identifying problems of paramount importance to your customers. For example, holding brainstorming sessions, as design thinking often calls for, can result in greater contribution from all and faster problem identification.

Creative Solutions

Many businesses fail to live up to their potential when all they do is making incremental improvements to their existing services and products. While the practice is perfectly acceptable and may well be good enough for survival, it can also leave your business vulnerable to outside disruptions.

Conversely, design thinking challenges the status quo by fostering creativity and enabling innovative ideas to surface. You can test those ideas later and determine if your customers would be happy with the end product. In doing so, the test results can provide you with a greater upside.

Learning at a Fast Pace

Design thinking assembles in a single room people from various departments for generating as many ideas as possible. This allows for quick testing of ideas in a prototype environment, after which you can pursue ideas that have traction and do away with the unpromising ones. The outcome is faster learning and problem-solving.

Clarity During Meetings

While full of useful insights, business meetings can also be a huge waste of time. You may discuss many things, but this doesn’t guarantee that your team will understand your company’s goals.

On the other hand, design thinking can lay out your expectations and get the team on the same page. With your employees in synergy, you can then develop a clear plan everyone will be able to follow easily.

How Do You Implement Design Thinking

Design thinking consists of a range of principles. Coming up is a summary of what you should do to encourage design thinking:

• Find a way to add quality to your product or service by learning from seasoned practitioners.
• Conduct experiments to boost your team’s creative confidence. The goal is to let them take risks in safe environments.
• Start coaching and facilitating creativity, collaboration, and co-creation.
• Focus on the customer experience.
• Help your team develop thought-provoking insights, redefine problems, and produce ideas according to your research.
• Encourage many different perspectives and check your assumptions.

In implementing this process, there are four crucial factors that will determine your success:

• Leadership – It’s up to you as the leader to connect design thinking activities to strategic goals. Offer resources, direction, and commitment.
• People – Encourage your team to take the initiative during changes through lighthouse projects. Develop a design thinking environment that shares best practices.
• Process – Adapt the general design thinking process to suit your company’s goals.
• Environment – Set up collaborative workspaces for your employees. Use them to innovate with partners and customers.

Make Your Business Thrive

As you can see, design thinking can help polish your business operations in many ways. Primarily, it enables you to define crucial problems and develop apt solutions to those problems, increasing your chances for success.

Best of all, you don’t have to take on this process on your own. Reach out to Learnsure and you’ll receive optimized learning solutions for your company. We can help your team embrace design thinking and be ready for future innovations.

Don’t settle for average performance. Choose your Learnsure solution and we’ll help your company blossom!