New ways of organizing work may lead to extraordinary improvements. Such a feat was recently made, with the popularization of a new concept, known as ‘Design Thinking’.

This is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to innovate and assess quality control, and is especially useful in tackling problems that are ill-defined or unknown. It enables you to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. The process involves 5 key phases.

1. Empathize. To start off, empathy is a required skill that must be honed – through extensive user research. This is crucial to begin this unique, human-centered process.
2. Define. Once you have accumulated information, you then begin to analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems identified – known as problem statements. You can create user personas to ensure your efforts remain human-centered.
3. Ideate. Now that you have your research, you begin to ideate by “thinking outside the box” by brainstorming alternative ways to view your problems.
4. Prototype. Now comes the experimental phase. You aim to identify the best possible solution for each problem by producing some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product, or specific features found within the product, and study the feasibility.
5. Test. Finally, you meticulously test out your solutions. 

Such a blend of tools and insight, applied to a work process – is regarded as a transformation of social technology. We know design thinking is iterative, which is exactly why teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems – often returning to previous stages to make further alterations and refinements to find or rule out alternative solutions.

The main difference between design thinking and business thinking is with regards to how the process works. Remember that the 5 phases above aren’t sequential by any means, and should rather be thought of as ‘modes’ as the process is carried out in a more flexible and non-linear fashion. In practice, different groups within the design team may conduct more than one stage concurrently. For example, results from the testing phase (#5. Test) may reveal curious insights, which in turn could lead to another brainstorming session (#3. Ideate) or the development of new prototypes (#4. Prototype). 

Don’t be intimidated - Design Thinking is not, and will never be exclusive property of designers. Throughout history, great innovators from across fields in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have extensively used this concept – and thus pave the way forward.