Left Brain Dominant Design Thinker

In a recent blog post, It’s not your Grandmother’s Lean anymore! I introduced a few thoughts from Tim Ogilvie, CEO of innovation strategy consultancy Peer Insight new book Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers. I would encourage you to visit that post before listening to the podcast and leave the diagram up or print it out as the discussion takes place.

If you are Design Thinking challenged, this book is for you. The book is built upon these four questions (A Design Thinker’s PDCA?):

What is? Exploring the current reality
What if? Envisioning alternative futures
What wows? Getting users to help make tough choices
What works? Making it work in-market, and as a business

Aligned to the four questions are ten tools, including customer journey mapping, value chain analysis, customer co-creation, and the learning launch. To make them come alive, readers are introduced to a number of practicing managers who are all using design thinking to drive innovation and growth in their organizations, including accountants, marketers, a nurse and an engineer – none of whom have design training.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Design Thinking or go to the Business901 iTunes Store

I believe what is more intriguing than the description and use of tools (Design Thinking must be going mainstream if we start having tool discussions), is the way that the tools are viewed. This, I believe is the real secret sauce in the book. As I read the book, I realized how easy it was to take and modify my Lean tool set to the desired applications or as others may put it to the culture of the company. One of the strengths of Lean that may be forgotten is that it is the adaption of the tools and culture and the process of making them your own which is the most important ingredient. Certainly we are not going to make major changes to PDCA but what is wrong in using an A3 Report laid out like the Business Model Generationtemplate.

We might have torched a few sacred cows during the podcast. One of them is thinking differently or moving away from the traditional Lean tools and the other is exposing a so-called Design Thinker, Tim Ogilvie as Left Brain Dominant!