Solving the Right Problem Through Design Thinking– by Sapna Banjade and Binu Ghalan
On October 1 and 2, we had our Design Thinking contact sessions, and it really changed our way of understanding people, questioning assumptions, and making decisions. We also read articles and books. So, putting these together with our class sessions helped us see that these lessons are useful for business strategy too.
Assumptions limit what we try
The nine-dot exercise our teacher gave us was one of the most interesting moments in the session, where we needed to connect nine points with four straight lines without picking up the pencil, and we were like, oh my god! It’s difficult. We found it hard because our own assumptions limited the ideas we tried. Afterwards, I kept thinking about companies. How many of them handle problems with familiar thinking and never ask whether their first assumptions were right?
We read a journal article, the Double Diamond framework by Shen et al. (2024), which clearly explains 4 phases: discover, define, develop, and deliver. It moves back and forth, opening up ideas and narrowing them down, so it shows that innovation needs both. Our exercise showed this in a practical way; Sometimes we can make progress just by looking at the problem in a different way.
Empathy shapes which problems we solve
In our group activities, we explored personal preferences, drew portraits, built a persona from a group member’s experience, and wrote a “How might we…?” question. This pushed us to look at people’s actual experiences instead of our assumptions.
Mootee (2013) connects design thinking to strategic business challenges such as business-model innovation, customer experience, and organisational change. Reading this altered how we thought about empathy. We used to believe that it is just mean being kind to people, but it can also influence which problems a company chooses to address and how it creates value to their customer.
The amazing simple message we learned was that if we genuinely understand customers and question our assumptions, we are less likely to choose the first idea that comes to mind. This is what Liedtka (2015) writes: design thinking can improve innovation by helping decision makers avoid biased thinking.
A prototype visualises ideas.
The LEGO prototype helped us to make the idea easier to explain and to examine.
Our biggest takeaway
What really ties our classroom work to the literature most seriously is that innovation starts before the solution exists, with understanding people’s needs, challenging assumptions, and identifying the real problem.
In our upcoming projects, we will ask ourselves two questions before we put forward an idea. Which assumption are we treating as a fact? Whose experience are we overlooking? We think the real advantage may come from asking better questions early, before everyone commits to the wrong answer.
References
Mootee, I. (2013). Design thinking for strategic innovation: What they can’t teach you at business or design school. John Wiley & Sons.
Shen, Y., Bosch, G., Pino, L., & Gopalan, V. (2024). Use of the ‘double diamond’ design framework to nurture creativity in life sciences research. Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 49(8), 654–657. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibs.2024.04.008
Liedtka, J. (2015). Perspective: Linking design thinking with innovation outcomes through cognitive bias reduction. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 32(6), 925–938. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12163
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