Like most successful leaders, you have the drive and dedication to improve your organization's effectiveness and performance. While no organization is perfect, and you likely realize there is an opportunity to enhance your services or products, determining where to start can be overwhelming — if not paralyzing.
Nevertheless, there is a way to effectively and efficiently solutions that create impactful substantive change. Design Thinking, an expeditiously expanding discipline in the business world, has emerged as a way for organizations to create experiences that increase happiness, retention, customer adoption rates, and ultimately revenue.
Here are my top 3 reasons why your organization should invest in Design Thinking!
1. Innovation needs to be approached holistically
Over the last century, the thrust of management theory and practice has focused on C-level and mid-level management developing their business around efficiency, driving many large organizations to get stuck in siloed thinking. As more leaders realize becoming a customer-centric organization, they recognize the importance of looking at the business through their customers' eyes. Customers don't see silos. They know the organization as one entity.
Investing in Design Thinking shatters siloed thinking for business leaders. It helps internal stakeholders look at the customer's experience from a holistic end-to-end journey perspective rather than a fragmented, touchpoint-focused viewpoint.
2. Excellent services produce customer loyalty- which is far better than a sheer transactional relationship with your customers
Successful service organizations strive to increase customer retention and brand loyalty. Traditionally transactional engagements lack commitment, see the service as a commodity, and the regular customers only want what is exclusively in their soundest interest (and often the lowest price).
An emotionally engaging solution offering is the reverse of the above. It facilitates fierce commitment. Customers see the solution as adding value to their lives, and price does not become the only driver as it often does in a transactional arrangement. One of the primary objectives of Design Thinking is to design innovative and desirable products, services, or experiences that reflect the ideas that lead to innovation and value.
3. Design Thinking efforts illuminate organizations.
If you still aren't convinced of the value of investing in a Design Thinking measure for your organization, should I mention that you can get excellent ROI for Design Thinking measures? As people in your organization experience the powerful impact of a Design Thinking initiative, it assembles an appetite for innovation in other areas of the organization. It creates momentum and ignites culture change.
We'd love to talk about your questions, doubts, fears, or previous experience with Design Thinking. Feel free to reach out to hello@dethornyoung.com, and we can set up a time to discuss.