Design thinking PR paints it as a magic silver bullet panacea—perfect on-demand innovation projects every time.  The process pretty much involves practices that have long been recognized as producing better outcomes, but with some different terms.

“Empathy” is understanding customers’ or users’ thinking and needs from their own perspectives.  Isn’t that what competent business analysis always has achieved and troubled projects probably lacked?

“Ideation” is coming up with suitable, especially innovative solutions.  That too is a fundamental part of business analysis.  Yet, solutions have not always been suitable, let alone innovative.      

Yes, empathy and ideation are key but are far harder and scarcer than design thinking suggests and too often are merely hollow buzzwords in an all-too-conventional mistaken model.  This interactive session reveals common weaknesses that can undercut design thinking’s promise and presents powerful more appropriate models and methods that enable design thinking to achieve its potential.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify design thinking’s strengths and also its too-commonly-overlooked pitfalls
• Analyze what’s actually involved in effective empathy and ideation
• Describe a more appropriate model that better enables effective empathy and ideation