BLoGPoST
rIChard anderSon

No More Worshiping at the Altar
of Our Cathedrals of Business

January + February 2012

interactions

I’ve been reviewing an excellent manuscript for a book on design thinking and reading about a new game and kit developed by IDEO to help explain it. These things delight me, as for years I’ve been focused on expanding the role of design/UX to be a full participant in defining business strategy and in being a catalyst for that change. More recently, participation in defining social strategy became an important part of that focus. Design thinking came to be advocated by business visionaries to be a major part of fixing a broken strategy-definition process [ 1]. Jon Kolko and I wrote about and published others’ writings about such things in interactions when we were editors-in-chief.

So, I have been intrigued by proclamations that design thinking is a failed experiment [ 2], that it is misguided to attempt to describe the process, and that design thinking must be recognized as the purview of the trained designer. Innumerable attempts at explaining the usually less ambitious UCD have been greeted by similar negative reactions over the years.

Just what is going on here? Stepping aside to look at related happenings in a seemingly different context can provide some insight.

In today’s world of healthcare, a
ballooning number of patients seek
at minimum full participation in
defining their diagnostic/treatment
strategy. Why? Because of an outra-
geous number of misdiagnoses [ 3],
because of what is often an insult-
ing patient experience that includes
doctors who don’t listen to or even
touch patients anymore [ 4], because
of claims that doctors tend to just
“regurgitate [knowledge] rather
than think” [ 5] and disregard limits
to their knowledge and experience,
because of a system of referrals
and approvals that prevent direct
and ready access to doctors with
needed expertise, among other
reasons—in short, because of a
healthcare system declared to be
“broken” by speaker after speaker at
Medicine 2.0’ 11 held at the Stanford
University Medical Center.