There’s a lot of talk around here lately about ‘the Death of Design Thinking’ as IDEO goes through a massive round of layoffs and restructuring. “Is Design Thinking dead?” everyone is asking, and for a lot of people the answer seems to be an enthusiastic YES.

But there is a big difference between Design Thinking(TM), a specific service offered and documented by IDEO, and the actual empathy-based tools and techniques that are so very useful in a business context. Let’s not dismiss the latter because the former didn’t work out as planned.

The value of human-centred thinking and working extends far beyond the creation of design deliverables, interactions and interfaces. To think in a human-centred way is to begin to understand the system your business is a part of, no matter what it does or makes. 

This is the second lesson of my new keynote, Not Dead Yet: Understand the system you’re a part of.

Following the competition is not a particularly effective way to get ahead of them. Understanding people, and the systems they move in, is. 

Because no matter your product or service, the moment your customer engages with it, it becomes part of a bigger ecosystem: theirs. In the wild, your thing isn’t side by side with the products and services that are normally seen as ‘the competition’ – companies with a similar offering – but rather with all the other things that are in your customers’ ecosystems. This is the context of your product/service. So the better you understand those people, that system, their world, the better you’ll be able to make them successful at whatever you’re helping them do – whether that’s managing marketing for a global corporation or getting sushi delivered at 10 on a Tuesday. The better you work within that system, the less likely your customers are to swap you out for someone else who understands and serves them better.

Surviving Stage IV cancer is all about systems. Initially I thought I needed to understand the disease itself, its characteristics, how it works and what it does – just like most business owners start off trying to understand everything about their particular industry or area. Pretty soon I realised that beyond the most basic facts, there are no straightforward answers to any of those questions – while there are patterns in outcomes, no two patients seem to have the same journey. Still, finding other people who were going through similar symptoms, treatments or surgeries was a great way to discover possibilities that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. I was able to learn how they made their decisions – their own systems and contexts – and that enabled me to learn from their successes and their failures alike. Just as businesses can learn from the successes and failures of their traditional competitors. 

Practitioners in Cancerland are also part of systems. There is so much research and development going on that nobody can possibly be expected to know about all of it, and not all doctors and caregivers feel empowered and encouraged to do their utmost, to push boundaries, even to ‘fail forward’ – the systems of their hospitals or universities and that affects their perspectives too. And the better I understand all of this, the more effectively I can advocate for myself and find the right path forward.

Understanding and navigating these systems took me from ‘dead in 1.5, 2 years tops’ (according to one of the foremost surgeons in the world of mCRC) to an open-ended, ‘good’ prognosis. 

And over the years, helping my clients understand the systems they’re a part of has made their businesses thrive as well.

So maybe we need to come up with a new term for this way of doing things, now that ‘design thinking’ is tarnished. But whatever it’s called next (and it’s been called many things over the course of my career), the core is the same: make businesses better (and make better businesses) by using empathy and placing humans front and centre. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: people are the heart of every system. So if you’re making plans, strategies or products without a solid focus on them, you might want to rethink that approach. As always, I would be delighted to help.