The most costly mistakes are made in the first fortnight of a project, when the problem gets defined. Everything after that is execution against an assumption nobody re-examined.
Design thinking is a discipline for not doing that: understand the people involved properly, define the problem from what you learn rather than what you assumed, generate more than one option, and test the promising ones cheaply before committing.
In practice, for the work we do, that looks like:
- Research with actual users — the staff doing the process and the clients, members or students on the other side of it. Short interviews and observation, not a survey.
- Journey mapping across the whole experience, including the parts your organisation can’t see: the waiting, the chasing, the form filled out twice.
- Problem framing that survives scrutiny, with the assumptions made explicit so they can be challenged.
- Facilitated ideation with a mixed group, structured so the loudest person in the room doesn’t decide the outcome.
- Prototyping and testing — paper, clickable, or a manual version run by hand for a fortnight. Deliberately cheap, because the goal is to be wrong early.
It’s especially worth it where the process is emotionally loaded or the users aren’t like you: enrolment, intake, complaints, bereavement, grant applications, membership renewal. Those are the ones where an efficient internal design can produce a genuinely bad experience, and nobody notices from inside the building.