Design Thinking Emergence and Trends in Christian Mission

Why is Design Thinking so Popular Right Now?

What exactly is the proliferation and popularization of design thinking as a search term, as the subject of articles in Harvard Business Review and other popular level publications, or the titles of an endless stream of new books pointing to? It seems that the emergence of design thinking is a response to a number of macro-trends in today’s business environment (particular the segments of the economy that are most post-industrial and technological).

More Wicked Problems — Increasingly, the integration and synthesis of multiple knowledge domains required to create a product or service has begun to require a more adaptive skill set out of leaders and managers, often beyond what they were trained or educated for. It isn’t possible, any more, for any particular subject matter expert or specialist to have the breadth and range necessary to develop a piece of software, a piece of hardware, or how they interact when you combine them, or how they deliver a positive experience to whatever customer is using them. Beyond technology, it increasingly takes more specialists from a wider array of disciplines to provide leadership insight in business, or politics, or education, or even ministry — in a leadership role, everyone is increasingly pushed towards being a high-level generalist that can navigate multiple domains toward the organizational mission and vision. Leadership, increasingly, requires the ability to be nimble and agile across knowledge domains (that the leader wasn’t trained in). Design thinking gives leaders and managers a pathway of depending on what they know — vision of their desired future — and walking through it humbly in a way that invites everyone’s contribution. It makes complex problems seem a little less complex. (Aside: Make sure and check out Richard Buchanan’s 1992 article titled “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” it was phenomenally helpful.)

Being a Little More Human — From a business perspective, it has become increasingly clear that to win a customer’s loyalty requires appealing not just to their sense of utility, but to their sense of beauty, aesthetic, and emotion. Understanding the world from the “other’s” point of view, and focusing on appealing to their emotional experiences, has become a huge advantage for business. Learning narrative, story, art, and beauty has been a way of appealing to the intrinsic emotions of a consumer. Apple, of course, is the most well known example of how to do this. Because technology allows for low switching costs between products and services for the consumer, especially information products, understanding one’s customer or audience has become a critical skill. Design thinking, with its primary focus on active participation with customers or beneficiaries, working towards comprehensive empathy with their situation, and designing products with a clear person and a clear value proposition and a clear emotional benefit in mind has forced businesses to become “more human” in how they design solutions — because the marketplace has more options. This business reality has driven the adaptation of design thinking significantly.

Risk Mitigation and Iteration — Finally, with the seemingly increased pace of today’s business environment, spending years on developing business plans for the future, with long-term investment outlays and specific product requirements on a product that wouldn’t be ready for 5 years all began to seem untenable. Design thinking offered a pathway to envision a way forward without knowing exactly what the product or even the market would be, but allowing the discovery process to be done in a way that allowed for lower initial risk, a faster cycle of failure and learning, and the ability to adjust to what was learned about the customer or the market as the process went forward. Design thinking has significantly helped organizations avoid major product or service launches that are based in bad assumptions about reality, and helps them fail faster, learn faster, and stay more in tune to what their customers really want in a rapidly changing environment. This agility amid ambiguity is the essence of the appeal of design thinking in a post-industrial, technological business environment.

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Since this is a bit of a trend piece, I’ll simply summarize by saying that the trends in Christianity and mission are no less complex — the rapid urbanization, secularization, technological saturation, and demographic changes that face our churches and mission organizations every day are requiring much more adaptive modes of leadership, often for leaders who studied Theology or Hebrew or New Testament. We are struggling to figure out how to design invitations and experiences that resonate in an authentic way with people who have a built in suspicion of anything religious, and we often don’t feel like we have sufficient resources (people, time, energy, etc) to try new things, and the cost of failure is too high.

More to come on this.