Design Thinking At Work

Design thinking isn’t easy. Organizations often face challenges developing creative strategies to innovate and evolve. Drawing upon years of international research with multinationals, governments and non-profits, David Dunne explores how companies around the world apply design-driven principles to workplace issues in his new book Design Thinking at Work: How Innovative Organizations are Embracing Design.

Design thinkers constantly run headlong into resistance and other barriers within bureaucratic and hostile cultures. Through compelling examples and lively stories from the field, Dunne reveals the most common obstacles they face, how the best organizations, including Procter & Gamble and the Australian Tax Office, deal with such challenges and what lessons can be distilled from their experiences. Are you inside, or outside, the organization? Will you change the world, or tweak something? Do you focus on the system, or on users? Dunne uses these prompts to identify the three tensions of design thinking: the tension of inclusion, the tension of disruption and the tension of perspective. To be successful with a design thinking program, you need to balance, and even reframe, these three tensions

Accessible yet comprehensive, Design Thinking at Work is essential reading for anyone interested in how design works in the real world. Dunne challenges many of the wild claims about design thinking that have been made in recent years, while offering a way forward.

DAVID DUNNE is Professor and Director of MBA Programs at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria. A former Marketing and Advertising executive with Unilever and Young & Rubicam, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.