Mastering Design Thinking

Using an Expanded Canvas to Address Business Challenges

Most companies are experts at improving their own businesses. Pursuing efficiency and continuous improvement has helped them achieve size, scale and financial success. Now, however, the relentless focus on efficiency has become the gravitational pull that holds companies back from exploring creative pathways and placing safe bets to drive growth.

Design Thinking has the potential to unleash people’s full creative energies. It shifts mindsets to the horizon of possibility, analysis toward a deeper focus on customer and user needs, and methods toward testing, learning and iterating. It represents both a philosophy and a process for finding and evolving customer-oriented solutions that can propel growth or generate radically improved processes.

Design thinking is available to anyone who wishes to develop a new way of thinking and working and finding better answers to challenges.

Design-centric companies tinker with ideas and iterate quickly on prototypes. They use customer journey maps and ethnographic research to explore the problem space and use prototypes to explore the solution space. When many leaders and teams become immersed in prototyping, testing and iterating on solutions, a new open-minded culture begins to emerge; a culture that values exploration and experimentation over rule following.

CorpU’s course Mastering Design Thinking helps leaders embrace Design Thinking as a discipline and practice, while nurturing an organizational culture that doesn’t encourage failure, but recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time.