Somewhere, in an office that still smells faintly of whiteboard marker, there is a wall covered in sticky notes. Yellow for customer pains, pink for ideas, green for “quick wins”. They were arranged with great enthusiasm during a two-day design thinking workshop. Everyone agreed it was energising. A facilitator took photographs.
That was eighteen months ago. Most of the notes have since curled at the edges and fallen behind the radiator. Not much else changed.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Design thinking was one of the most celebrated business ideas of the past two decades, promising that any organisation could innovate like a top design firm by following a simple, human-centred process. More recently, it has attracted a growing backlash from people who argue it became a ritual rather than a way of working.
Both views contain some truth. The interesting question for a small business isn’t whether design thinking is good or bad. It’s which parts of it actually help, and which parts were mostly sticky notes.
One Like insight: A method can’t make you curious. It can only give curious people a structure.
What design thinking promised
Design thinking emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, championed above all by the design consultancy IDEO and Stanford University’s d.school, which IDEO founder David Kelley also co-founded. Its roots go back further, to human-factors engineering and decades of research on collaboration. But it was IDEO that packaged it into a process anyone could follow.
The version most people learned has five or six steps. First, empathise with the people you’re designing for by observing and talking to them. Then define or reframe the problem, often as a “How might we…?” question. Next, generate lots of ideas, build quick prototypes, test them with real users and, finally, implement what works.
The appeal was enormous. In a world of cubicles and departmental silos, design thinking brought people from different disciplines into the same room at the start of a project. It made work feel more creative and more hopeful. And it carried a flattering message, captured in Change by Design, a 2009 book by IDEO’s then chief executive, Tim Brown, which suggested design had become too important to leave to designers. With the right process, anyone could do it.
By the 2010s, design thinking had spread from Silicon Valley to healthcare, government, banking and charities. Universities and boot camps launched courses. Consultancies ran workshops for organisations of every size. Somewhere along the way, the sticky note became its unofficial logo.
Highlight: Design thinking’s biggest promise was also its biggest risk: that anyone could innovate simply by following the steps.
The backlash
In 2023, the designer and writer Rebecca Ackermann published a widely discussed retrospective in MIT Technology Review asking where design thinking went wrong. Her central criticism was simple: “Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking.” Consultancies would arrive, run an energetic process, deliver a set of recommendations and leave before the hard part began. Some popular versions of the process even dropped the final implementation step altogether.
The article includes a telling story from Jake Knapp, who later created Google Ventures’ well-known Design Sprint method. While running design thinking workshops inside Google, he followed up to see which ideas had reached production. Few had. Teams went back to making decisions the old way, with a handful of people developing ideas separately and then selling them to senior leaders.
Ackermann also describes IDEO’s 2013 work redesigning school cafeterias in San Francisco. The consultancy delivered ten recommendations, including an app and vending machines. Some ran into practical problems, such as unreliable internet connections and strict building rules, and the app never materialised. Real, lasting improvements did come, but largely through the school district’s own slow work after the consultants had gone.
Other critics went further. Some argued that design thinking turned “empathy” into something performed by outside designers rather than built with the people affected. Others coined the term innovation theatre: going through the visible rituals of innovation without changing how decisions are actually made.
Highlight: Innovation theatre is when the workshop becomes the outcome.
What’s worth keeping
It would be easy to conclude that design thinking was a fad. But read the criticisms closely and they’re mostly about how it was sold and practised, not about its core ideas. Talking to the people you serve, testing ideas cheaply before committing, and bringing different perspectives together early are still sensible things to do. The problem was treating them as a two-day event rather than a habit.
Even the original champions have shifted. In Ackermann’s article, Tim Brown acknowledges that the real expertise usually lies with the people who use a system rather than the people designing it, and that designers could stand to be less arrogant about knowing everything. Stanford’s d.school has moved its language away from “empathy” towards making things and caring about long-term consequences.
The most practical reframing comes from Angela McKee Brown, who helped turn IDEO’s cafeteria ideas into reality from inside the San Francisco school district. She boiled the method down to three questions she asks her team: who have you talked to, have you tried it out before spending serious money, and how are you telling the story of the work? No sticky notes required.
[Infographic placement] Design theatre versus design practice. Two columns. Left, faded, headed Theatre: a two-day workshop, sticky notes on a wall, a list of recommendations, consultants leave, nothing ships. Right, bold, headed Practice: regular conversations with customers, small and cheap tests, decisions made on what you learn, someone owns implementation, results checked months later. Caption: The tools are the same. The habits are different. Optional footer with Angela McKee Brown’s three questions.
Highlight: The value of design thinking was never in the workshop. It was in what happened on the Monday after.
What this means for a small business
In one sense, small businesses never needed the workshop. The owner of a café or a plumbing firm already talks to customers every day, sees problems up close and can try something new on Tuesday without waiting for a committee. The risk is the opposite one: being so close to the business that you stop seeing it with fresh eyes, or so busy that you never test your assumptions at all.
The parts of design thinking worth borrowing are the habits, not the rituals. Talk to customers about the problem before you build the solution. Try the cheapest possible version of an idea before investing in the full one. And make sure that someone owns what happens next, because an insight nobody acts on is just an interesting conversation.
A few questions can help:
- When did we last speak to a customer specifically to understand a problem, rather than to sell?
- What are we about to spend money on that we haven’t tested in any small way?
- Who is responsible for turning our last good idea into something real?
- Which of our assumptions about customers have we never actually checked?
Which brings us back to that wall of curling sticky notes. The workshop wasn’t the mistake. The mistake was believing that generating ideas was the hard part. For most businesses, the hard part, and the valuable part, is everything that happens after the room empties.
Sources
- Rebecca Ackermann, “Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?”, MIT Technology Review, 9 February 2023.
