Design Thinking has different meaning to different people. In fact it is an approach we can use for innovation and growth in our organizations/businesses/professions and in our lives.
All successful innovation begins with an accurate study of state of the art (what is going on today). Starting out with understanding of current reality is a hallmark of design thinking and it is the core of design’s data intensive and user driven approach. Design thinking is human-centered, possibility-driven, option-focused, and iterative in its approach.
Human-centered as we always start with people. With real human beings. Not demographics or segmentation schemes. Design thinking emphasizes the importance of deep exploration into the lives and the problems of the people we hope to generate ‘value for’.

Design thinking is possibility-driven as it uses this information we have learned to ask the question, what if anything, were possible? As we begin to create new ideas about how to serve them. It also focuses on generating multiple options.
Option focused as we are guessing about our stakeholder’s needs and wants. We expect to be wrong a lot, so we want to come up with multiple options – let our stakeholders tell us which works for them, which means we want to manage a portfolio of new ideas.
Finally, the process is iterative. It’s committed to conducting cycles of real world experiments rather than running analysis using historical data.
Design thinking is a way of approaching a challenge that offers just another skill set and another approach. That’s complementary to other forms of thinking, other forms of product development. And it centers around some constructs that come from the design world. So, both convergent and divergent thinking prototyping and iteration. A certain kind of customer research that’s much more ethnographical and qualitative. All those things together form a rubric of what design thinking is about. It is not accurate to portray it as the only way of thinking, doing, managing and leading. It really is one holistic approach to management and leadership that has been missing for some time. It has a tremendous amount of promise to integrate and balance out a full set of skills.
What design thinking gives us is curiosity, ability to look out into the world and find new solutions to traditional problems, power of observation which takes data and puts it into context of a given situation. It is not a kind of one size fits all solution. Design thinking works best on particular kinds of problems.
How do to identify the kinds of problems that design thinking is really suited for versus those that our traditional analytic tool kit is better suited? The difference between problems that are wicked versus problems that are tame. What’s the level of uncertainty? If there are many unknowns, both large and small, and past data is unlikely to help us, design thinking is appropriate. On the other hand, if we have the past that is a pretty good predictor, the future analysis works.
Dr. N. K. Garg