Design Thinking in Business Strategy
Design Thinking in Business Strategy
Design Thinking in Business Strategy
Introduction
The era of management is proceeding towards complex, fuzzy, and interdependent
challenges that are often a result of rapid technological advancements and dynamic
customer aspirations. Managers are struggling to formulate strategies with ambiguous
and often unpredictable data sets from multiple customer touch points, in an attempt to
respond and capture dynamic market needs. According to Martin (2009), managers are
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Figure 1 The Integrated Design Thinking Framework: The Banyan tree that defines the key constructs
of design thinking necessary to induce design attitude in business leaders
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retrieved, the market feedbacks were processed by pricing management and product
management.
Figure 2: New collaborative value based pricing process with iterative customer feedback and
multiple stakeholder engagement.
The information flow was kept simple; six different sources were used to retrieve
information: sales employees (eight seniors), distributors or dealers (nearly 26), product
managers, suppliers, social media, and focus group. The customer’s expectations of and
responses for Company X products and services were then commonly defined, providing a
first common base to both sales and product management with objective information and
a direct channel of communication. Figure 2 explains the proposed pricing decision making
process in which the sales and product management obtain a direct feed of information
from four different sources. At the second layer, the sales and product management team
need to communicate and exchange information, standing point, and requests on the
basis of the same information that they validated together. Before the escalation, they
agreed on the method to operate; only the matters that really required the intervention of
senior management were escalated to the top management, thereby yielding a decision
with a strong information base and analysis previously conducted by the sales and
marketing (product management) teams.
Benefits of value based pricing process
• Challenging the traditional method of solving the pricing problem in the company
as well as empathising and later codesigning with multiple stakeholders involved
in the pricing process helped in identifying the major cause of certain price
deviations. As Company X evolves in a distributor/dealers market, identifying the
original source of an information or request can be challenging. By ensuring that
information is being relayed distinctively from all channels, isolating the source
becomes feasible.
• The new process significantly reduced the decision lead-time between sales and
marketing (product management); the decision time was reduced to 4 hrs to 48
hrs, depending on the urgency of the request. Previously, considerable time was
required to make a decision, considering the changing environment and the
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ongoing structural and functional changes. Reducing the lead-time and including
the multiple stakeholders’ opinions at different stages made the decisions easier
to apprehend. Less than 10% of request now required the involvement of
VP/board-level employees to be solved.
• The proposed new formal process provided a base for key decision-making in
terms of pricing and product’s value. The margins were defended and increased
by 2% without loss of market share. It addressed the previously explained key
issues because the decisions were being made without a systematic or systems
thinking approach and this troubled the stakeholders. The new solution
eliminated the complexity of the decision and helped the stakeholders focus on
their areas of accountability and fulfil their responsibilities.
• Incorporating regular customer feedback in the pricing process contributed to
understanding the customers’ willingness to pay for estimation. Empathy was
used to understand customers’ perception of the products, expectations from the
products, and value of the products, which were the essential determinants of the
willingness to pay. For the company, this insight helped in modifying the products
and services to reach the desired value level, enabling the company to price the
products and services without losing market shares.
• The newly designed processes adopted the six-sigma approach—define, measure,
analyse, design, and verify (DMADV). Design Thinking constructs were
incorporated at all the stages of the DMADV, as sense and respond, empathy, co
design and iteration were the leading principle for each stage. The applied
process was flexible: step one, ‘define’, was used to identify the need for the
process. This involved creating clarity, simplicity, fairness, gaining of time and
ability to work with small and large flow of information which is not intensive for
the stakeholders; step two, ‘measure’, was an motivation to implement a process
with at least some quantifiable information, such as the number of decisions that
required the attention of the top management versus the ones that could be
handled at a lower level of decision making (i.e. less than 10% out of the
approximately 40 cases required the involvement of the top management); step
three, ‘analyse’, was used for the analysis of the role of each stakeholder and
subsequently place them and make them interact accordingly; steps four and five,
‘design’ and ‘verify’, respectively, were used as an extension of the natural flow of
decisions and to validate the results. If the decision-making process and market
intelligence are actually useful for the major cases and do not show any signs of
weakness, then the results were found valid.
• A workshop was conducted with all stakeholders, country sales directors, and
marketing, finance, and operations personnel. Stakeholders were asked open-
ended questions to receive their input, expectations on prices, customers, and
strategy and to trigger a structured debate. The design of the questions and the
method of translating the qualitative feedbacks were also considered a
contribution from design thinking because it focused on being sense and
responsive and empathising with multiple stakeholders. The question typically
asked after the reception of the inputs was what should be a good way of
approaching and obtaining feedback from the customers? This provided
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additional basis to design all key elements of the pricing process, with the
reoccurring objective of translating the customer’s perspective into the process
and products.
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surfaced during the discussion. The DM, in addition to ensuring software delivery, is
responsible for managing the resource distribution in multiple projects and taking care of
talent up/reskilling for current upcoming technologies relevant to projects. Leads ensure
quality and timely delivery from developers and their right utilisation
Stage 2: In this stage, semi structured interviews (n = 10) were conducted with the
Associate Relations (AR), the Programme Control Office (PCO) and Resource Management
Group (RMG) representatives. During these sessions, previous survey results on reasons
for job exit and great place to work were discussed. Furthermore, challenges related to
associate rotation and associate onboarding/off-boarding were understood in detail.
Stage 3: In this stage, one meeting with the learning and organisational development
(L&OD) group and training department was conducted to consolidate, verify, and share
the learnings of the first two stages.
Key findings from field study
• Lack of opportunity for rotation: More than 80 discrete technologies require
expertise. In the current scenario, because associates were working in one
project, they were locked with one set of technologies, making it difficult to move
them across projects.
• Need for optimal use of resident talent because external hiring is very costly:
Associates with niche technical and functional expertise who can be useful in
some other projects should not be locked in projects where such technical
expertise is underutilised. The team structure should be modified after
considering the needs of the project and to meet the margin expectations.
• Need for the visibility of available and upcoming work (pipeline) in business units:
To align adequately talent and achieve optimisation in talent utilisation, a clear
visibility of available and upcoming work is required; to complete the task in real
time and seamlessly, a single source of truth is needed.
• Lack of transparency: A lack of transparency is not by design but inadvertent;
unavailability of system and a single source of truth makes it difficult for all
stakeholders, including the junior most associates, to examine the data that they
should have access to.
Codesign with multidisciplinary teams:
A codesign workshop was conducted involving multidisciplinary stakeholders (n = 20)
[Figure 1]. The objective of the focus group was to discuss the findings in previous
meetings and identify possible solutions. The participants included stakeholders from
different departments connected to the talent management value chain: an AR team,
which is an extended arm of the human resource (HR) team in big Business Units (BU) (n =
4), (b) PCO (n = 3), (c) delivery managers (n = 12), (d) and heads, RMG (n = 1) participated
in the workshop. Participants were divided into three groups. The contextual enquiry
method was adopted to draw insights from all the stakeholders and then build an affinity
model; the key issues were identified and clustered into categories. Thereafter, the
participants were asked to provide multiple solutions for the insights gathered.
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Key findings from codesign process:
• Working in silos: The Delivery Team, RMG, PCO, L&OD, and training department
worked in silos without regular interaction. The delivery team’s requirements
were not clearly understood by the other stakeholders. Each stakeholder was
striving to improve their statistics; however, when the systems view of the target
was generated, no interconnections were observed, particularly related to
attrition, fulfilment of vacant positions, revenue loss, gross margin impact,
deployable pool availability, and per year per associate training achievement.
• Lacking systems view: During the session, the talent management problem was
realised to be handled at the organisational level and not at a Business Unit level.
• Lack of transparency: A lack of transparency about the status quo of the talent
management process was observed between the different BUs and stakeholders,
including the associates.
Figure 3: Focus group session to facilitate codesigning with RMG, PCO. HR, and DM
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Proposed Design of New Talent Management System
To address the above issue, a multilayered strategy emerged from the preceding session.
First a ‘Tiger’ team was formed as the key touch point to interact with the multiple
stakeholders and the senior management. The Tiger team had one representative from
each department to integrate each person’s perspective in decision making and governing
policies. Second, the initiated process was changed. The pool management was now
rigorously handled by a team called Reserve Work Force (RWF); the rules for releasing
associates in this pool and further up/re-skilling were stringent and focused. Results are
now extracted from the system and used in the CEO metrics reporting during quarterly
reviews. Third, to aid in better visualisation of the talent management process and the
status quo of all stakeholders, a prototype software along with a mobile application was
developed. This system is described in detail as follows:
To track the progress and to take corrective actions, the baseline was first set first to
determine the resource distribution target of a project. The actual resource loading then
indicated the deviation, which could now be tracked at individual project manager-level,
thereby enabling the delivery head or Business Unit head to take informed decisions for
any movement of resources. The pipeline data was fed from the various IT systems into
the new proposed system. The available talent was mapped against the forthcoming
needs. The available current technology expertise and deviation from target resulted in an
immediate creation of a training plan for the associates that was automatically published
Figure 4 Screenshot of the proposed mobile application of the talent management system
illustrating multistakeholder visualisation of knowledge expertise
to the training department, allowing them to publish their training plan and invite
nominees. The HR stakeholders were provided dashboards to track the band and expertise
levels where the attrition was higher and plan for preventive actions; they could now
monitor the deviation of per-resource training needs according to the organisational
mandates and the actuals at any instance. Associates could view their position in
comparison with all the other employees with similar skills on technology and solution
expertise. The standardised assessment and representation helped them be aware of how
their career is shaping. The dashboard and user profiles for the multiple stakeholders
facilitated the information visualisation and customization of the talent management
process. As a next step, it will be integrated with the existing RMG and HRMS systems for
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the resource data. The development of the software was an iterative process; it began
with white-boarding and creation of a paper prototype. After obtaining the approval from
the various stakeholders, the technical team developed this functional prototype in two
months using MySQL as the database, Java, Spring, Hibernate, and Fusion Charts.
Pilot testing and iteration of talent management system
The system was implemented in limited release mode. A section of the team with all roles
covered had access to this application. First, the data entry from 500 associates spread
across the USA and India were incorporated into the system and the content was verified
and cleaned. This data entry exercise provided the first stage results with the system
usage. These inputs were collected and multiple iterations were performed to improve the
content and technological platform. In the second stage, the software was accessible to
1500 associates across shores along with other stakeholders.
Observations in talent management after system deployment
Two months post iteration with end users, the following key findings were observed:
• Corrective measures for talent distribution, training, and assessment: In a single
dashboard, viewing the status of training plan, technology expertise, and
background profile was easy, current projects, technologies applied and not
applied in current projects, and project profiles of the associates sent for training
could be accessed by the training department and the senior leads of the BU.
Managers could visualise the talent pool in a single dash board, thus, allowing
relevant decision making and prioritising of resources. This visualisation allowed
corrective action for talent distribution and assessment because the transparency
was very high between stakeholders. For example, the associate’s training needs
were quickly identified and linked to the programme needs and client roadmap,
eventually leading to customer satisfaction and balanced teams.
• Career progression visualisation: Employees such as a newly joined associate, a
mid-career associate, and managers could visualise personal career progression
and also compare their growth with that of the other associates with similar skills.
A happiness index was included in the system, which was given as a solution by
the management trainee. The happiness index helped in understanding the
aggregate satisfaction of the associates, providing the HR teams with a daily
updates and analysing the trends. If happiness index increases or decreases some
instances, they can also check the activities happening on or around those days
and can try to create an environment that ensures the happiness index is at or
exceeds the acceptable mark.
Conclusion
The article described the integrated-design thinking framework and its application in
managerial problem solving that has led to optimising talent management and creating
value-based product pricing in two global organisations. The article demonstrates how the
constructs defining design attitude (problem solving) have been instrumental in guiding
managers’ ability to sense and perceive problems holistically and at a systems level.
Furthermore, the managers can challenge the status quo of the existing solutions and
reframe problems from a human-centred perspective by involving multiple stakeholder.
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They can engage with the multiple stakeholders and break silos between clients,
customers, and internal departments to iteratively and collaboratively design solutions.
The human-centred reframing of problems and the agility in iteration leads to a co
working culture in the organisations that also has a long positive impact on customer
relations. This article contributes to the design and management literature as a case of
application of design thinking in core business processes. The proposed design thinking
framework is by no means an absolute framework but provides a pathway address the
need having such integrating frameworks which can guide managers in business problem
solving. Further work needs to be done in understanding how managers solve problems
and how the design problem solving can guide them. This research can guide further
development of the integrated design thinking framework.
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