EMRE UZUNOGLU / GLOBAL ORGANIZATION AND LEADERSHIP WEEK 12

The article “Design Thinking Comes of Age” by Jon Kolko, is about how design is becoming a more central part in
organizations. Most of the time design is thought of as only having to do with aesthetics, but this article explains
how important design thinking is to the modern business.

We can call it as ‘ it’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work’.

The concept that impress me is the realization of both, the author and other businesses, that design thinking should
be incorporated throughout an organization. The three main principles being: empathy with users, a discipline of
prototyping and a tolerance for failure. Kolko explains that these principles help to cut through complexities within
the organization making interactions more simple.

Incorporating design thinking and design individuals throughout the inner workings of an organization seems to be a
smart and lucrative practice. Through the increase in the value of design thinking, more companies will realize the
importance of the designer’s opinion and won’t totally disregard their ideas.

I think it is actually going very positive and designer’s opinions are consider much more now than it was in the past.

Kolko speaks of tolerating failure within an organization. This concept should be an important practice in any
company. If employees are afraid of failure, they will not take the risk to express new ideas. Encouraging new ideas,
while may lead to failure, can also lead to new innovations and learning opportunities. Either success or failure will
lead to a learning opportunity, which will lead to the company’s growth. A stagnant company is not a successful
company.In my current company, I did lots of mistakes but now I became very experienced in the industry and
making too little mistakes. What if my manager wouldn’t tolerate it? I wouldn’t be here.

More opportunities and innovations will grow from a working environment that encourages new ideas with no
repercussions for failure. Employees will be less intimidated to take a risk. I feel that I do better in environments that
encourage, rather than threaten. For example, in school, when a professor encourages the student to explore their
ideas in order for them to become more complex and meaningful rather than being told outright that the idea is a
bad one.Though Kolko mentions that design won’t solve all problems, I believe that the innovation that accompanies
design thinking it is a crucial part to the success of any modern company.

Agile innovation methods have revolutionized information technology. Over the past 25 to 30 years they have greatly
increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation
and productivity of IT teams.

THE PROBLEM Agile methods such as scrum, kanban, and lean development are spreading beyond IT to other
functions. Although some companies are scoring big improvements in productivity, speed to market, and customer
and employee satisfaction, others are struggling. THE ROOT CAUSE Leaders don’t really understand agile. As a result,
they unwittingly continue to employ conventional management practices that undermine agile projects. THE
SOLUTION Learn the basics of agile. Understand the conditions in which it does or doesn’t work. Start small and let it
spread organically. Allow “master” teams to customize it. Employ agile at the top. Destroy the barriers to agile
behaviors.Some executives associate Agile with lack of control. But this is not correct. There are several approaches to
Agile Development, and each one of them emphasizes different things: Scrum emphasizes creative and adaptive
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teamwork for solving complex problems; Lean development focuses on eliminating waste; Kanban concentrates in
reducing lead times and the amount of work in process.

The fundamentals of #Agile, and in particular for Scrum are relatively simple:

 To tackle an opportunity, the organization forms and empowers a small team (three to nine people). The
team is cross-functional and includes all the skills necessary to complete its tasks. It manages itself and is
strictly accountable for every aspect of the work.
 The team’s “initiative owner” (the product owner) is responsible for delivering value to customers and to the
business (Including internal customers and future users). The product owner usually comes from a business
function and divides his or her time between working with the team and coordinating with key stakeholders:
customers, senior executives, and business managers. The initiative owner may use a technique such as
design thinking or crowdsourcing to build a comprehensive “portfolio backlog” of promising opportunities.
 The team creates a simple roadmap and plans in detail only those activities that won’t change before
execution.
 The process is transparent to everyone. Team members hold brief daily “stand-up” meetings to review
progress and identify roadblocks.

Compared with traditional management approaches, agile offers a number of major benefits, all of which have been
well studied and documented.

 It increases team productivity and employee satisfaction.

 It minimizes the waste inherent in redundant meetings, repetitive planning, excessive documentation, quality
defects, and low-value product features.
 By improving visibility and continually adapting to customers’ changing priorities, agile improves customer
engagement and satisfaction, brings the most valuable products and features to market faster and more
predictably, and reduces risk.
 By engaging team members from multiple disciplines as collaborative peers, it broadens organizational
experience and builds mutual trust and respect.
 Finally, by dramatically reducing the time squandered on micromanaging functional projects, it allows senior
managers to devote themselves more fully to higher-value work that only they can do: creating and adjusting
the corporate vision; prioritizing strategic initiatives; simplifying and focusing work; assigning the right people
to tasks; increasing cross-functional collaboration; and removing impediments to progress.

Now agile methodologies—which involve new values, principles, practices, and benefits and are a radical alternative
to command-and-control-style management—are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions and
even into the C-suite. National Public Radio employs agile methods to create new programming. John Deere uses
them to develop new machines, and Saab to produce new fighter jets. Intronis, a leader in cloud backup services,
uses them in marketing. C.H. Robinson, a global third-party logistics provider, applies them in human resources.
Mission Bell Winery uses them for everything from wine production to warehousing to running its senior leadership
group. And GE relies on them to speed a much-publicized transition from 20th-century conglomerate to 21st-century
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“digital industrial company.” By taking people out of their functional silos and putting them in self-managed and
customer-focused multidisciplinary teams, the agile approach is not only accelerating profitable growth but also
helping to create a new generation of skilled general managers.

The spread of agile raises intriguing possibilities. What if a company could achieve positive returns with 50% more of
its new-product introductions? What if marketing programs could generate 40% more customer inquiries? What if
human resources could recruit 60% more of its highest-priority targets? What if twice as many workers were
emotionally engaged in their jobs? Agile has brought these levels of improvement to IT. The opportunity in other
parts of the company is substantial.

AGILE INNOVATION has revolutionized the software industry, which has arguably undergone more rapid and
profound change than any other area of business over the past 30 years. Now it is poised to transform nearly every
other function in every industry. At this point, the greatest impediment is not the need for better methodologies,
empirical evidence of significant benefits, or proof that agile can work outside IT. It is the behavior of executives.
Those who learn to lead agile’s extension into a broader range of business activities will accelerate profitable growth.

In this first article I understood that complex new designs of products ( e.g. EV) typically struggle to gain acceptance.
Many groundbreaking ideas fail in the starting gate.

Effective design was behind the success of many commercial goods, companies began employing it in more and
more contexts. High-tech firms that hired designers to work on hardware (to, say, come up with the shape and
layout of a smartphone) began asking them to create the look and feel of user-interface software. Then designers
were asked to help improve user experiences. Soon firms were treating corporate strategy making as an exercise in
design. Today design is even applied to helping multiple stakeholders and organizations work better as a system.

I would say things have changed since this article has been written, entrepreneurs are increasing and lots of new
ideas being brought into the game since last 5 years.Problems occur because usually new products and systems
often require people to change established business models and behaviours.As a result they encounter stiff resistance
from their intended beneficiaries and from the people who have to deliver or operate them.

What would be the solution?

We should treat the introduction of the new product or system – the ‘designed artifact’-as a design challenge itself.
When Intercrop Group in Peru took the approach, it won acceptance for a new technology enabled school concept in
which the teacher facilitates learning rather than serves as the sole lesson provider.Design thinking began as a way to
improve the process of designing tangible products. But that’s not where it will end. The Intercorp story and others
like it show that design thinking principles have the potential to be even more powerful when applied to managing
the intangible challenges involved in getting people to engage with and adopt innovative new ideas and experiences.

I personally think that lots of things changes in comparison with the past , change is much more easier in the
companies and new design or product ideas much more welcomed now than past.
 EMRE UZUNOGLU / GLOBAL ORGANIZATION AND LEADERSHIP WEEK 12

REFERENCES

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/04/21/hbrs-embrace-of-
agile/?sh=16e23b895802
2. https://agileforall.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R1605B-PDF-ENG.pdf

3. “Design for Action,” Tim Brown and Roger Martin, HBR, September 2015
4. “Design Thinking Comes of Age,” Jon Kolko, HBR, September 2015
5. “Embracing Agile,” Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Hirotaka Takeuchi, HBR, May 2016