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Ideas Made to Matter

Design thinking, explained

Rebecca Linke

Sep 14, 2017

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an innovative problem-solving process rooted in a set of skills.The approach has been around for decades, but it only started gaining traction outside of the design community after the 2008 Harvard Business Review article [subscription required] titled “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO.

Since then, the design thinking process has been applied to developing new products and services, and to a whole range of problems, from creating a business model for selling solar panels in Africa to the operation of Airbnb .

At a high level, the steps involved in the design thinking process are simple: first, fully understand the problem; second, explore a wide range of possible solutions; third, iterate extensively through prototyping and testing; and finally, implement through the customary deployment mechanisms. 

The skills associated with these steps help people apply creativity to effectively solve real-world problems better than they otherwise would. They can be readily learned, but take effort. For instance, when trying to understand a problem, setting aside your own preconceptions is vital, but it’s hard.

Creative brainstorming is necessary for developing possible solutions, but many people don’t do it particularly well. And throughout the process it is critical to engage in modeling, analysis, prototyping, and testing, and to really learn from these many iterations.

Once you master the skills central to the design thinking approach, they can be applied to solve problems in daily life and any industry.

Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Understand the problem 

The first step in design thinking is to understand the problem you are trying to solve before searching for solutions. Sometimes, the problem you need to address is not the one you originally set out to tackle.

“Most people don’t make much of an effort to explore the problem space before exploring the solution space,” said MIT Sloan professor Steve Eppinger. The mistake they make is to try and empathize, connecting the stated problem only to their own experiences. This falsely leads to the belief that you completely understand the situation. But the actual problem is always broader, more nuanced, or different than people originally assume.

Take the example of a meal delivery service in Holstebro, Denmark. When a team first began looking at the problem of poor nutrition and malnourishment among the elderly in the city, many of whom received meals from the service, it thought that simply updating the menu options would be a sufficient solution. But after closer observation, the team realized the scope of the problem was much larger , and that they would need to redesign the entire experience, not only for those receiving the meals, but for those preparing the meals as well. While the company changed almost everything about itself, including rebranding as The Good Kitchen, the most important change the company made when rethinking its business model was shifting how employees viewed themselves and their work. That, in turn, helped them create better meals (which were also drastically changed), yielding happier, better nourished customers.

Involve users

Imagine you are designing a new walker for rehabilitation patients and the elderly, but you have never used one. Could you fully understand what customers need? Certainly not, if you haven’t extensively observed and spoken with real customers. There is a reason that design thinking is often referred to as human-centered design.

“You have to immerse yourself in the problem,” Eppinger said.

How do you start to understand how to build a better walker? When a team from MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program together with the design firm Altitude took on that task, they met with walker users to interview them, observe them, and understand their experiences.  

“We center the design process on human beings by understanding their needs at the beginning, and then include them throughout the development and testing process,” Eppinger said.

Central to the design thinking process is prototyping and testing (more on that later) which allows designers to try, to fail, and to learn what works. Testing also involves customers, and that continued involvement provides essential user feedback on potential designs and use cases. If the MIT-Altitude team studying walkers had ended user involvement after its initial interviews, it would likely have ended up with a walker that didn’t work very well for customers. 

It is also important to interview and understand other stakeholders, like people selling the product, or those who are supporting the users throughout the product life cycle.

The second phase of design thinking is developing solutions to the problem (which you now fully understand). This begins with what most people know as brainstorming.

Hold nothing back during brainstorming sessions — except criticism. Infeasible ideas can generate useful solutions, but you’d never get there if you shoot down every impractical idea from the start.

“One of the key principles of brainstorming is to suspend judgment,” Eppinger said. “When we're exploring the solution space, we first broaden the search and generate lots of possibilities, including the wild and crazy ideas. Of course, the only way we're going to build on the wild and crazy ideas is if we consider them in the first place.”

That doesn’t mean you never judge the ideas, Eppinger said. That part comes later, in downselection. “But if we want 100 ideas to choose from, we can’t be very critical.”

In the case of The Good Kitchen, the kitchen employees were given new uniforms. Why? Uniforms don’t directly affect the competence of the cooks or the taste of the food.

But during interviews conducted with kitchen employees, designers realized that morale was low, in part because employees were bored preparing the same dishes over and over again, in part because they felt that others had a poor perception of them. The new, chef-style uniforms gave the cooks a greater sense of pride. It was only part of the solution, but if the idea had been rejected outright, or perhaps not even suggested, the company would have missed an important aspect of the solution.

Prototype and test. Repeat.

You’ve defined the problem. You’ve spoken to customers. You’ve brainstormed, come up with all sorts of ideas, and worked with your team to boil those ideas down to the ones you think may actually solve the problem you’ve defined.

“We don’t develop a good solution just by thinking about a list of ideas, bullet points and rough sketches,” Eppinger said. “We explore potential solutions through modeling and prototyping. We design, we build, we test, and repeat — this design iteration process is absolutely critical to effective design thinking.”

Repeating this loop of prototyping, testing, and gathering user feedback is crucial for making sure the design is right — that is, it works for customers, you can build it, and you can support it.

“After several iterations, we might get something that works, we validate it with real customers, and we often find that what we thought was a great solution is actually only just OK. But then we can make it a lot better through even just a few more iterations,” Eppinger said.

Implementation

The goal of all the steps that come before this is to have the best possible solution before you move into implementing the design. Your team will spend most of its time, its money, and its energy on this stage.

“Implementation involves detailed design, training, tooling, and ramping up. It is a huge amount of effort, so get it right before you expend that effort,” said Eppinger.

Design thinking isn’t just for “things.” If you are only applying the approach to physical products, you aren’t getting the most out of it. Design thinking can be applied to any problem that needs a creative solution. When Eppinger ran into a primary school educator who told him design thinking was big in his school, Eppinger thought he meant that they were teaching students the tenets of design thinking.

“It turns out they meant they were using design thinking in running their operations and improving the school programs. It’s being applied everywhere these days,” Eppinger said.

In another example from the education field, Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor hired design consulting firm IDEO to redesign every aspect of the learning experience in a network of schools in Peru. The ultimate goal? To elevate Peru’s middle class.

As you’d expect, many large corporations have also adopted design thinking. IBM has adopted it at a company-wide level, training many of its nearly 400,000 employees in design thinking principles .

What can design thinking do for your business?

The impact of all the buzz around design thinking today is that people are realizing that “anybody who has a challenge that needs creative problem solving could benefit from this approach,” Eppinger said. That means that managers can use it, not only to design a new product or service, “but anytime they’ve got a challenge, a problem to solve.”

Applying design thinking techniques to business problems can help executives across industries rethink their product offerings, grow their markets, offer greater value to customers, or innovate and stay relevant. “I don’t know industries that can’t use design thinking,” said Eppinger.

Ready to go deeper?

Read “ The Designful Company ” by Marty Neumeier, a book that focuses on how businesses can benefit from design thinking, and “ Product Design and Development ,” co-authored by Eppinger, to better understand the detailed methods.

Register for an MIT Sloan Executive Education course:

Systematic Innovation of Products, Processes, and Services , a five-day course taught by Eppinger and other MIT professors.

• Leadership by Design: Innovation Process and Culture , a two-day course taught by MIT Integrated Design and Management director Matthew Kressy.
• Managing Complex Technical Projects , a two-day course taught by Eppinger.
• Apply for M astering Design Thinking , a 3-month online certificate course taught by Eppinger and MIT Sloan senior lecturers Renée Richardson Gosline and David Robertson.

Steve Eppinger is a professor of management science and innovation at MIT Sloan. He holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and has a PhD from MIT in engineering. He is the faculty co-director of MIT's System Design and Management program and Integrated Design and Management program, both master’s degrees joint between the MIT Sloan and Engineering schools. His research focuses on product development and technical project management, and has been applied to improving complex engineering processes in many industries.

Read next: 10 agile ideas worth sharing

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Design thinking methodology: 5 principles to follow

When user empathy is at the core of product development, everyone wins. 

Your users feel seen and heard, and your product development process is resilient and efficient. That’s the power of embracing design thinking.

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In this chapter, we unpack five principles of the design thinking methodology to help you build excellent products and features for your customers.

Make your users a priority

Use Hotjar to learn what your users need and how your product fits in so you can launch updates and features that make their lives better.

A quick refresher: what is design thinking? 

Design thinking is an iterative process for solving problems in product development. The main thing to remember about design thinking is that the search for a solution puts the user front-and-center.

It’s a framework that empowers you to ask important questions about your product and how it affects users. If you want to throw out assumptions about your product experience and never hear “that’s how we’ve always done it” as reasoning for a product decision, design thinking is the way to go.

The 5 core principles of the design thinking methodology

The design thinking methodology is made of five principles:

User-centricity and empathy: your users, their problems, and their experience in your product are a priority, not an afterthought

Collaboration: every level and every role can contribute to, and see results from, design thinking

Ideation: the goal is to generate as many solutions as possible for a problem you’ve identified

Experimentation and iteration: the best solution ideas are turned into prototypes you can run experiments on

A bias towards action: ideas are most powerful when executed in real life, so taking action is essential

The focus on user empathy and action is the name of the game in design thinking; everything you do within design thinking ties back to the user and product experience.

Let’s dive into each principle and the role it plays in your work as a product team.

1. User-centricity and empathy

User-centricity and empathy are at the forefront of design thinking. When you explore solutions through design thinking, you do so based on human needs and user feedback.

The approach is about understanding what the user wants, needs, and struggles with when it comes to your product and its role in their life. It involves digging into how they feel about your product.

Think about it this way: if you struggle with customer churn, your business goal might be to reduce your churn rate (or increase your retention rate). But when you prioritize user-centricity and empathy, your actual goal is to improve the experience your customers have when using your product—which in turn positively impacts your business metrics.

Here are a few ways to start understanding your users and prioritizing empathy:

Surveys: ask users for direct feedback in key moments, like when they’re taking longer to complete a task or are about to abandon their session before reaching their goal

Recordings: peek over users’ virtual shoulders to understand what draws their attention, what frustrates them, and where they struggle

User interviews : unbiased, open-ended questions can reveal a mountain of insights you otherwise might not spot

It’s important to remember that the work you do to prioritize empathy never ends; you’ll never be ‘done’ understanding your users. Some of the biggest companies in the world know this: UberEats constantly interviews restaurant workers, delivery drivers, and meal recipients; Apple makes iterative customer involvement part of their design and development process.

Learn more about these (and other) examples in the design thinking examples chapter of this guide.

Hotjar helps us empathize with our users. It reminds us that there are real human beings on the other end. It also confirms that our work as a product development team has an impact, and is making our customer's lives easier. Hotjar helps us empathize with our users. It reminds us that there are real human beings on the other end. It also confirms that our work as a product development team has an impact, and is making our customer's lives easier.

2. Collaboration

Collaboration is a key dimension of design thinking. It allows product teams to step outside of your usual problem-solving and decision-making patterns and consider diverse ideas and perspectives. It sets the base for innovation and potential product solutions that would otherwise remain hidden.

In design thinking, input from teams like customer support, marketing, sales, customer success, and data or business intelligence is particularly useful in creating a problem statement—an actionable, concise sentence or question that drives your UX purpose and direction.

An effective problem statement is one that considers the entire user journey, start-to-finish—and this is where collaboration comes in: marketing and sales have a deeper insight into the earlier part of the customer journey, while support and customer success understand customer needs and struggles as they use your product.

We really love Hotjar. I share all the insights I find with the team. We get the Customer Success Manager to watch Recordings. UX person to watch recordings. Devs watch recordings. It’s a team effort. It’s democratic learning.

The wide range of skills across different teams is crucial to make your problem statement as useful as possible.

One excellent example of this in practice is Citrix. Knowing that many employees have little or no contact with users, they actively encourage design thinking and focus on the problems that matter to customers (and ultimately benefit the business, too).

See more problem statement examples in the problem statement chapter of this guide.

​​ 🔥 If you’re using Hotjar

Share product experience insights that would otherwise remain hidden to other teams. For example:

Use Recordings to show your customer support team the user behavior that led to an issue users told them about over live chat

Use Feedback to give the marketing team in-depth insights about parts of the pricing page that confuse potential customers

Use Surveys to share open-ended survey responses to user onboarding with sales reps who won them over

3. Ideation

In design thinking, designers hold ideation sessions to generate as many potential solutions to an issue as possible. Design thinking can’t happen without ideation—after all, it is a solution-focused process. Ideas are its essential building material.  

The goal is to propose as many solutions as possible—no matter how 'good' or 'bad' they might be—based on what you learn through user empathy and collaboration on a problem statement.

Here are a few things to keep in mind to get the most out of your ideation sessions:

Create a judgment-free zone: every idea is welcome, and the best way to generate as many ideas as possible is to ensure no one is holding back

No HiPPOs: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) can make one person's ideas seem more important or relevant than others’, so prevent that by giving all ideas equal space

Use as many ideation techniques as you can: take advantage of brainstorming, mind mapping, brain writing, sketching, and any other method that suits the people involved

Ignore the obstacles (for now): note down and log all ideas that come up during this process, even those that don’t seem feasible given the circumstances and resources you have

With people from different teams and rich, diverse skill sets taking part in ideation, you’ll end up with ideas you can combine, reframe, and consider in different contexts of your product.

💡 Pro tip: make the most of your product experience insights —the data that reveals how your users interact with your product—in the ideation phase.

For example, heatmaps might give you an idea of UX updates that will make the user journey smoother. Or you could compare session recordings between users who completed a task and those who abandoned it to brainstorm product improvements that might help more users reach their goal with your product.

4. Experimentation and iteration

With a bank of ideas, your next step is to narrow them down to a few you can focus on and—most importantly—run experiments with.

Embracing a product experimentation culture is key to product teams that put the customer first. It’s no wonder it also fits into the design thinking methodology. Use product prioritization to choose an idea to focus on and create a prototype you can test:

First, build thorough experiments. Define your goal, build a hypothesis, and choose KPIs you’ll use to measure results. This is essential to understand the true impact of your design thinking solutions. Otherwise, you’ll end up making assumptions and educated guesses (at best) about why a solution worked or failed.

Then, measure and iterate. As you run experiments on your ideas, like A/B tests or funnel tests, monitor results daily and keep an eye on additional quantitative and qualitative insights that give you context about the user experience.

For example, if you tweak a step in your product onboarding for a portion of your users, track the KPIs that measure its success, such as the completion rate. But don’t stop there: look at session recordings to better understand user progression and behavior during onboarding, and set up a Customer Effort Score survey to track ease of use for the original and updated versions.

5. A bias towards action

Much about the first four principles is focused on ideas—relying on empathy for the user to create as many ideas as possible, then testing prototypes in the real world.

The final building block of the design thinking methodology is to consistently and cyclically take action.

Ideas that stay in a team member’s mind don’t have any impact.

Ideas you experiment with have the potential to help a small portion of your users.

And ideas you choose to learn from, tweak, and release to your user base can have a lasting impact on both your users and your company’s success and long-term viability.

Consider the approach that RazorPay, an end-to-end payment solutions provider, took when updating their user dashboard:

Instead of endlessly hypothesizing and making vague assumptions, the RazorPay team released their redesign to just 10% of their users.

Then, instead of only tracking standard web analytics to measure success, they also kept an eye on the score these users gave their experience on a scale from 1 to 10. If the score was low, users could explain their rating in an open-ended survey.

At this point, RazorPay didn’t pat themselves on the back for a job well done— they kept working on the dashboard through multiple iterations based on continuous user feedback.

Read RazorPay's full story here .

Use design thinking to keep learning about your users

As you embrace design thinking and learn how your product team can make the most of it, remember: there’s no end to the process , and you can always use what you’ve learned from taking action to refine the ideas you’ve developed. 

Make product decisions based on what your users need

Use insights from Recordings, Heatmaps, Surveys, and Feedback to learn what your users need—and build a product that fits right in.

FAQs about design thinking methodology

What are the five design thinking principles.

The design thinking methodology focuses on solving issues by embodying these five principles:

User-centricity and empathy for user problems and experiences

Collaboration between teams

Ideation and generating as many solutions as possible

Experimentation and iteration of best ideas

A bias towards action and learning from experiments

Where can you find ideas for design thinking solutions?

Design thinking solution ideas can originate from anywhere in the user journey, from their experience signing up and onboarding to product usage and drop-off points.

Use design thinking software to find and develop ideas. A tool like Hotjar lets you observe user behavior in your product and ask the right questions at the right time. Other design thinking tools help you conduct live user interviews, run collaborative brainstorming sessions, and shape ideas into prototypes.

What is the key to making the design thinking methodology work?

Design thinking emphasizes taking action. Even the best ideas are wasted if you don’t implement them and learn from them for future improvements.

For example, when you brainstorm a new feature based on what you know about your customers, prototype it and test it with real users. Data like session recordings and survey responses will give you a world of learning you can build upon to improve your product.

Design thinking process

Previous chapter

Examples of design thinking

Next chapter

What is design thinking?

Design and conquer: in years past, the word “design” might have conjured images of expensive handbags or glossy coffee table books. Now, your mind might go straight to business. Design and design thinking are buzzing in the business community more than ever. Until now, design has focused largely on how something looks; these days, it’s a dynamic idea used to describe how organizations can adjust their problem-solving approaches to respond to rapidly changing environments—and create maximum impact and shareholder value. Design is a journey and a destination. Design thinking is a core way of starting the journey and arriving at the right destination at the right time.

Simply put, “design thinking is a methodology that we use to solve complex problems , and it’s a way of using systemic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal future states,” says McKinsey partner Jennifer Kilian. Design thinking, she continues, is “the single biggest competitive advantage that you can have, if your customers are loyal to you—because if you solve for their needs first, you’ll always win.”

Get to know and directly engage with senior McKinsey experts on design thinking

Tjark Freundt is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Hamburg office, Tomas Nauclér is a senior partner in the Stockholm office, Daniel Swan is a senior partner in the Stamford office, Warren Teichner is a senior partner in the New York office, Bill Wiseman is a senior partner in the Seattle office, and Kai Vollhardt is a senior partner in the Munich office.

And good design is good business. Kilian’s claim is backed up with data: McKinsey Design’s 2018 Business value of design report  found that the best design performers increase their revenues  and investor returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry competitors. What’s more, over a ten-year period, design-led companies outperformed  the S&P 500 by 219 percent.

As you may have guessed by now, design thinking goes way beyond just the way something looks. And incorporating design thinking into your business is more than just creating a design studio and hiring designers. Design thinking means fundamentally changing how you develop your products, services, and, indeed, your organization itself.

Read on for a deep dive into the theory and practice of design thinking.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice , and check out McKinsey’s latest Business value of design report here .

How do companies build a design-driven company culture?

There’s more to succeeding in business than developing a great product or service that generates a financial return. Empathy and purpose are core business needs. Design thinking means putting customers, employees, and the planet at the center of problem solving.

McKinsey’s Design Practice has learned that design-led organizations start with design-driven cultures. Here are four steps  to building success through the power of design:

Understand your audience. Design-driven companies go beyond asking what customers and employees want, to truly understanding why they want it. Frequently, design-driven companies will turn to cultural anthropologists and ethnographers to drill down into how their customers use and experience products, including what motivates them and what turns them away.

Makeup retailer Sephora provides an example. When marketing leaders actually watched  shoppers using the Sephora website, they realized customers would frequently go to YouTube to watch videos of people using products before making a purchase. Using this information, the cosmetics retailer developed its own line of demonstration videos, keeping shoppers on the site and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

• Bring design to the executive table. This leader can be a chief design officer, a chief digital officer, or a chief marketing officer. Overall, this executive should be the best advocate for the company’s customers and employees, bringing the point of view of the people, the planet, and the company’s purpose into strategic business decisions. The design lead should also build bridges between multiple functions and stakeholders, bringing various groups into the design iteration process.
• Design in real time. To understand how and why people—both customers and employees—use processes, products, or services, organizations should develop a three-pronged design-thinking model that combines design, business strategy, and technology. This approach allows business leaders to spot trends, cocreate using feedback and data, prototype, validate, and build governance models for ongoing investment.

Act quickly. Good design depends on agility. That means getting a product to users quickly, then iterating based on customer feedback. In a design-driven culture, companies aren’t afraid to release products that aren’t quite perfect. Designers know there is no end to the design process. The power of design, instead, lies in the ability to adopt and adapt as needs change. When designers are embedded within teams, they are uniquely positioned to gather and digest feedback, which can lead to unexpected revelations. Ultimately, this approach creates more impactful and profitable results than following a prescribed path.

Consider Instagram. Having launched an initial product in 2010, Instagram’s founders paid attention to what the most popular features were: image sharing, commenting, and liking. They relaunched with a stripped-down version a few months later, resulting in 100,000 downloads in less than a week and over two million users in under two months —all without any strategic promotion.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice .

What’s the relationship between user-centered design and design thinking?

Both processes are design led. And they both emphasize listening to and deeply understanding users and continually gathering and implementing feedback to develop, refine, and improve a service.

Where they are different is scale. User-centered design focuses on improving a specific product or service . Design thinking takes a broader view  as a way to creatively address complex problems—whether for a start-up, a large organization, or society as a whole.

User-centered design is great for developing a fantastic product or service. In the past, a company could coast on a superior process or product for years before competitors caught up. But now, as digitization drives more frequent and faster disruptions, users demand a dynamic mix of product and service. Emphasis has shifted firmly away  from features and functions toward purpose, lifestyle, and simplicity of use.

Introducing McKinsey Explainers : Direct answers to complex questions

McKinsey analysis has found that some industries—such as telecommunications, automotive, and consumer product companies— have already made strides toward combining product and service into a unified customer experience . Read on for concrete examples of how companies have applied design thinking to offer innovative—and lucrative—customer experiences.

Learn more about our Operations Practice .

What is the design-thinking process?

McKinsey analysis has shown that the design-thinking approach creates more value  than conventional approaches. The right design at the right price point spurs sustainability and resilience in a demonstrable way—a key driver of growth.

According to McKinsey’s Design  Practice, there are two key steps to the design-thinking process:

• Developing an understanding of behavior and needs that goes beyond what people are doing right now to what they will need in the future and how to deliver that. The best way to develop this understanding is to spend time with people.
• “Concepting,” iterating, and testing . First start with pen and paper, sketching out concepts. Then quickly put these into rough prototypes—with an emphasis on quickly. Get feedback, refine, and test again. As American chemist Linus Pauling said : “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”

What is D4VG versus DTV?

For more than a decade, manufacturers have used a design-to-value (DTV) model  to design and release products that have the features needed to be competitive at a low cost. During this time, DTV efforts were groundbreaking because they were based on data rather than experience. They also reached across functions, in contrast to the typical value-engineering approach.

The principles of DTV have evolved into design for value and growth (D4VG), a new way of creating products that provide exceptional customer experiences while driving both value and growth. Done right, D4VG efforts generate products with the features, form, and functionality that turn users into loyal fans .

D4VG products can cost more to build, but they can ultimately raise margins by delivering on a clear understanding of a product’s core brand attributes, insights into people’s motivations, and design thinking.

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods Practice .

What is design for sustainability?

As consumers, companies, and regulators shift toward increased sustainability, design processes are coming under even more scrutiny. The challenge is that carbon-efficient production processes tend to be more complex and can require more carbon-intensive materials. The good news is that an increased focus on design for sustainability (DFS), especially at the research and development stage , can help mitigate some of these inefficiencies and ultimately create even more sustainable products.

For example, the transition from internal-combustion engines to electric-propulsion vehicles  has highlighted emissions-intensive automobile production processes. One study found that around 20 percent of the carbon generated by a diesel vehicle comes from its production . If the vehicle ran on only renewable energy, production emissions would account for 85 percent of the total. With more sustainable design, electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturers stand to reduce the lifetime emissions of their products significantly.

To achieve design for sustainability at scale, companies can address three interrelated elements at the R&D stage:

• rethinking the way their products use resources, adapting them to changing regulations, adopting principles of circularity, and making use of customer insights
• understanding and tracking emissions and cost impact of design decisions in support of sustainability goals
• fostering the right mindsets and capabilities to integrate sustainability into every product and design decision

What is ‘skinny design’?

Skinny design is a less theoretical aspect of design thinking. It’s a method whereby consumer goods companies reassess the overall box size of products by reducing the total cubic volume of the package. According to McKinsey analysis , this can improve overall business performance in the following ways:

• Top-line growth of 4 to 5 percent through improvements in shelf and warehouse holding power. The ability to fit more stock into warehouses ultimately translates to growth.
• Bottom-line growth of more than 10 percent . Packing more product into containers and trucks creates the largest savings. Other cost reductions can come from designing packaging to minimize the labor required and facilitate automation.
• Sustainability improvements associated with reductions in carbon emissions through less diesel fuel burned per unit. Material choices can also confer improvements to the overall footprint.

Read more about skinny design and how it can help maximize the volume of consumer products that make it onto shelves.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Operations Practice .

How can a company become a top design performer?

The average person’s standard for design is higher than ever. Good design is no longer just a nice-to-have for a company. Customers now have extremely high expectations for design, whether it’s customer service, instant access to information, or clever products that are also aesthetically relevant in the current culture.

McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies  over a five-year period in multiple countries. Advanced regression analysis of more than two million pieces of financial data and more than 100,000 design actions revealed 12 actions most correlated to improved financial performance. These were then clustered into the following four themes:

• Analytical leadership . For the best financial performers, design is a top management issue , and design performance is assessed with the same rigor these companies use to approach revenue and cost. The companies with the top financial returns have combined design and business leadership through bold, design-centric visions. These include a commitment to maintain a baseline level of customer understanding among all executives. The CEO of one of the world’s largest banks, for example, spends one day a month with the bank’s clients and encourages all members of the company’s C-suite to do the same.
• Cross-functional talent . Top-performing companies make user-centric design everyone’s responsibility, not a siloed function. Companies whose designers are embedded within cross-functional teams have better overall business performance . Further, the alignment of design metrics with functional business metrics (such as financial performance, user adoption rates, and satisfaction results) is also correlated to better business performance.
• Design with people, not for people . Design flourishes best, according to our research, in environments that encourage learning, testing, and iterating with users . These practices increase the odds of creating breakthrough products and services, while at the same time reducing the risk of costly missteps.
• User experience (UX) . Top-quartile companies embrace the full user experience  by taking a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. Design approaches like mapping customer journeys can lead to more inclusive and sustainable solutions.

What are some real-world examples of how design thinking can improve efficiency and user experience?

Understanding the theory of design thinking is one thing. Seeing it work in practice is something else. Here are some examples of how elegant design created value for customers, a company, and shareholders:

• Stockholm’s international airport, Arlanda, used design thinking to address its air-traffic-control problem. The goal was to create a system that would make air traffic safer and more effective. By understanding the tasks and challenges of the air-traffic controllers, then collaboratively working on prototypes and iterating based on feedback, a working group was able to design a new departure-sequencing tool  that helped air-traffic controllers do their jobs better. The new system greatly reduced the amount of time planes spent between leaving the terminal and being in the air, which in turn helped reduce fuel consumption.
• When Tesla creates its electric vehicles , the company closely considers not only aesthetics but also the overall driving experience .
• The consumer electronics industry has a long history of dramatic evolutions lead by design thinking. Since Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007, for example, each new generation has seen additional features, new customers, and lower costs—all driven by design-led value creation .

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods  and Sustainability  Practices.

For a more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s Agile Organizations collection. Learn more about our Design Practice —and check out design-thinking-related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced:

• “ Skinny design: Smaller is better ,” April 26, 2022, Dave Fedewa , Daniel Swan , Warren Teichner , and Bill Wiseman
• “ Product sustainability: Back to the drawing board ,” February 7, 2022, Stephan Fuchs, Stephan Mohr , Malin Orebäck, and Jan Rys
• “ Emerging from COVID-19: Australians embrace their values ,” May 11, 2020, Lloyd Colling, Rod Farmer , Jenny Child, Dan Feldman, and Jean-Baptiste Coumau
• “ The business value of design ,” McKinsey Quarterly , October 25, 2018, Benedict Sheppard , Hugo Sarrazin, Garen Kouyoumjian, and Fabricio Dore
• “ More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value ,” December 8, 2017, Benedict Sheppard , John Edson, and Garen Kouyoumjian
• “ Creating value through sustainable design ,” July 25, 2017, Sara Andersson, David Crafoord, and Tomas Nauclér
• “ The expanding role of design in creating an end-to-end customer experience ,” June 6, 2017, Raffaele Breschi, Tjark Freundt , Malin Orebäck, and Kai Vollhardt
• “ Design for value and growth in a new world ,” April 13, 2017, Ankur Agrawal , Mark Dziersk, Dave Subburaj, and Kieran West
• “ The power of design thinking ,” March 1, 2016, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Barr Seitz
• “ Building a design-driven culture ,” September 1, 2015, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Hyo Yeon

Want to know more about design thinking?

Related articles.

Skinny design: Smaller is better

The business value of design

More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value

InVisionApp, Inc.

Inside Design

What is design thinking, and how do we apply it?

Emily stevens,   •   jan 30, 2020.

T he famous inventor, engineer, businessman, and holder of no fewer than 186 patents Charles Kettering once said, “If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.”

If you’re a designer, an entrepreneur, or any kind of employee, you are no stranger to the constant pressure to innovate. It’s the secret sauce, after all; the key to progress and success. Our capacity for innovation—the ability to conceive ideas which are at once actionable and effective—is what gives us the upper hand in competitive industries.

The Apples, Airbnbs, and Ubers of this world were all borne of innovation. Now, the challenge that all of these companies—and your company too, no doubt—face is to continue that innovation in order to maintain or further advance their position in their respective markets. Innovation can’t be a one-time affair; it needs to be part of the company’s DNA.

You also know that innovation doesn’t always come that easily.

That’s where design thinking comes in.

Design thinking has long been considered the holy grail of innovation—and the remedy to stagnation. It has been credited with remarkable feats, like transforming Airbnb from a failing startup to a billion-dollar business . It’s a concept that’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore, and yet, despite such high-profile success stories, it’s a concept that continues to be shrouded in mystery.

Enough of the vague definitions and abstract descriptions. In this post, we’ll show you exactly what design thinking is and what it looks like in action. Let’s get into:

What is design thinking?

• What are the key principles of design thinking?
• What is the design thinking methodology and how can I use it?
• How can I apply the design thinking framework?

Ready to leverage the power of design thinking? Let’s go.

Design thinking originally came about as a way of teaching engineers how to approach problems creatively, like designers do. One of the first people to write about design thinking was John E. Arnold, professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. In 1959, he wrote “ Creative Engineering ,” the text that established the four areas of design thinking. From there, design thinking began to evolve as a “way of thinking” in the fields of science and design engineering—as can be seen in Herbert A. Simon’s book “ The Sciences of the Artificial ” and in Robert McKim’s “ Experiences in Visual Thinking ”.

With the rise of human-centered design in the 80s and the formation of design consultancy IDEO in the 90s, design thinking became increasingly popular. By the start of the 21st century, design thinking was making its way into the world of business. In 2005, Stanford University’s d.school began teaching design thinking as an approach to technical and social innovation.

Indeed, many of the methods and techniques used in design thinking have been borrowed from the designer’s toolkit.

So what exactly is design thinking?

Design thinking is both an ideology and a process that seeks to solve complex problems in a user-centric way. It focuses on achieving practical results and solutions that are:

• Technically feasible : They can be developed into functional products or processes;
• Economically viable : The business can afford to implement them;
• Desirable for the user : They meet a real human need.

The ideology behind design thinking states that, in order to come up with innovative solutions, one must adopt a designer’s mindset and approach the problem from the user’s perspective. At the same time, design thinking is all about getting hands-on; the aim is to turn your ideas into tangible, testable products or processes as quickly as possible.

The design thinking process outlines a series of steps that bring this ideology to life—starting with building empathy for the user, right through to coming up with ideas and turning them into prototypes.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that this sounds suspiciously like UX. So what makes design thinking so special?

Design thinking helps us tackle “wicked” problems

The uniqueness of design thinking lies in the kinds of problems it addresses. When it comes to the problems to be solved with design thinking, we’re not just talking about ordinary, common problems that have tried-and-tested solutions. We’re talking about highly complex, “wicked” problems: the kind that refuse to be solved using standard methods and approaches.

Not only are these problems difficult to define, but any attempt to solve them is likely to give way to even more problems. Wicked problems are everywhere, ranging from global issues such as climate change and poverty, to challenges that affect almost all businesses such as change management, achieving sustainable growth, or maintaining your competitive edge.

Design thinking is an actionable approach which can be used to tackle the world’s wickedest of problems. It fosters user-centricity, creativity, innovation, and out-of-the-box thinking.

With that in mind, let’s explore the principles and pillars of design thinking in more detail.

What are the principles of design thinking?

There are certain principles that are pivotal to design thinking. These are reflected in the design thinking methodology, which we’ll explore in detail a little later on. We’ve outlined five of design thinking’s most important principles below.

1. User-centricity and empathy

Design thinking is all about finding solutions that respond to human needs and user feedback. People, not technology, are the drivers of innovation, so an essential part of the process involves stepping into the user’s shoes and building genuine empathy for your target audience.

2. Collaboration

The aim of design thinking is to pool a diverse variety of perspectives and ideas; this is what leads to innovation! Design thinking encourages collaboration between heterogeneous, multidisciplinary teams which may not typically work together.

3. Ideation

Design thinking is a solution-based framework, so the focus is on coming up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible. Ideation is both a core design thinking principle and a step in the design thinking process. The ideation step is a designated judgment-free zone where participants are encouraged to focus on the quantity of ideas, rather than the quality.

4. Experimentation and iteration

It’s not just about coming up with ideas; it’s about turning them into prototypes, testing them, and making changes based on user feedback. Design thinking is an iterative approach, so be prepared to repeat certain steps in the process as you uncover flaws and shortcomings in the early versions of your proposed solution.

5. A bias towards action

Design thinking is an extremely hands-on approach to problem-solving favoring action over discussion. Instead of hypothesizing about what your users want, design thinking encourages you to get out there and engage with them face-to-face. Rather than talking about potential solutions, you’ll turn them into tangible prototypes and test them in real-world contexts.

The design thinking methodology in action

So far, we’ve covered quite a bit of theory. We know what design thinking is and the key principles that shape it. Now let’s consider what the design thinking methodology looks like in action, starting with the five key steps in the design thinking process .

The design thinking framework: five key steps

The design thinking framework can be divided into three distinct phases: immersion, ideation, and implementation. This framework can be further broken down into five actionable steps which make up the design thinking process:

Although these steps appear to be sequential, it’s important to point out that design thinking doesn’t follow a strictly linear process. At each stage in the process, you’re likely to make new discoveries that require you to go back and repeat a previous step.

Step 1. Empathize

• What? During the empathize phase, you’ll engage with and observe your target audience.
• Why? The aim of this step is to paint a clear picture of who your end users are, what challenges they face, and what needs and expectations must be met.
• How? In order to build user empathy, you’ll conduct surveys, interviews, and observation sessions.
• For example: You want to address the issue of employee retention, so you ask each employee to complete an anonymous survey. You then hold user interviews with as many employees as possible to find out how they feel about retention within the company.

Step 2. Define

• What? Based on what you’ve learned in the empathize phase, the next step is to define a clear problem statement.
• Why? Your problem statement sets out the specific challenge you will address. It will guide the entire design process from here on out, giving you a fixed goal to focus on and helping to keep the user in mind at all times.
• How? When framing your problem statement, you’ll focus on the user’s needs rather than those of the business. A good problem statement is human-centered, broad enough for creativity, yet specific enough to provide guidance and direction.
• For example: “My employees need to be able to maintain a healthy lifestyle while working in the office” is much more user-centric than “I need to keep my employees healthy and happy in order to boost retention.”

Step 3. Ideate

• What? With a clear problem statement in mind, you’ll now aim to come up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible.
• Why? The ideation phase gets you thinking outside the box and exploring new angles. By focusing on quantity of ideas rather than quality, you’re more likely to free your mind and stumble upon innovation!
• How? During dedicated ideation sessions, you’ll use a range of different ideation techniques such as bodystorming, reverse thinking, and worst possible idea.
• For example: Based on what you’ve learned in the empathize phase, you hold several ideation sessions with a variety of different stakeholders. With your problem statement to hand, you come up with as many ideas as possible for how you might make your employees happier and thus more likely to stay with the company.

Step 4. Prototype

• What? Having narrowed your ideas down to a select few, you’ll now turn them into prototypes—or “scaled-down” versions of the product or concept you want to test.
• Why? The prototyping stagegives you something tangible that can be tested on real users. This is crucial in maintaining a user-centric approach.
• How? Depending on what you’re testing, prototypes can take various forms—from basic paper models to interactive, digital prototypes. When creating your prototypes, have a clear goal in mind; know exactly what you want your prototype to represent and therefore test.
• For example: During the ideation phase, one idea that came up was to offer free yoga classes. To prototype this idea, you set up a dedicated yoga room in the office, complete with mats, water bottles, and hand towels.

Step 5. Test

What? The fifth step in the design thinking process will see you testing your prototypes on real or representative users.

• Why? The testing phase enables you to see where your prototype works well and where it needs improving. Based on user feedback, you can make changes and improvements before you spend time and money developing and/or implementing your solution.
• How? You’ll run user testing sessions where you observe your target users as they interact with your prototype. You may also gather verbal feedback. With everything you learn from the testing phase, you’ll make changes to your design or come up with a completely new idea altogether!
• For example: You decide to test the yoga idea for two months to see how employees respond. You find that people enjoy the yoga classes, but are put off by the fact that they are in the middle of the day and there is nowhere to shower. Based on this feedback, you decide to move the yoga classes to the evening.

Applying the design thinking framework to your own work

Design thinking can also start small—you don’t need to become a UX designer in order to apply design thinking to your own work! You might choose to focus on just one aspect of the design thinking process, such as getting to know your customers and making a conscious effort to be more empathy-driven on a day to day basis. If you’re struggling to gather positive customer reviews, for example, you might choose to conduct user interviews in order to find out what your customers are missing.

Perhaps you want to focus on the collaborative nature of design thinking, in which case you might hold ideation sessions with representatives from a diverse variety of teams. If you notice that marketing and design constantly struggle to see eye-to-eye, for example, a few design thinking-style brainstorming sessions might help to get everybody on the same page.

Another increasingly popular method of applying design thinking is through design thinking workshops . If you have a specific problem you want to solve, such as coming up with a new product idea or figuring out how to boost employee retention, a design thinking workshop will take you through the entire design thinking process in a short space of time. Design thinking workshops are also used to teach non-design professionals how to innovate and find creative solutions—an essential skill in any area of business.

Examples of design thinking success

Product and service design are the most obvious contexts to benefit from design thinking. However, the design thinking framework can be used to tackle all kinds of challenges beyond the realm of design!

Design thinking is increasingly being integrated into business as a way to foster innovation and teamwork. IBM developed their Enterprise Design Thinking framework in order to “help multidisciplinary teams align around the real needs of their users,” claiming that businesses who use the framework are twice as quick to get their products to market, 75% more efficient in terms of teamwork, and enjoy a 300% return on investment.

Insurance firm MassMutual used a design thinking approach to tackle the challenge of getting young adults to purchase life insurance. In partnership with IDEO , they conducted extensive user research over the course of two years. Based on what they learned, they then embarked on a further two years of prototyping and testing. The end result was Society of Grownups , a suite of digital tools that help to educate young people to make smart financial choices.

Here at CareerFoundry , we not only teach design thinking as part of our UX Design Course , but we also incorporate it in the way we work and make decisions. The majority of our users are adult learners who are juggling online study with full-time work, and so one of the biggest challenges they face is time management. Based on the design thinking framework, we conducted extensive user research, including an in-house time management workshop with real students. With these new insights, we redesigned certain aspects of our e-learning dashboard—such as how project milestones are displayed, for example. In true design thinking fashion, we’ll continue to gather user feedback in order to iterate on and improve our current solution.

Now you know what design thinking is and how it can be applied to almost any context. If you’d like to learn more about design thinking, this comprehensive beginner’s guide explains how design thinking, lean, and agile work together, and sheds some light on the relationship between design thinking and UX design. If you’re keen to start incorporating design thinking into your work right away, check out these nine design thinking tools to try with your team .

Want to learn more about design thinking?

• 9 design thinking tools to try with your team
• 4 ways to improve your design thinking process
• Why the world needs more design thinking

Keep your design and dev teams synced on accessibility work using DSM.

by Emily Stevens

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A complete guide to the design thinking process

Learn the five stages of the design thinking process, get practical tips to apply them, and get templates to seamlessly run design thinking exercises.

How many projects have you worked on that stalled because your team couldn’t align on the best path forward? How many more got shelved because they didn’t meet user needs or expectations? And how many got delayed in rounds and rounds of never-ending feedback? 

Thankfully, you don’t have to keep repeating those experiences month after month. The (not so) secret weapon: design thinking .

Design thinking gives teams a new way to approach their projects and overcome some of those well-known challenges. It can help teams understand their users' needs and challenges, then apply those learnings to solve problems in a creative, innovative way. Understanding design thinking can transform your team’s problem-solving approach — and how you work together.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative process where teams seek to understand user needs, challenge assumptions, define complex problems to solve, and develop innovative solutions to prototype and test. The goal of design thinking is to come up with user-focused solutions tailored to the particular problem at hand.

While often used in product design, service design, and customer experience, you can use design thinking in virtually any situation, industry, or organization to create user-centric solutions to specific problems.

Design thinking process 101: Definitions and approaches

The design thinking process puts customers’ and users’ needs at the center and aims to solve challenges from their perspective.

Design thinking typically follows five distinct stages:

Empathize stage

The first stage of design thinking lays the foundation for the rest of the process because it focuses on the needs of the real people using your product. At this stage, you want to get familiar with the people experiencing the problems you’re trying to solve, understanding their point of view, and learning about their user experience. You want to understand their challenges and what they need from your product or company to address them.

The goal of this stage is for your team to develop a user-centered vision of the core problem you need to solve. The idea is to challenge any assumptions or biases teams have, instead using their customer perspective as a guiding source. This is important because it aligns the team on what needs to be considered during the rest of the design thinking process. 

To help you get a solid understanding of the problems you’re solving, you can ask a lot of questions to build empathy with your users. These will invite people to share their experiences and observations to help your team better understand the problem. Then, you can move on to some specific exercises for the empathy stage of the process.

As you build up your understanding of your users, it's helpful to visualize their experience. A common way to do this is to assemble a customer journey map . This helps identify areas of friction and understand customer preferences.

Learn more: 7 types of questions to build empathy for design thinking

Ideate stage

Your priority here is to think outside the box and source as many ideas as possible from all areas of the business. Bring in people from different departments so you benefit from a wider range of experiences and perspectives during ideation sessions. Don’t worry about coming up with concrete solutions or how to implement each one — you’ll build on that later. The goal is to explore new and creative ideas rather than come up with an actual plan.

Key steps in the ideation phase:

• Define your problem : Creating a problem statement ensures that your team can focus on solving the right problem and staying aligned with your end-user or customer’s problem
• Start ideating : Choose a brainstorming technique to help organize team participation that fits your goal (More on that in the next section.)
• Prioritize your ideas : Once you have several ideas, prioritize them based on how well they take into account the customer’s needs‍ ‍
• Choose the best solution : Choose the best ideas to move forward to either the define stage or the prototype stage

Learn more: The ideation stage of design thinking: What you need to know

Your priority here is to generate as many ideas as possible, without judging or evaluating them. This step encourages designers to think creatively and push the boundaries of what's possible. We’ve put together a list of different brainstorming techniques to help your teams come up with creative new ideas. 

Put it into practice: How to facilitate a brainstorming session

Prototyping stage

At this stage, your team’s goal is to remove uncertainty around your proposed solutions. This is where you start thinking about them in more detail, including how you’ll bring them to life. Your prototypes should help the team understand if the design or solution will work as it’s intended to. 

Here, the focus is on speed and efficiency — you don’t want to invest a ton of time or resources into these solutions yet because you’re not sure they’re the best ones for the problem you’re trying to solve. You just need a functional, interactive prototype that can prove your concept. These are learning opportunities to help you spot any issues or opportunities before you take it any further.

Learn more: A guide to prototyping: the 4th stage of design thinking

Testing stage

The testing stage is normally one of the last stages of the design thinking process. After you’ve developed a concept or prototype, you need to test it in the real-world to understand its viability and usability. It’s where your product, design, or development teams evaluate the creative solutions they’ve come up with, to see how real users interact with them. 

Testing your concepts and observing how people interact with them helps you understand whether or not the prototype solves real problems and meets their needs, before you invest in it fully.

However, design thinking is an iterative process: You may go through the ideation, prototyping, and testing phases multiple times to improve and refine your solutions as you learn more from your users.

Read the guide: Testing: A guide to the 5th stage of design thinking

The relationship between human-centered design and design thinking

These two terms are often used together, because they complement one another. However, they’re two different things, so understanding their differences is important. 

Simply put, design thinking is a working process, while human-centered design is a mindset or approach.

The first step in finding success with design thinking is to foster a culture of human-centered design within your team. This is because design thinking focuses so heavily on the users and customers — the people using your product or service.

To inspire your team, we’ve put together four human-centered design examples — and explain why they work so well.

Benefits of design thinking

For organizations who’ve never run a design thinking workshop before, it can feel like a big change in how you approach the design process. But it can offer many benefits for your business.

Foster a true design culture within your organization

Design thinking is an iterative process — it’s not something you do once and call it done. The more you do it, the more you’ll see a design-focused culture emerge within your organization, which is much more effective than going to one-off creative retreats or setting up expensive innovation centers that no one ever uses.

This mindset and cultural shift can help scale design thinking within the business. But it’s important to know how to avoid  some of the pitfalls companies can face when trying to create a design culture internally.

Learn more: How to use the LUMA System of Innovation for everyday design thinking

Encourage collaboration across departments

Design thinking isn’t just for the designers on the team. The earlier stages of the process — Empathize, Define, and Ideate — are perfect for bringing in people from across the business. In fact, bringing in varied viewpoints and perspectives can help you come up with more creative or effective solutions.

You can use the design thinking process to get more people involved, and help everyone contribute ideas.

Improve understanding of user needs

So many companies say they’re “customer focused,” but lack a clear understanding of what really matters most to their customers in the context of their product or service. Design thinking puts the user front and center, with the Empathize stage dedicated to understanding and discovering user needs.

Learn more: How to identify user needs and pain points

Skills and behaviors needed for successful design thinking

To get the most out of a design thinking exercise, you’ll need a collaborative and creative mindset within your team. The team needs to be willing to explore new ideas, and laser-focused on customer or user needs. 

Here are some specific skills to help your design thinking process run smoothly.

Divergent and convergent thinking

Divergence and convergence is a human-centered design approach to problem-solving. It switches between expansive and focused thinking, giving you a process that balances understanding people’s problems and developing solutions. 

It focuses on understanding a user's needs, behaviors, and motivations, to help you develop empathy for their problems. Then, it encourages experimentation and iteration to help you effectively design solutions to meet those needs.

Collaborative working

Design thinking isn’t a solo activity. You’ll bring in people from different teams or business areas. To get the most out of the process, everyone needs to collaborate and communicate effectively. Teams that are good at collaborating drive the best outcomes, while also making it an enjoyable experience working together.

There are several core collaboration skills your team needs to succeed:

• Open-mindedness
• Communication
• Adaptability
• Organization
• Time management

Learn more about why these skills are so important and how you can improve them individually or as a team: 7 collaboration skills your team needs to succeed

Participatory or collaborative design

For many design teams and creative folks, the idea of designing something with other people can be enough to make them shudder. “Design by committee” is their idea of a nightmare. But the design thinking process isn’t about “making the logo 10% bigger” or “using a different shade of blue.” It’s user- and solution-focused.

You’ll get the best outcomes if you bring insights, perspectives, and expertise from multiple stakeholders. That includes at the Prototype and Test stages, as everyone will have ideas to contribute to help you bring solutions to life.

Learn more: What is co-design? A primer on participatory design

Common challenges in design thinking

If your team hasn’t mastered or fully committed to each one of the design thinking steps, you may encounter problems that make it harder to reap the benefits of design thinking.

Here are 4 common challenges that teams face when implementing design thinking practices.

• A company culture that doesn't foster collaboration
• An inability to adjust to non-linear processes
• A lack of in-depth user research
• Getting too invested in a single idea

Learn how to address these in Mural's guide on design thinking challenges .

Design thinking tools and templates to help you get started

Using mural for design thinking.

There are lots of tools you can use to run design thinking workshops — including Mural. We help designers work as effectively as possible, so they can get to better solutions quicker. We’ve incorporated some design thinking shortcuts and “hidden” features into our application, making it perfect for in-person or remote (or even asynchronous) collaborative sessions. These include:

• Use the C-key shortcut to quickly connect ideas with arrows
• Seamlessly import existing information from spreadsheets
• Duplicate elements you already created for faster visualization
• Fit your canvas to your screen and zoom in
• Get even more options using the right-click menu

And to help you get started, we’ve hand-picked some Mural templates relevant to each stage of the design process below.

Templates for the Empathy stage

The empathy map template helps you visualize the thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customersto help you develop a better understanding of the their experiences. The map is divided into four quadrants, where you record the following:

• Thoughts: the customer’s internal dialogue and beliefs
• Feelings: the customer’s emotional responses
• Actions: the customer’s actions and behaviors
• Observations: what the customer is seeing and hearing.

Try Mural’s empathy map template

Templates for the Define stage

This exercise helps you understand a situation or problem by identifying what’s working, what’s not, and areas for improvement. You start by listing out the problem, then identifying the positive aspects (the rose), negatives (thorn), and possible solutions for improvement (the buds).

You can use this template to run the exercise individually or in groups. It gives you a way to gather new ideas and perspectives on the problem you’re solving in real-time.

Try Mural’s Rose, thorn, bud template

Templates for the Ideate stage

The round robin brainstorming exercise is a collaborative session where every person contributes multiple ideas. This is a great way to come up with lots of different ideas and solutions in the ideation stage of design thinking, where you’re focusing on quantity and creativity. 

Bringing in ideas from every team member encourages people to share their unique perspectives, and can also help you avoid groupthink. 

Try Mural’s Round robin template

Templates for the Prototype stage

This template helps you map out how an idea will work in practice, as a functional system. Schematic diagramming is very flexible, so it can be used in many types of projects to make sure your idea is  structurally sound. It can help you map out workflows and identify any decisions you need to make to bring your idea to life.

Try Mural’s Schematic diagramming template

Templates for the Test stage

In think aloud testing, users test out a product or prototype and talk through the relevant tasks as they complete them. You can use this template to record the feedback, insights, and experiences of your testers, and identify the success and failure points in your proposed solution.

Try Mural’s Think aloud testing template

Design thinking examples: What it looks like in practice

Design thinking is a very flexible approach that works for companies of any size, from large enterprises to small startups. 

Here are some examples of how companies use design thinking, for many types of creative projects.

IBM uses design thinking to design at scale

IBM was traditionally an engineering-led organization, but now it's shifting its focus onto design, working to spread a design culture throughout the business. One of the main ways of doing that is by launching IBM Design Camps.

These camps are comprehensive educational programs that help people understand the concept of design thinking and how it specifically works at IBM. 

Learn more about how IBM runs design thinking workshops with remote or distributed teams .

Somersault Innovation uses design thinking to transform its sales process

Somersault Innovation has used design thinking methods to help their sales team co-create solutions with their customers. It’s helped sellers become more customer-centric. 

Now, their sellers can create mutual success plans with their prospects, making it easier for them to find a path forward together.

Mural uses design thinking to drive growth

At Mural, our marketing team is constantly following new trends, evaluating metrics, and working to deliver the best experiences for our customers. Design thinking helps us adopt a customer-centric approach by ensuring that we're focused on the right problems. This helps us have the biggest impact on the company’s long-term growth while creating the most value for our users.

David J. Bland planned a book using the design thinking methodology

It’s not just visual creative projects that can benefit from the design thinking process. Founder, speaker, and author David J. Bland used the methodology to plan out his book and collaborate with other team members in the process. In addition to helping him refine and adjust the structure, Bland also used it to gather feedback from early readers and target audiences, which helped get the final product just right.

Support design thinking with tools that facilitate creative collaboration

While we’ve covered some of the skills and behaviors you need to successfully run design thinking exercises, having the right tools can help a lot, too. A collaborative platform helps teams communicate, share ideas, and turn those ideas into solutions together.

Mural helps teams visualize their ideas in a collaboration platform that unlocks teamwork . This helps everyone stay on the same page, while giving them the ability to add their own ideas freely and easily. Mural facilitates effective collaboration both in person and remotely, making it ideal for design thinking workshops for co-located and distributed teams. Plus, it has tons of ready-to-use templates (like the ones we listed above) to help you get started.

Ready to give it a try? Start your Free Forever account today, and run your next design thinking workshop in Mural.

About the authors

Bryan Kitch

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What Is Design Thinking? A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide

Design thinking is both an ideology and a process, concerned with solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way.

In this guide, we’ll give you a detailed definition of design thinking, illustrate exactly what the process involves, and underline why it matters: What is the value of design thinking, and in what contexts is it particularly useful?

We’ll also analyze the relationship between user experience design and design thinking and discuss two real-world case studies that show design thinking in action.

All sound a little overwhelming? Don’t worry—we’ve broken the guide down into digestible chunks.

If you want to skip to a certain section, just click on the relevant menu heading and you’ll go straight there.

• What is Design Thinking?
• What is the Design Thinking process?
• What is the purpose of Design Thinking?
• How do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?
• What are the benefits of Design Thinking at work?
• Design Thinking methodology in action: Case studies
• What is the relationship between Design Thinking and UX Design?

Ready to explore the fascinating world of Design Thinking? Let’s go!

1. What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an approach used for practical and creative problem-solving. It is based heavily on the methods and processes that designers use (hence the name), but it has actually evolved from a range of different fields—including architecture, engineering and business. Design thinking can also be applied to any field; it doesn’t necessarily have to be design-specific.

For an audio-visual introduction, watch this video from design expert and CareerFoundry mentor, Camren Browne:

It’s important to note that design thinking is different from user-centered design . Learn more about this other approach to design here: Design Thinking vs. User-Centered Design .

Design thinking is extremely user-centric. It focuses on humans first and foremost , seeking to understand people’s needs and come up with effective solutions to meet those needs. It is what we call a solution-based approach to problem-solving.

What does this actually mean? Let’s take a look.

What’s the difference between Solution-Based and Problem-Based Thinking?

As the name suggests, solution-based thinking focuses on finding solutions; coming up with something constructive to effectively tackle a certain problem. This is the opposite of problem-based thinking, which tends to fixate on obstacles and limitations.

A good example of these two approaches in action is an empirical study carried out by Bryan Lawson, a Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. Lawson wanted to investigate how a group of designers and a group of scientists would approach a particular problem.

He set each group the task of creating one-layer structures from a set of coloured blocks. The perimeter of the structure had to use either as many red bricks or as many blue bricks as possible (we can think of this is as the solution, the desired outcome), but there were unspecified rules regarding the placement and relationship of some of the blocks (the problem or limitation).

Lawson published his findings in his book How Designers Think , in which he observed that the scientists focused on identifying the problem (problem-based thinking) whilst the designers prioritized the need to find the right solution:

“The scientists adopted a technique of trying out a series of designs which used as many different blocks and combinations of blocks as possible as quickly as possible. Thus they tried to maximise the information available to them about the allowed combinations. If they could discover the rule governing which combinations of blocks were allowed, they could then search for an arrangement which would optimise the required colour around the layout.”

The designers, on the other hand:

“…selected their blocks in order to achieve the appropriately coloured perimeter. If this proved not to be an acceptable combination, then the next most favourably coloured block combination would be substituted and so on until an acceptable solution was discovered.”

Lawson’s findings go to the heart of what Design Thinking is all about: it’s an iterative process which favours ongoing experimentation until the right solution is found.

To learn more, check out this video introduction to design thinking , led by expert designer Camren Browne. For now, let’s take a look at the design thinking process and what that entails.

2. What is the Design Thinking process?

As already mentioned, the Design Thinking process is progressive and highly user-centric . Before looking at the process in more detail, let’s consider the four principles of Design Thinking as laid out by Christoph Meinel and Harry Leifer of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford University, California.

The Four Principles of Design Thinking

• The human rule: No matter what the context, all design activity is social in nature, and any social innovation will bring us back to the “human-centric point of view”.
• The ambiguity rule: Ambiguity is inevitable, and it cannot be removed or oversimplified. Experimenting at the limits of your knowledge and ability is crucial in being able to see things differently.
• The redesign rule: All design is redesign. While technology and social circumstances may change and evolve, basic human needs remain unchanged. We essentially only redesign the means of fulfilling these needs or reaching desired outcomes.
• The tangibility rule: Making ideas tangible in the form of prototypes enables designers to communicate them more effectively.

The Five Phases of Design Thinking

Based on these four principles, the Design Thinking process can be broken down into five steps or phases, as per the aforementioned Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford (otherwise known as d.school): Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Let’s explore each of these in more detail.

Phase 1: Empathise

Empathy provides the critical starting point for Design Thinking . The first stage of the process is spent getting to know the user and understanding their wants, needs and objectives.

This means observing and engaging with people in order to understand them on a psychological and emotional level. During this phase, the designer seeks to set aside their assumptions and gather real insights about the user. Learn all about key empathy-building methods in our guide .

Phase 2: Define

The second stage in the Design Thinking process is dedicated to defining the problem. You’ll gather all of your findings from the empathise phase and start to make sense of them: what difficulties and barriers are your users coming up against? What patterns do you observe? What is the big user problem that your team needs to solve?

By the end of the define phase, you will have a clear problem statement . The key here is to frame the problem in a user-centered way; rather than saying “We need to…”, frame it in terms of your user: “Retirees in the Bay area need…”

Once you’ve formulated the problem into words, you can start to come up with solutions and ideas — which brings us onto stage three.

Phase 3: Ideate

With a solid understanding of your users and a clear problem statement in mind, it’s time to start working on potential solutions. The third phase in the Design Thinking process is where the creativity happens, and it’s crucial to point out that the ideation stage is a judgement-free zone!

Designers will hold ideation sessions in order to come up with as many new angles and ideas as possible. There are many different types of ideation technique that designers might use, from brainstorming and mindmapping to bodystorming (roleplay scenarios) and provocation—an extreme lateral-thinking technique that gets the designer to challenge established beliefs and explore new options and alternatives.

Towards the end of the ideation phase, you’ll narrow it down to a few ideas with which to move forward. You can learn about all the most important ideation techniques in this guide .

Phase 4: Prototype

The fourth step in the Design Thinking process is all about experimentation and turning ideas into tangible products. A prototype is basically a scaled-down version of the product which incorporates the potential solutions identified in the previous stages. This step is key in putting each solution to the test and highlighting any constraints and flaws.

Throughout the prototype stage, the proposed solutions may be accepted, improved, redesigned or rejected depending on how they fare in prototype form. You can read all about the prototyping stage of Design Thinking in our in-depth guide .

Phase 5: Test

After prototyping comes user testing, but it’s important to note that this is rarely the end of the Design Thinking process. In reality, the results of the testing phase will often lead you back to a previous step, providing the insights you need to redefine the original problem statement or to come up with new ideas you hadn’t thought of before. Learn all about user testing in this guide .

Is Design Thinking a linear process?

No! You might look at these clearly defined steps and see a very logical sequence with a set order. However, the Design Thinking process is not linear; it is flexible and fluid, looping back and around and in on itself! With each new discovery that a certain phase brings, you’ll need to rethink and redefine what you’ve done before—you’ll never be moving in a straight line!

3. What is the purpose of Design Thinking?

Now we know more about how Design Thinking works, let’s consider why it matters. There are many benefits of using a Design Thinking approach—be it in a business, educational, personal or social context.

First and foremost, Design Thinking fosters creativity and innovation. As human beings, we rely on the knowledge and experiences we have accumulated to inform our actions. We form patterns and habits that, while useful in certain situations, can limit our view of things when it comes to problem-solving.

Rather than repeating the same tried-and-tested methods, Design Thinking encourages us to remove our blinkers and consider alternative solutions. The entire process lends itself to challenging assumptions and exploring new pathways and ideas.

Design Thinking is often cited as the healthy middle ground of problem-solving—it is not steeped wholly in emotion and intuition, nor does it rely solely on analytics, science and rationale; it uses a mixture of both.

Another great benefit of Design Thinking is that it puts humans first. By focusing so heavily on empathy, it encourages businesses and organizations to consider the real people who use their products and services—meaning they are much more likely to hit the mark when it comes to creating meaningful user experiences. For the user, this means better, more useful products that actually improve our lives. For businesses, this means happy customers and a healthier bottom line.

What’s a “wicked problem” in Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is especially useful when it comes to solving “wicked problems”. The term “wicked problem” was coined by design theorist Horst Rittel in the 1970s to describe particularly tricky problems that are highly ambiguous in nature.

With wicked problems, there are many unknown factors; unlike “tame” problems, there is no definitive solution. In fact, solving one aspect of a wicked problem is likely to reveal or give rise to further challenges. Another key characteristic of wicked problems is that they have no stopping point; as the nature of the problem changes over time, so must the solution.

Solving wicked problems is therefore an ongoing process that requires Design Thinking! Some examples of wicked problems in our society today include things like poverty, hunger, and climate change.

If you’d like to learn more about them, and how Design Thinking can help tackle them, check out our full guide to wicked problems .

4. Design Thinking in the workplace: How do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

Now we know what Design Thinking is, let’s consider how it fits into the overall product design process. You may be familiar with the terms “lean” and “agile”—and, as a UX designer, it’s important to understand how these three approaches work together.

What are lean and agile?

Based on the principles of lean manufacturing, lean UX focuses on streamlining the design process as much as possible—minimizing waste and maximizing value. Some core tenets of lean UX are:

• Cross-functional collaboration between designers, engineers, and product managers.
• Gathering feedback quickly and continuously, ensuring that you’re constantly learning and adapting as you go.
• Deciding as late as possible and delivering fast, with less focus on long-term deliverables.
• A strong emphasis on how the team operates as a whole.

Lean UX is a technique that works in conjunction with agile development methods. Agile is a software development process that works in iterative, incremental cycles known as sprints. Unlike traditional development methods, agile is flexible and adaptive. Based on the Agile Development Manifesto created in 2001, agile adheres to the following principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

Combining Design Thinking with lean and agile

Design Thinking, lean, and agile are often seen as three separate approaches. Companies and teams will ask themselves whether to use lean or agile or Design Thinking—but actually, they can (and should!) be merged for optimal results.

Why? Because applying Design Thinking in a lean, agile environment helps to create a product development process that is not only user-centric, but also highly efficient from a business perspective. While it’s true that each approach has its own modus operandi, there is also significant overlap.

Combining principles from each can be crucial in keeping cross-functional teams on the same page—ensuring that designers, developers, product managers, and business stakeholders are all collaborating on one common vision.

So how do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

As Jonny Schneider, Product Strategy and Design Principal at ThoughtWorks , explains: “Design Thinking is how we explore and solve problems; Lean is our framework for testing our beliefs and learning our way to the right outcomes; Agile is how we adapt to changing conditions with software.”

That’s all well and good, but what does it look like in practice?

As we’ve learned, Design Thinking is a solution-based approach to exploring and solving problems. It focuses on generating ideas with a specific problem in mind, keeping the user at the heart of the process throughout. Once you’ve established and designed a suitable solution, you’ll start to incorporate lean principles —testing your ideas, gathering quick and ongoing feedback to see what works—with particular emphasis on cross-team collaboration and overcoming departmental silos.

Agile ties all of this into short sprint cycles, allowing for adaptability in the face of change. In an agile environment, products are improved and built upon incrementally. Again, cross-team collaboration plays a crucial role; agile is all about delivering value that benefits both the end user and the business as a whole.

Together, Design Thinking, lean, and agile cut out unnecessary processes and documentation, leveraging the contributions of all key stakeholders for continuous delivery and improvement.

5. What are the benefits of Design Thinking at work?

As a designer, you have a pivotal role to play in shaping the products and experiences that your company puts to market. Integrating Design Thinking into your process can add huge business value, ultimately ensuring that the products you design are not only desirable for customers, but also viable in terms of company budget and resources.

With that in mind, let’s consider some of the main benefits of using Design Thinking at work:

• Significantly reduces time-to-market: With its emphasis on problem-solving and finding viable solutions, Design Thinking can significantly reduce the amount of time spent on design and development—especially in combination with lean and agile.
• Cost savings and a great ROI: Getting successful products to market faster ultimately saves the business money. Design Thinking has been proven to yield a significant return on investment; teams that are applying IBM’s Design Thinking practices , for example, have calculated an ROI of up to 300% as a result.
• Improves customer retention and loyalty: Design Thinking ensures a user-centric approach, which ultimately boosts user engagement and customer retention in the long term.
• Fosters innovation: Design Thinking is all about challenging assumptions and established beliefs, encouraging all stakeholders to think outside the box. This fosters a culture of innovation which extends well beyond the design team.
• Can be applied company-wide: The great thing about Design Thinking is that it’s not just for designers. It leverages group thinking and encourages cross-team collaboration. What’s more, it can be applied to virtually any team in any industry.

Whether you’re establishing a Design Thinking culture on a company-wide scale, or simply trying to improve your approach to user-centric design, Design Thinking will help you to innovate, focus on the user, and ultimately design products that solve real user problems.

6. Design Thinking methodology in action: Case studies

So we’ve looked in quite some detail at the theory behind Design Thinking and the processes involved — but what does this look like in action? Let’s explore some case studies where Design Thinking has made a huge real-world impact .

Healthcare Case Study: How Design Thinking transformed the Rotterdam Eye Hospital

Executives at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital wanted to transform the patient experience from the typically grim, anxiety-riddled affair into something much more pleasant and personal. To do this, they incorporated Design Thinking and design principles into their planning process. Here’s how they did it:

First, they set out to understand their target user — patients entering the hospital for treatment. The hospital CEO, CFO, managers, staff and doctors established that most patients came into hospital with the fear of going blind.

Based on their findings from the empathise stage, they determined that fear reduction needed to be a priority. Their problem statement may have looked something like the following: “Patients coming into our hospital need to feel comfortable and at ease.”

Armed with a deep understanding of their patients and a clear mission statement, they started to brainstorm potential solutions. As any good design thinker would, they sought inspiration from a range of both likely and unlikely sources. They looked to flagship airline KLM and supermarket chain Albert Heijn to learn about scheduling, for example, while turning to other medical organizations for inspiration on operational excellence.

In the prototyping stage, the team presented the most promising ideas they had come up with so far to those in charge of caregiving at the hospital. These teams of caregivers then used these insights to design informal, small-scale experiments that could test a potential solution and see if it was worthy of wide-scale adoption.

The testing phase consisted of running the aforementioned experiments and seeing if they took off. As Dirk Deichmann and Roel van der Heijde explain , the “transition to formal adoption of these ideas tended to be more gradual. If an idea worked, sooner or later other groups would ask if they could try it too, and the best ideas spread organically.”

The outcome

By adopting a Design Thinking approach, the Rotterdam Eye Hospital were able to get to the heart of their users’ needs and find effective solutions to fulfil them. In doing so, they have greatly improved the user experience: patient intake has risen 47%, and the hospital has since won several awards for safety, quality and design.

Business Case Study: How Design Thinking helped financial service provider MLP regain consumer trust

After the financial crisis hit, financial service provider MLP found that consumer trust was at an all-time low. They needed to re-engage with their target users and come up with new ways of building trust. In search of innovation, they decided to test out a Design Thinking approach. Here’s what they learned:

By focusing on their users and making a conscious effort to understand their needs first-hand, MLP learned that the assumptions they’d been going on were not so accurate after all. As Thomas Freese, division manager for marketing at MLP, explains :

“We always used to speak to customers about the goals they want to achieve. But they do not want to commit to a certain goal, as they often do not know themselves what that is. Rather, they want to talk about their ideas as it is more open and flexible regarding their financial planning.”

With this newfound empathy for their users, MLP were able to reframe their mission statement. They knew that they needed to rebuild consumer trust, and that the way to do this would be to speak to the customer in their own language and become a more relatable brand.

Ideate and Prototype

During the ideate and prototype phases, they decided to experiment with a completely new image. Instead of the formal business attire typically associated with the financial sector, the MLP team members went out in casual clothing. They tested Lego prototypes and homemade posters in designated hotspots — including a university campus and train stations.

By testing this new approach, they learned some extremely valuable lessons about their users and how to communicate with them. They found that even something as simple as dressing more casually had a huge impact in reducing the negative connotations associated with financial services. They also learned the value of asking open questions; rather than trying to sell their prototype, Design Thinking taught them to ask questions that focus on the user’s needs.

The Outcome

Their first foray into Design Thinking proved to be a huge learning curve for MLP. Taking the time to speak to their users gave them the insights they needed to redesign their messaging, allowing them to start marketing much more effectively.

In light of their findings, MLP opened up a new office space in a student district, putting their editorial and social media teams in close proximity to their customer base. Of course, Design Thinking is an iterative process, so this is just one way in which MLP hopes to continue learning to speak their customers’ language.

7. What is the relationship between Design Thinking and UX Design?

At this point, you’ve no doubt noticed lots of similarities between Design Thinking and user experience design , and may be wondering how they relate to one another. Both are extremely user-centric and driven by empathy, and UX designers will use many of the steps laid out in the Design Thinking process, such as user research , prototyping and testing.

Despite these similarities, there are certain distinctions that can be made between the two. For one, the impact of Design Thinking is often felt on a more strategic level; it explores a problem space—in the context of understanding users, technological feasibility, and business requirements—to discover possible solutions. As we have seen from the Rotterdam Eye Hospital and MLP case studies, Design Thinking is embraced and implemented by all different teams across the business, including C-level executives.

If Design Thinking focuses on finding solutions, UX design is concerned with actually designing these solutions and making sure they are usable, accessible and pleasant for the user.

You can think of Design Thinking as a toolset that UX designers dip into, and if you’re operating within the UX design field, it is one of many crucial methodologies you’ll rely on when it comes to creating fantastic user experiences. You can learn more about UX Design and Design Thinking in our UX Design Course , as well as earn a design thinking certification by completing a course in it.

Further reading

Want to see what design thinking looks like in practice? Here’s an article for you: 5 Game-Changing Examples of Design Thinking .

And if you’re new to the design field and wondering what all these newfangled terms mean, you may well be interested in the following guides:

• Learn How To Run Your Very Own Design Thinking Workshop!
• What Are Design Sprints?
• A Brief Guide To The Steps And Principles Of The Design Thinking Process
• How To Learn UX Design And Become A UX Designer

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What Is Design Thinking & Why Is It Important?

• 18 Jan 2022

In an age when innovation is key to business success and growth, you’ve likely come across the term “design thinking.” Perhaps you’ve heard it mentioned by a senior leader as something that needs to be utilized more, or maybe you’ve seen it on a prospective employee's resume.

While design thinking is an ideology based on designers’ workflows for mapping out stages of design, its purpose is to provide all professionals with a standardized innovation process to develop creative solutions to problems—design-related or not.

Why is design thinking needed? Innovation is defined as a product, process, service, or business model featuring two critical characteristics: novel and useful. Yet, there’s no use in creating something new and novel if people won’t use it. Design thinking offers innovation the upgrade it needs to inspire meaningful and impactful solutions.

But what is design thinking, and how does it benefit working professionals?

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a mindset and approach to problem-solving and innovation anchored around human-centered design . While it can be traced back centuries—and perhaps even longer—it gained traction in the modern business world after Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO, published an article about it in the Harvard Business Review .

Design thinking is different from other innovation and ideation processes in that it’s solution-based and user-centric rather than problem-based. This means it focuses on the solution to a problem instead of the problem itself.

For example, if a team is struggling with transitioning to remote work, the design thinking methodology encourages them to consider how to increase employee engagement rather than focus on the problem (decreasing productivity).

The essence of design thinking is human-centric and user-specific. It’s about the person behind the problem and solution, and requires asking questions such as “Who will be using this product?” and “How will this solution impact the user?”

The first, and arguably most important, step of design thinking is building empathy with users. By understanding the person affected by a problem, you can find a more impactful solution. On top of empathy, design thinking is centered on observing product interaction, drawing conclusions based on research, and ensuring the user remains the focus of the final implementation.

The Four Phases of Innovation

So, what does design thinking entail? There are many models of design thinking that range from three to seven steps.

In the online course Design Thinking and Innovation , Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar leverages a four-phase innovation framework. The phases venture from concrete to abstract thinking and back again as the process loops, reverses, and repeats. This is an important balance because abstract thinking increases the likelihood that an idea will be novel. It’s essential, however, to anchor abstract ideas in concrete thinking to ensure the solution is valid and useful.

Here are the four phases for effective innovation and, by extension, design thinking.

The first phase is about narrowing down the focus of the design thinking process. It involves identifying the problem statement to come up with the best outcome. This is done through observation and taking the time to determine the problem and the roadblocks that prevented a solution in the past.

Various tools and frameworks are available—and often needed—to make concrete observations about users and facts gathered through research. Regardless of which tools are implemented, the key is to observe without assumptions or biased expectations.

Once findings from your observations are collected, the next step is to shape insights by framing those observations. This is where you can venture into the abstract by reframing the problem in the form of a statement or question.

Once the problem statement or question has been solidified—not finalized—the next step is ideation. You can use a tool such as systematic inventive thinking (SIT) in this stage, which is useful for creating an innovative process that can be replicated in the future.

The goal is to ultimately overcome cognitive fixedness and devise new and innovative ideas that solve the problems you identified. Continue to actively avoid assumptions and keep the user at the forefront of your mind during ideation sessions.

The third phase involves developing concepts by critiquing a range of possible solutions. This includes multiple rounds of prototyping, testing, and experimenting to answer critical questions about a concept’s viability.

Remember: This step isn’t about perfection, but rather, experimenting with different ideas and seeing which parts work and which don’t.

4. Implement

The fourth and final phase, implementation, is when the entire process comes together. As an extension of the develop phase, implementation starts with testing, reflecting on results, reiterating, and testing again. This may require going back to a prior phase to iterate and refine until you find a successful solution. Such an approach is recommended because design thinking is often a nonlinear, iterative process.

In this phase, don’t forget to share results with stakeholders and reflect on the innovation management strategies implemented during the design thinking process. Learning from experience is an innovation process and design thinking project all its own.

Check out the video about the design thinking process below, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!

Why Design Thinking Skills Matter

The main value of design thinking is that it offers a defined process for innovation. While trial and error is a good way to test and experiment what works and what doesn’t, it’s often time-consuming, expensive, and ultimately ineffective. On the other hand, following the concrete steps of design thinking is an efficient way to develop new, innovative solutions.

On top of a clear, defined process that enables strategic innovation, design thinking can have immensely positive outcomes for your career—in terms of both advancement and salary.

As of December 2021, the most common occupations requiring design thinking skills were:

• Marketing managers
• Industrial engineers
• Graphic designers
• Software developers
• General and operations managers
• Management analysts
• Personal service managers
• Architectural and engineering managers
• Computer and information systems managers

In addition, jobs that require design thinking statistically have higher salaries. Take a marketing manager position, for example. The median annual salary is $107,900. Marketing manager job postings that require design thinking skills, however, have a median annual salary of $133,900—a 24 percent increase.

Overall, businesses are looking for talent with design thinking skills. As of November 2021, there were 29,648 job postings in the United States advertising design thinking as a necessary skill—a 153 percent increase from November 2020, and a 637 percent increase from November 2017.

As businesses continue to recognize the need for design thinking and innovation, they’ll likely create more demand for employees with those skills.

Learning Design Thinking

Design thinking is an extension of innovation that allows you to design solutions for end users with a single problem statement in mind. It not only imparts valuable skills but can help advance your career.

It’s also a collaborative endeavor that can only be mastered through practice with peers. As Datar says in the introduction to Design Thinking and Innovation : “Just as with learning how to swim, the best way to practice is to jump in and try.”

If you want to learn design thinking, take an active role in your education. Start polls, problem-solving exercises, and debates with peers to get a taste of the process. It’s also important to seek out diverse viewpoints to prepare yourself for the business world.

In addition, if you’re considering adding design thinking to your skill set, think about your goals and why you want to learn about it. What else might you need to be successful?

You might consider developing your communication, innovation, leadership, research, and management skills, as those are often listed alongside design thinking in job postings and professional profiles.

You may also notice skills like agile methodology, user experience, and prototyping in job postings, along with non-design skills, such as product management, strategic planning, and new product development.

Is Design Thinking Right for You?

There are many ways to approach problem-solving and innovation. Design thinking is just one of them. While it’s beneficial to learn how others have approached problems and evaluate if you have the same tools at your disposal, it can be more important to chart your own course to deliver what users and customers truly need.

You can also pursue an online course or workshop that dives deeper into design thinking methodology. This can be a practical path if you want to improve your design thinking skills or require a more collaborative environment.

Are you ready to develop your design thinking skills? Explore our online course Design Thinking and Innovation to discover how to leverage fundamental design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to address business challenges.

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Design Thinking Defined

—tim brown, executive chair of ideo.

Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which is known as design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.

IDEO did not invent design thinking, but we have become known for practicing it and applying it to solving problems small and large. It’s fair to say that we were in the right place at the right time. When we looked back over our shoulder, we discovered that there was a revolutionary movement behind us.

This design thinking site is just one small part of the IDEO network. There’s much more, including full online courses we've developed on many topics related to design thinking and its applications. We fundamentally believe in the power of design thinking as a methodology for creating positive impact in the world—and we bring that belief into our client engagements as well as into creating open resources such as this.

At IDEO, we’re often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We’ve developed this website in response to that request. Here, we introduce design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it. You’ll find our particular take on design thinking, as well as the perspectives of others. Everything on this site is free for you to use and share with proper attribution .

(From 2008-2018, designthinking.ideo.com was the home of IDEO's design thinking blog, written by our CEO, Tim Brown . You can find that blog here .)

We live and work in a world of interlocking systems, where many of the problems we face are dynamic, multifaceted, and inherently human. Think of some of the big questions being asked by businesses, government, educational and social organizations: How will we navigate the disruptive forces of the day, including technology and globalism? How will we grow and improve in response to rapid change? How can we effectively support individuals while simultaneously changing big systems? For us, design thinking offers an approach for addressing these and other big questions.

There’s no single definition for design thinking. It’s an idea, a strategy, a method, and a way of seeing the world. It’s grown beyond the confines of any individual person, organization or website. And as it matures, its history deepens and its impact evolves. For IDEO, design thinking is a way to solve problems through creativity. Certainly, it isn’t a fail-safe approach; nor is it the only approach. But based on the impact we are seeing in our work, the relevance of design thinking has never been greater.

Design thinking is maturing. It’s moving from a nascent practice to an established one, and with that comes interest and critique. People are debating its definition, pedigree, and value. As a leading and committed practitioner of design thinking, IDEO has a stake in this conversation—and a responsibility to contextualize its value in the present moment and, importantly, in the future.

We’ve learned a lot over the years, and we’d like to share our insights. We’ve seen design thinking transform lives and organizations, and on occasion we’ve seen it fall short when approached superficially, or without a solid foundation of study. Design thinking takes practice; and as a community of designers, entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, researchers, and more, we’ve followed the journey to mastery, and developed maps that can guide others.

Designer's mindset

At IDEO, we are a community of designers who naturally share a mindset due to our profession. Our teams include people who've trained in applied fields such as industrial design, environmental architecture, graphic design, and engineering; as well as people from law, psychology, anthropology, and many other areas. Together, we have rallied around design thinking as a way of explaining design's applications and utility so that others can practice it, too. Design thinking uses creative activities to foster collaboration and solve problems in human-centered ways. We adopt a “beginner’s mind,” with the intent to remain open and curious, to assume nothing, and to see ambiguity as an opportunity.

To think like a designer requires dreaming up wild ideas, taking time to tinker and test, and being willing to fail early and often. The designer's mindset embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity. And most critically, design thinking keeps people at the center of every process. A human-centered designer knows that as long as you stay focused on the people you're designing for—and listen to them directly—you can arrive at optimal solutions that meet their needs.

Anyone can approach the world like a designer. But to unlock greater potential and to learn how to work as a dynamic problem solver, creative confidence is key. For IDEO founder David Kelley, creative confidence is the belief that everyone is creative, and that creativity isn’t the ability to draw or compose or sculpt, but a way of understanding the world.

THINKING Methods

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is the most familiar and popular idea-generating technique for groups. Useful in all stages of a larger problem-solving process, brainstorming is entirely divergent.

A formal version of Charrette involves creative cram sessions over a number of days in which architects, their creative suppliers, municipal officials, developers, and residents participate. Such sessions are also called inquiry by design.

Creative Problem Solving

Since the arrival of the now classical Osborn-Parnes structure, any number of academic and business entities have re-sorted and renamed the stages and phases of what we now call the Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS).

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts to form a judgment. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. It entails effective communication and problem solving abilities, as well as a commitment to overcome our native egocentrism and sociocentrism.

Daydreaming

It is a method of following self-thought one after another, make one drifts in stream of ideas which, eventually take a conic shape: what seemingly started as random thoughts will end as a tip of the cone: the ultimate idea.

Dialectical Approaches

Several problem-solving approaches use debate to eliminate assumptions and to generate original ideas.

Force-Field Analysis

Force-Field Analysis identifies the competing forces associated with a problem and uses brainstorming to find solutions

FORTH Innovation Method

The FORTH innovation method is a customer oriented inspiring practical innovation method in five steps to create new products and services. Within 14 weeks of the kick-off you create 4 mini new business cases with a cross functional team.

Interactive Planning and Idealized Design

Interactive planning, as defined and disseminated on by Russell L. Ackoff, focuses on creating the future by designing a desirable present.

The K-J Method was developed as the the Affinity Diagram by Jiro Kawakita in the 1960s and has become one of the Seven Management and Planning Tools used in Total Quality Control

Lateral Thinking

Lateral Thinking is a deliberate, systematic creative-thinking process that deliberately looks at challenges from completely different angles.

Micro-Reality

Micro-Reality is a mind development technique that studies and dissects problems and challenges with a view to provide new, customized and dynamic solutions.

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is essentially a non-linear form of outlining. The idea is to make an organically associated diagram of words, concepts, ideas, tasks, decisions, or other information, and to link individual items as their associations demand.

Morphological Analysis

Morphological Analysis provides a system and format for examining the parameters of complex problem situations for novel combinations that can be developed into creative solutions.

Productive Thinking

Productive Thinking is a problem-solving and opportunity-finding framework designed to incorporate creativity techniques such as brainstorming and lateral thinking as needed.

Random Word Generator

Using a random word generator is an easy way to force your mind out of it's normal routine and off onto tangents it otherwise would not have taken.

SCAMPER is an acronym for seven thinking techniques that help those who use them come up untypical solutions to problems. The thinking techniques are so common to human creative behavior that it might be more accurate to call SCAMPER a mnemonic for the collection of techniques rather than a technique of its own.

Six Thinking Hats

The Six Thinking Hats method identifies six modes of thinking, which are meant to be directed in parallel at the problem at hand. This parallel thinking approach proactively discourages and replaces the argumentative approach in which members of a group advocate for opposing solutions.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis is well known as a business tool for planning but you can find that very useful generally in thinking.

The basis of Synectics lies in the meaning of the name. Throughout a Synectics session, the facilitator is responsible for bringing together and guiding a diversity of people, their divergent ideas, and random stimulation.

Systems Thinking

In this series on systems thinking, I share the key insights and tools needed to develop and advance a systems mindset for dealing with complex problem solving.

Theory of Trouble Shooting

This Theory is necessary for finding out root cause of any trouble in any system/machine. When you read it, you will appreciate the fact that no one has so far solved any trouble in any system/machine without inadvertant use of this method; which I have researched & documented meticulously.

Based on the hypothesis that there exist universal principles of creativity or patterns of invention, it follows that all solutions have been discovered. The TRIZ methodology relys on a knowledge base of such invention models.

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The Social Thinking Methodology

A guiding resource for people worldwide for 25+ years

Social learning for a lifetime of well-being.

The Social Thinking® Methodology is designed to teach and support individuals, ages 4 and older, how to better understand the social world, foster relationships, develop organizational skills, and build social competencies to meet their authentic social goals. The materials in the methodology are comprised of storybooks, teaching curricula, games, posters, and other products that have been developed alongside our clients and families. Our strategies help to break down complex social and organizational concepts into understandable parts that can be applied across settings. We believe that social concepts like social attention, perspective taking, interpretation, and problem-solving form the foundation of academic standards. These core building blocks promote literacy, collaboration, executive functions, and provide a scaffold for interpreting abstract academic and social information.

Our work is for any individual who has unmet social goals but is experiencing lagging social or organizational strategies to meet those goals, regardless of whether the individual has an educational or medical diagnosis. Our strategies are designed to support the learner “where they are” at that moment in time. Many individuals with social learning differences, difficulties, disabilities, or those with unmet goals have found our materials to be helpful. The methodology focuses on teaching “why” we use social competencies rather than using a behavioral approach to teach people to memorize social skills. For that reason, our materials are a better fit for those who actively think about thinking (metacognition) and have strong expressive language and cognition. And while our work is not a good match for everyone, we promote acceptance and inclusion for all.

The Social Thinking Methodology continually evolves based on the latest research, clinical insights, and input from the educational, therapeutic, and Neurodivergent community. The tools from the methodology have been a source of teaching and supports in specialized groups (Tiers 2 and 3) and mainstream classrooms (Tier 1), as well as workplace office settings. Some age-based curricula have been adopted both schoolwide and districtwide. For more than 25 years, our live conference series, on-demand videos, and free articles have been a guiding resource for schools, homeschools, clinics, offices, and homes around the world.

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What is social thinking.

Strategies to Build Social Competencies

The Social Thinking Methodology provides evidence-based strategies to help people ages four through adult develop their social competencies, flexible thinking & social problem solving to meet their own social goals and improve:

• Conversation & social connection
• Executive functioning
• Friendship & relationship development
• Perspective taking
• Self-regulation
• Social Thinking Vocabulary

Who We Help

The Social Thinking Methodology is designed for individuals ages four through adult with solid language, cognitive, and learning abilities. Our work is for individuals with social emotional learning differences and/or challenges, whether neurotypical or neurodivergent (ADHD, social communication learning differences, social anxiety, twice exceptional, autism levels 1 and 2). Our work has been adopted into mainstream classrooms and districts around the world to improve social, emotional, and academic learning for all.

Our strategies are taught by a wide variety of people, including educators, clinicians, families, caregivers, college students, etc. Professionals who use our work include speech-language pathologists, special and general education teachers, social workers, counselors, clinical and school psychologists, occupational therapists, behavior specialists, school administrators, paraprofessionals, marriage and family therapists, and medical professionals, to name a few.

The Concept of Social Thinking: It’s Tied to Social Skills and Academics

Academics Are Rooted in Social Thinking

How is the Social Thinking Methodology different from every other social and emotional learning program?

• Lessons, strategies, curricula, and tools can cross all 3 tiers of support
• It is designed to complement and embed into academic lessons
• It is accessible to general education and special education
• It uses visual supports and consistent vocabulary to make abstract social ideas clear and concrete
• It avoids assumptions that all learners will learn in the same way

Social thinking is the process by which we interpret the thoughts, beliefs, intentions, emotions, knowledge, and actions of another person along with the context of the situation to understand that person’s experience. If we are engaging or sharing space with another person, we use this information to determine how to respond to affect the thoughts that person has about us to achieve our social goals (such as being friendly to maintain a friendship, acting generous to impress a date, and seeming unfriendly to deflect attention when walking alone late at night, etc.). Social thinking is our meaning maker—it allows us to interpret the deeper meaning behind what others do in the world, and (if the situation calls for it) prompts us with how to respond. A person’s social thinking strength has a considerable effect on their relationships and success in school and at work. It affects the person’s social skills, perspective taking, self-awareness, self-regulation, critical thinking, social problem solving, play skills, reading comprehension, written expression, ability to learn and work in a group, organizational skills, etc.

The same social thinking is required to relate effectively to people around us and is essential for academic success. Students must use social thinking constantly at school—to work effectively as part of a group, stay on task, figure out the expected times to talk in class, and share space well with others in the classroom, cafeteria, and on the playground. Social thinking is also critical for effectively performing individualized academic tasks, such as reading a book. Social thinking is required when reading stories to understand the deeper meaning behind the actions of the characters and their relationships. If a student has poor social thinking abilities, they will struggle to take the perspective of characters, figure out how they are affected by others, and understand why characters act and feel as they do. These students tend to be “more literal” in how they interpret social cues and can have very strong factual learning. They tend to do better with informational text but are weak in comprehending social literature.

Social thinking is also required to write an effective essay. We use social thinking to make sure our arguments make sense to our audience by taking the perspective of the reader and considering what a person may already know or not know about the topic. We must also take the reader’s perspective to consider how to organize the information so it will be logical for the reader to follow. If a student struggles with social thinking, he or she will have difficulty understanding the perspective of the audience and will therefore have trouble writing a persuasive essay that is well-organized and easily understood by others.

Humans practice social thinking all day long, in typical social interactions (like conversations) and in a wide variety of other contexts. Essentially, we use social thinking whenever we think about the perspective of another person. For example,

• At work—when we become aware that by loudly sipping our coffee, we may be bothering our coworkers.
• At the grocery store—when we move our cart away from the middle of the isle so other shoppers can pass by.
• Watching TV—when we follow the story by understanding how the characters interpret and then influence each other.
• While driving—when we slow down upon sensing that another car will cut in front of us.
• When we’re on social media—to understand the intention of a message and its sender; for example, whether it is meant to be friendly, sarcastic, flirty, compassionate, etc.
• In conversation—when we attempt to read the thoughts, beliefs, intentions, emotions, knowledge, and actions of our conversation partner(s) and adapt our behavior to affect the thoughts they have about us.

Strengthening a person’s social thinking begins with improving self-awareness. Only as individuals gain awareness of their own thoughts, emotions, and intentions can they become increasingly aware of the thoughts, emotions, intentions, and actions of others. As a result, they are better able to use the information they’ve gained from their social thinking to inform many things they do throughout the day. Improving a person’s social thinking will help them make progress toward their social goals, such as improving their social skills (social behavior), reading comprehension, written expression, narrative language, ability to work as part of a group, ability to make and keep friends, etc. Much of what we do in school, at work, and as part of the community requires understanding the perspectives of other people. It all requires social thinking.

Remarkably few educators, administrators, counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists, speech-language pathologists, parents, and caregivers are aware of the power of the social mind and how it seeds our ability to think critically and socially problem solve. In fact, many journalists and politicians refer to social skills as “non-cognitive skills,” despite clear evidence that our social behavior is determined by our social cognition (our social thinking) and significantly affects the outcome of our lives!

The Social Thinking®–Social Competency Model (ST-SCM)Is at the Core of the Social Thinking Methodology

The goal of the Social Thinking® Methodology is to take complicated social, emotional, and academic learning processes and teach them explicitly in a way that social learners of all ages—and interventionists—can understand. Over the several decades since the Social Thinking Methodology was introduced in the mid-1990s, our work has been and continues to be, informed by many bodies of research and theory . These include, but are not limited to, social learning theory, social information processing, perspective taking, self-regulation, executive functioning, communication, autism, ADHD, sensory processing, reading comprehension, written expression, managing complex behavior, etc.

Ultimately, it became clear that the focus of our work is to teach students social competencies , which are much more than social skills or teaching students to “behave!” Through this process of integrating well-established research studies, including research on social information processing (Crick and Dodge, 1994; Beauchamp and Anderson, 2010) and thought into our methodology, we were inspired to develop the Social Thinking®–Social Competency Model (ST–SCM) .

The best way to think about this model is to imagine an iceberg. The swoop on the graphic represents a waterline. What we see above the waterline can be thought of as the social behaviors we notice in one another—just the tip of the iceberg. We refer to these as social behaviors or social responses rather than “social skills.” The foundational, “unseen” social, emotional, and academic learning components below the waterline represent the building blocks of our social competencies . The ST-SCM has four distinct parts, three of which fall below the waterline: social attention , social interpretation , and problem solving . Our social competencies are developmental and continually evolve across our lifetimes.

Most people view social skills (social behaviors/responses) as how an individual behaves, plays, and interacts with others; they teach from the point of view that all social behavior occurs during social interactions. Many do not realize their students need to interpret social information prior to producing relevant and related social responses. Yet, our more sophisticated, highly verbal students need to be taught explicit information to help them understand how the social world works for them to better understand how and why to navigate to regulate in the social world . Think of these as "essential ingredients" for their deeper learning to generalize what they are learning across different landscapes in their social world and handle expanding social expectations as they age.

We invite you to learn more about the Social Thinking–Social Competency Model in our free article and free webinar , or watch the short video lesson below where Michelle Garcia Winner, co-developer of The Social Thinking Methodology, describes the Social Thinking-Social Competency Model.

Developers of the Social Thinking Methodology

Michelle Garcia Winner & Dr. Pamela Crooke

Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP, is the founder and CEO of Social Thinking and a globally recognized thought leader, author, speaker, and social-cognitive therapist. Over her 30-year career, she has developed the Social Thinking Methodology, along with Dr. Pamela Crooke, which provides evidence-based strategies and curricula to help individuals of all ages develop social competencies by deeply connecting social, emotional, and cognitive development. Michelle's work emphasizes the impact of social competencies on relationships, academic performance, and career success.

Pamela Crooke , PhD, CCC-SLP, is Chief Curriculum Officer and Director of Research at Social Thinking. With extensive experience as a speech-language pathologist in the Arizona public schools and as a clinical faculty member of three universities, Pam is a renowned speaker, who has co-authored multiple award-winning books on Social Thinking with Michelle Garcia Winner in addition to co-developing the Social Thinking Methodology.

Michelle Garcia Winner and Dr. Pamela Crooke continuously update the Social Thinking Methodology based on the latest research, input from the community, and insights and evidence from clinical practice.

Social Thinking’s Three-Part Process & Social Emotional Chain Reaction

Three-part process.

1. Social thinking is our meaning maker. We observe and listen to interpret the perspectives of others. The first step to improving social thinking is to keenly observe the social world that surrounds us. 

A client of Michelle Garcia Winner, a 43-year-old engineer, found this step particularly valuable. He spent time learning how to observe people to be more aware of the social situations in which he was expected to socially relate to others. He had this to say about the experience: “Observing the social interactions of others is very helpful to me as I formulate how to interact myself. I’ve learned not everyone walks with their head down avoiding eye contact all the time. I’ve learned when and how to smile. I’ve studied what makes a stranger seem approachable. In short, you have to know the rules of the game in order to play the game.”

2. When seeking to engage or simply share space with others, we use social thinking to adapt our social behaviors (social skills) effectively as a means to meet our social goals. To do this, we must learn strong self-awareness, self-monitoring, and self-control. We must learn how to adapt our physical posture depending on the context, how we use our eyes to better understand others and communicate, and tools for conversational language to relate to others.  

3. Our social thinking and social skills directly impact how others feel about us. This impacts how we are treated, how we feel about others, and ultimately, how we feel about ourselves! At the end of the day, our social experience is an emotional experience. The purpose of social thinking is to produce social behavior that gives others the emotional experience you intend to give. The Social Thinking Methodology teaches people to be more aware of their feelings and emotions and better predict and relate to the emotions of others.

The Social Emotional Chain Reaction

The three-part process of social thinking leads to one of the core concepts within the Social Thinking Methodology, the Social Emotional Chain Reaction—the idea that how we act affects how others feel, how we make others feel affects how they treat us, how we are treated affects how we feel about others and ultimately how we feel about ourselves. Throughout our teaching we also highlight the fundamental idea that because we have the power to affect the thoughts, feelings, and lives of others, we have a responsibility to treat others, who pose no harm or threat to us, with kindness and respect. We are affected by others, and others are affected by us! Therefore, we must treat others well to benefit from the same treatment.

The Social Emotional Chain Reaction is at the foundation of social interaction and is at the heart of what we teach through the Social Thinking Methodology. Social Thinking (our company) teaches the Social Emotional Chain Reaction in different ways to different ages through our wide array of products—and to professionals, family members, and students, through our free library of articles and our 40 courses. One of our core treatment frameworks that teaches this concept is Social Situation Mapping , which can be used with all ages.

Social Thinking Deeply Connects Social, Emotional & Academic Learning

The Social Thinking Methodology has been a guiding resource for schools, clinics, individuals & families around the world for more than 25 years. Our resources are developed by experts in speech and language (SLPs) specializing in social cognition and dedicated to helping people of all ages reach their social goals. Instead of focusing on mastering social skills, we teach social competencies for lifelong learning, so individuals can make progress toward their self-determined goals.

Teachers, speech-language pathologists, counselors, parents, and therapists just like you have used our evidence-based lessons & strategies to teach people how to improve their social competencies, flexible thinking & social problem solving through: conversation & social connection , executive functioning , friendship & relationship development, perspective taking , self-regulation , and Social Thinking Vocabulary . 

Social Thinking resources deeply connect social, emotional & academic learning for a lifetime of well-being. Our materials are helpful for students in mainstream and specialized education—they can be used in schools as part of Tiers 1, 2, and 3 support. Explore our broad range of resources by developmental age below.

Award-Winning Resources by Developmental Age

Early Learners (Ages 4-7)

Elementary School (Ages 8-11)

Tweens & Teens

Young & Mature Adults

What people are saying about social thinking.

Parents & Families

Elementary School

Mental Health & Clinicians

Speech Language Pathologists

Adult Clients

Important Intellectual Property Information

Our teachings help engage people in social and emotional learning, not only about themselves but about others. help us protect the fidelity of this body of work and be informed about how you can/can’t use our materials..

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Methodological Thinking Basic Principles of Social Research Design

• Donileen R. Loseke - University of South Florida, USA
• Description

See what’s new to this edition by selecting the Features tab on this page. Should you need additional information or have questions regarding the HEOA information provided for this title, including what is new to this edition, please email [email protected] . Please include your name, contact information, and the name of the title for which you would like more information. For information on the HEOA, please go to http://ed.gov/policy/highered/leg/hea08/index.html .

For assistance with your order: Please email us at [email protected] or connect with your SAGE representative.

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Methodological Thinking is a highly accessible, practical guide to the often-intimidating process of designing a research project. An excellent starting point for an undergraduate course in social research fundamentals, full of useful examples and uncomplicated explanations of the starting stages of the research process.

This concise, approachable book with clear examples from published articles is a useful supplement to long, detailed, technical methodology texts that students sometimes find overwhelming and inaccessible.

The second edition of Methodological Thinking has only improved upon the first edition, by focusing more attention on critical issues related to sampling and ethics, along with a broader examination of the epistemology underlying social science research. This book is useful as a “go-to” reference on designing social science research and is excellent as a primary text at all levels of college.

Methodological Thinking helps students move past their preconceptions of research to critically engage in research design while enhancing skills that will help them evaluate information in their daily lives.

NEW TO THIS EDITION :

• Discussion of the philosophy of science as the underlying foundation of methodological thinking includes naturalism and constructionism.
• Expanded focus on research ethics and the importance of samples in social research helps researchers produce higher quality research that adheres to common standards.
• Explicit attention is given to both designing research and evaluating the research of others.

  KEY FEATURES:

• An interdisciplinary approach with examples in criminology/criminal justice, sociology, political science/international relations, and social work gives readers a range of ways to comprehend the material.
• A balanced account of theoretical perspectives provides students with an unbiased and informed presentation of the material.
• An emphasis on conveying the logic and general principles of social research design is reflected in minimal technical details for maximum clarity.

Sample Materials & Chapters

For instructors, select a purchasing option.

This title is also available on SAGE Research Methods , the ultimate digital methods library. If your library doesn’t have access, ask your librarian to start a trial .

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• Frequently asked questions

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply these human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, in our lives.

Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google and Samsung, rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and leading universities around the world teach the related methodology—including Stanford, Harvard, Imperial College London and the Srishti Institute in India. Before you incorporate design thinking into your own workflows, you need to know what it is and why it’s so popular. Here, we’ll cut to the chase and tell you what design thinking is all about and why it’s so in demand.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize , 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test.

Design thinking is an iterative process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions , redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test. The overall goal is to identify alternative strategies and solutions that are not instantly apparent with your initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is more than just a process; it opens up an entirely new way to think, and it offers a collection of hands-on methods to help you apply this new mindset.

In essence, design thinking:

Revolves around a deep interest to understand the people for whom we design products and services.

Helps us observe and develop empathy with the target users.

Enhances our ability to question: in design thinking you question the problem, the assumptions and the implications.

Proves extremely useful when you tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

Involves ongoing experimentation through sketches, prototypes, testing and trials of new concepts and ideas.

• Transcript loading…

In this video, Don Norman , the Grandfather of Human-Centered Design , explains how the approach and flexibility of design thinking can help us tackle major global challenges.

What Are the 5 Phases of Design Thinking?

Hasso-Platner Institute Panorama

Ludwig Wilhelm Wall, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. You can carry these stages out in parallel, repeat them and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process.

The core purpose of the process is to allow you to work in a dynamic way to develop and launch innovative ideas.

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test.

Design Thinking Makes You Think Outside the Box

Design thinking can help people do out-of-the-box or outside-the-box thinking. People who use this methodology:

Attempt to develop new ways of thinking —ways that do not abide by the dominant or more common problem-solving methods.

Have the intention to improve products, services and processes. They seek to analyze and understand how users interact with products to investigate the conditions in which they operate.

Ask significant questions and challenge assumptions . One element of outside-the-box / out-of-the-box thinking is to falsify previous assumptions—i.e., make it possible to prove whether they’re valid or not.

As you can see, design thinking offers us a means to think outside the box and also dig that bit deeper into problem-solving. It helps us carry out the right kind of research, create prototypes and test our products and services to uncover new ways to meet our users’ needs.

The Grand Old Man of User Experience , Don Norman, who also coined the very term User Experience , explains what Design Thinking is and what’s so special about it:

“…the more I pondered the nature of design and reflected on my recent encounters with engineers, business people and others who blindly solved the problems they thought they were facing without question or further study, I realized that these people could benefit from a good dose of design thinking. Designers have developed a number of techniques to avoid being captured by too facile a solution. They take the original problem as a suggestion, not as a final statement, then think broadly about what the real issues underlying this problem statement might really be (for example by using the " Five Whys " approach to get at root causes). Most important of all, is that the process is iterative and expansive. Designers resist the temptation to jump immediately to a solution to the stated problem. Instead, they first spend time determining what the basic, fundamental (root) issue is that needs to be addressed. They don't try to search for a solution until they have determined the real problem, and even then, instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal. This process is called "Design Thinking." — Don Norman, Rethinking Design Thinking

Design Thinking is for Everybody

How many people are involved in the design process when your organization decides to create a new product or service? Teams that build products are often composed of people from a variety of different departments. For this reason, it can be difficult to develop, categorize and organize ideas and solutions for the problems you try to solve. One way you can keep a project on track, and organize the core ideas, is to use a design thinking approach—and everybody can get involved in that!

Tim Brown, CEO of the celebrated innovation and design firm IDEO, emphasizes this in his successful book Change by Design when he says design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business.

Design thinking is not only for designers but also for creative employees, freelancers and leaders who seek to infuse it into every level of an organization. This widespread adoption of design thinking will drive the creation of alternative products and services for both business and society.

“Design thinking begins with skills designers have learned over many decades in their quest to match human needs with available technical resources within the practical constraints of business. By integrating what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never thought of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly greater range of problems.” — Tim Brown, Change by Design, Introduction

Design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business. You should involve colleagues from a wide range of departments to create a cross-functional team that can utilize knowledge and experience from different specialisms.

Tim Brown also shows how design thinking is not just for everybody—it’s about everybody, too. The process is firmly based on how you can generate a holistic and empathic understanding of the problems people face. Design thinking involves ambiguous, and inherently subjective, concepts such as emotions , needs, motivations and drivers of behavior.

In a solely scientific approach (for example, analyzing data), people are reduced to representative numbers, devoid of emotions. Design thinking, on the other hand, considers both quantitative as well as qualitative dimensions to gain a more complete understanding of user needs . For example, you might observe people performing a task such as shopping for groceries, and you might talk to a few shoppers who feel frustrated with the checkout process at the store (qualitative data). You can also ask them how many times a week they go shopping or feel a certain way at the checkout counter (quantitative data). You can then combine these data points to paint a holistic picture of user pain points, needs and problems.

Tim Brown sums up that design thinking provides a third way to look at problems. It’s essentially a problem-solving approach that has crystallized in the field of design to combine a holistic user-centered perspective with rational and analytical research—all with the goal to create innovative solutions.

“Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality , to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run a business based on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an overreliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as dangerous. The integrated approach at the core of the design process suggests a ‘third way.’” — Tim Brown, Change by Design, Introduction

Design Thinking Has a Scientific Side

Design thinking is both an art and a science. It combines investigations into ambiguous elements of the problem with rational and analytical research —the scientific side in other words. This magical concoction reveals previously unknown parameters and helps to uncover alternative strategies which lead to truly innovative solutions.

The scientific activities analyze how users interact with products, and investigate the conditions in which they operate. They include tasks which:

Research users’ needs.

Pool experience from previous projects.

Consider present and future conditions specific to the product.

Test the parameters of the problem.

Test the practical application of alternative problem solutions.

Once you arrive at a number of potential solutions, the selection process is then underpinned by rationality. As a designer, you are encouraged to analyze and falsify these solutions to arrive at the best available option for each problem or obstacle identified during phases of the design process.

With this in mind, it may be more correct to say design thinking is not about thinking outside the box, but on its edge, its corner, its flap, and under its bar code—as Clint Runge put it.

Clint Runge is Founder and Managing Director of Archrival, a distinguished youth marketing agency, and adjunct Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Resetting Our Mental Boxes and Developing a Fresh Mindset

Thinking outside of the box can provide an innovative solution to a sticky problem. However, thinking outside of the box can be a real challenge as we naturally develop patterns of thinking that are modeled on the repetitive activities and commonly accessed knowledge we surround ourselves with.

Some years ago, an incident occurred where a truck driver tried to pass under a low bridge. But he failed, and the truck was lodged firmly under the bridge. The driver was unable to continue driving through or reverse out.

The story goes that as the truck became stuck, it caused massive traffic problems, which resulted in emergency personnel, engineers, firefighters and truck drivers gathering to devise and negotiate various solutions for dislodging the trapped vehicle.

Emergency workers were debating whether to dismantle parts of the truck or chip away at parts of the bridge. Each spoke of a solution that fitted within his or her respective level of expertise.

A boy walking by and witnessing the intense debate looked at the truck, at the bridge, then looked at the road and said nonchalantly, “Why not just let the air out of the tires?” to the absolute amazement of all the specialists and experts trying to unpick the problem.

When the solution was tested, the truck was able to drive free with ease, having suffered only the damage caused by its initial attempt to pass underneath the bridge. The story symbolizes the struggles we face where oftentimes the most obvious solutions are the ones hardest to come by because of the self-imposed constraints we work within.

It’s often difficult for us humans to challenge our assumptions and everyday knowledge because we rely on building patterns of thinking in order to not have to learn everything from scratch every time. We rely on doing everyday processes more or less unconsciously—for example, when we get up in the morning, eat, walk, and read—but also when we assess challenges at work and in our private lives. In particular, experts and specialists rely on their solid thought patterns, and it can be very challenging and difficult for experts to start questioning their knowledge.

Stories Have the Power to Inspire

Why did we tell you this story about the truck and the bridge? Well, it’s because stories can help us inspire opportunities, ideas and solutions. Stories are framed around real people and their lives and are important because they’re accounts of specific events, not general statements. They provide us with concrete details which help us imagine solutions to particular problems.

Stories also help you develop the eye of a designer. As you walk around the world, you should try to look for the design stories that are all around you. Say to yourself “that’s an example of great design” or “that's an example of really bad design ” and try to figure out the reasons why.

When you come across something particularly significant, make sure you document it either through photos or video. This will prove beneficial not only to you and your design practice but also to others—your future clients, maybe.

The Take Away

Design Thinking is an iterative and non-linear process. This simply means that the design team continuously uses their results to review, question and improve their initial assumptions, understandings and results. Results from the final stage of the initial work process inform our understanding of the problem, help us determine the parameters of the problem, enable us to redefine the problem, and, perhaps most importantly, provide us with new insights so we can see any alternative solutions that might not have been available with our previous level of understanding.

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that consists of 5 phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. You can carry out the stages in parallel, repeat them and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process—you don’t have to follow them in order.

It’s a process that digs a bit deeper into problem-solving as you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions and redefine problems. The design thinking process has both a scientific and artistic side to it, as it asks us to understand and challenge our natural, restrictive patterns of thinking and generate innovative solutions to the problems our users face.

Design thinking is essentially a problem-solving approach that has the intention to improve products. It helps you assess and analyze known aspects of a problem and identify the more ambiguous or peripheral factors that contribute to the conditions of a problem. This contrasts with a more scientific approach where the concrete and known aspects are tested in order to arrive at a solution.

The iterative and ideation -oriented nature of design thinking means we constantly question and acquire knowledge throughout the process. This helps us redefine a problem so we can identify alternative strategies and solutions that aren’t instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is often referred to as outside-the-box thinking, as designers attempt to develop new ways of thinking that do not abide by the dominant or more common problem-solving methods—just like artists do.

The design thinking process has become increasingly popular over the last few decades because it was key to the success of many high-profile, global organizations. This outside-the-box thinking is now taught at leading universities across the world and is encouraged at every level of business.

“The ‘Design Thinking’ label is not a myth. It is a description of the application of well-tried design process to new challenges and opportunities, used by people from both design and non-design backgrounds. I welcome the recognition of the term and hope that its use continues to expand and be more universally understood, so that eventually every leader knows how to use design and design thinking for innovation and better results.” — Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, in Design Thinking: Dear Don

References & Where to Learn More

Enroll in our engaging course, “Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide”

Here are some examples of good and bad designs to inspire you to look for examples in your daily life.

Read this informative article “What Is Design Thinking, and How Can SMBs Accomplish It?” by Jackie Dove.

Read this insightful article “Rethinking Design Thinking” by Don Norman.

Check out Tim Brown’s book “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation Introduction,” 2009.

Learn more about Design Thinking in the article “Design Thinking: Dear Don” by Bill Moggridge.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide

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• What Is Critical Thinking? | Definition & Examples

What Is Critical Thinking? | Definition & Examples

Published on May 30, 2022 by Eoghan Ryan . Revised on May 31, 2023.

Critical thinking is the ability to effectively analyze information and form a judgment .

To think critically, you must be aware of your own biases and assumptions when encountering information, and apply consistent standards when evaluating sources .

Critical thinking skills help you to:

• Identify credible sources
• Evaluate and respond to arguments
• Assess alternative viewpoints
• Test hypotheses against relevant criteria

Table of contents

Why is critical thinking important, critical thinking examples, how to think critically, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about critical thinking.

Critical thinking is important for making judgments about sources of information and forming your own arguments. It emphasizes a rational, objective, and self-aware approach that can help you to identify credible sources and strengthen your conclusions.

Critical thinking is important in all disciplines and throughout all stages of the research process . The types of evidence used in the sciences and in the humanities may differ, but critical thinking skills are relevant to both.

In academic writing , critical thinking can help you to determine whether a source:

• Is free from research bias
• Provides evidence to support its research findings
• Considers alternative viewpoints

Outside of academia, critical thinking goes hand in hand with information literacy to help you form opinions rationally and engage independently and critically with popular media.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Critical thinking can help you to identify reliable sources of information that you can cite in your research paper . It can also guide your own research methods and inform your own arguments.

Outside of academia, critical thinking can help you to be aware of both your own and others’ biases and assumptions.

Academic examples

However, when you compare the findings of the study with other current research, you determine that the results seem improbable. You analyze the paper again, consulting the sources it cites.

You notice that the research was funded by the pharmaceutical company that created the treatment. Because of this, you view its results skeptically and determine that more independent research is necessary to confirm or refute them. Example: Poor critical thinking in an academic context You’re researching a paper on the impact wireless technology has had on developing countries that previously did not have large-scale communications infrastructure. You read an article that seems to confirm your hypothesis: the impact is mainly positive. Rather than evaluating the research methodology, you accept the findings uncritically.

Nonacademic examples

However, you decide to compare this review article with consumer reviews on a different site. You find that these reviews are not as positive. Some customers have had problems installing the alarm, and some have noted that it activates for no apparent reason.

You revisit the original review article. You notice that the words “sponsored content” appear in small print under the article title. Based on this, you conclude that the review is advertising and is therefore not an unbiased source. Example: Poor critical thinking in a nonacademic context You support a candidate in an upcoming election. You visit an online news site affiliated with their political party and read an article that criticizes their opponent. The article claims that the opponent is inexperienced in politics. You accept this without evidence, because it fits your preconceptions about the opponent.

There is no single way to think critically. How you engage with information will depend on the type of source you’re using and the information you need.

However, you can engage with sources in a systematic and critical way by asking certain questions when you encounter information. Like the CRAAP test , these questions focus on the currency , relevance , authority , accuracy , and purpose of a source of information.

When encountering information, ask:

• Who is the author? Are they an expert in their field?
• What do they say? Is their argument clear? Can you summarize it?
• When did they say this? Is the source current?
• Where is the information published? Is it an academic article? Is it peer-reviewed ?
• Why did the author publish it? What is their motivation?
• How do they make their argument? Is it backed up by evidence? Does it rely on opinion, speculation, or appeals to emotion ? Do they address alternative arguments?

Critical thinking also involves being aware of your own biases, not only those of others. When you make an argument or draw your own conclusions, you can ask similar questions about your own writing:

• Am I only considering evidence that supports my preconceptions?
• Is my argument expressed clearly and backed up with credible sources?
• Would I be convinced by this argument coming from someone else?

If you want to know more about ChatGPT, AI tools , citation , and plagiarism , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

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• Using ChatGPT for your studies
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Critical thinking refers to the ability to evaluate information and to be aware of biases or assumptions, including your own.

Like information literacy , it involves evaluating arguments, identifying and solving problems in an objective and systematic way, and clearly communicating your ideas.

Critical thinking skills include the ability to:

You can assess information and arguments critically by asking certain questions about the source. You can use the CRAAP test , focusing on the currency , relevance , authority , accuracy , and purpose of a source of information.

Ask questions such as:

• Who is the author? Are they an expert?
• How do they make their argument? Is it backed up by evidence?

A credible source should pass the CRAAP test  and follow these guidelines:

• The information should be up to date and current.
• The author and publication should be a trusted authority on the subject you are researching.
• The sources the author cited should be easy to find, clear, and unbiased.
• For a web source, the URL and layout should signify that it is trustworthy.

Information literacy refers to a broad range of skills, including the ability to find, evaluate, and use sources of information effectively.

Being information literate means that you:

• Know how to find credible sources
• Use relevant sources to inform your research
• Understand what constitutes plagiarism
• Know how to cite your sources correctly

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search, interpret, and recall information in a way that aligns with our pre-existing values, opinions, or beliefs. It refers to the ability to recollect information best when it amplifies what we already believe. Relatedly, we tend to forget information that contradicts our opinions.

Although selective recall is a component of confirmation bias, it should not be confused with recall bias.

On the other hand, recall bias refers to the differences in the ability between study participants to recall past events when self-reporting is used. This difference in accuracy or completeness of recollection is not related to beliefs or opinions. Rather, recall bias relates to other factors, such as the length of the recall period, age, and the characteristics of the disease under investigation.

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'Third Millennium Thinking': How to use scientific tools to solve everyday problems

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• Emiko Tamagawa

Life is full of decisions. “ Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Knowledge ” outlines methods of making choices rationally using scientific methods.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Saul Perlmutter , philosophy professor John Campbell , and social psychologist Robert MacCoun turned their course at the University of California Berkeley on using scientific tools to approach everyday problems into a book.

Perlmutter says it's easy to fall into mental traps or fool ourselves when making a choice. But when people assess all the variables that could influence them and the potential outcomes, they approach questions more thoughtfully, he says.

“There is so much of what is the scientific approach to the world that is never taught anywhere,” Perlmutter says. “It seemed like this was a time for us to be trying to figure out how can we teach this in ways that don't require having to become a scientist in order to do it.”

Book excerpt: 'Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense'

By Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell and Robert MacCoun

INTRODUCTION

In just the past few decades, those of us who live in the internet-​connected world have obtained access to a nearly unfathomable amount of information. We can click a link and instantly gain insight into whatever we’re curious about, whether it’s treatment options for a particular health condition, how to build a solar generator, or the political history of Malta. On the other hand, sometimes there is so much information we don’t know how to sort or evaluate it. The social science database ProQuest, for example, boasts of “a growing content collection that now encompasses . . . 6 billion digital pages and spans six centuries.” And that’s just old-​school, print information! The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, an archive of websites and other digital artifacts dating back to 1996, hosts almost a trillion pages of digital content, tens of millions of books and audios, and nearly a million software programs.

More and more often, it can be hard to determine what to focus on, let alone how to distinguish what’s revelatory and enlightening, in and among all the highly technical, specialized, contradictory, incomplete, out‑of‑date, biased, or deliberately untrue information we can now access. Was that drug study funded by a pharmaceutical company? Did an AI system invent all those supposedly authentic product reviews? What do those statistics leave out? What does that article even mean ? It is also increasingly tricky to identify whom to trust for expert guidance in interpreting this information. There are all sorts of people out there who claim expertise — and perhaps your favorite experts aren’t my favorite experts. Experts disagree, or have ulterior motives, or perhaps don’t understand the world or “real life” beyond their own narrow perspective. How do we find an expert we can safely trust?

To make a sound decision, take a meaningful action, or solve a problem — whether as individuals, in groups, or as a society — we need first to understand reality. But when reality is not easy to discern, and we’re not sure which experts to trust to clarify the matter, we adopt other strategies for navigating the clutter. We “go with our gut”; decide what we “believe” and look for evidence to reaffirm whatever that is; adopt positions based on our affiliations with people we know; even find reassurance in belittling the people who disagree with us. We choose to consult experts who tell us what we like to hear; or bond in shared mistrust of people providing or communicating the information that confuses us, whether they are scientists, scholars, journalists, community leaders, policymakers, or other experts. These coping strategies may help us get by in our personal or professional lives; they may provide a consoling sense of identity or belonging. But they do not actually help us see clearly or make good decisions. And resorting to them can have dangerous social and political consequences.

How can we navigate better — as individuals, and as a society — in this age of informational overwhelm? How do we ward off confusion, avoid mental traps, and sift sense out of nonsense? How do we make decisions and solve problems collaboratively with people who interpret information differently or have different values than we do?

The three of us — a physicist (Saul), a philosopher ( John), and a psychologist (Rob) — have been working closely together for nearly a decade on a project to help our students learn to think about big problems and make effective decisions in this “too much information” age. We began our collaboration in 2011, in response to what was already a worrying trend toward no‑think, politics-​driven decision-​making. An issue like raising the national debt ceiling, for example, was being debated that summer as if it were a religious schism, rather than a simple, practical, probably even testable question of what economic approach would work best to improve the country’s economic well-being. Most of the arguments both yea and nay betrayed equal disregard for, or ignorance of, the most basic principles of scientific thought. We began to wonder whether it might be possible to first articulate and then teach the principles that would lead to clearer thinking, more rational arguments, and a more fruitful collaborative decision-​making process.

The result was a team-​taught, multidisciplinary Big Ideas course at UC Berkeley, intended to teach students the whole gamut of ideas, tools, and approaches that natural and social scientists use to understand the world. We also designed the course to show how useful these approaches can be for everybody in day‑to‑day life, whether working individually or collaboratively, in making reasoned decisions and solving the full range of problems that face us. To our great satisfaction, the course has been both popular and successful, and has since been replicated and adapted by other teachers at a growing number of other universities.1 Our students appear to rethink their worlds and emerge energized with new ways to approach both personal decision-​making and our society’s problems. They are better able to investigate their questions, evaluate information and expertise, and work together as members of a group or a society. Inspired by their enthusiasm, we began to think about new ways to share these tools — and this new way of thinking and working together — beyond the classroom, with students and citizens of all ages.

We have become ever more concerned that our society is losing its way, causing suffering — and missing great opportunities — simply because we don’t have the tools that could help us make sense of the extraordinary amount of complex, often contradictory information now available to us. Practical problem-​solving can come to a standstill when we cannot ascertain the facts of the problems, or, when those problems require communal or political solutions, even agree with others on what those facts are. We humans, who can figure out rocket science and fly to the moon, can’t always figure out how to navigate uncertainty and conflicting points of view to make a simple reasonable decision when we need to.

Part of the problem is that science itself is often a major source of the highly technical, opaque, inconsistent, and contradictory information that has overwhelmed, perplexed, and even angered people. Trust in science has eroded in the recent past.2 The achievements of science cannot live up to all the utopian expectations those successes have generated. Some scientific achievements have also come with negative social, political, or environmental side effects. For these and other reasons, science has become one of the totems of polarization in political discussions. In short, as science became harder to understand, was connected to undesirable side effects, and subjected to politically partisan critiques, many people lost their trust in scientists and in “science” itself.3

But science also has a phenomenal record of providing insight into — if not answers to — the most confounding questions humans have thought to ask. It has helped us to solve puzzles, address problems, and make better lives over millennia. It is a culture of inquiry rooted in the dawn of humankind, with centuries of practice in evaluating conflicting information in a baffling world, and in distinguishing what we know from what we don’t. Along the way, scientists have learned from both successes and mistakes, breakthroughs and blunders, to refine the tools with which to address new questions and solve new problems.

Over the past few years, we have all become aware of the shocking degree of polarization in our society, and the surprising interaction between this polarization and our society’s often-​problematic relationship to science and scientific expertise. If we are to have any hope of finding the practical common plans and common understandings that can move our society ahead together, we need to learn to accept the possibility of errors in our own thinking, and our need for opposing views that help us see where we are going wrong. And we need to understand the source of the disenchantment with and backlash against scientific progress that arose during the end of the Second Millennium and seek to repair it.

No one book and no single approach can heal the rifts. Not all of our polarized disagreements will vanish. But we have to start somewhere. And we believe that one of our more promising starting points is with the culture of science — if we begin to borrow its tools, ideas, and processes, and make a Third Millennium shift in our own thinking.

Adapted from "Third Millenium Thinking" by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell, and Robert MacCoun. Copyright © 2024 by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell, and Robert MacCoun. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Emiko Tamagawa  produced and edited this interview for broadcast with  Todd Mundt .  Grace Griffin  adapted it for the web.

This article was originally published on March 26, 2024.

This segment aired on March 26, 2024.

Scott Tong Co-Host, Here & Now Scott Tong joined Here & Now as a co-host in July 2021 after spending 16 years at Marketplace as Shanghai bureau chief and senior correspondent.

Emiko Tamagawa Senior Producer, Here & Now Emiko Tamagawa produces arts and culture segments for Here & Now.

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: quiet-star: language models can teach themselves to think before speaking.

Abstract: When writing and talking, people sometimes pause to think. Although reasoning-focused works have often framed reasoning as a method of answering questions or completing agentic tasks, reasoning is implicit in almost all written text. For example, this applies to the steps not stated between the lines of a proof or to the theory of mind underlying a conversation. In the Self-Taught Reasoner (STaR, Zelikman et al. 2022), useful thinking is learned by inferring rationales from few-shot examples in question-answering and learning from those that lead to a correct answer. This is a highly constrained setting -- ideally, a language model could instead learn to infer unstated rationales in arbitrary text. We present Quiet-STaR, a generalization of STaR in which LMs learn to generate rationales at each token to explain future text, improving their predictions. We address key challenges, including 1) the computational cost of generating continuations, 2) the fact that the LM does not initially know how to generate or use internal thoughts, and 3) the need to predict beyond individual next tokens. To resolve these, we propose a tokenwise parallel sampling algorithm, using learnable tokens indicating a thought's start and end, and an extended teacher-forcing technique. Encouragingly, generated rationales disproportionately help model difficult-to-predict tokens and improve the LM's ability to directly answer difficult questions. In particular, after continued pretraining of an LM on a corpus of internet text with Quiet-STaR, we find zero-shot improvements on GSM8K (5.9%$\rightarrow$10.9%) and CommonsenseQA (36.3%$\rightarrow$47.2%) and observe a perplexity improvement of difficult tokens in natural text. Crucially, these improvements require no fine-tuning on these tasks. Quiet-STaR marks a step towards LMs that can learn to reason in a more general and scalable way.

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Here's what happens if Trump can't pay his $454 million bond

Andrea Bernstein

Rachel Treisman

Forty Wall Street, a Trump-owned building, stands in downtown Manhattan. Former President Trump says he can't secure a bond to appeal the $454 million penalty in his civil fraud case. But New York Attorney General Letitia James says she is prepared to seize the former president's assets, including the building at 40 Wall Street, if he is unable to pay. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

Forty Wall Street, a Trump-owned building, stands in downtown Manhattan. Former President Trump says he can't secure a bond to appeal the $454 million penalty in his civil fraud case. But New York Attorney General Letitia James says she is prepared to seize the former president's assets, including the building at 40 Wall Street, if he is unable to pay.

Former President Donald Trump needs to arrange a $454 million bond to comply with a New York court ruling in less than a week, but the presumptive Republican presidential nominee says he can't find a company to put up the bond.

Trump's lawyers are asking an appeals court to stay the judgment, but the clock is ticking.

How did Trump come to owe the state of New York some $454 million?

Trump ordered to pay over $355M for fraudulent business practices in New York

This is the ruling that Judge Arthur Engoron issued last month , after finding that Donald, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., along with Trump Organization employees, engaged in a decade-long conspiracy to lie about the value of their assets.

In New York, if you make money by persistently committing fraud, you owe the ill-gotten portion back to the state. In this case, Judge Engoron determined that Donald Trump made over $350 million more than he should have if he'd been honest and when you add in interest, you get to $454 million.

Why does Trump have to come up with the money now?

Trump doesn't have to actually pay that money now, but he has to get a company to make a guarantee to the court that they will pay the money if he loses his appeal. That's the bond part.

But to get a bond, you have to put up assets, and in a court filing Monday Trump lawyers said they'd approached 30 companies but that getting a bond was a "practical impossibility," because they'd need a billion dollars in cash, which they don't have.

Trump unable to post $450M bond in New York fraud case, his lawyers say

They submitted an affidavit from an insurance executive who had testified at trial, and whom the trial judge had already discredited.

Trump says he's a billionaire. Why can't he just come up with the money himself?

Trump said during a deposition for this case, taken about a year ago, that he had plenty of cash. He said, "I believe we have substantially in excess of $400 million in cash ." And, he added, it's "going up very substantially every month."

News organizations have estimated that Trump actually has about $300 million in liquid assets — but he already had to set aside $100 million or so to put up a bond to pay the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll civil case . The rest of his money is largely tied up in buildings and golf courses, and while he could sell a property, that can't happen right away. Trump said Tuesday that would be a "fire sale," though he said many times during the trial he could always find a buyer to pay top dollar.

Jury orders Trump to pay $83 million for defaming columnist E. Jean Carroll

While Trump's political action committees have spent millions of dollars on his legal fees, they're unlikely to be of help to him in this case because of campaign finance laws .

Trump has accused the judge in the case of trying to take away his rights, posting on social media that any assets he may be forced to sell would be gone even if he ultimately wins his appeal.

That's a concern that any defendant could raise, whether they're liable for $450 or $450 million, says Adam Pollock, a former assistant attorney general in New York.

"But if you want to bond the appeal — stop enforcement of the judgment — you have to put up the full amount," he told Morning Edition . "That's what the law says. And that's a policy decision that Albany has made."

The deadline is Monday. What does Trump do if the appeals court doesn't rule his way?

He can appeal to New York's highest court and ask that court to stay the judgment. If they don't, he can ask a benefactor or he could try and stall some more until he comes into money from the upcoming sale of his social media company, or he could — though it has many disadvantages — declare bankruptcy.

But New York Attorney General Letitia James has been clear: If Trump doesn't pay, she will move to seize his assets.

"If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court," she said. "And we will ask the judge to seize his assets."

Trump's noncash assets run to $3 billion, Forbes estimates, so there's plenty of value there. The law limits the AG to seizing properties that were a part of the case, but there's about two dozen of those, everything from the Doral Golf Club to 40 Wall Street to Trump Tower. She's not limited to New York properties, though there are extra steps if she chooses to go out of state.

She could, in theory, send a sheriff or a marshal to enforce the judgment, and that brings on another legal process with many more opportunities for delay.

Can Trump be forced to pay up?

James can begin enforcement of the judgment immediately after the 30-day grace period expires next week, says Pollock. And there are several devices she can use to try to get him to pay.

For one, he says, she could serve Trump a restraining notice that would restrict his spending in other areas until he pays his bond.

"The restraining notice would say: 'Don't spend money, don't fill up your jet at the pump, until you pay the state of New York, or you'll be held in contempt of court,' " Pollock says. "And my impression is that ... Engoran, the judge here in New York, would be quick to hold him in contempt of court."

He says it's theoretically possible that James' could consider settling, especially if Trump were to write a check for something like $250 million. But short of that, he doesn't see any reason for her to proactively lower his bond, especially since she has the tools to go into banks and drain his accounts.

"The entire trial was effectively a roadmap to his financial assets," Pollock adds. "She can now send out a sheriff or a marshal of the city of New York to go walk into a financial institution holding what's known as an execution and empty his bank account short of $3,000, which is the statutory floor."

Pollock acknowledges that Trump has said he doesn't have $450 million in cash. But if he wants to stave off enforcement, "he needs to find a way to raise it."

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What Would You Have Israel Do to Defend Itself?

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

There seems to be a broad consensus atop the Democratic Party about the war in Gaza, structured around two propositions. First, after the attacks of Oct. 7, Israel has the right to defend itself and defeat Hamas. Second, the way Israel is doing this is “over the top,” in President Biden’s words. The vast numbers of dead and starving children are gut wrenching, the devastation is overwhelming, and it’s hard not to see it all as indiscriminate.

Which leads to an obvious question: If the current Israeli military approach is inhumane, what’s the alternative? Is there a better military strategy Israel can use to defeat Hamas without a civilian blood bath? In recent weeks, I’ve been talking with security and urban warfare experts and others studying Israel’s approach to the conflict and scouring foreign policy and security journals in search of such ideas.

The thorniest reality that comes up is that this war is like few others because the crucial theater is underground. Before the war, Israelis estimated Hamas had dug around 100 miles of tunnels. Hamas leaders claimed they had a much more expansive network, and it turns out they were telling the truth. The current Israeli estimates range from 350 to about 500 miles of tunnels. The tunnel network, according to Israel, is where Hamas lives, holds hostages, stores weapons, builds missiles and moves from place to place. By some Israeli estimates, building these tunnels cost the Gazan people about a billion dollars, which could have gone to building schools and starting companies.

Hamas built many of its most important military and strategic facilities under hospitals, schools and so on. Its server farm, for example, was built under the offices of the U.N. relief agency in Gaza City, according to the Israeli military.

Daphne Richemond-Barak, the author of “Underground Warfare,” writes in Foreign Policy magazine: “Never in the history of tunnel warfare has a defender been able to spend months in such confined spaces. The digging itself, the innovative ways Hamas has made use of the tunnels and the group’s survival underground for this long have been unprecedented.”

In other words, in this war, Hamas is often underground, the Israelis are often aboveground, and Hamas seeks to position civilians directly between them. As Barry Posen, a professor at the security studies program at M.I.T., has written , Hamas’s strategy could be “described as ‘human camouflage’ and more ruthlessly as ‘human ammunition.’” Hamas’s goal is to maximize the number of Palestinians who die and in that way build international pressure until Israel is forced to end the war before Hamas is wiped out. Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion and on making this war as bloody as possible for civilians, until Israel relents.

The Israelis have not found an easy way to clear and destroy the tunnels. Currently, Israel Defense Forces units clear the ground around a tunnel entrance and then, Richemond-Barak writes, they send in robots, drones and dogs to detect explosives and enemy combatants. Then units trained in underground warfare pour in. She writes: “It has become clear that Israel cannot possibly detect or map the entirety of Hamas’s tunnel network. For Israel to persuasively declare victory, in my view, it must destroy at least two-thirds of Hamas’s known underground infrastructure.”

This is slow, dangerous and destructive work. Israel rained destruction down on Gaza, especially early in the war. Because very few buildings can withstand gigantic explosions beneath them, this method involves a lot of wreckage, compounding the damage brought by tens of thousands of airstrikes. In part because of the tunnels, Israel has caused more destruction in Gaza than Syria did in Aleppo and more than Russia did in Mariupol, according to an Associated Press analysis .

John Spencer is the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, served two tours in Iraq and has made two visits to Gaza during the current war to observe operations there. He told me that Israel has done far more to protect civilians than the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Spencer reports that Israel has warned civilians when and where it is about to begin operations and published an online map showing which areas to leave. It has sent out millions of pamphlets, texts and recorded calls warning civilians of coming operations. It has conducted four-hour daily pauses to allow civilians to leave combat areas. It has dropped speakers that blast out instructions about when to leave and where to go. These measures, Spencer told me, have telegraphed where the I.D.F. is going to move next and “have prolonged the war, to be honest.”

The measures are real, but in addition, Israel has cut off power in Gaza, making it hard for Palestinians to gain access to their phones and information and, most important, the evacuation orders published by Israel. Israel has also destroyed a vast majority of Gaza’s cellphone towers and on occasion bombed civilians in so-called safe areas and safe routes. For civilians, the urban battlefield is unbelievably nightmarish. They are caught between a nation enraged by Oct. 7 and using overwhelming and often reckless force and a terrorist group that has structured the battlefield to maximize the number of innocent dead.

So to step back: What do we make of the current Israeli strategy? Judged purely on a tactical level, there’s a strong argument that the I.D.F. has been remarkably effective against Hamas forces. I’ve learned to be suspicious of precise numbers tossed about in this war, but the I.D.F. claims to have killed over 13,000 of the roughly 30,000 Hamas troops. It has disrupted three-quarters of Hamas’s battalions so that they are no longer effective fighting units. It has also killed two of five brigade commanders and 19 of 24 battalion commanders. As of January, U.S. officials estimated that Israel had damaged or made inoperable 20 to 40 percent of the tunnels. Many Israelis believe the aggressive onslaught has begun to restore Israel’s deterrent power. (Readers should know that I have a son who served in the I.D.F. from 2014 to 2016; he’s been back home in the States since then.)

But on a larger political and strategic level, you’d have to conclude that the Israeli strategy has real problems. Global public opinion is moving decisively against Israel. The key shift is in Washington. Historically pro-Israeli Democrats like Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer are now pounding the current Israeli government with criticism. Biden wants Israel to call off its invasion of the final Hamas strongholds in the south. Israel is now risking a rupture with its closest ally and its only reliable friend on the U.N. Security Council. If Israel is going to defend itself from Iran, it needs strong alliances, and Israel is steadily losing those friends. Furthermore, Israeli tactics may be reducing Gaza to an ungovernable hellscape that will require further Israeli occupation and produce more terrorist groups for years.

Hamas’s strategy is pure evil, but it is based on an understanding of how the events on the ground will play out in the political world. The key weakness of the Israeli strategy has always been that it is aimed at defeating Hamas militarily without addressing Palestinian grievances and without paying enough attention to the wider consequences. As the leaders of Hamas watch Washington grow more critical of Jerusalem, they must know their strategy is working.

So we’re back to the original question: Is there a way to defeat Hamas with far fewer civilian deaths? Is there a way to fight the war that won’t leave Israel isolated?

One alternative strategy is that Israel should conduct a much more limited campaign. Fight Hamas, but with less intensity. To some degree, Israel has already made this adjustment. In January, Israel announced it was shifting to a smaller, more surgical strategy; U.S. officials estimated at the time that Israel had reduced the number of Israeli troops in northern Gaza to fewer than half of the 50,000 who were there in December.

The first problem with going further in this direction is that Israel may not be left with enough force to defeat Hamas. Even by Israel’s figures, most Hamas fighters are still out there. Will surgical operations be enough to defeat an enemy of this size? A similar strategy followed by America in Afghanistan doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

A second problem is that the light footprint approach leaves power vacuums. This allows Hamas units to reconstitute themselves in areas Israel has already taken. As the United States learned in Iraq, if troop levels get too low, the horrors of war turn into the horrors of anarchy.

Another alternative strategy is targeted assassinations. Instead of continuing with a massive invasion, just focus on the Hamas fighters responsible for the Oct. 7 attack, the way Israel took down the terrorists who perpetrated the attack on Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972.

The difference is that the attack on Israelis at Munich was a small-scale terrorist assault. Oct. 7 was a comprehensive invasion by an opposing army. Trying to assassinate perpetrators of that number would not look all that different from the current military approach. As Raphael Cohen, the director of the strategy and doctrine program at the RAND Corporation, notes : “In practical terms, killing or capturing those responsible for Oct. 7 means either thousands or potentially tens of thousands of airstrikes or raids dispersed throughout the Gaza Strip. Raids conducted on that scale are no longer a limited, targeted operation. It’s a full-blown war.”

Furthermore, Hamas’s fighters are hard to find, even the most notorious leaders. It took a decade for the United States to find Osama bin Laden, and Israel hasn’t had great success with eliminating key Hamas figures. In recent years, Israel tried to kill Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, seven times , without success.

The political costs of this kind of strategy might be even worse than the political costs of the current effort. Turkey, a Hamas supporter, has made it especially clear that Israel would pay a very heavy price if it went after Hamas leaders there.

A third alternative is a counterinsurgency strategy, of the kind that the United States used during the surge in Iraq. This is a less intense approach than the kind of massive invasion we’ve seen and would focus on going after insurgent cells and rebuilding the destroyed areas to build trust with the local population. The problem is that this works only after you’ve defeated the old regime and have a new host government you can work with. Israel is still trying to defeat the remaining Hamas battalions in places like Rafah. This kind of counterinsurgency approach would be an amendment to the current Israeli strategy, not a replacement.

Critics of the counterinsurgency approach point out that Gaza is not Iraq. If Israel tried to clear, hold and build new secure communities in classic counterinsurgency fashion, those new communities wouldn’t look like safe zones to the Palestinians. They would look like detention camps. Furthermore, if Israel settles on this strategy, it had better be prepared for a long war. One study of 71 counterinsurgency campaigns found that the median length of those conflicts was 10 years. Finally, the case for a full counterinsurgency approach would be stronger if that strategy had led to American victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, which it did not.

A fourth alternative is that Israel should just stop. It should settle for what it has achieved and not finish the job by invading Rafah and the southern areas of Gaza, or it should send in just small strike teams.

This is now the official Biden position. The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has argued that Israel can destroy Hamas in Gaza without a large invasion but “ by other means ” (which he did not elaborate on). The United States has asked Israel to send a delegation to Washington to discuss alternative Rafah strategies, which is good. The problem is that, first, there seems to be a budding disagreement over how much of Hamas needs to be destroyed to declare victory and, second, the I.D.F. estimates that there are 5,000 to 8,000 Hamas fighters in Rafah. Defeating an army that size would take thousands of airstrikes and raids. If you try to shrink the incursion, the math just doesn’t add up. As an Israeli war cabinet member, Benny Gantz, reportedly told U.S. officials, “Finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending in firefighters to put out 80 percent of a fire.”

If this war ends with a large chunk of Hamas in place, it would be a long-term disaster for the region. Victorious, Hamas would dominate whatever government was formed to govern Gaza. Hamas would rebuild its military to continue its efforts to exterminate the Jewish state, delivering on its promise to launch more and more attacks like that of Oct. 7. Israel would have to impose an even more severe blockade than the one that it imposed before, this time to keep out the steel, concrete and other materials that Hamas uses to build tunnels and munitions, but that Gazans would need to rebuild their homes.

If Hamas survives this war intact, it would be harder for the global community to invest in rebuilding Gaza. It would be impossible to begin a peace process. As the veteran Middle East observers Robert Satloff and Dennis Ross wrote in American Purpose, “Any talk of a postwar political process is meaningless without Israel battlefield success: There can be no serious discussion of a two-state solution or any other political objective with Hamas either still governing Gaza or commanding a coherent military force.”

So where are we? I’m left with the tragic conclusion that there is no magical alternative military strategy. As Cohen wrote in Foreign Policy: “If the international community wants Israel to change strategies in Gaza, then it should offer a viable alternative strategy to Israel’s announced goal of destroying Hamas in the strip. And right now, that alternate strategy simply does not exist.”

The lack of viable alternatives leaves me with the further conclusion that Israel must ultimately confront Hamas leaders and forces in Rafah rather than leave it as a Hamas beachhead. For now, a cease-fire may be in the offing in Gaza, which is crucial for the release of more hostages.

Israel can use that time to put in place the humanitarian relief plan that Israeli security officials are now, at long last, proposing (but that the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has not agreed to so far). Israel would also have to undertake a full-scale civilian evacuation of Rafah before any military operation and then try to take out as much of Hamas as possible with as few civilian casualties as possible. Given the horrors of this kind of tunnel-based urban warfare, this will be a painful time and painfully difficult. But absent some new alternative strategy, Biden is wrong to stop Israel from confronting the Hamas threat in southern Gaza.

Finally, like pretty much every expert I consulted, I’m also left with the conclusion that Israel has to completely rethink and change the humanitarian and political side of this operation. Israel needs to supplement its military strategy with an equally powerful Palestinian welfare strategy.

Israel’s core problems today are not mostly the fault of the I.D.F. or its self-defense strategy. Israel’s core problems flow from the growing callousness with which many of its people have viewed the Palestinians over the past decades, magnified exponentially by the trauma it has just suffered. Today, an emotionally shattered Israeli people see through the prism of Oct. 7. They feel existentially insecure, facing enemies on seven fronts — Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. As Ross has noted , many often don’t see a distinction between Hamas and the Palestinians. Over 80 percent of West Bank Palestinians told pollsters they supported the Oct. 7 attack.

As the columnist Anshel Pfeffer wrote in the Israeli paper Haaretz, “The very idea that Israel needed to take any responsibility whatsoever for the place from which those who had murdered, raped and pillaged had emerged was seen as a moral abomination.”

Pfeffer continued that because of this attitude, “the government’s policy on humanitarian supplies to Gaza is a combination of vengeance, ignorance and incompetence.” He quoted unnamed I.D.F. officials who acknowledged that of course Israel is responsible for the welfare of the people in the area it controls but that the civilian leaders refuse to confront this.

On occasions when Israel has responded to world pressure and shifted policy, it has done so in secret, with no discussion in the cabinet.

An officer whose duties specifically include addressing the needs of civilians told Pfeffer that he didn’t have much to do except for some odd jobs.

Israel is failing to lay the groundwork for some sort of better Palestinian future — to its own detriment. The security experts I spoke with acknowledge that providing humanitarian aid will be hard. As Cohen told me: “If the Israeli military takes over distributing humanitarian aid to Gaza, they will likely lose soldiers in the process. And so Israelis are asking why should their boys die providing aid to someone who wants to kill them. So the United States needs to convince Israel that this is the morally and strategically right thing to do.”

For her book “How Terrorism Ends,” the Carnegie Mellon scholar Audrey Kurth Cronin looked at about 460 terrorist groups to investigate how they were defeated. Trying to beat them with military force alone rarely works. The root causes have to be addressed. As the retired general David Petraeus reminded his audience recently at the New Orleans Book Festival, “Over time, hearts and minds still matter.”

Israel also has to offer the world a vision for Gaza’s recovery, and it has to do it right now. Ross argues that after the war is over, the core logic of the peace has to be demilitarization in exchange for reconstruction. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, he sketches out a comprehensive rebuilding effort, bringing in nations and agencies from all over the world, so Gaza doesn’t become a failed state or remain under Hamas control.

Is any of this realistic given the vicious enmity now ripping through the region? Well, many peace breakthroughs of the past decades happened after one side suffered a crushing defeat. Egypt established ties with Israel after it was thoroughly defeated in the Yom Kippur War. When Israel attacked Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006, the world was outraged. But after the fighting stopped, some Lebanese concluded that Hezbollah had dragged them into a bloody, unnecessary conflict. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was forced to acknowledge his error, saying he didn’t know Israel would react so violently. The Lebanese border stabilized. Israel’s over-the-top responses have sometimes served as effective deterrents and prevented further bloodshed.

Israel and the Palestinians have both just suffered shattering defeats. Maybe in the next few years they will do some difficult rethinking, and a new vision of the future will come into view. But that can happen only after Hamas is fully defeated as a military and governing force.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author, most recently,  of “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” @ nytdavidbrooks

Utah officials unsure how to enforce new statewide book ban retroactively — but it may mean more work for public schools

The state school board is “still in the process of mapping out implementation.”.

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) A woman walks past dozens of banned books displayed on a table in Weller Book Works in Trolley Square for Banned Book Week in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023.

Six Utah school districts have banned Jessie Ann Foley’s young adult novel “ The Carnival at Bray ” — but each for a different reason.

Davis School District cited violations of Utah’s criminal code regarding “ indecent public displays, ” while Nebo School District said it removed the title due to low circulation. Washington School District noted “illicit” descriptions of sex.

The three others — Alpine, Canyons and Granite school districts — cited no reason at all.

At least 35 other titles have been banned by three or more Utah school districts for various reasons, according to an analysis by The Salt Lake Lake Tribune — but none for the specific criteria that would lead to a statewide ban under a brand new Utah law.

That new law, starting July 1, will prompt all public schools across the state to remove a book from shelves if at least three school districts (or at least two school districts and five charter schools) specifically determine it amounts to “objective sensitive material” — pornographic or otherwise indecent material, as defined by Utah code .

The law, which Gov. Spencer Cox signed this month , is also supposed to apply retroactively, potentially putting those at least 36 books already banned by three or more school districts in limbo statewide.

The problem is, officials are unsure how to retroactively enforce the law. That’s because a statewide “objective” sensitive material standard has never existed. Until now, districts weren’t required to use that terminology when making removal determinations.

Will districts and charters need to re-review banned books to determine which ones amount to “objective” sensitive material? Or will titles that have already been removed by three or more districts under the former law be banned statewide automatically?

Those questions and more remain unanswered.

“[The Utah State Board of Education] is still in the process of mapping out implementation,” said Sharon Turner, director of public affairs for the USBE.

The state school board has been charged with overseeing and creating the process for a book’s statewide removal.

“We need to consider all options as to best support our districts,” Turner said.

New removal standards trump local process

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) A "read-in" put on by Let Utah Read to protest the book ban bill at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024.

Once that process is determined, it could mean major policy changes for all Utah school districts.

“We are just beginning to unpack the new ‘sensitive materials review’ amendments along with many other education-related bills that were passed this year,” said Kirsten Stewart, spokesperson for the Canyons School District. “We also await guidance from the Utah State Board of Education, which will factor into our policy reviews.”

Before the new law, schools evaluated sensitive materials according to a 2022 law , which required them to remove titles from student access if they contained “pornographic or indecent content.” Its teeth lay in a section of Utah criminal code that prohibits access to such materials on school property.

Renée Pinkney, president of the state’s largest teacher’s union, called the new law “anti-democratic,” arguing that it stands to burden school districts while eroding local control.

“Our districts were required to create a process to go through any book that was challenged at the local school board level, and they have done that,” she said. “They’ve created those processes, and they’re working. And now, to say that only three districts or two districts and five charters can make the decision for the entire state, you are taking away the power of the local school board members that were duly elected by their community members.”

The new law includes the previous definition of “sensitive” materials but also asks schools to evaluate a key difference — whether the material is objectively or subjectively sensitive, under the newly introduced removal standards. That distinction is important because “subjective” sensitive material determinations will not lead to a statewide ban, according to the law.

Both standards pertain to material that is considered pornographic or indecent, but “objective” sensitive material specifically involves content that violates a section of Utah criminal code regarding “indecent public displays” — any descriptions or depictions of sex or sexual stimulation.

In simpler terms, lawmakers have described “objective” sensitive material as “inherently” pornographic .

“Subjective” sensitive material may not meet the state’s definition of pornography or “indecent public displays,” but would otherwise be considered “harmful” to youth .

Can the state school board intervene in retroactive cases?

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) A shelf labeling banned books at Ken Sanders' Children's Reading Room at the Leonardo in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022.

There’s another looming uncertainty about the new law applying retroactively: If books previously banned by enough districts or charters do trigger the statewide ban, would the state school board still have the option to intervene?

According to the new law, state board members can reverse a ban triggered by that statewide removal threshold if they convene a hearing within 60 days to consider reinstating it.

If no hearing is held, the statewide removal stands. But if board leaders vote to reinstate a book, the statewide ban is overturned.

USBE officials did not say whether they plan to exercise that option come July, or whether the 60-day time limit would apply for any retroactive cases.

Gretchen Zaitzeff, president of the Utah Educational Library Media Association , said the new law will likely lead to “self-censorship,” with school librarians buying fewer books that address difficult topics out of fear they might not comply with state law.

UELMA was one of several literary and education organizations — as well as the Utah chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union — that penned an open letter to Cox urging him to veto the bill. Cox didn’t respond to the letter, Zaitzeff said.

“It’s a slippery slope of censorship,” Zaitzeff said. “[Students] will have less access to books about difficult topics that they may actually want to read.”

Supporters of the law have argued it’s about protecting children from accessing porn , but Zaitzeff, who is also the Canyons School District library specialist, argued “we have a semantics problem.”

“The foundational definition used to describe ‘sensitive materials’ is different than the legal definition used to describe pornography,” she said. “... If these works that are under reconsideration were actually pornographic, they would have been out of school long before today.”

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Bank of Japan may be less dovish than markets think

• BOJ's new language makes no promise to keep rates low - sources
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Reporting by Leika Kihara. Editing by Sam Holmes.

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Canada's GDP outperforms Jan growth forecast, likely grew 0.4% in Feb

Canada's gross domestic product in January increased 0.6%, the fastest growth rate in a year and higher than forecasts, and the economy likely expanded 0.4% in February, data showed on Thursday.

Net inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) to Saudi Arabia reached 13.1 billion riyals ($3.49 billion) in the fourth quarter of 2023, up 16% from 11.4 billion riyals ($3.04 billion) in the third quarter, government data showed on Thursday.