The concept of Design Thinking is too often thrown around at many conferences and in many articles as a sort of silver bullet to all kinds of problems. It’s exactly that kind of thinking, that careless glorification, that can render such a useful methodology ineffective.

Here at Make Technology, we’ve learned that it takes the right combination of factors—in the right situations—to make it work. Solid facilitation of the Design Thinking session, a diverse team, and empowered leadership are all essential ingredients in making Design Thinking the perfect tool for continuous corporate innovation.

With that, let me tell you how Generali Philippines put all them together in a Design Thinking workshop to kickstart their own corporate innovation.

What is Design Thinking?

“But wait! What exactly is Design Thinking?” you may ask.

At its core, Design Thinking is a human-centered approach that allows small, empowered teams to quickly align strategies and come up with solutions for real customer problems. It’s often used to tackle complex problems that require the collaboration of people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and levels of experience.

In Generali Philippines’ case, they wanted to adapt to their ever-changing customers. To help them do this, we took them through three main steps: Understand, Explore, and Materialize.

Step 1: Understand (Empathize & Define)

Before trying to solve any sort of problem, you first have to understand the people for whom you’re solving it.

“What is the context? What are their experiences? How do they feel about the problem?” These are the sort of questions worth asking.

This first step is crucial. Failing to understand your customers opens up your organization to the possibility of developing a product or service that insufficiently addresses your customers’ problem. Worse, you could come up with a solution to a problem that didn’t exist in the first place!

Oftentimes, organizations skip this step. They think they understand, jump the gun, and immediately try to solve the problem they assume has been correctly identified without considering the complete customer journey and the customer’s experience. The result is wasted time at the least and at most, a financial disaster.

It was only after a series of activities that the Generali Philippines team started to truly empathize with their customers, allowing them to see the whole picture through their customers’ eyes and properly define the problem they wished to solve. With the Design Thinking culture budding within Generali Philippines, the days of hastily-concocted solutions are long gone.

Step 2: Explore (Ideate and Prototype)

At this stage, we can start exploring possibilities and thinking of ideas to solve the problem or problems we identified in Step 1.

Design Thinking workshops employ different kinds of ideation tools and methods to stimulate a wide variety of ideas that go beyond the usual. The approach encourages teams to think outside the box and to use each member’s unique perspective to produce as many ideas as possible, without fear of judgment. It is only after this brainstorming session that the ideas are sifted through and trimmed down to a few promising ones that can be prototyped and tested with actual people.

Prototyping or creating artifacts that people can interact or engage with is an important step in the entire process because it allows the team to seriously consider an idea’s feasibility and experience the ideas in a tangible way.

Step 3: Materialize (Test and Implement)

The Generali Philippines team learned how important this step was once they got immediate feedback from a potential customer during a prototype-testing session. For the team, having feedback that they could quickly act upon and apply to their current iteration of a prototype was empowering and very exciting.

It is during this final step that teams usually see the magic and agility Design Thinking offers. By putting the fresh ideas they came up with through a trial by fire, they can clearly see which ones are worth pursuing.

At the end of the day, not all prototypes or ideas see the light of day in the real world. This is natural.

However, Generali Philippines’ strong embrace of Design Thinking principles at a corporate level has allowed them to pilot some truly innovative ideas and bring them to life. Ideas that they can confidently call their own.