“Instead the British Design Council expressed it as an infamous double diamond diagram that happens to look fantastic on a slide.”

“Designers don’t search for a solution until they have determined the real problem.”
I recently wrote a piece on the differences between design thinking, lean and agile. Since then I have been wanting to explore each of the topics on their own. The reason for this is because each of the mindsets deserve their own unique place in the sun. They have their own origin story and shine in different ways and contexts. Of course they shine most when combined to complement one another.
So Design Thinking…
One of the biggest buzzwords around today. For many it brings up visions of creative types walking around with pretty presentations of honeycombs and Venn diagrams. Paired with elaborate flow charts describing how it all works lead many to believe that design thinking is about process.
“But like most well intended ideas in our industry it is not about process or procedure at all. Instead it is once again a mindset or culture.”
But like most well intended ideas in our industry it is not about process or procedure at all. Instead it is once again a mindset or culture. It just so happens that the mindset is paired with a set of techniques for applying a designer’s way of doing things.
But design techniques are just for design?
Not true! Design thinking can be applied to any context or domain with great effectiveness. It is a fantastic approach to explore and brainstorm new territories. As such it is less about the outcome and more about the approach and path to get there. Conventional thinking would have you think that this is not the case and that the “design” in “design thinking” implies outcome.
So if design is not about design what is it?
It is about lifting they way designers approach problems and using it elsewhere. As Donald Norman the father of UX said: “Designers don’t 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 converge upon their proposal. This process is called Design Thinking.”
I still don’t get it spell it out for me
Ok, so its not about stickies, sketches, honeycombs or process. It’s not even about actual UX design. Design thinking is a set of approaches where almost all flavors aim to:
- Figure out what the real problem is instead of settling on the first solution
- Search for solutions expansively frequently leveraging the intelligence of the group
- Critically considering the options, narrowing it down to the best
- Collectively converging on a proposal that should in theory be far superior
The idea is that the more avenues and directions you explore the deeper and more thoroughly you think about your problem.
So why the honeycombs and diamonds?
Let’s formalize the above paragraph. Design thinking is the repeated divergence, emergence and convergence of solutions to problems. As such, it is nothing but deliberate practice for continually solving things from a different starting point and in a far better way.
“But that is way to fluffy to try and explain to business folk conditioned to think in PowerPoint and email. So instead the British Design Council expressed it as an infamous double diamond diagram that happens to look fantastic on a slide.”
But that is way to fluffy to try and explain to business folk conditioned to think in PowerPoint and email. So instead the British Design Council expressed it as an infamous double diamond diagram that happens to look fantastic on a slide. That diagram has now become the ubiquitous way of simply visualizing the model. Honeycomb diagrams aim to do the same with a little more detail.

“Behold the famous double diamond, or at least one version of it!”
Remind we what this all about again
As I said in my original blog. Design thinking is all about exploring the problem. Lean is all about building the right thing. And agile is all about building the thing right. Design thinking allows us to explore using intuition and deductive reasoning just like a designer. Or at least in theory 😉