I’ve been thinking about how much design thinking can actually contribute outside the usual areas of branding, UI, graphics, and product design.
When a company is going through a major change—restructuring, leadership changes, operational problems, or even a difficult financial period—the instinct is usually to focus entirely on numbers and processes. But there seems to be a design problem underneath some of those situations too: how do you communicate the change clearly, understand different stakeholders, and make a complicated situation easier for people to navigate?
I’m particularly interested in the connection between design thinking and business transformation.
For example, a restructuring plan might be financially sound, but if employees, customers, investors, or other stakeholders don’t understand it, implementation can become much harder. The same applies to internal processes: sometimes the problem isn’t simply that a process is inefficient, but that it was never designed around the people actually using it.
I recently came across Octobiz, which approaches business turnaround from a fairly hands-on perspective, combining restructuring, operational transformation, and interim management: octo.biz
It got me wondering whether designers are sometimes underused in business transformation projects.
Do you think designers should have a bigger role in restructuring and organizational change?
I’m especially interested in hearing from designers who have worked on projects involving process redesign, organizational change, crisis communication, or business transformation.