How design thinking aids problem solving

Take advantage of your organisation’s people power by working together to build up a stockpile of innovative ideas that focus on the solution, not the problem.

Australian businesses have a critical lack of perception regarding design thinking, which limits their strategic potential, according to Catherine Livingstone FAICDLife. “I fear Australia has a blind spot when it comes to the value of design and design thinking,” she warned delegates at the Australian Governance Summit in 2024.

Emphasising the importance of collaborative debate involving boards, senior management and their direct reports, Livingstone advocated for conversations that encourage questioning beyond “the first right answer,” highlighting the value of discovering the “second right answer”. The UTS chancellor and former chair of CommBank, Telstra and CSIRO cautioned that the country tends to underestimate the power of design thinking by mistakenly relegating it solely to products or fashion. “It is so much deeper,” she stressed, highlighting its relevance across “service design, software design, process design, value chain design, business model design, strategy design and, dare I say, policy design.”

Design thinking is a human-centred methodology that focuses on solutions rather than dwelling on problems. Popularised in the modern era by IDEO CEO Tim Brown through his influential Harvard Business Review article, design thinking emphasises understanding the user deeply by building empathy, observing interactions and keeping the human experience at the forefront of every solution.

Structured around phases that move from concrete to abstract thinking and back, design thinking combines creative exploration with practical validation. This iterative cycle ensures novel ideas are not only imaginative, but also viable and impactful. By prioritising the user and consistently testing assumptions, design thinking drives more effective innovation, solving genuine user needs with meaningful outcomes.

“This is the essence of design thinking and design-led strategy,” said Livingstone, underscoring that it helps businesses zero in on “the real problem to be solved”, encouraging experimentation and a rigorous test-and-learn mindset.

Livingstone cited industry disruptors like Tesla and Apple as prime examples, noting the strategic edge these companies gained by embedding design thinking deeply within their executive teams.

“They are all good-looking products, but they are so much more when you consider the problems they anticipated and solved, and the business model value created by being so far ahead of the rest of their sectors,” said Livingstone.

“Design thinking is hard, but it pays enormous dividends,” she concluded, urging Australian enterprises to prioritise building this capability to enhance their resilience and competitive edge amid accelerating change.

Design thinking helps the board and management to solve complex problems, even where information is incomplete, contradictory or conflicting.

At a recent AICD webinar, Sam Bucolo MAICD, executive director of the Australian Design Council, was joined by Jacqui Jordan, an ambassador for Good Design Australia and advisory panel member for the Australian Design Council, along with Mark Armstrong, an adjunct professor in design at Monash University and Design Institute of Australia fellow. The discussion brief was to demonstrate the benefits of design thinking for directors.

“A director can’t know all the facts all the time,” said Bucolo. “Design thinking is an iterative process that embraces the ambiguity you so frequently find in the boardroom. Strategy also needs to be a continuous conversation between board and management. Design thinking enables them to collaborate on key questions.”

A five-step process

In practice, design thinking can take the form of a five-step process.

1. Define: Ensure you’re solving the right problem by questioning your assumptions.

2. Empathise: Work with your customers and stakeholders at the deepest possible level to challenge and validate the impact you will deliver.

3. Ideate: Develop multiple, diverse ideas to meet the criteria you have defined.

4. Evaluate: Review your best ideas early and often.

5. Launch: Transform your idea into a commercial solution.

This systematic series of steps encourages both divergent and convergent thinking to guide directors from problem to solution.

“The Double Diamond framework (mrca.pub/4kF80mU) developed by the British Design Council provides a visual representation of the stages,” said Bucolo.

Armstrong and Jordan presented case studies to demonstrate how the steps can be applied successfully. Armstrong began with a physical example involving the transformation of the Qantas check-in experience. Jordan described the development of a clear strategic narrative across Emergence Insurance.

CASE STUDY #1

Transforming the Qantas check-in experience:

1. Define:

The brief was to improve the Qantas check-in experience for customers and staff:

2. Empathise:

“We spent a lot of time in the airport making observations and conducting face-to-face interviews,” said Armstrong. “This was far deeper than typical research because we wanted to know how each customer felt about the experience. It emerged that time was the key issue. No-one likes to be stuck in a queue.”

3. Ideate:

“One of the critical aspects of the ideation process is that it is non-linear, so we were looking for lots of ideas,” he said. “Our workshop included security experts, marketing people, economists, human behaviour specialists, engineers and industrial designers to ensure we drew on diverse thinking.”

4. Evaluate:

The information collected was distilled and analysed. As part of the process, the team used computer modelling to identify possible bottlenecks in the terminal’s operation and developed a prototype check-in station.

Bucolo stressed the value of prototypes. “These aren’t solutions in their own right, they simply capture the essence of the thinking at that time. Prototypes can be held, drawn over and broken, generating a very different conversation from a slide deck or written document.”

5. Launch:

Describing the finished design of the check-in stations as “bold”, Armstrong added, “I believe boldness is critical for good design. Qantas rolled the new design out across all their ports, changing the experience for customers and staff.”

CASE STUDY #2

A clear strategic narrative for Emergence Insurance:

1. Define:

Emergence Insurance is a rapidly growing cyber insurance specialist with a broad customer base.  The company’s core focus is cyber risk protection for businesses and families.

Since entering the Australian market nearly 10 years ago, rapid expansion and regional growth had brought its own set of problems.

“With so many new staff, there wasn’t a clear strategic narrative across the business,” said Jordan. “We were engaged to bring a design-led approach to resolving this.”

2. Empathise:

Both founder and CEO Troy Filipcevic and chair Gary Dransfield GAICD are strong advocates for design-led strategy and governance. By this stage, the board and executive leadership team had already shared their view of strategic priorities.

“We then engaged every employee in cross-functional teams to develop these priorities, which took about three weeks,” said Jordan.

“The teams presented and iterated their ideas to each other at a full-day workshop before visualising the emergent strategy on a single page.”

3. Ideate:

The team visualised their strategic plan using dynamic, metaphor-driven illustrations. One approach depicted the journey forward as a cityscape, plotting progress from the current landscape to future results, anchored by clear, foundational values. A separate visualisation adopted the metaphor of a pathway, charting practical steps from today’s context to tomorrow’s outcomes. Collaboration and stakeholder engagement took centre stage in an “arena” visual, placing shared values at the heart of the strategic conversation. Finally, a lighthouse metaphor was employed, illuminating core principles to guide the organisation from its present realities towards future targets.

4. Evaluate:

According to Jordan, evaluation was “messy”, with many questions, challenges and debates. However, both chair and CEO were determined to be active participants. “Gary and Troy saw the value of immersing themselves in this process,” said Jordan. “They were genuinely curious — and Gary got in with the teams, listening, engaging and focused on absorbing their different perspectives.”

5. Launch:

The objective, to cascade the “growth never finishes” strategy to the broader team and rebrand to a new co-owned growth strategy (commercial in confidence) was achieved through the iterative and collaborative design process.

This article first appeared under the headline 'Design Thinking' in the July 2025 issue of Company Director magazine.