Design thinking: Innovative thinking approach for new problems

In today’s business world, disruption is part of every landscape. Technology-driven disruption of entire markets and industries can happen overnight, and non-traditional competitors can appear without a warning with devastating impact. 
In other words, this disruptive era means nothing stays the same anymore. 
New problems arise all the time and they come at much greater speed, so we can’t possibly use the old solution or method for the newly created problems, can we?
Of course, there are many types of thinking and I am sure that each has a role to play in building and sustaining a business. 
In the past with a slower moving and more predictable business environment, organisations could prosper by using engineering thinking or critical thinking. 
They could take the enormous amounts of data available and use them to understand the past and the present. 
They could even extrapolate these historical patterns with some confidence into a future that was more predictable then. 
But the challenge now is for us to realise that the future is so uncertain and volatile that the past can no longer be relied upon to inform us about what’s ahead. 
With the rapid changes that come with disruption, which affect us all in many ways, the methods we used to solve problems in the past are no longer effective. 
That means we need to develop new ways of thinking to design better solutions for our current problems.
What we need is an approach or method that lets us explore, surface and define the un-served and high-value needs of our customers and then quickly develop and iterate ideas to serve them until we find the solution. This is because, if you want to be sure what the future will be like, you can’t just sit and wait but you need to create it, and this is where design thinking can step in. 
Design thinking can be perceived as a iterative process of discovery, ideation and experimentation that makes use of various design-related techniques to gather insight and yield innovative solutions for any challenges we might come across. 
It is a bold and newly systemised, non-linear approach that allows us to adopt a human-centred perspective in developing inventive solutions while integrating logic and groundwork research. 
Now, let’s look at some success cases of design thinking, like Uber.
Uber quickly transformed the market for taxis and limousines, and it did that by using human-centred design principles to recreate the taxi experience.
Looking back, Uber was designed to give customers what they wanted. We have heard people complaining about the service of taxis and how they failed to understand or respond to the needs of their fares. 
We’ve also heard the case of cabbies who didn’t like the risk of fares running away without paying, so Uber was created. 
By focusing on the customer, Uber could eventually disrupt a traditional business model by combing facts and figures with creative and innovative thinking.
Uber is just one of the many great examples of design thinking. 
It showed us a new method of problem-solving by using this innovative design-thinking approach that I’m sure can be beneficial in all aspects of lives, business-related or not. 

ARINYA TALERNGSRI, the managing director and chief capability officer of SEAC, formerly APMGroup, can be reached at [email protected] or www.seasiacenter.com.