What people get wrong with Design Thinking and Agile

When people think of design thinking they immediately think of post it notes and workshops. With agile people think user stories, sprints, points, showcases, retrospectives.

We lose focus of the higher level principles, for instance with agile having a process that allows changing software at the speed that businesses evolve. With design thinking it’s about creating or improving a solution that we don’t yet quiet know, but we’re confident we’ll get there.

It’s possible to have perfectly executed sprints, stories, grooming sessions and absolutely fail at agile. Have you created a process that adapts to change, or are you just executing a traditional approach in a new way?

The same with design thinking. The tragedy here is the misunderstanding around workshops. It’s just one tool of many. Design thinking is much more about reinvention than post-it and workshops, but unfortunately this isn’t the first thing people think of.

At the core of this issue is the assumption that work happens in the collective, not the individual. Work gets done in a story grooming session, a workshop, a sprint review or demo. These events have their place, but they should not take much time and rather spend more time on individuals using their brain power and wrestling with problems and trying different things, prototyping, collecting feedback.

Always go back to initial principles, they are the north star.