Giving Compass' Take:

•  Design Thinking for the Greater Good discusses the challenges of incorporating design thinking behaviors within social innovation. 

• How can a design thinking mindset spur impact philanthropy?

• Read about how design thinking can impact development aid. 

Design-thinking for social impact is becoming increasingly popular. The practice—which authors Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman, and Daisy Azer describe as “a problem-solving approach with a unique set of qualities: human-centered, possibility driven, option focused, and iterative”—is no longer confined to the private sector. It is catching on with social entrepreneurs and practitioners, even within large, hierarchical, bureaucratic, and risk-averse social and public sector organizations.

Like the authors of Design Thinking for the Greater Good at the University of Virginia, we at Stanford’s Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design" Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (also known as the d.school) are excited by this dramatic rise in interest in and practice of the approach.

Liedtka, Salzman, and Azer’s book makes an important contribution in outlining some of the challenges and opportunities of applying design thinking behaviors and mindsets in the social sector. They make a case for increasing the capacity needed to scale the approach across the sector, provide a framework for practitioners to apply it within their organizations, and offer case studies of organizations that have done so.

The authors stress that startups should not be the only generators of social innovation. Instead, we need to focus on shifting the culture within large social sector organizations that have existing clout and capabilities to tackle social problems.

If design thinking is to help address our greatest social challenges, we need to give teams the tools to determine the greatest leverage points when designing within complex systems and understand possible unintended consequences. We need to provide more details on how to sequence these steps: when to do a systems analysis, when to dig deeper with specific beneficiaries and stakeholders, and most importantly, how to choose between multiple possible solutions.

Without understanding how to navigate this complexity, and connect insights to big data and evidence, teams can waste hours of time with interviews, synthesis, and experiments, undermining their sense of mission and the design-thinking method’s credibility within the organization.

Read the full article by source Nadia Rounami about social impact from Stanford Social Innovation Review