Design thinking is not as novel as you think, here is why.

This might sound strange to you but fundamentally speaking design thinking is not a new concept.

Design thinking in its essence was built upon old and proven ways of approaching problem-solving that dates as far as the greek era. The secret sauce of design thinking is that it blends different types of reasoning in a systematic and organized manner.

Design thinking is heavily influenced by Abductive reasoning which was a unique way of conducting "thought experiments" for few empirical observations. Einstein was no stranger to abductive reasoning, in fact his theory of space-time, which was purely a thought experiment, is validated again and again experimentally.

The way to approach Design thinking is by allowing yourself to toggle between intuition, imagination, and pure logical reasoning without discriminating any one of them. It's easier said than done, and this is why design thinking proves to be a challenge to teach per se.

To simplify it further, you must allow yourself to active your right brain to fully absorb, observe and empathize the pain points of your fellow target users and then switch gears to interpret, categorize and build insights as to what exactly they are having a challenge with.

Abductive reasoning is all about achieving an educated guess without tampering with the initial environment that the challenge fosters from, it is also allowing the creation of new thought spaces of possible solutions, suggestions, and recommendations of what could be the "right" solution to the "right" problem.

If you are interested to learn more on how to systematic switch gears for optimized design thinking, you can join my live MINDSHOP's waitlist.

Happy learning!