The most pressing challenges that businesses face today are often technological in nature - such as digital transformation, climate action and AI adoption. These problems are assumed to be solved by incremental progress, linear roadmaps and isolated expertise far removed from the front lines. Yet this is a fallacy in thinking.
Many of the tech-related challenges at the heart of these issues have long been addressed and solved. The real opportunity for innovation now lies in reimagining how humans and technology interact to achieve transformative outcomes and meaningful change.
From climate action software to burgeoning AI tools, the technical capabilities exist but adoption, behavioural change and sustainable impact remain elusive. Effective change requires a mindset shift that puts technology to work in a fundamentally different way – one that puts people at the heart of the process.
It’s a philosophy that the design and innovation consultancy, IDEO, holds close to its heart. The firm’s human-centred design ideology plays a fundamental role in helping to solve business problems in a more creative and people-first manner, maximising the likelihood of successful adoption.
It’s an approach that aims to make leaders feel more confident in reframing their problems, imagining new possibilities and adding value while supercharging innovation.
A designers mindset
By drawing upon the methods and mindsets of designers, human-centred design enables leaders to apply fresh, problem-solving approaches to real-world business challenges.
“To think like a designer means imagining bold ideas, testing assumptions quickly and embracing early failures as opportunities to learn and improve,” says Lorenz Korder, managing director at IDEO.
For Korder, the designer’s mindset emphasises empathy for users, optimism, creative confidence, and comfort with ambiguity. Over four decades, IDEO has applied this philosophy to encourage clients to put humans at the heart of their problems in order to transform how businesses develop products, services and strategies.
The firm’s cross-functional teams - spanning fields such as industrial design, architecture, engineering and anthropology amongst others - demonstrate that innovation requires diverse perspectives grounded in human needs. This requires organisations to better understand their customers’ needs through research and open listening.
To think like a designer means imagining bold ideas, testing assumptions quickly and embracing early failures as opportunities to learn and improve
Unlike traditional problem-solving, human-centred design is iterative and non-linear. By listening to customers problems can be identified and reframed, with innovative solutions then developed through prototyping and rapid testing. The outputs not only have external benefits but also reduce risks while maximising learning internally.
“No matter their background, all of our people think with a designer’s mindset,” says Hannah Rosenfeld, senior design research director at IDEO. “Our goal is to instil that creative confidence in clients, helping them achieve better business outcomes.”
Technology that serves human needs
When Sage, the global business software company, set out to help small businesses tackle climate challenges, they realised technology alone wasn’t enough. Driving real change required a deeper and more fundamental understanding of their customers’ realities.
“The IDEO design team went deep with customers running all kinds of small businesses - from a taxi company and a champagne bar to a falconry center,” explains Korder. “Many business owners revealed they lacked the time to focus on climate issues, as smaller day-to-day decisions took precedence.”
These real-world, human-centred insights proved crucial in reshaping Sage’s solution. While the technical capability to calculate emissions existed, a breakthrough in thinking arose from the realisation that climate thinking and action needed to be made more accessible, practical and relevant for busy business owners, who were short on time. The result was ‘Sage Earth,’ a platform that now empowers 1.5m UK small businesses to better measure and manage their environmental impact in a way that complements their daily operations.
Deeply understanding your audience’s drivers
The journey that the television network and shopping channel QVC took to better support menopausal women underlines the importance of a deep audience understanding and further demonstrates how human-centric design can transform digital initiatives. Given its reach into millions of homes, QVC recognised its potentially unique position in addressing a conversation that had fallen by the wayside for too long.
Rather than simply launching new products or digital features that it thought might resonate, QVC began by deeply understanding the lived experiences of women going through menopause through in-depth interviews and research.
This holistic approach uncovered a need for more than products - menopausal women sought spaces to explore and share openly. The result was an integrated solution combining on-air programming ‘Menopause Your Way’, digital resources, and social media campaigns that fostered not just a shopping experience but a supportive community.
“Human-centered design thinking not only helped QVC to reach its core audience with solutions and relevant products but it also helped to create a space where menopause is out in the open and part of an ongoing conversation,” says Korder.
By shaping its thinking around audience needs rather than technical capabilities, QVC built something more valuable than a simple e-commerce offering - it built a digital community that women were eager to engage with and that would deliver long-term brand benefits.
Combining human-centred design and AI
Looking ahead, it’s clear that in the coming decade, generative AI will inevitably shape how businesses address their challenges. As the world embraces this technology, human-centred design will play a crucial role in shaping its usage.
The opportunity here lies beyond AI’s sheer computing power and in how it amplifies human ingenuity. The algorithms exist; the challenge now is to strategically partner with AI systems and integrate them in a way that enhances how people work, create, and solve problems.
IDEO’s work demonstrates the potential of human-centred design to unlock AI’s true value. From customer-specific chatbots, or “customerGPTs,” to using AI image generators for inspiration and employing neurolinguistic programming (NLP) to identify linguistic clichés, IDEO has repeatedly shown how AI can enhance creativity rather than replace it.
The impact is measurable. Businesses using AI to fuel innovation and creativity report a 38% greater impact on growth, according to a recent IDEO survey of 1,000 business leaders.
“AI is exciting in its ability to solve large-scale problems,” says Korder. “It enables us to do so much while also complementing our approach. Human-centred design is about framing the problem and AI models need good inputs to get the most out of them.”
Korder is clear on the technology’s promise: “AI’s greatest potential is in helping leaders to create and launch new ideas. I believe it has the potential to be the world’s most broadly informed collaborator, helping address more divergent and complex challenges with greater speed and scale”
This insight challenges the default response of pursuing purely technical solutions. True innovation emerges when technology is made to work for people - when empathy and iterative design combine to bridge the gap between capability and real-world impact.
As technology continues to evolve, leaders must ask: how can we harness transformative tools like generative AI to not just solve problems, but to enhance human potential?
By embracing human-centred design, organisations can navigate the complexities of a changing world while unlocking new opportunities for growth and creativity.
For more information, please visit: ideo.com
The most pressing challenges that businesses face today are often technological in nature - such as digital transformation, climate action and AI adoption. These problems are assumed to be solved by incremental progress, linear roadmaps and isolated expertise far removed from the front lines. Yet this is a fallacy in thinking.
Many of the tech-related challenges at the heart of these issues have long been addressed and solved. The real opportunity for innovation now lies in reimagining how humans and technology interact to achieve transformative outcomes and meaningful change.
From climate action software to burgeoning AI tools, the technical capabilities exist but adoption, behavioural change and sustainable impact remain elusive. Effective change requires a mindset shift that puts technology to work in a fundamentally different way – one that puts people at the heart of the process.
