I’ve seen an uptick in Design Thinking bashing online lately. Are the Design Thinking MBAs really devouring the actual designer class? This image taken from one of my SM feeds.
I have this feeling that DT is a trusted process that the bigger organizations sign up for along the lines of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. CYA consensus driven innovation…
Could you be a little more specific? Can’t say I’ve seen it.
The industry Is loaded with “design thinkers” and Master’s ID students who can’t put pen to paper. They talk a good game but can never actually create anything. In my experience, these people end up in the marketing department if there are legit designers on staff.
Are designers actually this petty? Only designers can think design?
I guess I can’t do research, engineering, quality assurance, process specification, etc. And the products where I did do those things obviously killed 100% of the users. 
I can’t be sure, but in a previous life I worked with one of those consultancies that promulgates DT, and we once worked on a $$$ “strategic innovation” program that went through the whole process- research, brainstorms, blizzards of Post-It notes to deliver a slew of ideas, none of which were immediately actionable. Meanwhile outside the program individual designers were delivering moments of brilliance and magic on other projects that got some of them poached by Apple.
Maybe DT is best in a needs-based, solution-driven space, while individual designers with a little bit of chaos, can go a bit rogue creating stuff that makes the heart beat a bit faster.