Design thinking has become one of the most widely cited innovation frameworks in enterprise organizations today. Originating at Stanford’s d.school and popularized globally by IDEO, it offers a structured, human-centred methodology for solving complex problems. Most innovation leaders know the five stages by heart: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.
The problem? A surprising number of organizations are skipping the most important one.
What Design Thinking Actually Promises
The fundamental premise of design thinking is a deliberate departure from how most organizations naturally operate. Rather than starting with internal assumptions about what customers need, it insists on building deep customer understanding first. Rather than committing to a single solution early, it encourages exploring multiple possibilities through low-fidelity prototyping before any significant investment is made.
This sounds straightforward. In practice, it cuts directly against the instincts of teams trained to move fast, ship early, and defend their prior assumptions. Design thinking, done properly, requires genuine intellectual humility — the willingness to discover that what the organization believed about its customers was incomplete or simply wrong.
That’s exactly why it’s valuable. And exactly why it’s so frequently shortchanged.
The Problem With “Fake Design Thinking”
A pattern worth naming in 2022 is the proliferation of what might be called fake design thinking — organizations that have adopted the language and the Post-it note aesthetic of the methodology without preserving its substance.
The most common failure point is the Empathise phase. Teams rush past it, treating customer research as a checkbox rather than the foundation of everything that follows. They move directly to Ideation based on internal assumptions, stakeholder opinions, and prior experience — exactly the starting point design thinking was designed to escape.
The result is innovation that feels customer-centric from the inside but isn’t. Products get built for the customer the organization imagined, not the customer who actually exists. The empathy work gets skipped because it’s slow, qualitative, and uncomfortable — and the output suffers accordingly.
Where the Real Breakthroughs Live
Across innovation efforts that genuinely move the needle, the pattern is consistent: the quality of the output is almost always determined by the quality of the empathy work that preceded it.
Deep customer research — interviews, observation, shadowing, contextual inquiry — surfaces insights that no internal brainstorm can generate. It reveals the gap between what customers say they need, what they actually do, and what they haven’t yet thought to ask for. That gap is where genuine innovation opportunities live.
The Ideation, Prototyping, and Testing phases are valuable — but they’re only as good as the problem definition they’re working from. And the problem definition is only as good as the empathy work that shaped it. Skipping the foundation doesn’t accelerate the process; it redirects effort toward solving the wrong problem faster.
Embedding Design Thinking With Discipline
The conversation worth having in innovation leadership teams is not whether to adopt design thinking — most already have, at least nominally — but how rigorously the empathy phase is being protected when timelines compress and stakeholder pressure mounts.
The organizations where design thinking is genuinely producing results treat customer research not as a preliminary step to get through quickly, but as the core of the innovation process. Product teams, strategy teams, and innovation labs all benefit from this discipline — because the underlying challenge is identical across all three: understanding the real problem before committing to a solution.
A Note for Founders on Empathy as Competitive Advantage
For founders, the design thinking empathy phase isn’t just a methodology — it’s a structural advantage over larger, slower-moving competitors. A founder who spends meaningful time with ten customers, understanding their workflows, frustrations, and workarounds in genuine depth, starts with better raw material than an enterprise innovation team that ran a survey.
The founders building products that consistently outperform their category aren’t necessarily smarter or better resourced. They tend to have a more accurate picture of the problem they’re solving — and that accuracy comes from investing in empathy work that most competitors skip.
How rigorously does your organization protect the empathy phase when timelines get tight? Is design thinking genuinely shaping your innovation process — or has it become a label on familiar habits? Let’s keep learning — together.
harish.balasubramanian 
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