Don’t Call it a Comeback (Design’s Been Here for Years)

Estimated Reading Time: 3-5 minutes

Leadership and Design’s formative years as an organization were between 2009-2012, a moment that were boom times for design thinking. I remember those years as a moment of tremendous optimism in education and in the small corner of the world I inhabited. 

It was a time of TED Talks and Twitter, of “Move Fast and Break Things.” The educators and designers I was meeting wanted to make education more hands-on, real-world, and relevant. Design – and design thinking – was emerging as one way to do so.

Times have changed. I’m not on Twitter any more – it stopped feeling fun. Design thinking no longer forms the theme of every other education conference – maybe it’s no longer the theme of any educational conference. 

Yet here we are as an organization, with more partners and more projects than ever. Why is that? We often use a model called the Gartner Hype Cycle in our work with clients. Originally conceived as a way to describe the boom and bust cycle of new technologies, it’s also an apt descriptor for many new developments – including educational trends.

The beginning of the cycle – an introduction of anything new and exciting – can quickly lead to a “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” where visibility and hopes are high. This is a moment when the new technology/idea/pedagogy/framework is touted as the answer to anything and everything. And the idea is everywhere. For a moment in 2011, 2012, and even into 2013, design thinking was riding that high.

You couldn’t go to a conference without tripping on a bevy of pipe cleaners, cardboard, Xacto knives, and sticky notes. We were cribbing notes from the Stanford d.school “bootcamp bootleg” and working our way through easy-to-print 60 minute design sprints. This era helped form our orientation toward design as a team – one of our earliest programs was a weeklong design camp for high school students and teachers, and we learned a lot from the designers who generously came in to teach their ways of thinking.

But there’s a second phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle. It’s called the “Trough of Disillusionment,” and it describes what happens when this new thing gets overexposed and overpromised. Educators learned that not everything was a human-centered design problem. We also remembered that big problems were messy and ambiguous – not everything could be sorted out in a 60 minute design charette. All the pipe cleaners started to feel like a fad and the inevitable backlash began. As with any new development, gaining mastery was hard. 

Many schools stopped there. Design thinking – thankfully – found a home in maker spaces and innovation programs, in electives offered by innovative teachers and in other niche spaces. But it rarely transformed school cultures, and it rarely drove the way leaders worked. 

That’s a shame, because there’s a third phase to this cycle – one you only get to through practice, learning, reflection, and time. It’s the “Plateau of Productivity.” It’s the space you get to where you learn what this new thing is good for and how it works, when you learn the skills you need to do it well. While many schools have continued to run some design thinking programs for students, fewer have truly embedded it in how they run school.

One of the reasons L+D has steadily grown over the last decade is that we don’t see design thinking as a fad, and we don’t think it’s only for students. By helping leaders at all levels think about schools like designers, we unlock a lot of possibilities. 

But I’ll let you in on a secret: usually, you don’t need to hire us at all. You just need to lean into the work and move through the mess with confidence. In that spirit, I’ll share three of the design habits I’ve seen have the most impact on projects of all types, led by leaders at all levels.

Conduct interviews to understand the lived experiences of community members. 

If you want to think like a designer, one of the simplest things you can do is ditch the survey and have some conversations to understand how members of your community actually live their lives. 

This is something we almost always do at Leadership and Design, whether we’re helping a school design a new schedule, rethink their programs, or develop a strategic plan. And I’m always blown away by how new it continues to feel to people.

Do you need any special training? Not necessary. Does it help to get coaching? Sure. Will you get better with practice? Absolutely.

Develop multiple prototypes and get feedback, early.

The typical way of working on a committee or task force is for a small group of people to 

meet behind closed doors to research and discuss. At the end of the process, the task 

force develops a plan and announces what it is. 

If you want to think like a designer, have your task force create multiple options early on, secure in the knowledge that none of them will be exactly right. Share them outside of the task force, not for a vote, but to better understand what people are looking for. What excites them? What worries them? How would it affect their lives? What questions do they have? 

Then develop more options, and get feedback again. Repeat as necessary. 

Designers generate more human-centered options because their designs are created in collaboration with the people who’ll use them. They accept it will take several iterations – and they normalize learning as the priority, rather than looking like they already knew the answer.

Launch small and scale.

Often, after a task force wraps up, their work is implemented schoolwide – typically, 

the following year. This habit avoids the chance for more learning. 

To think like a designer, try your idea at the smallest possible scale – a minimum viable 

product. Can it be tried in one division or in one department? Can we live with it for a 

week before trying it for a year? A series of pilots shouldn’t delay a change, because a 

small pilot should be something you can try quickly. Rather, by providing more learning, 

it can help you implement the change with more confidence. 

Of course, you can always hire us to bring a design lens to your thorniest challenges. But whether you do or not, there’s real power in adopting these habits as a team, in small ways. Listening to human experiments, running experiments, scaling what works – these things aren’t fads. Even if you aren’t pulling out those pipe cleaners any more. 

Let this be an encouragement to go deeper with design thinking. As I see every day with my Gen Z kids, everything comes back around eventually and is appreciated for what it is.