The Great Match: Design thinking-Lean-Agile

If you’re even slightly familiar with the entrepreneurial world, you most likely navigate in a tag cloud of methodologies, including design-thinking, lean startup, agile, scrum, etc. They are all useful in their own scope and contribute to easing up the process of building (or rethinking) a company.

Design Thinking is about ability and learning. Design Thinking is simply how we explore those problems and solutions. Everyone designs, whether it’s conscious or not. If you’re solving a problem, you’re designing a solution. Design Thinking is a mindset that helps us do it better.

Lean started out as a response to scientific management practices in manufacturing. Organizations sought efficiency through process, rules, and procedures and management was mostly about control. Lean says be adaptive, not predictive.

Agile is related to Lean. The differences are mostly about what these mindsets are applied to, and how. It’s also about scaling and evolving solutions over time.

The real benefit comes when we bring all three mindsets together. Too often, the question is “lean or agile?”. The answer is “and”, not “or”: it’s Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile. That’s easy to say, but how do we do it, and what does it look like in practice?

Success is about how teams develop new abilities, learn by doing, and adapt to what is learned.

I hope this insight into “design-thinking meets lean and agile” has shed some light to make your project ideas come true.