The fundamentals of design thinking have transformational potential.

More than just a technique or method, design is a practice, culture and mindset. Its fundamentals are fairly unconventional for big mature corporations structurally encamped on their heritage, assets, resources and short or medium-term financial interests.

There are many different starting points of our interventions (problems to resolve, opportunities to seize, etc.), but they all systematically involve an initial reflex of meaningfully re-problematizing the issues, of energy and of the initial areas of research Among these fundamentals we favour:

1 - Pluridisciplinarity
This is a constant of design thinking, a systematic key to opening up. Crossing frontiers, challenging hierarchies, break silos, promoting opening up to others, to differences, to skills, to the outside world… In a manner of speaking, it's all about putting the company under a different influence.

2 - The human factor
Empathetic immersion in the everyday life of people whose life we wish to improve activates the most inspiring creativity processes. It goes far beyond traditional active listening and observation techniques.

3 - The obsession with value, meaning and usefulness
It's a safeguard for fulfilling concrete, tangible and pragmatic projects for targeted individuals, and accordingly for the issuing company.

4 - Humility
It is at the heart of design culture. It drives one to test, try out, gather feedback, iterate…. It's an increasingly central value in the reason for being of the biggest companies that make themselves aware of their responsibilities with regard to their impact on their direct and indirect environment.

5 - Frugality
It traces a positive vector of constraint in design. Forcing oneself to think with limited means drives one to activate more essential and simpler solutions. This also often manifests itself in identifying and better using existing for former in-house resources and solutions (human resources, organizations, programmes, initiatives, tools, etc.).

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We better perceive the transformational dimension of design thinking when we put such notions perspective with the reality of the operating modes (and malfunctioning) of big organizations.

Increasing the number of innovative Design Thinking (or Human-Centred Design) projects boosts the company's creativity tenfold, breaks the silos, gets tens of people to meet and better know one another, helps us be more open-minded and cultivates the obsession with value, meaning and sustainability.

These practices are both a guarantee of better performance and guarantee the company greater recognition of its own impact on society.