Design Thinking in Managing (and Designing) for Organizational Change

Increasing interest in ‘design thinking’ in the fields of management and
organization has resulted in a concern with using design-oriented approaches
as means to support organizational change and innovation. To this end,
conceptual ideas such as Boland and Collopy’s ‘managing as designing’ have
aimed at exploring how ‘design thinking’ can inform managers and the work
done in organizational contexts. However, these concepts tend to be
discussed theoretically with little grounding in empirical studies of practice
that might inform managing according to a ‘design thinking’ approach. In this
paper we look at one attempt at facilitating organizational change through
‘design thinking’. The context is the design of a new building for the UTS
Business School, Sydney by architect Frank Gehry. User participation was
applied to engage stakeholders in ways that would produce valuable input for
managers as well as architects. We consider how architectural design and
organizational change are constructed and accomplished and to what extent
the manager’s approach can be considered ‘design thinking’. Our findings
suggest that while ‘design thinking’ may be one approach to managing
complex change processes, a deeper engagement between designers,
managers and users is needed.