Design thinking begins with understanding the people affected by the problem. This initial phase is commonly associated with empathy, discovery, or exploration. The practitioner investigates what users actually experience, need, value, and struggle with before defining or designing a solution.

Methods may include interviews, observation, contextual inquiry, journey mapping, and other approaches that reveal user behaviors and unmet needs. Beginning with user understanding reduces the risk that designers will solve the wrong problem or build a solution based primarily on internal assumptions.

Generating ideas occurs only after the problem and user context have been understood sufficiently. Prototyping follows ideation and allows promising concepts to be represented and tested. Storytelling may later help communicate findings or build support for a proposed solution, but it is not the first activity.

For talent development professionals, design thinking can be applied to learning experiences, performance-support systems, employee experiences, and organizational problems. Its human-centered orientation encourages practitioners to investigate the learner or stakeholder experience before committing resources to a solution.

Study Guide Topics: Design thinking; empathy; discovery; human-centered problem solving; decision-making.

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