How Design Thinking Can Help Leaders Enable Creativity In Others

Design thinking is a process of empathising with the end user, and one of its founding thinkers is David Kelley, who helped establish IDEO, a design and innovation company that has won more of the Business Week / ISDA Design Excellence Awards than any other firm. 
 
In a recent interview with Fast Company (entitled 'Designing Curious Employees') Kelley describes how he takes a similar approach to managing and leading people 

The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you are trying to design for. Leadership is exactly the same thing - building empathy for the people you are entrusted to help. If you want people to do extraordinary things, you really have to understand what they value. I'm trying to get people to remain confident in their creative ability. In order for them to do have that kind of creativity, you have to be very transparent. Understand them and involve them in the decision being made.

FranklinCovey has worked with IDEO to include some of their philosophy in our Synergy and Innovation work, but David Kelly's approach here also aligns closely with the mindsets and skillsets we develop in our Leadership Curriculum. To establish the right mindset about a leader's role in the first instance, the approach we take is to define leadership in terms of "the ability to recognise and affirm potential in others such that they come to see it for themselves". We then help leaders to develop practical skills such as empathic listening (which is very challenging for most to master in practice) and we also provide tools and structures which help them to have conversations with others which explore what it is that taps their talent, fuels their passion and meets the sense of contribution they would like to make.