Increasing popularity of ‘design thinking’ and ‘human-centred design’ among business and managerial audiences has driven many employees and leaders of large, mature (and often semi-static) organizations toward self-serve online resources and executive training programs to learn the methods and tools that ‘promise’ transformational innovation and lucrative business outcomes. Despite interest in what those design methods may deliver in terms of tangible business outputs and revolutionary products, many organizations remain resistant to the complexity of ‘wicked’ design problems and the nonlinear processes for creative problem solving. Through partnering with an executive design education company to conduct participant-observation and ethnographic interviews, this research explores how employees express value in design thinking through paid educational/training engagements. By investigating people’s individual and collective understanding of design processes within the context of their organization, this research seeks to identify opportunities for organizations to invest in deep understanding (human-centred design, with a focus on problem finding and framing) toward sustainable innovation.

Keywords: human-centred design, HCD, design thinking, applied social science, organizational change, integral theory, cognitive model