Design Thinking in Executive Education: When the Parts are Greater than the Whole

Abstract

Research on design thinking education at business schools has mostly been concerned with practical issues of implementation, the efficacy of teaching design processes, and participant cognition. Rarely have studies looked at how design thinking techniques and skills gained might translate from the business classroom into the workplace. To close this gap, we turned to situated learning theory and studied how senior managers experience design thinking education and attempt to relate it to their communities of practice at work. We compared custom and open-enrollment executive education courses and found that any uptake depended more on the idiosyncratic workplace situation than on the willingness of senior managers to employ design thinking. As a consequence, few managers were able to employ the whole process, and most managers rather transferred parts and perspectives of what they had learned. Our research has relevance for the larger debate of the efficacy of design thinking for management and offers an explanation for the discrepancy between how design thinking is taught and how it is practiced.