The world is seeing more disruption than ever before! There is an urgent need for organisations to change and adapt; quickly and often. Add to this an unexpected event such as the COVID-19 induced worldwide recession of 2020 – 2021. If companies do not reinvent themselves and the way they do business, they may not survive!

The heavy processes associated with traditional change management are no longer helpful. In an ever changing world, organisations are fundamentally rethinking their product and service offerings, reinventing their supply chains, looking at large scale organisational restructuring and digital transformation.

Employees must acquire practical skills that will enable them to innovate at work. In the new world, each one of us is an entrepreneur that must be able to apply a lateral lens to the innovation challenges presented to us on a daily basis. We need to learn how to apply innovative thinking to desired business outcomes.

When you look at your business through the eyes of your customer, what do you see? This is what a design thinking approach to business is all about – creating ideas to address customers’ unique needs and desires. The world is viewed through a human-centric lens.

We must go beyond thinking about the product or service itself and ask what the human need is behind what is being offered. This deeper level of thinking is central to entrepreneurs and businesses that want to generate bold and innovative ideas. A business is successful if it adequately serves people by providing a solution to their needs.

Fundamental changes in the way we do business, consumer behaviour, supply chains and routes to market are knocking companies off balance. Companies need to adopt agile ways of working and innovate in order to out-manoeuvre uncertainty. They need to address current disruptions and to repurpose and reshape the way they operate.

The Design Thinking approach is an iterative process that helps us to understand our target market, challenges our own assumptions and redefines challenges and helps us find alternative strategies and solutions, that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. It is a solution-based approach to solving problems, a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods

Name of Training Provider: The LLC Academy
Website: llcacademy.co.za
Contact person: Eileen Thornhill