Asian Journal of Management

The trendy acronym VUCA, short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, is what people and organizations alike are living, breathing and navigating through every moment. Businesses are unable to see what lies around the next corner, let alone months or years down the line. The digital disruption is overturning incumbents and reshaping markets; it is redefining industries and business models; redesigning products and services; and rewriting people (customer, employee, and stakeholder) expectations and experiences. To add to the woes, prosumers, are increasingly collaborating and sharing goods and services in globally distributed networked creative commons at near zero marginal costs disrupting the working of capitalist markets.

The slogan “innovate or die, ” is becoming true for many brands, but innovation and creativity do not come easy. As a result, businesses today, aspire to ‘think’ like designers and apply the design principles to address ‘evershifting’ problems and to excel in the workplace. Today design is about customer adoption and experience, market relevance, and meaningful results.

The article proposes using design thinking and service design, a practical and proven technique for these companies to change their trajectory and set the stage for innovation and drive growth. It does by bridging the gap between what companies know (strategy, data, analytics, insights) and do (products, services, interactions) with what they should be doing (empathy, context, content, convenience, conversations, connect, engage).