Ideo as an institution has rarely responded to critiques of design thinking or acknowledged its flaws. But at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Ideo partner and leader of its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office Michael Hendrix had a frank conversation with Co.Design senior writer Mark Wilson about why design thinking has gotten so much flack.

“I think it’s fair to critique design thinking, just as it’s fair to critique any other design strategy,” Hendrix says. “There’s of course many poor examples of design thinking, and there’s great examples. Just like there’s poor examples of industrial design and graphic design and different processes within organizations.”

Part of the problem is that many people use the design thinking methodology in superficial ways. Hendrix calls it the “theater of innovation.” Companies know they need to be more creative and innovative, and because they’re looking for fast ways to achieve those goals, they cut corners.

“We get a lot of the materials that look like innovation, or look like they make us more creative,” Hendrix says. “That could be anything from getting a bunch of Sharpie markers and Post-its and putting them in rooms for brainstorms, to having new dress codes, to programming play into the week. They all could be good tools to serve up creativity or innovation, they all could be methods of design thinking, but without some kind of history or strategy to tie them together, and track their progress, track their impact, they end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.'”

Hendrix recalls seeing a door near a client’s boardroom labeled with a sign reading, “creative thinking room/DVD storage.” It’s a perfect metaphor. Without the strategy and the discipline, the tools–like having a dedicated brainstorming room–ultimately won’t work. “Having access to the tools can be a little deceiving if you don’t understand how to use them in an appropriate way,” Hendrix says.

Part of the challenge of doing design thinking well, he argues, requires balancing the methodology’s structure, which allows designers to successfully and consistently tackle a wide range of problems, with the danger of that structure becoming too strict. “If you make something rigid and formulaic, it could absolutely fail,” he says. “You want to rely on milestones in the creative process, but you don’t want it to be a reactive process that loses its soul.”