“Hi Greg

Firstly, totally agree with Juho, Kam and Peter’s thoughts. At IDEO Design Thinking lives in the strategic world where we use design methods to find the right question and begin to answer it. Agile is lives in the software world where once a question is asked teams iterate toward a solution.

It’s worth digging into the origin stories for Design Thinking and Agile as, although they are both converging on the same challenges today, they come from quite different places:

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is the decoupling of Design from any specific toolset (Industrial Design, Architecture, Graphic Design) and recognising that the process can be applied to any problem space.

Design Thinking has also become synonymous with Human Centred Design; this link is largely due to the work of people inside Stanford and IDEO in the late 80s / early 90s. Design in this context is the cyclical process of defining a future state and then working backwards to connect to the current state (hence why terms like ‘reverse engineering’ and ‘post rationalisation’ are so common in design).

This jumping forwards and backwards between what’s possible, what’s wanted, and what makes money is the essence of design. I use the word ‘jumping’ here deliberately as no matter how many three-way venn diagrams, squiggly lines or metaphors we use it’s essentially a foggy process, where consensus and confidence only emerges by jumping forward (prototyping, brainstorming, sketching) and then jumping backward (synthesis, storytelling, reporting).

Agile

Agile is a methodology for developing software, and its properties are borne of software itself. To many it’s the antidote to Waterfall development (or Engineering as it’s otherwise known). The Waterfall / Engineering process is entirely appropriate for the production of hardware — but it turns out to be almost entirely wrong for software.

With hardware, the cost of making changes becomes increasingly expensive as a you move closer towards production; with software, or specifically object oriented software (basically all software since the 1970s) the implication of changing elements is less costly. This is further magnified by ‘always-on’ internet connectivity which means that updates to software can now be pushed to users as often as the software developer desires.

The Agile Manifesto embraces this notion of perpetual beta and that software should be developed with a continuous loop of customer needs going in and ‘good enough’ software coming out.

This state of continuous refinement is ultimately the same as design’s process of jumping backward and forward. The only difference is that with design we stay in this state for the duration of the project, whereas in Agile we stay in this state for the lifetime of the software.

Lean

Its also worth talking about Lean and Lean Startup (which are different things).

Lean builds on Agile.

Where Agile promotes autonomy of teams and continuous process, Lean further emphasises efficiency along the way (less waste, move quickly, have awareness of the bigger picture). These are again familiar concepts for design teams which leads to blurring between Lean and Design Thinking.

Lean Startup takes the methodology and applies it to building companies. It’s where the infamous Build/Measure/Learn loop comes from and it essentially borrows software paradigms and uses them in the world of business. It works so well because:

All new businesses are software businesses

(see Software Is Eating The World) and Software tools are increasingly democratised. Naturally this means that designers have access to the tools previous only accessible to software engineers — which is means that software people, design people and business people are all using the same tools.

[So, to answer the original question: how does IDEO differentiate the Design Thinking process from Agile?]

Similarities (between Design Thinking and Agile)