Ideas: Design thinking: The buzzword everyone loves to get wrong

This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on November 10, 2025 - November 16, 2025

Somewhere in a boardroom near you, someone is saying: “We need to do design thinking.” It lands on the table like a magic spell. Heads nod. Post-its tremble in anticipation. Someone in human resources quietly googles “design thinking training near me” before the biscuits run out.

Like “synergy” in the 1990s or “pivot” in the age of start-ups, design thinking has gone full buzzword. It has the aura of something edgy and Silicon Valley-approved, but also safe enough to be printed on a glossy corporate brochure. Which is exactly why it is so consistently misunderstood.

The truth is that design thinking has become the avocado toast of the innovation world. Everyone orders it. Few know why.

The first great myth is that design thinking is nothing more than sticky notes and Sharpies.

We have all seen the crime scene. Walls plastered with neon Post-its, each one marked with a frantic scrawl: Empowerment! Blockchain! Cats as a service? The session ends. Selfies are taken. Then nothing happens. The Post-its curl up, the Sharpies dry out and the problem remains just as tangled as before.

The props are not the process. They are window dressing. Without the deeper work, it is theatre with props.

The second myth is that design thinking is only for creative types, the café-dwelling hipsters with their sketchbooks and cortados. But design thinking is not about job title or wardrobe. It is about mindset. Teachers can use it to rethink classrooms. Bankers can use it to rethink financial services. Policymakers can use it to design systems that real humans can actually use without feeling like they have walked into a maze with no exits.

The cult of fast fixes

Another misconception is that design thinking delivers instant genius. Somewhere, there is always a consultancy promising that a two-hour design thinking workshop will transform your business. In reality, it is less microwave popcorn and more slow-cooked stew. Yes, it starts with sparks of creativity. But then comes the graft of testing, failing, iterating. Design thinking is not a hack. It is a habit.

And then there is the belief that it is all about ideas. Wrong. Ideas are easy. Humans generate thousands of them a day, most of them bad and some probably illegal. The real work of design thinking isn’t about the “what ifs” — it’s about the “who for”. Who needs this? What do they actually care about? It is empathy before imagination. You do not start with the lightbulb moment. You start by checking whether anyone is sitting in the dark.

What it actually is

So let’s scrape away the buzzword frosting and get to the cake. At its core, design thinking is a way of solving problems that begins with people, not with PowerPoint.

It starts with empathy, though not the soft-focus, hold-hands kind. It is the gritty business of understanding what users actually need. Sit with them. Watch them. Ask the obvious questions, the ones everyone else is too polite to ask. It is the hard graft of listening before leaping.

It continues with prototyping. Not glossy slide decks, but ugly, rough, cardboard-cut-out versions of solutions. Things you can test quickly. Things you expect to fail. The uglier, the better, because ugly is cheap and disposable.

And it thrives on iteration. The willingness to admit you are wrong, to scrap the precious idea, to try again. This, more than anything, is what makes design thinking rare in corporate boardrooms. Ego is cheap. Humility is expensive.

In the end, it is structured curiosity. A structured way of tackling problems that avoids the easy slide into buzzwords and box-ticking.

Why it matters

For the entrepreneur, design thinking is an insurance policy against wasting years building beautiful solutions to problems nobody actually has.

For the corporate manager, it is a way of forcing the gaze back where it belongs, which is the customer. Not the key performance indicator dashboard. Not the quarterly report. Not the boss’ pet idea. The actual human being on the other side.

For government and policy folk, it offers a chance to avoid the sort of systems where citizens need a PhD just to fill in a tax form. Imagine a welfare service designed by people who had to actually use it. Now there’s a radical thought.

And in everyday life, it is surprisingly practical. Even deciding what to cook for fussy children can be reframed as a design problem. What do they need? What would they test? How quickly can you turn spinach into something that passes for fun food? Congratulations, you are design thinking in your kitchen.

Cutting through the noise

Of course, there are criticisms. Design thinking has been hyped, abused, oversold and reduced to hashtags and workshop selfies. Yes, some workshops are little more than theatre, a kind of corporate improv comedy with bonus stationery.

But here is the thing. Behind the Post-its, the buzz and the consultancy fees, there is still something powerful. Because most of our biggest problems are messy, human and badly defined. And design thinking remains one of the best tools we have for untangling that mess.

Done badly, it is a colourful distraction. Done well, it changes how organisations work, how products are built and how problems are solved.

Extra time

So, what to do with this avocado-toast buzzword. The answer is to use it, but use it properly.

Next time someone in your office suggests “doing design thinking”, do not roll your eyes. Or rather, roll them knowingly, then roll up your sleeves. Ask who are the people we are solving for? What do they actually need? How can we test fast, fail cheap and learn quickly?

Because design thinking is not a religion, not a silver bullet or a box of stationery. It is simply a better way of making sure we solve the right problems in ways that actually work for people. Used well, it can help us build services, products and systems that actually work. Used badly, well … at least it keeps the Post-it sales figure healthy.

Ahmad Azuar Zainuddin is CEO of Satu Creative, a consultancy working with Asean start-ups and social enterprises to drive inclusive growth and sustainable impact

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