By Jim McFie, a Fellow of ICPAK
It Works by Taking an Approach from A Human Point of View
Many people claim that, today, we live in a fast-paced business environment; I do not agree with this claim, because if you really apply yourself in any activity, it is always fast-paced and has always been so, whether it be studying, running, swimming, playing a sport, carrying out the normal activities of each day or getting business done in an efficient and economical way. But let us go along with the claim to get to what is called design thinking. Design thinking offers a powerful methodology for business leaders to develop impactful products, services, and processes. By focusing on human needs, design thinking ensures that solutions are technologically feasible, economically viable, and deeply relevant to the people they serve. Design thinking is a problem-solving methodology that can deliver the most unexpected solutions to all sorts of issues. Design thinking has a human-centered core. It encourages organizations to focus on the people they are serving, which leads to better products, services, and processes. When you sit down to create a solution for a business need, the first question should always be what is the human need behind it? Design thinking is totally focused on human beings: their experiences, their difficulties, their desires, their needs and all that concerns the person using the product or service being developed. Empathy is of the essence. Additionally, while it acknowledges the value of rational-linear thinking, it encourages creativity and instincts to come into play. A combination of both approaches, the rational and the emotional, going from the rational to the emotional and going back to the rational, taking turns throughout the process is what makes it unique. David Kelley, the founder of Ideo, a global design company, states that: “The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you are trying to design for. Leadership is exactly the same thing – building empathy for the people that you are entrusted to help.”
The design thinking process works by taking an approach from a human point of view and combining it with what is technologically and economically feasible. In this “ideation” approach, a business can bring in creativity from all areas of a business to brainstorm ideas and not “silo” it to just designers. Some examples of design thinking organizations include Google, Airbnb and Apple. However, design thinking can be applied to many different sectors, such as business, government, nonprofit, among others. What makes design thinking different is its solution-based methodology. The user-centric nature of the approach means that the focus is on the solution to the problem, rather than the problem itself. A company struggling with getting workers into the office would, for example, focus its problem-solving on engaging those employees rather than solving the problem: the problem is a decrease in productivity; workers are more productive in the office. A design thinking team might be made up of professionals in a range of different fields such as graphic design, architecture, industrial design, entrepreneurs, researchers and more. The human-centered design is the crux of design thinking. It is about the user and engaging different stakeholders across a business to think about asking questions, including: Who will be using the product? How will the product or solution impact the user?
Design Thinking consists of a number of stages. There are a number of linear steps, but in practice the design thinking process is not always linear. Some of these steps may happen several times, and you may even jump back and forth between them. Moving through the phases of design thinking can take you from a blank slate to a new, innovative solution. The first stage is to frame a question: identify a driving question that inspires others to search for creative solutions. Then gather inspirations: create new thinking by discovering what people really need. Then synthesize for action: really think about the diverse information gathered to identify a strategic focus. The next stage is to generate possible solutions but get past obvious solutions to get to breakthrough ideas. Then make ideas tangible: develop rough prototypes to learn how to make ideas better. Then test to learn: refine ideas by gathering feedback and experimenting forward. Then share the story: create a human story to inspire others toward action.
When done correctly, design thinking will help you understand the mindsets and needs of the people you are producing for, creating opportunities based on needs, and lead you to innovative new solutions starting with quick, low-fidelity experiments that provide learning and gradually increase in fidelity.
How can accountants use design thinking? For the accountant, design thinking is a client centric process used by “designers” for creative problem solving. You must use the “designer’s” toolkit like empathy, intuition, systemic reasoning and experimentation to arrive at innovative solutions that benefit the end user or the customer. I remember a situation when I drafted a letter to the KRA for a client: when I consulted the tax partner about the letter, he said “I see you are trying to blind the KRA with science”: but the letter was merely based on the contents of the Income Tax Act. Finance is increasingly being called upon to provide effective business decision support. For many traditionally trained accounting and finance professionals, that request is a big ask. Understanding and influencing the entire value creation cycle of the business is not something that accountants are accustomed to. Instead, many accounting and finance teams are comfortable working in financial reporting roles. As businesses increasingly leverage new technologies to automate rules-based, transactional and repetitive tasks for a fraction of the full-time employee salary, it is only a matter of time before some finance team members become an endangered species. Stanbic Bank Kenya, driven by its digitization plans, laid off 88 employees in 2020 and a further 40 in 2024; a number of those members of staff left under a voluntary early retirement scheme. Accounting, financial reporting, taxation, and auditing are all compliance-focused. So it is easy for accountants to develop a box-ticking mindset. Having such a mindset will not help differentiate the business from its competitors and create a competitive advantage. Financial reporting or any other compliance tasks are important. But compliance activities do not develop innovative thinking. In the book “The Design of Business”, the author Roger Martin points out that one of the reasons many businesses face a struggle to innovate and create value for their stakeholders is because of an increased reliance on analytical thinking versus intuitive thinking. Analytical thinking involves senior management basing strategy on rigorous, quantitative analysis, and today, optimally backed by decision support software. Intuitive thinking is centered on the primacy of creativity and innovation, the art of knowing without reasoning. Businesses need to seek a balance or reconciliation of the two ways of thinking. Often finance transformation initiatives are driven by cost reduction strategies. The focus is on squeezing out as much slack as possible to achieve improved efficiency. For example: CFOs view new finance software as an opportunity to reduce employee numbers and cut costs, not as an opportunity to relieve finance teams of rudimentary tasks and focus on initiatives that require critical thinking.
“Designers” are accustomed to working collaboratively with ad-hoc teams and clearly defined goals in a projected-oriented environment. Rather than waiting until the outcome is right, “designers” expose their clients to a series of prototypes that improve with each iteration. Considering that finance business partnering extends beyond traditional month-end reporting tasks and involves working on various business-related projects, sharing performance insights and creating value, CFOs should therefore foster a culture that supports project-based work and explicitly make it clear that working on a project is no less important or rewarded than running a business segment. It is therefore imperative that finance business partners acquire design thinking capabilities that can help them develop a detailed and holistic understanding of their internal customers’ needs and frustrations, and serve them better by formulating and recommending creative and actionable solutions that deliver the desired outcomes. Equally important too is having the courage to elicit feedback from business partners, develop mastery of the value proposition model and deliver improved solutions. That is the challenge I leave with you: engage in root cause analysis to deliver design thinking.
