Design Thinking as an Agile Panacea? Towards a Symbiotic Understanding of Design Thinking and Organizational Culture

This chapter seeks to explore the role of organizational culture in employing design thinking as an agile management tool and to reflect upon the benefits and challenges of doing so. The authors highlight the issue that the most difficult underlying task if design thinking is to succeed is to organize for self-organization and show that design thinking cannot be employed successfully if the organizational culture does not allow for such an agile management approach. Such a managerial approach is also most likely to be contingent upon an appropriate organizational culture. The chapter thus posits that the ‘one size fits all’ premise in terms of design thinking is unlikely to hold true in managerial practice.