Weighing Catherine Courage's Design Thinking

Catherine Courage, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience, leads the shift at Citrix - from (a) dreaming up technology and delivery technology simply for the sake of technology, to (b) building a deeper empathy for customers and creating products and solutions that meet their actual needs.

This is not new thinking at all, but the fact that a renowned consultancy like McKinsey highlights it suggests that companies are still far far from adopting it, let alone grasp what it truly means.  As I argued in Part 2 - Making the Future, CEOs and their people may find themselves trapped in The Dilemma of Self-Centeredness, and not even know it.

Courage distinguishes the design thinking approach that she and her team adopts, from others who start with the problem, which they have an intuition about, and race toward a solution.  To me, starting with a problem, or an issue, challenge or objective, is actually a fine thing to do.

But to her point, Theory of Algorithms and The Core Algorithm emphasize focusing on the problem without preconceived notions and without a toolkit of solutions clambering to be used.  Instead, like design thinking, my conceptual framework and practical applications model work at engaging others - seek first to understand, then to be understood - for example, via an algorithm I call Galileo (Human) Algorithm, which counters Self-Centeredness.