I recently led a 2-day course in design thinking for DBA students of the School of Business and Management at Donghua University in Shanghai.

This course is delivered to a class of twelve executives from diverse industries such as finance, architecture & design, shopping mall & retail, education, charity, social services, industrial manufacturing services, AI and innovation research services.

The key word of the course is "change!" 改变!, a hard thing to do for humans.

The challenge is introducing design thinking to CEOs, Presidents and top managers. As design thinking facilitators, we all know too well that senior managers hardly step out of their role, and I am surprised to see how, after the first day spent in making acquaintance of the hand-on approach to the process, everyone accepted to take off her/his executive costume and get involved in empathizing, brainstorming, and prototyping new ideas.

The other challenge is finding a subject, question or problem common to the different activities and perspectives represented by this group of top managers and making it the “design” challenge to deal with as a team.

The survey done by the academic team at Donghua helps in finding out that the main concern for most of the students iss “how to deal with talent sourcing, management and motivation” and more generally with the “sense of belonging to a team and to a company”. What a better challenge for human centered design!

Our exchanges bring us to explore more in depth the needs of recognition and motivation in environments where the old and new work cultures collide, where Chinese and international know-how and approaches closely interact. It’s a vast topic and a very exciting one.

Many thanks to Doctor Ma Yong, Professor Xiehong Fu and Cui Wei Wei.