Design Thinking: A Practitioner's Guide to Human-Centred Innovation

By Allan Ung, Operational Excellence Consulting

Updated on 09 April 2026

Participants from Cisco and DHL at a Customer Journey Mapping workshop facilitated by Operational Excellence Consulting at the DHL Asia Pacific Innovation Center, Tampines Logistics Park, Singapore — mapping the end-to-end customer experience from order creation through parts and repair management.

Allan Ung is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Operational Excellence Consulting, a Singapore-based firm established in 2009. A veteran practitioner with over 30 years of experience — including senior leadership roles at IBM, Microsoft, and Underwriters Laboratories — Allan specialises in bridging the gap between human-centred discovery and operational execution. As a Design Thinking Coach and Certified Management Consultant (Japan), he moves beyond post-it notes to help organisations prototype and scale solutions that are both desirable for users and lean in their delivery. His unique approach integrates Design Thinking with the rigour of Lean Six Sigma and Systems Thinking, and has been applied by organisations including Integrated Health Information Systems, ST Electronics (Satcom & Sensor Systems), PSA, Cisco, Vermeg, Walldorf Consulting, Hai Sia Seafood, and global leaders across 50+ countries.

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Introduction: Why Most Innovation Initiatives Stall

Most organisations don't have an ideas problem. They have an empathy problem.

Teams generate solutions based on what they assume customers need, build elaborate business cases for those assumptions, and launch products or services that technically work — but fail to resonate. The root cause is rarely poor execution. It is that the problem was never properly understood in the first place.

Design Thinking addresses this at the source. It is a human-centred, iterative problem-solving methodology that puts deep customer understanding before solution generation. Unlike conventional analytical approaches that move linearly from problem to solution, Design Thinking is cyclical — it circles back, reframes, prototypes, and tests until a solution emerges that is simultaneously desirable to the people who will use it, technically feasible, and financially viable.

This guide draws on over 30 years of practitioner experience and real workshop delivery for organisations across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, public sector, and technology. It covers not just the five-step process, but the mindsets that make it work — and the common pitfalls that cause it to fail.

What Design Thinking Is — and What It Is Not

Tim Brown of IDEO defines Design Thinking as "a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success."

That definition is useful, but it understates one important thing: Design Thinking is as much a mindset as a process. Without the right attitude — genuine curiosity about users, willingness to embrace ambiguity, comfort with early failure — the five-step process becomes a mechanical checklist that produces the same conventional thinking it was designed to displace.

Design Thinking is not:

• A brainstorming session (it requires sustained research before ideas are generated)

• A one-day process (real problems require multiple iterations across days or weeks)

• Only for designers or creatives (it is a structured discipline for any leader, manager, or team)

• A replacement for analytical rigour (it complements Lean, Six Sigma, and systems thinking — it does not substitute for them)

• A silver bullet for every problem (it is most powerful when the problem has strong human dimensions, unclear requirements, or rapidly changing context)

Design Thinking is most valuable when:

• Problems are poorly defined or symptoms are being mistaken for root causes

• The solution requires a deep understanding of user needs that cannot be derived from data alone

• Teams need to test multiple possible solutions before committing resources to one

• Services or experiences need to be reimagined rather than just improved incrementally

The designer paradox — where what the customer asked for, what management approved, and what the team built all diverge entirely — is one of the most expensive recurring failures in product and service development. Design Thinking exists to prevent it.

The Three Lenses of Human-Centred Design

Before walking through the five steps, it is worth understanding the evaluative lens through which Design Thinking judges every solution. IDEO's framework asks three questions simultaneously:

Desirability — What do people actually want and need? Not what they say they want, and not what we assume they want, but what their behaviour, emotions, and unarticulated frustrations reveal.

Feasibility — What is technically and organisationally possible within real constraints? A solution that is desirable but impossible to deliver at scale has no value.

Viability — What can be financially sustained? A solution that is desirable and feasible but economically unsustainable will not outlast the pilot.

The power of Design Thinking is in finding solutions at the intersection of all three. Solutions that are only desirable are innovations that never scale. Solutions that are only feasible are products nobody wants. Solutions that are only viable are cost-optimised but miss the customer entirely.

The Five Mindsets of a Design Thinker

The five-step process is the visible structure of Design Thinking. The five mindsets are what determine whether it works.

1. Think users first. Every design decision is checked against what the end user actually experiences. This means stepping out of the office, engaging with real people, and resisting the temptation to substitute internal opinions for user insights. The traits to avoid: staying in your cubicle, ignoring customer feedback, and prioritising business objectives over human needs.

2. Ask the right questions. Design Thinking advances through questioning — of assumptions, of constraints, of the problem statement itself. The most important skill is asking why, repeatedly, until the underlying human need is exposed rather than the surface complaint. The five question types — opening, navigating, examining, experimenting, and closing — each serve a different purpose across the process.

3. Believe you can draw. Visualisation is the language of a design thinker. Drawing ideas, journeys, and problems forces clarity and creates shared understanding across a team faster than words alone. You do not need to be an artist. You need to make your thinking visible.

4. Commit to explore. There is always more than one solution. Design Thinking requires the discipline to generate many options before evaluating any of them — diverging fully before converging. Teams that jump to the first plausible solution skip the creative tension where better answers emerge.

5. Prototype to test. Build more, talk less. Ideas become real when they are made tangible, even roughly. The willingness to fail early and often, to build a paper prototype and learn from it before investing in implementation, is what separates organisations that iterate their way to great solutions from those that launch expensively and retreat quietly.

The Five-Step Design Thinking Process

Step 1: Empathise — Understand Before You Solve

"76% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations." — Salesforce Research

The empathise phase is the foundation of everything that follows. Its objective is to develop a genuine, grounded understanding of the people you are designing for — not a demographic profile, but an experiential understanding of what they think, feel, see, hear, say, do, and the pains and gains that drive their behaviour.

The primary tools are observation, engagement, and immersion. Watch users in context without judging. Conduct interviews that ask how and why rather than what. Immerse yourself in their environment when possible.

The wallet exercise is a powerful way to introduce empathise in a workshop setting. Participants are first asked to design their ideal wallet from their own perspective. They then pair up, interview their partner about how they actually use a wallet — their habits, frustrations, what they carry and why — and redesign based on that conversation. The results are almost always more creative and more practical than the original self-directed design. The lesson is visceral: you cannot design well for yourself. You must design for the person.

Workshop participants conduct peer interviews during the empathise phase of a Design Thinking session — the wallet exercise, where each person redesigns a wallet for their partner based on an interview rather than their own assumptions, makes the shift from inside-out to outside-in thinking immediate and visceral.

The deliverables of this phase are personas — fictional but research-grounded profiles of target user segments — and empathy maps, which synthesise what users think and feel, what they see and hear, and what pains and gains shape their experience.

Google Glass is the canonical counter-example. A technically remarkable product, it failed because its designers lacked empathy for how users would actually experience it — the social awkwardness of voice commands in public, the privacy concerns it raised for bystanders, the absence of a clear user need it addressed.

Singapore Airlines applied empathise at scale when redesigning its SilverKris lounges. By observing and engaging with lounge users across 15 cities, designers discovered customers wanted distinct personal spaces, personalised service, and a genuine sense of arrival rather than a generic transit experience. The result was a "home away from home" concept that brought the in-flight experience to the ground.

Step 2: Define — Frame the Right Problem

The define phase converts empathy research into a clear, actionable problem statement. This is where most teams shortcut, rushing from research to solution without crystallising what problem actually needs to be solved.

The key output is the Point of View (POV) statement, which takes the form: [User] needs [need] because [insight]. It is more precise than a problem statement because it anchors the design challenge in a specific human truth rather than an organisational objective.

Complementing the POV is the How Might We (HMW) question — a reframe of the POV into an open-ended challenge that invites creative solutions without prescribing them. "How might we help frequent business travellers feel genuinely at home during long connections?" is a fundamentally different starting point for ideation than "How do we increase lounge utilisation?"

Additional tools include stakeholder maps (understanding who else is affected by and has influence over the user's experience), context maps (understanding the broader forces — social, technological, economic — shaping the problem), and customer journey maps (visualising the end-to-end user experience to identify moments of truth, pain points, and opportunities).

The quality of the define phase determines the quality of everything that follows. A poorly framed problem produces clever solutions to the wrong question.

Step 3: Ideate — Generate Before You Evaluate

With a clear POV and HMW in hand, ideation is the phase of expansive creative generation. The discipline here is diverge first, converge later. No idea is rejected during generation. Volume is the goal — from quantity comes quality.

Ideation tools include classic brainstorming (when properly facilitated), affinity mapping (clustering ideas by theme to reveal patterns and priorities), SCAMPER (a structured provocation technique), and brainwriting (written ideation for teams where some members are inhibited by verbal dynamics).

The moment to converge — to evaluate, prioritise, and select — comes only after the ideation session is complete. Dot voting, impact-feasibility matrices, and prioritisation maps help teams make informed selections from a rich field of possibilities.

At a Cisco and DHL Customer Journey Mapping workshop facilitated at the DHL Asia Pacific Innovation Center in Singapore, teams representing both the customer (Cisco) and its logistics partner (DHL) simultaneously mapped the end-to-end experience from order creation through parts and repair management. Three teams, each working from a distinct customer persona, built empathy maps and identified the moments in the journey where the experience broke down.

Cisco manager Dominic Arevalo noted that the workshop "provides a good framework to address the CX initiatives and meet NPS and CX satisfaction."

DHL's Carlos Sebastian added that it "builds your brand or helps you how to do it."

The PSA Innovation Festival 2018 brought a similar collaborative dynamic, with OEC facilitating a Business Model Canvas workshop for PSA Singapore's managers as part of a broader innovation programme.

Nelson Quek, Head of Tuas Development, observed that "our staff has benefited from the insights shared and gained new perspectives."

Step 4: Prototype — Make Ideas Tangible

Prototyping is where Design Thinking separates itself most clearly from conventional strategy and innovation processes. Rather than planning extensively before acting, Design Thinking builds rough representations of ideas quickly and cheaply to learn from them.

The prototype can take many forms — a paper mock-up, a cardboard construction, a storyboard, a role-play, a wireframe, or a simple service blueprint drawn on a whiteboard. The purpose is not to produce a polished product. It is to make the idea concrete enough that users can react to it and the team can learn from that reaction.

The critical mindset here — prototype to test — means accepting that the first prototype will almost certainly be wrong. This is not a failure. It is the point. Every learning from a rough prototype costs a fraction of what the same learning would cost after full implementation.

Teams collaborate on rapid prototyping during a Design Thinking workshop — using paper, cardboard, and sticky notes to make ideas tangible quickly, gather user feedback, and iterate before committing resources to implementation.

Chua Wee Lead from ST Electronics (Satcom & Sensor Systems), following a two-day Design Thinking workshop facilitated by OEC, reflected: "Learn different methods to generate ideas (diverge) and select (converge) ideas."

The action-oriented session — which included building paper prototypes and conducting peer interviews — gave the team tools they could immediately apply to real organisational and customer challenges.

Step 5: Test — Learn, Refine, Repeat

Testing closes the loop by returning solutions to real users for feedback. The objective is not to validate what the team has built but to learn what needs to be changed. This requires genuinely listening to user reactions, including uncomfortable ones.

Testing tools include structured user interviews, observation (watching how users interact with the prototype without guiding them), and evaluation maps that document feedback and proposed refinements. The output feeds back into any earlier phase — sometimes revealing that the problem was defined incorrectly, sometimes uncovering a user need that was missed in the empathise phase, sometimes producing a small insight that transforms the prototype into something far more effective.

At Hai Sia Seafood's Customer Journey Mapping workshop in Singapore, employees mapped the onboarding journey of new hires as their design challenge — using persona creation, empathy mapping, and journey mapping to understand how new team members experienced their first weeks.

Natalie Quah from the Commercial department reflected: "I have a better view of the whole company process, and it's important to understand how the customer thinks and sees us."

The workshop empowered employees to translate insights directly into service improvement actions.

The workshop for the Integrated Health Information Systems applied the same human-centred discipline to the healthcare context, where understanding the patient and clinician experience with precision is critical to designing systems that improve rather than impede care delivery.

Design Thinking and the Broader Innovation System

Design Thinking does not operate in isolation. In OEC's practice, it functions as part of an integrated innovation and improvement system.

Lean Thinking provides the operational discipline to implement solutions in a waste-free, sustainable way. When Design Thinking identifies what to build, Lean determines how to build and deliver it efficiently — eliminating steps that don't add user value, designing standard work that sustains the new service, and building the management systems that prevent backsliding.

Systems Thinking extends the lens beyond individual user interactions to the broader system in which those interactions occur — the interdependencies, feedback loops, and unintended consequences that a purely user-centred view can miss. A service that delights individual users but creates downstream systemic problems has not been fully designed.

Critical Thinking using OEC's innovative 4-lens model provides the analytical rigour to evaluate ideas, challenge assumptions, and stress-test solutions against evidence. Creativity without critical evaluation produces enthusiasm but not necessarily progress.

The most durable innovations — the ones that organisations can sustain and scale — come from the integration of all four disciplines: Design Thinking to identify the right problem and human-centred solution; Lean to implement it without waste; Systems Thinking to understand its broader context; and Critical Thinking to evaluate it rigorously.

Design Thinking in Practice: The OEC Approach

After facilitating Design Thinking workshops across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, public sector, and technology clients in Singapore and across Asia, several consistent patterns emerge:

The wallet exercise never fails. Without exception, participants are surprised by how different their partner's needs are from their own. This single exercise, taking less than 60 minutes, shifts the team's orientation from inside-out to outside-in more effectively than any amount of instruction.

The define phase is where most real work gets done. Teams are eager to ideate. The discipline of forcing a clear, user-grounded POV statement before generating ideas is where facilitators earn their fee. A well-crafted HMW question can double the quality of ideation output.

90% satisfaction is achievable but requires full commitment. At the Cisco-DHL workshop, 90% of participants expressed satisfaction. At Hai Sia Seafood, participants left energised and with concrete next steps.

At ST Electronics, Genny Pang reflected that "the methodology can help me to solve difficult problems."

These results come from full, hands-on immersion — not lecture-based instruction.

Speed matters more than polish. The fastest path to a good solution is a rough prototype tested quickly, not a perfect prototype launched slowly. The design thinking tools — paper, post-its, cardboard, sharpies — are deliberately low-tech to reinforce this principle.

Further Learning: The Design Thinking Cluster

This article is part of OEC's Design Thinking and Human-Centred Innovation cluster. Related practitioner guides and resources:

Cluster articles:

• Customer Journey Mapping: A Practitioner's Guide — The five-step CJM process in detail: personas, empathy maps, journey maps, and how to turn insights into service improvements

• Human-Centred Systems Thinking — Extending human-centred design into complex, interconnected systems where individual user insights must be understood in their broader context

• Systems Thinking — Building the capability to understand feedback loops, interdependencies, and unintended consequences that shape how organisations function

• Critical Thinking: The 4-Lens Model — OEC's integrated framework for rigorous analytical evaluation: the discipline that keeps creativity grounded in reality

Training courses and workshops:

• Design Thinking Workshop

• Human-Centered Systems Thinking Workshop

• Service Design Workshop

• Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

Training presentations:

• Design Thinking Training Presentation & Practitioner Toolkit

• Customer Journey Mapping Training Presentation & Practitioner Toolkit

• Service Design Training Presentation

• Business Model Canvas Training Presentation

• Human-Centred Systems Thinking Training Presentation

About the Author

Allan Ung is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Operational Excellence Consulting, a Singapore-based firm established in 2009. With over 30 years of experience, Allan specialises in the intersection of human-centred innovation and operational discipline. While his roots are in manufacturing-intensive environments, he has pioneered a "Design-to-Delivery" approach that ensures creative solutions are both desirable for users and sustainable within complex systems.

As a Design Thinking Coach and Certified Management Consultant (CMC, Japan), Allan helps organisations move beyond ideation to tangible impact. His expertise spans Lean Thinking, Total Quality Management (TQM), and Systems Thinking, providing a pragmatic framework that allows teams to prototype, test, and scale innovations rapidly.

In senior regional and global roles at IBM, Microsoft, and Underwriters Laboratories, Allan led cross-border operational transformations that balanced technical efficiency with human-centred service design. He has facilitated Design Thinking, Lean, and Quality programmes for diverse organisations, including Ministry of Social & Family Development, Integrated Health Information Systems, ST Electronics (Satcom & Sensor Systems), Ministry of Education, Health Sciences Authority, PSA, Cisco, Vermeg, Walldorf Consulting, Tokyo Electron, Panasonic, Sika Group, Toyota Tsusho, Fugro Subsea Technologies, Lam Research, and NEC.

Allan holds a Bachelor of Engineering from the National University of Singapore and completed advanced consultancy training in Japan as a Colombo Plan scholar. He is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, JIPM-certified TPM Instructor, and TWI Master Trainer.

"True innovation is found at the intersection of empathy and discipline — identifying the right human problems through Design Thinking and solving them permanently through Lean execution."

His practitioner-led toolkits are used by managers across 50+ countries to build internal capability and drive sustainable organisational improvement.

👉 Learn more at: www.oeconsulting.com.sg

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Further Learning Resources  

Operational Excellence Consulting offers a full catalog of facilitation‑ready training presentations and practitioner toolkits designed to support leaders in driving innovation, aligning teams, and leading organizational transformation. These resources are developed from real workshops and executive programs, helping organizations embed strategic frameworks, strengthen leadership capability, and achieve sustainable growth.

👉 Explore the full library at: www.oeconsulting.com.sg