"Companies that have placed design at the center of the organization perform better. It allows an organization to differentiate, fend off competitors, and charge a premium. The CEO can bring design into the center of the organization by elevating the role, quite simply, and by asking some questions: What is the title of our most senior designer? How often do we talk to our customers?

Organizational culture represents a crucial factor for the introduction of innovation throughout the organization via Design Thinking and agile way of working. Thus, the organization must establish a culture that encompasses a shared vision with values that create a commitment to learn, experiment and accept failure.

Boeing employees have learned, from hard-won experience, innovation at the scale of aerospace requires functional groups to work together.

Many Design Thinkers face the challenge of how to position and sell Design Thinking within their executive team. They face a number of issues from CEO buy-in to resource allocation for design thinking activities. There are two basic strategies that can be used to get buy in from the team.

In our recent design thinking survey, one of the most difficult things respondents found about design thinking was integrating it into their corporations. When not supported from the CEO on down, design thinking is unlikely to create real change for a corporation and this manifests itself in many ways as we saw from the survey.

The association asked respondents what they found the most difficult thing about Design Thinking in our July 2020 Survey. 11% of respondents replied that convincing their bosses/CEO/Executive Management was the most difficult thing.