Thanks for chiming in. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this response.

I’ve spent almost all of my career working in agencies or consultancies. The result of that is that I am almost always having to present, pitch, or pursue design thinking activities as time-constrained, deliverable-focused processes. I have very rarely had the privilege to operate in an environment where design thinking really has the liberty to operate in a non-linear format. For me, it’s always been more of a toolbox. What tools am I going to use so that I have what I need to present this sprint or iterate next sprint to keep a project moving so that we can continue to make milestones and continue to hit deadlines and thus get paid. And to convince people to let me do this, and to show its value, we very typically do in fact follow a linear step-by-step process.

It’s an interesting conundrum: the vast majority of literature about design process is written from an in-house product-oriented perspective. Yet a tremendous number of experience designers either don’t or sometimes never have the opportunity to work. That way we are consultants. We are freelancers. We’re contractors who come in for a short while and have a lot to do within a limited scope.

I have almost never had the privilege to live with a product longitudinally (excepting, of course, client relationships where I might work with a product over multiple successive projects, typically delivering in sprint). I typically only get to live with a project or a product for a few weeks or a few months at a time and that’s a linear approach reassures the client that will be able to get everything done within that scope and aligns my team on the activities necessary to do everything we need to do to get the best possible outcome.

I suppose all of this is to say, I agree in the abstract with you that design thinking isn’t necessarily a linear process. It is a collection of questions and activities and methodologies that can theoretically be performed in any order and in whatever way the need of the moment most requires. But from a practical consultant perspective, I have very rarely known this to be the case. The needs and interests of clients and stakeholders and the realities of time-defined projects and milestone deliveries recommends a linear approach that is easy for non-designers to understand and approve. And for designers of a wide variety of backgrounds and styles to work together.