Effective leadership is essential to driving organisational success, but the challenges leaders face today make leadership more demanding than ever. From disengaged teams and shifting customer expectations to rapid technological developments, leaders are navigating complex, interconnected, and often ambiguous problems.
These new challenges require new ways of thinking, and leaders are increasingly seeking innovative approaches to leadership. To lead effectively in today’s environment, managers need a structured yet flexible approach to solving problems. This is where design thinking becomes a powerful tool for leadership, helping managers tackle complex challenges with clarity, creativity, and purpose.
Using Design Thinking to Navigate Modern Leadership
Design thinking is a “systemic, intuitive, customer-focused problem-solving approach that organisations can use to respond to rapidly changing environments and to create maximum impact”.
While the concept originates from design fields, it is now widely applied in management and leadership as an effective approach to navigating complex challenges.
McKinsey found that organisations that applied design thinking grew revenue and shareholder value at nearly twice the rate of their industry peers. Similarly, Forbes notes that “leaders who think like product designers – who listen deeply, iterate often and shape intentional systems – will be the ones who create lasting impact”.
Leaders who embrace design thinking are better equipped to adapt and lead with purpose, particularly in environments where change is constant and solutions are rarely straightforward. More than a creative exercise, design thinking provides a practical framework for solving the ambiguous problems leaders face every day.
By encouraging leaders to pause, empathise, test assumptions, and prototype solutions before scaling, design thinking shifts problem-solving from reactive decision-making to thoughtful, evidence-informed action. Modern organisational challenges are rarely linear; they involve people, processes and systems operating simultaneously. Design thinking, therefore, offers a structured yet flexible approach to navigating this complexity with greater confidence and impact.
Building Design Thinking Capability
Here at the University of Leeds our Design Thinking: Developing Innovative Solutions course supports learners in developing practical design thinking skills that can be applied directly to leadership contexts. Through interactive exercises, learners gain the tools to approach challenges systematically, frame problems more effectively, and generate innovative, human-centred solutions.
Investing in design thinking capability equips leaders not only to respond to today’s challenges, but to shape organisations that create lasting impact.