Interesting thoughts Ranjit. Thanks for sharing them. I will talk about both Design Thinking and Management Consulting in detail in future posts. However, let me state a couple of things.

1. I am not talking about professional roles. Like I wrote, “…I have used phrases such as “Think like a …Software Engineer / Product Designer / Process Expert / Management Consultant” instead of using words such as analytical thinking, design thinking, lean thinking and critical thinking to simply make it easier for us to imagine or visualize different types of thinking. This is not to suggest that a software engineer cannot or does not use design thinking or that other professions not referred to here ranging from building architects to accountants do not use these types of thinking.” So, you are right that a product designer may not necessarily come out with a new solution. On the other hand, the process of Design Thinking is best used when one needs to come out with a new solution. Design Thinking is not a high-throughput process. If the solution is already known, applying a lean or factory-based model might be more efficient. If I can draw a parallel, Peter Thiel contrasts O to 1 progress of invention from the 1 to n process of scaling. He calls them as Technology and Globalization respectively, categorizing Silicon Valley in the first bucket and China in the second. My experience is that Design Thinking is more useful for the 0 to 1 journey. Hence, I associate it with not only unknown problem, but also unknown solution.
2. In the Management Consulting examples cited by you, let’s talk through one of them, say, “How can you manage the refuge crisis in a sustainable manner?” This is a good example. As a management consultant, I would first ask the question, “Which problem do we have to solve? Is it how to stop more refugees from coming? Is it how to provide them a path to legal immigration? Is it how to provide education and healthcare for the refugees? Is is how to assist the neighboring country to be politically stable or economically developed so that their citizens don’t want to flee?” It can be a host of such questions. The crucial role of management consulting, in my opinion, to decide which of these questions needs an answer. You decide the order of priority based on data. Let’s say you decide that providing healthcare for refugees is one of the top problems to solve. If so, the answers one will look for will usually be the ones which are proven based on past experience elsewhere, rather than trying to come up with new innovative answers. Yes, just like a product designer may not necessarily design something new, it is quite possible that a management consultant does not find any leading practice to adopt and has to truly come out a new, innovative answer. However, in most cases, the majority of the effort should be decide which problems to prioritize based on data. Next to decide which proven answers one should adopt based on benchmarks. Of course, we will discuss this in more detail in subsequent articles.