
Designed Innovation is your agile podcast for your solo self-employment – and is published once a month.
As a solo self-employed person, I am a business journalist for insurance provision and real estate team and have a new business: I am active in consulting and coaching solo self-employed people based on design thinking.
I met Stefan Fortuin on Linkedin and had some very interesting conversations with him about design thinking and agile methods. I think he has a real plan and has also dealt with it very theoretically. I like that.
That’s why he’s a guest on my podcast. This episode is about how he is developing his own design thinking paradigm and the challenges that generally arise when implementing agile methods.
Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram.

The Book from Stefan:
„Foundations of Design Thinking – The Kanagaeru Guide to Mastering Design Thinking“
https://www.kangaeru.pro/
How Stefan defines his own design thinking paradigma
„Because when I was working as an innovation manager, one of my tasks was to improve mindset, culture, and capabilities for innovation. And then I thought, okay, those three, the mindset, the culture, and the capability, these are three different things. They’re like the three legs of a three-legged stool. And if you remove one of the legs, it falls over. So you need all three to have a stable seat, to do something in a stable, consistent manner, you need all three. The mindset, the thinking, the culture, which is the environment which I call the fertile ground, the right environment for your thinking, then the capabilities.
And the capabilities are usually the things that are in the workshops. You practice a tool or you look at a framework, you’ve got a five-step framework, and you just go through the framework. Sometimes they also mention, OK, in this step you need to be creative. And in this step, you need to be selective.
And then I started seeing how they all fit together. The paradigm there are six modes of thinking in three opposite pairs. Just imagine a three-dimensional base, so three axes perpendicular to each other, just like the normal three-dimensional space. So left, right are two modes forward backwards, two modes, and up and down another two modes. Left is creative, right is critical. Backwards is reflective, so reflective thinking. Forward interactive thinking, previously called absorptive as the opposite of reflective absorbing.
So you’re taking in information, but I think interactive as the forward mode is better because it’s not just absorbing stuff, but it’s also putting stuff out there up and down. So up is more abstract and down is more specific. So you’ve got creative, critical, reflective, interactive, and specific and abstract. Six different modes of thinking in three opposite pairs. The opposite pairs, they exclude each other.
What I state is that you can’t be creative and critical, and you can’t be reflective and interactive, or you can’t be specific and abstract. So you have to choose between the opposites. But you can combine, for example, creative with reflective or critical with interactive.
Then I made the next step. I said, OK, this is all a bit abstract. Let’s get more specific. And then I assigned activities to all the possible combinations. And when you look at it, when you have a three by three by three cue because you don’t just have the opposites, you also have the neutral positions. On every axis there are three positions and then you’ve got three axes. So three times three times three would be 27. The three times neutral, the origin in the middle, I leave that out as a thinking mode.
So you have 26 different thinking modes, which is a lot to absorb. It’s actually too much to explain. And then I made another simplification where I said, look at it from the top. So you only see left, right, front, and back. So you only see creative, critical, and reflective and interactive. And then when you put all the activities on that flat surface, you can look at it as three different levels of abstraction on that surface.“
The negative impact of hierarchies on agile methods and how to overcome them
„The article that I use, „The challenges of using design thinking in industry experience from five large firms“ and a few other ones: And they mentioned seven challenges. Misfit with existing process and structure, difficult to implement, difficult to prove the value of it. Principles and mindsets clash with the organizational culture, like literally clash, existing power dynamics are threatened. Imagine that you’re developing a new product which cannibalizes on the existing one. Oh, how do you get that one through? Because the existing organization and managers have a lot of power. They are there to maintain that power and that production. And then skills are hard to acquire.
I do think that mindsets are more flexible than most people think. There’s definitely room to stretch and broaden one’s capabilities, broaden one’s mindset and have, let’s say, more flexible culture.
I like that Agile delegates decision making to the team. And that was unheard of in the old fashioned management structures. But that was facilitated by software. Software development is such a specific thing that unless you work in it, you cannot judge whether you’re doing the right thing in how to build it, how to architect it, and what is possible. So having an external person decide what you’re going to do as developer doesn’t make any sense if their decision maker has not programmed themselves in the language that they are using. So that delegation facilitated by the nature of software development, I find that an interesting thing. The idea is when the environment changes increasingly faster.
Maybe next to maintaining current output, you need to have a structure in your organization of creating new output, your innovation department that operates in a different kind of culture and mindset and capabilities. But it becomes more urgent when your environment changes increasingly faster. And I think that is the case.“