I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, and I've seen design thinking work. A muniplacity wanted to do something about the high degree of long-term-sickness, with a goal of getting people back to health sooner. They set down a task force filled with design thinkers by education, with that goal, but no specific anything else (pretty unheard of in the public sector where everything is typically measured and weighed and only approved after the analysis and planning is over). After around 6 months, the task force changed a few things.<p>One of them was the changing location of the waiting room. It had previously been in a pass-through corridor, making it very busy and noisy, something that wasn't good for people with long-term-sickness such as stress. In fact it was terrible, and such an obvious small fix, but nobody had thought about it before they asked people what could be improved.<p>The biggest thing they did, was make a cardboard tool for your long-term-sickness plan and journal. In short terms, it's a plan with all the meetings and appointments you're required to go to filled in, with room for comments. Every time you go to an appointment, the case worker and you write down what you discuss and agree on during the meeting, and the case worker fills in the time and place for your next appointment before you leave.<p>This muniplicity is now significantly better at getting people with long-term-sickness back to health (and work) than every other muniplicity in the country. I can't remember the exact numbers but it's somewhere around 30% which is an insane amount of life quality increased (and money saved). I've seen it in action and I think Design Thinking can be absolutely brilliant. In most cases it's not though. Successes like the one I just describe lead other people to want the same thing, in fact, there is a now national program to utilise Design Thinking in every muniplicity of Denmark. Which is all well and good, except change management isn't easy.<p>Most muniplicities send one or two employees on a three day course to learn Design Thinking. It's employees who work with lean and other process/project management types, so they're certainly suited, but you don't really learn Design Thinking in three days. That the first problem, the far bigger problem is that nothing changes in the project models we utilise or the way management orders projects. I mean, sure, you can commit your citizens and do a few prototypes and that'll probably improve every project, but you're not really doing Design Thinking if you are still doing the full analysis, the full planning and the full requirement specification for what results you want from a project before you start doing your Design Thinking. This lack of commitment, ownership and focused change management is why Design Thinking is failing in most muniplacities. It's not just Design Thinking, it's also Enterprise Architecture, Digitisation, Benefit Realisation and a wide range of other brilliant tools that fail.