Application of Design Thinking to the Organization’s Policy and Plan Department

Abstract

Design thinking is a user-centered process aimed to solve problems correctly and involves stakeholders. This thinking concept tries to produce concrete outcomes that will fix problems while improving performance and creating innovation. In today’s world, government and private sectors adopt the concept. Its process is composed of five stages, namely empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. This article presents the concept application into the organization’s policy and plan department. Contents in this paper come from a literature review and reliable sources locally and internationally, then analyzed for application to the policy and planning department. The study found that Its policy and plan analysis follows two major stages when applying the concept. In the first stage, problems and work procedures are identified. First of all, the analyst empathizes with the target group who can voice out opinions. This is the stage where the analyst can understand and communicate with them from the beginning. Following this, the analyst defines major problems in order to design solutions, policies, and work procedures appropriately. The second stage is policy and work procedure drafting and comes after problems and solutions are identified concretely. This stage adopts ideating possibilities, prototyping policies or work procedures, and testing the prototype for feedback from stakeholders and further improvement. According to these mentioned stages, if the policy and plan analyst holds a discussion with colleagues and stakeholders from the start, positive results will be obtainable and affect the policy implementation and efficiency of the organization.