Henkel: Design Thinking

Henkel is a German chemical and consumer goods company headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. As a well established brand, they are on the search for new ways if innovation and ideation to help improve operations, customer service, as well as the products they sell.

About the project

The Theorem team was brought in to show how design thinking can lead to accelerating innovation within the organization. We spent two days with their internal teams walking through a design thinking workshop together. 

As done in Nestlé, we shaped the day around the four pillars: Understand, Diverge, Converge, and Plan. We focused a lot of our time on Understand, as this is where we found the most value for the Henkel team. The Understand phase is where we empathize with the user or the customer. This was accomplished through empathy mapping exercises where we could put ourselves in the user or customer’s shoes and map the experience of working with Henkel.

Value provided

We showed the power of iterating quickly and thinking about the end user in solutioning. We encouraged the teams to move away from perfectionism and embraced failure, learning, and the power of incrementally investing in initiatives based on demonstrating the value provided, rather than a hypothesis.