Video

The CA (Ret.) Pierre-Marie Borgeal offers a broad and pragmatic introduction to Design Thinking and its usefulness in the Defense and Security sector. In a 3-part conference, which he addressed to officers of the École de Guerre in Paris in May 2020, he offered an original and powerful synthesis of the concepts and the approach implemented by certain allied countries, in particular to the United States, Canada, Australia, Denmark.

Part 1: Issues and virtues of Design Thinking

In this first part, PM Borgeal characterizes the essence of Design Thinking through three issues at the heart of leadership: the reflective insight that transcends the method, the scaffolding of a shared sense that gives flesh analysis, and that of emergence which poses the requirement of a creative dynamic to face the complexity of our world.

Part 2: Usage considerations for Design Thinking

In the second part of his introductory conference, PM Borgeal characterizes Thought Design in a more practical way, through considerations which condition, require or favor its use. He begins by targeting the privileged “playground” of this Thought in the “garden of complexity” where defense and security issues by nature hold an eminent place; he goes on to characterize the use of the “Design part” of our complex thinking; it presents the place of Design in organizations, through the relationships they maintain with novelty, risk and formalism; Finally, it shows how the Design spirit can be characterized through the notion of the leader’s “cultural style”, assessed according to his attitude towards change and his mode of team interaction.

Part 3: Forms and tools of Design Thinking

In the third and the last part of his introductory conference, PM Borgeal addresses the field of “methods” in general, by developing the notion of “form” and “tools”. It offers a classification that sheds light on the contexts of the implementation of Design Thinking according to the degree of freedom left to the practitioner, from the most constrained form to the freest form, called “Integral Design”, of which it summarizes the foundations. . It illustrates the creative power of a Design approach which models its own tools “along the way”, taking as an example the free adaptation of a known tool (the SWOT heuristic); he ends by evoking the inescapable role of certain tools “creators of emergence” which are at the base of the power of the human brain: the semiotic square and the metaphor.