I think design thinking has the potential to create tremendous value and lead many projects to ultimate success. There are several powerful concepts which are promoted by the ideology. The need to empathize with the user, think outside the box, iterate on ideas until they lead to superior ones. The issue is that these things are very hard to teach in a short period of time. Being a good design thinker is predicated on many other skills that can take a lifetime to acquire such as critical thinking, in-depth user research, and effective prototyping. Like any framework that is taught in class, it will bring different value to different people. If you already have experience working on a type of problem then it might be useful to use design thinking to flip it all on its head and get to a better solution at the end of the day. Rarely however is design thinking taught in those kinds of situations.
Often, it is thrown around as some magical framework which will revamp an organization and pull it out of its state of slumber. That is where the peril arises. People start applying the ideas even though they have not grasped them properly and coming to very off base solutions which are much work than it would have been had the company employees stayed with old and traditional project management techniques. Also not every project lends itself to design thinking. There are some projects that you cannot iterate with because of the stakes at play.
For instance, in the case of Gainesville IDEO project, it was run in a superficial manner and the team failed to actually understand the intricacies of one of the most underrepresented populations. I would argue thought that the issue is not related to a fundamental flaw in the design thinking approach as much as improper due diligence by the design team. Had there been thorough research done about ALL of the stakeholders then I would imagine that the solution would have been very different. It would not have been so out of touch with the people who needed the most help.
How IDEO teaches design thinking is a very different question? It does sound like they are not good at executing it and therefore even less suited to teach it to others.
