The Utility of Design Thinking to Promote Systemic Instructional Design Practices in the Workplace

Designing within a system is ubiquitous to instructional design. In order to understand the systemic impact of design decisions within an organization, one must understand the interrelatedness of the objects within the system. Developing an understanding of context as it relates to the utility of instructional design solutions will position instructional designers to systemically influence the organization in a positive manner. This paper acknowledges the systemic challenges encountered by instructional designers in the workplace and discusses how design thinking can be leveraged with HPT strategies to assist the instructional designer with designing solutions that have a systemic impact on the organization. This paper also introduces a conceptual framework, grounded in general systems theory, that combines design thinking principles with instructional design practices to improve performance.