What to Take and Leave From Design Thinking and the Scientific Method

Most teams in social impact are more experimental than they get credit for. They test, they iterate, they build a hypothesis about how to reach the people they serve and adjust when reality pushes back. The sector already borrows from the scientific method and from design thinking, whether or not anyone names it that way. I have watched hundreds of these teams up close. The place I keep seeing the borrowed methods break down isn't the experimenting. It's what happens after something doesn't work. Science made its peace with this long ago. A failed experiment carries as much information as a successful one, and researchers publish both, so the whole field gets smarter from what didn't pan out. The sector almost never does. Jonathan can't think of a single blog or talk called "I tried to solve homelessness and I totally failed." The reasons are structural. Admit failure to your board and your job can be on the line. Tell a funder a program didn't work and you risk the funding stream a dozen livelihoods depend on. So the failure gets reframed as a learning, smoothed over for the annual report, and the insight that could have helped the next org in the sector disappears. Science built failure in and rewards the people who report it honestly. Social impact built the opposite, and it treats a lost grant as a kind of moral failing in a way a startup burning venture money never would. Design thinking gets the same pushback lately, and I want to defend it. It was built for these messy, wicked problems, the ones with no clean answer, to get teams out of endless planning and in front of the people they serve with something real. The throughline is discernment: knowing which failures you can afford and which you can't. You can fail on the format of an event; you cannot fail at getting food to the person who needs it. So the question this episode leaves open is one I haven’t answered for myself. Whose job is it to change this, and what would the sector look like if we let ourselves say out loud what didn't work? Episode Highlights: [00:03:30] Defining design thinking and the scientific method, side by side [00:08:00] The real failure point: we won't admit when things don't work [00:11:00] How science learned to publish its failures [00:18:00] A closed-door conference where funders aren't invited [00:24:30] In defense of design thinking [00:31:00] Knowing where failure is okay and where it isn't Notable Quotes: Jonathan Hicken [00:08:25]: "Failure of an experiment is just as valuable as the success of an experiment." Eric Ressler [00:09:45]: "You don't want to tell your donors you messed up and you failed. But that's the trap." Resources & Links: You Design Your Culture. Here's How : Designing Tomorrow Podcast Episode from August 18, 2026 —    • You Design Your Culture. Here's How   Stanford Social Innovation Review — https://ssir.org/articles/entry/when-... IDEO U — ideou.com Stanford d.school — dschool.stanford.edu Hosted by Eric Ressler, Founder & Creative Director of Cosmic, with co-host Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. New episodes every Tuesday. #nonprofitleadership #socialimpact #philanthropy #businessstrategy #designprinciples