“This is how I want us to think”: Introducing a design thinking activity into the practice of a sport organisation

ABSTRACT

As sport users continue to evolve, so must the approaches sport organisations take to optimally serve them. From the field of management, design thinking arises as a promising means of pursuing the human-centred generation of value for users. To establish the suitability of design thinking activities for use in sport management practice, we undertook a qualitative case study intervention within a commercial sport organisation. An activity derived from design practice, known as the Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ), met emergent criteria of suitability for adoption in practice. Further, the introduction of the activity linked to themes of design thinking in a manner consistent with previous explorations of design thinking in sport management research and practice. As such, this study builds on nascent but evolving work on design thinking in sport management and carries implications for both fields.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Design thinking enables identification of the unmet needs of sport users.

• An intervention is undertaken to identify a design thinking activity for sport practice.

• The Lightning Decision Jam is a useful design thinking activity for sport practice.

• The Lightning Decision Jam enables reflection in sport management practice.

• The Lightning Decision Jam might help hybrid sport organisations avoid dysfunction.

KEYWORDS:

• Design thinking
• human-centred design
• innovation
• organisational innovation
• creativity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ As the name “Big Bash League” and acronym “BBL” refer to both the organisation and the Men’s competition therein, confusion can arise with their usage. To avoid this, this article uses “BBL” to refer to the Big Bash League organisation, “[M]BBL” to refer to the Men’s competition, and “WBBL” to refer to the Women’s competition.

² For more about the three formats of cricket, see ICC (2019).

³ The WBBL and [M]BBL seasons unfolded simultaneously in 2018/19. The competitions were split in the following season, with the WBBL season preceding that of the [M]BBL.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.