Finding Creativity in Unexpected Places
If you asked most people where they imagine design thinking happening, they’d probably picture the usual suspects: product teams, innovation labs, maybe a start-up with sticky notes covering the walls.
A pharmaceutical analytics team?
Unlikely.
And yet, that’s exactly where I’ve been spending my time recently. And it’s been one of the most creatively rewarding places I’ve worked in a long while.
At first glance, dashboards, reports, and datasets don’t look like fertile ground for design. They seem fixed, functional, and fairly constrained. But once you step inside the day-to-day rhythm of an analytics team, you quickly realise something important:
They’re not just producing data.
They’re producing products.
Real ones, used by real people, making real decisions that affect real outcomes.
And that’s where design comes alive.
Seeing the product hidden inside the process
Every dashboard has an audience.
Every report has a purpose.
Every dataset supports a chain of decisions someone relies on.
But without intentional design, these things become noise. They do the job, technically, but not always effectively. That gap between “functioning” and “valuable” is exactly where design thinking can work its quiet magic.
When we brought in a few simple but powerful design approaches; empathising with end users, defining the right challenge to solve, sketching ideas quickly, prototyping, testing - the team didn’t just change what they built.
They changed how they built.
And the difference was immediate.
Clearer insights.
Better flow.
More purposeful decisions.
Less wasted effort.
It wasn’t about making the dashboards prettier. It was about making them work for the people who depend on them.
Creativity isn’t tied to a medium, it’s tied to a mindset
One of the quiet truths about design is that creativity doesn’t show up only where it’s expected. It thrives in the overlooked corners, the operational spaces, the “this-is-just-how-we-do-it” routines.
Sometimes all it needs is someone to open a door and let it in.
In the analytics team, that meant:
asking better questions before jumping to solutions
slowing down long enough to understand the real user need
making rough prototypes instead of polished assumptions
testing early, before ideas harden into immovable structures
It’s simple, practical stuff. The kind of design “wizardry” that doesn’t rely on smoke and mirrors, just clarity, curiosity, and a willingness to iterate.
And when those things come together, even the most unexpected environments can become creative playgrounds.
Design belongs everywhere, especially in the places it’s overlooked
This experience reminded me why I started Ritual Thinking in the first place: to help teams unlock the value that’s sitting right in front of them, often hidden in plain sight.
You don’t need to be a design-led company to benefit from design thinking. You just need to be making something for someone.
Dashboards. Services. Processes. Workflows. Reports. If it touches a person, design matters.
And when teams start designing with their users rather than for them, everything shifts - fast.
If this sparks something… let’s talk
If you’re working in a space that doesn’t traditionally get much design attention, but you know there’s more value waiting to be unlocked, I’d love to explore it with you.
Sometimes all it takes is a small shift in approach to reveal possibilities no one could see before.
Feel free to reach out.
Let’s see what we can make better together.
