Sit through enough strategy offsites and you start to recognise the same slide. A circle in the middle labelled "customer", arrows pointing inward, a values statement along the bottom. Ask the room when they last put a half-built idea in front of a real customer and the energy changes. People find something interesting on their laptops, and somebody mentions that research is in the pipeline.
The claim everyone makes
Mike Peng, CEO of IDEO, the firm that did more than most to popularise human-centred design, put it bluntly in an interview with Fortune: "Customer centricity just seems like table stakes now." He has the data to back the remark. Over 50% of companies already believe they are customer-centred, which means the label no longer separates anyone from anyone. When every firm claims the same virtue, the claim stops carrying information.
Belief versus behaviour
IDEO's Innovation Quotient survey of more than 250 product and innovation executives shows where the gap sits. Just 21% said they consistently tested ideas with customers. Only about 30% strongly agreed that their teams had the autonomy to experiment or to balance short and long-term goals. Put those two numbers next to the 50% who believe they are customer-centred and you get a picture of organisations that care about customers in principle and avoid the discomfort of finding out what customers think in practice.
The payoff for closing that gap is not small. The top quintile of IQ scorers generated 50% higher profits than the average firm. Testing early is uncomfortable because it exposes your favourite idea to people who owe you nothing, but the firms willing to sit through that discomfort are the ones pulling ahead.
Why AI raises the stakes
Peng names the risk of AI directly: everything goes towards the average. A model trained on what already exists will give your team a plausible concept, a plausible interface and a plausible value proposition, and so will it for your competitor. Finding the edge, in his words, is a human activity. That edge usually shows up in a conversation where a customer says something you did not expect, which is exactly the conversation 79% of surveyed leaders are not having consistently.
The labour market is already pricing this in. Fast Company, as cited in the interview, reported that product design job postings fell 18% last year and graphic design postings fell 57%. Producing artefacts has become cheap. Knowing which artefact is worth producing has not.
It also helps that Peng is candid about IDEO's own position. Revenue declined to less than $100m from $300m four years earlier, and the company cut a third of its workforce before he arrived. A firm that built its name on design reputation found that reputation alone did not protect it. His answer is to teach the person how to fish, which means building the capability inside the client rather than selling them the output.
What this means for L&D
If you run capability for innovation or product teams, stop asking whether your people value customers. They will say yes. Ask three harder questions instead. When did each team last test an idea with a customer before building it? Do they have permission to run a small experiment without a steering committee signing off? Can they explain how a short-term target and a longer bet are being balanced on their own roadmap?
The answers will tell you where the 21% and the 30% sit in your own organisation. Closing those gaps comes down to repetition: interviewing, prototyping, testing and adjusting until it feels routine rather than risky. That is the thinking behind our design thinking workshop, which gets teams in front of customers with something rough and real. Start with one team, one assumption and one week, and see what the customer says.
Run it as a design thinking workshop on a live service. The longer note is how to design a service with its users.
