Design Thinking for Advisors

Originally Posted on Advisor’s Edge
By Susan Goldberg
30 October 2020

Advisor’s Edge features Julia Chung’s use of Bill Burnett and Dale Evans’ Book, Designing your Life: How to build a well-lived, joyful life. It is a manual for design thinking that teaches how to take the mindset and processes that designers use to create iPhones, Ferraris and apply them to the complex, open-ended problems of everyday life including financial planning.

Julia and the team embrace the design thinking concept and apply it to every aspect of their work including cash flow, tax, investment strategies, retirement, and estate planning with clients. This is an approach that more and more advisors are considering.

Anna Float, director of Sun Life’s digital transformation office, points out that financial planning has relied on an “age and stage” approach for decades. She believes that it isn’t the same anymore in this day and age. Design thinking, she says, helps advisors build holistic and creative solutions.

“People within the same age group might have radically different life experiences. As an industry, we need to think about how to meet people where they are, give them the right advice [and] provide them with access to the right products.”

Julia further shares with us “How to think like a designer” and “The five steps of design thinking.”

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