Look for experience that extends beyond running workshops. A strong consultant should be able to help frame ambiguous business challenges, facilitate productive conversations across different stakeholders, and connect ideas to practical business decisions. Experience with strategy, innovation, customer experience, operations, or transformation can also be valuable depending on the problem you are trying to solve.

Industry experience can be helpful, particularly when the challenge involves complex regulations, technical requirements, or specialized customer needs. However, it should not be the only factor. A consultant with strong problem-solving and facilitation skills can often bring a valuable outside perspective, ask questions internal teams may overlook, and challenge assumptions that have become embedded in the organization.

Facilitation is a major part of many design thinking engagements. The consultant may need to bring together leaders, employees, customers, and other stakeholders with different priorities and perspectives. Look for someone who can create structure around complex conversations, encourage productive participation, manage competing viewpoints, and help the group move toward decisions.

Not necessarily. A workshop can be an effective way to accelerate problem-solving, but the strongest engagements establish what happens after the session. Before choosing a consultant, ask how outcomes will be documented, prioritized, tested, and translated into action. Ideas have limited value if there is no clear path for the organization to move forward.

A good design thinking consultant should spend time understanding the context before recommending a solution or designing a workshop. They should ask about the business challenge, the people affected, previous attempts to solve the problem, organizational constraints, and what a successful outcome would look like. Be cautious of a consultant who applies the exact same workshop format to every challenge without adapting the process.

The output depends on the objective. An engagement may produce a clearer problem definition, prioritized opportunities, customer insights, new concepts, prototypes, strategic recommendations, or an implementation roadmap. Before starting, align with the consultant on what tangible outcomes you expect and how the work will support a larger business objective.

Stonehill uses design thinking as a structured approach to solving complex business problems, exploring opportunities, and helping teams move from uncertainty toward action. Stonehill works as an extension of the client's team and can connect workshops and facilitated problem-solving with strategy, innovation, customer experience, project management, and broader transformation efforts. The goal is not simply to generate ideas, but to help organizations determine which opportunities are worth pursuing and what needs to happen next.