What follows are several dimensions in which to assess your personal and/or organization’s use of design thinking. Regardless of where you fall on either, these categorizations are less about good vs bad and more about how useful/appropriate your current approach may be for the choices you are making and the outcomes you’re trying to achieve.

Fast and Slow (Tempo): Design thinking fast and slow is about the speed or tempo of your design process. 

How rushed is the design thinking process at your organization? Is a half-day brainstorming session expected to generate perfectly executable ideas for the following year? Conversely, does decision making at your organization drag on and on getting ever more abstract and disconnected from the very people you’re looking to serve?

Shallow and Deep (Scope): Design thinking shallow and deep is about the scope of projects and problems your design process addresses.

Are you bound to solely designing things better (ie. incrementally improving predefined products, services, etc.) or do you have the freedom to design better things (ie. reimagine the very means and methods of addressing emerging issues)? How deep does your design process go? Is design thinking used as an artificial way of acting customer-centric or is your organization dedicated to addressing its stakeholders needs anyway possible (even if they are different from the organization’s current offerings)?

Wide and Narrow (Application): Design thinking wide and narrow is about how design is applied within your project or organization.

Does design thinking contribute to a portion of the project or is it integrated throughout the organization? Is design thinking used as merely a thought-exercise in meetings or is the process embedded in the way your organization operates? 

Thick and Thin (Integration): Design thinking thick and thin is about how integrated design thinking is across your organization.

Are you THE design advocate in your entire organization or is design thinking a shared mindset among teams, departments, projects, and disciplines? Where does the term ‘design thinking’ come up: your job description, your title, your department, the organization’s description, its mission?

High and Low (Hierarchy): Design thinking high and low is about the authority/power/hierarchy that design holds within a project or at an organization.

How is design valued at your organization? Are you the lowly employee pushing for new ways of improving the organization’s impact via design thinking or is the process a top-down mandate from your CEO, president, or even DEO (Design Executive Officer)? Furthermore, is it coming from an external source, like a consultant pushing for an entirely new process for your organization to adopt?

Regardless of where you and your org fall along any of these spectrums, the more important question is "Are you where you want to be?". Again, none of these qualities are inherently good or bad, they are merely about aligning how you operate with your overall goals. That's why finding where you are can help in acknowledging the gap between here and there.