Can design thinking support the development of leadership?

Sammanfattning: The digitalization of the society, which is often seen as an essential factor of the fourth industrial revolution, is impacting everything and everyone. This digital revolution puts high demands on many companies and organisations today. This requires a strong leadership within the organisations in order to keep up. Today many organisations invest in formal leadership development programs to support their leaders and managers. In times of change there is a need for new ways of solving challenges and design thinking, which is a human centred approach to finding the best ideas and solutions, is one such innovative approach. The purpose of this thesis is to describe, and analyse whether design thinking, or parts of design thinking, today are used in the creation of formal leadership development. The research is performed via a qualitative study involving six different companies. The research questions used are: What is design thinking? How is formal leadership development conducted and followed up today? And How can design thinking influence how formal leadership development is conducted? The result shows that parts of design thinking are used in the development of formal leadership programs but primarily unconsciously. It would be interesting to see how the quality of formal leadership development programs would be impacted by a more conscious and thorough use of design thinking.