What employers can do to encourage their workers to retrain

A STRANGE-LOOKING SMALL room full of vintage furniture—an armchair, a chest of drawers, a table—was being built in the middle of Infosys’s Palo Alto offices when your correspondent visited in November. Tweed jackets hung from a clothes rack; a piano was due to be delivered shortly. The structure was rough and unfinished. And that, according to Sanjay Rajagopalan, was largely the point.

Mr Rajagopalan is head of research and design at the Indian business-services firm. He is a disciple of “design thinking”, a problem-solving methodology rooted in observation of successful innovators. His goal is an ambitious one: to turn a firm that built a global offshoring business by following client specifications into one that can set the terms of its projects for itself.

Design thinking emphasises action over planning and encourages its followers to look at problems through the eyes of the people affected. Around 100,000 Infosys employees have gone through a series of workshops on it. The first such workshop sets the participants a task: for example, to improve the experience of digital photography. That involves moving from the idea of making a better camera to considering why people value photographs in the first place, as a way of capturing memories. As ideas flow, people taking part in the workshops immediately start producing prototypes with simple materials...