How Design Thinking Happens The myth of creative genius is resilient: We believe that great ideas pop fully formed out of brilliant minds, in feats of imagination well beyond the abilities of mere mortals. But what the Kaiser nursing team accomplished was neither a sudden breakthrough nor the lightning strike of genius; it was the result of hard work aug- mented by a creative human-centered discov- ery process and followed by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing, and refinement.