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Design Thinking & Culture Change

Kevin McCullagh did a great job covering The Big ReThink by The Economist. I especially appreciate McCullagh coverage of Roberto Verganti. Here are my thoughts -- I hope you find them helpful.

 

Verganti's research on design-driven innovation is spot on. I appreciate his insight into new product meanings and languages that steep into and influence society. But this is both hard and uncomfortable work. Corporate decision making is all about finding certainty in an uncertain world. Radical innovation is scary. It is a venture into the unknown. Businesses are more comfortable with the devil they know rather than the devil they don't. This leads to incrementalism rather than innovation.

 

One way "design thinking" is valuable is that its methodologies and processes attempt to force us out of our comfort zones. However, as other studies prove, radical innovation -- that is sustainable radical innovation -- is more dependent on corporate culture than on one time intensives. This is what Verganti's research also showed. Just as products have meanings and languages, corporations can have meanings and languages. Language is culture and culture defines behaviors and behaviors determine actions taken and actions not taken. What the discussion about design allows us to do today, more than anything, is influence the conversation -- as McCullagh, himself, has tried to do by striving to give design more strategic significance.

 

If we do not first change the language of the dialogue, do we offer anything in the way of elevating the role of design or, more importantly, solving sticky problems and uncovering new opportunities?

 

I hope to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to respond.

Why You Need to Know More About Design Thinking

From: Gene

To:  Patrick

Subject: RE: Design and Innovation Education -- BusinessWeek

 

Please review...and when ready...give the 15 minute version of why I should need to know more.

 

This was the response I received when I emailed Gene a link to the BusinessWeek Special Report on Design Thinking: "How best to educate the design thinkers and innovators of the future? BusinessWeek's list features promising programs from design and business schools from around the world."

 

What follows is my attempt at a 15-minute (or less) explanation of why he should need to know more.

 

Tim Brown, CEO IDEO, defines Design Thinking as: “Design thinking is really about using the sensibilities and methodologies that designers have developed to create new choices, new alternatives, new ideas that haven’t existed in the world before. But it’s being applied today much further upstream and to a much broader set of problems than it has been traditionally. It’s the same skills that designers developed literally for decades, but [those skills are now] applied on a much broader canvas than they used to be.”

 

Paula Thornton (@rotkapchen), I think, put it really well: "Design thinking is not about solving design problems, it's about solving problems with design."

Said another way, the skill and talent and methodologies employed to create a “better mousetrap” can and should be used to address bigger, more complex needs and issues. What was originally and narrowly constrained to solving only issues of aesthetics is now a vehicle for developing solutions to problems like patient care, banking, and retail. The mousetrap has been expanded to include things like business models, warehousing, drug delivery, and food distribution.

In his book, Change By Design, Brown writes, “Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols” (p. 4).

In brief, Design Thinking is an iterative process consisting of the following steps: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. What this means is Design Thinking identifies the problem and the people for whom the solution is to be designed, dives deep in exploring new and old ideas, new and old frontiers, fails early and often to see what works and what doesn’t, and then pushes the solution out of the lab and into the marketplace.  The iterative nature of Design Thinking means any one of these “steps” can be revisited and still be considered part of the process.

With that said, here are three reasons why you should know more about Design Thinking:

1. Design Thinking destroys groupthink.

Not surprisingly, researchers from the University of Minnesota discovered that the language most often used within an organization is a cultural signal of how innovative it is (You can listen the BusinessWeek podcast, or download the paper, or see my previous post). What has been observed is dissenting opinions get sidelined for a myopic consensus – i.e. groupthink. Design Thinking helps to change the way we approach the issues so all ideas get voiced and tested.

 2. Design Thinking reimagines a better future.

How do we create new services and meet new needs when our own experience is not sufficient? Because it is interdisciplinary, Design Thinking helps to reimagine and create a future borrowing from a world of experiences and perspectives. This can translate into new products, new markets, or new distribution systems – and eventually, new profits.

3. Design Thinking is being used by your competitors.

Chances are one of your competitors has started using Design Thinking or is planning to implement it as a mainstay of their business. Why? Ultimately, they see Design Thinking as the tool that will help them fulfill Peter Drucker’s axiom: "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business." Design Thinking is centered on observing human behavior in order to deduce latent human needs. People don’t always know how to say what they need, but they often show it. And your competitors are looking to capitalize on their insights into customer behaviors at your expense.

To summarize, Design Thinking is a method for making sure we are working on the right activities at the right times in order to better influence the right results in an increasingly complex world. This is one of the reasons why universities worldwide are beginning to offer hybrid programs that combine traditional MBAs with Design Thinking principles. As Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School, argues in his book The Design of Business: "Neither analysis nor intutition alone is enough... The most successful businesses in the years to come will balance analytical mastery and intuitive originality in a dynamic interplay that I call design thinking." It is simply becoming part of the new “how” of business.

 

Here are a handful of links that you can review if you want to dig a little deeper:

 

1. Design Thinking 101 by Daniel MacKenzie

 

2. Design Thinking, Tim Brown's blog

 

3. Sparc @ The Mayo Clinic

 

4. What is Design Thinking, Really? by Vanessa Miemis

 

5. FutureLab

 

6. Why We All Need A Little More Design Thinking by Saj-nicole Joni at Forbes.com

 

7. Design Thinking Can Give Businesses An Edge by Harold Hambrose

 

I think there is a lot of information online about Design Thinking. Gene asks an important question: "Why should I need to know more?" I have given three reasons above why Design Thinking is important. Why do you think Design Thinking is important? WHY should businesses consider its application?

Design Thinking -- Inspiration v Validation

As a graphic designer I could never look at a project element in isolation from any other project element. The font interacts with the words. The words interact with the images. The images interact with the font. Designers see how the pieces come together and work together. When you think about it, the finished design is static collaboration -- the various elements working together to achieve some key objective.

Design Thinking NOT Thinking about Design

Design Thinking is using the tools of design to find and implement beautiful solutions to wicked problems. As a former graphic designer, I often would look at a project from multiple angels simultaneously. I still do. It is wholistic approach to problem solving and allows for the combination of old with new, proven and unproven, deep and wide. It does not depend on "thinking outside of the box" because Design Thinkers often ask, "What box is this? Why are we in it? And who put us here?"

In an old post, Paula Thornton defines the basics -- the table stakes -- of Design Thinking. It is worth the read and the reminder.

http://totalexperience.corante.com/archives/2007/08/31/design_thinking.php

The Customer is ALWAYS Center

I'm an MBA student and taking a class on Operations Management. I found it intriguing and impressed that our text book -- written by the professor -- made the following claim:

"The CUSTOMER is ALWAYS the center and the most important focus of business, because they have what we want -- THE MONEY."

On our internal discussion board I posted the following:

It's interesting that you say the customer is always central. A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble (P&G), recently wrote a book called "Game-Changer." In it he says that the "customer is king" around this doctrine everything in the business revolves. P&G, similar to many other companies, has began to do on-site ethnography studies on how people -- customers -- actually use P&G products, like Tide. They live in a customer's house observing their daily lives and how they interact with products and then take this information back to development.

Companies like IDEO, an industrial design firm in California, and Adaptive Path, a web development firm, use the term empathy as it relates to customers and consumers. In this regard, empathy is the ability to consider how customers will respond, how customers will interact and use a products, and how they experience products and services.

This approach actually involves all aspects of the business. It's not balkanized into marketing. If fact, just the opposite. IDEO, when it worked with a hospital on how it could improve its services, it had the CEO and Senior Management play-act the role of patient to see how it felt to go through their hospital. When it comes to customer services, customer-centric organizations everyone is involved. Engineers need to learn to work directly with customers. Accountants and financial people need to learn to work with customers. Programmers need to learn to work with customers. Yet, it's been the norm that only Sales & Marketing have had direct customer contact. Each job function has some measurable impact on the overrall customer experience that not knowing who the customer is or how your job impacts the customer is a type of blindness.

Fundamentally, a business needs to be able to answer two questions -- "Who is our customer?" & "What do they want most when they work with us?"

There's more -- there's always more -- but that's a starting point.

Innovation vs. Transformation

In a sketch on Prairie Home Companion a character said, "Sincerity is the new irony." Similarly, Mr. Nussbaum has promoted transformation as the new innovation. It doesn't appear that "transformation" is any different than what innovation is becoming. His main point is that the word innovation has become overused and degraded.

Nussbaum says this about transformation: "It implies that our lives will increasingly be organized around digital platforms and networks that will replace edifices and big organizations (students already know this, university presidents still have edifice-complexes, which is why so many of them are getting the boot)."

Similarly, @ricetopher said: "Deleuze and Guattari had it right in 'A Thousand Plateaus': the tribe must become nomadic, rhizomatic to survive/thrive." Which, if I understand it correctly, means that there is no longer just one expert, but a multitude of voices contributing to the knowledge base. Wikipedia entry states: "Rhizome theory is also gaining currency in the educational field, as a means of framing knowledge creation and validation in the online era."

If we crowdsource the term, what might we get? Is "Transformation" a better description of what company's need to do to embrace a the future? Or is there something else?

Nussbaum continues: "(Transformation) implies radical transformation of our systems—education, health-care, economic growth, transportation, defense, political representation. It puts the focus on people, designing networks and systems off their wants and needs. It relies on humanizing technology, not imposing technology on humans. It approaches uncertainties with a methodology that creates options for new situations and sorts through them for the best quickly."

Tony Fry, author of "Design Futuring" believes that transformation is wrong.

"Design Futuring argues that responding to ethical, political, social and ecological concerns now requires a new type of practice that recognizes design's importance in overcoming a world made unsustainable."

Nussbaum makes mention of Paul Saffo. Here's a recent discussion he had on KQED. Tim Brown with IDEO on his blog Design Thinking summarized Saffo's thoughts.

"He discusses what he calls the ‘Creator Economy’ based around the simultaneous creation and consumption of value. He thinks of this as the evolution of what was once the producer economy, where scarcity was the controlling factor, and then became the consumer economy, where sales and marketing was the dominant idea. I have been wondering about this idea recently and see it as a natural extension of Robert Wright’s Non-Zero thesis. As our communication networks grow so does our ability to create new kinds of value. The early examples are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Threadless. These all rely on their ability to generate participation and through that create individual and group value."

What I appreciate about the discussion so far -- across multiple channels -- is the understanding that we can move forward; that we need to move forward. Innovation may very well be old-school, bushleague. Join the conversation at my Friendfeed... it only makes sense, right?