Since its from the beginning of August, some of you might allready have read this Business Week article written by Roger L. Martin, Dean of Rotman School of Management on what differentiates traditional companies from "design-oriented companies".
Martin has identified the key characteristics of the design-shop’s approaches to problem solving and argues that to generate meaningful benefits from design, corporations will have to change in fundamental ways. This will help them work like design consultancies and thus get the benefit of design by embed design into - not append it onto - their business.
So Martins basic idea is that companies that want to exploit the full potential of design and design thinking needs to work like design consultancies. Or at least use them as a benchmark.
Design organizations vary significantly from traditional firms along five key dimensions:
- flow of work life
- style of work
- mode of thinking
- source of status
- dominant attitude
That an internal design department can be inspired by this and organize themselves as their external counter-part makes good sense. That an entire company (also the departments not traditionally related to design) can transform the way they work, organize themselves, create incentives and basically the way they think, based on this model is challenging to say the least.
For a long time I have been arguing that design thinking can be used as an "opportunity identifier" and "problem-solver" on a more general level i.e. that its also a relevant way of life for companies in relation to traditionally non-design related issues (e.g. as a method to improve internal processess, as a way to create new business models, as a way to conduct market research, as a method to create business strategy etc.).
I believe that Martin are right in saying that these 5 dimensions are improved by design. I also believe that Design Thinking can help traditional business in a much broader sense then "only product & service development and marketing". Even though Design Thinking presents business with alot of new methodology and skills, the true value of Design Thinking is that it effects the whole company, starting with its culture. This is also the reason Design Thinking can help companies innovate - it all starts with how people work. All the design tools and methodology in the world won’t help you if you work the wrong way.
But if Design Thinking really can have an positive effect on corporate culture and thus build the basis for innovation - shouldn’t we include HR people in the sense-making around it? What do you think?
2 comments so far
Magnus,
You ask a good question at the end of this post, and I’m sure that I won’t be alone if I say to you that the last people we should include are the HR people. They are but the gatekeepers, it is the decision makers and the hiring managers who create the outline of what they are looking for in their organization.
I’ve also been thinking of late, on the concept of liminal space, that threshold time between the old and the new, and seeing how it is relevant to any kind of creative idea - and the environment that fosters innovation and risk taking. One of the interesting themes that came up in a conversation was the concept that people who were “whole” or “complete” in the sense of being balanced between right brain and left brain thinking, were more comfortable with chaos, ambiguity, flexibility and fluidity, all of which become key characteristics of an original thinker. Were we able to identify such people, a group of them would be a great start to creating the atmosphere required. Take for example, Stone Yamashita, they hire people who are “business” thinkers and “design” thinkers, an ideal is a “whole brain” thinker, and their teams are made up of such people. I interviewed them on this matter for my second article, here, http://www.core77.com/reactor/03.05_niti_bhan.asp
Also, I’d like to point out the major strides P&G is making when it comes to positioning the job correctly when hiring designers, and I don’t think it’s a bottom up process from HR so much as a top down process from the CEO and EVP’s.
http://nitibhan.typepad.com/perspective/2005/06/sneak_peek_at_m.html
I read Martin’s article back in August and perhaps too eagerly dismissed it for being too simplified to really suggest something valuable. Design thinking is sort of like strategic planning, where it is absolutely fantastic if you can apply it, but there are huge parts of business that simply don’t require it. A lot of business is managing the product/service long after the design/consultancy has left.
However - where I did partially agree was with that thinking and approaching certain activities can definitely benefit from a design thinking approach. That I’m in total agreement with, and the question, for me, is how to make that happen.
I recently met with a multi-billion dollar company to discuss coming up with a concept to aid performance (being vague with respect to NDA). And though I was meeting with an internal marketing group, we decided to approach this using design thinking, as opposed to traditional marketing techniques. The key benefit of this is that we look to define a problem statement, from which we will develop set of heuristics and metrics measure the change in performance. A business case and indexes with which to measure this change in performance will also get developed.
However, at some point, when the concept gets developed into a product - marketing will take over to deliver the product in the best way. Because that is what it does better, in this case. But marketing on its own isn’t capable of defining the problem, or solving it on their own.
So in that way I really very much like what Niti added (great core77 piece) in having balanced/complete thinking on the project. People who don’t prescribe a certain filtered-solution to the problem based on their discipline. So we still get to use the same types of people to work with, but channel their research and insights into a more collaborative and iterative form of problem solving. Relating to your - ‘how people work’ point.
I do think HR should be included- HR is afterall about people, and should be helping to work with strategic designers to measure the outcome or impact of this way of working. In the (vague) example I give above - we’re going to work closely with HR to develop systems and procedures to measure the effectiveness of performance, and how it motivates change.
On another note, I think HR is often incorrectly used to manage the employee-dissatisfaction parts of a company and not leveraged to work on the things that benefit employee-satisfaction for the long-term [fast company has a recent piece on ‘why we hate HR]. If we’re going to ask companies to adapt and add new layers of design-thinking into different areas of a company, HR need to help both to motivate this and measure its success. So I very much like - All the design tools and methodology in the world won’t help you if you work in the wrong way. And I would like to believe HR could be valuable in helping companies adapt a little to introduce design thinking as a core attribute.
My apologies for not staying on point.