Designasterisk

Here are some synopses from the sessions I most enjoyed.

Re-Thinking and Re-Designing Business Strategy
It’s probably my own particular bias that I thought that the panel with Jeanne Liedtka and Tony Golsby-Smith, moderated by Roger Martin, was the highlight of the conference. But the session really stood out for me as one of the most spirited and serious conversations of the two days. All three of them put forth a thesis and then used the conversation to back up their claims. While Tony, Roger and Jeanne were pretty much on the same page about the centrality of design thinking to strategy, each of them had a unique perspective on why that is, and how design can begin to play a stronger role in the strategy space.

Jeanne Liedtka: “Strategy is the most important thing a leader can be doing.” “But if you’re not trying to make tomorrow better than today, why bother doing strategy?” Jeanne talked about her frustration with business managers who are not looking at strategy as an opportunity to invent the future of their organizations. The problem is that the customary strategic processes involve spreadsheets and numeric projections and organizational culture is programmed to seek out certainty over possibility; visionary leadership must step outside that mindset to look for opportunity.

In her research, Jeanne has observed that there are innovative managers out there who grow their businesses despite their organizations’ tendency to crush creative thinking. It’s the entrepreneurial spirit of design that links it so strongly to strategy. Designers excel at finding ways to create new value. But, Jeanne also cautioned us that invention and value creation is not end game. She noted that value itself is an inconsistent principle, because value creation and value capture are two distinct components, and successful innovation requires both. It is not enough simply to create value; we must also invent the business models that allow us to capture that value.

Tony Golsby-Smith: Strategy is about thinking and conversation; not timetables and templates. In the business world, strategy is routinely suffocated under the budgetary process, and organizations fail to create space for vision. The thinking process is shrouded in analytics, yet we’ve never moved an inch into the future by analyzing. Tony then explained of Aristotle’s two roads of thought, Analytics (which dominates Western thinking, and propels management science) and Rhetoric/Dialectic (which is the domain of design and leadership and is the art to analytics’ science). The second road (Rhetoric/Dialectic) introduces values, where the first road is objective. Therefore the second road is better equipped to respond to human problems and gives us a toolkit for creating visions for the future.

Roger Martin: In 1959 the Ford Foundation said that business schools were not analytic enough, and we’ve been glorifying the hegemony of analytics ever since.

Jeanne Liedtka: Jeanne expressed skepticism about large organizations enthusiastically undertaking innovation, noting that, “innovation will continue to be a subversive activity.” Roger Martin responded that, “the subversive activity is to turn the future into the past.” (This prompted me to think that this would be a very interesting essay for the two of them to write.)

Jeanne called up the fixed mindset and learning mindset models researched by Carol Dweck at Stanford. Business thinking is predominated by the fixed mindset, people who are often driven by a fear of failure and of looking stupid. Innovators and design thinkers are more likely to be of the learning mindset, people characterized by actively seeking broad repertoires of experience and who are willing to take risks.

However, Jeanne suggested that these two mindsets can be brought together in the context of the organization through design. The hypothesis generation and testing that is inherent to design approaches is very effective for reducing corporate fear. And the way to succeed, to innovate, is to experiment in the marketplace.

Tony Golsby-Smith: Tony proposed the notion of the dialectic organization, one that is both analytical and rhetorical, capable of using both of Aristotle’s roads of thinking. While analytical thinking is an undeniably critical part of managing an organization well, leadership, decision-making, and innovation are inherently 2nd road activities. (Tony warned us not to make innovation alone the holy grail.)

Roger Martin: Roger added that everyone in the organization should be involved in making choices and determining the future, and therefore rhetorical thinking should not be limited to the province of leaders only.
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Last week I attended the Design Management Institute’s 2009 Design/Management/Brand Conference, titled “Re-Thinking Design”. It was my first DMI conference, and I was initially attracted by the “strategic conversations” focus of the conference, being organized by Roger Martin of the Rotman School at U. Toronto and Darrel Rhea of Cheskin Added Value. Adding to the attraction was a panel that would feature Jeanne Liedtka, a strategy professor at U. VA’s Darden School of Business, and Tony Golsby-Smith, my former boss at 2nd Road in Sydney.

All these people have been really crucial to the evolution of my thinking and practice of design over that past 5 years or so, so even though I’m not usually much of a conference maven, I realized that it might be pretty fun to be where these people were gathering in the same room.

The organizers chose a different format from the typical parade of slideshows. Instead, the speakers were invited to participate in panel discussions (only two speakers gave slide presentations). DMI President Tom Lockwood described it as “thoughtful conversations with thoughtful people—a process of rethinking design live”. Overall, this format gave a pleasant informality to the proceedings, but I have to admit that at times it had a bit less structure and depth than I might have liked.

I totally agree that no one likes to sit through hours of narrated slide presentations that usually amount to the latest version of a presentation that the speaker is using to promote their business or book. But I do like conferences that force their speakers to put themselves out there a bit, with a bold argument or a new concept. We did get some of this, as Robert Brunner of Ammunition LLC put forward a new business model for design, which involves doing away with clients. Or rather, becoming your own client. Also, Tony Golsby-Smith invited all of us to take thinking more seriously and promoted language as the skillset designers need to master if they want to be able to influence the big problems.

There was a strong representation from the business world as well as design leaders, but many of the attendees were designers who worked in large corporations. I would have liked to see some stronger representation from some of the design schools, too. On the whole, the range of topics was varied, and spoke to the different types of audience members—designers, managers, leaders, and consultants. I wear many of those hats, and I knew it would be a lot of “preaching to the choir” for me. I guess my biggest criticism was that I didn’t feel like the conference challenged my thinking significantly. But it does seem like professional conferences like this are more about finding common ground and sharing experiences in a convivial environment.

The running commentary by the moderators was what really held the sessions together and I appreciated their efforts to reflect on the proceedings as we went along.

On the first day of the conference, Roger Martin noted how enthusiastically business was beginning to embrace design. Darryl Rhea later suggested that the reverse was not necessarily true of design; that designers were generally too cowed by business matters; that design is afraid that it doesn’t know enough about the world of MBAs to make an impact and lets that fear of the unknown keep us out of the conversation. Designers always talk a lot about wanting to have a seat at the table. But I think Rhea’s point is that we don’t get to that table by sitting back and waiting to be asked. (Jeanne Liedtka noted, conversely, that the “table” is overrated, and that a lot of the truly important stuff happens out in the organization.) Several speakers over both days echoed the claim that we have a responsibility to learn the language of business, the language of our clients, of those we are collaborating with.

Rhea noted on Day 2 that one of the conference attendees had asked him “Why is it that the CEO from the accounting products company was more persuasive, more passionate about design—more articulate about design—than the heads of IDEO, Ziba and Adaptive Path?” I agree with that observation. I’m not sure why that was. Perhaps designers feel that they are going into alien territory when it comes to strategy, and so they adopt an unconsciously defensive or wary stance, rather than one of confidence and optimism. In any case, many of the design voices I heard over the two days were both cautious and cynical about design’s opportunity space in the business strategy world. But then, perhaps we designers don’t have the best perspective on design, because we don’t always have the opportunity to pull back and look at the impact and potential of our work from an organizational or societal perspective. We only see ourselves at ground level, where we are making and doing, and we may feel compelled to microscope, rather than telescope, the context of our work.

More thoughts on the conference can be read on the post “Some Highlights from the DMI Re-Thinking Design Conference”.