Designasterisk

There was an interesting article in the New York Times last Friday, Innovation, by Order of the Kremlin, which discusses Russia’s latest attempts at designing an environment of innovation to compete against the likes of Silicon Valley (and their copy cat cities around the world). What’s remarkable about the story is that the protagonists (in this case Russian expats from Silicon Valley VC groups and the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Russian Federation, amongst others) are working to create, not a walled-off city of scientist a la Cold War Soviet Union, but a bureaucracy-free zone un-mired by the unaccountable and varied enforcement of tax laws. Just outside Moscow now sits the promise of a city dedicated to developing new ideas to wean Russia off of its economic dependance on oil.

Russia’s new venture is great for a number of reasons – not the least of which is a move towards helping Russia avoid the massive intellectual capital brain-drain it has endured for the last twenty years. But the more subtle implication is the object lesson it provides for most large organisations. It wouldn’t be a stretch to compare most business cultures to the stereotypical red tape and institutional/policy barriers created by many governments. The implication from the NYT article is that, like Russia, to actually create an innovative environment an organisation needs to protect itself from the machinery that makes most organisations tick along so steadily. Easier said than done. But one might argue, if Russia can do it, so can Citibank or British Airways, amongst others.

Perhaps the argument for businesses creating “walled cities” of innovation is short-sighted. The real question isn’t whether or not organisations should create external innovative cultures, it’s knowing how to incubate a culture so that it produces the desired outcomes for growth. I’ve often spoken about the dynamic whereby most businesses enlist two general types of workers: Maintainers and Innovators. These are descriptive of two important approaches to work product (neither of which diminishes the other’s value to an organisation). In this case, Maintainers are skilled at taking a known processes and honing it to a sublime result (think specialists who master an important function and continue to provide incremental improvements over time). This has been the purview of MBA programmes and the model that most businesses aspire and adapt to.

The other approach to work product is the Innovator. In this case, it’s not about incremental improvement, rather it is about wholesale change. Innovators are looking to delve into areas where there is little expertise or specialised knowledge. The goal is to explore the potential of new methods of growth or engagement, typically way outside of the competence and comfort level of the organisation they work within. You can see where having both Maintainers and Innovators within the same organisation would be desirable, but it can also be problematic. Challenging the status quo in many companies can be an exercise in futility, and equally problematic is trying to institute structure and process onto “creative” groups. If this our fate, how can any organisation hope to be both “efficient” and “innovative”?

One of the most common solutions a business might be tempted to take to integrate innovation into their organisation is to create a skunkworks, just as Russia is doing. For those not familiar with the term, Skunk Works was the name of a group at Lockheed Martin that was given a very high degree of autonomy and was unhampered by corporate bureaucracy while they worked on secret projects. In this model, one wouldn’t bother trying to change the existing machine (or the Maintainers in my previous example), instead one would give carte blanche to a smaller and more nimble team to explore and invent without encumbrances. The challenge with this method of innovation is that the results of your skunkworks needs to be incorporated back into the culture where it couldn’t flourish to begin with. While a skunkworks is fantastic as a method for creating new businesses that develop on their own, this method is less useful for creating ideas that can be adopted by an existing organisation. Perhaps Russia’s foray into protected innovation cities isn’t the panacea for business it appears to be at first blush.

To have an integrated impact on an organisation, innovation has to be a function of the business process itself. In my example above, we rely on Maintainers to promote and improve the products, processes, and services necessary for the efficient and predictable running of a business. We have also been asking these same Maintainers to envision, develop, and implement new and disruptive technologies and platforms. It has been clear for at least the last decade that Maintainers are ill prepared for that task. Unfortunately, most organisations who are trying to build a culture of innovation do this by attempting to train Maintainers into being equally successful Innovators. I think this is at the root of the problem. In a general sense, Maintainers are not Innovators, nor is the opposite true.

To fundamentally improve an organisation’s approach to innovation, companies need to build on the inherent skills and talents of their business cultures (which, traditionally, are also inherently non-innovative) by focusing on what both Maintainers and Innovators do well. The real challenge isn’t in trying to develop Maintainers into Innovators, but rather creating a culture that allows Innovators to find success, accolades, and promotion within structures that historically don’t reward such outlier behaviour. Unfortunately, companies typically try to either make the same people play both Maintainer and Innovator roles, or Innovators are sequestered within a skunkworks where they can’t remain vital to the organisation.

It is common for companies, especially ones that are struggling to maintain a competitive position, to look towards outside agencies to help them develop an innovative approach to their business. These agencies typically specialise in strategy, change management, or service design and promise to help develop methods for growth whilst also imparting a process that the company can adopt to implement innovation on their own. My own experience is that those projects go fairly well as long as there is agency involvement, but flounder after completion and no actual change takes hold. This is to be expected, as there are few, if any, innovation advocates within organisations who are empowered to take the ball and run once the agency’s work is completed.

When organisations create incentives for Innovators to flourish within their culture, they create advocates for sustaining innovation. By having internal advocates manage the process of change, Maintainers are free to help integrate new approaches to business and implement the necessary processes and procedures to ensure a robust platform. Basically, Maintainers enlist the expertise of Innovators to implement innovation. Innovators work to challenge, envision, and prototype new approaches to business without having to be “graded” on their ability to function simultaneously as Maintainers.

The call-out to business is that, if they want to create compelling and competitive platforms, they need to enlist the support of Innovators as part of the business culture. This means creating incentives and rewards for promoting innovative behaviour that is separate to what makes a successful Maintainer. The challenge is that traditional metrics and key deliverables are poor indications of successful innovation. The design problem becomes much more focused when it’s not about integrating an innovation culture, but rather defining how to encourage and reward Innovation management and work product. For an organisation that has not yet integrated Innovators into their culture, perhaps the best use of an outside consultancy is to help answer that question.

Just as Russia has suffered a brain drain to the Bay Area, businesses have lost the other half of their talent to Innovators who have no place to flourish in a traditional organisation. Instead, these Innovators often end up working for outside agencies, freelancing, or find themselves under-appreciated and move from company to company, taking their own expertise, knowledge and potential with them. The answer isn’t creating “walled cities of innovation” within companies through skunkworks, outside design firms, or buying one’s innovative competitors. The answer lies in leveraging the inherent skills in two types of staff, Maintainers and Innovators, and incentivising each to be measured for the type of success they promote.

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”.

I’ve just finished reading the best-selling historical novel Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson, about the development of the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893. I picked it up out of interest in knowing more about Chicago history, and the book does a really outstanding job of bringing the physical reality of the city to life, giving great detail about how Chicago would have been experienced in the 1880′s and 1890′s. The book helped me to visualize what life must have been like for my great grandfather, who immigrated at that time and grew up on the South Side along with hundreds of thousands of other immigrants who were flocking to Chicago’s booming industries.

But the book is also an excellent rumination on the power of Design. Chicago won the world’s fair in 1890 (beating out NYC, Washington DC and St. Louis), just three years before the fair was set to open. Once Chicago was chosen as a venue, a local citizens’ committee of 250 prominent men was created to help steer and promote the fair, and the city formed a corporation with a 45-member Board to finance and build the fair.

The Board appointed a local architect named Daniel Burnham to lead the project. In essence he would become the principal and lead designer (as well as project manager). As you would expect, local politics immediately began to enter the equation as the groups became embroiled in arguments about exactly where in Chicago the fair should happen. By the time Burnham got the go-ahead to begin planning the chosen site, there was less than 2 years left to go about building a world’s fair from scratch. Sound like any design projects you’ve ever worked on?

Too much was at stake in Burnham’s career for him to decline the challenge, though I suspect many of us would have given up in the face of such a seemingly insurmountable task. Ambitiously, Burnham solicited a team of some of the top US architects of the day, a group of East Coasters who were quite dubious about helping podunk Chicago put together a world class project. He assembled his reluctant lean design team, eventually winning them over using the pivotal support of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, who had designed Central Park and many other significant public commissions.

The entire team was, frankly, freaked out by the seeming impossibility of the deadline before them, an absurdly short span of time in which to design, engineer and build a fair expected to host 27 million people over its 6 month lifespan and out-do the French, who had put on a smashing world fair in 1889 with the show-stealing Eiffel Tower as it’s coup de grâce.

The team rallied and put together a plan for 6 majestic main buildings and an overall landscape, which would be further populated by another 200 or so smaller buildings covering a square mile. But the designs came in behind schedule, pushing construction perilously close to the deadline. And throughout the project, Burnham and his team continued to face many barriers and slowdowns caused by the myriad of committees and stakeholders representing local, national and international interests. In the end, the fair went up, and had considerable success, but not without many cracks behind the veneer and a tremendous risk of outright failure. (The Ferris Wheel, the fair’s crowning glory and answer to Paris’ Eiffel, was not completed until 2 months after the fair opened.)

I provide this outline in order to illustrate an important and integral aspect of design work that is so commonly overlooked. (more…)

Recently I was having a discussion with Angela about how design sometimes misses the mark when it comes to supplying elegant solutions to complex problems. Too often designers come up with overly elaborate or contrived solutions to issues that could stand to use a more mundane and commonplace approach (either for purposes of simplicity, cost, or implementation). Users have seen countless examples of poor interface design that was subordinate to flashy graphics and artistic intros. Or information design that was more about sticking to a clever metaphor than getting the point across. Every industry has its examples.

Unique for the sake of uniqueness is even more typical in design schools. As is often the case, you have many capable and creative students working towards a common design problem—perhaps even the same one that a series of previous semesters’ students tackled as well. How is it possible to stand out in a crowd when most approaches to the problem have been touched on, if not delved into to a ridiculous degree? The honest answer is, you can’t. But what is lost in the pursuit of one-upping the competition so to speak, is the lesson that being novel isn’t necessarily a goal in good design. I’m not advocating that designers not attempt to build remarkable and unusual solutions to design problems, because they often will be required to. However, the imperative for new approaches should be driven by research into the needs of the users, and not merely an abstract sense of differentiation. It just may be that the solution that will most address the design problem will not be one that breaks convention and will more likely build on typical or past solutions. Any designer worth their salt will explore the potential of all avenues, including both conservative and innovative approaches.

But designers are encouraged and praised by their peers and professors for originality—sometimes over and above the fit for purpose. And that is a shame. Often times the most elegant solution will be the simplest and easiest to implement. It won’t require a new model or experience map for the user. New technologies won’t need to be created and organisational structures can remain relatively untouched. But those kinds of solutions are un-sexy and seem to show a complete lack of the “creative” skills designers are known for and so proud of. And it isn’t just in school that designers are encouraged to put avant-garde ideas ahead of practical ones. Design firms, design publications, and other designers often admire and praise those who are breaking ground (or “shifting paradigms”) over those who are simply getting things done. To be sure, this isn’t a rampant problem in the real world, but it is enough of an issue that the design industry should be more self policing.

As an example of our lack of enthusiasm for relevant design, we celebrate the Ferrari but have disdain for the Corolla (which, with over 35 million cars manufactured to date, is the best selling car of all time). Of course there is a place for high end sports cars, and Ferrari’s are wonderful examples of form vs. function. But the Corolla was just as effective a design solution, and had a positive effect on an exponentially greater group of people. Why celebrate the design of the Enzo as a higher form of achievement? Because it is sexy and sexy design is rewarding to the aesthetic sensibility and our egos. That’s a really poor aspiration to be encouraging in designers, in my opinion. If you are designing a million dollar sports car, you can play all you want. If you are designing the next “peoples car” you have to consider the cost of manufacturing, economy of materials, localization, usability across a range of needs, longevity, sustainability, ease of repair, customization, and a host of other issue that likely will not be focused on “make it fast and make it pretty”.

But it would be duplicitous of me to put the blame for this only on peer pressure and design school dynamics. Most businesses are not set up to let designers participate in the complete life of a product or service they develop. This is usually seen as an efficiency of skills within an organization (designers design and operations manage). The reality is that it doesn’t allow for the needed experience on seeing what works and what fails. This kind of experience is what builds the judgments necessary for understanding the best solution; novel or otherwise. Perhaps part of the problem is that while designers are correctly taught to take a design past its current limits, most design students are not taught how to elegantly bring the design back to conform with the constraints imposed. In school, students are allowed and even encouraged to leave their solutions “out there”. Or they are taught that it’s OK to sacrifice one or more criteria, so that you begin moving away from a complete solution in favor of a novel one.

Students typically don’t get to see the effect of their ideas in the real world and are not challenged to anticipate them either. As a design manager I’ve seen plenty of portfolios from outstanding graduates who are oblivious to the limits of their work. Why wouldn’t they be? Who has taken the time to challenge them? The better designers quickly begin to understand how to work in the real world, but it is difficult to break the new graduate’s habit of designing to their own sense of “cool” rather than focusing more on the best solution. And that’s assuming their boss, manager, mentor is helping them make that transition. Of course on the flip side, in a business setting, simple and elegant solutions often look deceptively easy to reach, which makes it hard for designers to command value for what they do. A complicated solution is perhaps more likely to be respected as an extension of rarified knowledge, whereas a simple solution might be merely regarded as the product of common sense that anyone could have produced.

Final thoughts:

I’d like to reemphasize that I am not advocating that designers avoid pushing boundaries, conventions, or the status quo. In fact, the opposite is true. The best advances in technology, products, and services have come from truly original thinking. The important lesson that has been inadvertently lost in this process of creating great ideas is the need to make appropriate judgments and not strive for original and unique just for the sake of novelty. When designers play and explore as extensively as they can, it only helps to build their repertoire of solutions to a problem. Great judgment allows them the ability to focus on the idea(s) that are best suited to the problem—even if those ideas seem unexciting. The strong designer knows when to leave the wondrous stuff on the drafting table and when to pursue it with vigor.

We do ourselves a great disservice by not catching our own hubris early in the process and verify that we’ve not made something more complex or unusable than we could have just to be novel. To continue broadening the scope of design into other areas such as business management, social services, and service design, the desire to be unique needs to be tempered with the drive to be relevant.

Photo credit: Design and Punishment, by Ben Cunningham, from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth’s 2007 Three Dimensional Design graduate directory.

BMW’s new electric MINI

The rising cost of gas for automobiles has kicked-started the development of electric and hybrid cars out of the realm of niche and into mainstream, albeit early adopter mainstream. BMW just announced a new electric version of their MINI and Tesla Motors has just released their high-end electric sports car. While this is certainly good for helping to move energy consumption away from specifically using fossil fuels (electric cars can get their power from wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, or other non-crude based supplies), there is another opportunity that waits in the wings:

The return of the boutique coachbuilder.

Over the last century, the breadth of coachbuilders designing the bodies for the chassis of other car manufacturers has waned to the point of being rather exotic. To be sure, companies such as Ghia and Pininfarina still do their thing, but we don’t see novel designs like the Karmann Ghias anymore. The advent of unibody construction has made custom coachbuilding practically impossible¹.

With the advent of electric motors and drive systems comes the potential for car manufacturers to go back to the days when a chassis was sold as-is. Coachworks would then build their own unique body on top of a standard base. Will the simplified electric car allow a new industry of coach manufactures and body shops cater to smaller groups of car buyers? I hope so.

Currently, Tesla Motors is beginning to sell their new electric sports car that will be sure to turn heads. And why shouldn’t it? The body is based off of a Lotus Elise, after Lotus won the design contest for the bodywork. This is a prime example of one company focusing on the motor (a complex and challenging design problem in an of itself) and another focusing on the more visual and tangible experience.

As we speak, both Ford and GM and struggling for relevance in a world that passed them by three decades ago. Is this their opportunity to turn their manufacturing ability into creating inexpensive and easily produced and maintained chassis? Dealerships could potentially partner with as many coachbuilders that they wanted to offer customers actual choice in the vehicle they drove.

I hope that the change to focus on electric motor vehicles is also an opportunity for a move back to more players in the actual design and production of auto styling. The competition and diversity would promote an amazing influx of creativity in an industry that has become, frankly, quite pedestrian. And focusing on creating chassis would allow Ford, GM, and their ilk a graceful way to move on from an industry that they helped devolve into so much cruft to one where their engineering expertise can push electric chassis development with more efficient and cost effective technologies.

¹ Wikipedia, Coachbuilders
Photo: BMW MINI, egmcartech.com