Design Thinking

It may seem entirely obvious that organizations with a sense of purpose achieve greater levels of innovation than those that don’t. I think of Apple (Insanely Great), and Nike (Just Do It) as good examples of purpose that guides and drives innovation, never mind the Aravind Eye Hospitals or Grameen Bank.

The question is why should this be so? Again - this might be obvious but I supect there are nuances.

Most start-ups have a clear sense of purpose but as they scale it gets lost. How can the very largest of organizations, those with the potential to have the most impact, create purpose that drives innovation? AG Lafley used the mantra - “the consumer is boss” to focus P&G on consumer led innovation. Jeffrey Immelt created Ecomagination, and more recently, Healthymagination as big ideas to create coordinated innovation across the many business units of GE. John Mackey at Whole Foods has used a set of core values to support grass roots innovation.

I believe that organizations whose purpose is only to build shareholder value or maximize profits will not sustain innovation. I also suspect that different types and sizes of organization need different expressions of purpose. Are there examples of sustained innovation without purpose?

d.light, the solar powered lighting company that came out of the Stanford D-school, is looking for design thinkers in New Delhi. One of the job titles “Human Torch” sounds faintly scary but illuminating. For those who are interested in making contact, the link is here.

Building design thinking capacity in the places where the needs are greatest has to be one of the most important things we get done over the next ten years.

Paul has long been one of the most inspirational guides for how to think imaginatively and sustainably but his Commencement address to the University of Portland in May is particularly good.

Commencement Address by Paul Hawken, University of Portland, May 3rd,
2009

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a
simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate,
lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there.

But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are
going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth
at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of
decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation - but not
one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute
that statement.

Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the
programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to
have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water,
soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch
the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that
spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue
that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per
hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really
good food - but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will
receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can
tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The
earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school.
It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and
that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And
here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not
possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know
what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it
was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my
answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is
happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data.
But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and
the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a
pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing
to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore
some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet
Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot
with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary
power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description.
Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action
is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses,
companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups
and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day:
climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger,
conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the
world has ever seen.

Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it
strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it
works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one
knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and
meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea,
not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants,
businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government
workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers,
weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders,
grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United
States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the
Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and
the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is
true.  Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may
befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress,
reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you
finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around
you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of
moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to
the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the
evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of
strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific
eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to
create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those
they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance
except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely
unknown - Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood - and
their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of
four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what
human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was
greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the
abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and
activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive
England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of
people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from
whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today
tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world
of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and
non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and
environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope
and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What
do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life
creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no
better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of
abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned
people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed
regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the
only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We
have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in
real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money
to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At
present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and
calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an
economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We
can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the
future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And
whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold
suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way
to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago,
and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally
you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by
Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our
fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is
to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90
percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and
without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each
human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes
between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human
body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one
with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has
undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the
universe - exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science
would discover that each living creature was a “little universe,
formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute
and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body?
Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on
simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore
it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who
is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully
not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are
conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want
you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a 20 deep
innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the
past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came
out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of
course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be
ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the
stars come out every night, and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and
the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened,
not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as
complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done
great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring
creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging,
stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations
before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted
and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your
existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for
a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic,
not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make
sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your
life depends on it.”

IDEO colleague Ryan Jacoby has recently started a great blog about business design at do_matic. His post on a 2012 curriculum for a degree in business design is genius. Judging from the early response there seem to be plenty of people like me who would love to sign up. This looks like the education I wish I had had as a designer. The only problem is I think I would have needed my seven years in art school to accumulate some of the skills necessary to consider applying to Ryan’s program.

The thorny issue is how do design thinkers get the breadth and depth of education they need to tackle the systemic problems that face us?

Do we start with depth, a more traditional undergraduate degree in industrial design or engineering let’s say, and then follow it with the breadth in the form of Ryan’s Masters in Business Design? Or maybe it needs to be the other way around. A great liberal arts degree with business design as a major followed by the depth building experience of a more traditional design masters. I suspect that neither of these proves to be the ideal recipe and that we need many more varied paths to accumulate knowledge and experience.

An interdisciplinary team from CCA (California College of Arts) and the University of Santa Clara have been working on a project for the 2009 Solar Decathlon. The video tells a very nice story of a group of smart students dealing with the challenges of a complex piece of design thinking. A link to the project on the CCA site is here. The movie was made by one of the project team members, Alexander Winter.

You can see me talking about participation on the Nokia Ideas Project site. There are a bunch of other folks also talking about ideas around communications technology.

I couldn’t resist posting this link pointed out to me by my colleague Gabe Trionfi. These are a delightful example of the power of visualization to explore new possibilities. None of these famous car brands would necessarily think of themselves as likely sellers of micro-cars but these images show that perhaps they are not so unlikely after all. Plus they are kind of cute.

This is the fifth, and last, of a series of pieces originally posted at Fast Company.

Those who have stuck with me all week, know that I believe that participation is key to the next big wave of innovation in business and society. Whether it is in the fundamentals of how we think about wealth or the economy, how we parse the minutiae of individual transactions, or how we evolve our most important social systems such as health care, I believe that the interconnectedness of our information society makes this shift inevitable and highly desirable.

The question that I inevitably ask as a designer is how we design these kinds of participatory systems?

The first and most obvious response to this question is that it really is all about we, not I. In other words, corporations and their designers cannot presume to conceive of, design and engineer complete systems and role them out to the enthusiastic applause of the masses. The best examples of current participatory systems included a significant amount of “user” participation in the design process itself. Whether it is Facebook or Apple, the richness and variety of their offerings are created by untold developers, not employed by the host brand, who have created solutions never imagined by the original architects of the platform.

But there are other design principles that must be considered here. First, and foremost, these systems need to be human-centered. Nobody will participate in a system that does not serve his or her needs, and hence those involved in design, whether inside or outside conventional organizations, must master the skills of human centered design thinking.

Additionally, these systems should be fractal. By this I mean they must work at both the small and large scale. Industrial production and consumerism relied on mass scale to operate. Millions of products were made at a low cost and distributed to millions of consumers; in those systems, individuals and small organizations typically could not compete with large-scale industrial corporations. Participative systems must be as relevant to a market of one as to a market of millions. Digital technology offers the flexibility to operate at very different scales. Any participatory offering must make effective use of the Internet.

As I discussed earlier in my post, :”Why We Need Economic Dashboards“, we have to design interactions that are profitable for all participants. And that profit must be measurable on one or more of the dimensions of the participation economy, even if they have associated costs on other dimensions. This way every interaction becomes a productive investment, not an act of consumption. This means we must design in the information feedback loops that make measurement of the various forms of participatory value easy. Robert Wright proposed a related idea in his book Non-Zero. My interpretation of his thesis is that good participatory systems will not rely on zero-sum trading of finite resources but will instead allow everyone to make a profit.

Earlier, I also mentioned information transparency. Figuring out how to make information transparent, and understandable, will unlock unanticipated forms of value and help create the “multiplier effects” recently explained by President Obama in his defense of the bank bailout.

It’s likely that the best ideas that emerge from our networks will not be those decreed from on high by senior executives or government officials. Hence we also need to design processes that allow us to spot new patterns, encourage the evolution of new ideas, and help new ideas scale to the point where they have impact. This is a different approach to innovation and management than the one we have been reliant upon for the last hundred years. It will take some getting used to. Gary Hamel has lots to say about this in his book The Future of Management.

Rapid prototyping and “learning by making” is already an accepted strategy for effective innovation. For participatory systems, this is even more important because the complexity of the interactions cannot possibly be anticipated by even the smartest of plans. The reality is that these prototypes cannot live in the lab; they have to be let out into the wild. So, we need to start getting comfortable with letting others participate in our innovation activities. Of course this means that many of our accepted notions of IP and trade secrets go out of the window. This is very scary for the lawyers.

Over the coming months I am hoping to build a clearer and more precise set of design principles for participatory systems and I would welcome your ideas for new principles. I’d also appreciate your thoughts on whether this thesis makes any sense at all!

This is the fourth of a series of pieces originally posted at Fast Company.

In the U.K. in the 1940s, Sir William Beveridge designed what became known as the welfare state. In an ambitious program, the post-war Labor government attempted to put in place a series of services designed to ensure that the population of Britain could reliably receive high-quality public education, health care and other public services. Beveridge envisioned a system in which citizens participated directly in their own well-being. Instead, he helped create what he later described as a “culture of consumption” of public services.

Here in the U.S., a “culture of consumption” is exactly what we have when it comes to health care. The third-party payer system (whether it is private insurance or government) has created passive consumers of health-care services who have little motivation to engage, and bloated, bureaucratic service providers who have little motivation to become more efficient. It is difficult to envision any effective reform of our seemingly doomed system that does not demand much higher levels of engagement from all the participants in the system.

As individuals, we must become more engaged with our health, including living lives that promote health and wellness rather than encourage the onset of chronic disease. As corporations, we must consider the social contract we have that grants us permission to operate and extract profits. As health-care providers and insurers, we cannot continue to demand an ever-increasing percentage of the nation’s wealth without providing widespread and sustainable benefits. Instead of each remaining entrenched in our own view of the system, we must find ways to achieve what presumably is a shared goal of a healthy and productive society.

Fundamental to this collaboration is the creation of platforms that encourage participation. By this I don’t mean goading people into eating healthier food or taking more exercise. These may be beneficial outcomes of other more systemic innovations, but they are not, on their own, going to create the major shifts that we need.

Two platforms that are already under discussion and, in my opinion, offer huge potential for improved collaboration and participation, are e-medical records and health savings accounts (HSAs). With the risk of sounding like a health-care reform lobbyist, here is why I think they are important, but also why I think current ideas about these platforms run the risk of limiting their impact.

Electronic medical records offer the opportunity for each and every member of society to take control of his or her health. Instead of waiting for some symptom to drive us to the doctor, we can integrate information from a host of sources, including ever more pervasive monitoring technologies, to give us a picture of our health. This system could also provide goals, allow us to rate and recommend service providers, let us explore alternative means of achieving health goals, and enable us to create a personal network of health providers where each individual expert can interact with every other to ensure optimum outcomes.

E-medical records can do for health what Facebook is doing for the creation and maintenance of social groups. However, they can only do this if they are designed to serve the needs of every stakeholder, but particularly us as individual citizens. If, instead, they are designed merely to automate existing bureaucratic processes, or to protect the interests of incumbents–including promoting walled gardens of information–then we will miss a huge opportunity to change the way individuals engage with their health.

Open, connected e-medical records designed to support unknown future products and services should be the goal. Imagine an equivalent to the Apple application store where all kinds of health products and services are available and where it is easy for us to build our own unique and personal toolkit for being and staying healthy.

Just as important as the acquisition and management of health services is the question of who pays for them. There is obviously a need for some kind of risk sharing to make health care equally accessible to all. In our current system there is little to motivate individuals to alter their behavior in the interests of better health.

Corporate America has been far more effective at encouraging us to spend money on fashion and beauty or SUV’s than it has been at seducing us to focus on our health. While the introduction of Health Savings Accounts (HSA’s) was a result of attempts to limit rising corporate health-care costs and to give individuals the opportunity to do some of their own risk management, I think they offer an opportunity for the government to significantly change our attitudes towards health.

Existing insurers are understandably reluctant to offer to pay for new services that might have a long-term preventative benefits but are yet unproven, but governments do this kind of this all the time. If the rules around what is a legitimate expenditure for an HSA were open to experiment, I believe that a host of nutrition, fitness and other health-related products and services would emerge to compete with the existing health-care services we have today.

Ultimately, enlightened insurance companies would provide additional benefits to those who took control of their personal health, thus helping to accelerate the shift to health versus health care. Existing incumbents in the health-care industry would get more serious about offering scientifically proven offerings, such as nutrition monitoring, if they could see that there was a significant market for them. Since we, as individuals, would be paying for them with our own dollars those offerings would much more likely be cost efficient.

E-medical records and HSAs are both examples of platforms that encourage participation and that can support an eco-system of innovation that results in untold benefits. Are there other participation-based platforms that might have an impact on health in America?

This is the third of a series of pieces originally posted at Fast Company.

A significant difference between those of us fortunate to be living above the poverty line and those unfortunate enough to be at the “bottom of the pyramid” is that the ‘wealthy’ can afford to consume. Being a “useful” member of a consumer society requires the consumption of products and services not directly necessary to survival. The very poor do not generally have that choice.

I never really appreciated that distinction until I began to understand what was so powerful about the concept behind organizations like Kickstart.

Founded by Martin Fisher and Nick Moon, Kickstart designs and distributes hand and foot-operated water pumps in West Africa. Unlike many organizations dedicated to alleviating poverty in struggling areas, Kickstart does not give the pumps away: it sells them.

Fisher believes that farmers who pay for pumps will have a far greater commitment and will devote a far greater effort to making their fields produce than those who might have received one as a donation. Kickstart’s numbers are amazing. The return on investment for a smallholder farmer can be hundreds or even thousands of dollars in one year–enough to put children through school or build a house. Kickstart has created more than 80,000 new businesses and creates $88M a year in profits for African farmers.

What if every transaction was like that for rich and poor alike? What if we could measure profit across several dimensions, and we engaged in transactions or interactions that clearly provided a profit on one or more? For the poor, those profits are likely to remain in the realm of economic value or the satisfaction of basic needs. For the rest of us, those profits might more appropriately be measured along the dimensions I discussed in my last post: Learning to Measure Participation.

In the West we tend to make a strong distinction between consumption and investing. Consumption only creates value for the minority, while theoretically investing can create value for every investor. If we thought of every interaction as an investment with measurable returns, might we think and act very differently? For example I may pay to subscribe to a community that gave me access to a network of like-minded creative business executives if it meant I could have high quality conversations with that community. There are lots of examples of people doing this already such as the World Economic Forum.

I may take what I learn from my new- found network of creative business executives and develop it into a point of view that I can sell as part of a consulting offering to my clients. I am trading on my knowledge-based capital.

Of course if we think about it, these kinds of transactions and exchanges are going on all the time, except that we don’t keep very good track of them. As I argued in my last post, I think that in an information society we can keep track of them and hence measure the returns we get.

This has some interesting implications. First, we need better tools for keeping track of various kinds of value at an individual, organizational and societal level. This seems like an interesting opportunity for new kinds of products and services–a kind of economic dashboard. Second, this all relies on information transparency. If you can’t see the data, then you can’t measure the returns. We might ask our governments to focus less on information privacy, which seems like a lost cause to me, and more on information access. Why should a corporation know things about me that I don’t know about myself? I wonder whether we would have gotten into such deep trouble in the current recession if we had done a better job of information transparency?

Ultimately managing our own social networks, our reputations, and our influence, and leveraging our ideas won’t just be a cool pastime carried out by the technorati. It will be essential to survival in a participation economy.