Design Thinking

Paul Hughes uploaded his notebook pages to Flickr a while ago but if you haven’t seen them, they are worth checking out.

My colleagues in London have started an experiment on Facebook called Big Conversations. They are looking to use it to start a conversation around the big issues facing business and design. It is already gathering quite a bit of momentum. Check it out.

Reflecting on my recent attendance at the WEF Global Agenda Council summit in Dubai, it is clear that the depth of the current crisis is unprecedented and that doing ‘more of the same’ will not be enough. The overall theme from the final plenary session was “Re-boot”. A call to re-visit and reinvent many of our current systems and approaches.

The term “sustainable and restorative” innovation emerged. I don’t know what this means but it sounds interesting to explore. What would restorative innovation be?

A few other ideas emerged that seemed to resonate with design thinking:

The need for the re-design of regulation. The current regulatory environment has not served us well but it is not clear that simply more regulation would help. Much of the discussion in the design council (see Bruce Nussbaum’s blog for more info on this) was about achieving transparency of information. Maybe this is a better form of regulation.

Exploring safe futures. Peter Schwartz, who invented scenario planning, criticized business and government for failing to explore potential futures in a safe way. He suggested that visualizing scenarios of potential futures would help us explore implications in a more productive way. There is an obvious role for designers here.

Tapping into the talent of all our people. The concensus was that the current problems, and more importantly achieving a sustainable future, cannot be solved without accessing the talent of all society. My view is that to do this we need new skills and the ability to be generative via design thinking is one of them.

Sector interdisciplinary collaboration. Bruce Nussbaum does a nice job of describing a frustrating session that he and I spent with the climate change council where it was clear that there are great risks associated with tackling these problems in silos. Design thinking forces interdisciplinarity.

Silver buckshot. While the metaphor is a little unfortunate, the idea was proposed that we need silver buckshot not silver bullets. This strikes me as a call for divergence as an alternative to convergent thinking.

While I can be legitimately criticized for seeing every conversation as an opportunity for design thinking, I came away from Dubai with a strong feeling that design can make a contribution to improving the way we tackle the deep systemic issues the world now faces. The other good news was that designers were invited to the table to participate in the discussion. Not something that would have happened in the past.

It has been very gratifying to see the considered comments that have followed some of my posts. I am delighted to see a conversation going on about many of these topics. My approach has been to just let them run rather than making any attempt to moderate or direct. This time however I was so struck by some of the comments on my last post that I felt compelled to attempt a sequel on the topic.

The idea that the reset is more complex this time rings very true to me. Paulo points to a crisis not only of credit but healthy food, sufficient energy and an aging population. The common factor is that these are all resources (including having enough working age folks to support retirees) that are being stressed by our incessant growth. They have now been joined by a lack of economic resource that, as we are seeing clearly in the US election, has jumped right to the top of the agenda.

In the past economics have trumped all other concerns in times of crisis to the point that important issues, such as renewable energy, have lost ground. My question is whether this is going to be the case this time?

It strikes me that one of the contributions that design thinking could make is to help find ways to show the interconnectedness between many of the strands of this particular crisis. Michael Pollan in a brilliant New York Times article, titled Farmer in Chief, did just this when he argued for a new approach to food policy. He connected health, food, economics and energy in a compelling way and helped show how a we might conceive of a system that would positively impact all of these interconnected resources.

I believe there is a real opportunity for a mass change in behavior around our use of resources toward approaches that are more sustainable (and probably more local) with this recession acting as a catalyst. Before this can happen however, as with all systemic change, we first need visibility and transparency. While cause and effect is not clear we will not change our behavior.

Crawford mentions ING Direct as an example of simplicity and transparency in financial services. There is evidence of an increased uptake around services that give new levels of transparency and control. PNC Bank in Pittsburgh recently launched a new service called Virtual Wallet that gives users much more control of how and when cash flows in and out of their account. Apparently it is proving to be a popular offering. (I should declare self interest here and mention that an IDEO team helped PNC with this service.)

Similarly, we need  tools to give  transparency to what energy we use, what food we eat, how we use water, what materials go into the products we buy and use and throw away. Artist Chris Jordan has done a fine job of giving us some insight in aggregate (one of his images is at the head of this post) but we have very few ways of understanding the impact of our decisions at an individual level. It is all very well to know my annual carbon footprint, which is very depressing, but this is backward looking. I need tools that help me make a decision now and show me the implications of that decision over time.

Geoffrey Moore (of Crossing the Chasm and Dealing With Darwin fame) and I spent yesterday speaking with a large group of analytics folks brought together by analytics software company SAS. I have to say that I have always considered analytics to be a long way from design thinking but I left yesterday’s session with a new point of view.

One of the biggest problems in design is knowing what questions to ask. You can take the intuitive approach but this seems to be very random when you are thinking about more strategic and upstream problems. At some point the potential area of exploration covers 360 degrees and goes to infinity. It seems to me that using clever pattern recognition through software analytics might point out interesting areas to explore. I heard about one example yesterday that is connected to a project IDEO did a few years back. When we helped Bank of America develop the savings service, Keep the Change, I had assumed that the consumers we observed were picked based on intuition. One of the BofA analytics folks was in the audience and she told me that her team had worked on the project and analyzed consumer data to identify some target groups of users that the company were interested in understanding better. So it turns out that analytics helped point us toward a segment that ended up inspiring us to create a pretty successful service.

I wonder what interesting patterns might emerge from the use of analytics and be a source of inspiration for design thinkers if we put some thought to it.

By the way, the graph above is the Google trend for use of the term design thinking over the last four years.

I met up with old friend and design thinking colleague Colin Burns last night. He is back living in bucolic Scotland these days and one of his many activities is to help out his friends Henry and Mo with their delicatessen in Kenmore on Loch Tay. The story Colin told me was that his wife Elaine came up with the idea of Credit Crunch cookies when Henry and Mo were talking about how the sale of cookies had soared since the credit crunch stories had started. You can check out Credit Crunch Cookies here and while I know this is shameless promotion I think it is a fantastic example of someone taking advantage of new consumer behaviors in a recession. Cookies represent an inexpensive way of having a treat when times are tough.

This is something I have been wondering about quite a bit recently. If a recession hits the reset switch for all of us then what new behaviors emerge that represent opportunities for innovation? Thinking back it seems like low cost airlines emerged in the recession of the late 80’s and early 90’s when consumers decided flying cheaply was more important than reserving your seat or having a crumby meal. That recession created a new industry that has gone on to disrupt nearly all of the existing incumbents.

I would argue that the recession of 2001 created new behaviours as well. The uncertainty created by 9/11 combined with the new access to the internet was a boon to any service that provided information, advice and reassurance. Google was the big winner but so was Trip Advisor, Angie’s List and WebMD. While the dotcom crash weeded out many of the weaker on-line offerings it also reinforced those that really did offer more for less just when we wanted it.

I am very interested in what new behaviors might emerge this time around and ultimately what innovations they may inspire. Will it be something to do with people changing their attitude toward saving versus spending? Will the growing uncertainty of the world encourage us to look for lives that are more resilient and sustainable versus ones where we are on the limit and vulnerable to the next downturn? It seems to me that now is the time that companies would be well served to think about this so that they are ready with the answers when the market turns. After all it isn’t only Credit Crunch Cookies that have the potential to make a killing.

More about the MLab. At the inagural event the MLAb folks interviewed the attendees to hear about what radical remedies they might have for the future of management. I talked about innovation and design thinking of course and if you want to check out my rambling conversation then you can do so here. More interestingly there is a series of other interviews with folks as varied as Gary Hamel himself, Kevin Kelly, Steve Jurvetson, Terry Kelly (CEO of WL Gore), John Mackie of Whole Foods, Marissa Mayer (Google), Lenny Mendonca (McKinsey), Vineet Nayar (the brilliant CEO of HCL) and CK Prahalad. This is quite a resource of thinking that is well worth spending some time with. You can find it here.

I spent Friday with a great group of people thinking about experimentation. The session was held at IDEO under the auspices of the Management Lab (MLab). MLab was founded by Gary Hamel and is designed to support research and experimentation around the future of management. It is a great privilege to hang out with Gary and the other smart people he invites to these events. I will leave it to Gary to publish more about the content of the session but it did get me thinking about how important it is to remind ourselves of the value of experimentation. My hypothesis is that organizations generally avoid experimentation when it comes to processes and management. In fact they positively hate it. One reason may be that it is scary to mess with people and processes and much harder to do than messing around with new technology or new products. That feels more like an excuse than a reason to me. I believe we lack processes for prototyping our ideas quickly when it comes to management. One insight that came from the day was that experiments too often turn into initiatives. Experiments are designed for learning and it is okay if they fail whereas initiatives are too important to fail. I came away thinking that initiatives are things to be avoided at least until you have learnt from some experiments.

In the interests of learning, here is another IDEO blog that publishses some of the experiments we have been up to recently. It’s called IDEO Labs.

Janet Rae-Dupree wrote about design thinking in the business section of the New York Times this weekend. It is good to see the discussion about the broader role for design appearing in the mass media. The article illustrates the very gray line between the traditional role of design and the more strategic contribution that design thinking can make. It is sometimes hard to tell what happened from the physical outcomes alone which adds to the challenge when it comes to explaining what design thinking is. I find it very easy to slip toward describing what is simply good design (based on a relatively conventional brief) or what is good business using normal convergent processes. A test is perhaps whether the business (or organizational, or societal) outcome is significantly different than would have been the case if design thinking had not taken place. In other words, were new choices created not only about the product, service or experience but about the business goal itself? Did a product become a service? Did a service become an experience? Were entirely new users or markets identified? Were new to the world offerings created? These questions seem to reflect the higher bar that I believe we might expect to be the result of a broader application of the design approach.

I do agree with the comments from Lara Lee of Jump Associates and George Kembel of the D-school that we must be leary of claiming design thinking as the perfect and only approach to all problems. The ability to integrate different approaches seems to me to be at the core of design thinking itself and it would therefore be foolish to assume its primacy as a problem solving methodology. My argument would simply be that we have spent the last few hundred years assuming other approaches are best and that it is time to consider design thinking alongside the alternatives.

While I offered a simple view of what makes design thinking unique in the article, the discussion that resulted from my earlier post about definitions of design thinking gives a better impression of the richness of the subject. Check out the comments if you haven’t already done so.

I have just been given a fabulous new book created by a recent arrival at IDEO, Ferdi van Heerden for publishers Gestalten. It’s called Data Flow and takes a look at data visualization in graphic design. This has long been the domain of Edward Tufte and Richard Saul Wurman but Data Flow does a great job of showing a diverse range of work from designers worldwide. Some of the work wins more points for aesthetic elegance than for information clarity, which somewhat defeats the point, but there are plenty of examples of innovative and effective ways of communicating complex data. My favorites includes World Mapper which connects a world map to data such that each country is scaled to represent its true scale for whatever topic is being displayed. Jessica Hagy with her wonderful and humorous index card graphs shows how graphical information can represent humanity. Xavier Barrade makes sense of the concept often used describing the loss of Amazonian rainforest based on the number of football (soccer) pitch equivalents by literally drawing the pitches onto aerial photos of the Amazon. It’s worth checking out for some great visual inspiration.