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?

Following the G20 summit this week, it seems as though we are in one of the most significant periods of new rule making we have seen for a long time. Our government leaders were promoting all kinds of new regulation to control hedge funds and banks. Similarly this year we expect to see new regulations emerging from the Copenhagen summit on carbon emissions. Here in the US, new rules are being proposed for health care, particularly around access, affordability and medical records.

Two of my colleagues at IDEO, Tatyana Mamut and Lionel Mori, have proposed that innovation, and particularly systemic innovation, is determined by a balance of three things – behavioral norms, tools and rules. As designers we tend to take rules and regulations as part of the existing constraints but in a time of rapid regulatory change I wonder whether there is a more active role for design thinking.

Take Formula 1 motor racing as an esoteric but illustrative example. This is a sport where the rules are often changed with little notice and the race teams invest millions of dollars in their response, attempting to gain tenths of a second in performance over their fellow competitors. Formula 1 is a kind of experimental hotbed where new rules are constantly tested. The intent of the rule makers is often to create a predictable reduction in performance so as to create safer or more competitive racing. What often happens however is that the ingenuity of engineers and designers combined with poorly written rules result in faster rather than slower cars. Design is testing the rules and innovation is the result.

What if design was used to test some of the rules our government leaders are proposing? Could we go through some experimental cycles using design and prototyping as a tool before final decisions are made about what rules to adopt? Might this help us avoid our tendency to create new rules and then walk away, under the assumption that our finance, health and global energy systems will now behave in the way we want them to?

So much of what we are able to do with design is dependent on the context in which we ask our questions. It may be that a definition of an innovator is someone who is able to ask a question that noone else has thought to ask. It seems to me that today the context in which we get to ask our questions has changed. Barak Obama’s inauguration speech layed out an agenda for innovation and design thinking that should keep us busy for quite some while.

We were certainly asking some of these questions before but now those around us will better understand what we were saying and perhaps be more open to the solutions that we propose. This is a good time to be a designer.

The question is, how do we best exploit it?

I am a big fan of a culture of experimentation as a driver of innovation. I believe it creates the divergence necessary to create the best, and least incremental, options. I also think that if an organization relies on top down direction to achieve that experimentation then it risks missing many of the most interesting opportunities. Steve Jobs aside, large companies have not exhibited a good track record when it comes to picking the right bets and I think that is because they started with too meager a set of choices.

I was wondering what the rule set might be for encouraging bottom-up or emergent experimentation such that you end up with better innovation options without the chaos or diffusion of “letting a thousand flowers bloom”. Here is my take:

1. Assume the best ideas emerge from the organizational ecosystem, including all stake-holders not just employees.
2. Set conditions so that those in the ecosystem who are most likely to be stimulated by changing external factors (technology, business factors, consumer needs, strategic threats or opportunities) are the ones who are best situated and motivated to have new ideas.
3. Do not favor ideas based on the author. Favor the relevance of the content.
4. Do favor ideas that create organizational resonance. Indeed demand new ideas gain a following, even if small and vocal, before giving organizational support.
5. Use the resources of senior leadership (the top-down bit) to cultivate, to tend, prune and harvest ideas.
6. Articulate an over-arching purpose so that the ecosystem has a context in which to innovate without top down control. (John Mackie has done a great job of this at Whole Foods)

None of these rules is necessarily easy to apply, especially for a top-down oriented organization, but I think they might achieve some pretty spectacular results. What do you think?