The Design Management Institute has just published an article titled “Unleashing the Power of Design Thinking” written by Kevin Clark, Program Director and Ron Smith, Brand Experience Strategist for IBM Corporate Marketing and Communications. While the magazine is fully accessible only for subscribers and members of DMI, this article (and others from previous issues) is available as a free download.

In the article the authors share their experience, a few examples and a case study about business projects where IBM actively pursued a design approach to develop solutions. Additionally they argue that designers should have a more influential role in today’s organizations.

In this call to action, Kevin Clark and Ron Smith posit that design professionals can and should take on leadership roles in nontraditional arenas. Their own efforts demonstrate that the ways in which designers address problems—leveraging emotional intelligence, integral intelligence, and experiential intelligence—offer organizations valuable insights across a diverse range of business activities and decision-making.

One of the practical examples that is presented in the article is about the out-of-box experience of newly delivered IBM systems:

The Corporate Experience Design and Systems and Technology Group Design formed a cross-functional team to study the out-of-box experience for recipients of newly delivered IBM systems. Professionals who normally didn’t have an opportunity to work closely together were trained in observational research and went out in “discovery teams” to see clients receive and set up their new large computing systems. They included professionals from engineering, finance, human factors, industrial design marketing, and market intelligence. Not only did they come up with lots of recommendations, but they also continued to collaborate after the project concluded. Building community and working across professional borders is an important residue of design thinking.

The article also includes a case study about the redesign of IBM’s Client Briefing Centers, here is a short excerpt:

The big “aha” was thinking about briefing centers not so much as places to be briefed as settings where a collaborative dialogue can take place. They became less about going to IBM University and more about clients visiting IBM at home. We needed to move from training our professionals less in presentation skills and more in listening and leading collaborative discussions. It is a different mindset, requiring different talent.

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