What are the difference between business people and designers? What are the differences between a “business mindset” and a “design mindset”? These are a few questions that I have been researching and thinking about recently and which I will try to answer in more detail in my Ph.D. thesis.

In this process I have collected different statements that summarize some of the differences, challenges and approaches to overcome the gap between managers and designers.

A.G. Lafley, CEO Procter & Gamble, found in "P&G Changes Its Game, BusinessWeek"

Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence). Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.

 

Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, found in "Design Thinking and How It Will Change Management Education: And Interview and Discussion"

A traditional manager would take the options that have been presented and analyze them based on deductive reasoning. You typically get those options on the basis of what you have seen before—that is, inductive logic. You then select the one that has highest net present value. Whereas a designer uses abductive reasoning to say, “What is something completely new that would be lovely if it existed but doesn’t now?”

 

Tim Brown, CEO IDEO, found in "Lessons from innovation’s front lines: An interview with IDEO’s CEO"

The innovation process is a series of divergent and then convergent activities – a very simple concept but one that a lot of leaders used to managing efficient processes in their businesses struggle with. By „divergence,“ I mean a willingness to explore things that seem far away from where you think your business is today. The discomfort that a lot of business leader have with innovation is with divergence. They think that it’s divergent forever and that they’ll never be able to focus on something that makes business sense. I think that’s where some business leaders, historically, have had a bit of problem with their internal innovation units: the leaders have a sense that these units are endlessly divergent. If you understand that convergence follows divergence, and that it‘s really hard to converge without first diverging, maybe that‘s a bit comforting.

 

If you are doing research in this field or if you are confronted with questions and challenges at the intersection of business and design, please don’t hesitate to send me an email at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com. I am interested in sharing experience and exchanging ideas.

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IDEO, the Californian design company that is one of driving forces to make the term "design thinking" popular, is not just the only "consultancy" company on the list of the most innovative companies (see this list in BusinessWeek from 2006), they also know how translate the complex process of human-centered design into a easily understandable form that allows the message to be picked up by main stream media.

One of the first milestones was a clip on 60 Minutes in 1999, another the cover story "The Power of Design" (Download PDF)(which should more approriately been named "The Power of Design Thinking") in the BusinessWeek in 2004 and the latest one is an article in the Harvard Business Review.

For years the clip was only available as a small clip on IDEO’s homepage, but since recently you can watch the full segment on YouTube.

Here are the three segments:

 

 

 

Here are the links to the single videos:

Inside IDEO – Part 1

Inside IDEO – Part 2

Inside IDEO – Part 3

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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.

Read more about “Unleashing the Power of Design Thinking”.

Find more free articles from the Design Management Institute.

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Jeneanne Rae observes in a recent article in BusinessWeek that “Design Thinking” is receiving increasing attention in the corporate world to crack difficult business problems where current approaches to innovation don’t deliver results. After Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), is Design Thinking yet another fad or is there truly something fundamental behind the “way designers think”?

First of all, I don’t think that all these are simply random management fads. Many companies have applied TQM, Six Sigma or BPR to increase operational efficiency and increase profits (See this post from Prof. Tom Davenport on the sustainability of these “Next Big Things”) . Nevertheless corporations are still struggling with innovation and a set of “design thinking” methods and tools will not do the job.

This quote from A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter&Gamble , summarizes the challenge:

“Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence),” he writes. “Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.”

Procter&Gamble might become the case study how organizations, the leadership team, managers and employees can adopt and introduce design thinking into their organization. At least this sounds interesting:

“It has been transformative for our leadership teams,” says Cindy Tripp, marketing director at P&G Global Design, as she describes her work rolling out the company’s Design Thinking Initiative. With a cadre of 100 internal facilitators, more than 40 design thinking workshops have been held in P&G business units across the globe during the past year. The design thinking facilitation team comes from every function at P&G (such as marketing, research and development, info tech, and product supply as well as design). Perhaps most important, half of the workshops focused on something other than new product initiatives to include other types of pressing business issues such as strategy, retail relationship building, and matters of operational excellence.

I haven’t read A.G.Leafley’s book “The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation” yet, but I already ordered it. Check back for a review in a few weeks.

Read the full article in BusinessWeek.

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Information about IDEO is rare and even though this presentation is already from 2005 it is still highly interesting and provides a good overview of IDEO’s design practice.

Making a valuable contribution to many types of business is the story of IDEO. The application of their expertise is moving from the more traditional product design to the recent application of design thinking to service and customer experiences for everything from hospitals to the GUI on cell phones.

The design process, the people and the culture of IDEO are world-renown for their ability to combine intellectual prowess with intuitive, human-centred design which generates marketleading results. As the applications of IDEO’s design expertise become more diverse, Tim sees IDEO’s design process being used as a navigational tool for discovering the right problem, more than simply designing the right solution.

Tim presentation focused how IDEO harnesses the talents of both their staff and their customers to gain the insights that they harvest into tangible outcomes for business.

Download the presentation here.

via [intuire]

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