Nick Leon doesn’t like the term “design thinking”. The former business development director for IBM’s Global Services Division in Europe who is the new director of Design London, a multidisciplinary educational initiative launched recently by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London, prefers a term that is more serious and in his opinion better suited for boardrooms. He suggest the use of the phrase “design method”.

You have to talk about something with more rigor. ‘Design method’ is how you organize multidisciplinary teams, how you exploit technology or what processes and practices you might apply. These are all things that are as natural as breathing to a designer—but which aren’t regularly used in a business sense. To start talking about ‘design thinking’ in the boardroom or in the business school doesn’t seem strong enough. It seems a little conceptual—I want to get deeper than that.

I am able to relate that it might be difficult to convice executives to “think about design” when they would rather prefer to apply some “design method” to solve their problems. A “design method” also has the benefit that you can suddenly become really busy with planning projects, calculating business cases and setting milestones which is all very complicated when you are talking about something conceptual as “design thinking”.

Nevertheless it is essential to differentiate between actual design methods and the philosophy behind these methods: the way of identifying problems, seeing potential solutions and the focus on fulfilling customer needs. These are just some areas within design thinking and they can’t be substituted with design methods.

If the use of “design method” instead of “design thinking” is what it takes to spread the word, then this is what we should use. Yet we should not forget, that we have to “design think” as well and not just apply “design methods”.

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The major obstacle when putting forward initiatives to improve the Customer Experience around your products and services is very often missing confidence by employees that these initiatives are supported by top management. Employees and managers see themselves stuck in a situation when they try to set-up such initiatives from the bottom-up. So what you can you do about it? From my point of view: not a lot.

The main determinant for successful projects is always top management support. I don’t know how many papers, surveys and interviews I have seen where the final conclusion is that the most important key success factor is top management support. This factor becomes even more important when talking about designing and delivering customer experiences.

Two basic patterns of strategic direction can be present within an organization. It is either inside-out oriented, focusing on their organizational performance (i.e. cost structure, production network) or it is outside-in oriented, focusing on markets and customers and deducing organizational requirements from this. In the field of strategic management this has been discussed in detail with the two concepts of “the resource based view” of an organization and market orientation. The decision what concept is dominant within an organization is naturally given by the direction that is defined within an organizations strategy which is ultimately defined by the CEO.

Convincing the CEO to focus on Customer Experiences or even just on customer focus when he is busy with controlling and production strategies is a difficult thing. The discussion whether leaders are born or made is an old one. What I am asking myself is this: Are customer oriented CEOs born or made? And if you are not customer oriented (enough), can you still change yourself as a CEO? (Or can you become more customer oriented through you employees?).

It is possible to become more customer oriented as a CEO. If people are able to climb Mount Everest or cross the Sahara it is possible for a manager to become costumer focused. What does it need for that? Determination to become a CEO that feels the pulse of the customer.

A few examples?

We have the usual suspects here, Steve Jobs of Apple or Tim Brown of IDEO. Another interesting person is Ron Dennis, the leader of the McLaren Formula 1 team. Here is an article about the McLaren technology center and as they say in the article: “a man’s obsession”. (found via metacool)

Bruce Nussbaum at the Businessweek talks about the challenge that “CEOs must be designers, not just hire them”. Here is one great excerpt from his article:

In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word “design.” Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that “design” only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology—I just call it all a banana.

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Many reasons exist for someone to start his own business or for a company to market new products. Even if you are not starting something new you are still in the situation where you are offering something to someone.

This could be an independent software developer producing some customized software application, a biotechnology entrepreneur trying to sell his potential blockbuster medicine or a musician playing music on the street.

The problem is that most of us are very focused on ourselves. What we have, what we do, what we can offer and what we want to get form that. When you catch yourself thinking “What can I do? What can I offer? How can I sell what I already have?” you should step back and take a look at the big picture again.

Here are some questions that should help you in this process:

1. What exactly is it that I am offering?

2. Who could be interested in that (a.k.a. Who are my customers)?

3. Why should anyone care about my offering?

4. Does my product or service increase anyone’s overall performance?

5. Does my product or service decrease anyone’s costs?

6. Are you really sure that your answers for 4 & 5 are realistic?

7. Why exactly should anyone choose you or your product and not someone else?

8. What could you do to improve the performance or decrease costs for someone?

Don’t get me wrong here. With these questions I don’t want to be overly pessimistic. All I want to do is to think about your business not from the point of “What’s in it for me?” but from the point “What’s in it for them?”. Because at the end of the day, everyone is thinking more about himself than they are thinking about you – so you better give them a good reason to do business with you!

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