Where Being “Patient” is the Only Choice*

You check in. The person behind the desk regards you briefly, no trace of emotion crossing his face: he’s really just confirming that a person is standing there. You are told to remove your clothes and any metal objects. The floors are cold and you shiver. You are given a thin uniform to wear. Nobody speaks to you. You are taken a to a small room with tiny window, a bed and hard chair. They leave you there and go about their business.

The walls are off-white and scuffed; no decorations defile them. There is an antiseptic smell but the place doesn’t feel clean. People pass by the open door. Nobody speaks to you. There is a TV showing programs that are of no interest to you, nor to anyone else if there was anyone there to watch them. You watch it because there is nothing better to do. Nobody speaks to you. You get to leave when they say you can, not before.

You are in hospital. Or in jail. There isn’t much difference.

* Thanks to Lisa Wilkins for this analogy.

It’s Design, not Brainstorming.

Jonah Lehrer, in a recent issue of the New Yorker, argues that brainstorming doesn’t work. It’s a sacrilegious argument in some quarters, and it goes like this: research has repeatedly shown that groups who engage in unbridled, criticism-free, brainstorming come up with fewer, and lower-quality, ideas than those who engage in vigorous debate and confront each other with the shortcomings of their ideas.

He’s right. But only under certain assumptions.

The first: that everyone is equal. It’s reasonable to argue that debate between peers produces more and better ideas. But in practice, bosses are often together with their employees in brainstorming groups – and what emerges? You guessed it, the boss’s ideas. The same also applies for dominant and shy personalities. So for mutually critical groups to work, they need to be peers, or at least see themselves as such.

The second: that everyone has something unique to contribute. If you populate a brainstorming group with accountants, you will get ideas about accounting. Homogeneous groups will be restricted to the boundaries of their world view. So the second assumption is that the groups are diverse – but not too much so, or they will have trouble understanding each other.

Leher’s third assumption exposes the nonsense of his argument. It’s that brainstorming is conducted in isolation, free of context. With this assumption, the value of groups that debate, versus those that don’t, is that they narrow the issues down and introduce constraints, enriching their understanding of the problem, progressively defining it more clearly, generating and refining ideas while redefining the problem, and “testing out” their solutions through discussion.

It’s a good process. But it’s much more than brainstorming. In a good design workshop, the participants develop a deep understanding of the problem through user research, go through several iterations of defining and redefining the problem, develop solution criteria, and only then brainstorm – as part of a larger process in which the ideas are refined, the problem redefined, prototypes are built and rebuilt, implementation plans developed. In other words, criticism-free brainstorming works when it is embedded in a comprehensive, user-centred design process.

To claim, as Lehrer does, that brainstorming doesn’t work is to throw out not just the baby with the bathwater, but the bath itself too and most of the plumbing.

Yet Lehrer makes some good points. Creative groups should be peers who approach the task with an open mind and relish the back-and-forth of the process; they should bring diverse, but not too diverse, perspectives to the problem. They should be primed and inspired to think differently. They should be prepared to let go of their ideas, refine them and even destroy them. They should work in physical surroundings that encourage mixing and mingling, and that they can shape and modify at their discretion.

You should read Lehrer’s article, at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer. But don’t be deceived: he’s not trashing brainstorming (though he may think he is). He is arguing in favour of design. Many, myself included, would agree.

Is Customer Experience Easy? Yes, and No.

Relieved, I inhaled deeply the already-stale air on board the Air Canada Jazz flight from Houston to Toronto. My dash from the other terminal would have done a Jamaican sprinter proud. But I had made my impossible connection, and as a consequence would get home before midnight.

Tucked away at the back, I surveyed the familiar scene: weary business travelers playing with blackberries in the last moments before takeoff, flight attendants demonstrating the use of seatbelts to an audience that studiously ignored their existence. As the sweat dried in my armpits and I recovered my breath, I realized I was hungry. Knowing there was no point in fishing around in my bag for a snack that did not exist, I waited.

A little later, I watched the food cart as it made its painfully slow way down the aisle, anticipating one of those chicken wraps: normally a bland, overpriced combination of chicken and lettuce, but in my hunger-crazed imagination a gastronomic delight. And when the cart finally reached me, I smiled broadly at the attendant – whose name, I later learned, was Sue – and asked for the item in question.

A shadow of genuine disappointment crossed her face as she explained to me that the last sandwich had just been sold, and was there anything else she could help me with? Suppressing the growling in my stomach, I shrugged and said I would have a granola bar and a beer – in the absence of nutrition, settling for anything that would fill the yawning internal cavern.

“But wait”, she said, “I can give you my crew sandwich from my own bag”. Touched, and a bit embarrassed, by such a generous offer, I said no, no, thanks, I was fine, and asked for another granola bar. She insisted. I insisted it wasn’t necessary – but thanks! The cart continued its steady course, while I settled into my dinner of beer and two granola bars.

Shortly afterwards, a still-contrite Sue came by and shamefacedly explained that someone had already taken her crew sandwich, but presented me with a handful of crackers and cheese from her bag. In the face of such personal treatment, my hunger disappeared and was replaced by a sense – rarely encountered in economy air travel – that someone really cared about me. The imagined chicken wrap, which had only a few minutes earlier loomed like a vision before me, dissolved away and was forgotten.

That was it. The lesson: a little humanity can turn a bad experience into a wonderful one. Easy. Just like that.

But there’s a postscript to the story. I was so moved that I emailed Air Canada to commend Sue’s selflessness. Shortly afterwards, I received an automated response that my “concern” would be dealt with within 15 business days. Soon afterwards, I received an apologetic message from Brian at Air Canada, explaining that inevitably they ran out of food from time to time, and thanking me for my comments. And would I accept a discount on my next flight? Of course I would – but I was far from aggrieved. It seemed that Air Canada was not accustomed to receiving positive comments about its flight attendants and was a bit perplexed about how to deal with me.

The problem was that I had deviated from the script – as had Sue. There is no doubt that the management of Air Canada would love to have every passenger disembark with the same warm glow I had as we touched down in Toronto. But Sue’s behavior came from the heart and could not be scripted, or predicted, or taught in customer service workshops.

Many aspects of customer experience are like this: easy to do in a specific instance, but tough to implement on a broader scale.

A few weeks ago, I sold my house and in the course of the move notified my cable provider, Rogers, that I would need to cancel the service. No problem, I was told: just return the TV converter when you are ready. Being a little anxious about the move, I returned it a few days before leaving my home – reasoning that I was so busy that I would not have time to watch TV. The adolescent at the Rogers store politely accepted the converter and told me that I would need to drop by with the internet modem too. Again, no problem, or so I thought: I would drop this by after the move, as I would still need to be online over the next few days.

Yet this was not to be. When I returned that evening, my home internet had been shut down. What the clerk had failed to mention was that, by handing in my TV converter, I had automatically cancelled the account. After a long, angst-filled call to Rogers, I was told that nothing that could be done to reverse this. The system had its own momentum, beyond the reach of mere humans. I had no sense that the staff actually cared about this major inconvenience to me at a critical time – after all, I was cancelling my account, so why should they care?

It would have been so easy to inform me that my internet account was being cancelled. And, in principle, it should have been easy to reverse the cancellation when I called and complained. Yet it was hard.

In the case of both Air Canada and Rogers, it seemed that individuals and the system were in conflict. In a positive way, Sue’s preparedness to circumvent the system confused Air Canada’s customer service centre; while the call centre staff at Rogers (whose names I, thankfully, quickly forgot) helplessly shrugged and pleaded there was nothing they could do.

Yet there are companies who work hard to make the system empower, rather than emasculate, the service staff. At Ritz Carlton Hotels, if a guest problem with plumbing is communicated to a housemaid, she has the power to, and is expected to, take the necessary steps to resolve the issue. Staff cruise the hallways wearing Bluetooth earpieces, in constant communication about the guest experience. Each member of staff carries a “credo card” which summarizes Ritz-Carlton’s core beliefs and is reviewed daily in the quest for an improved customer experience.

The human touch is the heart of the customer experience. But the system matches it beat for beat, supporting it, and strengthening it. Too many organizations find this too hard, suffering from an arrhythmia that drives customers away. Yes, customer experience is hard. But easy, too, when you get the system right.

Grooming Unhappy, Dissatisfied, Loyal Customers

It seems self-evident that brands benefit by making customers happy. Happy customers develop a relationship with the brand and come back to buy it again, or so the logic goes. Sadly, it ain’t necessarily so. Even the happiest customers may be swayed by a competitor’s hot deal. And there are many other ways to get people to buy your brand, and even become loyal to it.

Morgan Spurlock explores some of these in his latest doc, Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. It’s a cleverly satirical piece of work, a fresh look at a familiar issue: how marketers sneakily influence us through product placement and other means.

Pleasing your customers is hard. And, in fact, many marketers do everything they can to avoid doing so. If all those people who say they hate Air Canada stopped flying with them, Air Canada would be out of business by now. But customers still fly with them. Why? Prices, routing … and frequent flyer points. Loyalty programs are just one way of getting customers to come back, even if they hate you.

Contracts are another. Cell phone companies love contracts because they don’t have to worry about pleasing their customers. Then when the contract is almost up, they offer you a hot deal on a new iPhone to keep you hooked.

Of course, competitors can come in and offer better deals without strings attached … but as long as there are high entry barriers (and it helps to have the government on your side, as in airlines and mobile phones) it’s not an issue.

But there are many other ways of influencing customers without making them happy. You can scare them, for example. Governments regularly use this strategy to persuade people not to smoke. Equivalently, you can tell them they are stupid if they do (www.stupid.ca). It’s a strategy that’s tried and tested by deodorant manufacturers, drug manufacturers, toothpaste manufacturers and many others.

Or you can shame them. Wisk laundry detergent’s infamous “Ring Around the Collar” commercial in the 1970’s portrayed women fretting over the state of their husbands’ shirt collars and was heavily criticized  by feminists for its stereotyping of women. But it took many years before Lever Bros. capitulated and withdrew it – not because the company was the slightest bit concerned about what the feminist movement thought, but because awareness of the campaign was by then so high that there was no point in beating that particular drum any more. You’ll still find “Ring Around the Collar” proudly streamed on the Wisk website.

Even boring consumers can work, though it’s expensive. If you repeat something often enough, some of it sticks. You can’t be tuned out forever. Or you can shock them, as Benetton did in the 1980’s with its explicit advertising about social and political issues. At the cost of offending a few, you’ll get the media talking – free publicity and the added benefit of letting people know you care about the state of the world and aren’t afraid to say so.

You can turn them into addicts. Spurlock’s movie briefly talks about Neuromarketing, where marketers bypass your defence mechanisms to appeal directly to the pleasure centres in your brain. Scary? Yes, and as we learn more about how the brain works you can expect to see more of it. Well, you won’t actually see it, but you may feel it … or you may just suddenly, unexplainably, have an urge to go get a Budweiser from the fridge.

I wish the news were better. It would be a nicer world if manufacturers were dedicated to making us all happy. But customers are awkward: pampered, emotional, irrational. Up to a point, these things are manageable, but the kicker is this: they all want different things. Pleasing one customer is hard, pleasing two harder, pleasing millions impossible. It’s often easier to play the game of customer loyalty without worrying too much about customer satisfaction.

It makes me thirsty just to think about it. I think I’ll have a Bud.

The (Alleged) Death of Canadian Advertising

There has been no shortage of pundits ready to state that Canadian advertising is on its deathbed. Yet, like the reported death of Mark Twain, such rumours are greatly exaggerated. Canadian advertising is alive, kicking and vibrant. Just look at the CASSIES awards.

The awards are presented to agencies and clients that provide evidence that their campaign was effective. Entrants submit a case study giving details of the background to the campaign, the insights developed, the strategy, the campaign itself and the results. In addition to the overall winner, there are awards in such categories as “Sustained Success”, “Best Insight” and so on, as well as industry-specific awards.

I should hasten to comment that the evidence of effectiveness is never conclusive. This is the real world, where conditions are constantly shifting, measurement is poor, consumers’ motivations are obscure, competitors are trying to interfere. At best, an award-winning campaign will show some market share and sales improvement and some attitudinal shifts. These could have been caused by many things, but the authors try to exclude causes other than advertising, and some do this quite well. But the evidence is often ambiguous – as is all purported evidence of advertising’s effectiveness.

The lack of hard evidence aside, the cleverness of some of these campaigns is astounding. Witness Algoma University’s delightful campaign that turned its key disadvantage – how far it is from anywhere – into a plus, with a campaign for prospective students that asked them to “Put 681 km between you and ‘You’re not going out in that!’” and “Put 681 km between you and ‘You better be in by ten, mister!’”.  When you think of the target market, it’s a fresh, original idea and brings Algoma U closer to teens’ hearts, if not to their homes.

Or the Grand Prix winner, Hellman’s Real Food Movement, a campaign that supported the idea of local food through community gardens and involved partnerships with both media organizations and nonprofit groups, celebrity chef endorsements and the use of traditional and digital media. The campaign was remarkable for its combination of grass-roots and top-down marketing, and for the authenticity it gave the brand – reminiscent of another legendary CASSIES winner from the past, the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.

These are just two of many fascinating campaigns from this year’s CASSIES, and I urge you to go to the website, www.cassies.ca, where there is a comprehensive library of past winners, complete with videos and pictures of the creative work.

The explosion of new digital media was supposed to have been a threat to the industry: it would become more difficult to reach consumers, to control the brand message, to break through clutter and overcome skepticism. But the world seems to be unfolding differently. Canadian advertisers now have a much broader canvas to paint on, and are realizing that marketing communications mean not just cute ads but a multifaceted exchange with their consumers. Consumers are no longer just passive recipients of messages: they can give as good as they get, and smart marketers like the CASSIES winners are learning to engage in authentic conversations with them.

Some deathbed. Instead of being moribund, Canadian advertising is finding new life by shifting the meaning of advertising itself. Hats off to the CASSIES winners.

Wilikileaks, Brands and Web 2.0

If you didn’t know already, Julian Assange must have convinced you: the brand as we knew it is dead.

In my father’s time, corporations were run by a few men, who met in private clubs, seated in leather wing chairs and protected by wood-panelled walls from the outside world. There was no fear that a radical idea might disguise itself and creep in, and what crept out was tightly controlled. In those days, choice was limited and consumers, by and large, bought what was made available to them.

Baby boomers are fond of telling tales of how they took to the streets to oppose these elites, but of course we know now that these are the nostalgic laments of former armchair radicals. They took over the leather wing chairs from their elders and preached the doctrine that brands could be planned, managed and controlled. And, in their world, this was largely the case.

Shocked as the mainstream media were at the impotence of the US and other governments in the face of the Wikileaks scandal, governments were only experiencing what businesses have already seen several times over: you can’t control what is said about you. The gentlemen’s clubs have long since faded away, and other forces have taken over.

At one time, we might have written off these other forces as geeks: for a few years, those who understood new communications technologies had privileged access to public discourse. Now, the technology is so simple that a child has as much of a voice as those aging gentlemen who continue to linger on in the halls of power.

And that child can destroy a brand that has taken decades, and millions of dollars, to build. Conversely, he or she can build a brand from nothing. When Dave Carroll’s guitar was broken by United Airlines and he took his case to the court of YouTube, millions chuckled at his amusing videos, but United took the damage to its brand very seriously indeed. Unilever brilliantly built its Dove brand through a combination of conventional media and the internet, around its “Campaign for Real Beauty” theme: the campaign was widely parodied, not always positively, but it stuck.

This is Web 2.0, controlled not by corporations but by users. It’s the Wild West of communications, where anything goes but not much sticks. To survive, indeed thrive, in this environment, you need to do three things:

1. Forget the illusion that you have control over your brand. More than ever, your brand belongs to consumers. You do not control the discourse around it and there is no point losing sleep over what is said about it. This said, you can contribute to, and influence, the discourse.

2. Monitor what is being said about your brand. Keep a close eye on the discourse, where it is heading, and where it might go. This is relatively easy to do through monitoring software on blogs, social networking and video sites.
3. Engage in the discussion online. Don’t wait for a crisis to erupt: be part of the conversation with and between consumers. Position your brand as a facilitator and a medium, and in some areas an authority by virtue of the credibility you earn with consumers.

Web 2.0 can be seen as a threat or an opportunity – but either way, it is here to stay. For now, that is. Nothing is assured in the age of user control, except perhaps that Web 3.0, whatever it is, is around the corner. The leather wing chair is a bit less comfortable now, but comfort was always overrated …

Men with Brooms

What Two Very Different Campaigns Tell Us About Political Strategy

Not long ago, a smart, charismatic youngish man from a visible minority group campaigned on a bold vision and connected with young voters through social networks. He flummoxed his opponents and scored a staggering electoral win.

Barack Obama? Well, yes – but more recently, Naheed Nenshi, the new mayor of Calgary, following Obama’s recipe. A successful recipe, but, as it turns out, not the only route to victory.

Whatever you may think of Obama now, few would disagree that his election was a watershed event. And not just because of his colour or his promise of change. The Obama campaign took unprecedented advantage of “new” media – YouTube, blogs, Facebook and the like – to reach out to voters who would not normally take the trouble to turn out on Election Day. He connected with them, promising change they could believe in, and they believed.

Campaign managers everywhere sat up and took notice. Social media were not just for idle chatter, but, used strategically, could transform election campaigns.

Yet here’s the rub: not everybody in the political class got the message. And, as the very different mayoral campaigns in Calgary and Toronto show, it may not matter that they didn’t.

Like Obama, Nenshi used the internet strategically to engage young voters, starting early and staying engaged through online groups and regular Twitter updates. By the end of the campaign, he had 15,000 Facebook friends, more than any other candidate. Nenshi inspired his “purple army” with a dream of better neighbourhoods, a strong urban fabric and public spaces, while fighting off attacks from opponents and the suspicions of those who worried about electing a Muslim.

Toronto’s election was a nasty, divisive affair, pitting the suburbs against downtown. Ford drove home a simple message: government was too expensive and had to be stopped. His four-point plan was broadcast through traditional media, a website and sporadic Twitter feeds – but, unlike Nenshi, he did not attempt to build a groundswell through social media. Without a consistent internet strategy, without connecting particularly well with young voters, and in spite of vicious attacks from opponents, Ford carried the day.

On the face of it, two mayoral campaigns could not be more different. Yet both were successful in convincing a majority of voters and equally so in getting them to turn out: in both cities, 53% of the electorate cast their vote.
Nenshi and Ford both shared one quality with Obama, one that in the end turned out to be decisive: they were outsiders with a resolve to change the system. Nenshi was a business professor and former consultant; Ford, albeit a white male and a member of council, was able to position himself as a maverick who had the courage to say and do the right thing. Both vowed to shake things up.

At the end of the day, it didn’t matter whether this message was carried on TV, Radio, billboards, tweets or YouTube videos: to a frustrated, alienated electorate, shaking things up seemed like a good idea. It resonated.

Certainly, other considerations entered into each campaign: the changing demographics of each city, the economic downturn, the role of news media in building hype. But the common theme in both campaigns was that of a rebel with a cause. Just as former Toronto mayor David Miller used a broom to symbolize his intent to clean things up, Nenshi and Ford arrived with brooms of their own.

The message for political marketers is this: Obama’s campaign was a game-changer, but the old game is far from finished. Content still matters as much as reaching out on the internet. With apologies to both Marshall McLuhan and another U.S. President: it’s the message, stupid, not the medium.

Design is Doing

To design is to do. The term “design thinking” has become fashionable in business schools. But what business school folks don’t get is that design is the integration of thinking and action.

There is a bit of history here. Up till the 1960’s, not much thinking was done in business schools at all. The faculty were mostly business executives who would come in and tell students about their experiences, without much in the way of theory or research to back it up. The result was that business schools were seen on university campuses as lightweights. When the Ford and Carnegie Foundations issued reports on management education, they called for sweeping changes. With these changes began the business school as we know it today. Business schools are now rigorous, research-focused institutions that are respected – albeit grudgingly – by university administrations and other departments.

This new-found respect reflects the massive success of business schools. According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) there are more than 600 accredited schools, with many more emerging in developing countries. MBA degrees conferred in the US outnumber Law degrees by a factor of 3, and MD’s by a factor of 8.

Few would question the price of all that success. Much has been invested in business research and we now know a great deal more about what makes markets and managers tick than we used to. Nevertheless, some argue that the business school culture pays scant attention to ethics and breeds technocratic managers, rather than leaders.

However you look at it, managers are taught to think: a persistent issue in business schools is that the intense education students receive about theories and models leaves little room for confronting complex situations and working their way through them. Much of the learning in business schools is neatly packaged and simplified in ways that preserve the elegance of the model, but do little to test it against reality. Case studies, for example, provide only information that is relevant (from the casewriter’s perspective) and have all the information neatly tabulated, in one place. With a case study, you don’t have to go over to the plant and try to extract data from a grumpy production supervisor.

Design, by contrast, is “thinking in action”: in the act of trying, you learn and you feed that learning into your next effort. By doing, you define the problem itself: if one approach doesn’t work, then we mustn’t have been addressing the right problem; what if we tried another? By the time a designer has tried out several approaches, the problem appears very different.

As Goethe said, “Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.” The power of design is in putting thoughts into action. Next time you hear someone use the phrase “design thinking”, tell them Goethe was a designer. You may not convince them, but at least you’ll sound smart.

The Beautiful Game of Design and Business

In the World Cup of innovation, designers are from Brazil, managers from Italy[1]. Both teams train intensely to play the same game, but in very different ways: Brazilian teams of old are known for their skills at juggling the ball and their joy in the game, while Italians are intensely focused on winning through skillful offense and tight defense. Of course, everyone would like to do both: to have the flair of the Brazilian team and the discipline of the Italians.

Just as it would be difficult to turn Italians into Brazilians, managers don’t make good designers. And educating management students to become designers seems destined to fail. The best that can be hoped for is that managers will learn some skills that will help them raise their own game, without losing the essence of what makes them successful.

Design education thrives on project-based learning, where students are assigned projects that stretch and test their analytical, synthesis and creative skills to develop solutions to wicked problems. In this process, they receive intense guidance from faculty, who are often practicing designers. Donald Schön traces this process nicely in his landmark book The Reflective Practitioner: a process of “reflection-in-action” in which the supervisor gently, or sometimes not so gently, provides criticism and support from a rich base of experience.

By contrast, business schools are built on a “factory” management of education, in which the emphasis is on processing students and ultimately imprinting them as graduates. Both core and most elective classes are too large for the intimate project supervision required for design projects on wicked problems.

Most management faculty are not managers. They are experts in the theory of management, not its practice. Indeed, the practice of management is often held in disdain. The closest most faculty come to management practice is through case studies, abstractions of real situations in which the data are neatly packaged and the alternatives clear. They are not equipped to guide students through wicked problems.

In business schools, achievement, not reflection, dominates and process takes second place to results. In an extremely competitive job market for MBA students, grades are hugely important in establishing an individual’s career. The unpredictable twists and turns of design can be highly frustrating to those whose primary interest is in jumping through the necessary hoops to get a good grade and pay off their student loan.

Clearly, Italy cannot become Brazil and managers cannot become designers (Roger Martin has an alternative view[2]). But can Italy learn from Brazil: can business raise its own game by learning what designers do?

Several business schools have courses, or experiences, in design. Typically, they are elective and self-contained: they appeal to a minority of students and do not encroach on the core curriculum. In executive workshops such as that offered at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, participants work through design processes on a real-world, or fictitious, problem. There are design simulation packages that give students an overview of the process: one of these is sponsored by IDEO and can be completed in as little as ½ day.

There is a good chance that in such programs, students and managers will learn something new: patience with the ambiguity inherent in wicked problems, techniques for user research and brainstorming, and so on. This will not make them designers, but it should both make them better managers and more capable of working effectively with designers.

To accomplish this, however, business schools need to think and teach differently. The goal is not so much to impart knowledge as to develop consciousness: of the nature of the problem, of one’s own biases, and of the process itself.  This means engaging students primarily on an emotional, rather than a cognitive, level.

How will this play out? In experiences rather than courses; in exploration of the process itself rather than pursuit of a predefined path; in self-reflection; in exposure to diverse perspectives. Experiences such as these need to have a dramatic, personal impact on students if they are to change their approach to problems.

In a collaboration early in 2010 between the Rotman School of Management and the IIT Institute of Design, students worked on a project to develop strategies for the “smart grid” for electrical power. Since this type of collaboration was new to both schools, the subtext was exploration of the design/business process itself. In collaborating at a distance, the nine students (five from ID and four from Rotman) encountered many of the same challenges experienced by companies such as Microsoft, GE Healthcare, etc. where design teams are geographically dispersed and technology must be used to facilitate communication.

Among the lessons learned by the students were the importance of team-building (in the same location) at the outset of the project; the need to make their thinking explicit at all stages; the need for constraints; the importance of balance between design and business thinking at all stages of the project. One specific issue was language: the students found that a common language needed to be established so they could communicate about the project.

Above all, the students found the experience emotionally moving as it caused them to reflect deeply on the biases they brought to the project, their ways of thinking, their language and their ways of being with each other. In effect, they began to appreciate the unique value they and their counterparts each brought to the process. Brazilians and Italians learned to see their own approach to the game as only one of several possibilities; both sides scored a beautiful goal.

---

[1] The analogy refers to the FIFA World Cup of Soccer, and the difference is exaggerated for effect; apologies to supporters of both teams for the oversimplification.

[2] In his article “The Design of Business” (2004, Rotman Management), Martin states that “managers need to become designers”: his interest, however, is in managers learning how to think like designers. He too appears to be exaggerating for effect.

Is Design Thinking a Management Fad?

In a presentation last weekend to the Association of Professional Design firms, I posed the question “Is Design Thinking a Management Fad?”. Of course, there’s nothing like posing a question to which you have the answer. In this case, my answer was a qualified “no”.

“No”, because of the nature of problems businesses face: complex, intertwined, difficult to define, wicked. These are not routine business-as-usual problems but are “adaptive” problems that require true ingenuity to solve them.

The surprise here is that “ingenuity” isn’t what many of us think it is: a neat, creative solution. True ingenuity redefines the problem itself. The solution may look ingenious, but the true ingenuity is in re-interpreting the problem and looking at it through another lens. Those Apple products don’t sell because they are cool and easy to use. They sell because Apple has realized that products alone don’t solve customers’ problems: you need interconnected systems. iTunes is the indispensable backbone for the iPod; apps are the indispensable backbone for the iPhone.

These methods – turning the problem on its head, looking deeply into customers’ lives and putting systems together that solve their problems – are all things designers do. Business folks should do these things routinely, but often don’t. Hence the interest in design for business.

The “qualified” part of my answer comes from an unease I have had for some time. It does seem that not everyone who talks about design really understands it – yet that does not stop them from claiming that it is the saviour of innovation. I don’t think I fully understand it myself, because to understand it, you have to do it.

Not all designers “do” design in the way many of its proponents talk about it. Many accept the client’s problem as given – maybe that’s not great practice, but I suspect it is the norm. Many more do not talk to users and would not know how to do so. Many great designers are more concerned with aesthetics than the ability of their work to solve problems. Many design neat products but would not know a system if it stared them in the face. Management experts who tout the importance of design are talking about an idealized version of design, not design in the real world.

So I am hesitant to jump on what appears to be an accelerating bandwagon. My worry is that design will, in time, be written off as another management fad, and all of those great things – user centric thinking, systems, reframing problems, thinking by doing – will be written off too, in favour of the new fashion du jour.

But I wish I could think of a better term. Any takers? Anyone like to suggest a better label for these ideas?