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?
February 7, 2012 at 4:27 pm |
Naked virtuality. But I suspect this term also sucks. I coined it in a torturous attempt to find an umbrella term for the kind of original thinking where one sees a problem afresh, without assuming all the trappings have to come along. Small quote from the paper below.
The concept of naked virtuality, as it arises from Amel’s story, is a tool for getting at what to carry forward into any kind of virtualization, and what to purposefully obfuscate or leave behind. I evolved the idea as a mental trick for shedding light on old problems in new ways as a novelist, but because a novel is
a kind of virtuality, I plan to explore its potential as a kind of Occam’s razor for simplifying complex challenges in other fields … (http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ci/cyber%20hub/visions/v3/Williams%20paper.pdf)