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.
