Author: Victor

In Mintzberg’s “Strategy Safari” he devotes one chapter to The Design School: Strategy Formation as a Process of Conception. But his description of the cognitive act of design is different from the classic Herbert Simon description. So I appreciated discovering Liedtka’s In Defense of Strategy as Design (pdf), summarized…

This article proposes management reconsider the usefulness of the metaphor of design as a prescription for strategy making, arguing against Henry Mintzberg’s view that it is not appropriate. It reviews literature from the field of design and defines a set of attributes of the design process – which is synthetic, abductive, hypothesis-driven, opportunistic, dialectical, inquiring, and value-driven. The article examines the parallels between designing and creating business strategy and presents the implications of such an approach for designing the processes to design and execute strategy.

(Her Strategy as Design (2MB pdf) is an updated version of this argument.)

Now it seems Mintzberg and Liedtka have joined forces, submitting a piece titled Time for Design, “…making the case for design in management, in four approaches: formulaic, visionary, conversational, and evolving.” I’m looking forward to this one.

Yesterday I attended the Institute of Design Strategy Symposium. The remarks were along the lines of business design we’ve been reading about. What I particularly liked was that the conversation afterwards revolved mostly around the chasm between design and business and the means by which to span the chasm, mostly in terms of language (“design” is a non-starter; “innovation” is more business-friendly but too ambiguous to do anything more than start the conversation).

My colleagues and I don’t buy the stereotype of creative designers vs. logical financial people. There are people with different skillsets and attitudes and the best way to combine them to design new options is through close collaboration (aka co-creation). The example from the Symposium came from Mike Roberts who runs a customer experience group at JP Morgan. He makes progress through direct, personal conversations with people in traditional financial roles. As my friend Bill says, “Collaboration problems are People problems. They are often best solved by increasing the communication bandwidth between people.” The next step, I think, is to work on the best ways to get these skillsets collaborating using modes of conversation, prototyping exercises, boundary objects, and so on.

Nicholas Carr’s argument against peer-production of knowledge by “amateurs” has been getting a lot of attention, but I think it misses the point.

It’s not human-centered. I don’t mean that in a make the interface easy to use kind of way, but in a make it something people want kind of way. For example:

• We’re still learning that worse is better. In many cases simplicity is more important than correctness, consistency, and completeness. This is the reason Unix won out over Lisp (and then Linux over Unix), and more people read Wikipedia than Encyclopedia Brittanica. Most of the time a fast and free resource will suffice. It’s what people want.
• The algorithm that creates MP3s can make files smaller because it reproduces only the sound that humans hear and discards the rest, instead of trying to keep all the sound the microphone hears. MP3s won out over audiophile options because people like having 10,000 songs in their pocket. Most of the time a fast and free resource will suffice. It’s what people want.

Besides, these products don’t stay “worse” forever. They start simple, gain “market share” in a disruptive way, and then are improved over time. Linux has improved considerably. Wikipedia gets better every minute. AAC is an improvement over MP3. The new breed of wikis look swanky compared to the original wikis.

The ability to launch something simple and improve it over time is a huge competitive advantage for companies like Google. Can you imagine an established company having the discipline to launch something as simple as Craigslist?

The mantra is Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.

A recent post from Jess inspired several interesting comments about who designers are really, and how to gauge the maturity of an organization’s design. Unless you really like thinking about this topic, it must seem like an awful lot of navel gazing, which is fine as that’s one thing that makes blogs useful to us: debating half-formed thoughts.

But for me — someone who wants to make an impact on my clients welfare — Jess gets to the heart of the matter when he says, “I don’t know that the term “design thinking” will actually make an impact in the boardroom…” Although I explicitly talk about design thinking on this blog, I don’t think this term will impact the boardroom, at least not directly and not in the short term. It’s esoteric, too easily confused with style/form/function, and suffers from navel gazing. It’s what we do using design thinking that will impact the boardroom. The benefits as a concept are already understood, and to activate that concept in executives’ minds — and for the community to make substantial progress — we must frame the idea of design thinking differently.

No one has framed it well yet, because we’re still discovering it. But perhaps we’re now ready to move forward.

My challenge to the community is to reframe design thinking / business design in a way that will impact the boardroom.

Here’s how I would start framing it…

1. The pace and complexity of 21st century society present formidable challenges that require us to compliment our judgement thinking with an additional way of thinking which is collaborative, abductive, experimental, personal, integrative, and interpretive (replace with your own definition)
2. This way of thinking leads us to do (fill in kinds of actions)
3. These actions benefit companies by (fill in kinds of benefits in a way that impacts profit)
4. The above can be summed up by saying, “(fill in summary in ten words or less)”

That summary is the frame.

(We could get very meta and apply design thinking to this problem, which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader).