Author: Victor

Bill Breen’s new article on business design in Fast Company does a good job at bringing the topic down to a more concrete level than other articles to date.

The below quote resonated with me emotionally, as I encountered this situation exactly during a seminar I taught last week:

The trouble is, when confronted with a mystery, most linear business types resort to what they know best: They crunch the numbers, analyze, and ultimately redefine the problem “so it isn’t a mystery anymore; it’s something they’ve done 12 times before,” Martin says. Most don’t avail themselves of the designer’s tools — they don’t think like designers — and so they are ill-prepared for an economy where the winners are determined by design.

The link is courtesy Diego Rodriguez, whose blog entry has an interesting discussion of where the “good enough” in design thinking should be applied.

Everyone I’ve come across thus far who has written about design thinking cites Herbert Simon’s book The Sciences of the Artificial. Simon was a great thinker in economics (Nobel Prize), computer science and cognitive science. For considering the construct of design at the cognitive level, this book is part of the canon. In it he identified one aspect as what we now call abductive thinking — the mental creation of something new — as opposed to inductive or deductive thinking. A favorite quote:

“Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting
are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent —
not with how things are but with how they might be —
in short, with design.”

I’ve been thinking about why it can be hard to convince managers to trust the wisdom of their teams, allowing work to emerge from a collaborative process instead of dictating the what. The Wisdom of Crowds illustrates the evidence for multiple points of view rather than one, but I think we need more to make it happen, we need to acknowledge managers’ emotional situations too.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford GSB professor and author of compelling titles such as The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First and The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action, co-authored a relevant paper in 1997 titled, “Two Psychological Reasons Why Managers Don’t Empower Workers”. From the abstract:

The present study provides evidence for two psychological processes that may help explain managers’ reluctance to use worker empowerment practices such as delegation or self-managing teams:

1. a faith in supervision effect, which reflects the tendency of observers to see work performed under the control of a supervisor as better than identical work done without as much supervision; and
2. a self-enhancement effect, which reflects the tendency of managers to evaluate a work product more highly the more self-involved they are in its production.

So this offers more evidence to convince managers to put their faith in teams. Another approach I like is emphasizing other work the manager could do with the time they’d gain, such as thinking further in time on more or different strategic matters.

Update: WSJ today reports on overcontrolling bosses, upper-management at the extreme. Arthur Freedman, director of organizational development and change at American University says, “At some level of consciousness they don’t believe they know how to handle the demands of the job they’re in. So they revert or regress down one or two levels to the level where they felt comfortable.“

On the front page of the Wall Street Journal today is an article about Bill Gates’ self-education…

At a spartan lakeside cottage, the Microsoft chief isolates himself for a twice-yearly “Think Week,” which he uses to ponder the future of technology, and then propagate those thoughts across the Microsoft empire.

This might work for Microsoft, given how much momentum they have. As long as Windows, Office, and the server software keep bringing in insane amounts of money, pursuing bits of investment here and there based on one person’s judgment can result in some progress in some places.

For other companies, this way of pursuing innovation falls short for many reasons. For example, it doesn’t leverage the experience of the other executives, much less the entire company, in evaluating these ideas (even if the whole company is contributing ideas, they’re all going through one person’s decision gate). The sum of their good ideas isn’t expanded by seeing connections and generating new ideas (except through Bill). And so on.

It also amounts to founder’s syndrome. Carter McNamara describes founder’s syndrome as “primarily an organizational problem — not primarily a problem of the person in the prominent position. …the organization works according to the personality of the founding chief executive.” What is dogma at the top often filters down the management ranks to be accepted practice throughout the organization as they wait for answers from above.

Question: What’s the difference between a management consultant and a used-car salesman?
Answer: A used car salesman knows when he is lying.

The common perception of management consultants is that they’re smart and sometimes necessary, but too detached from the responsibility of running an organization. The Wikipedia entry on management consulting mentions the established stereotype:

Management consultants are often criticized for overuse of buzzwords, reliance on management fads and a failure to develop executable plans that can be followed through. A number of highly critical books about management consulting argue that the mismatch between management consulting advice and the ability of business executives to actually create the change suggested results in substantial damages to existing businesses, see, for example Dangerous Company by James O’Shea.

Consultants who practice business design — or at least my company — want to do things differently.

1. Change by doing means not delivering a giant report and walking away, it means finding what works by experimenting, building prototypical situations and iterating.
2. Avoiding buzzwords is a little easier since business design is not about having domain expertise. But any group of people will naturally form a common language and I’m sure we’ll be no exception (example: for non-American or English speakers of English the word buzzword is unfamiliar).
3. Avoiding management fads is less of an issue when one focuses on a general approach, and has many tools in the toolbox. We add design thinking to the scientific thinking that Arthur D. Little brought to consulting 100 years ago, adding to and integrating with what came. Design thinking is not a fad, it’s a way used by scientists, inventors and designers for hundreds of years.