12:41 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
I have been asked several times of late whether managers (and management students) should be expected to invest in design and design thinking during an economic downturn. There are at least two kinds of answers to this question.
The first is to question the assumptions that lie behind the question. For some who ask the question there may be the thought that design is about adding something extra. In this view, design is about adding a patina, styling, or packaging. The thought is that designers are brought in to make a basic thing or service “nicer” or more marketable. And in this view to manage by designing is likewise to add something extra to the real work of managing, which is doing the hard analysis and making the tough choices.
Real design, though, is about creating better alternatives. It calls for thinking hard about the conditions the organization faces and about what might produce real value for the users of the product, service, process, or organization itself. It calls for sweeping in the broadest possible array of influences to insure that no good idea gets overlooked. It is about making more with less, anticipating the most serious side effects, and solving problems we are not even aware of at the outset.
The second way to think about the question is to wonder about the conditions that prompt it. A downturn is virtually by definition a time when an organization faces all of the constraints that it once did, and then some! Say you are responsible for the quality of customers’ interactions with your organization. Those interactions have not gone away. But now you must add some additional constraints to all of the problems that you faced in serving them before. Perhaps your customers have less money. Perhaps they are busier making ends meet. Perhaps they are in worse moods and have less patience. At the same time you have fewer resources. Having let go several of the people who used to deal with your customers, you must now train new ones. Your may be unable to afford overtime. And you can’t invest in computer upgrades for the people who do still work in the function.
A decision attitude considers constraints the enemy. A design attitude, on the other hand, thrives on constraints. It looks to the constraints as challenges that can suggest new directions to pursue. It sees constraints as a source of learning and a way of negotiating new meanings. In short, constraints invite new sorts of engagement for someone with a design attitude. Two of my colleagues illustrated using a classic work of literature.
“In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig (1974) describes how Phaedrus, the author’s alter ego, helped students think of something to write. Rather than open up their options, he closed them down. He had one student write about the upper left-hand brick on the font of the Opera House in Bozeman, Montana. He had others write about their thumbs and one side of a coin. Narrowing enabled expansiveness by providing a starting point and a focus for creating (Betty Vandenbosh and Kevin Gallagher, “The Role of Constraints,” in Boland and Collopy, Managing as Designing, 2004, p. 199).”
Put a bit differently, we cannot turn out backs on the constraints that face us. And designers have a long history of accepting and exploiting constraints. Such an attitude characterized the work of Charles and Ray Eames who designed scores of chairs and other furniture and made numerous wonderful short films. “A recurring theme in Eames’s work and thinking is the creative acceptance of constraints, the satisfaction in pushing a material or an idea or a budget as far as it will go (Ralph Caplan, By Design, 2005, p. 208).”
New constraints are coming at us fast and furious; perhaps it is time to push some boundaries.
Recommend This If you liked this, let others know:
09:03 am | 0 recommendations | 2 comments
Becoming a professional includes cultivating certain attitudes. And part of what it means for managers to be designers in addition to being analysts, leaders, and deciders is to cultivate an attitude that complements the attitudes they have developed in those other roles. In the opening chapter of Managing as Designing (Stanford University Press 2004), Dick Boland and I summarized Nobel laureate Herbert Simon’s arguments for cultivating such an attitude.
"To summarize Simon's argument very briefly, humans have a limited cognitive capacity for reasoning when searching for a solution within a problem space. Given the relatively small size of our brain’s working memory, we can only consider a few aspects of any situation and can only analyze them in a few ways. This is also true of computers, although the constraints are less obvious. The problem space that a manager deals with in her mind or in her computer is dependent on the way she represents the situation that she faces. The first step in any problem-solving episode is representing the problem, and to a large extent, that representation has the solution hidden within it (pp. 8-9)."
In an article recently published in Organization Studies ("Uncovering Design Attitude: Inside the Culture of Designers," 2008, pp. 373-392), Kamil Michlewski reports on interviews that he did with 14 people at IDEO, Philips Design, Nissan Design and Wolff Olins. His interview subjects had training in industrial and interaction design (nine of them) and management (three); one studied experimental psychology and computer science and another was an historian and entrepreneur. The goal of the interviews was to ascertain the characteristics of a design attitude. In coding the interviews he came up with five core categories or themes. Taken together they provide an interesting picture of what it means to take on a design attitude.
The first theme is related to the role that designers play in consolidating and reconciling contradictory meanings and objectives. This includes blending the analytic and synthetic or balancing deep humanistic understandings with technical considerations. He quotes a senior director at Philips Design:
"Designers themselves are actually managing all the constituent parts, and therefore managing the connection and the connected contributions of all the constituent disciplines in solving any problem or creating a landscape for exploring further problems or further opportunities, further possibilities of growth (p. 378)."
The second theme, creating and bringing solutions to life, will be immediately familiar to most observers of design. Moving from the intangibles that are the typical starting point of designs to things that delight people and make them feel good requires rapid and inexpensive prototyping and visualization. As a senior manager at IDEO put it:
"Really important is this bringing things to life, being able to build prototypes, do it fast so that you don’t invest a lot of time and money into something that’s not what you want it to be (p. 380)."
What managers seem to find most disquieting about designers is their tendency to embrace discontinuity and open-endedness. Environments that encourage these are seen as jeopardizing commercial objectives. Michlewski observed that this attitude might be a consequence of designers searching for perfect solutions and noted the importance of Karl Weick’s observation that "the trick in designing is to stop while the design still has life."
A management consultant had quite a positive response to how designers engage multiple senses in aesthetic experiences, the fourth theme.
"You're blue on your face trying to explain a positioning strategy, a vision. I mean what is a vision?...You're there, in front of a room trying to explain it and you have used all the analytics. You've analyzed, you've talked about customers, competitors and they're nodding as you use words. And then, suddenly, you bring a visual and the whole room lights up. And that's very special!"
The final theme was one that most managers will embrace: engaging personal and commercial empathy. The interviewees held a view of designers not at odds with commercial interests but playing a role that reduces tensions. Their human-centeredness leads designers to engage in "listening and dialogue as a means to reaching customers' hidden needs (p. 384)."
Taken together the five themes describe an attitude oriented toward acting to create a future that is somehow better. This is done through exploration, often setting aside authority and past experience. "The spirit of challenge and exploration is what designers bring to their workplace (p. 385)" concludes Michlewski.
Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
Recommend This If you liked this, let others know:
