2
The Adoption of Design Thinking

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A Design Journey

April 2007 was raw and frigid in Chicago. As I looked south towards the Loop, the majestic statue of Ceres atop the Board of Trade seemed to tell me to stand and face the cold like a good Midwesterner. I hurried across to 350 North LaSalle St, home of the Illinois Institute of Technology Institute of Design.

If you’ve visited Chicago and explored its stunning architecture, you’ll know that it is a city that pays attention to design. Among its many famous institutions is the Illinois Institute of Technology. Its main campus (Figures 2.1a and 2.1b), itself an architectural masterpiece designed by landmark architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Rem Koolhaas, is some way south of the city.

IIT’s design school, the IIT Institute of Design – ID for short – was housed at that time in an office tower, a landmark building in its own right, located just north of the Chicago River.

ID’s annual strategy conference was a unique fusion of design and business, and I had been attending for some years. Its dean, Patrick Whitney, quiet and unassuming, spoke with great eloquence about the power and potential of design thinking in business. When he invited me to spend a few weeks as a research fellow at ID, the chance – to learn about design by hanging out with designers – seemed too good to pass up. In later years, I would build on what I learned at ID by teaching at other design schools and working with design firms.

2.1a and 2.1b At IIT Campus: Crown Hall by Mies van der Rohe (top), and Rem Koolhaas’s Campus Center Credit, 2.1a: Joe Ravi, CC-BY-SA 3.0, source: MIMOA; 2.1b: © Jeremy Atherton, 2006

Innovation and design had been part of my life for decades. As a former innovation manager in the packaged-goods industry, I had worked closely with creative people to design products, packaging, communications, and services. As a professor at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto in the early 2000s, I was exposed to design thinking as a way of approaching the world. I saw great possibilities for this concept in management education.1 My visit to ID, however, gave me new respect for a process that, till then, I barely understood.

ID, founded in 1937 as the New Bauhaus, considers itself a “methods” school, emphasizing analysis, synthesis, and structured thinking as cornerstones of effective design. Its students are taught hundreds of tools to think systematically through problems and support creativity.² Design, I learned, is not just a creative enterprise but a rigorous one too.

In Chicago, ID students introduced me to the local Irish pub, Fadó. Over pints of Guinness, they would share with me their energy and enthusiasm for design thinking – and their worries about finding jobs. For all the hype, there wasn’t much traction for design thinking in business at the time, and I left Chicago with many questions about how design thinking could ever be adopted more broadly. In later years, I would see many organizations embrace design thinking. Yet while some of these initiatives succeeded, many floundered.

Some designers were accusing business gurus of turning design thinking into a management fad, and I began to wonder whether, for all its appeal, it had been oversold. Perhaps organizations were embracing it as the next big thing without truly understanding it?

Or perhaps, in spite of the best efforts of its advocates, design thinking was just too difficult for organizations, too great a departure from normal business thinking. Managers were being advised to think like designers,3 but was this realistic?

I was to find elements of both: design thinking had indeed been oversold and misunderstood, and it was not easy for managers to get their heads around it. But it was possible. Some initiatives were surviving in the face of difficult challenges, while some were even thriving. These organizations were managing the three tensions of design thinking, and the best were redefining innovation by reframing these tensions.

Designers and the Design Thinking “Fad”

Designers have long known that they have a distinct way of thinking and so coined the term “design thinking” long before it caught the attention of the business community. But the aggressive selling of design thinking seemed for many designers to trivialize their profession, packaging it in an easily digestible form for managers.

Many organizations have been seduced by a dumbed-down version of design thinking, thinking of it as wild idea generation but passing over the deep analysis and reflection that are needed to come up with these ideas. One frustrated designer I interviewed, who preferred to remain anonymous, lamented the “lack of attention span” in his organization, saying, “They’re not willing to sit in the question, not willing to chew on it a little or revisit for a while ... They really quickly jump to ‘We want this finished, we want to move on,’ as opposed to actually taking the time to prototype, reframe, go through the iterations.” Ultimately, the trivialization of design thinking got it into trouble. When it did not reach the impossible heights claimed for it – literally, to change the world – some wrote it off. In 2011, Bruce Nussbaum, assistant managing editor of Businessweek and one of design thinking’s erstwhile advocates, dismissed it as a “failed experiment.”4

This, I felt, was unfair. Yet for a while, I was uncomfortable with the term “design thinking” and took steps to avoid using it. One reason for my discomfort was the reaction of some in the design community to the term: to them, design thinking had always been there and was part of the air they breathed. While some appreciated the attention, others resented the hype from what they saw as management arrivistes.

In my early research, I ran into quite a bit of suspicion as a businessperson with an interest in design thinking. One innovation consultant I interviewed told me, “[Design thinking is] just too simplistic. I’m kind of getting crotchety – I hope never defensive – but crotchety, if you oversimplify this subtle story.”

On another occasion, a prominent design researcher dropped into my office at a design school. On hearing that I was a businessperson, he smiled and said, “Oh, so you’re one of those people who think it’s just about Post-Its.”

My gaze fell on a couple of pads of brightly coloured Post-Its on my desk. Ouch.

As many designers saw it, the business community’s “discovery” of design thinking and its subsequent popularization cheapened the creative and rigorous work they were doing and passed over the rich body of knowledge that had been developed about the field.

Design theorists Petra Badke-Schaub, Norbert Roozenburg, and Carlos Cardoso argued that the hype around design thinking had diluted its meaning. While design thinking has a strong tradition in the design field, Badke-Schaub and her colleagues claimed that its business proponents were making sweeping claims for design as a “competitive advantage” as if they had invented it. “[Tim] Brown’s ‘new’ design thinking approach,” they wrote, “… is ultimately formulated at a rather low resolution level. The instructions are not empirically nor theoretically supported; they are a generalization of his own experiences packed in a kind of popularized management problem solving approach.”5

Others expressed similar views. Design expert Brian Ling argued that the oversimplification of design thinking – packaging it “like a Happy Meal” – was killing creativity;⁶ the field had been dumbed down to appeal to a business audience and had become the latest business fad. Others argued that design thinking would fail because it was misunderstood and had not been integrated with business thinking.⁷

Yet many felt there was more to design thinking than the latest business fad. We met Donald Norman, user-centred design guru and author of the classic The Design of Everyday Things, in chapter 1. He was just as sceptical about design thinking as many others but a little more sanguine. To Norman, design thinking was a myth – but a useful one.⁸

Management scholars weighed in, arguing that, imperfect as the term was, design thinking had something to offer managers. Lucy Kimbell, an associate fellow at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, was also sceptical about the term but argued for a “rethink” that focused more on the practices of different professions in different situations.⁹ Fred Collopy of the Weatherhead School of Management had a similar discomfort and, like Kimbell, argued for a shift in focus: “I would suggest that we should focus instead on building and describing an arsenal of methods and techniques, many of them drawn from various extant design practices, that are applicable to the domains and problems in question.”¹⁰

Kimbell’s and Collopy’s ideas made sense to me – up to a point. For all its imperfections, the term “design thinking” is now well established. For organizations, what matters is not the label but its ability to provide a fresh perspective through its methods and iterative approach.

Design thinking isn’t just an arsenal of methods, though. It is different from managerial thinking, and not easily picked up by managers. For one thing, the design field has a rich history and knowledge base that take years to learn. For another, its very differences from managerial thinking – such as reflective practice, as well as willingness to suspend judgment and to reframe the problem – make it challenging to apply in business and public-sector organizations.

Yet some organizations have established a strong foothold for design thinking. These organizations have faced tensions of their own in implementing it and have found ways to deal with them.

Four Case Studies in Design Thinking

From Chicago, my research led me to organizations around the world that have been trying to implement design thinking. I interviewed more than thirty organizational designers, design leaders, and experts in large organizations about their initiatives in design thinking, most of which took the form of innovation labs. The organizations included government departments, Fortune 500 companies, and large non-profits in Europe, North America, and Asia.

As much as I could, I paid a visit to the organization to see its physical surroundings and get a sense of its culture. In one case, I ran a three-hour workshop with an internal team of design thinkers to trace the history and challenges in their program; in others, I separately interviewed several designers in the same organization.

I was greeted warmly. My respondents were remarkably open, generous with their time, and often surprisingly frank about the difficulties they faced in their organizations.

Design thinking has captured the imagination of many managers. Around the early 2000s, organizations in the private, public, and non-profit sectors began to experiment with design thinking, an experiment that continues to gather pace around the world.

Storytellers in Design Thinking

To help you find your way through all the stories I discuss in this book, the following is a list of the of the key people I interviewed, along with their affiliations. Some preferred to remain anonymous, and I interviewed many others in the course of my design journey. Their ideas were immensely valuable in shaping my thinking.

The storytellers in this book

NAME	ORGANIZATION	POSITION	LOCATION
Alex Ryan	Alberta CoLab	Senior Systems Design Manager	Edmonton, AB, Canada
Anna Kindler	University of British Columbia	Vice Provost and Associate Vice President, Academic	Vancouver, BC, Canada
Brandon Riddell	Canadian Tire	Manager, Canadian Tire Innovations	Waterloo, ON, Canada
Brian Zubert	Thomson Reuters	Director, Thomson Reuters Labs	Waterloo, ON, Canada
Chris Ferguson	Bridgeable	CEO	Toronto, ON Canada
Christian Bason	MindLab	Director	Copenhagen, Denmark
Cindy Tripp	Procter & Gamble	President, Cindy Tripp & Company	Cincinnati, OH
Craig Haney	Communitech	Head, Corporate Innovation	Waterloo, ON, Canada
Dan Elitzer	IDEO	Blockchain and Digital Identity Lead, IDEO CoLab	San Francisco, CA
David Aycan	IDEO	Managing Director, IDEO Products	San Francisco, CA
Holly O’Driscoll	Procter & Gamble	Global Design Thinking Leader & Innovation Strategist	Cincinnati, OH
Jess Roberts	Allina Health	Principal Design Strategist	Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN
Joe Gerber	IDEO	Managing Director, IDEO CoLab	San Francisco, CA
John Body	Australian Tax Office	Principal and Founder at ThinkPlace	Canberra, Australia
Judy Mellett	TELUS	Director, Service Strategy & Design	Toronto, ON, Canada
Mark Leung	Rotman School of Management	Director, DesignWorks	Toronto, ON, Canada
Markus Grupp	TELUS	Senior Manager, Service Design & Innovation	Toronto, ON, Canada
Mathew Chow	IDEO	Senior Design Lead	San Francisco, CA
Ronna Chisolm	Dossier Creative	Business Strategist, Co-Founder	Vancouver, BC, Canada
Rocky Jain	Manulife	Director, RED Lab	Kitchener, Canada
Thomas Prehn	MindLab	Director	Copenhagen, Denmark
Wendy Mayer	Pfizer	Vice President, Worldwide Innovation	New York, NY
Xavier Debane	Manulife	Vice President, Innovation and Business Development	Toronto, ON, Canada

What these organizations had in common was their recognition that “business as usual” was not working. The world was becoming complex, globalized, and wired. Technology offered mind-bending solutions but created mind-bending problems too. Users had diverse lives and faced diverse challenges; they could communicate instantaneously and widely about their experience. Disruptive innovation was seen as the answer to a disrupted social order. Design thinking seemed to offer innovative solutions to wicked problems.

For most organizations that implemented it, design thinking began as a tentative step into the unknown; over time, some developed internal labs, while others tried to create quasi-independent innovation units. Still others tried to diffuse design thinking across the organization. In some cases, momentum has steadily built over time; in others, design thinking has waxed and waned with changes in leadership.

For all its attractions, design thinking can be an uneasy fit in large organizations. I found that such initiatives live in a persistent state of tension around three issues: their cultural engagement with the organization; how radical their innovations are; and taking on the user’s point of view. I call these the Tension of Inclusion, the Tension of Disruption, and the Tension of Perspective, respectively. I will discuss them later in this chapter and take each one in turn in chapters 3, 4, and 5.

The Three Tensions of Design Thinking in Organizations

Design thinkers approach the world with a distinct mindset, methodology, and purpose. It can be challenging to align these with the day-to-day business of organizations, particularly large organizations. I found that design thinkers in organizations face three fundamental tensions:

1 The Tension of Inclusion: Distance from the day-to-day pressures and politics in organizations can be a good thing, but too much distance can lead to isolation.

2 The Tension of Disruption: Design thinkers can have trouble pursuing disruptive innovations while meeting demands for incremental innovations – a difficulty that increases as the lab becomes better known.

3 The Tension of Perspective: Innovations are embedded in complex systems inside and outside the organization; it is difficult to take both a user-centred view and a systems view at the same time.

I’ve called these concepts “tensions” because they are chronic conditions that design thinkers live with every day. They never go away and are not resolved by one-time decisions – but, as we’ll see later, they may be reframed.

Four of the organizations are representative of the issues – and best practices – that I found in organizational design thinking initiatives:

The Australian Tax Office, a tax authority with a diffused design thinking program;

Procter & Gamble, a multinational consumer-products manufacturer with a comprehensive innovation program;

The Mayo Clinic, a large non-profit hospital with an internal design lab; and

MindLab, a quasi-external government innovation lab.

Throughout this book, I will use examples from the organizations I studied to illustrate the tensions I found. I take a deeper dive into these four and return repeatedly to them. I introduce each below and provide some background on their programs.

Designing Thinking in Taxation: The Australian Tax Office

By the late 1990s, after decades of a rigid, punitive approach with taxpayers, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) had earned a reputation as one of the Australian government’s most feared and hated agencies. The corporate tax system was seen as complex and Byzantine. Relations with taxpayers and with tax professionals were at a low ebb.

A complex, difficult-to-navigate tax system benefits no one: not the taxpayer, not the collection agency, not the politicians who have to deal with frustrated constituents. Yet it can be horrendously difficult to change processes and systems that have been layered on top of one another over time and are thoroughly interwoven. Added to this were a bias for command and control at the ATO and the risk-averse culture of bureaucracies everywhere.

The ATO’s initiative in design thinking grew out of an earlier focus on strategy and visualization. These approaches had greatly advanced the ATO’s thinking, yet the assistant commissioner at the time, John Body, and others felt that it was missing the crucial perspective of the taxpayer.

The concept of taxation “design” ushered in a completely new way of working. The ATO hoped to transform its relationship with taxpayers. However, it did not create an identifiable “centre” for design thinking: such a centre would have been difficult to sustain in the face of periodic budget cuts. “We built all these islands of capability through the organization that were stitched together by the brand of ‘design,’ but they weren’t centrally funded,” Body told me. “I just knew that if it was a target, it probably wouldn’t have a long shelf life.” Instead, design was seeded throughout the ATO through conferences and communities of practice.

One early project dealt with corporate tax. At the time, the legislation required a separate tax return for each company within a conglomerate. This created a significant burden for the largest companies, some of which had to prepare separate returns for more than one hundred subsidiaries. Accordingly, the government was considering a change that would allow corporations to file as a single, consolidated unit. The actual process of filing a single tax return – not just the return itself – needed to be designed, and the ATO took this on as a user-centred design challenge. Said Body, “It really was an experiment, where we tried things like prototyping: we actually constructed physical prototypes and walkthroughs, and took tax accountants through those walkthroughs. A lot of visualization, a lot of collaboration … the hallmarks of the design thinking approach.” From there, said Body, “progressively, the concept [of design thinking] just took off.”

As design took hold over the ensuing years, the ATO worked on hundreds of projects in a wide variety of areas. In spite of this, however, interest in design has waxed and waned. There has been talk of conducting a review, with a view to sharpening the ATO’s design capability.

Design Thinking in Consumer Products: Procter & Gamble

In a single day in March 2000, Procter & Gamble’s stock dropped more than 30 percent. With its core business in decline and no clear growth strategy, the company was excoriated in the business media and investors were exiting in droves.

To an outsider, a 165-year-old detergent company hardly seems a likely innovation hotbed. Yet, for A.G. Lafley, brought in as CEO in June of that year, innovation was exactly what Procter & Gamble (P&G) needed as its central organizing principle. Cindy Tripp, who later led P&G’s Global Design Initiative, told me that while the company was very good at inventing technology, superior products alone often weren’t enough. Overall product rating (consumers’ evaluation of product performance in tightly controlled tests) was considered to predict marketplace success. But in many cases, said Tripp, “overall product rating started to not correlate with in-market success. Why was that? That was the big dilemma.”

Lafley’s first major initiative was “Connect & Develop,” a program to link up with university labs, suppliers, and even competitors and apply P&G’s research and development, marketing, and manufacturing skills to develop ideas into commercial ventures.

Meanwhile, Lafley moved ahead with design thinking. As head of P&G Asia in Japan, he had seen the power of design. According to Tripp, “The mantra became ‘consumer response’ and ‘Let’s understand people’s needs, and if we understand people’s needs, then we can design things and invent things that meet those needs.’” In 2001, Lafley appointed Claudia Kotchka P&G’s first vice president for Design Strategy and Innovation.

From the beginning, the goal was to embed design thinking across the organization, starting with the executive team, who travelled to San Francisco for a two-day workshop with design firm IDEO. The workshop showed that design was all about customer experience, not just making things pretty. But how could this shift in thinking shape innovation across a multidivisional organization of more than 100,000 employees?

The design function – or, as it became known, the corporate design capability – was a catalyst. Kotchka founded P&G’s design lab, called clay street, in 2004. Housed six blocks from P&G’s head offices in a former brewery, clay street was to be both a problem-solving lab and a design thinking training facility.

One of clay street’s first projects was to revamp the tired Herbal Essences shampoo brand, then a dark-green product packaged in clear bottles. The team developed a new vision of “organic” products away from old, outdated associations with herbal tea and granola and towards more contemporary connotations of smoothies and brightly coloured blouses. This vision led to modernized opaque bottles in pink and other colours and the tag line “Discover pure botanical bliss.”

At clay street, teamwork, creativity, and human potential are articles of faith and are expressed in its own creed:

• We believe in the power of teams – they are more powerful than the sum of their parts

• We believe that people thrive in relationship

• We believe that creativity isn’t the domain of chosen few – it is simply part of being human

• We believe in playful spirit

• We believe that genius lies in everyone – it only needs to be revealed11

These beliefs are the foundation of “enduring truths” of creative teams and integrative leaders: intention to clarify and orient, compassion to be fully human, and connection to bring people and ideas together. More concretely, these truths translate into nine experiential aspects of the clay street experience:

INTENTION

• Set initial conditions

• Slow down to go fast

• Make the invisible visible

COMPASSION

• Hear all voices

• See with new eyes

• Fall in love

CONNECTION

• Nurture self-discovery

• Jump into ambiguity

•  Share stories¹²

Yet with leadership changes, design has ebbed and flowed at P&G too. Kotchka retired in 2004, handing over to Tripp, who retired in 2012. Lafley stepped down in 2009 but returned in 2013 after his successor resigned amid heavy criticism. David Taylor took the reins in 2015, promising to accelerate cost-cutting plans and shake up the corporate culture. In spite of these changes, design thinking has grown: from zero in 2004, the design network grew to 100 facilitators by 2008. By 2012, it was 350.

Design Thinking in Patient Care: The Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation

In the early 2000s, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, was considering a new approach. In an institution celebrated for its groundbreaking research and its deep commitment to patient care, some senior doctors felt that not enough attention was being given to the delivery of care.

In spite of great progress in drugs, vaccines, treatment, and technology over the centuries, little had changed between patients and physicians. Technological and social changes had put more information and power in patients’ hands than ever before, yet treatment facilities were essentially unchanged and the doctor-patient relationship was still paternalistic. The layout, look, and feel of examining rooms had also remained unchanged, as illustrated by the paired images in Figure 2.2, one taken in 1954 and the other in 2012.¹³

In 2002, two senior doctors at Mayo, Dr Nicholas LaRusso and Dr Michael Brennan, launched SPARC – for See, Plan, Act, Refine, Communicate. Said Brennan, “We never had something similar [to medical research] that can study the processes by which care is delivered. So we thought, well, why not?”14

2.2 Exam rooms in 1954 and in 2012 Credit: Used with permission of Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. All rights reserved

Housed in a corridor in the Department of Medicine, SPARC included medical professionals, business strategists, and designers in the hope of fostering close collaboration on innovation in patient care. The initiative was financed by internal funds and philanthropic support. In its first two years, SPARC conducted more than twenty projects. These included redesigning patient exam rooms, developing a check-in kiosk, and developing a new system of education cards for diabetes patients.

Over time, other innovation initiatives were brought in and SPARC evolved into the Center for Innovation (CFI), a fully staffed and funded lab that focused on the design of patient care. Where SPARC had been conducted quietly and behind the scenes, CFI represented a shift to a more public, visible endeavour to improve the delivery of patient care at Mayo.

In one project, Reengineering Dialysis (RED), a kidney-dialysis team mapped the patient’s experience with dialysis and developed an integrated-care team approach that took into account medical and non-medical aspects. Palliative care doctors were included; team members were trained in working with patients and families; and, armed with an in-depth understanding of patients, the CFI’s designers could develop useful, patient-responsive educational materials.

The RED project had very positive results: hospital admissions and in-hospital dialysis fell; patient, provider, and care-team satisfaction all increased; and there were significant cost savings.

The CFI became a significant – and public – initiative, hosting a large annual conference in health care design that attracts health care practitioners and designers from around the world. Yet the cultural challenge of being embedded in a sceptical “prove-it” culture has continued to dog its efforts.

Designing Thinking in Government Services: MindLab

In the early 2000s, the Danish government was experimenting with design thinking with a unit called MindLab. MindLab was initially about disrupting the bureaucracy – “the equivalent of throwing a grenade” at it, in the words of its founding director, Mikkel B. Rasmussen, then head of Business Affairs in the Ministry of Industry.

MindLab’s initial goal was to create the optimal conditions in the ministry for creativity and new ideas. With five full-time employees, it was in no position to disrupt government on its own. However, with skills in facilitation, teambuilding, hosting, and policy development, the MindLab team could exert an influence through creative collaboration within the ministry.

The group hoped to become a catalyst for change at the level of processes, policy development, and organizational development. The outcomes would include faster reaction times, quicker implementation of ideas, and improved creative competencies within the ministry itself. Its radical interior design, by artists/designers Bosch & Fjord, with mobile furniture, orange pillows, and “The Mind” – a ten-square-metre oval think-tank space with whiteboard walls – signalled that the activities there would be distinct from the day-to-day routine of government.

A project for the National Board of Industrial Injuries explored the experience with the system of those who had suffered industrial injuries. By making videos of interviews with these individuals, MindLab developed a user journey of each person’s experience of the handling of his or her entire case. The videos and journeys provided the board with a convincing picture of how the system appeared from the perspective of the user. New ideas were developed by storyboarding different processes and outcomes. As a result of the project, the board made a series of changes in its protocols for dealing with injured persons.

MindLab emphasizes openness and learning (Figure 2.3). Its staff members act as advocates for innovation in the public sector, conducting academic and professional research, publishing articles, and speaking at conferences around the world. Since many of the challenges faced by governments are common across countries, the approach helps MindLab deepen its understanding of systems and how to change them.

Over time, MindLab evolved from its “hand grenade” aspirations to a more strategic approach to systems change. “You can’t go out and redesign society,” its director, Christian Bason, told me in 2014. “What you can do is work within a complex system to find levers, or even … [like] organizational acupuncture: where are the pressure points you can actually address to make things happen in the direction you want.”

2.3 MindLab’s home page: http://mind-lab.dk/en/ Used with permission

Bason left MindLab in 2015 to be succeeded by Thomas Prehn. Under Prehn, MindLab has graduated from acupuncture to deep engagement with the bureaucracy and has undertaken projects to bring about behavioural and cultural change and enact a new vision of the public service.

MindLab started small, primarily as a workshop facilitator. However, like the Mayo Clinic, it soon confronted the limitations of this approach. With the full support of senior levels of government, it expanded its activities, first to applying the methods of user-centred design to public services and later to influencing the system at a deeper level.

Each of these organizations, in its own way, dealt with the three tensions of Inclusion, Disruption, and Perspective. Before turning to these tensions, let’s take a closer look at why organizations embark on the journey to begin with.

Why Organizations Implement Design Thinking

It may surprise you that design thinking is not just about innovation – and even that sometimes, innovation takes a back seat to other goals. I’ll go into these goals in more detail at the end of the book, but for now suffice it to say that there are many ways of implementing design thinking and many reasons for organizations to embark on it. For numerous organizations, innovation was an important goal, albeit often not the only one:

ORGANIZATIONS’ GOALS IN IMPLEMENTING DESIGN THINKING

Innovation: Facilitating innovation, particularly “disruptive” innovation

Internal change: Changing mindsets, perspectives, and behaviour

User experience: Developing better experiences for customers

Collaboration: Fostering internal teamwork and breaking down silos

Talent: Attracting and retaining highly creative people

System change: Bringing about fundamental changes in organizational and social systems

The ATO’s goal was to become more user-centred: strategic thinking was helping, but it was felt that the complexity of the tax system was counterproductive. Taxpayers were evading taxes not because they were criminals, but because it was sometimes just too difficult to navigate the system. The ATO’s own predatory attitude towards taxpayers was counterproductive, as it fostered a taxpayer culture of “getting away with what you can.”

Designers use the term “outside-in” to mean looking at the situation from the point of view of people external to the organization – as opposed to “inside-out,” which represents the internal perspective on the problem. At the ATO, the perspective shift to “outside-in” was quite dramatic. A noted academic and consultant, Richard Buchanan, was brought on board to help with the transition to design thinking. Buchanan interviewed about twenty of the ATO’s personnel and commented that while everyone talked about the tax system, individual taxpayers did not experience the whole system – only their pathway through it.

Up to this point, the ATO had been looking at things strategically – at the system as a whole – rather than on the different impact it was having on different types of taxpayer. As Body told me, “For us … that was a very profound statement, because it really reframed us from ‘We’re trying to run this whole thing for the country’ to ‘Maybe we should be designing pathways for cohorts of people and designing them more carefully and intentionally.’”

The ATO’s perspective shift was from thinking of taxpayers in aggregate, impersonal terms – as “taxpaying units,” if you will – to seeing them as individuals, or groups of individuals, who faced unique issues of their own. It’s a fundamentally different way of looking at problems.

Procter & Gamble’s goal, on the other hand, was to deal with intensifying global competition and technological shifts. Having seen the power of design in Japan, Lafley wrote in 2008, “Design was a missing ingredient in our quest to achieve superior organic growth … I believed the design thinking approach could open up new possibilities for P&G.”15

2.4 P&G’s home away from home, 1340 Clay Street

Lafley’s interest was in making the culture of a huge corporate bureaucracy more innovative and nimble in the face of massive changes in its environment. This meant that the design function needed to spread the seeds of design thinking through training and building a large internal network.

To see this in action, I visited P&G’s clay street lab in Cincinnati, Ohio (Figure 2.4). Located in a former brewery in Over-the-Rhine, a historic working-class neighbourhood close to the downtown core, it was evidently intended as a “step away” – an escape, even – from the strictures of the corporate head office. The area was a formerly rough but now gentrified part of town, with the occasional syringe still to be found on the pavement outside slick renos of new brick and frosted glass. Inside, the facility was a single room, about twenty metres square, bright, with exposed-brick walls, wood floors, and open ductwork overhead. In the centre was a green carpet with a semicircle of chairs, a flipchart, and a large LCD screen.

My host, Holly O’Driscoll, warmly welcomed me to Cincinnati. O’Driscoll is a global design thinking leader at P&G – an expert facilitator who both helps teams solve pressing problems and spreads the design network by training other facilitators. To my mind, she embodied design thinking at P&G: open, helpful, and positive, she was not afraid to challenge orthodoxy and encouraged teams to do the same. The green carpet, she explained, was a “safe space” where workshop participants could speak their mind without penalty.

I participated in an innovation session with one of the brand teams, a cross-functional group that included representatives from marketing, sales, R&D, and design. Some of the participants had been to a design thinking workshop before: they were thoughtful, curious, and, with O’Driscoll’s encouragement, creative. It seemed that within this room at least, design thinking was working. Whether P&G was closer to the across-the-board cultural change envisaged by Lafley, I could not tell – but with the design network steadily expanding, it looked as if progress was being made.

For the Mayo Clinic, healthcare was ripe for disruption, and design thinking promised to provide it. In a 2009 article, CFI associate director Alan Duncan and designer/researcher Margaret Breslin wrote, “It is axiomatic that the US healthcare system almost universally underperforms. Almost no one is satisfied with the current system of delivery and payment of health services. In fact, if the most vocal healthcare quality critics are to be believed, the system we entrust to make us healthier and extend our lives routinely does precisely the opposite.”16

The CFI’s mission, then, is to “transform the experience and delivery of health care.” To accomplish this, it focuses on specific “innovation platforms.” In its Practice Redesign platform, CFI aims to reduce outpatient costs by 30 percent. The Community Health Transformation platform is based on a “Triple Aim” model of improving population health, enhancing patient experience, and reducing per-capita costs. The Care-at-a-Distance platform aims to develop sustainable models that extend specialty care beyond the traditional hospital/clinic setting, such as underserved areas, affiliated practices, and patients’ homes.

Part of the CFI’s work is to foster a more innovative culture at Mayo, and for this reason the CFI has a number of outreach programs to connect with sympathizers across the institution. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the CFI is taking on cultural change as its primary goal. Scientific scepticism is deeply rooted in medicine, and the Mayo Clinic is naturally risk averse – as one might expect, indeed hope, in any medical facility. So unlike the P&G experience, significant cultural change is not a realistic aspiration at Mayo.

MindLab, in spite of its early aspirations to start a revolution within the Danish government, came to see itself as an innovation facilitator. Like bureaucracies everywhere, Denmark’s government has to contend with multiple constituencies and interests. In such a system, collaboration is key: it is one thing to come up with an innovation, another to implement it on a larger scale. MindLab’s motto became “facilitate, don’t consult”: working as a peer with governmental colleagues meant that it could extend its reach into the implementation of projects and thus have a greater effect.

However, MindLab still feels it has an important role to play in system change: to be the voice of the user in the system and a catalyst for cultural change. Like the ATO, but on a broader scale, it promotes cultural change to help public servants develop a more innovative, “outside-in” perspective.

In one project, MindLab worked with the Ministry of Industry, Business and Financial Affairs to help enact the ministry’s strategy of becoming more “agile.” While everyone liked the idea of being agile, nobody really knew what it meant in specific terms. Christmas “Advent calendars” were provided to ministry staff; each day in December, civil servants opened a “window” in the calendar to find a micro-behaviour that reflected agility. Said Thomas Prehn, “For all of December, you just have a ministry going completely crazy with agile, and then when December’s over, a lot of that disappears, but some of the language will stay behind, and you will also see some of the behaviours stick.”

MindLab’s facility is more like a boutique design studio than a government office. The space is bright and colourful, the furniture is mobile, and there is an open floor plan (Figure 2.6). At one end, the submarine-like Mind offers an enclosed space for focused thinking (Figures 2.7 and 2.8).

Several projects cut across government agencies, and MindLab’s role is to challenge these different parties to take an integrated perspective. Since users do not see the distinction between different silos and expect a cohesive experience, MindLab helps facilitate co-creation in which different ministries participate to find user-centred solutions.

2.5 MindLab’s studio in Copenhagen

Each of these organizations had its own reasons for adopting design thinking. While they have stood the test of time, none experienced dramatic, overnight change. Each, however, had to deal with the three tensions of Inclusion, Disruption, and Perspective.

2.6 MindLab’s studio in Copenhagen

2.7 The Mind at MindLab

2.8 Inside The Mind

The Three Tensions of Design Thinking in Organizations

As a way to solve problems, design thinking has downsides for large organizations. It may not provide ready answers to the original question, instead questioning the question itself. It can be disruptive; it can consume time and resources with uncertain results. The results themselves are hard to measure. As a result, many attempts to implement it have run up against established organizational systems, cultures, and processes.

Yet in spite of the challenges, organizations like the ATO, P&G, the Mayo Clinic, the Danish government, and many others have met with success. In this and subsequent chapters, I will take a close look at the obstacles these organizations have faced with design thinking and the strategies they have used to overcome them.

Design thinking programs live in tension. To survive and thrive, they manage this tension on a daily basis – not by making stark tradeoffs, but by finding ways of navigating it and even using the tension to their advantage. In my research, I found they had three particular tensions in common: the Tension of Inclusion, the Tension of Disruption, and the Tension of Perspective.

The first tension is Inclusion: Every successful design thinking initiative I encountered had what one interviewee termed “air cover”: explicit and consistent support from the top of the organization – often, though not always, from the CEO. Yet even with such unequivocal support, innovation can fly in the face of established organizational culture.

Many successful organizations are “doing” machines, built to accomplish clear goals as quickly and in as efficient a manner as possible. While innovation deals with ambiguous and ill-defined problems, ambiguity in the daily business of manufacturing, financing, and human resources can be toxic. Reflection, iteration, and nonlinear thinking may be fine for a design firm or a consultancy but are not helpful and are potentially disastrous if you are trying to run a manufacturing plant or get an aircraft off the ground.

The difference was particularly visible at the Mayo Clinic, where physicians’ formal dress and way of addressing patients were designed to put patients at ease, confident that they were in the hands of competent professionals. Design team members at the CFI dressed casually and were less formal. Their demeanour broadcast their difference from the health care teams.

In response, there is a temptation to build walls – physical or virtual – around an innovation program to protect it. Some organizations move their labs to an off-site location, for example. However, the risk is that the innovators will become isolated from the organization – speaking a different language and dressing and behaving differently. Ultimately, this can lead to irrelevance: to survive, innovators need not only the organization’s resources but also access to information and moral support from the grassroots, not just from the top.

This is the first tension. Design thinking programs need to maintain independence from the organization while being thoroughly engaged with it. They need to be simultaneously outside and inside, top down and bottom up.

The second tension is Disruption : “Disruptive innovation” has become a buzzword in business and even in the non-profit and public sectors. Disruptive trends in technology, demographics, and social behaviour create the need for products and services that respond to them. Innovation initiatives are often set up with such a response in mind.

Yet establishing a design thinking program does not make disruptive innovation easy. On the one hand, design thinking means revisiting the core assumptions that underpin the organization’s offerings; it involves “problem finding” to identify hidden issues that organizations, and even users, are not aware of; it requires a willingness to engage in abstraction – and it takes time.

On the other hand, innovators in any organization need to work within deadlines and budgets that arise from real-world constraints. Many take on “incremental” projects – tweaking current offerings, experimenting with variations on existing ways of doing things – to demonstrate short-term results. The problem is that it’s easy for this activity to take over and be derailed by the disruptive innovation they were set up to do. The more successful a program is, the more demands there will be for incremental work.

The ATO did not set up a distinct lab, preferring to “seed” design thinking across the organization. As John Body told me, the original intent of this was to insulate the program from budget cuts, but it had the effect of grounding innovation in the needs of the divisions, which were inherently incremental. In the meantime, senior managers worked on the disruptive task of redesigning the Tax Act itself.

Design thinking programs need to deliver immediate results, even as they undermine the foundations of the organizations that sponsor them. They need to bolster the organization as they question its core assumptions, to be incremental and disruptive at the same time.

Another common reason for setting up a design thinking initiative is to bring the user’s perspective into the organization: it can be a powerful impulse for the organization to get closer to its users (or customers), which creates a third tension: that of Perspective.

Design thinkers develop products and services centred on the experience of the individual user. Innovations, however, have to do more than engage users: they must engage several different systems and consider related products and services, related activities and experiences, as well as the impact on the social system and the environmental system. In addition, the organizational ecosystem is tasked with implementation of ideas: technical support, logistics, plant trials, and dealer relationships are all part of this system.

Design thinkers are regularly caught between the perspective of an individual user and that of the system as a whole.

For all its intentions of “throwing a hand grenade at the bureaucracy,” MindLab found that many of its ideas fell on fallow ground when it came to implementation. In response, it embedded its facilitators in the implementation process, carrying the ideas forward into the organizational system to be adapted and modified as needed.

In large organizations, to be a design thinker is to live with paradox, cultivate relationships, and conduct subtle negotiations around tricky issues. Design thinkers need to be as cognizant of the organizational system and its workings as they are of the world of products and users, and must be prepared to become involved in the implementation process. They need to be both user-centred and system-centred.

My own tension around the term “design thinking” was ultimately resolved by bypassing definitions and focusing on substance. For the organizations I talked to, the three tensions are less easily resolved. They live with them every day, and while there is no single, definitive way to resolve them, the best have developed some practices others can learn from.