6
Reframing Design Thinking

Luxury Liners and Small Craft

Railtown is a trendy neighbourhood in the otherwise depressed Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, BC, Canada. Nestled cheek-by-jowl alongside low-rent apartment buildings, safe injection sites, and hostels for the homeless, its fashionably renovated warehouses have attracted a quirky mix of artists, software entrepreneurs, wine bars … and designers.

Every one of these design studios is small, some tiny. One of the larger studios is Dossier Creative, which specializes in packaging, branding, and innovation. Located in a former canning plant, Dossier’s studio is an open area of about 5,000 square feet facing the industrial port and, beyond it, a sweeping view of the coastal mountains.

A total of fifteen employees occupy the space. There is one meeting room and a brainstorming room; otherwise, the studio is open plan. One of the co-founders, Ronna Chisolm, occupies the only office; her husband and the other co-founder, Don Chisolm, works at an open desk with the rest of the team. Tables are littered with scalpels, Sharpies, semi-finished sketches, and mocked-up packages (Figure 6.1).

figure-c006.f001

6.1 Dossier’s studio in Vancouver, Canada. Images provided by Dossier.

That’s it. That’s the entire company. It couldn’t be a further cry from the world of large corporations and government. Ronna Chisolm captured the vibe at Dossier:

As a small organization, we can be agile, change and pivot fast. When we wanted to create a business and design intern lab (Railyard*), we just did it – knowing we can test, iterate, and evolve it. When we wanted to move into partnering with companies in design ventures and launching our own venture – we could just make it happen. We’ve had to be lean and entrepreneurial to evolve over thirty years.

Design thinking grew up in places like this. Compared with large organizations, small studios like Dossier are like crossing the ocean in a small fishing boat as opposed to a luxury liner. Life can be turbulent, fast moving, and unpredictable, and the only way to survive is to be nimble.

Large organizations can be interesting and stimulating places to work; nimble they are not. Frustration with this aspect of corporate life – and with the challenge from smaller competitors – has led many CEOs to seek new, more fluid ways of working, such as “intrapreneurship,” and to adopt senseless maxims like “ready, fire, aim.” And to embrace design thinking.

The frustration is understandable, and indeed I believe that design thinking has much to offer large organizations. But the challenge of implementing it should not be underestimated.

It doesn’t help that nobody can agree on what design thinking is. This is a field that has been built through practice; theory is scrambling to catch up. Is it reasonable, for example, to suggest that designers of oil rigs think the same way as fashion designers? That all designers subscribe to a human-centred view of the world? (They don’t.) Just what is the common thread that defines design thinking? Like design itself, design thinking eludes definition.

As we saw in chapter 2, misconceptions abound. Though design thinking is often seen as a recent fad, the term has been used by designers for decades.1 It is seen as being all about creative thinking, but it is less about crazy ideas than reflective practice.2 It is not just a toolkit you can readily adopt, but a distinct way of seeing and being in the world.3 Nor is it a quick fix: successful organizational design thinking initiatives take years to mature. Misconceptions like these make it more difficult for organizational design thinkers to set and adhere to a reasonable set of expectations. In this chapter, I don’t hope to provide a precise definition of design thinking: such a definition would inevitably fall short of capturing the myriad ways it is applied in practice.

Can you turn a luxury liner into a small fishing boat? Certainly not; nor would you want to. Fortunately, however, the challenges of applying design thinking are predictable; I will suggest three ways of thinking about design thinking – of reframing it – to address the three tensions, as some organizations described in this book have done. In the process, I will offer some suggestions for your organization to take advantage of the experience of those who have sailed these waters. To help you navigate, you’ll find a summary of my recommendations in Figure 6.2.

Reframe 1: Design Thinking as a Mindset – Escape, Model, Prototype

In chapter 3, we saw how the Tension of Inclusion can be reframed as a question of mindset.

Designers are all about balancing possibility with practicality. Unlike the act of pure creation that we associate with fine art, the essence of design is making useful things.* The process of getting there requires an open mind, a sense of optimism, and a willingness to suspend reality, temporarily.

What does this look like in organizations? Design thinking can provide an escape from the systemic, political, and cultural constraints that stifle thought in many organizations. It can be modelled as a cultural movement. And it can be prototyped and scaled up.

6.2 Reframing Design Thinking: Summary

figure-c006.f003

Escape from the Dominant Mindset

There are several ways of using design as an escape valve.

1 Create a distinct space and location: Most of the labs I interviewed had a dedicated space that was physically different from the rest of the organization, and provided a relaxed and open vibe. At Procter & Gamble (P&G), there was even a “space-within-a-space”: the green carpet, where participants could speak openly without fear of reprisal.

If the space is an escape from the routine, it should not be too far away. Canadian Tire’s lab was a two-hour drive from its head office, which created difficulties in recruiting participants. MindLab’s and P&G’s spaces were located outside the main office but within easy reach.

2 Develop reflective practice: The Australian Tax Office (ATO) created a Community of Practice: a forum where design thinkers across the organization could meet regularly to share their challenges and experiences. In other organizations with a distributed design thinking model, opportunities for sharing experiences were no less important, but were less formal. Many design studios I know, including Dossier, take time out to discuss their practice and bring in new learning.

If design is reflective practice, it makes sense to reflect regularly on how it is working. When things are busy, it is difficult to carve out time for reflection; at the ATO, these sessions were held early in the morning.

3 Have an outreach program: Many design thinking initiatives, even highly centralized ones, make conscious efforts to reach out to other parts of the organization and to external communities. The Mayo Clinic’s annual Transform conference is a major event that brings health care innovators together. MindLab’s staff publish research and travel internationally to present at conferences.

I had expected that private-sector organizations would be extremely protective of their knowledge about innovation and design thinking; I was surprised to find many to be extremely open. While many such organizations have well-developed internal programs, there is an opportunity to go further still and sponsor design thinking conferences and other such outreach programs. This can open up the company to discovering new knowledge, exchanging best practices, and developing interesting networks.

Should You Centralize or Decentralize Design Thinking in Your Organization?

Whether you have a central lab or distribute design thinking throughout the organization depends on your goals. If you are primarily trying to develop a design mindset, a distributed model has its advantages; if you are mostly concerned with disruptive innovation, you will prefer a central lab that is connected externally. However, in the organizations I spoke to, almost all – even those with distributed programs like P&G – had some form of central lab that acted as home base.

Being centralized has some advantages:

You can control and preserve the integrity of the process.

You can develop in-house expertise on the design thinking process.

You can sponsor research and continuous learning about design thinking and methods.

You can provide an escape valve for operating departments.

You can do exploratory, cross-functional or “platform” work that doesn’t reside in departments.

However, there are advantages to a distributed program:

Your design work is closer to the action, more grounded in reality and should be easier to implement as a result.

Operating units own the projects and are therefore more committed to them.

You can build a common language across departments to discuss how work gets done.

You can work to foster a design mindset throughout the organization.

Cindy Tripp at P&G was a strong advocate of a distributed approach: “When you have a central group … you would never get past the quick win, because businesses are always going for the quick win,” she said.

Still, a good deal depends on the amount of autonomy and responsibility your operating units have. At P&G, business units were expected to develop disruptive innovations within their own areas, so having a distributed approach worked well with the goal of disruptive innovation. For situations in which operating units are not responsible for innovation, as in many public-sector organizations, you may need a centralized approach to bring about disruption. I’ll have more to say on this topic in the final chapter.

Model Your Mindset

Many organizations see design thinking as a vehicle for shifting their culture in the direction of customer centricity and creativity. Culture change is never an easy task, and the while a “design mindset” is a worthy goal, it needs to be made actionable for those who are not familiar with the idea. People need to see what the mindset actually is and what it means to them. Here are two basic considerations if your organization is framing the challenge in this way.

1 Leaders need a strong understanding of design thinking: The survival of design thinking depends critically on support of leaders, and a surface understanding leaves it vulnerable to hostile forces within the organization. Design thinking has been criticized as a “fad” by some in the business community, perhaps in reaction to the level of hype it has received; what can be underappreciated is the level of depth and rigour that design thinkers bring to innovation.

To develop this understanding, A.G. Lafley brought the P&G executive team to San Francisco for a workshop at IDEO. This investment of time was an important foundation for the company’s design thinking initiative. The Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation (CFI) brought together a team of high-profile design thinkers and consultants to act as advisors.

2 Open the Black Box: For those new to it, design thinking can be shrouded in mystery. Perhaps that is part of the attraction, different as it is from the normal way of doing things. Yet the image of design thinkers as “those crazy cowboys” (as at Canadian Tire) is not unusual and underscores the risk of isolation from the organization.

Most design initiatives publish a process diagram that encapsulates the key steps in their process while emphasizing its iterative nature.4 However, the organizations I spoke to described a process that, while systematic, is far from standardized. In the past, MindLab had published its approach, but by the time I spoke with Christian Bason, it had ceased to do so because it led to oversimplification of design as a linear process.

Regardless of whether you choose to publish a specific process, there is a need to demystify design thinking for the organization. You should make its underlying logic transparent and demonstrate how it integrates creativity, empathy, and reflection. The Advent calendar MindLab developed for one of its ministries was an appealing way of demonstrating the “agile” concept. Similarly inventive ways can be found to bring design thinking into everyday conversation.

Prototype the Mindset

The idea of prototyping – trying things out on a small scale and learning from them – is just as relevant to design thinking programs in organizations as it is to the design process itself. In creating your prototype, here are two central things you should build in.

1 Build and protect the mindset: Design thinking is less a set of methods than a way of seeing and being in the world: this idea of a design “mindset” came up again and again in my research. According to IDEO, design thinkers are not just creative, but also optimistic, empathetic, willing to learn from failure, comfortable with ambiguity, and confident.5 I also found that design thinkers are highly rigorous – though, as we saw at the Mayo Clinic, they interpret rigour in a very different way from scientists.

To build and communicate a design mindset, you need to be very clear on what it is and what it could mean in your organization. Though the field is relatively new, there are several excellent design researchers who have been grappling for some time with the problem of defining design as a way of thinking. As a starting point, I recommend reading and reflecting on the work of design researchers such as Richard Buchanan, Nigel Cross, and Kees Dorst. For a management perspective, I recommend Sara Beckman, Jeanne Liedtka, and Roger Martin.

2 Create movements, not mandates: All the design thinking initiatives I encountered had top management support. Some, like MindLab, had actually been instigated by senior managers who had a passion for design thinking. This support, while necessary, was not sufficient for success. The ATO, P&G, and others had experienced ups and downs in interest in design thinking as organizational leadership changed.

Mathew Chow at IDEO spoke to me of social movements as a model for spreading design thinking in organizations. Chris Ferguson’s experience with building grassroots initiatives supported this idea of a bottom-up approach. The task of senior management is to create room for design thinking – in the form of budgets and moral support – but from the beginning, you need to engage constituencies from the ground up.

Developing stories of success helps. I consistently heard about successful labs that initially went after “low-hanging fruit” – quick wins that got people talking, and from there developed a series of case histories they could use to engage the organization. Quick wins like these are readily available in most organizations; a simple reframe can dramatically transform a project and demonstrate the power of design thinking. The TELUS team started with a low-risk employee-engagement project, using the project as a way of getting fellow employees involved with design thinking to help them understand and talk about it; the success of this and other early projects helped get the TELUS Service Design team off the ground and set it on its way.

Reframe 2: Design Thinking as a Technological or Collaborative Platform

“Design platforms, not products” is a familiar design maxim. We saw in chapter 4 how design thinkers were reframing the Tension of Disruption by creating two types of platforms: technological and collaborative.

In Ten Types of Innovation, 6 Larry Keeley and his colleagues comment that technology companies build platforms for innovation by others; a good example of this would be Apple’s App Store. This strategy is well-established with the tech sector and is emerging in other sectors: the online crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, for example, provides a platform for creative projects. This approach can be used within organizations too: design thinking units can act as internal platform builders and allow individual divisions to elaborate on their ideas.

By taking incremental innovations as an opportunity to build technological platforms, design thinkers are providing concrete results while allowing individual departments to take the lead within their own spheres. Meanwhile, they are responding to the imperative to bring about more fundamental change.

Collaborative platforms, however, collect a diverse array of stakeholders who bring knowledge from different perspectives. Part of the design thinker’s job is to find these different perspectives – from suppliers, users, even competitors – bring them together and integrate them into a coherent innovation.

Of course they’re not independent from each other. Technological platforms provide a vehicle for collaboration, and collaborative platforms can lead to technology platforms. The following are some guidelines for developing and maintaining these platforms.

Technological Platforms

Technological platforms are big ideas that facilitate small ideas. In essence, you are doing the initial work and allowing your divisions to build innovations of their own in the areas they know best. If you are building technological platforms, you should consider the following:

1 Design choices, not solutions: There’s value in not completely solving problems. By allowing internal clients to come up with their own answers, you help create ownership of the ideas – which has the added bonus of helping defuse the Tension of Perspective and increasing the chance of implementation. There are other advantages to stopping short of a full solution: rather than try to take a deep dive into every problem, your design thinking program can focus on developing technology that will be helpful across a range of innovation problems.

Technology platforms are not restricted to tech companies or retailers of tech products like Canadian Tire. Unilever, for example, used its patent for “fragrance and encapsulated odour counteractant,”7 to develop global deodorant brands like Axe, Impulse, Rexona, and Sure. Each of these brands uses the same underlying technology to serve different markets in different parts of the world.

2 Develop and nurture “activators”: In stopping short of full solutions you still need to have a deep, intimate understanding of the end user, the technological and competitive landscape, and have a vision for the ultimate application of your platform. This means that your design thinking unit needs both to collaborate closely with departments that may use the platform and contribute ideas they may not have considered.

The term “activator” is used at Communitech and refers to the role of the lab director as a catalyst for change within the organization. A good lab director needs to be a problem finder who can identify opportunities for technologies that solve multiple problems across the organization. This means being not just a competent designer or a leader of a creative team: the activator must understand the global context, the possibilities inherent in the technology, engage the rest of the organization, and connect people.

Activators and Multipliers: Connect and Scale

An activator is a design thinker who acts as a spark to ignite innovation across the company. He or she may be the director of an internal innovation lab, though in the organizations I interviewed, the term could be applied to any of the team who worked with internal departments.

Says Craig Haney of Communitech, the activator is “as much a business development professional as they are a technology professional, because they are trying to seek problems within the organization” that have the potential for developing platforms.

By connecting across the organization, activators could look for platforms that solved multiple problems: multipliers, in Haney’s terms. “Every large organization is siloed to some level. If you can get the activator working within multiple groups within the organization, they can create these multipliers where one solution solves many problems within the organization.”

The people I interviewed had their own individual strengths, but the ability to work collaboratively with their client departments and to bring a broad, integrative perspective was common to all of them. Activators need to be clear on the organization’s innovation goals, deeply understand its technology, and stay in touch with social and technological trends. You should bring activators within your organization together regularly to share their experiences and stories; it is also a good idea to connect activators across different organizations to expose them to new perspectives.

Collaborative Platforms

Multiple perspectives bring more ideas to the table. Design thinking thrives on collaboration, and the positive, open-minded nature of the design thinkers I interviewed helped invite contributions from all sides. A design thinking program can create links across functional areas within business units and across different business units; it can act as a platform for collaboration by bringing people together in a shared space, and by creating communities of practice.

1 Multilateral collaboration: A design thinking workshop gives an organizational unit the opportunity to bring different perspectives to bear on a common problem. I saw this at work at P&G, where a session to develop ideas for the fabric-softener category included representatives from sales, R&D, and marketing. Each could comment on the feasibility of different approaches and contribute ideas of their own.

You can also have collaboration across organizational units that may be dealing with different problems. In this case, the discussion can encompass technological platforms, as discussed earlier, and also the practice of innovation itself – best practices in ethnographic research, brainstorming; experience with specific design methods, etc.

Organizations often bring users into the design process through a process of collaborative (or participatory) design. This has pros and cons. It can help the team innovate in real time, trying out prototypes and getting instant responses; for some innovations, user-designers can act as ambassadors for new products. On the other hand, users often have trouble envisaging possibilities for innovation early in the process. For this reason, organizations typically involve users selectively, at stages when their input is particularly useful.

2 Community of practice: As design thinking catches on, design facilitators can get very busy. It’s important from time to time to step away from solving specific problems and talk about the innovation process itself, the challenges they’re facing, and what they’re learning.

This is particularly important in distributed models, where design thinkers are spread throughout the organization. For the ATO, which did not establish an identifiable lab, regular Community of Practice sessions were particularly important in building a sense of cohesion and shared learning among design thinkers. Yet even in more “centralized” design labs, such as those at the Mayo Clinic and MindLab, design facilitators spend a great deal of time working with operating departments. The learning they gain about design mindset, process, and methods is hugely valuable to other facilitators and is shared regularly.

Reframe 3: Design Thinking Within a Bigger System

We saw in chapter 5 how the Tension of Perspective could be addressed by integrating a “systems” view with user-centred design. In effect, this means understanding problems both broadly and narrowly, incorporating the interests of those with a stake in the system as well as the direct users of the design. There are two important groups: internal stakeholders within your organization and external system players, including end users.

Many of the design thinkers I spoke to were not designers by profession, but executives from other parts of the organization who had developed a passion for this way of approaching problems. Yet it is all too easy for design thinkers – even former executives – to develop a “fortress” mentality, a belief that they alone truly understand users.

Internal stakeholders such as manufacturing, human resources, and sales constitute the organizational ecosystem that surrounds design team. Designers tend to think of them as a delivery system to the end user – but they are much more than that. They have deep understanding of the technology, people, and relationships. They also have influence and leverage where it matters. And they have opinions. They are not just a critical element in implementing ideas, but a diverse user group in themselves whose perspectives need to be built into the design process.

There is also an external ecosystem: wholesalers, retailers, and services that make the user experience possible. GE’s Adventure Series8 is a range of medical-imaging products based on pirate ships and jungle adventures (Figure 6.3). Going through an MRI can be stressful and intimidating for children, often at a confusing, frightening time in their lives. By making a “game” out of the experience, the GE machines can help reduce fear. They cost more than normal MRIs, however, so GE needs to bring hospital administrators on board: one argument for this group is that reduced fear means less sedation and lower costs. GE also needs to engage hospital staff to bring the fantasy alive9 by role-playing and setting the scene.

figure-c006.f003

6.3 GE’s “Pirate Island” MRI from the Adventure Series Credit: GE Healthcare

The delivery system is not the only external system. Complementary products and services can enhance the experience; competition can detract from it. Social movements, technology, and legislative issues all need to be considered. Because these are critical and changing all the time, you need to understand how key external stakeholders are framing the issues.

Here are some ways of thinking about internal and external stakeholders.

Internal Stakeholders

Internal stakeholders are a “user” group, and though their interests may differ from those of end users, it can be helpful to think of them this way. They need to be engaged in the design process, not treated as an afterthought. Your design thinking team and internal implementation team can use design methods to reflect together on the nature of the problem and its system implications.

1 Treat internal stakeholders as users: Internal stakeholders can make or break a project. They can be the carriers of stories that build commitment; they can find and influence leverage points; they can obtain the necessary budget and resources to make the project a reality. Yet they are often left out of the design process.

User-centred designers do everything possible to empathize with the user experience: shadowing users, observing them, interviewing them, and developing personas and mapping their pathway through the experience. In our study of the design process at an automobile manufacturer, Frido Smulders and I saw how the design team orchestrated workshops with drivers, going into great depth about the experience and brainstorming solutions. Although the internal team was involved at selected points, these interactions were more about gaining their buy-in to the design team’s agenda than true consultation.

To treat internal stakeholders as users, you might consider applying some of these same methods of empathizing with them. Spend time walking in their shoes; understand their motivations and the world they live in; develop personas and map their experience, analyse it, and understand the pain points. By gaining an appreciation of the issues involved in implementing the project, you increase the chances of success.

2 Actively engage them: Active engagement means more than involving internal users in brainstorming sessions. It means handing the process over to them. I saw this take shape in many different places: MindLab’s maxim of “facilitate, don’t consult” positioned it as an enabler of innovation, but the process was owned by the department responsible for implementing the project. The Mayo Clinic CFI sent design facilitators to departments for several weeks at a time to work with an internal team. The ATO and P&G spread design thinking through the organization by training design facilitators who return to their own departments.

This approach is not without risk: at P&G, the quality of facilitators was uneven, and spreading design thinking in this way was a slow process that required consistent, unwavering support from the top. Even the best-trained facilitators have to swim upstream in departmental cultures that are hostile to design thinking. So you need to provide ongoing support for internal facilitators too.

3 Fail, reflect and learn together: You need to involve internal stakeholders throughout the process, not just in parts of it. Reflective practice involves trying something out, watching what happens, learning from the experience, and putting into practice what you have learned.10 You learn more by failing than by succeeding: that’s why design thinkers put so much emphasis on rapid prototyping. You also learn more by seeking different perspectives on what you experience.

Internal stakeholders can both contribute to this learning process and benefit from it. They will usually know where to look for information about factors such as manufacturing processes, logistics, and resources to shed light on what the next prototype might look like. They may also be in touch with the power levers and personalities that are critical to making the project work and will bring this perspective to the team. However, they will benefit by being exposed to real users and using design methods to make sense of what they see.

Deep involvement of internal stakeholders is one of the advantages of a decentralized model, but as we’ve seen, this model has disadvantages too. If you choose a centralized lab, make sure you have key internal stakeholders engaged throughout your projects.

External Stakeholders

It is important to avoid false trade-offs and find solutions that integrate the different interests of different stakeholders. However, it’s a massive task to take account of external systems; the important thing is to understand the critical relationships and links within the various components, and there are tools available for this purpose. You also need to take account of “abstract” stakeholders, such as the environment or society, that do not have a direct voice.

1 Integrate and collaborate: To integrate is to combine separate things to make a complete and congruent whole. Some call this synthesis, and it’s intimately connected to creativity.11 Integrative thinking, says Roger Martin, is the ability to resolve the tension between two opposing ideas by coming up with an alternative that has elements of each but is superior to both:12 the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s both-and, not either-or.

My research showed that the most common way of integrating different perspectives was through collaboration. Pfizer’s approach to lung cancer drug trials shows how an integrative approach can meet the needs of both patients and drug companies at the same time. In lung cancer research, it is difficult to get enough patients to take part in clinical trials. Instead of competing for patients with other drug firms, Pfizer works with the National Institutes of Health – as well as some of Pfizer’s major competitors – on a major trial called Lung Cancer Master Protocol, or Lung-MAP. Lung-MAP uses genomic profiling to match patients to different drug trials. The system matches the right patient to the right trial, saving money, time, and possibly lives.

Pfizer, P&G, Communitech, and many others had an open, collaborative approach to innovation. To innovate across boundaries, you need to invite others in, sometimes even your competitors.

2 Focus on leverage points in the system: The term “systems thinking” grew out of engineering systems and has been considered technical, rigid, and difficult to apply to human systems. However, there have been a number of movements within the field in recent decades that are very promising for design thinkers. Among these, Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology13 relates systems thinking to managerial problems. If you want to understand how systems thinking can be applied to design, Checkland’s Systems Thinking, Systems Practice is well worth a read.

If you focus only on the individual user, as many human-centred designers tend to do, your solutions may not have the intended impact. You need to situate the product or service in relation to other products and services, sales channels, information channels, payment systems, and so on. You can design an improved admissions process in a hospital, but unless it takes account of the other things staff are doing, of the hospital’s information system, of the hospital’s physical infrastructure, it will probably not get very far. You need to identify what points in the system are critical for the design to succeed – the critical leverage points – and how they are related to each other.

The technique of Giga-mapping14 can help you get a macro view of the relationships in a system. A Giga-map is just what the name suggests: an “everything” map that attempts to capture the important forces in a system and the links between them. Figure 6.4 shows a sample, for urban-habitat design. It’s massive and complex – because that’s what systems often are. I’d suggest going to the website http://systemsorienteddesign.net/index.php/giga-mapping/giga-mapping-samples, where you can find more examples like this and zoom in to see the details.

A map of the organizational ecosystem can help you find leverage points for building a grassroots “movement” around design thinking on the lines of my interview with Mathew Chow at IDEO in chapter 3. In the field of organizational design, the organizational ecosystem is seen as having five components: strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people.15 This kind of framework could be a starting point for your thinking about leverage points.*

3 Include abstract stakeholders: Systems include people, but not only people. There are more abstract stakeholders too. No responsible designer these days ignores the environment or the community. As you broaden the lens, the organizational, social, and environmental context of design thinking come into focus, and effective design means taking all of these into account.

figure-c006.f004

6.4 Giga-map for urban habitat Credit: Young Eun Choi, Birger Sevaldson, Systems Oriented Design, AHO 2013

figure-c006.f005

6.5 Multiple system levels for design thinkers

I won’t pretend that this is easy. To give you a sense of the complexity here, in Figure 6.5, I’ve mapped the various stakeholders you need to think about as a set of concentric circles. Fully accounting for all the interests of such a range of stakeholders is a mind-boggling task, and clearly design thinkers need to prioritize. However, you can’t prioritize unless you are at least aware of the implications of your design across the system as a whole.

It may help you to see this not as imposing new constraints, but creating new opportunities. In 1977, designers Charles and Ray Eames produced a famous video, Powers of Ten.16 It’s a fantastic voyage that begins with an everyday scene of a couple having a picnic in a Chicago park. The camera zooms out, each time by a power of 10 metres. We see the couple from further and further away, till the earth itself is invisible in the limitless universe. At 1024, we are 100 million light years away from earth. The camera reverses, zooming in towards the couple and focusing on a spot in the young man’s hand, going deeper and deeper in, now into negative powers of 10. At 10?16 we are at the level of atoms. The message: everything is linked, and design thinkers themselves are part of a system. There are no limits, only possibilities: the sky is literally the limit.

Above all else, it’s this sense of possibility that keeps me intrigued by design thinking. Perhaps large organizations insulate us, as luxury liners do, from possibility in ways that, say, small fishing boats do not. Yet by reframing design thinking, we can make it safer to explore turbulent waters – or, perhaps, we can make ourselves less afraid to get wet.

Footnotes

* Dossier’s internship program in social innovation. http://railyardlab.com/.

* Not confined to material things: services and processes are also designed.

* To go deeper on this, you might consider IDEO’s extension of this famous model. External-facing factors are purpose, behaviours, offers, and culture, and internal factors include strategy, structure and roles, processes, talent and leadership, incentives, and infrastructure (space and technology).