Exploring ‘design thinking’ and organizational change: A Conversation

The popularity of books like Change by Design mirrors Daniel Pink’s  statement that “The MFA is the new MBA.” But what can “designers” specifically offer to improve change management practices?

MSLOC’s March 18 Innovator Event – ‘Designing for Change’ – explored this question by looking at the intersection of design thinking and organizational change through the experience of four expert panelists: Andrew Burroughs, Partner at IDEO; Kelly Costello, Research Discipline Practice Lead at IA Collaborative;  Shannon Ford, founder of Motif; and Jeanne Marie Olson, lecturer at Northwestern University.

These experts shared insights and experiences through a moderated panel discussion at the Innovator event.

Watch the video of the event (below) and read the panelists answers to the questions: What is design thinking? And why now – why does it seem to be emerging as important at this moment in time?

Join the on-going conversation by commenting at the bottom of this page.

How would you personally define “design thinking?” (as it relates to business and organizational change)?

Andrew Burroughs

Design thinking is: An attitude of optimism – believing that all problems have a solution. A willingness to try new things, experiment, prototype, give up on old ideas or ways of doing things. Generative vs analytical.

Kelly Costello

Design thinking relates to business and to organizational change in two different ways.

First, design thinking brings innovation to a business by creating new products, services or a completely new business model. Second, design thinking helps organizations change how they currently innovate.

In the first scenario, there has been a great deal of change in the way Design Thinking relates to business. Traditionally, people perceived design and business thinking as distinctly different endeavors. Business thinking was seen as an analytical process, relying on quantitative numbers and statistics to solve problems and make decisions. Design thinking was considered a creative process based on intuition and aesthetics. But these rather simple designations are being seriously questioned and reframed on both sides of the conversation.

Personally, I would not define design thinking as the antithesis of analytical thinking, it is its own mode of analysis— focusing on forms, relationships and real human interactions in the world—a holistic approach to looking at the world in a different way. Design thinking requires a broad perspective that analyzes a number of elements:

• How an “entity” (product, service, system or business) currently lives in the world, what it is comprised of at the material, component or functional level
• How people interact with that entity- the nature, frequency and attributes of that interaction
• How the different elements in the environment relate to one another
• The larger environment that everything lives within, including the culture, industry, geography or country

Whether it’s designing a chair or developing communication strategies for a business unit, design thinkers analyze the ecosystem in which that entity lives. For a chair, they look at the current form of the chair, the materials and construction, the people that use the chair, how it is used, the immediate surroundings (desk, room, house, geography), the broader environment and trends that impact furniture design.

In the second scenario, where design thinking intersects with organizational change to impact the way a company innovates, this same holistic vision applies. Design thinking approaches organizational change by looking at the structure of the company, the way people interact with one another, what capabilities exist, and how things are accomplished in the company (including innovation). The same layered approach used to understand and design a better chair is utilized to understand and design a better organization. At the organizational level, design thinking practitioners work with companies to strengthen their innovation capabilities and to identify (and overcome) organizational obstacles that hinder successful innovation.

Jeanne Marie Olson

No one has really agreed upon what “design thinking” really is exactly yet, though many are trying. However, you can look at the common denominators that exist across many definitions as well as observe designers at work, and be relatively sure that it includes:

• Applying different types of logical reasoning to the same data sets in order to generate the most comprehensive collection of possibilities and ideas.
• Identifying, acknowledging and setting aside the assumptions or preconceptions that limit thinking about a problem or opportunity.
• Setting aside things like “models”, “heuristics”, and other cognitive short cuts that push towards generating solutions prior to doing an examination of what is actually happening.
• Separating out the activities of being descriptive, interpretive and evaluative—suspending evaluation in order to pursue the best descriptions and interpretations before developing ideas.
• Tolerating ambiguity, disagreement, failure, and/or complexity—even being energized by them.
• Engaging enthusiastically in investigation, experimentation, adaptation, improvisation, and invention while not getting too emotionally attached to any iteration in order to keep learning and testing.

Many of these are related to other types of thinking and work as well. But using them in concert with design methodologies such as user research, visualization to create shared understanding, and prototyping gather them under the term of “design thinking” for me.

Organizational change professionals and business strategists often struggle with problems that deftly and correctly applied design methodologies are helpful in overcoming.

Rooting out incorrect assumptions that doom a high-level decision before it is even implemented. Using multimedia to visualize something that doesn’t yet exist in order to create a shared understanding, better communication, and a unified direction for a diverse group of participants. Expanding the pool of potential opportunities and solutions while enabling stakeholders closer to the problems of the organization to participate in diagnosing and solving them. Using prototypes of solutions to test predictions, engage advocates, educate, and iterate before unseen negative effects become issues for an organization’s balance sheet.

Design thinking is not just about creativity or unleashing innovation. It is about leveraging a better kind of problem-solving, interdisciplinary collaboration, efficient communication, and approach to tackling ambiguity, unknowns and uncertainties that prescriptive and historical models don’t address nearly as well.

Shannon Ford

Design thinking is a set of principles, processes, and tools used for solving complex problems and ‘conceiving and planning what does not yet exist.’[1] The discipline of design is somewhat unique in that it is has no specific content; that is, there is no single domain of human or natural activity that design acts upon in the way that biology does, for example. The upside to this is that design can be applied to a very wide range of situations.

To clarify what we mean by design thinking, it may help to explain how it is not design “doing.” Design doing is more associated with the craft of making something, or what you might think of as traditional designer roles: product designer, graphic designer, interior designer.  Each has become expert in the principles, tools, and materials relevant to creating a particular kind of solution – a 3-D product, a 2-D communication, the look and feel of homes and workplaces. Design thinking, however, is not about being a graphic designer, but rather about using some of the principles, processes, and tools that graphic (and other) designers have been taught to use when creating solutions in specific domains.

So, what tools and processes have designers been taught to think with? Broadly speaking, they fall into a few key areas:

• Ways of involving users and stakeholders to make sure needs and cultural values are addressed
• Ways of defining problems and solutions spaces, so that the solution is addressing the right problem
• Ways of synthesizing requirements across a number of different domains, because systems are interconnected and complex
• Ways of ideating, iterating upon, and evaluating solutions, so that you can push the boundaries before settling on the best direction
• Ways of communicating complex ideas for better understanding and buy-in

According to Horst Rittel, writing in the 1960s, “Wicked problems are ‘a class of social system problems that are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications of the system are thoroughly confusing.’”[2] Most design (thinking) problems are like this. They have no one right answer.

Design thinking is good for tackling wicked problems in part because the design process allows for ambiguity and chaos and thrives on exploring and synthesizing information from a wide range of sources. Within that culture, the processes, tools, and principles within these key areas are used to move out of the chaos and into the concrete.

[1] Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” The Idea of Design, ed. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, 1995, MIT Press.

[2] Richard Buchanan quoting original source, from “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”

Why is this important now? How are you seeing design and organizational change coming together in your own practice?

Andrew Burroughs

The world appears to be becoming more not less chaotic and cycles of change in the environment in which businesses exist are increasingly short. The old hierarchical way of organizing is no longer capable of adapting to such dynamic movement – organizations need to be nimble and it’s not obvious what structure or system will be able to deliver this, so agility is required – and adaptability to sudden shifts in the landscape. But how to maintain what defines a company or group whilst undergoing rapid change? That is the challenge we face.

At IDEO, our business model is potentially threatened by things like the open-sourcing of design solutions, available at much lower cost than our services, often with high quality work; Our principal asset – people – have many more choices for places to exercise their talents; As a result, we are consciously reaching out to experiment with new models, increasing our network connections, developing lab-type environments to explore new ways to doing business, and we have set up our open source innovation network to learn what this approach can offer and how we can use it to advantage.

Kelly Costello

Implementing successful and lasting innovation requires strong organizational changes, and we are seeing more engagements in the design consultancies focusing on helping businesses build an innovation culture. While organizations are embracing the idea of design thinking, they aren’t certain how to begin.

Design thinking practitioners help companies begin this journey of organizational change through several efforts. We first have clients comprise a multi-disciplinary team and then teach design thinking through a process that transfers the mindset, skillset and methods required to embrace new ways of thinking. While coaching people in a company to practice these new innovation methods, we also identify and launch a pilot project though which to apply these burgeoning capabilities. This “action learning” approach gives teams the ability to apply knowledge in a project that brings value to the company while increasing skills and abilities within the team.

This melding of design and organizational change has changed our practice quite a bit. We are now coaches as much as we are practitioners, and demands on communication skills and understanding of organizational behaviors are higher than ever before. There is a great opportunity for improvement and growth in how we think about ways design and organizational change come together, which is why the Innovator Series panel on March 18th offers an intriguing opportunity to discuss this new aspect of organizational innovation.

Jeanne Marie Olson

In my own practice, I’ve seen too many organizational change and business strategy projects relying on assumptions or pre-existing prescriptive models applied in complex situations where there is no right answer or linear solution or top-down implementation which will help the client to arrive at where they want to go. Many professionals keep pushing those one or two historical models they’re confident about, instead of acknowledging that clients are often venturing into ground that has not yet been covered and require solutions that haven’t been invented yet. Why? Because it has been predictable and efficient, and we think that is comforting to the client and efficiency is profitable.

Leveraging design methodologies for organizational and business strategy change is scary, it’s fun, it can be uncomfortable, it can be exhilarating, and it’s going to require business to operate in a different way than it has been operating. Because the design process makes room for investigation, reflection, and invention, I think it’s going to be a lot more relevant to organizational change than anything that we’ve tried before.