Use design thinking to extract the threads from the giant hairball

[Design thinking] is the ability to create new options and build new products, services and experiences that gives design so much power. It is the ability to understand deeply cultures from digital social media networks to small villages in southern India that gives design its power. – Bruce Nussbaum 

I first came across the term design thinking a several years ago, through the writing of Tim Brown and Bruce Nussbaum, two early champions of the approach. 

A designer by background, a former boss nudged me towards buyer personas, which started me on an exploration of the world of sales and marketing. 

This broadened my view into one that didn’t just focus on “user” but on the messy organizational context in which that person worked, the business problems faced by those organizations, and the challenges of balancing the needs of an organization, its customers, and its employees. 

Like people, organizations are fundamentally social organisms that follow a social logic not easily understood and make decisions based on an imperfect understanding of the past and present. Organizations have a social brain, are just as predictably irrational as individuals, and often make flawed decisions based on historic notions and incorrect paradigms that structure their thinking. 

As my understanding of the socio-cultural context of organizations grew, I started thinking about how to use design thinking to effect organizational change. 

And, because I work for a company that sells ECM software, I started thinking about why so many ECM (and enterprise software projects in general) fail to live up to expectations.

Having come across the example of square watermelons a blogger used to illustrate a design thinking approach, I created a simple diagram for a presentation I gave on using design thinking to tackle the wicked problems driving the need for ECM. This diagram illustrates some of the socio-cultural aspects that lay behind this novel solution to a tough problem facing Japanese farmers. Take a minute to think about what you see in the watermelon diagram. There’s a reason you’ve never seen square watermelons in North America or Europe.

Too often, what happens with enterprise software deployments is that this socio-cultural context is ignored or misunderstood. The messy people and organizational culture aspects of the equation are ignored, downplayed, or misunderstood. And yet to be successful, enterprise software deployments require organizational change. 

Empathy, as Bruna Martinuzzi argues, is missing: 

If there is any one secret of success,” said Henry Ford, “it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.”  … Almost one hundred years after Henry Ford’s pronouncement, Dave Patnaik, in Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy shows how a variety of global successful organizations, from Nike to Harley Davidson, benefit from integrating empathy for the consumer as an integral part of their culture. 

How does design thinking help us extract the threads of innovation from the giant hairball of a organizational bureaucracy mired in the past? Through a messy process of sensemaking, as the design squiggle illustrates. 

Source: The Process of Design Squiggle, Damien Newman 

• Design is about research, analysis, intuition, and synthesis
• Design is about identifying and proposing meaningful solutions
• Design is about the creative process to get to those solutions
• Design is about the experience that those solutions generate
• Design is about purchase experience and use experience
• Design is about customer relations and customer success
• Design is about business growth

Operating in the mess required by a design thinking approach is uncomfortable. But innovation requires nonlinearity. Organizational change requires nonlinearity. Both require inventing new meanings. And this means it’s impossible to use a linear, rational approach because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Are you interested in effecting change? In making new meanings? 

Try design thinking. “The truth is that despite the clumsiness of the term Design Thinking, there is no limitation to the Doing in the Design Thinking. It is a way of thinking about doing on a strategically big scale–a new learning experience for all children, a better health-care experience for older people, a more honest political system for voters.” – Bruce Nussbaum, Design Thinking Battle 

Here are a few books and a TED talk by IDEO’s Tim Brown to get you started on the path of design thinking:

• The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage – Roger Martin
• The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation – Marty Neumeier
• Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace – Gordon MacKenzie
• A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business – Harmut Esslinger (frog design)
• Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean – Roberto Verganti
• Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation – Tim Brown (IDEO)
• Tribes – Seth Godin
• Informing our Intuition: Design Research for Radical Innovation

Related posts:

1. Build design thinking into organizational DNA to infuse delight into customer’s lives
2. Welcome the fool, embrace a design attitude
3. Designing for a holistic customer experience – thinking outside the product
4. Complexity as opportunity – designing in hostile territory
5. Taking a people-centric approach to the design and deployment of enterprise software