Fast Track was invited to the World Innovation Forum 2011 (June 7&8, New York City). This annual conference on innovation covers bestselling authors and authoritative speakers. Design seemed to be the pervasive topic throughout the event this year, touched on by many, including Roger Martin (business), Paola Antonelli (art & technology), but also Tony Hsie (culture) and Dan Pink (people).
From experience, when working with business leaders and their managers alike, design and design thinking are among the more difficult concepts to convey. Way too often, innovations and organizational change are conceived and discussed from a business (that is, economical, financial) perspective only. Moreover, business tends to be risk-averse, and reliance on predictable approaches based on past experience doesn’t help in designing break-through innovations. Following a recent keynote on The future of Innovation, several conference participants expressed their distress about the breath of the innovation-spectrum, and the complexity of organizational change today. As if it had been sufficient to think of a new product design or service delivery in the past, from a technology or process point of view only, ignoring resource and social constraints…
Design thinking may not have a formal definition that is agreed upon by all. It remains a relatively ambiguous/undefined concept. To us, design thinking is all about being able to project ourselves into the future, whilst accounting for all the dimensions (and therefore constraints) of innovation. This obviously includes the technology and processes, but also the economics/financials, the organizational aspects, the cultural and people issues, the social and societal consequences, etc. To a large degree, Leavitt’s Diamond (balancing process, technology, organization and people dimensions) encompasses these different aspects.
As for the capability to project ourselves into the future, this aspect was discussed by Roger Martin (author of The Design of Business) in his talk. He sees design thinking as resulting from a different logic, not analytical or inductive, but abductive. Abductive reasoning involves the capability to infer past conditions from a future state (e.g., “The grass is wet, therefore, it may have rained” – see Wikipedia’s entry on Logical reasoning), or as Roger puts it, “integrating the future with the past”, rather than deducing the future from the past.
Unfortunately, even companies that master design thinking and gain competitive advantage from this capability, risk losing this as they grow. Larger organizations tend to lose their agility and aim for more predictability, reliability, stability…
It’s not possible to summarize all the presentations here, but it seems obvious that “everything is in everything” – if we wish to achieve breakthrough innovation, then we have to adopt a holistic view and integrate the business, product, service, and people perspectives. And what we see way too often, is that new developments are approached from a single point of view only. And most often that point of view is product or service… Or technology, which is an even more restrictive viewpoint. Moreover, a lesson to be learned from Tony Hsie and Dan Pink is that the internal perspective is not to be underestimated. Innovation is not only about bringing a better product or service to a (new) market, it is also about institutionalizing the change internally, motivating the employees through a culture of autonomy (and happiness) in the workplace!
Dan Pink’s path to Motivation goes through Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Similarly, Tony Hsie sees Happiness on a path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. But organizations embodying those concepts don’t grow accidentally, they happen by… design!
