Mainstreaming Design: Faster and For Keeps:  Design Thinking our Way into the Heart of Business

Question: What do the following trends have in common?

    *   Design thinking
    *   Experience design
    *   Customer-centered design

They are all trends at the intersection of design and business. They have more hype than bite. They each require a multi-disciplinary team to work together in new ways to integrate approaches designers use, in order to deliver better results than before.

I’ve emphasized three phrases in the prior paragraph to highlight the nature of the challenge we face. First, these trends are multi-disciplinary endeavors. Disciplines with different goals and approaches must be aligned and committed to deliver a compelling product, service, message or strategy. These disciplines include Marketing, R&D, Engineering, Software Development, Strategy, Production/Supply Chain/Operations, Customer Service, Finance, and Sales. Each discipline has their own language—each a culture to themselves, with their own beliefs and norms.

Second, these teams must work together in new ways; often across “silos” and formal roles and processes. After all, customers will buy from whatever company best fulfills their needs; they do not care whether two divisions have ever worked together. This is the basis for sustained competitive advantage—to deliver something other companies cannot deliver, because the organization change is too risky and painful for competitors. So what are some of the things each of the aforementioned disciplines need to change? They include, but are not limited to, the “mechanistic” and “human” side of responsibilities, roles, processes, metrics, rewards, tools, and policies. Making changes to any one of these may be rife with conflict.

The third unique characteristic of these trends is the need for organizations to accept and integrate approaches designers use. Designers’ skills—like artists’ skills—are based on heuristics; through experience for a given situation they know the best methods and solutions to apply. Unfortunately for companies, heuristic-based expertise is not scalable. In order for design’s contribution to be prominent, design experts need to be active participants in development teams. A company will undoubtedly benefit from other professionals being able to empathize with their customers and discern good solutions from bad; typically, it is not a substitute for having experts in design involved day in and day out in the development of offerings.

The first barrier for design to live at the heart of business is a lack of critical mass of designers with skills to “influence without authority.”

To sum up the challenge, in order for a company to successfully compete through design, disciplines that have never worked together need to rely on the judgment and contribution of a few design experts. Furthermore, since formal organization systems don’t exist to pave their way, they have to negotiate, and then work together in new roles with new processes. It’s no wonder more companies do not “flip the switch” to compete through design! This is what designers or design consultants that want their companies or clients to “use design more strategically” are up against. I’d estimate success depends 60-70% on good change leadership skills, and 30-40% on expertly using design skills. So, good design skills are not sufficient. I believe the first barrier for the design profession to contribute more strategically in business is a lack of critical mass of designers with skills to “influence without authority.” Typically the realm of promoting design is the design manager’s responsibility. This is just too small a population to effect broad, permanent change. Individual contributors should not depend on those they report to, to effect change; every designer must have a role in leading change. So what steps can we take to move beyond the platitude “every designer must be an agent of change” and take action that has more impact?

Build-It Option: “Positioning Design” as a Design Challenge

Does this sound familiar? This is the first of “five productive ways” that Roger Martin suggests to designers to work with business people in his presentations.* Let’s tease this apart further.

Your Design Challenge: Rather than “design a successful product or service,” design an approach to “position your design team to play a more strategic role in your organization.”

Your Customers: Your Customers are internal stakeholders for initiatives, projects, etc., rather than users or customers. Do you know who your most influential champions are? How about your biggest skeptics? What are they measured on? How can design help each of your champions be successful? For example, one stakeholder may value and be measured on market share, another on lower production costs.

Your Offering: Rather than product or service, what will your group contribute to the organizations business results that are valued by each of your stakeholders? For example, modifying an established offering for an adjacent new market or that reduces production costs.

Actions, Not Words: Observe what your key stakeholder’s groups do, decisions they make, actions they take—towards what goals? Just as with users, there’s often a disparity between what the group says about itself (an ideal) and the actions it takes (reality). This gap may suggest opportunities for your group to contribute to something that matters to management. For example, an R&D group’s strategy is to provide customers their information anytime, anywhere. In fact, their investments are focused narrowly on access via laptops. An opportunity for a well designed port to Smartphones may be valued.

Prototype and Refine to Bootstrap: Propose, for example, a small project that will contribute a small portion of the business results that matters to skeptical but receptive stakeholders. Tell them the business results they should expect you to deliver. Make sure assumptions for your projections are spelled out and are considered “reasonable” by the stakeholders or you’ll undermine your credibility. Execute on the project. Adjust projected results based on feedback from users and present back to stakeholders: “This is what we said we’d deliver towards a goal that matters to you, and this is what in the end we did deliver.” Use the success to garner support to tackle a larger challenge, using the same process and roles. For example, work with marketing, R&D, finance, and software developers to take the kernel of what users value most on the laptop software, and develop a rapid prototype of the Smartphone app and test it with users to reveal its value to them in context of their daily lives. Present the prototype and the user results to your stakeholders, and show them adjusted business results based on user feedback. Have a proposal ready for a bit larger project that builds on what you did, and uses the same roles and processes, though with a larger team. Document the iteration as a case study to use with other stakeholders in the future.

Stories: For lasting change, designers need to capture leaders’ minds and hearts. Hard numbers backed by sound assumptions gets your foot in the door, and captures their minds. Now follow with soft successes, such as market same, uplifts in sales, higher customer satisfaction, anecdotes, etc., to capture their hearts. Case studies are stories. Case studies, for example those from DMI, and particularly those created from your own group’s work, often wrap both hard and soft results into neat, sharable packages and can be reused with other stakeholders

Buy-It Option: Acquiring Needed Professional “Soft” Skills

Skills in persuasion, negotiation, facilitation, team-building and consultative relationship-building are key skills to influence without authority. When I was at HP, we incorporated these skills into our designers’ job requirements and sought individuals with heightened skills in these areas. This ensures we were increasing our ability to lead organization change. Every designer needs to at best, be a change leader and at least, an ambassador for design. Formal training in the aforementioned skills is available through a number of universities and professional societies. Curiously, I’ve found that design thinking underlies some of the most popular approaches associated with the change management and organization development, particularly in addressing the “human” dimension (this is an article in itself). So not only will designers have a head start in gaining these skills, they will also learn new techniques they can apply in their design work and so will be better designers for having learned the new skills.

More Designers, More Skillfully Positioning Design in Business

The synergies between Design Thinking and Change Management make a potent combination in positioning and practicing design more strategically in business. A design approach to lead organization change affords design managers the flexibility to continuously adapt to shifting organization dynamics and ambiguous “truths.” And with more designers with heightened skills in persuading, facilitating, and negotiating to execute on the approach, your group will bring design into the heart of business faster, and for keeps.

Steve Sato

Steve is the founder of Sato+Partners, LLC, a management consulting firm by and for design leaders. Steve works with executives, directors, and their teams to build design and innovation capability—focusing on the “how” part of creating experience-driven strategies and offerings. Previously, Steve was in Hewlett-Packard’s Corporate Design group and led a team responsible for building experience design capability across the company. Steve was formerly at Doblin Group and Accenture. He has a Masters in Design from the Institute of Design at IIT, Masters of Engineering Management from Northwestern University, and a Bachelor’s of Science, Mechanical Engineering, from the University of Illinois.