How Can Design Organisations Innovate?

Faster Horses. Cars. Faster Cars.

Design organisations haven’t learned. They have modern tools and processes, yet operate under Fordism principles regarding management, production and delivery.

Yes, we are all agile but we measure how fast can we ship more software and keep on iterating. Yes, we do user centred design but our user research is biased and validates the ideas we already have. Yes, we do design thinking but we work in silo-based departments with a top-down vision.

Honestly, who has time for purposeful communication and co-creation?

It’s likely that if you are reading this article is because you know how it goes on a day-to-day basis: design organisations are often kept busy with work, by which I mean “actual work”, the kind that produces deliverables and design outputs for the project. Despite their pseudo-flat hierarchies, design organisations tend to find a single voice to dictate the product direction and quickly stuff the team with tasks to be ticked off and moved around on the white board. So, what’s the problem?!

“For the sake of the user, we mastered the art of mistaking productivity for efficiency. Maximising the amount of design solutions, rather than their quality.”

An efficient and innovative design process is the one that helps your team to keep in mind the design problems, elevating those problems throughout all phases of a project and considering when to add multidimensional, differential and constant value along their internal design process. Ideally your design solutions should have a higher quality and value that ultimately improve the project outcomes.

It all starts with a “hey”.

Co-creation helps multidisciplinary teams to focus and iterate on the purpose of design problems, most importantly, facilitates an open environment where team members feel included, are eager to participate and are willing to try the new tools and processes that a project may demand.

The only imperative to co-creation is to use continuous conversation between team members.

For example along a project development you want to make sure to talk regularly with your team fellows, discuss the made assumptions and compose a shared road map to elevate design problems from different perspectives; motivating the team to efficiently react to change and readjust previously made decisions… please don’t just use Slack, get up and approach people to have a “real chat”.

“When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of non-thinkers.” — Jason Fried. Founder & CEO at Basecamp.

Encourage and develop a culture of thinkers, where a team isn’t just hustling to solve a design problem, but generating discussions that question *why* a certain solution is the most valid one and which are the alternatives to it.

How to co-create.

Co-creation is a steady process which is built over time by all team members, iterating on it by making use of conversations. In a nutshell, continuous conversations serve co-creation as a vehicle to motivate multidisciplinary teams to build shared purpose along the project development.

To co-create and generate robust value over time, your team has to develop their internal design based on:

1. Reflect

Modern design organisations are able to truly integrate failure within their design process as an element that inevitably arises very often. The question is, how does your team react and learn from failure?

What’s more, how do you integrate failure as an essential element to foster conversations and generate valuable insight?

Co-creation helps to harvest a learning culture based on continual reflection-learning. Team members should always be checking what has and what hasn’t worked so well over the last few days, and how they might take these learnings to refine their design process.

“Continual learning is the simple idea of understanding what did I learn today that I didn’t know before.” — Jared Spool. Founder UIE, Co-founder CenterCentre

Your and your multidisciplinary team have to develop and improve your own methods to detect failure, efficiently integrate the learnings and lately iterate on the actual design solutions.

2. Listen

If, for time I heard that a designer should be better at coding, brilliant at public speaking or mastering business principles, I earned a bitcoin, I would be rich by now.

Don’t get me wrong, I love bitcoins and I agree that designers should improve on all these skills… but there is one skill which comes first.

As soon as designers have an idea, they have a tendency to overhear others and get caught up in their own thinking. Simply put, most of the time designers don’t listen. That’s why I consider that before designers become better at anything else, they should simply become better listeners.

“The most effective teams are not those whose members have the highest IQs, but rather those whose members are most sensitive to the thoughts of others.” — Alex Pentland, Director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory.

A fundamental step for you to build a fruitful co-creation process is being able to put design assumptions aside, in order to grasp what other team members are saying and openly discuss the design solutions that have been adopted so far.

3. Adapt

Another relevant aspect of co-creation is adaptability. When talking about internal processes, I can’t exclude leadership. In the case of co-creation I’ll refer to adaptable leadership.

Yourself and each team member of a team must be able to self-manage a situation where he or she can contribute with valuable insights. Adaptable leadership mean that in a constant changing world, no single member can lead at all times and in all situations. Rigid rules are counterproductive for any team.

This may be specially challenging for conventional team leads, who must facilitate the appropriate conditions and informations to all team members to operate under an adaptive approach; in which everyone is able to hold a greater shared responsibility while growing project ownerships and attachment towards their product or service.

“Instead of telling employees what to do, senior managers will need to put in place key principles and guiding lights and allow them to act according to their intuition, making sure their workforce has the necessary capabilities.” — Fjord. The Era of Living Services.

What’s more, adaptability is an inherited concept of Lean UX, which is based on handling constant change and deciding whether the team needs to pivot in order to improve the actual design solutions.

One last tip. Make sure that your multidisciplinary team is regularly talking to users to gather qualitative data, as well as quantitative data from usability tests and user research. Ultimately you and every team member will have a better understanding on how to internally adapt and balance to the given risks and possible opportunities.