Marrying design and systems thinking
Considering the social challenges we face, while innovating in new ways to meet the human needs of the future.
By Rowan Conway, Jeff Masters and Jake Thorold.
Follow Rowan and Jake on Twitter @RowanEConway and @thorold_jake .
This article is an extract from the RSA report From Design Thinking to Systems Change: How to Invest in Innovation for Social Impact
We sit on the cusp of a fourth industrial revolution, with automation, robotics, machine learning and biotechnology promising to transform transport, medicine, social care, communication and more, and extend human capabilities in remarkable ways. But these new industrial advances also threaten to disrupt the labour market and create profound instability and public anxiety. For this industrial revolution to be “empowering and human-centred, rather than divisive and dehumanizing” as Founder of the World Economic Forum Professor Klaus Schwab hopes, we must think deeply about the social challenges we face, while innovating in new ways to meet the human needs of the future.
This might suggest a need for a human centred industrial strategy, one that takes tackling the real problems faced by ordinary people as a core metric of success rather than solely economic growth. This strategy should be enabled by a combination of design methodologies and systems thinking, working together to unleash the empowering potential of innovation.
At the RSA we argue for the need to adopt a process of thinking like a system and acting like an entrepreneur if the country is to meet this imperative.
The design economy
In recent years there has been a surge in the use of design methods to stimulate innovation. Public and private agencies have opened up challenge prizes and competitions that have stimulated markets, and the UK Government has promoted a range of design-led innovation processes. Innovate UK is ambitious about the potential of design to stimulate innovation and accelerate economic growth through “the wider take-up of impactful design across industry sectors and challenge areas.” Its 2015 Design in innovation strategy states: “Our aim is for UK businesses to innovate better, grow faster and achieve greater commercial success through the effective use of excellent early-stage design.”
The UK is a world leader in design. According to the Design Council’s Design Economy report, design activity generated £71.7bn in gross value add (GVA) in 2013. There is now an opportunity for UK plc to use design methodologies in early stage innovation to deliver improved social, economic and environmental impacts. Designers can reframe social and environmental issues like healthcare or climate change as creative opportunities. As Innovate UK says: “Identifying and tackling the ‘right’ problems: working with designers to utilise their problem solving skills on broader challenges can help businesses and organisations identify genuine economic, social and environmental viable opportunities, rather than concentrate on ‘solutions looking for a problem’”.
Designers are increasingly alert to the innovation potential of social challenges. In a 2017 RSA lecture, Jeremy Myerson, founder of the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the Royal College of Art, urged designers and entrepreneurs to respond to the challenge of an ageing population. As well as providing for a social good, Myerson identified the potential dividend that an ageing population provides for designers, with new retail markets emerging for products like the ‘grankini’ — an all-in-one high tech undergarment that supports mobility for the elderly.
But where a clear commercial market doesn’t exist, government agencies and charitable organisations can also create demand, by procuring innovations directly to support social change or improvements in public services. An example of this is the Small Business Research Initiative managed by Innovate UK, a vehicle through which government agencies can run design challenges predicated on particular problems that need solving.
Deploying design thinking
In Democratising Innovation, Eric von Hippel argues that we have moved into a ‘user-centred’ as opposed to ‘manufacturer-centric’ era of innovation. As Jeanne Liedtka said in the 2015 Batten Briefing on Innovation and Growth: “The most secure source of new ideas that have true competitive advantage, and hence, higher margins, is customers’ unarticulated needs.” Businesses are now routinely generating innovation using human centred methods. These processes employ user research, experimentation, prototyping, and iteration and foster innovations that meet a particular human need rather than being purely product-driven. These methods have been used to inform design innovations in everything from airline flatbeds at British Airways to breathable sportswear at Nike.
Design-led innovation has demonstrated a clear dividend in consumer-facing industries, and design thinking is no longer the preserve of product developers. The process also generates service solutions, new concepts and governance models, and it is being used to envisage new business strategies and services across sectors, including the public sector. An insurgency of open innovation labs and innovation districts in cities have emerged, such as Sitra in Finland, MindLab in Denmark, 18F in the US, and Policy Lab in the UK to test the methods on public policy. Challenge prizes and grant funds have been earmarked to stimulate design thinking and Innovate UK is currently investing up to £2m in early-stage, human centred design projects with its Design Foundations Fund. Social impact investment funds are also seeking to drive innovation for public good further, prominent recent examples being Big Society Capital Fund and the Cabinet Office’s Funds for Social Impact Bonds.
The potential for design thinking in public sector innovation is substantial and varied. In their review of studies on innovation in the public sector, De Vries et al show the range of innovation types that can be stimulated:
· Process innovations, including the creation of new organisational forms and working methods; or the creation or use of new technologies to improve services;
· Product or service innovations, the creation of new public services or products;
· Governance innovations, the development of new governance forms and processes to address specific social problems; and
· Conceptual innovations, such as new concepts, frames of reference or paradigms to change the understanding of problems and/or their solutions.
From design thinking to systems thinking
Excellent design has proved to be a catalyst for business innovation and growth and it is important that the UK builds on its leading design capabilities to drive innovation further. However, the nature of that innovation is also important. According to Clayton Christensen there is a rising focus on ‘efficiency innovations’– where innovation leads to process improvements that save costs — and there is insufficient investment in the ‘empowering’ market-creating innovations that lead to new technology or service breakthroughs that progress society.
Catalysing empowering innovation for social and environmental benefit requires a systemic view. To ensure the UK industrial strategy transforms performance, we need more fully to understand the systemic barriers to scaling empowering innovation and then act more creatively and adaptively when we spot opportunities to circumvent these barriers or take a different path. To transform markets and orientate investment toward empowering innovation, innovators will need to build on human centred design methods and augment them with systems thinking.
The think like a system, act like an entrepreneur approach follows a design thinking logic akin to the double diamond. The first diamond is about discovery of the problem and understanding systemic conditions: the value chain, the institutional or societal context in which it sits, and the power dynamics at play — using different frames of analysis including cultural theory and complexity analysis. The second diamond is about understanding how to opportunistically act like an entrepreneur to achieve change.
While design thinking alone provides a compelling process for idea development, it fails to recognise that without due consideration of systemic complexity and power dynamics, even the best ideas can lie on the shelf unused, and thus without impact. The design-led approach provides strong insights on users but remains two-dimensional; think like a system, act like an entrepreneur provides a third dimension: systemic understanding and impact.
Problems of design-led innovation diffusion
The spread of human centred design thinking is proving effective at developing new innovations, the policy challenge is now to shepherd these innovations towards a market — whether consumer, government or otherwise — helping them scale and make a wider social and economic impact. Innovations that address social challenges should be measured primarily in terms of impact, not necessarily by market uptake. The latter may achieve the former, but it may not. Social innovators should be constantly looking to supplement market making activities — of which SBRI is a prime example — with other interventions aimed at preparing the system to support the innovation. For example, in order for a service innovation to flourish, you may need to push for a complementary governance innovation, such as altering procurement frameworks or regulatory rules. The problem with many models of innovation is that they are premised upon linear assumptions of scaling.
Everett Rogers’ seminal 1962 model on the diffusion of innovations provides the axiomatic example of the limited thinking embraced by too many in the design and innovation sphere. Roger’s adoption curve follows a linear pathway from slow diffusion, through rapid growth, to saturation, then slowdown. Implicit faith in Roger’s curve can still be readily identified in the “engineering mindset” that sees the innovation chain as a linear path that begins with university research and development, followed by venture capital funding of startups, leading to wider commercialisation and dissemination.
Where this model of innovation diffusion sees growth as planned and relatively predictable, the reality is that the diffusion of innovations addressing complex social challenges is far from predictable. Probability analysis and prediction becomes ever more difficult for systems mired in complexity such as healthcare and education.
Warren Weaver’s analysis contests that social problems are “disorganized complexity”, that means the number of variables and interrelationships in a system can rarely be captured in probability statistics. With the rise of the social web, big data, globalisation, societal fragmentation, mass cities and value shift, complexity has become the norm. As McKinsey’s analysis shows, the pattern of diffusion is today harder to predict and innovations can take decades to scale. We must develop a new account of diffusion and scale that accounts for impact both at a social and economic level. This requires the ability to “think like a system”.
We explore the benefits of looking through a systems lens in our next article: Thinking like a system.
For full references and bibliography please visit the RSA website to download the report.
