How to undermine your business with design thinking
Or, alternately, how to take design for innovation far enough to be good for your business.
I’m a big fan of the democratization of design. In era’s past, my anthropology + business skill set wouldn’t have quite paved the way to the design leadership roles I’ve enjoyed. I find the modern boundaries of design to be inclusive of a usefully diverse crowd, and since I love my work I’m pretty happy about that.
But I’ve also seen some hazards from the spread of design thinking. Specifically, the danger of a false positive disguised as an incremental gain.
I think that false positive looks something like this:
It isn’t completely an illusion. The design process does make a steep gain in value right at the start of orienting to a space. Where I call this a false positive is not so much that this isn’t progress or that the outputs aren’t valuable, but I call this a false positive because this might not be the right amount of progress. Further to that, this might not be the right amount of progress and it might feel valuable enough and complete enough that further investment in the process is deemed unnecessary.
In discussing this with Joe Blair he introduced this great analogy: imagine the difference between going for a run and being a runner. You can go for a run, feel good about getting some exercise, recognize the run is over and have a marginal gain in your health. You can also become a runner, make it a regular part of your life and gain a significant and continued gain to your health. (Thank you, Joe, great analogy.)
The demands for near term impact in the business world has turned our attention to ever faster timelines for action and outcomes. And rightly so, the world is moving faster, we need to move fast to be relevant to the near future of just about any market. So the GV-style sprint, the 2-day design thinking charrette, or the 2-hour design thinking workshop, when done well, give us a sense of progress that is generally greater than how we might otherwise spend that time. Following the theories of cumulative incremental gains and additive views of the world, it stands to reason that a gain from design thinking practices when they can deliver a burst of progress can be layered in with gains from process optimization, lean development, and other complementary modes of conducting business. We feel good that we spent focused, structured, and creative time making a real gain. We also tend to feel good that we saw the natural plateau of progress that tells us to move on to something else, because of diminishing returns. Spending more time for incremental gains seems not worthwhile, so on to other approaches.
Here is where all that “positive” sense of gain turns to a false positive in certain (many, I think) circumstances: zooming out to the whole picture tends to look like this:
Of course, when you’re in the process, it is hard to figure out which zone you are in. Is this plateau ahead of me THE plateau of diminishing returns or is there more value waiting to be discovered on the other side?
Experienced designers tend to have a pretty good feel for this sense of time and progress. An intuition for opportunity yet to be discovered. For a novice designer, or someone who hasn’t seen this process play out over a bigger picture, it is harder to differentiate between significant early gains and the promised land of a mature design. But this is an important difference. Whether additional time with a problem will yield marginal gains or significant gains is the difference between a stable market equilibrium and an unstable market equilibrium. From a competitive perspective, the design that can yet be improved significantly leaves the opportunity that some other entity will make those improvements.
In my opinion, the false positives of incremental gain through minimized or stylized design practices can sometimes do more harm than good for the incumbent firms that dabble in design. We make small improvements to a business and bring consumer expectation to the brink of a market’s next era without being the ones to go the rest of the way with them.
Retail banks introduced ATMs, then internet banking, then mobile banking… but most didn’t actually change their retail infrastructure in anticipation of the new economics that digital-only banks (or banking products) would achieve. The classic business model essentially helped train consumer behavior on the artifacts and apparatus of the new banking business models. Peer lending and digital banking wouldn’t be possible without consumers first getting comfortable with automated service channels; but most incumbent commercial banks were unwilling to make the transformative leap to the higher value business model of digital banking. What’s worse, that new business model was most attractive to some of the most profitable customers.
Cable media companies saw the value in “on demand” entertainment, but stopped short of rethinking the media consumption experience that Hulu, Netflix, HBO and others have been less timid about rethinking. Higher education, hospitality, automotive, CPG, and just about any sector you can think of has recent or near future stories just like this. None of these industries are completely devoid of human-centric thinking. But I would argue there are many victims of the false positives of an incomplete design processes in the stories of industry destabilization.
I’m thankful that the skills and mindsets of design are being used across many disciplines and industries. I am always thrilled by the speed with which design activities produce valuable insight and direction in a short amount of time early in the process. But the greatest gains typically come as you start deeply understanding the problems, consumers, and context. That understanding only comes over time, and my main point is that you need to make design a continuous cycle, not an intermittent mode or tool. You are building your understanding, lesson after lesson, through continued investment. It isn’t a workshop here and a workshop there, it is a concerted effort to explore a space and develop deep insights.
If you don’t find that efficient and inevitable market, you run the risk that unmet needs or excess capacity (or both) will conspire against your future success. Incremental gains and unrealized transformation of a market will not protect you from the eventuality of that transformation being realized. Worse still if it creates the sense of progress that staves off investing in the truly strategic and more complete exploration of customer needs, technological opportunities, and economic realities of our ever evolving markets.
I’d argue that false positive of success dressed to look just like good design is a dangerous distraction for business leaders. There is very little escaping the classic relationship between time invested and value created.
Thanks to a couple great talks and discussions from today’s MITX conference that provided backing to these thoughts. Harry West at frog design for a great talk on industrialization of design and Jen Briselli from Mad*Pow for a great discussion on participatory design techniques.
