Leading from Design
Integral Design — A Touchstone
We live in a runaway world hurtling towards the mythical future. A world we don’t understand and perhaps never will. Yet these are interesting times. They are times of danger and growing uncertainty, while they are also more open and beholden to the creativity of humans than any other time in history. What we see around us reinforces the notion that everything happens a lot faster now than it did in the past. Even the recent past seems so far away. The Atlantic Journal published the following about the present situation.
“The world is too large for us. Too much is going on, too many crimes, too much violence, and too much stir. No matter how hard you try, you will lose the race. It is a constant struggle to try to keep up … and instead you lose your foothold. Science is pouring its findings over us so quickly that you jump between them in hopeless attempts to try to understand. The political world relies on a steady stream of fast news, so fast that you lose your breath trying to keep up with who’s in and who’s not. In the end the result is too much pressure on each and every one of us. The human being cannot cope with much more than this.”
Many of us will recognize much of this as an accurate portrayal of the present. It was, interestingly, in fact written in 1852. Therefore, while it may almost confirm that our understanding of the world has remained much the same for over 150 years, this time around the turbulence is real.
There’s a war out there in the world of business. The ammunition is out and leaders are busy. Efficiency and scale have been the goals of industrial age businesses. It’s almost as if the guns are pointed in the opposite direction.
The M&A frenzy in acquiring design firms by consulting and tech companies is all that we saw happening in the bid to make design a strategic differentiator. But you can’t just buy design and expect it to perform like a resource. One reason, according to John Maeda, is that
Design capabilities don’t scale like Moore’s Law.
Enter the Integral Design Framework that leaders can use to navigate the uncharted waters of a VUCA[i] (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) future. Jeff Smith, co-founder Lunar Design, and I successfully prototyped the framework in January 2018, in a workshop for the graduate students of the Management & Entrepreneurship program at Lehigh University’s Baker Institute.
© 2018. Jeff Smith & Sunil Malhotra.
Minding the Gaps
Imagine you could help leaders understand how their personality and style aligns with the market as well as the organizational strategy. Then imagine you could help them move from their current orientation to one that will bring results. Now imagine you had a toolbox — we’ll come to that later — that you could use to navigate these turbulent times. The integral design framework takes its inspiration from the Integral Theory (Ken Wilber) and extends it to the design discipline in a way that it can be used to map which quadrant a leader currently occupies and then provide a way for her to fill the gaps, if any, between style and strategy. As an illustration, let us walk through the journeys of the most famous company in the world, Apple.
Did Apple Lose its Mojo?
Apple has the pre-eminent design leader in Sir Jonathan Ive. But it didn’t save Apple’s stocks crashing by 40% in January 2019: the company lost its position as the world’s most valuable company. Why? It still has a great team. It is still one of the top 3 companies in the world. Customers still love Apple products. So, what’s going wrong at Apple?
To understand what’s going on, we need to see how the design revolution we are in the midst of took root, viz. the design thinking wave. Thanks to the focus on customer empathy, design thinking has transformed not just product design but also business design and made it a strategic differentiator. Look at BMW and Tesla if you have any doubts. Not just product companies but service organizations like Kaiser Permanente and Aravind Eye Care have taken advantage of design thinking approaches to retool their services and organizations to become more customer centric and provide more empathetic and meaningful care while also becoming more efficient. Now these leaders need to move to the next stage, having successfully used the power of design thinking.
Brazilian Industrial Designer Marcio Dupont says Design Thinking is Not Design—
But Design Thinking is not Design!
Due to press and media “miraculous articles” about DT, creating winner “innovations overnight”, a common widespread conception is that DT represents the “complete cycle of Design”; and also that, dominating DT you have “mastered” the complete Design process and even worse, the idea that DT only is more than enough to create the much needed innovation!
DT is only a part of the overall process of Design, very briefly, we can say that the entire process of DESIGN consists of two stages:
First stage: Creative ideas for a very specific need/problem. (DT)
Second stage: Concrete action from the designer, to materialize this ideas into a product/service to market.
Design thinking gets non-designers to understand how using the concepts and approaches that designers use, gives them an outside-in view of what users find relevant AND a way to test ideas with real users.
For organizations to evolve to next level of sustainable success, not only must they leverage more ‘feeling’ and ‘thinking’ dimensions of humanness, but also pay more attention to the ‘being’ dimension, using the strong voice of the leader/organization to next level of organizational design — not just product and services. Why?
Looping back to Apple, the question to ask is, “Does Apple still have a unique perspective?” Cut to when Jobs returned to Apple on July 9, 1997, to replace Gil Amelio as its CEO. Jobs stepped in as the interim CEO to begin a critical restructuring of the company’s product line. His passion, focus on simplicity, attention to detail, smaller number of products with unique and integrated perspective — iMac, iPoD, iPhones and iPads — gave a competitive edge to the company. While the features and technology are not new, the way Apple integrated them gave them a sustainable competitive edge. Tim Cook’s abilities in managing supply chain and operations took Apple from a market cap of $10 billion to $400 billion in just over 10 years. In other words, Steve Jobs’s perspective — the being-centred leader of design — kept Apple successful.
Let’s dig into Apple’s history to understand what has been going on. The following from Steve Jobs is now common knowledge —
“Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s perspective!
Jobs designed products for himself — he was both the customer and designer — making it possible to iterate rapidly to create breakthrough products that gave sustainable advantage to the company. In other words, Steve Jobs put all his energy, enthusiasm, meaning and creativity behind his unique perspective. A large part of the sustained success of Apple can be credited to Tim Cook’s operational expertise to help Jobs deliver on his marketing promise since the time he was brought back to head the flailing company in 1997. In his earlier stint, he had great ideas but lacked process-driven execution. When John Sculley joined Apple, Jobs became a better marketer but still lacked the execution skills needed for business success. He even carried these challenges onward to his next startup, NeXT, whose products were way superior in design, but in terms of market success, Jobs still had a lot to learn.
Was there something else that had to come together for Apple’s sustained disruption-led success? Let’s look at this through the lens of the Integral Design Framework. Add Jony Ive, the design leader leading design teams product after product through design doing. Jobs’s ideas needed to be translated into outstanding products and it was the coming together of Jobs, the being-centred leader of design (in the ‘I’ quadrant) whose perspective shone like a beacon, Jony Ive the design leader (in the ‘WE’ quadrant) who made the perspective tangible, and Tim Cook (in the ‘ITS’ quadrant) who steered the ship along its charted path to take Apple from the brink of bankruptcy in late 1990s to the world’s most valuable company in 2010.
[i] VUCA World — A Quick Summary — https://www.tothepointatwork.com/article/vuca-world/
