Strategic Minds: Oonie Chase (IDEO) — Are Strategy and Design Even That Different?
A conversation about strategy and design, organizational challenges, and how IDEO differs from Wieden+Kennedy.
Oonie Chase, Executive Portfolio Director at IDEO
Oonie has worked across multiple industries, in roles ranging from experience design to content strategy to co-founder. Before joining IDEO, she was Executive Creative Director at frog, leading interdisciplinary teams and growing the portfolio of frog’s San Francisco studio.
Oonie also has experience in advertising, leading Experience Design — the “juicy stuff” as she calls it — at Wieden+Kennedy, and working as Group Creative Director and VP of Interaction Design at Digitas. As if all of this isn’t impressive enough, she also built the digital department at GMMB, the firm that led Obama’s historic 2008 campaign.
As part of the interview series Strategic Minds, we talked about her understanding of strategy and design, some of the biggest challenges organizations face today and how IDEO differs from Wieden+Kennedy. Wouldn’t it be amazing if the two collaborated?
Please note that this interview is an edited transcript of a conversation Oonie and I had in person. Please excuse any grammatical irregularities.
Can you tell me a little bit about your role at IDEO?
As an Executive Portfolio Director at IDEO, I am responsible for building portfolios of work — either with a brand or in a particular industry or sector. For my clients, I am a strategic partner, connector and spotter of opportunities, as well as the lever with which they can bring the full force of IDEO to bear on their challenges.
What is your understanding of design versus strategy? Is there a big difference?
Oof — that’s a hotly contested question, methinks. For my part: When done well, I don’t think there is a big difference between strategy and design. If I’m being reductive, I’d say strategy is thinking, and design is thinking by doing — even in this, they share a common border. The danger is pulling them apart as two separate practices — it opens the door for doing one without the other and, in doing so, diminishing both.
Essentially, strategy and design are both about envisioning a different future, aren’t they?
Yes, we are in the business of imagining a better world that doesn’t currently exist, and then charting a course from the present to that imagined better world. It takes both the imagining and the doing to manifest a better future.
The challenge of separating strategy from design is the same challenge of separating theory from application. If they pull too far apart, then they can’t inform one another in a way that moves us closer to what we imagine could be.
IDEO does not have a separate strategy practice, today — the ability to think and act strategically is expected in every role — although it is a question that we’re currently looking at. I’m curious to see where we end up.
We have people who would be called strategists in other contexts — management consultants, business strategists, brand strategists, marketing strategists. Everyone is called a designer because we are always asking: “That’s an interesting idea — how do we prototype it and see if it works?”
Can most problems your clients face be boiled down to organizational challenges?
I don’t know if I’d go that far, but every piece of work I’ve ever done with a client has, at its heart, an organizational challenge or implication. At the very least, I’d say most challenges are organizational-adjacent.
For example, when we’re designing a new product or service, we have to attend to how and if the company needs to change in order for this new thing to survive. Sometimes that is an implicit part of the brief, sometimes it’s explicit.
The Design for Change Studio at IDEO, on the other hand, exclusively works on such questions. Briefs like, “We want business growth, and we suspect if we were more innovative, if we knew how to learn faster than our competition, that we’d achieve that growth faster. How do we need to change?”
What needs to change in organizations? Perhaps, one aspect would be increasing collaboration and breaking down silos?
Oh yeah. Spot on. Once you start making money, you — of course — start optimizing your core business. You start looking for efficiencies, and you get rewarded for that. New and different stuff triggers organizational antibodies. This makes fostering entrepreneurship or coming up with new ideas tricky.
At IDEO, we often find ourselves becoming a kind of connective tissue between different parts of the organization — creating bridges where none existed before. In this way, we become a kind of prototype for the company to explore what these new structures feel like, how they might work.
One of IDEO’s Big Questions is how to make organizations more creatively competitive. Can corporate managers or management consultants even be creative?
Of course they can! That said, I don’t believe creativity is the highest of the virtues (so to speak) — I think ingenuity is, especially in today’s world. Ingenuity is the ability to solve problems, often — but not always — in creative ways. In that sense, I’ve worked with clients and management consultants who are blisteringly good at wielding ingenuity in service of their goals. I’ve learned a lot from them.
Is design a mindset, something you’re born with, or is it more of a craft, something everybody can learn?
This is such a good question. IDEO would say that anybody can learn the tools of Design Thinking, and the more people we can give these tools to, the better the world will be. I’m a strong yes on that. But I also think that while anyone can use the tools, not everyone has the talent, discernment, judgement, taste — call it what you will — to use them well.
There is a framework called The Futures Cone that I reference a lot, and it works for this notion too. The realm of all possible futures can be imagined by anyone. The tools and methods of Design Thinking — or strategy, if you are so inclined — can reliably get us to the probable future (that which is the most likely). But I believe one needs talent to imagine a preferred future, and to bring it about. Put another way: we can all learn to build a chair, but an Eames is few and far between.
Not everyone at IDEO would agree with me on that. But hey — tension and friction is a good thing 😊.
What are some of the design tools or methods you apply?
Assembling an interdisciplinary diverse team, and practicing being a good one. A human-centered approach. Starting with desirability (or lovability) rather than viability. Having a bias towards action and tangibility. Prototyping ideas and iterating our way towards the solution, whether we are working in the physical, digital or human space. Also: getting out of the office and into culture, nature, quiet — into anything but a screen.
What would be an example of a prototype in the human space?
An example of this would be a ‘beacon project’. Say we are hired to help a firm identify a governance structure for projects that are unlike that of its core business — for example, projects that leverage new technologies, data, etc. We’ll hypothesize what this governance structure might be — the roles and responsibilities inside of it and around it — and then run the ‘beacon project’ through it as a way to prototype that structure, learn what works, what breaks, and what needs to change.
What is different at IDEO compared to Wieden+Kennedy?
Both Wieden and IDEO get invited into C-suites and Board rooms, and get read in on their most pressing problems. Both companies are considered fantastic places to work, and have leaned into company culture in a way that other companies can learn a lot from.
Beyond that: Wieden is gut-driven, IDEO is human-centered and gut, together. Wieden sells attention (as Renny Gleeson says), IDEO sells a path to a better world. Wieden worships novelty, IDEO worships iteration and prototyping. Wieden has some of the most insanely good storytellers on the planet — IDEO isn’t a slouch in that department but we’re not monotheistic about it. When a client comes to IDEO with a problem, the answer could take many different forms — communications, product, service, new entity, change to an old one, etc. etc. — whereas at Wieden the answer is going to be film (very good film) and/or some kind of digital stunt (also very good, but ephemeral).
IDEO doesn’t have ‘Super Bowl’ moments in the way Wieden does. For example, IDEO’s brief that led to the Innova school system in Peru was, “How do you lift up the middle class in a developing country?” That’s a huge, system-level question that is answered progressively over time.
I think Wieden and IDEO working together would be hard as hell but universe-dentingly amazing.
Is that the future of the industries?
Maybe? Why not? Accenture’s purchase of Droga5 is super interesting in this context. IDEO is part of the kyu creative collective, and Sid Lee is one of our sister companies, so it is something we are experimenting with as well.
What does someone need to be successful in either industry, advertising or design?
In advertising, novelty is a fundamental attribute of a good idea — novelty grabs attention, which is why it is so potent in advertising. Novelty has a short shelf-life, so if you’re good at spotting or concocting novel notions, and telling a good yarn with it, then you’ll thrive. It also helps to be a man, but that’s a whole other conversation. Suffice it to say, I did not thrive in advertising.
To be successful in design you need to be interested in systems and to be able to think in longer time horizons. The potency of design is progress.
Who has influenced your thinking?
Karin Giefer, with whom I worked at Arup and frog. She is a ferocious polymath — an architect, an engineer, a design strategist with a PhD in Mathematics. She’s also a brilliant designer in her own right. Easily the most adept business leader I’ve ever worked with. She is also a terrifyingly good negotiator.
Karen Finckenor is a human-centered designer of talent organizations and learning systems — she would not refer to herself in this way, but that’s what she is. She’s worked with the likes of Google, Publicis, JWT to build healthy, powerhouse creative cultures. Her superpower is a preternatural ability to find the signal through the noise.
Dan Hon, who I met when I was at Wieden. He is one of my all-time favorite writers and synthesizers. Give him a follow on Twitter and subscribe to his newsletter — you won’t be disappointed.
Brian Dunch. He is a management consultant at Strategy&/PwC and I learned so much from him about playing politics and personalities, and building alignment and coalitions. He is always 10 steps ahead — I am both attracted and repelled by how adept he is with shaping outcomes.
Thank you so much, Oonie!
What else you should know about Oonie:
Together with Cindy Gallop and Corey Innis, she co-founded MakeLoveNotPorn.tv.
An interesting podcast she recently came across:
John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed — reviewing the different facets of the human-centered planet, from Tetris to the Lascaux cave paintings, on a 5-star scale.
If you enjoyed reading this interview, keep an eye out for other interviews in the series Strategic Minds: Conversations with strategists across different disciplines exploring their view on the nuances of strategy.
