Design thinking became a hot topic in the naughties. Just like the other contender for the hot spot, sustainability, the concept is big enough and hazy enough for almost everyone to declare its importance, while attaching very different meanings to it.
The broad consensus on design thinking began to break down in 2009. Some leading design thinkers published books that expanded on what they meant; business leaders started to pick up the idea, while at the same time many design managers started to drop it.
This raises two questions: Why is design thinking such a hot topic with executives yet leaves so many designers cold? And, does the demand for design thinking represent more of an opportunity than the thinking itself?
Hot topic
Design thinking was first discussed in design circles in the early noughties. Roger Martin’s concept of integrative thinking was an inspiration, but it was IDEO chief Tim Brown who brought it to life in stories about his firm’s ‘T-shaped’ designers. Shortly after, Bruce Nussbaum, then assistant managing editor of BusinessWeek, picked up the cause and ran with it. And although it was BusinessWeek that first used the term design thinking in 2003, Tim Brown’s star turn at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2006 made a big impact in high places. Never before had a designer strutted his stuff on such a high-profile platform and been taken so seriously.
The design thinkers had been drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid.
While Brown spoke near the peak of the naughties economic bubble, today’s era of austerity has, if anything, only increased the appetite for design thinking. In March 2010, The Economist held a conference in London called The Big Rethink: Redesigning Business. Its premise was that design thinking was in demand: After the economic crisis, corporate leaders had lost confidence in the old ways of doing things, and were casting around for new ideas.
Now, when the house journal of the global business elite holds a conference on how design thinking can save business, you might expect the design fraternity to step forward with both enthusiasm and new thinking. Yet while some design enthusiasts have jumped in, many design managers have stepped back.
Cold turkey
I first noticed a distinct cooling-off in April 2009, when I talked to a handful of design managers about the challenges they faced after the financial meltdown. One reflected on how well the design thinkers in his organization had fared in the design boom years; then, raising an eyebrow, he murmured, ‘Even turkeys can fly in a tornado.’ However, when the tailwind dropped, many who had talked their way into high-flying positions were left gliding. Greater exposure to senior management’s interrogation had left many… well, exposed. The design thinkers had been drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid.
While many seasoned design professionals were unsure of the term, most shared the design thinkers’ ambition to play a more strategic role in the world than making pretty; but it became obvious that design thinking meant different things to different people. For some, it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling bigger and more-strategic problems that used to be the preserve of management consultants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it was merely a new spin on design.
This is definitely not the case with Roger Martin. His book The Design of Business focuses on ways of thinking—and particularly on ways to combine analytical and intuitive thought. However, Martin readily accepts that most designers do not think this way, relying too heavily on intuition. Indeed, he jokes about needing to find a new name for his concept.
“Design thinkers over-simplify by presenting design to business as a clear and codified process of methods, tools, and steps that can be learned by nondesigners.”
Although Martin’s definition does not tally with current design practice, other versions suffer from being indistinguishable from it. IDEO has done designland a great service by articulating what it does in a clear and compelling way for nondesigners. However, its description of design thinking is notably similar to the way it used to describe the design process. As Bill Moggridge acknowledged at an event in 2007, “Design thinking is a new story, not a new process.” Because the design process was not developed for the big problems that design thinkers wish to tackle, this really amounts to old thinking—for new times.
It’s not just world-weary designers who have spotted holes in the hype. In her review of the 2010 Aspen Design Summit, Helen Walters, the former editor of innovation and design at BusinessWeek, cautioned:
“Those looking for a prescribed way to implement design thinking are destined to be disappointed. It’s a messy, opaque process that depends as much on group dynamics as intellect or insight… The process was more important than the product…. the idea that people need a way to engage in multiple places within their community.”
Walters puts her finger on a new role for designers that many will not be happy with—as facilitators of an engagement process in which the quality of new products and services comes second to stakeholder involvement. This emphasis on process over outcomes could well lead to design correctness being given privileges over design effectiveness.
Stepping up
As business raises its expectations of what design can do, design thinkers run the risk of overstretching—not having the knowledge or capabilities to deliver at this new level. To win and consolidate a more strategic role for design, we need more than good stories. We need to raise our game. From my perspective, here are three priorities for design managers who want to step up to the plate:
Quality over quantity
Today, design by itself provides no competitive advantage. Only great design does that. In his book Design- Driven Innovation, Roberto Verganti convincingly argues that creativity is not in short supply, and that the key question is how to deliver high quality design. He is dismissive of one-size-fits-all processes, such as design thinking, and instead underlines the importance of broad and long-view perspectives, close working relationships with an ‘elite circle’ of genuinely insightful ‘interpreters’ and wise executive judgement.
Design thinkers over-simplify by presenting design to business as a clear and codified process of methods, tools, and steps that can be learned by nondesigners. While explaining design as an algorithm goes down well with managers, this pitch skips over the pivotal importance of talent and craft.
Designers learn by doing, not by practicing a theory. There is a process, but it is wielded tacitly. Professional designers have survived a brutally Darwinian selection process (there are far more graduates than jobs) and have clocked up well over Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000 hours of practice on projects. The small pool of talent that really adds competitive advantage combines creativity with a high degree of problem-solving and aesthetic craft.
Design thinkers have a tendency to look down on the craft component of design as a low-end commodity, but Apple’s success is just as much due to the quality of its design execution as it is to its strategic clarity. It’s therefore hard to believe that many senior managers can pick up any meaningful design skills after a workshop or two. And, to be frank, suggesting as much devalues what designers do.
We’ve had a decade of talk about co-creation and open innovation now. Results have been largely mediocre. It’s time for design managers to put together the business case for exceptional design—the kind that really makes a difference.
Analytical and intuitive thinking
While few designers (or design thinkers) currently live up to Martin’s ideal of a balance between analytical and intuitive thinking, it is a fine goal for the profession to aspire to, both individually and organizationally. Designers have traditionally excused their lack of analytical rigor by nonchalantly counterpoising it to their intuition, but this is a false and lazy dichotomy. Just as there are many creative mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, why can’t there be analytically cogent designers? This is all the more achievable with the new intake of academically gifted designers who previously would not have considered the profession. While not every talented designer is blessed with the gift of reason, design managers should ensure that their work is situated in an analytically robust context. Not only should they insist that other members of their teams are strong at analyzing, structuring and building coherent business cases, but they should also create a culture in which these skills are valued.
Vision over user insight
User-centered design became a dogma in the noughties, to the extent that every idea had to be backed by a user insight. Although these can inspire innovation (though usually of the incremental variety), an appreciation of consumers’ contexts, behaviors, needs, and preferences have begun to take preference over other drivers of innovation, including technical progress and wisdom from other sectors and markets. Verganti argues that ‘radical innovation does not come from users’; and Don Norman, an early champion of the user-centered design that design thinking bases itself on, has recently recanted and concurs with a new maxim: ‘Technology first, invention second, needs last.’ He even goes as far as to argue that ‘design thinking is a nonsensical phrase that deserves to die.’
Verganti presses his point home further with a tough truth: ‘Designers have become less visionary. They have spent the last 10 years getting close to consumers and trying to become businessmen, and have lost their visions.’
The biggest challenge for design managers is putting vision back into design. This will involve making a confident case for it in what Martin calls reliability-driven corporate cultures that demand predictable outcomes. Time and space must also be made to think big thoughts and envision new futures. After a period of nurturing what will still be a fragile big idea, careful thought should be put into how to bring it to life in clear and compelling ways.
Balancing process, talent and context
As ever, the challenge for design managers is to manage the mix between process, talent, and context. Design thinking tends to overly focus on process. Now that competitors have established design capabilities, it’s clear that finding, nurturing, and motivating talent is more critical than ever. Processes do need to be in place; but too much emphasis on process can turn off talented designers.
Processes do need to be in place; but too much emphasis on process can turn off talented designers.
Getting the context right is never a straightforward business. Framing fuzzy and complex problems, setting goals that get the balance right between ambition and constraints, and configuring the right mix of talent and resources has become a lot more difficult. The business world’s demand for design thinking has transformed the context in which we operate. Bigger and more wicked problems test our capacities, and our work is being judged against new criteria for success, while the recession brings new priorities.
All of this amounts to a great opportunity. But to seize that opportunity, designers need to be less pleased with themselves, and to put more effort into innovating how and what they do. The challenge is to match our raised ambitions with a higherlevel game. Another workshop just won’t cut it!
Design managers had a good 10 years between 1997-2007. The challenges in the good times were the result of positive developments such as design’s elevation up the management agenda, the expansion of its remit, and the resulting complexity that came with more responsibility and exposure. A harsher business climate will lead to a different set of demands.
In hindsight, two events in 1997 set the scene for design’s rise. In the UK Tony Blair’s New Labour were elected with a mandate to modernise Britain, and quickly elevated its Creative Industries to the forefront of economic policy. This was a strategy that was replicated around the world in the form of countless policies in the creative sector. Creativity and innovation were set to become buzzwords amongst political and business leaders.
In the same year Steve Jobs returned to Apple, which soon became the totemic case study of how to out-innovate the competition through smart design. As a design strategy consultant in this period, I lost count of how many brand directors’ strategy amounted to little more than aspiring to be the ‘Apple of our category’. The days of putting the case for the importance of design were replaced by fighting off calls from different parts of the business wanting to join the design party.
‘Design thinking’, the hazily defined notion that designers are well equipped to tackle a wide range of business problems, can be seen as a high water mark of this euphoria.
A critique began to surface in 2007, with questions raised about design’s sustainability credentials and its obsession with superficial novelty. Business Week magazine also reported an ‘innovation backlash’ in the same year. The recession has only served to sharpen the questions for design managers.
The idea of design as a silver bullet has lost currency. As one design manager put it to me recently, ‘Even Turkeys can fly in a tornado’; but when the tailwind dropped many design managers were left gliding. Greater exposure to senior management had left many… well… exposed.
The concern is that too much time has been spent trying to outsmart the MBAs, and that design managers have lost their focus on delivering great design. The most common response to this feeling of corporate over-stretch is to regroup and go back-to-basics, with many managers pining to just roll up their sleeves and get down to designing.
While this reaction to a sense of mission creep is understandable, it risks jettisoning some important gains. It is vital that design does not become viewed as part of the froth of the go-go years. While design is not a replacement for business strategy, it also has more to offer than experience aesthetics. One of the big challenges in the next period will be to define the boundaries of what design departments can and can’t usefully contribute to with more rigour and precision.
Design and innovation have undoubtedly become emptied of much of their meaning through over use (and abuse), but we should also resist the flight to new buzzwords. There is no alternative to explaining – in longhand – how design can contribute to business success as specifically as we can. We should also not shy away from explaining how difficult it is to deliver great design; and while there is a design process it is not a general purpose business methodology, but a specialist one that must be executed by experienced and talented designers.
‘What the hell is Design Leadership anyway?’ is what I keep hearing people mutter under their breath these days. It has become one of those subjects that any player in design now has to have an opinion on, but debating it usually generates more heat than light, as self-anointed design leaders rehearse their personal or company agendas. Self-importance, not clarity, seems to be the main concern.
At one level this isn’t surprising. Leadership is a slippery topic these days: there are more books on Amazon attempting to define the mojo of leadership than that other holy grail, innovation. The 21st century is dogged by crises of authority: whether they are presidents, CEOs or premier league soccer managers, today’s leaders are less respected and less certain of their position than the self-assured chiefs of yesteryear: Margaret Thatcher. Jack Welch. Bill Shankly. Having become a live topic in designland, leadership is now an even harder subject to get your arms around. Unlike business leadership, which is about leading organisations, the remit of design leadership is fuzzier. It is often used interchangeably with design management, but is also liberally applied to any big personality around the industry.
Faced with such confusion, it is worth stepping back to ask a few simple questions. What makes a design leader? Do they have to be designers? Who is leading whom? And to where exactly? I have recently been forced to grapple with these questions while producing a Design Leadership programme for senior designers from a range of companies and disciplines.
Leaders as pathfinders
First, it is useful to reflect on why Design Leadership has become such a hot topic. It began as a more specific ‘grey hair’ discussion within design management circles in the early noughties. But unlike other such debates this one captured the imagination ofconsultants, academia and the blogosphere. What is driving this widely felt need for leadership? One answer is that designland is feeling a collective sense of both disorientation and opportunity- have designers ever felt so simultaneously highly valued and uncertain about their future? As I have previously argued in these pages the design industry is living through ‘seismic times’ and ‘as the ground shifts under our feet, we scramble for a clearer view of the emerging landscape.’ To push this geological metaphor further, the industry is looking for pathfinders to guide us through unfamiliar new territory to the land of opportunity.
Many new paths are being cleared in numerous directions-from selling one-offs in art galleries to facilitating co-creation processes-by very different types of pioneers with their own perspectives and tool sets. For me it is useful to think of design leaders as trailblazers taking design forward in different ways. They break new ground by envisaging and then helping to create the future shape of the profession.
10 faces of design leadership
To illustrate the point here are 10 types of design leader who have pushed the boundaries of the profession over the past few decades – for good or bad. The categories are neither exhaustive, nor mutually exclusive… but hey, everyone loves (to hate) a list.
The Maestros
Design craft leaders who have raised the bar in design practice. Exemplar practitioners who have set new standards in their own fields include Jonathan Ive, Naoto Fukasawa, Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Thomas Heatherwick.
The Visionaries
Discipline leaders who have pioneered new fields of practice, like Bill Moggridge in product interaction design; Ron Arad in design art; Larry Keeley in design strategy; and Live|Work in adapting product and interaction design methods to the design of services.
The Managers
Corporate leaders who have led design to the top table in their companies and in turn elevated the design function, like J Mays as VP of design & Chief Creative Officer at Ford group, Chris Bangle at BMW, and Tom Ford at Gucci.
The Entrepreneurs
Business leaders who have explored new ways of doing business in design, like Terence Conran as design consultant and retailer; David Kelly in the foundation of Ideo; and Tom Dixon with his unique combination of roles as designer, manufacturer and director of Artek.
The Ambassadors
Communication leaders adept at accessing public, business and government forums to convey the benefits of design, like Richard Seymour and Dick Powell with their TV programmes; Clive Grinyer in various private and public sector roles; and Tim Brown, most notably at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The Entertainers
PR leaders who have captured the imagination of the non-design press and re-positioned what design means in the public consciousness – for better or for worse – like Philippe Starck, Karim Rashid, and Marcel Wanders.
The Scholars
Education leaders who have pioneered new forms of design education, like Michael and Katherine McCoy at the Cranbrook Institute in the Nineties; Gillian Crampton-Smith, the founder of both the Computer Related Design course at the RCA and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea; Lidewij Edelkoort in her role as chairwoman at the Design Academy Eindhoven; and Patrick Whitney, Director of the Institute of Design at IIT. And let us not forget the unsung leaders of great courses, such as those at the Universities of Cincinnati and Northumbria.
The Provocateurs
Thought leaders from outside designland who challenge its navel-gazing tendencies and cajole designers into reflecting on the context in which we work, like the ever polemical James Woudhuysen with his exposes of design’s muddled thinking and low expectations; John Thackara in his eclectic dispatches from the fringes of design, art and environmentalism; Rick Poynor with his well aimed broadsides; and Roger Martin with his home truths on how designers are perceived by business people.
The Scribes
Editorial leaders who have pioneered new forms of design journalism, like Deyan Sudjic with Blueprint; Jeremy Myerson with Design Week; Tyler Brule with Wallpaper and Monocle; Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week; the teams behind Core 77 and Design Observer.
The Curators
Influential museum and gallery directors who have presented design in new ways to new audiences, like Stephen Bayley at the V&A Boilerhouse and the Design Museum; Paola Antonelli at MoMA; Alice Rawsthorn at the Design Museum; Murray Moss at his Moss store; and Carla Sozzani at her 10 Corso Como store.
This is obviously a partial list – and some leaders could feature in several categories. For example, Steve Jobs is in a class of his own as not only a business but also a pivotal design leader for his sophisticated understanding of design and the exacting standards he holds Apple designers to. No matter. My point is to illustrate that there are many different types of design leaders – and no common template. A corporate design manager helping to steer a company into an emerging market requires a very different skill set and approach from the head of a start-up consultancy pioneering new methods in the design of public services.
Common qualities
However, design leaders do tend to share three general qualities: they are good at envisioning the future, thinking strategically and leading others. They tend to have mastered their professional craft and understand their field well, but are driven by a restless feeling in their gut that ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’. They have the ability to hover above the detail, see the big picture and think abstractly to imagine a different direction. Roger Martin unpicks this quality well in his book ‘The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking’.
Having glimpsed a new horizon, the best leaders articulate a vision of how things should be. One of my all time favourites is the admirably audacious goal Steve Jobs set out for Apple back in 1980:
‘To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the human mind that advance humankind.’
Having defined the aspiration, leaders set about working out how to get there. The way they develop their strategy differs enormously depending on the leader’s goal, field and position. However, four useful questions to ask are:
– what is changing and what opportunities flow from this change?
– what core competencies do we have and which do we need to build?
– how are we going to set ourselves apart from the competition?
– where’s the money?
Finally, to really make things happen, leaders have to get things done through others, by designing, inspiring and maintaining teams. They also often need to get people outside their team to buy into them, their idea or their business. This calls for both inspiration and tenacity. Let’s close by nailing two myths. The first is that leaders have to have big personalities; some do have larger-than-life egos, but many do not. Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive occupy opposite ends of this ego spectrum.
The second myth is that leaders are born and not made. While it is true that not everyone has the potential to lead, all of the above traits can be developed and honed: even Steve Jobs rehearses his presentations to make them appear effortless. However, they are not skills that can be learned on a one-off course; they must be nurtured over years. Most top CEOs have coaches to help them become better leaders, they just tend to keep their coaching sessions quiet – often entering them into their diary as a ‘haircut’!
So what the hell is a Design Leader? From Maestros to Scholars, there is no singular formula. While they are all visionary, tenacious and resourceful, ultimately what separates them from the smart talkers and false prophets is who follows them to change the world of design.
If design is a continent and its disciplines tectonic plates, we live in seismic times! As the ground shifts under our feet, we scramble for a clearer view of the emerging landscape. As the world changes, design changes. How should designers best prepare for the inevitable new openings? Where is the unexplored territory? Where will the action be?
When it comes to imagining what the design industry might look like in 10 years’ time, let’s assume that competing on cost and sticking our heads in sand are non-starters. The two remaining options seem either to be very, very good, or to be ahead of the curve in finding new work that employers and clients will pay for. Or preferably to be both!
When I asked the author Virginia Postrel for her observations on the design industry, she reflected that she found ‘designers, as a profession, have a peculiar combination of arrogance and insecurity. One minute, they’re declaring that they have uniquely appropriate skills for every problem, and the next they’re worried that people without the right credentials are using design. As a writer, I find the fear that too many people are practicing design pretty funny. Writers don’t go around complaining that too many kids are getting taught to write and too many people are practicing writing without the proper degrees.’
Just as a crack writer like Postrel is in demand, design supremos will always get good work. However, by definition there can only be a relatively small number of virtuosos in any field, so let’s look at how designers can prepare themselves for a changing world.
Ebb and flow
Before we explore some flux riding strategies, it is worth stepping back to take the long view. Design has always existed in a state of flux, although it has developed through periods of relative stability and rapid change. Take product design: in the twenties early pioneers like Marcel Breuer, Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius in Europe; and Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy in the USA transferred know-how from architecture, theatre set design and window dressing. As the new discipline established itself over the following decades it largely revolved around the creation and specification of mechanical objects. The jolts to the profession between the fifties and nineties were largely provided by new technology. Plastics and other new materials, and manufacturing processes like injection moulding broadened horizons in the fifties and sixties. The incorporation of electronics into products in the seventies and eighties started to challenge the link between form and function. The introduction of CAD in the nineties dramatically affected the way designers worked and communicated. This proved to be only the first of many shifts as design went digital. As more products incorporated electronics, interaction design was founded as an offshoot discipline. This in turn paved the way for many product designers to hitch a ride on the web design boom of the mid-nineties.
The pace of change has not slowed in the noughties, but what makes it more head-spinning is that the changes are less tangible and more multidimensional. How do we make sense of the rise of design strategy, user-centred methods, celebrity designers, design-art, structural packaging and service design? How do we deal with the challenges of the sustainability agenda, off-shoring and the raised expectations of business and government?
The general stance of designers towards this period of instability is one of fear and paranoia. Top of the gloom charts is the opening up of design to global competition. In his bestseller ‘The world is flat’ the globalization booster Thomas L. Friedman quotes a vivid Microsoft maxim on the number of geniuses in China: ‘Remember, in China if you are one in a million, there are 1,300 others just like you.’ The economic side of this equation was underlined for me a few years ago when a Shanghai-based designer paid me the backhanded compliment, ‘Your work is very good, but we do nearly as good for a tenth of the price!’
Globalization has reduced the number of manufacturers to relatively few behemoths, and multiplied the amounts of designers pitching for jobs. The era of product design as practiced by a small band of gurus in Milan, London, Munich and New York is long gone. There are now thousands of competent product designers around the world able to ‘give good form’. Design as ‘styling’ or ‘form-giving’ has become commoditized; and competing at this level is already a tough low-margin slog.
While those hide-bound by the past batten down the hatches, the wise remember that change throws up opportunities as well as challenges.
If we shed the blinkers and see the world differently there are many positive shifts, like the mainstreaming of design in business and the public sector, which offer glimpses of a chance to drastically expand the frontiers of design. A good place to start is by taking a wider view of our know-how.
Hidden assets
A big mistake designers make when evaluating their career options is to focus too narrowly on their most obvious and tangible craft skills, such as sketching, software skills or styling abilities. Widening their focus to include more indefinable cognitive talents can broaden horizons.
For example here are four intangible assets that good designers share:
1. Interpretation
Many designers are multi-lingual in different fields; many are fluent in consumer trends, marketing, manufacturing, and technology – corporate polyglots if you will. This familiarity with functions across the organization and the ability to translate and make connections between them is a much-underrated talent.
2. Tangibility
Many firms are plagued by articulate and persuasive ‘smart talkers’ who sound good in meetings, but get bogged down in abstract complexities. Whether it be by capturing a thought in a meeting with a sketch or quickly lashing together a physical or digital mock-up, designers are good at ‘making it real’.
3. Synthesis
Not only do designers specialize in being generalists, they tend to be good at making new connections, pulling together threads from different fields and integrating them into a new whole. These latter day renaissance men and women are in demand by strategy departments, who prize the ability to tackle complex problems through synthesis and expert assumptions.
4. Resolution
Some of the smartest execs get bogged down in the messy process of implementation. Good designers are smart at turning knowledge into action – they solve problems, resolve tensions, draw tangible and practical conclusions, and hit deadlines. Designers live by real world constraints. As Charles Eames put it, ‘Design depends largely on constraints’ and good design often means ‘the best you can do between now and Tuesday’!
It should be noted that these assets come into sharper focus within the context of cross-functional teams.
Flux riding strategies
Game changers map out future opportunities by exploring the interplay between their current know-how and potential new applications for it in a changing world. Here are a few habits of design’s trailblazers:
1. Adopt an agile perspective
Groundbreakers have an ability to see the world as it actually is and how it could be. They scan the horizon for defining moments and get busy.
An inspiring example of such discipline-busting ambition can be found in Anomaly, the three-year-old NYC communications agency, which was founded on the observation that the traditional Ad agency model was heading south. It has grown to 80+ staff by breaking many of the old creative and technology boundaries. For example it approached PayPal, the electronic payment company that is owned by eBay, asking if it had considered enabling consumer transactions by mobile phone. It had, but didn’t know how to make it work. Anomaly, with its rare mix of talent and audacity, helped PayPal to launch its ‘Text to buy’ service in 2006, allowing consumers to buy items like DVDs and shoes by simply sending a short code by text message. Having generated the service concept, developed the enabling software and set-up the server facility to process the orders, Anomaly now takes a cut of every purchase. That is what I call thinking differently.
2. Spot gaps
Another approach is to look out for disconnects and schisms. Bill Moggeridge helped found Interaction design after being shocked by the primitive interface on the first laptop that he had designed.
In a much smaller way, the most interesting work we do at Plan could be described as ‘problem framing’, and answering questions like ‘how do we make sense of this?’ and ‘what should be done?’
3. Make new connections
In his book the ‘Medici Effect’, Frans Johansson encourages innovators to ‘live in the Intersection’ where different ideas, concepts and cultures meet. ‘The Intersection represents a place that drastically increases the chances for unusual combinations to occur’.
For instance, animators at Pixar take acting lessons. Steve Jobs, game changer No.1 and then CEO of Pixar, explained why in its first annual report:
‘[increased processing power] frees our animators from drawing so that they can concentrating on acting, breathing life into their characters as they move. This allows Pixar to hire animators who may or may not excel at drawing, but are brilliant actors. Our animators even take acting lessons’.
How do you go about making new connections? Quit navel gazing for one – break out of your network of work and college mates, meet new types of people and discover new perspectives. Now you’ve got ‘Wii elbow’, drop it and learn something really new.
I for one like to hire folks with a broad range of interests and who have switched fields at least once. Just as learning a foreign language gives you the confidence and knowledge to learns others; switching fields gives people the assurance and tools to tackle new problems.
4. Teach yourself
Definers of new fields are often self-taught and have a broad range of knowledge. Charles Darwin once said: ‘I considered that all that I have learned of any value to be self-taught’. Thomas Edison was a voracious reader, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both dropped out of college to experiment with new ideas in the real world. The application of knowledge begets new knowledge.
On reflecting on the lessons he has learned over the years, Tom Dixon, who taught himself how to design and make; learned about quality by working with Italian furniture manufacturers; understood logistics as design director of Habitat; and now, as part-owner of Artek, is focused on redesigning business models.
Expand the industry
‘There is no one future waiting to happen’, as Gary Hamel once put it, ‘the future is something you create, not something that happens to you’. If we can shake off our static mindset, the seismic shifts taking place could offer a chance to grow the design industry so that there is plenty of room for us and the Chinese.
First, globalization is not a zero-sum game, while some traditional jobs will wither or get off-shored, many new ones will emerge. Just as they did in the UK in the nineties when more service jobs were created than industrial jobs were lost.
Second, we have the know-how to contribute far beyond traditional ‘designer’ roles. On top of this, the popularity of design has drawn a wider range of talent into the industry over the past decade. We need to build on this not only by innovating how we do what we do, but also by boldly branching out through old disciplinary boundaries and defining high-value new ones. Design will have to go through some growing pains and learn some new lessons to get there; but new times demand new know-how.
Finally, and most crucially, we need leaders who can seize the moment, define the new roles and make them happen. This will require the skills that are in short supply: entrepreneurship, the art of persuasion and the telling of new stories that will breathe life into these new openings.
The future is up for grabs and the big prizes will fall to the early pioneers. The trick is to spend less time thinking about what we do now, and more time on what is changing out there in the world and what we could do about it.