Change by Design

by Tim Brown

  Although we will never, I hope, lose respect for the designer as inspired form giver, it is common now to see designers working with psychologists and ethnographers, engineers and scientists, marketing and business experts, writers and filmmakers. All of these disciplines, and many more, have long contributed to the development of new products and services, but today we are bringing them together within the same team, in the same space, and using the same processes. As MBAs learn to talk to MFAs and PhDs across their disciplinary divides (not to mention to the occasional CEO, CFO, and CTO), there will be increasing overlap in activities and responsibilities.

  There is a popular saying around IDEO that “all of us are smarter than any of us,” and this is the key to unlocking the creative power of any organization. We ask people not simply to offer expert advice on materials, behaviors, or software but to be active in each of the spaces of innovation: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Staffing a project with people from diverse backgrounds and a multiplicity of disciplines takes some patience, however. It requires us to identify individuals who are confident enough of their expertise that they are willing to go beyond it.

  To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two dimensions—the “T-shaped” person made famous by McKinsey & Company. On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess a depth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions to the outcome. This competence—whether in the computer lab, in the machine shop, or out in the field—is difficult to acquire but easy to spot. It may be necessary to sift through literally thousands of résumés to find those unique individuals, but it is worth the effort.

  But that is not enough. Many designers who are skilled technicians, craftsmen, or researchers have struggled to survive in the messy environment required to solve today’s complex problems. They may play a valuable role, but they are destined to live in the downstream world of design execution. Design thinkers, by contrast, cross the “T.” They may be architects who have studied psychology, artists with MBAs, or engineers with marketing experience. A creative organization is constantly on the lookout for people with the capacity and—just as important—the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. In the end, this ability is what distinguishes the merely multidisciplinary team from a truly interdisciplinary one. In a multidisciplinary team each individual becomes an advocate for his or her own technical specialty and the project becomes a protracted negotiation among them, likely resulting in a gray compromise. In an interdisciplinary team there is collective ownership of ideas and everybody takes responsibility for them.

  teams of teams

  Design thinking is the opposite of group thinking, but paradoxically, it takes place in groups. The usual effect of “groupthink,” as William H. Whyte explained to the readers of Fortune back in 1952, is to suppress people’s creativity. Design thinking, by contrast, seeks to liberate it. When a team of talented, optimistic, and collaborative design thinkers comes together, a chemical change occurs that can lead to unpredictable actions and reactions. To reach this point, however, we have learned that we must channel this energy productively, and one way to achieve this is to do away with one large team in favor of many small ones.

  Though it is not uncommon to see large creative teams at work, it is nearly always in the implementation phase of the project; the inspiration phase, by contrast, requires a small, focused group whose job is to establish the overall framework. When Chief Designer Tom Matano presented the Miata concept to Mazda’s leadership in August 1984, he was accompanied by two other designers, a product planner, and a couple of engineers. By the time the project neared completion, his team had grown to thirty or forty. The same can be said of any major architectural project, software project, or entertainment project. Look at the credits on your next movie rental, and check out the preproduction phase. There will invariably be a small team consisting of director, writer, producer, and production designer who have developed the basic concept. Only later do the “armies” arrive.

  As long as the objective is simple and limited, this approach works. Faced with more complex problems, we may be tempted to increase the size of the core team early on, but more often than not this leads to a dramatic reduction in speed and efficiency as communications within the team begin to take up more time than the creative process itself. Are there alternatives? Is it possible to preserve the effectiveness of small teams while tackling more complex, system-level problems? It is increasingly clear that new technology—properly designed and wisely deployed—can help leverage the power of small teams.

  The promise of electronic collaboration should not be to create dispersed but ever-bigger teams; this tendency merely compounds the political and bureaucratic problems we are trying to solve. Rather, our goal should be to create interdependent networks of small teams as has been done by the online innovation exchange Innocentive. Any company that has an R&D problem can post a challenge on Innocentive and it will be exposed to tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, and designers who can choose to submit solutions. The Internet, in other words, characterized by dispersed, decentralized, mutually reinforcing networks, is not so much the means as the model of the new forms of organization taking shape. Because it is open-sourced and open-ended, it allows the energy of many small teams to be brought to bear on the same problem.

  Progressive companies are now grappling with a second, related problem. As the issues confronting us become more complex—intricate, multinational supply chains; rapid changes in technology platforms; the sudden appearance and disappearance of discrete consumer groups—the need to involve a number of specialists grows. This challenge is difficult enough when a group is physically in the same place, but it becomes far more challenging when critical input is required from partners dispersed around the globe.

  Much effort has gone into the problem of remote collaboration. Videoconferencing, although invented in the 1960s, became widespread once digital telephony networks became technically feasible in the 1980s. Only recently has it begun to show signs of taking hold as an effective medium of remote collaboration. E-mail has done little to support collective teamwork. The Internet helps move information around but has done little to bring people together. Creative teams need to be able to share their thoughts not only verbally but visually and physically as well. I am not at my best writing memos. Instead, put me in a room where somebody is sketching on a whiteboard, a couple of others are writing notes on Post-its or sticking Polaroid photos on the wall, and somebody is sitting on the floor putting together a quick prototype. I haven’t yet heard of a remote collaboration tool that can substitute for the give-and-take of sharing ideas in real time.

  So far, efforts to innovate around the topic of remote groups have suffered from a lack of understanding about what motivates creative teams and supports group collaboration. Too much has been focused on mechanical tasks such as storing and sharing data or running a structured meeting and not enough on the far messier tasks of generating ideas and building a consensus around them. Recently, however, there have been promising signs of change. The emergence of social networking sites has shown that people are driven to connect, share, and “publish,” even if there is no immediate reward to be gained. No economic model could have predicted the success of MySpace and Facebook. Technological initiatives such as the new “telepresence” systems being developed by Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems, will represent a quantum leap over the videoconferencing systems currently in use.

  Numerous smaller-scale tools are already available. “Always on” video links (also called “wormholes”) encourage spontaneous interactions among team members at different sites and increase a group’s access to people with expertise located in another city, state, or continent. This capability is important because good ideas rarely come on schedule and may wither and die in the interludes between weekly meetings. Instant messaging, blogs, and wikis all allow teams to publish and share insights
and ideas in new ways—with the advantage that an expensive IT support team is not necessary as long as someone on the team has a family member in junior high school. After all, none of these tools existed a decade ago (the Internet itself, as the technovisionary Kevin Kelly has remarked, is fewer than five thousand days old!). All are leading to new experiments in collaboration and hence to new insights into the interactions of teams. Anyone who is serious about design thinking across an organization will encourage them.

  cultures of innovation

  Google has slides, pink flamingos, and full-size inflatable dinosaurs. Pixar has beach huts. IDEO will erupt into a pitched FingerBlaster war on the slightest provocation.

  It’s hard not to trip over the evidence of the creative cultures for which each of these companies is famous, but these emblems of innovation are just that—emblems. To be creative, a place does not have to be crazy, kooky, and located in northern California. What is a prerequisite is an environment—social but also spatial—in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties. It does little good to identify the brightest T-shaped people around, assemble them in interdisciplinary teams, and network them to other teams if they are forced to work in an environment that dooms their efforts from the start. The physical and psychological spaces of an organization work in tandem to define the effectiveness of the people within it.

  A culture that believes that it is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas. If Gary Hamel is correct in arguing that the twenty-first century will favor adaptability and continuous innovation, it just makes sense that organizations whose “product” is creativity should foster environments that reflect and reinforce it. Relaxing the rules is not about letting people be silly so much as letting them be whole people—a step many companies seem reluctant to take. Indeed, the fragmentation of individual employees is often just a reflection of the fragmentation of the organization itself. I have observed many situations in which the supposedly “creative” designers are sequestered from the rest of the company. Although they may have a merry time off in their studios, this isolation quarantines them and undermines the creative efforts of the organization from opposite angles: the designers are cut off from other sources of knowledge and expertise, while everyone else is given the demoralizing message that theirs is the nine-to-five world of business attire and a sober business ethic. Would the U.S. auto industry have reacted faster to changes in the market if designers, marketers, and engineers had been sitting around the same table? Perhaps.

  The concept of “serious play” has a long, rich history within American social science, but nobody understands it in more practical terms than Ivy Ross. As senior VP of design for girls’ products at Mattel, Ross realized that Mattel had made it difficult for the various disciplines across the company to communicate and collaborate. To address this she created Platypus, the code name for a twelve-week experiment in which participants from across the organization were invited to relocate to an alternative space with the objective of creating new and out-of-the-box product ideas. “Other companies have skunk works,” Ross told Fast Company. “We have a platypus. I looked up the definition, and it said, ‘an uncommon mix of different species.’”

  Indeed, the species at Mattel could hardly have been more different: people came from finance, marketing, engineering, and design. The only requirement was that they commit themselves full-time to Platypus for three months. Since many of them had never been involved in new product development before and few had any kind of creative training, the first two weeks of the session were spent in a “creativity boot camp.” There they heard from a spectrum of experts about everything from child development to group psychology and were exposed to a range of new skills including improvised acting, brainstorming, and prototyping. During the remaining ten weeks they explored new directions for girls’ play and came up with a series of innovative product concepts. By the end they were ready to pitch their ideas to management.

  Although it was located literally in the shadow of the company’s headquarters in El Segundo, California, Platypus created a space that challenged all of the corporate rules. Ross regularly brought new teams together and put them into an environment designed to let people experiment in ways they had never been able to in their normal jobs. As she predicted, many Platypus graduates went back to their respective departments determined to use the practices and ideas they had learned. They found, however, that the culture of efficiency to which they returned invariably made that difficult. More than a few became frustrated. Some ultimately left the company.

  Clearly, it is not enough to inject selected people into a specialized environment designed for skunks, platypi, or other risk-taking creatures. They may indeed unleash their creative imaginations, but there must also be a plan for reentry into the organization. Claudia Kotchka understood this need when she created the Clay Street Project for Procter & Gamble—named for a loft in downtown Cincinnati where project teams can get away from the day-to-day distractions and think like designers. The theory of Clay Street is that a division—Hair Care or Pet Care, for example—funds and staffs each project, and teams that create particularly strong ideas are encouraged to shepherd them through execution and launch. This was the hothouse environment in which the dated Herbal Essences brand was transformed into a fresh, successful new range of products. The people who have experienced Clay Street return to their departments with new skills and new ideas that they can apply with the full permission of the company.

  how using real space helps the process

  Although it can at times seem forbiddingly abstract, design thinking is embodied thinking—embodied in teams and projects, to be sure, but embodied in the physical spaces of innovation as well. In a culture of meetings and milestones, it can be difficult to support the exploratory and iterative processes that are at the heart of the creative process. Happily, there are tangible things we can do to ensure that facilities do what they are supposed to do: facilitate! IDEO allocates special “project rooms” that are reserved to a team for the duration of its work. In one room a group will be thinking about the future of the credit card; next to it a team is working on a device to prevent deep-vein thrombosis among hospital patients, and another planning a clean water distribution system for rural India for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project spaces are large enough that the accumulated research materials, photos, storyboards, concepts, and prototypes can be out and available all of the time. The simultaneous visibility of these project materials helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur much more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks. A well-curated project space, augmented by a project Web site or wiki to help keep team members in touch when they are out in the field, can significantly improve the productivity of a team by supporting better collaboration among its members and better communication with outside partners and clients.

  So integral are these project spaces to our creative process that we have exported them, whenever possible, to our clients. Procter & Gamble has built the Gym in Cincinnati, an innovation lab that R&D teams use to turbocharge their projects and move more quickly to tangible prototypes. Steelcase has built its Learning Center in Grand Rapids, a corporate education facility that doubles as a design thinking space. On any given day the center’s team rooms and project spaces might be claimed by employees taking classes on management techniques, customers learning about how the company’s products can enhance collaboration, or senior leaders huddled together to discuss future strategy. These ideas have even made their way into the precincts of higher education. For the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, an IDEO team, working with the SCIL’s educational research experts, developed several floors of adaptable, reconfigurable spaces. Because of the inhere
ntly tentative and experimental nature of design thinking, flexibility is a key element of its success. As Dilbert has shown, regulation-size spaces tend to produce regulation-size ideas.

  There is an important lesson here about the challenges of shifting from a culture of hierarchy and efficiency to one of risk taking and exploration. Those who navigate this transition successfully are likely to become more deeply engaged, more highly motivated, and more wildly productive than they have ever been before. They will show up early and stay late because of the enormous satisfaction they get from giving form to new ideas and putting them out into the world. Once they have experienced this feeling, few people will be willing to give it up.

  Over the course of their century-long history of creative problem solving, designers have acquired a set of tools to help them move through what I have called the “three spaces of innovation”: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. My argument is that these skills now need to be dispersed throughout organizations. In particular, design thinking needs to move “upstream,” closer to the executive suites where strategic decisions are made. Design is now too important to be left to designers.

  It may be perplexing for those with hard-won design degrees to imagine a role for themselves beyond the studio, just as managers may find it strange to be asked to think like designers. But this should be seen as the inevitable result of a field that has come of age. The problems that challenged designers in the twentieth century—crafting a new object, creating a new logo, putting a scary bit of technology into a pleasing or at least innocuous box—are simply not the problems that will define the twenty-first. If we are to deal with what Bruce Mau has called the “massive change” that seems to be characteristic of our time, we all need to think like designers.