by Tim Brown
The rise of virtual collaboration—and of airfares—makes it easy to forget the value of bringing people together in the same room. In a hundred years this notion may seem quaint, but for now it is the way to create powerful bonds. Challenge your organization to think about how it can spend more time doing collaborative, generative work that will produce a tangible outcome at the end of the day—not having more meetings. Face-to-face time cultivates relationships and nourishes teams and is one of the most precious resources an organization possesses. Make it as productive and creative as possible. Building on the ideas of others is a whole lot easier when the building is happening in real time and among people who know and trust one another. And it is usually a whole lot more fun.
blend big and small projects
There is no silver bullet for innovation. Think of it more as “silver buckshot.” It makes sense to take a variety of approaches to innovation, but think about which ones are most likely to leverage the strengths of your organization. Diversify your assets. Manage a diversified portfolio of innovation that stretches from shorter-term incremental ideas—how to increase the mileage of this year’s model—to longer-term revolutionary ones—how to produce a car that runs on soybeans or sunbeams. The majority of your efforts will take place in the incremental zone, but without exploring more revolutionary ideas you risk being blindsided by unexpected competition. The downside: you may see fewer of these projects going to market. The upside: those that do are likely to have a lasting impact.
Encouraging experimentation is easy in the incremental zone. Business units should be encouraged to drive innovation around existing markets and offerings. The creative leader must also be willing to support the search for more breakthrough ideas from the top, whether this means introducing a new line of office furniture or a new primary school curriculum. Most organizations have metrics that measure the effectiveness of a division on its own terms. This type of thinking undermines effective collaboration across departmental silos. It is precisely in the interstitial spaces, however, that the most interesting opportunities lie.
budget to the pace of innovation
Design thinking is fast-paced, unruly, and disruptive, and it is important to resist the temptation to slow it down by relying on cumbersome budgeting cycles or bureaucratic reporting procedures. Rather than sabotage your most creative asset, be prepared to rethink funding schedules as projects unfold according to their own internal logic and teams learn more about the opportunities before them.
Agile resource allocation is challenging in any organization and downright scary in large ones. But there may be ways around a crippling reliance on the predictability of markets and the discipline of annual budgets. Some companies have experimented with venture funds that can be tapped to support promising projects. Others rely on the judgment of senior management to release funding as projects reach certain milestones. The trick is to accept that milestones cannot be predicted with certainty and that projects acquire an inner life of their own. Budgeting guidelines must be expected to change many times over. The key to agile budgeting is a review process that relies upon the judgment of senior leadership rather than some kind of algorithmic process mechanically applied. That’s how venture capital funds operate, and successful venture capitalists are nothing if not nimble.
find talent any way you can
Design thinkers may be in short supply, but they exist inside every organization. The trick is spotting them, nurturing them, and freeing them to do what they do best. Who among your staff spends time watching and listening to customers? Who would rather build a prototype than write a memo? Who seems to get more out of working with a team than holed up in a tastefully appointed cubicle? Who comes to the organization with a weird background (or just a weird tattoo) that might be a clue to a different way of looking at the world? These people are your raw material and your energy supply. They are money in the bank. And since they are accustomed to being marginalized, they will respond with alacrity to an opportunity to get involved in exciting projects at the earliest stage. If they happen to be designers, get them out of the comfort of their design studio and into interdisciplinary teams. If they are from Accounting, Legal, or HR, give them some art supplies.
Once you have tapped your internal resources, think about how you handle recruiting. Hire budding design thinkers from schools that “get it,” and bring in some interns and team them up with the more seasoned design thinkers you already have. Create some projects that have relatively short time horizons but are focused on divergent thinking. Share the results around the organization. Get a buzz going around design thinking, and converts will come crawling out of the woodwork. There is nothing as seductive to a true innovator as optimism.
design for the cycle
In many organizations the cadence of business calls for people to shift their job assignments every eighteen months or so. However, most design projects take longer to move from the launching pad and through their implementation phase—particularly projects aimed at a real breakthrough. When core team members are not able to follow a project through the complete cycle, both will suffer. The guiding idea behind a project is likely to be diluted, attenuated, or lost. Individuals will feel that their learning curves have been wasted and may be left with a sense of frustration that is hard to shake. The experience of going through the entire cycle of a project is invaluable.
DESIGN THINKING AND YOU
There is something wondrously gratifying about putting something new out into the world, whether it is an award-winning piece of industrial design, an elegant mathematical proof, or a first poem published in the high school newspaper. Many people find that cultivating this feeling of personal accomplishment is a powerful driving force. It also happens to be sound business practice because it makes us less likely to accept the familiar, the expedient, or the boring.
don’t ask what? ask why?
Every parent knows how infuriating five-year-olds can be with their constantly questioning “Why?” Every parent has at one point or another retreated behind the authoritarian “Because I said so.” For the design thinker, asking “Why?” is an opportunity to reframe a problem, redefine the constraints, and open the field to a more innovative answer. Instead of accepting a given constraint, ask whether this is even the right problem to be solving. Is it really faster cars that we want or better transportation? Televisions with more features or better entertainment? A snazzier hotel lobby or a good night’s sleep? A willingness to ask “Why?” will annoy your colleagues in the short run, but in the long run it will improve the chances of spending energy on the right problems. There is nothing more frustrating than coming up with the right answer to the wrong question. This is as true in responding to a brief or designing a new strategy for a company as it is in striking a meaningful balance between work and life.
open your eyes
We spend most of our lives not noticing the important things. The more familiar we are with a situation, the more we take for granted, which is why it usually takes a visiting relative to get us to visit Alcatraz or the Golden Gate Bridge, or spend a weekend in the Wine Country. My friend Tom Kelley likes to point out that “Innovation begins with an Eye,” but I’d like to take this one step further. Good design thinkers observe. Great design thinkers observe the ordinary. Make it a rule that at least once a day you will stop and think about an ordinary situation. Take a second look at some action or artifact that you would look at only once (or not at all) as if you were a police detective at a crime scene. Why are manhole covers round? Why is my teenager heading off to school dressed like that? How do I know how far back I should stand from the person in front of me in line? What would it be like to be color-blind? If we immerse ourselves in what Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison have recently called “the Super-Normal,” we can gain uncanny insights into the unwritten rules that guide us through life.
make it visual
Record your observations and ideas visually, even if just as a roug
h sketch in a notebook or a picture on your camera phone. If you think you can’t draw, too bad. Do it anyway. Every designer I know carries a sketch pad the way a doctor carries a stethoscope. These images will become a treasure trove of ideas to refer to and share.
The same is true for the way we develop our ideas. Ludwig Wittgenstein was the most cerebral of twentieth-century philosophers, but his motto was “Don’t think. Look.” Being visual allows us to look at a problem differently than if we rely only on words or numbers. I found it more useful to visualize this book as a mind map than to draw up an orderly table of contents. It gave me a sense of the whole that I couldn’t get from a linear table of contents. The biologist Barbara McClintock used to speak about “a feeling for the organism.” Her colleagues stopped ridiculing her “touchy-feely” approach to science when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. From Al Gore helping us to visualize the melting of the Greenland icecap to the artist Tara Donovan helping us to visualize a million Styrofoam cups, one picture can, as they say, be worth a thousand words. Maybe more.
build on the ideas of others
Everyone has heard of Moore’s Law and Planck’s Constant, but we should be suspicious when an idea becomes too closely identified with the person who first thought it up. If an idea becomes a piece of private property, it is likely to grow stale and brittle over time. If it migrates throughout an organization, undergoing continual permutations, combinations, and mutations, it is likely to flourish. Just as habitats need ecological diversity, corporations need a culture of competing ideas. Jazz musicians and improvisational actors have created an art form around their ability to build on the stories being created in real time by their fellow artists. There are a lot of “IDEOisms” floating around our office, but my favorite might be the oft-repeated reminder that “All of us are smarter than any of us.”
demand options
Don’t settle for the first good idea that comes into your head or seize the first promising solution presented to you. There are plenty more where they came from. Let a hundred flowers bloom, but then let them cross-pollinate. If you haven’t explored lots of options, you haven’t diverged enough. Your ideas are likely to be incremental or easy to copy.
This can be a difficult commitment to honor. The pursuit of new options takes time and makes things more complicated, but it is the route to more creative and satisfying solutions. In the meantime, your colleagues may get frustrated and your customers impatient, but they will be happier with the eventual results. You just have to know when to stop, and that is an art that can be learned but probably cannot be taught. Setting deadlines is one way. Not only will they put an outer limit on the amount of time you take, you will find that you become even more productive as the deadline looms. Curse deadlines all you want, but remember that time can be our most creative constraint.
balance your portfolio
One of the most satisfying things about thinking like a designer is that the results are tangible. Something new exists at the end of a project that didn’t exist before. Remember to document the process as it unfolds (we don’t wait for our kids to become finished adults before taking their pictures!). Shoot videos, preserve drawings and sketches, hold on to presentation documents, and find somewhere to store physical prototypes. Assembled as a portfolio, this material will document a process of growth and record the impact of many minds (which can be useful during performance reviews, job interviews, or when you are trying to explain to your kids just what it is that you do). Dennis Boyle, employee number eight at IDEO, has kept every prototype he ever made (we have declined his request to rent an airplane hangar to store them in). It is hard not to feel proud of your contribution when you have a record of it.
design a life
Design thinking has its origins in the training and the professional practice of designers, but these are principles that can be practiced by everyone and extended to every field of activity. There is a big difference, though, between planning a life, drifting through life, and designing a life.
We all know of people who go through life with every step preplanned. They knew which university they would attend, which internship would lead to a successful career, and at what age they will retire. If they falter, they have parents, agents, and life coaches to take up the slack. Unfortunately, this never works (remember the Black Swan?). And anyway, if you know the winner before the start, there’s not much point in playing the game.
Like any good design team, we can have a sense of purpose without deluding ourselves that we can predict every outcome in advance, for this is the space of creativity. We can blur the distinction between the final product and the creative process that got us there. Designers work within the constraints of nature and are learning to mimic its elegance, economy, and efficiency, and as citizens and consumers we too can learn to respect the fragile environment that surrounds and sustains us.
Above all, think of life as a prototype. We can conduct experiments, make discoveries, and change our perspectives. We can look for opportunities to turn processes into projects that have tangible outcomes. We can learn how to take joy in the things we create whether they take the form of a fleeting experience or an heirloom that will last for generations. We can learn that reward comes in creation and re-creation, not just in the consumption of the world around us. Active participation in the process of creation is our right and our privilege. We can learn to measure the success of our ideas not by our bank accounts but by their impact on the world.
I began this book by describing one of my heroes, a man who lived before the profession of design—not to say design thinking—even existed: the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. As the challenges of the industrial age spread to every field of human endeavor, a parade of bold innovators who would shape the world as they have shaped my own thinking would follow him. We have met many of them along the “reader’s journey” that I have tried to construct: William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, the American industrial designer Raymond Loewy, and the team of Ray and Charles Eames. What they all shared was optimism, openness to experimentation, a love of storytelling, a need to collaborate, and an instinct to think with their hands—to build, to prototype, and to communicate complex ideas with masterful simplicity. They did not just do design, they lived design.
The great thinkers to whom I am so deeply indebted are not as they appear in the coffee-table books about the “pioneers,” “masters,” and “icons” of modern design. They were not minimalist, esoteric members of design’s elite priesthood, and they did not wear black turtlenecks. They were creative innovators who could bridge the chasm between thinking and doing because they were passionately committed to the goal of a better life and a better world around them. Today we have an opportunity to take their example and unleash the power of design thinking as a means of exploring new possibilities, creating new choices, and bringing new solutions to the world. In the process we may find that we have made our societies healthier, our businesses more profitable, and our own lives richer, more impactful, and more meaningful.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To say Change by Design was a team effort risks stating the obvious, but the fact remains there were many who made invaluable contributions. Many of the most important insights should be credited to them. All of the errors should be assigned to me.
My silent partner Barry Katz, through his skillful use of words, made me appear more articulate than I really am. I thank him for the many contributions he made to the text and for the considerable time and effort he put into turning my draft manuscript into something ready for public consumption.
My agent, Christy Fletcher, saw the potential of this project and introduced me to the wonderful team at Harper Business, and particularly to editor, Ben Loehnen. I have heard said that the art of book editing is dying out in the rush of modern publishing, but Ben shows that high-quality editing and speed are not mutually exclusive. It has been a delight to work with him.
Others who
played essential roles in shepherding the project through to completion include Lew McCreary at Harvard Business Review, who edited my original article “Design Thinking” Sandy Speicher, Ian Groulx, and Katie Clark, who created the cover concept; Peter Macdonald, who illustrated my mind map; publicists Debbe Stern and Mark Fortier, who work diligently to get the message of Change by Design out in the world; Scott Underwood, who made sure I was being factual about IDEO projects; and my assistant, Sally Clark, who somehow managed to get me to the right places at the right time despite my best attempts to foil her plans.
In the course of researching this book I had the pleasure of visiting some wonderful organizations. I would particularly like to thank Pavi Mehta and Thulsi Thulasiraj of Aravind Eye Hospital; David Green; Amitabha Sadangi of IDE India; and Makoto Kakoi and Naoki Ito of Hakuhodo for being so generous with their time and ideas.
I have had the good fortune to spend time with some very smart people who have significantly influenced my thinking. Many of them have been mentioned in the text, but I wish to acknowledge Jacqueline Novagratz, Bruce Nussbaum, Naoto Fukasawa, Gary Hamel, John Thackera, Bob Sutton, Roger Martin, and Claudia Kotchka, because it is to their accomplishments that I owe many of my ideas. I would also like to thank Chris Anderson of TED, who through his wonderful conference has introduced me to countless ideas and people included in Change by Design.
At IDEO I would like to thank Whitney Mortimer, Jane Fulton Suri, Paul Bennett, Diego Rodriguez, Fred Dust, and Peter Coughlan for being regular sounding boards for my ideas. But there would be no Change by Design without the project contributions of my colleagues at IDEO and our clients, both past and present. They continue to be an endless source of inspiration.