Sato Partners Blog

This is first in a series of blogs on more successful alternatives to formalizing experience design, innovation and product development:
- processes
- standards
- metrics
- organizations

Situation
You’ve developed a standardized innovation, experience design or development process; yet they did not come. Policies your company implemented to enforce the use of the standardized processes have met with some success; though after trying it, practitioners experience it as “more overhead” than as an aid, so they try to find ways around it.

Next you turn your ethnography expertise internally to confirm the practitioner’s claims and find there is a mis-match between how they need to do things and your standardized process. At this point you realize the issue is an unsuitable design, not an organization transition issue. To further compound your challenge, you feel your team will be spending too much time revising and updating details of the process with every shift of the organization. So, what now?

One Size Fits All, Except…
Most often managers develop processes much like PERT (Project Evaluation and Review Technique) charts, around a sequence of activities to be carried out by designated individuals supported by certain frameworks, methods and tools. The weakness of this approach is the inflexibility of sequence of activities and who will carries them out. The process becomes outdated with every organization change or every alteration in your value delivery chain. So mangers spend inodrdinate time revising process standards or creating exceptions. Furthermore, the sequence of activities depends on the product or service being conceived, developed and produced; one group may outsource some of its development while another does not, requiring a different sequence of activities and roles. But in accomdating the variety of processes, the lowest common denominator brings you back to the obvious set of 3-7 process boxes!

Decision Flow, not Activity Flow
An alternative is to use a logical sequence of questions that need to be answered as a backbone for “standardizing a process”. I first learned about this approach from work MIT was doing to study how entities coordinate with one another. The researchers needed a way to compare apples to apples. For example, how does a school of fish coordinate on which direction to turn? How about a formation of fighter jets? This is an example of different approaches that answer the same question to produce the same results – turning in coordination. Often, to be successful, the questions need to be answered in a similar logical sequence.

Once we have the “question flow” established then we can answer each question through a combination of people, processes, roles, technologies and processes. For example, in customer-centered design the first logical question that needs to be answered is “who is your customer?” This question is followed by “what do they need (or desire)?”, then “why?” and so on. The second question “what do they need?” cannot accurately be answered without having an answer or speculation about the first question “who is your customer?” Note that in technology-driven design the sequence of questions is different – this reveals the competitive advantage that a customer-centered approach can provide a company yet also shows why customer-centered design is a bigger organization change challenge than most people realize). Fundamentally, your challenge is similar to the one the MIT researchers have – how can you successful support answering the same sequence of questions through different means?

Applying This Approach

• First, list in sequences, questions that need to be answered to conceive a concept, refine it or produce it with metrics for success (gating criteria) and gain alignment from stakeholders on it. There may be more than one sequence of questions that your organization uses to deliver concepts to market. Cocreating this sequence is a great way to get stakeholders on board early and often.
• Second, for each question, cite what expertises (design, marketing, R&D, production, etc.) are needed to best answer each question.
• Third, for each question, provide the best frameworks, methods or tools to most effectively answer the question.
• Fourth, create work session for the team of experts to figure out for themselves, then document and align on
  . the sequence of questions
  . roles for each question– who leads (typically whomever is accountable for the decision or their delegate), who supports (typically, experts)
  . measures to be used to determine the question has been successfully answered
  (the answer may be a hypothesis that will be validated later)
  . frameworks, methods and tools to support experts in succesfully answering the question
  This works session should be available for the team to make revisions if or when any of the items change
  and to reaffirm their agreement on the approach.
• Fifth, make the teams’ results available to other teams as templates – you’ll see patterns emerge over time.

By following this approach you will have provided teams the flexibly they need and gotten yourself out of the loop of revising multiple process standards. Instead, your efforts will be focused on heling teams define their process, finding and integrating the best frameworks, tools and methods available. In addition, it is scalable – in that it ought to work no matter the size of your organization.

Theory in Practice
We’ve used this approach to help the Chief Technology Office to standardize processes within a large multi-national IT hardware, software and services company. It was also used with success to help a division to integrate experience design and designers into a new product development approach; to figure out the roles and responsibilities, tools, methods and framewoks they would use going forward.

I’ve been told by consultants that I’m “giving away the store” sharing this kind of insight. Actually the framework and approach (the “theory”) is simple; though as you may discover implementing it for a given situation is the challenge. Experience helps with this.

Next time, I’ll blog on an alternative to standards that actually creates pull from practitioners.

The difficulty to do so is symptomatic of the schism between Design Thinking and conventional business approaches.

I believe the difficulty with measuring the contribution of innovation and design to business is a perfect study in the how walled off Design Thinking (DT) is from conventional business approaches (BT). I’ll use Roger Martins’ model to illustrate this; Design Thinking transforms mysteries into heuristics/principles/guidelines (apple falls > principle of “gravity”) and conventional business approaches are tuned to convert heuristics into algorithms.(how to reliably take advantage of “gravity” – for example, making lead shot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_tower )

Let’s start with the premise that one ought to measure what one wants to improve or “what matters” (determine what is “valid”). This is a situation where one needs to “cut cubes from fog”, or transform mysteries into heuristics. One often finds that a measurement system does not exist. Coming from a BT perspective, often a person will only consider measuring what can be measured, and frequently established metric systems have been set up to track efficiency and effectiveness (hard metrics that reinforces “reliability”). So in this case, what is measured does not reflect what matters.

Actionable Take-Aways: Designing systems to measure the contribution to business of innovation, experience and design needs to be a multi-disciplinary endeavor that is most successful if all team members are open to considering factors outside their normal focus or comfort zone. Marketing, Design, Finance and Supply Chain/Manufacturing need to work together to develop these metrics. People that are Design Thinkers will have an easier time figuring out what needs to be measured. Business focused thinkers will have an easier time figuring out what matters and what the organization is capable of measuring. Both need to work together to figure out how to measure what’s needed and to translate the measurements into things that matter to management (shifting management’s belief in what matters may be a longer term change management “project”). Brand management has come further in this area than other areas of overlap between design and business, logic and emotion, rational and intuitive, left and right brain, etc.

What to watch: Difficulty to measure contribution of innovation, experience or design will diminish as factors measuring validity integrate with measures of reliability.

This is an example of how using a Design Thinking framework helped us surface insights that provided a reasonable answer to what has often been a contentious question. All four phases of Design Thinking were touched upon – for this case, in the following order: Discoveries (Observations and Insights), Frameworks, Solutions then Principles

Scenario:
Marketers and Designers both were using Personas. A conflict arose, since both disciplines were adamant that their Personas were the “right” ones. Who’s Persona should prevail? Both – here’s why and how…

Useful Frames:
Companies typically have touch points with their customers, where the company can influence the customer’s experience. Simplified here, for retail, there are touch points for “sales experience”, “use experience” and “support experience”

Observation and Insights:
Same target customer segment.
Same framework, Personas being used.
Design intent/goals are different.
Focus is different on which touch points company has with customers each discipline is designing for.
Designers
- optimize offerings for “value from use”; primarily through the offering at the “Use Experience” touch point
- often seek out users that push the envelope on the utility of the offering (includes early adopters). Personas are base on the these customers in a target segment
Marketers
- optimize offerings for “value to sell”; though the offering (in-bound marketing) and marketing campaigns (out-bound marketing) at the “Sales Experience” touch point
- often seek the mean or average users that will buy the offering. Personas are based on the “mean” customers in the same target segment.

Principles:
Each discipline must have lattitude to use and adapt the frameworks and methods to achieve their objectives.
All the disciplines must have some common baseline to work against to make equivalent comparisons – for Personas, the same customer segment.

Suggested (Re)solution:
Intent or customer experience touch points you are trying to effect should dictate which Persona to use.
As long as both personas are in the same target customer segment, both Personas are valid and should be applied for their intended purposes.
Designer’s personas should be used by others if key objective is to increase value from use, often to benefit the customer’s “Use Experience”
Marketer’s personas should be used by others if key objective is to increase value to sell, often to benefit the customer’s “Sales Experience”

I’m writing an article with some colleagues that demonstrates synergies between Design Thinking and popular organization change and development approaches. This is an important issue for:
• innovators that take an active role as agents of change in their organizations to promote their innovations, or for
• design managers trying to position their teams more strategically.

However, I’ve not found a single list of attributes for Design Thinking that shows how it is complementary to business thinking yet is comprehensive [Roger Martin’s Validity vs. Reliability comparison is a good start]. So, I’ve developed this list of attributes/principles for Design Thinking, and am seeking comments on what’s missing or what changes I ought to consider. Thanks in advance for your comments – the post is from an early draft, please excuse typos and bad grammar.

Major Attributes of Design Thinking – That Complement Conventional Business Thinking

Finds Patterns and Relationships in Diverse Variables – Design Thinking employs a bottoms-up approach, more so than (but not to the exclusion of ) tops-down categorization or divide-and-conquer philosophies. Design thinking provides systematic ways to seek patterns and relationships in a broad number of diverse variables; including conflicting, ambiguous or paradoxical data.

Creates Principles or Guidelines from Patterns and Relationships [Martin] – Design Thinking’s unique contribution to business is to use the patterns and relationships found to generate a set of principles(rules, guidelines, imperatives, etc.) that increase the probability of success of addressing complex, dynamic, ambiguous challenges. Technically speaking, it is using Abductive reasoning to create heuristics. Perplexing dilemmas are often the nature of the challenges that change leaders and experts face daily.

Accommodates Intuition and Bias [Martin] – What is a good idea or bad idea is a decision. A growing body of research [Damasio, Lehrer] suggests that decisions on complex matters are primarily emotionally driven, not rationally driven. Design Thinking shapes what a decision-maker is aware of to inform their intuition, and hence their bias and judgment. Unlike in conventional business decision-making, factors that may play into a decision do not have to be defined, rationalized or even articulate-able before they are used. However, it is important that individuals are mindful of what they know and don’t know (that which informs their intuition) and biases throughout the Design Thinking cycle.

Balances Human-Centeredness with Company-Centricity [Owen] – Design Thinking seeks to balance benefit to company, with value to the customers, throughout the cycle whether in balancing perspectives or generating ideas. In a similar way, the balance that needs to be struck between employee needs and company needs is an everyday challenge for human resource professionals.

Relies on Actions, Reinforced with Words – Design Thinking relies on understanding actions and behaviors over what is said. Actions and behaviors require an investment of energy, time or resources, so reflect trade-off decisions a person made. In contrast what people say often reflects their ideal in abstract, without having had to make trade-off decisions or investments that arise in everyday life. Often the actions lead to questions about “why” a person or organization acted the way they did – this uncovers latent needs, relationships and meanings. Relying on actions applies to studying organizations too – one will often find a gap between what an organization claims its role is, and what it actually has resources to invest in.

Visualizes, Prototypes and Validates It; “Doing to Think” or “Playing” –Visualization reveals relationships that are not accessible in verbal-only representations [xxx]. Similarly, prototyping ideas make concepts concrete, so the concepts that embody the design principles can be shared and evaluated in “real world” settings.

Iterates Systematically and Scales – Design Thinking is scalable; it can be applied to messages, products, or strategies. It can be focused on a portion of a system simultaneous to being used for the whole system. Iteratively developing, prototyping and validating critical portions of system can be more cost and time effective, and less risky than doing an all-or-nothing full blown launch. Prototyping new policies, roles, processes and tools within a part of an organization, then making adjustments before launching more broadly has been a tactic long used in organization development.