Design AND Business Thinking needed to Create Meaningful Metrics for Innovation and Experience Design
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.