The Importance of Design Thinking (Without Getting Carried Away With It)

BusinessWeek.com's Bruce Nussbaum has a post titled "CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them. Think Steve Jobs And iPhone." Good reading. Here's a sample:

"In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word 'design.' Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that 'design' only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term 'innovation' because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology -- I just call it all a banana. Peel that banana back and you find great design. Yummy design. The kind of design that can change business culture and all of our civil society as well. ...

Design is so popular today mostly because business sees design as connecting it to the consumer populace in a deep, fundamental and honest way. An honest way. If you are in the myth-making business, you don’t need design. You need a great ad agency. But if you are in the authenticity and integrity business then you have to think design. If you are in the co-creation business today—and you’d better be in this age of social networking—then you have to think of design. Indeed, your brand is increasingly shaped and defined by network communities, not your ad agency. Brand manager? Forget about it. Brand curator maybe."

Nussbaum is coming from a Web 2.0 angle here, but I get the point. As branding moves online, design plays a more integral role. Let us not forget, though, about the plain ol' sales, marketing and distribution networks that are the backbone of consumer products. Journalists get a little carried away sometimes and forget about the innovative processes that created the Dell computer, for example, on which some of them marvel at Web 2.0 companies.

Actually, Nussbaum sort of addresses that here:

"Hate me if you will, but I am a believer in Design Thinking. In the world of business, there is no value proposition left for most companies in controlling costs or even quality. All that outsourcing has leveled this playing field. Cost and quality are commoditized today, merely the price of entry to the competitive game. Design and design thinking—or innovation if you like -- are the fresh, new variables that can bring advantage and fat profit margins to global corporations."

That's an overstatement. Processes can always be improved. Companies have not yet squeezed every drop of effiency out of manufacturing, shipping, warehousing and selling. They don't make for a very sexy topic for business writers, but such improvements will always be made. But I'll agree with Nussbaum and say that most such improvements are going to be marginal. Design change can really move the needle.

I should note that some journalists call a standard change in a company's positioning statement a "design change." Same thing, new term. And contrary to what many articles might lead us to believe, not all successful changes need to be huge, design-based changed. I recall reading an article many years ago about an airline's quest to improve customer satisfaction. It had a long list of possible improvements (anything from more ice in a cup, for example, to a different magazine). Rather than shoot for a few big changes, the airline made a collection of many small changes -- and its customers responded positively. I'm sure it was a cost-efficient way to improve service quality. Design change, on the other hand, may not be so cheap.

More reading on Design Thinking:

-- Design Thinking at Wikipedia

-- "The Empathy Economy" by Nussbaum, BusinessWeek.com, March 8, 2005

-- "The Business of Design" by Bill Breen, Fast Company, April 2005