Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation PDF

INTRODUCTION the power of design thinking an end to old ideas Practically everyone who has visited England has experienced the Great Western Railway, the crowning achievement of the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I grew up within earshot of the GWR, and as a child in rural Oxf...

INTRODUCTION the power of design thinking an end to old ideas Practically everyone who has visited England has experienced the Great Western Railway, the crowning achievement of the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I grew up within earshot of the GWR, and as a child in rural Oxfordshire I often bicycled alongside the line and waited for the great express trains to roar past at more than one hundred miles an hour. The train ride is more comfortable today (the carriages now sport springs and cushioned seats) and the scenery has certainly changed, but a century and a half after it was built the GWR still stands as an icon of the industrial revolution—and as an example of the power of design to shape the world around us. Although he was the engineer’s engineer, Brunel was not solely interested in the technology behind his creations. While considering the design of the system, he insisted upon the flattest possible gradient because he wanted passengers to have the sense of “floating across the countryside.” He constructed bridges, viaducts, cuttings, and tunnels all in the cause of creating not just efficient transportation but the best possible experience. He even imagined an integrated transport system that would allow the traveler to board a train at London’s Paddington Station and disembark from a steamship in New York. In every one of his great projects Brunel displayed a remarkable—and remarkably prescient—talent for balancing technical, commercial, and human considerations. He was not just a great engineer or a gifted designer; Isambard Kingdom Brunel was one of the earliest examples of a design thinker. Since the completion of the Great Western Railway in 1841, industrialization has wrought incredible change. Technology has helped lift millions out of poverty and has improved the standard of living of a considerable portion of humanity. As we enter the twenty-first century, however, we are increasingly aware of the underside of the revolution that has transformed the way we live, work, and play. The sooty clouds of smoke that once darkened the skies over Manchester and Birmingham have changed the climate of the planet. The torrent of cheap goods that began to flow from their factories and workshops has fed into a culture of excess consumption and prodigious waste. The industrialization of agriculture has left us vulnerable to natural and man-made catastrophes. The innovative breakthroughs of the past have become the routine procedures of today as businesses in Shenzhen and Bangalore tap into the same management theories as those in Silicon Valley and Detroit and face the same downward spiral of commoditization. Technology still has not run its course. The communications revolution sparked by the Internet has brought people closer together and given them the opportunity to share perspectives and create new ideas as never before. The sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics have merged in the forms of biotechnology and nanotechnology to create the promise of lifesaving medicines and wondrous new materials. But these spectacular achievements are unlikely to help us reverse our ominous course. Just the opposite. we need new choices A purely technocentric view of innovation is less sustainable now than ever, and a management philosophy based only on selecting from existing strategies is likely to be overwhelmed by new developments at home or abroad. What we need are new choices—new products that balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that result in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them. It is hard to imagine a time when the challenges we faced so vastly exceeded the creative resources we have brought to bear on them. Aspiring innovators may have attended a “brainstorming” session or learned a few gimmicks and tricks, but rarely do these temporary placeholders make it to the outside world in the form of new products, services, or strategies. What we need is an approach to innovation that is powerful, effective, and broadly accessible, that can be integrated into all aspects of business and society, and that individuals and teams can use to generate breakthrough ideas that are implemented and that therefore have an impact. Design thinking, the subject of this book, offers just such an approach. Design thinking begins with skills designers have learned over many decades in their quest to match human needs with available technical resources within the practical constraints of business. By integrating what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never thought of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly greater range of problems. Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run a business based on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an overreliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as dangerous. The integrated approach at the core of the design process suggests a “third way.” swimming upstream I was trained as an industrial designer, but it took me a long time to realize the difference between being a designer and thinking like a designer. Seven years of undergraduate and graduate education and fifteen years of professional practice went by before I had any real inkling that what I was doing was more than simply a link in a chain that connected a client’s engineering department to the folks upstairs in marketing. The very first products I designed as a design professional were for a venerable English machinery manufacturer called Wadkin Bursgreen. The people there invited a young and untested industrial designer into their midst to help improve their professional woodworking machines. I spent a summer creating drawings and models of circular saws that were better looking and spindle molders that were easier to use. I think I did a pretty good job, and it’s still possible to find my work in factories thirty years later. But you will no longer find the Wadkin Bursgreen company, which has long since gone out of business. As a designer I didn’t see that it was the future of the woodworking industry that was in question, not the design of its machines.  Only gradually did I come to see the power of design not as a link in a chain but as the hub of a wheel. When I left the protected world of art school—where everyone looked the same, acted the same, and spoke the same language—and entered the world of business, I had to spend far more time trying to explain to my clients what design was than actually doing it. I realized that I was approaching the world from a set of operating principles that was different from theirs. The resulting confusion was getting in the way of my creativity and productivity. I also noticed that the people who inspired me were not necessarily members of the design profession: engineers such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Edison, and Ferdinand Porsche, all of whom seemed to have a human-centered rather than technology-centered worldview; behavioral scientists such as Don Norman, who asked why products are so needlessly confusing; artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Antony Gormley, who seemed to engage their viewers in an experience that made them part of the artwork; business leaders such as Steve Jobs and Akio Morita, who were creating unique and meaningful products. I realized that behind the soaring rhetoric of “genius” and “visionary” was a basic commitment to the principles of design thinking. A few years ago, during one of the periodic booms and busts that are part of business as usual in Silicon Valley, my colleagues and I were struggling to figure how to keep my company, IDEO, meaningful and useful in the world. There was plenty of interest in our design services, but we also noticed that we were increasingly being asked to tackle problems that seemed very far away from the commonly held view of design. A health care foundation was asking us to help restructure its organization; a century-old manufacturing company was asking us to help it better understand its clients; an elite university was asking us to think about alternative learning environments. We were being pulled out of our comfort zone, but this was exciting because it opened up new possibilities for us to have more impact in the world. We started to talk about this expanded field as “design with a small d” in an attempt to move beyond the sculptural objet displayed in lifestyle magazines or on pedestals in museums of modern art. But this phrase never seemed fully satisfactory. One day I was chatting with my friend David Kelley, a Stanford professor and the founder of IDEO, and he remarked that every time someone came to ask him about design, he found himself inserting the word “thinking” to explain what it was that designers do. The term “design thinking” stuck. I now use it as a way of describing a set of principles that can be applied by diverse people to a wide range of problems. I have become a convert and an evangelist of design thinking. And I am not alone. Today, rather than enlist designers to make an already developed idea more attractive, the most progressive companies are challenging them to create ideas at the outset of the development process. The former role is tactical; it builds on what exists and usually moves it one step further. The latter is strategic; it pulls “design” out of the studio and unleashes its disruptive, game-changing potential. It’s no accident that designers can now be found in the boardrooms of some of the world’s most progressive companies. As a thought process, design has begun to move upstream. Moreover, the principles of design thinking turn out to be applicable to a wide range of organizations, not just to companies in search of new product offerings. A competent designer can always improve upon last year’s new widget, but an interdisciplinary team of skilled design thinkers is in a position to tackle more complex problems. From pediatric obesity to crime prevention to climate change, design thinking is now being applied to a range of challenges that bear little resemblance to the covetable objects that fill the pages of today’s coffee-table publications. The causes underlying the growing interest in design are clear. As the center of economic activity in the developing world shifts inexorably from industrial manufacturing to knowledge creation and service delivery, innovation has become nothing less than a survival strategy. It is, moreover, no longer limited to the introduction of new physical products but includes new sorts of processes, services, interactions, entertainment forms, and ways of communicating and collaborating. These are exactly the kinds of human-centered tasks that designers work on every day. The natural evolution from design doing to design thinking reflects the growing recognition on the part of today’s business leaders that design has become too important to be left to designers. Change by Design is divided into two parts. The first is a journey through some of the important stages of design thinking. It is not intended as a “how-to” guide, for ultimately these are skills best acquired through doing. What I hope to do is to provide a framework that will help the reader identify the principles and practices that make for great design thinking. As I suggest in chapter 6, design thinking flourishes in a rich culture of storytelling, and in that spirit I will explore many of these ideas by telling stories drawn from IDEO and other companies and organizations. The first part of the book focuses on design thinking as applied to business. Along the way we will see how it has been practiced by some of the most innovative companies in the world, how it has inspired breakthrough solutions, and where, on occasion, it has overreached (any business book that claims an unbroken record of success belongs on the “fiction” shelf). Part two is intended as a challenge for all of us to Think Big. By looking at three broad domains of human activity—business, markets, and society—I hope to show how design thinking can be extended in new ways to create ideas that are equal to the challenges we all face. If you are managing a hotel, design thinking can help you to rethink the very nature of hospitality. If you are working with a philanthropic agency, design thinking can help you grasp the needs of the people you are trying to serve. If you are a venture capitalist, design thinking can help you peer into the future. another way to look at it Ben Loehnen, my excellent editor at Harper Business, advised me that a proper book needs a proper table of contents. I have done my best to oblige. The truth is, however, that I see things a bit differently. Design thinking is all about exploring different possibilities, so I thought I would start by introducing the reader to another way of visualizing the contents of the book. There are times when linear thinking is called for, but at IDEO we often find it more helpful to visualize an idea using a technique with a long, rich history, the mind map. Linear thinking is about sequences; mind maps are about connections. This visual representation helps me see the relationships between the different topics I want to talk about, it gives me a more intuitive sense of the whole, and it helps me to think about how best to illustrate an idea. Linear thinkers like Ben are welcome to use the table of contents; more venturesome readers may wish to consult the inside cover and view the whole of Change by Design in one place. It may prompt you to jump to a particular section of interest. It may help you retrace your steps. It may remind you of the relationships among different topics of design thinking and may even help you to think of topics that are not covered here but should be. Experienced design thinkers may find that the mind map is all you need to capture my point of view. I hope that for everyone else the ten chapters that follow will provide a worthwhile insight into the world of design thinking and the potential it has for us to create meaningful change. If that proves to be the case, I hope you will let me know. TIM BROWN TIM BROWN Palo Alto, California, May 2009 PART I what is design thinking? CHAPTER ONE getting under your skin, or how design thinking is about more than style In 2004 Shimano, a leading Japanese manufacturer of bicycle components, was experiencing flattening growth in its traditional high-end road racing and mountain bike segments in the United States. The company had always relied on new technology to drive its growth. It had invested heavily in an effort to anticipate the next innovation. In the face of the changing market it seemed prudent to try something new, so Shimano invited IDEO to collaborate. What followed was an exercise in designer-client relations that looked very different from what such an engagement might have looked like a few decades or even a few years earlier. Shimano did not hand us a list of technical specifications and a binder full of market research and send us off to design a bunch of parts. Rather, we joined forces and set out together to explore the changing terrain of the cycling market. During the initial phase, we fielded an interdisciplinary team of designers, behavioral scientists, marketers, and engineers whose task was to identify appropriate constraints for the project. The team began with a hunch that it should not focus on the high-end market. Instead, they fanned out to learn why 90 percent of American adults don’t ride bikes—despite the fact that 90 percent of them did as kids! Looking for new ways to think about the problem, they spent time with consumers from across the spectrum. They discovered that nearly everyone they met had happy memories of being a kid on a bike but many are deterred by cycling today—by the retail experience (including the intimidating, Lycra-clad athletes who serve as sales staff in most independent bike stores); by the bewildering complexity and excessive cost of the bikes, accessories, and specialized clothing; by the danger of cycling on roads not designed for bicycles; and by the demands of maintaining a sophisticated machine that might be ridden only on weekends. They noted that everyone they talked to seemed to have a bike in the garage with a flat tire or a broken cable. This human-centered exploration—which looked for insights from bicycle aficionados but also, more important, from people outside Shimano’s core customer base—led to the realization that a whole new category of bicycling might reconnect American consumers to their experiences as children. A huge, untapped market began to take shape before their eyes. The design team, inspired by the old Schwinn coaster bikes that everyone seemed to remember, came up with the concept of “coasting.” Coasting would entice lapsed bikers back into an activity that was simple, straightforward, healthy, and fun. Coasting bikes, built more for pleasure than for sport, would have no controls on the handlebars, no cables snaking along the frame, no nest of precision gears to be cleaned, adjusted, repaired, and replaced. As we remember from our earliest bikes, the brakes would be applied by backpedaling. Coasting bikes would feature comfortable padded seats, upright handlebars, and puncture-resistant tires and require almost no maintenance. But this is not simply a retrobike: it incorporates sophisticated engineering with an automatic transmission that shifts the gears as the bicycle gains speed or slows. Three major manufacturers—Trek, Raleigh, and Giant—began to develop new bikes incorporating innovative components from Shimano, but the team didn’t stop there. Designers might have ended the project with the bike itself, but as holistic design thinkers they pressed ahead. They created in-store retailing strategies for independent bike dealers, in part to mitigate the discomfort that novices felt in retail settings built to serve enthusiasts. The team developed a brand that identified coasting as a way to enjoy life (“Chill. Explore. Dawdle. Lollygag. First one there’s a rotten egg.”). In collaboration with local governments and cycling organizations, it designed a public relations campaign including a Web site that identified safe places to ride. Many other people and organizations became involved in the project as it passed from inspiration through ideation and on into the implementation phase. Remarkably, the first problem the designers would have been expected to address—the look of the bikes—was deferred to a late stage in the development process, when the team created a “reference design” to show what was possible and to inspire the bicycle manufacturers’ own design teams. Within a year of the bike’s successful launch, seven more manufacturers had signed up to produce coasting bikes. An exercise in design had become an exercise in design thinking. three spaces of innovation Although I would love to provide a simple, easy-to-follow recipe that would ensure that every project ends as successfully as this one, the nature of design thinking makes that impossible. In contrast to the champions of scientific management at the beginning of the last century, design thinkers know that there is no “one best way” to move through the process. There are useful starting points and helpful landmarks along the way, but the continuum of innovation is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. We can think of them as inspiration, the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation, the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation, the path that leads from the project room to the market. Projects may loop back through these spaces more than once as the team refines its ideas and explores new directions. The reason for the iterative, nonlinear nature of the journey is not that design thinkers are disorganized or undisciplined but that design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory process; done right, it will invariably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead. Often these discoveries can be integrated into the ongoing process without disruption. At other times the discovery will motivate the team to revisit some of its most basic assumptions. While testing a prototype, for instance, consumers may provide us with insights that point to a more interesting, more promising, and potentially more profitable market opening up in front of us. Insights of this sort should inspire us to refine or rethink our assumptions rather than press onward in adherence to an original plan. To borrow the language of the computer industry, this approach should be seen not as a system reset but as a meaningful upgrade. The risk of such an iterative approach is that it appears to extend the time it takes to get an idea to market, but this is often a shortsighted perception. To the contrary, a team that understands what is happening will not feel bound to take the next logical step along an ultimately unproductive path. We have seen many projects killed by management because it became clear that the ideas were not good enough. When a project is terminated after months or even years, it can be devastating in terms of both money and morale. A nimble team of design thinkers will have been prototyping from day one and self-correcting along the way. As we say at IDEO, “Fail early to succeed sooner.” Insofar as it is open-ended, open-minded, and iterative, a process fed by design thinking will feel chaotic to those experiencing it for the first time. But over the life of a project, it invariably comes to make sense and achieves results that differ markedly from the linear, milestone-based processes that define traditional business practices. In any case, predictability leads to boredom and boredom leads to the loss of talented people. It also leads to results that rivals find easy to copy. It is better to take an experimental approach: share processes, encourage the collective ownership of ideas, and enable teams to learn from one another. A second way to think about the overlapping spaces of innovation is in terms of boundaries. To an artist in pursuit of beauty or a scientist in search of truth, the bounds of a project may appear as unwelcome constraints. But the mark of a designer, as the legendary Charles Eames said often, is a willing embrace of constraints. Without constraints design cannot happen, and the best design—a precision medical device or emergency shelter for disaster victims—is often carried out within quite severe constraints. For less extreme cases we need only look at Target’s success in bringing design within the reach of a broader population for significantly less cost than had previously been achieved. It is actually much more difficult for an accomplished designer such as Michael Graves to create a collection of low-cost kitchen implements or Isaac Mizrahi a line of ready-to-wear clothing than it is to design a teakettle that will sell in a museum store for hundreds of dollars or a dress that will sell in a boutique for thousands. The willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints is the foundation of design thinking. The first stage of the design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating them. Constraints can best be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas: feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people). A competent designer will resolve each of these three constraints, but a design thinker will bring them into a harmonious balance. The popular Nintendo Wii is a good example of what happens when someone gets it right. For many years a veritable arms race of more sophisticated graphics and more expensive consoles has been driving the gaming industry. Nintendo realized that it would be possible to break out of this vicious circle—and create a more immersive experience—by using the new technology of gestural control. This meant less focus on the resolution of the screen graphics, which in turn led to a less expensive console and better margins on the product. The Wii strikes a perfect balance of desirability, feasibility, and viability. It has created a more engaging user experience and generated huge profits for Nintendo. This pursuit of peaceful coexistence does not imply that all constraints are created equal; a given project may be driven disproportionately by technology, budget, or a volatile mix of human factors. Different types of organizations may push one or another of them to the fore. Nor is it a simple linear process. Design teams will cycle back through all three considerations throughout the life of a project, but the emphasis on fundamental human needs—as distinct from fleeting or artificially manipulated desires—is what drives design thinking to depart from the status quo. Though this may sound self-evident, the reality is that most companies tend to approach new ideas quite differently. Quite reasonably, they are likely to start with the constraint of what will fit within the framework of the existing business model. Because business systems are designed for efficiency, new ideas will tend to be incremental, predictable, and all too easy for the competition to emulate. This explains the oppressive uniformity of so many products on the market today; have you walked through the housewares section of any department store lately, shopped for a printer, or almost gotten into the wrong car in a parking lot? A second approach is the one commonly taken by engineering-driven companies looking for a technological breakthrough. In this scenario teams of researchers will discover a new way of doing something and only afterward will they think about how the technology might fit into an existing business system and create value. As Peter Drucker showed in his classic study Innovation and Entrepreneurship, reliance on technology is hugely risky. Relatively few technical innovations bring an immediate economic benefit that will justify the investments of time and resources they require. This may explain the steady decline of the large corporate R&D labs such as Xerox PARC and Bell Labs that were such powerful incubators in the 1960s and ’70s. Today, corporations instead attempt to narrow their innovation efforts to ideas that have more near-term business potential. They may be making a big mistake. By focusing their attention on near-term viability, they may be trading innovation for increment. Finally, an organization may be driven by its estimation of basic human needs and desires. At its worst this may mean dreaming up alluring but essentially meaningless products destined for the local landfill—persuading people, in the blunt words of the design gadfly Victor Papanek, “to buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress neighbors who don’t care.” Even when the goals are laudable, however—moving travelers safely through a security checkpoint or delivering clean water to rural communities in impoverished countries—the primary focus on one element of the triad of constraints, rather than the appropriate balance among all three, may undermine the sustainability of the overall program. the project Designers, then, have learned to excel at resolving one or another or even all three of these constraints. Design thinkers, by contrast, are learning to navigate between and among them in creative ways. They do so because they have shifted their thinking from problem to project. The project is the vehicle that carries an idea from concept to reality. Unlike many other processes we are used to—from playing the piano to paying our bills—a design project is not open- ended and ongoing. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it is precisely these restrictions that anchor it to the real world. That design thinking is expressed within the context of a project forces us to articulate a clear goal at the outset. It creates natural deadlines that impose discipline and give us an opportunity to review progress, make midcourse corrections, and redirect future activity. The clarity, direction, and limits of a well-defined project are vital to sustaining a high level of creative energy. The “Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Contest” competition is a good example. Google teamed up with the bike company Specialized to create a design competition whose modest challenge was to use bicycle technology to change the world. The winning team—five committed designers and an extended family of enthusiastic supporters—was a late starter. In a few frenzied weeks of brainstorming and prototyping, the team was able to identify a pressing issue (1.1 billion people in developing countries do not have access to clean drinking water), explore a variety of alternative solutions (mobile or stationary? trailer or luggage rack?) and build a working prototype: The Aquaduct, a human-powered tricycle designed to filter drinking water while transporting it, is now traveling the world to help promote clean water innovation. It succeeded because of the inflexible constraints of technology (pedal power), budget ($0.00), and inflexible deadline. The experience of the Aquaduct team is the reverse of that found in most academic or corporate labs, where the objective may be to extend the life of a research project indefinitely and where the end of a project may mean nothing more than the funding has dried up. the brief The classic starting point of any project is the brief. Almost like a scientific hypothesis, the brief is a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized: price point, available technology, market segment, and so on. The analogy goes even further. Just as a hypothesis is not the same as an algorithm, the project brief is not a set of instructions or an attempt to answer a question before it has been posed. Rather, a well-constructed brief will allow for serendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate, for that is the creative realm from which breakthrough ideas emerge. If you already know what you are after, there is usually not much point in looking. When I first started practicing as an industrial designer, the brief was handed to us in an envelope. It usually took the form of a highly constrained set of parameters that left us with little more to do than wrap a more or less attractive shell around a product whose basic concept had already been decided elsewhere. One of my first assignments was to design a new personal fax machine for a Danish electronics manufacturer. The technical aspects of the product took the form of a set of components that were being supplied by another company. Its commercial viability had been established by “management” and was geared to an existing market. Even its desirability had largely been predetermined by precedent, as everybody supposedly knew what a fax machine was supposed to look like. There was not a lot of room for maneuver, and I was left to try to make the machine stand out against those of other designers who were trying to do the same thing. It is no wonder that as more companies mastered the game, the competition among them became ever more intense. Nor have things changed much over the years. As one frustrated client recently lamented, “We are busting our ass for a few tenths of a percent of market share.” The erosion of margin and value is the inevitable result. The proof of this can be found at any consumer electronics store, where, under the buzz of the fluorescent lights, thousands of products are arrayed on the shelves, clamoring for our attention and differentiated only by unnecessary if not unfathomable features. Gratuitous efforts at styling and assertive graphics and packaging may catch our eye but do little to enhance the experience of ownership and use. A design brief that is too abstract risks leaving the project team wandering about in a fog. One that starts from too narrow a set of constraints, however, almost guarantees that the outcome will be incremental and, most likely, mediocre. It transfers to the design realm what economists like to call “the race to the bottom.” Not for nothing did its founders call economics “the dismal science.” The art of the brief can raise the bar and set great organizations apart from moderately successful ones. Procter & Gamble is a good example. In 2002 the company embarked on an initiative to use design as a source of innovation and growth. Driven by Chief Innovation Officer Claudia Kotchka, each of P&G’s divisions began to add design-led innovation to the strong technical R&D efforts for which the company was justly famous. Karl Ronn, the head of R&D for P&G’s Home Care Division, was one of the first senior executives to see the potential of this approach. His stated goal was not to produce incremental additions to existing products and brands but to inspire innovation that would generate significant growth. This led him to IDEO with a brief that was the ideal mix of freedom and constraint: reinvent bathroom cleaning with an emphasis on what was enigmatically called “the everyday clean.” Ronn didn’t show up with the latest technology from the lab and instruct the team to package it in streamlines and tail fins. He didn’t ask us to grow an existing market by a couple of percentage points. Without making the brief too concrete, he helped the team establish a realistic set of goals. Without making it too broad, he left us space to interpret the concept for ourselves, to explore and to discover. As the project progressed and new insights accumulated, it seemed advisable to adjust the initial plan by introducing additional constraints: a revised price point; a restriction that there be “no electric motors.” Such midcourse adjustments are common and are a natural feature of a process that is healthy, flexible, and dynamic. The modifications to the original brief helped Ronn to specify the level of cost and complexity that was appropriate for his business. Simultaneously, these continual refinements of the initial plan helped guide the project team toward the right balance of feasibility, viability, and desirability. Over the course of about twelve weeks, this well-crafted brief led to a staggering 350 product concepts, more than 60 prototypes, and 3 ideas that advanced to development. One of them—Mr. Clean Magic Reach, a multifunctional tool that met every one of the stated criteria—went into production eighteen months later. The message here is that design thinking needs to be practiced on both sides of the table: by the design team, obviously, but by the client as well. I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, “Give me the next iPod,” but it’s probably pretty close to the number of designers I’ve heard respond (under their breath), “Give me the next Steve Jobs.” The difference between a design brief with just the right level of constraint and one that is overly vague or overly restrictive can be the difference between a team on fire with breakthrough ideas and one that delivers a tired reworking of existing ones. smart teams The next ingredient is clearly the project team. Though it is possible to operate as an individual (the garages of Silicon Valley are still full of lone inventors aspiring to become the next Bill Hewlett or Dave Packard), the complexity of most of today’s projects is fast relegating this type of practice to the margins. Even in the more traditional design fields of industrial and graphic design, not to say architecture, teams have been the norm for years. An automobile company has dozens of designers working on each new model. A new building may involve hundreds of architects. As design begins to tackle a wider range of problems—and to move upstream in the innovation process—the lone designer, sitting alone in a studio and meditating upon the relation between form and function, has yielded to the interdisciplinary team. 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 inherently 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. Just as I am challenging companies to incorporate design into their organizational DNA, however, I want to challenge designers to continue the transformation of design practice itself. There will always be a place in our dizzying world for the artist, the craftsman, and the lone inventor, but the seismic shifts taking place in every industry demand a new design practice: collaborative but in a way that amplifies, rather than subdues, the creative powers of individuals; focused but at the same time flexible and responsive to unexpected opportunities; focused not just on optimizing the social, the technical, and the business components of a product but on bringing them into a harmonious balance. The next generation of designers will need to be as comfortable in the boardroom as they are in the studio or the shop, and they will need to begin looking at every problem—from adult illiteracy to global warming—as a design problem.