Solving Problems with Design Thinking PDF

Solving Problems with Design Thinking  SOLVING PROBLEMS WITH DESIGN THINKING JEANNE LIEDTKA, ANDREW KING, AND KEVIN BENNETT Columbia Business School Publishing  Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New Yo...

Solving Problems with Design Thinking  SOLVING PROBLEMS WITH DESIGN THINKING JEANNE LIEDTKA, ANDREW KING, AND KEVIN BENNETT Columbia Business School Publishing  Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2013 Jeanne Liedtka, Andrew King, and Kevin Bennett All rights reserved E-ISBN 978-0-231-53605-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liedtka, Jeanne. Solving problems with design thinking : ten stories of what works / Jeanne Liedtka, Andrew King, Kevin Bennett. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16356-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231- 53605-9 (ebook) 1. Creative ability in business. 2. Design. I. King, Andrew (Andrew Courtland) II. Bennett, Kevin B. (Kevin Bruce), 1957-III. Title. HD53.L545 2013 658.4’03—dc23 2013009497 A Columbia University Press E-book. CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected]. COVER DESIGN: Noah Arlow References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. For Debra and Matt  Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1 Dispelling the Moses Myth 2 Reimagining the Trade Show Experience at IBM 3 Postmerger Integration at Suncorp 4 Transforming B2B Customer Engagement at 3M 5 Rethinking Strategic Planning at SAP 6 Redesigning the Customer Contact Center at Toyota 7 Social Networking at MeYou Health 8 Industry Collaboration in Financial Services with the FiDJI Project 9 Rethinking Subsidized Meals for the Elderly at The Good Kitchen 10 Engaging the Citizens of Dublin 11 Scaling a Design Thinking Competency at Intuit 12 Where Do We Go from Here? POSTSCRIPT Educating Managers for Design  Preface The Story Behind Our Stories For those of you who don’t read prefaces, feel free to continue on without remorse—the stories you are about to hear will be just as satisfying. But for those who like to know what is going on backstage, we thought a bit of detail about the origin of our ten stories might be of interest. In the spring of 2010 the Design Management Institute (DMI) and researchers at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business (a team that included us) launched a multistage research program to assess the prevalence and impact of design thinking in business organizations. Sponsored by the Batten Institute, a center for the study of entrepreneurship and innovation at Darden, the study set out to develop an understanding of the extent to which the methods, techniques, and processes traditionally associated with design and designers had been adopted within established business and social sector organizations. Spurred by burgeoning attention to the topic in the popular business press, we set out to assess the actual impact that design thinking was having. We wondered: Was the increasingly prominent role for design in business just talk, or could we observe it in action? To what extent was design thinking just the latest fad, destined to fade away as quickly as it had arrived, or was it really driving some fundamental changes in the way managers saw and interacted with their world? But since design has been around in organizations as long as there have been products, we wondered to what extent design—and designers—had been embraced by corporations beyond the traditional design functions? By gathering information about the pace and process of the adoption of design thinking in business organizations, we hoped to inform designers and practicing managers about how to improve their collaboration and elevate and accelerate the recognition of design’s capability to enhance innovation within their organizations. We began Phase 1 of the study by conducting a series of interviews with design and innovation executives across a variety of industries. The idea was to start with design advocates who occupied roles at the interface between designers and managers and who, we felt, would be best positioned to help us understand the relationship between the two and how it was evolving in their organizations. A fascinating thing happened as we progressed through the Phase 1 interviews: Our conversations with the design executives surfaced a different set of issues than those we had anticipated (perhaps not a surprise at all to designers), which sometimes seemed to have little to do with our hypotheses and more to do with organizational politics. Rather than talking about the prevalence of design thinking per se, interviewees wanted to talk about questions such as, Who owns design? How much design thinking should managers be encouraged to do? How do you sell design to business executives? Even the definition of design thinking itself emerged as a contentious issue. We heard neither inspiring stories about how design thinking was in fact permeating new spaces in organizations, helping designers and managers work together in new ways, nor confirmation of the competing hypothesis, that design thinking was mostly smoke and mirrors with little output resulting from it. As researchers we were perplexed by what we heard in these initial interviews and unsure of what made sense for the next stage of the study. What we were learning might make for some great business school cases about how organizational structure and politics challenge the introduction of new approaches to business, but we didn’t think it would help practicing designers or managers on the front lines figure out how to work together to meet the challenges they faced more creatively and successfully. However, as educators we saw an opportunity to help organizations and individuals sort this all out. Our feeling was that we could do more to aid managers interested in learning about how to use design thinking by profiling success stories than by detailing political battles. We hoped that by gathering examples of the adoption of design approaches to solve problems in various kinds of organizations, we could identify the ways in which it was enhancing organizational performance beyond traditional incremental product development. So we wrote to a wide range of DMI and Darden stakeholders to ask for their help in identifying examples in which design thinking was affecting organizational performance in ways not traditionally seen as “design.” We wanted to explore the adoption of design thinking across a range of organizations and geographies through interviews with those involved in pioneering efforts to extend the influence of design beyond formal, established design groups or traditional research and development (R&D) functions. We created a website that made it easy for people to nominate organizations they knew about. The response to our request exceeded our best hopes. The stories that people sent us were truly inspirational. The breadth and richness of the ways in which design thinking tools and approaches were being used to innovate around a varied and important set of problems and opportunities were impressive. So we tossed out our original plans for Phase 2 of the study, which had focused on identifying the variables that would indicate the prevalence of design thinking in organizations that we could use to survey a larger and more diverse group of people. Instead, we opted to go the best practice route—to do a deep dive into situations where design thinking was working, sometimes despite the politics going on around it but more often because these forward-thinking organizations were doing it right. In the end what we discovered was so inspiring that we decided to write this book, in the hope that we could help the people we cared most about—managers and designers—see new possibilities to break through inertia and politics to use design thinking to accomplish the things we believed it was capable of, if we could only get it into the right hands. And now maybe we’re ready to go back and try that survey as Phase 3...  Acknowledgments First things first: Our profound thanks to the managers and designers who have shared their stories with us, for their generosity with their time, the candor with which they told their stories, and the insights that accompanied them. They were nothing short of remarkable. They inspired us to write this book: We felt a keen obligation to pass on to a broader audience all that they shared with us. We also want to acknowledge the support and involvement of the Design Management Institute and, in particular, Tom Lockwood, who participated in many of our initial interviews. The support of the Darden School, Dean Bob Bruner, and the Batten Institute has been essential to our ability to do the work that allowed us to produce this book. Our colleagues and friends at Darden have been a source of inspiration, learning, and encouragement, especially Ed Hess and Marian Moore, our partners in design crime. And of course, as always, our deepest thanks to Amy Halliday, whose wise advice and superb editing make us sound so much better than we deserve. From Jeanne To Karen Musselman, who never hung up on me even though I was five hundred miles away and being a pain. To Rachel Brozenske and Tim Ogilvie, my very own design posse. Where would I be without you? To my family and friends for their support and encouragement, especially Debra and Matt, always there and always porch partners in crime, whose glasses of wine and wisdom I can always count on. And of course, above all, to my saintly beloved husband, Salz, who has saved my sanity so many times and in so many ways. From Andrew To Jeanne, who has been a first-class mentor, for taking me on this fantastic ride. To Mike Lenox and Sean Carr, who have supported my research efforts and doctoral aspirations. And most importantly, to my wife, Eva, whose inspiration has helped me in countless ways. From Kevin  To Jeanne, a wonderful professor and mentor, who taught me the craft of design thinking, I remain eternally grateful. To Andrew, without whose impenetrable fortitude we would never have completed our journey, I thank you for your patience and generosity. To my Darden professors and classmates, you taught me more than you will ever know. And finally, to my saint of a mother, LuAnn Bennett, my inspirational brothers, Bryan and Richard, and to the world’s most patient and supportive girlfriend, Kristen Lamb, I say thank you.  1 Dispelling the Moses Myth MOST OF THE MANAGERS we meet harbor a deep, dark secret: They believe in their hearts that they are not creative. Picasso they know they are not. They also know that being seen as short on talent for invention in these days of innovation mania is almost as bad as not knowing how to populate an Excel spreadsheet. It all seems so unfair. After years spent focusing on prudence and proving the return on investment of any new idea, years spent trying not to look stupid, now all of a sudden we are also expected not to look—what would the word be—unimaginative? And each time some “creativity” consultant asks us to imagine ten novel uses for a paper clip, it confirms what we already know: We are no Steve Jobs, either. For most of us there will be no Moses-like parting of the waters of the status quo that we might safely cross the Red Sea of innovation. Drowning is more likely our fate. But despite popular misconceptions, innate genius isn’t the only way to solve business problems creatively. Those of us who can’t part the waters need instead to build a bridge to take us from current reality to a new future. In other words, we must manufacture our own miracles. And a technology for better bridge building already exists, right under our noses. What to call it is a matter of some dispute, but for lack of a better term we’ll call it design thinking. Whatever label it goes by, it is an approach to problem solving that is distinguished by a few key attributes: It emphasizes the importance of discovery in advance of solution generation using market research approaches that are empathetic and user driven. It expands the boundaries of both our problem definitions and our solutions. It is enthusiastic about engaging partners in co-creation. It is committed to conducting real-world experiments rather than just running analyses using historical data. And it works. Design thinking may look more pedestrian than miraculous, but it is capable of reliably producing new and better ways of creatively solving a host of organizational problems. Best of all, we believe that it is teachable to managers and scalable throughout an organization. Despite some confusion over what to call it—the term design thinking sounds fuzzy to some people, and design is clearly about a lot more than thinking—prominent examples of companies applying the tools of design to improve business results come readily to mind in the wake of Apple’s success and IDEO’s visibility, and many organizations now get the attraction of design thinking. Although some companies still appreciate design’s power only for developing new products and services, organizations interested in innovation increasingly recognize it as a way to create new business models and achieve organic growth. In fact, using design thinking to identify and execute on opportunities for growth was the focus of our previous work. Now we want to take our exploration of design’s potential a step further. Our goal in this book is to push the visibility of design thinking in business and the social sector to new places and to demonstrate that design has an even broader role to play in achieving creative organizational and even civic outcomes. This book is built around ten vivid illustrations of organizations and their managers and design partners doing just that—using design thinking in ways that work. Each story showcases a particular new use of design thinking. And each provides palpable examples of how organizations and individuals can stretch their capabilities when they approach problems through the design thinking lens. Using the voices of the managers and designers involved, we illustrate the value of a design thinking approach in addressing organizational challenges as diverse as reenvisioning call centers, energizing meals on wheels for the elderly, revitalizing a city’s urban neighborhoods, and rethinking strategic planning. Our ambitions here are grand: to offer a blueprint for deploying design thinking across levels and functions in order to embed a more creative approach to problem solving as a strategic capability in organizations. Building Bridges with Design Thinking Design thinking offers a great start to bridge building. It fosters creative problem solving by bringing a systematic end-to-end process to the challenge of innovation. A few years ago, Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie, the CEO of the innovation strategy consultancy Peer Insight, wrote a book called Designing for Growth (D4G, in our parlance), in which they laid out a simple process and tool kit for managers interested in learning how to use design thinking to accelerate the organic growth of their businesses. Here we aim to build on that work by examining how design thinking can be used to solve a broad array of other organizational problems, outside of growth. Whether your focus is producing growth, redesigning internal processes, engaging your sales force, or a host of other issues, the basic innovation methodology behind design thinking remains the same. Let’s first summarize the D4G approach: The process examines four basic questions, which correspond to the four stages of design thinking: 1. What is? 2. What if? 3. What wows? 4. What works? What is? explores current reality. What if? uses what we learn to envision multiple options for creating a new future. What wows? makes some choices about where to focus first. What works? takes us into the real world to interact with actual users through small experiments. The widening and narrowing of the bands around each question represent what designers call “divergent” and “convergent” thinking. In the early parts of the process, and even within each stage, we are diverging: progressively expanding our field of vision, looking as broadly and expansively around us as possible in order to escape the trap of our mental models. We then begin to converge, gradually narrowing our options to the most promising ones.  Let’s look at each question in a bit more depth: QUESTION 1: WHAT IS? All successful innovation begins with an accurate assessment of what is going on today. Indeed, starting out by developing a better understanding of current reality is a hallmark of design thinking and the core of design’s data-intensive and user-driven approach. Managers frequently want to run immediately to the future, to start the innovation process by brainstorming new options and ideas, but attending to the present pays dividends in two crucial ways. First, it helps broaden and perhaps reframe our definition of the problem or opportunity we want to tackle. A lot of managers throw away all kinds of opportunities before they even get started by framing the problem too narrowly. Second, this attention to the present helps uncover unarticulated needs, which are key to producing the kind of innovative design criteria that generate valuable solutions. What is? saves us from having to rely entirely on our imaginations as we move into idea development and gives us solid and, ideally, deep insights into what our stakeholders truly want and need, reducing the risk that our new idea will fail. It specifies what a great solution will look like without telling us the solution itself. QUESTION 2: WHAT IF? Having examined the data we gathered, identified patterns and insights, and translated these into specific design criteria, it is time to move from the data-based exploratory What is? to the more creativity-focused What if? Again, rather than rely on our imaginations in the idea generation process, we use a series of trigger questions that help us think outside our own boxes. Next, we take these ideas and treat them explicitly as hypotheses (in the form of concepts) and begin to think systematically about evaluating them against our design criteria. QUESTION 3: WHAT WOWS? If we get the first two stages approximately right, we will find—to our simultaneous pleasure and dismay—that we have far too many interesting concepts to move forward all at once, and so we must make some hard decisions. As we winnow the field of concepts to a manageable number, we are looking for those that hit the sweet spot where the chance of a significant upside for our stakeholders matches our organizational resources and capabilities and our ability to sustainably deliver the new offering. This is the “wow zone.” Making this assessment involves surfacing and testing the assumptions underlying our hypotheses. The concepts that pass this first test are good candidates for turning into experiments to be conducted with actual users. In order to do this we need to transform the concepts into something a potential customer can interact with: a prototype. QUESTION 4: WHAT WORKS? Finally, we are ready to learn from the real world by trying out a low- fidelity prototype with actual users. If they like it and give us useful feedback, we refine the prototype and test it with yet more users, iterating in this way until we feel confident about the value of our new idea and are ready to scale it. As we move through this process, we keep in mind some of the principles of this learning-in-action stage: work in fast feedback cycles, minimize the cost of conducting experiments, fail early to succeed sooner, and test for key trade-offs and assumptions early on. We will see these four questions at work in each of the ten stories we are about to share. Sometimes the entire process plays out. At other times, only pieces of it are evident. One of the most valuable aspects of design thinking is that you don’t need to follow every step soup to nuts. You can begin with any piece of it or with some of the tools. But process alone won’t be enough to build a bridge from current reality to a new future. You also need some tools to accompany the steps. In Designing for Growth Jeanne and Tim laid out a set of ten tools. In this book we consider several more. Although all of them are useful, and most will appear frequently in our stories, different tools are used for different purposes. 1 Visualization using imagery to envision possibilities and bring them to life 2 Journey Mapping assessing the existing experience through the customer’s eyes 3 Value Chain Analysis assessing the current value chain that supports the customer’s journey  4 Mind Mapping generating insights from exploration activities and using those to create design criteria 5 Brainstorming generating new possibilities and new alternative business models 6 Concept Development assembling innovative elements into a coherent alternative solution that can be explored and evaluated 7 Assumption Testing isolating and testing the key assumptions that will drive the success or failure of a concept 8 Rapid Prototyping expressing a new concept in a tangible form for exploration, testing, and refinement 9 Customer Co-Creation enrolling customers to participate in creating the solution that best meets their needs 10 Learning Launch creating an affordable experiment that lets customers experience the new solution over an extended period of time, to test key assumptions with market data Some tools, such as journey mapping, use ethnographic methods such as interviewing and observation to help us escape our mental models by immersing us in the lives (and giving us access to the mental models) of stakeholders, whether they are customers, partners, internal clients, or citizens. These tools let us get at the unarticulated needs of these people and, in the process, build a human connection that helps us see the possibility of making someone’s life better. They are the very core of the What is? stage and are the foundation for generating value through the design thinking process. In general, your ultimate solutions will only be as good as your learning during this discovery phase. Mind mapping is a clustering tool that helps us make sense of the torrent of data that comes at us at various points in the design thinking process. It can involve turning raw data gathered through ethnography into deep insights or sorting through the individual ideas we created during brainstorming to find those that can become concepts. This tool keeps us purposeful rather than overwhelmed. Brainstorming and concept development, two tools used in the What if? stage, work with rather than against our natural tendencies. Instead of asking us to come up with ideas based purely on our imaginations, they provide structure and allow us to leverage the insights generated during the What is? stage. They let us play with new ideas without risking a lot and invite various stakeholders into the problem-solving process: employees who eventually must make the new concepts work, customers who must buy them, or partners who need to work together in order to deliver them. This is the collaborative heart of design. Prototyping can be used at various stages of the process: to map What is? or to visualize What if? It expresses our ideas in tangible form and makes them feel real. Prototyping plays a central role in all ten stories. Our focus will be on what experts call “low-fidelity” prototypes, which are much simpler and less finished than what the word prototype conjures up for most managers. Learning launches help us plan and conduct the small market experiments that are so critical to the learning by doing that underlies design thinking. Taken together, the design thinking process and tools let us envision and build better solutions. But to do this we have to move beyond thinking of creativity and design as a black box. We must demystify design thinking and teach people how to do the research that generates deep insights, translate these insights into new ideas, and get these ideas in front of people who will react to them and act with us to make them real. Design as a Choice Deploying design throughout an organization involves more than providing a process and some tools. It involves helping individuals make a new set of choices: to seek deep insights and be user driven, to keep looking for great solutions even after hitting upon a good one, to risk not getting it right the first time, to continue to try in the face of failure. Because it runs counter to how managers have been trained and rewarded, and to how organizations are structured, design thinking won’t happen naturally. Committing to use the approach is a deliberate choice for managers, and often a tough one. So how do we help managers get comfortable choosing a new set of behaviors? By making that choice safe for them. We believe that the biggest obstacles to making better choices are ignorance and fear. To dispel these, we need success stories; we need to see others in action in order to envision and act on new possibilities. That is the role of the stories in this book. These stories emerged from the second phase of a research project, sponsored by the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business in partnership with the Design Management Institute (DMI), on the ways in which design thinking was being used in organizations (see our preface for more details). In the first phase, we generated an interesting and somewhat unexpected set of findings, suggesting that our ingoing hypothesis that we would find managers and designers working together in largely positive ways was not uniformly supported. True, we did speak with boundary spanners between business and design who were reaching out to managers to help them understand and exploit design’s potential, but we also uncovered a lot of tension between the worlds of business and design. With this tension came political and turf battles in which control over the “ownership” of design—and even the nomenclature—was a central issue. THE CHALLENGES OF DESIGN IN A BUSINESS ORGANIZATION Our previous research on the use of design thinking in business organizations gave us some insight into the challenges—and the opportunities—of the approach. Here are some highlights:1 The innovation space was hotly contested territory in many organizations Responsibility for innovation seemed to lack clarity and uniformity. It was distributed across many groups in the organization: R&D (sometimes with internal conflict between applied and “blue sky” work), newer “innovation” groups, and business unit managers with P&L responsibility. All of these groups needed the skill set of design to do their work, but they  often operated in silos that did not communicate or collaborate. Friction and turf battles were not uncommon. The language of “design thinking” was a prime source of contention The definition of design thinking itself was a hot topic. Some defined it as “what designers do” and saw no meaningful distinction to be made between design and design thinking. Some disliked the nomenclature, noting that design emphasized doing even more than thinking. Others saw it as a distinctive way of solving problems that could be applied to any business issue and scaled throughout an organization. Many in this group described the discrete aspects of what they saw as a design thinking approach: ethnography, visualization, pattern finding, ideation, and rapid prototyping. Teaching design thinking to managers was either a very good—or a very bad—idea From the basic conceptual divide around definitions, a related set of views emerged about who should be encouraged to use design thinking. Those who defined it as something that trained designers do did not see it as a useful tool set for managers to acquire. They not only doubted whether it was possible for managers to acquire such skills but also thought it was a bad idea to encourage them even to try. Managers trying to do design work were likely to lower the quality and credibility of design! We heard the opposite view from other experts: Managers not only could become design thinkers but should— so powerful was the process for finding innovative solutions to all categories of business challenges. They believed that teaching the design thinking approach to executives only increased designers’ visibility and clout. In the second phase, we decided to focus on collecting real-life best practice stories in which design thinking was working well, rather than those in which it wasn’t. Our hope was to inspire action among those interested in learning more about how to practice design thinking by collecting data that moved beyond theoretical debates and instead identified specific and concrete ways in which it was already achieving significant results. So we asked DMI members around the world to nominate exemplary design thinking projects for our study. Though we didn’t set out to find stories that specifically featured partnerships between managers and designers, that was, in fact, what we found. Rather than battling for ownership of the process, these designers wanted to share design, and the managers involved were eager to learn new ways of thinking and acting. The stories they told us were inspiring, diverse, and global. Here is a preview of what we heard: Some organizations were applying design thinking to internal process redesign: We learned about Suncorp, Australia’s second- largest insurance firm, driving a postmerger integration process with design thinking (chapter 3); about SAP imbuing its strategic planning process with a design approach (chapter 5); and Toyota using design thinking (coupled with change management) to redesign its West Coast customer contact center from the ground up (chapter 6). Others were leveraging design thinking to deepen customer engagement: We learned that IBM was transforming its approach to trade shows through design (chapter 2); 3M saw in design thinking a chance to reimagine the sales process in the materials science business (chapter 4); and a group of financial service executives from the largest banks and insurance companies in France were using it to explore how to restore public trust (chapter 8). Some organizations were bringing design thinking to management development and individual skill building: Healthways’ MeYou Health social networking application (chapter 7) and Intuit’s story of embedding designing for delight into its DNA (chapter 11) are both about using design thinking to create communities of people helping one another to develop their capabilities and learn more effective behaviors. Outside of the for-profit sector, other organizations were bringing design thinking to address social issues: In Denmark, The Good Kitchen transformed meal delivery service for the elderly using a comprehensive design thinking process from end to end (chapter 9), and the city of Dublin, Ireland, embraced it as a way to improve civic engagement in revitalizing urban spaces (chapter 10).  In each and every one of our stories, you will see a strong partnership between designers and managers. There are no stories of either managers or designers succeeding without the other. The deep expertise of the designers is fundamental to the success of these management initiatives, as is the management acumen of those on the business side. These designers want to “give design away rather than hoard it” (as Joseph O’Sullivan of Intuit described it). They let everybody touch the tools. The managers involved are invariably open to learning from and with their design partners. Matthew Holloway, the head of the design services team at SAP, had a wonderful way of describing the partnership: We saw our job as showing managers how design thinking worked. We taught clustering and visualizing the problem and then breaking out all the assumptions and making everything very explicit. The tools that we used for doing research and ideation were classic. Then we showed them how to make their ideas tangible in a prototype. And they quickly got that one plus one equals three. One manager we worked with who loved French cooking said, “It’s like we started off with just some milk, some eggs, and some flour, but by the time we were done, we had this beautiful cake. And the cake is way better than those three things by themselves.” You will also notice the diverse ways in which the design process plays out. This, we discovered, is one of the best aspects of design: You don’t have to buy the whole enchilada to have a taste. As Ryan Nichols, Matthew’s colleague at SAP, told us, “It doesn’t need to be intimidating. You can take bits and pieces of this and bring it to whatever you are doing in the traditional process just at the parts where you get stuck. These are just very simple tools that can help break logjams.” We find a lot of the managers in our stories doing just that. At the outset of our study, we had no intention of writing a book. But as we heard these stories, we came to believe that their diversity, creativity, spirit of partnership, and global reach made them deserving of a wider audience and a more detailed telling. We became convinced that we needed to share these stories of the many ways in which design thinking was working to help organizations solve problems in new ways—around the world. As we get started we should remind you, in the interest of full disclosure, that the sad stories in which organizational politics killed an otherwise excellent design thinking initiative didn’t make it into this book. Had we tried to catalogue them, we would have ended up with an encyclopedia-sized volume. We have here the stories at the happy convergence of talent, opportunity, and environment. And though they cannot tell a multifaceted tale about the various political environments that would-be design thinkers face, they can suggest the conditions under which they have a fighting chance. It is with great pleasure and anticipation that we share these ten stories, and it is our hope that you will find them and the managers and designers who star in them as inspiring as we have. 1These findings are summarized in S. Carr, A. Halliday, A. King, J. Liedtka, and T. Lockwood, “The Influence of Design Thinking in Business: Some Preliminary Observations,” Design Management Review, Volume 21, September 2010, pp. 58–63.  2 Reimagining the Trade Show Experience at IBM THE BUSINESS PROBLEM Differentiating IBM’s character and brand experience at thousands of trade shows around the globe THE CONTEXT IBM’s desire to make its trade show experience reflect the company’s “Smarter Planet” initiative and to find a way for trade shows to better demonstrate the depth and breadth of IBM’s expertise, strengthen customer relationships, and drive revenue growth DESIGN’S CONTRIBUTION Allowing the IBM team to generate insights from a wide- ranging study of human interaction and translate these into design criteria and then ultimately learning launches that transformed the IBM trade show into a collaborative experience TRADE SHOWS SEEM the ultimate in old-fashioned ways of doing business: a Las Vegas–like cacophony of booths, banners, and attractive people handing out brochures. Yet despite their often- predicted demise at the hands of the Internet, trade shows remain a $100 billion industry growing at 3 percent per year, according to BusinessWeek estimates. In this chapter, we get a look at how a team from experience marketing firm George P. Johnson collaborated with IBM to use design thinking to transform trade shows from spectacles into conversations that engage customers in collaborative experiences and yield stronger relationships and better business leads. IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative was born out of the recognition that the world was becoming more dynamic and complex, that technology was playing a larger role in addressing global pressure points across industries, and that IBM could help solve those problems through technology. To IBM, Smarter Planet was not just a campaign or a slogan but a way of looking at the world. It was a call to action to use systems thinking and technology to address the world’s biggest problems using IBM’s technology and business practices. IBM, accordingly, wanted to create experiences that embodied the principles and elements of Smarter Planet. Enter George P. Johnson (GPJ), a premier global event and experience marketing agency and long-time partner of IBM. Ben Roth and Kurt Miller, both of GPJ, led the project’s design- focused efforts. Ben began his career as a designer before moving up through creative positions at marketing and advertising agencies, where he worked with clients in industries ranging from retail to consumer packaged goods. As vice president for creative strategies, he focused on brand and experience marketing. Kurt, vice president for strategy and planning, had a background in communications and theater, having developed programs in creative persuasion in the context of political advertising as well as governmental and business communications. IBM asked the GPJ team one question: “Can you tell us confidently that every event we do—more than 8,000 per year worldwide—exhibits the essence of Smarter Planet?” The answer was no; there was a disconnect between these events and IBM’s positioning, strategic capabilities, and legacy of innovation. IBM and GPJ quickly identified trade shows, which constituted the majority of these events, as the largest opportunity. “Trade shows make up hundreds of millions of dollars every year that corporations spend individually, billions and billions of dollars overall, to get people together to essentially listen,” Ben told us. “You walk up and down alleyways, and on both sides people are trying to hawk shirts and squeeze balls and whatever else. There are tables, banners, monitors, and people talking at you, people pushing things at you.” Jim Gargan, IBM’s vice president of demand programs, explained the disconnect this way: “Fifteen years ago when people went to trade shows, it was to find out what was going on and to learn about the products. That’s no longer really the case. When they go to trade shows today, they’re looking for a deeper level of engagement.” With this much complexity, Ben explained that IBM and GPJ’s focus was on “shifting from a monologue to a dialogue” both within their internal team and in the new trade show experiences they designed. Leveraging IBM’s Legacy of Design and Core Competencies Kurt and Ben, along with John Kennedy (IBM’s vice president of corporate marketing), agreed that leveraging design thinking to align IBM’s trade shows with the Smarter Planet approach would be important to the project’s success. Indeed, using the tools of design would reflect IBM’s legacy of innovation—in particular, the company’s design and innovation work in the 1950s and 1960s. Over this period Charles and Ray Eames created some of the company’s best design and brand expressions. It was their innovative approach to design that distinguished them and, in turn, IBM during this period. Drawing on this legacy would be key. Importantly, IBM’s capabilities matched those needed to transform the trade show experience. Kurt explained that they would have to balance the art and science of trade shows, working with the diverse skills and capabilities within IBM: “the marrying of traditional design and brand systems thinking with social science, scientific thinking, and, ultimately, predictive revenue generation.” IBM’s competitive advantage lay with the intelligence of its experts and the ability to leverage their knowledge to provide learning moments and to be learners themselves. As IBM’s vice president of demand programs, Jim Gargan led a team of several thousand to craft strategies and create methods, systems, and processes that could be scaled across the company. When it came to bringing these capabilities together, the rubber met the road with Jim. He emphasized that any sustainable solution would have to “embed the things that make IBM special and unique” in the way it conducts business and engages customers. Incorporating the Four Questions Into a Three-Step Approach The team took a three-step approach to the project that resembled the four questions we talked about in chapter 1. Step 1 examined What is? and current state-of-the-art knowledge on human interaction with a goal of generating powerful insights into learning and collaboration. Step 2, mirroring our What if? stage, involved coming up with new ideas that could be used across multiple events and contexts. Step 3 combined What wows? and What works? to create testable prototypes that could be validated in the marketplace. Step 1: What Is? Learning About Learning Event experiences are critical to IBM from both a marketing and a business development perspective, and it was clear that, in the end, the project’s deliverable would be new experiences that could be implemented not only in the context of trade shows but also at onstage events and group sessions and on digital platforms. But the GPJ team wanted to begin by explicitly stepping away from the existing model of the trade show and focusing instead on a much broader topic: how human beings engage and learn. Ben explained the rationale: “Call it a trade show, call it a meeting, call it whatever you want. All these events depend on the interaction of people, the ability of people to engage, to bring insight, to address problems, to collaborate, and ultimately to drive some sort of business problem solving.” With this research goal in mind, team members decided to cast their nets wide to gather data on human interaction from experts in a variety of fields, from theater design to military training. DESIGN TOOL Secondary Research Designers do not rely exclusively on primary ethnographic research—they use secondhand data as well. This information may come from interviewing experts, as it does in GPJ’s case, or from previous studies, books, articles, or Internet searches. Over the next several months, the GPJ team interviewed more than one hundred experts in roughly twenty fields, seeking to understand why people behaved the way they did, how they learned, and how to engage them. Out of these interviews, many rich insights into human cognition and learning began to emerge. The team then sorted through them, looking for patterns and themes. “It was like a movie revealing itself,” Ben told us. “For instance, Tim Seldin, the president of the Montessori Foundation, said in his interview that the more you can create comfort, the more people behave as if they are comfortable. So the right meeting environment for learning might be the exact opposite of the typical conference room, where the walls are closed off, the temperature varies, and there is one glass of water on the table that everybody is eyeballing.” DESIGN TOOL Mind Mapping  Mind mapping is the tool we use to cull large amounts of data in order to spot patterns and develop insights. It is a clustering technique. By grouping observations, it’s easier to see patterns emerge and distill the insights that accompany them. Pattern recognition comes up again and again in design thinking as a critically important skill. We see it in the interpretation of ethnographic research and other data, as well as in customer journey mapping and working with subject matter experts, as GPJ and IBM have done here. Observations, patterns, and insights are the building blocks of value creation. The team also went back to IBM’s roots to meet with Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, who talked about his grandparents’ design principles. They understood, as Kurt explained, that “you don’t design for design’s sake; you design to solve a problem. Design is first and foremost about problem solving.” One of the themes centered on “planned spontaneity,” interactions that seemed like they were spontaneous but were actually designed to occur in a certain way. “Planned spontaneity,” like “creating comfort,” had implications for the team’s work on trade shows. In their discussions of the critical aspects of human learning, interviewees continuously returned to five general themes: engage, inform, discuss, persuade, and inspire. Ben explained how these words developed organically in the team’s discussion: “We talked about how inspiring someone to change their beliefs and actions required first engaging them. You had to have a discussion with them. There had to be some sort of collaboration, some mutual outcome, and then they would be inspired.” The challenge was to enact all five themes in the new trade show experience. So, team members needed to translate them into design criteria that IBM could execute at thousands of events spanning diverse markets and audiences. They began by focusing on the physical environment that would be part of the new trade show experience and creating a client journey that reflected the insights they had gathered. The physical environment would need to incorporate the different ways—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—that people learn. It would need to be comfortable, engaging, and conducive to informal communication. It would need to encourage the building of mutual trust and facilitate dialogue, collaboration, and co-creation. DESIGN TOOL Design Criteria Once you have discerned patterns in your data, you can use them to draw out the insights that help identify the criteria that your solution must meet. Translating insights into design criteria is important to ensuring that you have a reliable filter as you enter the brainstorming and concept development stage. Without design criteria, it is difficult to methodically sort through potential ideas and concepts. The design criteria developed by GPJ and IBM—creating comfort and facilitating dialogue—don’t tell them what the ideal solution is; those criteria tell them what the solution needs to accomplish. Step 2: What If? Putting Insights to Work The team now sought to use the insights, themes, and design criteria to create great trade show experiences using best practices from the world of human physical and visual experience creation. Team members thought in terms of creating physical spaces as “communications landscapes” to facilitate collaboration. In the past IBM might have organized eighteen technology-based banking solutions and pointed people toward a different part of the space at the trade show depending on which solution they wanted. Kurt explained that they “wanted to create a more flexible, interconnected environment” where participants could engage in a variety of settings. They wanted to focus on the way that conversations naturally take place. For the new trade show experience, the GPJ team created various settings, including seated and standing areas that would accommodate different learning styles and situations. “There might be a seated one-on-one arrangement or some other kind of seated area like you would see in a park or in a kitchen or at a dining room table or on a train,” Kurt noted. Team members wanted the spaces to be informal and comfortable so participants would engage naturally. They also created spaces for planned spontaneity in order to facilitate the sorts of conversations that occur around a watercooler or at a bar—places where people gather briefly and have short exchanges or stand comfortably for long periods of time and have more extensive conversations. They also created opportunities for formal conversations in conference rooms with large screens and whiteboards. “We have to look at all these different conditions and also at levels of intimacy, closed conditions, open conditions, soundproofing,” Ben told us. Importantly, the team also created hybrid environments so clients could use them in ways that felt most comfortable to them and shift seamlessly across communication contexts. Ben and Kurt described the hybrid environment of standing tables that “looked like puzzle pieces and acted as interlocking conversation zones.” These enabled participants to enter and exit the space as the dialogue shifted or as they sought to transition the conversation to a different environment. The GPJ team members focused on the details of each environment and the implications for human interaction. They wanted to ensure that people felt comfortable, so, for example, they used doubled-padded carpet in areas where they knew people would be standing. If people were comfortable standing, they would spend more time talking. The physical environment was not the only consideration. The GPJ team also knew that to make people truly comfortable and create opportunities for “planned spontaneity,” it would need to guide and facilitate the experience. In pondering how IBMers could best do that, team members turned to another Eames concept: the guest- host relationship. Ben explained: “If you bring someone into your home, there are certain ways you conduct yourself so your guest feels comfortable. You don’t call from the other room. Visitors don’t come in, sit down, and grab a drink for themselves, unless they know somebody really well. So we decided to bring clients into the space with a concierge.” This approach enabled subject matter experts acting as the concierges to develop an understanding of a visitor’s needs and either handle the conversation or, like a good host, hand off the person to someone better suited. Ben observed that these were basic principles, but the business-to-business world had never integrated them into its work. Building these and other insights into the new trade show concept, the team was able to develop a client-centered, multidirectional communication and learning experience. Step 3: What Wows and Works? Testing with Pilots Now that the GPJ team members had created new environments, they sought an opportunity to build prototypes and test their assumptions. “At that point we were willing to be wrong,” Ben explained. “We thought our concept was right—it felt right. But we needed to know.” The goal was to launch pilots in order to learn what worked and what didn’t, and then build a scalable model. They wanted to see what happened when a real customer stepped into the new IBM experience. DESIGN TOOL Learning Launch We use the term learning launch to describe the pilot that GPJ and IBM run. The goal is to get out of the lab or conference room and actually test your concept and the assumptions behind it with real customers in a live market environment. This process de-risks a project by not scaling a concept until you collect real data from real customers outside your company. Jim Brill, the director of marketing for IBM Financial Services, had volunteered to work with the team on IBM’s presence at Sibos, an event that brought together senior executives from the financial services industry and their technology partners. Compared to large trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show, which might draw more than 100,000 visitors, Sibos is small, generally drawing about 7,000 participants, but it is among the most important financial services trade shows that IBM participates in each year. That year, 2010, it was in Amsterdam, where the team would be conducting a learning launch of its new design. In the Sibos learning launch, team members implemented the physical space redesign they had envisioned as well as the concierge service. They also focused on integrating communications and technology into the experience in ways that would increase flexibility and flow across formal and informal situations. They loaded tablets with the same content that was showing on the larger screens so participants could experience a seamless flow of information as they moved through the space, from, say, a conference room area to a more informal space. Each of the three inner walls of the IBM booth was covered with a touch screen, and there was a touch table so people could engage in whatever way was most comfortable. The team members also trained IBM employees in storytelling, listening to clients, and navigating the experience on the basis of clients’ needs. Importantly, the physical spaces, technology, and employee training were integrated to provide a cohesive and engaging client experience. Success at Sibos The results at Sibos spoke for themselves. Physical elements like the puzzle-piece tables were a huge hit. Ben explained that “the most effective areas were those that were most open and felt like you could come and go but were clearly areas for discussion and collaboration.” People came and talked and stayed. Ben went on: Even when we did a cocktail hour in the same space, people immediately went to those areas because they just made sense. There was a table that was high enough. It was counter height so you could lean against it, you could put your laptop there, and you could put your drink down. But you could also stand around and talk, and you could access technology and research and data and other stuff an arm’s length away. In the wake of the Sibos pilot, IBM realized double-digit increases in client engagement leads, lead capture, and revenue. In fact, the number of leads during the Sibos pilot was greater than it had been in the previous two years combined (an increase of 78 percent, year over year). When IBM executives saw the results, they decided not to do further pilots but to scale the new approach immediately. As Ben described it: Jim [Brill]’s sponsor and colleagues were all interviewed in a short video we put together talking about how great the  experience was. And it literally was night and day from previous years, when we may have had pedestals with laptops on them, a screen above them, and a banner, and every pedestal had its own discrete solution with an expert talking about what it was they were selling and showing a PowerPoint presentation. That was it. There were none of those in the pilot year. Jim Gargan linked the positive client reaction to the intimate workspaces and to the ability to leverage technology in a way that fostered dialogue instead of just broadcasting one-way communication. For Jim, this was a home run: “The reactions were really quite stunning. We are expanding this as quickly as we can and scaling it.” The redesign was also attractive to IBM’s clients and business partners. The company’s presence at Sibos was among some of the largest financial services companies, which reinforced the message that IBM was a trusted partner in this industry. “Folks from J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and other financial institutions were right there watching people stand in the booth, discussing for hours,” Ben told us. “This whole dynamic was on stage in front of them throughout the event. And that led to new business-to-business relationships.” But Ben emphasized that the success wasn’t about the booth or the technology per se; it was about the more personalized experience they were able to create: I think the real story is that when you design an experience based on real knowledge of how people act and interact and want to engage, you have, in effect, broken down the barriers and eliminated the obstacles to human engagement in such a big way that people actually do connect, and relationships are formed and business gets done and is done better. He concluded that while they achieved success in the context of trade shows, the outcome of the project was about something more: “It’s not about trade shows,” he told us. “It’s not about conferences. It’s not about booth design. It’s about learning and engagement and relationship building. It’s about a unique way of collaborating.” Jim Gargan emphasized a similar point: “One of the reasons that C-level executives continue to go to events is that they are a trusted way for people to learn and to make meaningful connections. For us, it’s really about understanding whether we’ve helped the client begin to think about their business problems in a different way.” Internalizing the Changes Now that the team had redesigned the trade show, it needed to socialize design thinking with the IBM employees who would be expected to deliver the experience. Jim Gargan put the challenge succinctly: “It’s great to come up with a strategy, but you’ve got to operationalize and deploy it.” Ben explained that team members knew they had to be thoughtful about how they presented their work. They wanted to recreate their own discovery process for IBMers by taking them on a kind of “archeological dig.” He described their approach: “We reported on what we had uncovered in our research. We brought in some video clips of the interviews, transcripts, voice recordings, and illustrated examples like books, which all revealed the nature of our discovery process. We also shared a document full of our insights.” Next, they set out to share the terrific data and insights on human interaction and learning with IBMers all over the world. GPJ had often put together books for clients, but that did not seem to fit this project. The insights had emerged as part of an organic process, they did not occur in a certain order, and they were not all necessarily helpful for every case. So instead, the team created a card for each insight so people could engage with them in a more modular way. The goal was to use the deck of cards in a “train the trainer” model in which the GPJ team would train IBMers, who would then train other IBMers to use the cards when creating their next event. DESIGN TOOL Cards Cards are visualization tools that are especially popular in the world of design. GPJ creates cards that include photographs and text and uses them to engage and inspire. They provide a hands-on activity (people can select individual cards or group  them), which makes them particularly well suited to eliciting deeper thoughts and more creative ideas. Each card contained one insight, the theme it fell under, where it came from, a photograph representing it, and tips for leveraging it. Each of the five themes that the GPJ team had uncovered in its interviews (engage, inform, discuss, persuade, and inspire) became a category like a suit in a deck of cards, and each category had ten insights. An entire deck of fifty cards consisted of the keys to successful human engagement and learning, as well as ten insights related to each and tactics to help IBMers bring these insights to life at IBM’s more than 8,000 annual trade shows. For “creating comfort,” for example, the tip explained that organizing and creating physical spaces can dramatically influence whether participants feel comfortable and how they engage. This insight had led the GPJ team to understand that designing flexible spaces where people were greeted by IBM hosts would make them more comfortable than an arrangement of fifty-five pedestals and siloed solutions. Card Games The team introduced the cards to IBM employees all over the world, watching as they engaged the cards in different ways. Some organized them by suit, while others picked out the photos they found most appealing. Some people gathered into groups to work with the cards, while others chose their favorites individually and then presented them to the group. Ben explained that they saw instant collaboration: “The cards worked the way they were intended to, which was to find inspiration, to brainstorm, and to help solve your problem.” Once people became familiar with the cards, the team set up challenges for them. These often involved developing a narrative about a group of characters with a problem to be solved. Ben said that many of the participants pointed to specific insights from the cards that helped them come up with solutions. “It was an ownable thing,” he noted. “If I gave you that deck of cards, it was yours, and, in some respects, those insights became yours.”  The cards helped those on the ground understand the new approach to live events and trade shows and shortened their learning curves. In the end, they were a critical bridge between the strategy GPJ had developed and the IBM employees who had to operationalize it. “We needed something that we could leave behind that would help people latch onto the strategy,” Ben told us, “and the cards were a really important piece of that.” In the end the cards communicated the context and core insights needed to help IBMers across the globe create trade show experiences. Jim Gargan added, “They gave employees a new lens to think about their jobs and about engaging clients.” The cards that GPJ created were so successful that IBM adopted them as an integral aspect of the company’s approach, and they reached more than 5,000 IBM employees globally. By integrating the cards into their processes, IBM internalized design thinking. “We realized that people were more prone to adopt information when they felt like it was in their possession,” Ben noted. “Then they owned the experience. They owned the insights, and the problem looked different to them because their expertise had changed.” Jim Gargan provided another point of validation when he explained that he had a dog-eared deck of these cards in his office: “It’s not uncommon for me to speak to the person in the office next to me, going, ‘Hey, look at card 38.’ We pull it out and start talking about it. It’s a wonderful tool.” Converting the Holdouts Cards and training acclimated IBM employees to the ideas behind the new trade show experience, but there were still a few holdouts along the way. While preparing for a trade show, one subject matter expert in particular, whom Ben described as a “curmudgeon,” just wanted to give his PowerPoint presentation like he had always done. At the onsite training, he stood in the back of the room with his arms folded. Ben tried to engage him, to no avail. As the trade show was starting, Ben tried one more time, approaching the disgruntled IBMer, asking him what he liked to do. He loved fishing and began to talk about his fishing trips. “Before you knew it, his face relaxed, and he was telling me stories,” Ben recalled. Clients standing nearby began to join the conversation, listening to his anecdotes and asking him questions. Ben talked about what happened next: “He started talking to them in the same way he was talking to me. He said, ‘Wait a minute. Let me show you something.’ In two steps, he got to his PowerPoint and started going through it, but instead of going through page by page, he went right to slide 12 and started talking about the client’s issue, still referring to fishing. And he became the most vivacious, most gregarious guy there. He was like a changed person.” That experience was a great learning moment for Ben and his IBM colleague. In a very real way, it all came back to the early ideas about creating comfort and planned spontaneity. “At the end of the day, we set up the conditions for him to be comfortable,” Ben explained. “He was using storytelling. He was in a mode where he was really collaborating, really talking to people. Once you buy into this whole design-thinking approach, everybody involved is in a learning mode. Everybody involved is in a different place.” Rethinking Metrics and Delivering Results Rethinking the trade show experience also meant rethinking metrics. Ben emphasized the importance of stepping back to consider the intent of measurement. In this case, it was to assess whether trade shows produced high-quality sales leads. Whereas IBM had a robust system for capturing quantitative data, such as scanning a participant’s badge to record foot traffic, it did less to measure the qualitative elements of engagement, such as the likelihood that it would convert into a revenue-generating client relationship. The GPJ and IBM team sought to look beyond this traditional approach of counting eyeballs and impressions to focus instead on duration and depth of experience. The team believed that it could help IBM achieve its ultimate goal of increasing validated lead revenue. Kurt explained that the team “looked at behavioral metrics, such as engaging clients and prospects around a particular solution.” In the new trade show environment, IBM employees could share content with potential customers in real time and collect data about what was shared with whom. In previous years at Sibos, IBM employees may have had only seventy-five pieces of content to share with participants. With the trade show redesign, they had four hundred pieces of content, which gave them the ability to provide much more relevant, targeted material to participants in real time rather than tracking it down after the conference and then trying to deliver it to the right person, who would experience it out of context. Data around depth of engagement showed that the new trade shows were leading to greater relationship building and revenue generation. Ben saw that the experience was less about “I’m selling you something” and more about “I’m partnering with you to get to the heart of the problem.” These deeper relationships drove results. As Ben explained: We are seeing more deep engagements, which is really important and pretty amazing. We are also seeing more revenue generation results. We’re having fewer, better transactions to the tune of multiples of sales year over year. IBMers are even saying that ten times the number of hot leads have come from these events, even if the total number of people coming through the space was lower. From a qualitative standpoint, interviews now happen in our spaces. We have senior leaders who come and want to see the new trade show experience in action. Jim Gargan echoed this perspective from inside IBM: “What we tried to do was not focus on how many people got into the booth but on the quality of the experience and the dialogue that they were able to engage in with us once they got there. We created intimate spaces that would allow the IBMers and the clients to be able to engage in a different way.” For Ben it all came back to design thinking. “Design thinking gets into the emotional side of all this in a really meaningful way,” he observed. “Not just in turning people on or getting them excited about something, but helping them see that there’s more opportunity in what they do than they had thought. It is based on understanding people better. And you don’t understand people better until you undertake this kind of design discipline and start digging.” For Jim Gargan, this spelled results. He praised design thinking for “its ability to put business problems in a context and framework” and “as a way to build a consistent methodology that scales.”  In the end it added up to a more effective trade show experience for IBM and its clients. What Do We Take Away from IBM’s Story? GPJ and IBM provide a great example of an end-to-end process of gathering data, recognizing patterns and themes, generating insights, using these to develop design criteria, coming up with new ideas, and conducting learning launches. These are a few of our favorite takeaways: Know Thyself, Know Thy Company Socrates famously urged us to “know thyself.” We believe it is also important to “know thy company.” Design thinking is a powerful tool, but the context in which you integrate it into the organization matters. Think about your company or even your business unit. What are your core competencies? What is your legacy? What’s in your DNA? For IBM, the powerful legacy of Charles and Ray Eames’s work provided traction. Later, in the Toyota story, we’ll see how design thinking linked to the “Toyota Way.” Finding a link to your own organization’s history and values is important to the successful deployment of design thinking. Look Outside Your Industry to Drive Value Creation One of the greatest value creation opportunities design thinking offers is the invitation to look beyond a company’s industry or comfort zone. It is often our own internal mental models, rather than external constraints, that blind us to more innovative ways of doing something. IBM, working with GPJ, broadened its definition of the problem, stepping back from the trade show construct and considering instead the nature of human learning. It then sought out experts from far afield, from education to the arts, to find penetrating insights that could transform IBM’s trade show experience. Exploit the Power of Visualization Visualization is a powerful tool that can be used throughout the design thinking process. The GPJ team used it to communicate and translate concepts and ideas at various points. Visualization can be especially important when communicating ideas that are less intuitive and accessible or are more likely to face resistance. Whether it’s the way GPJ crafted its “archeological dig” to present research findings or the cards that the team created to make profound and somewhat abstract insights more meaningful for IBMers around the world, visualization was critical to GPJ and IBM’s success. Deepen Your Thinking on the Metrics That Matter Metrics are critical, but it’s important to remember why you have them in the first place. Keeping the ultimate goal in mind will help you pick the right metrics. In GPJ and IBM’s case, the goal was high- quality sales leads that would eventually drive revenue. Adjusting metrics to include qualitative data around engagement informed the stuff that was easy to count—the more quantitative metrics. Don’t Forget Design Thinking When Working with Your Colleagues People often learn design thinking skills and become proficient with the tools only to forget that they can be used not only to drive value but also to marshal internal support. Take an ethnographic approach to understanding your colleagues and what motivates them, help people to understand the user journey and be aware of their own journeys, and, finally, iterate with them and create value together. These steps could be the difference between a great idea that drives results and one that collects dust on a shelf.  3 Postmerger Integration at Suncorp THE BUSINESS PROBLEM Integrating two highly successful but different organizations without loss of momentum in a cutthroat competitive environment THE CONTEXT The merger of two titans in Australia’s commercial insurance segment, Suncorp and Promina, to form the country’s second largest insurer DESIGN’S CONTRIBUTION Facilitating a strategic conversation to build alignment on strategy and vision using the design tools of visualization, metaphor, and storytelling PUT YOURSELF IN THE SHOES of a leader trying to integrate two financial services organizations with significantly different business approaches and cultures. Does design thinking come immediately to mind as a way to solve this thorny problem? Probably not. That is just one of the reasons why we think this story of a group of managers from the Land Down Under teaming up with one of the most creative strategy consultancies we’ve ever met is so fascinating. The critical role played by design thinking in ensuring a successful merger between Suncorp and the Promina Group demonstrates its value in areas not traditionally seen as design friendly. Suncorp knew that capturing the synergies that would justify the merger, estimated to be worth several hundred million dollars annually, would require tackling significant change management challenges. The company succeeded by using metaphor-driven strategic conversations (sounds like consulting jargon, but it’s not— details to follow), which allowed the two organizations to build a single aligned strategy and to engage the newly formed organization behind it. And they’ve got the data to prove it! The potential for product line synergies in the merger of Suncorp and Promina was obvious to all. Suncorp-Metway was Australia’s sixth largest bank and a leader in banking, insurance, and investment services, focusing on retail customers and small to midsize businesses. Suncorp’s insurance group was Australia’s third largest general insurer and was among the organization’s largest profit contributors. Promina brought strong general insurance brands like Vero for commercial insurance, as well as personal insurance brands for car, home, and contents. Combined, the two organizations would become Australia’s second largest insurer. But they could hardly have been more different in their organizational approaches. Suncorp prided itself on being centralized while still offering a meaningful customer experience. Its leaders believed that significant synergies could be gained through consolidating its own and Promina’s operations; in fact, the company had achieved this in previous mergers. Promina, on the other hand, was highly decentralized—more a “house of brands,” as one observer commented, than a single organization. Mark Milliner was the Suncorp executive appointed head of the new commercial insurance (CI) business, which combined the relevant subsidiaries of the two organizations. He knew he had a challenge on his hands in integrating these two cultures. He worried about losing momentum and direction in a highly competitive marketplace, where the CI business could ill afford to lose market share or profitability. In particular, he worried how Suncorp’s high- level vision—“We help people build and protect their dreams”— would translate into meaningful action by employees in the newly combined business. Like Mark, Jacqui Jordan, CI’s strategy manager, was a veteran of previous mergers within Suncorp and had a sense of urgency around the need to build a new future together. “The merger was perceived as the end of something extremely precious to Vero, Promina’s CI business,” she told us. “It was almost religious the way this team loved its brand and the company. We knew that we had to create something new together and that it would need to be something very compelling.” To help them accomplish this, Suncorp chose to work with a consulting partner, Second Road, which practiced an unusual form of strategy consulting. Cue Aristotle. Why Take the Second Road? Tony Golsby-Smith founded Second Road on his passionate belief that an alternative approach to organizational transformation—one that had been largely ignored in the business realm—had the potential to facilitate large-scale change and help organizations create cultures more supportive of innovation. This belief was reflected in the name of the organization itself. Aristotle (yes, the ancient Greek philosopher) argued that there were two roads to truth: the path of rational scientific analysis based on numbers and the path of rhetorical argument based on conversation. According to Golsby-Smith, Aristotle’s “first road,” which dominated business thinking, was inadequate for confronting a world of increasing uncertainty: “My argument is simple: Modern organizations, like the Western world that spawned them, have been built on logic and analytics. This equips them well for control but not for creativity. Twenty years ago, that may not have mattered; today it is a fatal flaw. But we need more than just extra management tools or techniques: We need a revolution in thinking.” Second Road was built around the neglected path of conversation. The goal, Golsby-Smith explained, was to equip people to become “designers who are making worlds rather than analyzing them”—“authors” rather than “readers.” Successful corporate strategies, he believed, emerged out of dialogues that engaged not only senior executives but employees throughout the organization and that focused on invention rather than just analysis. From these ideas, Second Road developed a set of practices for guiding these dialogues, using a framework it called the AcdB model:  The format of the framework will be familiar to advocates of design thinking, with its focus on the What is? question about the present and the What if? question that points to a new future. It will be familiar to strategists, as well, with its identification of a gap between current reality and some desirable future and the development of plans to close it. Where the framework differs dramatically from traditional strategic planning is the process Second Road uses to conduct this analysis. At its heart lies a “strategic conversation,” which uses an array of design thinking tools— visualization, metaphor, brainstorming, and rapid prototyping—to engage participants and help them think more creatively about the future they want to create together. Led by both a facilitator and a designer, a group of people address a series of “designerly” questions: Where are we now? (in our design nomenclature, the What is? stage); where do we want to be? (What if?); what design will get us there? (What wows?); and how will we make this happen in the real world? (What works?). There are few PowerPoint slides in these conversations. Instead, a Second Road designer creates images of the dialogue as it evolves. Early on it tends to feel chaotic and circuitous as different perspectives and issues come into play. Even the problem itself is often defined differently by various participants. As the conversation progresses, however, clarity and alignment increase, and a hypothesis usually emerges as to the best way forward. Believing that many great ideas that bubble up during a conversation can be lost in the usual focus on conclusions and action planning, Second Road takes special care to map the conversations in real time on electronic whiteboards. DESIGN TOOL Visualization Visualization lies at the very core of design thinking. But that doesn’t mean you need to be an artist to use it. Visualization is the transformation of information into images that you see, either literally with your eyes or figuratively with your mind’s eye. We can do that in many ways—using drawings, photographs, stories, and even PowerPoint (but not lists of bullet points). The whiteboards used by Second Road become a canvas on which participants paint a new future together. The discussions over the course of a day might fill as many as twenty-eight whiteboards. Second Road consultants use all this input to create an AcdB model on one sheet of paper, which sums up the conversation. At the end of a workshop, they also produce what they call a TalkBook, which captures the thinking process of the conversation and contains sketches made during it. This visualization of the group’s thinking aims to transform participants from “managers” into “designers,” from “readers” into “authors,” with the whiteboard as their communal sketchpad. The Journey Begins, but the Car Stalls The Second Road team, led by Nick Ingram and Michael York, and the Suncorp team, headed by Jacqui Jordan, expected the strategic conversation approach to meet with some cultural resistance from Vero’s general managers. “When we first talked about transitioning staff from readers to authors,” Nick commented, “some of the Vero guys laughed. They thought it was a joke. What kind of way-out hippy stuff is this? They had a very traditional analytical approach to strategy.” To them, these conversations were “fact free.”  Despite some disappointing early conversations, the team pressed on. Acknowledging Vero’s preference for analytics-based decision making, the team decided to create a set of task forces, led by managers from both Suncorp and Vero, to gather data for the What is? phase of the next strategic conversation. The assigned topics included overviews of the current end market and the broker market, branding, the claims management process, the employee profile, IT systems, and challenges and opportunities. Second Road realized that both sides needed to buy in to the process and believed that analytics and design could work together without sacrificing the integrity of the strategic conversation. The debrief of the task forces, Nick Ingram and Jacqui Jordan knew, would be critical. “If we left the task forces unchaperoned,” Nick noted, “they were likely to walk in with twenty-slide PowerPoint presentations that would take the whole hour and leave no time for discussion.” So Jacqui and Nick decided to shake things up: They mandated that each group’s presentation include only three slides and last no longer than twenty minutes. This would maximize the time for good conversation. As was the usual practice, Second Road designer Amanda Vining mapped the conversation as Nick led it. The debrief went better than anyone had dared hope. The task forces had done a great job synthesizing the analytics as well as posing creative strategic questions for further discussion. It was the beginning of integrating the best of both cultures. “After they got over the shock of being limited to three slides, people liked it,” Nick noted. “The conversation really flowed.” But the biggest test was to come the following week, with a five-day strategic conversation among Mark’s newly constituted leadership team. From What Is? (Current Reality) to What If? (Envisioned Future) This five-day conversation was critical for the future of the business. Mark’s ambition was to describe the look and feel of the commercial insurance business the group wanted to create together. His intent was to build a team committed to a common purpose and set of outcomes. In the lead-up to the first day, Nick and Amanda from Second Road synthesized the findings and conversations from the task force debriefs. Instead of writing a report or making a PowerPoint presentation, they elected to create something more visual: a set of posters that captured the key points. “We had discussed most of the ‘current situation’ during the task force debriefs,” Nick recalled, “but I didn’t want to lose that momentum and insight. So we created the posters to immerse the team back into that topic.” DESIGN TOOL Posters In a world where everyone has too many meetings to attend and not enough time to read the materials carefully prepared in advance, posters are invaluable. For about $2 at a copy store, you can turn a slide into a big wall poster that people can browse as part of your meeting (when you’ve got them in your power), rather than relying on them preparing the material in advance (which they often don’t). Posters like the one, Second Road create to guide the Suncorp team allow you to bring a group quickly to a shared understanding of a problem or a data set. They allow you as the conversation leader to set boundaries by determining what goes on a poster, but they give your attendees the freedom to choose what they think is important in it. They don’t have quite the stature of Post-it Notes in the innovation world, but we think they deserve similar reverence! On the first day, Nick asked the group to walk with him from poster to poster, stopping to examine each and giving team members a chance to recall parts of the previous week’s conversation that had struck them. By the end of that session, they had cohered around a common “story” about their current situation and the challenges they faced.  The Power of Metaphor To transition into the discussion about the future—the What if? phase —Nick engaged the managers in an exercise using metaphors. “This was always going to be a ‘look and feel’ conversation,” he explained. “We were really trying to get the team to answer the question ‘What type of house do we want to build together?’ That type of situation just cries out for the use of metaphor. Metaphors help people think creatively, and they help people play with abstract ideas.” DESIGN TOOL Metaphor Metaphor is a commonly used design thinking tool. Taken from the Latin word meaning “to transfer,” it involves drawing an analogy between two objects, such as referring to business as war or an organization as a family. Using metaphor unlocks the creative side of our brains and surfaces unarticulated perspectives, feelings, and assumptions. It helps us to escape our mental models, and it encourages candor by reducing the risk of talking about difficult issues. Nick began by presenting a synopsis of left- and right-brain thinking. He then asked the managers to break into small groups to explore, using metaphor, what they wanted CI to look and feel like when it was achieving its purpose. Each group chose five cards out of a large deck filled with images such as cafés, markets, natural landscapes, people, and art. The objective was to look for rich metaphors to express what CI could be. Groups took different approaches: Some articulated multiple metaphors in their cards to represent various characteristics, while others selected overarching metaphors, such as marriage or a village, represented by all five cards. From Marriage to Merger Nick called the groups back together and worked with them to unpack the metaphors they had chosen in order to reveal “entailments”: the consequences that attach to a particular metaphor. For example, when asked what entailments go with the metaphor marriage, people came up with “love,” “children,” and “happiness,” along with two that generated a lot of conversation: “you’ve got to work at it” and “it’s public.” At designer Amanda Vining’s suggestion, Nick asked them to replace the word marriage with merger and to tell him the entailments of the metaphor, our merger is a marriage of two organizations. At that point, he explained, “Mark Milliner kind of gasped, and it was a very strong moment for all of them. I think it was at that point that they saw the power of metaphor.” It Takes a Village (or a City) Nick then sent smaller groups out to explore the look and feel of CI through the eyes of stakeholders such as the community, suppliers, brokers, and end customers. One group explored the business using the metaphor of a vibrant market village. People liked that metaphor but worried that it was not innovative or dynamic enough. It also seemed too small. Maybe we are really a thriving city, they suggested. At day’s end, Amanda, the Second Road designer, and Jacqui, CI’s strategy lead, created a visual representation of the day’s conversation—a map of a hypothetical city—which the managers found posted on the wall when they arrived on the second day. The picture was deliberately rough and unfinished so that the team would feel comfortable about changing and contributing to it. Rough prototypes, they knew, invited a kind of engagement that more polished ones did not. During the course of the morning’s discussion, the metaphor of the city gained resonance with the team. The map remained on the wall over the next few days as the group worked on other issues, and the managers were invited to post notes and adjust the design. By the end of the meeting, CI’s future had crystallized into that of an exciting and dynamic city infused with the warmth and community of a village. On the last morning of the meeting, Nick again broke the managers into small groups and asked them to create stories using the city metaphor that they could take back to their teams. He described the result: “The energy was quite remarkable around the stories they could tell. They were really pumped about it. And it was at that point I thought, okay, this thing can fly—they can own it and tell stories about it.” If You Build It, They Won’t Come The following week Mark Milliner began a series of meetings to introduce the new leadership team to all CI employees around the country. Buoyed by the team’s enthusiasm and commitment to the metaphor, he incorporated a more refined computerized image of the city into his road show. To the dismay of all, the city bombed. The feedback on the image was decidedly negative from the broader CI staff. As Nick described it, people wondered, “What the heck is this? What is it you want me to do with it?” As the Second Road–Suncorp team regrouped, it quickly became clear that it was the creation of the city that had made it so compelling for the team. “All the passion in Mark’s team had come from the fact that they lived and built the city,” Nick explained. “It was about their journey. Instead, people at the road show got handed the city in a fifteen-minute presentation. What did we expect?” But Mark refused to give up on the metaphor. “The city let people get involved in the conversation, and so it made sense to keep it moving forward,” he recalled. The challenge, he felt, was to send a consistent message across his business units and yet leave room for lower-level managers to make the city their own. “I wanted some consistency,” he said, “but I also wanted people to be able to play. We had learned that if you make it look too finished, people lose interest.” As Jacqui explained, “We wanted to create a similar experience for all our people so that they could engage with the city as well.” The solution the team hit upon was to ask each of the ten units in the CI business to design its own “neighborhood” within the larger city. As the team met to consider how to engage the rest of the organization more actively in this task, members went back and forth about how much detail to include in the map. There was some creative tension between the designers and the strategy team, which approached the challenge from slightly different perspectives. They initially elected to leave the map almost empty in order to invite input and spur conversation. But they worried about a lack of consistency across units. It was important to retain key elements of the version the leadership team had developed while leaving enough space for people to make the city their own. The design team ran prototype sessions to get feedback on the balance that would facilitate the best conversation. Some interesting dynamics emerged. Maps that were too filled in restricted creativity and resulted in stilted conversation. Maps that were almost entirely blank were equally bad: People felt unable to act. However, when prototype groups were given a map with some detail, the groups engaged in rich conversations. It was as if there was an “emptiness sweet spot” that provided guidance about the city’s identity but left enough space for the groups to make it their own. One City, Many Neighborhoods The claims division, led by Paul Smeaton, one of Mark’s direct reports, offered to go first. Paul was enthusiastic about the process. “My goal,” he explained, “was to reach the hearts and minds of all my staff, to help people see, feel, and understand our strategy and how we pictured CI in three to five years.” Smeaton, supported by two internal facilitators from CI’s strategy team, ran a two-day strategic conversation with his direct reports: CI’s claims managers. Alicia Eltherington, one of Smeaton’s direct reports, described the meeting: The workshop was quite conversational in approach. Paul described the journey that he, along with Mark Milliner and the rest of his staff, had been on as they formed their new team and started to discuss their aspirations for commercial insurance. They took us through exercises of thinking about our favorite city and then got us to articulate the attributes that we liked about that city. During the workshop we “built” the CI claims neighborhood using various location cut-outs and street names, and we discussed the different stakeholders in our neighborhood and what they would say, feel, and do. We even recorded a “tour” of the city by ad-libbing this among ourselves. Pre- and postconference surveys were designed into the process to gain some quantitative feedback on the impact on participants of participation in the workshops. These surveys queried employees on their understanding of the new Suncorp strategy and vision, how they saw their jobs fitting into that vision, and how compelling they found it. Even the CFO Likes It Even early skeptics like CFO Matt Pearson (“As a finance guy, the visualization techniques aren’t naturally appealing to me,” he told us) had become involved in the rollout of the city. Matt had identified one of his managers—Paul Muir, an enthusiastic supporter of the process—to act as champion. Paul led the effort to roll the city out to the rank and file in the CFO’s office. He worked with the CI strategy team to ensure consistency and quality. In their initial strategic conversation, Matt and his direct reports had come up with the idea of using a lifesaving theme to characterize the role of the CFO’s office. “Swim in between the flags” was the banner for their neighborhood. “Our job is about rules and guidelines, but we don’t want to be thought of as cops chasing ‘criminals’,” Matt explained. Reframing their role, in their own minds and in others’, from enforcers who punished violators to lifesavers who protected people was very motivating. Again, this was the power of metaphor. “One of my managers came up with the idea of the flag,” Matt recalled. “Our job is setting guidelines. It’s about prudential control. But as conditions change, you need to move the flags in a proactive way. Set the boundaries. Keep people out of trouble and save their lives if they get into it.” Matt’s own past included membership in one of Australia’s popular surf clubs, so the lifesaving metaphor resonated with him. He continued to use it with his group after that initial meeting. At a leadership offsite he held later in the year, he selected a beach setting, gave everyone a lifesaver shirt, and played Hawaii Five-o music in background. His staff loved it. Within the next several months, the majority of CI’s leadership team convened strategic conversations with at least their own direct reports. Mark decided to pull together all these managers, 110 in total, for a two-day leadership conference featuring a session in which a “marketplace” (using language from the city metaphor) had been set up in a large room. Each group had a market stall, manned by its general manager, in which to display the output from the neighborhood conversations. The managers in attendance visited each stall to learn more about their counterparts’ neighborhoods. Nick explained: “They were not in their normal work teams—they were in cross-divisional groups. The power of that was quite amazing. Afterwards, we got them back into their work teams to ground their learnings and work out their actions. That worked very well. The energy in the room with everyone going around the stalls was great. I was giving direction with a microphone and a whistle, and all of us were just having a fantastic time.” Jacqui explained to us why the cross-divisional composition of the groups was important. “We had all of the underwriters in one group, all of the claims leaders, all of the sales leaders,” she told us. “This was significant for us because until this point, we had worked in product silos and didn’t have any functional identity outside each division.” DESIGN TOOL Boundary-Crossing Teams Again and again we see the prominence of boundary-crossing teams in the innovation space. The reason is simple: We may be able to get out of our own box only by climbing into someone else’s. There is simply no better way to help managers develop the broad systems perspective that is a foundation for design thinking than by exposing them to people who think differently than they do. Take whatever silos your organization puts people in and mix them up. Diverse teams tend to generate better hypotheses. The CI strategy team later described the market stall event as an “accidental milestone in the buy-in and take-up of the city concept.” The team had hoped that people would find the session informative, but it never expected the level of energy and enthusiasm the event generated or the solidarity it built. Managers came away from that session with “a sense of how the components of the entire CI business came together,” as Matt described it. Its success helped build enthusiasm, even among previously “neutral” people. Results! In just eighteen months, strategic conversations had been rolled out through the ranks at all ten of CI’s business units, and the CI strategy team reviewed the postworkshop survey results on the impact of the strategic conversation process. They were dramatic, with significant increases among those who p