Design thinking – as opposed to design and design management – is not a function but a doctrine, and, as such, no less than a credendum that the entire organization and all its parts need to abide by.
From Design Excellence to Design as Core Competency
In all walks of life, bringing ideas to life can be a barrier. Good intentions often stay exactly that – intentions – and many great ideas never leave the minds of their originators or the organizations or teams in which they were incubated. This lack of executional power or implementation abilities is potentially fatal if it occurs in fast-moving environments, where not only thinking about change, but also actually bringing ideas to market is crucial for survival.
Increasingly, organizational analysts identify failure of implementation, innovation failure as the cause of many organizations’ inability to achieve the intended benefits of the innovations they adopt.1
Researchers Klein and Sorra identified the determining factors of an organization’s success rate in implementing innovation and change to be a climate characterized by the right skills, the right incentives and disincentives, and the absence of obstacles for implementation – in combination with a commitment from the guardians of the organizational values. In other words, appropriate management skills need to coexist with leadership commitment to guarantee successful implementation. Likewise, to truly benefit from design, the design itself, the management of design, design thinking, and leadership commitment are all needed (Figure 11). Hence, our reasoning and model entail that
Figure 11 Borja de Mozota and Valade-Amland: The Design Excellence Loop
Source: Borja de Mozota and Valade-Amland. 2018. Design Excellence Loop.
Design excellence = great design + design management + design thinking + leadership
Although design, design management, and design thinking have all been subject to extensive research and scholarly attention, design excellence serves primarily as a “label” used to award solutions, deemed to be excellent within their own categories of products or services and assessed according to some predefined criteria. We find the term “design excellence” interesting and appropriate to describe situations where design thinking exists as a premise and where design management has been applied professionally and successfully and adapted to the challenge or process in question.
Regardless of sector, industry, or organizational set-up, an increasing number of real-life experiences and studies point in the direction of an inescapable connectedness between design, design management, and design thinking, as well as a clear cause–effect relation or consequence entailing the extent to which and how design is embraced by an organization. Our assumption is that design – having been around since the beginning of human civilization – at one point in time, as design became recognized as a professional, structured, and replicable activity, fostered the need for a specific variety of project management, a discipline that already existed for ages but started taking shape from the late 1950s onward.2 This point in time emerged in the late seventies, and design management found its form in the eighties, where it gradually captured its own space and identity in the design and design research communities, as well as in education. It started as a clearly defined approach to managing design projects but slowly came to encompass the art of building a “design culture” within an organization. Where this dimension of design management proved successful, the somewhat more strategic and often C-level engagement in design at one point had become so massive in terms of interest both from academia and the boardrooms around the world that it was considered worthy of being “rebranded” as design thinking. And where design thinking reigns, the use of design and the development of the mechanisms needed to manage and benefit fully from design are regarded as just instrumental building blocks of corporate or organizational strategies, as are finances, human resources, investor relations, and public affairs.
Design has traditionally and most often embodied products and services, whereas design management plays a distinct role in enabling design and designers to do so, in the form of brand guardianship and strategic gatekeeping. Design thinking provides for inspiration and for the mandate and support needed for the organization to fully exploit design’s potential (Figure 12).
Figure 12 Borja de Mozota and Valade-Amland: The Products, Brand and Organization Loop
Source: Borja de Mozota and Valade-Amland. 2018. Products, Brand and Organization Loop.
To make sure that we do not add to the confusion, but rather cast some light over the field, we would like to contextualize our terminology in a manner that underpins our claim: design, design management, design thinking (or design leadership), and design excellence. We will do this by latching the four concepts onto the Montréal Design Declaration, endorsed by more than a dozen international bodies, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), because it is the closest we’ve ever come to universal consensus around the meaning, role, and value of design. It suddenly becomes evident that, as a whole, the eight aspirations of the global design community on behalf of its core interest, design, can be achieved only if it exists in all four forms. It even requires that design at large is embraced and appreciated by world leaders, international organizations, and policy makers, which has, incidentally, proven to be an easier battle than to convince many business leaders:
The Montreal Design Declaration defines the Value of Design through eight bold propositions:
- Design is a driver of innovation and competition, growth and development, efficiency and prosperity.
- Design is an agent for sustainable solutions.
- Design expresses culture.
- Design adds value to technology.
- Design facilitates change.
- Design introduces intelligence to cities.
- Design addresses resiliency and manages risk.
- Design fosters development.3
Strategic Intent and Design Governance
Delivering on these overriding and somehow all-encompassing ambitions, shared by most organizations around the world, requires, first of all, the existence of a clear and unambiguous intent, which is indisputably a leadership responsibility: design leadership, if you wish. This, fundamentally spoken, materializes in an informed mandate from the very top of the organization to pursue development goals by applying and integrating design methodologies, design processes, design principles, and design management in all relevant strategies and operations. This is how design thinking inspires and empowers. Assuming that such an intent exists and is known to all, as well as adopted throughout the organization, the exploration and assessment of new technologies and materials becomes a design management priority. The same applies to making sure that their application supports not only the organization’s own intent and delivery, on and beyond the expectations of the user, but also the aspirations of the organization vis-à-vis its concerns in the pursuit of meeting the sustainable development goals.4 Exploiting technological developments and turning data into valuable market intelligence to the benefit of one’s own competitive advantage, yet still reducing one’s footprint and complying with or aiming at transcending best practices with regard to governance and responsibility, requires true design leadership throughout the organization as well as professionalism and decision-making capacity on strategic, tactical, and operational levels. The role of design leadership and design management in a context of innovation was quite effectively spelled out in an article in 2005, albeit without using the term design thinking:
Creating an environment in which challenging the status quo is actively encouraged is at the heart of the innovation process. This process needs clear, firm leadership, and it’s the design leader’s responsibility to do just that – to make innovation part of the business’ DNA. It is then the job of the design manager to help realize the innovative thinking.5
Design’s significance as both a driver and a catalyst of innovation has increasingly been recognized by the world community:
The OECD/NESTI project has identified, through available and experimental measures and analysis, considerable evidence for the integrative role of design and designers between creative development efforts, the practice of innovation in firms, and the implementation of innovations in the marketplace. It is not only an activity carried out by specialized personnel in specific settings but is also a process that can systematically influence most of the activities usually contributing to business innovation projects.6
One reason for the role of design as a tool of innovation being more widely accepted might be its historical connotation of linking design to the invention and development of new physical products – thus also the key pillar in the innovation discourse, for centuries. However, studies show that design is exactly as valuable for companies whose core activity is intangible services – as opposed to tangible products – as for companies whose products and services are of equal importance.7 In line with our discussion about design and the overall intent, sustainable solutions require endorsement from the very top of the organization as much as they require knowledge about materials and processes and value chains in the parts of the organization dedicated to continuous improvement and innovation. Very few chief executive officers have the time and background needed to stay on top of new polymers or composites, sintering techniques or 3D printing processes, additive technologies or intelligent materials. This is not only because these are all demanding areas of science and expertise, but because the speed at which such new technologies are developed and improved is mind-blowing. In addition, of course, managing a medium or large company implies equally demanding expertise within other areas of business development and management. Having said that, also very few designers are able to keep track of these developments, but a pivotal part of design practice is to research and test, experiment with, and consider potentially relevant and useful new materials and technologies to enhance existing or develop new competitive products or solutions, including the considerations need to minimize their footprint throughout the entire life cycle, and including empathy for user needs and preferences. This requires not only an interest among design practitioners and endorsement from the top, but also a clear strategy for how design is used from operation to operation or department to department; in other words, design management.
In his book In the Bubble, the esteemed, although not entirely uncontroversial, design thinker John Thackara lists what he refers to as “design mindfulness,” driven by sensitivity to context, to relationships, and to consequences8:
- Think about the consequences of design actions and pay close attention to the natural, industrial and cultural systems that are the context of design actions
- Consider material and energy flows in all designed systems
- Give priority to human agency and not treat humans as a ‘factor’ in some bigger picture
- Deliver value to people – not deliver people to systems
- Treat ‘content’ as something we do, not something we are sold
- Treat place, time and cultural difference as positive values, not as obstacles
- Focus on services, not on things, and refrain from flooding the world with pointless devices
Not only do most designers already demonstrate the sensitivity Thackara calls for, but some of the world’s most successful companies are guided by similar principles.
In what it creates, for whom it creates, in where and how it creates, and in relationships with consumers and communities, an organization’s design team can help lead Corporate Social Responsibility.9
As the design profession has become more and more recognized as research and knowledge based, a paradigm shift has taken place, from being project oriented to being predominantly process oriented. Designers are more than just problem solvers; they are also drivers of the dynamics of knowledge building in organizations through research:
The activity of design consists in the transformation of an input representation into an output representation. In an activity that functions by way of representations, knowledge plays a central role. Designing is a cognitive activity.10
Moreover,
Prahalad and Hamel argue that information-based invisible assets such as technology, customer trust, brand image, corporate culture and management skills are the real resources of competitive advantage, because they are difficult and time consuming to accumulate, and can be used in multiple ways simultaneously. To design managers, it means assessing design value as a resource that is rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable; it also means managing design with the long-term perspective of sustained competitive advantage rather than a short-term view of project management.11
This new evidence of design as a resource and core competency comes from another theory of strategy, known as the Resource Based View (RBV). Could this theory explain the value of design thinking as the value of a set of specific key skills embedded in design thinking? The RBV of strategy claims that the development of valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and nonsubstitutable resources results in sustained superior performance. It emphasizes the ability to recognize the importance of invisible assets to build competitive advantage as a core competency. It gives value to the way you embed design in the organization or what is also called a “design you can’t see” strategy (Figure 13).
Figure 13 Borja de Mozota and Kim. 2009. From Design Excellence to Design as Core Competence
Source: Borja de Mozota and Kim. 2009. Design Competitive Advantage from Strategy as “Fit ” to Design as “Core Competency.”
The design industry is part of the creative industries, whose value has been studied and included in national statistics of economic performance all over the world for decades. Recently, studies from various sources have focused more specifically on the business value of design. The McKinsey Quarterly (October 2018) report insists on the value of measuring and driving design performance, stating that Design is more than a feeling; it is a CEO-level priority for growth and long-term performance. Behind this trend toward widespread acknowledgment of design indicators, there is an emerging understanding that the value of design can be measured on numerous levels beyond seeing design as “competitive advantage” that is immediately visible in the market – what has for many years been labeled design as differentiator.
In summary, when pleading for strategic design, design managers, designers and design educators should explain what their definition of strategy is, whether they refer to strategy as an external competitive advantage or strategy as a resource and internal sustained advantage. Additionally, if they want to adopt a prospective and contemporary view of design strategy, they may turn their vision far from designing artefacts to rather designing the organization resources and its knowledge capital.12
The buzz of design thinking is the buzz of adopting empathy in user-centered organizations and the recognition of the empathic skills of designers as fundamental to helping the entire organization run their activities closer to the needs of the market and their consumers. And it is true that innovation success and performance in many organizations are based on the ability to build a consumer-centric culture. As a matter of fact, the current digital transformation entails cultural transformation, which in turn demands designer skills, whether focusing on managers learning to think more like designers or on giving design functions the autonomy to drive the cultural change.
As a matter of fact, the business value of design is surprisingly well documented. In a European study from 2002, the CEOs of 33 companies, all of which had received design awards in their own countries, were asked to classify 21 variables of where design creates value (Figure 14):
Figure 14 Borja de Mozota. 2002. Design and Competitive Edge
Source: Borja de Mozota. 2002. Design and Competitive Edge, Academic Review - Design Management Journal 2 reprint 2011 Handbook Design Management, Research Berg.
A more recent report shows similar results, confirming that design
- increases speed to market
- extends market reach
- drives engagement and loyalty
- enhances internal capabilities
- inspires visionary transformation 13
When discussing the strategic positioning of design in a company, the choice between design as a competitive advantage – which is “design you can see” and “design strategy as fit” – which is design as a sustained competitive advantage, has to be made. Although the first kind is prone to be copied, design as a core competency is difficult to imitate by your competitors. During strategic audits and SWOT analyses, organizations use models for assessing their external environment, such as Porter’s Five Forces or PESTEL, and for carrying out internal audits, a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix, a value chain model, or a Business Model Canvas. The RBV of strategy brings another model, Value, Rarity, Imitability, Organization (VRIO) to the table, building on Barney’s difficult definition of core competency and sustained competitive advantage:
A resource that is valuable, rare, difficult to imitate and nonsubstitutable. 14
The question is how to recognize and organize the management of design so as to ensure that it is rare and difficult to imitate, hence improving the organization’s knowledge capital (Figure 15).
Figure 15 THE VRIO model - Barney RBV strategy.
Building Design Capacity
Capacity Building in Organizations
One key player in building evidence of service design impact on the governance of organizations is Christian Bason, who, in one of his latest books, set out to explore, among others, how working with design affected public sector managers:
Managers who use design approaches seem inclined toward governance that, in comparison to historical public management approaches are more:
- Relational, in terms of a distinctly human and often longer-term perspective on the role of the public organization and its impact on the outside world; often this implies a reframing of the kind of value the organization is supposed to bring to citizens and society
- Networked, understood as a model of governance that actively considers and includes a broad variety of societal actors to achieve public outcomes
- Interactive, exhibiting increased awareness and more explicit use of (physical and virtual) artefacts in mediating purposeful interactions between the organization and citizens and other users and stakeholders; and finally, managers who use design approaches are more
- Reflective, which is to say driven by a more qualitative, emphatic, subjective, and complex understanding of the organization’s ability to enact change.15
So in order to develop a business context that is favorable for design excellence, organizations have to consider designers’ skills as more significant than the value of designers’ tangible output (Figure 16).
Figure 16 Borja de Mozota. May 2011. Designers skills in organizations; The Value of Designers’ Skills in the 21st Century
Source: Borja de Mozota. May 2011. Designers skills in organizations; The Value of Designers’ Skills in the 21st Century, Design Research Society, Paris Symposium on Education.
Moreover, capacity needs to be built to ensure cultural sensitivity and differentiation. Globalization is a fact, and, to some extent, certain elements contributing to the variety and diversity one would expect when crossing borders or landing in some remote destination are slowly being eradicated. And yet regardless of how “global” we all tend to see ourselves, we respond inherently in different ways when faced with the reality of a culture to which we are not native. Hence, acknowledging and acting on these intrinsic, culturally rooted differences need to be, and are increasingly, reflected in design practice.
There is an emerging interest in the impact of cultural dimensions on the experience and interaction between people and products. Globalization has led to a situation in which product design teams from one culture or context often have to develop a product, which will be used in a (totally) other cultural environment. Globalization also confronts companies to decide between ‘global’ or ‘local’ featured design of products. As a result, it has become essential for the industrial design education and profession to take the context and culture of the end-users more serious[ly] and to look for consequences regarding industrial design.16
Capacity Building in Strategic Design as Sensemaking
This brings us back to the concept of strategic design as sensemaking, not only as Karl Weick used the term, making sense of our surroundings, of complexity and of the changes taking place around us – or Christian Madsbjerg’s large-scale making sense of a situation or a culture or a world.17 Design is also a pivotal component in making sense of products that we rely on every day, of information overload in most human-made environments, and of instructions and day-to-day digital and real-life interaction. John Maeda’s ten laws of simplicity in many ways represent a key to why design plays such an important role in building bridges between human beings and technology 18:
- Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
- Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
- Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
- Learn: Knowledge makes everything simpler.
- Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
- Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
- Emotion: More emotions are better than less.
- Trust: In simplicity we trust.
- Failure: Some things can never be made simple.
- The one: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.
By intuitively striving for simplicity where it is appropriate and possible, designers contribute to bridging technology with human needs, thus adding value to technology and, in turn, making technology sensible and more accessible to people, who would otherwise be prohibited from enjoying these advantages.
Capacity Building for Behavioral Change
Change is, as already discussed, not always perceived as good. However, change is a given, because the alternative is stagnation and regress. Regardless of design’s role as a change agent, design alone is rarely the only factor responsible for change. But it plays a vital role in making change easier and less frightening. Moreover, we know that change rarely comes by itself; it has to be started by something or someone, as observed by the authors of the bestseller Switch:
Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?19
Designers are rarely the ones who start behaving differently, but more often than we think the works of designers enable people to do so. Such changes can be prompted by user-friendly products, technologies, and digital applications, enabling concepts such as the sharing economy to flourish and home-based work to be a real alternative to spending time on commuting to an office, where exactly the same amount and quality of work would be delivered. Change can also be designed through subtle incentives to do something different or differently, also often referred to as choice architecture or nudging.20 Finally, people’s behavior is hugely influenced by communication design – from visual effects and ads to wayfinding and information design, by the design of physical environments, urban design, and affordances, and by service design, guiding our behavior vis-à-vis the providers of private or public sector services. This knowledge has been systematically exploited as a competitive tool for decades – even centuries – but has also increasingly been discovered by the public sectors of this world, not necessarily as a competitive tool as such, but as a proven, effective means to provide better or smarter services at a lower cost.
One of the areas where service design, in particular, has resonated surprisingly fast and well is within the public health and care sectors. For a long time, service design was almost synonymous with public sector design, until the private sector decided to be more overt about their use of and dependence on design. One of the pioneering suppliers of service design, LiveWork, calls it “humanising of services.”
In order to innovate the system of public services there is a need to step outside the box, get deep insights into the system from different perspectives, to radically reframe the problem, expand the system, ideate with relevant stakeholders and to develop prototypes that can be tested and refined: there is a proven need for service design. And these new ways of approaching challenges using the processes and methods of service design have to be brought inside the organisation, so training and capacity building are crucial to enable public sector organisations to re-invent themselves and their relationship to their citizens.21
Although the public sectors in some countries have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into service design and user-centered innovation, until now the endeavors have been fairly explorative, because hard evidence of design’s appropriateness vis-à-vis the challenges faced by the public sector has been scarce. Moreover, the enthusiasm for design has not always enjoyed the company of design management expertise, sometimes reducing the measurable effects of the sector’s endeavors.
Hence, much speaks to the advantage of design as a more holistic approach to the development of public services than other, more traditional approaches, emphasizing the experienced and long-term qualitative value rather than a shorter-term, single bottom line cost-benefit equation. We will revert to the specific area of service design later – for one very good reason…
Design Ability for Systemic Thinking
Another factor that adds to the rationale is the degree of complexity and need for systemic thinking.
The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.22
One can design an individual artefact in its own right, without depending on or assessing its connectedness to other products or contexts, even though a fundamental understanding of the context in which and by whom the object will be used will in most cases enhance the overall assessment of the design object. Services are intrinsically more dependent on the context in which they will be experienced, and organizational design has a clear systemic element per se. Design management also exists in an environment of determining factors and is thus somewhat influenced by and clearly benefits from systemic thinking, whereas design thinking is essentially systemic by nature. Whether or not a situation will benefit from systemic thinking can be tested quite simply by asking (1) whether it consists of a whole that is made up of any number of identifiable elements, (2) whether these elements are interconnected such that intervening with one element also affects one or several of the other elements and/or on the whole, and (3) whether there are multiple, nonlinear connections and feedback systems between the elements. Applying systems thinking starts with
- recognizing interconnectedness,
- identifying and understanding feedback
- understanding system structure
- differentiating types of stocks, flows, and variables
- identifying and understanding nonlinear relationships
- understanding dynamic behavior
- reducing complexity by modeling systems conceptually, and
- understanding systems at different scales.
The effect of applying systems thinking is improvement of the capability to identify and understand systems, predicting their behaviors, and devising modifications to them in order to produce desired effects.23 As such, there is an obvious kinship between systemic problems and wicked problems, which we discussed briefly at the very beginning of this book.
Design is increasingly involved in the discourse around so-called “wicked” problems – either because we are complicit in their creation or drawn to the complexity of design opportunity that surrounds them. These are the Lernaean Hydrae of design challenges – for every tangible facet of the problem we address an increasingly complex web of both tangible and intangible problems grows in its place. The potential contexts of design action within these wicked problems are dynamic, characterized by complex interdependencies, and difficult to identify.
This bridge is supported by four basic assertions about the intrinsic relation of contemporary design practice to systems thinking;
Assertion #1: One cannot design sustainably outside the space of systems.
Assertion #2: One cannot design empathically outside the space of systems.
Assertion #3: One cannot innovate outside the space of systems.
Assertion #4: One cannot teach design for this century outside of the space of systems 24
Don Norman, hence, was only partially right in his assumption that we are faced with a fork in the road, with two different possible futures for design: (1) A craft and practice; (2) A mode of thinking. Although it is true that a substantial part of the design stories that we encounter today seem to deal with either the one or the other, we also see design following a third future, embracing both design as a craft and practice and design as a mode of thinking – and what bridges the two is design management. This future is where design creates the utmost value. The need for design management to truly benefit from design as a representation, designed objects and services, has already been demonstrated,25 whereas it is still an assumption on our part that design excellence is achieved only where the entire palette of design effectiveness is brought into play to empower, enable, and embody.
The Primacy of Purpose
The purpose of a system is the reason why it exists. The only hope of getting people with all kinds of backgrounds and life projects to work together is a strong, organizing purpose, in a healthy organization. Goals support the mission and vision, whereas the mission and vision support the purpose. Julie Zhuo, former manager of Facebook’s design team, insists that purpose, people, and process are the three things managers think about all day. The why, the who, the how: three early phases of any creative design process.
Good design at its core is about understanding people and their needs in order to create the best possible tools for them. I am drawn to design for a lot of the same reasons that I am drawn to management – it feels like a deeply human endeavor to empower others.26
Designers’ Skills and Role
Designers’ Skills as Driver of Management Value
It would be odd if others were better at delivering design as we traditionally know it than people who trained to become professional design practitioners; the embodiment of strategies into products and services with due concern for the needs of people, organizations and the future – for people, profit, and planet, vested in their deep understanding of materials and functionality, of user experience, and of beauty. Even though amateurs and even professionals of inferior quality will always occupy a certain space in all markets, the acknowledgment of professional designers and their contribution to both our quality of life and to our economies seems to be rather firmly rooted.
Design as a highly complex and sophisticated skill. It is not a mystical ability given only to those with recondite powers, but a skill, which, for many, must be learnt and practiced rather like the playing of a sport or a musical instrument.27
So how are designers’ skills important for business? In his recent work, Kamil Michelswki classified five distinctive aspects of design as a professional culture:
Embracing uncertainty and ambiguity: Designers know that when it comes to creating something completely new and original, they are no guarantee of success. They realise and accept that a really creative process is often discontinuous and messy. This allows them to change the received wisdom with conviction and fearlessness. It is not difficult to see how this attitude may be a good basis for coming up with breakthrough ideas and conviction.
Engaging deep empathy: Using true empathy requires courage, honesty and abandoning one’s mental models. Designers treat these consumers as real human beings and not simply as management abstraction.
Embracing the power of the five senses: Designers recognize that two senses, namely sight and hearing, are often not enough to create something that captivates people on a deep, visceral level. Their attitude towards using their sense of aesthetics is honest and open. They are happy to use apparent complexity to create surprise and delight.
Playfully bringing things to life: In order to create an innovative process and dialogue, designers believe in the power of playfulness, humour and a healthy dose of subversion. They often use the cloak of creativity and apparent silliness, projected into them by other professions, to ask some profound questions and challenge entrenched ways of doing things. Creatively manifesting potential products, services and future scenarios as quickly is effectively their way of being.
Creating new meaning from complexity: At the heart of designers’ ways of doing things is the willingness to engage and to reconcile multiple, often contradictory, points of view and sources of information in order to come up with an entirely new way of thinking about something. Strategy is one thing but turning all the disparate elements into a coherent and delightful whole is something else entirely. 28
Designers’ skills therefore impact organizations by spreading their values and ways of doing things.
Their connections to the professional group closest to their own, namely marketers, can potentially be detrimental to the way in which designers and design attitude are seen in organizations. The power balance is levelling out, but power still predominantly rests with the marketers, once again citing Michlewski:
Designers are the invaders of the corporate world whilst marketers are the natives at the strategic level.
Design management character requires the understanding of design processes, but also of project and process management. Furthermore, there are various levels of design management – operational, functional, and strategic – for which different skills and professional profiles are needed.29
We have seen designers with a flair for management developing into first class representatives of all forms of design management, just as we have seen equivalent design managers coming from management careers and business schools. Thus, although there is no unambiguous road toward a career as design manager, there might be another, subtler prerequisite. A design manager needs to constantly negotiate between the creative aspirations of the designer or design team, on the one hand, and the limitations laid out in the design brief, the expectations of the client organization, whether internal or external, and the changing priorities and constant competition for a space in the minds of the senior management, on the other. And one has to love every bit of it, which narrows the field of talented design managers significantly.
The agents of the more strategic approach to design management in an organization hold hands with its conveyors of design thinking, and, as previously argued, design thinking resides in a deeply rooted understanding of the value of design in all its forms and shapes. A designer or design team as well as any design manager might be overt advocates of design thinking in an organization, regardless of the degree of resonance, but for design thinking to truly add any value to an organization, it needs to be embraced by and firmly rooted in the senior management and filter down throughout the entire organism.
Thus, design thinking – as opposed to design and design management – is not a function but a doctrine, and as such no less than a credendum to which the entire organization and all its parts need to abide by.
Approaching any creative job from a strategic standpoint is much more effective than a tactical execution-based approach. Although it might take longer in terms of up-front research, it yields better results. But for this to happen, new design leaders need to agree to share with business some common concepts: purpose, process, sustainable change, people, insights, strategy, value, and qualitative metrics.
Strategic Designers’ Role as the Future Agents for Change
Beyond the common understanding of design contributing to human-centered organizations, Heather Fraser considers three gears for business design, claiming that Business design is an exercise in agility: emotionally, tactically and cognitively
- empathy and deep human understanding
- concept visualization for holistic solutions that better meet the needs of your customers and other stakeholders
- a strategy to deliver and scale the idea process to refocus your resources in a more effective way30
Along the same lines of rationale, a recent book discussing the connections between designers’ skills and performance introduces the idea of seven role models for designers in organizations:
The seven roles that designers can adhere to in order to drive change in organizations are as follows:
- Cultural catalyst
- Framework maker
- Humaniser
- Power broker
- Friendly challenger
- Technology enabler, Community builder31
So, paradoxically, although design has become somewhat banalized, it has also moved up the value chain and become a boardroom topic, as reflected in these two observations:
Design seems to have moved from being a specialized competence of professions rooted in industrialized economies, to become something we can all practice as part of our consumption activities.32
and
The emphasis on design clearly is moving to the C-suite, and more and more organizations are creating a chief design officer role.33
For the concept of design, this ambiguity has existed for more than two decades, whereas it has been increasingly visible for the concept of design thinking since it was truly revitalized through Tim Brown’s book in 2009.34 And, in the meantime, the concept of design management almost disappeared from the radar.35 This has contributed to a distortion in both ends, as design and design thinking – hence also their organizational role as well as what it takes to excel in either of the two – have seemed to blend into a merged and consequently quite muddled picture, as well as jeopardizing their own future relevance.
Design thinking is situated in a kind of abeyance. Its further development appears to be open in all directions.36
Undertaking change driven by design means that design thinking and design management, as well as design skills and competences, need to be embraced. Moreover, depending on the organizational and decision-making level you choose to integrate design, different design-specific skills will be required to foster a specific type of change.
Inspire, Humanize, Experience
External forces for change are disturbing to all organizations, whether the change stems from increased globalization, digitization, demands for more sustainable solutions, gender and demographic issues, the defiance of institutions, personalization of consumption, or any other megatrend; all these external forces demand from companies that they revise their basic objectives.
Where the old world was characterized by a division between purpose-driven social organizations and profit-driven businesses, in the new world, purpose and profit go hand in hand. This also contributes to reframing the role of designers; reanimating their traditional attitude, ethics and mindsets; the design approach of applying outside-in rather than inside-out perspectives and of creating visual or tangible representations that build a set of shared references to align perceptions across functions, teams, and levels.
Social design has become increasingly attractive among designers, as governments are increasingly acknowledging design’s potential to address complex problems, whether aimed at improving the conditions of marginalized groups or the performance of public sector bodies. Social design is design that exists to improve society at large, and only when behaviors are facilitated, fostered, changed, or diminished does design contribute to social change. Behaviors are instrumental to societal transformation that can be managed and measured. However, it would be irresponsible to disregard that
very few designers recognize that they are actually fighting the problems their disciplines helped to create and keep creating. This sounds disturbing but the designers’ share of responsibility for the social issues we face is indisputable. In designing our man-made world, designers have contributed to design our problems too. Designers have helped creating the cars of people’s dreams and now they have to design us right out of those cars to save us from environmental destruction.37
Design has played a role in the softer issues of our times even if mundane designs such as buildings, cars, and smartphones may have created and heightened intercultural tension. Organizations and citizens now understand better that our physical and virtual environments affect our social interactions, management culture, and society at large.
All this reveals a paradox of contemporary design leadership: on the one hand, designers spread our design thinking methodologies to those who fight social issues, whereas on the other they continue to design our society in ways that actually sustain these same social issues. It would clearly be more efficient if organizations and design management at large could better anticipate the social implications of their design outputs. This might be the best opportunity ever to broaden the influence of design thinking, design management, and design: a coherent and coordinated, design-driven effort toward improving society at large. Which direction design takes next remains to be seen. The discussion seems to continue, and new models, terms, and dogmas are introduced at the same speed as before. In the meantime – and irrespective of this discussion – many design students are still trained to design as if nothing had happened, whereas more and more progressive design schools and professors, as well as more and more business schools, gradually integrate the constantly changing and most recent takes on design thinking into their curricula. In the years to come, this will inevitably change design practice, as well as the landscape surrounding design and designers. One specific development, however, might prove to be the ultimate turning point for bridging design and business: service design.
1K.J. Klein and J.S. Sorra. October 1996. “The Challenge of Innovation Implementation,” The Academy of Management Review 21, no. 4, pp. 1055-1080.
2T. Seymour and S. Hussein. 2014. “The History of Project Management,” International Journal of Management & Information Systems 18, no. 4.
3Montréal Design Declaration – Press release issued on November 9, 2017 at the first World Design Summit in Montréal.
4United Nations. 2015. Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Resolution 70/1 adopted by the General Assembly on September 25, 2015.
5R. Turner, Y. Weisbarth, K. Ekuan, G. Zaccai, P. Picaud, and P. Haythornthwaite. Spring 2005. “Insights on Innovation,” Design Management Review 16, no. 2, pp. 16-22.
6F. Galindo-Rueda and V. Millot. 2015. Measuring Design and its Role in Innovation, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, 2015/01, OECD Publishing.
7M. Candi. 2005. Design as an Element of Innovation: Evaluating Design Emphasis and Focus in New Technology Firms (Reykjavik, Iceland: School of Business, University of Reykjavik).
8J. Thackara. 2005. In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
9Y. Koo and R. Cooper. 2011. “Managing Corporate Social Responsibility through Design,” DMI Review 22, no. 1.
10W. Visser. 2006. The Cognitive Artifacts of Designing (New York, NY: Routledge).
11B. Borja de Mozota. 2011. Handbook of Design Management Research, Chapter 18: Design Strategic Value Revisited, pp. 278-93.
12B. Borja de Mozota and B. Y. Kim. 2009. “From Design as Fit to Design as Resource,” DMI Review 20/2, pp. 66–76.
13FROG. 2017. The Business Value of Design (San Francisco, CA: FROG Insights).
14J. Barney. 1991. “Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage,” Journal of Management 17, no. 1, pp. 99-120.
15C. Bason. 2017. Leading Public Design: How Managers Engage with Design to Transform Public Governance (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School).
16J.C. Diehl and H.H.C.M. Christiaans. Globalization and cross-cultural product design. Proceedings from International Design Conference – Design, May 15-18, 2006; Dubrovnik, Croatia.
17C. Madsbjerg. 2017. Sensemaking; What Makes Human Intelligence Essential in the Age of the Algorithm (New York, NY: Little Brown Book Group).
18J. Maeda. 2006. The Laws of Simplicity (Boston, MA: MIT Press).
19C. Heath and D. Heath. 2010. Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (New York, NY: Thorndike Press).
20R.H. Thaler and C.R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge – Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (London, UK: Penguin).
21Service Design Network/Netherlands Enterprise Agency. 2016. Service Design Impact Report: Public Sector, Cologne, Germany.
22F. Capra. 1996. The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter (London, UK: Flamingo).
23R.D. Arnold. 2015. A Definition of Systems Thinking: A Systems Approach, 2015 Conference on Systems Engineering Research.
24P. Beirne. 2014. Wicked Design 101: Teaching to the complexity of our times, Relating Systems Thinking and Design 2014 working paper.
25A. Fernández-Mesa, J. Alegre-Vidal, R. Chiva-Gómez and A. Gutiérrez-Gracia. 2012. Design Management Capability: Its Mediating Role between Organizational Learning Capability and Innovation Performance in SMEs.
26J. Zhuo. 2019. The Making of a Manager (New York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin).
27B. Lawson. 2005. How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified (London, UK: Elsevier Architectural Press).
28K. Michlewski. 2015. Design Attitude (London, UK: Gower).
29B. Borja de Mozota. 2003. Design Management – Using Design to Build Brand Value and Corporate Innovation (Sacramento, CA: DMI/Allworth).
30H.M.A. Fraser. 2019. Design Works: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Value through Business Design (Toronto, ON, Canada: Rotman).
31J. Yee, E. Jefferies and K. Michlewski. 2017. Transformations: 7 Roles to Drive Change by Design (Amsterdam: BIS Publishers).
32L. Kimbell. 2009. Beyond Design Thinking: Design-as-Practice and Designs-in-Practice. Paper presented at the CRESC Conference, September 2009, Manchester, UK.
33A. Ignatius. September 2015. Design as Strategy (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review).
34T. Brown. 2009. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (New York, NY: Harper Collins).
35Pollen Trend Consulting. 2017. Twitter Conversation Analysis on Design Management Hashtags 10.2.2017-10.3.2017 showed the occurrence of “Design Thinking” 10416 times, while ”Design Management” occurred 91 times during the same period.
36A. Papadopoulos. 2012. Design Thinking – Factors Influencing the Current and Future Adoption of Design Thinking within Design-Thinking-Experienced Companies [Master Thesis], Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School.
37N. Tromp and P. Hekkert. 2018. Designing for Society: Products and Services for a Better World (London, UK: Bloomsbury).