Making Design a Business Priority

October 11, 2015

Design is on everyone’s mind – has been for a while, and it is heartening to see that it continues to be so. While we know all the big names in design, those who like IDEO made it a household term, we now see others such as IT services companies of the likes of IBM and Infosys, and Management Consulting companies such as McKinsey champion it.

Mahin Samdhani, VP of Experience at McKinsey Design Labs was featured in a McKinsey Insights article. In an interview he talks about the need for businesses to make design a priority, what that implies and how to create an organization that leverages design. The article has a tenor that is similar to what one could expect if this were an interview with a design leader in any another services company that advocates design.

Briefly, this is what the article and the interview says:

There is evidence that companies that practice design or have made design an integral part of their strategy have not only delivered better outcomes for their customers but also have performed better on other indicators and created stockholder wealth.

If that is true, he asks companies to examine how they treat design and designers themselves – such as, the extent of influence designers carry on decisions as indicated for example, by their seniority in the organization.

He talks about the need to understand customers deeply and to put a lot of focus on truly understanding and solving their pain points. Focusing on lifestyles and experiences are the other two other commonly heard elements of advice.

When it comes to creating a design culture, he talks about the fact that companies need to make internal changes in the way they operate, their processes and systems in order to leverage the opportunities that come with becoming design-centric.

Here are my thoughts on these points:

These are all arguments we have heard for a while – that design delivers business advantage, that it is about customer-centricity, new dimensions of value such as experiences, and that one needs to foster a design culture that respects designers and gives them influence in the organization, while getting the whole organization to become design-thinkers.

I come away with the feeling I have now held for long, that there is something missing in this line of thinking.

The universe of design within any organization is vast – it touches not only what I prefer to call offerings that might include products, services, or a combination of the two, but also includes the systems and stakeholders that create that value, the business models that ensure that the value is captured, the processes and systems that deliver that value and so on. Yet, reading such articles, with their emphasis on customer-centricity, I think this more pervasive need for design in any enterprise is deemphasized and ignored.

Secondly, there is an implicit assumption that because one has ‘understood’ the customer, good design will result. I do not believe that such an outcome is an automatic correlation of the ‘understanding’. In fact, if there is anything that distinguishes design leaders from others that do or do not practice design, is their ability to translate what they have understood into offerings, systems and enterprises that make an impact, and deliver Positive, Distinctive and Enduring Value (I use the acronym VIPED – to bring these ideas together).

The operative word ‘understand’ is mostly described by the champions of design, as a data-gathering exercise, a result of open-minded observation and deep immersion. True, that is indeed important, but data gathering is but one stage. What follows is what makes the difference.

We all know what cognitive models do to what we see and how we learn. All enterprises have a history, they have a point-of-view about the world – frames through which they see reality. These extend way beyond their products and services to the extent that they are an integral part of their identity and sense of being. Those frames cannot be easily set aside, and reframing is non-trivial.

Even if one has an opportunity to get the frames right, the dots that connect the observation of the pain points to insights and eventually to good design too are non-trivial.

Nowhere do such recommendations talk about what that involves – the needs for understanding what value means, understanding ecosystems and systems and their dynamics, the many dimensions of the systems, such as Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political and Values (STEEP-V) that one must understand. One must understand the different ways change manifests through these lenses, the implications of trends and likely futures on what one designs so that it has enduring value. There is almost no mention of creating offerings that are design systems in themselves – platforms for value co-creation within stakeholder ecosystems.

These are some of the reasons design cultures are hard to build. This is why one sees a lot of disappointment and disillusion with the word.

For, important, urgent and critical as it is – one needs to look design in its face and understand that enterprises that truly want to embrace design, must also think of it simultaneously as a strategic design challenge.

Else, it will remain a cosmetic effort. Skin-deep at best, It will not deliver positive, enduring and distinctive value and make an impact.