Posts

No Walk in the Park

/0 Comments/in /by

Karnataka State in India is considering a Design Park along the lines of one in Dubai. Design is on everyone’s mind. Creative Economies are engines of growth, and the UK, as one example, has done a great job in making that real.

Could parks such as these alone become engines for the creative economy, or, does one need a more thoughtful approach to creating innovation ecosystems?

I am critical of such efforts, as I have seen a history of them not having enduring power. I advocate a deeper approach from a long-term societal development perspective, which is perhaps less spectacular.

In India, Industrial Parks have come and gone — there were software parks, electronic cities, and export zones and I am sure there are many that escape my memory. I do not believe any of them have made any substantial difference to the landscape, given our global standings in these areas. What made an enduring difference, was the Public Sector for example, much of  which is now on sale.

The fad of the day is a pretext to a spectacle — a big investment — some people, usually in construction and infrastructure will make a lot of money. Somebody who had access to a political ear, whispered promises and lullabies that fed into the hunger for finding a place on the world stage.

Not embedded in a wider culture, all these spectacles eventually die, as they need to wall themselves off behind gated communities, and mostly serve people elsewhere, to survive. There are perhaps now more graveyards than parks of these bygone eras.

So, here then comes yet another grand initiative.

As has been the general trend of ‘development’ in Bangalore in the past — one will need to go even farther off to find real estate, for it will demand huge amount of land. And, wherever they find that place, will be difficult to commute to — adding to the woes of this unfortunate city and its congestion and traffic woes.

And, all this in a society that is broadly not sensitive to design in its popular sense. All you need to do is check what is offered in most of the design schools across the country and the courses that are high in demand even in the best ones.

One of the NIIT founders (Mr. Thadani) several years ago, had rightly recognized that the country needed a quality consciousness. He was going to set up quality institutes along the lines of NIIT. Guess where that went?

The ideas of design, embedded in projects such as these, essentially feed the consumer economy driven engines — serving fashion and fad. It will perhaps, and in all likelihood, have very little impact on the well-being of the average citizen.

I have personally experienced what is mostly called ‘design’ — whether in the form of products or services. The lesser we talk about services the better — for neither design, nor quality exist in the so-called ‘back office’ of the world — clearly having learned nothing from what it means to provide quality services abroad.

Trickle-down theories do not work for sure. There are other forms of diffusion, and these are certainly not conceived strategically that way.

Product quality is a sham — there is much consciousness about “Brand” for sure — for there is excellence in but one field — Advertising — and the worlds of make-believe. Beware if you go deep under the covers of what you consume.

In the small town where I spent a little over a year recently, you could buy Zeiss lenses, except they did not know how to fit them into your frames, you could buy luxury paints, except the painters did not know what a good painting job looked like.

But, we do make exquisite jingles, and brand consciousness is high.

So, here comes another sham spectacle on a large stage — like other parks this too will wither and die.

Perhaps, I do not sound hopeful here. However, there is indeed an alternative, there always is — it is not in the spectacular and it will take hard work, and institution building and culture building, which is unfortunately not on the menu. It takes gumption, spine and understanding, and that is no walk in the park.

Rehearsing for theater and Design Research

/0 Comments/in , , /by

 

A conversation this morning, and this happened between long-time friends from the amateur theater world in Bangalore India, prompted this post. It occurred to me that rehearsals, which often lasted a couple of months or more, provided a direct experience in what it might mean in order to ‘make’ in a design studio for insight.

If a theater group stays with a production, then there is more that happens in terms of learning over time, as the play evolves and matures in its later iterations. I will come to that aspect of learning in some later post.

Here is a little background. Almost forty years ago, I got to become a part of an amateur theater group, Gnatak, in Bangalore, India. Pronounced ‘Natak’ (naa tuck), the Indian word for theater, the ‘G’ in the front of its spelling had many interpretations, left deliberately open. Every now and then, people would wonder and come up with some interpretation of what that letter might stand for —and in the process it seemed to provide a constantly evolving construction of identity.

That is a fascinating thought to explore, perhaps later — how posing an enigma creates a new language and grammar, opening up spaces for conversation and leaving a mystery in its trail for ongoing wonderment and fluid redefinition.

The motley group of college students, professional engineers, activists, artists, journalists, business people — fluidly came together around some sort of a permanent core of maybe eight or ten regulars, to produce on an average three to four plays a year. I happened to be there for almost five years during this intense period, until professional and other personal forces did their centrifugal magic.

At some other time, I will perhaps also write about the amazing productivity of the group’s informal organization, a concept I leveraged in my role as a Business Leader in an American Multinational to great success. It works!

The thought that got me to write this morning has to do with how the rehearsal process, a subset of the totality that was Gnatak for me, was a fascinating creative experience, a process whereby dead scripts and texts were brought to life.

The scripts, often written for a foreign, non-Indian context, (because we were all WAIP — Westernized, Anglo-Indian People), needed to be in English, the language we who came from across the country shared and were fluent in, often were about second hand-experiences.

These narratives were about strange contexts that we only had second-hand information, knowledge or understanding of. We were global citizens in some sense because of our upbringing and schooling, even though most of our knowledge beyond India was second or third-hand. However, we were merely in the face of huge unknowns that we needed to navigate over the course of the rehearsal months.

The not knowing too much about the context perhaps was an interesting prerequisite for our creativity — as we could make whatever meaning we wanted, giving it the accents of our looks, worldviews, ideas, and Indian-English manners of speaking in the process.

Somehow, through a process of initial probatory readings, a play was picked, because it produced some intuitive sense of its potential — it supposedly had ‘ghum’, another fluid word that in essence suggested a kind of radical exciting energy. 

Random contextual conditions would then decide what followed — who was available to act, who had time to direct, what spaces were available for rehearsal etc. 

Amateur theaters did not have permanent rehearsal spaces, which in afterthought is extremely conducive to creativity. All kinds of social networks came to life to find us somewhere we could practice. Often schools would let us use their halls to rehearse after hours, ignoring some of the social life and language that came with what characterized our unique sociality. 

But, when the gates were closed and lights turned off for the evening, there were always the streets lights under which one could go on into the early hours of the morning, timing determined by how late one could find restaurants that served tea. That is another fascinating dimension of an amateur theater ecosystem one must delve into later.

Every day the rehearsals were a revelation. One understood more about some nuance of the author’s intentions, historical context, the particular use of language, strange words that evoked our own made up meanings etc. Sometimes these revelations were radical and surprising. 

But, there was something else that happened that was perhaps more important for me. As we gave birth to these strange worlds as surrogates, who was acting, how they felt that day, and how they felt about each other, changed what happened on a given evening.  And, in that happening, something more opened up in the possibility spaces of the play’s worlds – Way beyond perhaps what the playwright might have had in mind. Every day these inter-personal dynamics changed what the play might have meant and what it meant to us.

This was a unique process of insight generation and it would definitely not have happened without the immersion and its youthful intensity. Some of the best and most interesting performances happened during these evenings and early hours of the morning on a street corner somewhere. 

There is one thing one learns from this process — there are no guarantees, irrespective of how much the idea is to concretize and capture the production of experience in a repeatable manner, that you will see something again. Not even on the day of the performance are you assured of a reproduction of your best rehearsal moments, though there is always the possibility of surprises on the day of the performance itself.

What a gift it is then to witness the evolution of meaning-making during the rehearsal, and not just some notion of a final version on the day of the public performance.

What then does this have to do with design research one might ask.

One watches a public performance of everyday life, in some kind of an ethnographic study sense. One brings back snapshots, and artifacts, and tries to capture and make sense of what those things might mean, looking for some kind of an essence beyond the literality of the spectacle and through that reflection reveal the scripts and the generative, productive processes — that are the ’sutras’ and the ‘mantras’, the signature patterns of the people we observe.

Gnatak too had a signature style — a very distinctive approach to what plays we chose to perform and how we did them. There are stories about how some other groups tried to do the same plays several decades later, and left audiences yearning for the return of the original.

Those signatures are what one is searching for too in society, the purpose of the research. 

It is the human collective that produces the human agents that is the intention of our understanding and quest. What for example, are the scripts in operation and how do we produce our responses to Covid or Climate Change? 

We can uncover the secrets of our improvisations and we could learn something from theater and the rehearsal process in particular about how to go backstage and get to those invisible authors of our lives.

Acting in Complexity

/0 Comments/in , /by

What does it mean to say, ’embrace complexity!’. This is something I have been pondering about for a while.

It is the recognition of a new kind if order – something we did not have language for – we also know the grammar of that expression- sometimes it is in visible structures but more often than not the structures are invisible. This is particularly true of human enterprise. It is much like a complex elephant – the kind that six blind men in the Jataka story try to figure out.

The purposeful human enterprise is a special case. When it encounters the real world, it must figure out how to make sense of and respond to this complexity in order to still achieve its purpose.

It needs the grammar and the language so that it can construct an appropriate response. It uses this to construct a model and Cilliers says this model must correspond as closely as possible to the world, but Borges or Foucault say that’s not possible. So, we are somehow condemned to never knowing completely- and yet we must act.

But we are no longer completely ignorant – what we have learnt is rather than command the world and expect it to obey, we invite it to a dance, and through this process, it reveals the balance of its secrets- that is our path to better knowledge. We cannot impose our will but tango and jazz.

The conversation is one that can anticipate and predict how the world will respond to our enquiries and requests.

The world is already engaged in a creative process – our presence must not intervene in its poetry but become co-creative.

The challenge for those that work in the design of new (digital) experiences, is to explore the transformational potential that digitizations harbor. Rather than slap digital onto the enterprise it asks how can one reimagine the enterprise in a fundamentally new way. Maybe develop better responses to some unanswered questions or wicked challenges. What are those?

To begin the process, we must have better knowledge – of what? What are the questions we must have good answers for? What has been worrying us – irrespective of whether a particular design challenge is on our mind. Could we make a strategic difference by considering something beyond the everyday?

Understanding the world is surely necessary, but so is the conception of a response- an enterprise that is a partner in the new creative endeavor- of value, perhaps more strategic!

Design schools do not have a discipline or practice that is analogous to the challenges strategic advisors face. The response is an artifact – the making of design principles.

The world cannot be described in a single way – the creative practitioner engages in a dialog and finds many answers – in that sense the practice is open-ended, but the essence, or the pearls start to reveal and speak the language of complex order. That is something we can learn from creative practitioners – how they pursue for discovery.

You need many probes, and single dives are inadequate- you must probe from many vantages – and many dimensions – like a grid one superimposes to tesselate and construct a whole image (techniques of painting from a photograph) – but it is all in the pursuit of seeking an answer to something – the pursuit of a more important question.

It calls for a deeper persistent engagement- not a one time thing – it is like acupuncture probes, or, constructing a jigsaw puzzle. You cannot do it in one setting.

We need to see new relationships- not the visible ones alone but the invisible ones within their own spaces and across spaces. Structures and flows lead to patterns in outcomes. Both structures and flows are novel.

How do you in your own world probe the unknown? What are your practices? What language and grammar do you use for understanding complexity?

When you see a swarm or beehive – when you see congestion or segregation – what questions arise? Are there analogous situations in your world? A catalog of the wicked.

What practices can you adopt or adapt? How do you construct questions? In the story of the sampling of the elephant in the Indian Jataka fable, and the formation of a fuzzy image. What is fuzzy logic here?

What you will ultimately behold still depends – self reflection and critique will reveal what perspectives inform your pictures of the world. What metaphors are at play? Landscapes and ecosystems.

Others will too. Another conversation- a meta conversation now occurs among our pictures – for we must now together construct yet another meta synthesis – a consensus tempered and informed by our purpose and the pragmatics of its realization. Once again, either we can conquer the landscape and impose on it a path, or invite a living organism to a dance.

Strategic design is about those choices – the degrees of intimacy we want in our relationship with the world – should we continue to act in narrow interests or become custodians of the worlds we inhabit.

The context of the larger Value Creating Complex and our own Value Creating Enterprise within it matter

In the Designed world of new experiences, there is more freedom for the agents – complex phenomena are likely to occur (fluid recombination) – harvesting from those appropriately is what is strategic- to anticipate and be proactive – how does complexity additionally manifest in digital worlds?

I could have used a sub-title for this post – Weaving tapestries – the warp of creative practice and the weft of complex human social worlds

Making Design a Business Priority

/0 Comments/in /by

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.

Fail Faster, Fail Often with Poor Design

/0 Comments/in /by

2014

There has been disappointing news in the entrepreneurial / new venture world in recent weeks.

Recent studies by the Economist showed a decline in new ventures and entrepreneurial activity in the US and this article by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker, tries to analyze the phenomena of large scale failure among startups.

Start up – Runner on the blocks

While it is generally assumed that entrepreneurship is for those who have a healthy appetitie for risk, he argues that that is not necessarily true. What distinguishes this class of adventurers according to him is their self-confidence.

There is a culture that has been created around entrepreneurship too – advice that recommends “Fail often and fail fast”, the relatively easy task of getting money and started and other circumstantial and contextual aspects that encourage such risk-taking.

Somewhere in such a system are mechanisms that are supposed to identify and filter the good from the poor ideas. It is assumed that the financiers have the acumen and wisdom to identify the ventures most likely to succeed. Then why I wonder is the failure rate so high.

I have had some exposure to a number of such entrepreneurs due to the location where I work in Cambridge. I am surrounded by the highest density in any one location of startups anywhere in the world. These are really smart people with great ideas, energetic, often young, enthusiastic, and also sincere.

However, I have often found, whether due to the culture of the entrepreneurial sector or due to their self-cofnidence, that their ventures are usually based primarily on product ideas or rooted in some novel technology. However, in most cases, they do not seem to have robust business concepts.

There is however also no appetite or patience for the effort it would take to design a venture. Having developed a business plan, in their mind, is a good enough substitute for a business design. I do not think they are to be held a fault here. The system encourages such thinking.

One argument is that, a good design evolves. Evolution does indeed happen in business, but then it also leaves too much to chance. Perhaps, the failure of an individual entrepreneur or venture is but a matter of statistics for the venture capitalist.

But, there is indeed a better way. It would do all in the system good to take the time to design the venture well – even if in visionary terms, before going too far forward. It would take some more deliberate work up front, but we would not see the kind of failures we see.

It is romantic indeed to think in terms of the tooth and claw nature of the world of competition and failure and extinction of species in biological/ecological terms. But, we are humans, our social systems are an improvement on that logic. We can change things through design.

If, I want to be an entrepreneur, I do not want to discover what the Germans found – that failure does not necessarily guarantee future success. I do not want to be a statistic in someone’s portfolio. I can design my way to better outcomes.

A design expert responds on Social Business strategy

/0 Comments/in /by

March 8, 2013

I came across this post by Idrees Mootee on his blog. It is his response to a blog post by Peter Kim of Dachis. I read through Peter’s post, and while I might differ on how I would express what he says, I agree with several of his arguments.

A good Social Business strategy cannot be a ‘me too’ one. As in the case of any substantial innovation, the strategy must be rooted in the enterprise’s own context. A friend used to say it well – “If you want to grow a rose in your garden, you cannot just pluck one from your neighbor’s garden”. That however is true of any strategic effort, and not just particular to Social Business. I prefer to look at Social Technology (more than Information Technology) -driven innovation as part of a larger domain of Enterprise Innovation. Perhaps the whole point of calling it ‘Social Business Strategy’ is to communicate with the larger conversation in the industry, where the term ‘social’ has been badly mauled in my opinion.

Any innovation strategy must be anchored within the larger strategic framework of the enterprise. Misalignment is dysfunctional in all cases, and is not true for Social Business Innovation alone. I advocate the creation of a Transformation Program which manages the Social Design product platform and brings an overall discipline to the prioritization and execution of innovation initiatives. This again is not a new idea. The typical ‘social media’ evangelists perhaps do not have exposure or familiarity with such ideas, so it is not surprising that this needs to be made explicit and emphasized. Given the general culture of the industry, there is a tendency to promise quick returns and discount the complexity and challenges involved in designing solutions that provide enduring advantage.

The other point Peter makes is one I have been advising my clients for a long time now. If this new trend is transformational, and I am convinced it is, then it must become a part of an enterprise’s business practices, just as six sigma or knowledge management have become integral to the way you do business. However, the new paradigm brings with a whole new set of practices that everyone in the enterprise is not proficient in. If an enterprise then wished to accelerate the spread of this innovation widely, it must establish a practice, a Center-of-Excellence, which provides a number of different kinds of value. It helps bring others on line with the new ideas, hand-holds them in their application, provides a place for accelerating learning, etc. Before the practice has reached maturity, an entity such as this can play a critical role in success.

What then is Idrees Mootee so upset about? (I have great respect for him – amazing pioneer in the field of design).

I think I would be upset too – if all this was positioned as something radically new, as something that was happening now. What is radical is the kind of innovation that is possible and the velocity with which new designs are emerging. There is an urgency here, an Enterprise State of Emergency, and people are trying to understand how to go beyond the popular narratives. He is right though, that some of these trends have been going on for quite some time. I have discussed elsewhere that Innovation with “social technologies” is not new – that is exactly what the Knowledge Management and Collaboration initiatives from 15 years ago were all about. I think a reconciliation between the two is possible. Idrees Mootee was most likely not Peter Kim’s audience for his article!