Category Archives: Design Thinking

Innovating While Getting Things Done

September 17, 2009 – 8:20 am

In Tom Watson’s response to Seth Godin yesterday, he wrote:

Change ain’t easy when the world keeps moving and you have the keep the lights on…

More nonprofits need to adapt, to experiment, to take risks, to embrace change. But they need to keep on providing services while they’re doing it.

This is a real dilemma. Interestingly, the New York Times had a story about exactly this issue last week.

In Welcoming the New, Improving the Old, Sara Beckman wrote:

For decades, companies from Cisco Systems to Staples to Bank of America have worked to embed the basic techniques of Six Sigma, the business approach that relies on measurement and analysis to make operations as efficient as possible.

More recently, in the last 5 to 10 years, they have been told they must master a new set of skills known as “design thinking.” Aiming to help companies innovate, design thinking starts with an intense focus on understanding real problems customers face in their day-to-day lives — often using techniques derived from ethnographers — and then entertains a range of possible solutions.

To many, the two skill sets don’t fit together well, and Chuck Jones, vice president for global consumer design at Whirlpool, explains why that may be so. Design thinkers, he says, are like quantum physicists, able to consider a world in which anything — like traveling at the speed of light — is theoretically possible. But a majority of people, including the Six Sigma advocates in most corporations, think more like Newtonian physicists — focused on measurement along three well-defined dimensions.

…The different world views, however, can be brought together.

At Whirlpool, Mr. Jones first proved the value of design with the introduction of the Duet washer and dryer. Duet’s novel, easy-to-use, energy-efficient design made Whirlpool a player in the front-loader market. After that success, he invited Whirlpool’s Six Sigma experts to help him improve design processes. They developed various new metrics — for how customers evaluate product quality, for example — that allowed designers and Six Sigma types to understand each other better.

Progressive Insurance has also turned design and Six Sigma techniques into reasonably comfortable bedfellows. In the early 1990s, it started emphasizing showing up at an accident scene and handling situations in real time, according to a 2004 article by Michael Hammer in The Harvard Business Review. That move reflected a designer’s way of thinking about customer needs, but the company was able to execute the idea through its ability to measure, analyze and improve its processes.

Both worlds — the quantum one where designers push boundaries to surprise and delight, and the Newtonian one where workers meet deadlines and margins — are meaningful. The most successful companies will learn to build bridges between them and leverage them both.

Commenting on the article, Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, writes:

I have to admit that for a long time I was highly skeptical of design thinking’s ability to operate in a Six Sigma environment and I was once quoted in the Economist as saying that it was toxic to innovation.

I don’t think that anymore. Having spent more time studying companies like Toyota I have realized that high quality (the goal of Six Sigma) is a great platform for new ideas (the goal of design thinking). Similarly, as Chuck Jones implies, Six Sigma can help new ideas get better faster…

Perhaps we should think of design thinking and Six Sigma being part of a cycle, each feeding the other to create new and improved products, services and experiences. Of course the biggest challenge will be to build business cultures that are agile enough to incorporate both.

I think Tim is right that the big challenge is to “build business cultures that are agile enough to incorporate both.” This is an area where nonprofits and for-profits share the exact same challenge. There’s no simple answer to this problem. It is simply something every outstanding organization has to figure out. As it relates to the conversation yesterday about social media, great organizations need to adopt social media even while older forms of communication are paying the bills. And while older approaches are being used, they still need to be improved.

No one ever said this stuff was easy.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Innovation, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Social Media | Comments (5)

Accepting Discomfort as We Navigate Uncertainty

September 14, 2009 – 8:04 am

Last month I was invited to a brainstorming session hosted by IDEO. The focus was on Innovation in Evaluation and one of the outputs is a blog authored by IDEO and hosted by GOOD magazine. The brainstorming session concluded with the identification of a number of core concepts that we discussed and a promise from IDEO to explore these topics further. This week, IDEO’s Aaron Sklar wrote a post on the GOOD blog in which he answered the question “How Might We Increase Comfort as We Navigate Uncertainty?”

Aaron wrote:

Anyone who engages with new ideas must develop a certain level of comfort with uncertainty. Once an organization takes a step beyond what it has successfully done in the past—a new offering or engaging a new group of people—uncertainty becomes an uneasy factor.  At a firm like IDEO, stepping into the unknown is a daily experience, and those drawn to collaborating with us are compelled to break away from the status quo, accepting the risks and discomfort that accompany bold moves.

…Below, we suggest four approaches to help organizations increase their level of comfort while making decisions in the face of uncertainty.

He then laid out four core ideas and explained each.

  • Determine what to measure early on.
  • Learn by doing.
  • Let indicators lead the way.
  • Refine what you are measuring as you learn more.

You can read all of Aaron’s post with his explanation of each approach by clicking here.

IDEO asked me to write a response to Aaron’s post on the GOOD blog. As I prepared to sketch out my ideas, I realized that while I thought Aaron was spot on, his suggestions were ways to overcome uncertainty. I wonder if instead, we need to learn to accept uncertainty. This is what I came up with.

Originally posted on the GOOD Magazine Innovation in Evaluation blog.

In his recent post, Aaron Sklar gave an excellent set of recommendations that focused on ways to decrease uncertainty by measuring proxies for the inevitably messy business of creating social impact. But in addition to finding ways to evaluate under conditions of uncertainty, I think it is critical that we get comfortable with the discomfort that uncertainty causes.

The question under consideration assumes that we should seek comfort in the way we tackle problems of social impact. But I wonder, at the risk of sounding too Zen, if instead we need to accept the idea that the business of creating social impact is one that explicitly makes people uncomfortable.

It isn’t fun to feel uncomfortable, but it isn’t terrible. In fact, in many cases, philanthropists are attempting to fund programs serving people who are far more uncomfortable than then donor will ever be. The “discomfort” stemming from a lack of access to water or an unplanned teenage pregnancy simply dwarfs the “discomfort” that a donor might feel from grant-making under conditions of uncertainty.

Great investors in the for-profit space have come to accept the discomfort of uncertainty. Baron Rothschild, a member of the great banking family, is known to have said, “Buy when there’s blood in the streets.” And Warren Buffett warns that “You pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus.” In other words, if everyone agrees with your investment decision, then it is probably not a good one.

Blood in the streets? Investing when no one agrees with you? Talk about discomfort and uncertainty. In fact, I believe that the discomfort caused by uncertainty is a requirement of great philanthropy. Great outcomes are achieved when an appropriate level of risk is undertaken; risk is caused by uncertainty, and uncertainty causes discomfort. We should not just advocate for philanthropy to become comfortable with uncertainty, but to acknowledge that great grant-making requires funders to accept discomfort.

Humans don’t like to take risks. We are evolutionarily designed to be risk adverse. But good philanthropy, just like good investing, requires taking risks. Maybe a Zen approach to evaluation isn’t just a new age joke. Maybe accepting discomfort rather than trying to overcome it is the key to navigating uncertainty.

  • How can philanthropists learn when discomfort stems from appropriate risk taking and when it signals an intuitive response to which the donor should listen?
  • Behavioral finance and psychology have offered investors many lessons on avoiding the traps that encourage them to succumb to discomfort. What lessons might philanthropy learn from these disciplines?

You can find the original post here.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Evaluation, Impact Measurement, Philanthropy | Comments (6)

IDEO & Philanthropy

August 13, 2009 – 9:09 am

Some time last year I started reading about the company IDEO. IDEO is one of the leading design firms globally (they designed the modern computer mouse!), but from my standpoint, it is their pioneering work in “design thinking” that caught my attention and got me thinking about the applications of their approach in philanthropy.

I briefly met IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown while we were both in Dubai last year for the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council meeting. A few months later I started writing about T-Shaped People in Philanthropy, a phrase Tim uses to describe the types of people IDEO hires. I later expanded on the idea in an essay I wrote for the Grant Managers Network about IDEO, design thinking and consilience.

But to tell you the truth, my sense that IDEO had something powerful to contribute to philanthropy was more of a hunch than anything else. But yesterday I had the pleasure of joining IDEO’s Social Impact group for an afternoon of brainstorming.

Wow.

If you are involved with a large grantmaker or nonprofit, I strongly suggest you keep an eye on IDEO and start thinking about how you might be able to get them involved with your work. Luckily, there’s a brand new way for our field to get familiar with how IDEO thinks about solving social problems: a blog they are authoring hosted by GOOD Magazine.

The blog is called Innovation in Evaluation. The brainstorming session I attended yesterday was intended to help them decide which topics to write about. You’ll have to read the blog to learn more, but if issues like dealing with uncertainty, planning under dynamic conditions, the value of intuitive decision making and how to measure “the unmeasureable” resonate with you, this is a blog you’re going to want to watch.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Evaluation, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy | Comments (5)

Successful Grantmaking

May 21, 2009 – 2:27 pm

This article I wrote appears in the current edition of the Grant Managers Network Examiner newsletter.

Successful Grantmaking: T-Shaped People, Consilience & Design Thinking

By Sean Stannard-Stockton

How can grantmakers be successful in the 21st century?  They need to embrace design thinking and become T-Shaped People.

Philanthropy is a most cross-disciplinary practice.  While program officers must have technical domain expertise in their core area of focus, to be truly successful they must also be able to relate their unique knowledge base to the broader, interrelated context within which society operates.  The name for people who are able to pull this off?  T-Shaped People.

The phrase is becoming closely associated with the pioneering design firm IDEO and its Chief Executive Officer Tim Brown.  That a design firm has lessons to teach philanthropy should not be surprising, once you understand IDEO’s business as “problem solving.”  In a recent Fast Company article, Brown wrote:

“We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them ‘T-shaped people.’”   They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers.  But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well.  They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need.   That’s what you’re after at this point — patterns that yield ideas.”

This belief that the individuals who achieve the most impact blend their core knowledge into a broader understanding of the world resonates with another concept that I think is relevant to philanthropy: consilience.  Consilience means “unity of knowledge” (or more literally the “jumping together” of knowledge).  The phrase was popularized by famed biologist Edward O. Wilson in his aptly named book Consilience:  The Unity of Knowledge.  I believe the key to unlocking the potential of philanthropy is to break out of our silos and embrace consilience.

Consilience recognizes that every field of study captures only a snapshot of reality.  For example, while economists might believe that economics is the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, the fact is economic theory does not accurately describe reality until you begin to take into account the biological, psychological, and sociological behaviors of humans.  Even then, a broader systems approach is needed to understand how the market affects the environment and human culture, as well as the moral implications of market outcomes.

For philanthropy to realize the potential being presented in the 21st century, the trick will be not just to bring economists, sociologists, technologists, biologists, etc. to the table, but to truly forge a consilience of knowledge across all domains.  The whole will be more than the sum of its parts.

IDEO, it turns out, has more to offer philanthropy.  IDEO Founder David Kelley was profiled recently in another Fast Company article, where he explained the concept of “design thinking,” which he teaches at the Stanford Institute of Design (the “d.school”). From the article:

The way Kelley sees it, [the United States’] polyglot populace gives us an extraordinary advantage in generating truly creative ideas.  That idea was one of the animating forces behind the d.school — a place that would help analytical Stanford types become creative thinkers.  The school would welcome students from business, law, education, medicine, engineering — the more diverse, the better.

“When David was making the case for the d.school at Stanford,” says [David’s brother], “he went to [University President John] Hennessy and said, ‘Look, we’re good at “deep.”  We have Nobel Laureates drilling down into esoteric topics.  But what if there are problems that aren’t solved by deep, but broad?  We should have a side bet in broad.’”

This concept is the activating principal behind T-Shaped people.  In the article, Kelley explains to a group of d.school students that IDEO and the d.school are focused on “design thinking,” not “design.”

“You’re sitting here today because we moved from thinking of ourselves as designers to thinking of ourselves as design thinkers,” he continues.  “What we, as design thinkers have, is this creative confidence that, when given a difficult problem, we have a methodology that enables us to come up with a solution that nobody has before.”

“They went meta on the notion of design,” says Roger Martin, Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, referring to the shift from object design to focusing on organizational processes.  “They concluded the same principles can be applied to the design of say, emergency-room procedures as a shopping cart.”

And this is where we make the connection to philanthropy.  If philanthropy is going to fund new, innovative ideas, we must engage in design thinking.  If our field is going to advance despite the absence of market forces requiring funders to make smart grants, we need design thinking.  If the social benefit sector as a whole is going to produce high-impact, systemic change, we need design thinking.

The article continues:

Design thinking represents a serious challenge to the status quo at more traditional companies, especially those where engineering or marketing may hold sway.  Patrick Whitney, Dean of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), who sends many of his graduates off to IDEO, says he sees this resistance all the time.  “A lot of my students have MBAs and engineering degrees.  They’re taught to identify the opportunity set, deal with whatever numbers you can find to give you certainty, then optimize.”

But some problems need to be restated before a big, new idea can be hatched.  It often helps to take the problem and break it apart, before putting it back together in a whole new way — the synthesis or abstraction step.  That’s where the creative leap often occurs and what IDEO’s process is designed to unearth.

I cannot think of an approach more finely tuned for philanthropy.  So many problems that philanthropy seeks to fix are products of unsatisfactory, but stable equilibriums.  Producing impact in many cases is not just about “optimizing” the current situation; it is about taking the problem, breaking it apart, and then putting it back together in a completely new way.

What does it all mean?  It means none of us has all the answers.  None of us knows what is right for philanthropy.  It means that for philanthropy to truly reach its potential, we need to “jump together” all of our varied wisdom in a way that recognizes our contribution is no more or less important than that of people with domain expertise different from our own.

What does it take to pull this off?  Empathy.

Tim Brown specifically states that T-Shaped people must be empathetic to pull it all together.  If there is one skill that everyone in philanthropy has, it is empathy.  Without empathy, philanthropy simply is not an interesting subject.  If there is one field that can pull off the difficult trick of creating consilience, it is ours.

—

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in New Philanthropy, Philanthropy | Comments (0)

Design Thinking in Philanthropy

February 24, 2009 – 9:05 pm

I just finished reading an excellent piece of journalism; an in depth look at IDEO founder David Kelley that appeared in last month’s issue of Wired Magazine Fast Company (hat tip @socialentrprnr). Earlier this month I wrote about IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown and the concept of T-Shaped People. I’ve been intrigued by IDEO for some time, but until reading the Wired piece I wasn’t quite sure why I thought a design firm held important lessons for philanthropy.

In addition to founding IDEO, Kelley also founded the Stanford d.school. From the article:

The way Kelley sees it, [the United States’] polyglot populace gives us an extraordinary advantage in generating truly creative ideas. That idea was one of the animating forces behind the d.school — a place that would help analytical Stanford types become creative thinkers. The school would welcome students from business, law, education, medicine, engineering — the more diverse, the better.

“When David was making the case for the d.school at Stanford,” says [David’s brother], “he went to [university president John] Hennessy and said, ‘Look, we’re good at “deep.” We have Nobel Laureates drilling down into esoteric topics. But what if there are problems that aren’t solved by deep, but broad? We should have a side bet in broad.’ “

This concept is the activating principal behind T-Shaped people. In the article Kelley explains to a group of d.School students that Ideo and the d.School is focused on “design thinking”, not “design”.

“You’re sitting here today because we moved from thinking of ourselves as designers to thinking of ourselves as design thinkers,” he continues. “What we, as design thinkers, have, is this creative confidence that, when given a difficult problem, we have a methodology that enables us to come up with a solution that nobody has before.”

…”They went meta on the notion of design,” says Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, referring to the shift from object design to focusing on organizational processes. “They concluded the same principles can be applied to the design of, say, emergency-room procedures as a shopping cart.”

And this is where we make the connection to philanthropy. If philanthropy is going to fund new, innovative ideas we must engage in design thinking. If our field is going to advance despite the absence of market forces requiring funders to make smart grants, we need design thinking. If the social benefit sector as a whole is going to produce high impact, systemic change, we need design thinking.

The article continues:

Design thinking represents a serious challenge to the status quo at more traditional companies, especially those where engineering or marketing may hold sway. Patrick Whitney, dean of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), who sends many of his graduates off to Ideo, says he sees this resistance all the time. “A lot of my students have MBAs and engineering degrees. They’re taught to identify the opportunity set, deal with whatever numbers you can find to give you certainty, then optimize.”

But some problems need to be restated before a big, new idea can be hatched. It often helps to take the problem and break it apart, before putting it back together in a whole new way — the synthesis or abstraction step. That’s where the creative leap often occurs and what Ideo’s process is designed to unearth.

I can’t think of an approach more finely tuned for philanthropy. So many problems that philanthropy seeks to fix are products of unsatisfactory, but stable equilibriums. Producing impact in many cases is not just about “optimizing” the current situation, it is about taking the problem, breaking it apart, and then putting it back together in a whole new way.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Information Sharing, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy | Comments (5)