Rotman Magazine Spring/Summer
2006
by Jeanne Liedtka
Design has been proclaimed the
‘secret weapon’ for competition in the 21st century. Here’s how managers can
start thinking more like designers.
The problems with traditional
approaches to planning have long been recognized.
They include the attempt to make
a ‘science’ of planning, with its subsequent loss
of creativity; the excessive
emphasis on numbers; the drive for administrative efficiency
at the expense of substance; and
the dominance of single techniques, inappropriately
applied. Yet, decades later,
strategists continue to struggle to propose
clear alternatives to traditional
processes.
Design offers a different
approach and suggests processes that are more
widely participative, more
dialogue-based, issue-rather-than-calendar-driven, and
conflict-using rather than
conflict-avoiding, all aimed at invention and learning,
rather than control.
But beneath all the hyperbole, we
have to question what it would actually mean for
business strategy if managers
took the idea of design seriously. What if we tried to
think the way designers do?
Having studied how various kinds of designers work and
create for the past decade, I
offer the following ten suggestions as a starting point in
the conversation.
If We Took the Design Metaphor
Seriously
1. We would realize that
designing business strategy is about invention.
For all their talk about the art
and science of management, strategists, in the analytic
search for ‘the one right
strategy’, have mostly paid attention to the science.Taking
the design metaphor seriously
means acknowledging the difference between
what scientists do and what
designers do.
Whereas scientists investigate
today to discover explanations for what already is,
designers invent tomorrow to
create something that isn’t.
We all care about strategy
because we want the future to be different from the
present. But powerful futures are
rarely discovered primarily through analytics.
They are, as Walt Disney said,
“created first in the mind and next in the activity.”
This doesn’t deny analysis an
important role, but it does subordinate analysis to the
process of invention.
As an example of the tension
between invention and analysis, take the Sydney
Opera House, whose designer, Jørn
Utzon, was awarded architecture’s highest
honor, the Pritzker Prize, in
2003. It’s hard now to imagine Australia without the Sydney
Opera House, but it’s quite
possible that it would never have been built if initial
estimates for the project had
been accurate. In 1957, when Utzon’s proposal was
selected, accountants estimated
that the project would take five years to complete
and cost $7 million. In reality,
it took 14 years and cost more than $100 million.
John Lowe, who chronicled the
story, quotes Ove Arup, an engineer who
collaborated with Utzon on the
project: “If the magnitude of the task had been fully
appreciated… the Opera House
would never have been built. And the fact that it
wasn’t known…was one of the
unusual circumstances that made the miracle
possible.” Thank goodness the
accountants got the analysis wrong.
2. We’d recognize the primacy of
persuasion.
If strategy is indeed an
invention – just one story about the future among many – then it is always
contestable. Leaders must therefore persuade others of the compelling wisdom
and superiority of the story they have chosen.They must, in fact, make the
story seductive; in selling their strategy,
they must, to put it bluntly,
treat employees like ‘lovers’ instead of ‘prostitutes.’
It’s not easy to entice people
into sharing an image of the future. After all,
strategies in most industries
today call on people to commit to something new and
different, to step away from the
security of what has worked in the past. This is never
an easy sell, even for the most
seasoned leaders. Like venturing into a new relationship,
persuading others to share your
vision works best when you issue an invitation
instead of a command.
Designers understand this.
Successful architects, for instance, know that to get
their great buildings built, they
must persuade clients to pay for them, and that
requires helping clients
visualize the end result. In fact, the more inventive the
architect, the more critical the
ability to conjure the image for the client and for
what may be a very skeptical
public. When Frank Gehry began sketching what
would become the Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao, he already had a profound feel
for what would draw a very
traditional Basque audience to his stunningly inventive
creation. Gehry explains his
approach: “You bring to the table certain things…the
Basques, their desire to use
culture, to bring the city to the river. And the industrial
feeling.”
Writing in The Los Angeles Times,
architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff
describes the result: “Gehry has
achieved what not so long ago seemed impossible for
most architects: the invention of
radically new architectural forms that nonetheless
speak to the man on the street.
Bilbao has become a pilgrimage point for those who,
until now, had little interest in
architecture. Working-class Basque couples arrive toting
children on weekends. The
cultural elite veer off their regular flight paths so they
can tell friends that they, too,
have seen the building in the flesh.” Gehry’s Guggenheim
persuades and seduces by
connecting to the Basque’s past and pointing toward a new
future.That is how strategies
become compelling and persuasive: they show an
organization its future without
discounting its past.They tell us what we get to keep as
well as what we must lose.
3. We’d value simplicity.
Think of an object you love. Chances
are that it is complex enough to perform its
function well, but no more
complex than it needs to be. In other words, it’s an elegant
solution. No design is a better
exemplar of simplicity and elegance than the little black
dress, or ‘LBD’.The most striking
aspect of the LBD, designed by Coco Chanel in the
1920s, is its simplicity. The LBD
does not overprescribe or adorn, but instead offers a
black canvas, which its wearer
tailors to the function at hand: add pearls and heels to
dress up; a bright scarf and
flats to dress down.The possibilities are endless, making
the LBD one of the most
functional items in a woman’s wardrobe. But the LBD goes beyond mere
functionality to achieve elegance: it lacks nothing essential and contains
nothing extraneous.
What if we used the LBD as a
model for business strategy? We would end up with strategies that would be
neither incomprehensible to all save their creators, nor banal and
self-evident. They would eschew the faddish and focus on enduring elements,
incorporating a versatility and
openness that invited their
‘wearers’ to add adornments to fit the occasion at hand. Perhaps
most importantly, they would
emphasize our positives while acknowledging our flaws – all in the service of
offering us hope for a better (thinner) tomorrow.
4. We’d aim to inspire.
One of the saddest facts about
the state of business design is the extent to which we settle for mediocrity.
We don’t even attempt to engage our audience at an emotional
level, let alone to inspire. Yet
the difference between great designs and those
that are only ‘okay’ is the way
the former call us to something greater.
Consider the differences between
the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Golden
Gate Bridge. The Bay Bridge
offers a route across the water. The Golden Gate Bridge does
that, too, but it also sweeps,
symbolizes, and enthralls. It has, like the Sydney Opera House,
become an icon of the land it
occupies. How many of our business
strategies are like the Golden
Gate Bridge? Too few, I’m afraid.
5. We’d master the core skills
first.
Each of the designs we’ve looked
at so far is inventive, persuasive, elegant, and inspiring.
Yet all of them succeed because
they also work well, and they do this because of
the mastery of technical
elements. The Sydney Opera House’s sail-shaped roof vaults
required expert engineering. The
Guggenheim Bilbao’s undulating titanium-clad
exterior was possible only with
the help of sophisticated computer modeling. And the
little black dress worked because
Chanel pioneered a synthetic fabric – jersey – that
flowed instead of clinging.
If you examine the 1895 painting
First Communion, you’ll see evidence of extraordinary
technique; the layers of white in
the young girl’s dress, in particular, are astonishing.
Who was the artist? Pablo
Picasso, who, at age 14, had clearly mastered conventional
art. Now consider Guernica, which
Picasso painted in 1937 to memorialize
the Nazi bombing of the Basque
village. There is little that is conventional
about this painting, considered
one of modern art’s most powerful antiwar statements. Picasso, who by this time
was recognized as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, had
moved beyond conventional technique, using his mastery to push the frontiers of
art.
6. We’d learn to experiment.
How does one move from mastery to
brilliance? From technical competence to true
innovation? By experimenting.
Some design experiments take place in the mind – think
of the strategic planning
process, in which strategists imagine and test new futures –
and some find their expression in
physical prototypes. Some experiments are even
conducted in the real world, and
here I offer my only design story from the business
world: IKEA. When the company’s
visionary founder, Ingvar Kamprad, started out, he had only a general sense of
what would become IKEA’s revolutionary approach to the furniture business.
Nearly every element of its now-legendary business model – showrooms and
catalogs in
tandem, knockdown furniture in
flat parcels, and customer pickup and assembly
– emerged over time from
experimental responses to urgent problems. Customer
pickup, for instance, became a
central element of IKEA’s strategy almost by chance, when frustrated customers
rushed into the warehouse because there weren’t enough employees to help them. The
store manager realized the advantages of the customers’ initiative and
suggested that the idea become permanent.
7. We’d be more inclusive in our strategic
conversations.
The image of the solitary genius
at work in his atelier is as much a myth in art, architecture,
and science as it is in business.
Design teaches us about the value of
including multiple perspectives
in the design process – turning the process into a
conversation. The more complex the design challenge, the
greater the benefits of multiple voices and perspectives.
Consider, for instance, the
complex and political process of urban planning – in
particular, the New Urbanism
movement, which emerged from the experiences of the
developers and architects of the
innovative Seaside community in Florida. What distinguishes
New Urbanism from other
architectural movements is its emphasis on
wide participation, which takes
the form of ‘charettes’ – interactive design conversations
with a long tradition in art and
architecture. Derived from the French word meaning ‘little cart’, charrettes
were used at the first formal school of architecture, the Ecole des Beaux Arts in
Paris, in
the 19th century. As students
progressed from one level to the next, their projects
were placed on small carts, onto
which students would leap to make their frantic
finishing touches.
The charette process used in New
Urbanism projects is based on four principles: involve everyone from the start
who might build, use, sell, approve, or block the project; work concurrently
and cross-functionally (architects, planners, engineers, economists, market
experts, citizens, public officials); work in short feedback loops; and work in
detail. The charette, I believe, offers a powerful
alternative to the traditional
strategic planning process by inviting the whole system to participate and by
including local knowledge in the conversation.
8. We’d learn to talk
differently.
Of course, simply putting a
variety of people in a room together is not enough. To
produce superior designs, we must
change the way we talk to one another. Most of us
have learned to talk in business
settings as if we are in a debate, advocating a position.
But within a diverse group,
debate is more likely to lead to stalemate than to breakthroughs:
breakthroughs come from asking
new questions, not debating existing solutions;
they come from reexamining what
we take as given.
As a case in point, consider the
design of Manhattan’s Central Park. In 1857, the country’s first public
landscape design competition was held to select the plan for this park. Of all
the submissions, only one – prepared by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux
– fulfilled all of the design requirements.The most challenging requirement?
That cross-town traffic be permitted without marring the pastoral feel of the
park – had been considered impossible to meet by all the other designers. Olmsted and Vaux succeeded by eliminating the
assumption that the park was a two-dimensional space. Instead, they imagined it
in three dimensions, and sank four roads eight feet below its surface.
9. We’d work backwards.
Most managers are taught a
straightforward problem-solving methodology: define a
problem, identify various
solutions, analyze each, and choose one. Designers begin at
the end of this process, as
Stephen Covey has famously admonished, by achieving
clarity about the desired
outcomes of the design and then working backwards.
Thomas Jefferson devoted the last
decade of his life to founding the University
of Virginia. For Jefferson, the
link between democracy and education was clear: without
an educated populace, there was
no hope of protecting the fledgling democracy that he
and the other founding fathers
had worked so hard to create. Jefferson’s university
would produce free-minded
graduates, and therefore it would need to differ from prevailing
educational institutions in many
ways: it would be a community where faculty
and students work as partners to
create a dialogue that produces the kind of learning
that democracy requires; the
typical large central building would be replaced with a
collection of smaller buildings. This
garden-encircled ‘academic village’ would be a
community of learning where
students would have unprecedented freedom in both
the choice of curriculum and in
governing their own behaviours.
To the modern observer,
Jefferson’s genius may appear to lie in the beauty of
the architecture he created. In
reality, he took much of his architectural inspiration
rather directly from the
sixteenth-century Italian architect Palladio. Jefferson’s true
genius lies in the power of the
space that he created and its ability to evoke so vividly
the purpose for which it was
designed.
10. We’d start the conversation
with possibilities.
Great design, it has been said,
occurs at the intersection of constraint, contingency, and
possibility – elements that are
central to creating innovative, elegant, and functional
designs. But it matters greatly
where you start. In business, we have tended to start
strategic conversation with
constraints: the constraints of budgets, of ease of implementation,
of the quarterly earnings focus
that Wall Street dictates. As a result, we get designs for tomorrow that merely
tweak today’s. Great design inevitably starts with the question “What if
anything were possible?” After all, if strategy is an invention, a product of
our imaginations, and our assumptions are bound only by what we can imagine,
then removing the assumptions that arise from the belief in constraints is job
number one.
For my final example, we will
turn to one of my favorite cities, Barcelona, and the story of its great
unfinished cathedral, Sagrada Familia, designed by Antoni Gaudi. Gaudi was just
32 in 1884 when he was named principal architect of the church known as the
‘Cathedral of the Poor’, which would be built entirely through donations. From
the outset, Gaudi envisioned the cathedral he wanted to create – a ‘Bible in
stone’, a soaring interior that evoked a forest and an exterior with towers
that reached for the heavens. Gaudi chose to disregard the usual constraints of
time and money. “My client is in no hurry,” was his response to skeptics who
doubted that the church would ever be completed. When funds became too scarce
to continue construction, he went back to designing,
building increasingly detailed
plaster models and stepping out of his architect-builder
role to raise funds personally.
The very real constraints imposed
by the construction materials and techniques available at the time were
impossible for Gaudi to ignore. Because the natural world served as a primary
source of inspiration in all of his designs, he aspired to create soaring
spaces with natural light and found himself profoundly encumbered by the need
for straight internal load-bearing walls and beams. Without the mathematical knowledge
and modeling techniques available today, the physics of the cathedral’s
construction were also a challenge, as Gaudi sought to avoid the massive arches and buttresses common to the great medieval
cathedrals.
In order to work around these
constraints, Gaudi sought out new tools and techniques. He found two tools,
little-used in Barcelona at the time, that would become the foundation of his
work. The first was the ‘catenary arch’, a simple arch whose shape could be
simulated by suspending a chain upside down. Gaudi was able to calculate the load-bearing
demands placed on the massive cathedral towers by suspending small bags of sand
from the inverted chain to mimic the weight that the towers would need to bear.
This created a perfect model (albeit upside down!) of the possible shapes and
dimensions that a real tower could take on. Computer models run on Gaudi’s
towers demonstrate the surprising accuracy of his method.
The second tool that he
discovered was a new material: cement. Combined with iron beams, brick or stone
pillars, and a new roofing approach, cement allowed the exterior walls to bear
most of the roof’s weight, giving Gaudi the freedom of interior design that he
craved. Gaudi died at the age of 74 (ironically, run over by a streetcar on his
way to church) with his cathedral only partially completed. Ten years later,
the Spanish civil war came to the city, bringing construction to a halt.
Rioters burned his workshop, destroying all of his plans and archives.
Fortunately, the plaster models survived and are being used today to guide the
final phase of the cathedral’s construction, which is expected within the next
20 years.
All of the design stories told
here are about possibilities made real, some of them
against great odds. In order to
achieve such designs, we must first aspire to achieve
them, challenging the mediocrity
of much of today’s design. We must also learn new skills, including the mastery
of core technologies and the ability to persuade, to talk differently, to
experiment. Finally, we must embrace new processes – processes that invite a
more diverse set of perspectives
into the strategic conversation,
that work backwards from a clear sense of the outcomes
that we want to create. And we must
start our conversations with possibilities. The kind of exemplary designs
discussed here are rarely achieved even in design – let alone in business. But
as we all know, it is that which is hard to do that is most worth doing.
Jeanne Liedtka is executive
director of the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia’s Darden School
of Business,which focuses on developing thought leadership in the areas of
entrepreneurship and corporate innovation. She is also the Johnson and Higgins
Research Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School
and the former chief learning officer of United Technologies Corporation.
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