Different By Design

How collaboration, curiosity, and flexibility can ignite innovation in your workforce.

In Change By Design, IDEO CEO and president Tim Brown points out that “by integrating what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today.” Brown is convinced that managers can use this kind of “design thinking” to address problems and create innovations in every aspect of business — even if you’ve never taken an art class. Here he tells Profit Online readers how to get started.

Profit Online: Why is design thinking important at this particular moment?

Brown: Businesses spend much of their time doing what I would describe as convergent thinking, which is basically about picking the best out of the inevitable set of choices and moving towards executing on that. That’s fine in a time when the context for business is relatively predictable, but we happen to be in time right now where the context for business is incredibly unpredictable.

We’ve got more change going on than we’ve ever had before, both rapid technological change and social change being driven either by things like the crisis in health care or global warming, which are forcing us to think differently about, some of the very basic kind of elements of our economy like whether consumption is a good thing.

In a time of change, trying to pick from an existing set of choices is not a great place to be, partly because those choices aren’t necessarily applicable, but also because everybody else is picking from that same set of choices. So what you need is a divergent approach, an approach that creates new alternatives, In this approach, you ask a question and start to imagine all the possible solutions there might be. You explore those, and then pick from the best one.

This type of thinking allows you to react to the changing context around you. Also, it is more likely that you’re going to get to an innovative answer that other people aren’t getting to at the same time.

Design thinking is by its very nature a divergent kind of synthesis based, human-centered approach to creating new choices, new alternatives. It’s a useful tool for businesses to be using not just on their new products and services and experiences, but in every aspect of the business.

Profit Online: You say that at IDEO, every design challenge begins with asking, “How might we...?” How do business leaders who adopt this technique know that they’re asking the right questions?

Brown: If there’s an art in innovation, and in art, and in design thinking it’s getting to that right question. It’s about getting to some sort of sweet spot between asking a question that’s too broad and therefore really impossible to answer and asking a question that’s too narrow, which means that you’re opportunity for innovation is too constrained. Also, make sure it’s not the same question that everybody else is asking. It’s that creative question that really then does kind of open up all the possibility.

Constraints are essential. Simply the worst possible thing you can say to somebody you want to be innovative is, “Here’s a blank sheet of paper, do what you like.” Because you’ve got an infinite set of questions you can ask and an infinite set of possibilities. You will end up doing something that is either completely inappropriate or that’s really quite incremental. Again, there’s an art or skill to getting those constraints just right. They want to be broad enough to allow people to look at a problem differently, but not so broad that they’ve got nothing to push against.

Profit Online: Towards the end of the book you talk about how to spot design thinkers within your organization, from their unusual backgrounds to their love of working on teams. Once managers have identified them, how can they cultivate them?

Brown: Put them on teams and get the working on difficult problems. When you take people who may have never had an opportunity to think of themselves as being creative problem solvers, and put them on a team — perhaps with designers or other creative types, so that everybody’s not working in the dark — it’s remarkable what happens. Whether its nurses or business folks or marketing folks or manufacturing engineers, if they’ve got some of those design thinker characteristics, if they’re generally optimistic people, if they’re really interested in other human beings, if they’re interested in collaboration, then people can be really quite productive very quickly.

Profit Online: You make several calls to action within the book, from finding space to be creative, to spending time focusing on normal ordinary moments. When business leaders read your book, what is the number one thing you want them to be aware of?

Brown: That they can tap into this enormous potential they have in their organization to innovate by unlocking this capacity that exists in so many of their own people. That instead of thinking about innovation being something they only have their R&D group do, or only do occasionally, it should be something that should be going on all the time. We’re not all able to make science breakthroughs, but almost all of us can have insights and perceptions about how we as people might be doing things better, or how certain things might be different, or how the needs either of our customers or our colleagues or consumers or whoever might not be being realized.

Many organizations feel frustrated that they somehow can’t get around to doing enough innovation, But look at organizations like Toyota. They make it part of everything they do. It’s something they do all the time, both at the very incremental level to get constant improvement and at the more breakthrough level with new products like the Prius.

For me that’s the message: Don’t think of innovation and design thinking as something that only experts can do or that only gets done occasionally or only gets done when you want some big breakthrough. It should be something that you want to you unlock in every possible piece of your organization. It’s a discipline just like good writing or mathematical skills. It can be learned and applied in many different places.