Design and Innovation in a Changing World

The Beginning

My connection with the Design world began in 1998 when I was invited by the CEO of the UK Design Council to develop a programme for their staff to help them communicate Design in a relevant way. Design had been championed in the UK in 1944 by Winston Churchill to elevate the country’s industrial standards. Through the 1970’s and 80’s Design in the UK had been made prominent through two mechanisms. The first was a triangular tag attached to products indicating good design or the receipt of an award. The second was a huge exhibition display space in a prime retail area on London’s Haymarket called The Design Centre. The centre was closing and the council staff had been trying to travel the country to raise interest in industry. At that point in the evolution of Design, Design was firmly aesthetic with some emphasis on functionality but the focus was heavily on products and the packaging of ideas.

Through a series of workshops I worked to reframe how the staff thought about the value of Design from the point of view of industry. I moved their focus from thinking about Design for its own sake to the business impact of Design on industry and community.

This significant break is the basis of the modern Design thinking movement.

New Thinking for Design

Shortly after this I began working for Colin Burns CEO IDEO UK (now Chief Design Officer BBC), Colin had asked me to help because, as traditional design projects were being competed away, the new project opportunities didn’t fit the culture processes and skills and caused tension among the staff. These new opportunities were less about a manufacturer providing a technical solution to which Design was to be applied to make it stand out in the market place. They were further up the invention chain. In addition, delivering the projects was highly stressful and challenging.

I introduced and taught my ‘New World’ approach to projects to the UK agency to enable the organisation to deal with more complex and less traditional design briefs. By allowing the agency to move away from tightly pre-defined product or outcome-based briefs to more fully engage in well managed projects, evolving from user needs and using ethnographic information as well as rapid prototyping, I provided the enabler to the early steps of User-Centred Design.

All the models I teach arise from my overarching World After Midnight framework. Simply put, the model frames the ‘flip’ all organisations have faced from the traditional ‘Old World’, where you could learn faster than your environment changed to a ‘New World’ which is the reverse.  Assumptions and processes which were viable become obsolete as the ‘flip’ happens. I have discovered that this reframing is an incredibly effective way to think about how to approach all of the challenges of this early 21st century. My TED Global Talk on the World After Midnight Model (WAM) thinking framework is an excellent starting point to understanding how to apply this philosophy.

A key conclusion of recognising the WAM effect is to move away from traditional theory based learning to modular design & delivery of learning. In addition because of the need for speed in execution success is less dependent on what individuals know but more dependent on their ability to animate together. I developed Performance Enhancement Tools (PETs) which are used collaboratively to align creative thinking without the need for extensive explanations of theory. There are some examples below.

In the ‘Old World’ projects were led from experience with clear briefs/ objectives and common processes to deliver them. I call this type of project ‘painting-by-numbers because of the similarity of the process to the children’s painting books. The New World however gives rise to projects where the processes have to be developed during the project (going-on-a-quest), projects where the brief itself is uncertain (making-a-movie), to completely open projects of an exploratory nature which must deliver a business outcome (lost-in-the-fog)!

The best method to deliver success is different. For example milestone sign-offs for the painting-by-numbers to parallel prototyping for the quest. (Quest projects at IDEO were immortalised in the ‘ABC Nightline’ documentary on the shopping cart project) For each project type, the best suited leader has different characteristics. From the organised delegator of the painting-by-numbers to the ultra-humble, communicative learner who succeeds in the fog. Introducing the different project types, approaches and leadership styles provided the robust flexibility which Design Thinking methods would build upon.

The learning program was extended by David Kelly to the San Francisco agency. Then working with Tim Brown, we developed the blueprint for IDEO 2.0 world-wide, re-aligning IDEO from a ‘traditional’ design agency to a Design Thinking based organisation tackling wider and strategic challenges. Making IDEO the powerhouse it is today.

My project concepts such as ‘Foggy’ projects and how to deal with them are taught in several Design schools and use is made of the Method cards developed by IDEO based on my book All Change!

Accelerating Innovation

Before my connection with the Design world began in the mid 1990’s, I’d been approached by SONY with a counter intuitive dilemma. For some time I had been trying to popularise a redefinition of innovation as separate from creativity or inventiveness and defined innovation as the process of transforming (new) ideas into money (societal benefits). 

By my definition SONY had an innovation problem. It seemed that the more creative ideas they generated for innovation the fewer innovations were delivered and worse the innovations were more mediocre/’me-too’ and made little money!  I had learnt from my WAM framework that the only research worth doing in the New World is causality-based research. Typical research in innovation involves interviewing innovators or studying innovative organisations and then listing the most common traits and characteristics. In the Old World, more stable and predictable business environments, collecting information on occurrence or incidence today gave a good view of tomorrow. Other research involves finding patterns.  For example, organisations of a certain size are four times more likely to innovate than others twice their size and so on. Correlations can also be extrapolated with some degree of success in the Old World. But SONY was in its World After Midnight. The move away from analogue cameras and towards smaller cameras was causing significant damage to profitability. So I created a ‘Bubble Diagram’ or causality map from interviewing a few key people. Asking them, “Why?”.  Validating their answers for both presence and null. The diagram was enormous and complex and you can use the link below to immediately access a headache. The reason for the counter intuitive outcome was simply that the total investment pot was fixed. That meant the more ideas they collected the more strenuous the weeding-out process had to be to ensure significant investment per idea. Weeding out began early in the life cycle and led by sensible ‘finance types’. Sensible people killed off all the unfamiliar ideas with indeterminate business cases and soon after any not showing ‘promising progress’. This left only mediocre/ me-too ideas to emerge late!

But there were two firm conclusions. The first was that there were only five real barriers to innovation I list here:

   1. Creating the Opportunity

We have not organised ourselves to create, capture improve, visualise and manage ideas

2. Achieving Focus

We have not made sure that we can assess the value/ relevance/ strategic fit/ balance of today vs. tomorrow/ commercial sense of ideas

3. Engaging Commitment

We have not removed all the barriers to progress/ Involved all the people we need/ Ensured they understand how to thrive with the innovation to and Emotionally prepared ourselves

4. Making it Possible

We have not de-risked the innovation internally/ externally and in terms of realisation?

5. Making it happen

We have not set-up the right type of project for making money/Getting benefits from the innovation and learning/ identifying patterns

The second conclusion is that for most organisations one (and at most two) of these five provides the only bottleneck to innovation. So improving that single dimension has a proportional increase in delivered innovation. For most of the organisations studied the biggest bottleneck was Creating the Opportunity to innovate so resolving that would directly accelerate innovation.

Creating the Opportunity to Innovate

There were two significant barriers to creating the opportunity to innovate. The first was a very real fear of failure. Fearing failure only makes logical sense in the ‘Old World’ where most actions are replicas or extensions of what has gone before. In that world, avoiding avoidable mistakes means that failure is almost by default a bad thing. Many organisational cultures abhor and punish failure. Simply telling people to ‘take risks’ will not overturn decades of blame and intolerance for failure. But in our real ‘New World’ there will be occasions where previous learning can be used but in terms of innovation almost everything is outside those limits. So now there are two ways to fail. Failing when you could have used prior knowledge – I call this ‘Dumb Failure’. And failing on a breakthrough – I call this ‘Smart Failure’  I also argue that Smart Failure should be praised and rewarded.

I now will no longer begin a culture change programme with a client, without encouraging the Senior leadership team to adopt the language of ‘Smart Failure' in their messages and communications. Remember the aim is still to avoid failure. Failure is not good because, repetitive failure without success tends to dampen the energy, enthusiasm and creativity of a team. So alongside adopting the language of Smart Failure I teach ‘prelimination’ that is how to see and prevent problems before they arise. Focus on prelimination means Smart Failure cannot be labelled by sceptics as a reason for sloppiness.

The other barrier to Creating the Opportunity is a failure to recognise that ideas are fundamentally different and suffer different risks in turning them into money / benefits. The BubbleDiagram showed that ideas originating from within the organisation are often well funded & championed but tend to fail when they meet the user or customer. Ideas from real needs or insights tend to be forced into ‘skunkworks’ and often fail to gain traction in the organisation. 

From this insight I developed my Sparq model. I balance ‘Push ideas’ – arising from internal creativity and invention in the organisation with ‘Pull ideas’ originating from human or technical needs and insights. 

Further, I split these into ideas arising from human or technical sources. By reframing different forms of innovation based on the initial source of the ideas I was able to de-risk delivery and also provide a view on why different industries and groups have all claimed innovation their own whilst disagreeing on how to make it happen.

The Sparq map explains why different sectors, fashion, film, research, invention marketing etc. all insist on different routes to innovation. The development of Design Thinking championed by the likes of Matt Marsh and Tom Kelly is a ‘land grab’ into another territory. 

Design expands from it’s traditional position in the bottom right hand corner to embrace the human dimension. This is the realm of User centred/ insight driven Design Thinking.

This, insights and inventions which balances ‘push & pull’ ideas, has been widely adopted across the design world. I have written more about this in my book Who Killed the Sparq

Enter the Double Diamond

By the mid 2000’s I had become a non –Executive Director of the UK Design Council under CEO David Kester and along with celebrated designers, such as Joe Ferry of Virgin and Jonathan Sands of the ever award winning Elmwood, was facilitating a workshop that I was also participating in. I had been stressing my analogy that in innovation it is important not to attempt to breathe in whilst breathing out – my analogy for the incompatibility between divergent and convergent thinking. It was a lively discussion and then I noticed our illustrator had drawn on the white board the now iconic shape of the Double Diamond.

The double diamond has gone on to become one of the most popular and enduring process frameworks for Design Thinking. Quite simply the Double Diamond process is the clearest process for Teaching and applying Design Thinking.

 It can be easily understood by professional designers and novices and allows them to work together collaboratively each contributing to the process at the right point in the right way.

The role of Digital in Innovation Today

Digital Transformation has provided more opportunities for innovation. Big data and AI propose the extraction of insights from large data sets. With time they will come to be used alongside Ethnography in the first of the two diamonds. I believe that immersion in big data sets will actually help humans to improve their intuition.

The digital opportunity I see as most relevant in my role as an educator and enabler is Virtual Reality. Learning in a virtual environment has all the advantages of a real one and more. The ability to link activities and actions to a place in a room improves memory retention. Dialogue and discussion by voice instead of just text communicates nuance needed in generating insights and serendipity. But there are advantages over real life. Brainstorms can be faster as everyone has perfect access to flipcharts and whiteboards. All ideas are retained. Anyone in the world can participate, so users can be brought in to the process early. And the fact the rooms can be left intact and returned to on demand 24*7 has an enormous advantage in creative continuity.  And finally there a culture of egalitarianism and openness you cannot replicate in real life. 

I have developed QUBE for teaching Innovation, Complex project Delivery, Design Thinking and also for the follow-on, real life delivery and execution to reach the result. The use of Performance Enhancement Tools and active facilitation means that there is collaboration as well as creative tension. After over eight years of delivering innovation digitally on QUBE, I continue to learn and be amazed at how fast, surprising and engaging the process can be.

Conclusion

Digital Design and Innovation together perhaps provide the most powerful lever for business growth, productivity and for creating a much happier society. We have all the thinking. We have all the tools and processes. We know the behaviours required. Now it’s just up to us to use make it happen

References

World After Midnight        TED talk               https://bit.ly/EddieObengTED

World After Midnight        Book     New Rules for the New World Wiley Publishing ISBN 1-900961-15-6

Projects and Methods        Book     All Change!          978-0-273-62221-5 

Quest Project in action      Blog       https://www.ideo.com/post/reimagining-the-shopping-cart

                                               Video    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2DAjoJsdQ

Causality Research            BubbleDiagram  https://pentacle.co.uk/Downloads/InnovationResources/RABBIT%20Innovation%20Bubbles01.JPG

Sparq Model                        Book     Who Killed The Sparq London Business Press ISBN 978-1-909877-04-7

Design Thinking                  Process DoubleDiamond   https://www.thecreativeindustries.co.uk/uk-creative-overview/news-and-views/view-what-is-design-and-why-it-matters

VR Based Learning            QUBE   https://QUBE.cc