Stop making sense

Or how, in an age of accelerated input overload, design can be used to make sense of fast changing environments.

Authored by Alex Barclay with contributions from Sherif Choudhry and Phil Gerrard — from BCG Platinion

“We can’t change fast enough. We have no advantage other than our huge bulk. We can’t do innovation internally because we can’t move. When we try, we get vaguely superficial solutions that don’t really move anything or anyone. And the way we’re structured… we’re so stiff and slow with layer after layer of management and processes. We come in 400% over budget, and bogged down by compliance and governance. We have to hack through a forest of pain and total mess to even start thinking let alone doing anything.”

CIO, major insurance firm

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I can't seem to face up to the facts,

I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax…

Lyric from Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

Song performed by the band Talking Heads, copyright Byrne, Weymouth, Franz, WCM

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The quotes above reveal a stark fact: that many of us, wherever we sit in the economic machine, are crying out in pain. Tens of thousands of individuals and businesses are experiencing systemic chaos, cash crises and a panicked outlook. Strange days in strange times.

A few decades ago Andrew Grove wrote about ‘inflection points’ — times at which the very model we hold of how the world operates seems to change. Grove notes: “A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.” In the times we’re living through now, I think there is an urgent need to focus our minds on design, in the very widest sense. Not making chairs and fancy brochures, but generating new systems and services. The tools and processes of design, plus the invigorated culture it creates and the attitudes and behaviours it engenders, are enabling businesses to not only survive, but to grow and flourish.

At BCG Platinion, we are evolving ways of transferring our own processes from the physical space to the virtual world, widening participation and ramping up creativity, speed and delivery. We believe the practice of design and design thinking can help organisations manage the inflexion point that we are now going through. In turn, this reveals opportunities for us to re-think and re-build, and deliver the means to convert these into strategically meaningful, growth promoting actions.

This essay shows how adopting the practice of design as a strategic lever can both solve immediate problems, and create strategic advantage in the longer term.

Measuring seismic change

As the virtual world encompasses our lives, like something from The Matrix, it appears to us that a myriad of new data is emerging. Like seismographs, design feeds on data, and designers love nothing more than taking this jangled-up mix of qualitative and quantitative inputs — some from humans, some from machines, some from the marketplace — and using them to start the process of sense-making. They try to act like human meerkats who stand up and tune into signals of what is going on in the outside world. They aggregate, de-noise, and de-code data to quickly identify what is significant or meaningful, what signifies change and opportunity and, crucially, which disturbances can be ignored.

Such signals might reveal the earliest shift in, say, end user attitudes and behaviours, or indeed confirm the solid, unbroken line of a deep-seated, established ones. For example, re-emerging notions of 'society' and 'community,' and a re-definition of 'work-life balance,' on ‘purpose,’ living a meaningful life, and on prioritising businesses that are seen to be working for the common good.

Designers may listen in to 'word of mouth' testimonies from workers, from buyers, stakeholders and so on, looking for those that describe what is failing and what is flying. Other signals may come from observing disruptive models in other sectors; for example a growing desire to 'go green' or to buy from a business that seems to have a higher social purpose, or from one that simply makes purchasing easy in this difficult world.

Value hunters such as designers and business strategists use these signals to identify where opportunities to create value lie. These are the elements they search for and focus on, using a mix of tools. Designers draw on a broad spectrum of data from end users, developers, practitioners, visual designers, business strategists and behavioural scientists, entwining different methods and philosophies to deliver products and experiences that can change how people behave. They ‘feel out’ on what is driving a change of behaviour — ‘why’ something is happening, not simply ‘what,’ in order to tackle it in a more effective way.

Armed with the knowledge of what is driving a particular type of person, group of people or community — for example, the need for convenience, to belong, to save money, to feel special in some way etc — designers are able to imagine and prototype products and services that deliver far more meaningful experiences, behaviour-changing and value-creating experiences than before: positive emotional responses.

It's all in the mind

Human beings aren't “thinking machines that feel,” but rather “feeling machines that think.”

Antonio Damasio

What do designers do with all this raw data? How do they decide what matters? Well, perhaps surprisingly, biology holds some answers. As we develop in childhood, we build a data set of experiences, ranging from suddenly removing our hand from a fire to rejecting sour food or shedding tears when frustrated. The body 'interprets' raw data using a process called interoperability; external signals are 'analysed' by the brain and an appropriate response is given. Through all these experiences each one of us builds our mental model of the world. (The part of the brain that does this is the cortex. In his book “The Physics of Consciousness,” Andrew Thomas posits that the cortex mimics deep learning neural networks, of the kind that form the technical architecture for DeepMind’s AlphaGo machine.)

Understanding mental models is like owning a set of keys that can unlock a problem and give designers the ability to see where to anchor new ideas, and to alter a world view. And marketers are increasingly exploiting mental model maps: Nike, for example, wanted to sell more trainers to young urban women, but the data told them young women associated trainers with running, sweat, masculinity and being uncool. The company created a running club of young, successful, fashionable women to illustrate how running can be hip. They changed the mental model map in their target market, and duly sold more trainers. More than that, they changed the way our society views running and exercise. Understanding a mental model allows you to tweak or adjust it, or to hook a new idea into it, but it doesn’t have to be about selling goods. It can be aimed at promoting better engagement in a changing world; or it can be used to change habits in a positive or permanent way.

Designers take noise and chaotic inputs, analyse and de-fuzz them, tune in, interpret and assign priority and value to them. Then we link what we have learned to the end-users mental models, and we use that to understand what is important to that person or business. As a result, we connect what is meaningful and sense-making to a new idea or product in a way that changes behaviour and creates more value in the desired way.

Adapt, learn, grow

The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.

Confucius

To return to the 'human meerkat' analogy, and in line with 'System 1 thinking fast' theories, designers scan the market for outliers and oddities — for what are sometimes called 'mavericks', or the people and businesses that are innovators and market makers, ahead of early adopters and the majority of users. And in the process we use virtual research and ideas sessions to train large numbers of people on new tools, almost by stealth.

We learn from these frontier folks. They are the ones asking 'What if?' and 'How could we? These questions enable the businesses we work with to adapt and incorporate what is seen, heard and thought into meaningful action — into the products, strategies, businesses and services we create.        

All of this good thinking and doing needs the right processes and governance in place if it's to fly. But the first challenge is the how to get the culture right: how to switch to working in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world to VUCA as the new normal. For those accustomed to a regular office-based nine to five, shifting to a virtual world with a new way of thinking, and indeed, being, is no easy task. But this is where leadership, training and tackling situations in bite-sized chunks comes into its own.

In our work, staff have been trained to use an array of new tools, in minutes rather than days and had new design systems up and running swiftly. Take one recent project with a large media firm as an example. At the start we invited the 30 or 40 so participants to attend a ‘Play Ground’, a half-hour session in which they were introduced to some basics of the software — in this case a Miro board (effectively an infinite whiteboard). We showed them how to use the cursor, create a virtual Post-it note, add a comment to a note, create a drawing, import information, and add a link. We set up and ran a virtual Kanban board to manage the workflow, and as a result created detailed service design blueprints. At first it was fairly chaotic watching all the named cursors zooming around the screen, but within half an hour people had mastered the basics and moved on to the rest of the workshop. By simply using the new tools, they built their confidence, completed all the tasks and developed a new understanding of their work journey. Not only did it solve the problem, it also created a workforce equipped to solve the next problem when it arises.

With this approach, the talent and technique lies in ensuring the engagement of the team, knowing when to energise, knowing when to slow down… knowing that when the quietest person in the room suddenly questions the whole brief, then perhaps it is time to question the overall purpose of the endeavour.

At the other end of the spectrum, we also know that productivity and output is critical. Trust and good metrics go hand in hand. Metrics can be used to show a team member how to continue improving their skills, or to show how a team is improving or slowing down. Indeed, the team should develop its own dashboard to indicate how it is doing, and with the help of engineers this dashboard can obtain data in real-time, for example, flow efficiency, velocity, DOR-DOD, and quality measures.

Taking this approach will build skills and know-how, de-mystify new digital tools, and introduce fast-paced collaborative team working. Again, almost by stealth, this begins the process of deeper seated cultural shift. It takes a seemingly inflexible workforce and helps get them more comfortable with working in volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and sometimes chaotic circumstances. The process also helps leverage staff energies, intelligence and creativity in new, more contextually valuable ways. It can even be fun. Of course, to do this in the first place and to inspire workforces means leadership must buy into this way of working, and to the vision and values that underpin it.

Finally, it helps to move workers up the Maslow hierarchy of needs so they approach self-actualisation. They can plug in their creative impulses, be more autonomous and see a direct and positive impact arising from actions tend to be more motivated, stay around longer be and more productive too — sometimes 200% more productive. From worker to business to NGOs, it's a win-win situation. Design enables this empowerment and it enables an adaptive strategy to be pursued. It helps deliver value and meaning to workers, businesses and end users alike: to bend in the wind.

Crawl, walk, run - just do it

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

If you feel the pain of the insurance firm CIO quoted at the start, if you feel constricted in a large organisation seemingly incapable of even leaning a little (let alone bending to adapt to the changes ahead) I hope you can take heart and some inspiration from the experiments described here. Change is possible, always. Even when there is “layer upon layer of management and process” … each layer consists of people, with ideas, energy, and the creativity required to design new ways of working.

"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

Herbert A Simon