Goodbye Six Sigma, hello Design Thinking!

Here’s an extract from another brilliantly thought-provoking speech Bruce Nussbaum’s just given at the Singapore Design Thinking Symposium (you can find the full text on his NussbaumOnDesign blog).

I post it, not only because Bruce’s closing thought (on the essential optimism of Design Thinking) picks up neatly on my previous post, but also because I think it provides a fantastic précis of the approaching tipping point – a sort of fin de siecle which will see the death of our 20th century obsession with homogeneity and efficiency as a meaningful basis of lasting value creation and competitive advantage.

“[T]hree global forces—the rise and fall of nations [the economic rise of Asia vis-a-vis the West], the rise and fall of generations [the demographic rise of Gen Y vis-a-vis Baby Boomers] and the spread of digital social media—are combining to transform our world and especially our global economy. We are on the cusp of a New Normal. This New Normal situation in the world will need a new paradigm and fresh tools and methods to generate economic growth and prosperity.

Which brings me to Design. During the time that big political, demographic and technological forces of change have been reshaping the global economy, the field of Design has been evolving into a serious discipline that can help us navigate today’s economic uncertainties and generate value for tomorrow’s products and services.

Design has made a revolutionary journey in the past decade from a narrow field able to focus on the making of stuff to the design of social systems and the transformation of healthcare, transportation, supply-chain, education…

How so? Building on the user-centric roots of industrial design, Design has an ethnographic core that allows businessmen and others to connect with any and all cultures, real and digital, anywhere around the world. And Design’s ability to learn from these cultural connections and translate that data into new concepts for products and services gives it the power to generate revenue and profits in a global economic environment of deepening uncertainty.

If Six Sigma and management thinking were our guides to efficient choice-making and profit maximization in yesterday’s era of global hegemony, stability and homogeneity, then in an era of global heterogeneity, instability and diversity, Design Thinking can be our guide to deep consumer understanding, visualization of possibilities, generative option-making and strategic brand finding…

Technology used to dominate innovation. Today, technology is everywhere and accessible to all. Design Thinking is far more important to innovation than technology. Finding relevance and meaning to people living in a multiplicity of real and digital cultures is the new key to success… Empathy. Connection. Engagement. Interaction. Options. That’s Design…

The challenge ahead for Singapore is to add a new competency, a Design Thinking competency, to its excellent model of efficient engineering. The challenge is to learn to understand cultures all over the real and digital world in order to deliver what people want, wherever they live, and on their platform of choice. This is where economic value is created today.

I would like to end on a philosophical note. One reason why people are turning to Design Thinking today is that it is essentially optimistic. Design has a future-facing perspective and a tool-using core competence. The whole purpose of Design is to make the new. We live a life of constant beta, a place of uncertainty and cascading change. In this new world, Design Thinking can be our navigator. We should embrace it.”

 

Filed under: Design & Innovation, Strategy & Competitive Advantage , Bruce Nussbaum, competitive advantage, culture, design thinking, diversity, innovation, value creation, NussbaumOnDesign, tipping point, ethnography

Sustainability and Design Thinking: it’s a hope thing

I made something of an off-the-cuff remark in a meeting with Richard Eisermann and his team at Prospect the other day – one that was greeted with enough smiles around the room to suggest that I might (unintentionally) have said something quite profound!

In chatting about the book, and what I see as the critical role of Design Thinking in imagining and realising more sustainable futures, I observed that Martin Luther King had had a dream, not a nightmare.

You probably get what I meant, without me needing to go into too much detail. Suffice it to say that, when so much talk about sustainability revolves around limits and sacrifice, it’s shouldn’t come as a huge surprise if people clap their hands to their ears and start yelling “Lalalalalalala!”

We need a more optimistic message to really engage people and that’s precisely why the gathering momentum of Design Thinking is to be welcomed. Design as a creative thought process is fundamentally idealistic, and it completely changes the tone and focus of the debate.

From “What is” to “What could be”.

From “Growth or no growth” to “What do you want to grow?”

From “Look what we’re going to have to give up!” to “Yeah, but have you considered the possibilities?”

Infinitely wiser people than me have said it before. Albert Einstein:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Likewise Edward de Bono:

“You can’t dig a new hole by digging the same one deeper.”

It’s why Design Thinking is absolutely a philosophy of its time. And it’s why IDEO’s Living Climate Change site and the recent launch of The Living Principles (a new sustainable design framework from AIGA) are exciting developments. These guys are cottoning on to the idea that sustainability is fundamentally a design problem, and they’re bringing a completely different way of thinking to help solve it.

Filed under: CR & Sustainability, Design & Innovation , AIGA, design, design thinking, IDEO, Living Climate Change, Prospect, Richard Eisermann, sustainability, The Living Principles

Why Marks & Spencer ‘get’ sustainability

Avid Radio 4 listener though I am, I can’t say I’ve ever made a point of tuning in to ‘You and Yours’. However I made an exception this morning, using R4’s Listen Again service to catch up on Tuesday’s special programme on “Corporate Social Responsibility”. Good or bad, it’s bound to provoke a blog post, I thought, and so it has.

Listening to David Henderson from the Institute of Economic Affairs prattling on about the ‘imposition’ of CSR as a huge cost burden for business, I could feel my inner ‘grumpy old man’ bubbling to the surface! Yet another economist with an outdated, blinkered view of CR and sustainability as something peripheral to core business – an unnecessary and costly distraction from the business of maximising short-term returns for shareholders.

Fortunately, this dinosaur’s views were very swiftly followed by an interview piece with Mike Barry, M&S’ head of sustainable business. He immediately restored my faith that there are people in the world who truly get the value and importance of ’sustainability’ in 21st century…

If you look ahead 10 years, the products and services that M&S will be selling in the future won’t be the same as today. Climate change, water stress – all those kinds of things – will make it harder and harder to sell what we do today. We have to prepare for the future… It makes business sense. If customers want it, it saves you money, motivates people and drives innovation, why would you stop [because of recession]?

Spot on, sir!

Filed under: CR & Sustainability, Strategy & Competitive Advantage , Corporate Responsibility, Corporate Social Responsibility, CR, CSR, innovation, Marks & Spencer, reputation, sustainability, M&S, Mike Barry

Sustainability is a religion – it’s official!

My wife told me about this fantastic story yesterday. A guy who claims he was unfairly dismissed on the basis of his views on climate change has been granted permission to take his former employer to tribunal.

Apparently, the essence of the judge’s ruling is that belief in man-made climate change constitutes a philosophical belief (not merely a political one) and is therefore protected by equality regulations concerning freedom of religion.

Can’t wait for the next UK Census now! =)

Filed under: Environment & Climate Change , climate change, sustainability

Bruce Nussbaum on sustainability and value creation…

In seeking the views of Design Thinking and innovation guru, Bruce Nussbaum, on my new book, I asked the slightly leading question:

Is design for sustainability set to become the critical driver of innovation and value creation?

You can check out Bruce’s answer below, taken from the latest edition of his Ask the Innovation Guru vodcast…

posted with vodpod

Filed under: CR & Sustainability, Design & Innovation, Strategy & Competitive Advantage , Ask the Innovation Guru, Bruce Nussbaum, design, design thinking, innovation, sustainability, value creation

A thumbs-up from Jonathon Porritt

If you’ve taken a look at the About my book page, you’ll have gathered that I’ve been busy gathering opinions on “Live Long and Prosper” from a variety of leading lights in the worlds of brand, design and sustainability, prior to publication.

In a true road test of the whole concept behind it – an antidote to heavy-duty business books that business leaders can read cover-to-cover in the course of a single journey – Jonathon Porritt’s just read it on a flight out to Shanghai. And he really likes it.

What started out as an interesting intellectual exercise (to see if I could condense various musings into a clear, concise and coherent thought-piece) has turned into something really exciting, and is opening doors to conversations with some incredible people – from sustainability gurus like Jonathon and Ray Anderson, to people at the vanguard of Design Thinking like Marty Neumeier and Tim Brown at IDEO.

12 months ago I’d never have dreamt of writing a book, now I’m so glad I did. Seriously, if you’ve got something to say, don’t keep it to yourself. Get writing. You never know where it might lead…

Filed under: Brand & Engagement, CR & Sustainability, Design & Innovation , brand, design, design thinking, Jonathon Porritt, Live Long and Prosper, Marty Neumeier, Ray Anderson, sustainability, Tim Brown

The persistence of silos in internal communication

Kevin Keohane’s book can’t come soon enough for some people…

Much as we may laud the advance of Design Thinking in the upstream world of brand-led business transformation, downstream, in the world of employee communications, recent experience would suggest that some organisations are still depressingly incapable of joined-up writing.

It’s an all-too-familiar story…

• Major change is in the offing, requiring extensive employee communications to build awareness and support for what needs to be done…
• HR instructs consultants…
• Comms decides it wants to own things (cue massive bun fight)…
• HR sponsor lacks sufficient clout with top brass and gets steam-rollered…
• Consultants are deemed “guilty by association” and come within a gnat’s chuff of getting fired…
• Comms sees sense and retains consultants, but a whole new round of approvals is required, setting the project back weeks…

What’s worse is that we’re talking about a very large, venerable institution here, where you’d expect people to be a bit more grown-up about things. Sadly – so it would seem – the larger the organisation, the larger the egos involved. And the pettier the politics!

A tangential rant:
It’s precisely this sort of stuff that’s led me to allow my IABC membership to lapse. You see, IABC’s credo is essentially one of “sustaining innovation” – of becoming incrementally better at what you already do. It suggests there’s real value in becoming more and more specialist, which can only perpetuate silo mentalities, and which ultimately condemns most communicators to the role of downstream “craftsmen”.

Meanwhile, the rest of the creative professions are swimming in entirely the opposite direction – valuing a “whole systems” approach and using their well-honed empathic and creative skills to find entirely new solutions to the world’s most complex, unstructured problems. I know which camp I’d rather belong to.

Filed under: Brand & Engagement , design thinking, employee engagement, human resources, IABC, internal communications, Kevin Keohane, systems thinking, whole systems

Corporate Responsibility vs. Sustainability – what’s the difference?

If you’ve ever asked yourself this question, then you should read Ethical Corporation’s interview with Jonathon Porritt, which offers a telling example.

In a nutshell, CR/CSR tends to denote the kind of peripheral stuff that the banks were winning awards for – right up to the point that they fell on their collective arses! By contrast, sustainability is the stuff that actually matters – interrogating and challenging the underlying business model – something that your average CR team wouldn’t be let anywhere near.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: asking how a business is responsible and how it is sustainable are two fundamentally different questions. The latter is infinitely broader in scope, essentially, “Why will you still be in business in 50 years’ time?”

Filed under: CR & Sustainability , Corporate Responsibility, Corporate Social Responsibility, CR, CSR, Ethical Corporation, Jonathon Porritt, sustainability

Ray Anderson: “Confessions of a Radical Industrialist”

Yet another must-read book hits the shelves this week. It’s the latest offering from sustainability hero, Ray Anderson – founder and chairman of Interface Inc. and a very generous endorser of my own upcoming book.

Where Live Long and Prosper offers a quick and simple way into understanding the “why?” – getting to grips with sustainability as an increasingly critical driver of brand and competitive advantage – Ray’s book will no doubt offer much more detailed answers on the “how?”

I don’t need to have read it to know that people will find fascinating and practical insights in its pages…

Filed under: CR & Sustainability, Strategy & Competitive Advantage , brand, competitive advantage, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, Interface, Live Long and Prosper, Ray Anderson, sustainability

Death of a food hero

Had to have a little “slurp” the other night in memory of Keith Floyd, who sadly died on Monday. With TV chefs poking their heads out of every corner of the schedule these days, it’s easy to forget that Keith Floyd was the original and best. Equally easy to forget that, beneath the completely charming and mildly alcoholic exterior, lay a genuine pioneer, fusing cookery and travelogue in a way that was utterly unique at the time.

Filed under: Uncategorized