This post is the last stop on the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour for the book The Designful Company by Martin Neumier, who is also author of The Brand Gap and Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands. I'm glad I had the opportunity to read this book and talk with the author, because I have to admit to some skepticism about the entire design-thinking movement and the effort to make all innovation be about design. However, after reading this book and engaging in the following email dialogue with Marty Neumier, I now understand more about the entire point of design thinking than I did before. It all hinges on how you are defining design and how much latitude can be given to using that broader description to drive corporate innovation.
Here's the interview:
R: Clearly when you talk about “design” as a way of apprehending and seeing the world, you are not talking about the design of room décor. For those not already on the “design thinking” bandwagon (and not already designers), what is the working definition of “design” that makes it appropriate as a system and not an action?
M: In my view, design can be a system, an action, or the outcome of an action. For example, I work in design (the system of thought), I design things (the action), and the results are various designs (the deliverables). I especially like Herbert Simon's definition of a designer. Simon was a Nobel-winning social scientist who helped pioneer artificial intelligence. He said: "Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."
My purpose in writing The Designful Company was to show that the discipline and the activity of design can be applied to more than "posters and toasters," or communications and products. It can also be applied to higher order challenges such as brand-building, decision-making, organizational structure, and management models.
R: You say that you can apply the principles of aesthetics to strategy and organizational change. How can aesthetics work for these things in a prescriptive way, rather than a descriptive — i.e., how can aesthetics be used to drive and guide strategy and organizational change, as opposed to being used to looking backward at those things and assign aesthetic principles to the results after the fact?
M: Nice observation. We normally "ascribe" aesthetic qualities to things we already believe are beautiful, don't we? But that's because most of us don't think like designers. We think like audiences who have little control over our experiences, except the control that comes from choosing. We've become a culture of shoppers. We expect to choose our solutions off the "solutions rack," instead of creating new solutions that weren't there before. When you start "designing" solutions, you bring along the need for aesthetics — concepts like contrast, rhythm, pattern, scale, simplicity, and efficiency — to inform your solutions, instead of noticing them after the fact. You become a maker instead of an audience member.
R: I'm particularly interested in the concepts of simplicity and efficiency. How can these be used to drive innovation at the organizational level?
M: It's easy to be innovative once. Most great businesses are founded on one great innovation. It's much harder to be innovative time and time again. To do that, you need a culture of innovation.
But what happens is that companies start building on their first successful innovation by adding more complexity — extra processes, controls, brand extensions, and so on — to bolster and commercialize what's working. This added complexity makes it more difficult to recreate the conditions that gave rise to the original innovation.
So what they need to do is to break down the silos, the complexity, and the rigid thinking so that they reclaim the simplicity that first allowed them to innovate. They need to become "designful" again.
R: There’s an ongoing debate as to whether a company culture must be innovative in order for the company to be innovative, or whether putting one innovation foot ahead of the other and pushing forward anyway can lead a company to develop an innovation culture. You seem to be in the first group here. Please talk about why you feel it’s important for a company to develop an innovation culture *before* trying to innovate, and talk about how they might go about doing that.
M: I'm actually in the second group. Realistically, a company can't wait until its culture has been fully transformed before starting to innovate. In my book I outline 16 "levers of change" that can be used separately or in concert to move the organization from a spreadsheet-driven company to a design-driven company. Of course, the further along the transformation curve, the easier it is to innovate.
R: I sense a tension in your book between asserting that everyone can be trained in design thinking and that you need real designers to be able to innovate. Are you saying that there’s a class of people who are designers and therefore able to do this, and another set of people who don’t have this talent and therefore are doomed to always need a designer to turn to for creative thinking?
M: No. I've found that most people are already design thinkers — they're just unaware of it. If designing is about changing an existing situation into a preferred one, then we're all designers. The only question is whether we can martial the principles and processes of design to apply them deliberately and effectively.
People don't easily acquire new skills, much less a new way of thinking. So the best way for a company to jumpstart a culture of innovation — at least in my experience — is to build a strong internal brand department that can work across silos to influence the rest of the company. The process starts with hiring the right people.
R: How would you go about training non-designers to think more like designers?
M: I'd use a "branded training program." I'd start a company-wide educational program that teaches rarefied skills in the areas of innovation, collaboration, communication, brand strategy, and brand behavior. I say "branded training" because the skills shouldn't generic — they should be aligned with the unique purpose and strategy of the business. The fact is, company can't out-innovate the competition unless it can first out-learn it.
My view is that anyone can think more like a designer by simply making it a priority. Like the zen master says, when the student is ready, the teacher appears
Here are links to the previous reviews, interviews, and podcasts on the tour:
- Monday, April 20: Brand Autopsy
- Tuesday, April 21: The Marketing Fresh Peel
- Wednesday, April 22: Idea Sandbox
- Thursday, April 23: Principled Innovation
