As originally published in BusinessWeek, this is the third installment in a four-part series that talks about embracing design-shop approaches to problem-solving and how that means having to shed some key characteristics of how traditional companies work. Part One. Part Two.
REVOLUTIONARY CHAIR. Design consultancies value and encourage abductive reasoning alongside deductive and inductive reasoning. Bill Stumpf, head of a Minneapolis-based design shop, and Don Chadwick, head of a design consultancy in Santa Monica, Calif., designed the award-winning Aeron chair for Herman Miller.
Stumpf and Chadwick had lots of detailed consumer research from which to apply inductive reasoning — and robust sets of design principles to consider deductively. But their reasoning processes went well beyond the inductive and deductive: They imagined what a chair of the future could look like and how that chair could change the way users would think about office chairs forever.
Could they prove any of it in advance? No. In fact, when users first saw the chair, they gave it a decidedly chilly reception — but only because it looked like no other chair they had ever seen.
WINNING SENSIBILITY. In short order, users warmed to the Aeron chair because Stumpf and Chadwick had indeed created a product that no consumer could have described — but that met their unarticulated needs and sought to trump anything on the planet. It turned into the best-selling office chair of all time and a must-have for even the fanciest boardrooms, despite coming with a price tag double the prevailing level of a high-end ergonomic office chair. And it won, among other accolades, an award for the best design of its entire decade.
None of this would have happened without the design-shop sensibilities that fostered Stumpf and Chadwick’s abductive reasoning.
Source of Status
The primary source of status in traditional firms is the management of big budgets and large staffs. When executives have the occasion to boast about themselves, they tend to refer to the number of people for whom they have direct responsibility and/or the bottom line that they deliver each year — for example, “I run a 5,000 person organization, and our bottom line this year will be $700 million.” And of course, bigger is always better!
In a design consultancy, the source of status and pride derives from solving “wicked problems” — problems with no definitive formulation or solution and that have definitions open to multiple interpretations. This reality is confirmed by the appearance of the office of any star designer: Desks, credenzas, and shelves are covered with the “best” designs — the ones that solve the most difficult design challenges in the most elegant fashion.
Designers become known for their great solutions, whether the Apple mouse, the Bilbao Guggenheim, or the Nike swoosh. These designers enjoy the highest status inside their firms and across their industries. As a consequence, everyone in the design field seeks to earn status through tackling and solving wicked problems, not administering the biggest budgets or the highest number of people.
Dominant Attitude
The dominant attitude of traditional firms is to see constraints as the enemy and budgets as the drivers of decisions. The common argument is, “We can only do what we have budget to do.” If only budget constraints could be relieved, these managers seem to imply, so much more would be possible.
As a result, budget constraints are the reason why a product’s packaging is cheap-looking, or a product is late to market, or its range is too narrow. The budget — arch enemy of the traditional firm manager — simply makes it impossible to do any better.
Next week, the fourth and final installment of this topic which talks about constraints and rewards in design…
Do you agree with the dominant attitude in design firms as described here?