As originally published in BusinessWeek, this is the first 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.
Creativity That Goes Deep
The topic of design is as hot as a pistol these days. Everywhere you look, you see cover stories and conferences. If it’s design-related, people are talking about it. Firms everywhere want to revolutionize themselves by turning design-oriented. They look wistfully at the stupendous growth that the iconic iPod has provided previously stagnating Apple Computer, and believe that design can help them create their own version of the iPod and restart their growth engines.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as hiring a chief design officer and declaring design as your top corporate priority. To generate meaningful benefits from design, corporations will have to change in fundamental ways before they can operate like the design consultancies who advise them on how to sharpen their design focus. To get the benefit of design, companies have to embed design into — not append it onto– their business.
Design organizations vary significantly from traditional firms along five key dimensions: flow of work life, style of work, mode of thinking, source of status, and dominant attitude. Left unchecked, the stark contrast between traditional firms and design consultancies will impede any attempt by traditional firms to become more design-oriented.
Flow of Work Life
Traditional firms organize the flow of work life around permanent jobs and ongoing tasks. “Vice-president of marketing” is a permanent position with a set of tasks considered ongoing, without finite duration: managing the annual advertising plan, setting marketing budgets, coordinating with sales, reporting quarterly on share trends to the CEO, etc. The marketing vice-president is rewarded primarily for fulfilling these ongoing responsibilities consistently and adroitly. By and large, colleagues mirror this flow of work life.
In design consultancies, the work flow differs radically. The world consists primarily of projects with defined terms. Designers are accustomed to being assigned to a given project with a specific deadline. When the deadline comes and the project is completed, it disappears from sight, and the designer moves on to other projects, each of which also has a fixed duration. Designers get used to mixing and matching with other designers on ad-hoc teams created with a specific purpose in mind. They see their lives as an accumulation of projects, rather than an accumulation of hierarchical job titles — i.e., manager, director, AVP, VP, SVP, EVP, and CEO.
NOTHING PERMANENT. Dropped into a traditional setting with a permanent job defined by the performance of an ongoing set of tasks, a designer will feel completely alienated from the “normal” way of operating, because design thinking and work require a different flow of work life.
Interestingly, one could argue that traditional firms actually fool themselves in attempting to portray jobs and tasks as “ongoing” and “permanent” when, in fact, most of work life is naturally a set of projects, each of which has its ebbs and flows. Many managers complain that, because of all the “fire-fighting” they have to do on things that come up, they can’t seem to get their “real job” done. I would argue that they have a skewed sense of reality: The fire-fighting is probably more real than the so-called real job.
Stay tuned for the second installment of this topic which talks about Style of Work and Mode of Thinking…
Until then, what are your design theories?
August 7th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I’m not sure I could disagree more with this piece.
My first disagreement is with the claim that design as a practice and design firms as a manifestation of that practice are so unique, and so radically different from standard corporate operations, that a corporation must undergo a radical and fundamental change to include design.
This claim implies 1) that there is some standard way corporations operate, 2) that design firms operate different from this standard, and 3) these two different ways are incompatible.
I think all three of these implications are utterly absurd. Both corporations and design firms operate in wildly varying ways. Some design firms act more like accounting firms, and some corporations act more like frat houses. In other words there are no standards, and as a result it is impossible to claim any inherent incompatibility between such non-existent standards.
My second disagreement is with the characterization of corporate workflow consisting of static permanent roles, and of design firm workflow consisting of projects with defined terms. I’m not sure how these are incompatible as the article suggests, but let’s assume they are.
Just as corporations have directors, AVPs, VPs, so many design firms have traffic managers, art directors, creative directors, account managers, etc. Each role has well circumscribes responsibilities, and exists in a hierarchical relation to each other. Sure not all design firms have these roles, but not all corporations have AVPs either.
And yes design firm operations are centered on projects. But so are corporate ops (hence the corporate ubiquity of project managers and program managers). Indeed the internal flow of capital within many corporations is usually tied to projects, with teams members billing their time against specific project budget codes—projects with start dates, end dates, resources and budgets. My experience working in big corporate America is that outside of manufacturing and customer support, nearly everything is project based.
So the author’s characterization of the organization and activities of both corporate and design firms is so wrong that I have to wonder if he has any personal experience working within either corporations or design firms.
And my third disagreement is with the implication that corporations *should* change to be more like design firms. Corporate America may be full of dyfunction, but anyone who has worked in a design firm can tell you the design is every bit as dysfunctional–and two dysfunctions don’t fix the problem.