By Roger L. Martin, Dean of Rotman School of Management

Creativity That Goes Deep

Embracing design-shop approaches to problem solving means having to shed some key characteristics of how traditional companies work

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 (AAPL ), 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.



Style of Work
Traditional firms have a style of work that
involves ongoing, permanent tasks. Roles tend to be carefully, if not
rigidly, defined with clear responsibilities for the individual laid
out and economic incentives linked tightly to those individual
responsibilities. People are typically much more adept at describing
"my responsibilities" than they are at describing "our
responsibilities."


They feel inclined to work away at these responsibilities,
refining and honing outputs before sharing a complete, final product
with others. For example, the SVP of marketing will work away on the
annual marketing plan, refining and adjusting it until it is "the
perfect plan" and only then take it to the CEO in the hopes of the boss
saying: "Perfect."



GEHRY'S BLUEPRINT.  In a design shop,
the style of work is much more collaborative. Even though some
hierarchy within teams likely exists, projects are typically assigned
to teams rather than to individuals. A design team is mandated to come
up with a design solution together -- not individually. And the team is
expected to interact throughout the process with the clients by
bringing them into the design collaboration.


Because of this collaboration with clients, the work style
also tends to be iterative -- the opposite of waiting until something
is "right." This involves prototyping, honing, and refining through
multiple iterations with the client.


Architect Frank Gehry is famous for this iterative style. The
first design that goes public typically elicits a firestorm of protests
for its inadequacies on a number of dimensions, making clients, users,
and observers extremely nervous because they generally work in
traditional organizations in which nothing sees the light of day until
it is "right."



JUDGED UNFAIRLY.  They can't imagine
that Gehry has only just begun, that even though he is the brilliant
expert, he wants to get valuable feedback for the next iteration, which
won't be final either, by the way. Indeed, "final" only emerges many
iterations into the future.


When traditional firms hire designers, their managers often
find them disappointing because, like Gehry, they produce prototypes
for feedback instead of final products. Unfortunately for the
designers, these firm managers think they are seeing a final product
and -- judged by that standard -- the product is deemed patently
substandard and the designer incompetent.

Mode of Thinking
Traditional firms utilize and reward the use
of two kinds of logic. The first, inductive, entails proving through
observation that something actually works. The second, deductive,
involves proving -- through reasoning from principles -- that something
must be.


A retailer may study the cost structure of all of its outlets,
for example, to determine which has the best cost position in order to
set, inductively, a cost target for the whole chain. Or a consumer
packaged-goods firm can use its engrained theory -- "build market share
and profits will follow" -- to deduce the appropriate action in a given
situation.


Any other form of reasoning or arguing outside these two is
discouraged and, at the extreme, exterminated. The challenge is always,
"Can you prove that?" And to prove something in a reliable fashion
means using rigorous inductive or deductive logic.


Designers also use and value inductive and deductive
reasoning. Designers induce patterns through the close study of users
and deduce answers through the application of design theories. However,
designers value highly a third type of logic: abductive reasoning.
Abductive reasoning, as described by Darden professor Jeanne Liedtka,
embraces the logic of what might be. Designers may not be able to prove
that something "is" or "must be," but they nevertheless reason that it "may be." This style of thinking is critical to the creative process.



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.



LOVE THOSE CONSTRAINTS.  By contrast,
design shops' dominant mind-set is: "There's nothing that can't be
done." If something can't be done yet, it is only because the thinking
hasn't yet been creative and inspired enough. For Buckminster Fuller,
the problem of buildings getting proportionally heavier, weaker, and
more expensive as they got larger in scale did not qualify as
intractable. It remained intractable only until he created the design
of the geodesic dome, which gets proportionally lighter, stronger, and
less expensive as it grows larger in scale.


For designers, constraints never constitute the enemy. On the
contrary, they serve to increase the challenge and excitement level of
the task at hand. In fact, given the source of status in these
organizations, constraints actually increase the level of a problem's
"wickedness," making its potential solution that much more rewarding.
Hence designers would rarely say: "That simply can't be done" or "We
don't have the budget for that." Rather, they'd proclaim: "Bring it
on!"

The Journey from Appending to Embedding
It is both
unrealistic and unproductive to think that traditional companies will
ever transform their organizations entirely into those of design
consultancies However, given today's design-centric environment,
traditional firms can -- and should -- make subtle but important
changes in their values to deeply embed and exploit design, rather than
append it as nothing more than the latest management fad.


The linchpin of the required change lies in the wicked
problem. A traditional firm's values result in assuming away wicked
problems as the product of immutable constraints with which the firm
must live: Managers avoid working on wicked problems, because status
comes from elsewhere, and concentrating on ongoing tasks crowds out
working on, and thinking about, wicked problems. Even if a traditional
firm takes on a wicked problem, the lack of appreciation of both
abductive reasoning and iterative/collaborate work makes it less likely
that it will be productively tackled.



REWARDING WITH WICKEDNESS.  If
instead, traditional firms recognize that the wicked problems that
present themselves represent their biggest opportunities for value
creation, they will see that tackling them requires a project-based
approach and that the important role of projects in company life must
not be protected from the tyranny of ongoing tasks.


They will be more inclined to assign their best and brightest
to tackling wicked projects, which will signal that solving wicked
problems is a high-status activity. And by recognizing these issues
explicitly as wicked problems, the corporation will in greater
likelihood recognize that abductive logic as well as
iterative/collaborative process is needed.


Companies that truly want to embed design into their
fundamental operations need to wade into wicked problems. "Bring it on"
needs to replace "nothing can be done" as the response to these
problems. Wading into wicked problems using the approaches described
here will provide the catalyst for introducing key design
characteristics into an established company.


And as many of today's most successful corporations have
shown, infusing an organization with design principles can pay big
dividends in value creation.

Roger L. Martin has served as
dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of
Toronto since Sept. 1, 1998. He was previously a director of Monitor
Company, a global strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Mass.
During his 13 years there, he founded and chaired the firm's
educational arm, Monitor University, and served as co-head of the firm
for two years and founded its Canadian practice.


His research interests lie in the areas of integrative
thinking, business design, global competitiveness, and corporate
citizenship. He has penned numerous articles for Harvard Business Review and also written for Barron's, Time, Fast Company, Compass, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Australian Financial Review, Maclean's, The Globe and Mail, and Healthcare Quarterly.

Martin's first book, The Responsibility Virus, was
published by Basic Books (New York) in 2002. He is currently chair of
the Ontario Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity, and Economic
Progress and director of the AIC Institute for Corporate Citizenship.


He received an AB from Harvard College, with a concentration
in economics, in 1979 and an MBA from the Harvard Business School in
1981. Martin also is the chair of Workbrain Inc. and serves on the
boards of Thomson Corp., Tennis Canada, and the Skoll Foundation. He is
a trustee of the Hospital for Sick Children. He lives in Toronto with
his wife Nancy and children Lloyd, Jennifer, and Daniel.