It is quite exhausting to go from listening to the customer to realizing them in an end product. Beyond building a competitive edge through market-share or maturity, supply-chain efficiency, business analytics, or intellectual property and technological innovation, Design seems to be charging ahead as a differentiating factor for many companies today. It is squarely felt in the consumer products world among the usual suspects (e.g., Apple, Samsung, Nike, etc.), but bringing design to the B2B world takes a new level of systems thinking.
In the traditional view of product development, there are processes to collect input from a wide range of existing customers, industry trends, expert views, business leaders, product architects, public social media; to word input into product requirements; to prioritize requirements by client needs, release plans, integration plans, strategic goals; to architect the requirements into the structure of the product itself; and eventually to plan and build it.
Product-dominant thinking has evolved over time to beyond the inventor’s view of the capabilities of the product, to the systems view of how, where and by whom it is used. When we say product these days, more organizations think of the system around it, moving us all one-step closer to thinking from the customer’s viewpoint.
This model fits well for the known or knowable products and systems. From concepts in the Cynefin framework of work and organizational complexity theorist, Dave Snowden, the ‘knowable’ applies to both his definition of Simple and Complicated ideas. You know what the cause-and-effects of specific needs are immediately or can determine them with some analysis.
However, many systems exist in the Complex world where you cannot determine cause and effect, although may be understood in retrospect. Take social collaboration software, for example. While the features can be as simple as buttons to Like something, or as complicated as the approval process of developing a technical standards document, the real complexity lies in understanding the many possibilities and the effect across a group of people. The complex world requires understanding intent, volatility, dynamic situations, and agile responsiveness.
Across all of these situations is Design (with a capital D). I like to think of design as the act of translating intent into action. The military term, Commander’s Intent, brings the concept of operational agility in a highly structured, some would say, process-oriented system. Rather than specific orders and instructions of what has to happen, it describes the desired end goals, and (my favorite subject) purpose. It is necessary in a hierarchical process-oriented organization to allow for agility and applying situational awareness.
If you reword this as customer’s intent, you effectively see the world of product development. Design takes the organization through conscious acts of:
- Translating the intent of many individual sources into common shared ideas;
- Developing a current view of the ideas in relation to the system;
- Creating shared (a new or prevailing) meaning of the evolving system;
- Defining guidelines that can help realize that meaning.
Design guidelines here are not product requirements. Rather they are test points of ‘does this meet the philosophy or intent’? What it creates is a field to frame more granular choices.
You may be familiar with the discrete digital logic of automated voice response systems—“Press 1 for X, Press 2 for Y, Press 0 for everything else”—the process oriented system to maximize flow for the most common choices. Customer intent however falls into the “Press 0” category, so we can quickly skip ahead, hopefully to talk to a human that can help us with the issues the way we see it—the old analog world of regular people.
For workers, this releases people from the strictures of process. You allow for creativity of solution, rather than step-by-step cog-and-gear actions. Customers aren’t frustrated by having to formulate their intentions to a strict context. “Help me do what I want, not what I am bound to with this product.” Those who bring the intent from customers do not have to word every discrete input and output black-box parameters for implementation. And those who have to turn the intent into a solution are not exclusively limited by those parameters, and have the freedom to be creative and explore.
It takes a lot of to and fro with customers to figure out intent: listening, discussing, documenting, prototyping, and then refining and repeating—similar to the Agile methodology in development.
There is always a downside, of course, which is misinterpreting the intent. However, paying attention to the intent carries us from discrete choices of digital logic to the analog views of humans. Obviously, understanding people takes both experience and skill. In best form, it is some elusive combination of psychology, sociology, technical skill, industry awareness, rhetorical thinking, and creativity—a true T-shaped job skills profile.
Hiring designers goes beyond examining a laundry list of certifications but into expressions of their ability to work with intent, to gather, understand, explore, interpret and envision the possibilities. There tends of a bit of turnover with designers because it takes a while to understand each hire, how they fit, and how they add value. Plus, it is in the nature of creative folks to move to new ideas and projects. It is why so many designers tend to be in agencies and service firms contracting to a broad clientele.
Companies understand they need designers but also see the difficulty of keeping such a variable job role. So, it was especially interesting to hear recent news of IBM ramping up its Design Studio in Austin, and looking to hire a large contingent of in-house designers. Starting with hiring 100 designers in its new 25,000 sq. foot facility in Austin, Texas, the services giant looks to hire an additional 150 designers each year with a goal of up to 400 by the end of 2015.
[Note: Stay tuned for a coming article on my conversation with Phil Gilbert, General Manager of IBM Design.]
What can you achieve with an army of designers? For one, it is the right step forward to co-create with customers. To quote organizational and community leadership specialist Margaret Wheatley, “People support what they create.” This goes both the customer and the vendor-side. The designers’ role is to bring both sides together.
Per Ms. Wheatley, it isn’t simply about collecting their input but to involve them and provide a share of idea ownership and provenance. Those who provide the input should be able to understand even point to something and say with positive excitement, “Hey, that’s my idea!” It reinforces engagement and loyalty.
While not every company can afford an entire legion, there are other possibilities to bring about tools and participative processes to enable co-design with customers. Even for IBM, a legion of designers directly in the job may not be enough, considering its massive customer footprint. Which is why it is focusing on expanding this skill across the company, to “imprint design into the DNA of IBM,” according to IBM Design GM, Phil Gilbert. It will take time, but it is a learnable philosophy and skill.
By enabling design, you are not only working to delight the customer, you can evolve your organization. Per Jon Husband, co-creation is a disruption to the limitations of existing organization culture. It shifts thinking from what exists to what is possible. It embraces bringing greater freedom and creativity to workers by releasing some of the clamps of process. It instills a sense of research, allowing for innovation through creativity. It broadens the backgrounds of who should be involved, from social sciences to new disciplines. And at the end, it creates a real value-add of the people (employees, partners and customers) behind a system that we still refer to as ‘a product’.
I’m having fun going through the design process at Alynd right now as well. You can reach me on Facebook.com/rawnshah or Twitter @rawn
