Go Beyond the Post-its
I am fascinated a great deal by the parallels of design and running a business. I came across this piece on medium about design muscles and its applicability in corporate life struck me a lot.
A lot of design tools are being applied in business now but just using the tools will not make people more creative. The key reason for that is that great design and creativity require not only mastery of the tools but being in the right mindsets depending where on the creativity process you are. This is what the design muscles are. A lot of the great designers are masters of staying in ambiguity for as long as it takes, noticing what is emerging, negotiating what are the most important aspects of the solutions, coming up with great metaphors and giving and receiving feedback.
The d.School fellows have identified five design muscles and they made me think about how much they can improve the problem solving abilities of big corporates:
Practicing ambiguity - it is very discomforting for many people not to know what is happening and where things are going. The cultures of a lot of companies require answers straight away and it is difficult to say that there is still lack of clarity. What this leads to is impatience to get to an answer rather than learn to deal with ambiguity for a bit longer. When we stay in the unknown long enough, we allow ourselves to explore, to ask questions and to see beyond the surface. Being comfortable with ambiguity requires a lot of trust and patience.
Practicing noticing - seeing first hand what emerges is critical while in many cases in big companies people rely solely on research, i.e. second-hand information. First-hand observation provides us with unique opportunity to see beyond what is immediately visible and is a source of powerful insights. It takes practice and requires us to suspend judgement, be curious and just observe. For me, noticing is linked to mindfulness - being in the moment, seeing as much as possible without lenses and becoming aware of opportunities and needs beyond what is initially said. Noticing is important for marketers, designers but also it is a critical skill for leadership. Leaders need to spend time with their teams and their customers to have a real understanding and insight into what is going on.
Practicing negotiating - this is about managing paradoxes and finding win-win solutions. What good designers are brilliant at is finding a solution that meets conflicting requirements. More and more, this is a practice that leaders need to be able to master. Leaders need to be able to reframe constraints and to show a different way at looking at a challenge. A brilliant example of this is the story about Audi winning the Le Mans race. The engineers at Audi were given the brief of how can Audi win the race without having the fastest car. As you can imagine, this set the team in a multiple different directions rather than just trying to have the fastest car.
Practicing metaphors - just like reframing, practicing metaphors gives us the opportunity to learn from other, unrelated fields. It requires us to look for the underlying principles, or questions and then see what inspiration we can draw from other places. It requires us to ask the question: “What is this really about?” and then look for inspiration from other fields. Practicing metaphors is linked with the sense of curiosity, which is one of the determinants of leadership potential in the model used by Egon Zehnder.
Practicing critique - the value of giving and receiving feedback and providing constructive critique is undisputable but yet there are so few organisations that have mastered this skill and made it an everyday practice. One of the key reasons for this is the lack of trust in many teams and between teams in many organisations. Practicing critique makes us vulnerable regardless if we are on the giving or receiving end that is why leaders need to establish high level of trust in the organisation, or the team, before they can practice critique easily. And yes, establishing trust in the team starts with being vulnerable and leading from that space. It starts that showing vulnerability is ok and that it makes us stronger.
Design is about creative, human-centered problem-solving and problem-solving is at the heart of what businesses do. No surprise why the applicability of design practices in business is so huge!