Not along ago it was exceptional to see the words innovation and design in a Request for Proposal / Tender, or a brief from a client. The terms design thinking and co-design were altogether absent.
Now all four words appear in almost every brief and request — even where the substance of the work is fairly straightforward and amenable to traditional methods.
It looks like the words are with us for some time to come. Like every other movement, they are already running the risk of becoming overused with little understanding: of becoming clichés.
I find it helpful to frame these four terms this way:
- Innovation is the outcome
- Design is the process
- Design thinking is the disposition
- Co-design is the mode of working
Let me fill out each one a little.
Innovation is the outcome
There’s nothing new about innovation. It is making new things and doing new things with old things. What may be new is our obsession with innovation!
There have always been three routes to innovation: serendipity, improvisation and design. We stumble across something new, we fiddle with something until it changes, and sometimes we are deliberate about making something new.
Serendipity. Improvisation. Design. These are still our three routes to innovation.
What has changed is the expectation of innovation and thus our investment in being deliberate about making new things. And thus our interest in design.
Design is the process
Design, too, is not new, but our emphasis upon it is. Design is the process of being deliberate about making something new or doing something new with something old. Sometimes the process is formalised. Most of the time it’s never that straightforward — even when we do have a process.
Design thinking is the disposition
Design thinking is the disposition that makes human experience central to design. That’s way harder than it sounds. We seem wired to starting with a process or system or template or ‘best practice’ or some other abstraction of a living, breathing human reality — like patients who get lost in a hospital admission system. Design thinking starts with those patients. Their stories, hopes, fears, and desires. And with stories of the administrators, nurses, doctors and more.
Stories are to design as data is to analytics.
Co-design is the mode of working
Co-design is making things together. Co-design is NOT collaboration, consensus, consultation, surveys, focus groups, or a warm and fuzzy feeling. It is CO (with) DESIGN (making). Two or more parties imagine and make something together in a way that each is glad for what they have made and each can recognise their own imprint upon what has been made. That takes enormous skill and courage.
Co-design is making things together.
Four marks of a great design process and outcome
Like I said, I like simple. Elegantly simple. Intelligently simple. I find these four words continually direct my efforts as a designer and challenge my sense of when the job has been done.
Great design processes and outcomes are:
- RELATIONAL — of, with, and for customers, citizens, communities
- BELIEVABLE — respectful of meaning and stories, coherent, sensible, and free of hype
- TANGIBLE — stuff you can point to show something good is emerging
- DELIVERABLE — desirable, usable, useful, and measurable
The toughest challenge of innovation and design
Being deliberate about innovation is hard work. It takes imagination, persistence, and a good deal of courage. Doing design well is also hard work. It means not cutting corners. Paying respect to the oddest details in people’s experiences because you have learned that insights don’t come gift-wrapped. And thinking like a designer is so unnatural for those of brought up to follow the rules, second-guess the teacher, and do things ‘right’. Paying attention to experience is not like that at all.
But none of these is the toughest challenge of innovation and design…
The toughest challenge is for leaders genuinely to understand innovation and design and to stay committed for the long haul.
In other words, sponsorship. In my experience this is the greatest predictor of success or failure for organisation based innovation and design.
You can tell the moment the subject is raised. The body language. The level of conversation. The degree to which leaders can think and debate beyond their own silo. The presence or absence of imagination. The level of comfort with a true conversation rather than a presentation. And so much more.
A plainly human, un-hyped process for innovation and design
Finally, if design thinking is about putting human experience at he centre of design, and co-design is about people making things together, then perhaps we should be as simply human about encouraging innovation and design on an organisational scale.
Here’s the headings for another post:
- Decode innovation and design wherever you can. Make it relational, believable, tangible and deliverable. Start with those leaders. If they can’t sustain intelligent conversations about innovation and design, it’s dead in the water.
- Find where innovation and design is already happening. It is. Look for the brilliance in the room before best practice elsewhere. Not IQ but the capacity of people to shine. It really is there already.
- Respect and leverage this existing brilliance. Some of these people are doing things that hold far larger promise. Find them. Get inside their experience and ideas. Ask them to lead the way.
- Foster new ways of working. As you work from one pocket of brilliance to another, people start realising that more of them are working in new ways. Don’t institutionalise it. Just breathe a little life on what’s happening.
- Sponsor pilots to create new service experiences. As momentum grows, you begin to build small design teams that can take on challenges where a breakthrough could have disproportionally good impact. If you’re the sponsor, back them, then back them some more. And get out of the way.
- Consolidate new value and capability. For years we have talked about learning organisation. No one become a learning organisation by talking about being a learning organisation. Nor do we learn by talking about learning. We learn by making things together, noticing what each other has done, asking questions, and inviting others to join in.
Look for the brilliance in the room before best practice elsewhere.
Don’t make innovation and design another change program. Keep it human. Keep it intelligently simple. Keep it anchored in experience.
People suffer from ‘stupid change’ fatigue and ‘change program’ fatigue, not change fatigue per se.
Doing innovation and design this way will always appear slower, less impressive, and too simple to work. In my experience it always proves to be faster and far more effective.
