Good thinking about design thinking

Tagged with design thinking | innovation | Roger Martin

Moving from London to Adelaide prompted an overdue pruning of my bookshelf. If you’re interested there’s a now a second hand book shop in Stoke Newington with a well stocked design and innovation section, but at a £1 a cover I think I got the better deal. So much of what’s written in this field is really not worth hanging onto. The book  that did make my hand luggage was Roger Martins’ – The Design of Business – Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage

Despite the generic title Design of Business is a key text for anyone who wants to understand and explain design thinking and innovation, the book easily translates for applying design thinking to social problems. Martin gives us a concrete definition of design thinking, explains how design is distinct to analytical problem solving approaches and provides us with a model for understanding stages of innovation. This model he calls the ‘knowledge funnel’.

At the top of the funnel is Mystery, problems awaiting solutions. The next stage is heuristics, rules of thumbs that seem to solve problems. The most developed form knowledge, at the bottom of the funnel, is algorithms – solutions that can be described as formulas that can be easily taken to scale. The example he uses is the McDonald brothers and their restaurants. Circa 1950 their chain of Californian barbeque and burger drive-ins was losing business. Food got cold whilst drivers waited for it to be delivered to their place in the parking lot and families were put off by the presence of growing hoards of teenagers. The brothers had a hunch that a family orientated restaurant with quick service would reverse their fortunes. Eventually they reduced the menu to just 25 standardised burgers and launched their new concept the Speedy Service System, inventing fast food. From their hunch they’d developed a rule of thumb that worked – a heuristic.

Meanwhile their milk shake machine supplier spotted an opportunity. In 1955 he bought out the brothers and refined their heuristic into an algorithm by further streamlining the menu. Soon the McDonalds franchise manual was born. The rest is (mostly) a very successful history.

Martin argues that successful organiastions find the approriate balance between mystery level activity and working at the level of heuristics – in other words they balance R&D with delivery at scale. McDonalds didn’t do that well. As you go down the funnel knowledge is removed – the McDonalds brothers (understandably) left health out of their heuristic. 50 years later it still wasn’t part of the algorithm and McDonalds found itself loosing out to healthier to competitors like Subway. McDonalds was forced into a radical shift, that if they were exploring mysteries they could have exploited.

Martins’s second major contribution is a definition of design thinking which goes beyond Tim Browns’ definition of ‘it’s what designers do’ which martin himself describes as circulatory.

For Martin design thinking is a distinct kind of logic, ‘abdutive logic’, as defined by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in 1832. Abductive logic sits alongside more analytical approaches of inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning.

I’ll explain the difference between the three using our current project focus of social services concerned with families and child protection in South Australia.

Were we to take an deductive approach to this problem we’d move from the general to the specific. We’d commission an audit of all child protection services operation in Australia, find the best approach and then apply it here. That would be expensive, time consuming, and we’d have to agree on what’s best – difficult with wicked problems. What’s more the audit’s already been done, it found that services are very similar in all States and territories and South Australia’s child protection system remains unchanged.

An inductive approach would work from the specific to the general. We’d take the best approach we know about and apply it here. Only we don’t yet know of approaches that work and we doubt that they’d fit culturally with Australia and Indigenous populations.

Instead we’re going to take an abductive approach, the ‘design thinking’ approach, we’ll work with some well informed hunches. We’ll start with observations of the existing system, of families that do well despite services and some knowledge of good practice. From this we’ll generate our hunches of what might work and quickly try them out in the form of a prototype service. From our early (and no doubt off the mark) prototypes we’ll learn what works, what doesn’t and improve on what we do, until we have a service we know works in context.

So according to Martin the essence of design thinking is the doing. We’ve been busy prototyping the definiation at St Martins and TACSI and can report it’s works well, particularly where fluffier definitions left people confused.

Roger Martin, The Design of Business – probably not available in a second hand bookshop near you.

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