India Design Futures: Reflections: 2008 Leadership by Design Summit in Bangalore

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India Design Futures: Reflections: 2008 Leadership by Design Summit in Bangalore Questions by:

Arvind Lodaya Head, 3-Dimensional Design, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology Bangalore, India Response by:

GK VanPatter Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute Co-Founder, Humantific  Making Sense of Cross-Disciplinary Innovation

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Question 1: Arvind Lodaya: In presenting Design 3.0 [at the conference in Bangalore] as a model to provide the "radical leadership" needed to face the "new challenges" before humanity, you seem to be echoing Kuhn's vision of paradigm shifts. Do you actually think it's possible (and desirable) for innovation and imagination to become the driving force in every organization rather than continuity?

GK VanPatter: Wow Arvind, you are jumping in with the heavy questions right away here! Let me say first of all that I was delighted to participate in the Leadership Through Design Summit in Bangalore and I am happy to have this follow-up conversation with you. In the compressed time slots of conference presentations it is often difficult to say everything we would like to say on a particular subject and that conference suffered from having no time for questions from the audience. We believe there is a great opportunity for the design community in India to create its own path to the future and that in essence was the message underlying both the presentations that I made in Bangalore.

Quite frankly I was surprised to see so much emphasis at the summit on depicting product and experience creation as the all encompassing present and future of design.

A lot of that seemed to be about mimicking what has been going on in America and what Business Week has been depicting as “design thinking�. For some years that depiction of design has been old hat so it was surprising to see so much of it so far from American shores at a summit on leadership through design. It struck me that there were so many other approaches possible.

From my perspective one of the highlights of the Bangalore summit was when Ms Neelam Chibbar stood up and questioned aloud if mimicking the present product-centric American orientation was an appropriate route for India. Go Neelam!

In general we found Interest in Design 3.0 to be extremely high in India. I saw numerous people doing forward thinking design work there and we made many new friends. Partners from Idiom invited me to their office downtown so that was fun to see. Idiom has terrific energy. It was a learning experience for me to find a design company with 200+ employees in Bangalore! Our energetic friends at Elephant Design are also doing interesting work getting more involved with helping organizations with their transformation related challenges. Elephant has significant interest in building a new innovation school in Pune.

I did come away from that conference with a sense of optimism. India, it seems to me, is a place of enormous complexity and great hope.

Regarding your two questions: I think its best for me to take them in reverse order and first say YES I believe it is possible for innovation to become the driving force in organizations where this is an agreed upon goal. Innovation is not available as a pill or in soft drink form that one can guzzle down quickly and have it. It takes a lot of difficult, sustained work to build such capabilities. It takes commitment on the part of organizational leaders. In some organizations innovation is simply not an agreed upon goal.

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In North America many large organizations have innovation embedded in their corporate values. Of course placing a sign on the wall that says innovation is the easy part.  Creating the enabling conditions for inclusive innovation and attaching actual behaviors to innovation is the heavy lift. We find many organizations grappling with how to reduce the abstractions around innovation. It’s one thing to read about innovation in a business magazine but how do you make it real? Often new skills are required to think and operate in a context of continuous change.

Lets keep in mind that some global organizations today have more than one hundred thousand employees. For many companies this is not about ten people sitting around a conference table. Scaling innovation is a significant challenge. Increasingly leaders do recognize connections between continuous marketplace change, internal adaptability, innovation enabling and creating meaningful responses to globalization.

Regarding the “imagination” part of your question: In our Humantific work we help organizational leaders understand and appreciate that decision-making alone will not make their organizations more innovative even though this might have been what they were told and taught in business school.  Decision-making is about convergence.

It is a mechanism that requires something to converge upon. Without ideas there is no convergence. In the bigger picture sense this has a lot to do with what our societies are conditioned to value.

When we place the imagination question in this context we recognize that this is not a new question. One can find this theme emerging early on in the work of E. Paul Torrance and other pioneers involved in the realm of creativity research in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. Those who have studied the history of creativity research (sometimes referred to as applied creativity) will know that Guilford, Torrance, Osborn, Parnes and other pioneers began to ring the alarm bells early on regarding the lack of recognition and attention given to divergent thinking and imagination in our schools and in American society in general. To a significant degree those bells are still ringing. In some countries today they ring louder than in others.

While he was involved in the psychology of team survival training during world war two Torrance saw very practical applications of imagination. After the war Torrance became a champion of divergent thinking and imagination among children, parents and teachers involved in elementary education. That advocacy became his life’s work.

Alex Osborn wrote “How to Think Up” in 1943 and “Wake Up Your Mind” in 1952.

Both were advocating more recognition of imagination in American society and in business. To a significant degree those struggles remain although the context keeps changing.

The 21st century context for imagination and adaptability is globalization and sustainability. Today business organizations face the continuously changing survival tests being created by the marketplace. In the complex world of today alot of sensemaking has to take place before imagination can begin. This is one significant difference between the applied imagination literature and what we face in the real world today.

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We teach adaptability in most of our Humantific workshops and we see non-stop need and interest in this subject among organizational leaders around the world.

Although business schools have for years done a great job selling decision-making, judgment, convergence as the highest form of value it is only part of the equation in the context of our now innovation oriented societies. The context has changed and these days the business schools are finding that a difficult sell. In practice we make a strong case for an equal partnership between ideation/divergence/imagination and judgment/convergence/decision-making when the objective is to create an innovative culture.

In comparison to what goes on in many companies this is a very different kind of universe that takes some getting use to. It is this universe that business schools have only just recently woken up to and are now scrambling to adapt to. It is a picture, a story, and a consultancy space that they not surprisingly seek to rapidly write themselves into.

We see this going on at Rotman and other business education institutions. They have awakened to the realization that decision-making is no longer the king of the castle.

To the business school academics this is a “New Creative Age”!  This late shift on their part is not exactly breaking news to enlightened practitioners, including designers already operating in the Design 3.0 transformation activity space.

Many of our Humantific clients are organizations seeking to use design thinking skills in the context of organizational adaptability and transformation. Today organizational leaders are looking to design oriented firms for that skill-set rather than looking to traditional business school graduates steeped in the intricacies of “decision-making”.

These choices make for some heat in the strategy and innovation skill-building marketplace.

Making the case for divergent thinking and imagination remains an important element in what we do in practice. In doing so we stand on the shoulders of many early pioneers who have preceded us. We have great respect for that work.

The quest to imagine and create a more human-centered world is part of that long struggle. Interconnected is advocacy for human-centered design. Of course it is important to know how the pieces connect. To be able to make the business case for imagination, for divergent thinking is extremely important. Today we do this work by advocating and enabling inclusive innovation. It is difficult to argue against the goal of maximizing the brainpower in organizations. Inside that circle of inclusion is a space for design. This is work that we deeply believe in.

Regarding your comment about Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts: We believe the design community has for some time, since at least 2000, been in a state of transformation towards more strategic work. One could certainly think of that as a series of paradigm shifts. It is a direction being driven by globalization’s impact on design and the various skill shifts underway in the marketplace rather than by scientific discoveries. One might say that migration is driving discovery and adaptation like never before.

Kuhn’s 1960s era “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is a sense-making manifesto and a great one. As a sense-maker I am equally interested in the focus, methods and organizational devices used by Kuhn to explain his analysis as I am in the analysis Page 4 of 11

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itself. We need not get into a debate about the differences between the purpose or evolutionary states of science and design to appreciate what Kuhn was trying to do in parsing the complexities and shifts within the field of science. I am sure there were, at that time, hundreds of variables in the mix so I can certainly appreciate Kuhn’s synthesis and the resulting framework. ď Š At NextD we never set out to transform the design industry but rather to make sense of the change already occurring. When we launched NextD in 2002 the very first thing we did was to embark on a sense-making journey that we could share with others.

Today we always try to present Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 as a sense-making framework.

We present Design 3.0 as a story about an alternate path through the forest for designers rather than as "radical leadership needed to face the new challenges before humanity.� Not everyone in the design community understands that 3.0 is not an abstract idea but rather a migration of survival driven by globalization. Some in our community including many academic leaders seem to be asleep to those forces.

At NextD we do talk about the traditional model of design leadership as an unsustainable burning platform. We do talk about traditional design process skills being out of sync with the challenges now facing humanity.

One difference between the science revolutions described by Kuhn and those occurring in the realm of design is that major design paradigms tend to coexist simultaneously rather than replace each other. Design is an amorphous time warp that exists in multiple states and across multiple domains simultaneously. At least this seems to be the case in the short term. For years and perhaps decades the paradigms of Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 will to a degree coexist. This makes for a complicated picture.

The numbers of firms operating in each is changing as the globalization writing on the wall gets clearer to more from month to month and year to year. While the 1.0 activity space is moving and shrinking the 3.0 space is growing and remains to a large degree undefined. Who has the skill-set to work in the space where fuzzy challenges and opportunities are co-defined in a cross-disciplinary context is among the most important questions of the marketplace today. Design-oriented firms are not only part of that conversation but are already active as innovators and leaders in that strategic space.

Design oriented firms are proactively bringing new skills and disciplines together like never before in history. It is that new combination of skill that organizational leaders now seek in their quest to become more innovative.

Since we began talking about next design in 2002 we have seen a tremendous migration by design-oriented firms towards more strategic work. This involves becoming more involved upstream in problem framing rather than waiting for briefs to be written by others. To a significant degree this involves new skills and tools not traditionally part of design. Understandably the migration is not universal by any means.

There are many folks in the design community who have no interest in this realm of work and have already decided to remain downstream where they are most comfortable regardless of what is shrinking or growing in the marketplace. That is a choice we all make everyday and design education is part of that mix whether they like it or not.

At NextD we are often asked which graduate schools offer skills that would equip graduates to engage in the Design 3.0 activity space.

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As Kuhn observed; it is difficult for a community to see and fully understand revolutions when you are inside one and this is certainly the case for the strategic innovation revolution today. As you know, not everyone in the scientific community agreed with Kuhn or acknowledged his perspective.

The future tends to arrive unevenly as William Gibson famously pointed out. There is therefore often controversy around futures work. Getting to the future is typically a bumpy road.

Some among us are not aware of a futures arrival, while others, for various personal, political or strategic reasons might not be comfortable acknowledging its arrival, others might be directly opposed to its arrival, some might have another future in mind that is more beneficial to them. Some professional organizations seek “their people” to be articulating what their particular future looks like in ways that are most comfortable to them. We see this kind of stuff going on over at AIGA here in North America.

Of course sense-making itself is powerful and not always welcome. All of this makes for a bumpy terrain for anything future related. It is no secret that the future has become as competitive as the present day marketplace.

Question 2: Arvind Lodaya: In your Bangalore conference presentation you asked rhetorically [I am paraphrasing here], "When we know that making more and more new products is not going to help the world's poor become rich, why is it that we continue making them?"

This is a particularly relevant question for India. What is the future scenario that you foresee that allows for inclusive growth without consuming more planetary resources?

GK VanPatter: OK I see you are paraphrasing here Arvind.  What I did was invite the conference audience to ask themselves a few simple questions.

I said: Look out into your communities and ask yourself how many of the challenges facing India can be solved by creating more consumer products? Consumer products represent solutions to what challenges in India? to whose challenges?

Framing the questions in this way tends to break the dominant product creation trance that is being aggressively sold out there. In problem finding terms it becomes quite clear to most people that the inhabitants of planet earth, certainly the people of India face many challenges that extend far beyond consumer product creation, however humancentered those products might be.

If very few of the challenges facing India can be addressed by creating more products, than you might ask yourselves why then is there so much design education focus in that direction?

Let’s be honest. It is no secret that essentially this is a model, an orientation being imported from the US where chasing the next iPod still dominates the consciousness.

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Go to any design conference and you will see that this is a model of design that several leading American graduate schools have been busy advocating for several years.

From my perspective this was the elephant in the living room at the Bangalore conference. On the one hand I heard a widely expressed goal among participants of doing things the Indian way while at the same time I saw a strong tendency to import the product-centric American Design 2.0 orientation. It does not take a rocket designer to see that amongst all the construction, energy and promise of Bangalore, India itself faces enormous challenges that will require new cross-disciplinary co-creation efforts. Not everyone will be pleased to hear that this might involve equipping designers to directly compete in the strategic space with business school educated consultants.

Why wouldn’t we want to write designers into the broadest innovation equation possible?

In whose interest is it to keep design contained in a product-centric 2.0 box? Why wouldn’t we want design to be involved in more meaningful work than chasing the next iPod? These are difficult questions, not for me, but rather for the design community in India to consider and wrestle with. We wish them well in that important work.

At NextD we see a future for design that is broader than most of the views around, certainly much broader than the view popularized in the new business press. Our community was quick to embrace that view without really understanding the consequences. Unless you are practicing in the 1.0 activity space Design 2.0 represents a foreshortened rather than an expanded view of design. This seemed to be not understood by the Bangalore conference organizers. Design 2.0 is also very much subservient to business. Many of our design schools have unfortunately been complicit in enabling that subservience. These are difficult things to talk about.

Nowhere in the traditional design press will you see any meaningful coverage of such issues. While 2.0 represents a huge industry keeping numerous leading consultancies busy and employing thousands of designers around the world we see much broader possibilities for design.

Question 3: Arvind Lodaya: You commented that the new designers will need to possess both content knowledge and process knowledge, which in my view obtains largely through experience. What then is the responsibility of the new design academy, and how different is it from the conventional one?

GK VanPatter: I think you must be referring to my comments about separating content knowledge from process knowledge. This is part of what we teach in our InnovationLab workshops in preparation for tackling larger scale challenges that involve cross-disciplinary co-creation. There are a number of reasons why we do this. In highly complex situations we need high levels of both content and process knowledge in the room, not always in the same persons.

Here is a pattern involving content and process that we continue to see in much of graduate design education today:

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1. On the content side of the equation today we see many design schools jumping on the sustainability band-wagon. We see academics encouraging students to take on giant global warming and world peace sized challenges without any changes in process skillbuilding.

2. On the process side of the equation we still see educators promoting the notion that process cannot be taught beyond putting students in a room together handing out a team assignment and asking them to teach themselves by doing a project.

This old model tends to repeat year after year because this was the way many design educators were themselves taught. This is part of design educations legacy system.

The fact is this kind of experience does not impart process skills that are competitive in the cross-disciplinary marketplace today. Doing is only part of the equation.

Externalizing and being able to explain process is equally important in the context of cross-disciplinary work. Forget about leading if you cannot explain process.

In addition much of the focus today tends to be on small-scale specialty process and not scalable adaptable skills. If students learn only a specialized process for creating products what do they do when they have a challenge that has nothing to do with products? What do they do when asked to move upstream where the challenges are yet undefined? Among graduates of most design schools today we find that adaptable process knowledge is often missing.

This is high/low innovation disconnect pattern is widespread in design education today: ie: giant scale expectations combined with relatively small scale process skills.

Educators do their students a disservice by not acknowledging that these two notions are in conflict with each other. You cannot take on world peace with poster-sized problem solving process skills, (unless you want to make world peace posters).

If we expect design educated designers to be actively participating or even leading in the arena of large complex social challenges then we have to provide them with the appropriate skills and tools to undertake this kind of work. Presently as we meet with graduates of many graduate programs we see a lot of good intention, a lot of ambitious sustainability related rhetoric and very few adaptable cross-disciplinary process skills.

Many seem to emerge from graduate and post graduate education with their intentions and advocacy completely out of sync with their skill-set and toolbox. Design education has to do better.

This is one of many disconnects that will need to be addressed by the new academies.

History teaches that process knowledge is much more sustainable than content knowledge. Content focuses come and go in relatively short economic cycles, while process knowledge is much more stable for longer periods of time. With change now recognized as a constant we want designers to be actively participating in many types of challenges, through many change cycles, and not just fashionable challenges of the moment.

Graduate students are getting much more savvy about their education dollars and are demanding more value from their schools. Why spend twenty or thirty thousand dollars on skills that are not sustainable and not applicable to the realties that they will face?

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In future academies there will be more focus on sustainability of capabilities.

Adaptable Inquiry will be taught on the front end in contrast to today where the responsibility for adapting skills and tools is largely placed on the shoulders of the students. Continuous adaptability will play a much more central role in future academies.

Question 4: Arvind Lodaya: You did acknowledge that design involves "borrowing ideas", which is an intrinsic aspect of grassroots innovation in countries like mine. In an ever-increasing era of ideas and knowledge as property and currency, how will ideas cross-pollinate and evolve?

GK VanPatter: I think you must be referring to when I was talking about the importance of being open to looking outside of ourselves and outside of design for knowledge in use elsewhere in other disciplines that is useful to new forms of practice, to new forms of design. Of course there are proper and improper ways to “borrow ideas” regardless whether one is “grassroots” or not.

The internet has obviously made more knowledge available than ever before and much of it is open. With that in mind I am not so sure that this is an era of ideas and knowledge as property. I guess in some parts of certain domains this is true. Some knowledge communities in some countries seem to be more oriented towards knowledge sharing than others. With a few exceptions this is not particularly big in the US. Knowledge sharing for its own sake is more popular in Europe I think.

I can tell you that NextD has over the years shared a considerable amount of knowledge.

Not only do we make materials free on the website, we also offer WorkshopONE once every summer to our own community. There are not many North American based organizations that do that. Many leading firms have “universities: that are accessible only to paying corporate clients. They are certainly not operated as open community sources for tools and methods.

Knowledge sharing in a competitive marketplace can be tricky. Keep in mind that there are some significant differences between the land of academia and that of practice. For instance, in academia proper source crediting protocols are taught and expected.

Unfortunately such protocols are often ignored and gamed in the marketplace.

Repeating starting points is also very common. This is when a new group starts an initiative almost identical to something that already exists but calls it something slightly different. There is a lot of this kind of stuff going on out there in the design community unfortunately including inside some of our high profile professional associations preaching ethics. The marketplace can be brutal. Open external knowledge sharing can be used and abused in the competitive marketplace unfortunately. Some leading firms are pulling back on their knowledge exposure through websites etc.

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Knowledge-sharing within organizations and networks is much easier to manage.

In organizational settings ideas are cross-pollinating by working across the functional silos and getting people from different disciplines to work together like never before.

Working across silos is what the 3.0 activity space is all about.

Question 5: Arvind Lodaya: You referred to language as a factor in design when you made a case for "polylingual innovation leadership", which is very interesting for someone who comes from a polylingual society, dominated by a monolingual power elite. Do you have any hypotheses or findings on the relationship between language and innovation?

GK VanPatter: I can see you have a gift for asking difficult questions Arvind.  There are many connections between language, power and innovation. We could expend ten thousand words just talking about this question alone.

In our corner of the universe process is a form of language and Design 3.0 is a polylingual arena. Polylingual or multilingual method mastery is a notion that we introduced to challenge the traditional idea that designers know and utilize only one strategic framework or language where content and process are intermixed. It is likely that traditionally trained designers operating in the Design 3.0 activity space will need more than one language. This is a subject unto itself that we can perhaps talk more about another day. We think of multilingual method mastery as a key aspect of Adaptable Inquiry.

I think you are probably referring to words as language rather than process as language.

Much of our focus in our Humantific practice is helping cross-disciplinary organizations create sustainable innovation capability. Part of that skill set is to rethink how to communicate across tribes.

In many organizations there tends to be a lot of tribal talk. Language is sometimes viewed as a form of exclusive currency. If you do not know the tribal lingo you are not “getting it”. This approach was popular during the early dot-com era and still today we see this often occurring in technology companies. Ironically they often think having tribal lingo is innovative. Many of us were taught that’s its cool to speak in tribal terms.

In some organizations hundreds of tribal short forms (acronyms) are generated each month without much consideration of the organizational impact. All that junk can slow you down.

In highly tribal cultures a lot of cognitive processing time is wasted in meetings trying to comprehend and decipher all the tribal talk rather than on more productive work. In large organizations this can have enormous productively implications. In a problem-solving context it tends to slow the process down and tire out participants by overloading them with cognitive mumbo jumbo that is not particularly constructive.

We try to get individuals to take responsibility for making their own communication understandable. Otherwise they cascade that responsibly to hundreds and often

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thousands of others who then have to spend more time figuring it out. Such cascades are multipliers of work for others and thus highly unproductive. We seek to refocus the responsibility on the sender rather than on the receivers. Thinking about such issues in an organizational context is part of the 3.0 activity space.

Inclusive Innovation includes thinking about and taking the responsibility for the whole not just ones own individual tribe. Thinking about the whole brain, the whole team and the whole system requires new thinking, new skills and new tools.

End.

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