Design Thinking: still a futuristic notion in business?

Design thinking brings creative techniques to business. 

The only problem? No one can agree on how to teach its methods.

While there is no consensus on how to teach it, there is agreement from some schools that creative thinking should be fostered into master's programs to integrate design, technology, and business.

It may be the latest trendy term to sweep the business world, but it is a technique that designers and executives alike hope may provide a solution to some of the world's serious challenges.

According to Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and one of the early supporters of the discipline, "Every corporation needs a design-thinking type."

Martin's interest in design thinking started when he worked with a small design firm, Hambly and Woolley, in Toronto. He says, "Just by osmosis I got interested in the way they (designers) would think about problems."

So, what is design thinking in relation to management?

Designers are passionate about their work. They are energized by constraints and think differently in the face of impossible challenges, and so do great business leaders.

"Today's business people don't need to understand designers better, they need to become designers" says Martin.

Although the idea of applying design approaches to management is new and, yet, largely undeveloped. As the world's business landscape evolves, some universities are attempting to keep up.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, some of the world's best design schools are found in Japan, China and India, but universities in the U.S. also have substantial offerings.

For instance, at the Art Center College of Design/INSEAD with locations in Pasadena, Calif., Fontainebleau, France or Singapore students can apply to take MBA courses for four months to study with the design students in the eight-week "Strategies for Product and Service Development" elective, offered through the 10-month MBA program.

Corporations such Disney, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola have business partnerships in the INSEAD Master's of Industrial Design/MBA program.

Similarly, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, launched a "Management by Designing" initiative in 2002. As a part of their MBA curriculum students take a two-semester course in either "Managing Design Opportunities" or in "Sustainable Value."

Universities build on their unique strengths to formulate these new design programs, so varied results have emerged, but despite the different approaches, the programs have a similar aim: to merge design, business, and technology.

As the world's business landscape continues to evolve, some universities are attempting to keep up by teaching "design thinking" to a new generation of global leaders.

The Scandal of Enron

What brought Enron to the largest bankruptcy reorganization in American history, and the biggest audit failure? 

What lessons can be learned?

The Enron scandal demonstrated the need for significant reform in accounting and corporate governance in the United States, as well as for a close look at the ethical quality of the culture of business generally and of business corporations in the United States.

But, when executives are uncooperative, it is not easy for analysts to understand and evaluate new kinds of businesses...

Because investment banks make far more money from underwriting or merger deals than they do from broker fees, industry analysts find it difficult to face the “conflicting loyalties” of chief executives and the investor.

When members of an organization’s board, industry analysts, and government agencies see “to-good-to-be true” financial statements, or a company’s excellent performance measures, it is up to human individuals’, and a corporations’ management, to be seen as the primary bearers of moral duty and moral responsibility.

In the case of the Enron failure, the senior executives believed that Enron had to be the best at everything it did and that they had to protect their reputations and their compensations as the most successful executives in the U.S. The perfection that the Enron executives found in their actions, was corruption in the form of accounting fraud, dishonest practices, and malfeasance.

In the Enron scandal, CFO, Andy Fastow, and CEO, Jeffrey Skilling planned a “mark to market” accounting plan to pump up the Enron’s stock price, by recording huge profits of “projected” future returns on start-up companies. Then, they would hide Enron losses  in the start-up companies, and then compensate company losses with Enron stock in the future, with more start-up companies. This led to an eventually write off $1.01 billion dollars in Enron losses, and eventually a loss of $1.2 billion dollars in shareholders equity due to accounting errors. 

After the Enron scandal, only with a healthy corporate culture, corporate and federal governance, the ability to discerning immoral and illegal acts, and visibility through truth and disclosure can the issue of corporate corruption find resolve. Shareholders should stay clear  of corporations that have a myopic focus, and a lack of truthfulness.

According to the law, each man has rendered the justice that is do to him. And, for the executives at Enron their justice is prison time to contemplate their crimes against America.

Stop Contemplating! Lead the Way!

Ask yourself, "Why don't I ever get to be the leader?"
On second thought, stop contemplating!

Daily in organizations everywhere, people exert social influence to enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task, and by doing so, they exert the quality of leadership, as defined by Wikipedia.

So why do we so often think of a prestigious job title, or a fast-talker in a fancy sports car when we think of a leader? Anyone can be a leader, just step up and gain a following, right? Or, just walk into a meeting and ask for the help of others?
No, wrong.

But, it may be possible.  According to some companies who have adopted a group leadership style, more than one person provides the group with direction. Over the past few years, in the face of the economic recession, many companies have taken this approach to leadership in hopes of increasing creativity, reducing costs, or downsizing.


But what about your boss?

Traditionally, we see our leader as our boss, to provide the direction to the group as a whole, but start thinking differently! You may be a team member in your group who has the opportunity to experience an elevated level of empowerment for a project, and could become a temporary leader.  

Group leadership teams have specific characteristics, so be sure to model these qualities to increase your chances of being the next group temporary leader.

Characteristics:

Team Leadership

• There must be an awareness of unity on the part of all its members.
• There must be interpersonal relationship. Members must have a chance to contribute, learn from and work with others.
• The member must have the ability to act together toward a common goal.

Ten characteristics of well-functioning teams

• Purpose: Members proudly share a sense of why the team exists and are invested in accomplishing its mission and goals.
• Priorities: Members know what needs to be done next, by whom, and by when to achieve team goals.
• Roles: Members know their roles in getting tasks done and when to allow a more skillful member to do a certain task.
• Decisions: Authority and decision-making lines are clearly understood.
• Conflict: Conflict is dealt with openly and is considered important to decision-making and personal growth.
• Personal traits: Members feel their unique personalities are appreciated and well utilized.
• Norms: Group norms for working together are set and seen as standards for every one in the groups.
• Effectiveness: Members find team meetings efficient and productive and look forward to this time together.
• Success: Members know clearly when the team has met with success and share in this equally and proudly.
• Training: Opportunities for feedback and updating skills are provided and taken advantage of by team members.

So, now you know. You don't have to Bill Gates to gain a following!

Get out there and lead!










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What is organizational effectiveness? Do you have it in your organization?

Is your organization achieving the outcomes it intends to produce? Or, is it ineffective?

Companies capture efficiencies and create measures to get the job done right, but why not just think of organizational effectiveness as "sensemaking."

In the detailed analysis, The collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster, theorist Karl Weick's analysis of the death of 13 Forest Service smokejumpers, made famous by Norman McClean's, Young Men and Fire, Weick states that the actions of the smokejumpers in their last critical moments of survival, can be used to illustrate a gap in our current understanding of organizations. Weick theorizes that participants to an event can actually question their own capacity to act if they loose a sense of their own reality.

"Sensemaking" as defined by Weick, is the basic idea that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs.  The idea of sensemaking emphasizes that people try to make things rationally accountable to themselves and others. So in effect, Weick reasons that, "individuals are not seen living in, and acting out their lives in relation to, a wider reality, so much as creating and sustaining images of a wider reality, in part to rationalize what they are doing." They realize their reality by reading into their situation patterns of significant meaning.

Weick's analysis of Mann Gulch theorizes that the smokejumpers were an organization, because their work was usually done in "small temporary outfits in which the stakes are high and where foul-ups can have serious consequences." So, theoretically, if we understand the Mann Gulch incident, we may be able to conceptualize and cope with contemporary organizations.

For these young men, the "root cause" of the Mann Gulch tragedy according to Weick was their inability to act and gain a sense of reality when overcome by looming disaster.   By "creating temporary systems, intergroup dynamics, and team building" when they became overcome by the threat of death by fire, they could have integrated and quite possibly survived. In Weick's opinion, their lack of organization at a crucial moment cost them their lives.

How unfortunate it would be to let organization loose it's sense of reality, or a let a senseless action cause you to lose your ability to make sense of things. When disaster is looming at work, be a leader, and ask yourself, how can I make my organization more effective?    

Webster's defines the word "sense" as, a "conscious awareness or rationality."


Does Weick's lack of Sensemaking remind you of any organization's that have collapsed in the face of a looming disaster? I'm sure you could name a few...






Read Weick's article, Leadership When Event Don't Play By the Rules:
http://www.bus.umich.edu/FacultyResearch/Research/TryingTimes/Rules.htm


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