Why I Love Design (Thinking)

Dear Friends!

This week, I am trying something different. In case you missed the last few newsletters, I am linking them below with a short summary. Hope that is helpful and useful.

I also want to take this opportunity to give a HUGE shoutout to my father, Palle, who is turning 85 tomorrow. I had planned to travel to be with him on this special day, but recent restrictions (Delta concerns, etc.) made that gesture both difficult and ill-advised. This virus continues to wreak havoc with our lives, and I can't wait until we can return to a more normal life.

I am beyond grateful to my father for the values he instilled in me and for continuing to be a source of inspiration. If you know him, please send him a note of appreciation and love. He created his own Facebook campaign to raise money for Ronald McDonald House Charities in Sweden, which he and my mother founded — inspired by and in honor of my sister, Erica. Our family remains avid, eternal, and strong supporters of RMHC (I have had the honor of serving on the RMHC global board of trustees for 18 years!).

Now to the topic of the week. DESIGN.

I fell in love with Design early. But I think, like most people, I was drawn to the objects of design rather than the process of it. The modern classics connected with me at a young age. From Eames to Saarinen, Alvar Alto to Bruno Mathsson, and also, for Stockholmers, the almost impossibly unavoidable Joseph Frank.

Then architecture started moving me. Greats like Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Gert Wingårdh, Frank Gehry, and perhaps in later years, the work of Foster, in general, and the work of Stefan Behling, in particular. (Thank you Angela for introducing me to this incredible man). Stefan and Foster designed many Apple stores and also the incredible Apple Park.

But that is NOT the point of my love for design. What I want to talk about is the process of design. Or what is more commonly referred to today as Design Thinking. For starters – we are all designers. Even though we might not think of ourselves that way. We design just about everything in our lives, whether we are conscious of it or not. In my opinion, the most important thing we pick is the people around us, as I wrote about here.

On a fundamental level, Design dictates our experiences. Whether those experiences are the feeling and function of a product or service, the walk to a subway station, the curriculum around how we approach and learn a new subject, or which way a door should open.

But have you ever wondered how these things are decided?

Well, I hadn't either. Not until I moved to Chicago in 1999.

One of the first people I was introduced to here was Patrick Whitney. Patrick was then the Dean at The Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I was also, around the same time, introduced to Larry Keeley, one of the leading strategists on the topic of innovation. Larry co-founded Doblin in 1980, a leading global innovation firm, and has been active on the faculty at ID for a long time.

Over time, via many meetings and also being Larry's sidekick in some classroom settings, I gradually understood that what goes into design is actually more important than what comes out of it.

It was the Bauhaus "school" of design that helped bring ID to life. In fact, it was first called The Bauhaus School when founded in 1937. Bauhaus giants such as László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were instrumental in shaping the philosophy and methodology of "the thinking behind design". The Bauhaus was in some way a reaction to the wartime era of the early 1900s. Artists broadly came together and tried to make better use of machines as a means of production for the betterment of humanity rather than winning wars. Their ways of thinking iteratively, creatively, and equitably (lots of women and otherwise ostracized people of Europe came to the school) became foundational for the Bauhaus movement.

There are so many books and articles to dive into if you want to go deeper on this interesting and important topic. I have linked a few below. If you want more, please let me know. For today, I have tried to summarize the four key tenets that I have internalized and come to believe are critical principles for all of us who wish to change and improve just about anything.

1. Human-Behavior Centric

Good design MUST be rooted in achieving a human benefit as the end result. And too much design is not. It's often a product of what we CAN do rather than what we SHOULD do. It's driven by technological capacity or engineering ingenuity rather than human usefulness. And the only way to understand how people use new or old products is really to observe them. Asking people what they want is overrated. Observing what they do and designing solutions based on their behaviors is much more effective. As the saying goes, if we would have asked for a car in the 1800s, we would have gotten faster horses.

Most designers, therefore, are trained in anthropology, ethnographic research, or various observational techniques. Personally, I believe that human-behavior-centricity often has a strong relationship with aspects of morality, which is why I particularly admire most designers. Hear me out.

I believe, quite passionately, that capitalism, entrepreneurialism, and the world of business are moral undertakings. I know many disagree. But Adam Smith, the grandfather of capitalism, was a moral philosopher and wrote the seminal Theory of Moral Sentiment: On Morals and why they matter to a liberal society of free people and free markets. However, over time, means triumph over ends, and we often “forget” the original intention. Designers, more than most professions in the market-based economy, tend to be animated by human behaviors, and hence focus on what a product or service can do for humanity. I love that. My own commitment to building companies with a purpose bigger than their products is very much is inspired by this ethos.

2. Open-Minded Ideation

Once the overall objective and human-centered outcomes have been decided, any design process goes into ideation. I will not cover all the various ways to ideate here, but let me just share two key aspects of good ideation that I have learned from the best.

First, consider the notion of a diamond-shaped ideation process (often referred to as a double diamond design process). This basically means that you diverge on ideas before you converge. The most valuable insight to me here is: the main reason why we fail to invent new things is that we hold too many old things as orthodox beliefs. They effectively blind us from seeing new perspectives. The key in innovation is to free yourself from any beliefs and just come up with as many ideas as you can find. Without any judgment. Leave that for later. Once you have a lot of ideas and you are running out of new ones, you will also start seeing patterns amongst them (which you can cluster into themes). That's when you know it's time to CONVERGE those ideas and down-select them into the most testable, practical, and exciting array of options.

Second, diversity of input matters a lot. This is why true diversity is incredibly valuable (and sadly still underrated). You have to make sure ideas come from all aspects of the context in which you are solving problems. You have to invite relevant voices into the ideation process, otherwise, you will not find relevant answers.

3. Rapid Prototyping

Once you have some ideas that you think could lead you to your desired outcome, you’ll need to test them. A key aspect of modern design thinking is your ability to quickly, cheaply, and effectively "test" those ideas on "users" (could be customers, patients, voters, clients, etc.). I often think of this "philosophy" as rapido, piccolo, economico (inspired by my friend Sven Atterhed). People typically can't respond to a "theoretical" idea, and you have to "show more than tell" if you are to understand whether your idea has legs or not. This is where 3D printing and computer A/B testing have helped tremendously in both the speed and cost of testing ideas. You can now test more ideas faster, and at lower costs, than ever before. It helps reduce the risk of prematurely scaling ideas that will later fail. Fail fast is the underlying notion here. As with waste in modern lifecycle-thinking, where waste from one process becomes the inputs to another (as with upcycling, recycling etc.), we look at failures as the inputs to new solutions. Why things don't work for people often will give us clues to what will.

4. Continuous Improvement Loops

This idea is, of course, not just core to good design processes, as it also represents the foundational underpinning of Kaizen and overall total quality management (TQM) thinking (the quality nerds out there know SPC, 6σ, lean, etc.).

But it is still worthy of reflection and reminder. We can only manage what we measure. And most things in life are repeatable processes. The trick for making progress with anything is to be aware of the loop (where the process begins and ends) and then set measures for deviation to your desired goal. Take note. Identify where the process failed or what kind of errors it produced (which often is represented by NOT achieving your desired outcomes perfectly). You then build systems for continuously monitoring these measures, and you make sure you keep improving. Don’t get too comfortable – there is no true “end goal”. It's an asymptotic idea which basically means there is ALWAYS room for improvement. I love that thinking.

Sorry for getting into some weeds here, but I truly believe that the field of design thinking offers so much to our world. Why? We are clearly transitioning our society from the industrial age to the information age, and as such, we have a need to re-envision, re-imagine and re-engineer most of the institutions (and processes) we built designed for the old world. Designers are therefore needed everywhere to make sure we make an orderly, smart, and efficient transition.

Here are a few resources if you want to learn more:

• I was honored to be the 2015 Commencement speaker at the Institute of Design. Here is the full speech where I laid out more reasons for why these kinds of designers are more needed than ever.

• Here is the Institute of Design website, and here is the history of the school with a focus on their Bauhaus Heritage.

• Here is another great piece on Bauhaus.

• This is a great TED talk by Tim Brown, CEO and now Executive Chair of IDEO, one of the most famous Design Agencies, which is centered on what Design Thinking is. You can also read his fantastic book, Change by Design.

• This is a really short video from Stanford that I liked which answers what Design Thinking is all about. Also, this one by HBR was also quite good, I thought.

• This is Larry Keeley talking about why innovation fails and how you make it succeed. Here is Larry's book on the 10 types of innovation which is a masterpiece.

• For those of you who know our youngest daughter, Rosanna, you can follow some of her work here. She is currently doing a Masters of Design (and Business) at the Institute of Design, and you can ask her ANYTHING about this exciting (and hopefully soon exploding) field. Thank you to Rosie for great input on my attempt to explain what it is that Design is all about.

I hope you found this useful. We are all designers and we all want a better future. So let's improve our tools so we can get there quicker and with less pain.

As promised up top, here are a few of my last blogs and a "teaser" in case you missed them

• The tensions of our intentions and how can better find room in the middle of binary choices and a particular focus on reframing the word quitting!

• Be the Change - how we must stop investing our dreams in other people changing the world. Just let's do what we can ourselves.

• The Joy of Decluttering - how we can better organize our environments and the benefits of less is more

• We are who we are with - the fact that we are the average of the few people we spend our most time with

• In pursuit of optimism - in this challenging world I am trying to make a strong case for optimism