Leveraging design in a corporate environment
..or, why you need a design strategy
Remember why we need design
It is easy to forget the value design brings, because we tend to confuse design as a noun with design as a verb. The design or a design is something that is made in some way (a product, packaging or service blueprint). Then you have to design which is the steps and process that people who’re called designers do. (These people should be evaluated in terms of both nouns and verbs.)
To design is a set of skills and attitudes, that make designers go about problems in other ways than other professions.
- Focus on experience and aesthetics
- Learning from making
- Collaboration through visualization
Remember, the ROI of design is incredible. The Design Management Institute made an article about their work on a Design Value Index. This compares companies with a stated investment in Design, with the rest of the S&P 500 pack. The Design Value Index outperformed the S&P 500 with over 200%.1
Design maturity (A ladder model)
Let’s look at what roles design can play in your organization.
Ladder graphic from the Design Business Council. Danish Design Center and others have made similar visualizations.
The ladder model is a common way of thinking about how an organization uses design. Many companies would stay around 2 or 3, and even then would only be there with the help of external agencies.
In order to reach step 4 and 5, you have to have a design strategy that lays out the path for how the organization will leverage design.
This means, among other things, that you as a leader and the organization as a whole, will know what to expect from the design capability (whatever shape it takes, more on that below). And crucially, to the designers, it is an outline of what is expected of them.
A leader who understands design deeply, will enable the design capability to move beyond making things look better. They will create a path for the team to come up with novel solutions to business problems, and feed it into the other teams. This aspect of governance is on a business leader, and not a design leader.
I have previously recommended Dan Hill’s Dark Matter and Trojan Horses in which he cites Steven Johnson in calling Apple’s approach “Concurrent or parallel production”. There is no hand-off, but rather continuous collaboration between the different expertise, along the service development or improvement cycle.
It doesn’t matter so much if it is within or across verticals.
Be careful about words
Here are some red flags to be careful of when thinking about design in your organization.
- “Design thinking team” is not the right name
Design thinking as a term is hard to pin down, and has been regretted by the people who came up with it. Their intention was to open up and democratize design, but the result was great confusion about the value that design brings (including confusion about design as noun and verb).
A design team on the other hand points to a more focussed entity, with a clearer MO, that is hopefully outlined in your design strategy.
- “Business design” is not a thing All variety of design in a business is necessarily related to the business. To say that designers have a unique perspective on ‘making business’ undermines their credibility. “Business” is too broad and abstract a material of design to be a specialty.
Instead, set a team by identifying the most critical areas of design that you can contribute with across TA’s.
A very serious take on service design might be your best bet, because it is broad and versatile. As the design team shows prowess and results under the design strategy, you can increase specializations into for example user researchers, copy-writers and graphic designers.
Dan Hill highlights the issues organizations face when trying to leverage design. From my own experience of being an external designer, with friends managing issues within companies, I wholly agree with him when he says:
Design is unlikely to be outsourced to consultants when it is so key to the success of the company’s products or services. Equally, a reliance on an organization’s staff picking up “design thinking” is not good enough, compared with professional (strategic) design expertise embedded within the organization.
Let’s keep this in mind when thinking about design in the org chart.
Morphing the Org Chart
You can use design talents in many ways. Here are some ways you can think about it.
- Design team as special forces
On step 3 and beyond of the design maturity ladder, we could imagine a design team as a special forces unit that go where others can’t. They have special training, and should be deployed to explore problems and propose solutions that the teams on the ground are too busy to work on, or simply not broad enough in scope to deal with.
The special forces can be deployed across the value chain.
Another way, lower on the design maturity ladder, would be to think of the design team as a separate workshop where designers receive things from other departments to make better visually. This is a narrow understanding of design, and severely limits the impact that the team can have.
- Design as expertise in guilds
In the Danish and UK governments they have spread out user researchers and service designers across departments, and they can move around as needed. The designers are connected through guilds or expert networks, so they continually hone their craft within the organization and share ways they have come up with to use design better. This is a hybrid way of thinking of design, and requires trust and clarity of mission from the leader to do.
- Designers as high priests
The product design team at Apple has been referred to as high priests. When a person from the design team is called into a meeting, the mood shifts and every one listens to them. Or so the anecdotes say.
This requires very competent designers. But also a respect in the organization for the results that design can bring to the business. This in turn relies on the fundamental belief from upper management in the leverage that the company can achieve from design.
The methods of design will be taught in training workshops, but will not be systematically put to use by people who have other things and ways to work in their normal work lives. Some tools are easy to use and can and should be adopted without designers involved (such as a blueprint). But they will inevitably lack the stance of the designer, to push for both user insight as well as an exploratory mode of working.
Let’s work on a design strategy together
Hire a design leader
Use your external budget to hire a design leader full or part-time.
When you’re moving up along the design maturity ladder, you should look for design leaders with design expertise, who also have the people skills to talk upwards and make the case for design continuously.
Without a strategy, from which the character of briefs and outcomes extends, you will most likely be annoyed with the design people in your team, and you will fall behind other organizations that embrace the humanity of design, and leverage it for the good of the business.