By M. Isi Eromosele

Business Design is a methods-based approach to innovation that helps teams get to bigger breakthroughs faster and define strategies for competitive advantage.

In working with executives from around the world, my colleagues and I at Oseme Creative have seen some clear patterns emerge regarding the particular attributes required to excel in this emerging discipline.

What we have found is that is that it takes a combination of the right mindset (being) and a rigorous methodology (doing) that unlocks a person’s thinking, and that one must consider all three of these factors to fully realize the potential of Business Design as a platform for enterprise success.

Being: Design as a Mindset

A design mind is characterized by a collection of mindsets that determine and define one’s emotional agility. These can come from the ‘self ’, and can also be shaped by the enterprise environment or workplace culture. Importantly, it is one’s personal choice to cultivate self-awareness and decide how to harness, manage or develop these dimensions in working with others.

Attributes Inherent In A Design Mindset

Openness

This entails being open to new ideas, new people and new ways of doing things. Elements of openness include an active imagination, sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, intellectual curiosity and an ability to suspend judgment.

People who are very open are willing to consider novel ideas and unconventional values. Without an open mind, one cannot fully realize the potential of the design approach to innovation.

Empathy

Human-centric design stems from a genuine sense of caring about people and being able to understand and appreciate their feelings, thoughts and needs. In designing something, we create value with and for other people.

Whether understanding vital stakeholders or valuing team members emotions and perspectives, the ability to listen emphatically and incorporate diverse perspectives into the design process lies at the heart of effective design.

Intrinsic Motivation

While extrinsic motivation such as raises, promotions and recognition is a natural part of the human psyche, intrinsic motivation has been identified as an important fuel for creativity.

Individuals motivated intrinsically by purpose or passion have a genuine interest, excitement and engagement in their work. Whether it be the challenge of a difficult problem or the pursuit of a purposeful ambition, these individuals become very involved in the development process of design.

This is often evidenced in organizations like hospitals and schools, but is equally intrinsic in for-profit enterprises of all types that have a clear mission to create true value (economic and human) for stakeholders.

Mindfulness

Consciousness of one’s thoughts, feelings and surroundings is critical to both maximizing inspiration and adaptability. In the design process, everything is relevant and can be a source of inspiration.

Greater mindfulness of both the self and the world around you will serve to create an expanded repertoire of reference points and stimulation in solving complex problems. Mindfulness also positions you to capitalize on serendipity, an integral part of seizing design opportunities.

Adjustment

Adjustment captures the general tendency to be emotionally stable, calm, even-tempered and functional in the face of ups and downs. Given the nature of the design process (collaborating with others, participating in a‘mash up’ of ideas and soliciting feedback as part of the development process), those who have a high adjustment profile are able to face challenging situations without becoming upset.

This also manifests itself in comfort with ambiguity, enabling people to find joy in the journey of tackling difficult problems.

Optimism

Just as adjustment can be critical in dealing with the present, optimism can help drive people forward toward creative and productive resolutions. Optimism also fuels resiliency and perseverance.

The design process is a dynamic one, filled with many twists and turns in the quest to iterate through to a breakthrough solution. A hopeful view of the future will fortify one’s ability to see a project through to successful completion.

Doing: Implementation Methods

Business Design combines thinking and doing through a rigourous methodology and thrives on tactical agility. Methods, frameworks and tools are learnable, skill-based exercises that help to shape behavior, shift mindsets, enhance thinking capacities, and ultimately boost both individual and team performance.

There is no pre-set process or ‘formula’ for doing, but rather a repertoire of tools that help to harness the wisdom and ingenuity of teams. Most of the ‘ways of doing’ that can be used throughout the design process, including the design of business strategies and models, fall into one of the following implementation methods:

Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration

Designers find value and inspiration in diverse perspectives and skills. Not only does this enable them to harness the wisdom of the team across functions and disciplines, it will accelerate progress by tapping into the team’s intuition and creative energy and establish a broad base of ownership that will give the outcomes traction.

Important mindsets for collaboration include openness, empathy and adjustment. Intrinsic motivation and optimism will also help you get past the rough patches in the collaborative process.

Understanding and Need-Finding

This is all about seeking to understand people’s motivations on a deeper level, both inside and outside the enterprise, leading to the discovery of unmet needs and new opportunities to create greater value.

There are many examples where companies have leveraged user insights not considered by the competition. For example, Nike’s deep understanding of the runners’ need to push their personal athletic performance to a higher level has driven an ongoing stream of innovation in products, services, events and community development.

To get to this kind of understanding, one must draw from many of the mindsets noted earlier, including empathy, openness, mindfulness and intrinsic motivation.

Iterative Prototyping and Experimentation

Prototyping entails building out ideas in order to make the abstract and the conceptual concrete, as a tool for thinking, communicating and advancing development. This is valuable in the broadest sense: creating physical prototypes or experiences during the development process enables a team to explore multiple strategies and business models to deliver value.

Even ‘in-market prototyping’ serves as an important experiment to test out new ideas, leading to important learning and quick wins.

All of the dimensions of a design mindset are critical here, with the most essential being empathy, intrinsic motivation, adjustment (for when your great ideas get trashed by consumers) and optimism, especially when you have a breakthrough concept but are challenged in making it viable from a business standpoint.

Thinking: Building a Wholesome Mental Capacity

The value of Business Design methodologies lies in their ability to stimulate breakthrough thinking in a structured and productive manner, thereby fostering intellectual agility.

Through the practice of these methodologies, all forms of intelligence can be more fully developed and make the brain more ‘whole’ on an individual level and more synergistic on a team or enterprise level. Following are six thinking skills that serve as important boosters in the value creation process.

Emotional Intelligence

Building on the empathy mindset, this entails more than just an attitude toward others and appreciation for their thoughts and feelings; it’s about knowing how to fully leverage the power of emotions throughout the entire design process.

It is a thinking skill focused on identifying, assessing and controlling the emotions of one’s self, of others and of groups. A masterful Business Designer applies emotional intelligence to every step of development and execution, to one’s self (in terms of awareness and management of one’s own emotions), the team (in understanding and managing the dynamics of productive teams), and the market place at large (in terms of ‘social intelligence’ – the awareness of and consideration of contextual human dynamics).

Systems Thinking

In Business Design, it is important to recognize virtually everything as part of a broader ‘ecosystem’of human systems, solution systems and business systems.

Enhanced through the process of mapping, a competent Business Designer has the capacity to think holistically and integratively and understand how people, solutions components and activities relate to and influence one another within a broader context.

Visualization

This form of thinking involves envisioning and communicating at every step of the design process. This includes the ability to see the end result as a concrete and complete picture: to see the complete solution played out in its most robust form, to see the way the business will work with all of the necessary partners and enterprise systems and even to see success in the market and the potential paradigm shift that a breakthrough can trigger.

The methodologies described in the doing section help stimulate this type of thinking through persona development, rapid prototyping, business model design and storytelling.

All of these bring ideas to life and lead to a more natural inclination to envision new possibilities. This kind of ‘destination thinking’ can also help bring teams into alignment.

Abductive Reasoning

Tapping into one’s imagination and believing that the seemingly impossible is actually quite possible requires a form of logic called ‘abductive reasoning’.

New-to-the-world ideas are difficult, if not impossible, to prove. The ability to believe in possibilities requires a combination of thinking skills, one of which is the ability to process many points of reference and make an intelligent ‘leap of logic’in making the case that there’s a great chance that an original idea could prove to be successful.

There are a number of examples in game-changing successes in which the organization

didn’t constrain itself to existing solution sets or models, but instead pursued what could be.

FedEx, eBay, Google, Southwest, Tata and Grameen Bank are all examples of new-to-the-world ideas that made a breakthrough impact on culture and enterprise value creation.

Synthesis

Throughout the design process, taking many disparate bits and pieces and transforming them into a new thought or solution is critical to new value creation. This is an essential notion in Business Design – the identification of an unmet (and often unarticulated) need.

It is also essential in creating new solutions which may draw upon a number of existing elements reconfigured in a new way or the design of new strategic models inspired by many different existing models in the pursuit to create an entirely new configuration.

Intuition

This entails more than just using gut feel to guide development. Rather, it is a very important and developable thinking skill that involves gathering, articulating and evaluating one’s own intuition and that of others.

By recognizing the value of intuition, being able to effectively deconstruct it and extract valuable data, one can capitalize on the wealth of wisdom within a team. Leveraging intuition also requires elements of the design mindset, most notably openness, empathy and mindfulness.

Closing

The practice of Business Design entails much more than design thinking. Different types of thinking are activated throughout the process on both an individual and a group basis.

Business Design calls for bilateral thinking and adaptive doing, enabling a constant toggling between a variety of ways of thinking and doing. Such agility is essential for innovation and becomes even more powerful if you are able to rewire your brain to be bilateral throughout the process.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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