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
Copyright Control ©
2013 Oseme Group
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