Using Design Thinking for Growth

Business901 Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Using Design Thinking for Growth
Guest was Tim Ogilvie

Related Podcast:
Design Thinker exposed as Left Brain Dominant

Copyright Business901

Tim Ogilvie is the CEO of Peer Insight, an innovation strategy
consultancy, where he has made pioneering contributions to the
emerging disciplines of service
innovation, customer experience
design, and business model
exploration. His projects seek to create
organic growth by using design
thinking methods to link new customer
experiences to scalable business
models.

“Design thinking” is a topic that
recently burst onto the scene
accompanied by lofty promises but
precious few practical details.
Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers is
the book that provides those details. Going beyond the basic
theory and philosophy of recent books about the topic, it shows
readers how to apply design thinking in a step-by-step way to
solve complex growth opportunities.

Authors Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie assure readers that
business leaders already have the power to design for the 21st
century–they just need to figure out how to use it. And they say
that any leader of innovation in an organization has likely been
practicing design thinking all along. Written in an approachable,
hyperbole-free tone, Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking
Toolkit for Managers will help business owners, executives,
managers and staff discover the strengths they already have and
teach them how to develop some new skills, providing the tools
and templates to make readers instant brown-belts in design
thinking.


Joe Dager: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of
the Business901 podcast. With me today is Tim Ogilvie who's the
CEO of Peer Insight, an innovations strategy consultancy, and he
is the coauthor of "Designing for Growth," a new book which is
subtitled "A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers." I want to
thank you, Tim, for joining me. I would like to start off by asking
one of your questions, "Who your book is meant for, designers,
innovators or is it a book for business managers?"
Tim Ogilvie: Great question. It is definitely targeted for the
practicing manager, the person who's got a responsibility to grow
their business and who does not have any training in design;
plain and simple, is looking at ways to grow their business. That's
our target.
Joe: Is it a business management tool versus, something for
innovators or for design engineers?
Tim: Well one of the challenges in innovation, Joe, is the
vocabulary isn't very uniform or shared. Unlike in the quality
profession where we have really precise language, we just don't
have that in the world of growth and innovation. Design in
particular is just a really fuzzy word that means a lot of things to
a lot of people. What we've done is to try to effectively demystify
what design thinking is. There's certainly been a lot of hyperbole
and a lot of talk at an abstract level. And my coauthor and I
thought, we need to reduce this to something really practical
that's a tool that people can use.
What you find as I know you spent time with the book is, it's very
much written in layperson's terms with the least amount of fancy
jargon and the greatest amount of very practical stories of how
everyday managers are quitting the tools to use. That's the thing
I'm proudest of.
Personally I'm vocabulary challenged; often will find a really
precise fancy word, and so fortunately your clients really coach

you to put it in plain English. My coauthor has been really great
that way, to keep the entire book in usable plain English for the
practicing manager.
Joe: One of the things I hesitated about is, when I did see your
coauthor being from, I think, Columbia Business School, I
thought is this going to be like a textbook? What is it going to be?
That was one of my first thoughts when I was looking at it on
Amazon, and it's not at all.
Tim: Jeanne is just the most pragmatic strategy professor in the
world, and I have been teaching with her for four years. When
she invited me to coauthor the book I knew it would be super
practical, super usable, but I totally understand your hesitation.
The expectation of the academic world is nuanced, precise,
vocabulary laden, and what we managed to create is actually
completely story based and practical. And again, for me that's
easy. My whole world is practicing with real managers on the
ground. But for Jeanne, it's an amazing trick for my coauthor,
and she has pulled it off.
Joe: Is this book a reflection of what you do at Peer Insights?
Tim: Oh yes, very much so. When she approached me she said,
"Tim, you have to help me write this book, because I don't have
stories - the access to all those stories and the people doing
this - in the same way that you do." She knew what we did as a
firm, and we've been teaching together for four years, and so we
knew that would come together quite naturally. But I think our
usual role in the world is to help companies solve growth
problems, and design thinking is a set of tools that are optimized
to solve growth problems. So this is a very close approximation of
our role in the business world.

Joe: Can you kind of give me an idea of how you would define
design thinking?


Tim: Yeah. I'm trained as an engineer, and I grew up in the
quality movement in the late '80s and early '90s. And in the
quality movement we use a method of thinking I would refer to
as analytical thinking. You have a data set to work from and you
reduce that data set to a series of insights, and you build
potential new answers based on that. Design thinking is another
problem solving approach that is a complement to analytic
thinking.
Design thinking is perfect for situations where we're looking at a
future that doesn't exist yet. Joe, if we're trying to figure out a
future that may or may not come into existence, we don't have
any source of data. The analytic tools break down very quickly.
Then as a practicing manager you think, "Well, I don't have tools
for that."
Design thinking is the tools for that, to say, hey, we can actually
prototype alternative futures. Rather than creating data for them,
we can simply have target users experience those prototypes. We
can observe from their own behaviors and preferences which
ones are working better than others.
So, very much, the core of what's in a design thinking approach
is extreme focus on the user and their experience; visualizing
multiple options, testing those in the hands of the users, and
iterating very quickly from less appealing options to more
appealing options.
It just relies on experimentation which analytic problem solving
processes don't need to rely on those as much because, in the
world of analytics, we have source data from which to work.
Joe: When you come out of a business management school, it
seems like MBAs are all very driven by analytics, are they not?
Tim: Well that's what we're trained in and, for that matter, even
before MBA we start getting trained in analytics in fourth and fifth

grade is the reality of it. We stop being trained in design because
it's not very practical. We're not going to be able to get a job,
most of us, as designers. It's a shame that we stop developing
those gifts because we all have them. But the beautiful reality of
design thinking is you haven't lost your gifts for creative
exploration at all. They're so innate to humans. And when we
show the tools to a manager, who's an MBA, like you said Joe,
and extremely analytics oriented and you put these tools in their
hands, they say, "I'll never do it the other way again."
They instantly have success. They don't have the vocabulary for it
necessarily, but they have the instincts and the intuition
perfectly.
If I may, I'll tell you a story. One of my favorite design thinkers
that we profile in the book is Dave Jarrett. Dave's a senior
partner at Crowe Horwath accounting and consulting firm. So, of
course, Dave has an MBA; Dave has a CPA. Do you think he's
hyper analytically developed? Absolutely.

But what he found was that, when they were developing new
solutions for clients, they were creating data where none existed.
They were treating that data as if it was real. They were building
whole solutions that might cost $25,000 to create the prototype,
getting it perfect before they took it to the customer.
Then they'd go to the customer and the customer would say, "Oh,
it's not really what I need." It's like, as Dave says, "You get a lot
of false starts." We worked with Dave and solved that and
introduced these tools of rapid prototyping.
Today what Dave does is, he'll get a group of people in a room.
They'll spend a day or a day and a half experimenting with what
new solutions could be. They'll turn those into a simple
storyboard, a sketch if you will, and go out to customers on day
three, before they've spent $25,000 creating a prototype. They'll


say, "Hey, here's the scenario we see, and here's the direction
we're working toward. What do you think?"

What was really fun about Dave's experiment was that he'd
schedule an hour with his clients, and his partner said, "You're
insane. Your clients don't want you out there half-cocked with
something you haven't thought through."
What Dave found was just the opposite. That, he said, he'd
schedule an hour for these meetings, and the clients were
spending two hours completely loving the invitation to design
something with us, and they'd have all kinds of enthusiasm.
He'd be back a week later with a more highly evolved version of
it, and they'd say, "Oh, that's getting much closer. Now it just
needs this or it needs..." Within a few weeks they really had
figured out what the prototype was that was worth building, and
they already had a customer for it before they wrote the first line
of code.

That, to me, is a guy who's a born again design thinker even
though, as we said, he's effectively trained exclusively in
analytics and math and in science.
Joe: That kind of brings me to a couple of my questions about
prototyping and co-creation. You explained the co-creation
process to me, because it's out there working with the customer.
Versus, I think a lot of people think of co-creation is, that you're
getting this customer in this room. You're talking about what
each other needs and things like that. But it's not. You're showing
him something, working with him through a process, constant
prototyping somewhat. Is that a fair analogy?

Tim: Yeah, very fair. I think the listing that you're talking about
also happens, but it happens upstream. As you're really thinking
about whether this is a problem you think you can solve. Of
course you're working closely with your customer and you're

asking him what's frustrating. Most of our clients have that
context already in hand, whether it's an internal customer or,
more classically, an external customer. The difference in
co-creation and prototyping is you're actually mocking something
up visually that, again, it could be a crude sketch or it could be a
wiring diagram. Most often we're taking it out of PowerPoint,
easily the worst tool for this type of innovation.

We're getting it onto a poster, so something that you can lay out
on a table like a blueprint, or something you can tape up on the
wall. We're asking them to interact with it with their hands, and
put a Post-it note at the parts they don't understand or put a
Post-it note to fill in a blank.
You can imagine, it's just completely participatory. You're out of
language at that point and you're into images, even if they're
crude, stick figure images. You're accessing a different part of
your customer's brain and a different part of their competence.
When I think about Christi Zuber, who's a nurse at Kaiser
Permanente, she was asking their nurses in the field to describe a
particularly stressful process that they go through every day on
the floor.
One of the ways she asked them to do it was, she said, "Draw a
sketch of what this part of your day is like," and she would have
nurses drawing. At first the nurses would say, "Well, it's stressful,
but everything's stressful." So we're in language, and it's not
working. And they're drawing a picture of themselves on roller
skates with people on either side of them shouting at them. Now
you're getting somewhere. You're starting to see the real stress
that she's feeling.

The idea of the roller skates tells you, oh she feels like she can't
go fast enough, that she has to find ways to move even faster.
She feels like she's being shouted at from two different


directions. There's an information flow requirement here that we
need to manage.

But you're really starting to get, as I say, your customer's
competence starting to come through. In the same way that a
quality engineer knows that using an Ishikawa diagram is a
fantastic way to stimulate people to think about the different
potential failure modes in a process.
Joe: Well, I think of this as really just a great extension of Lean.
Lean is learn by doing, a hypothesis, a PDCA cycle. With these
iterations it's a great way of really taking what I call a new level
to Lean, because design thinking adds some great skills to it.
Especially I look at your organizing framework of what is, what if,
what wows, what works, really was a great bridge between a
PDCA cycle to a normal business practice.
Tim: So I agree, and I have seen Lean experts struggle with
design thinking at the front end in a couple of ways. I think
philosophically you're right. It's absolutely perfectly aligned. At a
practical level, there is in a Lean world, very often a source of
data and a set of data tools that are hugely valuable and a certain
comfort. Those typically don't really exist in a design problem. If
you're looking at futures, we often just don't have data. I think
that comfort with using eight or 10 customer interactions as your
data, as opposed to, which is obviously all qualitative, and think,
"Twelve observations, I can't get any quantitative insights from
that." And we agree. So getting some comfort level with small
sample sizes, I think, has been a trick.

I think there's also Lean practitioners - the desire to get to the
answer quickly and get to implementation - that Lean has this
wonderful sense that there's a clock ticking. But design thinking
seeks at the beginning to keep it open and generate more and
more new alternatives, and, in fact, experiment with multiple
alternatives in a way that, it's not against the principles of Lean,


but as I say, we've seen some Lean practitioners want to jump
too quickly to the answer is just intuitively speaking to them.

What we urge in design thinking is wait, spend more time and
give the customer three alternatives to experience, and not just
one. Not just the one that you think is the most likely. That
discipline of exploring multiple options is classic designer's
discipline. The designer doesn't believe there's a perfect solution.
They believe that there's one that will just be more preferred by
users, and the user's behavior will tell you which one that is.

Joe: I think that's a great way of looking at it, because it is. We
end up sometimes making it a single one instead of going out
there with like three. I think it's an excellent way of putting it.
Tim: The rule of threes is obviously really human magic right
there. If I go to my customer and I say, "I've been working on
this thing and here's what I think it is." Go back to Dave Jarrett
at Crowe Horwath. He used to take the client a 50-page
PowerPoint, and then say, "Hey, what do you think?" The client
looks at this beautiful -- they've thought of every question,
they've walked through every answer, and he says, "Boy, they're
doing this. It doesn't matter what I say. They've put a lot of
thought into this." And so he tends to say, "Yeah. I like it." But
then when you build it, he may not use it, right. In the design
thinking world, you come to him with three different story boards,
and you say, "Hey, which of these is more interesting to you?"
Now, they're just sketches, and there are three of them, and so
you haven't sent a signal to him that you're building any of them.

You've signaled that you're open to these three, and in fact if he's
got a fourth in his mind that you haven't thought of, you're
probably open to that. So, it's just a different degree of tolerance
for being in the unknown at the front end of the process that
often can really set you free.


A firm that a lot of us admire is Google. They test things that
they don't think will work. You think, "Well, that sounds stupid."
But Gmail is a classic 20 percent times opportunity or offering
that they thought probably wouldn't work. Of course, look at the
incredible popularity of Gmail.
You know, the basic premise behind Gmail is what if you get free
email, you let us see it, and a bot gets to read your email
messages and serve up ads that you think will be relevant based
on what you were talking about in your email. Most people would
say, if you did a survey, "Well, that's just an invasion of privacy,
and I don't think so." But look at the way Gmail turned out. It
does that. I use Gmail. It serves me ads based on reading my
personal email messages that I send through Google, and I don't
mind.
It's just the idea of testing something that you think will fail, as
long as you make the test affordable. I think that's another key of
design thinking is, we like to place bets, but we like to keep them
small. Right? Make the leaps of faith. Design thinking can help
you make your leaps of faith smaller leaps. So you can learn very
quickly and say, "Oops, I'm not going that way. I'm going the
other way."
Joe: Design thinking's been around a while, hasn't it? I mean,
what's bringing it to the surface now?
Tim: I think it's the economic times. I agree completely that
there have been firms that have competed on design and have
used design thinking to solve problems, but in the '90s none of us
really needed it. You could grow by acquiring firms that were
similar to yours and integrating them, right, through applying
Lean and Six Sigma. You could grow by expanding geographically
into a market that you weren't serving yet. You could get both in
a way that was more mathematical and required less of a leap of


faith. Or, you could get growth where you could actually forecast
the ROI in advance and agree that it's acceptable.

All right, that growth engine for most companies just isn't
available anymore, right? The market's not growing at that rate.
We've got global saturation in most markets with the exceptions
maybe of India and China. The growth rate's just not there.
So, you've got a guy like Jeffrey Immelt of GE, and if he tries to
do what Jack Welch did, he'll get fired because he's going to get
six or seven percent year on year growth. He's got to do
something else. The heyday of M&A, and Six Sigma, and
Operational Excellence as giving you double digit growth is over.
So, guys like Jeffrey Immelt and guys like A.G. Laffley at P&G
said, "I got to do something more than that." I think these were
kind of the bellwether firms that said, "Hey, let's unleash design
thinking and see if that could be a new engine of organic growth
that gets us into the double digit growth that I promised my
shareholders."
Joe: Can I simplify it and say maybe it's just because back then
demand exceeded supply, and now supply exceeds demand?
Tim: That's beautiful. And of course, the world's also flat in
terms of the way the Internet makes distribution, especially
anything that's IT based, extremely cost effective. That's part of
the same supply and demand phenomena. I think you've nailed
it.
Joe: Could that be a reason why design thinking has taken a
hold in Europe earlier than it has in the U.S.?

Tim: Yes. First of all, design thinking has an appeal to Europe
because design has an appeal way beyond what it has in the U.S.
Europe has been very design centric. The design education is
more extensive. The amount of public money that gets spent on


design is ten to one more than the way we use public money here
in the U.S. We rely on the private markets to take care of the
way government services work, and so, Europe, in general, is
much more design forward and has a positive feeling about
design. American business has been extremely efficiency oriented
and competed on design until the last decade, with the exception
of firms like Disney, perhaps, and Apple. But those have been the
exception to the rule. I think we're obviously realizing potential,
and lots of American firms are competing based on customer
experience design and design thinking.
We're changing our tune. We're not going to change how we
invest public money, I don't think in any meaningful way. But
we're certainly having a growing appetite for design thinking. Just
to give you an example, there's a wonderful educational program
in Chicago based at the Institute of Design, and they're teaching
people masters in design management, and every one of these
students is getting a job the day they walk out of the door.
They can't expand the program, the D school at Stanford, and the
Carnegie Mellon's design school they just can't produce enough
graduates. The industry is sucking them up at a 100 percent rate.
You can clearly see the demand by businesses for skills that are
optimized for design thinking is easily outstripping the supply
from an educational standpoint.
Joe: Tim, in your book you provided a framework, and I think
that's an ideal framework to get into business managers, but do
you practice them ten tools? Are you using these on a regular
basis and are they just the surface? Do you use a lot more?
Tim: Joe, I would say I'm like a reformed smoker. I think there's
nobody who's more rabid about anti-smoking than a reformed
smoker. I'm a reformed non-design thinker. I like to get to the
answer quickly and get into execution surrounded by people who
are design trained. In the past eight years, I've learned the


discipline to always use the tools of design thinking. So, now it's
a learned habit, and a very conscious habit. This is one of the
challenges a Six Sigma black belt has is, they have their habits
and they've been very successful based on those habits. Design
thinking is going to ask them to create some new habits.
Truthfully, we use these tools everyday on our internal projects
when there's no client. We apply them.

I will say that I think the book lays them out in a way that might
be artificially linear. Right? Visualization happens at each stage.
Prototyping can happen at lots of different stages and for
simplicity and clarity we've left them it in a single place in the
book. So I think, as you practice with the tools in the book, you'll
say, "Oh, I can be prototyping this thing way early."
I think that's absolutely right. You might find that you're using
some tools in multiple places along the series of four questions.
But we use them all everyday. In terms of are there more to the
tools that are there, the basic ones? We'll get you were you need
to be on every project.
Joe: How did they develop? It's something that you just work
from? Because mind mapping, per se, isn't the Tony Buzan type
of mind mapping that you imagine. It's a little different than that.
Tim: There are more tools, potentially. But we like to keep it
straightforward so that it encourages a proxy manager to step in
and try it. We polled a bunch of design practitioners in great
design firms that are prime companies and people we admire. We
looked at the tools that we use, and this was, to us, the most
simple and elegant set of tools. I will say the mind mapping, I
have a synonym for that, which is sense making. So, imagine
you're a Six Sigma black belt and most of the data that you've
been processing in an upper lower control limits, or a design of
experiments, you're going to have this quantitative data and
there's a formula for making sense of it.


In the design world, a lot of our data is going to be in many
variable forms. When we go observe customers interacting with
something, they're going to look at clicks on a website, we're
going to test language and see what different language occurs to
people. So, we'll look at verbatim key words that they're using.
So now you get this big hodge podge of data and we need to
make some decisions. There's no algorithm that tells you how to
do that. So, mind mapping is the process that we lay out in the
book that says the only way to make sense of multiple data sets
that is mostly qualitative is to lay it all out in front of you like a
yard sale, and get in a room and start generating potential
themes with a small group of people that are very immersed in it.
To me, it's the signature aspect of design thinking that tells you
you're really stretching yourself if you've got three or four, five
different sources of data an insight that you need to make sense
of. It's the reason why design firms often occupy these open
spaces with huge white boards and tackable surfaces. The iconic
image of innovation is a big mess on the whiteboard with Post-it
notes and photographs and a handful of people pulled close
thinking about what it might mean. It is an absolute key part of
the process.
What I realize is you don't have to get the answer exactly right.
What you have to get is a new hypothesis that you think the
other guys don't have. That's what you have to get to. Then you
can go test the hypothesis in your prototypes with your
customers. If they don't hold up, you can come back to the yard
sale you have spread out on the wall and ask yourself the
question, "Hey, now we have new data, what direction does that
nudge us in?"
It's a very iterative process. Taking a few bites of the apple in the
conference room, getting back out in the field with customers,
coming back in the conference room. Again, it may not be the


linear process that helps you to calculate your upper and lower
control limits, but it's a very human process. We all get it. We've
all done this. It's really natural to explore different alternatives
and to recalculate once you get some feedback on one of those
alternatives.
Joe: What I liked about the book, probably more so than
anything else, is that it took some of that messiness away from
design thinking that I always see. Like you mentioned, the
pictures of it is just all these guys with Post-it notes all over the
wall, and it's kind of like, "Where do I go from here?" It's OK, but
being that left-brained guy, I need some structure to do it for me.
I think that's what that framework gave me. It gave me some
structure and build upon that to be able to go from point A to
point B, but still maintained that sense of, that it is a hypothesis
all the way through and it continues to be a hypothesis.

Tim: Yeah, I'm really comfortable that we've got that part right,
and the trick of it is to get a person who likes to go to his
customer with something really perfect and really buttoned up,
and I think the one place it takes real courage is to say, I'm
gonna go see my customer and show them something that is
makeshift, something that is cobbled together, something that
doesn't pretend to be ready for prime time. That's why Google
has done us all a great favor. The idea of beta is cool, right? Ten
years ago, beta said we hadn't done your homework. Today, put
something out on beta says, "I trust my customers to know what
it is that they want and to guide me in the right direction." But I
say what Google does isn't necessarily what every firm is ready to
do and that's one reason why I love David Jarrett at Crowe
Horwath. He just had the guts, and his partner said, "I think your
clients are going to laugh at you." Right? And they said, "I'm
willing to take a risk."

He went out and showed his clients cartoons. One of the things
they showed was an inventory solution for automobile

dealerships, and he had a cartoon of a bunch of red cars and a
bunch of blue cars, and one of the red cars was saying, "I'm
going to be stuck here forever." And the blue car says, "I'm only
going to be here for an hour and a half. I'm the color and the
model that's the most popular." It was to lay out the idea that
they didn't have good information about which types of cars were
the most likely to sell, and they were getting stuck with a bunch
of slow moving inventory on their lots.
Just that simple little cartoon that he took out to discuss a
potential inventory management solution was all he needed to
get his car dealership customers to start sharing ideas for what
the new inventory management solution could be. That takes real
guts, to go to your clients with a cartoon of two cars talking to
each other because I think he does call for a little bit of courage.
All of us have customers who trust us like that.

Joe: I think it takes really a different mindset for a sales person
to handle this type of thinking, doesn't it?

Tim: It is a different mindset. For every one of us, I think, to be
as professionals, to be comfortable not knowing the answer.
That's, I think, the crux of it and so maybe if nothing else it just
says there's a certain amount of self-honesty, right? That I'm
trying to solve a tough problem? It doesn't lend itself to analytic
tools because there's no existing source of data that I can
calculate my most likely future outcome with. It's still my
responsibility to do something about it, getting comfortable that
I'm going to start by not knowing the answer. The book says,
"Hey, so don't start with your most crucial customer count, where
you're already on probation." It says, "Start with an internal
customer that you trust, that trusts you, that will work with you
on this. Pretty soon you'll find that you will get your sea legs
really quickly.


Joe: You're supposed to be the expert. I would say you have to
have enough confidence to say that, "Yeah, I'm an expert, but
I'm not an expert about your business. So let me learn more
about yours."
Tim: A part your business is they say, "That's one of the tough
challenges. We're going to solve this. We're going to figure it out
together." Inventory management for a car dealership is always a
core process, right? And yet it still isn't solved beautifully because
they still have slow moving inventory. Dave Jarrett knew that
that was a place that he could go, and that they were well
prepared, and both he and his customer were going to explore
some unknown areas. I think it takes a certain amount of
courage, and so not everybody is going to want to jump in, but
companies don't need everybody in their firm to go crazy during
design thinking. We just need the people who are responsible for
growth, to have permission, and to have the tools to do design
thinking. Not everybody's responsible for growth and so I think at
P&G they're not trying to get a 100 percent of their employees to
be design thinkers. But they sure like to have 15 percent. That's
probably a good way to think about it.

Joe: A take-off on that is then, how does an organization
support the use of design thinking?
Tim: It's not native, for sure, in organization. Big organizations
are built for control risk mitigation, for executing the existing
business, and yet as we found in the GE example, if they just
stick to the knitting they're only going to grow at five to six
percent a year and that's going to get a CEO fired. I think
somewhere you going to have a guy who says, "We have to grow
and I'm prepared to take prudent risks to make that happen." I
think that's one thing, that's just to make a commitment at the
top level to innovation and growth, which means accepting a
certain tolerance for failure, and especially of constructive failure
that you learn from. A lot of us have actually heard that message

from our senior leaders so I think we're in a good place as an
economy from that stand point.

But a second thing is to start to think of design thinking as tools
and not a philosophy, because it's very hard to implement a
philosophy if you can't make it tangible and real to the practicing
manager. As I said, I came out of Georgia Tech in the late '80s
and I taught people in a factory floor how to compute upper and
lower control limits who had not had a high school degree. I
taught them how to do problem solving using the Ishikawa
diagram, how to use a Kanban to communicate with the
downstream business process that they were connected to. These
are people without a high school degree, many of them, and so
those tools work. There's no doubt. They're practical.
Well, innovation is not there yet. We're not at that level where, a
bible like Dr. Deming’s or a bible like Dr. Juran's bible, that you
could turn to and say that this is now reduced to practice. That
was part of our goal, was to say, "If we can't turn design thinking
into tools that a motivated, smart manager can use, then it will
never become the economic gift to society that quality has
become."
Quality has been an amazing success story in the world in terms
of what it has contributed to productivity and the well-being of
people in our society. It's amazing. I don't know that design
thinking will achieve that, but it has the same potential. That's a
big part of this book, was to say, "Let's try to start the dialogue
and make it a more pragmatic one about tools and methods that
everyday people can use without going to Stanford Design School
or the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Joe: I think that's a great message, Tim. I agree with you.
People and businesses typically get started in quality through the
tools. That's how they get started and that's how people learn it.


Then you go to the next level where you really start building a
culture but without the tools you can't jump into the culture.

Tim: I mean, it's a big field. If you want to change you're
organization, our organizations are still made up of people and
that person who needs to say, "Hey, the skills I brought that got
me here are not what you're asking me for now. You're asking
me to do design thinking now. I wasn't trained in that, and so
how can I picture myself being successful in that world?" If you
want them to get on board, you've got to put a tool in their hands
and let them demonstrate their confidence in themselves. We did
that with quality. When I came out of Georgia Tech and went into
manufacturing, I thought everyone was going to be doing it.
Instead we had a VP of production and a VP of quality, and they
had an argument on the loading dock on the 30th of the month
as to whether we we're going to ship that order or not. And the
VP of quality said, "It's not high enough quality because I
inspected it." And the VP of production said, "I got to make my
order."
It was an adversarial system, and here we are 25 years later and
the quality is all baked in because at our workstation we self-
inspected and we fulfilled with a Kanban, and we got single
minute exchanges. All of these amazing breakthroughs have
happened in that time period. So I think, well, innovation and
growth, design thinking is not there yet. But, I think if we take a
25-year view of the potential, it can be an even greater gift to the
world if we can reduce it to practice, really have a constructive
dialogue about which tools are working the best and how to
deploy them.
Joe: Is there something that you would like to add to this
conversation that maybe I didn't ask?

Tim: I have a sense that there's a change in the leadership
philosophy of U.S. organizations that will be necessary. This


appetite for affordable experimentation and this idea that the
most competitive company, it knows how to pick where to learn
and how to learn afford-ably. That's still truly not really codified
and taught in schools and so it's hard for me to picture how that
change happens. Clearly some of it might be generational. There
are those of us in charge that grew up during the M&A and Six
Sigma era of the '90s, and we'll pass the mantle of leadership to
people who grew up in the 2000s, and maybe that will be part of
the answer. I think part of it is going to have to be to get the
academic world to support the research around leadership
environments that encourage experimentation and failure. That,
to me, seems to be one of the things we're doing to make it
harder instead of easier. Maybe I should say, that seems to be
part of one of the missions is to create this really solid grounded
academic understanding of permission.
Joe: I think that people are already doing it though, Tim,
because my take on it is that's what the gaming industry has
done with our kids. With the Wii's and the Xbox's and
gamefication is that trial and error and hypothesis is that's how
them kids learn, and that's become part of our culture.

Tim: I think it's really interesting, play is becoming more part of
our culture than it was in the '80s and '90s and play might
actually be -- I think you're on to something -- play might
actually be the gateway to design thinking. Because if you think
about it, I want to conduct a learning experiment, I can do that if
I think of it as, "I'm just playing with this and it's not going to
cost that much and I'll learn something and then we'll take
another run at it based on what we want."
Joe: That's how they've adjusted the learning. I mean they've
grown up with Mario, Mario and Luigi beating against a wall
finding an opening. That's all trial and error. It is how they learn
the game. Look at the use of instruction manuals anymore.


Tim: Yes, I totally see it. The 25 year horizon that I'm talking
about will be heavily fueled by a much more open attitude
towards constructive experimentation and playful exploration,
and you can only see how that will be great for Lean and Six
Sigma just as it will be for design thinking. Ultimately, I don't see
design thinking as the panacea that's going to stamp out all of
our misguided notions about how business works. We know a lot
about how business works, right? I just say it's another set of
tools. Personally I feel like I'm in an exciting time period where
it's struggling to be born in the mass market. It exists
wonderfully in the design department, right, but the design
department isn't in charge of too much in American business
today, and the idea about design thinking isn't, "We just need to
have 10x larger design departments." But the idea, it's the same
thing for quality. We've had that VP of quality and he had a staff,
and the answer to quality wasn't to quadruple the size of his
staff. The answer was for him to put himself out of business by
making every production worker their own quality inspector.
That's going to be the answer for design thinking, too. If you
have every, ultimately, every worker who has as many growth
responsibilities using design thinking to solve problems, in
addition to analytic methods, then that will be an amazing future.
Maybe 25 years is too long a horizon, Joe, as you talked about
the generational change in philosophy. Maybe it will happen in 15
years. That will be exciting.
Joe: I think there is a possibility of that. Well, I would like to
thank you very much, Tim. I thoroughly enjoyed the
conversation. This podcast will be available in the Business901
website, and also on the Business901 iTunes store. So, thanks
again.
Tim: Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to share my
thoughts. It's been fun.



Joseph T. Dager
Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
Ph: 260-438-0411 Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Web/Blog: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901
What others say: In the past 20 years, Joe and I
have collaborated on many difficult issues. Joe's
ability to combine his expertise with "out of the
box" thinking is unsurpassed. He has always
delivered quickly, cost effectively and with
ingenuity. A brilliant mind that is always a pleasure
to work with." James R.

Joe Dager is President of Business901, a progressive company providing
direction in areas such as Lean Marketing, Product Marketing, Product
Launches and Re-Launches. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt,
Business901 provides and implements marketing, project and performance
planning methodologies in small businesses. The simplicity of a single
flexible model will create clarity for your staff and as a result better
execution. My goal is to allow you spend your time on the need versus the
plan.

An example of how we may work: Business901 could start with a
consulting style utilizing an individual from your organization or a virtual
assistance that is well versed in our principles. We have capabilities to
plug virtually any marketing function into your process immediately. As
proficiencies develop, Business901 moves into a coach’s role supporting the
process as needed. The goal of implementing a system is that the processes
will become a habit and not an event.

Business901 Podcast Opportunity Expert Status


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