eight reasons why business people and designers think differently

You know what they say about couples. Opposites attract. A similar dynamic exists between business leaders and designers. It's as if business people are from Mars; designers from Venus. 

Business people and designers are substantially different species. Which is what makes their partnership so valuable. Business leaders that collaborate with designers and businesses that incorporate design into their organization grow exponentially. 

"2015 results show that over the last 10 years design-led companies have maintained significant stock market advantage, outperforming the S&P by an extraordinary 211 percent," according to the Design Management Institute Design Value Index Study.

Opposites attract. So what makes us so different? I reached out to Alexander Osterwalder, creator of the bestseller, the Business Canvas Model, which has become an indispensable tool for mapping out business plans for entrepreneurs and innovative organizations. He is also the lead author of Business Canvas Generation, together with Yves Pigneur, professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Lausanne.

Osterwalder is a business person who is fluent in design, and I am a designer who is fluent in business strategy. I wanted to bring clarity to why we are so different and yet so complimentary. 

Here are eight reasons why business people and designers think substantially differently, according to Osterwalder:

1. Business people manage and execute. Designers create and imagine.

2. Business people are trained to find the right solutions. Designers are trained to create and imagine solutions that don't exist.

3. Business people focus on what is. Designers on what can be.

4. Business decisions emerge from a given knowledge set. Designer decisions emerge over time from what you learn as you explore and ideate multiple alternatives.

5. Business is a culture of perfection. Design is a culture of rough prototypes, continuous iteration and throwing away what doesn't work.

6. In business, you know therefore you are. In design, you imagine therefore you are.

7. In business, solutions come from knowledge of what exists. In design, solutions come from the process of exploring new options.

8. Business values efficiency. Design values ambiguity and divergent thinking.

Business thinking is especially skilled at "exploiting" what is. Design is highly skilled at "exploring" what can be. 

Osterwalder reminds us that 80 percent of all companies in the world are to disappear and that, where organizational structures are so broken, we need to fundamentally rethink them.

"Human cost of companies disappearing is so high, moral obligation is helping them stay alive, to help them live."

To help make organizations better, we need both Exploiters and Explorers. Or as I call them, Evolutionaries and Revolutionaries. Knowledge-based business thinking and imagination-based design thinking. It's the ying and yang of good business. 

Opposites attract and that is how successful partnerships are formed.

This article first appeared on Inc.com on December 13, 2018

Why And When To Call In a Designer For Help

This week's New Yorker magazine has The Back Page by Roz Chast and it's a cartoon called The Big Book of Parent-Child Fights. The Table of Contents has 12 entries starting with Food Arguments and ending with Miscellaneous Battles. It left me in stitches--I have two teens at home. It also made me love the way it takes a complex idea, the relation between parents and their children, and makes it super simple to understand.

The relation between organizations and design is just as complex. 

Most organizations and leaders don't know why they need designers. To put it into perspective, think about when you need a lawyer. Or when you need a plumber. Easy, right? The answer is not as easy or intuitive with design. 

If you know why you need design, you can double your growth. You can build trust with your customers. You can get better at navigating the world of uncertainty with agility. I call this having a high Design Quotient (DQ).

If you don't know when to call a designer, or how to have design embedded into your company culture, you fall behind. You follow versus lead, others eat you for lunch. 

With inspiration from Chast, here is The Big Book of When to Call a Designer. If you answer Yes (Y) to any of the points, it's time to talk to a designer.

1. You want to increase your revenues radically, and faster. Y/N

According to studies by Design Management Institute (DMI), IBM Global CEO Study 2017, and, more recently a study by Mc Kinsey that tracked 300 companies, organizations that are design-driven increase their revenues faster in the same period.

"Top-quartile MDI scorers increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders (TRS) substantially faster than their industry counterparts did over a five-year period--32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher TRS growth for the period as a whole." The Business Value of Design, Mc Kinsey

2. You need to lower your risks but want to increase your rate of innovation. Y/N

The design process inherently reduces risk--its multiple ideas, iteration, rapid prototyping, testing, and reiteration means you can fail fast and at a low cost until you have a winning idea.

"Prototype ideas from low fidelity to high fidelity with increasing evidence that your ideas are going to work." Alex Osterwalder, author, Business Model Canvas

3. You want to build your customers' trust and be close to them. Y/N

Organizations that use design tools regularly, such as co-creation and user-journey maps, develop empathy for their users. This leads to a better understanding of their needs, leading to better solutions, and eventually and most importantly, leading to trust. 

4. Your C-suite doesn't include a design function. Y/N

Most organizations do not have a design function in their C-suite. Yet design can bring user experience-centered, multi-functional vision building and decision making at the highest levels.  Having someone at the top who does this helps to embed it internally and creates long-term returns as noted in point #1.

5. Your organization is siloed, and it gets in the way of effective collaboration. Y/N

Design is collaborative. Designers are generalists. Often what they don't know, and want to learn, that makes them great at bringing cross-functional teams together. In fact, their superpower is synthesizing diverse knowledge and input into a coherent vision.

6. Your research generates insights that everyone has. Y/N

If you want innovation, you need innovative research tools. Designers constantly invent new qualitative and quantitative research tools--researching other industries, studying outliers, using AI and machine-learning to generate permutations--that bring new insights to old problems.

7. You listen to the customer's voice, but do not imagine the customer experience. Y/N

Channeling Henry Ford for a moment, the customer's voice gives you a faster horse. Customer experience, on the other hand, gives you a Model T. Design brings physical, digital, and service together to define experiences that improve our lives. 

8. You have dichotomies, but do not know how to resolve them. Y/N

"Less is more" is my favorite dichotomy. Good design at an affordable price is Target's. Simple and high performance is Apple's. Each is a strong design organization with an embedded design culture, and each creates long-term, high value through the resolution of dichotomies.

There's no one easy answer to when to call a designer; there are many good reasons. But can you afford not to? The answer to that is simple and best said by, Ralph Caplan, author, and National Design Mind Awardee:

"Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous."

This article first appeared on Inc.com on December 8, 2018

Want to Learn Like a Designer? Check Out The 4 Simple Habits

A few weeks back I wrote about how leaders and teams that can think like designers are the foundation of agile, empathic, problem-solving cultures. These cultures are learning cultures and their ability to learn is interlinked with their ability to imagine and use their right brains.

In a world of VUCA (an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), one area where thinking like a designer becomes a huge advantage is in your attitude towards knowledge, learning, and information.

Simply put, designers love knowledge. Not for its transactional power, or intellectual prowess, or even geekiness. Designers love learning because knowledge feeds your imagination. 

You imagine the future based on what you know today. Everything you learn becomes the building blocks for what you can imagine tomorrow. And for knowledge to be transformed into the stuff of imagination, you need a certain, design-ful attitude towards learning. 

I call this the "Animal Kingdom of Design Learning". Each is inspired by an animal to explain the four habits of learning like a designer.

1. See Like A Bird.

Have a problem to solve? Look at the big picture.

Try to see the whole, not just the parts. Change your viewing angle until you start to see new patterns. Notice the things at the periphery or around the edges. Look for and learn from outliers. Use the big picture to be inspired by the potential relations between things previously not connected. Use this distance also to create a healthy detachment from things you might care deeply about (like your own ideas, products and services) to think more objectively.

Inspiration: Watch Powers of Ten, Ray and Charles Eames' film, about the relative size of things in the universe, to understand how seeing the big picture literally changes what you see.

2. Pollinate like a bee.

See each challenge is an invitation to go out, get, and bring back inspiration. 

Complex problems are daunting. You tend to only see the burdens and feel crushed by the weight of it all. This is when you need to get out under that weight and look for parts of the solution in different places, like a bee collecting pollen by going from flower to flower. When you don't know what the solution is, you intuit it by collecting diverse information and feeding your unconscious with inspiration.

"Nothing is more to the point than a good digression." Ralph Caplan, author of By Design and recipient of the 2010 Design Mind Award​ by Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Hint: Trust your instinct as your gather inspiration. When something you learn or discover excites you, trust that your unconscious is making connections even if your conscious doesn't know it yet. 

3. Extend your tentacles, like an octopus.

Curious Octopus. That is the twitter handle for Paola Antonelli, senior design curator for the Museum of Modern Arts (MoMA), who explains, "I'm like a curious octopus--I go in all directions."

In a world of VUCA, being an octopus is the perfect antidote. Be ambiguous and uncertain about what to learn. Go in all directions. Let your tentacles for information reach far and wide. Have your mind bend and form-shift with elasticity (one of Antonelli's most powerful design shows for MoMA was called Design and the Elastic Mind). 

Hidden advantage: The curious octopus touches many things. The more you touch the more you learn, for your immediate needs and for projects yet to come. The more you know, the more you can share too. 

4. Learn like a sponge.

Once I was called a sponge by one of our clients for my ability to suck up information and the name stuck. Being a sponge for information is a superpower. There is an urgency and speed to your rate of absorption that is important. You need to be efficient in how you absorb information. As well as how you ascertain what is useful, versus what is garbage to be filtered out. 

Hint: Empty out your mind every so often so that you can absorb again. How? Take a break. Go on vacation. Meditate.

Think differently about information, like a designer. Information is a novel way of connecting the dots, seeing unexpected patterns, finding inspiration in unexpected places. It is not learning for learning's sake but learning to fuel your imagination. 

This article first appeared on Inc.com on November 29, 2018

How to Become Better Visual Thinkers

Business leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs who are using visual tools are creating a differentiator that pays big dividends. 

Design-centric companies yield 21 percent higher returns than their competitors, according to the 2015 Design Value Index Study. Their not so secret arsenal? Design thinkers and design teams who are trained in visualization.

Another group, according to IBM Global CEO study 2017 are the Reinventors lead the pack in Digital Transformation. The visual tool that gives them their competitive edge? User journey maps (visual maps that outline a detailed user experience over time). 

Add to that the 150 thousand business people who use Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder, Swiss business theorist and entrepreneur, every year. What differentiates them? Business Model Canvas, which Osterwalder calls the cartography of business, and its companion book, Value Proposition Design, both visual business tools.

Some of the most innovative leaders either think like designers or work very closely with them--Steve Jobs (Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla), Indra Nooyi (former Pepsi), Brian Chesky (AirBNB), Mary Barra (GM).

There are still many business leaders who are uncomfortable with visualization and they have a big problem--applying left brain tools to think with your right brain. 

Why? Think of it like this. As an innovator, you're in the business of right brain. But if you're not visualizing and only using text-centric tools, you're using your right brain with left brain tools. Have you ever traveled to Europe and plugged in your 120V hairdryer into a 220V outlet and fried it? That is what's happening here. 

The good news is visualization is a skill you can get better at with practice and visual business tools are accessible and easy to learn--ranging from journey maps, films, and animation, models and mock-ups, and afore-mentioned Business Canvas Model.

Here are why visualization tools can help you become a better business leader:

What you can visualize you can make happen.

Visualization is one of the key principles of Design Quotient (DQ), your ability to think like a designer, with agility and clarity, in the face of constant change and uncertainty. The power of visualization is that what you can see you can make happen. Visualization is the language of imagination and dreams. It helps you paint a picture of the future based on what you know today.

Once you understand that, you understand the power of visualizing ideas. You won't know if something works until you visualize it. Once you map, draw and model an idea for the future, you have something you can evaluate, share, get feedback on, improve or leave behind and start again. 

My favorite design saying, from designer and teacher Bruce Hannah, captures it with a wink--"Mock it up before you fock it up."

Images are easier to understand and remember. 

According to John Medina, developmental molecular biologist and best selling author of Brain Rules, your brain is better at recognizing and remembering visual input. This is called "Pictorial superiority effect." Ideas that are visualized are remembered 65 percent better than ideas presented orally which only have a recall rate of 10%. Text is less efficient than images because your brain decodes each letter into its own visual cue. As Medina says, "reading creates a bottleneck of comprehension." 

If you're innovating, you want people to remember your ideas over a long period of time, the time it takes to invest, develop and test your ideas. Now knowing the brain science behind memory, what do you think will help your ideas to be memorable? You got it. If you want your ideas to be remembered visualize them.

"If we don't make it visual and tangible it's difficult to understand each other and collaborate productively. Making it visual creates a shared language."--Alex Osterwalder

Visualize to make ideas memorable.

Visualize to reveal preconceptions

When we draw something from memory, we often draw our preconception of it. This can be revealing. According to a New York Times article, when researchers asked people to draw "an effective leader," both women and men drew a man. The drawings revealed unconscious assumptions. Similarly, when asked to draw a house, almost everyone draws the same drawing. We go with our stereotypes. It is important to capture these biases early in innovation work, to either use them intentionally or to break them.

"When we 'process information through the lens of stereotype' our interpretation may be 'consistent with stereotyped expectations rather than objective reality.'"--Nilanjana Dasgupta, professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Next time you want to reveal biases, draw.

Visualize in your own style

There's a myth about drawing. That you need talent for it. Let's put that to bed.

I start all my ideation sessions with a drawing exercise--I get people to draw each other in three minutes--and after working with thousands of people, I know you are all very capable of it. So before you tell yourself you cannot draw and therefore you cannot visualize, remember that we've learned to draw since were old enough to hold a crayon. And like riding a bicycle, it comes back.

We can all draw, just like we can all write. We all have different handwriting styles, from chicken scratch to calligraphy level, similarly, we all have different drawing styles. There are also different ways you can visualize an idea. Mapping is one. Photos are another. Films are a good tool too. Models and mock-ups are tools for visualization too--you can cut and paste some paper, bend some wire, tie two things with a string. Its there and easy to do, you just have to try it. 

Visualization is one of the key pillars of your Design Quotient, your ability to think like a designer in a world of complex and constant change. It's foundational to agile, empathic, problem-solving cultures.

This article first appeared on Inc.com on November 21, 2018