Design thinking and appreciative inquiry...

In a recent Appreciative Inquiry workshop we were co-creating dreams for a transformed future. After going through the workshop, my attention was drawn to this cartoon clip.

While this may make some wince, I would like to put it in perspective. Please click one of my earlier blog posts titled “Bubbles of positivism”

The above clip and the blog post are meant to remind us of the ground reality while dreaming for a better future. As already expressed in the AI workshop, here is a quote from the book titled The Design of Business - Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger Martin:  “Design thinking focuses on accelerating the pace at which knowledge advances from mystery (an unexplainable problem) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward a solution) to algorithm (a replicable success formula).”

Hence, while appreciative inquiry embraces the world as a mystery by not dwelling on problems, design thinking is not averse to the mystery even if it is an unsolved problem (read nightmares, wicked problems etc.). It aims to find creative ideas to overcome problems and exploit opportunities. It holds design as a purposive application of creativity throughout the process of innovation (where innovation involves the successful application of new ideas in the form of improved products, processes and services). Thus, design, like appreciative inquiry, aims to see the world as it could be, and not as it is.

Bottom line: Organizations need to exploit the transformative power of design thinking through appreciative inquiry.

Related references: 

• Avital, M., Boland, R.J. and Cooperrider D.L. (Eds.) Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens: Advances in Appreciative Inquiry (Volume 2), Elsevier Science, Oxford, 2008.
• Boland, R.J. and Collopy, F. (Eds.) Managing as Designing, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2004.
• Bruce, M. and Bessant, J. (Eds.) Design in Business-Strategic Innovation through Design, Prentice Hall, 2002

Design Deficit in India

“Design thinking is not part of the Indian business psyche”……as rightly observed by Kamya Jaiswal in this ET cover story titled “India Inc’s Design Deficit” [The Economic Times on Sunday, 6 May 2012].

Some excerpts [blogger comments]:

“Design thinking is not limited to a culture or particular product or service category. It is a set of principles that can be used very broadly, need to be understood, and can be learned by managers all over the world”….Stefan Thomke, William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School.

“Where art meets engineering, where form sharpens function, where beauty adds to the bottomline – therein lies the great weakness of Indian business.” ...[Note: This is partly a fall out of our education system that promotes silos.]

“….Technology convergence has made disruptive design a norm and digitisation has shrunk the time to market of new ideas.”

“….As the creative goal posts keep moving forward, Indian businesses can………decide to build design capabilities of the future. This doesn't only mean setting up design labs but also collaborating with academia. The well-worn cliche of a creative eco system must be brought to life.”

“….Finally, our engineers and managers must learn to imagine.”

Here is where Indian Educators need to come up with models to overcome the design deficit. As noted above, our weaknesses lie at the interfaces (or the boundaries). We need to build bridges to foster multidisciplinary interactions between areas, departments and schools. Engineers and managers need to be encouraged to look beyond narrow domains of specializations. 

Related blogs:

• Promoting Design Thinking in Indian Professional Higher Education
• Other posts under design thinking

7 BILLION STRONG? ....?

"Some say our planet is too crowded. I say we are seven billion strong. But we will only be able to use that strength for the benefit of all if our societies are built on mutual respect and understanding," …Ban Ki-Moon UN Secretary-General. [News report, TNIE, 1.11.11]

And that is a big if….to be strong….

As rightly stated by Mr. Moon, collective strength requires mutual respect and understanding which is clearly missing under the various global imperatives. Since weaknesses abound, there is a distinct lack of “unity of purpose”. Weaknesses abound because of our strong domain dependence. Domains come in various forms….religion, nation, state, caste, creed, class, school, departments, areas, specializations, and so on…..just name a turf (and it is there). This detracts the individual entity from supporting the inclusive growth challenges because the individual prefers to be within the comfort zone of the domain-specific boundaries.

Another extract from the same report reads…

[Quote] UN Population Fund's (UNFPA) Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin said actions taken now will decide whether the future of the seventh billion baby will be healthy, sustainable and prosperous or marked by inequalities, environmental decline and economic setbacks. "The world must seize the opportunity to invest in the health and education of its youth to reap the full benefits of future economic development or else face a continuation of the sorry state of disparities in which hundreds of millions of people in developing nations lack the most basic ingredients for a decent life," Osotimehin said. [Unquote]

According to Osotimehin, “planning and the right investments in people will empower them to make choices that are not only good for themselves, but also for a world of seven billion.”

Is Indian education sector investing accordingly? While transcending the borders is the need of the hour, we have regulatory bodies that continue to pursue policies of yesteryears that drive the entities into various impermeable disciplinary silos. While “design thinking” and “systems thinking” philosophies have been promoting concepts of the whole being actually larger than the part, we continue to participate in a fragmented (read parochial) education system that would much rather promote the part being larger than the whole. As a result, professional higher education (particularly in India) is not geared to think differently.

Design thinking is the next competitive advantage…yet in most B-School placements, it is made to appear that the industry is still interested in the “specialization tag”. This confuses the students who are then later supposed to work with a “unity of purpose”. [Earlier blog post: Story of Strong Areas and Weak Areas”]

Related link: Kakodkar Committee Report

Neuromarketing and virtual products

Here is an excerpt from this article by Raja Mohan Tella titled “Neuromarketing targets the brain” [TNIE, 1-11-11]:
[Quote] Neuromarketing can loosely be defined as the efforts of marketers to understand how the human brain processes images and various marketing stimuli. How, for instance, does the brain collect and filter information while making decisions related to buying. The brain retains some of this collected information; it recalls and re‐associates it when exposed to the corresponding stimuli. This information‐collection process is an ongoing one. We may assume this is done unconsciously, spontaneously and speedily. Ponder over this when you make your next buying decision. What attracted you? What were the colours you liked? How did you react to the words around the product and the images? How did you associate the words with the colours and the propositions the product sets out? These questions will give you a sense of what neuromarketers are attempting to do. [Unquote]

Our new course on Consumer Response to Manufactured Products attempts to elicit human response to products even before they are manufactured. It is part of the PLM courses under Technology Management. The course page is under development (click here for the course descriptions).

Kakodkar Committee Report

The report released recently is available at http://www.education.nic.in/tech/KakodkarCommitteeReport-05132011.pdf

The report reaffirms what has been mentioned earlier in this blog regarding Indian education failing to promote design thinking in engineering and management schools.

The report comments on the academic stucture and acknowledges the fact that IITs have always enjoyed greater academic autonomy. What is puzzling is that the IITs could not exploit their academic autonomy in breaking free from the department silos to encourage cross-disciplinary interactions. The needs of twentieth century coupled with the industrial focus on mass production, perhaps, prompted them to overemphasize the role of specialists. Unfortunately, this ultimately resulted in unhealthy competition between departments which make it difficult now to encourage inter-disciplinary work. The needs of the 21st century are different. [Related blogposts: (i) A Necessary Condition, but is it Sufficient? (ii) Should we specialize?].

Here are some excerpts from the Kakodkar Committee Report [Source: Chapter-7 Innovation and Entrepreneurship] which highlights the need for a change to meet the challenges ahead.

(Quote)
The IITs have built their departments as silos. Little inter-department work is done and, in fact, when faculty from different departments start working together, they are often even discouraged. Inter-disciplinary programmes have therefore rarely come up and even if they do, they are finally one or the other department's baby. [Page 145]

The curriculum for B.Tech/M.Tech students follows the decades old traditional structure. It progresses from basics of the sciences, to basics of a particular discipline to advanced topics in that discipline. There is some flexibility to take electives, but these are often towards the end of the degree course and are carefully restricted to fit students into a predetermined mould. This well-structured curriculum does not allow a creative student the freedom to do courses across departments, take off for a semester and try participating in a start-up and come back, or take up some project work instead of a course. The curriculum is designed for a mass of ordinary students; it does not cater to exceptional students. The structure goes against the promotion of entrepreneurship and innovation. [page 146-147]

There are exploratory attempts to change this. For example, IIT Delhi has a course on design in the first year which gives students hands-on experience with designing and building useful products. The new IITs have the chance to quickly develop much more flexible curricula as they are not weighed down by decades of tradition and cumbersome processes. IIT Mandi is extending the IIT Delhi approach to give students hands-on design-oriented mini projects throughout their programme. This is patterned on the curriculum in Olin College, Boston, and the conceive-design-implement-operate (CDIO) approach being popularized by MIT. [Page 147]
(Unquote)

Related links:
Collaborating by Design
http://ksahu.blogspot.com/2010/03/school-of-design-iit-bhubaneswar.html
Design Thinking in the Upcoming IITs, IIMs, NITs

Bottomline:
64% feel that IITs must play a role in shaping technical education in the country [Page 186].

That being so, in my opinion, their biggest contribution will be to bring back the “Voice of the Faculty (in general)” which is presently lost in the academic hegemony of our education system that stifles creativity and innovation [There are good teachers outside the IITs and IIMs as well]. Click on the figure below to see whose autonomy has been always endangered.