Design Thinking @SAP – Lessons for India

Hasso Plattner, cofounder of SAP AG, has made remarkable contributions in helping organizations adopt design thinking. As mentioned earlier in this blog post titled “Reengineering Indian Academic Processes ”, he also cofounded the Institute of Design at Stanford (with Professor Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering).

These are commendable industry-institute initiatives meant to foster epistemological pluralism. Indian Institutes, on the other hand, prefer to work within their own narrow disciplinary domains. Most of them are grappling to develop a shared understanding of the design thinking principles. Policy initiatives in India, therefore, do not get the necessary stimulus and Indian education and business continue to lag behind with a huge design deficit [see India Inc’s Design Deficit].

Indian organizations, like the rest of the world, need to design for the triple bottom line – people (society), planet (environment) and profit (business). Further, India has its own developmental challenges and has undertaken various inclusive growth initiatives. Hence, there is an urgent need to embrace the conflicts imposed by these initiatives {see “going to the gemba” {see HBR Jan 2004}.

Design thinking promotes a culture with a design attitude to solve problems (however wicked they may be) with purposive application of creativity throughout the process of innovation. Here are excerpts from the paper titled “How tangible is your strategy? How design thinking can turn your strategy into reality” by Matthew Holloway [in the Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 30, No. 2/3 2009 pp. 50-56]

• ‘‘ What if you could express your strategy not as numbers or frameworks or even a rhetorical narrative, but as something concrete? What if your strategy took shape as a prototype that shows your organization what success will look like when you have delivered against your goals? ’’
• ‘‘ The design thinking approach also encourages teams to create ‘project war rooms’ and to work visually using pictures, diagrams, sketches, video clips, photographs, and artifacts collected from their research. ’’

Related blogs:

Promoting Design Thinking in Indian Professional Higher Education

Other posts under design thinking

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).