Reimagining The Future Of The Design Agency
Reimagining is a tough business. We are filled with biases that distort our perception and prevent us from seeing possibilities. In a recent article in HBR called When Your Moon Shots Don’t Take Off, the authors propose a set of five tools an tactics that are designed to challenge our powerful instinct to avoid risk and choose the easy path. I thought it was a good idea to try to apply these tactics to reimagine the design agency.
The first tactic is called science fiction. Science fiction can be used to dislodge the mind from thinking that the way we work now is the only way people can live. Based on observations today we can imagine how the world could look like in 10 years from now if we plot creative paths from these starting points. The only thing that is left after that is to make a rigorous plan and go for it. So let’s go…
Let’s start with a few observations from the design world, the businesses involved and the questions clients have:
Let’s see how this could play out in 10 years…
Well, it’s not really science fiction if it’s about design. Then it is design fiction 🙂
It’s 7 AM. The date is November 28th, 2029. John wakes up, takes a cold shower, chugs downs a ristretto and jumps in his Tesla Defender. Once he is on the highway, the car takes over control and he has a chance to navigate through the prototype his team of interns built. He sees the last pull request on the server has a timestamp of 04:15 CET. That was 11:15 in Shanghai. That means Han had some time this morning to add an extra branch to the Conversational UI. When he sees the changes his team made, he smiles. He asks his digital agent to negotiate an hour-long meeting to evaluate today’s workshop with the team.
This prototype is going open the minds of the board to a whole new set of possibilities. These past years, the phrase “seeing is believing” took on a whole new meaning. He found that the innovative solutions that helped solve the biggest business challenges already exist. You just have to see them. All the building blocks are available, you just have to make the right connections. Today’s technological building blocks are powerful and available on any scale to everybody. The competitive advantage resides in the connections, not in the building blocks. The blocks in themselves are excellent in one limited set of tasks but if you string them together, you can make them do anything you need. The blocks are the bot workers in the assembly line of digital services. The possibilities are endless.
John chuckles when thinks of the MOOC he put together last year that has become an accredited part of the new International Master track of Design Leadership at Hyper Island. He starts his course with a little history lesson about Fredrick Taylor, Henry Ford, Adam Smith, and René Descartes. These guys gave birth to the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Management movement. Together they brought great prosperity to our society. But humanity paid a hefty price. Humans were reduced to assembly line workers, super specialists insides boxes that rewarded only left-brain thinking. Luckily the complexity their system created was also their downfall. The linear, compartmentalized thinking was unable to deal with the pace, uncertainty, and connectedness of modern business challenges. That gave rise to the right-brain, holistic, systems thinking of design. Under the flag of Design Thinking, designers entered into the very core of strategic decision making of businesses worldwide. The irony that made John chuckle is that the bots that a lot of people feared fit perfectly in the assembly line of Scientific Management. The left brain, linear, logical, repetitive, rules-based work was a perfect match for the bots. The digital building blocks, powered by AI and Big Data, are the workers that are the wet dream of Frederick Taylor.
Just like the traditional HR departments had to recruit the best people, modern business relies heavily on identifying the best digital building blocks. Where the traditional manager had to guide the assembly line specialists, the modern manager is responsible for the collaboration between the digital building blocks that deliver the services of the business. In the old days, the IT solutions had to align with the business processes that were established before anybody thought of IT. Today the most successful businesses are the one that can leverage the new business processes that are enabled by IT.
That is why John’s task as a designer shifted throughout his career from designing interfaces to designing ecosystems of digital building blocks to designing organizations. When the UI’s became screenless and the digital building blocks became more powerful than any business could harness, the biggest design challenge became the organization. Organization was the limfac and the old mental models did not provide any support to design the 21st century organization. John’s book on how the mind-, skill- and toolset of the designer could fuel the much-needed business transformation was one of the interventions that brought the business world to its tipping point. And just like any innovative solution is already there, his book was also just about seeing the right connection. All he did was connect the 30-year-old ideas of the learning organization to the even older ideas of Design Thinking. Now it all seems so obvious and logical. It seems the ideas have always there, just like gravity existed already before Newton discovered it.
John’s pioneering work into the application of design on management and organization problems lead to a whole new department in the agency he works. To fit the old mental models of business people, they called the department Business Consulting. That is of course what the department does, but it’s quite different from the business consulting of the 20th century. That was largely based on economic and technological thinking. The new type of business consulting his department delivers is based on design, artistic thinking. It does not use fixed models, deliverables and procedures but runs on skill, intuition, and improvisation. It uses the tools of design to make things concrete, to add visual thinking to the mix, to create a platform for all the disciplines involved in complex challenges to come together. It uses the skills of design to navigate complexity. It leverages the mindset of design to be bold, holistic and create an atmosphere of joy, energy, and trust. It basically unlocks the human potential that lay dormant for a century under layers of fear, rules, and disconnectedness. It creates speed with rapid prototyping, it opens eyes with visual thinking, it energizes by showing the big picture and operates in reality by obsessing over the smallest details.
In a world where platforms rule the economy, design has become the platform to attack business problems. When John started spreading his ideas, teaching students, educating business people, he was pleasantly surprised by the fact that young students picked up his ideas like they were the most logical ideas. He had to work for years with 20th-century people to get them to fully embrace the new role of design. But students took to it immediately and naturally. In the new Master program where students follow his online course, business, technology, and design are one, the scientific and the artistic approach two sides of the same coin.
Sometimes John thinks he is back in the Renaissance, back in the time when art and science were still friends. Maybe this time is a New Renaissance in which the world awakes from the slumber induced by Scientific Management. The board members he is about to meet still live in a different world. In the heads of the COO, CTO, CFO, and CEO, art and science are still enemies. The old thinking patterns are hard to break. That is why they now have a CDO, a Chief Design Officer on the board. This way, at least design has a seat at the highest table.
There is still some work to be done but that is why John has a job. His job is to add design into the corporate mix. His talent is to solve the traditional business problems of performance, risk management, and value creation by adding design to the mix.
The prototype his team developed is based on the outcomes of the workshops he facilitated with all stakeholders. He had all stakeholders draw and prototype in the workshops but he always uses the expertise of a design team to take things to the next level. Although the ways of design have entered the foundations of business problem solving, designing still remains a skill, a craft that requires talent and honing. No matter how much effort he puts into leading people off the safe and easy paths, boldness, creativity, and dexterity in the visual realm is still something his agency can provide to the world.
John likes to think of the designers working with him as hackers, hackers of the way people think. They hack through the eyes, through the visual cortex and enter the brain to create new patterns. Design has always been about change. Architects change the way people live. Software designers change the way people work. Design thinkers change the way people think.
It’s 9 AM. John arrives at the office building of his client. He is wearing a suit and sneakers to express his hybrid state between business and design, creativity and discipline. He is confident the prototype he brought is going to uncover new ways to see the world, the challenge, the problem space. It always does. Even if it totally misses the mark, it always presents opportunities to learn. That is why he designed it.
To learn.
To think.
Maybe this design fiction is still too safe and easy. Maybe this suggestion is too much in line with what’s already happening. Maybe it’s not radical enough. But it’s all about iterating. I’m just gonna see this as a first exercise 🙂
I quite like the idea of treating design like a technology that could have new applications in the future just like new technology can enable new applications in the future. It creates a story about human capabilities whereas science fiction is a story about the capabilities of technology. In a time of AI and bots, maybe it’s time for a narrative on the future of human potential 🙂
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, don’t forget to hit the clap button. I will dive deeper into the topics of Design Leadership in upcoming articles. If you follow me here on Medium, you will see them pop up on your Medium homepage. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn or talk to my bot at dennishambeukers.com 🙂
Reimagining The Future Of The Design Agency
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