Dear David,

Travel always has the potential to throw a curve ball in an ongoing list conversation. In danger of this being a mute point by now, I would still like to respond to some of the comments you made in your mail from March 31. I am not sure that I always understand where you are coming from but I will do my best to respond:


>On 31 Mar 2009, at 04:24, David Sless wrote:

> I found this list surprising. I suppose I was expecting more, or at least something different. I have seen much of this type of 'design service' for organisations being offered from within management and communication consultant firms for at least the last 15 years. Indeed, our Institute has been doing a lot of this type of work as a service to our members. But we have done that within a framework of 'communication' rather than 'design'. So I'm having some difficulty understanding the uniquely 'design' part of this.
>

It took me a while to grasp the real point you are making here. And it is not with the list per se but with the idea that I put a list together and seem to claim to have single-handedly discovered (since it is going Easter, pun intended) Columbus' Egg. I can assure you, I have not:) But in all seriousness, why does such a list have to "surprise" us? The most surprising aspect of design and designing is that so many people engage in it every day more or less aware that our capacity for making and changing is enormous. I do, however, take some exception to "this type of design service" being offered "from within management and communication consultant firms for at least the last 15 years." As you point out below, most of these consultants did not find their way in the organization unless they were able to explain their expected financial ROI at the onset of a project. This immediately points to a determined outcome. How else can you predict the ROI in dollars? A design inquiry, which involves the elements I listed, is not in a position to do so at the beginning of the research. But it can provide real examples and real case studies (or references) of organizations that have pursued a design approach and document the gains they made. We are, however, still at the beginning here but the body of knowledge is growing.


> Whatever approach is used, the central question many of the organisations we deal with want to know is how much money will they save by adopting a particular approach, how much extra profit will they make, and how long will it it take them to recoup the cost of our fees? To answer these questions we do a lot of measuring, before, during, and after the implementation of our 'designs' or 'recommendations' On that basis we can give organisations a reasonable estimate on their return on investment (ROI). In all the stuff I have recently read on service design (and I must admit I have not fully read the literature) I have found no reference to ROI. I should add that this is not unusual among people who take an advocacy role for design.

This remains indeed a weak point and I am sure you will not be satisfied with my response above. There are several ways to look at the problem of ROI. One is that more and more organizations look beyond the monetary ROI and recognize the value of design in generating new insights, identifying opportunities for innovation and facilitate organizational learning and knowledge transfer that together, constitute to an organization's overall competitiveness and operational efficiency. Many of the metrics developed in management are trying to take these into consideration. One can look to attempts at measuring performance, for example, the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton 1996; Meyer 2002), to trace the shifts from financial performance, one can also look to Peter Senge et al (2008). There are now many organizations serving the public who are quite keen in using design thinking and design methods as a way to develop products and services better tailored to the people they are intended for.

Some, like Toby Scott (former head of the UK Design Council) would say that companies that want to know upfront what their ROI will be are simply not ready to apply design thinking and design methods (see EAD 2009 Keynote Speech). I personally think that short and inexpensive pilot studies can serve to demonstrate the value and the need for a design inquiry.

> Lots of those dangling qualifiers, but no susbstance. Claims about 'change', 'transformation', and 'improvement' but from what to what ???

Another very good question. As a matter of fact, I made a related point at the IDSA/ICSID conference in 2007. The title of my talk was "Design and Change: A Paradox?." One of the key points I tried to make was that designers (and here we are talking about traditional designers, i.e. people trained in the traditional design professions), generally do not know enough about organizational change. Designers often do not understand where and how they fit into an organization's change strategy. As a result, many of the changes designers end up generating and implementing are what Rousseau (1995) calls "accommodations." Accommodations are similar to the idea of "If it ain't broken, don't fix it." That is, they are reactive individual fixes. No overarching change strategy consists to connect them. The system gets patched up until one patch interferes with another leading to a new system break down. This is one of the reasons I think it helpful to move away from a narrow concept of "the designer" (whoever it is) and to the activities and the purposes of designing.

But it would be too easy if we could simply and uniformly state: This is the purpose, this is the goal. As every organization is unique in the way it brings together people around a purpose and the way they are developing structures and make use of available resources to fulfill this vision, the "from what-to what?" may look different for different organizations. I don't see the role of design to tell anyone what to do. Instead, I consider it a useful way to generate insights and to help people in an organization to clarify through design inquiries the purpose of their own organization and their own roles in this context. For me, one of the initial "deliverables" of a design inquiry is to understand "what is" which includes an examination of "what works" and "what does not work" for people inside and outside of the organization, always looking for why is this? These findings provide a frame for envisioning how things could be other than they are.

> I take the rather simple view that if one is going to make claims about the value of a particular process, particularly on a list concerned with phd research, then evidence of value must follow close behind. Getting excited about ideas one has just discovered is good, but not sufficient.

The elements I listed are based on several projects I have either been directly involved in or studied for the role design can have in organizational change. These include projects at the Australian Tax Office (underway since end of 1990s), the United States Postal Service (conducted from 2001-2005), the Internal Revenue Service of the United States (conducted in the 1980s) and more recently, a student-driven pilot study with the Lancaster University Library Project (conducted in 2008). I will be happy to make the case studies available, though not all of them can be conveniently e-mailed due to size.

> Which brings me back to my question about manageable complexity in design 'problems'. Has anyone been doing any interesting work on this question? I would have thought there are at least half a dozen phd's to be written on the subject, if they have not already been done.

It would be nice to see studies on this topic. The way we manage complexity in our projects is for students to shift their perspectives between the organizational level and the project level. The organizational systems can be overwhelming but the focus on the project tasks at hand generate a framework for priorities and "order."

>
> My fear is that many designers—caught up in their enthusiasm for ever expanding horizons and problem boundaries—see nothing to prevent them from becoming the latest masters of the universe.

Enthusiasm is not necessarily a bad thing. For me, it is not about "for ever expanding horizons and problem boundaries" nor would I wish for anyone to become a master of the universe. What I do wish for is for design methods and design thinking to be understood by more people so that they can decide to make use of them in a conscious and conscientious fashion. What is so bad about trying to understand where designing already plays a role–and where it might be useful? I just shared a recent project by our students with a lawyer who immediately made to connection to the problems his organization is currently struggling with. The insights the students produced, the re-envisioning of the organization's purpose and the first concepts the students developed in seven weeks did not only advance the students' understanding of designing in the organization (the key goal) but already contributed to that organization's sharing of knowledge and changing in perception of possibilities. Clearly, there is something design research can contribute (and yes, I am enthusiastic about this:).

As the list has moved on to other topics and since I will be on the road for the next two weeks, it may be best to continue our conversation off list.

With warm regards,

Sabine

References

Organizational Change:

Rousseau, D.M. (1995), Psychological Contracts in Organizations: Understanding Written and Unwritten Agreements, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Senge, P., Smith, B., Schley, S. Laur, J. and Kruschwitz, N. (2008). The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, Doubleday.


Balanced Scorecard:

Kaplan, Robert S. and David P. Norton 1996. The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press).

Meyer, Marshall, W. 2002. Rethinking Performance Measurement–Beyond the Balanced Scorecard, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press).

Case Studies:

Junginger, S. (2006), ‘‘Change in the making – organizational change through human-centered product development’’, doctoral dissertation, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, May 2006: Chapters 4-6.




Sabine Junginger, PhD
Lecturer || Junior Professorin || Assistant Professor

Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts
ImaginationLancaster
Lancaster University
Lancaster
LA1 4YW

http://imagination.lancs.ac.uk/
www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/lica

office: ++44 (0)1524.594.250
mobile: ++44 (0)79.049.234.74
s.junginger[at]lancaster.ac.uk