Hello again Jude: I appreciate your comments regarding 'Simon shopping'. Your questions are all around the topic of the original thread and some are rather complex so I will touch on a few here briefly as best I can. It might get to the point where a face-to-face conversation is required.
Regarding your question: In the organizational settings in which we practice we never use the term ‘designers epistemological repertoire’ and are not there pushing divergent thinking. Nor are we there as convergent thinking advocates.
In the organizational settings in which we practice it is quite common for various human parties to make suggestions regarding the dynamics that should be set in place under various banners that might include innovation, change-making, design thinking etc. I hate to break the news but often these suggestions are simple projections of their own thinking preferences. If one has no idea that all human adults have thinking preferences that we project then understanding what is going on and why would not be possible.
One part of what we are doing in organizational enabling is refereeing the various cognitive biases that folks have in mind whether they know it or not. We are in effect doing a form of cognitive bias surgery on the organizational brain. Designing inclusion requires considerable understanding of cognitive bias constructions.
Due to the overwhelming dominance of convergent thinking preferences in North American business organizations we see every imaginable rationalization for why, from that particular perspective more convergent thinking is needed. We have seen convergent thinking rewrapped and represented in every imaginable shape. On any given day you can go to HBR or Fast Company or any modern business school logic dominated publication and see such rationales being put forth under a 100 different shapes and packages.
A high profile publicly visible example that you might recall (largely not well understood in the design community) was when the folks at Rotman were wandering around the marketplace, including various graduate design schools actively suggesting that integrative thinking is actually a decision-making technique and now should be considered as such according to their logic. That was complete nonsense with the potential to undermine what integrative thinking already was but this is an example of what goes on. It can be going on by design or by ignorance.
Many leaders in the design community more accustomed to product creation dynamics seem to have little understanding of such power phenomenon that are in the context of organizational culture building and change making quite common. The continuing privileging of convergent thinking is among the most difficult trains to stop and reroute as it is deeply ingrained. Don't under estimate the forces in play around such issues. This is one of numerous previously stated differences between this work and other types of design-oriented interventions.
Very interesting your thoughts on ‘Simon shopping is not shopping’ but we have as stated above seen a zillion different versions of ‘this is not that’. At the end of the day decision-making is convergence. It matters not if Simon was considering 3 or 3000 divergently created options.
It is no secret that the graduate business schools in particular have been teaching that convergent thinking is the highest form of value for decades whether it made any sense in the constantly changing real world outside or not. Quite frankly they have done a great job of convincing themselves and many others that convergent thinking is the highest form of value. One result is that there are multiple generations of organizational leaders in the mix who have been schooled that convergent thinking is the highest form of value. That is the default condition in 90% of the organizations that we encounter in practice. That legacy system teaching has only just recently started to change. Now of course they struggle with the need to create meaningful change and participate in change-making leadership. The world has changed around that long taught default preference.
Much of what we do at the scale of organizations is to reroute some of these old trains and get them reconnected to the demands that the outside world is now placing on the organizations.
For this and a host of other reasons we do resist any suggestions, coming from any direction (and their have been some) to convert design and or design thinking to decision theory. Not going to happen. If organizations are drowning in blue paint the suggestion that more blue is needed is a full stop no-go in our corner of the universe. We seek to keep the diversity of thinking in play.
That dynamic design is central to The OTHER Design Thinking….at least the Humantific version. Time will tell what others are doing in this direction.
Hope this helps.
gk
PS: If anyone out there is working in an organization that is completely dominated by convergent thinking behaviors and values give us a call. I would be happy to have a chat with you.
Related
See why we don't form teams based just on discipline tags alone.
Design Thinking Made Visible Research (In the Humantific Library on ISSUU)
http://issuu.com/humantific/docs/humantificthinkingmadevisible
...
GK VanPatter
Co-Founder
Humantific
SenseMaking for ChangeMaking
NEW YORK / MADRID
6 West 18th Street, 9th Floor
New York City, NY 10011
T: 212-660-2577
http://www.humantific.com
NEWSLETTER:
Subscribe to Humantific Quarterly
Follow Humantific on twitter: http://twitter.com/humantific
...
On Nov 30, 2013, at 2:02 AM, CHUA Soo Meng Jude (PLS) wrote:
> Thanks GK.
>
> But Simon's window shopping is not shopping. Window shopping, unlike shopping for something, is instead a walking about the malls to see what is interesting, a kinds of search, exploration, and is hence that divergent thrust in Simon's thinking rather than the convergent one. Simon's able to explain the need for various forms of divergent thinking with a bit of psychology and philosophy and decision theory. I find that very helpful, because, ok so divergent thinking is what is part of the designer's epistemological repertoire - but why? Simon says: It's bounded rationality (empirically supported an idea), cos we dont have the wits to optimize, and if we are able to find one solution to satisfice we are lucky but before several means in complex scenarios we don;t know which is optimal, which is the best, and later in life, he talks about the incommensurability of preferential ends, which is also included in his conception of rationality;s boundaries, and if ends are commensurable, optimization, choosing the best of these ends is irrational. IT's very interesting cos critiques of consequentialist utilitarianism who dont read Simon also develop in parallel the same criticism, for instance in law, John Finnis attacks economic analysis of law in similar ways. But back to Simon, it's part of a "Science"of design , rigorous theory of design decision making (at least according to him) that we need divergent thinking. So Simon's design / decision theory is about how the homo economicus actually CANNOT decide! No right answer. keep searching.
>
> But for OTHER DT, why would you all focus on that kind of divergent thinking projects? IS there a kind of sense of a warrant for celebrating these, and putting them into a book? What might that kind of warrant be? Your theoretical justification for that different, other direction would be interesting and helpful to lay out.
>
> Jude
>
> ________________________________________
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
