Dear Chuck,
It seems like several of us wrote to you off-list to say that we couldn't find the Nordstrom Innovation Lab when you posted their material yesterday. Sorry to read your news today.
Your note today ends with two good points: " ... I think we should appreciate what they were able to do to lead the field, and recognize that getting design integrated into established business is no cakewalk. ... We have a lot to do to improve what goes on - including how to introduce and sustain our principles."
Nordstrom Innovation Lab and organisations like them have been genuinely interesting to me. I came to design, as others of us did, from the social and behavioural sciences. I won't recount the long and winding road that got me here, but I will recount a vital lesson that I had at the start of my journey in the 1960s.
Back in 1968 or so, I studied with John Collier Jr. at San Francisco State University. John was pioneer in applied anthropology and visual anthropology. Much of what we examined in his courses and seminars was how to change organisations and -- by extension -- aspects of societies and cultures from what we found them to be to what we prefer them to be. We spoke in terms of planned, intentional change rather than using the word design, but this was design. In fact, this was fourth-order design much as Dick Buchanan would later define it.
John often discussed the great challenge of this kind of design. Any organisation has a history and a culture of its own. The larger and more durable the organisation, the stronger and more deeply rooted the organisational culture. The problem of changing cultures, John said, was that it is impossible truly to change any one aspect of a culture unless one changed the entire culture around it -- and it is impossible to change the entire culture without changing each of the many key single aspects that define a culture.
Now this isn't quite true, either, because cultures change in time, and the workings of time and human activity can accomplish a great deal. Doing it in a planned way, though, designing the change and implementing it is tough. My rule of thumb for real culture change in organisations is that changing an existing organisational culture is generally a process that takes around a decade. The time might be a little less in some cases, longer in some cases, depending on local circumstances, and depending on the larger context within which the specific organisation is embedded.
In businesses -- and organisations of all kinds -- people who attempt to work with these issues are repeatedly thwarted by what the sociologist Herbert Blumer described as "the obdurate nature of reality." In the preface to a book, Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin (2002: xiii) asked whether research and theory could make any possible contribution to organisational change "when the realities of business are determined by endogenous forces fully dedicated to system survival, or at least to the perpetuation of the interests that govern the system, frequently at the expense of the consumers and employees whom the system should be serving."
Then, we get to exogenous variables. The organisation may be doing very well, developing, changing, and improving when the context around it changes. Exogenous variables may take their toll -- I recall a marvellous Dutch company that made a product I liked a great deal when I first moved to Europe. This was a small company with a superior product. One day, I found that the crucial ingredient in the product had changed -- after careful inquiries, I learned that a larger competitor making a similar but far cheaper product had bought the company, retaining the brand name and packaging but essentially selling their own cheaper product under the former company's name. In essence, they controlled the market by acquisition -- continuing to sell their own product under their own name to people who preferred their brand while selling their own product under another name through the company whose band name they purchased and whose production lines and factories they closed or converted.
I myself was once engaged for a major culture change process. At the start, I stated that it would take seven to ten years. Halfway through, the CEO who engaged me left. Soon after, one source of government funding was cut, reducing the entire organisational budget by 30% per annum overnight. It became impossible for me to complete the project that I had undertaken.
Change processes fail for many reasons.
Within organisations, many decisions involve what has been called the garbage can model of decision making. The garbage can model is a decision-making process that emerges when different actors choose among alternate goals. "To understand processes within organisations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated. The mix of garbage in a single can depends on the mix of cans available, on the labels attached to the alternative cans, on what garbage is currently being produced, and on the speed with which garbage is collected and removed from the scene" (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972: 2). But it's worse than this -- power within the organisation and external circumstances often mean that one specific actor has the power to lift the lid of the garbage can, reach in, and pull out the decision that he or she has already determined to impose on the rest of the organisation.
Sun Tsu addressed the problem of organisational culture in the famous example in which he trained a company of the emperor's concubines. The history of Henry V and his success at Agincourt show both Henry's success in creating a culture of high morale and effective fighting -- but also the price of an older, feudal culture at play in the French army. Henry's army defeated a far larger French force as a result. If the details are of interest, read John Keegan's (2014) Face of Combat. When I taught organisation theory and design at the Norwegian School of Management in the 1990s, I used Agincourt as a case study in leadership issues responding to context and opportunity. Henry, of course, was a sovereign monarch in an era of nearly absolute monarchy, and his achievements as a general in the field were based on part on his ability to command within the larger context of the conflict. He did not answer to field marshal who answered to a commander-in-chief who answered to a chief of staff who answered to a war minister who answered to a prime minister who answered to a majority party in parliament.
Nevertheless, there are examples of modern warriors who do answer up the chain of command and manage even so to achieve astounding results through effective culture building. Lord Nelson's victory at Trafalgar and the culture of his captains made it possible, along with Nelson's thorough grasp of seamanship and administrative routine but his rejection of bureaucracy. This culture was that of a self-conscious "band of brothers" who referred to themselves in a phrase taken from Henry's Agincourt speech.
David Halberstam's (1986) masterpiece, The Reckoning, shows the difference that different kinds of organisational cultural made in the automobile industry -- and the long period of development and change that is at play in any major culture.
On the premise that designers who create products and services should know something about organisations and organisation design, I was once asked to teach a similar course at a design school. It did not work very well, partly because the department head did not understand that students required time to read and think outside the class-room, so outside the three hours a week the class required, students were completely booked with projects and assignments for other courses. He could never understand the general rule of 1 hour classroom time to 3 hours reading time as a general standard in a research university. This becomes even more significant when designers begin to design organisations and cultures.
While I've addressed this issue in different ways over the years, John Collier got me started thinking about the key problems back in 1968 or so. The challenge involves a nested set of ten issues (see Friedman 2012: 149-151). Describing the challenge is one thing. Explaining what to do about it is another.
This is also difficult because of the natural lag time between research and education. It takes time genuinely to understand what is at work in anything on which we do serious research. Buckminster Fuller always estimated a quarter-century lag time between the research that identifies causal factors and genuine solutions and their application in society, business, and industry.
While I have heard the occasional argument that researchers lag behind the cutting edge of professional practice, I'm not sure that this is the case. Organisational survival rates, organisational bankruptcy rates, and the failure rates of new products, systems, and services suggest that professional practitioners in most fields don't understand causality any better than researchers do. They frequently misunderstand or misattribute the causes of success or failure. They rarely publish the full story of their activities, and what they do publish nearly never presents all the facts or figures. It is generally impossible for the rest of us to understand or evaluate what actually takes place, not even in single one-case projects.
There is also a lag-time between research and education. Part of this has to do with the fact that education draws on material for which there is demonstrated evidence. In a field where research is still young, that evidence is missing in great part. If educational institutions were to adopt every new idea that emerges in any field of professional practice, they'd be changing curriculum models twice a year -- and dropping new curriculum models twice year when once-promising companies and processes evaporate in different bubbles, crashes, or normal failures when systems, services, and products fail to find a market.
What I saw and heard about Nordstrom Innovation Lab over the years was very promising. I went to take a deeper look after your post yesterday. I was sorry to learn today that the experiment has changed -- it would be interesting to see more, and to know what happened.
I have always had a particular fondness for Helsinki Design Lab. Because they were a not-for-profit, public service organisation, they were always able to publish full stories and relatively complete data on the principle that they described as "blazing the trail." In that sense, they differed to most private practices simply because they saw their intellectual property as a form of public property and a social capital investment supported by public investment. They had nothing to conceal because they had nothing to sell: their goal was to generate and create value, sharing it as widely as possible.
While I recognise that those of us who work in universities lean toward open disclosure of peer reviewed research, it would be a better world if more private organisations undertook these kinds of experiments, reported them in a richer and more comprehensive way, and gave the rest of us an opportunity to see (and to think about) what works, what doesn't and why.
That is what made the difference between medical practice, medical education, and medical research in the 19th century, in the years of education change following the Flexner report, and today. Physicians and nurses are still struggling with these issues, but they have made good steps. It would be wonderful to see design make a similar kind of progress.
For that to happen, we must build a better framework for the links between research, education, and practice -- and participants in all three fields must do their share. For this we need a progressive research program and a great many forms of cultural innovation within the design field.
There are good examples -- I hope that someone will assemble the Nordstrom story and share it with the rest of us.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University | http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology
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Reference
Cohen, Michael D., James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen. 1972. “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice.” Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1–25.
Friedman, Ken. 2012. “Models of Design: Envisioning a Future for Design Education.” Visible Language, Vol. 46, No. 1/2, pp. 128-151. Available at URL:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Halberstam, David. 1986. The Reckoning. New York: Avon Books.
Keegan, John. 2014 (1991). The Face of Combat. A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. London: The Bodley Head.
Zuboff, Shoshana, and James Maxmin. 2002. The Support Economy. Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism." London: Allen Lane. The Penguin Press.
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