Dear Chuck,

Once again, you [1, below] misread my comments [2, 3, below]. You seem to see assumptions that I do not make. 

I do not make assumptions about the supervisor’s domain knowledge. I describe objective factors in the context of the research problem. These factors make a difference to what a PhD student can learn based on background, expertise, and experience.

Good supervisors bring in help when they need it. This includes subject domain knowledge, methodological expertise, and other kinds of knowledge and expertise.

Supervisor knowledge doesn’t change the complexity or nature of the problem.

You ask six questions as an alternative way to think about how to gain and generate new knowledge. Each question involves a significant number of issues, so a serious answer requires a long post. 

A six-month time frame makes sense by limiting the research problem. However, structuring time to make the project manageable reshapes the research problem. It is impossible to answer the original research question in a six-month window. The original question you asked about the IBM design thinking initiative is: “what worked and what didn’t?”

The questions you now ask are: “Why did IBM hire these people?”, “Why did they accept the offer of employment?”, or “Why did they decline the offer of employment?” 

On the organisational level, this involves questions in human resources management, hiring policy, organisational psychology, or labour economics. On the individual level, it involves the individual psychology of career strategy and job choices.

Even within this frame, significant problems are visible. During the first six months of the program, IBM will only be able to hire a small percentage of the thousand or so designers the company plans to hire. Staffing up to the level that Steve Lohr describes in the New York Times article will take several years. Organisations typically require one or two full years to add two or three dozen experienced staff for a program of this kind. Hiring more than a thousand will take a long time. 

You have reframed the research question to focus on hiring policies and staffing policies. This focus does not examine the results of the design thinking initiative. The decision to limit this to the questions you propose makes it impossible to answer your original question. Answering your original question — “what worked and what didn’t” — requires a longitudinal study with enough time to gather the real answers based on the long-term results of the IBM design thinking initiative. While I did not specify time horizons in my earlier reply, the structural difficulties were great enough to explain why this question would be unsuitable for a single PhD student. Your question makes the dimension of time significant. 

Six months is not enough time to explain “what worked and what didn’t” in an initiative of this kind. The time frame for the question might permit researchers to learn something about why some managers hired some people and why the people they hired accepted. That raises new questions.

Would a PhD student in design be interested in a research question involving human resources management, hiring policy, or labour economics? I don’t know. That sounds to me like asking a physicist to study the management of a cyclotron facility rather than doing physics. 

But what if a design student were to find this new research question interesting? Changing the time horizon makes *one* aspect of the project more feasible. It does not resolve other structural problems. 

The most important structural problem is the fact that the design thinking initiative is a global initiative. Whoever does this research would still face the challenge of working across multiple 170 nations through a network of multiple organisations, units, divisions, and subsidiaries

Doing the interviews required for this study would still involve many of the structural problems I described [2, below]. It would also involve massive budgetary problems — scheduling interviews, travel costs for site visits, and more. (It would be very difficult to undertake properly nuanced interviews by Skyp when these interviews require cultural sensitivity and an understanding of the different cultural and organisational dimensions of each unit.)   

Your six questions also involve two further sets of detailed problems. One involves universities. The other involves IBM. 

Every major research university has serious regulations governing human research. Most research universities require clearances and permissions for any research involving living human beings. This also applies to research involving confidential data about living human beings. Even if IBM grants access to its  human resources records, the university would have to approve the use of human resources records at IBM. Later in the response, I will discuss why IBM is not likely to grant access to these records, but that involves a different set of problems. 

Permissions and clearance are granted based on two factors. One is the *research problem* and what the research can contribute. The other is the *capacity* of the researcher to undertake serious and meaningful research. In determining capacity, university research boards want to know whether researchers have an appropriate background in the research methods they plan to use. They also want to know that researchers have the capacity to´ analyse and interpret the data they gather. If a researcher lacks the appropriate capacity, the university will not grant permission. This is the case for all researchers — PhD students  and professors alike. 

The vast majority of PhD students in design come from a pure studio background. They generally have an undergraduate degree in studio design and perhaps a graduate degree in some design field. Most of these students are new to research. Any university research board will ask a serious question: can a PhD student in design without a background in the social sciences can manage a research project of this kind?  

To speak about gaining or generating new knowledge, we must distinguish between the kinds *new knowledge* that researchers seek, and a situation in which people *learn* something *new to them* that others already know.  

Don Norman’s Core77 essay, “Why Design Education Must Change” explains the difficulty that designers and PhD students in would have in generating new knowledge on the topics you propose. Don writes:

“Today ... designers work on organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully undereducated for the task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes can produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable. Designers often lack the requisite understanding. Design schools do not train students about these complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific method, and experimental design.Related problems occur with designers trained in engineering, for although they may understand hard-core science, they are often ignorant of the so-called soft areas of social and behavioral sciences. They do not understand human behavior, chiding people for not using technology properly, asking how they could be so illogical. (You may have all heard the refrain: ‘if only we didn’t have people, our stuff would work just fine,’ forgetting that the point of the work was to help people.) Engineers are often ignorant of how people actually behave. And both engineers and designers are often ignorant of the biases that can be unwittingly introduced into experimental designs and the dangers of inappropriate generalization. The social and behavioral sciences have their own problems, for they generally are disdainful of applied, practical work and their experimental methods are inappropriate: scientists seek “truth” whereas practitioners seek “good enough.” Scientists look for small differences, whereas designers want large impact. People in human-computer interaction, cognitive engineering, and human factors or ergonomics are usually ignorant of design. All disciplines have their problems: everyone can share the blame.”

The full essay appears at:

http://www.core77.com/posts/17993/why-design-education-must-change-17993

This is important to consider with respect to your comment on “an alternative way to think about how to gain and generate new knowledge.” As Don writes, “Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known.”

And this is where IBM’s needs and interests come into play. IBM is not simply a massive global corporation with 370,000 employees. It is a massive research-based corporation with more working researchers than any university in the world. 

IBM employs researchers that have amongst their number greater research expertise than all but a few top universities. 

IBM employees have won five Nobel prizes while working for IBM. 

According to a 2012 article in Computer World UK, IBM claims to employ more people with a PhD in mathematics than any other organisation in the world:

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-vendors/ibm-boasts-we-employ-most-phd-mathematicians-3338361/

IBM employs a massive number of researchers, technologists, and applied scientists with a PhD. These cover more fields than mathematics and computing. They also employ massive numbers of psychologists, economists, management scholars, and social scientists of all kinds. In addition, many of the managers and leaders at IBM were researchers before moving into management.

The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards Program provides an idea of the range and scope of research that takes place within the company. This program is a competitive worldwide program that links PhD students with research mentors *within* IBM already working in these fields at a senior level. 

According to IBM, the program — and its IBMN-based mentors — cover “problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study. These include: computer science and engineering (including cyber security, cloud, and mobile computing), electrical and mechanical engineering, physical sciences (including chemistry, material sciences, and physics), mathematical sciences (including analytics of massive scale data with uncertainty, operations research, and optimization), public sector and business sciences (including urban policy and analytics, social technologies, learning systems and Cognitive Computing), and Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME) and Industry Solutions (Healthcare, Life sciences, Education, Energy & Environment).” In addition, the current cycle covers more areas. To see the program, go to URL:

http://www.research.ibm.com/university/awards/phdfellowship.shtml

The scope and scale of research at IBM is massive. The talent pool of senior researchers at IBM is deep. Will the knowledge that emerges from a six-month project by a PhD student in design be *new knowledge* at IBM? 

You suggest that IBM should use senior managers as informants and guides in a student research project. This is a massive request. Before agreeing, IBM will ask the same questions that a university research board will ask. They will also ask more questions. Among these will be, “Will any benefit to IBM justify the cost of senior management time in helping a PhD student in design?”

But it’s not clear that IBM would use any PhD student for this kind of project. Consider the massive investment that IBM is making in the design thinking initiative. Lohr’s article states that IBM is “well on its way to hiring 1,000 professional designers.” IBM will employ more high-level working designers than all but a few of the world’s largest design practices. Salaries and benefits for 1,000 senior designers must run close to $150 million dollars a year. The costs of administrative staff and support staff to lead and support these designers across the organisation will push the total further. In five to seven years, the cost of this initiative will exceed one billion dollars. As Everett Dirksen used to say, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”  

I suggest that IBM has already assigned an internal group of senior researchers to study the project.

IBM will want to know “what worked and what didn’t” — and *why* — and they won’t want apprentice researchers doing the work. Before approving an initiative of this scale, I would guess that IBM has undertaken a massive literature review and a feasibility study that is far deeper than most PhD theses. 

In my view, you underestimate the complexity of the issues involved, the depth of what researchers already know, and the skills required for a project of this kind. 

A little back-of-the-envelope estimate work shows why a PhD student in design would not be able to manage the six questions you ask. It also shows why IBM would be unlikely to invest the time required — or give a design student access to complex, confidential data. The massive investment involved in this initiative suggest reasons for using seasoned researchers to answer these questions.    

In this post, I do make some assumptions. I state the premises for these assumptions carefully. They are anchored in university policy, in IBM’s own statements, and in facts about IBM. I doubt that there are any hidden assumptions here. No amount of creative work by designers will change the massive objective difficulties of this kind of research. The size of the investment will make IBM extremely careful about everything they do and everyone they work with to examine what they do.

Am I wrong? Perhaps. There is a simple way to prove me wrong. Get a PhD student to take this on as a doctoral research project. Find a university that will permit it. Get IBM to grant access. Then let the student complete the research and finish his or her thesis.    

Reading your reply, I feel that you see me as an old-fashioned fellow who fails to recognise the powerful creativity of design students who move from studio work to a PhD program. You may be right. Then again, I have actually studied several hundred PhD dissertations — many in design. And I have looked at many of the doctoral programs in the design field. 

My skepticism is based on an objective understanding of the structural problems in this kind of research. They limit what any single student can do in taking these issues on. 

While design students are creative, these objective problems limit what any research student can do without the requisite experience and skills. And given the scale and scope of the investment, my skepticism is based on what IBM might be willing to consider. It’s one thing to talk with Steve Lohr for an article in the New York Times. It’s another entirely to talk with a fledgling researcher doing interviews for a PhD. 

A couple posts back, Peter Jones described me as a scold. Perhaps he is right. This reply isn’t a Philippic or a Jeremiad, but I suppose that my views put me in the category of Calvinist skeptics. 

To anyone who puts a PhD student in design to work on a topic such as this, I would answer with a passage from Psalms 73:18 that Jonathan Edwards used: 

“Surely thou didst set them in slippery places.”

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: 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 | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia

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[1]

Charles Burnette wrote:

—snip—

What if a PhD candidate decided to focus their research on why the person in charge of hiring designers for IBM did what they did in the first six months of their job. What if they approached IBM for a research position to investigate this question? What if this information would be useful to IBM to improve their program, and the managers concerned  were asked to become stakeholders? What if the subject of this inquiry was willing to provide information about his strategy, and how he came to it? What if the PhD candidate was given permission to talk to those he hired about why they took the job he offered them; what they hoped to do, and what they spent their time doing? What if the candidate asked the people who declined a job offer why they did so? etc. until the candidate had enough information to document what happened during and immediately after the first six months of the program? I pose these questions to you, not as an approach I recommend, but as an alternative way to think about how to gain and generate new knowledge. 

You seem to be saying it is all up to their supervisor’s domain knowledge when the supervisor could, in theory, call in others when they were not able to respond to the issues underlying each question. A problem of obtaining knowledge can be framed and approached many ways. And a good supervisor should be as curious and open to possibilities as the candidate they advise. Seeing things as too complex to comprehend flies in the face of science, which always seeks something that fits the problem of interest and the resources available to study it. PhD dissertations can be scaled to what is feasible. They certainly shouldn’t be torpedoed by subjective inflation of what someone, in this discussion you, considers necessary.

—snip—

—

[2]

Ken Friedman wrote:

—snip—

While I withdrew from the thread on design thinking at IBM, your last reply calls for an answer. This answer does not involve design thinking at IBM. It involves the issue of scale, scope, and skills in PhD research.

From time to time, you argue that I make seemingly unstated assumptions rather than recognising a set of clearly defined premises that account for my position.

Your did this in the case of my response to your proposal for a PhD thesis:  

[Chuck Burnette wrote:] “This seems to assume that fresh minds are not capable ones, and that the PhD candidate has to meet requirements that prevent them from generating new knowledge, or do critical and constructive thinking, perhaps in concert with others that have more knowledge and expertise on a subject than they do.”

I made no such assumption. I assume and *expect* that a serious PhD student capable of the required work has a fresh mind. It takes a fresh mind to undertake the original research required for this topic. Only original research with critical and constructive thinking will generate new knowledge.

I also assume and expect that PhD students work with others who have greater knowledge and expertise on the subject. This is the role of supervisors. It is also the case where students must learn from working experts located within the organisation under study. In the case of IBM, this woulds not be one organisation, but the network of the overall firm as well as many organisations, units, divisions, and subsidiaries employing 370,000 people spread across 170 nations.

The problems I described state objective impediments that make it difficult for one single person to do this work as a single PhD thesis. No matter how fresh, intelligent, critical, and constructive the mind, the research problem you proposed requires gathering too much data across too many disciplines for a single PhD student to achieve serious results. 

A journalist might offer some insights, but we do not hold newspaper articles, magazine articles, or even books to the same standards that we hold a PhD thesis. The work required to deal adequately with this thesis on an organisation of 370,000 employees in 170 nations would be massive. 

There are books with comparable scale and scope. David Halberstam’s 1986 book, The Reckoning is such a book. This is a 750-page masterpiece on the automobile industry written by a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist in his 50s. Another example is the Toyota Way series by Jeffrey Liker, Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at University of Michigan. Barry Katz’s magnificent new book is another case in point — Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design. Katz is a professor of engineering at Stanford and a professor of design at California College of Art, as well as an IDEO Fellow.

Perhaps the Toyota Way series takes on the scale and scope of the questions involved in “what worked and what didn’t” at IBM. The others are more limited in scope, though still massive. An experienced professor would likely gather a research team to understand these issues in an organisation of this size.

While the question involves the results of design thinking in a massive industrial organisation, but the *research question* is a social science question — “what worked and what didn’t.”  Answering this questions requires information, data, and analysis involving management studies, organisation theory, and organisational psychology, and most likely it will involve micro-economics, innovation studies, and technology. In other words, you are talking about this issue as though it is a design problem. The *research problem* for this PhD thesis involves the social sciences. 

In too many cases, I have seen the unfortunate result of PhD students in design who come from a design background attempting to answer research questions in social science without the necessary foundation. This is often made worse by PhD supervisors in design who fail to understand the complexity of the issues involved. What’s worse is that many supervisors apparently don’t understand the basic research skills that all PhD students should have, or at least they do not teach them to their students. As a result, students take on projects for which they are entirely unprepared. 

In visiting different universities, I have often met PhD students with fresh minds and the capacity for critical, constructive thought whose thesis projects were mediocre or even incompetent. Reading the thesis and speaking with the students, I found that the deficient research skills evident in the thesis projects often involved poor supervision. This nearly always involved skills gaps based on what supervisors did NOT teach. It also involved mistakes that students made on the direct advice of supervisors who did not understand simple methodological challenges. 

A PhD dissertation differs from a master’s thesis. A master’s thesis can take any of several directions. A PhD dissertation must make an original contribution to the knowledge of the field. I *assume* and *expect* that a PhD student will study under faculty members with subject domain knowledge and methodological expertise in the area they study. This also means having an appropriate sense for the limits of a dissertation topic and the work needed to gather the data and information on which the student will do research.

Finding out “what worked and what didn’t” in ANY initiative at a company operating in 170 nations raises dozens of subsidiary research problems. To do this for IBM as a whole is impossible for a single PhD student.

Anyone who comes to design with a foundation in the social and behavioural sciences has an awareness of the challenges involved. This project requires understanding an organisation that employs 370,000 people in 170 nations through a network of multiple organisations, units, divisions, and subsidiaries. Many of these units have their own histories and cultures as organisations purchased by IBM and merged into the larger organisational network, generally with differing degrees of success. The very fact that the old IBM culture has fragmented and is no longer what it once was while the company operates in a very different world is one reason for the design thinking initiative.  

It would be possible for a single PhD students to ask how this initiative works or fails to work at one IBM unit in the nation where the student already works, understands the general culture, and speaks the language fluently. This topic is sufficiently limited for a single PhD student who is willing to dig in. Even this requires learning about the organisation within that specific IBM unit at sufficient depth to ask the right questions. It will also requires framing and reframing the questions and answers under way, and developing an understanding for the people involved and the context within which they work.

Could a single PhD student find out “what worked and what didn’t” in IBM as a whole? I say “No.” You seem to say, “Yes.” There is one way to demonstrate that a single PhD student really could do such a project successfully. That would be for a single PhD student to do what you propose and succeed. Perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps not.  

Over the past several decades, I have looked at hundreds of PhD theses in several fields. I’ve read some carefully. I have skimmed several hundred more. I have also reviewed many articles and journal papers by people who have presumably earned a PhD. Few of the PhD students and few of these authors could manage a topic such as this. 

To tackle the research question you propose — “what worked and what didn’t” across the full organisational network of IBM — requires more than a fresh mind. I assume a fresh mind. What I do not assume is the depth of experience and research skill needed to answer a difficult and complex problem at the scope and scale you propose it. 

It is wrong to assume that a PhD student has the experience or skill required for such a project. Students undertake a PhD to develop these skills. 

Moreover, a problem of this scale and scope requires far greater experience and subject domain expertise than most single researchers have. That is why people gather research teams for major projects.

I hope this clarifies the difference between the seeming assumptions I did not make and the explicit premises I stated in explaining why this kind of question is unsuitable for a PhD thesis. 

—snip—

—

[3]

—snip—

Ken Friedman wrote [i.e., the explicit premises for the problem in question]:

—snip—

2) The results of the effort at IBM would not be a suitable topic for a PhD dissertation at most universities.

The empirical research required would take more than three years, making this impossible within the Bologna scheme or at universities in the UK or Australia. It would also require a significant foundation in management studies, organisation theory, and some acquaintance with organisational psychology. Depending on the issues that emerge, it would likely require a serious understanding of micro-economics, innovation studies, and technology. That would make too great a stretch for most PhD students in design, and the lack of familiarity with design would make it a difficult subject for PhD students in other fields.

The first question alone requires a broad reach. Steve Lohr’s article puts it this way: “IBM, like many established companies, is confronting the relentless advance of digital technology. For these companies, the question is: Can you grow in the new businesses faster than your older, lucrative businesses decline?”

As you read further into the article, however, at least another half dozen key questions emerge.

These questions are simply too large for a single PhD student to answer. To genuinely understand “what worked and what didn’t” requires a researcher with an appropriate theoretical foundation, significant research experience, and an appropriate basis for the required judgment calls.

It takes a lot of work to understand anything that happens in a company with more than 370,000 employees. This is particularly the case for a major multi-nation corporation that operates in over 170 nations with more than $100 billion in revenue from a massive array of subsidiaries, regions, product ranges, and more. 

Many PhD students would have difficulty analysing Lohr’s article in the New York Times to identify the dozen or so subject fields involved and the multiple research methods that one would need to ask the appropriate research questions. Gathering the data to answer those questions would stretch any single researcher, no matter how much experience he or she has.

This is an important topic — to do it justice requires a seasoned researcher with adequate funds and access to the key data. Working on such a project could provide enough useful material to employ have a dozen PhD students in a research team. It is far too much for a single dissertation, and it requires far greater skill than any one PhD student has.

While the goal is worthy, this is too much for a PhD student to achieve.

—snip—

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