John: Earlier I noticed your post regarding the Roger Martin / Rotman model
but have been traveling so apologies for this late reply. If you are
interested in the subject of cross-disciplinary team sense-making you are
welcome to participate in a NextD exercise that we began conducting last
year in collaboration with several graduate schools internationally. It¹s
called DeFuzzing WHO / Understanding Ourselves in the Context of Cross
Disciplinary Innovation. We usually do the exercise with instructors but if
you round up a group of 12 students you can participate and we will make the
tools available to you for free, for one morning or afternoon. DeFuzzing WHO
is designed as a simple classroom exercise. It involves three simple tasks
and takes a couple of hours to do.
 
To be as tactful as possible here: I believe you will find out for yourself,
by doing the DeFuzzing WHO exercise, that in the real world gaining insights
into attributes and preferences of cross-disciplinary teams is not as simple
as preassigning attribute tags to disciplines as proposed in the Roger
Martin / Rotman model.
 
To suggest that some humans have preferences for validity and some for
reliability is one thing but to suggest that we can predetermine and hard
wire those notions to specific disciplines, especially without any blind
self-determination mechanism is something quite different. The Martin /
Rotman validity/reliability model appears to be more of a hypothesis rather
then a real operationalized tool. Obviously there is a huge difference
between those two things.
 
FYI: We have known for numerous years that anyone calling themselves a
designer or a business manager could lean towards any one of a number of
different problem finding/solving styles or preferences. For some time we
have known that organizing teams by discipline tags alone is no longer
meaningful, no longer enough if the goal is to create diversity of thinking,
especially today when anyone can pretty much call themselves anything.
Apparently it is news to the Rotman crowd but discipline tags as a single
organizing principle have for some time been obsolete.
 
In addition you probably will want to think carefully about what you
ultimately intend to do with the models and tools John. If your goal or
responsibilities happen to involve building a co-creation culture in a
cross-disciplinary organizational setting, based not only on inclusion, but
equality and trust, you will have to find real tools that are relatively
power bias free. 
 
For example you cannot have one preference called innovator and the others
called dogs breakfast and chopped liver. In the literature there is a lot of
this kind of structural power-based stuff around. Some of it is quite
subtle. Language plays an important role in fostering inclusion so if you
are going to be responsible for enabling the conditions for inclusive
innovation you will need to heighten your precisions and your sensibilities
considerably in this regard.
Having some business media attention around a model does not guarantee it is
suitable as a basis for co-creation. You will need to extend your expertise
far beyond that of the media. If you have, as a design oriented person, been
focused on form and function you will likely need a new set of lenses..:-)
It is actually quite difficult to find inclusive co-creation tools and
models rather then abrasive and or power biased ones.
 
Have you studied the Rotman models and interconnected point of view closely?
There are interesting orientations and tonalities for you to consider there
John. The Rotman narrative, the Rotman approach appears to be, by design,
oriented towards one group navigating the hostility of another (³Designing
in HOSTILE Territory²). What does that sound like to you? Does that sound
like a formula for equality and co-creation?
 
Today, in the spirit of co-creation we see many disciplines coming together
to collaborate like never before. One of the challenges is to sort out and
make sense of the various models. With the best of intentions many have
ideas and models that can be and often are extremely helpful. In practice we
use many tools from outside of design and have for many years. Others
arriving on the scene with the same good intentions, offer up models, often
historically based, that can be counter productive to the greater goal of
inclusion and fairness for all involved in co-creation. Keep in mind that
inclusion and integrative cross-disciplinary thinking have not been the
focus of traditional business education for many generations. Why would we
assume that they are experts?
 
One scenario that is not uncommon to see, due to various educational
defaults, is models being proposed where judgment is positioned as the
highest form of value. Guess which type of graduate school program has been
teaching judgment/convergence as its central focus for decades? These are
typical challenges from the strategic space today, a space where designers
are already operating. The old rules and the old game have changed. Who is
most equipped to lead in the new game is a question that is being answered
in the competitive marketplace every day. Design education institutions are
part of that marketplace.
 
Today every discipline is reinventing itself to one degree or another. Each
has its own peculiarities. Design is no exception. If you are studying
design history you will know that embedded there are some quite complex and
deeply rooted entanglements around the orientation of design in society. At
various times in history design has gotten itself into trouble by becoming
too subservient to business. That is not a future that we seek to repeat for
design. Although you might not know it by listening to some design education
leaders but subservience is quite different from co-creation and
collaboration. We as a new generation of design leaders must be conscious of
this history, this tendency among some of our last generation leaders and
guard against a repeat of this folly in this new age. There is no need for
design to be positioned as subservient today yet the tendency continues. It
is clear that we must rid our design education systems of the subservience
factor however in some schools it is built right into the learning system. I
am always astonished to hear design educators advocating its continuance as
a route to maintaining their status quo and even proposing it as a good
route to the future for design. Instead we need to be among those out in
front of the old messes creating the conditions for co-creation among many
disciplines including ourselves.
 
As we work with other disciplines outside of design we have to be more aware
that there are forces in the world that have a tendency towards power and we
can help untangle those forces for the greater good. This is not a desired
future state but rather already among the important tasks for co-creation
strategists and innovation process leaders. To get there, to be able to do
this work in the face of very well meaning collaborators with problematic
power models is difficult work.
 
No tools or models are perfect however you can find inclusive ones that are
reasonably power unbiased both inside and outside of design if you condition
yourself to know what you are looking at. What exactly am I talking about?
If you choose to participate in the DeFuzzing WHO exercise you will
experience an 
example of one such tool. In terms of its development, refinement and
application it is ten years ahead of the Martin / Rotman modelŠJ It is
inclusive. In its language it is not power biased. All preferences are equal
in value. It has research behind it. It is an operating tool, not a
hypothesis. It is even interconnected to other tools and by the way, it was
not invented by a person with a design background.
 
In closing I will point out for those journalistically minded participants
among us here that in addition to the question that John asked, there are
actually two bigger stories embedded there. These might be research or story
opportunities for some.
 
1. In spite of the fanfare around the Martin / Rotman model including it
being featured at several high profile graduate design schools last yearŠto
a significant degree the Rotman crowd presently seems to be unaware that
problem solving preferences to a significant degree transcend disciplines.
Awareness of this leads to quite a different innovation enabling story.
Co-creation is not, or does not need to be, about one group gearing up to
navigate another groups hostility. If that is what is going on in your
organization you are using the wrong models. Creating sustainable
human-centered innovation capabilities within organizations today involves
rethinking old power projections among other things. It is unlikely that the
business schools are going to be leading the charge there. Human-centered
design oriented firms already competing in the 3.0 strategic co-creation
arena have quite different models to offer. For some time NextD has been
significantly out in front of NextB.
 
2. Another interesting story embedded in John¹s post is even more difficult
and that involves the question of why has the intelligentsia of design
academia (largely represented by this list) not stepped up and taken on the
task of unpacking and questioning the widely distributed Martin / Rotman
models and their interconnected points of view regarding design and
designers.
 
We cannot expect the design press to do so as there is really no such thing!
There is no design press.
 
Surely this highly sophisticated list group must be fully aware of the
odd-ball orientations in the Martin models. If such models had no
consequences for design it would not make a difference but clearly they do
and they will have consequences for future generations. Isn¹t this kind of
questioning what leaders are supposed to do? The thing is its not enough
anymore to just talk among ourselves on lists like this.
 
Many in design academia still seem to view business schools in the old
fashioned way as remote from what their students are learning how to do and
full of future design patrons without understanding that world is long gone.
 
Your students will soon have to collaborate with and probably even compete
in the marketplace with Rotman students. They might find themselves sitting
in organizations with these models. You might ask yourselves, or perhaps
more appropriately your students might ask you: Are you training your
graduate students to work for Rotman graduates or to operate as equals with
them in the strategic space where challenge framing and other important
activities take place?
 
Students are smart today and they are asking: where are your models and
tools? For the cost of a graduate or post-graduate design education today
they should certainly be provided with some, not subservience based models
but rather the opposite. The tools that they will need are those that they
can use to lead and operate as equals in the strategic space and not be, by
design, subservient to others. Is your school providing your students with
such tools? Have you bought into or out of the subservience factor?
 
Suffice it to say there are lots of untold stories around.
 
Hope this is helpful.
 
John, let me know if you would like to participate in the DeFuzzing WHO
exercise. 
 
 
GK VanPatter
Co-Founder
NextDesign Leadership Institute
New York

NextD
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> From: John Stevens <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: John Stevens <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 09:53:56 +0100
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Designers are from Venus, managers are from Mars
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I like Roger Martin's description of designers as validity-oriented,
> compared with business managers & leaders who are more reliability-
> oriented [<http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/sep2005/
> id20050929_872877.htm>]. Designers' output, he says, aims to meet an
> objective which can only be substantiated with future tests, whereas
> typical managers and business leaders prefer to work with (and
> demand) reliability ­ the production of consistent, replicable outcomes.
> 
> General as they are, his terms seem to make sense to me, but I can't
> help thinking this must be well-trodden ground in design research. Is
> this so? I'd like to collate a list of similar design-versus-business
> stereotypes from literature, and would appreciate any suggestions.
> 
> Best wishes from sunny Cambridge.
> --
> John Stevens
> Doctoral candidate
> Institute for Manufacturing
> Cambridge University, England.