innovation playground Idris Mootee

Is Design Thinking Built-To-Last Or Just Another Management Fad?

I have been teaching and practicing design thinking for business for the almost ten years and over the years I saw the growing interest of design thinking among both business and design communities. Take away the aspiration side for now including notion such as design thinking to change the world etc., design thinking in business is barely understood let alone bring practiced widely. This is the time when businesses have been desperately looking for the next big thing - think the management “wonder drug”.  Lets put some thought into this, is “design thinking" helpful or is it just a hype that is exporting the dogmas of design to business strategy? Design industry is having their own set of big issues.

What's Design Thinking? Design Thinking bascially refers to the methods, framework, tools and processes for investigating ill-defined problems, acquiring and visualizing insights, synthesizing knowledge, and imagining solutions in the design and planning fields. As a style of thinking or a method of creating solution, it is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and ideas, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context.

While design thinking has become part of the popular lexicon in industrial design and engineering, its broader use in describing a particular style of creative thinking-in-action is having an increasing influence on 21st century education across disciplines. In this respect, it is similar to systems thinking in naming a particular approach to understanding and solving problems.

Buchanan’s (1992) paper “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” shifted design theory away from its legacy in the world of craft and industrial production towards a more generalized “design thinking” that could be applied to nearly anything. I mean anything, whether a tangible object or a complex system. Drawing on Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, Buchanan saw design as a liberal art, uniquely well-placed to serve the needs of a technological culture in which many kinds of thing are designed, and human problems are complex. It is basically instilling new perspectives to look at a problem and frame them in different ways to provide more options to tackle whatever the problem is.

And for Design Thinking in Business - The very core of many management theories are being questioned and “management” is close to a point of failure or needed serious reset. Business leaders are looking to find something new to grasp onto in order to make sense of what’s going on and are looking to organize for a future of unprecedented uncertainties. Design Thinking brings a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- but design thinking is far from a cure-all. Innovation, strategy and leadership are closely interconnected and to succeed you must have all three. Innovation is the ability to differentiate options for the future and develop a set of perspectives to guide them there. Strategy is the ability to connect customer needs and wants to the corporation’s core capability, economics and leadership is the ability to instill a sense of purpose for the organization and to mobilize everyone to work towards a common goal.

I don't think Design Thinking will end up like other short-lived management fads and it will eventually deeply embedded in what we called 'management' today and it will help connect the three: Innovation, Strategy and Leadership.

What Are The Least Understood Innovation Tools? Here Are The Results From Idea Couture Recent Survey (Part 3 of 3).

Here is a picture of our reception floor of our new office in the Idea Couture building. We're al least 4 weeks away before we can we are done with the place. This is the final of the three part series. We surveyed to find out what are the most popular innovation tools and the least understood innovation tools,  if you don't know about any of these tools on the list, you are not alone because there are many others like you.

Why are these the Top 5 least understood? Think about it, innovation is an emerging field. Therefore, at any given time, new tools are being developed, tested and refined in response to new kinds of problems, advances in technology, or as older methods are upgraded or mothballed. Other reasons include:

• Lack of exposure
• Newness of tool
• Has been recently adopted from another discipline
• Requires a unique skill set to execute successfully
• Requires rigorous adherence to a structured methodology

1. SIGNAL SCANNING Is a method of identifying and interpreting ‘signals’ from a variety of social, cultural, technological and/or business contexts to help inform, influence and inspire a product, service, marketing orother opportunity. Signal Scanning collects information, interprets information and gives meaning to information, thus helping teams build awareness, organize uncertainties, and re-orient perspectives and assumptions.

When to use it: Scanning is basic research that happens at the front end of any innovation engagement. It sits within the Insights and Inspiration Phase. It can be conducted in tandem with ethnographic and/or co-creation research. It help shape the kinds of questions that are explored in ethnographic and/or co-creation research. It can also be an ongoing process that increasingly builds internal knowledge and awareness on any specific field of research.

Why use it: Where most businesses are enamoured with watching and analyzing the trends of today, scanning provides a competitive advantage by helping organizations to better envision tomorrow. With a focus on the ‘emerging’, scanning empowers teams to more deeply, analytically and imaginatively consider the factors that might play a role in shaping future business opportunities.

2. CONSUMER CO-CREATION is a tool (it is a tool but also a research/design apporach) that directly involves consumers in an iterative process of designing and refining the concepts that will best fit into the context of their lives and needs. By acknowledging the value of customer input in the early stages of development, co-creation turns the top-down orthodoxy, of undifferentiated brand offerings on its head and offers a much higher likelihood of bringing relevant products and experiences to market. The reason this is not so well understood is that it is not a common practice for companies to include customers as part of the value chain.

When to use it: It can be used in the early stage of ideas generation to the final stage of idea validation.

Why use it: Like ethnography, Consumer Co-Creation should be used as a way to cultivate empathy for consumers. Co-Creation is used to:

• Better understand social, cultural and behavioural drivers of use & adoption when ethnographic research is not recommended or possible.
• Gather consumer/expert/lead user input into the design of a product, service or experience
• Explore potential tangible outcomes in packaging, ingredients, communications, display, retail, naming, CSR, service etc.

3. SENSEMAKING is the activity of framing observations and situations, and grounding them in meaningful ways, that help people understand and gain insight into an activity, behavior or system. In short, Sensemaking is the process by which people give meaning to experience. Many times problem spaces can be described as either informationally scarce, working at a deficit, or working from an overabundance of information. Ofthen there is  an overabundance of market research information, requiring a more focused and convergent approach to information and pattern definition. In both cases, recognizing and revealing the patterns are essential to developing insights and making sense of the research landscape.

The reason that Sensemaking activities are difficult because it is dealing with many conflicting and unstratucred data. Providing opportunities for people to Sensemake and infer meaning from unstructured information, allows them to hone their pattern recognition skills, contributing to their professional growth, and the professionalization of the organization.

When use it: Typically used as part of the opportunity mapping stage.

Why use it: It is an effective way to synthesize information into somthing people can understand in terms of the what and how value is being created.

4. STRATEGIC FORESIGHT is about preparing, not predicting. It is about establishing well-informed future oriented perspectives that fuel, guide, and inspire innovation processes, planning and decision-making. It helps organizations better understand, imagine, anticipate and prepare for change by equipping their teams with the tools and resources needed to ask provocative questions, challenge dominant logic, test assumptions, rethink opportunities, reset goals, and explore meaningful alternatives.

The reasons why Strategic Foresight is difficult to understand and execute is that it requires rigor and adherence to a set of steps and methods, beginning with problem definition, and scope.

When to use it: It can be used at the front end of innovation as a way to uncover relevant and pertinent research questions and define the problem space. It can be used to fuel innovation processes, and as a post innovation exercise to extend future contexts or to verify validity of strategy, products and services.

Why use it: The process allows people to ask provocative questions, challenge dominant logic, test assumptions, rethink opportunities, reset goals, and explore meaningful alternatives, to many possible futures. 

5. CREATIVE COLLISIONS Gives research and design teams a tool to intentionally, creatively and playfully collide (draw inferences) different, product, service and consumer culture experiences that are not normally considered together. Innovation is often born where these normally disparate categories intersect; a deliberately counter-intuitive methodology, which forces people well out of their comfort zones and challenges them to override their left-brain, analytical bias in favor of a more open-minded acceptance of contradictory, illogical ideas.

When to use it: Opportunity mapping phase or before/during ideation 

Why to use it: To leverage zones of opportunity, flesh out sub-ideas, and to get you outside your ‘box’ or mixing 'boxes'.

 

Sometimes Design Means To Achieve Timeless Deconstruction, Stimulating Unpredictability and Controlling Chaos

Designing something simple is easy, but adding elegance and substance requires a subtle complexity that not everyone can access and achieve. Design of elgance product is easy, becasue they don't have to deal with the complexity just as some other products. When you want elegance, ability to handle complexity and substance, that's hard.

When it was first introduced in literary criticism, deconstructionism aimed to question traditional assumptions about certainty, identity and truth, asserting that words can only refer to other words. Novelist and philosophy professor Rebecca Goldstein notes that, “in deconstruction, there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable ‘virtual texts’ constructed by readers in their search for meaning.” In other words, language becomes far more than the sum of its scattered, severed parts. In architecture, the finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit the many deconstructivist ‘styles’ is characterized by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos.

As the deconstructive philosophy trickled down to other fields, particularly art and design, it further demonstrated how destruction could be commoditized. The fashion house of Comme des Garçon, as shepherded by Rei Kawakubo, reinterprets this aesthetic by taking clothes to their undoing by strategically dismantling them and then putting them back together. The show, White Drama, presented in Paris provided an unforgettable sensory experience – Snow White meets Victorian Lace. Rei Kawakubo is one of the most influential fashion designers and master of what I like to call ‘simplexity.’

Her signature style of modern simplicity reflects how imperfect beauty captures the complexities of the relationships around us. Kawakubo begins by actually creating the fabrics for each specific collection. Many of her ‘broken bride’ dresses are made from bolts of silk that she printed with intricate trompe l'oeil effects, which enriched the texture and shape of her pleated skirts without adding extra bulky fabric or thread.

Her deconstructive approach in cutting and sewing fabrics is deliberately compromised by design. Hems are left uneven; yarn is dropped mid-stitch in her knitwork; and clashing color threads hold the seams together. Final pieces seem to be the blueprint rather than the final product. Even the patents that inspire her initial work are executed in unconventional steps in an effort to fully divorce form from function. Her design philosophy further sets her apart because she doesn't design for any specific body type, allowing those shorter than 6 feet and larger than size zero to access her clothing. A truly refreshing concept in the world of fashion. At the end of the show, Kawakubo explained her inspiration for the collection by remarking that “all of life’s drama in a white dress.” Each one embodies the complex and contradictory relationships in our lives.

I hesitate to even describe her pieces as ‘fashion,’ because they are so uninterrupted by time and trend. They are artworks that free us to consider, create and embody our passions. That’s when you know that the work appeals to more than just fashion followers, and it is not meant to épater le bourgeois, but anyone who appreciates postmodernist simplicity and visual intrigue.

Design Thinking Can Make Strategic Management Simpler. But Never Simple. People Are Naive To Think That Management Can Be Explained In A Few Circles.

"Strateic Management" sounds academic. Should management be always scientific?  Since the publication of Frederick Taylor’s 1911 treatise, “The Principles of Scientific Management,” the field of industrial engineering has attempted to improve efficiency through ‘scientific management.’ At almost 100 years old, this form of industrial management is primarily based on a mechanical view of our universe as it relates to finding the ‘best’ ways to work.

Spurring powerful business models like the Ford assembly line, this discipline of speeding up productivity, controlling quality and minimizing cost remains the primary management modus operandi. Ever since then, scientists haven’t made much headway in scientific management.

In the mid-1980s, scientists used advanced computer modeling to seek order in chaos, creating mathematical diagrams at warp speed with the new technology. Though they found some fascinating data visualizations, they couldn't explain or understand the patterns. Like forecasting the weather, one could make educated predictions but never guarantee sunny skies. A decade later, some scientists stopped focusing on chaos and took a new interest in complexity.

Using advanced computer models to uncover the structure of life forms, a new approach was applied to business management. Comparing everything from beehives to genetic DNA to traffic jams to the hyperactive, complex properties of our technological and economical environment, they created many a compelling metaphor for strategic management. Still, these studies fell short of revealing any fail-proof practical applications. Today, Fortune 500s and other companies around the world still manage companies like machines – valuing profits before all else, maintaining authority with command-and-control management and relying on Six Sigma to improve quality, overreliance on the metrics on utilization, output and efficiency of mass production.

Thanks to Mr. Taylor,these practices suddenly serve to create a bureaucratic structure, distance executives from laborers and encourage them to manage rigidly and systematically. They do nothing to benefit companies that are looking to innovate in today's creative economy. If anything, it’s getting harder to weed out the chaos now that we’re bombarded with massive data and enterprise software, which forces managers to think in confining formulas. They get caught in a tangle of technology, complex processes, product portfolios and business units, and the straightjacket only tightens its grips. They watch in paralysis as these systems drain their financial and labor resources overnight.

Design Thinking is what Scientic Management needs to maintain its relevance. The only way to simplify management is to apply the voice we’ve lost touch of amidst all this white noise: our intuition. Intuition is anything but simple, yet it has the remarkable ability to bring clarity to strategic decision-making to light because it reveals a subtle qualitative and quantitative balance that is oftentimes needed for all the parts to click.

Sometimes we need to tune out the algorithms, the data and the consciousness. Sometimes it takes a white board, some weird field trips and a few crazt people to show us the world has changed and our business models have expired. We need to use our sense to get into the rhythm of disuptive competition. We need to free ourselves from the rational-logical-linear model that keeps us frozen or stagnant in a fast-moving and uncertain environment. We need a touch of finesse and the courage to wipe the slate clean.

Thinking Usability Beyond Simplicity And Can We Really Afford Simplcity? Is Dieter Rams' 10 Principles Of Design Still Applicable Today?

Came back from beautiful Thailand speaking at the Design Is Opportunity event. Everyone is thinking about design not only as producing great products but also as a competitive advantage for creating new industries and as comparative advantage for countries. Met many people who are passionate in design and design thinking.

There are 16 remote controls that sit on my coffee table at home, and I have no idea what they are all for. It’s enough to make one think twice about turning on their phone, buying a new camera or downloading a new app. Looking around my surroundings, I’m struck with how overly complicated life is. Products that are supposed to simplify our lives now require a steep learning curve and possibly a special diploma.

Which leads me to wonder whether the concept of ‘usability’ means anything to designers and manufacturers anymore. Are they not concerned with alienating a large part of the market with their constant stream of complexities and change? Are they so sure that we’ll loyally follow them to the ends of the earth, syncing our lives to their products? Only a handful of companies are doing it right.

Usability springs out of a discipline called Human Factors, which has deep roots in military strategy. Crucial during wartime, when soldiers needed to design tactics to easily and accurately protect themselves while defeating their enemies. In the most intense and critical moment of one’s life, human factors mean the difference between survival and death. Many are confused over the difference between Industrial Designers (ID) and Design Engineers (DE), let alone between Industrial Designers and Human Factors Engineers (HF).

Industrial Design (ID) is an applied art whereby the aesthetics and usability of products may be improved. Depending which school of design you come from, you can be an artist or a designer that follows most if not all of the 10 principles of good design from Dieter Rams. Design Engineering (DE) on the other hand is a discipline that creates and transforms ideas into a product definition that deliver on customer needs.


The key difference between the two is: ID is an applied art, whereas DE is a discipline. This means that industrial designers' job is to dream up products and design engineers' job is to make it work. Dieter Rams is both a indistrial designer, artist and human factor engineer. He wants his product to be usefil, elegant and easy to use. Sometimes an indsutrial designer performs all three roles.

How did human factors come into design? WWII launched the starting point for electronic systems with user interfaces that were controlled by human operators. At the time, industrial psychologists like John Flanagan discovered that reducing the amount of clutter, such as buttons, switches and knobs on the control panels of aircrafts could dramatically improve operator performance. New models became increasingly streamlined, such as the P-51 Mustang fighter, “one of the conflict’s most successful and recognizable aircrafts.”

Aviation and weapons designers must consider a myriad of human factors, including how to prevent accidental firing, decrease use fatigue, withstand climate conditions, and equipment maintenance, to name just a few. Perhaps the most important factors that guide design involve the human condition. In short, the design must take into account those that will operate the equipment. The degree of automation and ease of maneuverability also play a role. Usability is all about transcending human limitations to achieve the upper hand.

The concept expanded when computers came on the scene. The evolution of the computer, from military technology to personal use, spanned many decades but it finally reached the hands of the public. For the first time, employees could have personal computers, but during this first introduction there were little to no instructions or guides. Despite this, software designers continued to assume that their users were knowledgeable and competent enough to understand the technical lingo and structure of operating systems to not only use the systems but also troubleshoot errors. Such implicit assumptions proved unacceptable, especially if computers were to achieve mainstream success. Today, we expect them to accommodate our limitations, intuition and even emotions.

Adapted from an article Usability Beyond Simplicity from the upcoming Sept issue of MISC- The Simplicity Issue which be available in newstand around the world in the third week of Sept 2012.

Apple Vs Samsung - The Verdict Is A Wake-Up Call And Shaping The Very Nature Of What Competitive Strategy Means.

Here I am the first day in our new office - the building is officially named Idea Couture Place and I took the opporunity to talk about who we are and what are really good at to our people. There are still a lot of people that don't quite understand what a strategic innovation firm does and why it is not just another industrial design, strategy firm or creative house.

Now the move is over but it will take abother 2 months before we are really settled as many furnitures and equipment are still shipping from Italty, Belgium and China. I can't wait to see the fully finished office. For now, everyone is really happy. The roof top patio will look like a boutique hotel.

What exactly does Apple’s victory means for many other companies? The overwhelming patent infringement victory over Samsung is shaping the strategies of many and everyone is getting a wake-up call and now they need to revisit how they approach strategic innovation.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook told his employees about how Apple values originality and innovation and pour their lives into making the best products on earth. They do this to delight their customers, not for competitors to flagrantly copy.

The result of this court case actually shapes the playing field of competition and the very nature of competitive strategy. Samsung, Motorola (Google), HTC, RIM, HP, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, Xerox, Sony, Amazon and IBM . All have quivers full of patents and armies of retained patent lawyers ready to go to court to protect their interests and raise the barriers of entry for new players.

If you look at any new or old product categories, product and user experiences will become more andmore similar over time. Look around you and you realize a lot of cars looks the same and drive the same way. And over time, most phones, laptops or tablets will have similar designs and behaviors, just like TVs, cameras and typewriters. Switches and buttons whether they have rounded or rectangular corners or whatever shaped icons and the overall look and feel aren't likely the key points of differentiation. It has always been part of the commoditization process and companies will continue try to innovate with new ideas.

Every great innovation attracts copycats and it is hard to say whether we are promoting innovation by offering protection or deterring innovation by raising the barriers. There is no easy answer to this one. What’s next? If you’re a small start-up you will have a hard time to make it big as once you gain some attention and market success, you will then discover that you may be infringing on patents even though you think you’re not.

Can anyone realistically come up with an idea that can past the patent test of Apple/Google(Motorola)/Cisco/Xeorx/RIM/Sony/Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures (the world's biggest patent troll) when everone is waiting to collect royalties for what you were pretty sure was an original idea or invention.

I can’t wait for a day when Apple is suing Google and Google is suing Nokia and HP is suing Apple and Samsung is suing HP and everyone is suing everyone – one hell of a party. In the end, it's more likely that these crazy entanglements will result in more cross-licensing agreements than to massive payouts – one big happy family and everyone is getting a check.

As for now, my phone hasn’t stop ringing as every company needs to “out-innovate” and wants Idea Couture to bring Design Thinking to them. Now no one is safe. Welcome to the crazy world.

It Is Time For India To Think Big And Stop Their Obessions With Jugaad. What They Need Is Bigger Asipirations And Design Thinking Competencies.

I wrote a blog post about two years ago titled “Is the Age of ‘Indovation’ and ‘Chinovation’ Becoming Real?” and it was very popular piece and I’ve got a few publications calling me including Knowledge@Wharton and others seeking out my point-of-view. Two years later and I am writing this post in India and will be in China next week, perhaps it is time for an update.

Let’s start with the question around innovation in India and is it really happening? Or happening enough? Well the answer varies depending who you talk and what industry sectors you’re referring to.  For the Indian pharma industry, it is not without trying but there were no commercial or very little success so far. For the auto industry, there are moderate successes but I won’t call it breakthrough innovation. For IT mainly software, there are hardly any effort and it is not because of there’s a lack of money or talent. These tech companies understand the risks and it is easier to just write codes and make money. 

Was this due to a lack of aspiration, unwilling to commit or was it due to the lack of ability to execute successfully?  In my opinion, India doesn’t really get innovation and seriously lacking robust innovation capability. And I don’t mean R&D. Their world-class engineering capability was not put to use solving problems that yet to exists – unknown and unmet needs of customers. 

They need to stop thinking innovating only at the bottom of the pyramid but start to build aspiration for innovation for bigger ideas.  Instead of engineering down products to fit the needs of the limited buying power constrained mass markets, they need to start thinking engineering up for products that shape industries in the developed markets.

India needs to develop high value industries and actively transform itself from a low-cost software and outsourcing economy to global innovation test bed. How can India learn to overcome the fear of failure? And how do they move away from thinking small hoping it will grow big?

Conversations about innovation in India with anyone always start with jugaad. Jugaad is a Hindi word that loosely translates as "the gutsy art of overcoming harsh constraints by designing an effective solution using limited resources." For them, Jugaad is an antidote to the extreme complexity of Indian societies: a country with pervasive scarcity of resources and infrastructure and good policy. Over the years it has developed a way to fixing things that are broken and mashing up different products for different usage.

Jugaad is not unique to India and they should stop putting that at the core of innovation for India. The future of innovation in India is solving bigger global problems. India can help the world to search for new solutions that do more with less for more. That is to say, they should provide more value using less energy, material, effort or time, and serve more consumers.

To be fair, it’s not just the Indian companies that are grappling with this issue. Companies in UK, US, Canada, Finland, Japan and Korea all grappling with this. Every country has a different need for innovation and needs a different strategy for innovation and not everyone needs to look at frugal engineering. Some have a steeper climb in brining design into the engineering process. By bringing together different sectors of society to think and talk about innovation in a structured manner, India can bring about a new and higher threshold for innovation thinking and practice.

What Is The Right Organization Design For Your Corporation? And What Test To Use To Know If You've Got The Right One?

Innovation effectiveness is closely linked to organization design. In the past, most organization design objectives were driven by a need to improve efficiency, resource sharing and improving focus. It is not common to see innovation as the core driver or organization design to improve speed, creativity and agility. Many organizations struggle to 1/designing the organization and available options 2/understand the implications of different design option 3/making the decision among different organization design models. So what are the factors that should guide the choice (and criticality) of organization design?

There are many rules of thumb about things such as spans of control / empowerment and cross functional/business units reporting relationships and revenue and cost allocation.  There are many theories on organization design but not very useful in guiding organization design decisions. Even if you’ll have 2 or 3 different options on the table, you still need to figure a way to make the big decision? What I advise companies is use the following test when prototyping organizational design. It is both a logical exercise as well as a creative exercise and requires serious prototyping, not moving boxes in a power point.

The Future Test: Does that design reflect the needs for how a company thinks and tthey plan to compete in the future and not just replicated an existing org design taken from another company.  And how does the org design help create some competitive advantage? How future proof is the design?

The People/Culture Test: Does the design adequately reflect the motivations, strengths and weaknesses of the available managers and staff and the organization purpose?

The Competitive Advantage Test:  Does the org design allocate sufficient management emphasis to the strategic priorities in any specific product/market spaces or chosen boundaries?

The Corporate Parenting Advantage Test: This one applies when there are multiple business units and each unit is being looked at individually before holistically. Does the design allocate enough attention to the intended sources of added value and strategic initiatives of the parent or holding company?

The Power Test: Does the org design provide the desired allocated power to groups/individuals that is linked to the strategic value of the unit or functions? Or does it leverage the strength of groups/departments that can positively drive performance beyond its direct influence.

The Agility Test: This addresses whether the org design provide the adaptability and increase speed to respond and allow having the agility to adapt quickly to future changes?

The Market Perception Test: This address how the investment communities perceive the motive and benefit of the redesign. It is important (for public company) that investors and analysts buy into the needs as well as the outcomes.

Organization design is not a pure rational exercise. What is a good organization design?  You won’t know when you finish designing; the prototyping of organization design is tightly linked to employee engagement, strategic futures and organization purpose. It takes some experimentation before getting it right. At the end, its goals are to improve all of the above. The tests provide a good starting point to look at organization design requirements. That’s where Design Thinking comes into play.

The Five Rules Of Business Reinvention: What You Can Learn From Burberry?

The word ‘Reinvention” is a beautiful word. It links people to a path of hope, dreams and possibilities. It is a point when people or organizations are ready to claim and design a new defining moment that will cause a major transformation in their lives and in their organizations.  It takes commitment, reflection and action and in the process removing distractions, making peace with realities and sometimes completely letting go of the past.

Business historian can come up with a long list of great names of firms that failed to adapt and change with the times. For every Apple and Jobs; IBM and Gerstner; and GE and Welch, there are dozens of firms - many of which once held great status in households around the world - that are no longer great, good or even exist. 

Companies that have reinvented themselves successfully typically have some combination of factors on their side. Committed leadership, a deep sense of trust among employees and the courage to throw away irrelevant legacy systems are but a few. The new issue of MISC Magazine is the Big Reinvention Issue. The cove feature story is Burberry – the Reinvention of a British Icon.

So, why are some companies successful in reinvention while others fail? To begin to answer that question, consider the road taken by the company that can arguably claim the biggest success story of the past decade, Burberry. What's the difference between Aquascutum and Burberry? Both are famous for their trenchcoats but while Burberry's success is the luxury brand equivalent to the iPod, Aquascutum's is the MP3 player. Here's an excerpt from the article Burberry: Reinvention of A British Icon. You can download the full article here.

So, how did Burberry do it? While its secrets are woven in and out of the ideas, experiences, inspirations and actions of Ahrendts, Bailey and their senior executives, here are five ways that the iconic British brand has reinvented itself over the past six years.

Rule #1 - Reignite The Passion

Too many organizations attempt to spark a reinvention with an over simplified vision or a strategic statement like "double sales by 2015" or "achieve an ROI of 15% by 2015." These goals may be achievable, but they're uninspiring. At best, they provide a measure to evaluate strategic outcome. At worst, they are more suited towards pursuing efficient operations than encouraging innovation.

From smart shareholders to employees, people being told about a reinvention in the works need stories they can get behind. While never losing sight of how to make the firm more competitively effective, Ahrendts and Bailey clearly understood that Burberry needed bigger aspirations and goals powered by passion. They achieved this by making brand the core focus and announcing to executives that art, not business, would drive major decisions. In doing so, they reconnected employees around the world to the legacy of the iconic 150-year-old British brand, enabled strategists, to planners and beyond to experience the real spirit of their industry and inspired everyone to design beauty into every facet of the business.

Rule #2 - Refresh the Brand Core

Having a globally recognized brand is one thing. Making it magical is something very different. In failing to understand meaning, purpose, promise and history as defining features of a brand, too many companies hope to spark reinvention with a new logo, tagline, communications strategy or other 'brand' sleight-of-hand. With years of what some critics suggested was irreparable neglect and damage to the brand caused by copies of its trademark tartan, mass-market designs produced by franchises and a dearth of product presence in discount outlets, Burberry could well have fallen into this trap. It didn't. Instead, since 2006, its comeback has been elegantly executed with constant brand refreshing, courtesy of Bailey and his design team charting a sustainable growth path through collection after collection. Surprising and delighting customers with every new handbag, jacket, trench or dress, Burberry keeps the magic alive by reimagining its spirit of 'disheveled elegance' with every season. From the latest collection inspired by the color and energy of Henry Moore's textiles to the opening of its more causal Brit store in London's Covent Garden, surprises are always around the corner.

Rule #3 - Reinvent The Brand Experience

Companies often think about customer experience in a very limited sense and are often far too conservative in adapting to and using new social technologies. And luxury companies have, arguably, been the most reluctant to embrace and adapt to the new. To reinvent its brand experience, Burberry brought a redefined promise to life by designing a customer experience that was truly global, true to its core and what other luxury houses at the time could never have imagined and would never have implemented: democratized access to luxury. With an agnostic and borderless approach to social media, Burberry gave customers total access to the brand across any device, on multiple platforms and anywhere, anytime. As a result, it's the dominant luxury brand on Facebook. With a belief that fashion is for everyone - not just the press and industry elite - it opened the locked doors to the runway by livestreaming each season's show and then allowing customers to order pieces for home delivery before collections arrived at stores. The result is excitement, interest and loyalty among consumers who are not yet even customers.

Rule #4 - Reinforce A Balanced Culture

Creating a results culture requires not only producing the right results but also producing the right results the right way. For too many companies, that means relentlessly promoting a single way of thinking, working and doing. At Burberry, where 'balance' is one of the key words in the company's vocabulary, there is no single way of thinking, working and doing. Instead, by hiring people with an EQ as high as their IQ, pursuing cross-disciplinary collaboration between right- and left-brain specialists, and encouraging informal mentorships across and between various departments, tacit knowledges, divergent processes and asymmetrical personalities are shared. The result is that ideas are born, decisions are made and designs are discovered in ways that are more organic and holistic. It's not a formula; Burberry recognizes that maintaining balance is not an end game, it's an ongoing practice.

Rule #5 - Reimagine The Future

Making the right trade-offs between investing in today and investing in tomorrow can be one of the most daunting challenges for any organization. Performing well or not, every company feels the short-term pressure that often forces managers to make bad trade-offs. Very few have the capabilities or the culture of trust that empowers management to make the right trade-offs to balance the need for long term strategic health, cash flow and shareholder expectations. Burberry does. In addition to a clear, creative vision at the top, a Strategic Innovation Council pools the interdisciplinary and intergenerational wisdom and experience of some of the company's best and brightest to consider, examine, feel, see and sense what might be ahead. Stacked with Millennials who live and breathe the kind of cultural shifts that are or potentially will be relevant to the industry, it's a place to challenge assumptions, imagine solutions and, ultimately, dream about what this iconic, 150-year-old British brand could become in the years ahead.

(Disclosure: Burberry is a client of Idea Couture)

Five Critical Questions About Organization Culture That People Avoid Asking.

There is a piece on HBR Blog on the topic of organization culture “Culture Takes Over When the CEO Leaves the Room” by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss (both HBS professors). It is a good piece worth reading and here's an summary of their ideas:

Excellence = design x culture. Your job as a leader is to get both right. You must build a winning structure for your organization and then foster the often unspoken rules and values that will bring that structure to life.

But if we may be blunt for a second, what the hell is culture? And how exactly do you get any better at it? In short, culture guides discretionary behavior and it picks up where the employee handbook leaves off.

Culture tells us how to respond to an unprecedented service request. It tells us whether to risk telling our bosses about our new ideas, and whether to surface or hide problems. Employees make hundreds of decisions on their own every day, and culture is our guide. Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn't in the room, which is of course most of the time.

My favorite line is “Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn't in the room.” I have been studying the ‘creation and nurturing” of organization culture for decades looking for practices and patterns among organizations with highly effective and sustainable cultures. Especially those that were not built on incentives such as stock options and those that were transnational.

It is easy to just look at those service intensive companies (Four Seasons, Starbucks, Zappos, Nordstrom and Southwest etc.) where there is close relationships between service and culture, but I am more interested in looking at culture and their relationships with strategy, structure, purpose and their implications on business performance and innovation effectiveness. Some of the questions I have been exploring include:

• The first question is does the CEO or the executive management knows what kind of culture they’re trying to build or what are the conditions required for those culture to flourish and key concepts to build from? Or it is simply unintended consequences of the CEO management style or something inherited from previous management? Do you know what you're building towards?
• The second question is can a company articulate its corporate culture in a way that is both tangible and explicit. A company publishes an annual report about its financies, should they publish a book about the company culture? A company’s prevailing values, mental models, assumptions, attitudes and beliefs all make up the soft, invisible stuff of culture that crate an environment of trust and balance. It determine its outlook—what it finds meaningful and important. Can you capture these stories and communicate them in a tangible way outside a Power Point? And what are the best practices to do this?
• The third question is when company is attempting a culture transformation; do they need a vision of what they want to become? Is there a genuine need to diagnose their present culture so that they can define the current state and the future state? And if the gap is too big, how do they know if the transformation is too drastic and simply not achievable?
• The fourth question is when organization culture gives people a sense of self and identity and determines, rituals, beliefs, style, meanings, values, norms and language, the way in which ‘things are done that way around here’, who should own it or is it possible for any function to own?
• The fifth question is around maintainence. An empowering executive management team can better assess the current status of an organization with an eye to shaping /modifying / eliminating the parts that are dysfunctional or ineffectivel, then replacing them with qualities that will improve the speed of decision making, productivity, and employee engagement. Corporate culture needs a maintainence plan. Do you have one?

Organization culture is not a vision, mission or management system. It is the strategy that guides how a company makes decisions disregard of what industry they compete in or where they play along the value chain and how decisions are made when the CEO is not around. And in particular today’s fast pace turbulent business conditions, a strong corporate culture can provide the strategic agility and empowerment needed to reduce the recovery time from any unavoidable setbacks or disruption.

Organizaion culture is the glue that holds a company today, even when lacking a robust business strategy. Far too many CEOs and executive leadership fail to make the connection between a “hard” strategy and a “soft” strategy and not putting enough effort to make creating, building, and nurturing a winning corporate culture the heart of the company strategy.

“To be an enduring, great company, you have to build a mechanism for preventing or solving problems that will long outlast any one individual leader.”           

                                                                - Howard Schultz

"We needed to integrate as a team inside the company so that we could integrate for the customers on their premises.” 

                                                                - Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

The New Battlefield Between iPhone, BlackBerry and Android Smartphone: The Keypad and VBBM.

Apple iPhone has officially become the “defender” instead of the “attacker”. The battlefront so far has been on the screen and apps and now the battlefield is switching back to the keyboard. There are two camps: physical keyboard and virtual keyboard. I definitely belong to the group that I needed a real keyboard and therefore I use Blackberry. And there are those who can type at lightening speed on iPhone virtual keyboard.

Since last week, there were rumors that the next generation of Blackberry will come without a physical keyboard (which BlackBerry CEO Heins reassured that RIM is not getting rid of its tried-and-true physical keyboard) and this is no easy decision.

One exciting new feature for the BlackBerry 10 is the redesigned user interface. The clean design features "cascades," which let users flip through apps with a simple swipe gesture, replacing a back key or physical button. It will also feature an intelligent virtual keyboard that takes touch-screen keypads to another level. It learns the words that you often use, your typing style and compensates for sloppy typing (I admit I am one of those sloppy typers). If they solve this problem, another good reason for me to stick with Blackberry. I currently have three BlackBerry and a Playbook.

There were reports that now Apple is considering offering a real keyboard for the iPhone 5. While this is highly unlikely, it will be a smart move for them to change the game again if they can completely rethink the design and engineering of a physical keyboard. The next competitive front will not be the camera, screen size or processor speed, it will be battle of the keyboard.

I speculate that RIM is betting (and committed) on winning the keyboard battle because they know it well, typing for BlackBerry users is everything and this is the last defense.  And now RIM is properly equipped with the smarter, faster QNX platform.

Let the battle begins…..and here's a few free advice:

• BlackBerry should seriously push the design front and explore the BlackBerry DNA and go against Apple’s simple design and opt for more sophisticated European asthetic.
• BlackBerry should turn up the keypad battle and bring in new function and keys to allow new document management capabilities. I can tell you 5 ways you can improve the keyboard typing experience.
• BlackBerry should stop engineering creeps and hold back innovation on those features to reduce distractions.
• BlackBerry should drop the Apps race and give that up completely. Don't fight a battle that you cannot win.
• BlackBerry should turn BBM into an open software and get mass adoption including all Android phones.
• Blackberry should add voice to BBM and that will be a killer app.
• Blackberry should explore innovative features on “identity” management. I think there are lots of rooms to innovate here.
• Blackberry should innovate about live document sharing. Talking and reviewing a word of power point doc is another killer app.
• BlackBerry should innovate around “security” features (not just data security) but real security and design service around it.
• Blackberry should design a business mode and a personal model so the phone switch personality. We don't want to carry two phones.
• BlackBerry should leverage the 200+ million cars are on the road using RIM's QNX operating system and create the most sophisticated integrated features. Most BlackBerry users like me take calls in the car for hours everyday.

I can go on and on for hours and give BlackBerry another 100 ideas to compete for the future. The big strategy is to ignore “Apple”. I mean completely ignore Apple. And all you need to do is to do three of the above right and that earned you the right to play. Next step is to attach and fight back. Go RIM Go!!!

Design Thinking Is A Cognitive And Intellectual Process That Balances The Rational And Emotional. Not Included With Your MBA.

What is Design Thinking? Because of the word “design” and many automatically associate it with the craft of design or design as a profession. Actually it is less to do with “design” and more with “system”. There are many ways to define "design thinking" and this list is not exhaustive:

• A way to instill customer-centricity and empathy
• A framework for exploration and experimentation
• An approach to sense-making and problem solving
• A methodology to foster exploration and experimentation
• A design buzzword to tell you a designer can do more than design
• A management buzzword sold as the “next” strategic tool
• A marketing slogan or tag line
• A self-gratifying term for those who think they are creative

The term “design thinkers” implies that designers are craftsmen and not thinkers, which is NOT always the case. It is also a stretch for traditional industrial or brand/graphic design firms to claim to be able to use "design thinking" to solve complex strategic issues. These firms need to go through a radical transformation and close a big capability gap before they can even attempt to implement it for others.

Today, "design thinking" is frequently compared and contrasted to business. This is often an over simplification that forces us into predetermined roles along with their associated rules, conventions, behaviors and formal expectations. It Is important to recognize that "design thinking" is NOT exclusive to designers or unattainable to those in another discipline. Design thinking is natural and inherent in all of us who are smart and creative.

"Design thinking" is a cognitive and intellectual process that balances the rational and emotional – in effect combining left brain and right brain thinking. When applied, it harmonizes with other modes of thinking and closes knowledge and information gaps, creating order and refining meaning. Because "design thinking" is a dynamic, constructive process that is iterative in nature, developing ideas requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation and assessment.

To achieve those tangible outcomes, you need to open the process to multiple participants and socialize the process and outcomes, visualization is a very critical part of the process, not an outcome. Even the Department of Defence recognizes the needs to train "design thinkers" that are capable of critical and creative thinking to plan operations in dynamic environments with fast-changing uncertainties in extremely complex conditions.

People who are capable of using "design thinking" to identify and develop different military response options within the context of a big strategy are crucial to successful military operations. The development of such skills requires a shift in their focus from the operational and tactical environments to the strategic environment. This is an extremely challenging undertaking given that many military officers spend the majority of their career starting at lower levels and their advancement depends upon how well they perform tactically. This is very much like managers in large organizations who were promoted based on their ability to execute tactically.

To develop senior commanding officers with "design thinking" capabilities require DOF to train them new skills including analysis as well as synthesis. "Design thinkers" possess the ability to think critically on a "system" level; break concepts into simpler parts and mapping out their relationship and system impact before rearranging the elements into a new whole; in other words, to produce something through imaginative skills and quick experiments. And yes, imagination is always needed.

Successful Business Transformation Requires A New Logic To Handle Ambiguity And Change.

The future is scary and there are reasons for it. I have been giving a lot of keynotes lately to different professional organizations and senior executive roundtables and my keynote topic of strategic innovation and design thinking went beyond innovating to find growth and adapting to new economic, market, political and social order. I shared ideas on the future of economic development, the come-back of manufacturing, developing glocal innovation networks and creative or self-destruction of old establishments and the renewal and transformation of the modern enterprise.

There were never ending questions from the audiences on these topics. I can write a book on them, I guess I won’t have time. I hardly have time to get enough sleep. Everyone is looking for a theory to anchor. The future has never been so uncertain and almost any economic theories invented decades ago has become another working white paper again. The very old ideas of management and strategy taught in b-schools are so dated and when I look at the 800+ management books I have on my bookshelf, I am guessing 80% of them are completely irrelevant (50% were irrelevant when they were first written).

Some turn to other knowledge disciplines to look for sources of inspirations. The field of business strategy borrowed heavily from industrial economics and the filed of management sciences borrowed heavily on organizational psychology. What about "Strategic Foresights?” Where can we look for anchors and new inspirations? How about mathematics?

Fuzzy logic is the branch of mathematics that says that science isn't about absolute truth; it's just a heap of guesses at a reality that's much more complicated than that. The term “Fuzzy Logic” emerged in the development of the theory of fuzzy sets by Lotfi Zadeh (1965). A fuzzy subset A of a (crisp) set X is characterized by assigning to each element x of X the degree of membership of x in A (e.g., X is a group of people, A the fuzzy set of old people in X). Now if X is a set of propositions then its elements may be assigned their degree of truth, which may be “absolutely true,” “absolutely false” or some intermediate truth degree: a proposition may be more true than another proposition.

Professor Bart Kosko (Professor of Electrical Engineering in the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering and a Professor of Engineering and Law in USC's Gould School of Law) draws out some pretty interesting applications of that theory. He lost his faith and rediscovers it in science. The fuzzy future is part bog-standard libertarianism (with a side of Reaganomics), part extropian hooting-and-hollering, part small boy reveling in the Tolstoy and Clancy school of military exchange, and part Rube Goldberg engineering of unlikely theory, all bound up in hundred of pages of inscrutable equations in the footnotes.

My teaching on 'Design Thinking" goes beyond many simple (and shallow) creative tools. Forget those three wheels of design, technology or whatever. Those are complete BS. "Design thinking" is comfortable with change, it is disruptive and provocative by nature, and promotes new ways of looking at problems, often through new lenses. The strategic framing of complex and ambiguous issues requires thinking approaches that are free from organizational dogmas, codified limitations and old assumptions.

A large part of the design thinking process is to step out of roles conventions and free oneself from these dogmas and explore new frames of thought and approaches to problem solving. I am using "Design Thinking" to push us to rethink everything from scratch, including the tools of logic itself. Most people believe creativity means there is no logic. But what is creativity anyway? Or what is design? We need to look at the world or our business or social challenges with a fuzzy prism. It is like watching 3D movies without the 3D glasses. You can never make sense of the present and the future by using conventional lenses and logic.

In a world of full of chaos, unpredictability and fuzziness we need to look at the world through a fuzzy prism. Here is what Dr. Bart Kosco has to say, "How do you upload yourself onto a chip?" The fuzziest fact of all. The problem with current schemes in theory is a binary shock, when all of a sudden you die in meat, and wake up in chip. So how do you do it consciously? We could cut out that little chunk of your brain and replace it with an equally functioning chip, maybe a more powerful chip. We could keep doing it, while you're wide-awake. So in the end, you've completely transferred to a network of chips, and your brain is a bunch of sodium chunks in a jar of formaldehyde.

For the modern enterprise to evolve, survive and even prosper in the future, any change and transformation effort cannot just be putting on bandages. There is no one single future state to map against current state. There could be a range of different strategic futures and companies need to be ready for all of those. It takes a very different kind of transformation process when the future state is unknown.

Design Thinking And Creating Social Capital. Here's An Example From Tampiquito, Mexico.

Creativity happens everywhere. Not only in design firms or creative agencies. And you can easily find the results of creativity all around you; you don’t need to seek out a gallery. People think creativity only happens in art schools and innovation don't usually happens only in a lab. Design Thinking and Strategic Creaitivty is all around us and funny enough many don't it Design Thinking. In fact, they happen more often than in a design environment. Design is not Design Thinking.

Creativity is everywhere and you need the eyes to see them. One example is PARK(ing) Day, an annual, worldwide event that invites citizens everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good. The beauty of these guerrilla installations is in their ability to engage and energize people. If all advertisers take 5% of their ad budget and use it for street installations, I think it would be a very valuable addition to their media mix. Imagine using this space for activation in creating social capital?

Meet Luis Alvarez who is an engineer by training and owns and runs a car repair shop, Autocity, in Tampiquito, Mexico. Luis also run an art gallery and an Artist-in-Residence program that aims to engage young local and international artists in projects for the development of the neighborhood’s social capital. Both the Gallery and Art Studio are located within his auto repair shop. Yes, people create art to the sounds of auto equipment and mechanics shouting, the entire process blends into a performance all its own.

It is a first for sure. And It brings me to the question, why doesn’t this happen in other spaces? In other places of business? What about shopping malls? This is one of the most creative ideas I’ve come across this year and I think Luis’ idea has legs. So far, two Artists-in-Residence projects have started up in Tampiquito. In 2009, the urban artist Eltono came to Tampiquito, stayed for two months, and painted the facades of about 50 houses in the neighborhood.

In 2010, Luis and his friends, El Narval, invited the Colombian sculptor Ana J. Haugwitz to join them. She also stayed for two months and worked together with the neighborhood’s craftsmen. The result was a collection of nine works of art, which were exhibited publicly in the neighborhood. Each work of art reflected the young artist’s collaboration with the talent she found in the workshops. I think art itself needs innovation more than anything else. It should get out of the studio and galleries and be part of our everyday lives. We can use a few more Luis in every neighborhood.

There Is An Inherent Conflict Between Logic, Emotion And Creativity. So How Should We Deal With It?

When peope ask the quesion "Do you know the correct answer?" I don't like that question at all. It is not a smart question as a start. The biggest problem with our formal education systems is our over-emphasis on finding the correct answer to a particular problem. While the quest for correct answers helps us to function at work, it also impedes us when it comes to making the bigger, more important decisions, largely because many bigger, real-life business issues are ambiguous, complex and dynamic. If you have been around for over 50 years and have travelled to more than 20 countries and speak a few languages and have a few degrees under your belt, you probably know there is no right answer, may be a lot of wrong answers.

Creativity is not a license to be wrong (you have been reading too much Fast Company), strategy is not a license to be boring or lack of imagination (Reading too much HBR). A PhD degree is not a license to overintellectualize and being irrelevant to the real world and use words that you need to explain what you mean. And an MBA is not an automatic license to make key business decision, you need to earn it.

However an MBA does teach you a few important concepts if only if you understand how to apply them. You should know how to re-org your in-laws into a 'team-based family.' You learn to refer having babies as pilot market testing. You should understand the cost structure and sytem implications of starting a family. You know the cost of capital when your spouse decided to purchase a Hermes Birkin. And most of all, you know how to talk about your past relationships as ‘sunk costs.’

I definitely school needs to teach more creativity. Not the crazy useless exercises but applied creativity and design thinking in everyday life from science to economics. Today (and I should say it has always been) creative thinking is critical to business strategy and innovation; however, If you look at the top 20 MBA programs around the world, you will be challenged to find any courses, core or elective, which teach, train or even inspire students to be truly creative. Instead, most MBA programs and courses focus on numbers, analysis and the logic of deductive reasoning.

There is an inherent conflict between this kind of logic and creativity, and in most business settings, logic is usually quick to get in the way of creativity. Creative ideas can run into the walls of business logic because 1/ it does not quickly, clearly or at all connect to 2/ business strategists often operate within the boundaries of defined roles, and decisions are made based on those boundaries – they draw on what they know and what they have learned including formulaic behaviors, processes and the “best practices” that have evolved through mass consensus – to shape how they think and act.

That explains how many MBA students had Adam Smith on their reading list. The 18th Century idea that people – given their limited time, information, resources and budgets – act purposefully to maximize their own satisfaction is epistemologically central to business thinking. In Smith’s view, all human behavior is rationally self-interested and we are innately selfish. Thanks to this model convinces many how “easy” it is to predict individual or organizational behavior. It is not quite that simple.

When it comes to human behavior, this is where many economic principles, particularly Smith’s, break down. I am not rational (ask those people who work wiht me) and many of us are not. The economist's notion that people act rationally only implies that they try to act in ways that are consistent with their own personal objectives, even if those objectives seem absurd to outsiders. That's the beauty of being human. Read more about creativity in this coming issue of M/I/S/C - The Creativity Issue.