If you haven’t read Change by Design, you’ve missed out on what one of the originators of Co Creation has to say about innovation…
Sometimes you read a book late. Five or more years after it’s fashionable. That’s what I did with Tim Brown’s Change by Design. I felt like I was coming late to a party (at the clearing up stage!) where a new, fashionable idea… Co Creation was all the talk, the place where the ‘focus group’ was first declared dead.
Tim runs the world famous design business Ideo, and he wants us to apply Design Thinking broadly throughout business and politics. His argument: in order to innovate you need inspiration, ideation and implementation.
To get the inspiration, you go out into the world, observe, listen, think – understand what the problem is you that want to solve, and understand what people’s experience on the ground is. Empathy is key. This is where Brown’s criticism of focus groups comes in… don’t show people a bunch of ideas to get their opinions on them… understand the lived experience. He’s essentially an advocate for ethnography, deep dives, customer closeness, all the ‘new’ stuff that research agencies have been adding to their tool kit for the last ten years or more.
For ideation, you take your inspiration and start developing ideas (through brainstorming techniques). Design thinking doesn’t confine us to post-it notes and the written word. Brown wants us to prototype. This is a big idea, because prototyping might be mocking up the lobby of a hotel, or ‘launching’ a vision for a new business by mapping out visually what the business will look like in the future – or even acting out what a new service would be like… Brown wants us to “think with our hands”, to communicate visually, so that new ideas can be experienced, not just thought about.
This is influential stuff, kick-starting the rush to ideas about speaking less and visualising more, and the power of experiencing over reasoning.
Brown also advocates getting all stakeholders involved in the design process: so providers; users; makers and consumers all get together to develop and refine new ideas. And that’s essentially Co Creation! Welcome to today’s world of marketing and innovation.
His thinking is/was revolutionary (in a business sense) because he wants ideas to develop from the ground up, and the boundaries between business and consumer, or government and citizen to be overcome. It’s an optimistic approach, but then anyone involved in innovation must be a glass-waiting-to- be-filled- up type of person…
Implementation is perhaps the most obvious ‘stage’ in the design innovation process, but actually Brown sees inspiration, ideation and implementation as three overlapping ‘spaces’, and prototyping sits, perhaps, in the ideation and implementation spaces.
Some other principles that Brown develops:
- Divergent then Convergent thinking – at the ideas stage develop lots of ideas, some of them conflicting: start; develop; go back; start again – he says “fail early to succeed sooner” At some point converge – make choices to move the idea forwards. (This feels like the classic Synectics brainstorming model to me).
- Constrained thinking – by balancing the needs of desirability, feasibility (can we make it?) and viability (can we make a business case for it?)
- Develop a multi-discipline team to develop ideas and create an innovation culture in your business that’s nimble. Follow ideas that excite, not (necessarily) ideas from leadership
I’ve come late to Brown’s thinking, but I’ve been reading echoes of it everywhere over the last few years. It was fun to read, and it did inspire me – particularly with ideas on prototyping and thinking with your hands. Reading late too allows you to absorb ideas in a more stand-offish way. Brown gives us some business cases of ‘great design thinking’ that didn’t make it long-term. His process works for some, but not for everyone.
What remains, I think, is his case for empathy. Empathy is the real source code for insight because it helps you understand what people truly need to make things better. That’s what ‘customer closeness’ and ‘deep dives’ and co creation should really be all about.
