Tony Golsby-Smith

We had a visit from former Nierenberg Chair Tony Golsby-Smith. He's a design consultant in Australia, facilitating what he calls "strategic conversations" with "big organizations that don't usually hire design firms or even know about design." One of these is Price Waterhouse Coopers, and he brought along a client, Luke, from PWC.

Tony has these conversations so that by thinking together with him, the organization can better design their worlds. They are a way of turning on design thinking in organizations. During these sessions, they tackle big, strategic issues, examining them in a designer-ly way, not just an analytical way. This doesn't happen in most businesses.

In the past, organizations were much more focused internally, pushing products out into the market. But over the last 20 years, power has shifted to the markets, and the markets have turned organizations from inside --> out to outside --> in. Organizations now need to focus much more on the areas that design knows a lot about: products, services, and customers (users).

Luke talked about how PWC was trying to use design to create a competitive advantage by creating new products and services, forming better relationships with clients, and utilizing different capabilities from across the firm. To do this last item, PWC has created MindLab, a shared physical space that brings together their three service lines in order to better co-create solutions with clients using expertise from all three lines.

Originally posted on Thursday, March 17, 2005