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March 30, 2005

Vector of Organizational Change: Design Attitude

A vector is both a force or influence and a course or direction. There are four of what Dick Buchanan calls "Vectors of Organizational Change;" four "things" that can be used separately or together to affect organizations. The second of these is the design attitude, a way of thinking and doing.

The Design Attitude is about the way designers think. It's about rising above analysis and "paralysis by analysis" to find solutions, not compromises. It's not about the facts, but the connections between the facts and this is where design comes in: making connections. It's about synthesis, about not being mechanistic and bloodless. It's about re-animating what has lain dormant in organizations for the last 50 years, smothered by too much analytics. And this vector is about people; it is people who possess the design attitude.

And, since this is Dick Buchanan's class, the design attitude is also about rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion through invention. It is not the decoration of messages, but the creation of arguments. The model of rhetoric (speaker/audience/speech) is also the model of design (designer/user/product). Products are arguments about how we should live our lives.

Products have three characteristics: Ethos, the voice of the product, or its desirability; Pathos, which addresses the values and expectations (physical, cognitive, and cultural) of the audience; and Logos, the technological reasoning, or how the product works. We are persuaded by all three aspects, sometimes one more than the others, sometimes all in balance. Good products and good arguments combine all three.

People in organizations should be involved in rhetoric all the time. When every person in an organization participates as a speaker or audience, creativity permeates the organization.

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Vector of Organizational Change: Products

A vector is both a force or influence and a course or direction. There are four of what Dick Buchanan calls "Vectors of Organizational Change;" four "things" that can be used separately or together to affect organizations. The first of these is products.

Products are the baseline of what a designer contributes to an organization; they create opportunities and allow change. But we're not talking products as an end to themselves; organizations use products to do things. Products in this sense are commodities, material, stuff. They aren't a final goal; they are a means to an end.

Products provide many things to organizations. They can provide physical support for work, create or augment the skills of workers, provide a new language to think and do, instigate structural changes to create new products, reduce costs, and change the company's vision and operating values. The product itself can be an expression of the company's values and vision.

The iPod is a great example of a product as a vector of organizational change.

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Design and Its Products Readings

• "Designing the Australian Taxation System" by Alan Preston
• Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life by John Heskett
• "Designing Services" by Shelley Evenson
• "Bringing High Reliability to a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit" by Daved van Stralen, M.D.
• "ZIBA Design and the FedEx Project" by recent CMU alumna Maggie Breslin

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Quality in Service Design Reading

"Quality in new service development: Key concepts and a frame of reference" by Bo Edvardsson from The International Journal of Production Economics.

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The Process of Designing for Service

The process of designing a service is still being developed because it's new. Here are some of the stages and their steps suggested by Shelley Evenson.

• Discovery. Identify the environment, customers, and stakeholders.
  • Environment Description. Describe the situation to be addressed. Why this situation? Who is involved? Use images to ground the situation.
  • Stakeholder Description and/or Model. Who are the people who need to be addressed and who will be affected?
  • Company Perception and Core Competency. What are the expectations of the customers? What is the company good at?
  • Market Conditions. What makes this service something the organization would engage in? Is there a customer demand or need?
  • Brand Perception. How is the company perceived and what expectations are set by its brand?
  • Touchpoints. What are the key touchpoints? Include communications, identity, naming, network of partners, physical locations, etc.
  • Research Overview. What types of research did you conduct? With whom? Why?
• Synthesis. About making deep connections with the stakeholders and customers.
  • Customer Typologies. Diagram or listing of characteristics, expectations, goals, and tasks.
  • Pathway or Process Mapping. High-level view of the overall experience and where the design work being done falls in the overall experience. Shows boundaries: what's in and what's out. What is the customer journey? Where are the touchpoints?
  • Cultural Conditions. What's going on with the organization. Will the organization make the recommended changes? How can you get the organization involved?
• Construct.
  • Personas. Document characters to play out in the scenarios/stories of the future state.
  • Understand Key Service Moments. Find the crucial moments and those moments that can be easily and inexpensively changed. What will deliver the most value?
  • Sketch Prototypes of the Moment Ideas. Show who, what stage in the process, and what the value would be.
  • Put Moments Together in a Scenario/Service String. Put the moments together to create a future state. This is the place to show the BIG idea in written and visual form (storyboards).
  • Enactments. Play out the scenarios as theatre. Victor Turner says that in doing ethnographies, one of the best ways to move away from your personal view is to enact scenarios as theatre. This will show how the service will feel.
• Refinement.
  • Service Evaluation. Ways to bring a prototype to life so that you can get feedback on it. An example are "pilot programs" at a small number of locations.
  • Service Strategy. Way of communicating the new in a nutshell. Communicating why are we doing this? What's the value? What is the approach? How are you going to support the change?
  • Service Documentation. One page/poster that illustrates and documents the elements of the service strategy. What are all the elements? What needs to be produced? Who will be involved? What needs to happen "on stage" and "back stage"? How is it consistent with the brand and identity?

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March 28, 2005

Design Inquiry for Organizational Change Reading

"Interaction Pathways in Organizational Life" by CMU's own Richard Buchanan.

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March 23, 2005

Management Perspective on Design Reading

"Rethinking Organizational Design" by Karl Weick.

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March 21, 2005

References

I spent a couple of hours doing something mindless but necessary: compiling the references section of my thesis paper. Thirty-two references in all. Or roughly one per page of the paper's body.

I'm trying to get the final version of the paper done by April 1st so that I can just put it to bed and not worry about it any longer. I've got probably three pages left to write and the document to format nicely, so my goal should be doable. But we'll see.

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March 17, 2005

Service Design Reading

"Will You Survive the Services Revolution?" by Uday Karmarkar from the Harvard Business Review.

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Hoodie

I ordered my cap and gown and Master's hood today. The sun is shining. I removed the lining from my jacket. Spring is here, finally. The end is in sight.

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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.

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March 15, 2005

Design Attitude Readings

"Design Matters for Management" and "Towards a Design Vocabulary for Management" by Richard Boland and Fred Callopy and "Reflections on Designing and Architectural Practice" by Frank Gehry. All in Managing as Designing.

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March 14, 2005

Nature of Experiences Reading

"The Contextual and Dialectical Nature of Experiences" by Sudheer Gupta and Mirjana Vajic from New Service Development: Creating Memorable Experiences

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Designing for Service

I started a new class today: Designing for Service, taught by Shelley Evenson. What is a service, and why bother designing it? Services are all around us. A service is a chain of (sequential, parallel, overlapping and/or recurrent) value-creating activities or events which form a process. Customers often take part in performing different elements in the interactions with employees of the service company for the purpose of achieving a particular result. In service design, the "users" are both the customers and the employees.

Services make up 70% of the economy. (Goods are the other 30%.) It's important to start designing services because good service is good business and a well-designed service can be a great business. Customer expectations are rising too. Fed Ex, with their allowing customers to track their own packages, started the trend of customers expecting things to happen in real-time and with them in control (or seeming control) over the service.

Dematerializing products can have a positive impact on our society and environment as well. By making less products and more services, there is a conceptual shift away from ownership of things. Customers don't have to own the product anymore, just the service. What if, instead of a washer/drier, you instead purchased "laundry service" from Sears?

Services are intangible, but designers are good at leaving tangible traces to experience. We can create the tangible evidence or artifacts of the service experience. So is service design really experience design? Yes and no. A service is a thing, and the experience is the environment of the service. Experiences have personal meanings. You can't design an experience (or activities), but you can provide the environment and tools for activities and experiences to happen. This environment is composed of people, products, and places--a setting with resources with potential for interaction and participation.

Service design is about many different touchpoints that happen over time. A service design language has to function (provide resources) across all levels of the system and as the experience develops among constituents (customers and employees), in stages of time, through different channels/methods of service, and at different touchpoints (the objects themselves).

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PI Day 2005

On campus today, another CMU nerdtastic tradition: written in chalk all over the sidewalks, looping all over campus are the first 16384 digits of PI. All this in honor of 3.14.

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T-Minus Two Months

It's an unusually bright and sunny day for Pittsburgh as I return back to school after break to start the last two months of school. The last ten percent of anything is usually the hardest, and I'm sure that could be the case as I wrap up my two-year odyssey here.

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March 7, 2005

Thesis Paper Presentation

I've finally posted a longer version (2.5 mb pdf) of the presentation I gave on my thesis paper back in January. I'm not sure if it will make any sense without my commentary, but some of the images are funny.

Posted by Dan at 8:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 3, 2005

Spring Break 2005

School is off for a week. The second-year women in my program are headed to Ashley Deal's father's house in Florida for some tanning. Me, I'm off to Montreal, where I'll be lucky if the temperature gets above 20F.

It's funny, but I can slowly feel myself disengaging with school. It's that feeling of being somewhere but your mind is somewhere else. School doesn't seem as difficult now because I'm not so wrapped up in it. I want to be finished, sure, and I'm enjoying my classes this semester, but it's not such a grind as, well, the first 3/4 of school were. Maybe it's because the end is in sight. Maybe it's because my thesis paper is mainly done and my thesis project is back in development again. Or maybe I've finally gone totally insane. Either way, it's a relief.

Have a nice break.

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My Own Private Conceptual Model

I finished my last project for my Conceptual Models class: a model of CMU's BlackBoard system (15k pdf). I'm pleased with its clarity and ease of use.

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The Beginning of Organizational Design

In the 1970s, there began to be an understanding that the creation of organizations is really all about Design. And yet, a discipline of organizational design had never evolved with its own methods. At the same time, organizations were changing, adapting to new environment, that of the globalized world. Customers began to become the focus of organizations, as was innovation. Organizations had gotten so strong, idividuals were finding it hard to fit into them. Into this steps Jay Galbraith and begins to create a methodology of organizational design.

There are three main design problems in the design of organizations: figuring out the design of the organization; figuring out how you get there (how you make the organization); and figuring out what principle or purpose is going to tell if the organization is successful. In this, it is almost like the creation of an art: what do you do? How do you do it? And what's the purpose?

Gilbraith said that design is fundamentally about strategy and making strategic choices. An organization needs to find coherence between three big things: the purpose of the organization, the mode of the organization, and the people within an organization. This coherence needs to be maintained over time; it is the primary thing to ensure success. He then set about to create a method of doing just this.

His method is this:

• Strategy. Identify a domain. What are the boundaries of your organization? What products and services are you going to offer? What customers or clients are you going to serve? What technology are you going to use? Where is the work going to be located?

  Strategy also involves setting objectives and goals. How will the organization relate to others? Identify objectives (implicit or explicit), then translate those into aspirational goals. Then translate those into operational goals.

• Choose a Mode of Organizing. Analyze the work that needs to be done and get it down to reasonable parts. Then divide up the work and coordinate it.
• Choose Policies to Integrate People. Select the people to work with. Design the tasks themselves, then design a reward system for completing those tasks.

There is a loose correlation between this process and what we think of as the design process. Deeply, there are the same sorts of design problems in designing organizations as there are in designing "posters and toasters."

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Design Management Readings

• "The Future of Design and Its Management" by Peter Gorb from Design Management
• "Design Management at Olivetti" by Paulo Viti and Pier Paride Vidari
• "Design Management at Bang and Olufsen" by Jorgen Palshoj
• "Design Maturity: The Ladder and the Wall" by David Walker
• "Design as a Strategic Management Tool" by Brigitte Borja de Mozota

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Organizational Culture Reform Movement Readings

• Selections from The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
• "Simultaneous Loose-Tight Properties" by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr. from In Search of Excellence
• "Overview of the Deming, Crosby and Juran Quality Programs" by V. Daniel Hunt
• "Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less: A Report of the National Performance Review" by Vice President Al Gore
• "Approaches to Organizational Design" by Jay Galbraith

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March 1, 2005

Organizational Culture

How do people come together and do things? It's too rich an area to be contained by any one idea. You need a gene pool of different ideas to explain how that happens and that's what the theory of organizational culture is. Culture is a condition, contained within people, yet bigger than than individuals. But also not in a systemic manner. It's how organizations learn new things but retain old things. It's also this concept that leads directly to designing organizations.

Edgar Schein ("Defining Organizational Culture") posits that culture is something used to give structural stability through repeating patterns that organizations have in order to achieve things over a sustained period of time. In "Culture and Organizational Learning," Scott Cook and Dvora Yanow examine how organizations, not individuals, learn. Or, in other words, how an organization constitutes and reconstitutes itself. For them, it's about the interaction of people with their things. Culture is an environment--an interactive environment. The artifacts of an organization are transmitters of meanings that are shared between people. The learning is about the making of things. Which brings us to Design.

Designers make stuff. We design the things that people live with: objects, information and how it's shared, activities, processes. The more subtle and rich we make things, the more we can affect people and thus the culture of organizations.

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