Over the
last two and half decades, Design thinking as a philosophy had gone deep rooted
in the annals of product development and many organisations had reaped rich
benefit out of this methodology to come out in flying colours for the product
engineering and development. It had now
come to being the de-facto standard in product development. Design thinking approach to innovation was
popularized by the design firm IDEO in the 1990s. Design
thinking has been defined as a non-linear,
iterative process which seeks to understand users, challenge assumptions,
redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.
This user-centric perspective has made design thinking hugely popular.
However, some consultants
and academics felt that design thinking does not help to have great innovation,
it is too structured & prescriptive, and it results in
incremental or conservative outputs only.
This is where Grand
Design comes into play. Grand design
approach to innovation of a new product or service is fully-formed in the
mind’s eye of the innovator before it is developed and commercialized. It is felt that it
can be more effective than design thinking under certain circumstances, most
notably when a market is in its early formative stage of development.
Grand
Design, in comparison to deign thinking, offers four key components of innovation to be considered while developing product ideas.
1. Begins as creating a work of art
Design thinking seeks
to create practical, user-oriented solutions: it is about pulling together what’s desirable
from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically
viable.
Grand design starts
with a concept, a vision in the mind’s eye of the creator, and it holds onto
that concept for as long as possible. Since the focus is truly not about creating a commercial product,
there could be conflict between artistic
ideals and commercial realities.
2.
Little consideration to user views & ideas Design thinking is all about
empathy – the ability to see the world through other
people’s eyes, to see what they see, and experience things as they do.Grand design approach
takes a very selective approach to the user views. It goes by the thought that if
one does everything the users ask, the result would be of increased complexity
and a loss of coherence. Thus, specific user requests are mostly deliberately
ignored in grand design.
3.
Top down process
Design
thinking is greatly about collaboration, it believes that good ideas emerge
through a social process where people build on each other’s suggestions. Therefore,
there is no place for big egos in design thinking.
There is
very little freedom to the collective in grad design and it puts more faith in
the views of a small number of people or maybe, just one person, at the top.
It is definite top-down process. Therefore, it is paternalistic in style
and the attitude is, ‘you may share your ideas, but we won’t act on many of
them, because believe we know what is best’.
Of course, this top-down approach brings challenges. It does
not allow leadership to emerge from within the companies and it stifles fresh
thinking. The leader here may have to work hard to assuage the team’s
feelings.
4.
The Courage of conviction.
The
style of leadership required for design thinking favours a coaching style of leadership, hand-holding when
needed, and receding into the background when the team hits the glory.
The grand design logic puts leaders, not the team, on the top,
as they embody the design they are pursuing, and they display an emotional
conviction about why it is right.
This type of leadership may be charismatic or
larger-than-life, and they maybe soft spoken and introverted. It is not that leaders who adopt design
thinking aren’t lacking in conviction, but their conviction is to a process, a
way of working, rather than to any particular design.
Finding the right
approach to innovation
How do want innovators
go by, design thinking or grand design? To begin with, one needs to understand the key
principles underlying the approach for innovation and product development.
Design thinking is now so well established that many people don’t question
whether it is the right methodology. But it builds on the underlying
assumptions of empathy with user needs and collaborative development. Some successful examples of products which
evolved through design thinking are Facebook, Airbnb, Uber Eats etc.
Design thinking
may not be right for all circumstances. By laying out the alternative set of
assumptions underlying a grand design logic, one can engage in a more critical
and constructive discussion about why one is using own chosen model. One should
be thoughtful about the specific circumstances in which one is operating, and
choose the innovation approach on that basis. Design thinking works well in
established and mature markets where user needs are properly understood and
innovation tends to be incremental. The grand design approach has greater scope
to succeed under conditions of high uncertainty, and where user needs are
unknown and the market is potentially shape-able. Some of successful products
that had come through grand design are Walkman from Masaru Ibuka, iPod and the iPhone from Steve Jobs,
and WeChat of Allen Zhang. There are failures too here,
for example, Segway personal transportation vehicle invented by Dean Kamen
Innovation is
the lifeblood of any successful company, but many companies could get it wrong,
may be by falling into the trap of ‘me-too’ incrementalism, or by relying on
risky new offerings that fail. Better understanding of the conditions in which
we are operating will help us make better choices about the approach to
innovation that we may decide.
