DESIGN THINKING & GRAND DESIGN

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.