Article Reading Response
10 | Research-Technology Management • May—June 2012
Roger Martin has been studying what it takes to create breakthrough innovation for many years. In that time, he has become frustrated by the increasingly heavy reliance on analytics in most businesses, which crowds out intuitive thinking. For Martin, both analytics and intuitive insight are necessary to create successful breakthroughs; he calls this productive synthesis “design thinking.” In his books The Opposable Mind: Winning through Integrative Thinking and The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage , he explores design thinking and its importance in making the truly important decisions. I talked with him about design thinking and how it can be nurtured into today’s analytical businesses.
JIM EUCHNER [JE]: You have written extensively about the importance of design thinking in business. How do you de- fi ne “design thinking”?
ROGER MARTIN [RM]: I consider design thinking to be the productive mix of analytical thinking and intuitive think- ing. I call it a productive mix because you need both kinds of thinking if you’re going to analyze the past, project what you can from it, and create futures that go beyond an
extrapolation of the past. If you use analytical thinking alone, you will just extrapolate from the past, which will work for you if you are willing to accept a future that is no different from the past. If you use intuitive thinking alone, you won’t take advantage in a rigorous way of the data that’s available. Both of them are needed. Analytical think- ing tends to miss new different things that change the envi- ronment. And intuitive thinking tends to be just plain wrong too many times. What you want and need is a com- bination of the two.
JE: Analytical thinking has dominated and still dominates business, and it’s been fairly successful. Why is there a need now for more design thinking?
RM: I’m not sure it has been successful. It’s credited with lots of success. Science and the scientifi c method have made a notable difference in the world. But what’s happened in the business world is that we’ve gotten too analytical, to the point where analysis is relied on too much. And what that does is calcify companies. You have to ask yourself, “Why is it that big companies keep getting beaten up by little com- panies?” Old companies get beaten up by little, new compa- nies. How can that be?
I’d say the answer is that big, old companies get totally analytical, and they focus on honing and refi ning what it is that they’re currently doing. The little companies come along and challenge that which now exists, and they blow the big, old companies completely out of the water. I think that phe- nomenon is a direct function of the predominance of analyti- cal thinking in these big companies. The problem is less about the world having changed; it is more about the intensity of analytical thinking.
JE: That’s very interesting. You don’t attribute disruption to faster movement of technology and shorter cycle times for products, but rather to the reifi cation of analytical thinking in business.
RM: More so. I can’t believe that there is a lot of truth to the pace of technology explanation. Henry Mintzberg gave a talk
Roger Martin has served as dean of the Rotman School of Management since September 1998. Previously, he spent 13 years as a director of Moni- tor Company, a global strategy consulting fi rm based in Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts. His research work is in integrative thinking, business design, corporate social responsibility, and national competitiveness. He is the author of four books: Fixing the Game (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), The Design of Business (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), The Opposable Mind (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) and The Responsi- bility Virus (Basic Books, 2002). He also co-wrote (with Mihnea Moldoveanu) The Future of the MBA (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Diaminds (Uni- versity of Toronto Press, 2009). Roger earned an AB with a concentration in economics from Harvard College and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. martin@rotman.utoronto.ca
Jim Euchner is editor-in-chief of Research-Technology Management and vice president of global innovation at Goodyear. He previously held senior management positions in the leadership of innovation at Pitney Bowes and Bell Atlantic. He holds BS and MS degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Cornell and Princeton Universities, respectively, and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. euchner@iriweb.org
DOI: 10.5437/08956308X5503003
CONVERSATIONS
Design Thinking An Interview with Roger Martin Roger Martin talks with Jim Euchner about the need to include intuitive thinking in the innovation process.
Conversations May—June 2012 | 11
at a conference 20 or 25 years ago where he put up a slide with a quote about how things are moving so fast, techno- logical advances are happening as never before, etc. It’s the greatest we’ve ever seen in history. And he froze the slide and he asked, “Where’s that from?” And everybody thought it was from last month’s Wired or something. But it was from Scientifi c American . In 1868. And so it’s stuck in my mind that we have to be careful saying how much the world has changed, when much of it hasn’t changed at all.
There is an insight of this wacky but brilliant twentieth- century American analytical philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. He was a contemporary of William James and John Dewey, but his thinking was ahead of many people. He came to the conclusion that you cannot prove any new idea through analytical thinking. He argued that no new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance through inductive or deductive logic.
But there are new ideas in the world. Where do they come from? They come from another thought process, which Peirce called abductive logic. And I think he’s just plain right. People relying on all these analytical method- ologies do not realize that you cannot use them to demon- strate any new idea in advance. So if you’re using them, you’re using them to reinforce existing ideas. They have an embedded assumption that the future is going to look a lot like the past.
JE: I hear your point. It’s interesting, because at the same time that design thinking is becoming a much bigger topic of discussion, people are also focused on competing on analytics and big data. Do you think the two are complementary, or do you think that there are people who just have opposing points of view of how you create the future?
RM: I think the intensity of interest in analytics by some is representative of the absolute last gasp of attention that happens before you get a big change. At least most of the stuff I see says, “Wow, we’ve got all this data and we need to redevelop analytics to deal with it.” I think that it’s more of a symptom of the challenge than a prescription to answer it.
JE: A kind of interesting synthesis is in the movie Moneyball , which describes a situation where analytics are deeply im- portant, but so is throwing reliance on past heuristics out the door.
RM: I could describe that as design thinking, which is the pro- ductive combination of both of those. Take advantage of ev- ery bit of past data that you have, but then add some artistry to that in order to imagine a future that is productively differ- ent from the past.
JE: In your book, you say that business leaders don’t need just to understand designers and how they think and how they talk and what they do, but they need to become design- ers. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
RM: I do not think that you’re going to be a great business leader if you are just an analyst. I do not believe you can ana- lyze your way to business leadership greatness. Some of the people who quote me imagine that I’m saying that leaders have to become artists. I don’t believe that’s the case. The dif- ference between a fi ne artist and a designer is that a fi ne art- ist cares about personal expression and not necessarily what anybody else cares about, or whether it produces fi nancial success, whereas a designer has to care about whether what they’re designing will work and provide the economic bene- fi t that it was designed to deliver.
What great business leaders have to do is become design- ers in the sense of integrating their intuition in an explicit way into their decisions, rather than suppressing it, hiding it, and not making it explicit. That’s what I mean when I say leaders must become designers. They need to develop their skills and sensitivity. They need to understand qualitative dis- tinctions between things. And in that way, they have to become designers.
JE: Let me push on that a little bit more. In most corpora- tions, there’s a CEO and a senior management team. And they’re probably heavily biased toward an analytical ap- proach to the world. But in addition, they’re likely to have a variety of intuitions on a given issue that they may or may not be able to express effectively to others. How do you
Roger Martin , author of The Opposable Mind: Winning through Integrative Thinking and The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage , believes that a productive synthesis of analytic and intuitive insight is required to create successful breakthroughs.
What great business leaders have to
do is become designers in the sense of
integrating their intuition in an explicit
way into their decisions.
12 | Research-Technology Management Conversations
manage the team dynamic? In the end, are you going to end up relying heavily on the intuition of just the CEO in making things happen?
RM: There’s where I think excellent management is going to play out. You put your fi nger very much on it. I think a great leader is going to be a leader who makes it both legitimate and safe to put your intuitive thoughts on the table rather than dismissing them as being of lesser value than the ana- lytical thoughts. That’s one thing.
And second, a leader helps people develop a language for discussing these things. A great modern leader will do this and not let a discussion at the board table be entirely analyti- cally driven. Otherwise, the intuition of the team is going to be hidden and the intuitions of the CEO will dominate.
JE: Do you think that design thinking can be taught or learned?
RM: Absolutely, positively. There isn’t a question in my mind.
JE: Under what conditions will that happen? It really is a dis- tinct way of thinking.
RM: This is one of the most interesting things in my work. People seem to think that something that is untaught is un- teachable. And other than in a few places, business design thinking is untaught. The assumption that it’s unteachable is staggering to me. We’re teaching it here at Rotman, and it’s totally teachable. Most people in the world of business—cer- tainly in the world of technology—stopped doing anything abductive very early in their education. They took an English literature course maybe in grade 11 or 12, and they haven’t taken a single thing that would exercise one iota of their ab- ductive logical capability since. Then they go work at an en- gineering fi rm, and 15 years later they would appear totally incapable of having any kind of design capability. But it’s be- cause they haven’t exercised it for a long, long time.
JE: So what can you do with a senior management team to get them to the point where they can actually express their intuitions and work with them and have a discussion about them? Suppose three out of the seven people on the man- agement team go to a week-long course in design thinking. They’re going to have awareness, but that’s about it. How do you help an organization move from one where you might
have an inspired leader to one where you have an organiza- tional capability?
RM: Procter & Gamble is a good case in point. I worked inti- mately with them in an effort to make them a design-thinking company. It took time, but we created a customized process for taking category teams through the design thinking process.
We would take one category at a time. The fi rst one we took through the process was global hair care, and then we did global laundry, skin care, and a whole bunch of others. We took the senior management teams through a process that taught them about design thinking, and they actually applied those principles to the decisions and challenges in their company and in their category at that time. And we did eight or nine of them ourselves, and then trained the Procter people to be able to do it. Now they have a couple of hundred facilitators who can facilitate the approach.
That’s a user-friendly way for management teams to prac- tice design thinking and impart their ability to create a future to the next level. The result is a change in the dialogue at se- nior management team meetings. They all know the lan- guage that they’re using and how they came up with ideas. They’ve been told that if you ever say “prove it” to anybody, it guarantees that you won’t get anything new happening.
JE: What are you teaching in these sessions? Ways of being aware of and listening to your intuition? Qualitative data col- lection? Customer insight? Prototyping? What kinds of things are you helping people get better at?
RM: All of those things. Design thinking includes helping people get a deeper understanding of customers using more qualitative approaches. So we teach how to do that and how to legitimize qualitative research. We also teach some kind of tools for how to create ideas that may make sense, how you prototype them, and then how you convert them into strat- egy. That last step is one of the things that is unique about the approach that I developed for Procter and that we now teach at Rotman.
What I think is missing in the design fi eld is how to con- vert design thinking into a winning strategy—one that puts the pieces together. The key tools are customer understand- ing, visualization, prototyping, and strategic business design. It’s fun to watch the combination at work.
JE: Let’s dig deeper into what leaders need to do to create environments where these intuitive leaps can happen— environments that are hospitable to the leaps happening. Even if you’re not ever going to be a genius design thinker, you might be able to create an environment in which design can survive and have a signifi cant voice. When I worked with designers, their biggest complaint was they just felt like their concerns didn’t get heard until they were re- phrased by someone with a different background or way of talking. I’m trying to understand what people need to do to make design effective in their organizations, even if it doesn’t become predominant.
That’s a user-friendly way for
management teams to practice design
thinking and impart their ability to
create a future to the next level.
Conversations May—June 2012 | 13
RM: My view is that there are subtle things that can be easily done that make a big difference. One of the things that A. G. Lafl ey and I engineered at Procter & Gamble was a relatively modest change in the way strategy planning meetings were run. It wasn’t an expansive change; it was kind of a small change, but it created an environment that allowed for the possibility of design thinking.
Traditionally at Procter & Gamble, every September all the categories would come forward to the senior management— the CEO, the COO, the CFO—to have their strategies re- viewed. The category teams would come in with big, long strategy presentations in a PowerPoint deck. They would come in with many little loops of three to fi ve slides each to respond to every question they could anticipate. “It’s funny that you should ask that. Here are the three answers to that question specifi cally.” The whole goal of these meetings from the respective categories was—and they used this term for it—to “get in and get out.” It was a successful meeting if you could get in and get out unscathed. Nothing changed; there was no more work to be done.
So that was the goal, with senior management kind of taking the critic’s role. “We’re going to ask tough questions and you’d better have the answers.”
If that’s your goal, what are you going to generate? You’re going to have a totally analytical meeting where you try to prove things so that you can “get in and get out.” We said, “From here on in, you will send us whatever material you want to include two weeks in advance. We’ll read it and we’ll issue you three to fi ve questions that we would like to have dialogue on in your strategy review meeting. You’re not al- lowed to bring more than three 8 ½ x 11 inch additional pages into the meeting, because we don’t want you to create another presentation that provides “perfect answers” to all of our questions. We actually want to have a generative discus- sion of these issues. There’ll be no presentation. We will think together and come up with better solutions that way. That’s how we’re going to run the meeting.”
That changed the meetings to meetings that were actually discussions about what might be—What could we do here? What might be a good idea?—rather than a discussion about proving or disproving what the leaders said about their strat- egies. That changed things tremendously; it created an enor- mous change in what goes on in those meetings and how productive those meetings are. They’re now meetings about imagining what could be, what could be different, what could be better, instead of meetings about the past.
JE: That’s great. I’m sure A. G. Lafl ey’s leadership made that happen.
RM: Absolutely. And it was profoundly disturbing to the ex- ecutives, profoundly disturbing. They were conditioned to getting hammered for not having everything perfect. A. G. had to prove over time that he actually wanted a dialogue; he actually wanted a discussion about what might be and what could be. We fi rst did that in 2001. Now, I don’t think they could go back. If they went back to the old approach, it would
be so depressing for people, so disconcerting, that it would be really hard.
JE: They still have to make decisions, for example that they’re going to invest $200 million in this area and not in that area. How do they get to the point where they’re willing to make those bets about a world that may not be?
RM: There’s just more recognition that that’s how all impor- tant decisions are made. There is no proof. It’s a matter of getting out of this fool-proof mode.
That’s what I hate about the “competing on analytics” idea. You’ve got to prove everything to be right before you can do it. But the things that you can prove to be right or wrong tend to be the most inconsequential things in the en- tire decision. The things you cannot prove at all are the most consequential elements of any decision. That’s what you get paid the big bucks for.
JE: I guess another way to look at it is that a lot of business teams are focused on not making the decision to invest in a bad initiative and less focused on failing to invest in a good initiative. There are two types of errors, right?
RM: Yes. And certainly one is more correlated with the use of analytical techniques. Analysis makes you overconfi dent with the impulse to keep on doing what you’re doing. So that’s what we get in many businesses today. We get lots of people confi dently doing more of the same. You have Gen- eral Motors confi dently having their production plan for 2008 be more pickup trucks and more full-sized sport-utility vehicles. Was that stupid? No. If you analyzed the past and extrapolated it into 2008, 2009, you could extrapolate the SUV and pickup truck demand, and you could say we should gear up to make many more of these vehicles. There’s an overconfi dence created by the analysis of the past.
JE: How do companies that you’ve worked with achieve the right balance? It may be diffi cult for one person to be both a great intuitive thinker and a good placer of bets on something that isn’t so certain. How do companies create a successful synthesis, or what you call the productive synthesis?
But the things that you can prove to
be right or wrong tend to be the most
inconsequential things in the entire
decision. The things you cannot prove at
all are the most consequential elements
of any decision.
14 | Research-Technology Management Conversations
RM: I think a whole lot of it has to do with respect for the other side. The best intuitive thinkers understand the limita- tions of their intuition and give credence to analytical types and partner with them.
JE: I have just one more question. A lot of the people who will read this interview are leaders of innovation functions or R&D labs. What kind of advice would you give them about design thinking and what they can do to incorporate it into their worlds?
RM: One of the big problems internal R&D labs have is that they get very analytical and very reliability focused. That’s the biggest thing to watch out for. I would say, on average, I am struck by how conservative and analytical corporate R&D departments are.
JE: How do you suggest they get beyond it? They’re by na- ture embedded in a very analytical tradition.
RM: I would stop hiring all analysts. That’s one of the biggest problems in big companies: their selection criteria are either implicitly or explicitly driven to focus on analytical talent. And so they get many analysts, and guess what the analysts do? They analyze.
Think about actually having your selection criteria in- clude something about somebody’s intuitive capacity. Think about it. What do R&D departments look for when they hire?
JE: They’re looking for the technical disciplines and execu- tion ability. People in R&D are looking for people who have made creative contributions, but perhaps—
RM: Not much. I don’t fi nd that. I fi nd there is a focus on super-high grade-point averages, and how do you get a super-high GPA?
JE: You’re very good at what the schools are teaching, which are the analytical subjects.
RM: And on the fi nal exam, with the big project that’s worth everything, are people likely to take a leap to do something wacky and way out there? No, because that one B could be the difference between a 3.9 and a 3.85, and you’re going to lose out to some other 3.9. It’s incredibly narrowing conser- vatism. And we in business select for that. It’s scary.
JE: Just to build further—you can’t hire one or two designers to create this capability. You’ve got to start getting a critical mass. So what do you think a critical mass of people with that sort of background is, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
RM: It would be the fi rst tree I’d bark up. But you don’t need a design background. Take Claudia Kotchka, Procter & Gam- ble’s head of design under Lafl ey. Before going to Procter & Gamble, she was an Arthur Anderson auditor.
She’s a friend of mine. She’s brilliant. But it’s not about her having a design education but about having a mind that was open to design. And she’s learned a lot. She hangs out with designers; she reads everything about design. So she’s very knowledgeable. But it doesn’t necessarily take design- ers. That’s why I make a distinction between designers and design thinking.
Design thinking is a way of thinking. What you need to be successful is somebody who encourages a different way of thinking in the organization. You will end up hiring design- ers and working with designers because you’ll say, “Wow, there’s real value in that kind of training and expertise.” But the training is not the key. There are lots of designers with great training who are not design thinkers.
JE: I very much appreciate your insights. It’s been a fascinat- ing discussion.
Design thinking is a way of thinking.
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