Many articles on Steve Job’s tenure at Apple have
focused on the mystery of Job’s approach to his work. The articles are representative
of the ongoing desire to uncover the recipe or secret sauce that made Apple’s
products so dominant in the market place. The focus on design is often
mentioned as Apple’s essential core competence during the Job era.
Job’s character is often critiqued, but mostly the
center of attention is on trying to discern his—i.e. Apple’s—design approach,
processes and methods during his time at the helm. As a popularized guess, ‘design
thinking’ has become the normative category to use when referring to these or
anyone’s methods or approaches to successful designing. That was not Job’s
approach but ‘design thinking’ has taken on a life of its own.
‘Design thinking’ in fact has become a highly
touted approach for businesses and governments to take whether focused on
products or services. ‘Design thinking’ is being pushed in text and video as
the strategy for solving complex dynamic problems faced by business and
governmental agencies in today’s admittedly complex and rapidly changing world.
However, ‘design thinking’ is not the same thing as
design inquiry, or design action—i.e. designing—and this confusion has
serious consequences. ‘Design thinking’ is defined as a set of steps that, when
followed, guarantee good outcomes by revealing the right solutions for clear
problem statements—an ideal bureaucracy. However, designing is not primarily
about solving problems. It is about something quite different.
By taking a problem focused approach to design,
leaders, decision makers and stakeholders constantly skirt taking
responsibility and accepting accountability for their decisions and actions by
focusing on externalized methods, thus avoiding the courageous by
grasping for the certain. Rollo May’s classic The Courage to Create
and Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces are examples of an
alternative perspective of what it means to be courageous and willing to take
risks and why.
Courage is not the same as the aggressiveness acted
out in office politics and political governance. A deeper look into what
courage can be provides an alternative perspective to the solitary, command and
control individual. It is dramatically different from the kind of ‘take charge’
hero of popular culture that is the anathema of those championing the dominance
of the group over the individual—in the process, diminishing both. Both May and
Campbell provide a view of the systemic interdependency of courageous
individuals and their essential connection to the well being of collective
lives.
Few business or governmental leaders are representative
of this type of interdependent heroic figure and it seems their constituency
like it that way. Most everyone colludes in demanding a risk-free environment—no
risky decisions, and no accountabilities or responsibilities. People in charge
are happy to collect their rewards for following prescribed rules, routines and
approved procedures; arriving at the right answers, just like we were shown how
to do in grammar school.
As Russ Ackoff points out,
panaceas are ever in demand in business, governmental agencies and other social
organizations. One look at a typical Harvard Business Review’s table of
contents reveals that the dominant focus is on numbering—numbered steps,
numbered categories, numbered certainty. We all like the safe feeling of limits
set by solid numbered sequencing. A methodological certainty that saves us from
having to take responsibility for our making sense of the chaos we face daily
and making difficult judgments about what actions we ought to take in any
situation—all without having guarantors in place to protect us from failures
and unintended consequences.
Design is about courage and not about guaranteed
outcomes. It is about competency, skill, ability, and character, brought into
the service of others—clients, stakeholders, society and the greater good. It
is a ‘conspiracy’—a breathing together—of people who understand the true nature
of the challenge and the necessity of taking it head on without a bag full of
‘tricks’. There are plenty of people with bags of ‘tricks for treats’ that feed
the need in organizations and institutions for easy, accessible and certain
approaches to overwhelmingly complex challenges. One of my favorite political
cartoons by Danziger published in the Christian Science Monitor several years ago,
caught the spirit of our political and business leaders’ habit of always
looking for ‘the trick’ rather than looking to themselves for the courage and
competence to become designers of the real world.
