Design Matters II: Learning from Roger Martin
-- Peter Pula

Roger Martin’s latest book, The Design of Business clearly demonstrates how design is an answer to a fundamental gap in most organizations. That gap is the oft-neglected vacuum in innovation.

Over the years, tipped off by the distinction Peter F. Drucker made between operations and innovation, I have repeatedly come across the preference for one and the dangerous neglect of the other. I have seen the phenomenon in my workplace, through years of news coverage, as a member of community boards and as the chairman of one of them.

Drucker described the phenomenon clearly. Today’s breadwinner is concrete, understood because of repeated and predictable patterns, and usually urgent. Today’s breadwinner, today’s product and service, demands attention and receives daily stimulus from the customer and operating environment.

People who are busy dealing with operating in a known environment with concrete realities are not well placed to daydream and imagine a different reality. Tomorrow’s business, product, or service does not yet exist. It belongs to the future, not today. It is not understood, is not predictable, and is seemingly not urgent. As a result it’s very often crowded out and postponed one day at a time until it is perennially neglected.

And so, while it is all too easy to behave as though the future never comes, it inevitably does.

To make matters even more difficult, as yesterday’s breadwinner reaches the end stages of its usefulness the critical question of survival makes innovation that much harder. Since the best way to manage in the future is to create it, not attending to innovation is just plain daffy, but that doesn’t make it easy.

Martin furnishes new language and maps out how design can provide us a way to better attend to the future. He gives us two distinct points in the life cycle to work from: Exploration and Exploitation – terms that perhaps advance Drucker’s differentiation between Innovation and Operations.

This tension between Exploration/Innovation and Exploitation/Operations can be found all over the place.

An organization, project, or initiative is founded and flourishes under the guidance and leadership of a founder or small group. Then as the organization moves from a formative stage to a normative one, the more design-like exploratory methods of the founders give way to a need to exploit the results of successful exploration. Enter: the operators and their ability to deliver a higher degree of predictability and efficiency. From this complementary beginning, the tension between exploration and exploitation grows. It manifests itself in struggles over power, roles, priorities, governance, succession, spending, and on and on.

The fact that an organization has moved between degrees of formative and normative stages, though, does not grant us permission to give precedence to either Exploration or Exploitation for all time. Operating environments are generally too demanding for such a rudimentary response.

Non-profit and advocacy groups deal with this, too. As they move farther away in time from their founding cause and moment, they often become more professional. They get better at delivering predictable results and hone what become time-honoured operating principles. Over time, as the organization delivers success, that very success changes the operating environment.

The trouble is that past success has become entrenched and many people have interests in keeping that success alive as long as possible. Operators remain absolutely necessary, but alone they are not enough. They too are best served by recognizing this. Rather than quashing change agents they can quietly continue their work while cultivating an active curiosity in the innovators’ work.

In return, the innovators must not expect everyone to jump on board and support new ideas. They simply need to respect that, if they are lucky, the operators are protecting the revenue stream and reputation of the very organizations that are funding their exploratory work. Then, just wait and supporters will naturally gravitate to working innovations.

Martin’s book shows how design in business can give us a way to manage these tensions. It makes the distinctions incredibly clear, ties in the innovation cycle, and narrates live experience in some highly effective firms and how they use design, and designers, to bridge the gap.

Our recent coverage has us talking about design a lot in the newsroom. That chatter brought about an impromptu distinction in the uses of design: Design of Products and Services, Design of Processes and, finally, the way we Design Business Itself and for What Purpose.

It is in this last one where the greatest potential for Massive Change likely rests.

Read Part I: Design Matters

Next: As promised last time but postponed in favour of this entry; Social Mission Matters.