Beyond Design Thinking -part 2
By: Irina Damascan
Tags: Knowledge, Startup, Embodied Cognition, Design Thinking, Business

Beyond Design Thinking -part 2

In the first part of this article, I bring into discussion the history of design thinking, and with a phenomenological and philosophical perspective, I explained the connection to craftsmanship and our human biology of the brain. These aspects are complemented now from an abstract framework to a concrete sample of organizational behaviors that we can build to create holistic design systems for companies that scale sustainably. Irina Damascan Dec 14, 2020·7 min read

Our brain structures are already predetermining us to a certain way of perceiving the world. The trouble with having hard wiring of the brain that is inflexible to the different circumstances you are exposed to daily in the workplace is that it leaves some people out of the conversation. The outcasting model is probably the first symptoms you can determine in an organization bounded to face misalignments once they scale. That’s why many companies never pass the 26FTE level. But even when they do pass the 26FTE and scale to 50FTE, the problems don’t get any easier. The wisdom of the embodiment model offers us a short glimpse into the model that scaling organizations have.

Scaling organizations manage to:

Tackle complexity by including every stakeholder in the conversation and taking them along the journey with a firm emotional buy-in. We can never perform in any environment without being emotionally motivated. Get the root cause of the problem and work at the system, not fixing the symptoms. Organizations that work on the holistic picture rather than in a vacuum will thrive to connect with their users in a much more sustainable way. Take people along rather than leave people out. The inclusion model is often seen as the way to go about this but it’s much broader than inclusion and diversity if the voice of one person doesn’t weigh equally with the others. It’s more than accepting and tolerating differences, it’s about the integration of those differences in a more robust system. The hierarchical system doesn’t dissolve the voices but supports growth in a structured manner. When a hierarchy is only used for performance and reporting, the real growth of people is confined within the parameters of the box they are in. However, real growth happens by exposing yourself to challenging situations and risk that alters the boundaries of your box and makes you free float in the areas of your challenges. If in time, someone from the lower level of the hierarchy is exposed more than someone from the top, then growth for the lower level is limited by its hierarchical leader. The exposure needs to be equally challenging even if it’s on different paths. A company that invests in its people will understand to invest both in the managers to challenge their leadership and personal limiting beliefs as much as they develop the skills of the execution workforce. That way, the voice of the expert with a lower level in the hierarchy will not be forced into silence because the manager is not able to see why that issue is important for the organization.

How is this process supported by matters that start with design thinking but go beyond it?

The first answer to this is that these matters come from a complexity rather than a single-rooted problem. One of those immense resources of knowledge still unexplored about complex systems as an asset rather than a challenge is found in philosophy. Jacque Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher who brought up “deconstruction as an attempt to expose and undermine the metaphysics of hierarchized binary oppositions”. That sort of perspective over the world allows us to add more color and complexity without feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information that doesn’t settle strictly in one “box” or another. By not wanting to judge so quickly and rush into a decision about a context and problem you’re facing, you let even more empathy into the “design thinking” process.

In design thinking, we often rush to the stages of creating desired outcomes. We want to focus so we can sharpen our value proposition and quickly launch so we can later iterate.

But this type of thinking comes from the same eagerness for industrialization, fast deployment of infrastructure, and leaving people who can’t keep up with the rapid developments out of the system. However, the system cannot function in isolation from the rest of the world who doesn’t come from this right brain development. Due to many problems created by industrialization, our mental health became an underlining issue because we lack the proper balance between how we use the two hemispheres. In order to succeed in the society created by industrialization, you had to use mainly the left side of the brain which is analytical and focused on functionality which ultimately leads to progress. However, this type of mentality over success also created problems for the more creative people making them feel like outcasts because they don’t fit traditional organizations. By eliminating much of the manual or creative work and automating as many of the processes as we could, the workplace quickly became a dry, emotionless environment which causes many mental health issues to workers that felt symptoms of something they couldn’t quite put their finger on. That’s how we’ve moved from a well-balanced experience of our work environments to something that produces abstract new problems disconnecting more and more from the traditional human-centric values. In fact, it’s disconnect comes more from the alienation of the natural elements, the ones connected most to our human nature.

Many of the B2B SaaS companies out there solving “problems” of organizations are “not sticky” enough for the users even if they are on a positive cash flow because they lack the human-centric values. They solve human-made problems which ultimately leads to a tool that works in a vacuum.

Design thinking limitations become clear in this context. What served us to progress will not serve us to scale. At this point, complexity needs to step in and design the ethics of the system we have made with the technological developments deployed in the last century. The new industrial revolution is about human enablement through technology and seeing technology as a means to an end rather than the purpose itself.

This type of repurposing needs to take place starting with our educational models. That’s why we see so many leadership schools or MBA’s addressing this need.

The fundamental difference they make in how they look as the world is that they rebalance the forces between our left and right side of the brain. While many D-schools are focused on craft and design, B-schools are focused on business and analytics and C-schools focus on combined creativity from the best of both worlds. This ultimately results in a different economic model based on what we are learning to use from our brain capacity.

Joe Pine, the famous author of the experience economy concept makes a very valid point in his research about the key attribute of each economical model.

We’ve been stepping away from the natural to the standardized, and now on to customized and personalized attribution of the problem. That’s why design thinking no longer serves us as it addresses the customization problems, not personalization.

In the personalization attribution model, we will talk more about the complexities rather than the outliers. Outliers are dealt with in isolation from the system, but as many economists see realized in their research, they never produce isolated effects. They are interconnected and ultimately generate “black swans”.

In the example of Taleb for potential outliers that through cumulative effects lead to black swans, he talks about agents. These agents are the forces that influence the system and are maybe outside of our business context.

The design thinking limitations help us focus on predictable events.

That’s why one of the biggest hurdles for companies today is to move away from big data and go into personalization using granular data modeling.

Lastly, if you think that design thinking is a fad, think again more thoroughly at the reason why this way of working came about instead of simply making it redundant in time. It might be insightful to look beyond its implicit limitations.