I recently had the pleasure to sit down with Brandon Schauer and talk about business, design, and particularly some of the pitfalls of design thinking. As always, Brandon’s opinions are his own and not necessarily those of his employer, etc.

Jess McMullin I’m here with Brandon Schauer, who’s at Adaptive Path, a leading user experience firm, and he’s actually the Experience Design Director there. So, Brandon, you came to Adaptive Path from the Institute of Design, right?

Brandon Schauer I did.

J. And you did the dual degree track, if I recall correctly, at the Institute of Design where you got a Masters in Design and also an MBA.

B. Yes, I was one of a handful of pioneers who went through that before that it was a formal track.

J. Yes, you, Brad Nemer….

B. Yes, and Elaine Lee, who’s at Doblin now. And we all saw the possibility and the power of putting the two degrees together. One of the best things was actually going to one of the schools, say the business school and apply what you’ve learned from the design school there, and vice versa going to the design school and apply to the projects there things you dug out of business school. And it allowed for a few doors to open that may have not opened to me, just by having the little initials of having the MBA attached when you’re talking to design or business folks.

J. That’s fantastic. And actually while you were at the Institute of Design, you helped with the Strategy conference, which is now an annual event there looking at bridging those two worlds of business and design as well.

B. My particular role was in a lot of working with speakers beforehand and talking to them and getting them to contribute essays or interviews that we could share with potential attendees to show the type of information and type of dialogue that would be going on at the conference. It was a real joy to have some time set aside to talk with really smart people like Josephine Green at Philips or Jim Hackett, CEO of Steelcase, to pick their minds was a real pleasure.

J. That’s great. So now you’re out in the consulting world at AP. You still follow that design and business conversation, where we’ve really seen since 2004 a real resurgence in certain business circles around the concept of design thinking. That packages up a few different things, and it seems to mean different things to different people. I think for me, it’s really just useful shorthand (to confess to some handwaving) to say “these kinds of things”, but I don’t think that there’s a really clear definition that’s agreed on. If you were going to give somebody a quick rundown of what you think design thinking is, what would you tell them?

B. That’s a term that I’m really really careful about, just because there’s so much hype around it. I think the popular press, especially Business Week, but a few others, tout that term. In those cases I think it means things like ethnographic-style research, prototyping, particular activities that designers engage in to help them see problems from a customer viewpoint and then help think about what possible futures could be and learn about those futures through prototyping rather than through specification and failure.

J. Right.

B. To me, I think that one of the best descriptions if you really want to make a case for design thinking being a different school of thought than say engineering thinking or business thinking. Some of the best work on that that I’ve seen is from Chris Conley who is a principal at Gravity Tank in Chicago and also teaches at the Institute of Design. He put together a paper for the Design Management Institute’s Design Management Journal. I think it was called "Leveraging Design’s Core Competencies" (pdf) and he laid out about seven things that are different about how designers approach problems and solve them. Things like knowing the right level of abstraction at which to solve a problem. The ability to create multiple alternatives to a solution and evaluate them simultaneously. Those are the types of capabilities that I think most designers look at and go "I do these types of things a little bit different than others in the world". I think in general it’s a mix of empathy, not just for the end user, but also for other people in the process. Sometimes I think we don’t use that often enough – client empathy, operator empathy. Also mixing in the ability to suggest what a possible future could be with an incomplete amount of information. We don’t necessarily need all the facts before we suggest what a possible alternative of the future could be.

J. Definitely. I really like the way that Dick Boland and Fred Collopy (who are at Case Western at the business school there) talk about a design attitude vs. a decision attitude (pdf) as something that underscores design thinking and is really about exploring possibility. In a formal way, that’s talking about abductive thinking, but is really about exploring different alternatives and go from there instead of looking for evidence and reasoning from that going forward. Now design thinking is great, and one of the reasons it gets hyped is because its novel and people hold out hope for a silver bullet. I think it gets reinforced by some people in the design community who make the leap from the fact that "I identify as a designer, and therefore I am a design thinker, and I can make these great strategic contributions if they’d only let me."

There’s this note of almost entitlement that has crept into the design community. That’s something I’m particularly cautious about because I think that most designers aren’t design thinkers yet because they don’t have the concrete fluency with business, and many visual designers don’t face the same constraints on actual usage that an interaction designer or industrial designer face. That lack of constraint means that they don’t develop all of those competencies that make up design thinking, particularly a lack of empathy for the actual use of a product or service versus the one-way consumption of a visually expressed message in something like a poster or album cover. Ethnographic research isn’t required to create a great poster, and so it’s just not a skillset that gets cultivated in that particular corner of the design disciplines.

So that’s one of the pitfalls of design thinking – that sense of designer entitlement that "I am an amazing business strategist because I’m automatically a design thinker". I’d like to explore other pitfalls of design thinking – what are your thoughts there?

B. We talked about abductive thinking and the ability to suggest possible future options and things like that. The trouble with that is that it’s somewhat like inverting critical thinking. Critical thinking is gathering facts, drawing conclusions based on those facts, and going about decisions from that standpoint. The idea of suggesting multiple alternatives before you know all the facts is valuable, but it’s also an inverse of that sort of critical thinking. Sometimes, at some point in a process, whether you lead to alternatives first, and then do your critical thinking, or do your critical thinking first and then come up with alternatives in a much tighter box, you still have to do your homework and do your critical thinking. Design thinking left unchecked can just lead to failure failure failure, just as pure critical thinking (with no pushing the boundaries of what you think might be possible) just gets you to the obvious solution. That obvious solution can lead to failure again and again as well.

J. Too true. So what other design thinking pitfalls do you see?

B. I really worry about design thinking especially at diagnosing any sort of business problem. It’s not necessarily great at planning the future out into multiple steps or multiple releases. I think design thinking can get stronger in those areas but just diagnosing the real business problem is a challenge. Is the market growing or shrinking: is there going to be more pie out there in terms of the market, or am I going to have to steal pie from other people? What are my competitors doing and can I trip them up by releasing capabilities that they can’t copy? How can I do things that are competitively smart? What are the real forces that are at play in the marketplace? It’s probably not just features and customer empathy. It’s probably things like regulations, things that the government has established. I think you and I have recently worked in retirement savings within corporate spaces – that’s a place where government regulations mean a lot, and changes in those regulations can really change what offerings are considered more valuable than others by the customers. There’s a lot of play in the marketplace besides the relationship between a customer and the product or the interface that they are using, and design thinking typically doesn’t look at those other aspects of the world.

J. I think that’s a really important thing for the community to appreciate and understand is that design thinking in and of itself isn’t sufficient. It’s a great contributor, but it’s not something that stands alone. Just hearing what you’re talking about, one of the things I’ve been working on personally and hopefully will be sharing more about in the future is the idea of cultivating business fluency. You had the fantastic opportunity to study design and business together in your grad work, and many of us didn’t have the opportunity to be able to develop an MBA level understanding of the business world. Do you have any thoughts on how designers can cultivate that kind of fluency so that they can actually make a better contribution?

B. Most designers, we live in the insular community, we talk a lot to each other, we go to AIGA conferences, IDSA conferences, web conferences, we read design blogs. A lot of that is because, especially in the web world, keeping up to date and relevant on our own topics is a lot of work. But you can actually learn a heck of a lot of what you need to in terms of business fluency by just spending time outside of your own boundaries of your discipline. So getting that subscription to Harvard Business Review, or keeping up with newsletters coming from McKinsey Quarterly, or multiple business-related magazines, in strategy and things like that, you can keep in touch with the pulse of the big thoughts in the business world.

You also learn what things like what strategy really means. That’s one of the things that bothers me most about what’s going on in design conversations – when you hear about strategy it’s really just about that there’s a part where we did some thinking, and then we started designing. When you start reading up on the world of strategy, there’s a lot more thought, there’s a lot more tools and techniques that go into how do you be competitive and how do you understand what’s unique about an organization and really connect the experiences you’re creating to something distinct that this organization has that no other organization can do. So I think that it’s not that hard to attain. You don’t necessarily need to go and get an MBA – I’ve heard an MBA called a degree in common sense and I can’t necessarily argue with that. But the key is just realizing the world that your business partners come from, whether they’re looking through a lens of finance or of operations or management, and being able to understand the issues they are dealing with. Having empathy with the issues that they come to the table with and actually being able to resonate with those by having read similar topics, having an appreciation for what their needs are and listening to them just as you would listen to a customer when you go out to do your research can really change how you work together.

J. Absolutely.

B. A brief example is that we were working with a financial institution and their interactive marketing group. Their interactive marketing group was seen as a cost center, they weren’t necessarily adding to the profits. This was an organization, in financial services, obviously run through a financial lens in how they operated. What we were able to do was to work with them to generate some ways that they could impact the bottom line of the business. We helped identify key metrics that people actually cared about that the web and the interactive marketing group could actually impact, and how can we calculate the impact that a potential project could have on those numbers. Suddenly, they are having this financial dialog, when before they were just talking about personas or user flows and things like that. So that really changed their relationship with the rest of the organization by being able to think through and articulate things in a way that was valued.

J. Excellent. I really think just being able to talk with business stakeholders in something resembling their own language is a huge part of bridging the gap between business and design. And that’s why I think about business fluency – just like learning French or Italian, we need to be able to learn to speak to those people. So there’s a whole bunch of other things that we could talk about today but I think we’ll start wrapping things up. Is there anything else that you’d like to cover?

B. On the topic of design thinking, it’s probably something we just need to get over, and be real – besides magic buzzwords, beyond pointing at the iPod and various products by IDEO, what is it that we really do, what kind of value do we really contribute, and how do we talk about that with other people. I think that’s what you’re really nailing with business fluency, understanding your business partners and what’s the real value of this design thinking thing.

J. So thank you so much Brandon. Look forward to seeing you at MX in Philadelphia or UX Intensive in Vancouver. Do you want to wrap by telling us a bit about those?

B. Sure. Managing Experience is for those who are looking for those who are looking to moving up in their career or already find themselves in management or VP positions. We’re talking about how you manage groups, organizations, products, services, metrics, all those sorts of things. We’re doing that in Philadelphia, you can find out about that at adaptivepath.com, and that’s happening in October.

Again, we’re teaching our User Experience Intensive, which is four days of a la carte in strategy, interaction design, information architecture, and research, and that’s in Vancouver in November. You can also find out about that at Adaptivepath.com

J. Great. Look forward to that, thanks so much for your time and we’ll be keeping in touch.

B. Thanks Jess.