Business Fluency
Eating lunch with my friend Matthew Milan last week in Miami, he turned to me and said "you need to blog more". Thanks for the encouragement :) I completely agree, and to build some personal momentum will be surfacing some of my ongoing interests and themes that got bplusd started three years ago this month.
Something that I’ve talked about for a few years is the idea of business fluency. I chaired a panel on speaking the language of business at the 2005 IA Summit, and and wrote about business fluency in Stanford d.school’s Ambidextrous magazine. To have greater influence in the organizations that we work with, design innovators need to cultivate an understanding of business - not that we need to get MBAs, but that we need to relate our efforts to business goals and context if we’re going to practice value centered design. Until we understand business, we’re arrogant hypocrites if (when) we complain about business ‘not getting it.’ Not getting it is just a reflection of someone operating from a different frame - and understanding and reframing are strong points for design and innovation. We have no excuses for ignoring business fluency, or expecting that business decision makers should learn our lingo instead.
When we do turn to business fluency, much of the conversation is about facts, figures, and formulas. This conceptual fluency is important, but often secondary to understanding networks, power, and motivations in an organization. That kind of cultural fluency is what really gets things done in an organization—ROI is often a red herring when the real issues are cultural.
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:52 am
Amen to the need for greater cultural fluency in business environments.
If conceptual fluency is language, then cultural fluency is the local dialect; it’s different from organization to organization, and even from group to group in a single organization. Sam Ladner (http://designresearch.wordpress.com/) used to call the discovery of this “BEGging” (Business Ethnographic Gathering), which was the cultural discovery you need to do in order to really understand and respect the cultural elements of the business you’re working in/with.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:30 am
I think that there’s an untapped market for qualitative cultural research as part of the due diligence process during M&A work, since too often the rationale for a merger or acquisition is based on conceptual fluency considerations, but the success of corporate unions is largely due to cultural integration (or clashes).