I sympathize that design thinking is getting a lot of attention the business press, leaving design doing without the love it deserves. But this sort of reaction is counterproductive. We’re here to co-opt innovation, not throw a tantrum because we aren’t understood. From the article:

"The problem that designers face now is the same problem they have faced all along: how to communicate with clients who lack a basic grounding in the visual arts and don’t seem to think it matters. Businesspeople don’t need to become designers. They need to learn that there are types of awareness and understanding expressed through visual form…"

The problem isn’t business people who don’t care. That’s just juvenile abdication. The real problem is designers who don’t care enough about business to understand how to communicate the value of their work. That’s why business fluency is so important. Until designers get there, complaining about business not getting it is just venting. Instead we could spend our time inventing better ways to work with business, even if that means embracing innovation and design thinking.
thanks Black Belt Jones for the link

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.

I’m interested in finding a good word to describe the practice of creating these artifacts, distinct from prototypes. It’s different than codesign or participatory design (which describes *who* is involved, rather than the output of the effort). Artifacting (vs. prototyping) gets at what I’m interested in, but sounds silly. Maybe with enough repetition I’ll come to love it…or if you have a brilliant alternative, let me know in the comments…I’ll keep thinking too.

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to visit with an elephant, they are incredible animals. Beyond their sheer mass and unique look, elephants are smart and have complex social lives. And yet, with a global population under a million, their environmental impact is dwarfed by the global contribution of the lowly ant.

Though we rarely pay attention, ants are pretty amazing too. Taking advantage of their size, ants can lift 10-20 times their body mass, and have complex distributed social structures and behavior. Most importantly, ants are almost everywhere. They make up 15-20% of terrestrial animal biomass, and represent an extraordinary volume of ecological activity around the entire planet.

Looking at the innovation landscape, the iPhone looks like a bull elephant charging towards your Land Rover. It’s big. It’s moving fast. It’s unique. It’s novel. And its global economic impact is dwarfed by more mundane, more distributed innovations in sectors like healthcare and environmental products and services.

Like comparing elephants and ants, this is simply a matter of scale. Healthcare in the US is topping 2.25 trillion dollars annually. If you look at the things that green technology touches (food, energy, transport, building, communications, manufacturing, etc. etc.) the scale is similar. As I said before, that’s a heck of a lot of iPhones. In the Serengeti of Silicon Valley, there might even be the market penetration to give the illusion that the iPhone, like the elephant, rules the ecosystem. But that’s just an illusion - for every iPhone, there’s a user who consumes healthcare services and carries a deeply unsustainable footprint.

No one is arguing that the iPhone isn’t significant. It is, and it’s a leading indicator for a sea change in interaction design, from mobile to multitouch. It just pales in comparison to the broader sectors that Nussbaum also singled out for innovation investment. That’s the objection, and focusing on the iPhone might make for good copy, even good VC, but it’s poor economic policy.

Make no mistake - healthcare and the environment are the ants of the innovation landscape. If we’re going to innovate our way out of recession, that’s where to invest.