Design consulting is the new management consulting

Over the past few days I've been reading a white paper called Transformation Design produced by The Design Council's RED unit. This paper was originally published last February on their RED blog but I just recently discovered it. From their blurb ... "RED is a 'do tank' that develops new thinking and practice on social and economic problems through design-led innovation."

What attracted me to their work is that they think the practice of design is on the cusp of a major shift, "one that represents a step change in scope, approach, and impact" according to their paper. And they name this step change in design approach "Transformation Design." They offer these possibilities for transformation design.

"A new design discipline is emerging. It builds on traditional design skills to address social and economic issues. It uses the design process as a means to enable a wide range of disciplines and stakeholders to collaborate. It develops solutions that are practical and desirable. It is an approach that places the individual at the heart of new solutions, and builds the capacity to innovate into organizations and institutions."

They make the point that traditionally organizations have been designed to cope with a complicated rather than a complex world. A complicated world requires hierarchical control structures which break down problems into less complicated and more manageable problems.

However, they suggest, that we don't so much live in a complicated world as a complex world. Problems like addressing climate change aren't complicated and bendable to the will of hierarchical control. Addressing climate change requires many people and many organizations around the world to change their behavior on many different levels. That makes addressing climate change a complex problem. And hierarchical models of organization (and design) aren't well-suited to addressing such complexity. In fact, they hamper addressing complexity.

The Red unit suggests that "even organizations could be design objects." And this is the fulcrum around which the new design discipline is emerging - design is not simply design of things, it is design of behaviors (dare I say ways of being).

They name as tenets of this new design approach the following:

1. Defining and redefining the brief - participating with the client to declare the design problem instead of taking the client's design brief as the declaration of the problem
2. Collaborating between disciplines - complex problems cannot be addressed from a single point of view
3. Employing participatory design practices - solutions must emerge from those intended to deliver and use them
4. Building capacity, not dependency - because 'design is never done,' build the capacity to continue adapting and designing
5. Designing beyond traditional solutions - design must move beyond designing things and into designing behaviors and experiences
6. Creating fundamental change - create systemic change on a national scale to address shared social and economic concerns

The design community is waking up to the larger role and impact of design in shaping our lives as human beings. And this requires designers to work in a new and different way.

And the parallels of transformation design to leading, designing, and coaching as I've been exploring them in this blog are many. It seems to me that RED has declared a breakdown in the current practice of design to meet the complexity of today's problems. And, while they don't use this language, they have discovered that the most important designing is ontological designing - designing ways of being.

As I was reading this article I realized that design consulting is the new management consulting.

Take care,

-Steve

Comments

[Amiel]

A couple of questions:

1. If design consulting is the new management consulting, then who is the new McKinsey?

2. For talented people who embrace this approach, what are the clues upon coming into contact with an organization that it is a place to practice this? And what are the signs it is not? In short, how as design consultants do we assess the readiness of organizations for this work?

3. A related question to #2: in my experience and in the stories I hear from colleagues, one initial step in building a consulting relationship based on these principles is to earn what Bill Torbert calls "conformity points" - the capacity to do what is conventional and expected, succeed at it, and thereby use this "conformity capital" (my expression) to do truly innovative design work. Do you agree? How do you see this?

[Steve]

Amiel,

Thanks for your comments.

1. I don't know. Maybe IDEO? But I don't know how much they are venturing into transformation design. They have certainly proven themselves in the practice of traditional design.

2. Organizations that have problems today sometimes call management consultants. Underlying this is the belief that good management is the source of the solution (if not the solution itself). However, anyone who has worked in business for even a few years knows that often management consulting firms don't generate the value they promise. Often they focus on analysis and recommend certain strategies and decisions that seem great in theory. However, strategies and decisions are a far cry from implementation.

Design approaches are pragmatic and take a user-centered and participative approach. Designers focus on generating value in the context of the users' world. From what I've seen this isn't the way management consulting firms operate.

For management consulting firms to stay competitive, they will have to take on design (and coaching) approaches.

3. Innovation is not offered as a transformation (even though it often is) but as a more effective way of taking care of concerns that we already have. You can't sell transformation because buyers don't know what they are buying (and those selling transformation don't know what they are selling).

-Steve