Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BUSINESS
DESIGN:
BECOMING
A BILATERAL
THINKER
by Heather Fraser
How Business People Can Become Business Designers By David Aycan and Arvind Gupta
1. Look beyond your industry. Creativity almost never occurs in a head of a business unit what the divisions strategy is; the answers
vacuum it builds off the ideas of others. When putting together a tend to be general, incremental, and repetitious rather than revolution-
portfolio of possibilities to explore, looking at other organizations, ary. To get more value out of conversations, express early ideas more
experiences and industries can be enlightening. For the best results, concretely, explaining the offerings, systems and other changes that
carefully define the vectors of your search. IDEOs business designers your project could create. Simple is best express the core nugget of
usually take a three-step approach: first, define the challenges and your thinking and let others imagine and articulate the rest. For exam-
hypothetical opportunities; second, find examples of where similar ple, if you believe that radical customization may be relevant to con-
challenges have been effectively addressed and opportunities seized, sumers in the future, draw or write down a basic scenario of how that
and third, study the success stories and imagine how you might apply experience might play out. Ask others to articulate the challenges and
their principles in your work. For example, a team working on a project new opportunities that they anticipate in making a scenario a reality
for Florida Horse Park speculated that, although equestrian sports and to provide their take on the overall appeal and viability of the solu-
attract mostly women, there could be a broader tourism opportunity tion. It can be tempting to demonstrate how much you know by
that appealed to the whole family. The team drew inspiration from spelling out all of the details, but youll limit the responses you get.
Nascar, which had managed to boost its female fan base to nearly
rival that of their male counterparts, and myriad ski and golf resorts, 4. Use letters and numbers. Conversations with experts and cus-
which had leveraged adjacent properties to introduce adventure tours. tomers can yield a lot of information and ideas; sometimes too many.
When your mind and project walls are overwhelmed, how do you know
2. Apply rich constraints. Searching for innovative business oppor- what to zero in on? In these moments, we find hybrid (i.e. both quali-
tunities can be overwhelming. Business designers believe that the tative and quantitative) studies to be extremely useful in finding the
ideal development process starts by quickly establishing rough true signals amid the noise. We take the hypotheses that we form
parameters for the initial challenge, and then investing more time from our qualitative research and ask quantitative follow-up ques-
developing creative solutions within those boundaries. For instance, tions. We use these studies to identify customer segments based on
in the first few days of a project for a scrapbooking hardware manu- novel insights and the result can often form the basis for new innova-
facturer, we commissioned a study to identify consumer behaviour tion strategies. For example, on a project to redesign local news,
and market sizes of several adjacent crafting markets. The design some new designs were viscerally expressed by experience design-
team discovered substantial behavioural overlap among scrapbook- ers and provided merchants with believable scenarios within which
ers and hobbyists who enjoyed home decorating and woodworking, they could imagine themselves and their business. The team had
which were the largest untapped crafting markets for our client. identified unmet merchant needs from interviews, but it wasnt until
Within a week, we were able to focus our effort on exploring opportu- the hybrid study had been analyzed and small business owners clus-
nities in these markets. We didnt presume that we knew all the tered that we identified some interesting new needs that happened
answers yet, but we knew we were digging in rich soil. to be predominant only with merchants who were highly resistant to
engage with new marketing channels. Instead, we recognized that a
3. Use tangible provocations. Working on a creative project means formerly overlooked insight that some merchants highly desired to
that no single individual involved knows everything that he or she piggyback on their hero merchants was sizeable and predominant
needs to know. Conversations with other business units, experts and amongst merchants that were keen to find and pay for new ways to
consumers can spark ideas. That said, beware of asking only open- reach new customers. The team was then able to adapt designs and
ended questions, such as asking consumers what they want or the shift the strategy towards a deeper understanding of the market.
5. Speak to your crowd. The most productive design teams are make fine end goals, but they are not actionable strategies.
deliberate and fluid in the way that they share ideas. Team members Strategies are important, because they fuel the thinking of every-
frequently communicate insights from within their disciplines in ways one whos supporting your organization or business unit. Want to
that welcome input, conversation and debate. Ideally, business know if your strategy is actionable? Try this test: sit down with your
designers are also visual people who can present information in a way team and ask each person to draw a bunch of concepts that fit with-
that is easily digested by others. This can be difficult, because much in your framework. If you can do this, you have an actionable strate-
of the standard toolset is not readily accessible, such as spread- gy. At IDEO, we often draw the larger project process as an arc that
sheets with 8-point type. Even small changes can help you here: make goes from concrete (real-world problems) to abstract (strategy and
the fonts bigger; put the basic assumptions and outputs near one cognitive frameworks) and back to concrete (offerings in the world).
another and have a graphic designer format them nicely. If you really In reality, the cycle needs to happen almost continuously and on
want to win over your team, take their input, plug it into your model, many scales.
and show how it changes on the spot; youll see the creative ideas
flow, and theyll start to think about the business impact of their cre- 8. Let go of right. Business people are taught to be right. We feel as
ative input. On the Florida Horse Park project, the IDEO business if we should have an answer to every question that could get thrown
designer built a financial model that dynamically compared the parks at us. That can be scary so scary that you cant move or act. In the
site design to its business model. Green numbers meant they were absence of real knowledge or rigor, we fool ourselves into thinking
aligned, and red numbers meant that they were out of sync prompt- that the right answer is there. We use answers to an abstract question
ing productive conversations. in a survey to plug in a penetration number in our financial model, or
we wait until we can create scientific evidence before we advocate for
6. Deliver stories, not data. Tackling a new challenge generates a ideas that we intuitively believe in. Business Design is about realizing
lot of stories, tidbits and data. To sell any concept, the innovation that innovation is a process of discovery that continues even after a
team needs to tell a concise, compelling story that brings together product is released. So, turn your fear of what you dont know into an
customer needs, market realities, overall context and the strategic exciting opportunity to learn something essential to the business.
nature of the product. Crafting a single narrative out of all that raw Start modeling opportunities without knowing much of anything
information can be tough, but often makes all the difference in getting then use the model to have conversations that will get you to better
other people as excited about an idea as you are. Focus on a few key assumptions. Share work in progress, and admit what you dont know
points and use only the most poignant stories and data points to tell in fact, highlight the things you dont know. The irony of this approach
the story. For example, while working on some collaborative tools for of building things that arent yet right is that your answers will become
a cloud-based offering, we parlayed both the experiential and busi- right a lot faster, and your challenges will evolve from scary moments
ness value into a five-minute video. Each team member identified the into exciting possibilities to wake up to every morning.
strongest points in their area of expertise, and we worked together to
craft an engaging, effective story. Whittling all those detail down to a
story about whats most important gives your team a clearer focus
for moving forward.
David Aycan (MBA 05) is a Business Design lead and senior project
7. Aim, ideate, repeat. Grow margin! Our net promoter score needs leader at IDEOs Palo Alto, California office. Arvind Gupta is an
to be higher! Deliver unprecedented quality. Go! These mandates industrial design and practice lead at IDEO, also in Palo Alto.
forward (This is a dream worth pursuing). Many paradigm- solutions which may draw upon a number of existing elements
shifting innovations trace back to a combination of recongured in a new way or the design of new strategic mod-
visualization and abductive reasoning; for example, Medtronic els inspired by many different existing models in the pursuit to
founder Earl Bakkens inspiration from Frankenstein that elec- create an entirely new conguration.
tricity could extend and improve the life of mankind. Again,
without the right mindset, new possibilities will never materi- 6. Intuition. This entails more than just using gut feel to
alize into new realities. guide development. Rather, it is a very important and devel-
opable thinking skill that involves gathering, articulating and
4. Abductive Reasoning. Tapping into ones imagination and evaluating ones own intuition and that of others. By recog-
believing that the seemingly impossible is actually quite possi- nizing the value of intuition, being able to effectively
ble requires a form of logic called abductive reasoning. deconstruct it and extract valuable data, one can capitalize
New-to-the-world ideas are difcult, if not impossible, to on the wealth of wisdom within a team. Leveraging intuition
prove. The ability to believe in possibilities requires a combina- also requires elements of the design mindset, most notably
tion of thinking skills, one of which is the ability to process openness, empathy and mindfulness.
many points of reference and make an intelligent leap of logic
in making the case that theres a great chance that an original In closing
idea could prove to be successful. There are a number of exam- Ultimately, the practice of Business Design entails much more
ples in game-changing successes in which the organization than design thinking. Different types of thinking are activated
didnt constrain itself to existing solution sets or models, but throughout the process on both an individual and a group basis.
instead pursued what could be. From a business perspective, they As described herein, Business Design calls for bilateral thinking
may have moved vertically or horizontally, exited old categories and adaptive doing, enabling a constant toggling between a vari-
and created/entered new businesses. For example, FedEx, ety of ways of thinking and doing. Such agility is essential for
eBay, Google, Southwest, Tata and Grameen Bank are all innovation and becomes even more powerful if you are able to
examples of new-to-the-world ideas that made a breakthrough rewire your brain to be bilateral throughout the process.
impact on culture and enterprise value creation. Not only did
these initiatives require a keen sense of imagination and abduc-
tive reasoning, they took a healthy design mindset to persevere
and see the innovations through to success.