Discussions about design thinking tend to focus on companies that employ it and the successes they achieve, rather than on the people who actually do it
The term ‘design thinking’ has lost some of its lustre of late, particularly in business publications. In my view, this is the natural result of throwing around a term with a bit too much enthusiasm and not enough understanding, and it is truly unfortunate, because the qualities it describes have never been more important.
Not that design thinking is easy to pin down: while its effects are fairly clear — a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning that leads to an unusually-pragmatic strain of creativity — thinking of any sort is a human activity, and humans are notoriously hard to figure out. Discussions about design thinking tend to focus on companies that employ it and the successes they achieve, rather than on the people who actually do it.
This poses a problem for the rest of us, because once a company sees the value in the design thinking approach, the next step is to try to build this capability through directed hiring, and this is universally frustrating. For one thing, the term itself is probably a misnomer: design thinkers are just as likely to be business people or engineers as designers, and very few of them went to design school. In fact, the great examples of design thinking in business — P&G, Apple, Umpqua Bank, Zappos — are led by folks with no design training whatsoever.
To get a better idea of what traits to look for, I recently spoke with three people from the vibrant creative economy here in Portland, Oregon, who exemplify the innovation-driven success associated with design thinking: Kenton Gregory is an inventor of life-saving medical technologies, including solutions to battlefield injury problems that have challenged medics for decades; Naomi Pomeroy is a chef who has pushed the boundaries of Portland’s renowned food scene for a decade, first with Ripe — a group of restaurants and supper clubs that redefined the city’s culinary direction — and more recently with her prix fixe restaurant Beast, which often occupies Best Of lists for the entire west coast; and Michael Czysz is an award-winning architect who transformed at the height of a promising career into a designer of groundbreaking electric transportation. Of the three, only Czysz attended design school — two years of Architecture — which he abandoned to pursue projects with more personal interest.
Over a series of focused interviews, some common traits began to emerge:
1.Design thinkers are internally-motivated by challenge and curiosity.
As technical challenges go, building the world’s fastest electric motorcycle is among the most difficult and most expensive a small shop could take on. Yet that’s what Michael Czysz’s tiny company Motoczysz decided to pursue, and it’s been an uphill battle ever since. This fascination with difficult, complex problems showed up in all three interviews. Complexity and difficulty is what interests these people -- not recognition, and certainly not wealth. Money, in fact, is mentioned by both Czysz and Gregory as a building block or an obstacle; a means of achieving solutions rather than a goal in itself. Design thinkers are internally motivated, by personal curiosity, a desire to effect change and the pleasure of figuring something out.
Kenton Gregory: “The world’s a great place, full of great problems. I want to really make a big jump; not just a slightly better hypertension drug — a whole a new drug.”
“Looking at a problem or a creation from different angles generates an energy that is addicting. You don’t do it for the money, you do it because of that high — of creating something and sharing that energy.”
“I tend to like enormously complex, intricate things of beauty. Everywhere you look, there is something you can make more beautiful.”
Naomi Pomeroy: “Taking on too much work, having too much to do: that’s when I find myself most productive and creative.”
“You know in the airplane they tell you to put your oxygen mask on before you put your child’s mask on? I do that all the time in my life. I can’t make you happy if I’m not happy. That’s why I’m always trying to create.”
Michael Czysz: “I was drawn to the motorcycle industry by passion. In the second chapter of my life, I wanted a harder task than architecture -- a challenge with a need for more accuracy, but also with bigger potential; greater reward and possibly greater loss.”
“We all have open minds as children, but they get closed as we grow older. We don’t let ourselves explore. Everybody has had a good idea, but they immediately think, ‘Oh, I can’t do anything about it,’ and they close the door. I think more people could do it -- they just don’t try.”
2. Design thinkers alternate between intuition and analysis.
Perhaps the main reason it’s so hard to identify the problem-solving approach of design thinkers is that there isn’t one; there are two. Creative people can be outgoing, collaborative and intuitive, or they can be introverted, focused and analytical, but design thinkers embrace both. A pattern of oscillation between periods of playful exploration and periods of detail-oriented deep focus showed up in all three interviews. The result: a powerful hybrid approach — an ‘informed intuition’ that exposes new solutions and brings them to fruition.
KG: “To get something done, you really need to have intense focus. You have to shut everything out and use all your resources, especially if you’re solving a new problem. That’s why I don’t mind being by myself. I can spend two or three hours out at my ranch and come back and have figured something out.”
“If you’re a driven, creative person and you don’t regularly ‘defocus’, you can get myopic. I think that’s good for all careers --to be able to focus intently and then defocus and look at the bigger picture, and be doing that constantly -- mixing and matching intuition with analysis.”
NP: “If I am focused and my head is down, anybody off the street can see it. I just can’t help it. I can’t hear anything, I can’t see anything, I can only do the thing in front of me.”
5. Design thinkers prefer prototypes to theories.
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]