Deconstructing the Design Thinker

Sohrab Vossoughi,founder and president of Ziba Design

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.”

“You can get sparked by an inspiration, but after that it’s as much about thinking and talking as it is about listening and learning. You have to have rigor, otherwise it’s just messing around.”

MS: “My process for arriving at innovation is not stressing. I relax, and take a kind of trip. I allow myself to take it all the way through, and when I get back to the starting point, I’ve touched all the bases and I’m comfortable that it’s a solid idea.”

“Sometimes, you just use your intuition and you pray. But your intuition is always better when you have more data and more personal experience.”


3. Design thinkers are inherently multidisciplinary.
Kenton Gregory is a doctor who studied Engineering and now develops wound treatment processes and energy production systems in parallel; Naomi Pomeroy is a chef who’s never taken a culinary class, but found herself managing 95 cooks and staff by the age of 30; Michael Czysz grew up riding motorcycles, left Architecture school to do interiors, and now designs innovative battery systems without the benefit of formal Engineering study. An innate desire for new knowledge and abilities — even if there’s no immediate application for them — forms the core of this multi-disciplinary tendency, and contributes to the curiosity that design thinkers exhibit. It also pushes them to seek out collaborators they can learn from, and teams with a level of diversity that mirrors their own.

KG: “I bounced around a bit, and that’s what gave me a relatively broad background. I wanted to make a contribution, to add something to the planet, so I did Environmental Engineering and learned how to make things, how to solve problems. Then I went into Medicine, and there are unlimited problems to solve there, too. I’m planning to work on Photovoltaics next; this is a method of generating electrical power by converting solar radiation into direct current electricity using semiconductors that exhibit the ‘photovoltaic effect’. I’m usually working on about 20 things at once.”

“When I’m at any kind of professional meeting, I try to wander off into other rooms and see something completely different. I may not have any inkling of understanding, but it always challenges my brain.”

“The number one thing you need in a team is diversity. When I’m putting one together, I feel like Noah: I want one or two of everything. I expect more than just respect for diversity of gender or religion or politics, I expect respect for diversity of thought. It’s difficult for one person to do everything, so I fill in for my weaknesses, which are many, and put together a group of people that are very diverse and that have optimism.”

NP: “Chefs can fall into a kind of tunnel vision — most aren’t  ‘people persons’ and they can get too focused, like a scientist in his Lab. But you have to come outside of your box in order to stay current.”

MC: “You need experience and you need some stick-to-it-iveness, but it’s nice to be able to step over and look into other areas that you don’t have a lot of experience in, because you’ll come at it from a different perspective, which is clearly healthy. In many cases, everybody in an industry comes at problems from the same perspective, so they all get the same results; you need somebody from the outside to take a look.”

4. Design thinkers are optimistic and tenacious.
If these interviews are any indication, the best design thinkers may actually fail more than the rest of us. Completely absent from these discussions was any sense that they possess some unique ability to get things right the first time. The key qualities instead tend to be optimism, tenacity and a willingness to learn from mistakes. All three brought up the value of failure several times in conversation, and have the history to back it up. Pomeroy, for example, turned the collapse of Portland’s most celebrated culinary empire into a preamble for her current success.

KG: “One of the essential ingredients that college students have in abundance is optimism; sometimes, they are even a little too cocky — ‘Yeah, we can solve any problem!’ What I’ve told my students when they’re trying to be creative, is that being brilliant is helpful, but not essential: what’s more important is tenacity -- that sheer force of will that doesn’t let you give up, and keeps you working until three or four in the morning. Together, optimism and tenacity give you good vision.”

NP: “Being 30 years old and having 95 employees was daunting, but it was a good opportunity to learn, learn, learn. There’s always this sort of golden thing that happens when you take what you’ve learned from failure -- whether it’s a single dish that didn’t work out, or on a large scale, like your business failing. But in both cases you have to say, ‘So, now what?’ There’s always a next opportunity there, just around the corner.”

5. Design thinkers prefer prototypes to theories.
Design thinkers are a thoughtful bunch: smart, literate and well-read. Yet they will always prefer trying something out to theorizing about it. Of the five common traits that came out in these interviews, this one is the most striking: whether it’s Czysz tinkering with the size of a gear, Pomeroy developing a new recipe through instinct, trial and error, or Gregory helping to cobble together a model of an artery probe with Legos and duct tape, the distance between a design thinker’s idea and a testable prototype is remarkably short.

KG: “Our military friends wanted something like Fix-a-Flat for wounds -- a can of foam that you could use to stop the bleeding in someone who’s been shot. People have been working on that in pigs, but it kills the pig every time. It stops the bleeding, because it also stops the blood supply. But I let my students give it a try, testing out some ideas using foam shaving cream. They all failed, but they kept pushing, and eventually one of them thought, ‘Foams don’t work, but Williams-Sonoma has these pop-up sponges that expand rapidly.’ So they chopped up some sponges, we injected them, and it stopped the bleeding instantly. It looks smart now, but we started with shaving cream and some sponges.”

NP: “It’s all fast, it’s experimentation, it’s prototyping. You’re working towards an end goal and you don’t know what the best approach is going to be. Recently I needed to get a lot of yield off some lamb and thought, ‘Okay, let’s clarify some butter and put the lamb in that.’ I had never done that before, or even heard of it. So I guess that’s like prototyping. It was so delicious that I thought, “Oh we could do this with pork, or...with anything!’”

MC: “I’ll give an idea to the engineers and they will start modeling while I sit with them. We get a few variations on there, minor ones. We rarely get to fully realize it, put it on the shelf and start a new product — the prototype is our finished product. We make the prototype, that’s what goes on the bike, and that’s what we race with. This is a gamble that only a start-up would take, whereas a more mature company wouldn’t -- which is why bigger companies often innovate less.”

Finding Design Thinkers
So how can companies find design thinkers? These insights make it clear that the typical filters of schooling, experience and recommendations aren’t a very reliable guide. The traits I have described are the product of both education and experience, but there is no single program of study or career track that reliably produces them. None could, after all, because a diverse background is one of the key indicators.

As a result, the first thing to look for is an unusual CV. An orderly career progression can produce an excellent employee, but probably not a design thinker. Look instead for shifts in task and education that seem odd, but make sense on deeper examination. The developer who gains great expertise in traditional web coding and then sidesteps to pursue a new technology is a good example. So is the engineer whose skill with structural analysis leads her to a side project with an artistic or entrepreneurial bent. In discussions and interviews, it’s important to determine the reasons for career shifts. Design thinkers take side-steps to find interesting challenges, even if it involves a reduction in status or pay.

During phone conversations and interviews, look beyond achievements and learn about motivations. Asking about a candidate’s favorite or most surprising project can yield tremendous insights. Responses should convey fascination with the process, respect for their team, and an embrace of challenges. Design thinkers constantly seek opportunities to learn, so look for inquisitive candidates, and interviews that ‘go away’, slipping from question-and-answer into conversations about process, goals and potential projects.

Where you look is just as important. Companies that are frustrated by applicants with conventional approaches may have better luck drawing from unexpected career paths -- different from the position being filled, but with related skill sets. Remember, a design thinker isn’t just another competent employee, but someone who challenges the way you do business.

One of the most productive places to seek out design thinkers is within your own organization. For every design thinker who is able to express her unique approach and foster innovation, there are dozens who never get the chance. Looking for these qualities within your own team and encouraging them is an outstanding way to build your innovation capacity. It also makes it easier to bring the right people on board. Foster the five traits above, and design thinkers might start seeking you out.

Sohrab Vossoughi is the founder and president of Ziba Design, based in Portland, Oregon.