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Last week, Tony Golsby-Smith, CEO of 2nd Road, the Sydney-based consulting company that focuses on shaping large-scale change, visited Richard Buchanan’s Design, Management, and Organizational Change class. Over the course of three hours, he shared his perspective on design and its role within 2nd Road. What follows are notes and thoughts from that conversation.

Tony is an interesting character. He can easily reach the top of any white board and gives thoughtful responses to the questions put to him. He believes that 2nd Road is fundamentally challenging the world view of organizations. “I’m driven by a revolution in organization fabric,” he says. Organizations have been built for stability and not innovation. They kill innovation. His firm helps organizations build what they call innovation capability.

Essentially, his firm seems to be an alternative to industrial age management thinking. And while design thinking is part of their process and information design is a core skill within the firm, they prefer to call themselves management consultants and work with upper management to create vision and strategy, build skills for new thinking, change systems, and change organizational culture. They are already at the table where designers sometimes desire to be. I’m a bit unclear how 2nd Road got there, but it seems like that’s where they started, or at least very near there. Tony argued that if you start in the marketing and consumer space, it’s harder to move up because you’ve been put into a box.

I wonder if designers in the consumer space really want to be at the table, or at the table in the same way in which 2nd Road participates. Transforming organizations seems like an entirely different wicked monster to deal with. But it certainly does pay well. While I won’t divulge the numbers, a three-day Strategic Conversation costs their clients more than you make in a year. Interestingly, I had a conversation with a San Francisco design consultancy that seemed to suggest their consulting workshops with management did not yield much income.

If I had to pull a definition of design from the way he talked about it, I’d say it is upfront conceptual thinking. “Tomorrow doesn’t exist,” he says, “You can’t analyze it.” Through rhetoric, 2nd Road invents tomorrow through dialogue, creating worlds through words (or visualizations). It seems that conversation plays a large role in their offerings. As much as possible, they want the client to own the process.

In terms of where they operate, Tony says they work in third and fourth order design. If you’ve never taken a class with Richard Buchanan, you likely don’t know what that means, which makes me wonder if it’s useful to describe design in this way. Simply, it means they are using design for services, environments, systems, and the interconnectedness of systems as opposed to design that is concerned with communication and forms. They work on highly complex and highly ambiguous problems that take place over the course of years rather than days, weeks, or months.

I’m curious about how design works in this arena, which is why I am talking to 2nd Road about opportunities to work with them. I’m curious about how this type of firm is different from design consultancies like IDEO, Frog, and Adaptive Path. I’m also curious how similar or dissimilar they are to the big management consulting companies or an innovation strategy firm, like Doblin. Good questions to ask in the next round of talks, I suppose.

Overall, Tony’s visit makes concrete some of the more abstract ideas about the role of design in organizational change that we have been discussing throughout the semester. But it’s noteworthy that they don’t call themselves a design firm. I wonder what that means for the discipline. Is design something that business consultants can consume and make their own, or can it stand on its own, and as Dan Saffer recently said, smash the table altogether?

Richard Buchanan presented the “Core Competencies of Design” in class this week, offering a slightly different version of the list of why designers are valued. I’m not sure if this is just a further iteration or different due to the shift in focus from designers to design itself. The language is fairly similar, though notably different in a few areas. I’ve included both for comparison.

Core Competencies of Design

• Vision: see the whole
• Facilitation: work across disciplines
  • Why? Something to do with being able to see the whole. To see the way things fit together
• Visualization: polysensorial awareness
  • Many senses: aural, touch, smell, as a way of grasping the situation we are in
• Prototyping: rapid experimentation
  • This is close to how we work. It’s not a comfortable way of working for most people.
  • Opposite to: if you don’t do it the right the first time, you fail. Philosophic difference.
• Human-centered focus: focus on people and their goals (individuals and organizations)
  • Look a people as individuals and as groups. Also in context of an organization, because humans work in teams or groups

Why Designers Are Valued

• Whole/part: designers look at the whole in relation to the parts; they see the big picture
• Bring to life/creativity: designers have a passion for making things
• Comfortable with ambiguity: openendedness; not prejudging the solution; take chances, take risks; try multiple solutions
• Polysensorial aesthetics: an aesthetic of many senses; this is about the actual making: prototyping; drawing; visualizing
• Emotion/empathy: emotion is a way to engage with the world; passion; designers care about people

Also, Buchanan said the core competencies list will be part of an upcoming publication, which I think is not his own.

In continuation of our project to design the next design firm, we were attempting to articulate our personal visions for the future of what design might be when we stumbled upon three perspectives for trying to understand why we design. We separated these into design to advance the discipline of design, design to benefit organizations, and design to benefit individuals. These are interrelated, but have distinctions, I believe. We realized that a debate about these perspectives might last a few days, so we cut it short and moved on. However, I’d like to note the beginning of the discussion and throw out some further thoughts.

Design to advance the discipline is interested in establishing design as a more widely recognized approach to solving certain (wicked) problems. While it was noted in our meeting that this view has the potential for getting up its own ass and is largely academic, given the characteristic humility of design, perhaps not. A byproduct of advancing a discipline that is concerned with moving from the current state to the preferred state by human-centered means is that individuals and organizations would inherently benefit.

We didn’t really talk about what the perspective of designing for organizations and individuals might be. But I’ll take a stab at it. Designing for organizations focuses on the success of the organization as a whole and is concerned with the survival of said organization. Design is an approach to accomplish this end, but again the focus is the organization. Individuals may benefit from this endeavor, though they are not the focus. The discipline of design may benefit, but it is not the focus. Designing for individuals concerns itself with the individual first. The goal is to help people and design is a means to do this. Organizations may benefit, but that is not the goal. Again, the discipline may benefit, but that is not the purpose.

The distinction I see between the three is in the end purpose. There are other ways to help organizations and individuals other than design. If the focus of ones designing is to benefit those two, I view that as different from endeavoring to promote the discipline of design because it will inherently benefit those two. Perhaps this is too subtle a distinction, or completely silly to debate. Or maybe there’s something interesting there.

As our efforts to consider how current design firms might transition to new areas for design, our team talked about designing design teams as a possible strategy to advance the influence and understanding of design. The idea is that as a design consulting firm, we would create design teams within organizations that could sustain themselves and then create other design teams within the organization if or as needed.

But obviously, it would be difficult for a current design firm to make this transition. We discussed initially inviting people to work with us during a design engagement, to be part of a design team for a real project to gain design experience and learn methods and tools. These people would then go back to their organizations with their new appreciation of design as advocates for design and for our firm. With word-of-mouth marketing, we would seek to shift the business from taking individuals into our firm to embedding ourselves into client organizations while we help build internal design teams. This is similar to what IDEO did for SAP a few years ago when they created the Design Services Team.

Just a few days ago, Henning Fischer of Adaptive Path interviewed Peter Coughlan, Partner and Transformation Practice Lead at IDEO. The following snippet of conversation addresses a potential problem are nascent plan would face.

Fischer: The challenge we are most often faced with happens when the engagement ends and the client team struggles. How do we avoid situations like that?

Coughlan: Well, the obvious answer to that is to anticipate the client team struggles, and design the program in anticipation of that. We started down this path by offering clients some “telephone consulting” or follow-up visits to hold their feet to the fire — that’s evolved into a more formal process in which we help them prototype the infrastructure they’ll need to implement while we’re still actively engaged. We’re also exploring new models including “externships” (where an IDEO person goes to live with a client to keep things moving along), as well IDEO alumni who can embed themselves in our client organizations after we’ve completed our programs.

I view this as design mentoring. Naturally, client teams or even new design teams, as my team is considering, will not have the expertise and experience of design firms whose mission is to be leaders in the field. But as Coughlan points out in the interview, solutions are more likely to be implemented if developed by the client and not the design firm. The role of the design firm thus becomes to show clients the way rather than to do the work.

Coughlan: I would say that the most important shift in the design profession will be for designers to get comfortable with the notion that it’s more important for a client to have a great idea than for the designer to have the idea. If the client organization has played a role in coming up with the idea, it’s way more likely to see the light of day.

Designing design teams could be an extension to this shift.

For the Color and Communication class I’m taking this semester with Kristin Hughes and Mark Mentzer, we were asked to create a mask out of recycled plastic. The project was inspired by the practice of creating toys from plastic bottles and objects that Kristin saw during a trip to South Africa.

We were then asked to create a poster for Earth Day using the mask, which was a bit odd, especially since we did not know this when creating our masks. Our local Whole Foods agreed to display the photos and collect votes from customers on the best one.

I used Ten Personal Steps from newdream.org as the content for my poster. I combined this with photographs of my mask in a composition that I think is interesting, but requires a bit of interpretation from the audience. The poster was designed to be 23″ x 30″, but was reduced significantly to fit in Whole Foods’ window. This makes the text difficult to read.

In addition to the poster, our original plastic masks are hanging in the front window as well. It’s both odd and very cool to see my work where I shop for groceries.

The poster that gets the most votes will be reprinted in mass by Whole Foods. I’m not sure what the distribution will be. But I do not foresee mine winning anyway. Still, you never know.