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I’ve heard “fourth order design” thrown around a lot lately. The more I hear it, the more I would rather hear what the the person is really talking about. It makes me wonder whether the term helps clarify anything or actually muddies design. Can we not call design “design”?

To a degree, I think that’s what the Down with Innovation article was saying:

“Design is now so important, it seems, that designers can no longer be trusted with it, and to make it absolutely clear that control has moved into someone else’s hands, design needs to be given a fancy new name. Call it design thinking. Call it innovation.”

Is fourth order design along these lines? Perhaps not now, but it has potential. I wonder if it would be useful if it was a widely used term, or if it would be as meaningful as innovation.

Speaking of which, this wonderfully illustrated piece coming out of Adaptive Path’s recent MX conference contains the “I” word. Reading it, I wondered why innovation was mentioned at all. Could we not replace “innovation” with “design”? Would it make more sense?

I’m a bit against what I’m about to do, but let’s compare the definitions of innovate and design. Let’s start with innovate, which in Merriam-Webster only has one useful definition.

innovate (transitive verb) to introduce as or as if new

Design, on the other hand, is much richer, with lots of definitions. For brevity, I’ll only pull the first.

design (transitive verb) to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan

Given these two definitions, innovate does not work in the above piece: “Why innovate? To create better solutions, organizations, and world.” Introducing something new is no guarantee of better. This is the problem with innovation as a goal. If I were betting on better solutions, organizations, and world, I would put my money on design.

Personally, I would like to see designers call design by its name. That goes for business folks as well. Calling design something else so that it’s not scary will not help the discipline. Fourth order design, at least, contains the word design.

A concern I have for fourth order design is that while it may encapsulate some ideas about (new?) ways to think about design,  it may also splinter design by alluding to a hierarchy. Fourth is better than first, second, and third, assuming higher is better. Though I could see businesses feeling more comfortable dealing with design that is perceived to be on a higher level.

We have a hard enough time being on the same page when talking about design. Throwing around fourth order design does not make it any more clear. To make my point, I purposely haven’t defined fourth order design in this post.

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?

As an unexpected twist to the end of the semester, for my Design, Management, and Organizational Change class with Richard Buchanan, we were asked to design our ideal design consulting company. The class was split into three groups that are to approach the question from three different perspectives: people, products and services (forms), and brand, vision, and values. I’m in the people group.

We were asked if there is a new role for design that we could tap into. Are there new forms or places for design? And although not explicitly stated, where are there opportunities for what Buchanan calls fourth order design, or systemic integration? What problems would we want to address? Would we focus on the internal or external issues of organizations? What kinds of clients would be like? How does the vision affect the firm? What might the implementation of the vision be?

To this end we mapped the competitive landscape of design and business consulting firms. We detailed the problems design companies face moving into newer territory. And we debated endlessly on what it is we would like to do and the problems we would like to solve with design. Albeit, much of our discussions remain somewhat vague. And we are having a difficult time coming to consensus, or barring that, direction.

As it stands, we have not come up with anything too radical. Our ideas are already in the minds of many designers and consulting firms. So our dilemma and deliverable may be to articulate a means to position a design firm in a new space and the value of design in that area.

Will we be able to do that better than an existing firm looking to do the same thing? Or will this will merely turn out to be an academic exercise? In five weeks, I’ll let you know.