jamin.org

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?

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.