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.
Comments
3 responses to “Designing Design Teams”
Many designers do this already – I consider it part of the job of consulting. Perhaps because I view design consulting more like management consulting than “design delivery,” I stay very close to my long term clients. I’ve done this since 2001 as a small research/design consulting firm, and have noticed that smaller consulting firms have always done this. Its the larger firms like IDEO that have to formalize a process for customer intimacy – but when you’re already close to your client, you nurture them in many ways outside of the contractual relationship.
A problem with larger design agencies is they cannot afford to seat their better designers or advisors with clients in a mentoring capacity, and their rate structure won’t easily allow them to give up the time. If we all did a better job of educating the client while working on projects, this would not seem a novel idea but par for the course. We also need to realize that better transition planning (the deliverables handoff from design to development) will reduce the need for mitigating turmoil in the client’s implementation of our design plans.
Great point. I agree, design firms already act as mentors or management consultants. I did this myself when working with my clients before graduate school. Education was a big component of what I provided. And I know many other smaller design firms that establish this kind of relationship with their clients. Still, many others do not handle education so well, or don’t even try.
But to clarify, what we were discussing was creating design teams within organizations as our main mission. We would not just educate or mentor clients as we worked with them to design a traditional product or service. Our service would be to help put together an internal design team that would sustain itself. We would then mentor that design team. However, they would be the ones providing design services to the organization.
As a possible strategy to transition to this from design traditional products and services, we considered allowing people to work on one of our teams for a project not related or in association with their company. So it would start off, perhaps, as education by doing alongside us. Then, as that program became a success, we might be able to transition to creating design teams within organizations instead of having individuals come to us.
This is all an academic exercise. But I still thought the idea was intriguing.
Hi Jamin,
Can I encourage your thinking by saying that it [creating design teams within organizations as our main mission] is not just “an academic exercise”. This is what 2nd Road does, and there are many stories we can tell you from the front line. We combine basic design training with a ‘do and learn’ approach on real organizational projects. In summary – the people love it, the management push against it. It’s where the rivers of Design and Culture hit head on – the rapids are rough but exciting…