Redesigning Business with The Economist and the Design Council

 

Redesigning Business Summit

The Big Rethink

11th - 12th March 2010
Kings Place, London

Redesigning Business Summit: The Big Rethink

'Sample the fresh thinking that business needs to seize opportunities in a volatile world.'

 

On Thursday 11th and Friday 12th March, Economist Conferences, in partnership with the Design Council, hosted a two-day summit to discuss the value of 'design thinking' for business.

 

The hypothesis is that problem-solving tools which are more typically applied to straightforward design questions might be useful in a business context, especially where innovative thinking is required. New approaches to business strategy are in demand now more than ever when businesses are facing radical challenges from multiple sides – changing consumer landscapes, the impact of the internet, a recent lack of access to capital, strengthening emerging markets, increasingly demanding environmental and sustainability requirements.


That design techniques might be useful in this context isn’t a far-fetched proposition. The basis of designing, as Richard Seymour says, should be observation and ‘anthropology’ (more on Richard’s presentation to the summit here), and evidently an understanding of the conusmer is crucial in delivering value in business.

Some of the well-established approaches to understanding , managing and developing organizations that emerged through the 20th century are derived from traditional engineering concepts. For example, organisation design principles have been poached from ‘systems thinking’ (taking as a starting point the organisation as a system and subsystems) and some organisation development practices that have proved extremely popular are business re-engineering, or process re-engineering (taking a machine analogy or a process view – where the machine transforms inputs through processes into outputs).
 
It is not a huge conceptual leap from engineering thinking to design thinking. The theory has been around for while, developed significantly by innovation consultancy Ideo, whose CEO Tim Brown believes designers should be devoting their skills to more than just designing kettles. (Watch Tim Brown’s TED talk here).

But it is controversial, even among some designers, who would suggest that a) designers should stick to what they know rather than interfering with sectors for which they don’t have the requisite body of knowledge; and b) it’s an insult to design professionals to suggest that their hard-earned expertise can be substituted with a few teachable management tools.


In spite of these misgivings it is gaining recognition – witness The Economist devoting two days to discussing it – partly because, as conference host and Economist correspondent Vijay Vaitheeswaran suggested, people are ‘casting about for some fresh ideas’. It is also the basis of the Design Council’s activities, programmes that help both business and the public sector to rethink the way they work using experienced design professionals as mentors in the change process.

However it suffers for still being an unfortunately woolly concept. At no point during the conference did anyone offer a definitive definition of ‘design thinking’. This ambiguity leads to an inability to delineate what is and is not a design problem. So everything, by default, becomes a potential design problem. The bounds of what designers can tackle are now seemingly endless, which is perhaps not so silly as it sounds. At some point though it is worth mentioning that a rubbish designer will be no more help than any other rubbish consultant. 

 
The format of the conference was a series of mini-presentations and case studies grouped under thematic headings, such as ‘How the world is changing, and the implications for business’, ‘Fresh thinking about business models’, ‘Four visions of the world tomorrow, and how to build your company around them’.

There was plenty of evidence and advice about innovative thinking, but disappointingly the word 'design' didn’t actually feature all that often. And although it kept the pace of the day going, the snappy ten-minute-pitch format didn’t work for all the speakers. Personally I would have liked to listen to Will Hutton on ‘identifying the new value drivers in business’, for example, for much longer. However, it was a highly stimulating couple of days, with plenty of interesting examples of businesses new and established that are demolishing and reinventing their strategies - valuable learning in itself.
 
There is a more complete series of articles about the conference, blogged live from Kings Place, on the Core 77 website here.
 
The full programme for the conference is here, with photos here
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