300.000.000 USD from a name
The brilliance behind Design Thinking
"Design Thinking" is a polarising term.
Some love it, some despise it.
But that is not what's interesting about it.
Design Thinking is exhibit number one that workshops help sell complex expertise.
If you sell complex expertise, this will probably interest you.
It's a story of specialists developing new ways of working, remixing existing knowledge, knowing their customers like no one else and packaging it like maestros.
Strap up, we are going back in time.
Three Hundred Million Dollars worth of Design Services
It's impossible to talk about Design Thinking without mentioning IDEO, the legendary Design Firm.
IDEO was born in Palo Alto from a merging of multiple Design businesses that had been working at the intersection of Technology (again, Palo Alto) and Design since the late 60's.
What they did was weird, creative, smart and great at bridging the gap between the Design world and the Business world.
They had an approach that worked, but it was a bit of a complex thing, not super easy to explain.
And being hard to explain made it harder to sell.
Fun Fact:
Every expert I interview says that explaining what they do is a major pain point.
If client's struggle to get it, experts struggle to get paid for it.
At IDEO, in the 70's and 80's they were using different tools and methods, from a bunch of different disciplines. There was no overarching name for that. Human-Centered Design was the closest thing to that but the name was a mouthful.
So they created a name for it.
Ideo did not invent Design Thinking, the approach.
But they coined "Design Thinking", the name.
In doing that, they took all those whimsical things they did and made it possible to…
talk about,
ask about,
sell
and buy it.
A former employee told Fast Company that in 2019, IDEO had revenues of 300.000.000. Given how central Design Thinking is to IDEO's offerings, it's fair to say that at least good chunk of that can be directly attributed to Design Thinking.1
Being legible is better than being accurate
When the IDEO folk began codifying what they were doing into a recognizable set of practices, they followed their own advice: they focused on the user.
The user of Design Thinking is not a Designer.
They are probably a manager that needs to operate in an industry that is not known for creativity and innovation.
This user understands the power of creative, multidisciplinary, human-centered, problem-solving.
But this user also needs something they can sell to their boss. 2
Decision makers prefer certainty
The genius of "Design Thinking” is in creating a picture of a process that has the appropriate level of detail for its target market. No more, no less.
It needs to be detailed enough that it feels right to an outsider, but cannot be so rigorous that it alienates its non-expert audience.
Experts tend to struggle with this. Focus on the specifics of their craft to the point of losing the interest of customers.
There's a lot of criticism around Design Thinking as a method.3
I agree with pretty much all of it.
But you have to respect the fact that "Design Thinking", as a legible idea, worked really well for IDEO.
What about workshops?
Workshops are perhaps the most identifiable aspect of Design Thinking.
If you do an Image Search on Design Thinking, you will find two sorts of pictures:
Process infographics that tell you about it's 5 stages
Photographs of groups of people moving posts around whiteboards
Workshops, from a media standpoint (ask anyone that works in internal communications at some company) are golden: They show groups of people, often in a great mood, thinking about things, in a way that said thinking becomes visible (post-its, visual frameworks, moodboards, etc).
This creates something that can be shared, distributed. Workshops have memetic power.
In the context of Design Thinking, workshops serve two purposes:
They are actually useful in helping groups of people to work together and solve complex problems. By incorporating tools and approaches that guide focused collaboration of groups of people, they are indeed very powerful.
but also…They create a visual clue of what the client will buy (they buy the meeting and they buy the outcomes of the meeting 4)
Show, don't tell
Explaining what we do is getting harder and harder.
Complexity increases and professions become extremely niche, hard to relate to.
If you do valuable work, at the fringes of what is common knowledge, you are very used to this.
Workshops allow you to escape the Explanation Trap and show your expertise, without having to tell people about it.
You don't have to trust me on this, just see how IDEO did it.
What I'm learning about you
I'm interviewing a few of you and it's absolutely fascinating.
This is a sneak peak of some of your most pressing issues.
I'm developing my workshop offer to address all of them.
Clients don't immediately understand what you do.
But they get it once they see you do the work.Client's don't know that they need your services.
It often feels that they lucked into you.For fear of promising a concrete result you adapting your process for each customer.
Customization takes a lot of time, but you treat it as insurance against dissatisfied clients.
If you're an agency or consulting firm aiming to productize and create your first workshop formats, I'm creating something for you.
I've been gathering feedback on it and improving it non-stop.
If you want to have a workshop format ready before November starts, hit me up
Full Disclosure: this was said in the context of how far has IDEO fallen from it's heyday. If you're curious to read more, ask in the comments and I'll drop the link there.
This boss, almost without fail, became a boss because he did good work, predictably and without excessive risk-taking. Selling creative problem-solving to this guy is not easy.
As a method, it oversimplifies things that do not fit in a box. It professes that everybody can do it (disregarding aspects like skill, personality or experience level). It sanitizes the messy aspects of iterative, multidisciplinary approaches. It creates a false illusion that all problems can be solved using a similar strategy.
The results can be visual frameworks or worksheets, for instance. These are very good for distribution.