Change by Design Read online

  Just as products become more like services, services are becoming more like experiences. Underlying this profound and inevitable evolution is an understanding of the importance of investing in systematic, design-based innovation that engages people—both employees and customers—at the deepest level. Eventually it will be as natural to see innovation labs in service-sector companies as it is to see research and development facilities in manufacturing companies.

  systems at scale and why we should act more like honeybees

  Every design challenge at IDEO begins with a “How Might We?” Navigating between the overly general and the too specific, we ask ourselves, “HMW simplify the interface on an emergency heart defibrillator? HMW encourage healthy snacking among preteens? HMW promote the revival of a historic jazz district in Kansas City?” “How might we improve the human condition?” is too big a problem to get our arms around. “How might we adjust the tension in a disk-drive eject mechanism?” is probably too small.

  Here is a good one: how might we improve the airport-security experience? Airport security is one of the challenges that every design thinker must have thought about a hundred times since September 11, 2001—I certainly do every time I struggle to take my shoes off and put them onto the conveyor belt without holding up traffic, share the indignity of my Indian traveling companion as he pretends to ignore furtive glances in his direction, or watch somebody’s forgetful grandmother surrender her shampoo bottle to an apologetic officer. It is hard for me as a designer not to think about how we might better meet our legitimate need for security in the post-9/11 world. As both a citizen and a designer, I was thrilled when the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) came and asked us that very question.

  Our work with the TSA proved to be among the most challenging assignments in IDEO’s thirty-year history. It illustrates how design thinking has to move into the hands of all participants if we are to improve the performance of our large-scale systems.

  Reconfiguring the space and flow of the checkpoint will certainly make for an easier traveling experience by giving passengers more time to organize themselves and providing a better informational context for what is going on. The space is just the physical dimension of a larger systemic problem, however. The key idea was to move upstream and rethink the manner in which passenger and Transportation Security Officer (TSO) participate in a common experience.

  TSA was attempting to redirect its focus from the detection of objects to the detection of hostile intent: a pair of sharp manicure scissors in a lady’s purse poses little threat, whereas an empty soft drink can—as a TSA official demonstrated, to the consternation of one of our designers—can be made into a lethal weapon. A set of top-down regulations issued from Washington was not enough to bring this about, however. To implement the new security strategy, a comprehensive new design strategy seemed essential.

  The guiding principle for any systemwide project on this scale is to ensure that the objectives of different participants are aligned. In the case of airport security, this insight meant recognizing that security personnel and the traveling public are not adversaries but partners, whose respective goals—to spot likely terrorists and to get to their departure gates quickly and with minimum stress—are complementary. Taking the stress out of the normal passenger experience makes it easier to spot abnormal behaviors of those who might do us harm (if everyone in the queue is nervous and agitated, the malefactor with a bomb in his shoe will blend right in). This became the framework within which we pressed forward with concrete proposals for how we might streamline processes and modify environments.

  In the observation phase of our research we saw how passengers, confronted with opaque procedural rules, become anxious, aggressive, and uncooperative. TSOs, for their part, responded by retreating into scripted roles that made them appear intimidating, aloof, and unsympathetic. A vicious circle of inefficiency and unpleasantness is the result, and to the extent that an adversarial climate creates unnecessary distractions, it actually impedes the common goal of safe travel. Thus the designer’s question—“How might we reconfigure the security checkpoint?”—evolved into the design thinker’s question “How might we instill a feeling of empathy in participants on both sides of the X-ray machine?” Our physical design solutions became tactics in the service of a broader, human-centered strategy.

  This led us in two parallel directions. First, we created a program of environmental and informational design elements designed to smooth the transition from lobby to final checkpoint and brought to life in a working prototype in Baltimore Washington International Airport. The physical layout and information displays were designed to explain as much as possible about what to expect. If passengers understand what is being asked of them and why, they are more likely to be tolerant of procedures that might otherwise seem pointless and arbitrary. At the same time, however, we helped create for TSA officers a training program designed to give them authority to engage the system in a new way. It encourages a broadening out from rote-based procedures to a more flexible yet rigorous reliance on critical thinking. The new training includes an emphasis on understanding behavior, people, and security measures, while instilling confidence among colleagues and passengers.

  Much has been written about complex nonhierarchical systems in which the behavior of the system is the result not of centralized command and control but of a set of individual behaviors that, when repeated thousands of times, achieve predictable results. Anthills and beehives are good examples, but when it comes to colonies of humans, we have to reckon with the additional factors of individual intelligence and free will (often to the despair of designers, police officers, and high school teachers). The implication is that we must think differently. Instead of an inflexible, hierarchical process that is designed once and executed many times, we must imagine how we might create highly flexible, constantly evolving systems in which each exchange between participants is an opportunity for empathy, insight, innovation, and implementation. Every interaction is a small opportunity to make that exchange more valuable to and meaningful for all participants.

  Colonies of bees, ants, and humans must adapt and evolve if they are to be successful, and one way to achieve this is to empower individuals with some degree of control over the end result. In the case of TSA, this proved to be a powerful argument for the design thinker’s gambit of handing off the tools of design to the people who will ultimately be responsible for implementing them.

  working both sides of the counter

  One does not have to grapple with the extraordinary challenges of asymmetrical warfare, nonstate actors, and terrorism to see value in the empathic approach of the design thinker. In 2004 Julie Gilbert, the vice president of customer centricity at Best Buy, created the Women’s Leadership Forum, known as WOLF. Each “WOLF Pack” consists of twenty-five women and two men who come together from all parts of the organization to focus on challenges arising in a retail industry built by men and for men but in which 45 percent of all purchases are made by women. As a result of their efforts—which have involved more than 20,000 customers and employees—there has been an increase in female job applicants of 37% and a nearly 6% decrease in female employee turnover. Women—again, on both sides of the counter—have become active coparticipants in transforming Best Buy as a place to shop and to work. Initiatives include widening aisles so that baby strollers can fit down them, whittling the stacks of equipment down to make the environment less intimidating, and displaying wide-screen TVs and surround-sound systems in living room mock-ups so that shoppers can see what the products will look like in their home. Instead of intimidating customers with performance features, staff is now trained to talk to them about their lifestyles and what they want the technology to do for them.

  Toyota’s total immersion training program demonstrates the same commitment to softening the distinctions—between management and employees, between customer and staff. Toyota is, in effect, training its leaders to listen and its empl
oyees to speak up, to the advantage of both. The management consultant Steven J. Spear has observed how a new Toyota plant manager experiences his first few weeks on the job by working directly on the manufacturing line. The American manager, who could not speak Japanese, spent a week working alongside a Japanese production worker with no English; using a common language of observation, prototyping, and role playing, they identified solutions to more than thirty-five production problems, ranging from reducing the distance a worker had to walk to check a part by 50 percent to improving the ergonomics of a tool change, and fixed them on the spot. By redefining the role of leaders and employees, Toyota promotes a level of collaboration unimaginable in most Western-run industrial companies. Spear identifies four principles fundamental to Toyota’s success with total immersion training: “There’s no substitute for direct observation” “Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments” “Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible” “Managers should coach, not fix.” Observation? Prototyping? Experiment? Throw in a brainstorming session or two, and you have a pretty accurate description of a culture in which design thinking has moved out of the studio and into the boardroom and the factory floor.

  Sometimes, as with Toyota, the principles of design thinking are formulated explicitly. In other instances it takes the form of a more generalized commitment to the alignment of system and participants. In January 2000, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger began to create a free, online encyclopedia with content supplied by volunteers. Their initial approach was quite conventional: accredited experts would submit articles for peer review. After nine months this careful process had generated exactly twelve articles.

  By chance the team had learned about wiki software, a type of collaborative, open-source Web site launched by the programmer Ward Cunningham about five years earlier that allows anyone to modify its content without consulting some centralized authority. Wales had the idea to use this new tool to speed up the process of getting articles for the encyclopedia. Wikipedia was launched in January 2001, inviting users to submit articles directly. Within a month they had one thousand articles. By September, ten thousand. Wikipedia is today by far the largest publication on the Net, providing references for almost every high school paper and business book in existence (including this one). By positioning Wikipedia as a nonprofit foundation rather than a business, Jimmy Wales held to his core principle that unpaid contributors are crucial to the enterprise. Its entries are created by people who care about the content, rather than by paid professionals, which gives Wikipedia its credibility, controls its quality, and ensures its relevance. Wikipedia is a testament to the power of participation in a system whose participants are aligned in their objectives.

  It is instructive to compare the successes of Wikipedia, Toyota, and Best Buy with some of the broken systems we encounter in our everyday lives. The ordeal of renewing a driving license, negotiating with a health insurance provider, or voting in an election suggests that too many of our large-scale systems fail to deliver a respectful, efficient, participatory experience. We might resign ourselves to the ponderous workings of government bureaucracies, but we should not forgive the companies we patronize for their decided lack of imagination.

  Every media company that resists the digitization of content, every mobile service provider that forces us to buy services from a single source, every bank that exacts outrageous fees opens up opportunities for more agile and imaginative competitors. The open-source platform Android, now owned by Google, is a good example of a disruptive innovation that is poised to dislodge more established mobile phone providers. Thousands of developers are already working on Android applications, far outstripping the capabilities of Google’s in-house development teams, and the first G-phones operating the Android operating system are appearing on the market. Demand is outstripping supply. In banking, another industry whose titans are falling from power, online social lending institutions such as Zopa, are taking a new approach. Zopa’s direct, peer-to-peer model sidesteps the banks and helps potential borrowers and lenders find a “zone of possible agreement” between them. Since its founding in 2005, Zopa has spread from its base in Britain to the United States, Italy, and Japan and has achieved remarkably low default rates.

  The idea of participation is attractive but not sufficient. No one wants to use a poorly designed mobile application or deposit a paycheck in an insecure bank, no matter how “participatory” it may feel. These new kinds of systems must also deliver high-quality performance that is at least as good as that of companies that rely on a top-down approach. Android applications will have to be as engaging and intuitive as those from Apple and Nokia, or they will remain the preserve of open-source techno-geeks, and Zopa’s customers must be assured that their money is safe. This confidence does not come from a network administrator. If open, flexible, large-scale systems are to realize their enormous promise, their developers must have the courage to open them up to the people who will use them. Design is about delivering a satisfying experience. Design thinking is about creating a multipolar experience in which everyone has the opportunity to participate in the conversation.

  the future of companies, economies, and Planet Earth

  What all of these themes and examples have in common is direct engagement with people—whether they happen to be customers, clients, members of an audience, or solitary viewers of a Web site. The widespread shift, even among traditional manufacturing companies, from a “product” orientation to a “service” orientation is key to scaling up the tools of the design thinker to grapple with complex systems on the order of airport security. It is the very essence of open-source, social networking and Web 2.0.

  Having looked at systems designed to move travelers through airports, products through markets, and electrons through the encyclopedic virtual world of the Internet, we can now turn to the biggest system of them all: the fragile, beautiful, delicately balanced life-support system that Buckminster Fuller called “Spaceship Earth.” If a task ever required the combination of analytic and synthetic practices, divergent and convergent thought, the designer’s mastery of technology and insight into human behavior, preserving the health of our planet would be it. Holding the economic sustainability of society and the biological sustainability of the planet in balance requires the most “opposable” of minds.

  As a designer, I am proud that we have helped create better products that meet people’s needs and help humanize the technology they rely on. We have better buildings that allow us to live and work more comfortably. We have innovative media that inform and entertain us and allow us to communicate with one another in undreamed-of ways. But we also have a Pandora’s box of unanticipated problems that may have already contributed to long-term damage to our culture, our economy, and our environment.

  Some years ago a talented team at IDEO worked with Oral-B to design a better children’s toothbrush. The team began with an intensive research phase, going into the field to watch kids of all ages clean their teeth—or at least try to. One reason why children struggle to keep their teeth healthy is that brushing teeth is not an activity that most kids would choose to do. It hurts. It’s not fun. It tastes funny. Another is that young children do not have the manual dexterity to hold a toothbrush. Most children’s toothbrushes were scaled-down versions of those designed for adults (like the Dutch Masters of the seventeenth century, industrial designers of the twentieth century simply treated children as miniature adults). The solution led to the first toothbrushes with the squishy “comolded” rubber handles that are now the norm for all toothbrushes, for both children and adults. The team also gave the Oral-B brushes bright colors, bold textures, and forms evoking turtles and dinosaurs. The new toothbrushes were a huge hit.

  Oral-B had a successful product, and lots of kids had healthier teeth. But this is just the “front end” of the story. Just six months after its launch, the lead designer in this group was walking along an isolated beach in Baja California and no
ticed a colorful blue object lying just out of reach of the surf. It was not a turtle. One of our ergonomically designed, dentist-approved, commercially successful Oral-B toothbrushes had washed up on shore. With the exception of some tiny barnacles that indicated that it had been in the water for some time, the toothbrush looked more or less the same as it had on the day someone had thrown it away. The circle closed. One of our signature products had found its final resting place on a pristine beach in Mexico.

  Designers can’t prevent people from doing what they want to with products they own, but that does not excuse them from ignoring the larger system. Often, in our enthusiasm for solving the problem in front of us, we fail to see the problems that we create. Designers, and people who aspire to think like designers, are in a position to make important decisions about what resources society uses and where they end up.