 book review: change by design
Social Entrepreneurs Are at
the Forefront of the Green Business Revolution
By Andrea Bassett
In
Tim Brown’s fascinating new book, Change by Design: How Design
Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, he
promotes the application of design thinking in all facets of business
and life. This approach spurs innovation and promotes creativity in
problem-solving that provides new and lasting solutions to
operational, financial, and social problems. To Brown, design thinking
moves people from creating products to analyzing relationships between
people and products. Design thinking pushes its practitioners to use
interdisciplinary approaches to tackle difficult problems, seeking
solutions by evaluating products or processes through a humanistic lens.
He cites countless examples—from historic innovations and his work with IDEO—to support his overall objective of encouraging all readers to
become design thinkers in their respective fields.
Brown begins his discussion of innovation through design thinking by
explaining that “design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory
process,” which must focus on human experience rather than function.
People must work through what he calls the continuum of innovation, a
non-linear process involving inspiration, ideation, and implementation.
Brown explains that the emphasis must be on fundamental human needs—as
distinct from fleeting or artificially manipulated desires—to drive
design thinking to depart from the status quo.
To
execute this process, Brown encourages group collaboration within
organizations, inviting CEOs to pull individuals from accounting,
marketing, and human resources to work as a team to solve a problem. He
recommends that the project team diverge to create a range of choices,
then converge to agree upon which of those choices to pursue. He
strongly encourages using creative techniques such as storyboarding,
building models with scraps or Legos, and acting out skits to express
and exchange ideas. Rapid prototyping is essential at IDEO, where they
say, “Fail early to succeed sooner.”
Perhaps the most important best practice Brown offers for organizational
leaders to sustain innovation is to create a culture of innovation. He
argues that to be creative, a place does not have to look like Google or
Pixar: “What is a prerequisite is an environment—social, but also
spatial—in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and
explore the full range of their faculties.”
Brown supports this comment with examples:
-
nurses collaborating at Kaiser
Permanente to improve patient care
-
coworkers at Mattel creating new
product designs for children, and
-
women employees working together at
Best Buy to better serve female customers.
Change by Design offers numerous other intriguing case studies to
prove that important and necessary innovation occurs in a creative and
collaborative environment.
While Brown discusses innovation with products and services in the
for-profit sector for most of his book, he also applies the principles
of design thinking to the social sector. Like Heather Peeler in the
March 2010 article in Community Wealth Vanguard,
“Learning to Build Your Organization’s DNA,”
Brown stresses the necessity of deeply-rooted innovation to achieve
impact: “Innovation needs to be coded into the DNA of a company if it is
to have large-scale, long-term impact.”
He
specifically cites IDEO’s work with the Acumen Fund as an exciting
collaboration that blends business goals with philanthropic objectives,
and also explores the potential impact design thinking might have on
childhood obesity, crime rates, and education. Initiatives solving these
problems should not interrupt careers, but instead will change their
course to be able to serve those in need.
Change by Design concludes with this hopeful observation: “Today we
have an opportunity to . . . unleash the power of design thinking as a
means of exploring new possibilities, creating new choices, and bringing
new solutions to the world.” As we apply principles of design thinking
in our organizations, we will be able to innovate effectively and
thereby tremendously increase our social impact.
Andrea Bassett
is a team member at Community Wealth Ventures.
You can reach
her at
abassett@communitywealth.com.
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