home | consulting | documents | contact | blog

 

…of metrics for design and innovation. A fool's errand.

January 2007

“The purpose of business is to create a customer.”
            ~ Peter Drucker

A business invests in only two things, marketing and innovation. Every other expenditure is a cost – the price of being in business. Marketing and innovation are the two areas where a business has an opportunity to reap extraordinary rate of return. Metrics are absolutely necessary and typically well established for costs such as accounting, finance, operations, customer service and manufacturing. But metrics, as we know of them now, have no place in measuring the success of design and innovation.

Bill Breen’s recent column[1] in the February issue of Fast Company discusses the thinking behind Chuck Jones’ efforts to install a metric system to gauge the success of innovation at Whirlpool. I suppose it varies from company to company, but I think the notion of metrics specific to innovation is a fool’s errand. It represents the business world’s efforts to conform design thinking to the ideals of command and control management and the language of business. The true measure of innovation is success in the marketplace. Granted, there are a lot of steps along a process that can sour a potentially stellar product, and metrics are perfectly appropriate for many of those steps.

Part of the problem with simple metrics is with the nature of people. People find ways to work the system, locate loopholes and otherwise manipulate any system. We all know this as we have seen it for ourselves. Of primary concern is that if metrics are put in place for the design process, those metrics will, in time, threaten our methodologies and create a risk adverse culture. At that point the metrics themselves can become a cancer. Exposing the system to complacency and even corrupt manipulation as evidence by the multitudes of corporate scandals in the news. Nearly all of these are stories tell of individuals looking to distort a well-intentioned organizational metric, for personal gain.

The larger question for design is, in what direction should the influence flow. Rather than constrain and marginalize the potential of design to impact business through metrics, we need to better prepare ourselves for our increasingly important role in business. Design needs to establish a proper language that brings precision to the conversations with the business. Richard Boland and Fred Callopy make and excellent start in the last chapter of Managing as Design[2]. In this work business school academics are working to help design play a larger and more important role in business.  But there is much more to be done. Expansion, adoption, consensus and consistent use of this language are critical.

By no means do I intend to simplify this issue as the division of two camps. There are, however fundamental differences that both designers and business people need to recognize and respect. Rottman School of Management’s Roger Martin argues that one of those lays in the constructs that designers and business people use to make rational decisions. Designers tend to look for validity, while business people rely greatly on reliability. The ability to replicate process and control variability is a natural tendency in the cost areas of business. This gets to the root and genesis of programs such as Six Sigma and TQM. Unpredictable variability in resource allocation and budgeting, as well as in quality control constitutes a serious concern. This is exactly why so many designers are pressured for metrics and quantitative rational for their decisions.

Inversely, great designers tend not to favor the rote mechanics of process and the value of statistical research, and for good reason. In the design process quantitative research rarely presents enough depth to fully explore and define the problem in question. The best quantitative research can hope for is to locate and indicate issues. Secondly, nearly every designer’s primary concern is to define the question or problem. Once defined, problems are solvable. But rarely is the problem or solutions identical to the previous undertaking and in fact they are even difficult to classify. Nearly every problem requires its own process and tool set. This makes business managers crazy as it is not predictable in either outcome or resource allocation. It is, however, a highly effective manor for designers to work.

One of the final points I will make in the argument will again draw on Boland and Callopy. Business is rooted in making decisions. Making those decisions typically involves choosing from a list of alternatives. The least objectionable, that which poses the least risk, is likely the final choice. This decision attitude is a driving force for both personal choices and those for the organization. Boland and Callopy observed, in the workings of Frank Gehry a different tact, one they called a design attitude. Design attitude is focused not on satisfying, but exceeding the satisfactory solution. As in, how great can we make it? It pushed our limits and boundaries. It questions the very measurement of when a job is finished. It seeks an extraordinary solution, not one that merely satisfies the requirements. Most great designers that I have had the opportunity to work with are never finished with a project. Even after its delivery to the client, or installation as “the” solution, they are contemplating a better resolve. A design attitude embraces this notion and allows for breakthroughs and advancements that can have substantial impact on the business’ bottom line. That should be design’s contribution to business. I cannot, for the life of me, fathom how you might measure something with unlimited potential. The entire concept of metrics assumes a static low and a predictable high. Within that, there typically lies an acceptable threshold as a target. This limited scale is hardly appropriate for the adoption of a design attitude. It is however perfectly suited for a decision attitude.

John Thackara draws from the Agile Manefesto[4] in his recent book In the Bubble[5].

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value

Individuals and interactions over process and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Certainly I am not the first to observe that the Agile Manifesto is an attempt to build guidelines of process and to use design thinking in order to overcome organizational dysfunction and business thinking to succeed at design and innovation. Should this have to be a manifesto? Should we have to covertly work around business constructs? In the short term maybe, but it is in our best interest to define our language, refine our conversation and educate business in order to better facilitate collaboration.

As business is awakening to the power of design, it is important for designers to maintain those constructs that make it so very powerful. Certainly in the near future it will benefit any designer to learn the language of business. We must sell our ideas and critical to this is speaking the language of our audience – ROI, monetization, long tail, etc. But we must also teach to business the language of design. We must help business to understand how we can take advantage of variability, how validity can provide assurance differently than reliability, and how adopting a design attitude - seeking an even better solution, can benefit their cause. Being constrained by the metrics of the cost side of business has no place here. Developing a rational for investment in innovation certainly does.

 

References:

1 Breen, Bill. No Accounting for Design, Fast Company, Mansueto Ventures,  New York, February 2007.

2 Borland, Richard J., and Collopy, Fred., Managing as Designing, Stanford Business Books, Stanford, California. 2004.

3 Martin, Roger. Designing in a Hostile Territory, Rottman Magazine, Rottman School of Management, Toronto, Spring 2006

4 Thackara, John., In the Bubble. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005