Michael Roller

A Curriculum for Business Design

Ryan Jacoby’s newish blog do_matic is all about business design, so he proposed a futuristic curriculum for an advanced degree in the subject. Bookmark this one because he comes out swinging. Even though design thinking is a bit trendy, Ryan provides it with a sense of longevity by balancing it with essential “non-design thinking” (I don’t know what else to call it). This is a great overview of everything that creative business professionals need to understand, wrapped in a cool story about a student seeking this knowledge. Some of my favorite courses (for what it’s worth) are:

1. BDES 266 | Organizational Design and Culture (Charts & Farts)
2. BDES 126 | Creating Infectious Action (CIA)
3. BDES 105 | Empathy, Inspiration and Alternative Data (Eyes & Ears / AltDat)

Finally, this comment from Ryan is an important point:

I’m not envisioning a “business for designers” curriculum or a “design for business-types” curriculum. It isn’t Design+Business or Business+Design, but instead the program would be focused on the new discipline of business design: a practical mix of entrepreneurship, commerce and art all with the “making” focus you mention.

Tags: business, design thinking

Four Essential Members of a Great Design Team

Have you ever wondered why you can successfully collaborate with another designer in your office? Maybe you share similar ideas, but there’s also a good chance you’re nothing alike. At Kaleidoscope, some of the designers (including me) are organized and analytical. Others think freely and contextually. How can we coexist? My analytical thinking pushed me to break down and understand how these differences can be complementary. What I ultimately realized is that a successfully diverse design team requires four key members.

The Evangelist

A design team without a visionary leader is like a church without a preacher. The Evangelist focuses on design at the highest level, developing strategies and processes that push the limits of design and business as a whole. Contextual thinking helps him understand how design fits into a larger business plan. As a former Dreamer, he loves to push the boundaries and question assumptions of the products and categories he leads. The Evangelist won’t ever be an operations specialist, and may even lead activities that feel counterproductive to more analytical thinkers. Although possibly his greatest challenge, he will come through in the end and prove that his dreaming offers real business value. With a great Evangelist leading the charge, firms can be proactive, trendsetting, and highly valued for their ideas.

The Conductor

To complement the Evangelist, every design team needs a leader who directs the finishing touches on each project. The Conductor’s analytical mind helps her to ensure that no detail goes unconsidered. Like directing an orchestra, she brings together all the little details into harmony, making sure everything has been figured out and nothing taken for granted. She probably has the highest standards of any designer in the office and ensures that every project is top quality. Often the team doing the first 95% of the work is exhausted or checked out by the end, and the Conductor plays a key role in making the final push to finish the project right. In more corporate roles, she shepherds projects through to production and defends key design details that might otherwise be lost. The Conductor may wish she was still a designer, struggling to find the appropriate level of feedback or adding unnecessary work for her team. At her best, the Conductor is the key to creating consistently solid work that will have clients or consumers coming back for more.

The Dreamer

When analytical minds struggle with paradoxical design constraints, the Dreamer cuts through it all to offer a surprisingly fresh attitude. He avoids the technical boundaries of a project in favor of contextual experimentation. A great design team deploys Dreamers to brainstorms where blue sky thinking is necessary, and keeps them involved when the end product must push category boundaries or create brand new ones. The Dreamer becomes easily frustrated when not allowed to exercise fantasies, so don’t expect him to handle detail-oriented work or anything that is heavily constrained by technical requirements. The wild ideas he contributes won’t always become part of the final product, but the Dreamer is essential in setting the stage for innovation as well as offering an entertainment value to novelty-seeking design managers.

The Surgeon

Whether it comes down to aesthetic or ergonomic excellence, so many great pieces of design rely on details. A great design team relies on the Surgeon – an analytical thinker who cuts up and dissects design problems to find the best solutions. By definition, she breaks down a product into its components, considering the pieces of design and then reuniting them into a cohesive whole. The Surgeon isn’t always the best decision maker, because she can end up thinking in circles or frustrated by a project’s lack of clarity. When it comes to making sense of complex design problems, a Surgeon is your best bet to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

The Jack of All Trades (Master of None?)

Every team has designers with diverse skill sets, but the Jack of All Trades might be the most talented person in your office because he can truly do everything. He leads a range of projects, solves tricky problems, and dreams up big ideas. Recent graduates make great “Junior Jacks,” because they can contribute on a variety of levels while they gain experience and become more aware of their greatest strengths. Don’t confuse a real Jack with someone whose strengths are not prevalent or ambiguous. In reality, the rare Jack of All Trades might not be essential to have, but will feel essential to any team that has one.

I hope this helps you make better sense of how you and the people around you fit into a design organization. How well do the designers you know fit into these buckets? How could this concept be stronger? In coming posts, I’ll look at how different combinations of these five members help execute the different strategies that design businesses use.

Tags: business, strategy, teams

Innovation: Not the Only Way to Survive a Recession

Amidst this recession, the design blogosphere is calling for innovation as the (only) way to save our economy. I definitely see the value in innovative products and processes, but I found myself wondering what else there might be. Thanks to someone on Twitter (I couldn’t find the original tweet), I was pointed to Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog on Web 2.0. He’s starting a series of posts entitled How to Survive and Thrive in Business Today with Web 2.0. Check out his graphic, in which innovation, along with growth, transformation, and cost reduction are listed as the four key areas.

The point I’m trying to make is that even though it’s currently popular in business, design isn’t just about innovation. Right now, I’m working on a cost-reduction project and a growth project. As a designer, I can see ways to provide value in all four of these areas, which will be very important to our function in the coming year.

Tags: business, social media