Lies are an important source of design insight. Design research ought to embrace lies as potential sources of creative inspiration. Lies are indicators of a gap between what we are and what we think we ought to be. Well-designed products soften and assuage the effects of this gap.

Photo courtesy of: www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/213108466

The other day, one interviewee asked me, near the end of the interview, what “is this all about.” At first I was confused, having explained the study we were conducting and what specifically we were interested in finding out. Yet she pressed me further, wanting to know the “mystery” behind the study.

I reflected and realized that she was expecting a great “reveal” of the “real” purpose behind the study. She was expecting me to pull back the curtain and tell her what I was actually interested in.

If you have ever participated in a university psychology study, this story will sound familiar to you. You had likely been recruited as an undergraduate, incented to participate with the promise of a few percentage points tacked onto your final grade.

Or perhaps you attended a focus group, which had a one-way mirror at one end of the room that you were directed to “try to ignore.” Or maybe you have answered a telephone survey that had a mysterious combination of questions the meaning of which you could not decipher.

Perhaps you, like my participant, have been conditioned to believe that “unbiased” or “scientific” social research involves trickery or outright deception. Proponents of this approach may argue that in order to get “the truth,” researchers must mask their true intentions, lest participants lie. This kind of research seeks to sanitize the results, to make them somehow untainted by “bias.”

What underlies this idea of deception and lying in social research? There is an assumption that The Truth is something that lives within the minds of your participants and your job as a social researcher is to pry that nugget out of their minds. Your job is to eliminate any “bias” that would filter this truth.

This is the same assumption ethnographers make when they believe a year’s fieldwork is essential. The classic anthropological model is a one-year field assignment. But ethnographers who hold this view are actually similar to market researchers who assume participants may “lie.” They are hoping to establish “rapport,” so that participants will eventually “drop their guard” and show the ethnographer their “true” or “authentic self.”

But if you assume that the truth is something we create, in tandem with our participants, authenticity or truthfulness become irrelevant concepts. Instead, a researcher can assume participants do indeed lie, but that lying is an interesting data point. The savvy, design ethnographer can ask, “Now why did she lie about cleaning her oven weekly, when she clearly hasn’t cleaned it in months?”

This is not a clean stove

These kinds of questions can lead to interpretive gold.

Perhaps oven cleaning is considered “proper,” and women are encouraged to act “properly” by cleaning their ovens regularly. Perhaps a better-designed stove looks “clean” on its exterior, whether it is actually clean inside or not. Perhaps a better-designed stove provides women with mechanical “excuses” of why it should NOT be cleaned regularly, thereby absolving its owner of any shame.

Both design solutions assuage the guilt and the shame of having not lived up to a perceived norm.

Indeed, the Swiffer provides exactly this kind of “cover.” Hardwood floors are supposedly “different” than regular floors and require a “different” kind of broom and mop. It just so happens that the Swiffer is faster, more ergonomic, and less messy than a regular broom. It requires less effort, yet Swiffer uses are told they are doing the “proper” thing by using this “special” kind of broom.

When you are hunting for design solutions, become a lie detector. Do not question the veracity of a participant’s statement, but go deeper. Why did he say that he “tries to not be the dad on the cell phone”? What ideal is not living up to?

Design interventions based on lies could promise to be the most user-accepted designs.

Yesterday, I attended Roger Martin’s presentation of his new book, The Design of Business, hosted at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Roger gave a brief overview of his book and then engaged in a dialogue with the host, Michael Dila, and members of the audience.

Roger explained that some organizations are better able to embrace “design thinking,” which he defines as the ability to think both analytically and intuitively. He pointed out in his presentation and in his book that 20^th century corporations have perfected the analytical frame of mind, but fail continuously to embrace the abductive leaps of logic that innovation requires.

Audience members repeatedly asked how to equip their organizations to embrace design thinking. Roger advised designers to “empathize” with their analytical peers, and business managers to “empathize” with their intuitive colleagues.

I can’t help but be reminded of the world’s most ineffective coaching in John Cusak’s movie Better Off Dead. Cusak’s character is attempting to win a ski race to impress his love interest. His hapless friend Booger offers this useless advice, “Try to ski…faster.”

Roger’s advice fell short because he could not explain the social dynamics of organizational change. Just like Booger, he simply described; he failed to explain.

Explaining Organizational Change: Innovative Values

One woman in the audience asked specifically what cultural traits design-thinking organizations exhibit. Roger suggested vague ideas such as a concern for the future. The Value Orientation Model can specifically identify value systems that are, yes, future oriented, but have four other qualities that support innovation. Anthropologist Florence Kluckhohn argued that all cultures can be understood in terms of five major values. I have adapted this model to show the groupings of organizations. Innovative organizations, surprisingly, embrace “static” values, thus allowing the free floating of ideas.

Figure 1: The Value Orientation Model

Adapted from Kluckhohn, F. R. (1953). Dominant and variant value orientations. Personality in Nature, Society and Culture. . J. a. K. Murrayh, F.R. New York, Knopf: 346.

Being future oriented can be conducive to innovation, as Roger indicated. But if an organization obsesses over its future state, it may have difficulty focusing on tasks at hand. This future orientation is not enough, particularly if the organization prizes “doing” over “becoming.”

Take, for example, “the productivity myth,” which Tony Schwartz explores on Harvard Business Review’s blogs. He complains that writing and responding to ever more emails does not add value – yet it appears to be “productive.” Organizations that consider emails “productive” have a “doing” orientation, instead of a “becoming” orientation. An organization must prize both the future and the process of “becoming” in order to be innovative.

Moreover, this organization must trust its employees. If the organization’s culture implicity believes that “man is born bad,” then it will not provide employees with the freedom and autonomy they need to be innovative. Roger argued Taylorist management styles of command and control have outlived their usefulness. I would agree with him. However, I would argue that no company that believes its employees will “steal time” from the company can ever truly forsake Taylorist principles.

Take, for example, WalMart, which was recently named one of Businessweek’s top 50 innovative companies. Its innovation, according to Businessweek, is its razor thin supply chain and cost-conscious green practices. Does this mean WalMart is innovative? No, it means it is cost-conscious. WalMart will never get out of the business of selling cheap goods at the lowest prices because it does not trust its employees to be autonomous. Individual store managers cannot begin selling locally-targeted goods because they are not trusted to experiment. WalMart will never design an iPhone; it will only figure out how to sell it more cheaply than anyone else.

Roger’s book explains design thinking well, but he only describes how it plays out in real organizations. In order to understand how design thinking is adopted, one must have a sociological lens on organizational change – and that means understanding the nature of socially defined values.

Designing Design Thinkers

Organizational change is notoriously difficult to effect. Management consultants have tried it, now designers are trying it. Building on Roger’s description, and offering my explanation of the underlying value system, I now offer an application designing a design-thinking organization.

1. Map your values: understand what values your organization prizes by doing an audit of the “good worker.” What do people say a “good worker” is? Rosabeth Moss Kanter used the “good worker” rubric to explain how women faced subtle discrimination in her classic Men And Women of The Corporation. When you know how your organization thinks, you’ll know what it values.
2. Create value goals collectively: decide as a group what values you would like to embrace. This means more than crowdsourcing. This means hosting open dialogue meetings where the only expected outcome is a discussion. Voting will help, but only after you have face-to-face discussions.
3. Use art: community theatre, interactive installations, and performance art have transformative properties. Encourage members of the organization to describe their experiences through comedic skits at meetings, collaborative and humorous art projects that can displayed in main areas. Art speaks truth. Knowing your organization’s values requires truth telling — and it especially helps if you laugh a lot.
4. Embrace “Static Values” when you can: In her incredibly insightful article on innovation, Carol Steiner argues that innovators reject established ways of thinking, Unfortunately, deeply trained scientists, managers, and social scientists spend so much time learning established ways of thinking, they forget to be open to new ideas. Be open, she argues, but simply BEING.

Remember “synergy?” AOL Time Warner was designed to save money and make money. But it was not designed to be a true organization. 10 years ago, Time Warner aimed to blast into the 21st century by “synergizing” with America Online.

The New York Times has a fabulous retrospective of the merger.

In their teaser video, Robert Puttnam, former co-COO of the merged entity tells us:

The thing that makes a merger work is culture. These were two mergers of equals And now you’re trying to put two together and if the cultures aren’t somewhat aligned, you’re going to have problems. And we had big problems.

The article traces in historical detail where the merger’s economic logic went awry, but more importantly where it’s cultural integration went awry.

New York Times: Gerald Levin and Stephen Case in happier times

The story provides first-person accounts of key milestones in the negotiations. Key are the recollections of key executives in Time Warner, who had been kept out of the loop until the deal was finalized. They were aghast. Don Logan, the head of Time Inc., said simply “The dumbest idea I had ever heard in my life.”

The entire article is a testament to “the power of the people,” in the sense that senior leaders can make all the change they want, but if they do not enrol the organization, change will never happen . Culture is indeed the wild card in mergers. 45% of executives say their mergers are failures. 45%! That failure rate is astoundingly high, considering that improving success can be as simple as adding sociological inquiry to the pre and post-merger cultures.

I recently completed a sociological study of a merger for the express purposes of designing a new, cohesive, innovative organization. The key lesson I learned in that process is that truth telling about the organization’s true values is difficult but necessary. Cultures try to reproduce themselves, even if it means lying about their true values. Maybe an organization doesn’t actually value diversity. That truth needs to be told.

It was the conflict in values that brought down the merger. As one Time Warner executive told the NY Times:

I knew and I loved Time Warner. I saw it as a company with a vision and a set of values, and I saw AOL in a much less favorable light, much more opportunistic, made up of folks who were really trying to merely exploit the market they were in as opposed to developing something that was enduring, and I was very leery about this deal.

In the case of AOL Time Warner, AOL’s truth was that it set out to make money, not to actually “revolutionize” the media landscape. Telling this truth would have made the AOL culture much more authentic to the Time Warner culture, and may have actually saved the merger.

Designing an innovative organization doesn’t necessarily mean a “flat” organization. We tend to believe that innovation and hierarchy are antithetical, but in truth, innovation often thrives in hierarchical organizations. Here are the key ingredients to an innovative organization, whether hierarchical or not.

The Internet: A Democratic Utopia We tend to believe that hierarchy kills innovation and creativity. This is particularly true for organizations that design and build technology. The cultural heritage of the Internet is one that implicitly values a utopian vision of anti-authority.

The initial plans for ARPANET explicitly included a commitment to the open architecture concept, with “no global controls at the operations level” (Leiner, 1998). In other words, those that designed the Internet designed it explicitly to have no central authority.

Stickin' it to The Man

This decentralized structure connoted a sense of democratic administration. The hacker ethic has reinforced this implicit belief in democracy. In his 1984 book Hackers, Steven Levy (Levy, 1984) traced how the “laid back” culture of universities, such as Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence lab, spread to other technology start-ups. Technological innovation came to be culturally synonymous with an explicit rejection of hierarchy.

The Innovation World Is Not Flat But this is cultural myth of “democratic” innovation is merely a representation of innovation, and not a necessary ingredient for it. Take, for example, Apple Inc. Apple’s legendary innovative reputation is not contingent on democracy – far from it. Indeed, it appears that Steve Jobs and his senior leadership team have a iron-grip of control over innovation projects. This hierarchical order is ironically represented as democratic, a fact that The Onion happily lampoons in “Apple Employee Fired For Thinking Different.”

The reality is that large organizations in today’s global economy require some form of hierarchical control. This is a requirement of both capitalism and the sheer scope of modern corporate life. Alfred Chandler (1977) showed how the growth of the railroads required detailed project management, making 20th century management both rational and hierarchical. 21st century management must grapple with the same issues of synchronizing the schedules of employees across multiple time zones, and grappling with constant changes in the competitive landscape and the economy. “Democratic” innovation is messy, time consuming, and difficult to manage. For this reason, many companies like Apple have created controlled environments in which innovation can occur.

Innovation Within A Hierarchy If your organization is hierarchical (and in most cases, that will be true), there are features of innovation that can be embedded within this hierarchical system.

Creating Flow Through Non-Time Measurement:

Clocking in at Creativity Inc.

Innovative teams are those that are insulated from time-based metrics of productivity. Working for one hour on a rote task is not equal to working for one hour on a groundbreaking project, yet oftentimes organizations treat these hours as exactly the same.

My research on time in interactive agencies found that time-based metrics frequently interrupt “flow,” making it difficult for designers to work creatively. Organizations that want to optimize creativity must abandon time-based metrics of performance.

Stop Lying About Democracy: rare is it today that an individual truly doubts the need for some form of hierarchy in a profit-seeking company. But pretending that hierarchy doesn’t exist is corrosive. Organizations that continually fail to live up to their democratic ideal must continually tell lies to mask this gap. Over time, this gap renders real democracy meaningless (after all, the Bullshitter cares nothing for the truth).

Ruthlessly Commit To Project Resources and Timelines: many people are familiar with the agile development notion of the “sprint.” A group of people are dedicated exclusively to a software project for a specific, discrete period of time. Their attention is devoted completely to this project and they are enormously productive as a result. Why do innovation project often fail? Simply because individuals are pulled in too many directions or senior leadership changes priorities, seemingly on a whim. If you mean to combat the negative aspects of hierarchy, then you must commit to a project and let nothing get in the way. Individuals must be dedicated. The project length must not be shrunk. And collectively, the organization must stake its reputation on this commitment.

Be Democratic When It Matters: creative people can take direction, even when it infringes on their work. But they must have a say in what infringements are negotiable. The biggest mistake managers can make is assuming that the bounds of hierarchy is understood equally by everyone; they are not. Accept that democratic rule can and should happen, even when it affects timelines. Be unfraid to collectively identify what is negotiable and what is not. Most people do not question the legitimacy of authority, but they do question the legitimacy of lack of debate. In the end, innovation can occur in hierarchical organizations. The democratic ideal provides an aspirational model but don’t be afraid to accept that it is an ideal, at times.

References

Chandler, A. D. (1977). The visible hand : the managerial revolution in American business. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.

Leiner, B. e. a. (1998, Februrary 20, 1998). A Brief History of the Internet.   Retrieved April 10, 2000, 2000, from http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.html

Levy, S. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Penguin Group.