This column, too: we labeled Apple, AirBnB, Google and their increasing tribe as ‘digital darlings’. In their wake, we noted, traditional behemoths like P&G and GE have made design more central, and made products, development and innovation (thus design) central to their resource allocations and hierarchy. Nowadays, these grey gentlemen are far less bashful in their approaches. The elevation of design seems like the new orthodoxy. In innovation cultures like the Silicon Valley, it may even be passe.

The digital darlings represent the school of creative disruption. It is based on the new realisation of the centrality of user/customer experience, via human-centred design (in the jargon) rather than on physical products; so goes the narrative.

The digital darlings represent the school of creative disruption. It is based on the new realisation of the centrality of user/customer experience

This narrative needs flesh and detail. Deep Design brings it to you by examining the intriguing phenomenon of large management consulting firms acquiring design companies, while tis no surprise for product firms to do so. It provides a fuller explanation of what design can do for business.

The facts: in 2015, McKinsey has made a large acquisition of Lunar, a highly regarded, 375 strong product design firm. Accenture too has a similar albeit smaller acquisition in Fjord, a service design firm, and owns several agencies besides, as does Deloitte.

Design and management consulting are profoundly dissimilar. Most fundamentally, design is in the making business, rather than the advising business. Design synthesises different strands of observed reality in order to imagine a better future. It acts via a new relationship between product (for example) and users. The result might be computers that run on pictures, and which housewives and their kids can use; or taxis on demand from a company that doesn’t own any, from a magically visual screen on a handheld device.

Design and management consulting are profoundly dissimilar. Design is in the making business, while management is in the advising business.

Management consulting is predicated on continuity, optimising the present. It analyses situations in the light of cases: data on how peer or near peer firms as similar as possible to the client acted, and what resulted. This industry knowledge makes the consulting practice formidable—they know too much. They may suggest a broad class of actions, but never intervene to engage with specifics inside the client’s messy complexity.

It’s realistic to propose that these times present a challenge to management consulting. Industry and customer data from sources old and new (social media for example) has never been more available, and with new tools for analysis, they can substitute for knowledge of industry frameworks acquired over decades. The knowledge advantage between clients and a Mckinsey may be melting, but this age may be also rendering what’s left less relevant.

That’s because it’s an age where industries are digitally disrupted, where consumers, users and suppliers can cause shapeshifting transformations to both markets and supply ecosystems in a wink. Technological changes seem too extreme to handle even when their building blocks are known. Neither the iPhone or the iPod introduced virgin technologies, but had decisive impact on their industries. Today’s building blocks are artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain, and the internet of things.

Management consulting likes certainty. It uses deductive methods (if-then) and industry experience (as-is) to pronounce the one magnificent conclusion that’s ‘not wrong’, preferably infallible or at least unfalsifiable. Authority is prized; clients are vanquished with intellect. Its preferred output is a presentation deck, with a recommendation from a set of known possibilities. It’s final.

Design methods tolerate uncertainty, and are happy with mere validity. ‘Can work’ might be preferable to ‘it is so’; certainty is an illusion, and proof is hubris. Its methods lean more on what-if than if-then. An imperfect solution illustrates the question better than an analysis. Design’s preferred response might be a cheap, rapid prototype, and there are more where they came from. Tentativeness? That’s confidence.

Forcing order by sheer will and intellect may not be appropriate in a storm, because it assumes that waves stand still, so to speak. Change affects not just the client industry, but is part of a mesh of interactions (the motor car needs petrol, and petrol leads to…). The laws of speed dictate that a perfect response will be redundant, so it’s better to be premature than late. Accumulated knowledge about slow-changing industries may be far less valuable. That’s why a yet-to-be product may be a better response to choppy waves and the onrush of technologies.

Management consultancies may acquire design companies as insurance against this threat. Design firms might find it safer to be allied to a major practice, rather they clash with them for the ears and purses of the same clients. They also enjoy the consulting firms peremptory access to client and industry data that they are often denied in the normal course.

Usually consulting firms don’t fold the acquisition in, or absorb it, fearing a clash of cultures and values. Neither do their clients, (digital darlings excepted) acquire design firms themselves. Even the best intentioned can fail—the celebrated firm Ideo merged with their best client, who returned the firm to its founder two years later.

Companies may be comforted by inserting a layer of predictability that a consulting practice brings in between themselves and the design firm. They could doubt their own ability to extract value from the design way of working, which is a competence that a design-led culture like Apple’s embeds. Perhaps clear, deep voiced, instructions are preferable to response and conversation.

It’s not likely that design consulting will influence the main management consulting business to the degree that a new type of consulting grows. Complex life evolved this way, by the merger of simpler forms, but the process took aeons.

Meanwhile, there’s an opportunity or threat to be responded to first. A solid, thoroughly validated, presentation deck in a six months or a observant but speculative prototype in one?

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘The Business of Consulting’ in Business Standard, 26 May, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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business is getting very, very attracted to design

Let’s start by looking at the shapes this movement has taken. According to a survey of 400+ companies, startups are very likely to have CEOs or CXOs to influence design decisions, and those businesses appear to quantifiably benefit from design.

But top management can go further than being involved in design, and actually invest in it. In 2016, General Electric, an icon of US industry, announced a new headquarters, three-fourths of whose employees would be “digital industrial product managers, designers, and developers”. For a corporate office, that number shows an unprecedented proportion for the design function, broadly defined, and its unusual proximity to the power centre of an industrial company.

Or it could actually invite designers to the top. Most of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) 2016 list of most innovative firms has designers and design in positions of power: the likes of Apple, Google, Tesla, Samsung regularly feature on it. Several have designers in the founder group (Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, Pinterest’s Evan Sharp) or as CEOs. Yet other companies have designations like Chief Design Officer (3M, Apple, PepsiCo, Philips) or Executive Creative Officer, or just Chief Creative.

But good businesses have always used design, if not its language. IBM was a design leader decades before today’s design darling, Apple was born. What has changed? An accelerated rise in design consciousness, and concomitantly, its visibility. One can speculate on the causes and the period of this change.

Design has countered commoditisation since at least the 18th century: consider Wedgwood’s famous china ware, a manufactured product carefully designed to meet a series of precise design objectives. To be sure, the same forces of commoditisation keep pace with the thousands of products that appear, washing over them, and making innovation the most prized attribute of modern business. No industry typifies this like information technology.

The top ten of BCG’s innovation list concentrates these prodigies in a tight cluster. These companies either make the tools, like Apple or Google, or embed them into their services so completely that firms like Amazon or Uber may be better seen as technology companies than as supermarket or taxi businesses.

Deep Design’s speculation is that this digital breed has given design this status by employing it in a manner that other industries seek to imitate. Design is now seen by the admirers of these digital wunderkind as a synonym or a precursor to the holy grail, innovation. (While there are overlaps, design and innovation are not identical, but more another time).

Design is now seen by the admirers of these digital wunderkind as a synonym or a precursor to the holy grail, innovation.

In this hypothesis, the digital breed was driven to develop an explicit vocabulary for design to enable its minting as a currency of business, which is now cashable in the boardroom. The vocabulary comes from the field now called user experience or UX. Of course that is, in some sense, what designers have always done. But labels matter: UX points to an outcome, while ’design’ appears to refer more to the activity than the result. The new label expands, and makes more tangible, the older rubrics, ‘usability’ and ‘human computer interface’.

But labels matter: UX points to an outcome, while ’design’ appears to refer more to the activity than the result.

Of course, it’s not wordsmithing alone. UX lays out its methods like a recipe. It makes the tacit knowledge of designers explicit, and re-frames designers’ instincts as a series of steps. It commandeers research from psychology’s cognitive sides. (Both the NASDAQ and Apple’s market cap have more than doubled since Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 bestseller Thinking Fast, and Slow, which made cognitive biases part of every executive’s gab book. And since Kahneman’s 2001 Nobel, Apple’s worth has grown 180 times).

This totally rational emphasis made UX, read design, acceptable to engineers, who actually build the stuff, and may see designers as exotic anarchists. It gave business managers (a good many of them from engineering backgrounds) faith in the predictability of the design outcomes and a means to participate in the process. Design’s mystical ‘black box’ has been broken open, and made to serve new masters. Further this association with technology and business confers approval in a uniquely modern way. This all may apply only to the digital domain, but to business, what else has mattered more in the last two decades?

Increasingly, businesses become more and more virtual, less physical. This makes experience, which is at heart a messy, psychological concept, easy to contain in the palm of your hand, viewed as episodes, each leaving a data trail amenable to analysis.

Design and business have followed the suits. In current design speak, UX defines customer journeys that map how a user (previously: consumer) interacts with a brand. Experience is a universal paradigm; it’s intuitive, from user experience, to imagine customer experience, the emergent new face of marketing. PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer, Mauro Porcini, exemplifies the new argot: people “don’t buy, actually, products anymore, they buy experiences”.

Experience is a universal paradigm; it’s intuitive, from user experience, to imagine customer experience, the emergent new face of marketing.

Boardrooms have adopted design in two ways. The first is to improve design buying, making the company’s investments in, say, product design or communication, more effective. The second is to spread design culture across the company, in the role of a new approach to solving problems or seeing opportunities. To do either, designers will have to face a boardroom, peopled by stalwarts of an ancient regime, so to speak. The qualities they will need in these waters and their experiences thus far will make for a fascinating study.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Visionary Position: Design on Top’ in Business Standard, 25 November, in Deep Design, a monthly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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