Architecting the Intangibles: Designing a Design Thinking Culture

Design thinking has become increasingly popular since the publication of IDEO CEO Tim Brown’s book, Change by Design, in 2009. Although familiarity with design thinking isn’t yet ubiquitous throughout the professional services world, most agencies and B2C companies with younger workforces have been exposed to it. Its focus on innovation and its proven ability to identify and solve sometimes difficult to understand consumer problems has made brought it acceptance within the business community. Indeed, Brown – an industrial designer by training – now contributes at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Who would have thought that an industrial designer would be able to edge their way into a tight-knit community of MBAs, bankers, and lawyers? But, thanks to the design thinking revolution, creatives now have a place in business.

I’m a huge proponent of design thinking, having seen how effective it can be at providing tangible solutions to sometime ethereal problems. Design thinking gurus, however, are mostly found in branding and design firms. Thus, if your company is looking to use design thinking to solve a problem, you’ll most likely have to hire an expensive agency like IDEO, Frog, Continuum, and the like. Although this may make economic sense for larger companies, smaller companies often can’t afford to retain team of pricey consultants, researchers, and designers every time a challenge crops up. An alternative is to build design thinking into the culture of an organization so that employees can address design problems themselves rather than repeatedly hire outside help. While organizations won’t always have the resources to tackle every design-related problem, creating a culture of design thinking will help foster innovation and problem solving without added expenditures. One of the hallmarks of design thinking is the empathy that it espouses for users or consumers of a product and many agencies that employ design thinking will do extensive qualitative research to put themselves in the shoes of the audience. But, who better to employ design thinking than employees, who often know a company’s processes and products more intimately than upper management. This solution allows organizations can build design thinking into their culture, so that employees are constantly innovating on behalf of the company. Think Total Quality Management.

“build design thinking into the culture of an organization so that employees can address design problems themselves rather than repeatedly hire outside help.”

The key to constructing a design thinking culture – or any culture for that matter – is social architecture, the creation of systems for the purpose of influencing behavior. Like design thinking, social architecture is concerned with designing environments to improve outcomes. The primary difference is that social architecture is solely concerned with perceptions and social interaction, whereas design thinking is most often applied in the design of physical products and spaces. So, in many ways, what we’re talking about here is using design thinking to design a culture of design thinking. Sounds great, but how is it done?

1. Engage: the first step, which sounds obvious but is often overlooked, is to convince employees that many opportunities for improvement exist and design thinking can help capitalize on them. To do this, the merits of design thinking must be clearly communicated along with the benefit that the approach can have for them, e.g. optimized workspaces mean more productivity and less stress, better processes mean more safety and less inefficiency. The message: building design thinking into the business will be good for everyone.
2. Equip: once you have your employees on board, they will have to be equipped with the observational and analytical tools necessary to identify problems and innovate solutions. Although things like workshops can help inform and equip employees with basic design thinking tools, nobody can force employees to use them. Fortunately, in most cases, employees are actually enthusiastic about having the opportunity to solve design problems. In fact, if you ask your employees, they probably already have mental lists of issues that could be addressed through design thinking.
3. Empower: giving employees the autonomy to speculate and innovate is critical to fostering a culture in which design thinking can flourish. Inculcating design thinking into an organization at all levels depends on the freedom of employees to experiment, both mentally and physically, with workspaces, systems, and processes. Giving them the latitude to try new things, even if they fail, is essential to empowering employees in a way that will result in meaningful insights and innovations. It’s also important that managers create channels of communication between themselves and employees so that new ideas – ideas that are generated by the people on the front lines – get the attention they deserve. Some type of incentive regime that rewards innovation is also helpful in motivating employees to apply design thinking in their daily work. That being said, taking employee input seriously and providing the funding necessary to implement employee generated ideas, signals that they’re opinions are respected and valued – a powerful incentive in itself.
4. Evaluate: finally, it’s important to continuously evaluate any type of cultural program. When trying to drive design thinking across an organization, it’s just as  important to evaluate the ideation process among employees as it is to evaluate the success of their ideas. Optimizing the process by which employees analyze, collaborate, and ideate will ideally lead to more successful ideas. Thus, only measuring the success of ideas might not be the best form of evaluation. Rather, evaluating the process that employees are using – which can be done in a number of qualitative and quantitative ways – will likely provide more apropos insights that can help gauge the success of the program

The goal in all of this is to create a social system where employees feel comfortable challenging the status quo and collaborating with other employees to generate their own solutions to workspace, process, and product problems. This requires designing a system that fosters constant innovation, that can build design thinking into every process. This task can be daunting, but once achieved can help organizations become inherently innovative. After all, why hire outside firms to solve your business problems when the people that know your business best are already inside it.

Working From Home: The Bigger Picture

Recently, as you’ve probably heard, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned working from home after seeing data suggesting that Yahoo’s remote workers weren’t doing a whole lot of work. “Some of the best decisions and insights,” Mayer said, “come from the hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.” Mayer’s announcement has catalyzed a national debate on remote workers, work-life balance, and corporate culture – and with a 75 percent increase in telecommuters since 2005, these concerns will only continue to get more important. Without summarizing the arguments on both sides of the issue, it will suffice to say that there are legitimate arguments on both sides of this issue. Indeed, working from home can both hinder and foster productivity, collaboration, and employee morale.

Many consultants and pundits have attempted to solve the remote worker challenge, with many rightly concluding that the answer, as with most other things, rests somewhere in the middle. Few, however, have used this debate as an opportunity to discuss the broader trends that are driving these workforce changes. For those who observe culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, the controversy over the remote worker should come as no surprise. In fact, the rise of working from home, and now the opposition to it, were foreshadowed by trends in philosophy, art, and technology. Analyzing and comparing some of these macro-trends can also help us predict the future of the technologized workforce. Where will it head next? Will it stay at home? Will it head back to the office? Or, will something else emerge altogether?

“The optimal solution, however, is not working from home or working from work, but somewhere in the middle where work and home converge in new ways enabled by new technologies or technological paradigms that bring work and home together.”

The digital revolution that was really catalyzed by the commoditization of the internet, has led to the digitization of everything. The promise of efficiency, convenience, accessibility, and affordability have accelerated this trend. We communicate online. We get our news online. We go to school online. We shop online. We watch TV online. We listen to music online. We work online. All of the major activities of our lives, except for eating, sleeping, and some other unmentionables, have been digitzed. Although the advent of digital everything has made our society hyper-connected, the ability to do all of these things from pretty much any place at pretty much any time has also made our society hyper-fragmented – quite the paradox. People don’t need to physically come together to interact. They can talk from anywhere. People don’t need to go to the store to shop. They can shop from anywhere. People don’t need to be in a classroom to go to school. They can learn from anywhere. People don’t need to go into the office to work. They can work from home. All of these realities have created a fragmented society where our daily activities are highly decentralized and geographically more diffuse.

Interestingly, this trend parallels the shift from Romantic and early modern art to postmodern art and the shift from modernist to postmodern philosophy. Romantic and early modern art were extremely literal. They depicted scenes that could be found in the tangible world requiring little interpretation. Likewise, modernist philosophy was extremely objectivist. It believed in the power of observation and reason, and tended to make universalist and structuralist claims. These movements prized unity, literalness, concreteness, reason, centralization, conformity, and objectivity. Postmodern philosophy and art rebelled against their predecessors by championing interpretation, abstractness, decentralization, fragmentation, complexity, difference, and subjectivism. Postmodern art, for example, is often seen by many as pointless and meaningless, but the meaning of postmodern art is found in the interpretation, in the fragmentation. Similarly, postmodern philosophy prizes interpretation and subjective experiences and challenges the one-size-fits-all mentality. None of these qualities are bad. In fact, they were necessary to adjust some of the flaws in preceding schools of thought, but – as in most cases – too much of a good thing can be bad.

Recently, talk of a new movement in both philosophy and art has emerged called metamodernism, which has arisen as an attempt to rediscover the meaningfulness of the modern while maintaining the openness and freedom of the postmodern. The similarities here to the evolution of our lifestyles are remarkable. Before the digital revolution, everyone has to go into work, into the classroom, to the store, over to each other’s houses. Things were concrete, unified, and centralized. The digital paradigm shift changed all of that. It made things more subjective, more fragmented, and more decentralized. Now, as if paralleling the growing interest in metamodernism, there seems to be a growing feeling – as evidenced by the remote worker debate – that we’ve become overly dependent on a digital lifestyle. Yearning for more unity, concreteness, and centralization, people have been rediscovering an appreciation for the tangible. This counter shift has led to technology that integrates the digital and the physical, like apps that respond to your location or surroundings, augmented reality applications, wearable technology, etc. These convergence technologies embrace both the digital and the physical just as metamodernism embraces both the postmodern and the modern. It’s a social law of motion: for every action, there is a reaction. 

Workforce trends – heavily influenced by technological developments – have followed the same trajectory, and have moved from highly centralized to increasingly fragmented. Now, as that fragmentation accelerates, we’re reassessing the importance of physical presence. The optimal solution, however, is not working from home or working from work, but somewhere in the middle where work and home converge in new ways enabled by new technologies or technological paradigms that bring work and home together. A multidisciplinary approach that employs social, technological, and spatial design strategies, can help create a more effective workforce by creating a workplace that is more engaging, more enjoyable, more comfortable, and more open. This workplace does not necessarily have to be in one place either. Designing devices, software, and work spaces that unify remote workers and connect them with the mother ship can help bring work and home closer together. Yahoo employees worked from home using virtual private networks. VPNs, although useful, cannot be the be-all-end-all of remote worker technology. In a world of video conferencing, telepresence robots, wearable technology, and SoLoMo communication there are more creative ways to make working from home collaborative and productive. 

While it’s hard to say exactly what the future holds for the technologized workforce, broader cultural trends make one thing is clear: the future of corporate culture does not hinge on the battle between working from home and working from work, but on the convergence of home and work. We have some tantalizing ideas about what this convergence might look like, but those will have to be saved for another post.

Ethnography Case Study in Quirk’s Marketing Research Review

This month’s edition of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review features one of our case studies as the cover story. You can read the article online here or download the PDF of the print publication here.

The article demonstrates how group and digital ethnography can be used by organizations of any size to affordable conduct in-depth qualitative research.

Culture Concepts uses ethnographic research methods to identify, describe, and understand consumer values and social behavior. Although ethnography can be extremely subjective, proper training and a comprehensive understanding of the people you’re studying can help mitigate researcher bias.

For more information on how your business or organization can leverage ethnography as a marketing research tool, contact us today. We offer a full range of immersive and digital ethnography services, as well as ethnographer training and workshops.

Cultural Marketing: The Future of the Industry?

Cultural marketing is a buzzword in some circles, but unheard of in many others. Most who have heard the term have likely heard it used to refer to ethnic culture marketing or marketing strategies that attempt to leverage popular cultural trends. These, however, are very narrow and limited views of what cultural marketing is and what it can do. And, while many an agency has sprung up seeking to help brands use cultural trends to reach consumers, these agencies – frankly – are taking a primitive and unimaginative approach to cultural marketing. A more useful, but admittedly more challenging, approach – and one that Culture Concepts believes will become more popular in the next few years – is to create cultures rather than piggyback off of existing ones. Cultures are created all the time, most of them small. Business today, however, have the power to develop long-lasting consumer cultures around their brands. Political groups and religious sects create new cultures all the time (think Tea Party and Opus Dei), and with dedication and patience businesses can as well.

The power of cultural marketing, which has been extensively discussed in marketing academia, rests in the fundamental human need for social belonging – a need that has entrenched itself in the human psyche over the course of our evolution. All people belong to a multitude of cultures, which are defined by the ideas and customs we share with others, permeate every aspect of our lives and frame the way we see ourselves and the world. Our families have cultures. Our places of employment have cultures. Our neighborhoods and nations have cultures. Our religions have cultures. The common values and experiences we share with others create these cultures, and they are vital to our individual and social identities. Brands can become the focal point of cultures as well, and begin to take on cultural status when consumers start forming common ideas and traditions based on the role that those brands play in their lives. For this reason, cultural marketing is, I believe, largely superior to other popular marketing frameworks, e.g. psychological marketing, social marketing, movement marketing, etc. Interestingly enough, cultural marketing combines several of the most effective characteristics of these other frameworks.

“Brands…begin to take on cultural status when consumers start forming common ideas and traditions based on the role that those brands play in their lives.”

Psychological marketing, for example, correctly emphasizes the need to understand people rather than four Ps of traditional marketing. Ultimately, however, psychological marketing is far too individualistic. It focuses too much on the individual’s psychology rather than how an individual influences and is influenced by others. Human beings are social creatures by nature, and any marketing framework that isn’t serious about group behavior won’t be very useful in our super social, hyperlocal, ultra mobile 21st century. Social marketing comes a little closer to cultural marketing in its focus on creating conversation and two-way engagement. The fundamental strategy of social marketing, however, is to create dialogue between a company and its consumers. This is undoubtedly important, but a cultural approach goes deeper, aiming instead to create the ideas that will generate organic conversation not only between a company and its consumers but between consumers themselves as well. Movement marketing comes the closest, but still stops short of achieving the understanding of human social behavior that underpins cultural marketing. Movement marketing leverages people’s longing to be part of a purposeful mission that’s bigger than themselves. Movement marketing, however, draws its efficacy from the fact that the purpose and mission is shared among people with common ideas. It is this shared element that makes people feel that they are part of something bigger, without which any movement would be meaningless. Thus, in actuality, a movement is nothing more than a fledgling culture with a defined purpose. Cultural marketing doesn’t need to create movements because every culture has the potential to become a movement, and a healthy culture will spawn movements organically.  Creating a movement may spark momentary excitement, but to really curate and develop that movement it has to take on deeper cultural characteristics. It has to develop shared creeds, rituals, and standards – and this is where cultural marketing comes to the rescue.

Cultural marketing, far beyond simply leveraging cultural trends, can help marketers create cultures that can set the trends. By building a strong culture of consumers around a brand, businesses can generate the psychological, social, and purposeful mechanisms necessary to deliver meaningful consumer experiences to their followers. It is because of this potential that I believe cultural marketing will begin to replace other marketing paradigms in the coming years. Signs of the increasing popularity of cultural marketing already abound: the American Marketing Association has begun to take consumer culture theory, on which cultural marketing is built, more seriously and the language of culture is starting to permeate the agency world with upstart agencies like Translation have begun championing the importance of pop culture in marketing and branding. As technology and globalization continue to forge a more connected planet, the importance of understanding and influencing human social behavior will only increase. As it does, marketers will realize that the strategies of today are inadequate and a more holistic sociological and anthropological approach is necessary. 

5 Tips for Building Brand Cultures

1. Cultures aren’t built in a day – it takes time to build consumer culture. Brand cultures are not like campaigns that have set start and end dates. They are organic, are as dynamic as the people that comprise them, and extremely delicate. They need to be fostered, guided, and maintained in order to add value to a business and its consumers. This process, like any cultural or change management program, takes time – sometimes years. The potential payout, however, exceeds nearly every other type of conceivable business strategy except maybe developing a product that solves world hunger or cures cancer.

2. It’s about people, plural - a lot of marketing strategies and campaigns focus on reaching individual consumers. They use advertising or promotional tactics that communicate a message directly from the company to a single consumer. While these approaches can be effective, they’ll never be as effective as approaches that generate conversation between consumers themselves. In our age, when all media is becoming social media, the greatest advertisement is word of mouth. People talk about their politics, their hobbies, their beliefs, and the significant events in their lives all the time. Creating a culture of consumers around your brand can allow it to take on these characteristics, but only if you’re committed to cultivating a truly cultural experience that fosters shared ideas among people, plural.

3. Everyone can be an influencer – today, a lot of social marketing focuses on building relationships with influential individuals like celebrities and important business and political figures who can endorse or help promote a product or campaign. Many of the world’s most powerful cultures, however, were built by people with little influence. Building cultures may require the help of a few key individuals, but it may require a groundswell of support generated by average folks. Everyone is an influencer, or can be. The most powerful cultures in human history were constructed by committed evangelists, who may or may not have a lot of social influence, but  were willing to live and share the values of those cultures.

4. Express ideas through rituals - the longest lasting, most successful cultures in human history – most of them political or religious – have had sacred rites and rituals that help frame how people live their lives. The United States has elections, caucuses, and debates. Catholicism has Mass, communion, and baptism. All of these things work to inculcate cultural ideas into the minds of followers. Similarly, brand cultures must not just espouse their values verbally but must express them ritually. Constructing a set of rituals to structure the way people interact with a culture is critical to growing devotion and making a culture a more meaningful part of people’s lives.

5. Don’t just tell stories, build myths – successful cultures have a rich set of myths that support their beliefs. Unlike stories that tell a narrative about a real or imagined event, myths combine stories to create a network of narratives that assert a worldview. Stories are meant to inform or inspire, but myths are meant to transform the way people think. Creating a brand mythology is key to getting consumers to buy in to the story that your brand is trying to tell, and provide an organized system of messages for followers to learn, invest themselves in, and share.

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The Real Big Data Problem, Interpretation or Organization?

Big Data – buzz word alert – was one of the hottest business topics of 2012. In fact, if I made a penny every time Harvard Business Review or Strategy+Business published an article about Big Data, I’d be able to buy lifetime subscriptions to both magazines at the single issue cover price. Despite the volume of content produced on Big Data, however, very little of it is substantive. Many articles have focused on why Big Data analytics are necessary or how Big Data can add value to your business, even though very few people are still asking these questions. Instead, attention has turned to how various algorithms and programs can help organize the deluge of data sitting on enterprise servers everywhere. Figuring out how to organize Big Data is a pressing and important question. But, once the software companies master Big Data organization, it will be up to the insights and strategy crowd to master Big Data interpretation. Indeed, the organization of the data is only the first step towards actualizing the potential of Big Data. The more difficult and potentially more precarious step is the interpretation of that data.

Many companies are finding that after the algorithms have organized, categorized, segmented, graphed, or mapped the “big” data, the meaning of the data isn’t always self-evident. Although new software tools can help you correlate and visualize the data, knowing what the information says and knowing what it means are two entirely different things. You can read something and not understand it. This is why interpretation – the act of deriving meaning from, or coming to a particular understanding of, something – is so critical in the process of drawing out actionable insights from the mounds of raw information. In fact, I would contend that it is the lack of adequate interpretation, not adequate organization, that  has given rise to the Big Data problem to begin with. The biggest Big Data problem isn’t an organizational or technological problem, but an epistemological and hermeneutical problem. Data need to be interpreted and understood in order to be meaningful or useful. Now, of course, organizing and structuring the data in the right way helps make them easier to interpret and understand. However, the process of organizing Big Data cannot be conflated with the process of interpreting it. Organizations that make this mistake will end up passing off gigabytes of confusing information that has neither meaning or application, leaving their organizations asking: so what?

“Although new software tools can help you correlate and visualize the data, knowing what the information says and knowing what it means are two entirely different things.”

To avoid falling into the Big Data interpretation trap, researchers and analysts should adopt a systematic and multidisciplinary approach to interpretation. To systematize the interpretive process, marketers might begin with a set of high-level strategic questions. What are our business objectives? What do we know now? What information do we need? In asking these questions, it is important to remember that you don’t know what you don’t know, that is, always be open to discovering potentially useful information that you didn’t think you needed or that you didn’t know existed. Using these types of high-level questions to formulate business case statements helps to keep the interpretive process grounded and focused. It is also often useful to draw correlations between the data, and between the data and the business case statements. The data, as organized by people or software, may already be segmented into different categories or pre-correlated based on various criteria. At some point, however, all of these data points will have to be interpreted in light of concrete business considerations. What do they mean for the business? How do they help us understand our consumers or processes? How can these granular bits of information add value to our marketing and operational strategies? Once these relevant correlations between the data and the business’ needs have been made, actionable insights can be teased out based on the new understanding emerges from making thoughtful connections. Regardless of what methodology is used, however, it is important to construct some type of framework to guide the interpretive process in order to ensure your interpretations serve the business case. 

Finally, throughout this entire process, organizations must remember to leverage people from different departments and different disciplines. An interpretation is only as good as the interpreter, and interpreters – as human beings – all have their own biases and blind spots. Thus, it’s imperative that the interpretive process be a collaborative one that includes people from a diversity of backgrounds. Conquering Big Data requires a broad base of knowledge and insight.

Obviously, the value of a formalized interpretive process will vary from organization to organization and from data set to data set. However, the most important component in creating an effective interpretive framework is simply appreciating the importance of interpretation in solving the Big Data problem and taking it seriously. If organizations do that, they’ll have no problem finding the right method and the right team to tackle the real Big Data dilemma, which isn’t how the data are organized but how they’re interpreted and understood. 

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