Design, Thinking, and Change
Short of demonstrations that become memory, language drives the way we both obtain and retain understandings that need to be shared. There’s no news value in pointing that out, but here is why it is a topic of attention now: the high-speed blurring of meaning that occurs through popular marketing of ideas forces them to be replaced by formulas and branding, making them into competing commodity products.
You’ve heard the complaint: when an idea means whatever anyone wants it to mean, then it doesn’t really mean anything. But there are two flavors of this problem — both subject to being abused: one, the name of an idea; and two, the point of the idea that is carrying the name.
What seems to resolve the dilution of meaning is, simply, the audience of its users. Meaning is user-centric!
This explains what branded ideas usually need the most in order to be useful: customers. Branded ideas are customer-centric!
These observations are important because they point out that the context in which value is generated is centered in what people need. People-centric!
With these things being known already for decades, why then is it so newsy that managing change affecting humans should be human-centric? Does anybody think this hasn’t already been getting done since the 1860's? Parents, artists and teachers have been doing it ever since there were… parents, artists and teachers.
Obviously, the thing here is that someone of great influence who should have been doing it all along just found out that not doing it was a bad idea in comparison. It’s not an innovation; it’s just a better practice.
Probably the most important thing to do about it is to learn how to stop Not Doing It when the pressure is on to continue Not Doing It.
All change is, by definition, difference established over time. Let’s observe that “change” occurs whether it is managed or not. Our vocabulary for change is pretty extensive, mostly because we keep looking for ways to emphasize one or another aspect of experiencing it and assigning value to it.
For example, construction, progress, translation, transition, transformation, evolution, innovation, modification, degradation, disintegration, renovation, remodel, and the mighty morphing are all ways to point at change, but each way is a different tool or instrument for placing the idea of change where we want it to be for any immediate next use of the idea.
As it turns out, sometimes that placement depends on adding qualifiers, the most popular one (in this audience) currently being “human-centric”. As soon as we say that about change, some of the types of change fall out of the ongoing discussion, such as “degradation” or “construction”. That happens because the reason for saying “human-centric” has the intention not of putting “humans” into the context of change — but exactly the opposite: putting change in the context of humans.
In this situation, the word “human” comes with a halo; it is never intended to make us think about “bad guys” or “infants”, nor is it intended to make us think about non-human change-makers like machines— and my point here is that the language is usually used as a shorthand for a profile of a targeted beneficiary, customer, or other expected affected party.
That implicit profile has importance precisely because by association with the change, someone is going to be held accountable, or perhaps simply blamed, by whoever is (a.) in charge, (b.) making change, (c.) feeling change, or (d.) getting left out of change. Does this mean that there are four kinds of “centricity”? Well, yes. We need to get this straight: centricity is simply a way of invoking a Point Of View. And Perspective (a great synonym for Intelligence) is what becomes collectively evident from that Point Of View. And guess what? Different points of view “on the same subject” can compete, cooperate, or coincide — and their perspectives may or may not overlap in order to be that way. (Play with this observation as you like.)
Deliberately going through this span and degree of detail is ordinarily what we would call thinking. The thing about thinking that ought to make it easy to distinguish from something else is that thinking is supposed to be a way to produce an idea. “Production”, however, might be done in a variety of ways. “Producing” an idea simply means that there is a moment when the idea is not in evidence, and a subsequent moment when as a result of a particular intended activity there is an idea in evidence. That is, “producing” an idea could be accomplished whether the idea is made, found or procured by the producer. But thinking always indicates that an idea is being (a.) created, (b.) hunted, or (c.) studied.
Managing change always means intentionally attending to change to influence it, and certainly thinking about change is part of managing it. So of course this involves coming up with an idea — presumably about a particular type of change — and that idea of the change easily triggers three obvious questions:
- Why that particular type?
- How do we ensure that type is what then occurs?
- How do we know that the type, and not some other, is the best type to occur?
Design is where we normally start to exert influence on the answers to those questions. Design is all about arranging the occurrence of some future state that we want because it will fit some purpose that we already have.
“Design Thinking” is a branded label for the effort to discover and verify an idea of a change that is especially appropriate to the profile of a chosen probable affected party. Again, somewhere between the 1860’s and the beginning of time, this was already being routinely done, just not under the same name and probably not very frequently for the same level of compensation expected from employing it today. “Design Thinking”, regardless, is famous for its advocacy of concern about risks posed to humans by “solutions” to the complexity of urgent problems. Its response to that risk is to cultivate both the problem definition and the solution definition from the people who are going to be the affected parties. If cultivation makes your boss nervous, you might not get to do it, but this is obviously pretty friendly to the notion of managing change.
Today, the big buzz about human-centricity in change isn’t even really about change itself — it’s about management! Again, change occurs whether it is managed or not. There’s no way that managed change cannot be manager-centric, but the question is whether the manager is human-centric.
© 2019 malcolm ryder/archestra research
