A colleague gave me this example the other day.

Kieran Duck (http://www.secondroad.com.au/OurPeople.asp?NAVID=2&CID=64&ShowTitleOnly=1&StaffID=32 ) gave me this example the other day…

A simple confirming instance of the drive to more exhaustively fill out and describe the existing knowledge space…

He was contrasting the relative strengths and weaknesses of the bigger consulting groups, and noted that BCG is renowned for this strength: the setting of “work plans” for its researchers – establishing an exhaustive a priori certainty that the data they will collect will be necessary and sufficient to prove the case to a client.

Features of Design Thinking: Systemic Thinking?

Why do so many writers lump “systemic thinking” in with Design Thinking? And why are words like “holistic thinking”, or “wholism” so often invoked around Design Thinkers.

Looking at the two archetypes reveals the driver for this phenomenon. It shows why systemic thinking is more apt to be invoked in Design Thinking contexts than in Scientific Thinking contexts. Let’s be under no illusion, however. Those who DO science have a need of systemic thinking (and are unconscious practitioners of it to more or less able extents) on a regular basis.

Again, back to our heuristic:

The one: and the other

Which feature of these epistemic acts, if most regularly excercised, is most likely to nurture or call upon suystemic thinking?

It is the task of Framing:

More technically, “Systems Thinking” is the capacity to conceptualise large spaces – literally, to turn large amounts of related information into concepts. Here we come to another critical term in our epistemology – the “concept”.

George Miller popularised the research showing that the mind had a finite capacity to hold and manipulate concepts – that finite capacity being “The magical Number Seven, plus or minus a few”. And while memory champions use tricks to regurgitate staggeringly long arrays of information, and a few savants (such as the original “Rain Man” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek ) display sticky memories that put the Wikipedia back into human perspective, the truth is that most of us, no matter how sharp, are bound by that 5 – 12 item reality. But here’s the trick. These 5 – 12 items are not things, or brute factoids. Not like the party trick (eg http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chmemory.html) with the mixture of kitchen items – unitised physical objects such as a peeler, a cork, a whisk. No. The memory functions with the “names” of things – with the concepts that “label” bunches of allied information. So if we can make the bunches we hold under these conceptual labels bigger, then we can hold and manipulate more “stuff”. So how do people handle higher and higher complexity as they grow more experienced in a subject matter (eg scientists), or as they tackle big new fields of information (eg designers)? They do it by changing what they can fit inside a single concept.

Scientists do this bunching by their highly honed lexical stock. They use shorthand all the time – which is why technical texts are often incomprehensible to lay people no matter how “plain Englished” they are. Manipulating the “voice” the text is written in, or using plainer verbs doesn’t change the way the concepts are constructed. It’s also why techos prefer their own company – they can stride across large technical landscapes using their shorthand. Their fluency crashes to the floor when confronted by the need to slow their airspeed while they unpack each of their technical terms for a lay listener.

And so to the relevance of systems thinking to Design Thinking. A system is a way of conceptualising a large bunch of stuff – of treating it as a whole because we understand it as a whole through its connections and interdependencies, not as a zillion disparate independent particles.

And what Design Thinking has to be able to do is hold the Frame as a whole (or close to a whole) in order to move out from that ground to a new focus.

So Systems thinking is the ability to take large pieces of reality, see the theme and name it, and thus reduce the pieces to manipulable dimensions

Not only is the need for systemic thinking – for using the tools of systems thinking – more apparent and inescapable in Design Thinking, it has to be accepted that it is less likely to happen in a world where the dominant thinking styles are Scientific Thinking. Look at that model again:

The movements of mind toward analytical decomposition and inferential extension don’t foster holism. In fact Ian Mitrof wrote: “The extent of fragmentation in the minds of trained scientists is such as to require therapeutic invention”. (Mitroff http://mitroff.net/about/ was the President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences – this quote reconstructed from 1992 memories – another one of those seeringly memorable quotes from the days when everything didn’t end up in on-line searchable repositories).

Another way to annoy people if we take our epistemology seriously…

Stop asking “what is X?”

Start asking “How do you know if you have X?”

“What is…” is a respectable scientific question.

What is an atom, a bird, a pollination mechanism, continental drift, the distance to mars, the length of a metre?

Where we have come unstuck is that we have kept asking our respectable scientific question in perfectly unsuitable places:

What is love, marriage, God, death, an ethical decision, hope, joy….

And we end up with bizarre and completely unsatisfying answers, delivered with the same whitecoated authority that tells us how a detergent works.

Stop asking “what is X?”

Start asking “How do you know if you have X?”

Set yourself a test. How would YOU narrate this difference based on our two archetypes? Because that’s where it makes sense.

Design Thinking… ….and Scientific Thinking

a small sample of the implications…

Here are some “tapas” – some tastes of what the shape of these archetypes means for the things that characterise or are valued by the different Thinkers:

some implications…

and some for design thinking….

Begin to work your own ideas about design and science using this heuristic.

Cross-paradigm confusions

These are different ways of thinking. Different ways of working, different preoccupations, different value systems, different inputs and outcomes. Different communities of practice. Different CULTURES.

So it is no surprise to find that there are cross-cultural communication challenges.

I think of two great cross-cultural challenges I have lived through:

a) New Guinea, 1960’s

A Papuan native hired as a house servant fresh from the bush is asked to wash the car with the hose. He does so. Inside as well as out. Another is asked to pluck the chicken and put it in the fridge. The chicken is found naked and shivering in the fridge.

b) Anywhere, 1970’s

A woman with a new computer attempts to use the mouse as a foot pedal. A man rings service demanding to know where the “ANY’ key is.

These are not examples of stupidity or ill will. They are paradigm collisions. These happen in conversations between designers and traditional scientific management.

1. I went to a meeting of a product development group, who expressed interest in what design could offer, but said I was there a bit to soon. They didn’t have a product yet, but when they did, they were sure I could help with the colours and fonts in the marketing materials.

In this world, what else could design offer but ornamentation of the inferential extensions of what we already know?

1. Don’t try and push a Design Thinker for certainty of outcome!

2. And expect Scientific Thinkers to be bemused at times by questions about intent:

I think this could become a party game for rapprochement between the two traditions!

It is doubly unfortunate when some of these miscarriages are overlayed with disrespect for the other tradition, or for its practitioners. But often they are genuine enough mis-placements when viewed within the “opposite” tradition.

“the spreadsheet crowd”

I don’t intend to be guilty of what Peter Merholz referred to as “dismissal of the spreadsheet crowd”http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/merholz/2009/10/why-design-thinking-wont-save.html

I do intend to speak plainly about the strengths and weaknesses of the two epistemic patterns I am contrasting in this blog.

You read some quotes that sear into your mind and stay with you. This is one that has been with me since I read it in 1991:

"The most dangerous, hideously misused and thought-annihilating piece of technology invented in the past 15 years has to be the electronic spreadsheet. Every day, millions of managers boot up their Lotus 1-2-3s and Microsoft Excels, twiddle a few numbers and diligently sucker themselves into thinking they’re forecasting the future.

In truth, number-crunching with spreadsheets is like computationally pumping iron: You bulk up data but do virtually nothing for your conceptual quickness or flexibility. It’s an intellectual exercise that stretches the fingers more than the mind. But managers are infatuated with those matrices of laser-printed numbers just the same. There’s something comforting about them."

Michael Schrage Spreadsheets: Bulking up on data Los Angeles Times, 1991

This model allows us to understand both the power and the delusions of the spreadsheet. A spreadsheet captures both the drive to exhaustiveness (the seemingly infinite matrix to capture as many subdivisions of our analysis as we wish (yes I know it only has 65,536 = 2^16 fields, and I know people who have exhausted those meager limits and complained…), and the capacity for inference (its embedded formulae that instantly show the “therefore’s”)

Of course it takes me back to H.G. Gadamer:

“Analysis and methodical questioning tend not to call into question their own guiding presuppositions, but rather to operate within a system, so that the answer is always potentially present and expected within the system. Thus they are not so much forms of true questioning as of testing.”

more about the Scientific thinking archetype

There are two main choices for scientific thinking styles (For the moment I’ve left them distinct on the epistemic model to show how they resemble or, under some conditions, approximate design thinking).

And the extensive human activity in those two spaces has activities we are familiar with – Research and analysis. But both these thinking styles, when habituated, actually work against our capacity to innovate – they don’t exercise those parts of our beings that go out to a new focal awareness.

Features of Design Thinking: Iteration?

So as a result of our last post, we have two main patterns of thinking that can be visually modelled thus:

Design Thinking

And

Scientific Thinking

With that ground work laid, we proceed to explore what this helps us see. For starters, we could explore each of the features of “design thinking” that are currently being bartered about as candidates for locating its distinctiveness. Let’s start with iteration:

The iterative character of this epistemic act is immediately apparent. The moment we move to a new focus, we stand in a new field, and our focus moves out to a new area. In contrast, the analytical and inferential moves always seemingly create “novelty”, an illusion of driving forth into the unknown and being productive, while in fact simply extrapolating from or filling out the known

Attempts to name this creative move have spoken of “creative destruction” – I prefer “obsolescence”. In the same way as my children know nothing of having to master a slide rule or log tables (I had to learn both), there is a leaving behind of what constitutes relevant knowledge to the current focus

Another way of understanding this difference is the notion of “scaffolding” versus “platform”. In the case of Design thinking, each field of subsidiary awareness creates a scaffolding from which we move to the next focus – a scaffolding which falls away as we move forward. In contrast the prior scientific knowledge (in normal science) is a requisite platform for the next thinking. It’s premises continue to be necessary to the validity of the next move.

A bit more about Design Thinking

So we are in the middle of a raging debate about “Design Thinking” versus “design”.

Whence the heat?

I am arguing that it is because design-the-discipline has accepted as the canons of its respectability an epistemological heritage that is not true to its core genius. That is, the design discipline as we currently know it has been formed in the forge of euroamerican modernity. So despite its core moves being Design Thinking

it has tried to understand its identity and characterise its offer in terms of Scientific Thinking .

This has two failure modes that show up in the current furore:

a) the attempts to characterise Design Thinking by those who are striving to break out of the disciplinary mould lack an epistemology to cohere their stance, while

b) those who feel their professionalism is being subverted (diluted? Disdained? Disrespected?) by all this loose talk don’t see that the framework they use for their defence is incongruent with their own core commitments.

The reason that this way of thinking has been submerged is because it foundationally involves emotion and, oh the horror of it all, subjectivity. It is an act of thinking in which the whole person must be present in order to establish the relevance of where you are and where you want to go. You can’t get that in a textbook or a pile of “the current literature”

No wonder that design is “humanistic”, that designers are often gentle folks, that designers aspire to change the world. It is because the act of design thinking, to be truly done, requires the whole person to be present. It requires that we think in and with our bodyness. This is distinct from the espoused, valued and pursued thinking styles of science (and management) in modernity. The encounter with the other is foundationally an act of empathy – an act of emotional towardness that opens my being to the other.

Now I am not romantic about this. The act of design is also an act of objectification. It is that that distinguishes design from friendship. I am not toward you because I want to hang out and catch some rays/tunes/waves or whatever. I am towards you within a context of enterprise, of intent. My towardness is actually with a goal of objectifying some dimension of your being. So to me the one true distinctive of design is this: That it uses Design Thinking.

And the core distinctives of Design Thinking are these (and each entails the other):

1. That it it must be an integrated act of human thought. It cannot be outsourced, subcontracted, subdivided or delegated. (Contrast the dominant ways of knowing in the production world which Taylorism was determined to show that EXACTLY that process was possible).

1. That it is embodied thought. It requires the presence of emotion that is toward the other.

Design Thinking by David Jones

I choose to start here.

I start with the proposition that this is the basic shape of productive human thought:

And for the purposes of getting started, I’ll simplify it even further, and claim that this is the basic shape of DESIGN THINKING:

And to give a “whiff” of respectability, I’m going to quote someone else giving a summary description of Michael Polanyi’s take on this:

“Building on the general ideas from Gestalt-psychology, (Polanyi) described a difference between two kinds of awareness: subsidiary and focal awareness. In our focal awareness we are aware of a coherent whole, a Gestalt. In our subsidiary awareness we implicitly are conscious of the different impressions, memories that build this Gestalt. This Gestalt is not given, but it is an achievement, realized by interpretative skills.” (http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Tacit_knowledge#encyclopedia accessed 11Nov09)

So that would look like:

But something else can happen to the shape of our thinking when we start focussing on the world where physical things are predominant in our attention. We pretty much stop going out to a focal awareness – we become obsessed with attending to our own subsidiary awareness, and rolling out its implications.

So again I’m just going to commit myself and jump, and claim that this:

Is the basic shape of SCIENTIFIC THINKING.

And I’m going to claim that those are pretty much the two basic ways we have of creating knowledge in the world.