The Influence of Aristotle on Design Thinking in Business

Transcript

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: Navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership,

Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. Joining us today to talk about what’s next for design is business strategist Roger L. Martin, former Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, who advanced the conversation about design and business with his influential work in the late 2000s.

We’ll talk about the parts of that vision that worked out as well as the parts that didn’t, the new forces shaping design’s business impact, and what design leaders should be advocating for next from Aristotle to Hermes. Here’s our wide-ranging conversation with Roger Martin.

Peter: Hello, Roger. Thank you for joining us today. For our podcast listeners who might not be familiar with you, how do you introduce yourself and what are you up to of late?

Roger: Ah, that’s a good question. Well, I guess I’m a writer, an advisor on topics of business, mainly strategy, innovation.

And I’m mainly an advisor, to mainly CEOs, and writer. And I kind of split my time fairly evenly between those two things. I was an academic for a while in the middle of my career. But what I like most is helping people solve problems that they don’t have a way of thinking about.

That would be the way would describe my goal in life. If there’s some problem or issue where you’re saying, man, I don’t even know how to think about this. I try to provide ways of thinking about that.

Peter: Jesse and I would have become familiar with you sometime in the mid-2000s when we were running Adaptive Path and you were one of the few business school people talking about the intersection of design and business, which was something we were interested in. We’d actually hired in 2005, a gentleman named Brandon Schauer from the Institute of Design, who actually had both an MBA and an MFA.

So that intersection was something we pursued. In fact, earlier in 2002 or 2003, we did research with Sara Beckman at UC Berkeley.

Roger: I love Sara.

Peter: So we were familiar with you from afar. So it’s great getting a chance to talk to you today. I’m curious, over these last 20 years, and where you land today in terms of your relationship with design and how you think of whatever the conversation is around the intersection of design and business.

Roger: Yeah, I, I’ve probably in some ways, even though it might not feel explicitly this way to folks watching, because I wrote more specifically on design in the late 2000s and then the next decade, like I had my book design of business was 2009, but my dive into design, I would argue, has deeply influenced my way of approaching business problems in general.

Learning from Aristotle

Roger: So even though I’m writing less about design, design, design those principles are there. And I would say it comes up particularly in my view of Aristotle, and the super important distinction he made that’s ignored by almost everybody on the face of the planet and certainly at educational institutions where he said, yes, I created this scientific method. He is the world’s first scientists. And he said, here’s how you be scientific: book, Analytica Posteriora, one of the most important books in an entire history of science, if not the most important book. And the world has become ever more scientific, all sorts of disciplines like the, my undergrad discipline was economics and it’s become highly scientific and quantitative and analytical.

But all of those people, in the entire world of economics, in the entire world of business, ignored what the father of science said, and he said, you should only use my method in the part of the world where things cannot be other than they are. Well, what part of the world would that be? Well, it’s the part of the world where I’ve got a pen in my hand, and if I let go of it, guess what? It falls. Last week. It falls in Fort Lauderdale. It falls in Saskatoon. It falls in Antarctica. What will happen next week when I let go of this pen? It’ll fall, right?

So that’s what Aristotle meant by the part of the world where things cannot be other than they are. Why? There’s a universal force called gravity that doesn’t come and go, it’s always around. It doesn’t have a different effect. It always has the same effect. And he said, use my scientific method. So essentially analyze the past, gather data from the past in order to be able to understand what he was most interested in his entire life was understanding the cause of the facts. So he said, you will, if you can study that enough, you’ll figure out the cause of, of of the effect.

And sure enough, the world eventually figured out that there’s a universal force called gravity, accelerates everything at 9.8 meters per second squared, unless you’re in America, which is an exceptional country there, it accelerates at 32 feet per second squared. But that’s the part of the world where things cannot be other than they are.

What the world has ignored entirely is a warning by Aristotle, where he said, there’s another part of the world, it’s called the part of the world where things can be other than they are. So if I think about, you know, smartphone, how many of those were there in 1999? Answer, zero. First smartphone was in 2000, the BlackBerry.

How many are there now? Last time I checked the data, 5.5 billion of them. That is clearly the part of the world where things can be other than there are. No smartphones to 5.5 billion in a quarter century only. Think about that. Quarter century 0 to 5 billion.

And Aristotle said in that part of the world, do not use my scientific method.

Now, that has a profound influence on the entire world of design. When these other disciplines like business- -and that’s super important for design, because fine art doesn’t deal with business, design deals with the world of business– in that part of the world, you should not analyze the past to decide what to do in the future, you should do what Aristotle said, he said, rigorous thinking in that part of the world, in the part of the world where things can be other than they are, is to imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made.

The Internal Contradiction of the MBA

Roger: Not analyze the data and choose the thing that the data suggests the world of business teaches, and I ran an MBA school for, for a decade and a half. So like I’m absolutely sure of this, the MBA world, it teaches the only way to be a competent, even moral, business person is to crunch the data analytically, in scientifically rigorous ways, a big enough sample size, all of that, in order to make your decisions.

And that is the rule in business. Now, it’s a funny sort of rule, especially if you look at MBA programs. So in all MBA programs, virtually across America, at least, or North America, at least, first year, there’s a, there’s a required statistics course, and in that required statistics course, you are taught how to make inferences from a sample to a universe.

I’m going to take a sample of electric vehicle drivers to figure out what EV vehicle drivers, or people who might be interested in buying one, think, right? And the statistics professor will say, now, if you only interview men as your sample, you can’t extrapolate to EV buyers because that is not representative of EV buyers, of which there are a whole bunch of women, right? Or if you only interview women or if you only interview young people or old people, the sample has to be representative of the universe. Okay. And so you’re taught that in statistics, then you walk across literally 15 minutes later into a marketing class or a strategy class, and you’re taught here’s how you must analyze data to determine what to do. Okay. Fair enough.

But what assumption do you need to make in order to satisfy your statistics professor who taught in the same course across the hall from this? What you have to assume is that the sample from which that data was taken is representative of the universe that you want to make a decision about.

So you want to make a decision about what era, the future, making decisions about the past is kind of like, Hmm, kind of not helpful…

Peter: …history, but…

Roger: Yeah, history, so you’re taught analyze the data, to make a decision about the future. If you’re listening to your statistics professor, what do we have to assume about the future vis a vis the past?

It’s got to be identical, because Aristotle would say that’s… you’re on, that’s good. The future cannot be other than the past. Then taking a sample from the past, he didn’t say it this because, but is representative of the future world, but we know in the world of business, everything changes all the frigging time, right?

And so we have a schism in the business school world itself, where we teach statistics and then we teach abuse of statistics, right? Back to back to back.

What Designers Do

Roger: What implication does this have for design? Well. Designers are following Aristotle. Designers are trying to create, last time I checked, something that does not exist today, right?

Even if it’s a wedding invitation for somebody’s wedding, if they’re a graphic designer, if it’s a chair, right, if it’s a graphical user interface, they’re trying to design something that doesn’t exist in its current form. Now, by Aristotle’s definition, his core definition that is part of the world where things can be other than they are.

Otherwise, the designer would say, why hire me? Just keep doing exactly precisely what it is now. You say you want a better graphical user interface. Nope, world can’t be any different. Just use the one that you’ve got now. No, designers all work in this world. And what do they do? In my view, they imagine possibilities and choose the one for which they can make to themselves and others, the most compelling argument.

So designers arguably are the only people in the business world who systematically listen to Aristotle. Everybody else in the business world ignores Aristotle. They take his method, which he said, don’t use here, and they use it there. So that’s why you’ve got this huge schism between designers in business and other people in business, they’re all playing a completely flawed playbook. and it’s clear, clear as a bell.

And if you just say to them, right, like, if you just say to somebody in business, so let me get this straight. You want me to make this decision based on this data that you’ve collected in the past. So that means, the future cannot be different in any respect from the past. And they’re like, Oh, come on, Roger, that’s insane. And I have to turn around and say, then what you’re doing is insane, my friend. So there you have it.

Peter: Right.

Roger: It will not go away. The challenge of designers living in the world of business will not go away until business wakes up and says, basically, we’re being stupid.

Jesse: Well, I wonder about what it’s going to take to create that change, because certainly, within digital product over the last 25 years, honestly, we’ve seen a real, I think, waning of interest in, appetite for, desire to, differentiate on innovation in user experience design. Honestly, a lot of these design leaders are not asked to help organizations do new things that can’t be predicted.

They’re asked to create predictability and maximize the predictability of the work that their teams do. And I wonder about, you know, simply creating demand for innovation in business again, and what it’s going to take to get there.

Creeping Scientism

Roger: Yeah, no, I, I buy that thesis completely. And what I tie it to more than anything else is the takeover of science in domains that are not scientific.

So there’s been this slow creeping takeover, and it’s so that it’s getting worse, not, not better. And there are some things about the world of technology in particular that are exacerbating it. For starters, you have a whole bunch of people who are, who are trained in a more scientific discipline than not, let’s say a bunch of computer scientists, right?

That’s a really scientific discipline, computer engineering is a scientific discipline. And then they’re over in the world of business, right? Most talented computer sciences and computer engineers stop doing that pretty soon in their careers, and become managers. So in there in the world of business, and they immediately say, Let me use the rules that I learned in this new discipline, because last time I checked, most of them don’t read Aristotle, never, never have, never will.

And so they don’t realize the flaw that they’re building into their work. And then any technique that is amenable to analysis, more apparently amenable to analysis, because nothing in the part of the world where things can be other than they are, is actually amenable to analysis, right?

It’s just appears to be. So for example, performance marketing is a perfect example. I can just pay for clicks, right? Brand building. Ooh, if, how do you do that? Just pay for more… clicks, A/B testing is another one that’s assuming that whatever’s happening now will be determinative of the future.

So you have a whole cadre of people who are trained to be scientific going and applying those disciplines to an unscientific domain. And it’s not as though that the world of business is entirely non-scientific. I mean, figuring out how much server capacity you need and what the power is of each server, whatever, you don’t, that’s science, that’s, that’s computer engineering.

And there are rules of physics that says, well, this is not much heat dissipation. There is this far apart. You’ve got to have the servers. Here’s how much coolant you have. Like, Oh, there are aspects of business that are scientific, right? But most of the things that really make a difference in the world of business are, are not.

It’s, hmm, how could we appeal to human beings in a different way than they’ve been appealed to before? Hmm. How could we do that anyway? That’s not scientific.

Jesse: There are a couple of touchstones from the history of digital product design that come to mind for me here. One is that I, I wrote an article more than 20 years ago now, where I described this sort of creeping scientism as dressing up in lab coats. And…

Roger: Oh, good, good for you. I send it to me afterwards because that was ahead of it. That was ahead of its time. If it was 20 years ago.

Jesse: Yeah, depressingly still relevant. I’m also reminded…

Roger: More true today than then..

Jesse: …of, yeah, our friend Doug Bowman, who was a designer around here in the Valley for many years, who, when he left Google, kind of was a bit of a canary in the coal mine in this respect, in publicly calling them out for carrying A/B testing to absurd conclusions in the design process and testing 40 shades of blue and that kind of thing.

Roger: Yeah, yeah. Oh, good.

Jesse: It almost seems like you’re making an argument for poetry in corporate decision making here.

Roger: The only thing I don’t love about that metaphor is that you are talking about humanity there, and so there’s this difference to me, fine art and design are in my view, two different disciplines.

They have some, some roots together. Poetry is also a humanistic discipline. Like one of the reasons why I like design as much as I like design is because it is a business-oriented, business- related discipline. So you actually have to appeal to somebody other than yourself.

A fine artist can say nobody will ever buy a painting of mine, but I’m still a great artist, or nobody will ever buy a book of my poetry, but I’m still a great poet because I think so. And I’ve expressed myself. A designer has to have their design come to fruition, which often takes you know, somebody to decide to green light investment.

Jesse: Absolutely.

The Pragmatics of Design

Roger: You know, I consulted to Herman Miller and Steelcase in my life. And, you know, the designers there had to design with manufacturability in mind, right? If you couldn’t manufacture the new chair, like who cares? Or if it costs so much to manufacture it. That at that price point, it wouldn’t sell any, so they couldn’t get the scale to tool up a manufacturing line.

So I like the fact that designers have to live in those worlds where they have to actually pay attention to the economics. They have to pay attention to the consumers, even the distribution channel, the suppliers. Poetry is a little farther than I will….

Jesse: I guess what brought that word to mind for me was just wondering what the antidote might be to all of this excessive over-analysis and this worship of the analytical.

And what came to mind for me was arguing for the intangibles, for the human element. That can’t be measured, that can’t be quantified or nailed down and boxed in.

Roger: In advance.

Jesse: Yes. Yeah.

Roger: Like ex post facto, you can say, well, that would be about 3 trillion worth of design there at Apple, right? Yeah. But only after the fact, because prior to it, like, are you kidding me?

Jesse: Yeah.

Roger: You’re kidding me? This, tiny little useless company that makes these funny devices. No, no. 3 billion. 33 trillion. There are consumers who can’t live without them. As with most things, I’m a Kuhnian guy, structure of scientific revolutions kind of guy.

One of my favorite books of all time, because I think there’s some really core insights there, which is there’s always a dominant theory and as it builds strength and becomes the dominant theory, more and more people study in that mode, work in that mode, work with that theory completely in their minds. and anybody who does not buy that theory is, you know, cast out and suppressed.

So we got that. But then this, nasty little thing called anomalies pop up, and when enough anomalies kind of hit, there gets to be this momentum behind the idea that maybe the dominant theory doesn’t actually work the way it’s supposed to, because there wouldn’t be all these anomalies.

And then you have this sort of melting period where there’s a bit of chaos for a while until you settle on to a new theory. We are at the point of having more anomalies kind of showing up to this analytical view of business. More, we forecast this, we went and tested with consumers, this product, and then they didn’t decide to buy it or the like.

And, slowly, but surely, but it’ll probably take another quarter century, would be my guess, for the analytical view of business, the database analytical view of business, to crumble. And I’m not sure what other than more anomalies and Steve Jobs provides, you know, really, a touchstone anomaly.

They’re like, why, why with those rounded corners? And why do you need all that crap? Because you do. And I will show you only by the evolving of future events. That’s what the designer has to say. And I’m against designers who play the stupid corporate game.

Oh, I’ll try to quantify this for you. You know, you got to just say, yes, yes, I will quantify this for you on the basis of, future events. Because if you just think about it from a data standpoint, the problem with the next six months is we have zero data about it. A hundred percent of the world’s data is from the past. Do you agree?

There’s no data, right? So the problem with the next six months is there’s no data about it. That’s the problem with it. The good thing about the next six months is in six months, there’ll be plenty of data about it. Right. And so my view is the designer’s job is to figure out how to productively turn the future into the past.,

You’ve got to try and figure out how to convince somebody to let you try something, make a prediction of what will happen. And then after it happens, you can say to them, see, we have data. So the designer has to set up a situation in which they can say, I was data-based, I was, but only ex post facto,

Peter: Right.

Roger: To get to there, I had to have you try something. Now, let me try something twice as big. Five times as big, 10 times as big. And you’ve got to build your way to it by cleverly figuring out how to turn the future productively into the past. If you don’t tell anybody about what you predict, right, this is the Babe Ruth effect, Babe Ruth points to center field and then hits it out.

People say that was kind of a special homer. That was maybe like the most special home run that’s ever been hit in the history of the sport. Because boy, oh boy, being able to predict that on the next pitch, you put it over the center field wall is sort of crazy. So the fact that he predicted it rather than just swung hard and hoped made it that much more epic. It’s memorable. It’s memorable for all time. It’s considered onel with the Willie Mays over the shoulder catch, like, considered the most memorable play in all of baseball history. And it has this unique characteristic of, predicting something that you couldn’t prove, doing it and then being able to say, kind of like, see?

Designers should do that rather than spending any time saying, well, we can quantify it and we can, well, maybe this was, that’s playing the game of losers. Don’t play games with losers. Don’t play games of losers with losers.

The Late ’00s Were a Magical Time

Peter: I want to go back a little bit to the Thomas Kuhn and the revolutions thing, because around the time you wrote Design of Business, Adaptive Path wrote a book called Subject to Change, which is very much what you’re talking about, right? You don’t know what’s coming. So here’s a set of practices or approaches that will allow you to succeed regardless of what that future is, or to kind of plan for that change. We had articles like the MFA is the new MBA…

Roger: Ah yes, Dan Pink!

Peter: 2008 2009 was this heady time that design was going to remake business.

Roger: Yep.

Peter: And then it didn’t.

Roger: Yeah.

Peter: And so I guess I’m wondering, what was that blip around then that created some conditions where, this was in the air, but then what didn’t happen, or what happened such that it didn’t carry forward? Maybe because you said it’s going to take another quarter century, are we thinking in terms of the wrong timescale?

Should we be looking at this in like 50 year chunks as opposed to like 10 to 20 year chunks when it comes to this kind of change in evolution?

Roger: Yes. I guess I think what happened were, again, back to anomalies. There were some really substantial anomalies in that period. iPhone.

Peter: iPhone being the most obvious.

Roger: Yes, but Herman Miller, Aeron chair. Right. Cool, cool thing. Like, it became the best selling chair in the history and the most profitable chair in the history of humanity. Right. And it didn’t look like anything before it. And in the clinics when they brought in a student, they didn’t clinic well at all.

The research was crummy and they just said, we’re going to do it anyway. And the thesis behind it was they pointed out the real problems, the things they really hated about their task chairs. And we’ve solved those problems. The problem is it doesn’t look like a chair. In fact, the people at the clinics would come in sit in a chair and then be all mad and say, Why did you come and, make a sit in an unfinished chair?

Peter: Right, right.

Roger: They expected it would be padded and upholstered. Yeah. There were some anomalies. In that period, Samsung embracing design and taking on the Japanese, Philips, while many big Dutch companies were like having, you know, kind of European disease, was flourishing.

So I think there were enough companies doing this weird thing that got people excited about it. And I think the problem is, in some sense, there wasn’t a flow of the necessary kind of person that went into the business world.

And I pointed this out to Dan. Dan’s a great friend of mine. And I said to Dan, Dan, there is a slight problem here, right? Which is, you said the MFA is the new MBA. America produces 150,000 MBAs a year and about 1500 MFAs a year. So. If it’s going to be the new MBA, there’s going to be two orders of magnitude too few of them to fill those jobs.

And of course he didn’t mean exactly that. And we have a fun conversation about it, but, of those MFAs, how many of them care about business? Answer, maybe 2, 3 percent of them. So what I think you just didn’t have is enough people who had any useful training in design that knew enough about business to figure out how to overcome the organ rejection complex that happened.

And of course, I was intimately involved from start onward of the design thrust of A. G. Lafley and Claudia Kotchka at P&G. And that took incredible amount of skill and fortitude to make that so that it didn’t get killed, but boy, the attempt to kill it was all over the place.

So I just think there was a closing of ranks, as Kuhn would predict. We’ve got some anomalies, but those are weird anomalies, says the mainstream, and let’s close ranks and stop this before it gets dangerous and so. You know, we had a huge bubble and a crash on stuff internet in 2000 and 2001 was disaster, a crash it’s gone, but sure enough, 10 years later, 2.0 came along and now we’re maybe in 3.0 or 4.0, whatever people want, and it now rules the known universe. And so I think sometimes that Kuhnian kind of thing has spasms and that spasm was not big enough to overcome the, organ rejection antibodies.

Charting Anomalies

Peter: What are some of the anomalies you’re seeing?

I got the sense you feel like the anomalous is like ratcheting up again. You know, one of the things Jesse and I have been pursuing, the last roughly 10 conversations on our podcast is, like, where things are headed. And to your point, we, you don’t really know, but it felt like from about 2008 to 2022, there was a trajectory, at least for design, you could probably say for product, product development.

But then at the beginning of 2023, like there’s been this convulsion, at least in, tech spaces, right, with layoffs and all that kind of stuff. And what’s next is just this fog, like, whereas before you could kind of, you know, prior data would kind of indicate future results that is no longer the case.

Roger: Yeah.

Peter: And so I’m curious what you’re seeing or sensing or suggestions for navigating through that uncertainty that we all seem to be in right now.

Roger: Yeah, so I agree and observe it, too, the layoffs in silicon valley of all the ux people is, it’s quite sort of catastrophic in magnitude for that discipline.

And it’ll have a long term ripple effect. So, I think I see what you’re seeing. I still see it as a, bit of a, another spasm, right? Where, you know, there was over promising. And we have to have a more sophisticated view of what this sort of, in this case, user interface feature development, based on the individual.

One of the things I’m working on these days, I’m, collaborating with buddies of mine at Red, you know, Red associates, right?

Peter: Yes.

And… the folks out of Denmark.

Roger: Yep. And what our hypothesis is, is the world of strategy started out focusing on economics back in 1963, BCG learning curve, you get your economics better and you win.

And then in the 80s, starting with Mike Porter, to say, no, there’s something called differentiation where you’ve got to understand the user deeply and you can appeal to them, that then morphed into the whole design movement. How do you understand the individual? Oh, ethnographically, deeper user understanding and you start designing features and the graphical user interface associated with them in these digital products in a way that it’ll appeal to them as individuals, and then you will succeed.

A bunch of that success did happen because understanding consumers, their needs, their wants, and designing things for them that they loved made a whole lot of sense. But there was this massive investment in that individual, and what we think that obscured and did not help understand, that’s being brought to light by, in the tech world, another anomaly, and the anomaly is TikTok, which should not be able to do what it’s doing, right?

Network economics should have made it, squashable, like a bug, just like Facebook did to Snap, right? Just, our network economics can crush you like a bug. And we have put more money into feature development, understanding the user, A/B testing, feature development, so make the user experience, you know, so, so awesome.

Meta, what with both Facebook and Instagram have huge, huge lead over, TikTok on that. Why, how can TikTok violate the rules of network economics completely, violate the rules of feature design, feature development, UX design. Why, they shouldn’t be able to do that.

And it’s because It’s not a psychology problem, right? Individual psychology. It’s a sociology problem.

Actually TikTok has created a world that people want to be part of more than they want to be individually attracted by Facebook or Instagram. So you want to be a TikToker and be part of that.

That world has norms, conventions, rules, and you want to adhere to those so that you’re part of that world. So what I think is, the design imperative is going to shift from understanding the individual to understanding and developing, nurturing a world, which you have much less control over, it’s a trickier thing to nurture a world than to design a user interface that you maybe tested to be superior for kind of an individual.

So my explanation would be these companies invested in the new toy, which is user interface designers, feature designers, hired tens of thousands of them, and it didn’t produce the results they were hoping for.

And so they’ve said, guess that didn’t work, and they’re waiting to figure out what to try next. But the answers still are in, if you will, if we can use this term designerly attributes. But they’re not going to be designers who work on the individual.

It’s not as though that was never part of the thing. Your family being on Facebook was helpful to the network economics, but now you actually don’t want to be in the same world as your grandmother. To do your silly dance, you don’t want your grandmother on it. You want other people who love silly dances. And that’s a world and it’s got its rules. It’s got its norms, it’s got its conventions.

So I’m sort of obsessed about this now because I think of it as the next, kind of, forefront of strategy design. It’s designing worlds.

And Hermes has done that spectacularly, sort of, in the physical world. Absolutely spectacularly. There’s a world of Hermes people who want to be part of it as norms and conventions that has weird rules. Like you may want a Birkin or a Kelly bag, but we’re not going to give one to you, sell one to you at an exorbitant price. You have to go through a bunch of steps to qualify to be part of that world. And that’s why at 15 billion of sales, it’s got the same market cap as PetroChina with 240 billion of sales.

How could that be? It’s got a higher market cap to revenue ratio than any tech company except now Nvidia. How can that be? It’s so different from the other luxury goods producers. It’s because over the many years created a world. Do you know how much advertising Hermes does?

Peter: Not a clue. I pay no attention to the luxury market. Have you seen what I’m wearing?

Roger: Yeah, you got a point there. Uh, Jesse, do you know?

Jesse: No. Neither do I.

Roger: Almost nothing. Almost nothing for a exceedingly highly branded consumer product.

Exceedingly highly branded. What do they spend their money on, do you think? Just guess what they spend their money on in the way of building the brand.

Events. Events.

Peter: Oh, so, so, gatherings. Yes, gathering. Social experiences.

Roger: Social experiences, yeah. But not focused on an individual influencer. That’s what’s different about it. it’s incredibly, incredibly cool. Artistically, wowing kind of parties of every, every cool person in Hong Kong, or everybody who’s part of the Hermes kind of world in Hong Kong. So it’s a world oriented strategy, just like TikTok, world oriented strategy.

And so the next big design frontier is designing worlds.

Jesse: Mm hmm. So as I think about the opportunity for design leaders to lead a different kind of conversation to drive some dialogue that reaches beyond the anthropological toward the sociological to bring more of the humanistic into these analytical conversations, a lot of design leaders are struggling just to find the opportunities…

Roger: yeah.

Design Thinking WTF?

Jesse: …for those kinds of things. And your work a decade plus ago was foundational to a lot of people’s ideas about how to create those opportunities for themselves through the methodology that became known as design thinking. And now, at this point in the evolution of things I have to ask: Roger Martin. Design thinking, what went wrong?

Roger: Um, a couple things. One, you didn’t have the human capital necessary to, operate it, right? So you had some thought leaders weighing in on it. Tim Brown’s books. But you then didn’t have the horses to back it up. And so people started to reach for these folks who had a design degree on their resume.

And say, we’ll create a design department. But very few of them knew enough about business to fit in. But there was probably over promising that went on and I think in the tech world, a racing out farther and farther on the thinner and thinner branch, let’s have another thousand UX designers at Google or at, Facebook, and eventually it snapped off behind them because the results weren’t there.

Interesting enough, The Design of Business still sells. It sort of didn’t go… it kind of still sells and, it’s a more foundational, but like Tim Brown, and who’s a good friend of mine, wrote more of the manual for here’s the steps you take.

I said, how should we even think about this? That was Design of Business’s purpose. How can we think about this phenomenon? And I think the core thoughts about mysteries, heuristics, algorithms, code is kind of more right than wrong, shall we say, and just needs to be applied in a different way.

A big problem, though, is like America’s biggest single educational enterprise, higher educational enterprise is business. There are almost half a million, 450,000 between MBAs and undergrads in business, that comes out of that, were just huge. That’s over 20 percent of all people in tertiary education in America.

And, they’re being taught things that are inimical to design and are anti-Aristotelian in a fundamental way. And so what I tried to do, in part, by being a dean for 15 years was to convert an MBA program into a, what I said, I wanted it to be as a master of business design, that was my desire.

But like, it’s the hardest thing I ever tried to do in my life, like advising CEOs on their most important decisions was easy compared to that. And when I left as Dean, it pretty much went away.

At one point, people from around the world came to the Rotman school to learn business design. And we did a really good job educating them. And some of them are floating through companies doing awesome work, but even it is just a drop in the bucket. So the challenge is just might makes right. and the might of US business education is overwhelming.

One discipline, it’s bigger than all the hard sciences and engineering combined. It’s just gigantic. And it has got a core foundational theory is that if we teach you a bunch of analytical techniques, you will analyze the world and make good business decisions.

Peter: Can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Roger: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yes. I mean, what I just said is like demonstrably false, but it is the dominant theory, and that’s why I say it’s probably 25 years till it breaks down and, we need more, we Herman Miller’s and Philips and Samsung’s of the world to show that a different paradigm is what we need. And again, remember how tiny the design education field is. It’s really hard to tell how many graduates of undergraduate design there is. In America, but if it’s 10 percent of the 400…

Peter: …and it’s not, it’s nowhere near.

Roger: Yeah. Yeah. 10 percent of the 300, 000 undergrads, cause it’s about 300,000 undergraduates, 150,000 graduates, last time I checked the numbers, don’t hold me to that, okay.

There’s very little production of the human beings kind of necessary to bring about that revolution. And, as an educator, higher ed person for, 21 years, 15 years as Dean, I just know how slowly that, world changes.

Though, with the right leadership, like we were, attracting design students and teaching them business design.

Peter: Yeah. you just said something you said the phrase, the right leadership.

Roger: Yeah.

Peter: I want to unpack that a bit because something that has happened in the last 20 some years, even with some of the backsliding over the last couple of years, is that a majority of meaningful businesses have some flavor of senior design leadership, kind of director level or above.

They’re all over the place. You know, tens of thousands of design leaders at banks and insurance services firms and healthcare as well as in tech as in retail. They’re everywhere.

But the question then is, you said the phrase the right leadership and I’m wondering , how should these design leaders who are in these businesses have some presence and hopefully some say? How should they be showing up? What should maybe they be doing differently than they’re doing in order to help advance what you’re talking about and get some of these designerly ways better appreciated, to push back a bit on the overwhelming wave of scientism that is, that is drowning, potentially crashing over them. Yeah.

Like, are there tactics that they could be employing to reverse that tide?

How to Succeed

Roger: Yeah, there are. The thing I would first advise is, and this is the same advice I give to students who say, well, Roger, you’re teaching us all this stuff, but we’re going to go into a company. And how do I convince everybody else to do this? And I say, don’t.

Don’t. You’re responsible for something. It may be a tiny little triangle. Like the biggest triangle is the one that the CEO has the whole thing. You’ve got a little triangle, in that triangle to do what I’ve taught you.

If I’ve taught you well, and what I’ve done makes sense, guess what happens? You get a bigger triangle because you succeeded, right? And then you do what? Same thing again. Don’t tell everybody else to do things differently. Then get a bigger triangle, and a bigger triangle, eventually you have the whole thing.

And that’s the advice I’d give. And then the specific advice within your triangle is, you have to be Gandhi-esque, be the change you want to see, right? You’ve got to do things in your own sphere of control for which there is no proof from past data, like all my, you know, kind of consequential successes such as they are in my life have been by doing things for which there was no data to prove in advance, right?

So. Rotman School, fourth best business school in Southern Ontario. I say, I’m going to make it Canada’s only globally relevant business school. And we’re going to do it by embracing integrative thinking and business design, new way to think. We’re going to grow the thing like crazy and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And everybody’s like, you’re kind of nuts and you’re crazy, but you did it. And we became Canada’s only consequential global business school. I went on the board of Tennis Canada, we were nothing, not top 50 nation. We said, we’re going to be a leading tennis nation with Grand Slam singles champions, Davis Cup champions, Fed Cup champions.

Everybody’s like, that’s nuts. We did it. We’ve won Rensselaer Singles, Davis cup, Fed Cup. Were always considered one of the world’s leading tennis nations now. Not the leader; at 30 million with snow you can’t, can’t be that,

So I was the change I wanted to see, by saying I can imagine a possibility. And we’re going to make it happen. And I will be undaunted by anybody who doesn’t buy it and try my best to convince them.

So, people say, yes, but you were the boss, right? No, deans aren’t bosses. I reported to the provost who reported to the president. I was two steps from the top in a hidebound, you know, universe, the university universe, I said, I’m just going to do this.

So I would say, stop looking outside, look inside. Have the courage of your convictions to attempt to do something for which there is no data to satisfy anybody who wants data that you will succeed, and just figure out a way to make it happen. And if that has to happen slower than you wish, because nobody else believes in it, so be it.

And I always used to say at the Rotman School, I’m patient, but resolute. But some things take a while. And in fact, I was saying, I want the Rotman School of the last year of my deanship to be unrecognizable as having had anything to do the Rotman School of my first year.

Those have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with one another, but each year, there would be small enough changes that nobody’s going to kind of jump off the boat and swim to the shore saying this guy’s a lunatic. And that’s what we did. We transformed it utterly and totally to something that nobody thought it made even any sense in the business school world.

So, that would be my practical advice.

Jesse: I guess that if it’s going to take an accumulation of anomalies to create this kind of large scale change, we need more people who are willing to go out there and be the anomalies.

Roger: Yeah. Yeah. And, that is the rate limiting step. So you’ve Jesse, you, put your finger right on it.

Peter: Is that what we’re going to print t-shirts that read “be the anomaly” and sell those at design conferences?

Roger: I kind of think so. I mean, there is a bit of a Nike to this. It’s just do it, right. I mean, stop whining about it. Yeah. You’re a design leader and you’re like, they won’t let me do this. They don’t want that. Well, figure out what you are in charge of and be designerly about that. And, don’t be shy about it. They’re all just doable. But if you’re cowed by the lack of data, then good luck to you.

Jesse: So, embrace the uncertainty, imagine the possibilities, be the anomaly and just go do it.

Roger Martin. Thank you so much for being with us.

Roger: You’re most welcome.

Peter: Where can the people find you, Roger? how do you like to be found these days?

Roger: Well I write a weekly column on Medium, they can find me there. I’m on LinkedIn and X, and I have a website, which is http://www.rogerlmartin. com. You got to put in my middle initial L for Lloyd, my father, otherwise it goes to a real estate salesman in Houston, who’s extremely nice guy. I’ve sent him a lot of business. He’s got, he’s got, he’s just got a lot of emails and he always forwards them to me. So, but I don’t want to have him have too much work so you can find me at any of those places.

Peter: Awesome.

Jesse: Roger Martins of the world unite.

Peter: Yes. Thank you so much for joining us

Roger: Terrific. Thanks for having me.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.