Overview of Article: Chip and Dan Heath offer some very interesting options on solving tough problems through cross-disciplinary approaches.

Thoughts on this Article: I enjoy the Heath’s writing style and ability to find new and creative ways to present information.

Original Post HERE at FastCompay

A Problem-Solver’s Guide to Copycatting

By: Dan Heath & Chip Heath

FISH TALE The Antarctic icefish digests oils in extreme cold. That process offers lessons and inspiration for cold-water stain-fighting detergents.

Instead, look for the folks who have already solved them.

Your business has a big problem. You’ve thought about it, but you can’t seem to crack it. So you consult your colleagues — to no avail. Then you turn to the big guns — your industry’s top experts. They’ve got nothing. (Well, to be precise, they’ve got 40 PowerPoint slides worth of nothing, and you’ve got $225,000 less of something.) Now what?

You might take some inspiration from Pete Foley, associate director of the cognitive science group at Procter & Gamble, who was looking for an inspired solution to challenges faced by P&G’s feminine-care business unit. Its R&D staff had pursued several approaches, but none of them offered the breakthrough that Foley craved. So he did the next logical thing:

He took his team to the San Diego Zoo.

The zoo is developing a specialty in biomimicry, a discipline that tries to solve problems by imitating the ingenious and sustainable answers provided by nature. In a working session with the company, the zoo’s biomimicry experts made an unexpected connection between P&G’s problem and the physiology of a gecko. Other ideas came quickly, inspired by flower petals, armadillos, squirrels, and anteaters.

(Full disclosure: Chip led a workshop with the biomimicry team on another issue.)

By the end of the day, the working group had generated eight fresh approaches to the challenge. It was as if Ideo had opened an office on Noah’s Ark.

Most of us don’t solve problems this way. We start by tapping the local knowledge, and if it’s insufficient, we go looking for specialists. But what if we’re following the wrong protocol?

We should stop looking for experts and start looking for analogues.

It’s a big world: Chances are someone has solved your problem already. And she might be an anteater.

Let’s say you’re looking to create a detergent that works superbly in cold temperatures. This would seem to be a Chemical Engineering Problem. But, as the zoo’s scientists tell us, it’s also an Antarctic Icefish Problem.

When the icefish eats other fish, it has to digest the oils of its prey, and this process is remarkably similar to what happens in the wash with the oily taco stains on your T-shirt. Furthermore, the icefish typically dines in water as cold as — 2 degrees Celsius. (Try that, All-Temperature Cheer!) So, thanks to this cold fish, you have a working model for an ultra-low-temperature detergent — and it’s a solution that would have never occurred to an expert.

The model also suggests that the world’s auto-safety leaders ought to be studying cockroaches, which routinely walk away from newspaper swats that must be the equivalent of dropping the city of Cleveland on your Corolla.

Exotic animals are clearly not the only place to look for answers.

What if another industry has solved your problem? In 1989, the pilots of the Exxon Valdez ran it into Bligh Reef, spilling enough oil to cover 11,000 square miles of ocean. To finish this cleanup job, you’d have to clear an area the size of Walt Disney World Resort every week for about five years.

One major obstacle was that the oil and water tended to freeze together, making the oil harder to skim off. This problem defied engineers for years until a man named John Davis, who had no experience in the oil industry, solved it. In 2007, he proposed using a construction tool that vibrates cement to keep it in liquid form as it pours. Presto!

Why is it counter intuitive to look outside our own turf for answers?

“If you’ve spent five or six years getting a PhD, or 5 to 10 years in the field itself, you’re a domain expert,” says Karim Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies innovation.

“You can’t imagine that someone else may have a different perspective. But problems that are difficult in one domain may be trivial to solve from the perspective of a different domain.”

The trick, of course, is locating that elusive person who’d find your problem trivial. If this hunt were easy, we’d all be problem free. We could resolve life’s great mysteries with epiphanies sparked by toucans and frozen-yogurt machines.

But while the hunt may not be easy, it’s not random either.

It’s about pattern matching.

Ask yourself who might have solved a problem similar to yours. For instance, health-care advocates trying to reduce medical errors have learned from total-quality-management experts in the manufacturing world who obsess about ways to reduce product-defect rates.

Olympic swimwear designers, intent on reducing the water’s drag on swimmers, have enlisted help from NASA engineers who make aircraft more aerodynamic.

The biggest barrier to the idea hunt, in fact, may be you.

It may never occur to you to start searching because we all commonly keep our thinking penned up within our company or industry. How can you overcome this conformist instinct? We’re not entirely sure, but a good first step might be a workshop with the Hells Angels.

Dan Heath and Chip Heath are the best-selling authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Their next book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, will be released in February 2010.

Thoughts on this Post: I appreciate the points that Robert makes on how to approach social design.  He offers very practical ways to move the process forward.

Live From PopTech: Designing for Impact

Original Post and Comments HERE at FastCompany.com

The design process really kicked into high gear on day three–Kevin Starr of the Rainer Arnhold Fellows program and I teamed up for our presentation.

Members of the PopTech fellows program

No one is better than Kevin at getting social entrepreneurs to think clearly about their interventions. He set up some basic components of each fellow’s impact model, including the concise definition of their mission and, more importantly, impact measurement.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but I prefer to work backwards from impact, rather than forwards from mission in the social innovation design process. It really clears a lot of things up fast. If you know the specific impact that you are trying to achieve, the steps to get you there become very clear. And the organization that you need to drive those steps emerges quickly. With a group that has this kind of creativity and capacity it is all about focus.

I spent most of the five-hour work session focusing on understanding behavior (no surprise), particularly the creation of what Kevin refers to as a Behavior Chain. As you have probably guessed, I define social impact as the ability to drive lasting behavior within a community. And I’m always amazed when we’re able to get past all the aspirational language and break down a social initiative into a discreet set of behavioral building blocks (like getting rural health care workers to collect information with their mobile phones).

The fellows are an exceptionally accomplished bunch. Among them are some real veterans, such as Nigel Waller and Deb Levine. Yet this kind of simple analysis always reveals major gaps in understanding around the participants and behaviors that are central to their work. Here are some of the steps:

• Define a clear and simple impact statement (something measurable) like improving health indicators in resource limited settings (in the case of Diagnostics for All).

• Start working backwards. Entrepreneurs usually know the one thing that’s key to delivering an impact. In the case of Diagnostics for All, it is increased rates of testing in these settings.

• From there, you can back out the rest of the behaviors that need to happen to increase the number of people who are testing all the way up through the typical rural health system.

• Look at the incentives and conditions that are necessary to drive behavior at each link in the chain. Are they present?

It goes a lot deeper beyond that, but you get the idea. Common sense, right? But it requires a number of things:

• You have to know whom you are trying to influence.
• You must think not just about the target participants in your intervention (the families in these remote communities) but all the other participants, such as doctors or public health officials that are essential to delivering impact for the end user.

This last bit is crucial because the most essential, sustainable, and innovative part of your program may be in how you can deliver a change in behavior further upstream in the ecosystem. That can be very hard to do. But once you have figured out how to solve for incentives related to distribution (for example) or procurement you can use that platform to support many different interventions. This is how people like Paul Polak have driven value on such a large scale. Reaching the customer is usually 80% of the battle.

With a first pass at the Behavior Chain my goal was to show them how integrate design methods into their process to test and refine their chain. I provided some structured thinking tools to guide them through the process of testing their assumptions and adapting to changes in conditions. It was a great session, although I wish that I had much more time with each of the fellows.

PopTech fellow Beth Kanter

I was followed by the incredible Bath Kanter who took them through a deep analysis of social media strategies. She drew some nice parallels between my core message about the iterative nature of the design process and how you think through these strategies. You can check out more on her blog. It was an honor to collaborate with Kevin, Beth, and the other faculty members. And throughout the process we were assisted by the incomparable Peter Durand and his nimble graphic facilitation skills. What a treat!

[Photos by Erik Hersman]

Related Stories: Inside PopTech’s Solar-Powered Bag

Read Robert Fabricant’s Design4Impact blog
Browse blogs by our other Expert Designers

Robert Fabricant is a leader of frog’s health-care expert group, a cross-disciplinary global team that works collectively to share best practices and build frog’s health-care capabilities. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert recently led Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat the world’s worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Robert is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he teaches a foundation course in Interaction Design. In 2009, he joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and is a faculty member of the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellowship Program. A regular speaker at conferences and events, Robert recently gave a keynote speech at the 2009 IxDA Interaction Conference. He is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including I.D. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Thoughts on Post: Robert touches on one of the biggest challenges that Design Thinking faces when applied to the social/human application:  How do you create an effective rapid prototyping experience?  I look forward to reading his thoughts on this.

Original Post HERE at FastCompay

Live From PopTech: Bringing Design to Social Innovators

BY Robert FabricantWed Oct 21, 2009 at 11:58 AM

Every year (at least for the last two) I have had the honor of serving as part of the core faculty of the PopTech Fellows Program. This means I’m involved in the planning stages for this five-day retreat. No matter how much time I spend preparing for the program, I’m always astounded when I finally meet the fellows. It’s difficult to comprehend the variety of innovations that this incredible group is driving, from virtual mobile phones and paper diagnostics to batteries made of common soil and building materials made of mushrooms. What’s even more astounding is the fact that the people driving these ideas are both incredibly special and shockingly ordinary.

My role is to introduce them to the design process–to provide some tools to help them think through and challenge the assumptions they’re making about their interventions. As always, I’m struck by how open-minded and creative these social innovators are (otherwise they would not have achieved anything close to the outcomes they’ve already seen). Creativity is not something they chose as an identity or practice–it’s a means, not an end. They many not spend a great deal of time talking about design, but research, prototyping, and abductive reasoning are at the heart of their work.

One of their most refreshing qualities is their orientation towards technology. This struck me while listening to Deb Levine, a longtime innovator in the area of technology and sexual health. She has an unparalleled track record–in the past 15+ years–of using digital technologies to increase access to information. Yet to hear her talk you wouldn’t think technology is anything special–though she was one of the first people to offer sexual health info on the Web and mobile devices in the U.S. In her intro talk, she described a teen-focused project she initiated in 2006. The default assumption is that the info would be delivered via the Web. But Deb started hanging out in front of schools and watching all of the kids “doing that thing with their thumbs.” Her simple observation led to a very early health intervention using SMS.

So what am I doing here? I don’t know much about the power grid in Namibia or low-cost diagnostics in Saudi Arabia. It’s interesting to be in a position of expertise with a group that has gone down roads and achieved things I don’t think I could achieve myself. My focus, as always, will be on behavior. I continue to see social impact largely through that lens. So we will be doing a deep dive into how you create the right conditions to drive changes in behavior. I will work with the group to help them answer the following questions:

• How do you link a set of behaviors together to achieve the desired impact of your intervention?
• How do you design prototypes and other interventions to test your assumptions around behavior and the underlying motivations that will support behavior change?
• How do you look at the barriers to behavior change and use them to your advantage?

This last point is key. Most designers (and social innovators) look at prototyping as a way to test their ideas, to see what works from a functional perspective and what appeals from an attitudinal perspective. But the most useful dimension of prototyping, I find, is to think about it as a tool for understanding behavior. Think about each prototype not as an intervention, but as a set of conditions to better understand the behavior you are trying to drive. It’s an important distinction because it shifts your orientation from what you are prototyping to the impact you are trying to create.

I will be blogging from PopTech throughout the week. Next up, a deep dive into how you design for impact. Please stay tuned.

[Photos by Erik Hersman]

Related Stories: Inside PopTech’s Solar-Powered Bag

Read Robert Fabricant’s Design4Impact blog
Browse blogs by our other Expert Designers

Robert Fabricant is a leader of frog’s health-care expert group, a cross-disciplinary global team that works collectively to share best practices and build frog’s health-care capabilities. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert recently led Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat the world’s worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Robert is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he teaches a foundation course in Interaction Design. In 2009, he joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and is a faculty member of the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellowship Program. A regular speaker at conferences and events, Robert recently gave a keynote speech at the 2009 IxDA Interaction Conference. He is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including I.D. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Thoughts on this Article:  This is a brief interview that could have had a great deal of substance if it were longer.

Original Article HERE at FastCompany

BY Linda TischlerMon Sep 28, 2009 at 7:07 AM

Better ballot design could have changed the results of the 2000 election. A better design for information sharing might have prevented 9/11. Now, could design thinking help fix something fundamentally broken in American democracy: how we engage in national debate?

Whether the topic is climate change, financial regulation, or health care reform, when asked to “discuss amongst ourselves,” the conversation devolves into who can shout the loudest, hurl the nastiest epithets, or pervert the facts to fit their own agendas. Can this process be saved?

We spoke to Tim Brown, CEO of famed design and innovation firm, IDEO, and author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, (and Fast Company expert blogger) to see what might be done.

Fast Company: Lately, our national conversations about important issues seem to have reached a new low. Could design thinking improve how we engage in national debate?

Tim Brown: What’s missing from the debate right now is that much of our discussion is about what we have to give up, or how we have to make choices among unattractive alternatives. The role of design thinking is to put new choices in the world. We look at people and their needs, and create new ideas and insights. We do that all the time with companies. Right now, whether it’s health care or climate change, there’s a relative dearth of new choices, which means everybody is arguing from entrenched positions.

FC: One of the problems seems to be that there’s a lot of confusion about what various proposals mean. How could that be remedied?

TB: Last year at Davos, I got stuck in a big debate with world leaders arguing about whether there should be 50% less carbon, or 80% less. I thought, “This isn’t helping.” Nobody was talking about what life would be like in 30 years if we make our goals or not.So, over the summer we developed a Web site, called Living Climate Change, that shows what life would be like in 30 or 40 years with various scenarios showing changes in food, transportation, and other things, depending on whether we make our goals or not.

We need to have the same discussions in health care and other issues, with a way to describe what various options would be like. That would allow people to imagine their future and participate in it. Right now, it’s hard to imagine these things, and politicians exploit that.

FC: Certainly, that’s been part of the problem, hasn’t it? That so much of the information out there seems driven by ideology, industry lobbyists, or other forms of self interest. It’s hard to know what to trust

TB: What design thinking offers is that it enters the debate without an agenda. How do we make life better? So much of what’s out there now seems based on a world of 50 years ago.

FC: One of the things design thinking does well is prototyping alternatives. How could that work for something as complex as health care policy?

TB esign thinking brings experiments to life quickly to see what works and what doesn’t. It also lets us put more options on the table. Google does this all the time. Instead of making judgments based on some political agenda, we should try to make one prototype better than the last.

FC: Good point. What else could the public sector learn from the private?

TB: That it’s important to actively manage a portfolio of experiments. In health, for example, we need to explore the issue of prevention, finance, increased productivity, etc. We can do this in a linear way – dealing, for example, with access now and prevention later.

FC: What could we learn from developing countries?

TB: A lot. In India, health care is completely driven from the grass roots, rather than from the top down. In America, much of our innovation is also from the ground up. There needs to be a way for government to understand the role it can play in encouraging grass roots innovation.

FC: Of course, all this presumes that there’s a willingness to think differently within government organizations.

TB: True. Culture plays a huge role. Great, innovative companies focus on building internal capabilities. We need to see that same capacity in public life. But there’s hope. Recently John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management – essentially the government’s HR agency – came to Silicon Valley to see how Facebook, IDEO, and Google went about building inquisitive cultures. The idea was how to make government service cool again.

FC: Maybe with the market collapse, smart young MBAs will start considering government service instead of Goldman!

TB: Recently, Universum, a talent strategy consulting firm that ranks the attractiveness of employers, called to say that in their latest survey of 6,200 MBAs, IDEO ranked #15. That’s ridiculous since we’re a tiny company, but to me it was indicative that kids in business school are fascinated by innovation. Imagine if we could get government thinking that way — not just to serve but to innovate, to make the world a better place. p>

Thoughts on this Article:  Wow.

Original Article at Fast Company (HERE)

Meet the man with a nearly uncontainable design challenge: making Coke even bigger (and staying ahead of Pepsi).

By Linda Tischler

Photograph by Jake Chessum

The image on the Webcam is grainy but unmistakable: a blond woman, likely in her thirties, steps up to a shiny silver soda-fountain machine at a fast-food restaurant in Atlanta and plants a fat kiss on its side. The moment is unscripted and, as far as the woman knows, unwitnessed by anyone except a girl who appears to be her daughter, busily filling her cup. If great design is all about creating a bond between your product and your customer, this is clearly some kind of mechanized Cyrano de Bergerac, brokering the ardor between a consumer and her Diet Cherry Coke.

The reason for this public display of affection? It might be the fountain’s astounding array of choices, more than 100 different Coca-Cola variants, including exotic hybrids such as Minute Maid Raspberry Lemonade, Caffeine-Free Diet Coke With Lime, Orange Coke, and Fanta Peach. Or it could be the machine’s intuitive, glowing screen, with its play-ful interface. Or the appeal might be more primal, what the Pietmontese call geddu: Its studly curves and elegant grillwork were sculpted by designers at Pininfarina, stylists of the Ferrari, Maserati, and Alfa Romeo.

Hot or not, the new Freestyle fountain, originally code-named Project Jet, has been a top-secret priority at Coca-Cola for the past four years. In alpha testing this summer (hence the hidden Webcam), it finally goes public this fall, rolling out to various Subway, Jack in the Box, and Burger King restaurants on the West Coast. It’s an audacious move for Coke, representing the largest investment in equipment innovation in the company’s history — hundreds of millions of dollars — and a big bet by CEO Muhtar Kent. Kent, a Formula One fan, not only approved the project but also urged the team to make the machine look “like a Ferrari.”

But Freestyle’s success — or failure — will ultimately be a referendum on David Butler, the company’s vice president of global design, who masterminded its development. Butler, along with industrial design chief Vince Voron (recruited by Butler four years ago from Apple as the point man for the machine’s design), built Freestyle to address a host of business conundrums: how to satisfy a consumer base that has been increasingly moving away from carbonated sodas; how to lighten the carbon footprint generated by hauling millions of gallons of syrup around the world; how to offer maximum variety within the cramped confines of a fast-food restaurant or cafeteria; and how to get accurate, real-time feedback on customer choices.

That’s a lot to ask of one machine, but it’s just the kind of challenge that rings Butler’s chimes. “I love big, giant, enormous systems, no matter what they are,” he says.

Being a systems geek would seem to be a prerequisite for design success at a place like Coke. “The reality of the business is that it’s a flow of material and energy on a massive scale,” says Bruce Mau, a guy who, as founder of the international design project Massive Change, understands what “massive” really means. Mau helped Coke design a major sustainability initiative. “Our whole project was systems,” he says. “In fact, that’s how they refer to the company — as a system.”

If Butler likes his systems big, he has come to the right place. With 450 brands operating in 200 countries, and 20,000 retailers selling 1.6 billion servings of Coke products per day — that’s 18,000 servings per second — it would be hard to find a bigger canvas on which to explore design as an enterprise function. Butler oversees a team of 50 designers within Coke and works with some 300 agencies worldwide. In a company as colossal as this one, no single designer can pretend to control every permutation of every product in every far-flung fast-food joint. Instead, Butler’s job has been to build a central design apparatus that is at once specific and flexible, one that can roll out across the globe without losing focus — or customers. And that’s exactly what he’s done, from the brand identity at the center of Coke’s corporate id to the advertising machine that projects that identity around the world to the very machines that dispense the company’s myriad products into your cup.

Butler’s job has been to build a central design apparatus that is at once specific and flexible, one that can roll out across the globe without losing focus — or customers.

“If you distill it down, it’s this,” Butler says. “Big giant brands. Big scale. And how to create value through design.”

Tall and soft-spoken, Butler is holding forth from the cozy confines of a conference room at the World of Coca-Cola, the three-story, $15 million shrine to the world’s best-selling soft drink; outside, a spectacular thunderstorm roils the Atlanta skies. Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Coke messaging in Thai, longish sideburns, and hair just shaggy enough to signal that he’s not one of the suits, the native Floridian could pass for the bassist in an indie band or a surf-shop owner in Cocoa Beach. Butler, 43, is ambitious but self-effacing, passionate but strategic, relentless but patient as a monk.

“He’s an old soul,” says Keith Yamashita, cofounder of Stone Yamashita, who has worked as a management consultant to the company for four years. “Most people are attracted to Coke because of ego,” Yamashita says. “You need that to think you can change a billion-dollar brand. David is the opposite. He doesn’t feel like he has to grandstand or dominate you, because it’s not about him; it’s about success.”

But Butler isn’t at Coke to change a billion-dollar brand — he’s there to reconceive the design of 13 billion-dollar brands. Since he arrived in 2004, he has torn down and rebuilt the design strategy at every level of the company. And he has managed this epic list of projects with a low-key but extraordinarily effective strategy: Avoid using the word “design” at all costs.

“It’s great that when David speaks, he doesn’t speak in the language of design,” says Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola’s global marketing chief. When he talks to folks on the manufacturing side, to the bottlers, to the retailers, Butler’s message, Tripodi says, “is very simple: Here’s what I’m going to do to help you sell more stuff.”

Contrast that with his counterpart, Pepsi’s design consultant, Peter Arnell, who titillated the blogosphere last spring with a 27-page memo he wrote called “Breathtaking,” defending his new logo design. He cited inspiration from da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to his Vitruvian Man, and described the “gravitational pull” of a can of Pepsi on a supermarket shelf. That was before he compared his genius at creating a 3-D Super Bowl ad to Thomas Edison’s invention of motion pictures. Many designers were mortified, fearing Arnell had discredited the whole tribe with his claptrap.

In many ways, Butler is the anti-Arnell, a first-class designer who shuns the latest trendspeak. “I read all the journals. I love design theory. I’m a junkie for that stuff. But that’s at home,” he says. “At work, I don’t use the phrase ‘design thinking.’ Here, it’s about creating more value. How do we sell more of something? How do we improve the experience to make more money and create a sustainable planet?”

Selling “more stuff” has proven to be a pretty effective strategy, even in a downturn. Case volume was up 4% for the second quarter and profits were better than expected, based on strong sales in China and India. And in 2008, the Coca-Cola company’s market share was 42.7%, compared to PepsiCo’s 30.8%, according to Beverage Digest. On the brand level, Coke’s share rose to 17.3% from 17.2% in the carbonated soft-drink category in 2008, while Pepsi’s fell to 10.3% from 10.7% a year earlier.

Nobody’s saying these results can be credited solely to Butler. Coke’s latest advertising campaign, “Open Happiness,” by Wieden+Kennedy, has bumped brand-preference scores globally by 6% versus 2007. And strong performance by Fuze and the recently acquired VitaminWater have boosted sales in the increasingly important noncarbonated-beverage segment. But, as Tripodi notes, “Butler happens to be one of the most visible and biggest facilitators of how we will win in the marketplace.”

That’s no small tribute, given the volatile and competitive corporate ecosystem in which Butler operates. “There have been three CMOs and three CEOs in David’s time,” Yamashita says. “Who would have thought that the quietest guy in the room would thrive in a place that’s so complex and cutthroat? David is like your best secretary of state. His job is to bring multiple people to the table and set a new high bar. That’s what his work did.”

It’s Butler’s marching orders when he arrived five years ago were simple. So simple, in fact, they fit on a Post-it Note. On his first day at work, his then boss, chief creative officer Esther Lee (now at AT&T), handed him a yellow sticky. It said three things: 1) Meet a lot of new people and get to know the business. 2) Work on Coke. 3) Tell me when you need help.

“I took the job with the attitude that Coke has the largest supply chain on the planet, it has the biggest [manufacturing] system, giant brands, and it’s fairly broken from a design perspective,” Butler recalls. “Naively, I thought, What can go wrong? This is a great opportunity!”

Coke’s business at the time was languishing. Douglas Daft was CEO; by the end of the year, he would be replaced by E. Neville Isdell, who himself would be succeeded, in 2008, by Kent. There were supply-chain problems, trouble with bottlers, lost opportunities in the global markets, dwindling interest in its core products. The CMO chair was like the teacup ride at Disney World. “I came in 2007, and I’m the seventh [marketing] person since 1998!” Tripodi says.

“The churn at the top was shocking,” another designer told me. “I have mustard in my fridge that’s been around longer than some of those execs.”

Making Butler’s job even more complicated was the fact that during the previous decade, as the globalization debate heated up, big brands like Coke had struggled to balance maintaining a strong, unified identity with the need for a more decentralized strategy. By allowing local marketers to put their spin on a brand, they hoped to defuse some of the anti-American hostility that had led farmers in France to ransack a McDonald’s and protesters to smash Starbucks’s windows in Seattle. During Daft’s tenure (he left in 2004), he pushed for more local autonomy in peddling Coke products: If bottlers in the Baltics wanted to slap bubbles and homegrown typography on their cans, he said, so be it.

Predictably, perhaps, by 2005 the brand messaging was a mess. Even within the United States, the design language was chaotic: There were multiple variations on the bottle, the color palette was haphazard, the placement of the signature Coke “ribbon” was arbitrary, illustration and photography styles were idiosyncratic. Just the kind of chaos, in other words, that gets Butler excited. In his mind, he saw big, broken systems — and massive opportunity. “When I came,” Butler says, “people recognized that they had a business problem. They just didn’t know it was a design problem.”

Coca-Cola had never had an in-house vice president of design until Butler. In fact, his original title, vice president of visual identity, described a limited sphere of influence. In his first few weeks, folks would routinely show up at his door asking for help in designing banners for volleyball tournaments and graphics for off-sites, assignments he diplomatically deflected. Six months in, Butler still wasn’t getting much traction. The problem, he realized, was that nobody really understood the word “design.” So he had what he describes as his “Jerry Maguire moment.” He wrote a three-page manifesto, short and simple, called “Designing on Purpose” and sent it out to everyone he knew in the company.

The idea was to show his colleagues that even though they didn’t recognize it as such, Coca-Cola is one of the world’s largest design companies. And to point out that a more deliberate focus on design could sell more stuff. “The word ‘design’ is not so important to the top echelons of the company, but winning at the point of sale is fundamental,” Butler says. “I wanted to show how you could create value for the business through design. I had no organization, no influence, nothing to point to, but now we had that statement out there — a flag in the ground.”

It worked. “I wasn’t trying to create a magic phrase,” he says, “but after that, every time I stood up, people would say, ‘This is the guy who’s about designing on purpose.’ ”

A big opportunity to demonstrate what that meant soon presented itself. Marc Mathieu, at the time head of Coke global brand marketing, was determined to rein in the brand identity that had run amok the previous years. Under the banner of “revival of an icon,” he convened a meeting of 30 people in London for three days, where he walked through his idea. Butler had his first big mission.

His background had teed him up for just such a project. In 1994, six years and several graphic design jobs after graduating from the University of South Florida with a degree in mass communications, Butler took a job with the Atlanta firm Copeland Hirthler, creating the identity standards for the 1996 Atlanta Games. It was his first hairy systems project. The logos and images he created were deployed on everything from T-shirts to collectibles to identity systems for Olympic affiliates. It was a lesson he wouldn’t forget: “You have to think big; you have to think scale.”

A year after the Games, Butler went to his bosses and suggested the company move into the exciting new-media space growing up alongside the Internet. They were dismissive: It’s a fad, they said, simultaneously losing both a potential competitive edge and one of their most promising employees. Butler, a fan of both Marshall McLuhan and Nicholas Negroponte, was enamored of the digital space. “The concept of millions of machines together fascinated me,” he says. So he and a partner started a firm called Process 1234 to explore the burgeoning industry. They designed the user interface for CNN.com’s first streaming video player.

Butler was hooked. He wanted to go large; his partner wanted to stay small. So he sold his pal the business, and joined Clement Mok’s new firm in Atlanta, Studio Archetype. He thrived helping design strategies for companies that wanted to move onto the Web. In 1998, Mok sold his company to Sapient, the new-economy consulting firm, and Butler suddenly had a new employer with supersize clients, including United.com, Delta.com, Gucci.com, and UPS.com.

That experience and a run-in with Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization changed the way Butler thought about design. He saw how systems thinking could be applied in a more holistic way. In the past, he says, design had been focused on straightforward problems: Come up with a drinking vessel, say. But now it was being asked to solve multipronged problems: How do we get clean drinking water? “We’re moving from linear problems to wicked problems,” he says, and the old default solution — hire a rock-star designer — no longer works. “The model of a master of design creating that magical object that is going to change the business is an old way of thinking. I can’t use it to work on wicked problems. I need to have capability internally.”

Then Coke called. Butler had a few other offers on the table, but his mentor, Mok, told him to go for it: “If design is really going to make an impact on business, the only way it can happen is to have people inside, designing from the inside out.”

Stashed behind an unmarked green door, down a long, gray hall of green doors, in the basement of Coke’s North American headquarters, is the vast Coca-Cola archive. Inside are several hundred thousand artifacts accumulated over the company’s 123-year history, from the world’s first six-pack to hip-hopper Cee-Lo Green’s giant zebra coat from the “Open Happiness” video.

Butler began his odyssey here, among some of the touchstones of American design: the original contour bottles, whose design was based on an erroneous idea of what a coca pod looked like; handwritten letters to the sales force, in the lovely Spencerian hand of bookkeeper Frank Robinson, who penned Coke’s signature logotype; and fountain dispensers designed by that master of modern industrial design, Raymond Loewy. If Butler was going to “revive the icon,” he needed to know what the icon originally looked like.

In league with Todd Brooks, group design director for global brands whom Butler had recruited from Sapient, he set out to pare the flagship brand down to its core assets — the color red, the script, the ribbon, and the contour bottle. In search of an identity scheme that could be replicated across the Coke universe, Brooks and Butler established four core principles. Each design, whether it was packaging, point of sale, equipment, or any other touch point, would need to reflect bold simplicity, real authenticity, the power of red, and be “familiar yet surprising.”

The two tapped the U.K.-based design firm Attik to create a global brand-identity system using those principles. The brief, says Attik’s cofounder James Sommerville, was basically about decluttering through design. “It was about bringing a simplicity to the language, about the bold use of the iconic bottle, a flat red, and a flat script… . Core brands need a timeless quality.”

To ensure that these new identity standards were understood throughout the 200-country system, Attik and Brooks developed a hefty global-standards book, specifying in excruciating detail every element of the design, from the placement of the white ribbon that swirls down the can to the kinds of clothes that models can wear in photographs featuring the product. Pio Schunker, who oversees both North American advertising and design, was responsible for codeveloping the system with San Francisco’s Turner Duckworth, the lead North American advertising agency. “As life gets visually noisier, brands that dial back to their core essence stand out by contrast,” Schunker says, pointing to Apple, Google, and Nike as examples. But for Coke, the stakes are even higher. Unlike, say, a consumer-electronics company that can make news through its latest innovation, Coke’s product doesn’t change. Indeed, heaven help it if it does (see New Coke). That places an even heavier burden on design, to keep the product looking fresh, appealing, and relevant.

Yet to redo everything, from the smallest paper cup to the largest tractor-trailer truck, is a multimillion-dollar investment, Schunker says. “Unlike an ad campaign, these decisions will have to last for years and years.”

Butler’s global brand-identity program enabled Coke’s major brands — Coke, Diet Coke, and the newest, Coke Zero — to establish crystal clear, yet integrated, brand identities: red, silver, and black, embellished with script and ribbon. From that foundation, the opportunities to riff on the icon were legion.

In 2005, Butler and his team introduced sexy aluminum versions of the classic contour bottle for all three brands at clubs and entertainment venues. He also invited five design studios, from Brazil, Japan, South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S., to produce limited-edition versions (printed with iridescent inks, which react to black light), and launched them with accompanying music and videos. In 2008, he invited eight up-and-coming Chinese artists to design bottles for the Beijing Olympics, causing a run on the Games’ gift shops. Later this year, Attik will introduce a new design system for next year’s World Cup in South Africa featuring modular elements that can be adapted to each competing country’s needs. “It’s a good design system when groups feel like they can add their own personality, but it doesn’t deviate from the map,” says Attik’s Sommerville. “Coke has managed to achieve a foot in both camps.”

I’m sitting in front of a laptop at Coke’s Global Innovation Center, in an office park just down the road from the Atlanta headquarters. I’ve been invited to try my hand with Coke’s new Design Machine, a Web-based design tool and digital-asset management system built to allow the smallest Coca-Cola marketer to create point-of-sale materials that are customized for local markets but adhere to the global brand strategy. “Junior designers in Bangalore can use this in a snap!” says Gerardo Garcia, global group design director, jinxing my test-drive before it begins.

“Pick a language,” Garcia begins. I have a choice of 36. Kazakh it is. “Now a product.” Of the 100 options, I’m guessing Fanta is a favorite on the steppe. “Now an occasion,” he instructs. At leisure. I survey the options, and pick an image of smiling people gathered around the table, hoisting cans of Fanta; above is the message, “Open happiness!” in Kazakh. A perfect banner for my little shashlik stand in Almaty.

I hit send and the machine zips my design for local approval and legal review, then sends it off to the printer. The whole thing has taken less than 10 minutes.

The Design Machine addresses one of CEO Kent’s major strategic goals: winning at the point of sale. What’s more, it’s a remarkably cost-efficient tool, reducing fees to local ad shops by 30%. And it’s bonehead simple.

“We needed to develop a collaborative platform that could drive capability around the world,” Garcia says. “A modular design that would allow us to scale was critical.”

The machine, launched in 2007, holds more than 8,600 templates and is constantly being fed with new “best in class” materials generated around the world. So the smallest grocery store in Tokyo can take advantage of, say, the best of Turner Duckworth’s work in San Francisco. And if a particularly clever designer in Guangzhou comes up with a great campaign for Chinese New Year, the work can be zapped around the planet.

Similarly, the Freestyle fountain machine may one day let local merchants tailor the selection of drinks they offer to the idiosyncratic tastes of their customers (in one test location in Atlanta, for example, Caffeine-Free Diet Coke became the third-best seller after 4 p.m.). The machine also eliminates the current need for 5-gallon bags of concentrate, replacing them with concentrated 46-ounce cartridges, reducing the product’s carbon footprint drastically. What’s more, an onboard computer monitors usage, enabling folks in Atlanta to analyze data about beverage consumption, peak times, and popular locations. Coke can also talk back to the machine, letting it know electronically if a particular flavor needs to be discontinued or recalled.

Both Freestyle and the Design Machine reflect Butler’s efforts to integrate design and scale, to create systems that can leverage the best of both. “We were trying to create a standard of excellence around the world where it’s easy to do the right thing, and difficult to do the wrong thing,” he says.

As we’re walking back to headquarters, Butler ticks off the countries he is planning to visit on a grueling march through Asia and South America. But there’s one more thing he wants to say before we part. “This is not a design story,” he tells me yet again. “I understand there are some people who would like to hear the words ‘design-driven’ come out of our CEO’s mouth. Honestly, I don’t care. We’re leveraging design to drive innovation and to win at the point of sale, which is fundamental to our business. Full stop.”

[Photos Courtesy of Coca Cola, Turner Duckworth, and Marcel Christ]

Original Post Fast Company Blog

Thoughts: While I agree with A LOT of this article, (99.99%), I think that Dev overlooked the fact the it was the designers that were put into the system that ultimately brought the results.  Even though Claudia Kotchka used “Hybrid Thinking” to figure out what needed to be done, it is unfair to say that the mainstream industrial design thinking process was not the vehicle for the change.  This article has prompted me to write a personal post that will look at the use of the term “Design Thinking” and give people a solid understanding of how they can build the process into any environment.

Forget Design Thinking and Try Hybrid Thinking

BY Dev PatnaikTue Aug 25, 2009 at 3:51 PM

When A.G. Lafley was named CEO of Procter & Gamble during the summer of 2000, the task of turning the organization around looked overwhelming. The price of a share in the consumer packaged goods giant had declined by nearly 55% in just two months. The company was missing revenue and profit targets as it learned to grapple with the Internet and new global competitors. To remain the world’s preeminent maker of useful stuff for the house, P&G needed to make a lot of changes very quickly. Lafley saw design as being central to P&G’s transformation. Design promised to unleash the creativity of the organization and find new ways to unlock value that a marketing-driven company might not have discovered.

To lead the charge, Lafley appointed Claudia Kotchka as the company’s first-ever VP for design strategy and innovation in 2002. Her job was remarkably ambitious: Make innovation happen at P&G.

And she did. In her nine years in the role, Claudia up-ended the status quo in P&G’s product development process. She placed designers within the company’s many business units so they could shape strategy directly instead of just designing how products looked. She educated businesspeople in the company about the strategic impact design could have. She formed a board of leading external design experts who offered guidance for how to make P&G into a world-class design organization. Over time, her efforts have P&G to once again become one of the most innovative companies on earth. Between 2000 and 2008, revenue more than doubled from $40 billion to $83 billion, while earnings took a gigantic leap from $2.5 billion to more than $12 billion. This growth is the kind of performance one expects from an IT company or a firm operating in an emerging market. Not a 200-year-old soap company based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Claudia’s success has been celebrated in many corners as a triumph of design thinking. Though its definition varies depending on who you ask, most of its proponents (including many at P&G) agree that design thinking is any process that applies the methods of industrial designers to problems beyond how a product should look. My mentor at Stanford, Rolf Faste, did more than anyone to define the term and express the unique role that designers could play in making pretty much everything. Not just products, but services, experiences, and presumably finance, education, and government, as well. By this standard, what Claudia achieved at P&G is perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of design thinking’s relatively recent heritage. She took what she knew about design and applied it to a broad array of problems faced by one of the world’s largest corporations. On the face of it, Claudia’s tenure at P&G is a testament to the power of thinking like a designer.

Here’s the problem: Claudia Kotchka isn’t a designer. She’s an accountant by training. And she spent most of her career working in marketing. It would be hard to envision a business executive with a more traditional background. While Claudia’s success makes a great case study for the triumph of a designer finally being brought into the conversation, it’s just not true. And it calls into question whether design thinking is really the missing ingredient in innovation.

Indeed, the real power of Claudia’s story is that she isn’t a designer. I see this phenomenon all the time: accounts who lead a design revolution, former journalists who manage a technology lab, even doctors who become agents of organizational change. All of these cases suggest that something bigger is going on, more powerful than the adoption of a single school of thought. The secret isn’t design thinking, it’s “hybrid thinking”: the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo. Claudia’s lack of experience as a designer didn’t make her a weaker proponent of design, it made her a stronger one. She immersed herself in design thinking and then merged it with her experiences in accountant thinking, marketing thinking, and several more besides. To walk away concluding that design thinking is what makes P&G great would be like going to the movies and concluding that Indiana Jones is a great hero because he always wears a hat.

Hybridity matters now because the problems companies need to solve are simply too complex for any one skillset to tackle. We’re in an era when car companies are trying to grapple with massive changes in technological capability and market need, when cell phone companies are trying to own global entertainment, and when snack food companies face extinction unless they figure out how to promote health and wellness. As Lou Lenzi, a design executive at Audiovox, once told me, if you want to innovate, “You need to be one part humanist, one part technologist, and one part capitalist.”

Hybrid thinking is much more than gathering together a multidisciplinary team. Hybrid thinking is about multidisciplinary people. John Lasseter, the co-founder of Pixar and creator of Toy Story, isn’t beloved and admired because he’s good at technology. We love him because he effortlessly fuses technology, art, and storytelling.

Alton Brown, star of Good Eats, began as a TV producer, then decided to learn how to cook and became fascinated by food science in the process. His program on Food Network is a potent admixture of cooking show, science class, and sketch comedy, wrapped into one of the slickest how-to shows on TV. It’s particularly interesting to note how many proponents of design thinking are actually hybrid thinkers themselves. David Kelley, the celebrated founder of the design firm IDEO, has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon in addition to his master’s in design from Stanford.

My own personal experience is that hybrid thinkers make for a much more interesting day at work. At Jump Associates our staff includes a former partner at Deloitte who’s also an award-winning sculptor. We’ve employed a Ph.D. in cognitive science who’s also a filmmaker. And another one of my colleagues has an MBA as well as degrees in Chinese language and international relations. Jump is constantly on the hunt for hybrid thinkers, folks who can connect the dots between what’s culturally desirable, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view. And to be sure, it hasn’t made our recruiters’ lives any easier. We live in a society that prizes depth in a single field of research over breadth in multiple areas. Innovation, however, demands that you see the world through multiple lenses at the same time, and draw meaning from seemingly disparate points of data.

Without a doubt, design thinking is an important new body of knowledge for companies seeking to expand their capacity to innovate. But the goal isn’t to shift from one mindset to another. Learning new ways to think isn’t very helpful if you forget what already know.

Oringinal Post on Fast Company Tue Jun 23, 2009 at 10:52 AM

Overview of Article: Amit takes on the notion that people who engage in Design Thinking are really designers. His general argument is that there is a big difference between the thinking process and actually being a designer, and that using the term Design Thinking is actually demeaning to designers.

Thoughts on this Article. This one is sure to hit a nerve in the Design Thinking community.  Amin makes several great points, but the main focus is on the term “Design Thinking”. I expect this to be one of the early challenges to the term.  Good stuff!!

In his recent post, “Design is Too Important to be Left to Thinkers,” Robert Brunner made a good point about how every Tom, Dick, corporate strategist, and engineer is now calling himself a “design thinker.” This issue needs a deeper look. In 1921, Albert Einstein won a Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, based on a paper he published in 1905. The physics behind every solar panel was effectively described and understood by Einstein. Does that mean Einstein was a designer?

I’m guessing if he were living today, many design institutions and pundits would rush to declare him “The Grand Designer of All Things Solar!” However, I would disagree. Einstein is obviously one of humanity’s greatest minds, absolutely the gold-standard for creative thinking, and one seriously interesting character. Still, not a designer.

Think of another example:  Rembrandt’s fabulous painting, The Night Watch. It was commissioned by Captain Frans Banning Cocq and 17 members of his squad, and was destined to be hung in the banquet hall of their meeting house. In the context of today’s world, Captain Cocq and his squad were the clients, but were they also the real artists? The “painting thinkers?” Can you fathom that? No more painters, or artists, just “art thinkers”? After all, they commissioned the work, set the brief, even argued and guided the painter in position and order. (Captain Cocq–dressed in black, with a red sash–and his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburch, get pride of place, in the center of the painting). In current design-world speak, they were the “thinkers”: they came up with the idea, and even suggested funding (18 members of the militia kicked in a total of 1,600 guilders), so why not give one Frans Banning Cocq credit for one of Holland’s most famous artworks? Also, there’s the fact that Rembrandt did have help from quite a few assistants, so why is he so famous? Where am I going with this?

Simply put, there is a massive push to trivialize the act of design and with it, the designer’s unique position. It is an immoral and anti-cultural behavior that is widespread. Although in the English language the verb “design” could be attributed to many aspects of creation (from floral design to microprocessor design) in the public/cultural/media vernacular, design generally means one thing: the creation of a visual object of a cultural importance. But that cultural aura is the reason it’s suddenly so cool to be a designer and that’s the very reason why there is a pile-up of love around the use of this term. To paraphrase MoMA’s design curator, Paola Antonelli, in a world full of complexities, designers become the ultimate intellectuals. Intel runs a great commercial with its USB inventor, Ajay Bhatt, as a rock star.

It says a lot about our current media culture and the case in point is simple–no one typically thinks of the USB inventor as a true rock star…but maybe we should, right?

Then why is Rembrandt the real artist and not a mere vendor for a squad of art thinkers? It’s because of all the things Rembrandt put in The Night Watch that are beyond the brief. The way he interpreted the brief, the way he fought the brief, and the way he made his client go beyond the obvious, the non-verbal, non-cerebral things: the nuances, the whimsical postures, the color palette and many more. Basically designers are unique for all the things “thinkers” cannot visualize and cannot imagine.

That’s the true reason why design (like art) is such a precious word. The interpretation of the idea from verbal-cognitive to a visual-emotional is the magic designers bring to the world. And where does morality come in? Somehow designers feel philosophically-weak in defending the uniqueness of design creation. They’re uncomfortable saying that artists and designers are different from other types of thinkers or those with great ideas. It seems undemocratic or elitist. Fortunately, smarter people have already dealt with the issue.

There is a body of law dealing with moral rights and it is becoming more applicable every day. Regardless of the practical meaning and application of such law, the philosophy behind that legal concept is relevant. It establishes our society’s interest in protecting the cultural authorship generally and the visual creative class specifically. Beyond functional ownership, copyrights and such, moral rights speak implicitly about the important role designers and artists have in our society. Moral right philosophy applies only to a visual work of art. Hence, there is a special place in legal and moral philosophy for these very nuanced forms of creation: The visual arts.

That morality is the core of my (and Brunner’s) disdain of the design-thinking crowd. Like it or not, that set of values suggests strongly that it is immoral for non-designers to be associated with the visual intangible that designers and artist bring to our world.

So here is my bottom line. Albert Einstein, Captain Frans Banning Cocq, Ajay Bhatt, and many others are important and amazingly creative individuals. We should celebrate their contribution to humanity in any way possible. Just don’t call them designers