Validity vs. Reliability: The Innovation Trade-off
Several years ago, before B-schools were even aware of the term 'design-thinking,' Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School, began teaching his students the value of the designer's approach to problem solving. His viewpoint: "Businesspeople will have to become more 'masters of heuristics' than 'managers of algorithms."
From the last issue of Rotman Magazine, Martin has written a really good article, Designing in Hostile Territory, where he argues that economic value creation will only be found if organizations shift from "an obsession with reliability" to a "welcoming environment for validity."
What a great concept to help business people understand the true value of design management.
Design-thinking has a natural bias towards validity, because good designers "seek deep understanding of the user and the context, which entails the consideration of many variables." Unfortunately, all too often, most organizations put a high priority on the production of consistent, predictable outcomes.
"Design-unfriendly people use words such as 'proof', 'regression analysis', 'certainty', 'best practices', and 'deployment'. Design-oriented people speak the language of validity, putting a high priority on producing outcomes that delight users, whether they are consistent and predictable or not."
With a laser-like business focus, Martin states that it's not enough to call yourself a design-oriented organization. Leaders, he says, "must take responsibility for safe-guarding validity." The article goes on to describe the five things you need to do if you want to be effective in a design-unfriendly organization.
Martin is a breath of fresh air for us non-designers who believe in the power of design management. He provides the tools and rhetoric to help those pesky corporate reliability-oriented managers embrace the uncertainty of validity-based innovation.
Posted May 19, 2006 09:49 AM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
