Design for resilience
Today’s organisations must respond to significant and often unpredictable changes. In this article, Grace Kane and Alex Peacop have outlined how methods learned from design can be repurposed to help organisations respond faster and better to threats. Building resilience into their product pipelines and future-proofing their teams to enable them to better respond to an unpredictable future.
Resilience versus disruption
As a product design consultancy, we’ve seen a shift in the last decade in how companies approach innovation. Ten years ago, broadly speaking, companies wanted to use design to be disruptive – to create something new, that would shake up or push forward the market. Today, companies are less concerned about creating disruption than they are about surviving disruption.
Markets are more volatile than ever, and the future of supply chains and resources is uncertain. The companies who survive will be those who are resilient – those who can respond strategically to a changing world. Innovation is an important part of this. Companies with good innovation pipelines can use it as an asset for resilience. Unfortunately, more often than not we see companies innovating in a non-resilient way, which actually leaves them more vulnerable to threats. But what does that look like?
we’ve seen a shift in the last decade in how companies approach innovation
Are you a tanker or a bouncing ball?
We typically see two types of non-resilient behaviour. Some companies don’t respond to change fast enough, and some companies respond too fast. The former operate like a massive oil tanker heading towards an iceberg – even if they can see the threat coming up, they somehow can’t corral their resources to respond to it until it’s too late. The latter act like a rubber bouncing ball – each new threat or opportunity sends them flying off in new directions, regardless of its actual significance.
Both behaviours result in essentially the same outcome. Companies waste resources on innovation that either fails (bouncy balls) or never gets to market in the first place (oil tankers). The number of scrapped projects grows and grows, creating a ‘graveyard’ of dead ideas. This begins to affect the company culture – ‘innovation fatigue’ sets in, as people become disillusioned with innovation programs and brainstorming sessions that never seem to go anywhere.
So if non-resilient companies act like bouncing balls and oil tankers, what do resilient companies act like? A good analogy might be a tree.
Trees are among the longest-living organisms on the planet. Their resilience depends on the right combination of flexibility and strength – they are anchored by their roots, but can bend with the wind. In a similar way, resilient companies are able to adapt to changing circumstances without getting distracted from their core goals. This insight has impacted the way we now work with companies to help build their innovation pipelines.
Can design build resilience?
As designers and innovators, we don’t necessarily have the power to change the culture of a company that has become non-resilient. But we can build resilient behaviours into the innovation process so that ideas are more likely to succeed. As we’ve recognised the need for our clients to build resilience, we are integrating these techniques into our clients’ innovation programs.
From linear to dynamic
Many companies introducing innovation processes run them as linear processes. Companies start from a blank slate, disregarding previous work. They gather new insights, generate new ideas, then place these ideas on an innovation roadmap. But as soon as anything changes (which it inevitably will), the roadmap becomes redundant, and chaos reigns once again.
In reality, innovation is a cyclical process – it doesn’t have a clear start or end point. Insights should be updated, roadmaps revised, and old ideas revisited.
We now begin innovation projects by mining the ‘idea graveyard’ of lost, past projects. Often there are some perfectly good ideas that have been tried before, but just had bad timing, or needed a tweak, rework or enabling technology. Even bad ideas can teach us lessons about what succeeds or fails in a particular industry.
This can significantly shortcut the innovation process, giving us a starting point to expand on with new research and ideas.
When we build our roadmaps, we now create them as dynamic, live documents, accessible to the team in a shared location and able to be updated when key assumptions change.
Break down mindset barriers
Internal miscommunication is a hidden barrier to innovation. Teams from different backgrounds end up working towards different goals, even if they think they’re aligned.
There’s a common situation we’ve seen time and again in multi-disciplinary brainstorming sessions. The room begins united around their shared goal, but can quickly divides into two camps. On one side are the people incentivised by their company to be creative, daring and forward looking. These people will jump into creating new ideas – the more outlandish the better.
In the other camp are the people in the room who are incentivised not to be creative and daring – their job is to reduce costs, increase efficiency and minimise risks. These people – doing their jobs – will start to point out flaws in the ideas. The result is mutual frustration, and the project stalls.
The received Design Thinking wisdom is to tell them to put aside their concerns – ‘there’s no such thing as a bad idea’. Unfortunately, this will only stop people voicing problems in the moment. The problems will remain and return to trip up the ideas later in the project.
Instead, we try to see how innovation will benefit all stakeholders. At the start of an innovation project we interview some of the more risk averse functions (manufacturing, quality, regulatory) to see what problems they encounter, and see how we can bring them into the innovation process.
We work with these ‘policemen’ – who are used to putting up barriers to ideas (often with good reason) – to try to turn them instead into ‘pathfinders’, who while still highlighting risks, also help find a way to navigate around them.
the room begins united around their shared goal, but can quickly divides into two camps
Show, don’t tell
It’s hard to imagine the future when you can’t experience it. In recent years, early experience prototyping has fallen down the priority list for companies trying to reduce costs. It can be a considerable investment, especially when the experience is both physical and digital. But there’s no better way to align different stakeholders around an idea than to give them something they can actually see, touch and feel.
We make real, tangible prototypes very early in the process – ideally long before they are even needed for user trials. These early prototypes help stakeholders all understand exactly what a future experience could be and overcome any individual misunderstandings or prejudices about an idea.
Teams who can all envision the future in the same way gain mutual clarity and alignment, enabling them to make better decisions about which opportunities to prioritise, where to invest their resources and what projects to take forwards.
we make real, tangible prototypes very early in the process
The results
Applying these principles has subtly but powerfully transformed the way we run innovation projects with our clients. It has increased the success rate of their early ideas and helped the innovation process run in a much smoother, more collaborative and flexible way.
This way of working has helped our clients stay ahead of the game, empowering them to respond quickly to the unexpected, enabling them not just to survive disruption, but to thrive.
Recent examples of the innovation projects we’ve applied these principles to include:
- Uniting a FMCG FTSE 100 client’s R&D and marketing departments to co-create a product pipeline strategy and roadmap to meet their ‘net-zero goals’.
- Creating a bespoke front end innovation process for a large consumer healthcare FTSE 100 company, leading to a 40% increase in the number of innovations progressing through their stage-gate process.
- Envisioning future scenarios through a series of advanced, physical/digital, experience prototypes for a luxury automotive company to explore and plan how to harness AI to enhance driver and passenger experience. Designing and building fully working, experience prototypes for an S&P 100 FMCG company to explore, test and plan future innovation strategies, that dramatically lower domestic water usage.
a 40% increase in the number of innovations progressing through their stage-gate process
Helping our clients achieve success through great product design
