Interactions - March/April 2010

ing? These are important questions when seeking to improve interactions with your colleagues, and ones that are unlikely to be asked unless you apply your design savvy to the task.

Try applying abductive reasoning to the process plan itself. Ask yourself, if you were to design a new process for working with this group of colleagues, one that could leverage their strengths and expertise to achieve a better end product, what would that process look like? What might their ideal process look like? How might you go about co-designing a process that incorporates the best of both approaches? Remember, ask yourself what could be, not what is. Designers ask the business team to imagine what could be relative to a design solution; why not take the same approach to the interaction design?

Then it is a question of thinking through a way of engaging your colleagues in the process. Demonstrating a genuine interest in their view and a level of respect for their recommendations are good early steps. So is explicitly designing a process together and gaining agreement to that process before delving into issues of content. And finally, exhibiting a stance that clearly says you are open to new possibilities—rather than you’re just into getting sign-off on existing ones—is helpful and productive.

Configure

We prototype and test solutions
for products, services, and expe-
riences. Why not for interactions
at work as well? Design a process
and try it. Test it. Get feedback
and refine. Bring the discipline
of prototyping itself into the
discussion explicitly. Together
with your colleagues, seek to
imagine an option—an answer to
the dilemma that you face. The
prototype of that option takes
the form of a happy story of what
could be. Lay out the story of that
option together and then ask:
What would have to be true for
us to make that happy story a
reality? How could we test to see
what really is true? If it were not
true, what would prevent us from
choosing this option? Explore and
test these options to refine your
prototype.

meant that the strategy meetings had to become discussions rather than presentations. Only by more or less forcing category managers to toss around ideas with senior management, Lafley reasoned, could they become comfortable with the logical leaps of mind needed to generate new ideas.

At first the presidents and their teams chafed at the new process. Actual dialogue at the senior levels of P&G had been exceedingly rare. Rather than engaging in dialogue, executives had devoted their time to bulletproofing arguments, then advocating and defending them. Dialogue was different, foreign, and unnerving. Only after two or three cycles did the presidents come to see how invigorating it was to engage in dialogue about what could be rather than what is. It was also great for their businesses: Freed from the demand to come up with the single right answer and prove it, they started to work out bigger bets with the corporate team. Simply redesigning the meeting process had a profound effect on the players and the outcome. That is the effect of applying design thinking

to interactions.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Roger L. Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and author of The Design of

Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009).

Jennifer Riel is associate director of the Deasutels Centre for Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School and collaborated on The Design of Business.