Great post.  I’d like to clarify one piece.  You say that designers are great when they change the rules.  I think we should specify that these are the rules *of making things* (and not necessarily the rules of business).

Making stuff is super important and we designers are really good at it, we just need to remember that as we move forward.

Awesome.  Just what I needed!

Michael: I totally agree that the current rules of business are different. I do wonder tho, if they are really so very different from the ways of making great things (the key here is *great*.) I hope that somewhere among the pathways for making great things and making great businesses, we can find the shared ground on how the two intertwine, so that we don’t end up in an “either-or” situation.

Either-or choices smell like ultimatums. I think they are often the best indicator that thinking is trapped and we need to find another way.

Interesting post.  Thanks.

Although, as you reference it, I think you are undervaluing Design with a capital D or overvaluing design/implementation.

Design isnt about implementation. Designers who just “make things” dont really deserve a seat at the big table. 

My sense is that Designers who are strategic thinkers wanting to apply that thinking to a specific business outcome are required to achieve that outcome and need to be at the table, and businesses need them to be there. 

Unfortunately, Design is too often thought of in tactical terms, commoditized, and then relegated to the kids table.

I dont think that is what youre advocating, yet your advice seems to indicate an assumption that somehow implementation skills are equal to Design skills and they just aren’t.

Designers need a seat at the table, designers do not.

Designers want a seat at the table because (in the world of product development) Marketing has traditionally leaned on what has worked in the past as a means to address the needs of the future.  Ask any designer (heck, any design student!) and he or she will tell you this is just plain wrong.  Especially if the goal is innovation.  I think designers are right to want to participate in, guide, and change the nature of the Business dialogue.  Of course, sitting at the table is only the first step.  Now Design and Marketing have to learn how to talk to one another, and to be open to hearing new perspectives.  A fruitful discussion will result when both sides agree on the objective and open their minds to fresh thinking and true collaboration.

[...] Says Kate Rutter (Adaptive Path): I hear folks say that design thinking is different from other kind of thinking, and that by infusing design thinking into the strategy of an organization, the business will be more innovative. The perception here is that designers are the hero best suited to use design thinking to pull the innovation sword from the strategy stone. In fact, the more I read about it, the more there is to read about it. Conversation in the blogdom is aswirl with the trifecta of seat at the table + design thinking + innovation. [...]

Great idea to offer the blow-out-proportion chair at the table as a DIY prop.

It insprired me to add <a>my two cents</a>.

Thanks!

This is an issue of responsibility. When design teams are responsible, they provide constant feedback to the strategy folks…saying “this is working” or “this isn’t working”. And because they’re close to the ground, they might even have a recommendation for improvement…

If all designers do is build and forget to evaluate what they’ve done, then the company flounders for a while until someone catches the usability bug and invites some usability consultant to come in and tell them again why it’s important to focus on people and what they’re actually doing. I worked for a company like this for five years (UIE), and honestly we helped many clients but the problems we saw were so much deeper than one usability study could fix…there was no design team kicking its own ass. There were exceptions, like Netflix, who were self-critical, and thus felt responsible for what they did, and thus didn’t really need usability help. They knew that evaluation was a critical part of design…

Designers who are critical of their own design, who constantly ask how it can be better are the ones who will get a seat at the strategy table. As we all know (at least I hope we do) design is an ongoing process that happens over time. The design once and forget it publishing model just doesn’t work on the web. If you’re creating a template well then that’s fine. But if you’re creating a real application that is of value to people, designers really need to be their own critics. And when designers are their own critics, when they give a damn about how its actually being used, and when they feed that information back into the organization and make visible changes to improve it, people will listen.

Thank you all for the interesting and insightful comments.

Jeffrey, I think we can agree to disagree on some points. But to clarify, I do think there is a difference between 1) designers who talk about strategic design, 2) designers who make things, and 3) the people who are responsible for producing things other people have designed. Perhaps it’s a clarification of language. I do believe that designers who both talk about design and who also actually make things have the greatest power to impact business. I’ve seen too many grand plans fail because they weren’t implemented well, and too many high-minded designs be amazing…but not realistic for real-world implementation. Being engaged in the implementation of a design is crucial to its success. When you’re next in SF, stop by and we can have a beer and wrangle semantics further. ;)

Candice-Leigh: I couldn’t agree more. Being open to changing our thinking and engaging in healthy dialog is key.

Alex: thanks!

Joshua: I think you’ve hit something really important: creating an environment for critique and critical assessment and evaluation of design results is an important factor in making designs work. Listening to feedback from customers and responding to market changes are both strategic issues. We’ve been talking about the culture of critique internally, and Peter recently sent out a link to the article in Harvard Business Review about the creative culture at Pixar. Note that this is internal critique approach only, not customer feedback. But it’s a great story about building a culture where delivering the strongest designs/products is the top priority, and where criticism is accepted, expected and welcomed. You can read it here: http://icanhaz.com/pixarcreativity

Kate: This is great! (I went somewhat into this headspace a while back with a post on Strategy vs Innovation, I’d love to know what you think of it: http://tinyurl.com/5ptvq4).  Your post sharpens something I hadn’t really focused on yet, though: that practitioners’ best work is at the level of practice. They make things, and they make things better, based on the concrete experience of the things themselves. The strategy table, however, has traditionally been populated by those who are pretty far removed from the street-level effects of their decisions, working from the level of ideology. (Not that it’s a bad thing—most ideology is the result of learned wisdom over time, it just gets too calcified and/or used in the wrong context at times.) This is one reason why so many strategists love data rather than first-hand experience: they can (too often) see the data however they need to, based on whatever ideological glasses they’re wearing.

When designers leave the context of hands-on, concrete problem solving and try to mix it up with the abstraction/ideology crowd, they’re no longer in their element. So they have to *bring* their element along with them. Take that concrete, messy, human design problem, and drop it on the table with a *thud*—just be ready to have some “data” and business speak ready to translate for the audience.

It’s too bad that so many folks are getting tied up in semantic dogfights about “design”—but it’s unavoidable, I guess, given how deeply people’s identities are wrapped up in the word.

A while back Victor Lombardi framed design as a discipline that makes models that others use to make things, and I think that’s very true.

We don’t make things. We make models of things.

(I know I’m poking at semantics, here, but I think this is a really, really, really important distinction to remember. It really affects and changes how we approach everything.)

I’m totally with Austin on this. It’s not really “just semantics”. When designers acknowledge that their core contribution is modeling, I find it that it actually helps at ‘being at the strategy table’ because if you are focused on modeling, you are primarily concerned with the outcome that the ‘final product’ will produce—which is very aligned with what ‘strategy’ means in essence. It doesn’t mean you aren’t making things any less, it’s more of a frame of mind that helps frame the conversation in a way that doesn’t engage designers in self-defeating conversations like “I’m only doing tactical stuff, I never get to do any strategy work”.