Design thinking, creative thinking
INTRODUCTION
Steven Overman is the lead strategist on advertising agency Lowe Worldwide’s Team Nokia, travelling between London and Finland for the mobile giant. He’s also a film graduate and former Hollywood directors’ assistant who arrived in ad-land via Wired magazine, the new technology and business bible he helped found during the dot.com boom.
For him running a business is an ‘act of design’ and he uses his experience to embed design into everything from Nokia’s business strategy to its product development. He’s been so successful that Design Week recently included the company in its 2008 ‘Hot 50’, saying that design was ‘stitched into the fabric of the business.’
WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING?
When tasked by Designer Breakfasts to demystify the term ‘design thinking’ and make it relevant to designers with SME clients, he wasted no time in translating his approach into a fun series of ‘extreme design makeovers’ aimed at showing just how simple a way of working it is.
His presentation ‘Get your Client out of the Weeds’ demonstrated how design brings clarity and colour to business life and is appreciated by everyone from the organisation’s senior team to the people at grass roots.
In fact time-pressed senior employees like it most of all. “They are very busy and have short attention spans. They want things to be simple,” he said.
Dividing the presentation into four ‘makeovers’ - business strategy, research reporting, product development and change management - he showed Breakfasters how their expertise could add value to areas traditionally communicated by accountants or business school graduates.
Under business strategy, old-fashioned strategy documents became magazine-style presentations complete with colourful layouts and grabby headlines. In reporting research – an area that Nokia applies particular rigour to – Steven replaced charts with reportage style photographs taken by an up and coming photographer.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Meanwhile, in change management he and his team turned turned a plain letter urging staff to show passion into an employee extravaganza. Organising a special day, they encouraged every member of staff to think of their own passions – from cake baking to basketball – and to share them with colleagues. These became the material for a coffee-table book owned and produced by employees. His message was clear: designers should realise that what seems obvious to them is not the way most people see things. “You can make things beautiful and people respond to beautiful things,” he said. “Believe you have something to offer people.”
He explained that for most business people designers were ‘the fun part of the day’ with a talent for bringing out creativity in everyone. “When people are thinking creatively, they are thinking productively,” he said. “I get people at Nokia to take off their Nokia hats and put on their Apple and Google hats.” What’s more, with an economic slowdown underway he reckons designers have a golden opportunity to get out of the box clients keep them in. “Don’t let them say, ‘you make our business look good’. Say ‘no, I solve your business problems’, because it’s during a recession that governments, organisations and tribes are paying attention to their problems. ”
HIS SIX STEP PROGRAMME
1 Your client’s business is a design brief
2 Find out what their non-design challenges are
3 Identify a process that needs improvement
4 Prototype a redesign of it
5 Communicate everything
6 All communications are better when they’ve been designed
You’ll be more credible if you can include terms such as ‘return on investment’ in your conversation with clients and understand their significance. But above all, don’t wait to be asked and, if necessary, be crafty – sneak your ideas through!