Q&A with the Authors

In early March, Carl Fudge, a Director at Peer Insight, sat down with Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie, co-authors of Designing for Growth, to discuss their book.  The following is an excerpt of that discussion.

Carl Fudge
Thanks for agreeing to reflect on your new book, Designing for Growth.  One of the first things that struck me is that the first word of the title is “designing,” yet neither of you is a designer.  Could you comment on that?

Jeanne Liedtka
Believe me, I know I’m not a designer, because my designer friends remind me of that all the time (laughs).  But that’s kind of the point of the book: Design thinking isn’t the exclusive domain of those with design training.  It is just a different …

Tim Ogilvie
(interrupts) Or if it is, then society has missed an opportunity, right?

Jeanne Liedtka
Yes, exactly.  There are too many tough challenges that simply don’t yield to the classic analytical approaches.  We need a new approach to certain classes of problems, and design thinking offers us a solution.

Carl Fudge
So this book isn’t by designers or for designers?

Jeanne Liedtka
That’s right, this book is for all of us without design training, so Tim and I are the perfect people to write it.  We can empathize with our audience.  This book is for the practicing managers of the world, who might have an MBA and probably haven’t sketched anything since their etch-a-sketch broke.

Tim Ogilvie
To be clear, a lot of those practicing managers are pretty good design thinkers, they just don’t know it yet.  This book gives them a simple language to understand themselves as design thinkers – or emerging design thinkers – and to learn some shortcuts to making it a strength.

Carl Fudge
Tim, how would you characterize design thinking then?  What makes it different?

Tim Ogilvie
First off, design thinking is an approach to problem-solving.  It isn’t better than the traditional analytic approaches, it‘s just different.  Design thinking is especially suited to the challenges of innovation and growth.  The hallmarks of design thinking – the things that make it unique – are a deep focus on the user context [pauses] … prototyping, especially the notion of playing with multiple prototypes, and the open collaboration with customers and partners.

Jeanne Liedtka
One thing that amazes me about analytic thinking – now that I am steeped in design thinking – is how quickly we jump to the answer.  Design thinking has much less invested in the answer; it is much more open to alternative possibilities.  It has a patience and a curiosity about what might be that analytic methods simply don’t tolerate.

Tim Ogilvie
I totally agree.  In that way, design thinking is more human.  Or more based in what makes us human.

Carl Fudge
The jacket text promises simple tools the practicing manager can use right away.  What’s an example?

Tim Ogilvie
Oh, that’s easy: The journey map.  Any manager can make a customer journey map.  Think of it as a process map with a heart.  And what shows up will invariably surprise you.

Jeanne Liedtka
There is a story in the book of how we mapped the Darden MBA journey.  When the student team presented the findings to our faculty, one of the Darden professors said, “I learned more about the lives of students in the past hour than I have in the past 20 years.”

Carl Fudge
The galleys [of the book] are just out, so I guess you don’t know yet what the response will be.  What do you think will surprise readers?

Tim Ogilvie
For one thing, they will love hearing the voices of other managers just like them.  I think this is by far the most approachable book I’ve seen on growth and innovation, with zero pretension and zero hyperbole.

Jeanne Liedtka
[to Tim] Zero hyperbole?

Tim Ogilvie
[laughs.] OK, very, very minimal hyperbole.

Jeanne Liedtka
I agree it’s the stories and the recurring real-life characters, like Christi Zuber at Kaiser Permanente or Diane Ty at AARP.

Tim Ogilvie
Or Dave Jarrett!

Jeanne Liedtka
Yes, Dave Jarrett.  He’s one of three design thinkers in the book that is trained as an accountant.  I believe readers will see themselves and come away believing in their own abilities to use design thinking.

Carl Fudge
Jeanne, how has design thinking changed your life?

Jeanne Liedtka
Wow, that’s a good one.  [pauses.] You know, I first came to design because I got frustrated by classical strategy.  This was about a decade ago, and the pace of change just seemed to make whole planning paradigm obsolete.  So I turned to design as an alternative way in, if you will.

Tim Ogilvie
[to Jeanne] And how did that change you?

Jeanne Liedtka
You’re not going to let me off the hook, are you?  I’ll have to think about that some more.

Carl Fudge
OK, Tim, same question.

Tim Ogilvie
Design thinking has helped me understand myself as an entrepreneur.  It isn’t who I am, but it is a way I can approach challenging problems.  [pauses.] Probably it has made me a more optimistic person, too. And I want to think about it some more, too!  [laughs.]