8/14/2019 Hybid Thinking

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hybid-thinking 1/4

Article location:http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/dev-patnaik/innovation/forget-design-thinking-and-try-hybrid-thinking 

August 25, 2009

Forget Design Thinking and Try Hybrid Thinking

By Dev Patnaik  

When A.G. Lafley was named CEO of Procter & Gamble [1] during the summer of 2000,the task of turning the organization around looked overwhelming. The price of a share inthe consumer packaged goods giant had declined by nearly 55% in just two months. Thecompany was missing revenue and profit targets as it learned to grapple with the Internetand new global competitors. To remain the world's preeminent maker of useful stuff for the house, P&G needed to make a lot of changes very quickly. Lafley saw design as being central to P&G's transformation. Design promised to unleash the creativity of theorganization and find new ways to unlock value that a marketing-driven company mightnot have discovered. To lead the charge, Lafley appointed Claudia Kotchka as thecompany's first-ever VP for design strategy and innovation in 2002. Her job wasremarkably ambitious: Make innovation happen at P&G.

And she did. In her nine years in the role, Claudia up-ended the status quo [2] in P&G's product development process. She placed designers within the company's many businessunits so they could shape strategy directly instead of just designing how products looked.She educated businesspeople in the company about the strategic impact design couldhave. She formed a board of leading external design experts who offered guidance for how to make P&G into a world-class design organization. Over time, her efforts have

8/14/2019 Hybid Thinking

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hybid-thinking 2/4

P&G to once again become one of the most innovative companies on earth. Between2000 and 2008, revenue more than doubled from $40 billion to $83 billion, whileearnings took a gigantic leap from $2.5 billion to more than $12 billion. This growth isthe kind of performance one expects from an IT company or a firm operating in anemerging market. Not a 200-year-old soap company based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Claudia's success has been celebrated in many corners as a triumph of design thinking.Though its definition varies depending on who you ask, most of its proponents (includingmany at P&G) agree that design thinking is any process that applies the methods of industrial designers to problems beyond how a product should look. My mentor atStanford, Rolf Faste, did more than anyone to define the term and express the unique rolethat designers could play in making pretty much everything. Not just products, butservices, experiences, and presumably finance, education, and government, as well. Bythis standard, what Claudia achieved at P&G is perhaps the most impressiveaccomplishment of design thinking's relatively recent heritage. She took what she knewabout design and applied it to a broad array of problems faced by one of the world's

largest corporations. On the face of it, Claudia's tenure at P&G is a testament to the power of thinking like a designer.

Here's the problem: Claudia Kotchka isn't a designer. She's an accountant by training.And she spent most of her career working in marketing. It would be hard to envision a business executive with a more traditional background. While Claudia's success makes agreat case study for the triumph of a designer finally being brought into the conversation,it's just not true. And it calls into question whether design thinking is really the missingingredient in innovation.

Indeed, the real power of Claudia's story is that she isn't a designer. I see this

phenomenon all the time: accounts who lead a design revolution, former journalists

who manage a technology lab, even doctors who become agents of organizational

change. All of these cases suggest that something bigger is going on, more powerful

than the adoption of a single school of thought. The secret isn't design thinking, it's

"hybrid thinking": the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover

and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo. Claudia's

8/14/2019 Hybid Thinking

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hybid-thinking 3/4

lack of experience as a designer didn't make her a weaker proponent of design, it madeher a stronger one. She immersed herself in design thinking and then merged it with her experiences in accountant thinking, marketing thinking, and several more besides. Towalk away concluding that design thinking is what makes P&G great would be like goingto the movies and concluding that Indiana Jones is a great hero because he always wears

a hat.

Hybridity matters now because the problems companies need to solve are simply too

complex for any one skillset to tackle. We're in an era when car companies are trying tograpple with massive changes in technological capability and market need, when cell  phone companies are trying to own global entertainment, and when snack foodcompanies face extinction unless they figure out how to promote health and wellness. AsLou Lenzi, a design executive at Audiovox, once told me, if you want to innovate, "Youneed to be one part humanist, one part technologist, and one part capitalist."

Hybrid thinking is much more than gathering together a multidisciplinary team.

Hybrid thinking is about multidisciplinary people. John Lasseter, the co-founder of Pixar and creator of  Toy Story, isn't beloved and admired because he's good attechnology. We love him because he effortlessly fuses technology, art, and storytelling.Alton Brown, star of Good Eats [3], began as a TV producer, then decided to learn howto cook and became fascinated by food science in the process. His program on Food Network is a potent admixture of cooking show, science class, and sketch comedy,wrapped into one of the slickest how-to shows on TV. It's particularly interesting to notehow many proponents of design thinking are actually hybrid thinkers themselves. DavidKelley, the celebrated founder of the design firm IDEO, has a bachelor's degree inelectrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon in addition to his master's in design fromStanford.

My own personal experience is that hybrid thinkers make for a much more

interesting day at work. At Jump Associates our staff includes a former partner atDeloitte who's also an award-winning sculptor. We've employed a Ph.D. in cognitivescience who's also a filmmaker. And another one of my colleagues has an MBA as wellas degrees in Chinese language and international relations. Jump is constantly on the huntfor hybrid thinkers, folks who can connect the dots between what's culturally desirable,technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view. And to be sure, it hasn'tmade our recruiters' lives any easier. We live in a society that prizes depth in a single

field of research over breadth in multiple areas. Innovation, however, demands that

you see the world through multiple lenses at the same time, and draw meaning from

seemingly disparate points of data.

Without a doubt, design thinking is an important new body of knowledge for companiesseeking to expand their capacity to innovate. But the goal isn't to shift from one mindsetto another. Learning new ways to think isn't very helpful if you forget what alreadyknow.

8/14/2019 Hybid Thinking

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hybid-thinking 4/4

 Dev Patnaik is the CEO and founder of Jump Associates, a firm that helps companiescreate new businesses and reinvent existing ones. A trusted advisor to senior executives

at some of America's most admired companies, including GE, Nike, Target and Hewlett-

 Packard, Dev is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University, teaching design-

research methods.

  His book  Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create WidespreadEmpathy  , making the audacious argument that the human power of empathy is the

 source of all innovation, was published in spring of 2009 by the Financial Times Press. A

 frequent speaker at marketing, design and innovation forums, Dev was recently featured as a guest on "The Business of Innovation," a series on CNBC. His articles on innovation

and strategy have appeared in several publications including BusinessWeek, Brandweek and the Design Management Review.