places of design

Learnings from Interpretive Management: What General Managers Can Learn From Design by Richard K. Lester, Michael J. Piore, and Kamal M. Male, from Harvard Business Review, March-April 1998:

TWO APPROACHES TO MANAGEMENT

Analytical

• managing design
• engineering challenge: a problem that must be solved
• goal is to arrive at a fixed and final shape
• like an engineer
• customer knows what she wants and needs
• ex: AT&T – moving cellular operations out of Bell Labs and moving away from their original interpretive management approach; they stopped questioning the nature of a cellular system
• this view often times says, “These are our capabilities, and these are the products we will produce, and these are the processes we will use to produce them.”
• about closure, wanting to end discovery process as company gets more complex; resorts to a structured, formal organization and process

Interpretive

• designing management
• design challenge: open-ended and creative process, not a specific problem to be solved
• dynamic form: embraces ambiguity and uncertainty
• like a leader of a jazz combo (improv): about guiding emerging series of interactions, or conversations
• good to think of customer as having no preexisting needs at all
• ex: fashion industry – “The sense of what is fashionable emerges from a series of conversations among fashion designers, clothing buyers, key customers, garment manufacturers, and fashion writers. The conversations have neither a beginning nor an end.”
• constantly questions boundaries of company’s core competency, sometimes deliberately straying across those boundaries

The two approaches presented by Lester and Co. are strikingly similar to Richard J. Boland’s Decision Attitude and Design Attitude discussed in the book Managing as Designing. Both approaches/attitudes are needed in organizations, however, it still remains very difficult to talk about the interpretive approach/design attitude because there is no set vocabulary (as mentioned by both authors). Business schools and management theory has been discussing much of the analytic approach/decision attitude for over a century now, but how can we address the unpredictable and complex problems of the future? Both readings agree, not with the traditional approach/attitude.

Lester and Co. write,

… as radical uncertainty becomes a more pervasive feature of the business environment – as it has in the cellular business – the limitations of a strictly analytical model becomes progressively more debilitating. The most successful managers will understand both approaches, seeing them as complementary, not antagonistic, and they will be capable of striking a sensible balance between the two … just as modern physics instructs us to think about light as both particles and waves, so too can a business organization be looked at from either the analytical or the interpretive perspective … this back-and-forth process [between analytic and interpretive], essentially interpretive in nature [emphasis is mine], is almost always fruitful, revealing new possibilities … pp. 94-5

So, we are in search of a dialectic art/discipline that deals well with contradictions and moves towards conversations. Could this be design? Here is the simplified break-down of the two approaches provided by Dick Buchanan:

Analytic

• grammar
• logic

Interpretive

• rhetoric
• dialectic

Is there a dialectic art that seeks to balance these two approaches … this may very well be Design – as Buchanan calls, “fourth-order” design.
So, what is the nature of a conversation?