From the Drawing Board to the Board Room: Generating

The following expands on my article originally appearing in bbetween 3, published by the Billy Blue College of Design in 2010.

I confess. I’m a doodle-holic. While in a board room the other day I caught myself. It was a pressure-cooked space, where we were deciding some fundamental strategies with a client. But there I was ‘mindlessly’ drawing. Heck I wasn’t even being discrete about it.

When I was a young and working alongside a team of product designers, constant drawing was not only okay, it was expected. But is it okay now, when I’m working alongside a team of senior managers? Actually… yes. (Or rather, it should be okay.) I find drawing embodies three arts that are just as useful to creating good product sketches as they are to creating successful business strategies.

The three arts I see are: generating, critiquing, and vignetting.This post explores the first art of generating.

In 2006, I was a Design student doing an MBA exchange at the INSEAD School of Business. Part of the program was developing new businesses and pitching them to venture capitalists. We saw teams of MBA plus Design students consistently outperform teams of only MBA’s. In fact, one of those MBA + Designer teams went on to win INSEAD Business Model of the Year, and I was part of a team that became finalists at the European Business Model of the Year Competition.

Why did new businesses involving Designers gain more investment? One reason was their ability to generate more compelling market opportunities.

MBA-only teams moved almost immediately from identifying potential markets to analysing their validity. The quicker the MBA’s could narrow their market, the more certain they felt about their calculations.

Conversely, Designers introduced ways of quickly getting opportunities down on paper, leaving certainty til later, and moving on to naming more opportunities. The Designers showed the MBA’s how to thumbnail! This empowered the MBA’s to exhaust their ideas, morph them from different perspectives, and combine them. They created opportunities that were exciting not only because they were bigger, but because they were starting to look like opportunities nobody had ever addressed. Of course, analysis still played a big part, but the MBA’s were comfortable putting that off because of the excitement. The Designers were helping the MBA’s come up with bigger opportunities that were untapped.

Designers rarely (if ever) start a drawing and nail it the first time. They start by generating a large number of thumbnails.

For the MBA’s, thumbnailing alternatives – before jumping into analysis – helped generate market opportunities that were more furtive ground for gaining investment, and starting a new business.

Generating is one of the arts I use today to make myself valuable in the board room. It best complements the analysis engine to which manager’s instinctually jump, especially when they’re leading the creation of something new. Analysis can only break down and bring more certain understanding of what’s already happened in the past. By invoking imaginations, and creating multiple possibilities, generating helps managers with compelling ideas for the future.

Have a story about narrowing options too early and missing out on generating some better alternatives? I’d love to hear from you!