The Business of NEW

Larry Keeley
Co-Founder, President, Doblin Inc.
Author: The Taming of the New

GK. VanPatter
Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute
Partner & Co-Founder, UnderstandingLab

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1
GK VanPatter: Thanks so much for joining us in conversation Larry. We heard that your new book: The Taming of the New will soon be published. Is this a good time to be writing and talking about innovation?

Larry Keeley: Yes and no. Savvy companies have long known that down cycles are an ideal time to innovate. It's a time when customers need something novel and relevant to their changed circumstances. It's also a time when innovations-strategically chosen-can stun competitors and buy firms a year or two before they will respond (as compared to six or nine months when the economy is hotter). So you'd think this bizarre economic and geo-political cycle we are in would breed many innovations.

Unfortunately, conventional wisdom gets in the way. Instead of being aggressive in seeking innovation when times are tough, most firms circle the wagons and act as conservatively as they can. As an illustration consider the airlines. They have been extruded through a series of systemic shocks that are-in part-beyond their control. But look how little they have done to respond positively, inventively, and cleverly to bring customers back. Between the government and the airlines, air travel has been turned into an ordeal and customers are staying away in droves.

Often this kind of thinking stems from one of the most pervasive myths about innovation: that it has to be expensive. It is a surprise to most people to learn that innovation is more highly correlated with resource scarcity than resource abundance, and that smaller firms can do it as well as larger firms.

2
GK VanPatter: Can you tell us something about The Taming of the New and why you wrote it?

Larry Keeley: The Taming of the New stems from one key observation: innovation is now universally important but almost all firms and so-called innovation experts are plumb lousy at it. Some facts can help here. The average firm succeeds at innovation a mere 4% of the time. This means we fail at innovation about 96% of the time. To put this in perspective, in many parts of the United States parents are justifiably up in arms about school systems where a mere 20% of the graduates can't get decent jobs because they're skills aren't good enough. Among other things, I was curious about how any field could take itself seriously (or get any attention from companies) when its systemic failure rate is so high.

The basic idea of management science is to take topics that are universally important and figure out how to get them to happen routinely and reliably. As the great management guru Peter Drucker says; "Design your business so any idiot can run it-because someday, one will." This imperative is what has allowed business schools to have something useful to say about topics like accounting, strategy, human relations, finance, or marketing. So far what they have had to say about innovation has been soft and ineffectual.

With some fear and trepidation, along with colleagues at Doblin, we have begun a serious effort to fix this. It would be outrageously arrogant to say we have cracked 'The Theory of Innovation' or some such malarkey. But it is fair to say we have spent four years and several million dollars trying to have something provocative to say about it. What we did was to treat innovation forensically, like forensic medicine. We obsessed over innovation failures, trying to take them apart, find patterns and figure out when, why and how innovations go off the rails. The good news is that we made dozens of discoveries about what doesn't work and have started to figure out which interventions make the biggest difference. Now, when firms try the innovation approaches we espouse, they typically get innovation success rates between 35 and 70%-this is an improvement of nine to seventeen times the pathetic "normal" success rate of just over 4%.

For companies that need to innovate, that's big news. The book tells the story of these discoveries and tries to suggest the skeletal outline of an emerging new innovation field that no one, including me, can fully imagine yet.

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GK VanPatter: Let me change directions here and steer us towards a different terrain that I know you are also well familiar with. In creating this series we are endeavoring to open new streams of conversation regarding the future of design leadership. We see innovation leadership as being closely connected.

It is well known that you were instrumental in helping to create the graduate programs in the Institute of Design at IIT, Chicago. I also know that in the past, you have been critical of traditional designs' orientation, focus and methods. Several years ago I recall seeing comments from you in an article entitled "Design for a Time of Weird, Wild Change" which appeared in Communications Arts Magazine. I believe the year was 1996. In that article you made the following observations and constructive suggestions:

"Issue 1: Few designers understand the sheer scale of modern business transformation. Issue 2: We need to understand what it means to live and work in revolutionary times. Issue 3: Designers can play a pivotal role in resolving the contradictions between business and societal needs.

Recommended Response:

Designers need to work in teams. Designers need to combine their talents with unfamiliar expertise form other fields. Design teams not only need to accept but actually embrace the notion of accountability. Designers need to invent and use a series of methods that bring rigor and robustness to the field. Designers must come to understand that making something hip and culturally connected is only one dimension of being strategic."

It is now seven long years later and much has changed in the world. Although the initial internet boom has come and gone, one thing that remains consistent is the continuous transformation of modern business. It is not that particular transformation that I want to ask you about here, but rather the transformation of design itself. From your perspective today do you think designers and the design leadership of that time got it? Did they heed your message? You can tell us Larry. Across the dimensions referred to in your recommendations, have you observed much progress being made in the realm of design and design education since your suggestions appeared seven years ago?

Larry Keeley: Sheesh, I totally forgot I wrote that piece. Interesting to revisit it. Hearing it now, it's obvious to me that it was written in the early days of a boom, so of course it feels odd now in the mid- to late-stages of a bust cycle. The post-9/11 period makes it even more surreal. Somehow it colors everything with a frisson of disgust: "Damn, how could we have overlooked this gathering storm?"

So, are design and design education keeping up with the challenges posed in our changing world? I'd give us an unequivocal no. In pockets here and there, both the practice of design and select design schools are getting better than ever-smarter, more systemic, more switched on, more sophisticated. But this is true of every field. If you look at the center of gravity of design practice and compare it to the average pace of change in the world, design seems to be losing steam. Certainly we are not advancing our field at anywhere near the pace of, say, medicine, computing, entertainment, or sciences research. Maybe not even athletic shoes. More poignantly-and symptomatic of our times-the design field seems to be advancing far less swiftly and comprehensively than the U.S. machinery of war and our Department of Defense. If you believe as I do, that design is fundamentally about humanizing the world around us, how pathetic is that? How are we to feel about a world where the forces of destruction are advancing far more and far faster than the forces of construction?

Is this the fault of design leaders? Not really. It is the inevitable result of the economic fundamentals of our field. I vaguely recall that the front section of the piece you cited was talking about how design was rapidly becoming a vocational technical field, with the emphasis on people who could use automated tools to lay out a document, produce architectural drawings with AutoCAD, or engineer a product for ease of manufacture. So we end up with design being overwhelmingly used to give us good style, a hyper-abundance of choice, and affordability. The world may be coarser, harsher, and less humane, but at least we've got dozens of well-designed toothbrushes to choose from at Walgreen's and cool stuff available cheap at Target.

In a world with far more designers, designing far more artifacts, some commoditization is inevitable. But let's be fair. As ever, design has some fine thought leaders who continue the tradition of past giants. Some of the most interesting and provocative, like Tibor Kalman, have left us, sadly. Still, there remains a cadre of individuals who want to think deeply about what life could be, what it should be, and our role in closing the gap with our daily reality. Thoughtful designers can and must find one another, and continue to ask the tough questions.

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GK VanPatter: I see a lot we could talk about there Larry. In the short time that we have, I want to try to combine and follow-up on 4 notions that you referenced:

1. Design is fundamentally about humanizing the world.

2. Design is overwhelmingly being used (presently) to give us good style, a hyper-abundance of choice, and affordability.

3. Design is not keeping up with the challenges posed in our changing world.

4. Design is not developing at anywhere near the pace of medicine, computing, entertainment, or sciences research.

From the perspective of NextD, these are interconnected issues that lay at the center of a new design context universe. All are related to adaptability or a lack there-of on the part of design as a field of endeavor. I also see numerous connections to scale and process.

Let me try it this way: If design is ultimately about humanizing the world, that seems to imply an ability to take on challenges that may be more complex then creating the next generation of tooth brushes. To lead such a process of world humanization seems to suggest that we need to rethink what it means to be a design leader. That kind of leadership seems to connect more to what you do Larry than what toothbrush designers are doing today. I wonder if the design fields' reluctance to acknowledge and embrace such fundamental notions, at very senior levels, has hampered its ability to not only keep up with the challenges posed in a changing world but also our ability to advance the profession as rapidly as other fields?

Lets be honest: the commoditization of design is a significant issue in the mix here. While the low end of design complexity is increasingly becoming commoditized by do-it-yourself technology, the field of design has had difficulty moving itself into the next terrain, which we both know, often involves more complexity.

While we see growing desire in the design community to take on "world peace" like issues, we still see considerable reluctance to acknowledge that such challenges represent significant shifts of scale. Addressing such challenges requires different process skills then those applicable to business card or poster sized challenges…unless we restrict design to the work of creating the promotional posters and newsletter for world peace!

It strikes me that what we are talking about here is really a way of thinking that you have been a major proponent of for numerous years, as was your associate Jay Doblin. That way of thinking has not always been well received by the powers that be in the traditional design community. This reminds me of something that I recall you saying in a roundtable session at least five years ago. I want to give you due credit for that! I think it might have been at New York University. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you said this:

"We need to understand the scale of complexity that we want to address ourselves to, and then work out what base skills are needed….Consider the scale of projects…from business cards to cities. As you rise up that scale, you go through many thresholds of complexity, and that demands changes in methods and tools."

Now as you well know, much of design education, even at the graduate level, remains focused on teaching process skills and behaviors that are applicable to business card sized challenges. Coming to terms with the ramifications of that is obviously an enormous hurdle for many traditional designers and design educators today.

Assuming for a moment that the design field wants to get serious about taking on "world peace" sized challenges, serious about redefining the "Power of Design" what, in your view, does that mean in terms of methodology changes? From your perspective today, how can design move itself to a place where its value is perceived to be, and is in reality, based on more than an ability to add style, choice, and affordability?

Larry Keeley: Gee, Garry, you certainly have a gift for succinct and easy questions. ;-) My sense is that the thoughtful answer has to come at three different levels.

First, let's take it historically. Professions need giants in their early stages to survive. In law, accounting, management consulting, medicine, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and other professions the early pioneers were remarkable. They bring passion, brilliance, curiosity, courage, discipline and a sense of urgent mission sufficient to blaze a trail. Consider our own founding fathers for instance. Around Independence Day in 1776 the total U.S. population was 2% of what it is now, yet somehow we had sufficient talent to invent the form of democracy that is now the oldest, most durable and influential on the planet.

Similarly, the early pioneers that birthed our architectural, product, and graphic design fields were giants. Raymond Loewy, Paul Rand, Charles Eames, George Nelson, Walter Gropius, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, Richard Latham, Walter Teague, Henry Dreyfuss, even gadflies like Harley Earl-these were tough birds who expected to hang out with CEOs. And the CEOs back then were as likely to start conversations with these individuals about any issues in life, not just design. These guys had to have fusion knowledge then-combining art, engineering, culture, manufacturing, sales promotion, etc.-all arenas separated into specialties today that seldom work effectively together. We still have brilliant practitioners today, of course, like Tadao Ando, Maya Lin, Amory Lovins, and hundreds more, but they are Balkanized and used like spices. Your community or university needs attention? Better build some Frank Gehry spectacle. Your hotel needs to pack 'em in? Trot out Philippe Starck and have him go nuts. This isn't necessarily bad compared to early days, but it sure is different.

Second let's take it economically. Over time fields evolve into focused units that can be managed for efficiency, scale, visibility, and leadership. Try making it in product design today without having spectacular skills in NC modeling, or in architecture without AutoCAD plus a huge archive of prior drawings. Graphic designers making the packaging for a music CD will frequently charge less than 100 bucks-they own the Power Mac and all the pre-press automation tools already, and they hope they will get to meet Sting or Britney at the wrap party.

In this sense design is little different from medicine, law, consulting, or mathematics. Progress today tends to happen at the fringes of ever more granular specialties and firms ignore this at their peril. What we gain in efficiency we may lose in sophistication and richness, of course. T.S. Eliot said it especially elegantly long ago in his famous chorus from "The Rock":

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Finally, third, let's put it in the context of complexity generally. Just one of those very granular egghead specialties that has emerged in the last ten years or so is complexity theory. Among its tenets is the belief that complex systems (like weather, economies, distribution networks, flows of capital or trends) will be affected by even small perturbations in ways that defy prediction. Despite the persistent attempts by some portions of the US government to tell us we can beat terrorism or bring democracy, prosperity, shopping malls and sit coms to a sullen and seething Middle East, the reality proves tougher, highly resistant to prediction or control. In a related way, it would be nigh on impossible to assemble the Dream Design Team adequate to crack world peace, hunger, global warming, globalization, political freedom, or any of dozens more worthy topics in anything other than a superficial way.

Glancing back over these three dimensions it is easy to think I have somehow lost my own optimism, hope, or capacity to expect and demand the best from a field I admire. This is not true. My most recent graduate courses focused on global freshwater problems and, as ever, the students worked hard, did brilliant work, and astonished one another. Inevitably some of them will go on to make a big mark on the world. But design as a field cannot afford to crack the big problems. GM is reportedly spending over $100 million per year on fuel cell research and commercial viability is still 10+ years off. Most design firms do not through off enough free cash flow to have an R&D budget that exceeds $10,000 per year. That's why we become less influential over time, even as we become better at the specifics of our trade.

The good news is that I do have a theory or two about how to bust out of this trap.

5
GK VanPatter: I got a chuckle out of your "succinct and easy questions" comment Larry. I have to admit, we do stay away from sound bite conversations here! What we are trying to do is share the kind of real dialogue that we have in our practice, rather than construct more traditional magazine type "interviews". We appreciate your willingness to participate and share your significant insights. Yes, of course we would love to hear about the "theory or two" that you reference. As we move towards landing this plane, I believe your thoughts on "how to bust out" would make a great finale.

In reading your thoughts above, I can see that you and I view similar terrain through different lenses. I think we are moving towards better understanding each other but we are not quite there yet…: Perhaps this response to the issues that you raised above might help set the context for the finale.

You will get no argument from me regarding the importance of understanding history. What I would like to do however is bring us back to the question of methodology. To cut to the chase, I do think there are some things for a new generation of design leaders to think about, beyond the notion that early design "giants" were fusion thinkers with access to CEOs. Let me try it this way: In the past, design has often been about responding to what we, at NextD call framed challenges. So you want a building, Frank has a process in place that will deliver a spectacular result, and it will be a building. Frank and others in that talented tribe have an ever-improving specialized methodology, augmented with the latest technology, to produce building outcomes. You need a new toothbrush design; no problem, XYZ Design Associates has a methodology in place that will deliver either a new toothbrush or a new way of thinking about cleaning teeth. Heck, XYZ might be extremely creative and suggest that we don't need teeth at all!

Now to connect to the point that you were making earlier about design not responding well to world challenges: At the leading edge of the marketplace, what we see is that many challenges facing organizations today, facing the world today are no longer conveniently framed up in concise packages that can be addressed by processes originally created to respond to specialized framed problems. There-in lies part of the dilemma for design from our humble perspective. As long as design remains in the realm of only being responders to specialized, and already framed problems we are stuck in a confined and shrinking universe. At the low end of the spectrum in that universe is vocational type work. What is occurring at the high end of the spectrum is of particular interest here at NextD.

At the high end we see other professions moving in to do the strategic thinking work, framing up what the challenges are or might be. To your earlier point about specialization, we are concerned for the future of design that the real strategic thinking is being siphoned off by others because designers often lack the skills and tools to deal with the reality of what we call unframed challenges. If we are not careful, strategic thinking and complex problem solving will become a specialty that exists outside of design. In the marketplace, that shift is already underway. The platform of design is being eroded at the low end by technology commoditization and at the high end by the specialized siphoning off of strategic thinking and project leadership. As that siphoning grows, the perceived value of design plummets in the market place. Not a pretty picture.

So for us, its not so much about whether George Nelson and the boys were giants or not. Let's not get ourselves deflected by worrying about that. What we are interested in is understanding how the world of challenges has changed since those long ago days. We want to know what effects the massive, continuous change underway in the global marketplace is having on how humans need to organize and work in order to address today's challenges and opportunities. We seek to explore what tools and processes humans need to operate and innovate in this new context. To be blunt about it: We seek to place next design at the center of that universe. If the platform of design can get itself even partially renovated and reinvented, we believe there are enormous opportunities for future, next design leaders in that terrain.

On the issue of R&D constraints in the design business, you will also get no argument from me. It is possible however that you may be talking about very real problems associated with apples while we see enormous opportunities around oranges..: Again, let's be fair and point out that for a new generation of design leaders there is lots to think about here beyond the notion of being unable to compete with the R&D budget of General Motors. As you rightly point out, those are the apples. In our consulting practice we work with GM on innovation related challenges so I am familiar with that gigantic organization. We have no interest in trying to compete with their future transportation R&D budgets but that does not mean we have nothing of substance to offer such organizations. In this realm we see the strategic relevance of next design increasing, not diminishing. Those are the oranges…:

I am not sure I completely understand your views on "complexity". Your earlier comments about design as a constructive, humanizing force in the world would suggest that you did not intend to imply that there is no longer any need for such intentionality now that the world has been diagnosed as a non-predictive complex system. I presume you will agree that we need to be optimistic and encourage a new generation of design leaders to equip themselves to engage in the challenge of humanizing the world while fully recognizing the complexity and diversity that exists there. Correct me if I am wrong here. As the finale to this conversation I welcome your thoughts on the design "trap" and how to bust out of it. Help us better understand what you feel optimistic about today and in what or in whom do you place your hope?

Larry Keeley: Hmm… Garry, first I would like to lose the whole notion that somehow we are talking about different things. I don't think so at all. I think we may be reading a little differently the systemic effects on the evolution of our profession over time-especially what is likely to occur next.

Let's start with the good news. What I love about being close to the design field is that designers almost invariably have their hearts in the right place. They know they should make individual experiences better; they think they should try to make the whole world better. The actions they take nearly invariably are thoughtful, decent and nuanced within these goals. More than hipness, style, or the continual search for the new edge of culture or commerce, this is what makes us feel good about our work. The problem is that after decades of practice that forces most designers, design firms, and design schools deeper into a vocational technical corner they experience the Rodney Dangerfield effect: "I don't get no respect." Much as any individual designer would probably have much to say, the average CEO doesn't drop in to solicit his/her views. Instead he/she is relegated to pitching some middle management purchasing agent the third downward revision of a proposal to lay out the annual report.

I believe this goes well beyond challenge framing. It is structural, caused by commoditization forces too powerful to ignore, too omnipresent to finesse away. When earlier in our conversation I suggested the early design pioneers were giants, I should have stated with equal fervor that they had the freedom to chart virgin territory. Consider the 1977 Eero Saarinen quote of his father Eliel's remarks, probably originally uttered some 60 years ago:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context-a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
Eliel Saarinen

This is sharp, clear advice and good designers think this way instinctively. The problem is that now, as you broaden the arena you address you exponentially increase the complexity of what you must consider. This almost certainly will cut across dozens of specialties about which you may know very little. God help the designer who casually and cavalierly expands his remit into specialties beyond his credentialing. In today's world the liabilities will be staggering.

On the current condition

So you and I both assess the current condition of the field similarly:

At the bottom, the advent of ever more sophisticated forms of design automation creates a new economic floor in our industry-this is why the average college degree-holding graphic designer in Chicago (where I live) makes less than Chicago bus drivers. The structural causes are numerous and will only get worse-design automation, intense specialization, improved operational protocols, high-speed networks that allow us to disseminate work in progress and integrate the pieces thereafter, plus "focused factories" that can do specialized functions in India, China, or wherever the labor rate is lowest. No designer should assume that he will be spared the effects of this industrial transformation. Economics may not be everything, but they aren't nothing either.

Meanwhile, at the high end, as your comments allude, designers, the design sensibility, and many of the more exotic design specialties get embedded in other firms that rarely call themselves design. So strategy firms, engineering firms, systems integration firms, retail consultancies, web service firms, ad agencies, movie special FX firms, digital photo archives, and many more start to use designers-though almost invariably in roles with comparatively little influence or control.

As an aside, my own firm Doblin Inc. may be one of these culprits-as is your own firm, Understanding Lab. Folks at Doblin rarely talk about design; though perhaps 20% of our staff has advanced design degrees and nearly 40% of our staff teaches Design Masters or Ph.D. students at the Institute of Design. Our focus is on innovation, with a specialty in innovation effectiveness. Are we advancing the design field? Not really. We are merely embedding its healthy sensibility into a new sub-specialty.

These two poles leave the average design firm stuck in the middle, a classically awful strategic position. In the main, design firms are neither efficient enough to be the least-cost producer of their specialty, nor differentiated enough to be the only game around for some high-value added service. Such firms get by on the strength of relationships-the people they know, the history they have had, or sheer behavioral inertia.

Education for design tends to exacerbate this, out of sheer internal momentum continuing to perpetrate the polite fiction that there will be vibrant and viable careers in graphic design, product design, architecture, photography, fashion, etc. I don't blame these schools particularly either. As ever, it is hard to stop seeing individual trees and see instead the evolving condition of some forest ecosystem. Photographic technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, for instance. Any great teacher of the subject will feel daunted enough just to pack in teaching about all the field's digital frontiers. This makes it bloody unlikely that she will pause to say "Uh oh! These technologies change everything and I may inadvertently be leading my sheep to slaughter…"

On the consequences of this shift

Now I worry that I am sounding terribly gloomy or fatalistic here. Anyone that knows me knows my incurable optimism, my boundless confidence that we can collectively find important, useful things to do, and that we ought to be well paid for doing them.

Your questions, even the great name of your publication, NextDesign, are clearly headed in the right direction. You want to stand in the future and see how things look from there. Let's give that a brave try…

Option 1: Sophistication and depth of expertise…
Your comments suggest that the only practical answer to the forces acting on the industry is to increase the sophistication of our approaches. In particular, you cite methods, and I certainly do not disagree. Having been mentored by Jay Doblin, arguably the greatest methodologist of his day, that would once have been my primary answer too. Methods matter a lot, perhaps now more than ever. But now I suggest they are necessary but not sufficient for success.

If we simply increase the methods base within the existing historic specialties of our field, chances are we will mostly get more expensive product design, graphic design, and architectural offices, with far higher base levels of capital investment. Such firms can differentiate themselves for a while, but they become very vulnerable to focused, low-end competitors-precisely the kind that is emerging fastest today.

Option 2: Efficiency and focus…
So another way to go is to pick a recurring capability and really nail it. Be the best there is at, say, finite element analysis, so you can tell auto companies how their cars will fare in a crash. Or help Disney better render fur in animation sequences. This is a perfectly valid strategy, but notice how it forces you to know more and more about less and less over time-the exact opposite of what design schools historically valued and espoused.

Option 3: New roles and new sources of value
This is where I think some interesting and important alternate futures lie. This demands a willingness to challenge the composition of the team, their protocols, and the nature of their quest. It is this last point that is most fundamental because I think it is changing in ways that are unclear and unstable-though some shadowy outlines are lurking in the loaming.

Let's let that hang out there to quiver a while. I promise I will address it later.

The larger context of shifts today
The best business strategy theorists think the nature of corporate strategy is changing. Leading economists think the underlying postulates of economics (most especially the central belief that man is a rational economic actor) are nonsense. Medical researchers are quite clear that we are poised on the edge of a revolution in medical methods and theories. Scientists think the nature of discovery and progress has permanently shifted. I could go on with this laundry list, but won't. My point is simple: what makes us think design ought to be any different?

Now perhaps this is what you mean by getting beyond a "framed challenge." I think it is a bigger deal than that. It demands that we fundamentally embrace a watershed change in the nature of the role and the source of value that designers should contribute today. The essential challenge here is to rethink what we ought to do, and with whom. It seems to me that this paramount question must precede the good next question you espouse-what methods ought we use.

Two prior theory programs have been done at Doblin to illuminate this. One is called Facts Forces Fog, and was done as a gift to the design profession. It originally debuted at the Fiftieth Anniversary Aspen Design Conference (2001) as a keynote speech. The method we used was pattern recognition, and the goal was to search for the future fields that would be vital to address. (A PDF file showing this model is provided for free at the end of this conversation). Let's reprise the primary assertion. Our discoveries suggest that business worldwide is now well into a post-industrial phase where industries are no longer a meaningful unit of analysis or optimization. We assert that there are at least 11 emergent arenas that will get more important over time and within which designers ought to play vital roles. In the actual speech these were offered with apologies-while we are certain these 11 will be huge, we think it likely that others will also become evident that we have been unable to detect or predict. The eleven rising arenas are:

Simplicity
Enlightenment
Talent Leverage
Mastery
Travel
Entertainment
Personal Expression
Relationships
Financial Health
Health & Environment
Political Freedom

In the original model, each of these words was surrounded by many other terms meant to convey subtle dimensions of these deceptively simple-seeming words. But two key observations deserve reiteration. First, none of these terms describes an industry per se. Different parts of many industries must find ways to restructure if they are to focus effectively on these rising topics. Perhaps you will take great comfort Garry in noting that often you find magazines that make one or another such topic a central to their focus. Second, notice that in all cases these rising arenas represent the triumphant ascent of some aspect of people's lives. This is a powerful reaffirmation of the central value of design and designers.

Let me explain why I call this a gift to the design community. Any designer that focuses her talent, her career, her heart and mind on one or another of these issues-and masters it-is likely to get more important, more recognized, and better compensated over time. This is a blueprint for future value. That's why I cite individuals like Maya Lin, Paul MacCready, or Amory Lovins. They are models for the rest of us. I urge designers to gather together in firms that focus on these topics as centroids of their practice. They will help the future to show up somewhat ahead of its regularly scheduled arrival.

The second piece of theory Doblin has done that is pertinent to your query is the final chapter of my forthcoming book The Taming of the New. It speculates about the future of innovation. In it, I run through a broad catalog of the emerging methods that will totally reshape how we can search for the new and optimize our way through complex alternatives. For your readers that do not want to wait until Harvard Business School Press finishes producing my book, the recent book by Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis called It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology and Business offers a great introduction to some aspects of this revolution.

Both books share a conviction that the times we inhabit are ambiguous, complex and volatile. Because of this, it becomes especially important that designers consider the options I have outlined and make active choices. Otherwise, it is likely that unpleasant options will be forced upon them. That's the bad news.

The good news is that the world is moving our way. So many parts of daily life need to be humanized, reinvented, and made more gracious, involving, and understandable. Corporations can't and won't do this in the highest, best ways without being led by people with an acute design sensibility. So pick an arena and pitch in. There's important work to be done.


Download: Facts_Forces_Fog.pdf

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