Double Diamond Illusions

Making Sense of a GIANT Methods Architecture HICCUP

GK VanPatter, Jacob Lee Ravnborg, Aimi Winkler

Welcome NextD Journal readers. 

As part of the research for our upcoming book; Innovation Methods Mapping 2: Design for Complexity, we are, from a practice-based perspective, looking at several related historical methods that cascade into today. Our long time readers will know that we have previously published on this bumpy subject. This post is particularly directed to readers working on methods design related research and or methods redesign initiatives geared in the direction of adapting to increasing complexity of challenges.

As in our Innovation Methods Mapping Book 1, we are particularly interested in the evolution of process architecture; what evolved, what changed, what remained the same. Our focus in Book 2 is also on unpacking process design, the implications of the design and not on evaluating the effectiveness of methods.

In particular for this background research post, we are sharing a look at the somewhat infamous, widely misunderstood Bela H. Banathy method models that appear in his 1996 book, “Designing Social Systems in a Changing World”. We consider it to be an important systems related book from the 1990s era and unfortunately among the most unwieldy, discombobulated and confusing books ever published on the subject of “design”. 

Authored by Professor, Counseling Psychologist, Linguist, Systems Scientist, Scholar, Bela H. Banathy (1919-2003), making use of the “design” word, how the various models inside the book are explained and diagramed, the connections or lack there-of between the text and the models is perplexing, to say the very least. It is a mash-up that has created a tidal wave of confusion, spanning decades, particularly in the design community. If it wasn’t for that confusion wave, we would not be here writing this post.

With that 1996 book selling for $100-$200 USD today, it’s our guess that most folks referencing the “Banathy Method” have never actually read the 370 page book. It seems even less likely that many have read his previous 1991 book entitled; “Systems Design of Education” which oddly contains much more straight-forward and clear explanations of his evolving methodology. Inside the 1996 book are several methods-related mysteries that we hope to unpack and make sense of in our upcoming Book 2. This post is a simple draft work, one chapter in progress. 

The importance of that 1996 Banathy material is not just in the book itself but also in the apparent misreadings, reinterpretations, redepictions of the models by many prominent folks and institutions in the design community spanning decades. With the so-called “Double Diamond Method” being the most popular derivative, now deeply embedded and widespread in the design community, this is not an easy story to table.

Journalistically speaking, it is a missing, over-due, some might even say a blockbuster of a methodology hiccup story that cascades forward and is still very much present. We view the ongoing wave of misreadings, reinterpretations, redepictions as a simple distraction, as well as a blockade to recognition of need for forward methods R&D motion in the design community, thus impacting Design for Complexity evolutions. 

Sharing how we make sense of the hiccups might hopefully help our readers look at the various derivative models with a fresh set of forward looking lenses. 

Of course the so-called “diamonds” did not originate in the design community or the systems thinking community or with Bela Banathy, so what the “diamonds” were originally meant to be, where they came from and how many of them were actually called for by Banathy is part of the story.

In this work of Root Source Analysis having original materials to view is always extremely useful. To see how explanations of the models are present, absent or muddled in the original text is key to understanding what happened here. 

Example Revelations:

REVELATION 2 of 10. The design community has loaded the kitchen sink onto two diamond shapes resulting in the number of phases shown most often having no relationship to two “diamonds”. As if they were somehow religious shapes not to be tampered with, some have loaded 10-12 phases into two “diamonds”. Most examples of “Double Diamond” seen today in the design community actually contain 4-5 cycles of diverge/converge, not two. Who owns all the misrepresentation?

REVELATION 3 of 10. In the 1996 book a tribal-centric Banathy features and credits three fellow system thinking approaches as influential predecessors to his own approach: Ackoff, Checkland, and Nadler, None of those approaches contain any behavioral “diamonds”.

REVELATION 5 of 10. In the Banathy book there is NO crediting of JP Guilford (1897-1987), the “American psychologist best known for his psychometric study of human intelligence, including the distinction between divergent and convergent production”, circa 1955. Guilford was closely aligned with the American, CPS (Creative Problem Solving) community. With a masters degree in counseling psychology it seems unlikely that Banathy did not know who JP Guilford was. The Banathy book’s crediting attribution truncation leads to a lot of just plain incorrect miscrediting to “Banathy’s Dynamics of Diverge-Converge” in soft systems thinking and design literatures. Sleepy scholarship? 

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