Design Thinking Collaboration
Meet Professor Mark Clark from American University, and author of Six Paths to Leadership: Lessons from Successful Executives, Politicians, Entrepreneurs, and More. I got to know Mark just as my book “Lessons From Mars” was being published. Mark was kind enough to invite me in to talk to some of his students.
And that works both ways in terms of kindness, because I'm always looking for folks who can bring the real world into the classroom. Carlos, what you were able to talk about, actually resonated with my point of view with how we tried to teach teams at least within business schools and mostly within psychology and other areas that cover that as well.
But you know, if you're offering this semester is just starting, There's always room.
Learning from Juveniles
Mark, what is your background and how did you get into this work?
I'm currently an associate professor at the Kogod School of Business at American University. I've actually been in academia now for 20 years, so I always say that long enough to be part of the problem. And what I mean by that is we get away from the impetus that drove us into studying teams and studying relationships and people in organizations as I do, the further we're in academia. Now, most of us try to be out there in the world and through our students through our collaborations, making sure that we're keeping abreast of what's going on in real organizations. But it can be hard and so I facetiously say I’m part of the problem. But I tried to remedy that by speaking to folks like you, by having my students do live projects, and usually in teams, not always.
But what got me into teams in the first place was way back, I worked at something called Boysville of Michigan, which was a residential juvenile treatment facility. We had most of the drug runners in the 80s. They were incarcerated, but in a developmental treatment context, which was one step away from juvie hall and jail. We used a collaborative model at the time. We called it a positive peer culture. And the idea was to help these kids realize that they are not only part of a collaboration or a peer model that influences them, but they can also influence others.
We basically followed some of the Tuckman’s stages stuff that you'd be really familiar with Carlos. You know, the forming and storming and norming and performing.
But, we did it in a kind of a loose clinical way. That's what really got me going with the team environment.
Were you then licensed social worker, or psychologist at that point?
I was actually a psychology undergrad major in college. And I started working there nights to get myself through school, and was able to get promoted into the day shift because in social work, there's such a shortage of qualified people that they cast an exemption for me before I actually had my undergraduate degree. Anyway, I did that for three years. While I was doing that, I learned a lot of facilitation techniques, because we're always trying to put it back on the group, let them be responsible for themselves and each other and teach them how to build their own positive peer culture. That meant that I was able to see a lot of dynamics that go on within groups and teams and how the individuals play a role in that. And how, of course, it can shift over time, over people and over situations. When I started applying that to other areas, I realized that those dynamics that I saw were pretty much the same whether I was working with executives or whether I was working with juvenile delinquents. In fact, the juvenile delinquents were often more honest.
That's a sad fact. One of my favorite clients years ago, when I worked at IBM was an adult juvenile delinquent. He was great. I loved working with him because he held nothing back. He was fairly senior. Years later, he would get a little more polish after they sent him off to leadership development programs. Smart as a whip.
And the thing that you're talking about is essentially that we learn in more sophisticated groups or careers that we're supposed to be a little bit more subtle about our goals and our actions. That's why I said that the juvenile delinquents were more honest, because they were right out there. They still need to collaborate to get things done, but their bold ideology was, “Hey, this is what I want out of it.”
Did you go right off to grad school or did you go work in other places for a while before you went and got your advanced degrees?
I did my master's degree at Ohio State while I was working two-and-a-half hours away.
That's because I was a Michigander, right, living in Ohio. But Ohio was paying me and Ohio State was paying my tuition. So, I owed a debt of gratitude to them.
While I was there I did Community Economic Development, I did youth development, I worked with the University Extension, and was able to then start my own side training sort of thing. That's where I first started working with executives, and others, as a trainer. I’d go into companies and do industrial training, look at work units. We would maybe call them teams, but they were just looser than that. It was sort of the equivalent of a production line, where they would have a collaborative unit per se, that would need to get something done, and they needed some skills to do that. So, some of my initial forays into this were simply training people on some content related stuff. Like here's the math that you need to get this done to make sure everybody was up to spec. But more importantly, here are the collaborative aspects of this; here are the things that you have to do process-wise to make sure that other people are getting the information that you're trying to impart. And I continued doing that for years, even while I did go back to grad school formally.
Academia has its benefits
Alright, so you got your PhD, and all this time, it sounds like you were thinking about teams and teamwork
All the different dimensions of that. To me, it wasn't so much about the team itself. It was about what they are getting done? I was always very interested in looking at what are the factors that affect people's ability to collaborate? My initial dissertation, if you look at that, you’d say, “What does that have to do with teams?” because it was on perceived relational diversity. I was looking at, what are the wide variety of categories which change the way a work unit is able to work together? People have done a lot of work on demography, the visible characteristics, but not so much on knowledge differences, value differences, personality. So I incorporated that into my research project and looked at how that would affect people's ability to get things done.
And you've been at American University. How long?
Since 2001. So, this would be my 20th year, I guess.
Most of your professional teaching life you've been at American.
Yeah, my academic life has been here at American University. I love it, love the city, great students, great place to be, a lot of ways you can collaborate outside of the university walls in a city like this. So it's very, very cool.
And one of the reasons I was particularly interested in working with you and coming in and talking to your classes is that I myself have the degree from American, my Masters of Science in org development.
That's what caught my attention when I read your email. Besides the Mars thing, I’ve always wanted to have a Martian in the classroom. But it was also, “Hey, this guy's from AU,” and students love to hear from alumni.
I've mostly taught MBA students but actually loved teaching the undergrads when I get a chance, and you've come in a couple of times to the undergrad class, my high performing teams class. And you've also come into my grad teams class, as well.
Academic Research: Design Thinking
So, let's talk about your research. You're on the front edge of things. You're out there doing research and thinking about things that might make their way into the mainstream later. Or testing things that are out there and seeing if they're real.
I consider it iterative, following and leading what's going on in organizations. We take ideas from what businesses and what organizations are doing out there in terms of their teams, their collaborative processes. We also come up with ideas and test them. One of the things that really motivated me to get a PhD in the first place was when I was out there doing these training programs, it was hard to tell what was “the flavor of the month,” versus what was the basis of that and understanding the science behind it, understanding what is true across a variety of situations. I can give lots of examples of that sort of thing. But it basically comes down to finding all kinds of new systems, whether we call it design thinking, or looking at sprints, and looking at total quality management, or the latest personality measuring device. And yet those have a basis in science. Until we understand that basis in organizational and human science, then we don't really understand how it compares with other things that we've learned.
So my challenge as a trainer at the time was trying to figure out well, then what's the commonality? What works across this? And what can I say that actually has some basis in truth, rather than it just sells very well? When I started doing the research, as I mentioned, I talked early on in my career, a lot about the diversity aspects of teams. But what part of the diversity really interested me was the knowledge. I was really inspired at the macro level. These guys wrote a book called The Knowledge Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi, and their idea was that organizations create innovation by pairing tacit and explicit knowledge. That means that something tacit is something that I might have knowledge of, but I might have a hard time explaining it, putting it into words. It's procedural very often. So, if you think about routines that you engage in every day, how do you ride a bike, for example. Explaining that as a lot harder than just simply demonstrating it.
The value of diverse thinking and how to extract ideas
When you are in an organization, then you're putting these people together because they have different bases of knowledge, different perspectives. And if you pair that tacit knowledge with explicit, you'd then have to explain it to other people when you put them together, then that's going to give us a combined or integrative perspective that results in innovation. Obviously, oversimplifying it.
It's putting people together and figuring out how to make it work. It's not just putting people together and hoping something will happen, it's not that garbage can model. It's, “No, I'm actually going to manage the process.” To me, that was inspiring because I thought, well, alright, we do this, or at least we try to do this, in teams. This is what we're after. Teams are supposed to be about creating value. There's got to be a reason to have a team, there's got to be a reason to put people together. It's not just for the sake of having teams. And there are plenty of times that teams are a drag on the system.
Yeah, I mean, you've heard me say before Carlos, I tell my students all the time, we all take our own paycheck home. There is an individual in that team, and you have to learn how to manage the individual and manage broadly. You have to look at performance management systems, incentive systems, motivations, things that make people tick. And then you also, when you're putting it in an organizational context where the organizations want to get things done. They don't want to waste people's time. They don't want to waste their own resources. They have goals, they want to create value. So, you can't just throw people together and expect it to work. You’ve got to have processes that work toward a particular value-driven goal.
So, I'm thinking now about the people and the diversity part. Of course, diversity, inclusion, and equity, big topics. That's diversity along a number of dimensions, gender, race, ethnicity. Then you're talking more about diversity of knowledge here. Every bit as important. And now if you're talking to a manager, average, Jane, the manager, and she's building a team. The organization chart says you lead a team, there are five or six boxes underneath your box on the org chart. It's your job to build that team, to staff it. Is there a suggestion in what you're talking about here, Mark, that as you're putting people into that team you look specifically for this diversity of knowledge? Let's say it's a finance team. So they're all going to be finance people. How would this insight you've been talking about apply in this case?
That's a great question, Carlos. I think that you need to look at the task itself. What do you need to get done? If you're just trying to apply brute force to something, it's a tug of war. That's an
additive task, right? There's an old thing, the Steiner task topology that talks about, is it additive? Is it conjunctive? Is it disjunctive? What are you trying to get accomplished here? A disjunctive would be that there's one right answer. It's like you're putting a group of people together and trying to come up with something that matches reality, something correct.
Another kind of task, like an additive task, is I might need you as a teammate on my tug of war team, Carlos, we're all using the same sort of strength, even if we vary in it. It depends on the task. Even within finance, of course, there's an in-group, out-group thing. So, you're looking at this and going, “hey, it's a bunch of finance majors, or a bunch of finance experts”. But within themselves, they probably look at each other and go, “Oh, well, you come from this type of perspective.” And, “Oh, you're really good at this aspect of finance while I'm really good at this other aspect of finance,” So, the in-group, out-group, plays very strongly here. Within that task, you might choose people who still have varied perspectives. So, you and I are teams guys, to some extent, and some people would lump us together. But you and I know that even though we share a lot of commonalities, we also have a lot of differences and experiences and opinions and things like that.
I'm talking about matching to the task. You have this goal, and you have to construct whatever work unit is best able to fulfill that goal. If it's something where I'm trying to produce innovation - which is what people very often talk about when they're looking to put together a team - then you want the sufficient and necessary perspectives that will actually help you to arrive at the answer or the innovation that you're after.
Design Thinking at work
You were telling me about work you're doing on design thinking and teams.
Yeah, to me, it's not quite a “flavor of the month.” Design thinking is an established area. But it is to guys like you and me who work with teams and collaboration: it’s just another process. Design thinking is basically trying to figure out, how do we take the team – could be an organization or a group of people from divergent thinking to convergent thinking, people with a lot of diversity of opinions and perspectives - to align on something useful?
Let's tackle that term, design thinking. It does have a specific underlying definition. Could you just touch on that for a second?
Design thinking comes out of the design field, largely, but it's basically human-centered problem solving. Guys like you and me, we go, “Well, no kidding, of course, you need humans to go through a process to solve problems.” But when you're talking about some of the engineering sciences that relate to the design field, to them this is different, because they're thinking it's not just the design itself. It's not just the engineering process. It is actually the human-centered problem solving that gets us further. So that's what design thinking is, it emphasizes collaboration, creativity - and this is key - empathy,
Right. Empathy. Empathy, in particular, for your customer who's going to be using this thing.
Or any stakeholder.
We work back from the need and what they're saying is the problem, and then we bring our collaborative efforts to help create that notion of empathy here. Because we have to constantly be thinking, we're not designing for the sake of design. We're designing to a human need.
That's it. So, design thinking says there's a user, and you can call that the customer or the stakeholder or whatever, and that user needs to solve a problem. So, what do we do? Well, we don't just say, “Okay, let me solve your problem.” First, we empathize. We say, “Okay, let me understand you. Let's talk, let's go through a process here, where I really get a feel for what that problem is, from your perspective.” And then you start the process of, “Okay, let's define that.” Lets then ideate, come up with ideas and go back and forth, iterate, until we can make a prototype. And we might make 1000 prototypes, because the ideas come quickly, let's make some quick prototypes.
Fail Fast and learn
-and use a feedback process so that it loops back and so we're constantly getting more ideas, more empathy, more definitions, more ideation, multiple prototypes, until we get something that fulfills a user's need. That's design thinking.
I could do that by myself. I mean, I could say you're, you're my stakeholder Mark, and you have a problem you want to solve around here. And I could say, “Well, let me just ideate around it. Let me create some prototypes, test them, fail fast and learn from my failures and keep refining until I come up with something that works for Mark Clark”. You said in a collaboration it’s an important part of how design thinking gets done. Why?
To collaborate, you need at least two different perspectives. So you're right that you could do this as just a one-on-one. Usually though, what you find is that more perspectives help more, especially if you're talking about complex problems, which benefit. The problem that we have can only be solved by these different perspectives.
I'll give you an example. I was working with the Alto Design School with my colleague, Daniel Graff. This is what the start of some of our research on design thinking with teams. We did various things with clients in Finland, this is in Helsinki. And we went through the Helsinki airport doing a user interface, empathy exercise. We tried to experience the airport in the way that a typical traveler might. And we said typical, but in a diverse sense. So, we had students who sat in wheelchairs and tried to negotiate the airport through wheelchairs. We had students leave something purposefully in their bag that they knew would be found. This is pre the security measures that we have now. But the idea was that they would then come across these situations that would give them insights or empathy into the traveler, which they can then use to feed back to Finnair, was the company that we were working with within the airport. Now, if you’d just done this one-on-one, say, with a Finnair rep, and one student or one consultant, then it would have been really hard to get the diversity of perspectives that were needed to actually give them good feedback on this operation work.
We keep coming back to that term, that diversity of thought and perspective.
Or variety, if you want to say it that way. Right?
Yeah, it’s all valid. The collaboration as a part of design thinking, I get at that level. Let's say that we go back to that finance team for a second. And this is a person who's trying to run the accounting part of a company or small business. They have four or five people, but slightly different disciplines, and so forth. Is there any application in day-to-day business for design thinking?
Well, yeah, yeah. I don't want to get too macro here. But if you look at organizations and how they've evolved over time, right. They've gone from being these very often functional silos and very tall hierarchies to flatter organizations that need to be more nimble to respond to the environment, right. That sounds like a lot of hash, but really what we're saying here is that people have gone from saying, “I can be this specialist and just do what I need to and filling out this spreadsheet as an accountant,” to, “No, I really need to understand what's going on with our product development folks. Because we need to be a lot quicker about developing new products; about reaching new markets with diverse needs.” That means that I have to have some understanding - a “requisite variety,” from the operations point of view - that I have to have requisite understanding and that empathy helps me to get that. Because I realized that they're doing a job like I'm doing a job. I can benefit from understanding, and I can also create value for them by understanding.
How do people share knowledge and perspectives within teams?
Now we're getting to some of the areas closer to some of the research that I've been doing: trying to understand how people share these perspectives, and how they share knowledge within the team environment.
And that's as part of design thinking?
It extends design thinking. This is almost like design thinking could be considered one application of team process tools and team process approaches. The research that I do has touched on design thinking and has been published in a couple of design journals, as well as publishing my research in other mainstream management or groups and teams journals.
So, you continue your work in this area of design thinking and teams?
Yeah, absolutely. From my perspective, we're just looking at the processes that help people share their perspective and share their knowledge and information. When I started working with my colleague, Daniel Graff, at Alto University - now he's in Tongji University in Shanghai, which is very well known for their design - we were looking at how to bring together what's already known in teams, but then applying it to this new area. And then, of course, reciprocating back: what can we get from design thinking that can help us to understand what's going on in teams? There's some well-known or least well accepted practical aspects of design thinking such as how do you get divergent perspectives to be understood by others within your environment, whether those are stakeholders that you're trying to empathize with or other team members?
How could John and Jane manager help foster the understanding of diverse perspectives?
This is a process tool, if we think of it in that way. A process tool could be the use of analogies and metaphor. And that's where my research with Daniel and with our other colleague, Nicoleta Meslec who is in the Netherlands, comes in. What we've done is say, “Well, folks have a fairly decent acceptance of when we're trying to get a point across, we tell stories,” what they call design thinking - the narrative approach.
Or we give visualization. Visualization is very important in design thinking, you can think of things like the Back of the Napkin concept that if you can't sketch your idea in the back of a napkin of a graphic, or some short bullet points, then you aren't really going to be successful in getting the idea across to anyone else.
So, we know about narratives. We know about visualizations, charts, graphs. But we aren't so good at understanding “how do I actually get across to someone, a concept that they otherwise are not familiar with?” We conceived or borrowed this idea of looking at the use of metaphor, and the use of analogy as a form of metaphor, of how people convey meaning within teams. And we looked at this with applied design teams that were doing work with clients. We did some work in labs, we've published a few different things on this, that basically the more that you can try to use an analogy that's understood by both sides, that will enable you to convey your meaning or to bridge the perspectives of people who are diverse, in essence.
Use common analogy to bridge the understanding gap
So is there any analogy or metaphor you can recall from your work that struck you as a good example of how it helps people understand a diverse point of view?
You know, I should have known that you're going to ask that question, Carlos. And I should have had one in mind. The one that my colleague was always talking about was a car brand: A Ferrari is like a passionate kiss. “Well, what does that mean?” Well, then that enables you to puzzle this out. So when you're trying to convey that aspect of this car to somebody, then you're saying, “Look, it's not about how fast it goes. But to me, it gives me a feeling right of something that I experience when I have a passionate kiss.” I hope almost everyone can understand what it's like to have a passionate kiss, and they go, “You know what that means something to me, too.” And then that helps you to start bridging the perspective and exploring a little bit more.
What I like about that, Mark, is it is a little bit confusing. It's like, “A passionate kiss? Those things at first blush don't seem alike. You got a car and then a physical act of intimacy. It’s like, “Wait a minute, hold on!” But you're right. It opens up a really interesting area to explore when you consider the aspects of the two things that are similar. I love it. Great example.
Well, if you think about why does somebody buy a car? Here I was thinking it is because of the specs. Maybe I'm the guy who wants the fastest half mile, that sort of thing. But is that what it's about for every consumer?
And if you want a more pragmatic one, even just the metaphor of understanding way back with Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor, his guru who helped him understand the scientific management, Henry Ford said building a car is just like any other factory. Rather than that custom craft pursuit that building a car had been before that: the Mercedes Benz approach where you go, like, we have a team, and that team assembled one car. Instead, Henry Ford said, No, it's more like a factory. Then he created the vision from that.
The use of metaphor is powerful, because it transfers meaning in a different way than what you might explicitly see on paper. That, as you point out, gets the conversation going, because it kind of sparks something in you. And that's what we found in our research is that it's actually not only effective, but it adds value beyond what other methods such as narratives and visualization do within a team that's trying to share their diverse perspectives.
I worked for a guy once who was nominated as Entrepreneur of the Year. He ended up being a runner up, but he attended a couple of social events. And he came back to the office one morning, and he said, “You know what I noticed about being with a bunch of CEOs, they use analogies all the time to make things clear.” I thought, Oh, man, I have to learn how to do analogies better. So I can be a big important CEO person. You notice it stuck with me. It is an art. It is a skill we can learn. It is like a muscle that if we work it enough, we can flex it, I find I have to plan for these things. You know, I've written a couple of books, and I am not a natural analogizer. But my editor said, “Come on Carlos, you've got to bring more clarity to these things you're explaining for people. I love that as a practical application. So get out there brilliant listeners and start practicing your analogies and your metaphors and see if you can help your team grok some of this stuff they might otherwise not be getting.
You got to communicate with others, right? If you're trying to get that information that perspective across, you’ve got to figure out a way to do it. That's what I love about design thinking as applied to collaboration in teams. It offers this set of tools that we can enhance by looking at our group processes that we know something about. Daniel and I were amazed that no one had really done research on the use of analogies and metaphors in teams to help them in their diverse information processing.
So there's got to be a book in there somewhere and Mark.
And it's a lot of fun to speak with you, Carlos. I read your book on collaboration at Mars and I steal ideas and examples from it all the time when I'm talking in class. I really appreciate your perspective on it.
I have truly enjoyed the partnership I’ve had with Dr. Mark Clark over the years. After this interview, Mark’s book was released on design thinking, Six Paths to Leadership: Lessons from Successful Executives, Politicians, Entrepreneurs, and More. Enjoy it!
. You can learn more from and about Mark Clark here at his AU profile.