While I’ve been going into my PhD research about bridging the way that User-centered Design (UCD) and marketing study people in the context of innovation I keep on running into organizational issues.  Quite often selling a design, or getting money in order to study people in the innovation process (whether it comes before or after technology development) can be a difficult thing.  Even after a design concept has been fashioned it can be difficult to sell the design up the decision tree.

Quite often the problem is that it’s the designer or the UX professional or perhaps the head of UX that is doing the pitch.  As noted at CHI2010 there are too few UX/usability professionals and Designers who choose to, or who are able to advance into leadership roles. All the while there is this thing called design thinking that is becoming more popular.  While there are some who are saying that design thinking has “won” I guess I don’t really see it very often in many companies, though there are some notable exceptions.

One of the reasons why I think that design thinking has become popular is that it represents, perhaps not to a radical degree, a break with business as usual.  The power of design thinking I think is two-fold: it makes people more important (a big boost to meaningfulness), and it makes forward looking more important that backward (makes validity more important than repeatability/controlling risk).  Where I want to go with this though is not to extoll design thinking or (even though I long for it) a good precise, operationalizable definition, no I want to say that I am starting to see a trend, some weak signals if you will things that are starting out in the fringes, but in some cases are becoming more mainstream.

I’m calling this trend “meaningful business.”  Maybe there’s a better label for it, but this one works for my purposes.  I don’t have a good definition for this one either (sorry!) but here’s a description.  A constellation of ideas about business and how it’s run, what it makes, and how it’s results ought or at least can be measured.  Here are some books and sets of ideas around this.  If you are unfamiliar with any of these, just google the phrase and you’ll quickly find what I mean.

• The slow business manifesto
• The triple bottom line
• The HIP investor
• Motivation 3.0 (see DRiVE by Daniel pink and this video of him)
• Leadership instead of (or at least in addition to) management
• New forms of businesses (Non-profit/for-profit hybrid, B-corp,Low-profit limited liability corp (LLLC))
• Results only work environment (ROWE)
• The Positive Business Manifesto

It occurs to me that there are others that are missing and if you’ve heard  of some, please leave them in the comments and I’ll edit the post to include them.

Lastly I think that we may be able to put all these things together and start talking about what the commonalities are, and how organizations can best address how, when, and if they change, perhaps selecting the aspects of some of these they feel most comfortable with first, or diving straight in.