Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard J. Boland, Jr is Professor of Information Systems and Professor of Accountancy at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Fred Collopy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Information Systems at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.

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Managing as Designing

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ixPreface...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................xiPART ONE. MANAGING AND DESIGNING......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................11 Design Matters for Management Richard J. Boland Jr. and Fred Collopy...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................32 Reflections on Designing and Architectural Practice Frank O. Gehry.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................193 Rethinking Organizational Design Karl E. Weick.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................364 Management and Design: Interaction Pathways in Organizational Life Richard Buchanan................................................................................................................................................................................................................54PART TWO. FOUNDATIONS OF MANAGING AS DESIGNING........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................655 Evolving Spatial Intelligence Tools, From Architectural Poetics to Management Methods Alexander Tzonis.............................................................................................................................................................................................676 Designing for Thrownness Karl E. Weick.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................747 People Mutht Be Amuthed John Leslie King...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................798 In Praise of Symbolic Poverty Nicholas Cook........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................859 Managing and Designing: Attending to Reflexiveness and Enactment Wanda J. Orlikowski...............................................................................................................................................................................................................9010 Managing as Argumentative History-Making Yrj Engestrm...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................9611 Management as the Designing of an Action Net Barbara Czarniawska..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................10212 Design in the Punctuation of Management Action Richard J. Boland Jr...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................10613 Managing Design, Designing Management Mariann Jelinek.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................11314 Webs Rather than Kevlar: Designing Organizational Systems Hilary Bradbury with Sue Simington, Sara Metcalf, Anita Burke, Catherine Grey, Darcy Winslow, Sarah Severn, Chris Page, Denise Kalule, Catherine Bragdon, Sara Schley, Catherine Greener Boughan, and Joyce LaValle.....................12115 Groundlessness, Compassion, and Ethics in Management and Design Joseph A. Goguen..................................................................................................................................................................................................................12916 The Friction of Our Surroundings Miriam R. Levin..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................13717 Management and Design: A Historical Reflection on Possible Future Relations Keith Hoskin..........................................................................................................................................................................................................143PART THREE. LEARNING FROM DESIGN PRACTICE.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................15118 "Open Planning": Reflection on Methods and Innovative Work Practices in Architecture Ina Wagner...................................................................................................................................................................................................15319 "I Think with My Hands": On Balancing the Analytical and Intuitive in Designing Fred Collopy......................................................................................................................................................................................................16420 Decentering the Manager/Designer Lucy Suchman.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................16921 From Tangibles to Toolkits and Chaos to Convection: Management and Innovation at Leading Design Organizations and Idea Labs Joseph A. Paradiso....................................................................................................................................................17422 (Re)design in Management Julia Grant..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................17923 Drivers Versus Designers as an Organization's Building Philosophy Po Chung........................................................................................................................................................................................................................18424 Managing Change, by Design Peter Coughlan and Ilya Prokopoff......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................18825 Design Thinking: The Role of Hypotheses Generation and Testing Jeanne Liedtka.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................19326 The Role of Constraints Betty Vandenbosch and Kevin Gallagher.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................19827 On the Design of Creative Collaboration Paul Kaiser...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................20328 Designing the Australian Tax System Alan Preston..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................20829 Persuasive Artifacts Sten Jnsson.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................21430 Designing of What? What Is the Design Stuff Made Of? Kalle Lyytinen...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................221PART FOUR. ENVISIONING THE FUTURE.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................22731 The Less, the Better, Perhaps: Learning from Music Language Youngjin Yoo..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................22932 Purposes in Lieu of Goals, Enterprises in Lieu of Things Jurgen Faust.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................23333 Designing Learning Paul Eickmann, Alice Kolb, and David Kolb......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................24134 The Managing as Designing Project Calls for a Redesign of the Research Setting! Niels Dechow......................................................................................................................................................................................................24835 Design and Designability Rikard Stankiewicz.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................25436 Public Policy as a Form of Design Bo Carlsson.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................25937 Toward a Design Vocabulary for Management Richard J. Boland Jr. and Fred Collopy..................................................................................................................................................................................................................265Contributors..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................277Index.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................289

Chapter One

Richard J. Boland Jr. and Fred Collopy

RECENTLY, OUR faculty had the good fortune to work with the world-renowned architect Frank O. Gehry and his firm, Gehry Partners, on the design and construction of the Peter B. Lewis Building as a new home for the Weatherhead School of Management. During the four and one-half years of working with Gehry Partners on the planning, design, and construction of the Lewis Building, we experienced an approach to problem solving that is quite different from our own, from that of the managers we study, and from what we teach to our students. We refer to this unique mind-set and approach to problem solving as a design attitude.

A DESIGN ATTITUDE

We believe that if managers adopted a design attitude, the world of business would be different and better. Managers would approach problems with a sensibility that swept in the broadest array of influences to shape inspiring and energizing designs for products, services, and processes that are both profitable and humanly satisfying. Gehry's approach to problems reflects the entrepreneurial spirit that was at the heart of the industrial and information revolutions. He approaches each new project with a desire to do something differently and better than he has done before and to experiment with materials, technologies, and methods in his quest. Working with him has led us to see how both management practice and education have allowed a limited and narrow vocabulary of decision making to drive an expansive and embracing vocabulary of design out of circulation. In our focus on teaching students advanced analytical techniques for choosing among alternatives, our attention to strengthening their design skills for shaping new alternatives has withered. What is needed in management practice and education today is the development of a design attitude, which goes beyond default solutions in creating new possibilities for the future.

A decision attitude toward problem solving is used extensively in management education. It portrays the manager as facing a set of alternative courses of action from which a choice must be made. The decision attitude assumes it is easy to come up with alternatives to consider, but difficult to choose among them. The design attitude toward problem solving, in contrast, assumes that it is difficult to design a good alternative, but once you have developed a truly great one, the decision about which alternative to select becomes trivial. The design attitude appreciates that the cost of not conceiving of a better course of action than those that are already being considered is often much higher than making the "wrong" choice among them.

The decision attitude toward problem solving and the many decision-making tools we have developed for supporting it have strengths that make them suitable for certain situations. In a clearly defined and stable situation, when the feasible alternatives are well known, a decision attitude may be the most efficient and effective way to approach problem solving. But when those conditions do not hold, a design attitude is required. The decision attitude and the analytic tools managers have to support it were developed in a simpler time. They are the product of fifty years of concerted effort to strengthen the mathematical and scientific basis of management education. Today's world is much different from that of the 1950s when the movement to expand analytic techniques in management began to flourish. We are suggesting that now is the time to incorporate a better balance of the two approaches to problem solving in management practice and education.

The premise of this book is that managers are designers as well as decision makers and that although the two are inextricably linked in management action, we have for too long emphasized the decision face of management over the design face.

AN EXAMPLE OF THE DESIGN ATTITUDE

Toward the end of the design process for the Lewis Building, there was a need to reduce the floor space by about 4,500 square feet. One of us traveled to Gehry's Santa Monica offices and worked with the project architect, Matt Fineout, on the problem. We first identified those miscellaneous spaces that had to be squeezed into the smaller footprint (tea kitchens, closets, rest rooms, storage areas, and spaces for copiers, fax machines, and printers). There were many constraints to be met including proximity to classrooms and offices, "ownership" by various departments and research centers, and circulation patterns in each area. We went through the floor plans, beginning with the lower level and working our way up to the fifth floor. The process took two days.

Working with large sheets of onionskin paper laid on top of floor plans, we would sketch possible arrangements until we had something we all agreed was a good solution. Then we would transfer the arrangement in red pencil onto the plans. Each move of one element affected others and often required backtracking and revising previously located elements. Many times during the two days, we would reach a roadblock where things were just not working out, so we would start with a clean sheet of onionskin and try a different approach. At the end of two days, it was a tremendous sense of accomplishment to have succeeded in locating all the required elements into the reduced floor sizes. We were working at a large table and Matt was leaning far onto it, marking the final changes. As he pushed back from the table, we were joking about how tedious the process had been and how glad we were to have it over. As we joked, Matt gathered all the sheets of onionskin and the marked-up floor plans, stacked them, and then grabbed an edge and tore them in half. Then he crumpled the pieces and threw them in the trashcan in the corner of the room. This was a shock! What was he doing? In a matter-of-fact tone, he said, "We proved we could do it, now we can think about how we want to do it."

What was going on there? A perfectly good solution had been worked out. It responded to all of our requirements and fulfilled the needs of the program. And it was difficult to accomplish. Why tear it up? A very different mind-set for approaching problems was evident here. Was this approach to problem solving an aberration of no consequence, or was it worth figuring out and considering its implications for management generally? The design approach of Frank Gehry and his associates may not mirror the work practices of the vast majority of architects. But he is one of the most successful and highly regarded architects of our day, and we believe there is something in his approach to problem solving that is an important part of his success. Bringing at least the flavor of his design thinking and design attitude to managers stimulated both the workshop and this book. Like the plans that Matt tore up that day, the ideas in this book are not meant to be the end point of managing as designing. They just show that we can do it-we can rethink managing as designing. The question is, how do we as managers want to do our designing?

THE DECISION ATTITUDE

A decision attitude toward problem solving is overwhelmingly dominant in management practice and education today. It solves problems by making rational choices among alternatives and uses tools such as economic analysis, risk assessment, multiple criteria decision making, simulation, and the time value of money. But for all the power of analytic approaches to problem solving, they share a central weakness in that they take as given the alternative courses of action from which the manager is to choose. The decision attitude is concerned with the various techniques, methods, algorithms, and heuristics that a manger can use in making such choices. In other words, it starts with an assumption that the alternative courses of action are ready at hand-that there is a good set of options already available, or at least readily obtainable. This is a decidedly passive view of the decision maker as a problem solver, and one that makes the untenable assumption that the alternatives that are on the table, or the first ones we will think of, include the best ones. The design attitude, in contrast, is concerned with finding the best answer possible, given the skills, time, and resources of the team, and takes for granted that it will require the invention of new alternatives. So, the decision attitude is in the unrealistic position of assuming that good design work has already taken place, even though that is not usually the case. It is, therefore, doomed to mediocrity in its organizational outcomes.

Take the classic inventory control problem as an example. A decision attitude toward that problem has traditionally modeled the inventory process as a buffer between varying demands placed on different sections of the production, distribution, and consumption chain. That image became the default approach for thirty years, while research and teaching on inventory control worked to perfect that model and enable the best possible decision making about the timing, quantity, and location of inventory acquisitions. As a result, we have developed elegant and powerful techniques for calculating reorder points, economic lot sizes, and risks of stock outs, as well as for minimizing holding costs. But we also became more deeply enmeshed in a default model of the inventory process that carried with it its own form of closure. We were blinded for decades to the possibility that inventories could be minimized by different means, such as by rethinking how we design our production processes, our relations with suppliers, our workforce, and our information systems. Only when we broke from the decision attitude in thinking about inventory control and engaged in a design attitude, did we start to see how it was possible to take the elimination of inventory, rather than its management, as our goal in a lean manufacturing approach to production. The design attitude toward problem solving was a higher order approach that allowed us to step back from the decision-making techniques we had developed and ask the more fundamental question "what are we trying to do?"

The decision attitude is too susceptible to early closure of the problem-solving space, just as the design approach is too susceptible to keeping the search going long after it is beneficial. There is a time for openness and a time for closure in our project-based episodes of problem solving, and managers need to develop strength in both the decision and design attitudes.

WHY DESIGN MATTERS FOR MANAGEMENT NOW

It is commonplace today to note that management as a profession is in a difficult situation. The last few years have been a continuing tale of misdeeds, failures, and embarrassments. Both the fantasies of a "new economy" and the exuberance of the dot com bubble are things that the entire managerial establishment participated in creating. From government policy to investment banking to venture capitalists, to auditors, to educators, to stock analysts, the scope of complicity is almost universal. Where do we look for an explanation of failure on such a mass scale? Is it the complexity, uncertainty, and chaos of modern times that brought about the dot com bubble, or Enron, or Global Crossing, or First Capital, or the telecom collapse? Or is it something more fundamental? We argue that our everyday image of what a manager is, along with a specialized language of management education that has been developing for more than fifty years, has very much to do with it. The problem is rooted in the training of managers as decision makers and in the vocabulary of choice that is imbedded in our increasingly monoclonal MBA programs and their Executive Education arms.

The recent failings of management have been attributed to moral lapses or lack of adequate regulatory oversight, but that seems an unlikely or at best only partial cause. Over time, we will no doubt see additional regulation and a call for more ethics courses in management schools, but we do not believe that either of those attempts at remedies will be successful. That is because the failings of management are most directly attributed to a famine of good ideas. To take one highly visible example, Enron's management failed to make the earnings and cash flows it had promised and resorted to creating revenues and hiding debt through complex transactions because they didn't have sufficiently good ideas to make sales and profits in real ways. Off-balance-sheet financial manipulation was the best idea they had, and no matter how bad that idea was, they were not able to generate a better alternative.

Exotic methods of financial analysis do not create value. Only inventing and delivering new products, processes, and services that serve human needs can do that. But managers are not trained for that type of life. Instead, they are trained and rewarded for being decision makers-to have alternatives presented to them from which they make choices by computing net present values, optimizing underassumed constraints, and trading off risks for returns. There is something tragically missing from management practice and education today, and missing even from our managerial icons. That missing element is an image of the manager as an idea generator who gives form to new possibilities with a well-developed vocabulary of design. Managers as form-givers care deeply about the world that is being shaped by a business and refuse to accept the default alternatives. They understand that the design of better products, processes, and services is their core responsibility. The design attitude is the source of those inventions. A decision does not generate inventions, no matter how advanced its analytic capabilities.

Management school faculty members should also consider how our own role as educators has played a part in bringing about the conditions and mindsets underlying recent events. Like it or not, management education is involved in the current problems of the corporate world and will also be involved in any reforms that help lead to a recovery of management's leadership role in society. More of the same does not seem to be a viable formula for the future of management education.

PRECEDENTS FOR A DESIGN ATTITUDE IN MANAGEMENT THINKING

Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate in economics, wrote The Sciences of the Artificial, which is one of the finest examples we have of a well-developed theory of the design attitude for managers. Simon called for a new curriculum for management education based on design. He saw management as a profession whose training should follow that of engineering or architecture as an applied science, not that of the natural sciences. The manager's professional responsibility is not to discover the laws of the universe, but to act responsibly in the world to transform existing situations into more preferred ones. Simon held that, like the engineer or the architect, the manager is a form-giver who shapes organizations and economic processes. As he states in the preface to the second edition:

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent-not how things are but how they might be-in short, with design. (Simon, 1996, p. xii.)

To summarize Simon's argument very briefly, humans have a limited cognitive capacity for reasoning when searching for a solution within a problem space. Given the relatively small size of our brain's working memory, we can only consider a few aspects of any situation and can only analyze them in a few ways. This is also true of computers, although the constraints are less obvious. The problem space that a manager deals with in her mind or in her computer is dependent on the way she represents the situation that she faces. The first step in any problem-solving episode is representing the problem, and to a large extent, that representation has the solution hidden within it. A decision attitude carries with it a default representation of the problem being faced, whereas a design attitude begins by questioning the way the problem is represented. To use Donald Schon's classic example, if we refer to an urban neighborhood as a blight it evokes a particular problem space where certain types of design intervention are seen as most appropriate (cutting out the blight, bringing in a fresh form of life). We have seen the results in town planning that flattened whole sections of a city and replaced them with more "healthy" elements. If we label the same area a folk community, we can marvel at the resilience of its social support networks and approach it with designs for strengthening its existing social infrastructure.

Simon concludes by asking us to strive for a kind of design that has no final goals beyond that of leaving more possibilities open to future generations than we ourselves inherited. He also asks us to avoid designs that create irreversible commitments for future generations and to strive to open ourselves to the largest number of diverse experiences possible, in order to allow us to draw from an ever-wider variety of idea sources in order to make our designs humanly satisfying as well as economically viable.

(Continues...)

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