Combining the core insight of Design Thinking — “everything is design” — with the truism that “design by committee produces mediocrity”, it begins to appear that the widespread (mis)use of meetings to shape collective action might be one of the great engines of contemporary collective frustration. Much of our lives are mired in mediocrity because everything that matters most — our institutions, our processes, our approaches to solving big problems — end up essentially designed by committee.
*
In distinguishing design problems from other kinds of problems, my rule of thumb is this: if a problem involves interactions between free people and things of any kind (objects, services, communications, screens, ideas) that problem should be viewed as a design problem, approached with design methods, developed as a design system, and evaluated as a design. In this light, all kinds of things that seem to be management, strategy, engineering, marketing, etc. problems are seen as varieties of design problems.
What design thinking does is fully acknowledge the “people part of the problem” as central to its resolution and focusing its efforts on getting that part right. And the only way to do this is to include the very people who will, through their free choice (or rejection), make the resolution a success (or failure) as partners in the development of the solution.
Failing this, it will be necessary to handle the people part of the problem by 1) speculating on it, 2) ignoring it, or 3) eliminating it.
1) Speculation means remembering/assuming/guessing on the needs and wants, conceptions and perceptions, attitudes and tastes — in short, the practical worldview — of the people involved in the people part of the problem. We human beings are much worse at this than we think, especially when we don’t regularly put our visionary clairvoyance to the test. It is not uncommon in the design world to hear design researchers cheerfully admit to an inability to predict how people will behave, where others in the room make bold predictions based on their own gut-level knowledge of how people are. (It pays to remember why the Oracle at Delphi identified Socrates as the wisest man in Greece!) People research teaches respect for the elusiveness of other people’s worldviews.
2) Ignoring the people part of problems means pulling the engineering parts of the problem (the sub-problems that are made up of creating systems of unfree, rule-governed elements) out of context and solving those in the hope that the people part will take care of itself (or that “marketing’s got that covered” or that the system can be tweaked after it is finished until people like it enough to accept it.) Fact is, a great many engineers choose a career in engineering because they prefer interacting with objects more than interacting with subjects, and they will tend to prefer solutions to problems that allow them to spend most of their time in the company of objects or teams of like-minded people building object-systems. And that is fine, as long as someone has their eye on the people part and provides context for the engineering problems that contribute to the solution.
3) Eliminating the people part of the problem sounds ominous and it ought to: it amounts to turning freely choosing people into unfreely complying people. It means destroying alternative choices through anticompetitive practices (like those employed by Microsoft in the 90s or Apple’s recent supply chain manipulations) or by finding ways to bypass choice and control behaviors directly either through coercion (legislation) or psychological manipulation (like behavioral economics. The purpose of this is to make people into engineerable elements, that is unfree, rule-governed, controllable, predictable elements of a profitable system. It was this mentality that predominated in 20th Century social engineering projects, which unfairly discredited the very concept of deliberate societal self-determination for a great many US citizens. Social engineering is a hellish totalitarian notion. Social design, however, is deeply liberal-democratic, and the future of liberal democracy depends on it.
But — getting back to the original thread — this means we must learn to see design problems wherever they occur — especially when they seem to be something other than design. It means also that we must adjust our response to them to allow the right mindset and methods. As Marty Neumeier pointed out, we cannot “decide our way through them, we must design our way through them.” Which, again, means meetings are the wrong format for shaping solutions. (Unless, like some Design Management people, you believe the right workshop techniques transforms committees into design teams. I remain skeptical. I’ve seen workshops produce much more kumbaya than eureka. Workshops are more productive than most meetings, but what is produced should not be confused with design. Workshops are better-designed meetings, not meetings that produce better design.)
Once again, I’m going to trot out Le Carre’s famous quote: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” It is important to remember that a conference table is just a big desk for a committee to sit behind. No matter how many post-it notes, white board markers and ice-breaking games you try to add to it, a meeting is a meeting is a meeting. To design effectively we must rethink why we meet, how we meet, what we can expect from meeting, what thinking can only be done in non-meeting contexts.
Meetings are an effective tool, but like all tools, meetings have their proper uses and places where another tool might be better.