Design Thinking: What Quadrant Are You Living In?

One of the reasons design thinking has become so powerful in organizational life is that the problems we face today are qualitatively different than the ones facing previous generations.

Stanford’s Banny Bannerjee showed us a powerful chart dividing problems up depending on the familiarity or novelty of the contexts and solutions.

The easiest place to be in the quadrant is when you face a problem with known solutions in a familiar context. If you are lucky enough to find yourself in this quadrant, your training will be enough to help you. All you need to do is work hard, use what you’ve learned, and success will be yours. Visionary leaders aren’t needed in these environments; good managers are more than adequate.

The next two quadrants describe problems that require a more evolutionary approach. You might find yourself facing a situation where you are in a familiar context but the old solutions aren’t working any longer. Or, conversely, it’s possible to find yourself with good solutions but a shifting context. In both of these cases conventional management won’t be enough to get the job done. Visionary leaders have to figure out how to pair different solutions with a world they know well or take good solutions and morph them to fit a changing landscape.

In the last quadrant we find ourselves in a truly tough spot: in the final quadrant we no longer recognize the situation we’re in, and the solutions we understand don’t work. As the King James Version evocatively puts it: these are the times we find ourselves to be “strangers wandering in a strange land.”

Not too long ago I had the pleasure of hearing Deborah Wright and Jim Kitchens address a group of us from the Presbytery of the Cascades. As they often do, they were teaching us about adaptive leadership. My favorite moment was when they said you know you’re in a situation that requires adaptive leadership when you’ve come out of the football locker room after the half time pep talk only you step out onto a baseball field and someone hands you a hockey stick. All of a sudden you realize you don’t know what you’re doing, and whatever it was you were doing probably isn’t going to work.

The church has faced problems with characteristics matching all of these quadrants. The bottom quadrant where known solutions fit a familiar context reminds me of the stories I hear about people planting churches in the American 50’s. Apparently, you could just slap an open sign on a building, and people just flooded the place on Sunday mornings. Leadership at that time didn’t require vision- it required executing details well and managing complicated but understandable challenges.

The classical missionary movements paired traditional methods to changing geographical contexts. Indeed, one of the often-merited criticisms of these missionary efforts was cultural imperialism: some missionaries simply imposed western practices and behaviors on new environments. It is striking to see western style church buildings with pews in African or South American settings as if a small patch of England was just picked up and plopped down in a new spot.

The opposite of this, however, is when the context remains fairly similar but the old methods no longer work. The “worship wars” still afflicting some churches remind me of this. Yes, it’s true that North American context shifted in the 70’s and 80’s, but for the most part the churches stuck in worship wars were composed of the same basic types of people: they were white, largely middle class, and fairly affluent. (As my kids would say arguing over music styles is definitely a first world problem.) So, churches evolved, using new tactics like traditional/contemporary worship or blended worship trying to dream up a new solution to suit a roughly similar context.

Of course today most of us are realizing that we’re all living in that final quadrant- none of us really understand where we are anymore and few of the things we were trained to do work consistently. Serving a church in the Pacific Northwest my sense is we’re a little ahead of the curve on this shifting culture thing, but the reality is wherever you live it’s coming to town near you soon. Now, I’m far from the first person to notice that unless you have something to offer on Sunday morning that’s better than brunch (and in Portland, OR that’s a tall order) you might as well go out to lunch. You don’t need design thinking to tell you that.

What I did learn from design thinking was how much company we have in this situation. Sometimes I hear pastors moan and groan about this shifting landscape like we’re the only people in the world dealing with this issue. What I learned from hanging around these design thinkers- EVERYONE feels like they were trained for jobs that really don’t exist and no one really knows which end is up. Everyone. We aren’t special. Disruptive technology, global instability, and economic turmoil mean the smartest people in the most well equipped places are feeling the same anxiety we are. When I was a kid I remember those commercials for E.F. Hutton: “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” Well, E.F. Hutton hasn’t said anything in a long, long time, because it ceased to be in 1988. The same is true of TWA, Compaq, General Foods, and scores of others. When you consider how much “creative destruction” occurs in the for-profit world today, mainline leaders might actually be grateful (and somewhat amazed) that we are doing andyroid for pc as well as we are.

But to do more than just survive, we will need to learn from people like design thinkers who, when they face changing contexts where the old solutions don’t work, don’t grumble or run for the hills- they roll up their sleeves, get out their sticky notes, play improv games, and get to dreaming their wild dreams. I’ll take that over whining any day…