McKinsey Report on the Value of Designers in Businesses

Interesting read -------- Duh. Designers have been espousing this for decades.

Fastcompany article:

Report

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… what’s the issue here?

this might be an easier to parse link: Redesigning the design department | McKinsey

Thank you so much for posting this. It’s just what I needed to put various lines of thought together that I need to communicate with my department.

It does capture a lot of good stuff, and having it come fro McKinsey is great for forwarding it to your CEO. I appreciated that little roles wrap up at the end for CEO and CDO. If you forward it on, I’d include a little TLDR summation for the execs you send it to!

Agreed Yo/MD! I have put together a powerpoint summarizing it and I’ll be running through it with my manager first. I like to get team support. Depending on how that goes, I might be forwarding things on to my CEO and VP’s. I have another powerpoint I’ve been chipping away at over the past year or so that integrates well. This study might be a good primer for the push I hope to make with my own presentation.

Mckinsey intelligence reports are the great post-modern deconstructors of anything that makes business tick. Use to be the Rand Corp.

The report’s thrust opens with the increasing focus on the transparency in design. Does anyone here create counter measures like Apple does to show progress but not reveal what is really being developed when the suits schedule a visit? They do not address the importance of confidentiality and non-disclosure in the report.

The new Design Thinking business types love to snoop and apply their understanding of design to what is going on at the detail level I have found.

That’s a good point about addressing confidentiality. I have learned there are certain things that don’t turn out well if they get expedited through sales before they are fully developed. I’ll have to address that while also attempting to prevent siloing the design department. If you play the confidentiality hand too much, you aren’t included in the decisions anymore. That leads to a drive-through design service process in the company, which is what I’m trying to avoid. Not that drive-through projects can’t happen, but if that’s all that happens, it under-utilizes the department and leads to poor morale.

OH man this is exactly what I’ve been looking for… Thank you for posting this.

not to imply anything, but remember McKinsey did buy several design firms including Lunar, and might not be completely impartial. they have a vested interest in selling design services.

Good point.

What is McKinsey thinking? How tone deaf are they? Or is this what happens when you have far too many IIT-IIM types running your operations at the “digital” level?

This is showing up in my feeds as “4 weeks ago”

Design and conquer: in years past, the word “design” might have conjured images of expensive handbags or glossy coffee table books. Now, your mind might go straight to business. Design and design thinking are buzzing in the business community more than ever. Until now, design has focused largely on how something looks; these days, it’s a dynamic idea used to describe how organizations can adjust their problem-solving approaches to respond to rapidly changing environments—and create maximum impact and shareholder value. Design is a journey and a destination. Design thinking is a core way of starting the journey and arriving at the right destination at the right time.

gags & chokes

WAIT… did AI write this crap?

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It’s certainly crap regardless of derivation.

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They really should just complete the transition to nonsense design hucksters and get a YouTube channel.

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What McKinsey fails to recognize in their quest to infiltrate and exploit design, is in the process of doing so, they overly rely on surveillance and manipulation of media to create the value they pretend to offer. Otherwise what used to be known as smoke and mirrors.

It is analogous to what Don Norman is doing with his Design for Humanity shtick. They take a meta approach to problem solving to include more of what has not been included in the design brief, cast an even larger problem space net and claim to have control of the process better than others. They believe that the more comprehensive the approach, the more value will be created everytime.

Having said that, I appreciate what they are trying to do with their attempts at chasing all of the data points and measuring the value that design dilettantes and salty designers bring to the table. Leveraging the new IT technologies of the past 10 years, they have created a whole new set of metrics by performing surgical procedures on companies that stand to further confuse and vex executives when it comes to funding profligate design programs within their organizations. What they really do is the opposite of the Occam’s Razor principle.

First, your point about whether to change/expand/reconfigure a problem statement could have been done in 10 words or less instead of your 3 paragraphs.

Second, your constant attacks on “design authorities” without any evidence is tiresome and pointless. These people hold no power. It’s like attacking an army private for leading the army astray.

And C, any designer knows creating the proper problem statement is in fact the most difficult part of new product development. If you are going to invest time and other resources for a successful outcome, the problem statement should have the most scrutiny. Accepting the first thing that crosses your desk is a fool’s errand.

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