Musings from an MBA: Part II

Editor's Note: frog Senior Strategist Tanya Khakbaz authored this as a continuation to an earlier post.  In her last post, she described how she entered the design industry as an MBA, having been exposed to the fanfare and excitement of design thinking that is dominant in business schools today.  As a strategist working on teams with designers, Tanya has learned several lessons about what it takes to make the business-design partnership work, which she continues to share in this post.

PROBLEM-SOLVING: Top-down thinking has its limits

As a former management consultant, I was conditioned to think “top-down.”  We generated hypotheses at the start of the project that we adjusted depending on the results of the analysis.  Though we were creative within a framework, we relied heavily on these frameworks to ensure that we were thinking about the problem in a systematic and exhaustive way.

In the design process, insights tend to be generated bottom-up.  Post-its are our best friends (though there is controversy in the industry).  We tend to put all of our observations, data points, important stakeholder and user interview quotes onto post-its, and then we do clustering exercises to identify themes across our data and generate insights. By looking for themes in this bottom-up way, we strive to ground our insights directly and clearly in research. 

At first, I was a bit skeptical about this bottom-up approach.  It seemed like a big waste of paper for something that could have been done on the whiteboard.  It also seemed to be an affront to my near-religious belief in the 80/20 rule.  In my training, the 80/20 rule implied that we should not let little details distract us from the bigger problem at hand.  However, in design, the post-it celebrates each of these little details that may actually be the inspiration of a design concept.  After several projects and many paper-cuts, I now have complete faith in this fundamental part of the design synthesis process.  It took just a couple of sessions working with the design team to cluster and re-cluster our insights to see the value.  Not only does thinking in this bottom-up way help us as a collective team see trends or themes we may not have seen if we just followed our initial hypotheses, but the tactile feeling of moving around different observations and putting them together helps the team learn and internalize the information.

I think the most powerful insights are generated when we combine both top-down and bottom-up approaches.  This is where a business strategy thinker can add value in a creative firm like frog.  Starting all projects “backward” by working through a sketch of what we want our end deliverable to be (and what our hypotheses are so far) and explicitly listing the key questions that need to be answered through the work helps ensure that the team is not diverted on paths of synthesis that lead us to lose sight of the larger picture.  I use these questions, which become a framework of sorts, to push myself and my teams in our synthesis process, to make sure we are looking at all pieces of a puzzle.  This can be done by anybody on the design team, however I think it is a strength that strategists typically have in their toolkit and can use to help design colleagues think in a different and holistic way.

COMMUNICATION: Storytelling is powerful

Good business training promotes Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle as a way to tell stories.  Focus on the key point first, and then delve into the supporting arguments for your assertion.  I was coached to only provide the key “so-what” when I spoke—if our clients had questions beyond that, they would ask for more information.  The concept of a “slow reveal” did not exist.  Executives did not have time to sit there and wait for the point: we had to cut right to the chase.

At frog, we celebrate the slow reveal.  We build stories using images and metaphors to draw in our audience and to illustrate our strategies.  Our hope is to immerse our clients in the user experience and the user journey. 

This form of storytelling can be very effective when making presentations.  I truly see the difference in the level of engagement and the inspiration that our clients feel.  A picture is worth a thousand words, and our ways of visualizing abstract concepts and strategies add value beyond making the page pretty.

While creative consultancies are excellent storytellers when it comes to sharing designs and user experience, I think the industry must continue to refine the art of incorporating business thinking into these stories.  

When I first joined frog, I presented a few classic MBA slides to my first program team (some two by twos rich with data points, a few bar charts, some text-heavy slides showing pros and cons of two approaches). Leaving aside the fact that the pages themselves could have benefited from some visual finessing, the content on the slides was met with a mixture of awe and confusion by my team. On one hand, my team saw that there were a lot of interesting pieces of information on the pages.  On the other hand, they had a harder time digesting it because it was not being shared in a way that they were used to, and there was far more content on the pages than they would ever want to share.  These pages, which would have probably been called excellent work in my past jobs, were relegated to the appendix, while a few of the insights from them were eventually incorporated in the final deck.

My challenge is to find ways to showcase the nuances of business thinking while preserving the integrity of the analysis and delivering the message in an evocative way that integrates seamlessly with our design storytelling. 

In conclusion, transitioning into design from a traditional MBA work experience presents challenges in various forms, from developing an individual process for working with teams, to learning how to merge top-down and bottom up problem-solving, to learning how to tell stories.

It can be tough to find a role for the MBA the design industry.  There are very few positions and many people vying over them.  However, the challenge does not end when you get the job.  Doing the job well can be hard.  It is critical that we as strategists in design continue the struggle to define and improve our craft.  When it is done well, integrating business with design gives clients tools that are so much better than the sum of their parts.

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At frog, Tanya works with design teams to incorporate the business and market perspective into the design process. She has worked on a diverse set of frog projects, from ATM redesign for a large bank to digital media strategy for a media conglomerate. Before joining frog, Tanya worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.  She received her MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and her undergraduate degree in Economics with distinction from Stanford University.

AVP of Marketing Strategy Adam Richardson is the author of Innovation X: Why a Company’s Toughest Problems are its Greatest Advantage. His book is the manual for leaders looking for clarity about the emerging challenges facing their businesses. You can follow Adam on Twitter @richardsona.