in an iPod world

culture and visual thinking

When I teach system thinking, I start with an exercise in which students are given a blank sheet of paper and given a question, "what makes organizations fail?" In the US, when I do that, invariably students develop a bullet list. I use it as an opportunity to say that they should draw a picture showing the whole system and interrelationship among factors. This is a technique that I inherited from Fred Collopy and others and quite useful. That was until I used it here in Japan. Few weeks ago, in my first class here in Japan, I opened the session on system thinking with this usual exercise. There are 14 students in all. To my surprise, 4 students drew pictures. 3 of them were Japanese students. So, I was not sure what to do as my opening line is preempted. People who are in the teaching business know what I mean!

That whole experience however made me to think why that was the case. So, each time I met people here in Japan, I shared that experience. The responses are remarkably consistent. Most of them say that they are not surprised. They point out Japanese culture is so visual that it is too surprising to hear that students' first instinctive reaction to the exercise was to draw. They point out Manga culture as one important element of such visual culture. Then, I began realizing that I am surrounded by strong visual cues no matter where I go. Here are some of those visual cues.

I wish I can take him home!

This is a quick video I took at a pet store in Shinjuku. I wish I can take him home!

transformation of being and doing

Several years ago, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton wrote "The Knowing-Doing Gap". The essence of their argument is that too often, organizations fool themselves by believing that knowing what to do is enough, without actually doing. They point out the fallacy of modern management practices and theories that are based on Cartesian separation of mind and body. This type of dualism led to the separation of white collar and blue collar workers, knowledge work and physical work, and office and factory. More fundamentally, I believe, such beliefs creates the chasm between management and work, as if management primarily involves knowing while work is primarily about doing.

However, I begin to believe that there is a third element that needs to be added here. That is Being. While closing the chasm between knowing and doing is critical, it is equally critical that organizations close the gap between doing and being. The idea here is that there is a inseparable binding between who we are and what we do. Yet, merely accumulating certain doing does not necessarily lead to the transformation of being. In other words, doing deals with the appearance of our actions, while being deals with the true essence of our agency in choosing those actions.

Here is an example. My wife does many things for me. Her doing is emitted from her being, not the way around. Even if someone does all that my wife does for me, that does not still make that person my wife. On the other hand, my wife can skip some of her doing, if she chooses to do so. That does not make her less of my wife. Therefore, being gives agency and freedom, while doing restricts and constraints. This kind of idea is also found in Christian teaching. The conversion process, being born-again, is relentless focusing on being, not doing; and, with that comes a sense of liberation and freedom. Ancient fathers taught us the inseparable duality of being and doing when the conversion is true and authentic.

As I think about the proliferation of design thinking in organizations, I begin to wonder whether what we are teaching to students and managers simply focus too much on doing (methods and tools). While I cannot emphasize enough the importance of such design-centric actions, I also wonder whether we are missing an even more important message that needs to be conveyed. That is, the organization who want to embrace design must focus on collective being of a design-centric organization, as much as it focuses on design thinking methods (as doing).

SEPTA's Quiet Car and System Thinking

SEPTA will begin Quite Cars for all its rail services beginning today. It is a set of regulations that will be self-enforced by peer riders on cell phone use, music listening and loud conversations. Of course, I applaud the SEPTA's decisions to implement Quite Cars. However, it is an interesting case study to apply System Thinking to predict its consequences.

It is easy to predict that it will have a positive impact. In fact, on NPR this morning, so-called an expert on commuter stress predicted that Quiet Car will be a major factor in reducing the commute stress. Noise being one of the key factors contributing to the stress, the expert argued that just knowing the availability of quite cars would reduce the commuters' stress level. At the same time, he also mentioned that crowdedness and delay are two other major factors. While his expert prediction seems to make sense on the surface, one can easily imagine undesirable impact once we consider feedback loop and other factors that contribute to the commuter stress. Here's how it might happen. Once people realize it is much more comfortable to commute in the Quite Car, most people will choose to ride Quite Cars. Since it is likely that SEPTA will assign only few cars as Quiet Cars, this will make Quite Cars overly crowded, while leaving non-Quiet Cars only to few noisy people. Therefore, individuals who prefer quite ride will face two undesirable choices. EIther they have to face the crowded Quiet Cars or they have to choose non-crowded but noisy cars. This undesirable impact will only be more amplified as Quiet Cars become more popular.

Therefore a sensible design choice is to get rid of non-Quiet Cars all together or to make Quiet Cars as default choices and leave only very few cars as non-Quiet Cars.

Video of the Talk at Viktoria Institute

Last November (on Thanksgiving Day), I gave a talk at Viktoria Institute on a topic "Open Innovation in a Digitized World." Here is the link to the presentation. Below are the slides that I used for the talk.

open innovation in a digitized world

View more presentations from Youngjin Yoo.