Session Information
32 SES 06, Leading Organizations toward the Future: Educational Perspectives on Organizational Learning
Paper Session
Contribution
The purpose of this paper is to analyse how design capability can contribute to the process of organisational learning and innovation and to propose a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamic unfolding of design capability within organizational constraints.
The contemporary world is often described as “postmodern”, “liquid”, “post-managerial”, etc. Notwithstanding the variety of labels, the above cited theories describe the fact that contemporary life is linked to the unexplored territories of the future: close enough to envision and disclose, but still far to be described and enacted. Nowadays organizations are facing the challenges of recent societal transformations and technological progress and striving in the competitive arena. Innovation is the new imperative. If we take a resource-based view of organisations, we will see that learning, dynamic and integrative capabilities are getting unprecedented importance for competitiveness. Gaining innovation capabilities means learning new ways of learning. However, organizational traditional configurations and practices can’t be solid scaffoldings for the development of these new forms of knowledge discovery. The dominant managerial thinking created the “silos” effect, while a new idea of learning that stresses the importance of the learning process allows to propose a new epistemological learning framework that bases itself on the creation of in-between spaces, where differences and opposites aren’t annihilated but firstly emphasised and only then mediated, enhancing the ability of the embodied mind to see connections, modifying points of view and re-shaping possibility. Moreover, in-between spaces permit cognitive and affective dimensions of learning to find their place and use, stimulating the individual and the collective desire to learn and spreading the wish to create something new in and for the organization.
The findings from the field of design theory open up a room for addressing this challenge. Design is concerned with the arts of planning, inventing, making and doing, which ties it closely to innovation. Designers are trained as creatives, capable of envisioning a better future full of possibilities and moving along the subtle frontline of absent and desired, and as technicians, capable of synthesising knowledge and skills in the pursuit of practical tasks. The design process is based on Herbert Simon’s idea of bounded rationality: the creative sessions of ideation most often use participative methods, based on emphatic skills that enrich the creative process, rebalancing the creative purpose towards a common goal, and help to contain the uncertainty caused by the rising of Bion’s Basic Assumptions inside the work group. Thus, design research shows an example of learning in between, by exploiting designer’s experiential world and connecting creatively with multiple users of the design process.
Design capability is multifaceted and may include: (1) specific repertoires of knowledge and skills (e.g. finding an optimal solution to a problem); (2) design-related reflective mode (e.g. abductive, analogical and visual thinking, phenomenological view of societal phenomena); (3) transfiguration abilities (e.g. cognitive inquiry on semantic problems and solutions); (4) design-related mind-set (e.g. advancing knowledge from mystery to algorithm, typically called “design thinking”); (5) design-related methods (e.g. think maps, 5whys).
If it is already a recognized fact that companies willing to uncover new meanings and embrace new business opportunities should make design capability part of their innovation-based culture, little is known about how they can be triggered, taught and developed within organizations. Thus, further explorations are needed to better understand which procedural, methodological and pedagogical settings can contribute to the optimal development of the design capabilities in organisations.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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