Hybrid Thinking in Design Management.

Design organizations gather experts in far-flung fields to tackle complex design problems, for example from Humvee safety to ultra-fast AIDs testing. Today, International design and innovation organizations are starting divisions that takes the fuzzy notion of hybrid thinking. The division gathers more than four dozen authorities in fields ranging from industrial design to biomedical engineering to toil at the intersection of technology, systems, and human-centered design. The hope is that by putting together far flung ways of thinking; the division will be far more creative. The division will focus on complex, hydra-headed problems, whose solutions might not come from one area of expertise. Few such problems are
How to design an AIDS test that is easy to administer in the poorest reaches of the world ?
How to make military vehicles safer ?
Each of those problems touches upon not only products, but also entire systems that surround them. The connection between technology and people is the core of the business unit. The new division is does the modification of the existing design approach which depends heavily on user research– and throwing a raft of specialists at it. The difference lies in the core skills and experience applied to create those solutions. The Design Organizations is made up of experts in not only human-centered design but also technology development, human factors, regulatory, and mechanical, electrical and software engineering.Hybrid thinking is a more powerful term than design thinking because it emphasizes a number of key elements required for success in today’s hyper-connected environments, specifically integrative thinking, resilience and co-creative outcomes.
The conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo. Hybridity matters now because the problems companies need to solve are simply too complex for any one skillet to tackle. We are in an era when car companies are trying to grapple with massive changes in technological capability and market need, when cell phone companies are trying to own global entertainment, and when snack food companies face extinction unless they figure out how to promote health and wellness. As Lou Lenzi, a design executive at Audiovox once told if you want to innovate, “You need to be one part humanist, one part technologist, and one part capitalist.
Hybrid thinking is much more than gathering a multidisciplinary team. Hybrid thinking is about multidisciplinary staff. John Lasseter, the co-founder of Pixar and creator of Toy Story, is not beloved and admired because he is good at technology. We are fascinated by him because he effortlessly fuses technology, art, and storytelling.
Alton Brown, star of Good Eats, began as a TV producer, then decided to learn how to cook, and became fascinated by food science in the process. His program on Food Network is a potent admixture of cooking show, science class, and sketch comedy, wrapped into one of the slickest how-to shows on TV. It is particularly interesting to note how many proponents of design thinking are actually hybrid thinkers themselves. David Kelley, the celebrated founder of the design firm IDEO, has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon in addition to his master’s in design from Stanford.
At Jump Associates staff includes a former partner at Deloitte who is also an award-winning sculptor. Jump Associates have employed a Ph.D. in cognitive science who is also a filmmaker. In addition, another one of other colleagues has an MBA as well as degrees in Chinese language and international relations. Jump is constantly on the hunt for hybrid thinkers, folks who can connect the dots between what is culturally desirable, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view. In addition, to be sure, it has not made recruiters’ lives any easier. We live in a society that prizes depth in a single field of research over breadth in multiple areas. Innovation, however, demands that to see the world through multiple lenses at the same time, and draw meaning from seemingly disparate points of data. Without a doubt, design thinking is an important new body of knowledge for companies seeking to expand their capacity to innovate. However, the goal is not to shift from one mindset to another. Learning new ways to think is not very helpful if we forget what already know.

Hybrid thinking is a progressive notion about the multi-dimensional craft as well as a reflection on the interconnectedness of all kinds of design within the economic and commercial fabric of society. It balances the skills, talents, and relative strengths of designers to create both physical and non-physical objects, and their refinement, delivery, and relevancy within a cultural, social, and responsible context. In addition, it advances the current rage for design thinking by producing tangible, well-crafted solutions to the strategic and difficult challenges businesses face in this new and complex environment. Hybrid design breaks these professional silos and asks the design team to be aware, intelligent, and reactive to an eco-system of experts surrounding the design process. Hybrid designers re-design, re-think, and, in time, reflect on their work in progressive new ways. Over time, the work coming out of a hybrid design team is of a better quality, better suited to a complex physical/non-physical world and better positioned to weather the tests of time, society, and culture. Hybrid design is the de-facto merger of industrial, interactive, and brand design. It is, however, more than that, since it places these trusted design methodologies within an actionable, focused, and deliverable framework.
Hybrid thinking integrates the increasingly popular business concept of design thinking with other ways of thinking in order to take on wicked problems in business transformation, innovation and strategy. Design thinking’s fundamental emphasis on creating meaningful, human-centered experiences provides the core for hybrid thinking, which is an emerging discipline of disciplines. Hybrid thinking goes beyond design thinking by integrating other forms of creative thinking to take on the most ambiguous, contradictory and complex problems. Wikipedia notes that Jeff Conklin who wrote Dialogue Mapping- Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems. Seeking to generalize the concept of problem wickedness to areas other than planning and policy, Conklin identifies the following as defining characteristics of wicked problems:

•  The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
• Wicked problems have no stopping rules
• Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
• Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
• Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation’
• Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

According to Gartner, wicked problems are tackled by hybrid thinking, defined as more than just the binary integration of design thinking with a single complementary discipline. It is the integration, over time, of many disparate disciplines into a unified discipline of disciplines In this regard, hybrid thinking is like scientific thinking, which unifies and integrates a diverse range of disciplines – from physics to psychology.
One of the most profound paradigm shifts represented by hybrid thinking is the shift toward a primarily biological and ecological paradigm of transformation, innovation, and strategy, and away from a predominantly engineering paradigm. This is because wicked problems are more like biological or ecological problems than they are like engineering problems.
A good example of this shift can be found in a recent paper presented by Andrew Haldane, executive director of financial stability for the Bank of England, entitled Rethinking the Financial Network.
The financial crises resulted from the behavior under stress of a complex, adaptive network. Complex because these networks were a cat’s-cradle of interconnections, financial and nonfinancial. Adaptive because behavior in these networks was driven by interactions between optimizing, but confused, agents. Seizures in the electricity grid, degradation of ecosystems, the spread of epidemics and the disintegration of the financial system – each is essentially a different branch of the same network family tree. The financial system is as a complex adaptive system. It applies some of the lessons from other network disciplines – such as ecology, epidemiology, biology, and engineering – to the financial sphere.