Abstract
In this essay, we examine how aesthetic knowledge defines design thinking and also poses a challenge for many organizational systems. Design thinking is one problem-solving approach that addresses problems where multiple and conflicting interests must be met by perceiving the holistic quality of the interconnections across such interests. However, there has not been a clear declaration of what is at the core of design thinking. The direct engagement of the bodily senses in design-thinking methods points to the importance of aesthetic knowledge for problem definition and solution generation. Organizational systems, however, often occlude the role of the body at work, and therefore of aesthetic knowledge. Drawing on structurationist theory, we make suggestions for how organizational systems might adapt to more effectively generate and use aesthetic knowledge and tackle increasingly complex problems.
A recent news story about the small Canadian town of Leader in Saskatchewan began with the words “A set of Lego bricks was used to inspire planning for a new health center . . . an unorthodox approach that was initially viewed as ‘kind of silly’ and then embraced” (“Hospital Planning Is Child’s Play,” 2014). The article went on to describe how
engaging people with the Lego blocks seemed to open people up to new ways of thinking. The planners used the toy bricks to help people figure out how to run their health facility more efficiently, before construction, with real bricks, begins.
Members of the team attempting to incorporate quality improvements into their new facility were not used to working as a team, but found that the practice of working together to build a Lego model of the facility helped them to collectively identify core problems such as the physical flow of activity that doctors might have to traverse in navigating a nursing home, hospital, clinic, and emergency medical service (EMS) in one facility. Having the blocks handy also made it possible to quickly iterate potential solutions by moving around figures that represented physicians and hospital beds to see what configurations made sense to all the different team members and, presumably, reconfigure suggested ideas in real time. As a member of the town council voiced, “Where is this going to go?” when “About half an hour in, it got really serious about does this process work . . . It took on a whole new dynamic that a lot of us would never even think about.”
Experiences like these are cropping up in many different kinds of organizations, and enable organizational members to explicitly engage their bodily senses in ways that artists and designers commonly do, to bound and identify organizational problems. Much has been made about the especially complex nature of the problems faced by modern organizations based on the events that have characterized the early 21st century (e.g., Starkey & Tempest, 2009; Tung, 2006). Therefore, some attention has been directed to developing and examining new ways of perceiving the world and approaching problems, such as design thinking. Design thinking can be defined as “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity” (Brown, 2008, p. 2). The idea behind this approach is to employ practices that help organizational participants to reevaluate fundamental assumptions about the way their organizations function and to thus develop appropriate solutions to novel problems (Boland & Collopy, 2004).
However, there are two issues that have received limited attention in our thinking about and practice of design thinking to date. On one hand, there has not been a clear declaration of what lies at the core of design thinking that, on the other hand, limits how specific we can be about implementing design thinking and approaches like this. In this essay, we address these issues by describing how a design-thinking approach to problem-solving directly engages the body in sensory experiences that reframe organizational issues. Therefore, aesthetic knowledge, or what we know about a problem or a situation through our bodily senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, is the fundamental quality that makes design thinking useful for problem-solving. By articulating this, we are also able to highlight how including the body in problem-solving can be difficult for organizations, and suggest how organizational systems might need to adjust to better accommodate the use of aesthetic knowledge. Without these kinds of considerations, even if design thinking is useful for generating a “new dynamic” in organizations, its usefulness will be limited by feelings of “this is kind of silly” and “Where is this going to go?”
We ground the essay by first defining the design-thinking process and how it is distinct from other related arts-based approaches to understanding organizational problems. We then define the aesthetic knowledge that is at the core of design thinking’s usefulness and distinguish this kind of knowledge from other ways of knowing through “feeling.” Without specifying aesthetic knowledge as its core element, design thinking can easily seem like any and everything, leaving many organizations ill-equipped to effectively use their methods for problem-solving. To illustrate how organizations may limit themselves and how they can more fully use aesthetic knowledge, we describe different ways in which organizational structures and practices influence each other (Giddens, 1984), so as to facilitate generating and using aesthetic knowledge. Taken together, these perspectives can help both scholars and practitioners better appreciate and examine the place of aesthetic knowledge in organizational problem definition and problem-solving.
Organizational Problem-Solving by Design Thinking
As organizations face increasingly complex problems, people in organizations have been drawn to methods with the requisite complexity to define and solve such problems. With the increased dynamism in the global business environment, organizations need to strike a balance between flexibility and efficiency (Eisenhardt, Furr, & Bingham, 2010). Simultaneously accomplishing flexible, yet efficient responses to problems is especially challenging in highly unpredictable environments where patterns across variables are hard to perceive. This is driving managers to depend on abstracted, yet “cognitively sophisticated solutions” that help them to see similarities across seemingly different situations and characteristics (Eisenhardt et al., 2010). Today, high-performing organizations must constantly problem-solve in an ad hoc, rather than a straightforward and predictable fashion (Schreyögg & Sydow, 2010). While there is no lack of recognition of the need for constant, yet sophisticated approaches of seeing patterns to tackle problems, the means for executing this are far from straightforward.
Design thinking presents one such approach to enabling people in organizations to recognize the complex patterns of elements that comprise a problem, and then develop appropriate solutions based on this knowledge. A “problem” can be defined as “a choice situation in which a person attaches negative value to the current state of affairs, and is in doubt [about] which course of action to take” (de Mast & Lokkerbol, 2012, p. 606). For an organization, a problem is anything that stands in the way of its goals (Shook, 2008). Design thinking presents an alternative to typical approaches to organizational problem-solving, which consist of several steps that include defining the problem, analyzing it, generating and selecting solutions, testing and evaluating those solutions, and, finally, developing new routines (MacDuffie, 1997; March & Simon, 1958). Some popular approaches to organizational problem-solving focus on cutting down on waste and promoting efficiencies in a range of industries, from service to manufacturing. These include Total Quality Management, where every stage of the operations process is monitored for improvement opportunities (from suppliers, to employee teams, to customer requirements; Powell, 1995); the Lean Production system, which focuses on whether or not processes use resources for anything other than creating value for the end customer (Anvari, Ismail, & Hojjati, 2011); and Six Sigma, a method that depends on statistical and scientific methods to improve processes for product and service development (e.g., de Mast & Lokkerbol, 2012).
In contrast to these approaches, design thinking uniquely draws on “the designer’s sensibility” (Brown, 2008, p. 2) or a particular way of approaching problems with both creativity and rationality. Design thinking involves two main steps of problem definition and solution design (Buchanan, 1992). The other problem-solving approaches described above also all attempt to first define a problem and then develop solutions to it. With Total Quality Management and Lean Production—which have a great deal of overlapping features (Anvari et al., 2011)—problem definition occurs through visiting the location (e.g., the factory or hospital floor) and continuously asking why participants think that the problem is occurring (Shook, 2008). Solution generation with Six Sigma occurs through testing solution prototypes, which are developed through capturing facts and empirics (de Mast & Lokkerbol, 2012). Design thinking differs from these approaches in several important ways. First, as will be described in more detail below, while the problem-definition phase of design thinking can involve actually visiting the site of the problem and engaging with those experiencing the problem, there is explicit attention paid to what participants feel as they experience the problem. Design thinking involves uncovering the underlying meanings participants have about the problem, and does so through creating different representations of the problem situation, rather than accepting the problem as it presents itself. Next, the kind of knowledge design thinking relies on to define and generate solutions for problems is not based on empirical data that are easily translated into a chart. Instead, design thinking is intended to help participants see patterns and qualities of problems that were difficult to see before, rather than predefined alternatives (Boland & Collopy, 2004; Hatchuel, 2002). Frameworks such as Six Sigma are less suited for addressing problems that involve differences in meaning, values, and other forms of subjective perceptions (de Mast & Lokkerbol, 2012) that make problems “wicked” (Rittel & Webber, 1973), without a clear set of choices, or path to a solution (Pretz, Naples, & Sternberg, 2003).
How exactly does design thinking accomplish this? In the first step of problem definition, there is some inquiry into the problem requirements, or the particular needs of the people involved in the problem. This inquiry involves the problem solvers immersing themselves into the direct sensory experience of the properties of the context, activity, or experience that comprises the problem situation. For example, nurses concerned with improving the quality of patient care between shift changes role played various debriefing processes and reviewed videos of such simulations to better understand the nature and boundaries of the problem (Brown, 2008). Those involved in design thinking thus develop physical, sensate representations of the problem through practices such as prototyping and sketching, much like the citizens asking themselves “What can this look like?” or “What will this feel like?” while constructing their proposed facility with Lego blocks.
Next, participants in design thinking engage in solution design, such as developing a better system for transferring patient information between nurses (Brown, 2008). After first identifying the key elements of a situation that need to be used to develop a solution, this second step involves iterating different recombinations of elements that could satisfy multiple aspects of the problem (Buchanan, 1992). Participants develop different visual and textual representations of the problem and its potential solutions (e.g., by sketching, modeling, and role-playing), using their bodies, minds, objects, and language to develop solutions that best fit the particular problem at hand (Kimbell, 2009). This can involve recreating or researching the experiences of end-users, who can report on whether a particular solution best addresses their multiple and often conflicting needs (Bason, 2010; Brown, 2008; Kimbell, 2009; Martin, 2009). Ultimately, design thinking is aimed at generating solutions that are consciously designed to affect the way people feel as much as how they think and behave (Bason, 2010; Martin, 2009; Verganti, 2009).
Unfortunately, although scholars have responded with vigor and hopefulness to the idea that design thinking will be a fruitful approach to tackling today’s complex problems (e.g., Adler, 2006; Boland & Collopy, 2004; Dunne & Martin, 2006; Starkey & Tempest, 2009), the concept of design thinking has its own problems. First, design thinking tends to be defined so abstractly that it is difficult to communicate what it is and thus to ensure that it is being used effectively (Badke-Schaub, Roozenburg, & Cardoso, 2010; McCullagh, 2010). Most notably, it is not clear what a “designer’s sensibility” (Brown, 2008) consists of, and how well non-designers might develop and make use of it. Second, although design thinking suggests a great degree of flexibility in the types of methods used to represent, reframe, and resolve problems through open-ended understandings, scholars and practitioners have given little consideration to how this approach is to be incorporated into organizational systems. As Schreyögg and Sydow (2010) point out, simply advocating for hyperflexibility in responding to the complex challenges of the 21st century can “blind us to the institutional dynamics of the organizational world and its implications for organizational behavior and effectiveness” (p. 1252). To address these two issues, we first define design thinking in terms of what it is not (workarts or aesthetic management) and what seems to uniquely define it (the intentional generation and use of aesthetic knowledge). Next, we identify the implicit challenge design thinking poses to organizational systems, given its reliance on the bodily senses for defining and solving problems. Drawing on a structurationist perspective, we then articulate what needs to be kept in mind about individuals, the relationships between them, and the overall system as a whole to facilitate the generation and use of aesthetic knowledge.
What Design Thinking Is (Not)
Design thinking can seem like any and everything to anyone who has surveyed the descriptions found on various blog posts, discussion board entries, magazine articles, and books. Several of the practices used to develop knowledge about the immediate experience of a problem (e.g., participant-observation and interviewing) were first established in other fields such as anthropology and sociology (Merholz, 2009). Design thinking is distinctive for its reliance on arts-based methods such as sketching and acting to flesh out organizational problems, but it also involves information search, assessment, and learning (Badke-Schaub et al., 2010), just like other problem-solving approaches. To better understand what design thinking is and is not, we first describe what it is related to. Design thinking seems to be a form of arts-based inquiry into organizational problem-solving. This involves using creative processes, such as acting, directing musical ensembles, painting, sculpting, photography, and even theater (e.g., Barry & Meisiek, 2010) to represent organizational problems in a different light. Doing so helps participants see previously hidden relationships and interpretations of the problem (Bartunek & Carboni, 2006; Meisiek & Barry, 2007). For example, to figure out its employees’ values and how well they aligned with the organization’s, one firm had its employees engage in an active-audience theater experience, in which audience members could direct actors portraying different work scenarios, and then propose solutions to the problem faced in the scenario (Barry & Meisiek, 2010).
In arts-based inquiry, participants intentionally use artistic processes to represent and resolve problems. It is this intentionality that differentiates design thinking from other ways in which art has become intertwined in organizations. For example, in many workplaces, one may find workarts or art pieces that can evoke connections between whatever the art might represent and participants’ work, causing the latter to see more deeply into what their work means or to view that work differently (Barry & Meisiek, 2010). Workarts can serve as boundary objects, connecting two distinct knowledge domains in an organization (e.g., a modeling tool to aid communication and problem-solving across vehicle styling and climate control in automobile manufacturing; Carlile, 2004). However, workarts only have the potential to create these connections, and there is no guarantee that they will evoke understandings about a specific problem or produce the most relevant and useful understandings (Barry & Meisiek, 2010). Similarly, aesthetic management conceptualizes leaders or managers being able to act as artists, drawing on passion, playfulness, intuition, and senses-based judgments of beauty to guide an organization’s profitability (Guillet de Monthoux, 2004). However, aesthetic management describes an overall approach to managing, rather than specifically tackling problems through the intentional use of arts-based processes. Where art is more concerned with expressing internal thoughts and feelings, design thinking intentionally marshals a set of processes toward defining and solving a specific problem (Lawson, 2006).
Aesthetic Knowledge and the “Sensibility” of Design Thinking
So far, we have identified that design thinking falls into a class of problem-solving approaches that rely on arts-based forms of inquiry. Design thinking differs from other ways in which the arts and organizations intersect, as its processes are intentionally used to define and resolve a specific problem. What further distinguishes design thinking is the intentional use of the bodily senses. In defining the problem, participants create models of the situation or experience through the use of physical materials, or acting out the various processes they hope to change. In designing solutions to the problem, participants actually try out multiple iterations on themselves and with end-users, continuously scrutinizing “How does that feel?” or “What can you do differently now?” It is the information derived from the bodily senses that is the concrete core at the heart of the abstract quality of the “designer’s sensibility.” This sensibility has been described in terms of a “design attitude,” which describes an orientation of openness to multiple ways of viewing a problem (Boland & Collopy, 2004). Recent research has identified various dimensions of this attitude (Michlewski, 2008), but we argue that one dimension in particular—engaging the bodily senses to develop aesthetic knowledge (Kimbell, 2009; Michlewski, 2008) —is not only the linchpin for the usefulness of design thinking as a problem-solving approach but also presents a considerable challenge to modern organizations.
Arts-based approaches are useful for defining and resolving problems because they can help participants to see “beyond superficial appearances” (Bartunek & Carboni, 2006, p. 503) and enable them to “cut through accumulated labels, and schemas, and stereotypes, and to move back toward original, natural, coherent wholes” (Weick, 2004, p. 46). This idea of apprehending problems in terms of their holistic qualities is at the core of aesthetic knowledge. Aesthetics are how we as human beings perceive the forms we experience in the world about us, whether they are other human beings, a process we observe or partake in, or objects we encounter or create. Organizational aesthetics, in particular, refer to a feeling or a sensation of the holistic qualities of the people, processes, objects, and interactions encountered in organizations, known through the bodily senses (Strati, 1992, 1999; Taylor & Hansen, 2005). With each of the five senses in simultaneous operation, we take in much more information from our environments than we can be conscious of. The impressions of myriad elements of our immediate experience cohere into an immediate, summative “feel” for what is occurring. Through direct sensory experience, that “feel” comprises the aesthetic knowledge about whether people, places, and processes possess beauty (Kant, 1789/1911), ugliness (Strati, 1992, 1996), disgust (Pelzer, 2002), and harmony (White, 1996).
Aesthetic knowledge is useful for defining and solving organizational problems as it is the summative quality of a situation or experience (Dewey, 1934). A problem is defined as “a choice situation” that is given a particular meaning because it is an experience that participants want to change. In pragmatist philosophy, the terms “situation” and “experience” refer to encounters with our environment that are definable by a meaningful, “pervasive” quality, or a feeling that sums up or seems to unify all the characteristics of that situation (Dewey, 1934; Johnson, 2008). Put another way, we make meaning out of our reality by experiencing situations in terms of their holistic, aesthetic quality, prior to analyzing and decomposing the distinct features and parts of an experience (Dewey, 1934; Gagliardi, 1996). Aesthetic knowledge thus helps us first define a problem through some summative feeling; for example, with the Lego blocks, participants may feel that one version of the model of the proposed health facility feels too spread out. Then, grounded in that meaningful aesthetic knowledge, we can parse out specific objects and characteristics (Johnson, 2008) that may be modified, removed, or replaced; for example, “Ah, now I see how the distance between the elder care facility and the emergency room might be problematic.”
It is because of this powerful summative quality that we suggest that aesthetic knowledge defines and activates other attributes of the design attitude that helps participants effectively make use of design-thinking processes (cf. Michlewski, 2008). The dimensions of design attitude include (a) consolidating multidimensional and conflicting meanings, (b) creating tangible media and representations that give life to new ways of seeing a problem, (c) embracing discontinuity and allowing for novel ways of behaving, and (d) engaging both the human values and concrete, commercial needs that characterize a problem. The holistic nature of aesthetic knowledge, in which a single unifying quality is felt to characterize the problem as a whole, consolidates the multiple and sometimes superficially conflicting meanings (a) and objectives (d) of a problem. The use of the bodily senses to know this unifying felt quality is explicit in the creative arts-based activities of sketching, prototyping, and role-playing (b) that help participants to actively feel and imagine the characteristics of a problem. Finally, (c) embracing discontinuity and letting go of prior categories and decisions draws on the aesthetic knowledge of the immediate situation, which is felt before judgments and prioritizations from past experiences are imposed. With its holistic properties, based on the engagement of the bodily senses in direct experience of a problem, aesthetic knowledge is at the core of the attitude or orientation that makes design-thinking and arts-based approaches useful for solving problems in today’s world.
The aesthetic knowledge developed through design thinking is distinct from other kinds of “felt” knowledge that are similarly non-conscious, rapid, and based on the bodily senses, such as tacit knowledge, intuition, and emotions. Aesthetic knowledge can be described as a type of tacit knowledge (Cross, 2006) or the kind of knowledge tied to the bodily senses and physical experiences, rather than the explicit kind of knowledge that can be articulated through speech or writing (Polanyi, 1967). Tacit kinds of knowledge are often described as “sticky” as they stem from embodied practice and are thus difficult to transfer from one individual or group to another (Erden, von Krogh, & Nonaka, 2008). Other kinds of knowledge associated with the body include intuition and emotions. Intuitions are “affectively charged judgments that arise through rapid, nonconscious, and holistic associations” (Dane & Pratt, 2007, p. 40), which are often described as being known as “gut feelings.” Like intuitions, emotions are affectively charged appraisals that characterize the experience of a target person or event as either positive or negative (Frijda, 1993), and are associated with physical expressions and sensations (Ekman, 2003). Aesthetic knowledge can be affective in nature, just as intuitions and emotions: A problem can be negatively experienced as “narrowness” or “rigidity,” or a solution can be positively perceived as “beautiful.”
A key distinction between these constructs and the aesthetic knowledge developed through design-thinking methods is how the latter emerges from the deliberate use of practices such as sketching, prototyping, and role-playing. Rather than simply allowing aesthetic knowledge to emerge unguided and disconnected from the problem at hand, “Designing is a process of pattern synthesis, rather than pattern recognition. The solution . . . has to be actively constructed by the designer’s own efforts” (Cross, 2006, p. 8). Most kinds of tacit knowledge are not typically associated with such intentionality and deliberation; “sticky” procedural knowledge develops incrementally over time, and is embedded in a group or an organization’s norms, culture, and routines (Erden et al., 2008). Similarly, where intuitions are unsolicited judgments, aesthetic knowledge is intentionally generated in design thinking by manipulating various forms of media (e.g., Schon & Wiggins, 1992). In addition, intuition is the opposite of rational decision making (Dane & Pratt, 2007), but design thinking explicitly blends felt knowledge about patterns and holistic associations (“intuition”) with deliberate evaluation of the usefulness and relevance of that knowledge (“rationality”; Martin, 2009). Finally, emotions can trigger intuitions (Dane & Pratt, 2007), but tend to follow from, rather than precede, aesthetic knowledge about the holistic qualities of the problem. As emotions involve appraisal of a specific target, there must first be some perception of the form of the target, such as the continuity or similarity of its various characteristics (Reiman & Schilke, 2011). In sum, aesthetic knowledge is uniquely important for defining and solving organizational problems as it not only captures the felt quality that ties together the various characteristics of a problem but can also be deliberately generated and evaluated in terms of how it meets the needs of a particular problem.
Aesthetic Knowledge: A “Body” Problem for Organizational Problem-Solving
Articulating the distinctive importance of aesthetic knowledge for design thinking has never been so specified, although aesthetics have always intuitively been connected to design thinking (e.g., Golsby-Smith, 1996; Kimbell, 2009; Lundberg & Pitsis, 2010; Michlewski, 2008). We needed to first more sharply define what lies at the heart of design thinking to now highlight and address the inherent challenges that come with using design thinking in organizations that are not design firms. Design thinking seems to have been successfully implemented in only a few large corporations such as Procter & Gamble and General Electric (Martin, 2009; Walters, 2010). Managers explicitly thinking like designers has not become a mainstream phenomenon (Nussbaum, 2011). Designers have critiqued their own for poorly communicating how their “sensibility,” or style of thinking, is possible for managers (Badke-Schaub et al., 2010; McCullagh, 2010). In sum, these criticisms point out that it is overly simplistic to import a set of design-thinking practices (e.g., sketching, role-playing, prototyping) and expect their use to automatically resolve “wicked” problems in an organization.
Design thinking, and any kind of organizational problem-solving method drawing on aesthetic knowledge, has a “body” problem. The bodily senses have to be privileged to a great extent when applying design thinking to a problem, but organizational systems can make it difficult to explicitly draw on what we know through our bodies. Mechanistic, bureaucratic views have historically shaped the perception of organizations as depersonalized, disembodied systems of work (Weber, 1948/1991). For quite some time now, our scholarly theories have followed from the Cartesian dualism that privileged mind over body (Johnson, 2008). Especially in organizations focused on knowledge work, for example, investment banking and professional services firms, bodies are typically controlled in ways to support mostly cognitively focused activities (Michel, 2012). A study of employees in service organizations revealed the vicious cycle of how bodily felt aspects of work experiences were difficult to acknowledge, let alone describe, leading to an impoverished ability to know through feeling, or an “aesthetic muteness” (Taylor, 2002). The inarticulate nature of aesthetics compounds the perception that bodily concerns and expression can be distracting from efficiency and effectiveness (Taylor, 2002; Taylor & Hansen, 2005). Taken together, these viewpoints speak to an entrenched disregard in organizations for what we know through our bodily senses or, in the best of cases, discomfort and confusion about how to make use of aesthetic knowledge.
Highlighting the challenges in considering the role of the body at work does not preclude that organizational actors, and managers, in particular, involve their bodies in making decisions and solving problems. The objectively rational, profit-maximizing corporate manager is a myth (Palmas & von Busch, 2008), as managers are human beings who make sense of problems with their bodies. Management involves constantly facing discontinuity and ambiguity (Mintzberg, 1975/1990). Rather than following the constraints of prior experience or espoused beliefs, managers embrace open-endedness in facing ill-structured decisions (Walsh, 1988). When faced with unstructured and novel decisions, managers also craft vague pictures of potential solutions to jumpstart cycles of iterative design processes (Mintzberg, Raisinghani, & Theoret, 1976), thus creating their own cues when they try out new behaviors and see what happens (Daft & Weick, 1984). Where organizations perform more physical work, aesthetic knowledge has more obvious importance, for example, a team of anesthesiologists, using “the sights, sounds and feel of colleagues” to inform how they respond to each other in providing patient care (Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2007, p. 1413). For mastercraftsmen creating the “best flutes in the world,” the “hand-to-hand judgments of feel and eye” are essential for determining whether their work meets the standards for which they are known (Cook & Yanow, 1993, p. 381). While aesthetic knowledge is generated and put to use by managers and actors in these contexts, for design thinking to be used effectively, such knowledge must be intentionally developed. Given the manner in which organizational systems are often designed to limit or devalue the involvement of the body at work, the intentional generation and use of aesthetic knowledge may be hard won.
Resolving the “Body Problem” for Aesthetic Knowledge
Given design thinking’s reliance on aesthetic knowledge based on the bodily senses, organizational systems hoping to use design thinking may need to engage in considerable reforms or adjustments. A similar issue has been identified with other problem-solving approaches such as Total Quality Management, where underlying intangible aspects of this approach, such as cultural assumptions, employee empowerment, and executive commitment, received little prior attention, but were found to be critical to successful adoption attempts (Powell, 1995). Using a structurationist view of organizations, in this section we develop a simplified framework for analyzing what changes organizations might make to resolve their “body problem.” Structurationist theory explains social phenomena such as organizations in terms of how they are characterized by mutually constitutive properties; for example, organizational structures constrain human activity, but they are also enacted and brought to life by what organizational members say and do (Giddens, 1984). More specifically, this approach directs our focus to how the structure of organizations and the practices that generate aesthetic knowledge interrelate in terms of various modalities, or fundamental aspects of what emerges from the mutual constitution of structure and action. In the modality of knowledge, structure refers to the stocks of knowledge, symbols, and modes of discourse that actors draw upon in interpreting and communicating social action, which are, in turn, constructed through such interpretation and communication. The modality of power describes how the ability to execute one kind of action rather than another is facilitated or constrained by mechanisms of power. With the modality of value, structure is evidenced in terms of what is considered legitimate or not; this is constituted by actions and interactions that sanction certain practices rather than others (Giddens, 1984).
To more systematically present our analysis, we describe how aesthetic knowledge challenges each of the various modalities at different levels of the organization (viz., individuals, relationships between individuals and groups, and the organizational system). We then provide suggestions for how, across problem definition and solution generation, organizational structure and action must mutually interact in certain ways to fruitfully generate and make use of aesthetic knowledge. We ground this analysis in a concrete example of how aesthetic knowledge was used in a problem-solving process. This example is a story of how the ThedaCare hospital system in Wisconsin developed a patient-centered collaborative care model that now brings a doctor, nurse, and pharmacist trio together to focus on each patient from admission to discharge, and with outpatient, follow-up care (Bielaszka-DuVernay, 2011). As a problem-solving story described in terms of successfully managing change in a complex system (Golden-Biddle, 2013), it is particularly revealing of how the various modalities of knowledge, power, and value can help to support the generation and use of aesthetic knowledge.
The ThedaCare Story: Walking the Bodily Senses Through the Problem of Patient Care
In the problem-definition phase, problem solvers must sensorily immerse themselves directly into the problem situation. This is important for developing empathy or a shared perspective on how others see, hear, and feel the problem for themselves. For example, for ThedaCare, the group of clinicians and managers tasked with continuous improvement first engaged in a value-stream mapping exercise to identify and analyze every step in the patient care process (Bielaszka-DuVernay, 2011). However, what became apparent in this process of problem definition was that each of the change management team members were familiar with only a small portion of the patient care process, and there was no coherent flow to the process that could be easily mapped. To better understand the process from admission, to discharge, to follow-up tests, team members were assigned to literally walk with individual patients throughout this process flow. It was in walking with patients from the waiting room to the lab, for example, that team members could see how much the distance between labs was a physical burden on elderly and severely ill patients. No one knew or expected how confusing or mentally and physically worrying the patient process was until they walked alongside their patient. Instead of looking over process maps from other health systems or reviewing the organizational design literature, this team decided to physically immerse themselves in the bodily experience of their patients (Golden-Biddle, 2013).
When it came to solution generation for ThedaCare, feeling the direct experience of patients drove the change management team to engage in prototyping a new model of the patient care process. This time, while following the flow of patient care, a smaller design team charted all the fine details of the process, noting that the process did less to “pull the patient through the system,” than it did to keep patients in the hospital. For example, nurses lacked knowledge about doctors’ rationales for specific treatment plans, which limited how well nurses could answer patients’ questions and identify errors themselves. To address such roadblocks, leadership enabled all clinicians to have access to the details and rationales surrounding specific plans and developed the collaborative, patient-centered trio of pharmacist, nurse, and doctor (Golden-Biddle, 2013). We suggest that this, and other examples, first demonstrate how an organization and the individuals who must relate to each other in it can take the body into account to define and then generate solutions to a problem. Next, examples like this also show how systems of knowledge, power, and values are important for creating an environment where this approach to defining the problem can be effective.
Individual knowledge, power, and values
To develop and use aesthetic knowledge in design thinking, organizations would have to help individuals incorporate practices that intentionally allow aesthetic knowledge about a problem to emerge. This was accomplished in the ThedaCare example by certain actions, such as having team members walk with the patients and feel the “burdensome” nature of navigating through the patient care process. Individuals need to continue using practices such as developing artifacts (e.g., stories and objects) to facilitate solution generation. For example, in processes such as “experience prototyping,” both designers and potential beneficiaries use simulations to feel which potential solution best meets user needs. In such cases, participants can engage in “bodystorming,” where variations on how to speak, act, and interact with improvised materials and situations help them to play with physical and experiential aspects of proposed solutions (Buchenau & Suri, 2000). This was apparent in the case of ThedaCare as well, where developing potential solutions was left up to a smaller design team who could easily share insights from their walks with patients, rather than relying on assembling documents to justify why some patients were taking so long to move through the flow (Golden-Biddle, 2013).
While it may sound simple enough to have individuals use such tools, participants drawing on aesthetic knowledge are faced with the challenge of trying to draw on and communicate about a tacit, sometimes inarticulate form of knowledge. Individuals will be making sense of organizational problems through “feel” as well as in terms of instrumental value. It will be difficult to determine what solutions simultaneously meet standards that are both objective and subjective in organizations where the role of the body is either invisible or devalued. Consider the example of a human resources management team member involved in reviewing proposals for the organizational design of a new government enterprise. He cannot “put a finger on” why he feels some of the proposals look “messy, confusing, or complicated,” and so opts to keep this felt knowledge to himself. With no objections from anyone in the team, when the proposals are put forward to the Board of Directors, they react strongly against the “unclear accountabilities, huge spans of control, and multi-dimensional matrix.” At that point, the team member regrets he had not spoken up earlier. In addition to the challenge inherent in the kind of knowledge being used, and how it is valued, power is also implicated here, as one may fear being perceived as “soft” because of concerns for beautiful or elegant solutions (Ladkin, 2008).
Ultimately, when intentionally bringing aesthetic knowledge to bear on solving a specific problem, final decisions must take into account objective technical details, functional aspects, and the feasibility of execution, as well as subjective aspects such as stiffness, openness, and comfort (Goldschmidt, 1995). Knowledge, action, and values cohere at this level, in the sense that individuals will need to personally value design-thinking methods and the aesthetic knowledge they generate, which was observed in the embrace of firsthand, embodied experience in ThedaCare, although there were many tools that could have been used in the overall lean improvement strategy (Golden-Biddle, 2013). The structurationist view of mutual influence is also apparent here since, for individuals to express and enact these values, organizations need to structure space and time for individuals to draw on a flexible array of practices to produce different ways of feeling out the problem. If any option, object, or process can be remotely helpful for generating knowledge about the problem, it is not ruled out (e.g., videorecording and reviewing reenactments of the nursing process; Brown, 2008). As those using design thinking know that their first attempt at framing a solution is not going to be the best, instead of developing and relying on stopping “rules,” they allow for an iterative process that may take a longer time. The architect Frank Gehry (2004) refers to this as a “liquid state” (p. 20) that “allows the freedom to make choices for quite a long time in the process so that there are a lot of opportunities for the design . . .” (p. 21).
Knowledge, power, and values in relationships
Design thinking is consistently described as a collaborative tool, involving relationships among multiple participants (e.g., Lundberg & Pitsis, 2010; Yoo, Boland, & Lyttinen, 2006). In the ThedaCare example, members of the change management team had to collaborate with patients to gain their input in defining and designing solutions to problems with the patient care process. What seems to be especially important for communicating aesthetic knowledge effectively are face-to-face interactions, and active group simulations of the problem and its potential solutions. Engaging in such shared practices face-to-face can allow for the flexible use of the body across space and time, enabling sharing and mutually building on feelings that arise. For example, managers at Procter & Gamble visited salons to learn from users how it actually felt to use their products (Martin, 2009). Developing visual representations of the problem and of potential solutions provides artifacts that can serve as boundary objects that raises different questions for different stakeholders and invites the building of shared knowledge (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2009). Even when a new solution is developed, it may still need to be modified in practice, which may not be known until multiple participants actually engage in “dry runs” or rehearsals; this made the difference for surgical teams who successfully adopted a new cardiac surgery method, in contrast with those teams who eventually abandoned it (Edmondson, Bohmer, & Pisano, 2001).
The challenge inherent in relying on these kinds of interactions is that organizational systems often depend on a diverse set of specialties, functions, and hierarchical roles that can often negatively affect information-sharing (Bunderson & Sutcliffe, 2002). As was observed within the ThedaCare team, developing shared understandings across differences in functions and specialties can be challenging (Bechky, 2003; Heath & Staudenmayer, 2000). Organizational participants often face difficulties in translating knowledge across “thought worlds” (Dougherty, 1992), and with aesthetic knowledge that is highly tacit and sometimes inarticulate, it would be especially important to intentionally structure interactions in certain ways. Displaying how one values such knowledge by one’s actions would involve being open and attentive to the felt aesthetic knowledge others try to share. This would seem to require high-quality connections in which team members constructively handle the sometimes negative emotions that arise from conflicting ways of seeing the same problem (Dutton & Heaphy, 2003; Stephens, Heaphy, Carmeli, Spreitzer, & Dutton, 2013). In addition to knowledge and action, power would have to be reframed, as participants would need to defer to whoever has specialized, local knowledge of the problem, no matter their hierarchical level or function (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 1999). This would be similarly evident in the concept of humble inquiry, where participants support each other’s vulnerability by displaying curiosity and a willingness to ask anyone about things in which the latter may be more knowledgeable (Schein, 2013). The mutual influence between action and structure would be borne out in an organizational system of relational leadership, where individuals are open to influence from others at various hierarchical levels or in different functions (Fletcher, 2004, 2007).
Knowledge, power, and values in the system
A few examples suggest that if the bodily senses are to intentionally be put to use toward problem definition and solution-generation, support must come from the top of the organizational system, with leaders who are open supporters, acting on their own vision of how aesthetic knowledge will be useful. The change initiative at ThedaCare was instigated by senior leadership at the medical center, who asked questions that initiated problem definition, such as “What is it that has to be right?” and supported the team’s decision to walk with patients (Golden-Biddle, 2013). Large corporations such as General Electric have been able to successfully use aesthetic knowledge from design processes due to advocacy by top management (Walters, 2010). In Procter & Gamble, it was those in power who ultimately decided to channel financial and human resources toward gathering data about users’ experiences or with directly experiencing various products and processes (Martin, 2009).
There are several challenges to actually seeing this through. First, to actually “solve” a problem with aesthetic knowledge of the problem’s key characteristics and requirements, participants must make some kind of decision about when to stop iterating and which version of a solution will actually be put into action. In many organizations, rather than draw on the collective knowledge of everyone involved in the problem, that decision-making power still resides with a few people in top management, leading to solutions that lack meaning and relevance for the system as a whole. For example, the CEO of a hospital was faced with a huge outcry when he ignored the felt experience of those employees who would actually have to live through the changes he designed (Bate, Khan, & Pye, 2000). While those in top management have more access to knowledge about the overall organizational system (Gavetti, 2005), they may be distanced from the day-to-day embodied experiences of front-line employees, who are “closer to the ground.” As everyone in an organization has a body, aesthetic knowledge is equally accessible to all (Sandelands, 1998), making it inherently disruptive to power and hierarchy. Therefore, who determines what knowledge will inform the final decision and how that is to be done is called into question when trying to draw on aesthetic knowledge in design thinking.
By taking these challenges into account, there are several ways we can imagine the organizational system as a whole would have to adjust to better support the generation and use of aesthetic knowledge. In their actions toward those sharing their aesthetic knowledge, leaders have to be mindful of setting aside personal discomfort, or basing their responses on narrow interests, to encourage further insights (Skogstad & Leifer, 2011). In addition to providing time, space, and materials for such practices, leaders would have to ensure that they and their followers receive the advice and training needed to do this well. Socialization of current and new organizational members would also have to accompany this training to instill both competence and a sense of value for these practices, the discomfort that might accompany this “liquid state,” and the feelings that arise in the process.
Not only would the system have to reward the use of alternative, arts-based practices, but the collaboration needed to develop shared understandings about the aesthetic knowledge generated by these practices would also have to be supported. More specifically, help-seeking and help-giving would have to be taught and rewarded (e.g., with credit and promotions; Hargadon & Bechky, 2006) in the course of developing collaborative routines (Dougherty, 1992). This reinforcing value system is important for counteracting any sense of stigma or punishment attached to actions such as sharing and seeking out knowledge about potential solutions (e.g., Lee, 2002), let alone highly tacit knowledge that requires communication through developing shared bodily experiences. Where formal plans reinforce a value system that subjugates one interest (e.g., financials) over the others at stake in a particular problem, new routines may need to be developed that allow all parties to interact frequently and intently. This would enable collective efforts at developing solutions that address all ambiguous and tacit aspects of a problem (Dougherty, 1992). Structure and action reinforce each other, while valuing help-seeking, help-giving, and collective action across a system facilitate the generation and use of aesthetic knowledge. This knowledge then motivates further cycles of testing, failing, reformulating, and retesting potential solutions, which provides value for the system in turn.
Toward Designing the Organization for Design Thinking
The above discussion has revealed how the recently popular view of design thinking as a recommended problem-solving approach in organizations (e.g., Brown, 2008; Nussbaum, 2004) has been too simply put. Recommendations that modern organizations develop flexible, more nuanced understandings of their problems by employing the arts-based methods of design thinking have come with few caveats. The design literature has tried to articulate “designerly ways of knowing” (Cross, 2006) or a “designer’s sensibility” (Brown, 2008) but has not done so clearly. Where organizational scholars have tried to distinguish between traditional notions of organizational design and incorporating design thinking into an organization, they are yet to take a critical view of design thinking, highlight the challenges in using these methods, or offer suggestions about how to meet those challenges (Yoo et al., 2006). To address these gaps, we identified aesthetic knowledge and its basis in the bodily senses as the core element of design thinking, and integrated insights from organizational and design research to highlight the inherent challenges this kind of knowledge poses for organizations. With these insights, we further suggest an agenda for meeting these challenges, designing organizations so that they are more welcoming and less hostile to aesthetic knowledge and design.
Our analysis expands previous understandings of how meaning-making occurs in organizational problem-solving and of how aesthetic knowledge is uniquely shaped by organizational systems. First, while we did not try to address the vast literature on problem-solving in its entirety, we based our analysis on the commonly accepted definition of a problem as a type of “choice situation” with a particular meaning or value to the people involved (de Mast & Lokkerbol, 2012). By imposing an aesthetic perspective on this definition, we were able to describe how problems are a type of aesthetic experience, each with their own particular summative, holistic quality that gives them meaning (Dewey, 1934). Viewed in this way, we have implicated the body and its senses as a meaning-making system for organizational problem-solving. While this is not novel in the fields of pragmatics (e.g., Goodwin, 2000) or embodied philosophy (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), this body-based perspective is different from the typically cognitive view of meaning in organizations (see Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010).
Instead, when we think of meaning-making in embodied terms, it hits home that it takes a lot of work to actually treat this with true intent and seriousness in organizations. Aesthetic knowledge (Taylor & Hansen, 2005) and designing (Verganti, 2009) are all about meaning, but the challenges of using them in organizations are often overlooked. If we take a step back from our analysis, we see how issues of what kinds of knowledge are used, who has the power to decide what will be used, and whose values guide such decisions are all implicated in individuals, their relationships, and the organizational system as a whole. All of these modalities are inextricably linked across each level of analysis, and it may be a tall order for a single organization to take it all into account. To make use of the meaning signified by their aesthetic knowledge, individuals may have to combat their own discomfort and “aesthetic muteness” (Taylor, 2002), but the organizational structure needs to simultaneously provide resources such as space and time, and the tools to support individuals in their use of aesthetic knowledge. Collaborative relationships and face-to-face interactions must also be valued and rewarded by the system but, in practice, it is up to the individuals involved to manage and enact those relationships in constructive and mutually beneficial ways. To balance both efficiency and flexibility (Eisenhardt et al., 2010), the organizational system and the individuals, relationships, and teams within it would mutually reinforce the values and power dynamics needed to support design-thinking practices, and the aesthetic knowledge these practices generate. While this fuller picture may give some organizations pause in considering whether or not to incorporate design thinking, it also better specifies to those who would proceed with design-thinking methods the extent of the resources and intentionality required to support those efforts.
In addition to broadening our notions of meaning-making and the necessary interactions between structure and agency in organizations, our analysis also problematizes how aesthetic knowledge can be present in, and set toward specific purposes in organizations. While aesthetic knowledge is an inherently personal and subjective form of knowledge, design-thinking practices often involve communicating such knowledge across different people and doing so in organizations typically requires making such knowledge useful for a range of functions, specialties, and interests. This reformulates traditional understandings about aesthetics in at least two ways. First, according to Kant (1789/1911), “pure” forms of aesthetic judgment involve not only perceiving the structural form of an object or work of art, but having the felt knowledge of that form be disinterested or disconnected from any instrumental purpose. For Kant, the feeling of pleasure associated with a beautiful work of art emerges from a sense of the various characteristics of that object cohering in a seemingly intentional and well-fitted manner, even though no specific purpose may be apparent (Budd, 2001). However, as emphasized above, design thinking intentionally generates and makes use of aesthetic knowledge with the purpose of developing solutions for a specific problem. Although many organizational aesthetic scholars draw on a Kantian perspective on aesthetic knowledge (e.g., Taylor & Hansen, 2005; White, 1996), this seems to conflict with the intentionality found in design thinking and with the generally goal-oriented nature of organizational systems. Instead, a Deweyan perspective seems more fitting for understanding how aesthetic knowledge can be useful in organizations. For Dewey (1934), as aesthetic knowledge is the pervasive quality that sums up or cuts across all the characteristics of a situation, then what is known through feeling must necessarily involve the goal or purpose at hand. The “heightened awareness of subtle details and patterns” (Bartunek & Carboni, 2006, p. 503) afforded by aesthetic knowledge is not useful in and of itself, but only if it captures what and how organizational goals are being frustrated.
Second, while design thinking and the organizational context seem to disconfirm Kant’s idea of aesthetic knowledge as disinterested, they seem to confirm the importance of developing and using aesthetic knowledge that is universal, or publicly perceptible and agreed upon (Kant, 1789/1911). The social nature of design thinking (e.g., team members learning from ThedaCare patients or consultants learning from townspeople about their health facility needs), and of organizations more generally, suggests that aesthetic knowledge can and must be universally understood to be useful for organizational problem-solving. For example, leaders might use a particular symbol (e.g., a set of cufflinks looking like two halves of the globe) to invoke the same feelings of unity across a group of conflicted colleagues (Weick, 2004). Where workarts may be used to evoke analogies between their symbolic properties and the work happening around them, they are not always intentionally used to bridge understandings among the people performing the work (Barry & Meisiek, 2010). By contrast, design-thinking practices seem to honor intentionally creating knowledge that is perceptible to those with different experiences of the problem (e.g., having those directly experiencing the problem collaborate with those trying to solve it; Bason, 2010), or those with different interests who operate in different contexts (Whyte & Cardellino, 2010). Through developing different kinds of sensate media that can serve as boundary objects that connect across differences (Carlile, 2002), design thinking insists on enabling a broad spectrum of organizational actors to develop shared aesthetic knowledge of the same problem.
This viewpoint suggests that aesthetic knowledge for the purpose of problem-solving must be actively socially constructed, or refined and reshaped via communal interaction (Gergen, 1985). This contrasts with Kant’s (1789/1911) argument that aesthetic knowledge could be universally known through the way in which a piece of art was composed. In an ideal scenario, all the stakeholders being affected by the problem would be involved in expressing their felt knowledge about the problem and the potential solutions being developed for problem-solving efforts to succeed (e.g., Bate et al., 2000). The collective knowledge of what the problem “is” is not a given, but developed over time through careful inquiry into what different people perceive and care about. The social nature of design-thinking practices helps us better see how the emphasis on connections in organizational aesthetics theory (Taylor & Hansen, 2005) is instrumentally useful for organizational problem-solving.
We have presented a sharper, more precise, and more firmly grounded appreciation for aesthetic knowledge in design thinking, and a sobering but hopeful consideration of the effort required by organizational participants and systems to make use of this kind of knowledge in tackling problems. Underlying all problem-solving approaches is the hope that the organization will learn from the problem and grow in a more desirable direction. The promise of effectively using aesthetic knowledge in design thinking is that it would facilitate “generative learning” in organizations, where participants not only react to problems but creatively innovate alternative approaches even before problems arise (Senge, 2006). This generative learning depends on the conscious awareness of the holistic qualities of increasingly interconnected processes, organizations, and national institutions (Bartunek & Carboni, 2006). As it sums up interconnections, aesthetic knowledge seems inherently important for generative learning in organizations. With the challenges and adjustments described here, we hope that participants trying to apply design thinking would approach the process with less trepidation and more openness; that they would be mindful of the types of institutional and community supports they need to build into the process; that they would feel empowered to draw on and share the different feelings that arise from their interactions with each other and the materials they develop; and that when they land on a potential solution, it would be one that summed up the felt quality desired by most, if not all, the people involved.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks goes out to Richard J. Boland, Jr., Corinne Coen, Kipum Lee, Christopher Michaelson, Lloyd (Lance) Sandelands, and the particpants of the 2011 EGOS Colloquium Sub-theme on Art, Design & Organization for their helpful feedback and suggestions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.