Generative Thinking as a Critical Skill - A Conversation with GK VanPatter
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Critical skills are an important area of research at Ibbaka. We want to make sure that these skills are well represented, and well connected, in our skill graph. Critical skills, in all their various forms, often act as catalysts for other skills. Excellence in a few critical skills can shape a career, or a life.
Critical thinking often comes up as one of the most important skills. In conversations with experienced software developers it is often identified as the most important of their skills, more important than any particular technical skill.
Critical thinking can also come up in the context of design thinking. In a discussion on the LinkedIn Design Thinking Group, GK vanPatter mentioned that generative thinking is even more important to design thinking than critical thinking. This intrigued us and we reached out to GK for more insight.
As GK is one of the true experts on design thinking, and has written one of the most important recent books on the subject (Rethinking Design Thinking), the conversation went well beyond generative thinking to explore the key concepts of design thinking and its application.
The interview was conducted for Ibbaka by Steven Forth.
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Ibbaka: Welcome to the Ibbaka Talent Blog. We are familiar with your Humantific company, as well as your many postings on the subjects of design thinking and innovation skill-building. We also have your most recent book Rethinking Design Thinking here! We wanted to follow up and ask you a few questions related to this series theme of “Critical Skills”. Can you share with us a bit about your background and how it informs your approach to design and design thinking?
GK VanPatter: Hello Ibbaka / Steven. Thanks for the invite and happy to engage with you. The short answer to your question is that several life-times ago I started out in the architecture business, and always worked in multi-disciplinary practices for many years, where architects, industrial designers, graphic designers, information designers, etc, were all present. This provided me with early perspective across all of the design fields in terms of what knowledge was present and absent.
The more senior I became, the more I was asked to lead various projects and teams. Thus I became aware of the absence of suitable tools and methods in the traditional design fields. Early on I became open to looking outside of design for the tools that seemed to be missing. Among the communities that I found deep process knowledge in was the CPS (Creative Problem Solving) community, also known as the Applied Creativity community. I saw that many of the skills and tools that I was looking for could be found there and adapted to what we were, in multidisciplinary design practice doing.
I became acutely interested in cocreation methodologies and team dynamics. After I finished graduate school I met and worked with Richard Wurman and Nancye Green who introduced me to what they referred to then as the Understanding Business. That introduction changed my life, as I felt as if I had, as a sensemaker, found home.
Long story short: I was eventually able to combine sensemaking with cocreation methods. Early on, working with Richard and Nancye, I met Elizabeth Pastor. One of our first projects had to do with creating a global innovation knowledge center. We realized that the many things we figured out for that project could be applied to virtually every company on the planet.
We joined Scient at the outset of the dotcom era. I was the first person with a design background on the leadership team of Scient and so I learned alot from that challenging experience. Elizabeth and I were the founders of the Innovation Acceleration Labs at Scient before we launched Humantific. At Scient we created Innovation Acceleration Labs on both coasts, designed the skill-building program and trained 2000+ colleagues. Both of us were educated in design academies. Elizabeth and I have been working together exploring the same themes sensemaking and changemking for several decades. These are deep and interesting subjects.
Ibbaka: How do you use the idea ‘design thinking’?
GK VanPatter: Design thinking is a troubled subject and has been for many years. To back up one step, we became concerned about the state of design leadership around 2002 and launched the NextDesign Leadership Network and NextD Journal as a community sensemaking initiative. We embarked on a 30 interview community sensemaking experiment that we shared via the NextD Journal publication website, now found in the NextD Library.
Around 2005 we had enough information to create the NextD Geographies Framework as an aid to conversations on the subject of design. Without that framework we would often see conversations on the subject of design / design thinking, going in circles as various folks were talking past each other, using similar words to mean different things. We started presenting the NextD work at global conferences around 2005 so we were years and years ahead of the curve on this subject. Since we were also in practice it took many years to finish the book which we published last year as Rethinking Design Thinking, Making Sense of the Future that Has Already Arrived.
The book is a giant synthesis of what we learned along the way in that journey. Seeing the state of the subject of design thinking and the mountain of confusion being generated, we recently rebooted NextD Journal and are presently running a Peer Review series. Its purpose is really to unpack and explain how the subject of design thinking got so mixed up, the role of the design community in that confusion and do a final round of explaining why new design thinking methods are required for the new, more complex world we now all live in.
As you may know, included in the Rethinking Design Thinking book are not only numerous never before published conversations between Peter Jones and myself but also 10 Secrets of Design Thinking, 16 Yesterday/Today Shifts as well as 25 Change Avenues: How to Fix/Evolve design/design thinking for complex contexts.
To cut to the chase: Our central focus as a participating firm in the emerging practice community is to evolve the state of design thinking methods to better sync with the complexities that now exist. There are several names for this including Design for Complexity. Participating in the evolution of design thinking methods is something we do as a community contribution. It is not the focus of our Humantific practice.
Ibbaka: How is design thinking and its applications evolving?
GK VanPatter: As we point out in the book there is an emerging practice community that has for numerous years been evolving design thinking beyond product, service, experience creation assumptions. Still, the vast majority of the community remains focused in the arena of Design 2.0. Most of the graduate design programs remain focused there. Very few of the graduate design schools are producing folks with upstream skills. Many graduates have been told that their downstream skills are upstream skills or that design philosophy is design methodology so suffice it to say it’s a bit of a mess out there presently.
We created this diagram below to depict how we see the community picture. Much of the community, including most of the graduate design schools, are heavily invested in and focused on marketing the current state which essentially is product, servic, experience creation, recast as design thinking. We guess that as little as 10% of the community is seriously involved in the reinvention and redesign of design thinking from a methods perspective.
Ibbaka: Empathy and critical thinking are often identified as being key to design thinking. You have proposed generative thinking as a critical skill. Can you say something about what you mean by generative thinking and how it applies to design thinking?
GK VanPatter: Ok here we are entering bumpy territory that will require a few heavy lifts to sort through..:-)
You and I have never met and come from different backgrounds, so it’s not unusual for Ibbaka folks to be using terms that have different meanings in our Humantific practice and in the communities where we operate. I am not exactly sure where you saw me “proposing generative thinking” as important. It’s not really a proposal but rather a well-known fact. In this compressed format, perhaps most important is to understand why I was doing that and this relates to the other term you are using “critical thinking.”
The number one dynamic we see in organizational settings that is negatively impacting innovation is vast over-emphasis on convergent thinking. What are some other ways to say convergent thinking? Among them would be judgment thinking, critical thinking, devils advocate, and decision-making. Whichever term you choose to use, judgment thinking is narrowing. The assumption is that options exist and now you are narrowing them by applying convergent thinking. It’s not that difficult to see that having a team or an organization that just narrows its thinking is not on a path to change, growth, adaptation, innovation or creation of any kind.
What if no options to judge exist? What would the convergent thinkers, the “deciders” do? Where do the options come from? If we do not expend the energy to value and include the divergent thinkers or generative thinkers, the folks geared to creating options, there will be nothing to judge, nothing to criticize. This awareness is a rather fundamental principle of innovation enabling.
In a conversation I once had with Edward de Bono we talked at length about this subject. It was a memorable conversation that has stayed with me for many years. Sharing a clip: Edward stated:
"The word critical comes from the Greek kritikos which means ‘judge’. Judgment thinking is indeed a useful part of thinking but by itself it is no more adequate than would be a single wheel of a car. There is a need for thinking that is generative, productive and creative. Six brilliantly trained critical thinkers can sit around a table but can do nothing about a project until someone actually makes a suggestion. Critical thinking by itself is not only inadequate but dangerous. It is not enough to hope that if you but get rid of ‘wrong’ things then everything will be fine. This type of mental software originated with the ‘Gang of Three’. Socrates was only interested in argument and criticism. Plato believed that the truth was there to be discovered (this is very different from design). Aristotle created boxes or definitions from the past and then judged whether something fitted or did not fit into the box. All this provides a very limited sort of thinking which has held back the development of Western civilization by about 300 years."
As referenced above, it is very important to understand the operational context of today, the water most folks in large organizations are swimming in. Primarily that is vast over-capacity for and dominance of convergent thinking, particularly in organizations, where folks running the show learned their operational values in graduate schools where convergent thinking (decision-making) often remains positioned as the highest form of value. Can you guess which graduate schools these might be? To keep it simple: A primary responsibility for OpenFrame Design Leaders is to ensure that bias is disassembled and reconstituted as Think Balance to better meet the challenges of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) today. This is essentially what human centered design thinking responsibility is at the scale of organizational culture building.
This also helps to explain why we do not subscribe to the notion of converting design or design thinking into a decision making, convergent thinking process. There are lots of cognitively biased, self-serving suggestions around so lets be aware.
These are among the forces alive out there that any enlightened Chief Design Thinking Officer or a OpenFrame Design Leader has to understand and grapple with in order to create cognitively inclusive culture. This is why you see me speaking up in this direction on LinkedIn conversations and elsewhere. We speak up for cognitive inclusion in the face of heavy dominance of convergent thinking in many organizational contexts. Inclusion has always been underneath everything we do. This orientation is not found in traditional avenues of design or in conventional design thinking.
Ibbaka: When I hear ‘generative’ I think about Chomsky’s generative grammars and generative design. Are there any connections here worth exploring?
GK VanPatter: Interesting. Well again that probably relates to your background and interests. It’s not a common connection. Divergent/generative thinking is a big subject that connects to many other big subjects including brain function. Of course, any good conceptualizer, can see possible connecting dots between many subjects, common and esoteric. I see folks in the music theory business have made connections to Chomsky’s generative grammars seeking to better understand/explain the algorithms and harmonic structures of music. Other than the word “generative” this is probably as close as one might get to a connection to human innovation cycle behaviors.
Certainly when we were constructing our first book Innovation Methods Mapping; Demystifying 80+ years of Innovation Process Design, looking across 60+ method constructions we noticed many rhythmic similarities in process structure. Many contain no behavior signals but the notion that diverge and converge appear not once or twice but in every step, (discovered circa 1960) begins to bend towards the notion of what has, in innovation enabling been referred to as harmonics. We have in the past used this word ourselves in several different contexts, a longer story for another day.
I would however place this Chomsky dot-connecting in the esoteric neighborhoods of this subject, good material for graduate students but presently too far out to be useful in the context of organizational transformation. In the transformation business what one is doing has to be relatively bullet proof as there are always going to be sharks in the water.
For us at Humantific, we are certainly more explorative than many consultancies and we tend to stay focused on how what we are looking at impacts organizational or societal sensemaking and changemaking. Essentially Think Balance is the suggestion that the repeating pattern of diverge/converge represents the foundational harmonics of root innovation behaviors, if you want to state it that way.
All forms of design are significantly generative but the problem is that is often overpowered by the dynamics of the organization and the reality is that many designerly folks are not equipped to fight the dominant convergent wave that often exists in organizations. Think Balance is about speaking up for the inclusion of both, not just the generative thinkers.
You can perhaps guess who is happiest to see us arrive into an organizational intervention..:-) While the divergent thinkings see us as helpful, the convergent thinkers, often in power, need to be convinced that the brain surgery we are about to do on the company is going to be fair, constructive and helpful to the goal of building proactive adaptive capacity.
Ibbaka: What are some of the skills that are associated with generative thinking?
GK VanPatter: The fundamentals of generative thinking are taught in most introductory innovation skill-building workshops. We call these root innovation skills or behaviors. Many so-called design thinking workshops borrow heavily from collaborative problem solving exercises. (See ReAppreciating Guidebook.) The orchestrated application of generative thinking is about behaviors. Those readers who are familiar with historical design literature will know that the subject of behaviors is not commonly found there. Since design has some of its historical roots in craft the notion of orchestrating behaviors of multiple people participating in cocreation is not something that comes naturally to many with traditional design skills. Behaviors and behavior orchestration linked to methods is something that has existed in the Applied Creativity community for many decades. Learning the skill of separating generative thinking from convergent thinking is Innovation 101 stuff today.
A more advanced skill-set, applicable to Open Frame Design Leaders, is to be able to explain and enable how those behaviors link to innovation strategy, to ambidexterity, to process, to team dynamics, to psychological safety, to enabling cognitive inclusion and to maximizing collective brainpower, to building adaptive capacity. This know-how is not found in traditional avenues of design or conventional design thinking. If the existing rules of the organization are old power dynamics from the industrial era and need to be reset, one has to be able to explain why your inclusive case makes sense not only cognitively for the entire team but strategically and ultimately financially for the organization. These are basic building blocks of adaptive capacity. Without that capacity it is unlikely the organization will survive.
Sometimes we say the basic caterpillar construct of generative thinking and convergent thinking went on to become the multidimensional butterfly that exists today. Open Frame Design Leaders need to know how to tell that story. Making sure cognitive bias does not exist is a central responsibility of Frame Design Leaders who need to enable the participation of many.
Ibbaka: Are critical thinking and generative thinking complementary skills?
GK VanPatter: As per above, once we understand that critical thinking is convergent thinking then we can see how it is opposite to generative/divergent thinking. One narrows and the other widens. Both are needed and not only repeat in every step of the innovation process but reflect the thinking styles of the team that is present. These are not abstractions. Imagine half your team having a preference for divergent thinking and half towards convergent thinking. Why would we want to be privileging one over the other? Why would we want to leave half of your team behind? We wouldn’t. We don’t.
We make the case for everyone to be included. For us, fighting the good fight involves speaking up for cognitively inclusive culture.
Image Credits
Humantific: Rethinking Design Thinking, Making Sense of the Future that Has Already Arrived, 2020
Humantific: Journey to Inclusive Culture Building
Edward de Bono quote from Thinking in Action in conversation with GK VanPatter, Restart Magazine 1996
Related Posts by GK vanPatter
HUMANTIFIC: Design Leadership: Ready for Which Context?
HUMANTIFIC: Ambidexterity Continuum: Getting the Conversation Started
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