Roger Martin transformed the Rotman School of Management from a flagging business school into a thriving institution based on the principles of design thinking. Interview by Roy Green.
Roy Green: Roger, you began as a strategy consultant and now you find yourself running a business school. How did you make that transition?
Roger Martin: It was mainly an accident, in truth. I was minding my own business, consulting, and I met Rob Prichard, then the wonderful president of the University of Toronto. He decided I needed to be the next dean of his business school, and since he’s one of the most persuasive men I’ve ever met, he managed to talk me into it. I guess I’ve always believed business people should turn to public service at some point in their lives, and I always believed that I would. I just ended up doing it when I was 41 instead of in my fifties because of Rob. But I look back on it with great amusement, because I knew so little about how academic institutions worked, it scares me now to think about it.
It must have been a shock making that transition…
It was. The faculty was good to me; it’s just that I knew very little. What I did know was that business education was broken. I knew because I ran recruiting at Monitor Company (a leading US management consultancy) for about a decade, from the time we were 30 consultants to the time we were about 600. We couldn’t get what we needed out of business schools, full stop.
In 1991, I did a massively unpopular thing: I put the undergraduate consultants in exactly the same orientation training program as Harvard MBAs and Stanford MBAs, which drove the latter crazy, but it’s because they’d been taught nothing that was particularly useful to us. They were older, more mature and had good resumes, so once we trained them how to think the way we needed them to think, they were great employees.
I knew the business schools weren’t teaching the thing most important to business, which I termed at the time ‘integrative thinking’. Monitor Company was ‘young punks consulting’. We were all in our twenties when we started that company, and I had to keep asking myself, why on Earth would anybody want to hire us? We’re kids; they could hire one of the more established consulting firms. It turns out they only hired us to … work on problems where it was hard to even frame what the problem was.
When you arrived at Rotman in 1998, how would you characterise the business school?
What was interesting about it was that it was in Toronto’s greatest business city by far and in Canada’s best university. They had Canada’s number-one graduate schools across virtually every discipline, and probably the number-six business school. So I saw it as a place that could be improved. It stood below where it should stand and was utterly traditional.
But it’s an enormous leap from there to saying that using integrative thinking we can make ourselves the best. What brought that on?
Basically, I’m delusional. Ninety percent of new businesses fail within 18 months, and if anybody actually took that statistic to heart, nobody would ever start a good business. But everybody is delusional enough to think they’re going to be the one success. I was delusional enough to think I could transform a [traditional] business school into one that taught a more holistic, integrated way of looking at business.
At UTS Business school, we’re at that formative stage. We’re quite hopeful, given that we have an iconic building on the way, which will exemplify our interest in this integrative thinking and a more innovative approach to programs. In Australia, we have very standardised business education, driven by the funding model, and it’s hard to break free from that. There’s always a danger that if you break too far away, you’ve sacrificed the revenue stream.
The critical formative point was a review I was asked to do by the Federal Minister for Innovation in the Rudd Labor government – the textiles, clothing and footwear review. One aspect of the review was to look at what happened to graduates in fashion and design. What happened is that they emerged from faculties and schools with very limited business skills. Often, companies with all that entrepreneurial zeal fail after a year. All that talent wasted. I thought business schools could contribute to the success of these wonderful graduates. It offers an opportunity at UTS to do something very distinctive without entirely breaking free from the funding model: to use what freedom we have to make some changes.
The seminal thing [for me] was a 1992-to-1995 assignment with Herman Miller, the office-furniture company that created the Aeron chair. They launched it while I was there and I was hired by the senior vice-president for design. He said, ‘Well, Roger, we think of strategy as a design process.’ It got me thinking, and I watched Herman Miller with care as they thought about the design of the now-iconic mesh-backed chair.
That chair was launched at about US$800 (A$900): then, the price point for a good-quality ergonomic chair was US$400. It didn’t look like any chair before but it became the best-selling, most profitable chair in the history of the planet.
When they tested the chair, some people got angry. They said, ‘Why are you bringing me in to sit on an unfinished chair?’ It didn’t look like a [traditional] chair but what was fascinating was that management said, ‘No, we’re going to do this. We’ve hired two of the best designers in the world, Stumpf and Chadwick. They’ve worked long and hard to figure out what people really don’t like about their chairs. They’ve incorporated that into a wonderful design, and some people don’t think it looks chair-like enough and it makes them nervous, but we’re going to launch it anyway.’
Virtually any other company I’ve worked for would have said, ‘Hmm, we’d better go back and make it look more like a chair.’ I was fascinated. Here’s a billion-dollar company saying judgement and intuition have to be integrated with analysis, right up to the CEO.
From that point, I was more and more interested in how we think. I always thought you could analyse your way to answers. You can’t: analysis is just an aid to judgement. Integrative thinkers, when they face two models that are conflicting, rather than choose one over the other, say, ‘I must create a new model that doesn’t yet exist.’
How would you depict the distinctive features of design thinking? Sometimes we associate it with design, but it isn’t necessarily associated with design at all. There’s something well beyond design that you call ‘design thinking’.
That’s right. Many [designers] are not very conscious of their own thinking. They just do. They’re skilled with their hands; they have a skilled eye for graphic design, but they can’t tell you why and how they’re doing what they’re doing. A few features of design education I believe need to be incorporated under business thinking generally aren’t. One has to do with a deeper, holistic understanding of consumers. The world of consumer research has become more technical and technocratic: it’s all about statistics and having a big enough sample size and questions that [yield] reliable answers – which is all well and good. But to have statistical significance and a view that it’s a reliable instrument we really understand means ignoring everything that’s hard to quantify.
We have to appreciate the qualities, not just the quantities, when we’re thinking about consumers. We’ve got to follow [consumers] around for two weeks, not send them a survey they can do in 15 minutes. So that’s one element: user understanding.
The second element of design we need to incorporate is ‘abductive reasoning’. If you look through most design-school curricula, they’re given one task after another that says ‘create something that doesn’t now exist’. It hardly happens in business education. So [designers] come to believe that’s their job. The different perspectives on the customer and the production process are things out of the world of design that morphed into business education.
That might be true if you’re in a company trying to create new markets but how does that relate to business education? Is this something that can be taught? Because what we tend to do in business education is offer deep specialisation. Some generic skills flow across, but we take the view as educators that we must ground people in the disciplines, then when they go out into the world they can find out about abductive thinking and cross-disciplinary thinking. How do you translate integrative thinking into a business-school curriculum?
One thing I ask anybody who questions whether they can do design thinking and creative thinking in business education is, ‘Whoever made the rule that because something is untaught, it’s unteachable?’ That’s an assumption lots of people make but you’ve just got to think about how to do it. One percent of the population has perfect pitch: they can sing a C without hearing it. It turns out that if you get people early and train them, you can get that number up to 75 percent, yet most people would say you’re either born with it or not. If you’re in a society that believes you’re born with perfect pitch, it will be one percent, and if you study and develop it, you can get 75 percent. That’s what I believe about teaching people abductive logic. We teach them abductive, inductive and deductive logic.
Is it too late by the time they reach university?
That’s one of the challenges. One experiment I’m doing with my colleagues is how early you can teach integrative thinking: last year, we did an unbelievably successful pilot with grade-10 girls, teaching them integrative thinking. They were spectacular. I came away saying, ‘There is absolutely no problem with grade-10-aged kids’ – now we’re heading towards grades seven and eight. It is harder work to overcome the reductivist, silo-ised, analytically-driven, ‘there is a right answer’ orientation that students get for 12, 13, 14 years from kindergarten to year 12, and through another four years of undergraduate education. By that time, they’ve got a bunch of wiring that has to be seriously rewired. So the answer might be teaching integrative thinking to kindergarteners.
If this is so compelling, why are so few business schools doing it?
I guess it’s an absolutely bog-standard diffusion of ideas. Some innovators now are attempting to prove something that hasn’t been done before, but there are a bunch of people who will be early adopters, who will say, ‘I know things are kind of broken now and if they can succeed even a little, we’ll adopt it.’ Then there’s a bunch of people in the middle saying, ‘I’m going to wait until either this passes as a fad or shows me it’s here to stay.’
I’m not at all perplexed by this. This is the way it always happens. What I set out to do at the school, I knew would be a relatively lonely journey. Now it gives me great encouragement when a UTS or Stanford starts doing that stuff in their own way. Nobody is cloning what we’re doing but they’re taking some aspects of it. That’s encouraging, but I study the diffusion of ideas, and it generally takes around 30 years for an idea that’s proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to become widely diffused.
