“Staying within your comfort zone is a good way to prepare for today, but it’s a terrible way to prepare for tomorrow.”
—David Peterson, director of executive coaching and leadership, Google
What is Hybrid Thinking? How do Hybrid and Design Thinking work and interact to make new, successful, human-centric solutions? How can they help you navigate an ambiguous and changing business landscape?
Change and Chaos
“The pace of technological change has never been faster, so it’s more important for people to understand things that are harder to keep on top of.”
—Julius Genachowski, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, partner, Carlyle Group investment firm
We are operating in an industrial revolution in which the complexities of the world require solutions that connect different disciplines to solve issues and problems. Economies and organizations are operating in what The Clayton Christensen Institute term a “hybrid stage,” that is, in the middle of a disruptive transformation. The parameters are too complex for one type of skill set or business model to take on. To achieve long-term sustainability and growth, organizations need to create cross-platform solutions and systems.
However, since the beginning of the first industrial revolution, jobs have been divided up into smaller and more specific sets of responsibilities. We craft our resumes to focus on a single competency, to fit a square peg in a square hole. This is one of the contradictions of the current business and employment market.
Throughout history people whose expertise spans several subject areas—hybrid thinkers or polymaths and T-shaped thinkers; people who have a core competency, and have a broad understanding of other areas—have changed the world. Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, sculptor, architect, and inventor and Ben Franklin (author, printer, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, and diplomat) helped shape the world that we live in. Some modern-day examples include Howard Hughes, and of course Steve Jobs, as well as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Susan Cain (attorney, mother, writer, cofounder of the Quiet Revolution). And there’s also Gene Simmons, who is certainly best known for his part in the band Kiss, but is also an entrepreneur, television personality, and writer with a business book called Me, Inc.: Build an Army of One, Unleash Your Inner Rock God, Win in Life and Business to his name. Each of these people has a core competency but has allied knowledge and skills in many different directions. They demonstrate that new ideas and innovation are created from connecting different disciples together.
Hybrid thinking creates a bridge, not only between different categories but the past and the future of a business as well. Hybrid thinking processes allows organizations to focus on their short-term goals and to create a strategy for long-term growth and sustainability without alienating its core user.
Market Changes and Uncertainty
Change creates market and organizational uncertainty. But change also creates the opportunity to pave new paths. “The Prius Approach,” which appears in the November 2015 Harvard Business Reviewdiscusses how important hybrid technology is to effecting change. Hybrid technology has helped insulate and protect organizations from disruption and change. These new directions create a stabilizing foundation and can help insulate an organization’s business from the fluctuations within the business landscape.
These days, solutions using hybrid technologies are everywhere. One of the most well known is the hybrid automobile. However, banking, television, news media, publishing, photography, and retail shopping are all involved. Disney’s MyMagic+ and its MagicBand is a recent example of hybrid thinking. They have created a new experience for their theme park visitors by creating a wearable technology platform. Another example of hybrid thinking is Oscar Healthcare, which is trying to disrupt the health insurance industry by simplifying the health insurance experience by combining technology and very user-friendly design to achieve a trustworthy connection with people. These are hybrid thinking solutions because they create a new or enhanced experience for users and growth opportunities for organizations by connecting different fields and technology together. These experiences bridge the past with the present and pave the way towards the future.
Design Thinking vs. Hybrid Thinking
Are hybrid thinking and design thinking the same thing? Not quite, but they work together to solve the problems within complexities of the current world. Design thinking is a creative problem-solving process or system that creates solutions that bring business needs, technology and human empathy together. It ultimately creates an experience or a system.
Hybrid thinking is an essential part of the creative problem-solving process that bridges the gap between different and unrelated fields, ideas, and disciplines. This helps to create a strategic framework for the solution. Imagine design thinking as the engine of a car, a system of parts that come together to move a car forward. Hybrid thinking is the reaction that happens in the cylinder. Oxygen and gasoline, two unrelated properties, are brought together and ignited with a spark (creativity) to power the engine.
The strength of the combination of hybrid and design thinking comes from bringing together two very common phrases, “bridging the gap” and “connecting the dots.” This is the junction between hybrid thinking and design thinking and aligns with strategy and execution. It brings together the components that will eventually become the strategy and a solid execution plan.
Add a Dash of Creativity
Hybrid-design thinking requires creativity to spark the process. This is what makes hybrid-design thinkers valuable in the current business landscape. Hybrid thinkers are creative, empathetic, optimistic, experimental, collaborative, multidisciplinary and comfortable with ambiguity. Design thinkers seek to create a system or a methodology to develop a solution and idea. Both use creativity to connect the information to actuate a business solution. This is where the right and left-brain thought processes intersect.
Studies have shown that creative people share common traits. They tend to be introspective and thoughtful, are comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, are able to create order from chaos, and are independent and are willing to take risks. These traits can be important balancing the ambiguity in the business landscape. In fact, according to Dev Patnaik, founder and principal of the strategy consultancy organization Jump Associates, the best kind of people to work on ambiguous growth challenges are hybrid thinkers.
Strategy and Execution is Hybrid-Design Thinking
What happens when strategy and execution are missed? Barnes and Noble, which has seen its business drop over the past 10 years, missed the opportunity to build a new market from their original community of readers. An online reader community was never really developed and they lost ground to online sales and the e-reader market. The content, such as authors, interviews and the digital platform for conversations has always existed. But the dots were never connected and the business suffered. They can create podcasts and public radio type broadcasts to build conversations, share news and give reading recommendations. Sharing author’s ideas and thoughts can drive interest and traffic to the stores and increase knowledge, awareness and conversation towards important topics. This can help Barnes and Noble engage with their audience at a new level. It can help create interest, curiosity and drive people to purchase more books.
In the other side of the aisle, in 2015, Amazon Books opened up a physical bookstore in Seattle. The store taps into the mobile app and the Amazon backend personalized algorithm and check out experiences. The books are all placed with their covers facing out, which give book buyers the comfort of a tangible experience. There’s no doubt that this is a laboratory for future retail data and experience opportunity, but it’s the way Amazon acknowledges the importance and value of combining the physical and digital platforms together.
In 2014, Bain & Company registered the word “Digical®“, saying, “Both the digital world and the physical one are indispensable parts of life and of business. The real transformation taking place today isn’t the replacement of the one by the other, it’s the marriage of the two into combinations that create wholly new sources of value.” Organizations like Barnes and Noble have the digital and physical pieces, but they fail because these types of connections and strategies are not created.
An organization’s strategy is only as good as its execution. One cannot exist without the other. Strategy without execution is just another idea that goes nowhere. Hybrid-design thinkers link these together. They bridge the gaps and connect the dots, then create the path towards a new execution using creativity as the catalyst. However, many organizations are not managing the intersection of strategy and execution effectively. According to the Harvard Business Review; “In a 2013 survey of nearly 700 executives across a variety of industries, our firm asked respondents to rate the effectiveness of the top leaders of their companies. How many excelled at strategy? How many excelled at execution? The results are shown in the chart below. These responses are sobering: Only 16% of top leaders were rated very effective at either strategy or execution. Only 8% were very effective at both, while 63% were rated neutral or worse on at least one dimension.”
Jack of All Trades, Master of None
I am a hybrid thinker, but I have also been labeled as a “Jack of all trades, master of none.” For some people, I am a square peg in a round hole. Many organizations have difficulty identifying the benefit of hybrid-design thinking. We have become a world that’s opposite of polymath, monopathy, or over-specialization. Many companies are seeking answers for their business problems through innovation and disruption, but how are these ideas and solutions being generated? The conflict between over-specialization and creating innovation exists. Job descriptions are becoming more and more narrow and specific, but great ideas require forward thinking strategies that can bring together unrelated ideas and thoughts to create unique and creative solutions. This narrow focus eliminates a broader curiosity of the business. Curiosity allows for a better understanding of short and long-term thinking, which ultimately helps shift attitudes about risk.
Some organizations are beginning to seek candidates that fit their culture of innovation. Recruiting algorithms are used to identify these people. However, the narrowness of the job descriptions can inadvertently weed out potential hybrid-design thinkers. Additionally, the word “innovation” is a vague word that has no specific direction. Organizations need to be focusing on creating a culture that fosters the development of ideas and products that are generated by creativity, curiosity, empathy towards the needs of the customer and a broad understanding of the surrounding landscape.
Even our own education system is conflicted. They process of learning is supposed to broaden a student’s thinking and learning process, but college admissions relies on testing and evaluation that focuses on inside the box thinking.
So, the next time you are looking for a square peg for the square hole look for someone that has a core competency that fits the need, but give them a voice and an opportunity to connect the dots around the organization and the strategy. More importantly, think about what shape that hole might evolve into.
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Additional Reading:
Master of Many Trades
A 10-Year Study Reveals What Great Executives Know and Do
In Defense of Polymaths
Thinking Inside and Outside the Box
Why You Should Reignite Curiosity At Work, And How To Do It
Creative people’s brains really do work differently