Design as means to sustainable transformation, with Matti Mölsä
Matti Mölsä has been leading and practising design for over two decades. As one of the founders of Nordkapp, and a freshly assigned interim Managing Director, he has faced global changes in what design is and how it’s perceived & applied first-hand, experiencing the challenges that came with it. When we spoke, Matti had yet another challenge to face: to reach mount Teide, one of the highest peaks in Spain, climbing a 4,000m volcano with nothing but a bicycle and plenty of time for personal reflections.
Matti on the biggest problem of design
Today’s hurdle isn’t to hire the right designer but to use a designer for the right means. Companies in Finland and abroad have matured a lot in recent years, growing their internal design & strategy teams and applying design thinking practices daily across functions & levels. Some companies, on the other hand, still hire freelance or design consultants to get their immediate deeds done. There’re companies that take design to the next level: they build a powerhouse of futurists, researchers, foresight and industrial design people combined to imagine the impossible and excite their customers constantly.
Matti once asked himself: if there’re these diverse companies with such unique setups, what could he offer them? How could he help? The “A-ha!” moment came unexpectedly when he and his family — and their newborn — moved to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, to open a new Nordkapp office in 2018. Working with large banking & the world’s leading heating appliance industries, he realised one thing for certain: “The biggest problem is not the design resources, the biggest problem is how to get value from that setup. What businesses have in common is that they all encounter problems around how to do things, how to make right things, how to select where to focus and navigate complexity.” For a eureka moment, this was a design problem defined from a completely fresh point of view — and with little competition on the market as well.
Matti on education
Matti & others at Nordkapp followed that hunch, exploring the role of education & coaching in the organisational transformation that design work steers. Embedding design thinking into the customer ways of working and culture became the new norm. Best said in Matti’s own words, “Instead of doing these things for our clients, we’d enable them to do those things by themselves. I think that’s where the design industry is heading.”
Imagine a large bank that provides mortgages & loan support to their clients. Instead of designers, their own sales personnel would use the customer centricity principle to explore customer pain points & needs. It was groundbreaking how the banking personnel not only asked the customer’s opinion for the first time, but started owning the insight, stepping into the shoes of dissatisfied customers. “It was groundbreaking for me too because I understood that I have this magic wand, the design tools that I can use to educate others”.
There’s power in satisfying customer needs, but there’s a blast of it in reshaping how company personnel works and thinks. “ I understood that the same design methodologies and approaches can be applied to this internal context as well. We can use our client and B2C toolkit in the B2B context and internal context and strategy. They can make much more impact when we look at this organisation as internal units”.
The superstar individual designers aren’t what the industry needs: we need superstar transformators.
Matti on the meaning of design
Design is often described as a creative problem-solving process, a holistic approach to creating something new. When businesses solve problems, they seek truth in clarity and prefer hard facts and quantitative historical data over soft insight thrown into that equation. “Sometimes the hunch that change is needed is all the truth we need. It’s more true than the Excel sheet that always describes the past. It’s kind of a problem of Excel and data that they never describe the future.” As humans, we prefer clarity and tangibility over abstraction, but for creating innovation opportunities, we must give way to freedom of exploration and trust our intuition.
In fact, the design would have a place to be even if all problems in the world had been solved. Humans and businesses both strive for sustainability: if nothing can be solved, something can always be improved. “The definition of sustainability lies in a combination of economy, society, and environment. And design shares these same components: thinking about business represents economy, stepping into user’s shoes represents society, and the ecosystem or context you tap into represents the environment. We have to be creative enough to find sustainable approaches. Only designers can do that”.
Matti on Nordkapp
The world is changing at a fast pace. The superstar individual designers aren’t what the industry needs: we need superstar transformators. There’re too many opportunities for companies to navigate to pick that one direction to proceed. Working with designers in a business context provides means to navigate & simplify that complexity. This is and will be the role of design in the future. It’s all about sustainable transformation.
Nordkapp is proactively exploring this direction as a change agency for visionaries. But it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Behind the black & white brand identity of Nordkapp hides a rather colourful bunch of people that, collectively, have worked with every company type & industry out there. “Journey is sometimes more important than the all the individual wins. We must take this journey together, as a team”. After all, working with people that are smarter & better is what Matti has always found very stimulating.
Written by: Siia Kozina / @kozina_me
Image credit: Nadine van der Wielen / @snap.me.pretty
If you’ve read this far… What do you think about sustainable transformation? Want to hear more about who we are and how we think? Are you interested in improving this area in your organisation?
Ping us at info@nordkapp.fi to book a no-obligation chat / mini workshop with Matti.
