First question. Do I think leadership and design are the same, in some sense? Really, no. I think one can lead without having a specific design, or without being a designer. And, quite frequently, designers are not gifted leaders.

Effective leaders and designers, I think, share competences for listening to the concerns of communities, and for developing diagnostic interpretations about the situations in which communities of people find themselves. Diagnostic interpretations means narrative interpretations about the situation that can serve as effective platforms for people to propose how to act in new ways. Leaders and designers also share concerns for bringing about alternative futures.

The work of leaders, I think, can be substantially assisted by competent designers who provide artifacts and structures that assist the leaders in producing the kinds of moods and unsettlement in members of communities that lead to the development of new practices. Leaders must call for new practices. Obviously sometimes it is better if the leader knows what practices to call for, but sometimes not. The designer’s concerns are, in my interpretation, focused around the declaration of the structures and artifacts. (I like John Kotter’s distinction between the concern of managers to manage stability, and the concern of leaders to bring the right instabilities that allow a community to move into a new future.)

Personally, I originally found myself in a set of concerns that I eventually understood as those of a designer. Later, I realized, with the help of some friends and mentors, that my designs were not going to be worth a damn if I didn’t learn something about how to interact with leaders, and, eventually, to lead sometimes myself. So I became interested in the competences and concerns of leading later. Today, I am more interested in leading than in designing, but then I also do have certain unusual foundational competence as a designer that I can call on whenever I want.

Second question. If design is inseparable from the tradition in which it springs, where do really radical innovations come from … or must even they be grounded in some prior tradition. Well, inseparable and tradition are tricky words here. I would rather have the whole conversation in a different framework.

One issue for me is that there is a huge difference between the story that external observers tell about innovations and how they come about, and the kinds of stories that designers tell about what they did. A good current example for me is the pretty extensive literature in the US about the Toyota Production System, what it is, and how it came about. I find almost all of the literature to be journalistic narratives that may be entertaining reading, but they are not what Toyota invented. The proof is in the eating: the entities that have the best reasons to learn how to imitate what Toyota has done – the big three automakers – have clearly failed to do that. Moreover, the evidence is everywhere that people who apply the “lean” stories that appear in what I am calling journalistic narratives about TPS get very marginal returns – 10-15 or 20% improvements in productivity. Those kinds of returns don’t add up to the kinds of results that Toyota has produced.

Taichi Ohno claimed at the end of his book “Toyota Production System” that what he had invented was really nothing more than what Henry Ford would have invented had he been alive and Japanese, in Japan, in 1955. In other words, for the inventor of TPS, what he did was not a particularly radical innovation. It was an invention that was constructed within a clear set of historical traditions.

Second comment: Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus, writing in Disclosing New Worlds, talk about various ways in which innovations are built. I find their work good on this subject, and one way that they see unusual innovations emerging is from what they call cross-appropriations. Ohno, for example, saw the way that inventories were ordered on the basis of cans disappearing from US supermarket shelves, and from that he invented the core idea of kanban and just-in-time supply. He cross-appropriated a practice from supermarkets to production.

Third comment. My friend Guillermo Wechsler likes to talk about innovation as a process of “design AND discovery”, iteratively, together, happening in patterns that are not regular. In other words, we don’t have good words for understanding what is going on, so we invent narratives in which “radical” innovations are bigger and better than others.

Human beings, Heidegger tells us, are organized around care for our concerns. Here is a quick explication of how I understand some of this. In the process of caring for our concerns, we “disclose” networks of equipment, habits, emotional structures, etc., for coping. As we detect things missing, broken, or in the way within those networks, we continuously improvise, adjust, and … innovate. Human beings who are alive, awake, and dealing with the normal anxiety of living in our modern times … innovate. We don’t innovate when we have either or both of two “inauthentic” responses to anxiety. Sometimes we freeze up, get paralyzed, etc., as with structures of resignation, for example. Even more often, responding to anxiety, we “flee into normal everyday action” – we do things that used to work, hoping that they will work again, without stopping to confront the fact that we have not really ever before encountered the situations before us.

When normal human beings confront what is happening in their world, and it is not working, with the result that people’s concerns are not being taken care of, … they innovate! I think that Paul Hawken’s new book, Blessed Unrest, is very worthwhile as a place for thinking about this in our current world. He says that the messes are so great that we are going to have to reinvent everything we know and do, and, he celebrates that: what a great time to be alive, he says. I agree.