Expanding the ‘3 Lenses’: beyond viability, feasibility & desirability
Three is powerful. Three is the magic number. The Romans knew it: ‘omne trium perfectum’ they said — everything that comes in threes is perfect. But it doesn’t stop there. Triads symbolising harmony and unity are found in many ancient cultures and religions right across the globe, from the Celtic to the Middle East, India to China.
Not wanting to be left out of the ‘threes’ party, the field of business and service innovation has the ‘Three Lenses’, a diagram popularised by design firm IDEO that makes a seductively simple promise: develop a solution that balances the needs of the organisation with those of the customer and what can feasibly be delivered, and you’ll have yourself a winner. However, this article will argue that this simplistic framework often hinders more than it helps, serving to effectively discourage consideration of the full range of risks and opportunities, embed short-term thinking and ultimately jeopardise the success of projects.
The Power of Pictures
In her book Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth relates a time when, dispirited by the seemingly unswervable commitment of many in her discipline to GDP growth as the measure of economic success, she came to a realisation: the best way to challenge the supremacy of this firmly-entrenched metric was to create an alternative visualisation to the simple growth curve graph that underpinned it. The result was the ‘Doughnut’- a diagram that tries to take a holistic view of humanity’s fundamental needs in the context of the planet’s ecological boundaries, and so prompts us to question the very goals that the economy serves. This diagram has by all accounts had a great impact, helping not just to open up debate but also providing a vision of an inclusive and sustainable future around which many have rallied. Yet as the author herself has it, we shouldn’t be surprised at the power that a ‘picture’ such as this has to inform our thinking: ‘what we draw determines what we can and cannot see, what we notice and what we ignore, and so shapes all that follows.’
‘The Three Lenses’
Raworth’s writings got me thinking about the visualisations commonly utilised in my own field, and how they might determine what we ‘can and cannot see’. No doubt the most influential is the ‘Three Lenses of Innovation’ (otherwise known as the Three Lenses of Human-Centred Design) popularised by design consultancy IDEO, which as well as being used directly, is also effectively the underpinning of the Business Model Canvas. The premise is pretty simple: if we can develop a solution that balances meeting the organisation’s goals (viability), technological and operational possibilities (feasibility) and the customer or user’s needs (desirability), then we’ll occupy that ‘sweet spot’ of innovation in the centre and have ourselves a success. We’ll be able to deliver it, customers will buy it, and the business will make money from it. Hooray.
Ignoring other ‘Lenses’ means we have blind spots
However, the problems come in that no real-world project is this simple. While viability, desirability and feasibility are clearly fundamental to the success of any new business or service, in reality there are other factors that while initially appearing more peripheral, may develop over time into fundamental challenges. For example, customers or end users are usually not the only human beings involved or impacted: in nearly all cases, the providing organisation will have employees, and their experiences will significantly influence both the delivery of the service and public perceptions of it. There may also be environmental consequences, which could manifest locally (such as noise or air pollution) or globally (such as greenhouse gas emissions), and these factors may too impact public opinion. Then there is the political context, in this case potentially influenced by wider societal perceptions, which may ultimately result in legislation and regulation that fundamentally impacts the viability of the service.
Uber & Deliveroo highlight the issues
The case of Uber is perhaps a useful example to highlight this point. Judged in terms of the ‘Three Lenses’ alone, Uber’s model may be (and frequently has been) declared a great success, despite the long wait for profitability. Certainly, from the user’s perspective, being able to hail a ride from a smart phone at all times of day or night seems mightily convenient. However, as the company has grown and its services become more widespread, other factors, outside of the ‘three lenses’, have come into play: increased road traffic and air pollution in city centres such as London have led to growing societal concern and media scrutiny and the question of drivers’ rights and pay have led to a court battle in the UK, culminating with the Supreme Court ultimately ruling that Uber drivers be classed as workers rather than as self-employed. The implications of this are profound. As Uber put it when they filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2019, classifying drivers in this way ‘would require us to fundamentally change our business model, and consequently have an adverse effect on our business and financial condition’. UK-based takeaway food delivery service Deliveroo, recently valued at £8.8 billion, has had to admit that making riders employees “could affect our ability to continue operating”. While the precise way these issues panned out was not necessarily knowable from the start, they were perhaps very predictable. Looking beyond the Three lenses would certainly have better prepared these organisations for managing these risks.
Seizing opportunities as well as having visibility of risks
Additionally, organisations that fail to consider the ‘sustainability’ of their services over the medium and longer term may also be missing out on significant opportunities. Several major studies have shown that far from being a burden and a dent on profits, a focus on sustainability brings long-term prosperity and benefits ranging from better morale and retention of employees through to improved sales and marketing, when embedded at the core of an organisation’s strategies. As Andrew Winton has succinctly described it, ‘Companies operating more sustainably slash costs, manage risks better, drive innovation, and build brand value. They’re more profitable.’
The takeaway
Designers often pride themselves on an ability to take a step back, to question the assumptions inherent in project briefs and then to do the research needed to ensure that the ‘right’ problem is being solved, before solutions are considered. However, if we are only considering desirability, viability and feasibility when developing a service, we are in essence turning a blind eye to the full range of risks and opportunities, and cannot be confident that our solutions are really in that ‘innovation sweet spot’. More holistic, thorough approaches are required, and for that, we need different innovation frameworks to guide us.
To that end, I set out to scour the internet to find examples of different frameworks that are being developed to this very end. These I will review and playback in my next article!
Further Reading:
