A Quiet Moment — Mt. Rainier National Park, Adjacent to the Longmire Visitor Center

One of the challenging issues that many executives are just waking up to is the fact that, like it or not, they must consider social/ethical issues in their production or supply chain.  In their heart, they may want to service their inner Authoritarian — but the connectivity of the Internet, what I’ve called the evolving nervous system for the planet, isn’t going to let them decide that they get to lop off large parts of the world for their own use.

Once we understand how emergent social systems (as well as the people necessary to run them) evolve, we start accepting that V-Meme scaffolding will happen.  And it might behoove players to get involved with the game a priori instead of finding out, too late, and getting punished or crucified.

The Servant Leadership 2.0 Servant Leader has far more going for him or her in heading off conflict, and negative consequences at the pass.  Because they’ve moved beyond total egocentricity, they’re open to exploring others’ agendas, as well as functioning at a higher level of total responsibility, than someone who views their role as master and commander.

A great example of “it’s gonna be Global Holistic, like it or not” might be the rise of the group, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).  RAN is a different kind of environmental group.  Operating largely on international issues spatially far away from their home office in San Francisco, RAN has successfully run campaigns to save coastal rainforests in British Columbia, stop cattle ranching and exportation in Central and South America that were driving deforestation, and toxic waste dumping in Ecuador. It does this through a variety of tactics, including civil disobedience, media campaigns, but most importantly, corporate campaigns directed against large multi-nationals.  In the world of Spiral Dynamics, they are a coupled Global Holistic/Performance-based V-meme organization, focused on results, as opposed to process.  Though they may participate in larger conferences involving both governmental and non-governmental organizations, their focus is on bringing change on issues they are concerned with inside a created social environment of informed consumer outrage.

This is in direct contrast to more typical environmental organizations, that, in many ways, ‘play by the rules’ laid out by governments and their statutory legal environments.  The results have evolved the organization into one of the most effective actors in the social change portfolio.

Consider their actions against Chevron in their ‘We Can Change Chevron’ campaign in 2009.  Chevron had acquired Texaco, along with its liabilities in Ecuador, in 2001.  Chevron claimed that it had honored its commitments to past Texaco liabilities by funding 1/3 of their cleanup for dumping toxic waste in Ecuador, in its shared business with PetroEcuador.  Through a combination of legal action in Ecuador, as well as an extremely well-managed PR campaign, run jointly with the satirical group, the Yes Men, Rainforest Action Network crowdsourced multiple farcical advertisements from supporters, while essentially destroying an $80 million Greenwashing ad campaign run concurrently by Chevron.  Judges in Ecuador ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion to the plaintiffs.

Still other campaigns, like the latest Conflict Palm Oil campaign, instead of looking solely to punish companies using palm oil grown on deforested lands in Indonesia and Malaysia, recruit companies into signing pledges for sustainable sourcing.  Palm oil, a key ingredient in snack food and noodles around the world, has been a driver of deforestation and serves as an extinction threat for animals such as orangutans.  Through coupling a combination carrot and stick approach, along with connections across issues — the palm oil campaign highlights not just forest destruction and species extinction, but human slave trafficking, child labor laws, and native community destruction — RAN creates effective higher-level empathetic hooks in developed countries that then put pressure on Authoritarian v-Meme governments, like Indonesia, to evolve.

The point here is simple — the idea of a painless neocolonialist approach toward using areas off the communication channel, with the intent of reaping profits, doesn’t exist anymore.  The Internet, and the tools for creating all sorts of media content, are ubiquitous.  RAN, and other groups like RAN, are coming for the non-empathetic corporation.

At the same time, I should say that in RAN’s latest campaign to save orangutans, as well as the forests they live in in Indonesia, has no guarantee of success.  Wouldn’t it be better if we evolved our multi-nationals to a more enlightened level of leadership in the first place?  Especially when the larger external costs so often end up in corporate ledgers.  Doing the larger, right thing is also the best thing for the bottom line.

Takeaways:  The idea that ‘what you don’t care to know can’t hurt you’ is simply no longer true.  Servant Leadership 2.0 offers a channel to understand multiple stakeholder perspectives and develop pathways for consequential thinking before things go south.  

Further reading:  In case you want to understand just how bad the orangutan situation is in Borneo, you might read this article.  And then think before you buy — do you really want 2500 baby orangutans living in cages because a company that could use an easily substituted commodity needs to make a couple extra bucks?  A small note — this situation has not changed significantly since the publication date of 2009.

On the Piazza, Lucca, Italy

Once we understand the origination of a given paradigm, we can map how it might evolve empathetically — as well as assess how difficult it might be to move groups of people up the Spiral to higher levels of connectivity.  Servant leadership is one paradigm that can motivate a group of individuals — leaders in the business community — to start that journey.  Even though, as we’ve seen, servant leadership rests on independent, trust-based relationships, it is a status trigger for those down there in external relationship v-Meme land.  Getting to deny, then proclaim oneself striving for servant leadership is good bait for the status conscious.

But because it is based not on title, but an aggregate of empathetic relationship construction and actual performance, anyone that’s healthy in the head is along for an upward ride.  That’s the point of Servant Leadership 1.0.  It’s an implicit evolutionary ladder.  You do the various tasks — build your team, focus on performance and measurement, catalyze your team, and so on — you’re going to grow empathetically.  Because you have to.

Servant Leadership 2.0 is also an evolutionary, empathetic ladder — with Servant Leadership 1.0 nested inside of it.  But with its focus on self-awareness, and inner development of the individual, it unlocks larger potentials in terms of leadership team function.  And because mindfulness training is millennia-old, far more evolved minds have debated and discussed it.

But if you have to boil it down, it’s going to come down to two core practices.  The first is debate with others.  One has to open oneself up to exchange with other constituencies — the broader, the better.  It can’t just happen with a bunch of white men sitting in a board room.  The broader the constituencies, the larger the growth.

The second is meditation and reflection.  The two are tied intrinsically together, because you simply can’t get to the silence of meditation without reflection.  For me personally, it happens on my bike — I start riding, and after about 30 minutes of getting through my stress and anger about whoever I perceive is doing me wrong today, I get to a point of positivity, and then start thinking about the good things in my life.  And then, after about 15 more minutes, I’m through those thoughts.  And then there’s just me.

Debate is an intrinsic element of learning to build independent relationships with others.  Anyone that aspires to servant leadership has to effectively, empathetically master it — because without it, the information coherence in the channel simply can’t be sufficient for the effective leader to receive accurate information.  That means the Servant Leader must place-take constantly, because if not, the person they are talking to may shut down, and not tell them something critical they need to know.  The quality of the grounding of experience with others is directly related to the openness one approaches the dialogue.

And as well, reflection and meditation must be core practices for Servant Leadership 2.0.  Why?  Because without an inner dialogue, where one deals empathetically with oneself, how can one develop an honest dialogue with our own insides?  Because if we want to have data-driven, trust-based relationships with others, the first person we must construct one with is ourselves.

Once we accept this paradigm, many pathways open up for development of Servant Leadership 2.0.  There may be some direct algorithmic training involved — breathing exercises and so on.  But by and large, it’s going to involve interacting with others — experiential learning.  Varying the scales of such learning, both temporally and spatially — from short-term to long-term relationships, as well as friends here, and friends across the globe, in different cultures and places — is key.

When enough of a cohort of such individuals are gathered together, the possibility of interconnected, empathetic collaborative teams offer a pathway to larger, Global Holistic modes.  No one independently needs to be the spiritual master.  It’s the whole — not the one.  And skilled in open debate, as well as private reflection, decisions can be jointly made that benefit the larger whole.  That’s how you get Global Holistic out of a team of Global Systemic thinkers.  Each one is a self-aware node on their authority and realm of influence and responsibility.  And because all parties are well-formed, they know what they know — as well as what they don’t.  That then yields to the integrated landscape necessary for running the modern, empathetic global corporation.

Further Reading:  Some interesting work on the development and merging of rational thought with spiritual practice.  Though I haven’t heard much since I read about this four years ago — teaching Tibetan monks neuroscience —  I’m wondering how Arri Eisen’s work has proceeded.  Not surprisingly for followers of this blog, the development of a rational spirituality opens the door, when even previously unexposed, to the methods of science.

Snowshoeing five years ago, on the Palouse Divide

A nod to Jake Leachman, good friend and debating partner for the title.  Check out his blog:  hydrogen.wsu.edu!

One of the key things to understanding the answer to the evolution of servant leadership — and yes, the concept has to evolve — is to understand the likely mindset of Jim Collins, the inventor of the term, when he made it.  There’s lots of data, with his definition of servant leadership, that Collins is firmly ensconced in the Performance v-Meme (what does it take to have enduring financial performance is a huge theme of his writing), and then that tracks to the Inner Hedgehog (the one thing one’s company does well, subject to constraints.)  Collins makes the point that one can’t become a servant leader without his or her employees connecting profoundly with him or her — which at some level, implies an independent, trust-based, data driven relationship — that has to be reciprocated, as much as is possible.  Pretty Communitarian v-Meme, if you ask me.

And for those that remember past posts, that all fits.  Someone in the Performance v-Meme is going to allude in a meaningful way to the v-Meme above them as being core to leadership — in this case, building a community where individuals are valued.

But after, or really above that, it’s also no surprise that things start to run dry.  It’s been a while since I read the book, but I can’t remember any nod at all to Self Awareness (Global Systemic — Tier 2 V-meme).  And on up, it doesn’t get any better.  Collins, with his prescriptive Hedgehog, doesn’t even consider the Global Holistic obligations any truly evolved leader has in today’s global marketplace.  In fact, he might very well consider it a conflict — out of the range — or compacted down into the elusive nature of servant leadership which he says is poorly understood.  How do you build the core integrity of a low probability, magical animal?  Like every other business writer, Collins is v-Meme limited.  It’s gonna get down to things like ‘spirituality’ sooner or later — that ‘nod to God’.

And it’s also no surprise that there are Coral/Bodhisattva allusions.  One thing I’ve seen is that open-minded people can recognize enlightenment when they see it, even if they’re going to have a hard time getting there themselves.  One of my favorite little anecdotes is traveling around the world and finding people like the movie ‘Groundhog Day’.  People get the enlightenment path — even if it’s staged in Punxsutawney, PA.

Collins pulled his definition out of an exhaustive, algorithmic search, with a little heuristic messing-about where he used his own personal judgment.  He did it from data collected in the ’90s — in so many ways, a very different world.  And then he pulled the 11 companies out from his own judgment after he applied his rubric.

I want to reiterate — there is nothing wrong with that.  And the concept of servant leadership, I’d argue, is fundamentally a Spiral/Empathetic Ladder.  Good on him.  But how can we build on his insight, as our societies continue to evolve?  What might an Evolved Hedgehog look like?

Enter Servant Leadership 2.0.  The biggest leap  to be made from Servant Leadership 1.0 (Collins’ model) is the idea that the Servant Leader is aware of their own motivations in their actions.  Why is that important?  Because then the Servant Leader has the potential for self-compensatory feedback.  They don’t need someone else at their level to tell them about themselves (though outside influences and coaches never hurt!)  They are aware of their own Confirmation Bias, and instead of searching out case studies and data that support their worldview, are aware of knowledge coming their way that doesn’t support their worldview.  And, as an extension, are accepting of that.  Confirmation Bias is a huge vector for down converting Heuristic Thinking to Algorithmic Thinking.  Self-awareness can prevent that.

What that does, more than anything else, is prevent the shift in one’s thinking, out of Roger Martin’s Heuristic down to Algorithmic thinking.  Confirmation Bias is a huge vector for down converting Heuristic Thinking to Algorithmic Thinking.  Self-awareness can prevent that.  It keeps one data-driven, instead of, over time, creating a set of beliefs that become more rigid.  It keeps meta-cognition alive, and keeps the individual Servant Leader on an evolutionary path. Which then makes that person more resilient in the face of change, and more open to input channels from especially younger employees, as the tools and paradigms available for business change.

But most importantly, what it likely does is this:

It makes it more possible for the Servant Leader to collaborate across other industries/divisions with equivalent personalities. Or even non-equivalent, less-evolved individuals.

Why does this matter so much?

One of the things that has been bothering me quite a bit in my thinking are Beck’s statistics on percentages of individuals occupying various v-Memes.  Most of the information I’ve received comes from web pages, and these, for some reason, vanish and reappear.  Not very encouraging.  But there are a couple of numbers that stick in my head:

Performance v-Memes in the US population:  30%

Communitarian v-Memes in the US population ~ 10-20%

Global Systemic v-Memes ~ 1%

Global Holistic v-Memes ~.1%

So, let’s think of the implications.  What this means is that the odds that someone with a global perspective, with an evolved sense of global empathy and the decision-making ability to create meaningful management and change, is basically 0%.

Yet what we see is that there are global corporations.  Their behavior ranges on a spectrum from a moral good -> bad scale (I’m not going to list the bad actors, but it’s not hard to guess) and they’re proceeding apace.  How can that be?  Is Spiral Dynamics wrong?

I think what we are seeing is the emergence of combined higher thinking in management teams across global enterprises.  Global enterprises require global thinking — there’s simply no way to get away from the fundamental exigencies of the situation.  And so, true to form, global thinking becomes emergent.  Networks of individuals embody the communication needs across continents and countries, and start the process of evolving the people inside.

That does not mean that a more profound empathy is always created — one that satisfies our moral codes for justice, egalitarian treatment, and human and environmental rights.  Those types of values must be developed more deeply in the scaffolding of organizations, and cannot come without interaction with governments, NGOs, and basic populations.  As has been discussed before, diversity is key.  But it is hard to argue that Amazon or Shell isn’t globally interactive.  They may be, in certain ways, pathological because of poor scaffolding — a recent siting of an Amazon computing cloud in Dayton, driven by the desire for cheap, coal-powered electricity might be an example.  More progressive players like Apple and Google, in announcing their data centers, for example, said they would be powered 100% by renewables.  But this is likely a result of poor scaffolding — not the lack of global thinking and the demanding interconnectivity it requires.

What is likely required for the modern corporation, then, is the more achievable goal of Servant Leadership 2.0 — an evolved mindfulness of the individual leader.  And that may lead to fixing the larger deficits we see in corporate governance across the planet.

Takeaways:  Servant leadership, defined as elusive, and potentially non-achievable by most, is unsatisfying to say the least.  Implying there is no causal chain to get there  is also not so hot.  We can do better than just describe it.  We can think of it in evolutionary terms.  And that gives us paths, and actions that we can take to have a more evolved leadership team — Servant Leadership 2.0.

Old Highway 195, outside of Thornton, WA, south of Spokane

After pondering the characteristics of environments that, unfortunately, we’re all familiar with — Authoritarian and Legalistic v-Meme sets that dominate a large part of our world — you’re probably looking for a little hope that higher level leadership is even possible.

The good news is that it is.  Work environments that, at some level, prioritize performance can evolve.  The common denominator that starts the process may not be as appealing to the idealists in the crowd.

What is that common denominator?  Believe it or not, it’s money.  Money is a great generator of information coherence inside an organization.  It’s an external measure of performance.  People are only going to buy your product if they want to.  And money comes from customers.  And interaction with customers, through their diverse personalities, is going to drive empathy development — especially rational place-taking — throughout a given company.

Continuing along this track, we can also see that industries that rely on customer preference also have the greatest potential for empathetic development of their employees.  It’s no wonder that oil, gas and mining companies are chronically running afoul of varieties of public opinion.  No one really has a gasoline preference nowadays, other than regular/premium.  Whereas companies with semi-infinite supply chains (like aerospace) or ones driven by consumer preference (like selling tennis shoes) are more likely to have accelerated empathetic development.  And once again, companies with larger empathetic backgrounds are much more likely to have avenues where servant leadership can develop.

Let’s put up Collins’ Servant Leadership pyramid and do a little examination for the Performance v-Meme in his levels.

Collins explicitly prioritizes making money as part of his tripartite prioritization of the Hedgehog Principle.  So it should come as no surprise that one of the primary characteristics of a servant leader is to service that one thing the company does well as a vehicle for creating economic value.  And every level of his management development schema emphasizes performance.  Let’s review, one by one.

Level 1 — the person themselves must be capable of performance and being productive.

Level 2 — the person must have all of Level 1, plus connect to others to share information (both emotional and rational empathetic.)

Level 3 — Efficient resource manager implies a perspective toward optimal resource allocation, as well as the first nod toward multi-solution thinking.  Optimal is inherently going to be time dependent, and means evolving the operation to current market conditions.  And that means multi-solution thinking, which comes out of an environment where rational place-taking, with its nonlinear connections, is encouraged.

Level 4 — Interestingly enough, this level implies a larger level of emotional empathy with individuals that they work with.  It is impossible to catalyze commitment from people who sense you do not care about their larger well-being.

Level 5 — Finally at Level 5, we establish enduring performance and embodiment of larger care and concern for more aspects of his/her employees lives (and even destinies) as critical.  And the only way for an individual to do this is to develop those larger temporal and spatial scales in their own head that are possible through empathetic development.

We can also start seeing that Design Thinking starts coming into play, from Level 3 on up — if the objectives that Collins is referring to are generated in part from their customers.

In short, the Performance v-Meme, along with Design Thinking at the higher levels, is ingratiated into Collins’ model.  Along the way, Collins emphasizes indirectly the need to build community along with this.  Employees are individuals, and optimal performance can only be drawn out of those people with some level of independent connection and knowledge through leadership.

Yet at the same time, Collins’ model, originally published in his book in 2001, shows some element of age.  Is there servant leadership, and corporate performance, beyond his definition and the Hedgehog Principle?  The Hedgehog Principle itself, requiring a company to do one thing well, should draw your suspicions.  Within the last 15 years, much has changed with companies that aspire to SOTA performance.  That not only they do well (with solid profits) but they also do good.  What kind of leadership gets us there?

Takeaways:  Collins’ model of servant leadership, while having nods to higher Spiral levels above Performance/Communitarian, and showing some appearance of the Coral/Bodhisattva v-Memes, is, like all our structures, a creation of knowledge structures of our time.  It’s true that servant leadership is a huge step up from the tired Authoritarianism of the past.  But there are (and always will be) higher levels to aspire to.

Braden on a roll at nine, starting on the journey between Passau, Germany, and Vienna, Austria.

When I started the Industrial Design Clinic (IDC) over 22 years ago, it can be fairly safe to say I had no idea what I was doing.  I was a nonlinear physicist, essentially, by training — though my degree was in mechanical engineering.  Helped by my as-yet-unmade friend, Les Okonek, from ARCO/BP/now retired, and fellow refinery engineer Brett Emmons, I implemented a pretty standard design process.  This was further enhanced by the adoption of the book, Product Design and Development, by Karl Ulrich and Steven Eppinger. The First Edition came out in 1995, and it was the first textbook I folded into my efforts.  It may seem just a little dated now, but it’s a solid book, and describes what most people recognize as a canonical design process — in fact, it documents THE canonical design process that most people use.  There are variations on modification of design ‘gates’ and decision points, dependent on the agency and organization (is it any surprise, for example, that MILSPEC has ‘gates’?).  But it still holds up — and my students have literally built hundreds of designs using some modification of this process.

What’s the short version?

1.  Scoping.
2. Specification, using some form of Needs/Metrics/House of Quality toolset.
3. Conceptual and Preliminary Design, with a focus on generation of multiple designs, followed by review and down-select.
4. Final Design.
5. Manufacturing.
6. Benchmarking of the design against the specification.
7. Redesign (if benchmarks aren’t met) or Delivery to the Customer.

This all seems reasonable, of course.  And it is.  Yet like all knowledge products, its dominant characteristics are inseparable from our social/empathetic structure.  Both Ulrich and Eppinger are professors at MIT, and it’s not surprising that this design process sits squarely on the transition between the Legalistic v-Meme and the Performance v-Meme.  Design necessarily must have a large focus on performance and hitting goals, and these are rigorously enshrined in the process.

I’ve said that we can see that the knowledge product of the design process itself is a function of the v-Memes of the people documenting and generating it.  How?

1.  The process is meta-linear.  Varying diagrams may show this process as a straight line, or perhaps as a circle, but the bottom line is ‘we get one thing done, we move to the next one.’
2. Ulrich and Eppinger are big on a variety of algorithmic tools — more meta-linear, step-by-step processes that scaffold each of the heuristic steps, that lead in a predictable fashion to the next level.
3. Customers are included at the start of the project, as focus groups primarily.  Their input is then distilled into numbers (Measure to Manage!) and these are represented in the House of Quality/Metrics type tools.  Customers typically don’t loop around back into the process until the Benchmark/Delivery steps.
4. Empathetic development of the team does not allow for evolution of empathy and relationships with the customer.  The idea of evolving an experience along with the customer, while not particularly disallowed,  is not so much in the cards.
5. Larger synergies are not intrinsic between designers of the product and the outside world.  Synergies in that form are largely an afterthought — not surprising, considering the relative level of empathetic connection in the process.

As I’ve said earlier, we’ve used this process (and still use it!) for literally hundreds of successfully shipped products.  And for most products developed by the students in the IDC, it’s great.  Those products are necessarily Rev. 1, due to time limitations — the students only spend 4 months in the class.  Rev. 2 designs are sometimes commissioned by customers/sponsors, but are usually refinement projects (that algorithmic devolution thing again) — this system developed an unexpected crack during testing/use, etc., and the customer wants to take the extant design and improve it.

What is this design process great at?  Not surprisingly, it works very well for assembling engineered components (what I call ‘Lego Engineering’) into a new product, designing components with a large basis in the laws of physics (contrasting, evaluating and selecting, for example, different boiler designs), and some limited systems work, where interfaces are well-known.  Students often will be asked to visit a factory where a problem has been specified within a given system boundary, and students, in coming up with different preliminary designs, will often draw different system sizes and zones of inclusions.

Because multiple solutions are mandated in the preliminary design phase, there is the necessary headroom for different members of a group to be heard.  I often task everyone in the group with coming up with at least one potential design, and in order to dump a little empathetic development in the mix, often insist of pairing among students to generate ideas.  Students naturally tend toward solitary innovation — that comes straight out of their dominant authoritarian social structure (we’ve penalized them for working together their whole career — we call it cheating!) and so it is often necessary to order collaboration and sharing at the beginning of the project.  Students (and often multidisciplinary teams) will often take any project and fractionate it according to specific titles and established skill sets. Synergies, if any, will come at the end.

So much of what happens with this given design process will depend on the manager(s) of the effort.  If they implement things like pairing, the odds of synergies will increase.  If they insist more time spent with the customer, then it will happen.  Much rests on their Authority.  There is only a minimal level of emergent empathetic connection in the process itself.

And that shouldn’t be surprising.  That would be the natural construction of the professors who created it.

What’s especially fascinating is that in a follow-on paper, in the Harvard Business Review, Are Your Engineers Talking to One Another When They Should?, by Manuel Sosa, Steven Eppinger, and Craig Rowles — the same Eppinger of the book above — they recognize some of these problems.  They note the lack of metacognition — not with the language of this blog, but by stating in large projects (such as the Airbus A380) the existence of unattended interfaces.  They then state that the effort is really a failure of planning, and not surprisingly, introduce a set of algorithmic tools called Design Interface, Team Interaction, and Alignment Matrices — a Legalistic v-Meme intervention and tracking tool.  None of this is, of course, surprising.  The Principle of Reinforcement, where social/relational systems and their respective empathetic levels, reinforce and develop the behavior of its participants, and vice-versa, is at play even at MIT.

For things like large aircraft, where configurations are relatively fixed (look at the Boeing 737 family of designs) such tools are in themselves not such a bad thing.  Mapping out the interfaces, and who’s talking to whom is important.  There’s all sorts of implicit assumptions built into this, of course — that not only are they talking to each other, but the protocol that exists is actually getting the message across.  It’s an Authoritarian v-Meme idea that communication is 100% effective, even when it’s not.

But at the same time, the point of all this is that one must be aware of where our tools come from, and what kind of behavior they generate.  Ulrich and Eppinger’s process is great (not surprisingly) for the uses listed above.  Those map well within the social structure created to accomplish those given designs.  But we’ve got to think out-of-the-box, or perhaps better said, with a truly expanded sense of metacognition, if we’re going to attack larger problems, or larger synergistic systems — or cater more effectively to varying human preferences.  If we want more breakthroughs, we have to have more opportunities for larger rational empathetic interactions, and more nonlinear behavior.  We have to make a larger commitment to empathetically evolving the people inside the problem so they can naturally recognize and solve these types of challenges.  That’s not going to happen so much with the design process sketched out above.

And with the above design process, synergistic behavior is not intrinsic or emergent.  If leadership doesn’t order some of it up, with the social physics discussed in this blog, we likely won’t see it.  In fact, we may see failure because of a lack of it.  The system is not self-correcting.  Like Clint Eastwood as the character Dirty Harry so famously said — “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Takeaways:  The canonical design process above is a huge step up from the arbitrary design processes of the past.  It successfully promotes multi-solution thinking, benchmarking with metrics, and working from a specification.  But there are limitations in generating new synergies, as well as tackling more complex, time-dependent projects.