What strategic innovation and art have in common

If you are into fashion or art & culture, you might have heard that Martin Margiela is arguably one of the most influential designers of our times. Margiela subverted norms in the fashion industry in the late 80s, challenged every form that was widely accepted and continues to be a massive influence on young designers. Margiela started his first collection in the Spring/Summer of 1988, communicating to the world a set of principles and values that the Maison would stand for in the next decades. Mysterious, coherent and subversive by design, Margiela’s success carries parallels and lessons for strategic innovation. 

Having become more curious about Margiela and more ingrained in the world of strategic innovation, I started to see parallels (something I recognize as a professional distortion of continuously trying to abstract) – the role of our identity, the need to have a direction and clearly conceptualized design principles, the audacity to repeatedly press the system & deconstruct openly.

Here’s my readout:

• A clear definition of identity – who we are, what we bring to this space, and who we are in relation to others. Throughout our work on portfolios, one of the most difficult questions to answer has been who holds the portfolio. In typical project management, this is easily addressed and agreed between parties at the outset. But when we started dabbling in system transformation, we quickly found ourselves questioning who we are in this system, what is our right to intervene here, what we bring to it that adds value to other activities and who we are accountable to. We accept humbly that we are not relevant enough to transform the system, but we can merely be present, ‘probe’ it, and ideally learn from those experiences. In the latest module we ran on portfolio induction, our EU partners said that the role of international organizations like UNDP and the EU should be to de-risk innovation by designing, implementing and generating learnings for the government on where they should be channeling public finance. That type of clarity is something to aspire to. 

• A shared direction (intent) – this is relevant to who we are and why we’re here. For the artist, it is the subject of their life’s work. For UNDP, it’s a function of our capability, identity and the assets, which we bring into the system. Accepting that the answer to that may be fuzzy and knowing that it can change (because the world is changing), the direction should be in line with the principles, values and the identity that we have. That intent can be shared at multiple levels – having a common mental model of our direction within an organization or team, or an intent that is shared amongst actors in the system. Intent communicates a will, which influences action, distribution of resources and leads to discovery. Whether between different actors or within an office, having that shared intent requires negotiation, discussion, openness and trust – in a never-ending cycle of recalibration and mindfulness. 
  
• In Uzbekistan, we worked with the AccLab team to design a portfolio on the future of work. By stepping out of projects, and marrying our assets and capabilities to the needs in the system, we determined that UNDP’s intent in Uzbekistan would be to attract resources, develop policies, model actions, and induce system-wide propensities towards responsive labor market, social resilience and green transition. 

• Probing the boundaries, discovering the possible, reframing identities, learning from experiences – Margiela challenged who fashion was accessible to, the beauty standards in the industry, who gets the attention, and the celebrity of the designer. He never stopped exploring ways in which to manifest those values. We increasingly experience uncertainty and complexity, the pandemic being a perfect example, therefore the need to probe, make sense and adapt grows. For humans, this is a part of the evolutionary process and our own adaptation. Think about how we learned to distinguish between the 10,000 types of mushrooms that exist out there – which ones can kill us, which ones have hallucinogenic effects and which ones are nutritious. To apply some of this thinking to development, we produced Agora together with the CHORA Foundation – a meta-model for urban transformation, which functions like a water-pump, accelerating the generation of probes and enabling faster adaptation. The water-pump generates continuous options, when needed, which are coherent with the direction of the portfolio.  

• Deconstruction & making the invisible visible – Margiela deconstructed the process of designing and creating clothing, and highlighted the beauty in the process, making the internal – seams and patterns – visible. In sensemaking, we take a deep dive into projects, deconstructing their elements by asking: what is it they are made of, what type of knowledge or other resources are they generating, what are the needs that exist or are emerging, how are we responding to those, and how are we set-up to respond? Instead of looking at projects as a single unit, we look at the relational aspect between what they generate and what they respond to, making the project frame almost obsolete.
  
• Through our practice, emergent as is, we are challenging established ways of doing things. Our relationships with partners are based on trust, openness and shared intent. The portfolio is a decision-making tool – what emerges out of it is accessible to all, and what we make sense of we hope to expand over time, opening the space to all with a shared intent. 

Did Margiela intend to be subversive, or was this an unintended consequence of staying true to embodied values and principles? Maybe, but maybe not. In the end it doesn’t matter because human survival is a result of continuous adaptation and learning, and our role has changed and evolved over time to respond to how the context has changed. How can we expect anything less or simpler of a system that has been designed to work on some of humanity’s most complex challenges? 

This blog has benefited from conversations and work with Luca Gatti (CHORA Foundation), Indy Johar (DML), Gorka Espiau (ALC), Giulio Quagiotto, as well as designer Venera Mustafa, and photographer Stella Schwendner.