An interview with Larry Keeley, Doblin Group

With a clear-cut fluency of an American businessperson Larry Keeley, the president of Doblin Group, delivered his talk "Transform: Reinventing Industries through Strategic Design Planning" in the UIAH conference "Design--Pleasure or Responsibility?"

Doblin Group is a Chicago, Illinois-based consulting company specializing in strategic design planning. Staffed with a McKinsey breed of business consultants, top-notch social scientists and designers on their new strategic planning career, it caters to a small but very impressive clientele with design strategies. And only strategies. Doblin group is not a design shop, yet it suggests the best of designers, architects and advertising agencies to realize its visionary plans.

Opening his speech with such classics of strategic planning as Igor Ansoff and Michael Porter, Larry Keeley soon rendered the complex, all inclusive models of strategic planning hilariously ridiculous. Like Henry Mintzberg in "The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning", he condemned the old school of strategic planning as programmatic and having lost sight of the future.

With a parade of pictures of well known designs that have renewed their industries, Keeley made the touchstone of strategic thinking loud and clear: Are you sure you are doing the right thing? If so, are you doing it the right way?

Mr. Keeley, choosing your case for today, did you know that in Scandinavia the filling stations have been clean, safe and emotionally appealing for quite a number of years already?

How would you sell your idea of strategic design planning to an average pragmatic business executive?

I am a strong believer of what you just said, but does it really need a very expensive outside consultant to make a company to understand design?

Your argumentation lies mainly on the business side, do you still consider yourselves as design consultants?