Could design thinking stop CEO Thanos?
How well does Design Thinking avoid harmful outcomes?
Have you noticed that the protagonist in superhero movies almost never has a lofty goal for making the world a better place? If there’s a character who has a grand plan to change the world and works hard to make it happen, they’re usually the big bad villain. Audiences are used to it; once someone announces a plan to change the world for the better, we immediately doubt their motivation or their capacity to carry out their plan without terrible consequences.
However, if you look at the narratives that technology companies use to market themselves, they frequently follow the same playbook: “We wanted to change the world. We made a breakthrough advancement, disrupted an industry, drastically improved people’s lives, and made the world a better place.” It’s not strange that they talk like this, because it happens to work. Having a vision inspires people, sells products, and gathers those of a like mind to work for you. As Simon Sinek famously illustrated with his golden circle paradigm, people are more likely to do business with you when you communicate your “why,” the grand purpose behind your actions. It’s not just marketing; people working in the design space have adopted a mindset and culture of solving big problems and driving global change.
Doing bad things for good reasons
A pessimist might presume evil intentions hidden behind every ambitious plan, but even well-intentioned agendas always risk unintended consequences. Do our design methods allow us to catch these risks?
Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that a fictional supervillain was living among us, but his story begins as an innovator with a grand vision and altruistic intentions. Let’s pick a good villain, one that you can tell is “evil,” but could be inspiring, and re-imagine what it would be like if they were commanding a large company to enact their plan. When it comes to good villains, here are some of my criteria:
- They’re realistic: You can imagine them existing in some form in your own life. A good example is Madame Umbridge, from Harry Potter. You don’t need to believe in magic, just corruption.
- Their motivations are understandable: You can almost empathize with them. Think about Magneto from X-men, who grew up in a Nazi concentration camp. Can you blame him for not believing people will eventually accept others that are different?
- Their idea is morally ambiguous: It leads to a philosophical argument about what “good” even means. Sort of like the train and trolley problem, but on a larger scale. Think about the villain from Watchmen, for example. By the end of the movie, you might start wondering who is actually right.
I think a great character to use is Thanos, from Marvel’s Infinity War. He fits my bill for a convincing villain, his master plan as presented in the movie was jaw-droppingly stupid (I’ll explain why later), and yet if you search, you can find several posts, threads, and videos titled some version of “Thanos was right!” As we take a closer look at this character’s motivations, his vision, and the actions he takes to enact it, I want you to imagine that he’s the CEO of a big company in real life trying to make a difference.
Summary of the movie plot
(spoilers ahead! skip to the next section if you already know, or want to avoid knowing)
Thanos is a big strong warrior from another planet that had an overpopulation problem. He saw that there were too many people, and not enough resources to go around. He sees this problem and suggests killing half of his own population, so there’s enough to go around. To be fair to all, it would be a random selection. Their leaders say no, their society fails and their planet becomes a ghost planet. Thanos survives, and thinking he was right all along, builds an army to go around making sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. He finds other planets and other species that are overpopulated, kills half of their population and flies away, I assume singing this song.
Then he has this nagging thought: “there’s got to be a better way.” Which leads us to the main storyline where he is trying to find six magical rocks that together will basically act like a genie and let him kill half of all life by snapping his fingers, to achieve what he calls “balance,” which to him meant that there would be enough resources in the universe to sustain life without anyone suffering. So specifically (and this is how it’s communicated in the movie) the plan says one snap means half of all life in the universe just goes away, randomly selecting who dies so as to make sure it’s fair. After the snap, Thanos declares success, destroys the stones, and leaves to enjoy farm life.
Let’s put the CEO hat on Thanos now
Imagining CEO Thanos shouldn’t be hard. Instead of an army he has employees. His technology division has a bunch of designers in it, and he takes their word that design thinking is the right way to problem solve, just like it’s done at Apple, Nike, and IBM.
If you think back to his story, you can fit a lot of the major pieces into Stanford’s famous 5 step process:
- Empathize with the user: Thanos spends years among the people in whichever town he was from, understanding the suffering of those who did not have enough.
- Define the problem: Thanos comes to the understanding that Earth has too many people based on the finite resources that exist. He aspires to create “balance” (defined by a ratio of humans to resources)
- Ideate to find possible solutions: His idea is simple: reduce resource demand by reducing humans
- Prototype before you build: He builds a bot capable of wiping out small towns and cities
- Test before you launch: Thanos finds a few remote islands that don’t have contact with the outside world and conducts mini massacres
So what happened? The tests he ran showed that killing half of a community meant more food was available for everyone else. So then he scales up his prototype, creating a tech solution that’s a combination of a death laser and a giant powerball lottery to randomly, instantly, and painlessly remove half of life on Earth regardless of age, gender, race, social class, wealth, power, etc. He is, if anything, inclusive.
Why so stupid?
Clearly (hopefully), this would never happen in real life and governments would band together like bureaucratic Avengers to nip this in the bud. But even without opposition, this plan is a dud. Remember I called it stupid? Before we move on, I want to make it very clear why the plan would never actually work in any universe. I’m going to sum up three big problems that make this plan useless. I will skip the moral argument entirely, focusing on why his actions could not possibly meet its own success criteria. Let’s call them Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to keep the corporate metaphor going. Remember, all Thanos wants is for Earth to be balanced in terms of humans and resources, so that people stop suffering. To that end…
- 50% is meaningless:
Thanos’ plan assumes that 50% is some kind of magic number that will balance any population. Where did this come from? Pretending he knows exactly how to calculate how much “resources” a population needs, it’s still a huge assumption that every single country is overpopulated by the same amount, or even above that number to the point where halving is helpful. Maybe some countries are underpopulated. A 50% population loss will hit each country differently, assuming the culling happens evenly by country.
That leads me to an issue with statistics. This is a nitpick, but Thanos just said that people would die “randomly.” Random doesn’t mean even. Truly random selections with everyone in the same bag to draw from means you can come out with some really wacky results with a bad dice roll. Imagine an unbalanced snap that leaves way too few people to maintain a stable population for future generations because everyone is too young, old, or one gender. Thanos never said “stratified random sampling,” which means you randomly sample within certain groups, like by country. Or Age. Or Gender. Or even species.
One more nitpick, Thanos didn’t say “kill all humanoid intelligent beings,” he said “all life.” If we include plants and animals as targets, plants and animals basically ARE the resources humans have when it comes to food. If you halve the mouths to feed but also halve the food, you’ve done nothing for balance.
2. Populations and resources change over time:
Thanos’ plan is a one-time mass murder. Let’s ignore the first point about 50% being meaningless, and assume everything goes perfectly into “balance”. What then? Well, populations reached a super high level in the first place somehow, what’s stopping them from going right back? Imagine we were just talking about rabbits. Or flies. If you got rid of half of them instantly, they would repopulate within a few generations. For some insects that have really short lifespans, this could be a matter of days or hours. His fix of balancing the universe would last a shorter period of time than it took for him to get the technology in the first place.
Also, resources are not necessarily well-defined or set in stone. Think about early humans that were hunter-gatherers. There are only so many deer you can eat, so there weren’t a lot of humans at the time. But when they discovered agriculture, suddenly their population exploded because resources they could access were more plentiful. What happens once humans can pull a Matt Damon and farm poop potatoes on other planets? What resource limit do you judge a species by, if the planet’s resources aren’t necessarily a limit? As a space traveler, movie Thanos should understand this very well.
3. Availability does not mean accessibility
Thanos is operating on a painfully simple formula. If population > resources, kill until population = resources. If he understood anything about societies, he should know about a little thing called income inequality. And food waste.
Just because there are enough resources to go around does not mean they will make the rounds
Even assuming resources are unchanging and 50% is a magic number, “balancing” the population with resources does nothing to affect income distribution and shipping logistics.
Design thinking doesn’t work!?!
So where did this plan go wrong? Thanos appeared to follow most of the steps in a typical design thinking process, as long as you don’t look too closely. Since you made it this far, let’s point out the mistakes he made at every step.
- Empathize: This step is also known as “Discover”, where your goal is to find a problem to solve, often by building empathy with a group of people. This step is usually done through qualitative research in the form of interviews, and is intended to allow you to understand the pains that your “customer” faces and their nuances. The core issue for innovators is that you should never assume you understand the problem perfectly from your own experience, because you are not your customer. An important note here is that to understand a big problem like overpopulation, it’s usually not enough to only talk to the people that feel the pain the most. You need to understand the systems that cause the problem, which requires talking to experts and key players. It wasn’t clear how much effort Thanos spent on this process, but from his glaring oversights it really looks like he skipped it altogether, or had extreme tunnel vision. Who overlooks that populations keep growing through reproduction and that not everyone is equally hungry?
- Define: this step is all about creating a perspective on what problem you are actually solving, which has a huge impact on the strategies that you come up with as well as how you define what success looks like. For example, a failing farmer in a hot region could conclude that his poor rice harvest was due to too little rainfall, or he could say that he was growing the wrong crops. Neither one is incorrect, but one is way more productive. Thanos chose to target overpopulation as the problem to solve, and defined the problem to solve as the lack of resources for a given population size, or in his words, “balance.” This is a classic case of choosing a really complex problem and trying to fix it all with a straightforward solution. People experienced in most big problem spaces will tell you there is usually no “silver bullet” that solves everything at once. Thanos focused too much on a simple ratio to aim for, which captures none of the complexities of the system that caused the problem in the first place. Unfortunately, businesses love simple metrics, and these things can happen often. Ever see a business whose goal is to “make more money next quarter?” Sure, that would be great. But how?
Quick pause here. You may have noticed that Thanos appeared to take a step that’s not explicitly part of design thinking, but is a common step in the design industry, and that’s to create a vision. This is establishing an easy-to-remember statement that sums up what the end goal is and why. This is the implementation of the golden circle in action, creating a simple message about the purpose of doing everything you do. His vision was to “create balance,” and this served as his mantra, his rallying cry that drove his followers to act on his behalf, but also set a very specific key performance indicator. This is a problem: by declaring that the only thing that matters is equalizing two variables (population and resources), you limit the possible solutions that can be generated. The vision ignores very important details like access to resources.
- Ideation: Now we’re at the step of coming up with answers to the problem. Usually this is a collaborative brainstorming-type exercise with people from different areas of the business weighing in with their diverse expertise and viewpoints, before taking them from rough idea to polished end product. The movie did not show a lot of this happening. Only one idea was ever shared by Thanos, and that’s culling the population. He had the same exact idea throughout his entire story arc, unchanged except for its method (space army to magical stones). What likely happened is that he had an early idea, which he became too invested in. He was unwilling to hear alternatives or feedback, and pushed for his vision above all others. If you have ever worked in a business, you might know someone like this by name.
- Test: Thanos did conduct “small” experiments with his local massacres to test his hypothesis of “murder leads to balance,” but he is no researcher. He picked several specific populations to test on. Was every place he encountered overpopulated? Every species? Or did he cherrypick the ones that fit his criteria and assume it applied to every population? He made a few other cardinal sin-level mistakes that were apparent even in the movie. When he massacred the people of the girl that eventually became his “daughter,” for example, he seemed to have put his thumb on the scale to intervene: he chose which species would live and die (and in the case of his daughter, possibly even which individuals). Interestingly, his experiment was technically a longitudinal study; he claims he went back to the same place years after the massacre to see how it was doing, saying it was a “paradise.” But he must not have looked very closely, because if he did he would have noticed that the population wasn’t the same as when he left, so the “balance” should have been a little off as well, cluing him into some potential issues. It’s unclear whether he didn’t notice, didn’t care, or didn’t measure. Pick your poison. A research motto is “test early, test often.” Not included in that motto, but very important, is also to test your final product before launching it. If you are launching a new version of a website, you might usually conduct an A/B test where you build the actual website in code, and make it available to some small (1–10% or more) of your site traffic to see what happens. A physical product or service might do a limited pre-release with the real thing (not a prototype). A full launch just means opening up access to the same product for more people. Thanos’ actual product (a service, really) changed entirely between testing and launching. He changed the process (stones vs army), and the population (every living thing vs a single species on a planet). This can also happen in corporations that do a lot of small-scale prototype testing and trust the mockups to be a close-enough representation of the real thing. If you don’t test the actual product or something very close to it, you invite problems.
Final thoughts
Here’s a summary of some of the real and very plausible mistakes you can make while trying to follow the tenets of design thinking:
- Skipping or rushing problem discovery
- Oversimplifying a complex problem
- Making a vision too specific that doesn’t allow for pivoting
- Assuming a “silver bullet” solution that can solve a big problem
- Getting attached to a specific idea too early
- Not being collaborative or accepting of feedback
- Biased, rushed, ignored, or skipped research
- Testing prototypes but not the final production-quality product before launch
These are just the ones I highlighted as likely mistakes; other writers have pointed out pitfalls such as not starting with understanding the customer, failing to include skilled practitioners in the process, or even using design thinking for product development at all.
With all the mistakes that good designers could easily make along the way, evil intentions are not required for massively harmful outcomes. Although neither design thinking nor any creative process can reliably prevent a Thanos-type leader from bullying a team into building a bad product, if done right it can avoid a surprising amount of potential harm, or at least make the folks involved in building it more aware of the risks.
If there is one piece of advice I could give aspiring visionaries, it is to not let your vision cloud you from seeing what your actions are actually doing.
