The Value of North Stars in Internal Communications

Peter Schreyer, the man behind the New Beetle and countless other Volkswagen and Audi hits, turned Hyundai and Kia into design powerhouses in their own right.

I recently read one of those Gestalten books about car designer Peter Schreyer called “Roots and Wings—Peter Schreyer: Designer, Artist, and Visionary.” I didn’t know anything about Peter Schreyer, and I know you’re not actually supposed to read these artsy coffee table books, but what can I say.

The most instructive part of the book for me as a non-automotive strategist was how Schreyer transformed the design cultures at Hyundai and Kia.

Among his most effective tools of transformation and guidance were manifestos and north stars.

How to define and use north stars in internal communications

A north star is a slogan used to empower members of an enterprise with a common concept or philosophy. The best north stars are so concise, they’re impossible for people at the enterprise to forget.

I say empowerment rather than alignment because the latter feels constricting. This is not about constricting anyone’s instincts or creativity or enforcing brand in a draconian way. It’s about unlocking people’s creativity in a way that’s guaranteed to be strategic and cohesive.

Two interesting examples across both Kia and Hyundai stand out.

The first is the slogan “The Simplicity of a Straight Line” Schreyer espoused to Kia’s designers. It’s like a creative prompt. On its face, not a particularly unique or insightful idea. But there’s a lot going on here. First, it’s an aspiration. We must all aspire to simplicity as stark as a straight line. That sounds like a good rule of thumb when designing a commodity like a car, when it would probably be tempting to embellish as a means of differentiation.

Then there’s the tension of espousing the virtue of a straight line in the context of a product that, to the naked eyed, is covered in curvature. Schreyer’s issuing both an aspiration and a challenge to his team that each person will interpret differently. Sometimes it might lead to wrong-headed ideas. Sometimes it will translate to exciting ideas. What we know is that without this kind of provocation, the ideas would likely be mediocre or lacking cohesion.

The so-called Tiger Nose grille on the Kia was born from this north star, so clearly it bore handsome fruit.

Making manifestos visual

Schreyer also used a form of communication that’s probably underrated in the field of internal communications, and that’s a totem, or visual manifesto.

He developed one each for Hyundai and Kia.

The rivers stone and the billiard ball served as physical manifesto for Hyundai and Kia, respectively, under Peter Schreyer’s strategic guidance.

For the Hyundai group, it was a river stone—something solid, occurring in nature, and that water molded over time. You can see how the tension between solidness and fluidity could produce interesting, infinitely iterative results, and how the theme of “nature” could influence design decisions. Evidently, Schreyer gifted all his designers a stone to keep on their desks as a reminder of what they were all aiming for. How’s that for a north star?

For Kia, the totem was a billiard ball: a perfectly shaped, man-made made object that’s also a little funky and playful (it is used in a game, after all). A designer I was talking to about this the other day also pointed out to me that a billiard ball is also designed to withstand being slammed into other objects (not unlike a car). When you look at Kia’s modern fleet, the connection to the billiard ball seems clear if not explicit. Like the river stone, the billiard ball, too, adorns Kia designers’ desks as a physical north star.

Many companies have north stars, lighthouses… some guiding principle that the whole enterprise is supposed to follow to “stay aligned.” The problem, inevitably, is that people forget all about these frameworks in the course of their daily work and ensuing chaos. And you can’t use a framework you forget.

A physical object in their workspace at all times stands a much better chance of being remembered—and therefore useful.