…and become gigantic.”

The article “What’s thwarting American Innovation? Too Much Science” in Fast Company this week is one of the most thought provoking I have read in awhile, with a unique and exciting perspective. The future is going to have to be design-led, and I love that.

Roger Martin, of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, doesn’t agree with the approach (or cost) that management consultants take when helping companies strategize and innovate.
“If I didn’t like my job, I’d go out and create a killer firm that would take on McKinsey head-to-head in their own market. A company would get better results, at a fraction of the price.”

“Corporations have pushed analytical thinking so far that it’s unproductive. No idea in the world has been proved in advance with inductive or deductive reasoning,”

What Then?
“Bring in the folks whose job it is to imagine the future, and who are experts in intuitive thinking. That’s where design thinking comes in”

These responses from Martin in his interview with Fast Company really resonated with me:

“Most companies try to be innovative, but the enemy of innovation is the mandate to “prove it.” You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning. The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers.”

“New ideas must come from a new kind of thinking. The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce called it abductive logic. It’s a logical leap of the mind that you can’t prove from past data.”

“In a knowledge-intensive world, design thinking is critical to overcoming the biggest block: overcoming analytical thinking and fear of intuitive thinking. The design thinker enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, originality and mastery.”

“Absolutely. Like anybody who takes a job in another country, and needs to learn the local language in order to function, design thinkers need to learn the language of reliability, terms such as proof, regression analysis, and best practices.”

“This is a fascinating time, and there’s an interesting battle coming. One of these smallish design firms might combine the best of the analytical from the business world and the best intuitive thinking from the design world and become gigantic. There would be massive traction for it. It wouldn’t be the first time that a little company in a garage saw things differently.”

These views reinforce some of the ideas of Daniel Pink’s book I read recently,  “A Whole New Mind,” which provides a original and very well-reasoned view on “why right-brainers will rule the future.”

In “A Whole New Mind” Pink introduces the new six senses:

• Design
• Story
• Symphony
• Empathy
• Play
• Meaning

I talked more about this book, which I am now reading for a second time, in a previous post which you can check out here.

To extend the thinking even further beyond just a design thinking centric approach here, see this post from Peter Merholz in the Harvard Business Review on “Why design thinking won’t save you”. This article is in response to BusinessWeek article titled “How Business is Adopting Design Thinking”. Merholz agrees that while design principles bring value, excluding other valuable skills and approaches from other disciplines and vocations  will be to your detriment and may unnecessarily constrain your results. He cites an example of “journalism thinking: gathering information, winnowing it down, finding the core narrative, and telling it concisely” – these skills can be accessed and added to an approach that includes design thinking, business thinking, librarian thinking and what ever other thinking styles and tactics will bring a better outcome. I absolutely agree with this view of Merholz, and think it is a great extension of the ideas discussed earlier in this post. The BusinessWeek article, closes in a quote sharing this view: “Certainly, design thinking is not the only mechanism these corporations use to achieve growth. But for now, says GE’s Schwartz, “if there’s a box of crayons, we’re a favorite color.”

I will close this post with an excerpt from the “Design” Chapter of “A Whole New Mind”, and touch more on this in further posts, where I plan to look at agencies and firms that are using design thinking to strategize and innovate and what kind of results they are having as well as some more insights into what design thinking actually is and its place in a corporate environment.

“Design – that is, utility enhanced by significance – has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success for at least three reasons.  First, thanks to rising prosperity and advancing technology, good design is now more accessible than ever, which allows more people to partake in its pleasures and become connoisseurs of what was once specialized knowledge. Second, in an age of material abundance, design has become crucial for most modern businesses- as a means of differentiation and as a way to create new markets. Third, as more people develop a design sensibility, we’ll increasingly be able to deploy design for its ultimate purpose: changing the world.”