Roger L. Martin is a leading business strategist, author and Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.Design thinking is about applying the principles of design to solutions for business. The phrase came out of a conversation that Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO and I had in 2002 on the transformation of IDEO's business. IDEO started off as a design firm for high technology products, like the first commercial working mouse, but increasingly was moving into more abstract uses of design like designing customer experience or designing organisational structures.
Brown's challenge was that the firm needed to start to think more generally about design. And so I said, yes, what you need to do is ‘design thinking’. My own personal journey into design thinking began in 2001 when I got involved with Procter & Gamble's design revolution, spearheaded by chairman AG Lafley. He had just appointed P&G's first vice president of design innovation in 2001.
Together with Brown and IDEO's founder David Kelley, I worked on integrating this new design initiative into general management techniques, because ultimately all that design work had to go commercial. What we discovered is that the design community is great at two things, which make up two-thirds of the concept of design thinking.
They're really good at deep holistic, ethnographic user understanding and they're obviously very good at visualising, imagining and prototyping. The third part is actually tying this to business strategy. Those are the three gears of business design. What we created was an end-to- end process that we called design works and it transformed the way P&G thought about everything.
Design has always been around in corporations but it has operated in silos. That's what we wanted to break companies out of, by bring it into operations. Our approach is about teaching general managers to think like designers. And this can be used to solve any business problem — increase market share of a product or redesign compensation packages. General Electric today is very big on this.
My biggest worry is that we've become over dependent on analytical thinking. Corporations have become far too analytical, and education systems as well. In this modern, scientific, rational world I am mortified at the degree to which kids are taught that if you want to be relevant and get good jobs drop subjects like art, take math and science.
I don't believe that you can be only left brained or right brained; we're all born with more right brain capacity than we'll ever need. But I also believe that if you don't use it you could lose it, but then you can always retrain yourself. It's like BF Skinner who taught pigeons how to play ping pong. You don't always have to choose between music and math.
This is a problem that arises from the education system. However it is slowly changing in some quarters of business education. Design thinking has become such a hot topic that, as with other hot topics, everybody's trying to figure out what's the easiest way to incorporate it. Of course, one easy way is to take your students to a design school and give them exposure to that.
Another easy way is to declare the management of design to be important and teach that. There are people doing both. However there are very few people doing IP development in business design and creating brand new conceptual frameworks for thinking about design thinking and teaching it. We've done that at Rotman School of Management by redesigning the way we teach business education and students love it.
Design thinking can become a huge competitive advantage for Indian companies so that they can sell not solely on cost arbitrage, but please the more sophisticated consumer with their design thinking rather than cheap prices. The world needs to move away from its dependence on analytical thinking.
Our entire lineage of modern scientific thought can be traced back to Aristotle and his book Analytica, which forms the basis of the scientific method that we all use, whether people know it or not. What we are forgetting is that at the end of the tome he says that this book and the methods described in this book are for that part of the world where things cannot be other than they are. So an oak tree is an oak tree and an ant is an ant and neither can be anything else. He said use this book for that part of the world.
NOTE: The above article is not originally authored by the blogger. It is a reproduction from the series of articles appearing in the Corporate Dossier Supplement of The Economic Times of 24th December, 2010
