Thinking Like a Designer

You've read my posts about Design as a New Religion and Revenge of the Right Brain where the the seismic shift is ending the Information age and begins the Conceptual Age. It's time we recognize that as goods and services are becoming increasingly routinized, our new value allows us to design entire systems, serve as life planners, and move out of the intricacies of Excel and into the art of the deal.

I've just read a great article in FastCompany's April Issue The Business of Design. We're becoming a design-based economy and companies must become more like design shops. Roger Martin, Dean of University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business also believes the North American economy is radically transforming, "Businesspeople don't just need to understand designers better - they need to become designers."

Don't pull out Photoshop just yet.

Currently, two types of logic are rewarded in traditional companies: inductive and deductive -end of story. However, abductive thinking is a process that allows designers to bet on what's probable, instead of acting on what is certain. Moreover, designers try it, prototype it, improve it and then move it -much like Apple did with the IPod.

Growing up, it was my perspective that one's worth was based on being a productive part of society -creating and innovating streamlined solutions. When I became inducted into Corporate America (ohh, I feel a comic hero parody coming on), I noticed that status was based on managing budgets and large staff. Frankly, I could give a flip about that, but I did care about process and the enveloping beauty of elegant solutions. I wished I had kept this oh-so-cool makeup case produced for Avon Cosmetics by a Holland design firm back in the early 80s.

If organizations adopt a design-based strategy, they can embrace the designer's maxim: learn by doing by identifying weakness and make midflight corrections along the way. If everything must be proven, innovations will never take place, thus preventing themselves from becoming the trendsetters.