I recently came across the following quote:
A lack of imaginative products and advanced manufacturing was a form of fear that had contributed to the general economic decline. The problems all over the world, were, of course, much large, but one of the solutions was to create consumer demand. Eventually, a few industrial design pioneers were able to make some business leaders aware that this lack of vision and industrial timidity was foreign to the spirit of adventure that had made America a leading nation. And could again.
What’s interesting is that this quote is from the 1930’s (See pgs 33-34 of Rolph Scarlett: Painter, Designer, Jeweller. I couldn’t help but think that this is very similar to what I hear about today when thinkers like Umair Haque are writing the Awesomeness Manifesto. I’d love to think that a new order of innovative entrepreneurs are going to lead the rebirth of economy.
With that in mind, I went tonight to a conversation between Bruce Nussbaum and Tim Brown (he of Ideo) about design thinking. They made a few interesting points that relate to the point above. Central was the difference between design and analytical thinking. Most of us-especially most business people-are trained as analytical thinkers. They have a fantastic toolkit for making the best decision, given a set of choices. (People like this are really good at figuring out how to reduce costs in business, squeeze more money out of a product, improve a sales force’s efficiency, etc.)
However, design thinking is a set of tools to create new choices. It’s about prototyping ideas and turning them into reality. This is a fundamentally different toolkit that what is needed to pick the best choice amongst existing choices.
And this is where we get stuck. Design thinking is fairly mature as a way to create new products, but our current problems aren’t like the 1930’s where we needed new products. Our challenges today are about needing new systems: healthcare, education, energy policy/global warming – you pick it, it’s a complex system where there’s no one fix needed.
I’m betting that the solution is going to be a mix of the two. People who can analyze systems to determine where the bottlenecks and compromises are, but who also have the creativity to come up with bold solutions (and that aren’t anchored on what they analyzed) and can execute them. Now if we can only figure out how to teach this…