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Cover by Columbia Business School Publishing
This is the first publication, I’m aware of, that tries to address the operative nature of design methodology in management practices. A bit supprised by the monodisciplinary approach, (previous publications of other authors have favored mostly multi.- or transdisciplinary approaches) “Designing for Growth: a design thinking tool kit for managers” by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilivie frames a good logical structure and sheds some light on the use of design thinking in management practices .
Since the book isn’t out yet, this review draws on the first two chapters which are online and definitely worth a read.
The main share of the first chapter is devoted to develop a convergence between design and business and point out four main reasons why design is beneficial to managers:
- Design is all about action, and business to often get stuck at the talking stage.
- Design teaches us how to make things feel real, and most business rhetoric today remains largely irrelevant to the people who are supposed to make things happen.
- Design is tailored to deal with uncertainty, and business’s obsession with analysis is best suited for a stable and predictable world.
- Design understands that products and services are bought by human beings.
Although these statements read like an ad campaign for design the authors clarify their view on management practices by stating: “The problem in many established organizations today is not that our analytical approaches are bad – it’s all we’ve got…”.
The second chapter offer an alternative visualization of the process. Instead of using a verb based vocabulary the authors identified four basic questions, underlying the design process. (Fig.1.)
Fig.1: Design thinking process description from "Designing for Growth" by J. Liedtka and T.Oglivie
In addition to these, the book suggests 10 tools which should be used within the steps to manage the journey from identifying today’s challenges till the learning lunch, a tool which moves concepts into the field to find out about disconfirming data to improve previously developed hypotheses (prototypes). Although these tools might not seem that many, its great to see a logical structured approach from ideation to insights to ideas and finally concepts, underpinned with tools that allow a replicable approach.
The second chapter ends with a WARNING that, despite all good intentions, the biggest obstacles with this lies in the inner barriers of companies who “still don’t get it”. Although I don’t know if that’s just the companies fault, the outlook on a final chapter addressing “moving a design project through an organization”, sounds promising.
All in all, I’m looking forward to the final book, which will be released (according to amazon.com) in June 2011. The only main critique which I would have right now is that design thinking, as far as I understood it in the first two chapters, is mend to be used as a toolbox, which I think differs quite heavily from recent approaches and misses a lot of the benefits one can get through collaboration.
