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AFR Boss identifies “Skilled designers head many of the world’s leading organizations. They just don’t realise they’re designers”

09 May 2005

In the May 2005 (p. 86) edition of the AFR Boss magazine (www.afrboss.com.au), Roger Martin, dean and professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and chair of Ontario’s Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity, signalled “just getting the formula right won’t help companies much in the 21st century. They’ll need to go beyond the McDonald’s approach and start thinking like designers.”

Martin goes on to say, “I see the beginnings of a fundamental backlash against the ‘codification’ of the world around us. There are three major implications of this shift for business.

“The first is design and business skills are converging. Business people have to become more like designers… The skill of design is the ability to reach into the mystery of some seemingly intractable problem and apply the creativity and innovation necessary to convert it into a heuristic. Highly skilled designers head up many of the world’s leading organizations – they just don’t realise they are designers, because they weren’t formally trained as such.

“The second implication is that traditional firms have to start acting more like design firms on a number of dimensions. Whereas traditional firms organise around ongoing tasks and permanent assignments, in design [consultancies] work flows around projects with defined terms and constant dialogue with clients. Status in traditional firms is largely inductive (proving that something actually operates) and deductive (proving that something must be). Design [consultancies] add abductive reasoning to the scenario: suggesting that something may be, and exploring the possibilities. Traditional firms see constraints as the enemy, but for design firms nothing is impossible and constraints only increase the excitement level.

“The third implication is that we must change our thinking. The trends discussed here have generated interest in design by business community, but it tends to be focussed on the ‘business of design’ – trying to figure out what designers do, how they do it, and how to manage them. This misses the point. The focus should be placed on ‘the design of business’: we need to focus on designing our businesses to provide elegant products and services in the most graceful manner.”

AFR BOSS is published in The Australian Financial Review (www.afr.com.au) on the second Friday of the month. Click here to read the full story by Roger Martin.