The basic tenant behind The Design of Businessasserts the need for a more balanced business model that accommodates predictions based on validity alongside those based on reliability in order to sustain the health of a company. Most companies, understandably, place high value on predictions based on reliability, a process which looks to the past as a measure of unbiased proof and is able to reproduce consistent results. Valid predictions, on the other hand, cannot be proven until they occcur since their very nature involves looking to the future.Businesses arise out of recognizing a need, formulating a solution to address that need and reiterating their solution over and over in the form of products or services provided to consumers. In The Design of Business, Roger Martin illustrates this process as one that moves along a “Knowledge Funnel. The progress starts with a mystery and involves its exploration, such as a research scientist exploring “the mystery of a syndrome such as autism” (Martin’s example). The next stage takes that mystery and narrows the field of inquiry to a manageable size, the heuristic. This is the stage less successful companies get stuck in but if they are able to transform their heuristic into a replicatable formula, they will have advanced to the algorithm stage.Valid predictions are what begins the process within the Knowledge Funnel, and while all businesses move within that funnel, their failing commonly resides in that they cease to move through the funnel once they reach the algorithm stage. Rather, they start depending on the reliability of their formula, eventually stagnating as competitors arise out of their own approach to the Knowledge Funnel. To maintain the life of a business, it must continually move along the funnel from mystery, to heuristics, to algorithms.Tim Brown of IDEO specifically articulates design thinking in relation to business as  “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity”. The ability to peer into the mystery is a common skill found in designers, what was articulated by American pragmatist philosophers as ‘abductive logic’. Abductive logic is modal reasoning that posits wondering as the beginning of reasoning, its goal being to posit what could possibly be true. This ability lies at the heart of the meaning of design thinking. It is essentially what businesses need to employ to ensure the continued viability of their endeavors.

The book illustrates the power of design thinking application through a wide variety of industries from the traditional corporation of Proctor and Gamble, to the tech company Research in Motion (RIM) to an actual design company, Herman Miller. I have long understood that design extended beyond graphical representation, that it was essentially a process and problem solving discipline that had broad range in application. Martin’s book clearly articulates that concept and defines the holistic processes behind design in a clear and easily read style.

 

Jen Wang