NextD Journal I ReReThinking Design Conversation 22
Managing is Designing?
there are identifiable constraints on the manager’s activities. But the world is changing, and the boundaries are no longer so well defined. For example, who is responsible for the disposal of an empty cartridge that contains a toxic residue? There are any number of ways of seeing this. The traditional view would be that the customer purchased it and, as its owner, has assumed that responsibility. But some companies are drawing the boundaries around that transaction in new ways. They are designing mechanisms to participate in the disposal (or recycling) of the products they produce. This is partly a reflection of their willingness to see their own system differently, to see it as part of some larger systems. When you do that, you enter the realm of design, because as systems are nested within one another, traditional methods of analysis and understanding are inadequate. Without clear boundaries defining the limits of your analysis, what function do you optimize? Without fairly simple objectives, how do you measure your success? Designers know, and a design way of thinking reinforces, that for most interesting problems no single solution is the right solution. Another solution might provide a different set of benefits, problems, and tensions that are in some sense better. Another solution might shift the way of thinking about the problem altogether. Managers are growing ever more comfortable with this new world. I don’t want to suggest that we are swimming against the current here. Managers and management professors are aware that the world demands people who can see beyond the next quarter’s numbers and beyond their own organization’s narrow interests. But most of the tools we give them have a century of assumptions built into them. These assumptions tend to favor a decision-making paradigm. It is time to provide another set of tools that support a designing paradigm. Not to replace all that we have accomplished, but to augment it. Richard Boland: Over the last ten years, business has seen that the design of products and services are critical to their success. They have seen that collaboration across organizational boundaries is essential and that the familiar ways of doing business are just not good enough. In business schools, on the other hand, we see a growing emphasis on financial analysis and financial engineering - a narrowing of student vision and an effort to have one way of seeing business and its value displace all other ways. Along with that shrinking scope of attention in business schools to a smaller range of issues centered on finance, there is a parallel growth in emphasis on analytic techniques in other disciplines. This is fine in moderation, but has a debilitating effect when taken as a whole over time. By this I mean that in order to introduce analytic techniques and build skills in using them to make decisions among alternative courses of action, business schools focus more and more on stereotypical alternatives open to the decision maker. Coming up with a new alternative course of action, which is not readily modeled by existing decision-making techniques, is suppressed. Students are trained to see alternatives that fit into their models and that can be analyzed by their decision techniques. The result is a failure of imagination and a tendency to reproduce the past. So it is the failure of our business schools to create a truly educated person that we are reacting to when we reach out to design and design thinking. The truly educated person brings the full range of human experience to their engagement with the world. They are open to critical thinking and to exploring new relations and domains. We believe that a
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