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6.12.06

Aristotle, father of design thinking?

Interesting article on BusinessWeek from Roger L. Martin (Dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto) on mind-sets and reality. I am not deeply into Aristotle, but fully support the argumentation and conclusions.

The latter, where things can be other than they are, is the world of people, of organizations, of cultures. For example, a badly performing organization can be something else—a great organization—if someone figures out how it to turn it around. For this entire domain, Aristotle explicitly argued that analytics is an inappropriate tool.

Instead, in his book Rhetoric he described the proper thinking tools: conversation, invention, and intention. In Rhetoric, the object of endeavor is not the description of what is real but rather the creation of something that does not currently exist; that must first be imagined.

The great pity for innovation, creativity, and possibility is that the modern world has adopted Analytics as the universal thinking dogma rather than as an approach its inventor saw as being useful in just one specific domain.

Innovation and creativity require a fundamentally different approach. Many believe they require a new way of thinking but, ironically, they require a very old way of thinking, brought to us by the same man who created the analytical model we need to replace: Aristotle.

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