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5.02.07

Design thinking in Business

As the attentive reader might have witnessed (see here, or here or here), I am engaged in business design for quite some time now. Recently, I stumbled across a blog written by Alex Osterwalder who also seems quite interested in this issue (and not to forget Ralf Beuker).

In a recent entry, Alex writes about some specific characteristics of the designer resp. the design process. His list is very similar to the statements made by an architect I interviewed last week. He told me about a tendering procedure for a casino in the US and how he started to solve the difficulty between formulating the written guidelines for the tender and allowing enough flexibility to receive diverse projects. I think one major difference between business people and designers (besides those that have been mentioned) is the detail vs. overview approach. Designers and artists in general start with an outline (this reminds me on an interview with the musician Falco who said that he sees many similarities between his approach to composing and an artist’s approach to painting). Namely, to start with an outline and then work on the details. Since I am confronted regularly with business/project ideas, I can say that many business descriptions focus far too much on the details. Architects/designers usually start with a broad outline, then focus on some details, re-outline the entire object according to feedback and at the same time handle the input of many different stakeholders. So, this is also what business leaders can learn from them, since they often have to:

- deal with complexity
- reconcile a variety of different demands
- understand the basic priniples of their business, but often don’t need to know every detail (as an architect needs to know basically the interfaces but not the technical specs of steel beams etc)
- be able to listen to outside comments and incorporate these in revised plans/assumptions

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