Time for Design

Design Management Review, Spring 2006 by Liedtka, Jeanne, Mintzberg, Henry

Defining the attributes common to all great designs, Jeanne Liedtka and Henry Mintzberg offer four case studies as the gateway to understanding the nexus of design and business. Their stories present managers with contrasting visions and methodologies. They also illustrate the creative tensions related to who designs, how designing happens, and when designing is completed.

Pundits invoke design as a remedy for many of business' current ills-from lackluster, look-alike products to sagging margins. After years of attention to moving the bottom line through costcutting and restructuring, attention has turned to the top line and the pursuit of growth through enhancing creativity and innovative capacity. Cover profiles on companies IDEO and Play in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and other popular-press business magazines proclaim that design is the twenty-first century's secret weapon.

Nearly 40 years ago, Herbert Simon, an eminent business-school thinker and the 1978 winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, argued that "everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones... Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training...architecture, business, education, law, and medicine are all centrally concerned with the process of design."1 Maybe the time has finally come when business will take his message seriously.

But design is hardly the core of any management training-or its practice. In fact, it's not clear that we even agree on what design means. The problem runs deep. It's not that design is ignored in management so much as it is assumed, implicitly, in a particularly narrow way. Design is something that happens to products; or it's equated with some kind of liber-planning and analysis.

Business needs to develop a deeper understanding of what constitutes design. As two business academics long interested in design, our purpose here is first, to show the robustness of the notion of design; and second, to examine the various forms that designing can take. After that, we'll explore design's potential for helping people to manage more effectively. To do so, we'll draw on examples from architecture, urban planning, business, and software. We'll begin by looking at the notion of design itself, and then profile four approaches to designing to illustrate its richness and variety, arguing that there exists no one-size-fits-all approach in design any more than in business.

Great Designs

Though frequently invoked, the nomenclature of design is rarely defined. Design is both a noun and a verb. Most recent attention has focused on the noun. Though we start there, as well, much of design's potential power for business lies with the verb.

As a noun, design refers to an outcome and suggests that some outcomes are superior. There are great designs, and there are mediocre ones. If we aim to take design seriously, we ought to know the kinds of outcomes we aspire to create. Do we know what makes a design great in the eyes of the user?

It turns out that we don't have to look hard to appreciate the difference between great and so-so designs, and the way they speak to us. Owen Edwards suggests a comparison of the Golden Gate and the San Francisco Bay bridges.2 Both offer reliable transport across the water separating San Francisco and its neighbors-but the similarity ends there (Figures 1 and 2). The Golden Gate enthralls, sweeps, and symbolizes, inspiring art, music, and myth. The San Francisco Bay Bridge merely gets the job done.

Does that difference matter? We believe that it does-and that business has much to learn from this tale of the two bridges.

We find that the personal objects people cherish do more than just work-that functionality is an insufficient pre-condition for a great design.1 Beloved objects seem to share a number of other characteristics-for instance, they seem simple but complete to their users. They contain nothing extraneous, yet lack nothing important. They engage at an emotional level. Beyond their ability to serve function without fanfare and froufrou, they hook their users in an almost sensual way. Finally, these designs manage to be simultaneously enduring and innovative. They connect to the past with a reassuring familiarity, while surprising users with their inventiveness.

And so the important lessons of design (as a noun) turn out to be reassuringly straightforward. If you want great designs, seek simplicity, emotional engagement, and that sweet spot between the familiar and the new-and, of course, do the job well. And yet, if it's all that obvious, why are we surrounded by so many mediocre designs?

Which brings us to the tricky part, the act of designing-that is, design as a verb.

Designing is the difficult part. And like most things that are hard to do, it is where the competitive advantage lies. Better designing-of products, organizations, strategies-holds the key to unlocking the real potential that design has for business.