Someone asked me who’s the design head in our company? I am not sure. My answer would be everyone. Everyone is a strategist and everyone is a designer (or design thinker) in our company. We long understood strategy doesn’t necessarily come from strategist, and design idea doesn’t necessarily come from designer. Design wants to change the world and often over thinking and under-doing. Strategy wants to change the world but stuck in an old paradigm of management.
Strategy, management and design are not what it used to be.
“Strategy” is distancing itself from “Competition” and “Innovation” is distancing itself from “Invention”. Strategy now needs design and design needs strategy in order to have impact. Met John Maeda today and his idea of the difference between art and design is design should is being ”relevant” and art should is being “free” and design is “producable” and art is “imaginable”. Those are good observations.
Let’s come back to business strategy for a moment, if “strategy’ is “predictable” then innovation is “unknown”. Business schools are not very good in teaching people seeing, imagining, conceptualizing, and visualizing the future. Design schools are very good in training people to imagining and asking questions, but terrible in understand from a system view how the world works.
Strategy’s ultimate goal is to create power and exercise them to your benefit. Design’s ultimate goal is to come up with solutions to a predefined problem. Art’s goal is to ask questions and reflect on some of our paradoxes and express deeper concepts that sometimes words fail to do the job. If strategy is ultimately about effectively exercising power, the answers to these questions may convey a good deal about how we think strategically. There is ample ground to conclude that our ability simply to cope with—much less shape—a future of pronounced complexity, uncertainty, and turbulence will depend in large measure on the prevalence of strategic thinkers in our midst. Ideas and the ability to generate them seem increasingly likely, in fact, to be more important than capital and weapons.
The question is what type of thinkers do we need that has the intellect to dissect the status quo, grasp the big picture, discern important relationships among events, understand causation and events, generate imaginative possibilities to inspire, and operate easily in the conceptual realm as well as understand execution and change. Integrative creativity simply does not exist today.
As Maeda puts it, "Right now, our nation sees left-brain thinking, focused on logic and reasoning, as critical to future economic development. You can see it in the emphasis on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) subjects. What's missing from STEM is right brain thinking -- embodied by what I call the key "IDEA" (Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art). We need both both halves of the brain to work together and channel that brilliance through our hands and propagate ideas throughout our world." That's what we meant by the power of D-schools + b-schools.