To design is to do. The term “design thinking” has become fashionable in business schools. But what business school folks don’t get is that design is the integration of thinking and action.
There is a bit of history here. Up till the 1960’s, not much thinking was done in business schools at all. The faculty were mostly business executives who would come in and tell students about their experiences, without much in the way of theory or research to back it up. The result was that business schools were seen on university campuses as lightweights. When the Ford and Carnegie Foundations issued reports on management education, they called for sweeping changes. With these changes began the business school as we know it today. Business schools are now rigorous, research-focused institutions that are respected – albeit grudgingly – by university administrations and other departments.
This new-found respect reflects the massive success of business schools. According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) there are more than 600 accredited schools, with many more emerging in developing countries. MBA degrees conferred in the US outnumber Law degrees by a factor of 3, and MD’s by a factor of 8.
Few would question the price of all that success. Much has been invested in business research and we now know a great deal more about what makes markets and managers tick than we used to. Nevertheless, some argue that the business school culture pays scant attention to ethics and breeds technocratic managers, rather than leaders.
However you look at it, managers are taught to think: a persistent issue in business schools is that the intense education students receive about theories and models leaves little room for confronting complex situations and working their way through them. Much of the learning in business schools is neatly packaged and simplified in ways that preserve the elegance of the model, but do little to test it against reality. Case studies, for example, provide only information that is relevant (from the casewriter’s perspective) and have all the information neatly tabulated, in one place. With a case study, you don’t have to go over to the plant and try to extract data from a grumpy production supervisor.
Design, by contrast, is “thinking in action”: in the act of trying, you learn and you feed that learning into your next effort. By doing, you define the problem itself: if one approach doesn’t work, then we mustn’t have been addressing the right problem; what if we tried another? By the time a designer has tried out several approaches, the problem appears very different.
As Goethe said, “Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.” The power of design is in putting thoughts into action. Next time you hear someone use the phrase “design thinking”, tell them Goethe was a designer. You may not convince them, but at least you’ll sound smart.
