In Business Grand Design

For a long time I was frightened of thinking. It was (I assumed) an analytic practice. I had a brain that was wretched at analysis. But quite good at synthesis and association.

Actually, that wasn’t all bad. As you get older, analysis tends to lose its vigour; it's a young persons’ game. But synthesis goes on, and gets better results, perhaps as you get more experience to synthesise as you get older.

I would like to have been taught that a long time ago. But they didn’t seem to teach thinking in those days. However it is now becoming a discipline in its own right, and this week’s programme hears from several people keenly interested in rethinking business ideas, from a very specific point of view.

Business schools are all very well, if you’ve got the time and the money to invest in them. Management education gives its expensive students the tools to do the job: analytic techniques, strategic skill sets, case studies about historic problems to be solved afresh, and of course a prodigious network of fellow graduates who will go out and conquer their own worlds.

But business schools may also give those who attend them the dangerous feeling that the outside world can be fenced off from the gated community inhabited by the business enterprise.

Companies are quick to find ways of cutting themselves off from their customers... and maybe that process is encouraged by the MBA education gained by at least some of the bosses at an impressionable time of their lives.

One or two business schools I know are seeking to break down this intellectual isolation, but last year the weighty Harvard Business Review printed an important article from outside the walls of academe which moved the ideas of business thinking onwards and outwards.

It was written by the designer Tim Brown, the British born Royal College of Art graduate who is now president and chief executive of the international design group Ideo, based in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley (that place again!).

He thinks that design has a great deal to teach managers. His HBR article was called Design Thinking.

For many years Ideo has gone far deeper into business than merely designing products. A walk round any of the Ideo studios is exhilarating. Ideo’s designers often start a project by creating a pretty detailed profile of the customer who may use the final product: a fully fleshed out biography that will enable them to envision how real people will respond to thing they are creating.

But design thinking goes deeper than that. Tim Brown argues that thinking like designers ought to animate many aspects of management, hitherto obsessed with process and marketing and strategy to the often exclusion of the people who will buy the product or service the company is trying to make.

If business people pay attention, it might create nothing less than a revolution. Managers love to repeat the mantra “Keep it simple stupid”. But life isn’t simple, and designers may be more aware of that than companies are.

In this programme, the Head of Design for Virgin Atlantic Airways, Joe Ferry, points out that designers are used to dealing with the messy real world. They are not afraid of coping with unresolved problems which may baffle the tidy-minded conventional manager. Design Thinking may have huge potential.

That’s just a thought... but quite a big one. The kind they really ought to be teaching at business school.

Peter Day