Book Review: The Design of Business

by Roger Martin

The Teak Yew Business Book of the month for March 2010 is The Design of Business, by Roger Martin.

Is creativity or reliability more important for your business? Do you provide a repeatable and reliable product or service, or do you focus on creating unique solutions?

It’s easy to think that you have to choose one or the other, but in his book, The Design of Business, Roger Martin discusses businesses who have found a balance between these competing imperatives. It’s called Design Thinking, and Roger Martin sees it as the next competitive advantage for business.

Design thinking is a way of working that allows innovation and efficiency to co-exist within a dynamic business environment. As Martin explains, design thinking is all about solving wicked problems. Traditional analytical problem solving, or reliability thinking, relies on using what has happened in the past to predict what will happen in the future. Wicked problems, however, are problems that can’t be solved by looking to the past. Instead, what’s required is an ability to imagine new solutions beyond our current knowledge.

Many management and business strategy issues can be seen as wicked problems. They involve many people from different disciplines and arise in complex environments where answers are not clear-cut and the past cannot be used as a predictor of the future. Yet reliability thinking still tends to prevail, as organisations often see themselves and their environments as stable or unchanging. From a strategy perspective there is a danger if a company fails to adapt to the inevitable changes in its environment.

To embrace design thinking businesses owners and managers may need to see themselves as problem setters, rather than problem solvers. Martin explains the concept of the Knowledge Funnel, giving examples of companies who actively seek out the next important mystery or wicked problem. They create value and improve their efficiency and profitability by turning these mysteries into rules-of-thumb and finally into algorithms that provide predictable solutions to the mystery.

Roger Martin’s book, The Design of Business, is thought provoking and will give business owners and managers an insight into how the way they think can affect the way they operate their businesses.

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