The Design Process: to explore and to challenge.

“The Industrial Revolution is over.” The most striking and revealing statement by Idris Mootee in his book, Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation. It embodies the spirit about what makes the design process so special.

Differences aside, it aims to attain a similar effect as that of Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece, Thus spoke Zarathustra, and the presumption that man must find a new mode of being given the death of God. So much is talked upon how we must change for the sake of future generations, but not much is done from a paradigmatic point of view.

Let’s change our belief systems if we wish to change our realities.

Design’s disciplined imagination is a means to free ourselves from the rational-logical-linear model that keeps us frozen in a fast-moving and uncertain environment. It opens an opportunity to address the need for the transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones.

The world is changing and we must change with it.

The benefits rely on an integrative thinking approach to consider challenges on a systems level through inquiry and expression and its consequent complementation for the enhancement of existing skills, behaviours, and techniques.

Having the design process mode of analysis embedded into an organization’s fundamentals bestows the capacity to re-discover valuable opportunities that might seem hidden from traditional ways of working. A deep understanding from the point of view of the end user is encouraged to arrive to creative solutions for unmet needs within a specific context and constraints of a specific situation.

This fosters the remarkable ability to structure chaos to enhance strategic decision making as a multidisciplinary approach to business problem solving. In the technological and fast-changing context of the future, as a meaningful holistic experience it seeks to better understand the components of a wide variety of problems through business strategy, portfolio management, market power, industry dynamics, channel economics, and capital intensity.

The tools and tactics to grapple with a prospective design problem are action oriented, intended to acknowledge and act upon the human need for meaning and connectivity. These, creative and logical, can facilitate innovation and transformation, making strategic management not only efficient but effective by being clearer.

Furthermore, the relevance of intuition as a unique human factor to reach clarity for strategic decision making is highlighted as a key component of this tool set. Having a strong sense of intuition reflects having an acute awareness of timing, and that in itself is an art to master.

“There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die, (growth-storytelling)

a time to plant and a time to uproot, (predictability-strategic foresight)

a time to kill and a time to heal, (change-sensing)

a time to tear down and a time to build, (relevance-value redefinition)

a time to weep and a time to laugh, (extreme competition-experience design)

a time to mourn and a time to dance, (standardization-humanization)

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, (creative culture-prototyping)

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, (strategy and organization-business model design)

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.”

– Ecclesiastes 3,1:8. Holy Bible NIV

These actions nurture the ability to think about wider systems, interdependencies, interconnectedness, and the different patterns of behavior that are emerging. Therefore, if we allow ourselves to believe that all things begin and end as stories, we will understand that the story of a company truly determines its purpose and value.

If you write it, you own it.

Complexity and diversity are lost when efforts are concentrated to ensure predictability. Being able to adapt to a specific context and explore for variation while surfing ambiguity is a way to make sense of disruption and to sustain competitiveness. This is a viable alternative to help organizations in shaping business decisions based on future opportunities rather than past events.

“The universe is not being pushed from behind; it’s being pulled from the future.” (Terrence McKenna in Approaching Timewave Zero, Magical Blend, no. 44, 1994) If long-term weather forecasting is proven to be impossible we must find a way to evolve and adapt on a daily basis given that certainly, all of our actions will create our future.