Design Thinking is just Good Thinking

Vanessa Miemis on her blog Emergent by Design has a nice summary of Design Thinking in her post titled What Is Design Thinking, but ultimately misses a key point. Design thinking is actually just GOOD thinking...which means asking the right questions instead of jumping to solutions. Good thinking is not limited to the world of design, but is, however, rare in the world generally.

Dan Roberts, in a comment on her blog, links to a video of Patrick Whitney explaining what design thinking is. And it is indeed a good summary of how to ask the right questions in order to innovate. But it is not really about design thinking but rather about Good Thinking.

Contrary to what Dan suggests, most of the good engineers and business strategists (certainly the ones that I have worked with) think this way in their own domains. After all, innovation does occur elsewhere other than design. If you forget for a moment that Patrick is talking about design thinking and ask what he is really diagramming in his video, he is saying that to get innovation you have to use abstraction to enlarge the domain of your inquiry about the nature of the problem. Well, interestingly enough, this is what every clever and innovative person who has ever had a good idea (particularly world transforming one) does.

What Patrick is actually saying in that video is that good thinking is about asking the right questions...not about jumping to solutions. And I suspect that if you look at how good MBAs and Engineers are trained, they will be taught to ask the right questions to identify possibilities because that mitigates risk.

So in the end analysis, there is no such thing as Design thinking...there is only GOOD thinking. Unfortunately, most people are pretty rubbish at thinking...and so most of the decisions that people make are pretty average and not particularly innovative. But blame that on the education system, not the lack of "design thinking".

But of course, the entire debate about "design thinking" is about trying to assess whether or not this "new" way of thinking can help businesses innovate and make the world a better place....

So, as for whether or not we can design better futures with "design/good thinking:...well, I do believe we can design better solutions to the problems we have and understand now (which have logical extensions/impacts into the future). But if one really understands how complex systems work, every thing we (and everyone else) does has an impact on how our future will play out...and not always in the ways that we can anticipate (because we are not omniscient). The design process, while good at coming up with innovative solutions to problems we can identify now, is not so good at anticipating the future.

Part of the reason that businesses (and societies) prefer to respond to the present rather than design a better future is because actually the latter is largely impossible. What they tend to do is make plans and contingencies in order to be prepared to respond to an unpredictable future where any number of things can happen.

Like all complex systems, the future is the result of the cumulative decisions of all the components in that system acting freely. To reduce them to a deterministic future (e.g. designing the future) is to destroy the very structure of that complexity and eliminate emergence as a fundamental, organic and evolutionary phenomenon...and I would argue, is ultimately futile. From an application of resources point of view (e.g. return on investment relative to the likelyhood of achieving a successful outcome), it is often better to respond intelligently to the present than to invest too much into trying to control or anticipate the future.

A good example of this phenomenon how the world community is currently approaching the issues of global warming. Because the system is so complex, the investment so significant and the outcomes of any given set of solutions so unpredictable, that most governments/businesses/people are not willing to do anything until it becomes a crisis. But this is not just a problem with societies, governments or businesses....this is a fundamental human trait. Very few of us are proactive about all the things we should be doing to ensure we are successful and live longer and happier lives...we only tend to react when a problem presents itself or there is a crisis. Unfortunately, all the good thinking and good designs for how things "should" or "could" be can't change this.

Having said that, designing our own futures (or rather trying to influence the future that we would like to live in) is also a fundamental part of our psyche (and our attempts at improving our individual and collective survival)...so we will always want to design better futures. But those of us who create these solutions need also to accept that there will always be a tension between what any individual or group imagines "should be" and what actually happens. After all, the future is not our decision alone...it is the result of the often unintended consequences of our collective (and individual) attempts to influence it for our own interests colliding with all those unintentional actions and random events that make up the complex system we exist in.

So the best we can do is to just be open, inquisitive, adaptive, rigourous and thorough in both our thinking and our actions, enjoy ourselves...and hope for the best.