Designing the Future of Business

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Agility Beats Ownership

Today, there's no safe ground in business. The old barriers to competition—ownership of factories, access to capital, technology patents, regulatory protection, distribution choke holds, customer ignorance—are rapidly collapsing. In our Darwinian era of perpetual innovation, we're either commoditizing or revolutionizing.

Why does change always have to be crisis-driven? Is it possible to change ahead of the curve? What keeps companies from the continuous transformation needed to keep up with the speed of the market?

A company can't will itself to be agile. Agility is an emergent property that appears when an organization has the right mindset, the right skills, and the ability to multiply those skills through collaboration. To count agility as a core competence, you have to embed it into the culture. You have to encourage an enterprisewide appetite for radical ideas. You have to keep the company in a constant state of inventiveness. It's one thing to inject a company with inventiveness. It's another thing to build a company on inventiveness.

To organize for agility, your company needs to develop a "designful mind." A designful mind confers the ability to invent the widest range of solutions for the wicked problems now facing your company, your industry, and your world.

Next, Eco-Everything

Necessity may well be the mother of invention. But if we continue to manufacture mountains of toxic stuff, invention may soon become the mother of necessity. Our natural resources will disappear and our planet made uninhabitable.

As a thought experiment, imagine a future in which all companies were compelled to take back every product they made. How would that change their behavior? For starters, they would make their products with parts they could salvage and reuse at the end of their lifecycles. This, in turn, would spawn whole industries dedicated to the design of reusable materials. As companies struggled to afford the full cost of manufacturing, the prices of products and services would rise. To keep prices under control, companies would localize their operations to save on transportation costs. Localizing businesses would change the nature of communities, creating a network of quasi-independent economies more akin to the Agricultural Age than to the Industrial Age.

In Germany, Volkswagen (VOWG) is demonstrating that corporate responsibility doesn't end at the loading dock. The company is already selling cars that are 85% recyclable and 95% reusable, and it's building a zero-emissions car that operates on a fuel cell, 12 batteries, and a solar panel instead of fossil fuels.

While eco-sustainability isn't yet top-of-mind for most CEOs, when the tide finally turns, it'll turn fast. There's already a significant migration of talented executives from traditional technology to green technology. As venture capitalist Adam Grosser puts it: "They have had their consciousness energized, and they believe there is a lot of money to be made."

Business is Design Blind

Until a decade or so ago, the public's taste for design had been stunted by the limitations of mass production. Now people have more buying choices, so they're choosing in favor of beauty, simplicity, and the "tribal identity" of their favorite brands.

Yet if design is such a powerful tool, why aren't more practitioners working in corporations? If economic value increasingly derives from such intangibles as knowledge, inspiration, and creativity, why don't we hear the language of design echoing down the corridors?

Unfortunately, most business managers are deaf, dumb, and blind when it comes to the creative process. They learned their chops by rote, through a bounded tradition of spreadsheet-based theory. As one MBA joked, in his world, the language of design is a sound only dogs can hear.

For businesses to bottle the kind of experiences that rivet minds and run away with hearts, not just one time but over and over, they'll need to do more than hire designers. They'll need to be designers. They'll need to think like designers, feel like designers, work like designers. The narrow-gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today's wicked problems. We can no longer play the music as written. Instead, we have to invent a whole new scale.

Business Exchange related topics:
Marketing Innovation
Product Design
Sustainable Design
Business Intelligence

Provided by Design Management Review—This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Design Management Review, which explores how great design provides long-term competitive advantage in a changing world. The Review was founded in 1989 and is published quarterly.