Design Thinking: How Thinking Like a Designer Can Create Sustainable Advantage

By: Roger L. Martin

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: Designers tend to actively look for new data points, challenge prevailing wisdom, and wonder about possible new worlds. However, to many middle managers, asking them to think like a designer is tantamount to asking them to be less productive and more subversive and flaky. For many leaders, the risk of breaking with time-tested data and experience in favor of innovation is too great. But for design-thinking expert Roger Martin, the real danger to the corporation is to maintain an environment that is hostile to creativity, leaving it at the mercy of competitors who look upstream to find unprecedented solutions to business problems. In this chapter, he explains why embracing abductive reasoning--a skill exhibited by the most imaginative designers--alongside more traditional inductive and deductive models is in the best interest of organizations that want to prosper from design thinking, and individuals who want to be design thinkers. The case of RIM--creator of the Blackberry--is examined. This chapter was originally published as Chapter 3 of "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage."