︎ What’s the difference between design thinking and traditional business thinking?
Written by Giacomo Felace
Design thinking is a foreign language to most entrepreneur and managers. This is because the principles of traditional business management evolved to serve the needs of the industrial age. They rely on a mechanical two-step process for making decisions: knowing & doing.
The problem with this process is that what you know is limited to either “what is” or “what was”, while innovation is all about “what could be” .
It’s impossible to know what could be without the process of design. To generate new ideas, the design process inserts a middle step: making.
Through the act of prototyping, the making step puts options on the table that weren’t there before.
It pushes back on what we think we know, and also changes what we’re likely to do. It shifts the emphasis from deciding the future to designing the future.
In a business climate that requires perpetual innovation, industrial-age thinking is useful, but woefully inadequate. We also need design thinking.