I attended a talk yesterday, given by Roger Martin (Dean and professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management). He argued that businesses are driven by "analytical thinking" - the need to refine, examine and measure the past, limit bias and minimize judgment in any conclusions.  The goal of all this is to have reliability (consistent, repeatable outcomes).  Yet, to stay competitive, a company also needs innovation.  And, this is really what software/IT development is about - new code and new ideas, and not just improvements and refinements in algorithms and process.  This second kind of thinking is "design thinking". 

Design thinking is about finding new heuristics and algorithms, not about refining existing ones.  In this world, one considers the future - along with some bias and judgment calls.  The goal of this is to have validity - the production of future outcomes that meet objectives.  Wow, these two worlds are really different - and I have seen the differences come out in many discussions, in many ways.

For example, I am working with some IT customers on new ways to capture and formalize business information.  But, the business people are very reluctant to work on this - not wanting to give up any information or to change anything.  In fact, in the business world, most new strategies are looked on with skepticism. (This may be why companies like Cisco get the majority of their new ideas from acquisition instead of internal innovation. I used to work there, so I am speaking from some experience.) 

According to Dr. Martin, all these problems stem from the differences in analytical and design thinking.  He told a story of consulting to a bank and recommending a new operational strategy. The head of the bank asked if the idea had ever been tried before.  Energetically, Dr. Martin said "NO!" - and that was the end of the idea.  For a design-thinker, "NO!" was a great answer - a chance to leapfrog competition and define whole new heuristics and algorithms.  For an analytical-thinker, it was a departure from the past with no sense of reliability.

So, what did Dr. Martin suggest?  He suggested that design-thinkers consider the following when pitching new ideas to business people:

• Make "design unfriendliness" part of the challenge in doing the new work
• Empathize with the analytical thinkers (who talk about best practices, consistency and proofs)
• Use analogies and stories to tie the ideas to past events (In his banking example, he said that a much better answer was that the new strategy was actually based on Swiss banking practices, but adapted to the environment in which he was working.  He should have explained why the strategy was based on the past - past Swiss experience and past banking environmental knowledge.)
• "Bite off as little a piece of the problem as possible" to generate proof - for example, running a small set of customers using the new strategy for 3 months and examining results. In this way, you get "proof" and have the "past" to analyze.

Similarly, Dr. Martin suggested that analytical thinkers consider "reliability unfriendliness" as part of their management challenge, empathize with the design thinkers and speak their language, share data and reasonings and not conclusions about what won't work, and "bite off as big a piece of the problem as possible" to give innovation a chance.

I thought that the talk was fascinating and plan to implement these ideas in how I pitch my innovations.

Andrea