Chris Writes.

During the two years I spent at the Rotman School of Management, the school’s Dean, Roger Martin, developed a glossy sheen that was applied to many facets of the academic curriculum, and designated to be “Integrative Thinking”. It’s a framework that, while best explained in far more detail than I’ll get into here, basically shone a spotlight on the success that can be found when a problem is not solved by selecting between alternatives, but rather synthesizing the best of all alternatives. Said even more plainly: it’s a systematized way of achieving ‘also/and’ instead of settling for ‘either/or’.

In the not-quite-five years since I graduated, this framework has evolved, earned media praise, birthed books published at Harvard Press, and most importantly, it’s been something I’ve been able to apply in regular doses across the multiplicity of my responsibilities. Now, Roger has expanded his approach into a new realm, termed “Design Thinking”, as something that’s not so much an evolution of Integrative Thinking, but rather as a critical and practical way to bridge the gap between the practicality of integrative thinking, and the possibilities that come out of visionary imaginations. Design Thinking, rather than focusing specifically on decision making and synthesis of options, focuses instead on thinking styles, and synthesis of analytic rigor with the artistry of intuition, thus providing the tools required to actually create something new. Again, please note this definition, and entire blog post, is violently truncated. For the whole story, go read this, and probably this too. And for a single-shot of the whole discussion, created in real-time on a giant flip chart, here’s an overly large picture that you can print out poster size if you want.

On Monday, Roger paid a visit to Jump Associates, a Design Consultancy in nearby San Mateo, just a short few miles from my home in Redwood City. He was there for an evening lecture on Design Thinking in promotion of his new book. I wanted to summarize some of the insights, and where I can, relate some of the key points back to bikes. Maybe, just maybe, this might help to show that while the majority of the cycling world may never talk in the same language of strategy consulting firms, the business model fundamentals, competitive landscape, and strategy dynamics are sufficiently complex to justify application of this level of thought. Bike biz is full of smrt people. Sometimes we don’t give ourselves proper credit. (for extra points, go recruit a Rotman grad or two, k?)

Roger’s talk covered many areas, but two sets of interplayed dynamics seemed key to the topic:

1. reliability vs validity
2. inductive/deductive logic vs abductive logic

PART 1: Business in general tends to prefer reliable results, through broad application of proven templates and template-styled thinking, and data analysis tools like linear regression: give the same set of numbers to a group of statisticians, and ask them to use the data to predict the future trends, and they’ll all come up with *exactly* the same answer, the same confidence interval, and the same measures of statistical significance. Sadly, this does not mean that the data will predict what will really happen. As a bike example: the number of speeds on a new mountain bike has progressed steadily upwards over the years. However, this does not mean that we should expect 56-speed bikes by 2025.

Validity, on the other hand, is being able to look past what might be expected, to apply some insight, outside knowledge, or deep understanding, to adjust strategy to match an accurate future, instead of the one that everyone expects, or that mathematics says it can predict. It’s everything that templates are not. Linear regression-styled thinking, for example, would not have expected the number of speeds on an XC racing bike to go from 27 down to 20, yet SRAM’s new XX component group has done exactly that *and* improved performance for these riders. They did it by understanding what those riders needed, at a very fundamental human level, and it wasn’t more gears.

Good business designers, Roger postulates, achieve validity by applying imagination and creativity to the challenges they face. Designers tend to imagine the future, versus a business analyst who uses linear regressions and data to try to predict it. This is not to say that a good designer simply discards analysis; more accurate would be to say that they still rely heavily on analysis, but in the face of an intuitive notion that conflicts with the data, they simply have the brass balls required to challenge the authority of the graphs.

One good related story here that Roger shared was from his days at Monitor, when he was hired by Rob Harvey, who headed up design at Herman Miller. The project: the Aeron chair. This was a chair that when people first saw it garnered nothing but negative comments, sometimes even hostility. He persevered through the first impressions to create an absolute icon. When Roger asked Rob at the time why he, the head of design, was hiring a strategy consultant, Rob replied “Isn’t strategy a design process?”

PART 2: Typically, the business world relies on inductive and deductive logic, essentially ‘what will be’ based on what we know of causal relationships. As a bike example: gas prices are increasing, so alternative modes of both fuel and transport will be required, leading to the conclusion that bike sales will naturally increase. Seems reasonable enough, right?

Roger made the case that designers rely additionally on abductive logic: thinking ‘what might be’, based on what we know of human behavior, latent needs, and our own intuition. An example here might be to use the same gas price pressures to justify designing villages and neighborhoods that simply require less travel, and to perhaps design them by looking at senior communities (since they’re already low mobility) as models for ways we could better design new family communities that required less transport. That sort of thing.

The refrain here from both sides is that business people claim designers aren’t practical, while design people claim business people aren’t imaginative. To a large extent, these stereotypes are correct. This is probably in part because the business types enjoy their reliability even if it means they’re stuck making relatively safe but boring incremental improvements (ie ‘we made our new carbon race wheels 4 grams lighter’). Similarly, the designers enjoy their claim on validity even if it means being commercially wrong sometimes (ie ‘Trek Lime’).

As people, we all have a personal and immediate reaction to aesthetics, whether it’s a chair or a TT frame – products evoke reactions because they’re immediate and sensory. Business has a similar but less obvious aesthetic, which might be as simple as thinking of as the ‘brand’ as the product, or as Roger put it, to say that managers work in the medium of strategy. The reactions a brand creates, and the relationships that it develops with the people it was designed for: these are what define it as being well designed, or poorly designed. And like the Aeron chair, sometimes first glance isn’t indicative of the future. Just as we’ve seen more recently with fixies & Rotor rings, or years ago with SRAM twist shifters: the initial reaction was a poor gauge of their potential.

It’s worth noting that the business designer, then, doesn’t pick from the business rules or the design rules exclusively. Instead, business design seems to be about using both, and having the wisdom, forsight, and the guts to play both sides of the field. I suppose, then, that Roger has done a particularly good job of combining integrative thinking with design thinking. Integrative thinking and design thinking together create a very robust set of thought principles. It’s likely no accident that they work best in an ‘and/also’ partnership.