Enterprise Design Thinking – part 1

A creative way of thinking is required to bring business architecture to its full potential. Just copying common practice from the enterprise architecture doesn’t work. This would have been too simple because information technology excels in Systems Thinking while business primarily bases its decisions on intuition.

David M. Kelley founder of IDEO and Professor at Institute of Design at Stanford University is known for adapting design thinking for business purposes – an organic approach combining intuitive thinking and analytical thinking instead of an engineering way of thinking to design products and services.

“At what cost do we keep pleasing the user? This question can only be answered from a holistic perspective, which has been centralized around the value proposition in respect to generated margin by happy customers.“

In practice we see design thinking being applied in IT workspace around user experiences. Potentially facing danger of losing intuitive thinking due to constrains set by IT expertise or solutions.

From a business perspective we should never neglect primary focus on value proposition, creating and addressing the needs and wants of paying customers.

As mentioned above a business is both organic and organized. Therefore  applying a structured approach will still be feasible. Dev Patnaik founder and principal of Jump Associates introduced us to Hybrid Thinking – one-part humanist, one-part technologist and one-part capitalist. He points out to be more focused and curate creativity.

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that a tomato doesn’t belong in a fruit salad.” – Miles Kington

Roger L. Martin dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto taught us about design thinking – the ability to both exploit existing knowledge and create new knowledge – and integrative thinking – the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and generating a creative solution that contains elements of the individual models.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while”. – Steve Jobs

The way forward is the sum of design thinking and systems thinking. Simply stated adding holistic perspective and structure of systems thinking to design thinking. The term Enterprise Design Thinking describes it all: a way of thinking to create a business architecture that is value-focused, strategy-driven and process-oriented

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