The Design of Business

The design thinker, in the words of novelist Saul Bellow, is "a first-class noticer"6

The final tool of the design thinker is configuration-translating the idea into an activity system that will produce the desired business outcome.

"We understood that value," Lazaridis says, "and then everything

Wicked problems, first identified by mathematician and planner Horst Rittel in the 1960s, are messy, aggressive, and confounding. Rittel's notion of wicked problems was detailed by C. West Churchman in a 1968 issue of Management Science. Churchman described wicked problems as "a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where t

stages, a business needs to think differently about three elements of its organization: its structures, its processes, and its cultural norms.

innovation. At the heart of this school is intuitive thinking-the art of knowing without reasoning. This is the world of

intuitive thinking, the design thinker uses an explicit form of logic and a process that, while less certain and clear than analytical thinking, has promise for producing advances with greater consistency and replicability than pure intuition.

In 1928, the Dow Jones

of reliability. For activities aimed at advancing knowledge, however, financial planning should consist only of setting goals and spending limits. Goals define the breakthrough

mysteries as well. "In a business," he says, "no matter how good the process is, no matter how much you've got it down pat, no matter how much money you're making, how efficient, you have to always go back and say `Is there something fundamentally wrong with the way we're seeing the market?