The Design of Business

just a few years ago. As an argument for the power of design thinking, that's hard to top.

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

The company is birthed through a creative act that converts a mystery to a heuristic through intuitive thinking. It then hones and refines that heuristic through increasingly pervasive analytical thinking and enters a long phase in which the administration of business dominates. And in due course, a competitor stares at the mystery that provided th

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

Understanding did not entail progress toward an absolute truth but

Matching McDonald's accomplishment-and that of every other organization that creates value across the knowledge funnel-requires two very different activities: moving across the knowledge stages of the funnel from mystery to heuristic and heuristic to algorithm and operating within each knowledge stage of the funnel by honing and refining an existin

We develop heuristics-rules of thumb-that guide us toward a solution by way of organized exploration of the possibilities.

As such, abductive logic sits squarely between the past-data-driven world of analytical thinking and the knowing-without-reasoning world of intuitive thinking.

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