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Devotions
Design Thinking balances analytical thinking and intuitive thinking, enabling an organization to both exploit existing knowledge and create new knowledge. A design-thinking organization is capable of effectively advancing knowledge from mystery to heuristic to algorithm, gaining a cost advantage over its competitors along the way. And with that cost advantage, it can redirect its design thinking capacity to solve the next important mystery and advance still further ahead of its competitors. In this way, the design-thinking organization is capable of achieving lasting and regenerating competitive advantage.
My Devotion:
I am devoted to helping companies, who tend to be ruled by analytical thinking, integrate into their thinking pattern, the best of intuitive thinking, which is typically the thinking pattern of artists and designers. Analytical thinkers tend to see “creatives” as potentially useful but quite scary because they don’t understand how “creatives” think – if they think at all! And creatives tend to see business-people as closed to new and potentially powerful ways of looking at things. As a consequence, they are more inclined to fight with or detach from one another – not utilize one another’s unique capability.
Neither understands that each needs one another. Analytical thinking is great for exploiting knowledge within the existing stage – i.e. refining an existing heuristic or honing a current algorithm. Intuitive thinking is great for advancing knowledge to the next stage – i.e. exploration of mysteries to make them heuristics or heuristics to make them algorithms. Analytical thinkers focus almost exclusively on generating reliability – the ability to produce a consistent, replicable outcome – while intuitive thinkers focus on validity – the production of a desired outcome, whether or not it is consistent or replicable.
I am committed to helping exploitation and reliability-driven analytical thinkers and exploration and validity-driven intuitive thinkers understand why and how they need each other and why the higher goal for each is to develop their design thinking capacity. This is the capacity to combine the best of analytical and intuitive thinking into a reasoning capability that balances exploitation and exploration; that seeks reliability and validity; that provides the fastest and best movement through the Knowledge Funnel; and provides lasting competitive advantage in the 21st century.
