Business Design – Creative Art or Engineering Discipline?

This blog is about ‘connections’ – by definition a connection requires two distinct concepts that can be linked together. In this post I explore the connections between Business and Design. Is Business Design a Creative Art or an Engineering Discipline?

Business is defined as ‘purposeful activity – usually commercial or mercantile in nature’. Design on the other hand is defined as ‘to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan’; ‘to conceive and plan out in the mind’; and ‘to devise for a specific function or end’.

Putting these two concepts together we arrive at Business Design (follow this link for more information). Business Design is viewed by some as a creative and artistic endeavour. Roger Martin of Rotman School of Management defines business design as follows:

“Great design is characterized by a deep understanding of the user, creative resolution of tensions, collaborative prototyping and continuous modification and enhancement of ideas and solutions. Great design is characterized by Integrative ThinkingTM. The application of these principles to business practices is what we call Business DesignTM”

The businessweek article (see here) quotes Procter & Gamble’s CEO A.G. Lafley from his book The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation.

“Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence),” he writes. “Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.”

The Three C’s of Business Design

The site OlayForYou clearly illustrates the 3C’s of Business Design. First and foremost is the notion of the Consumer. The entire experience is centered around the consumer – their concerns, issues and solutions. It is based on a deep understanding of the consumer – their life-stage, the nature of their skin, their gender, and their aspirations. It empathizes with the consumer and ‘creates what could be possible’.

The second C of Business Design is Collaboration. The consumer is intimately involved in developing the solution for himself or herself. By asking a series of questions the system narrows in on the key parameters of the design space (e.g., aging induced wrinkles for someone in their 40’s with dry skin condition). Once the design space has been identified it then uses abduction or the best possible explantion for the consumers concern to develop a solution (e.g., best possible product and treatment for the given situation).

Context - the third component of good Business Design comes through in the OlayForYou with the creative design of the site, the guided tour of a friendly human voice, and the conversational tone that makes the consumer feel at ease and will to share information.

Business Design as design thinking or integrative thinking is gaining in importance and is being actively promoted by a number of academic institutions (e.g.,Rotmans School of Management, Instiute of Design at Stanford, and Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology). While it is laudable to bring aspects of creative design into designing businesses or developing innovative business models and creating the future, I think it should not just stop there. The emerging inter-disciplinary area of Business Design should also draw its inspiration from Engineering Design.

The Three F’s of Business Design

Viewed as an engineering discipline, the 3 F’s of Form, Function, and Fit play a major role in Businesss Design. Form in the engineering sense refers to shape, size, dimension and other physical characteristing of an object. In the context of business design ‘form‘ refers to the organizational structure of the business – how hierarchical or how flat the organization is and where the decision rights in the organization reside.

Function within the context of business design refers to the business processes or functions that a business performs – producing a widget or delivering a service or creating an experience. Going back to the definition of a business as ‘purposeful activity’ it is the business function that characterizes the purpose of the business.

The most important aspect of business design is ‘fit’ - how well do the different components of the business fit together – from the customer needs, to the product, to the strategy of the firm, to the ecosystem that the business is embedded in, to the business processes, the information architecture, the organization structure, and the IT systems.

No company better exemplifies the ethos of Business Design than Apple – both in its creative design and in its engineering discipline. The creative element in all things Apple needs no elaboration – the sleek design of the iPhone, the beauty of the ultra-slim MacBook, and even their elegant and distinctive stores are the envy of any Design house.

However, it is not just the creative part of Business Design that is at work at Apple. Apple also exemplifies the engineering discipline of business design. The ‘form’ or how Apple is organized plays a great role in its innovative designs. As quoted by Daniel Turner in MIT Technology Review:

“The businessman wants to create something for everyone, which leads to products that are middle of the road,” says Brunner. “It becomes about consensus, and that’s why you rarely see the spark of genius.”

“Critical to Apple’s success in design is the way Jobs brought focus and discipline to the product teams,” Norman says. “[Jobs] had a single, cohesive image of the final product and would not allow any deviation, no matter how promising a new proposed feature appeared to be, no matter how much the team complained. Other companies are more democratic, listening to everyone’s opinions, and the result is bloat and a lack of cohesion.

Brunner says that part of what makes minimalist design possible at Apple is the way Jobs structured the design group–and the way he privileged it. “The design leader has to walk a fine line,” he says. “He has to be integrated with the company but keep his team members protected from being lobbied by marketing, engineers, manufacturers. They all have viewpoints on design.” In recognition of these pressures, Apple has always kept its design team small–somewhere between 12 and 20 people, Brunner estimates.

The importance given to the Design group and the uncompromising attitude of Steve Jobs defined the ‘form’ of the company. This to a great extent allows Apple to fulfill its primary business function of delivering the ‘Best Designed’ gadgets in an aesthetically pleaseing way. The fit between the product and consumer tastes is what catapulted iPod and iPhone to their pre-eminent positions in the market. The product design itself was aided by the fit between the design and how the company was organized to create superior design with no compromises.

As business design gains in popularity both in academic circles and in practice, I hope that the tension between the elements of creative art and the elements of engineering discipline both enrich the field of business design.

I’ll continue to explore the concept of business design and show connections between business design and system dynamics, as well as business design and artificial intelligence in my future blogs.