Roger Martin Says Designers Can Predict the Future

Rotman School of Management dean and author of several fantastic books Roger Martin wants to tell us why design thinking is the next competitive advantage. He breaks down design thinking this way: Problems begin as a Mystery, and “mysteries are enormously expensive for the world.” People then try to break them down into Heuristics, a way of understanding something. Eventually, problem solvers can convert that into an Algorithm: an exact formula for figuring out what we want.

Roger Martin on the competitive advantage of design.

He gives the example of McDonald’s as a solution to feeding casually-dressed, beach-bound Southern Californians, which became a franchise, repeatable again and again all over the world. Any organization who can take a mystery, and convert it into an algorithm efficiently, has a competitive advantage, he says, and they can make money to invest in solving the next problem. Obviously the next algorithm to conquer for the restaurant industry was to create food that didn’t kill us. “That’s why we have Subway,” he quips.

Analytical thinkers prove their decisions through induction and deduction; intuitive thinkers make their decisions based on gut reactions. Design thinkers have a perfect 50/50 balance of the two. The result is a great combination of both Reliability & Validity, what Roger calls a productive balance. The design thinker finds out ways to communicate to both the analytical thinkers and the intuitive thinkers at a corporation to help them bridge the gap between everything that came before (what can be proven) and what is yet to come (what we must imagine). So here’s the thing. Since designers are so good at cultivating their intuitive skills, that they can envision what hasn’t yet happened. Yes, designers can predict the future. Tell that to your boss.