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Design Attitude

Business model innovation rarely happens by coincidence. But This distinction is particularly applicable to business model innova-
neither is it the exclusive domain of the creative business genius. tion. You can do as much analysis as you want yet still fail to develop
It is something that can be managed, structured into processes, and a satisfactory new business model. The world is so full of ambiguity
used to leverage the creative potential of an entire organization. and uncertainty that the design attitude of exploring and prototyping
multiple possibilities is most likely to lead to a powerful new business
The challenge, though, is that business model innovation remains model. Such exploration involves messy, opportunistic bouncing
messy and unpredictable, despite attempts to implement a process. back and forth between market research, analysis, business model
It requires the ability to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty until a prototyping, and idea generation. Design attitude is far less linear and
good solution emerges. This takes time. Participants must be willing uncertain than decision attitude, which focuses on analysis, decision,
to invest significant time and energy exploring many possibilities and optimization. Yet a purposeful quest for new and competitive
without jumping too quickly to adopt one solution. The reward for growth models demands the design approach.
time invested will likely be a powerful new business model that
246 assures future growth. Damien Newman of the design firm Central eloquently expressed
the design attitude in an image he calls the “Design Squiggle.” The
We call this approach design attitude, which differs sharply from Design Squiggle embodies the characteristics of the design process:
the decision attitude that dominates traditional business manage- Uncertain at the outset, it is messy and opportunistic, until it focuses
ment. Fred Collopy and Richard Boland of the Weatherhead School on a single point of clarity once the design has matured.
of Management eloquently explain this point in their article “Design
Matters” in the book Managing as Designing. The decision attitude,
they write, assumes that it is easy to come up with alternatives but
difficult to choose between them. The design attitude, in contrast,
assumes that it is difficult to design an outstanding alternative,
but once you have, the decision about which alternative to select
becomes trivial (see p. 164).

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