You Can’t Prove The Future, But You Can Invent It
Tough Love for businesses that want to love design, from a Fast Company article by Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management:
Perhaps the most glaring difference between the worlds of business-as-usual and business-by-design is the way each side actually thinks. In traditional organizations, the dominant forms of logic are inductive (demonstrating through observation that something actually works) and deductive (reasoning from a set of existing principles to prove that something must be).
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Corporate folks typically believe they can “prove” the future by applying rigorous inductive and deductive logic to the present.
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Designers use inductive and deductive reasoning as well, but they also rely on a third type: abductive reasoning, the logic of what might be. A.G. Lafley, the chief executive of Procter & Gamble, understands the need to braid all three forms of creative thinking. While he is a true data hound, Lafley also pores over anecdotal research and allows customer comments to influence him even if they are not rigorously collected or statistically significant.
via MetaCool
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[…] The other day I posted on the difference between researching the future and inventing it, pointing to an article that argued design-types are more likely to user “abductive reasoning” and creative thinking to decide what the future will/should look like, while corporate-types often tend toward research and deductive reasoning. […]
Chalk One Up for Evidence Based Management - The Whiny Nil at MissingMethod - Build Something Beautiful / October 5th, 2006, 10:03 am / #
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