Strategic thinking - the design approach

A fat man and a thin man are running a race. For reasons which will become obvious later, we shall change from a ‘race’ to ‘running after the girls’. The thin man will come out ahead in most cases - unless the thinness of the thin man is due to illness or starvation! Let us look at some different thoughtapproaches to this situation.

CATEGORY APPROACH

Here we put the fat man into the appropriate ‘fat man’ category. We then know that fat men do not run very fast. This is the approach adopted by psychologists, psychiatrists and business executives in general. Once we can ‘box’ the situation, we know the expected behaviour. If it is this type of situation, then we know, from experience, how the situation will develop.

The whole of our ‘thinking software’, as developed by the GG3 (Greek Gang of 3) is about identifying the standard situations and thus knowing all about them. A doctor does this all the time. The doctor diagnoses the illness. Once the diagnosis has been made, the probable course of the illness is known. The possible complications are known.

Most important of all, the standard treatment is known. Identifying the category immediately indicates the required action. While this may be very useful in predicting the outcome of the competition between the thin and the fat man, it does not help the fat man at all.

THE GENES APPROACH

This is even more fundamental than the category approach. Here we say that the fat man has ‘fat man genes’. There is nothing he can do about it. He will always be fat, because that is the way his metabolism works. So he had better adjust to the situation and stop trying to compete with thin men.

While this approach may seem rather negative, it also seems practical. Why attempt the impossible? Be pragmatic. Do what can be done. Assess the actual capabilities of your organisation and yourself, and then play to those capabilities.

This can rather easily translate into: ‘be content with the existing situation and do not strive to change it’.

The result is complacency. Many organisations have this strategy, even though they would rarely admit it: ‘You cannot change your genes - so do not waste your time trying.’

THE ANALYSIS APPROACH

This would probably be the most common, because it arises from the way in which we are taught thinking at school, at university, in business schools etc. We analyse the situation: the fat man cannot run fast because he is fat.

We now seek to put things right. We analyse further. Why is this man fat? We refuse to accept the passivity of the ‘gene approach’. We suspect that the man is eating too much. So, based on our analysis, we take action to put things right. We put the man on a strict diet. The hope is that the fat man will indeed lose weight and will then compete with the thin man.

Analyse the situation. Find the cause. Remove the cause. You have now put things right and solved the problem. This approach works quite often. At this point we may believe that we have covered all the approaches. But we have not. The best approach is still
to come.

THE BICYCLE APPROACH

We provide the fat man with a bicycle, and he will now surely outdistance the thin man. At this point we can see why the ‘race’ metaphor would not have applied, because the rules of the race would have precluded a bicycle. The approach is not that of analysis, but the approach of ‘designing the way forward’. Here is the situation. How do we design a way forward to reach the values that we want? Design is very different from analysis.

DESIGN AND ANALYSIS

When Greek thinking was re-introduced into Europe at the Renaissance, schools and universities were largely run by the Church. The Church had a great need for the ‘truth’. This was needed to prove heretics wrong. Education became truth-obsessed. Analysis is part of the search for the truth. What are the elements here? How is this made up? What is the underlying truth?

We believed, and still believe, that if you have the truth, then action is easy. You can have the truth about the present and the past, but you cannot have the truth about the future. Design is about the future. Analysis is about the past.

You can never have the truth about something which is not yet there and will not be there until you have designed it. As a result ‘design’ has never been a part of formal education. Education is about the way things are and about the ‘truth’. Of course, there are certain fields like architecture which are all about design - even though they are too often taught as the ‘analysis of different styles’. But, in general, design is not adequately taught.

PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE

Most people working on human thinking set out to analyse the different stages of thinking. They then set out to teach these stages. But description does not provide an operational tool. The same people seek to analyse why someone thinks in a certain way. They then seek to correct any obvious faults. This is the traditional analysis approach. So what is the ‘design’ approach?

In the ‘design’ approach we design frameworks and structures which people can learn and use deliberately. So the Six Thinking Hats is a designed structure that can be learned and used. It is so practical and simple to use that it is in fact used by four-year-olds, by senior executives and by top economists. It is a far better way of exploring a subject than the absurdity of argument.

• A major corporation in Finland used to spend thirty days on its multi-national project discussions. Using the parallel thinking of the Six Hats, the discussions now take only two days.

• MDS, a company in Canada, did a careful costing and showed that using the Six Hats saved $20 million in the first year.

Another example of a ‘designed’ framework is the CoRT thinking tools which bring about an expanded perception. The Hungerford Guidance Centre in London takes youngsters who are too violent to be taught in normal schools. When David Lane was the principal, he started teaching these thinking tools to the youngsters. He has now done a 20-year follow-up, which has shown that the rate of crime, measured by convictions, is far lower in the group taught thinking than in the group not so taught. This is a remarkably powerful effect. Sadly, most people in education – and business - have no idea that designed thinking tools can make a huge difference.

DESIGN

Design means putting together what we have in order to deliver a value that we want. In the beginning every business was a design. Later, maintenance and problem solving take over, and the design element disappears.