Purposive Drift

The Manager as a Designer

Back in 1974 I was a research assistant at North East London Polytechnic (now East London University). I was attached to a working party developing a multidisciplinary design degree, under the direction of Richard Fletcher. Richard had written a paper, "The Manager as a Designer", which argued, among other things, that many key design decisions were taken by managers rather than designers.

So, some thirty years later, I was intrigued to read this on the Fast Company site, "It rare that I find something of interest in a business school alumni magazine. But there's a remarkably thoughtful essay on design in the latest issue of the University of Toronto's School of Management alumni mag. It's written, no less, by the dean of the Rotman School of Management, Roger Martin. He convincingly argues that business people don't just need to understand designers better -- they need to become designers."

And then to download the PDF of the original article and read this:

"I would argue that to be successful in the future, businesspeople will have to become more like designers - more 'masters of heuristics' than 'managers of algorithms'. For much of the 20th century, they moved ahead by demonstrating the latter capability. This shift creates a huge challenge, as it will require entirely new kinds of education and training, since until now, design skills have not been explicitly valued in business. The truth is, highly-skilled designers are currently heading-up many of the world's top organizations - they just don't know they are designers, because they were never trained as such."