Over the past decade we have been studying great designers and their organizations to learn what they can tell us about developing great managers. Our timing on this turns out to be fortuitous for at least two reasons. One has to do with the nature of design. Design is most often a response to the kind of complex problems that cannot be solved with a simple fix. And the world of modern management faces more and more such problems. The growing complexity and interrelatedness of the social, technical, and economic realms calls for more explicit attention to how we manage by designing. Another reason is that the world is gaining interest in the relationship of managing and designing. Business Week has done special sections over the past two years on the topic (and is preparing to do another). The Harvard Business Review has published several articles (including one in which David Pink speculated that "the MFA may be the new MBA"). And the CEOs of companies such as IDEO and Procter & Gamble have written books about how design is permeating and changing organizational cultures and the practice of management.

Managers have been trained to view themselves as decision-makers and leaders. While these are important to effective management, there is more to great management. Part of that more is captured in what we have called the design attitude.

The design attitude is that of a generalist. While most designers do have specialist knowledge and skills, the attitude with which they approach each new assignment is one of seeing it as an opportunity to learn new things and sweep in the broadest possible array of influences. This is done in part as an acknowledgement of the rapidly changing world in which they work, and in part as a consequence of a belief that we can do better than what has been done before.

So what are the elements of such an attitude. Kamil Michlewski observed 14 senior designers and managers at IDEO, Nissan Design, Philips Design, and Wolff Olins and proposed that there are at least five interrelated concepts and values that define a culture of design.

We'll take a closer look at each of these when we explore design skills, but taken together they suggest an attitude that is comfortable with ambiguity, surprise, play, and empathy. They also suggest an attitude that is well-matched to the challenges now facing businesses, governments, and other organizations.

There are many modes of thought. Among the most common is analytic thinking, in which we break complex things down into their component parts. Analytic thinking can be extremely helpful in understanding many things. That is why it is such a widely used strategy and one of the things we learn to do as young children and spend much of our lives getting good at.

One of the results of the world wars was the development of another type of thinking known as systems thinking. Systems thinking calls for consideration of the whole; that is, you cannot really take a system apart and expect to fully appreciate why it is as it is. Systems thinking is about learning to deal with feedback, side effects, and the emergent qualities of complex situations.

Design thinking elaborates on and updates systems thinking to take advantage of insights and principles that those engaged in designing have developed over the past half-century.

Design thinking has become a hot topic among design writers and bloggers who see it as a way for design to move up the organizational ladder into areas that have traditionally been the province of analytically-trained managers. A google search on "design thinking" and "management" produced 146,000 items. When "business" is substituted for management the number jumps to 180,000. Some of the people and sites that have stimulated our thinking about design thinking include:

• Jeffrey Huang's comments on design thinking and business focus on the way a design approach starts by questioning the problem and on the important roles play by synthesis and by teams as business problems become more complex.
• The Interaction Design Associates IxDA site has an engaging discussion of the nature of design thinking that distinguishes viewing it as a "proven, repeatable protocol" from seeing it as "a growing collection of methods."
• Victor Lombardi's Noise Between Stations sees design thinking as collaborative, adbuctive, experiential, personal, integrative and interpretive.
• Chas Martin's InnovativEye provides a synopsis on Bill Buxton's view that design thinking is important for business and requires infrastructure that supports it. He argues that design thinking is expansive rather than vertical like engineering and that sketching is one of its central facilities.
• NitiBahn's Emerging Futures Lab contrasts design and design thinking, arguing that each has its place in an organization's design strategy.
• Charles Owen's article Design thinking: Driving innovation characterizes design thinking in terms of conditioned inventiveness, human-centered focus, environment-centered concern, ability to visualize, tempered optimism, bias for adaptivity, predisposition toward multifunctionality, systemic vision, view of the generalist, ability to use language as a tool, affinity for teamwork, facility for avoiding the necessity of choice, self-governing practicality, ability to work systematically with qualitative information, and being into play. He argues that these things are rarely taught explicitly, but are rather acquired tacitly.
• Dan Saffer's Thinking about design thinking characterizes design thinking more simply. He includes a focus on customers/users, finding alternatives, ideation and prototyping, wicked problems, a wide range of influences, and emotion as the important elements. He notes that other disciplines do one of more of these, but doing them all at one time constitutes design thinking.
• Mark Schraad's ... of metrics for design and innovation. A fool's errand discusses design's increasingly important role in business and thoughtfully examines common differences between the two.
• Luke Wroblewski's Defining design thinking has annotated links to a dozen or so additional sites of interest.

One of the questions that management students ask when exposed to these ideas for the first time is "Can you teach people to design?" We believe that the answer is yes, of course. A design attitude can be cultivated, design thinking can be encouraged, and most importantly design skills can be identified and learned. So then, what are the skills that designers bring to bear on the problems they face? And how might those skills strengthen managers?

Let's look again at Michlewski's culture of design, but this time we'll replace the high-level concepts and values with the associated skills that he identified.

As you look at these you will likely agree, whether you are a manager, a designer, or new to both that you possess some of these skills already. Some others will come simply from being in an environment in which they are encouraged and valued. But several of them may require a concerted effort to learn, very much like learning to do a cash flow analysis, or to identify the critical path for a complex project. In what follows we highlight several of those.

One highly visible feature of designing is the use of models and sketches both for thinking and collaborating. While the use of visualization and models was mentioned on some of the designers' web sites, it is not accorded the importance that our observations and that the literature on designing suggest it deserves. Sketching and other forms of modeling play an important role in design practice. What is most striking to us is the number of models that are typically created and the frequency with which sketches are employed. Managers are used to using models, but more often than not a single model is brought to bear on a particular problem. We have witnessed cases in which an architect has created hundreds of models for a building, dozens related to one specific feature.

Reframing is another skill that designers often bring to the table. In the 1950s a lot of people were concerned with making cargo ships move faster. But the most dramatic change in shipping in that decade probably resulted from Malcom McLean's view of it as a problem in loading and unloading. With the invention of container shipping, the time in port shrunk from three weeks to 18 hours. Dockworkers achieved more and ships moved faster. Increasingly, problems defy the boundaries along which businesses organize themselves (marketing, production, human resources, finance, accounting). Instead, they come as messy, tangled webs.

Students seem comfortable generalizing from the experience of designers to managing complexity more generally. When I presented the method of a design critique (moving systematically from a description through analysis and then interpretation before arriving at a judgment), one of the students, Jekki Kim, observed "Wouldn't things go much more smoothly if we adopted this process in managing generally?" In Herbert Simon's terms, all managers are engaged in the sciences of the artificial and designing is central to that. So we might as well get good at it.

Design almost always includes an element of discovery. If we already know how to solve the problem at hand and need only to apply that solution, it is rarely described as designing. Of course, conditions change so what was once a no-brainer can become a design puzzle. Helping managers know when to put on a design attitude, call on design thinking, and employ design skills are among the most challenging issues facing management education.