Design as a discipline has come a long way in the last years. That’s especially because of the rise of design thinking, a series of cognitive, strategic, and practical processes through which new products, services, and more are developed. This fresh approach got design out of the “aesthetic” ghetto a lot of people put it for a long time.
Besides, the future looks promising for design as a whole. Jobs like Augmented Reality Designers, Fusionists, and Embodied Interaction Designers, among others, will surely revolutionise the discipline in ways we can’t imagine now. Yet, for all the exciting prospects all of these roles will bring, nothing looks more promising than business design.
It’s funny what happens with this emerging approach that can change how companies can rapidly evolve and grasp new business opportunities. In the context of an ever-changing tech world that seemingly moves at the speed of sound, most executives are neglecting the many benefits a design-led approach to business can provide.
What’s more worrying – not many people are even talking about business design. Let’s see why they need to start doing it.
What’s Business Design?
Maybe one of the reasons why not so many people are talking about business design is that its supporters can’t even agree on what it actually means. A quick Google search will surely bring you hundreds of articles on the subject, each with its own take and definition of what it means. Being an emerging trend, that feels natural. However, we can’t let that stop us from talking about it.
For the purposes of this article, we’re going to use the definition found in Beyond User’s fantastic and comprehensive guide on Business Design. It goes as follows:
“Business design is an activity that uses design methodologies, design mindset, and business tools to solve business challenges.”
Since that definition covers a lot of ground, let’s see its main components in a little more detail:
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Design Methodologies: when coming up with a new idea, companies often build mostly designers, a couple of marketers, and maybe some IT staffers. This is a mistake, as homogeneous teams often ignore a lot of aspects that could be useful in the final product. That’s why business design needs to have a multidisciplinary approach that puts the customer at the centre
Additionally, business design needs abductive reasoning, a midpoint between inductions and deductions. Since the business world is a complex field with incomplete information, abductions allow deriving insights and hypotheses from partial data.
Finally, there’s the customer-centric nature of design methodologies. Design thinking has already put the customers in the spotlight but business designers need to go further ahead. If it were for customers, they would want it all, like a car that drives itself, saves energy, has a good stereo, and costs like a regular car. But designing a business based only on the client’s desires isn’t feasible. Business designers address that by balancing the design with the stakeholder’s input.
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Design Mindset: abductive reasoning makes sense for business design because it lets us look at a lot of possible solutions for any given business challenge. The idea is to get insights from as many sources as possible, so everyone’s point of view is taken into account.
Business designers can do that with a variety of mindsets whose combinations might provide them with the most possible information. Talking to customers and stakeholders is sort of an obvious starting point but companies don’t have to stop there. Considering the wildest possible ideas, building prototypes to test hypotheses, and combining data from all kinds of sources and from all sizes are all aids in embracing a new mindset for business design.
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Business Tools: design methodologies aren’t enough, so business design uses business tools to get results. They are mostly used to create the prototype to test the hypotheses. This is pretty self-explanatory. Since the list of tools is too long to cover here, it’s enough to say that companies can use all tools they deem necessary, from business model canvases to business opportunity estimations and sales funnels.
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Business Challenges: the other components of the definition need to be applied to a business challenge for it all to become a business design process. As it happens with tools, there are a lot out there. There even are challenges that are company-specific, so it’s impossible to cover them all here. We can mention, though, some of the most common ones, like revenue growth, market share increase, improvement of value creation, cost optimisation, and process optimisation.
What we can take from all this is that business design doesn’t just look at desirability. Although it takes what customers want into account, it never neglects the business side of things. This means that, beyond what the target audience wants, companies using the business design approach should also look into the idea’s feasibility and viability.
Why We Need to Talk More About It
After defining what business design looks like, it’s safe to say that it can re-shape how companies come up with new ideas in a fast-paced world. We could argue that taking the opinions of both customers and stakeholders into account is the only possible way to provide true value to the products and services we put out. What’s more – business design feels like the perfect way to detect new business opportunities in an environment that keeps shape-shifting with new technologies and advancements.
As such, business design has a lot of potential to become the design discipline of the future. Yet, we’re still in its infancy. Even when the concept isn’t precisely new (it was born in the early 2000s), there’s a long way ahead of us. The very definition of business design is still open for debate – even when one as complete as the one cited above. From there on, everything is up for discussion.
When adding that most executives haven’t even heard about business design, let alone implemented a business design approach, it’s understandable why we need to talk about it. There’s a double purpose in doing so. The first one is to start to find common ground in those discussions and begin to define basic concepts, techniques, and tools to propel business design into the mainstream.
The second purpose is to bring further visibility to a very promising approach, whose potential to provide business growth is impressive. This is a very much needed step before business design becomes a staple in the business world and starts specialising and branching out in new sub-disciplines.
We are years away from that happening but that doesn’t isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, these are exciting times to get into the discussion about business design and help shape its own future. Talking about it can help refine and sophisticate the discipline which, in turn, will bring increasing results for companies using this approach.
The future of design will surely encompass a lot of new jobs and roles. But no one will be as defining as business design. With its potential to give a fertile platform and a solid structure for idea generation, the discipline is forming right now and, along with it, the future of the whole design world. Shouldn’t we be talking about it?
