during my career as a thinker and academic lecturer on strategy and design management I’ve read a lot of reports, memos and assignments.
in most cases they ask for an evaluation of a problem or strategic objective and demand a set of superior recommendations. these reports are usually restricted in terms of a maximum word count. therefore they require a responsible use of resources. this obviously includes to make a trade-off between the inferior and the superior solutions.-
today I’ve been inspired by an online article written by Scott Berkun, a former user interface engineer at microsoft. with the title: “Why Good Design Comes from Bad Design”. scott describes lively the challenge to come up with good designs, concepts, solutions or whatever you want to call them. he challenges the paradigm of the ’single right answer’ by calling for a ‘learning by doing’ approach. he illustrates this with a short description of a crucial experience with a product designer he studied while executing product sketches. the upshot is simple: “I don’t know what a good idea looks like until I’ve seen the bad ones”.-
in the same way I only start giving final marks for my student reports after I’ve read them all (’I don’t know what a good idea looks like until I’ve seen the bad ones’) management both design and strategic should consider to incorporate this kind of thinking into decision making more often. (my future students will certainly experience this ;-)
and this is particularly true for germany where we tend to strive for the ’single best solution’ and failure is still seen as a flaw and not an opportunity to learn from. however this complaint is not new ;-) read scott’s column >>>
