Research-Technology Management

ISSN: 0895-6308 (Print) 1930-0166 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/urtm20

Design Thinking

Roger Martin & Jim Euchner

To cite this article: Roger Martin & Jim Euchner (2012) Design Thinking, Research-Technology
Management, 55:3, 10-14

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.5437/08956308X5503003

Published online: 28 Dec 2015.

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CONVERSATIONS
Design Thinking
An Interview with Roger Martin
Roger Martin talks with Jim Euchner about the need to include intuitive thinking in the innovation process.
R oger Martin has been studying what it takes to create
breakthrough innovation for many years. In that time,
he has become frustrated by the increasingly heavy reliance
on analytics in most businesses, which crowds out intuitive
thinking. For Martin, both analytics and intuitive insight
are necessary to create successful breakthroughs; he calls
this productive synthesis “design thinking.” In his books
The Opposable Mind: Winning through Integrative Thinking
and The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next
Competitive Advantage, he explores design thinking and its
importance in making the truly important decisions. I talked
with him about design thinking and how it can be nurtured
into today’s analytical businesses.
JIM EUCHNER [JE]: You have written extensively about the
importance of design thinking in business. How do you de-
fine “design thinking”?
ROGER MARTIN [RM]: I consider design thinking to be the
productive mix of analytical thinking and intuitive think-
ing. I call it a productive mix because you need both kinds
of thinking if you’re going to analyze the past, project
what you can from it, and create futures that go beyond an
Roger Martin has served as dean of the Rotman School of Management
since September 1998. Previously, he spent 13 years as a director of Moni-
tor Company, a global strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts. His research work is in integrative thinking, business design,
corporate social responsibility, and national competitiveness. He is the
author of four books: Fixing the Game (Harvard Business Review Press,
2011), The Design of Business (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), The
Opposable Mind (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) and The Responsi-
bility Virus (Basic Books, 2002). He also co-wrote (with Mihnea Moldoveanu)
The Future of the MBA (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Diaminds (Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 2009). Roger earned an AB with a concentration in
economics from Harvard College and an MBA from the Harvard Business
School. martin@rotman.utoronto.ca
Jim Euchner is editor-in-chief of Research-Technology Management and
vice president of global innovation at Goodyear. He previously held senior
management positions in the leadership of innovation at Pitney Bowes and
Bell Atlantic. He holds BS and MS degrees in mechanical and aerospace
engineering from Cornell and Princeton Universities, respectively, and an
MBA from Southern Methodist University. euchner@iriweb.org
DOI: 10.5437/08956308X5503003
10 | Research-Technology Management • May—June 2012
extrapolation of the past. If you use analytical thinking
alone, you will just extrapolate from the past, which will
work for you if you are willing to accept a future that is no
different from the past. If you use intuitive thinking alone,
you won’t take advantage in a rigorous way of the data
that’s available. Both of them are needed. Analytical think-
ing tends to miss new different things that change the envi-
ronment. And intuitive thinking tends to be just plain
wrong too many times. What you want and need is a com-
bination of the two.
JE: Analytical thinking has dominated and still dominates
business, and it’s been fairly successful. Why is there a need
now for more design thinking?
RM: I’m not sure it has been successful. It’s credited with lots
of success. Science and the scientific method have made a
notable difference in the world. But what’s happened in the
business world is that we’ve gotten too analytical, to the
point where analysis is relied on too much. And what that
does is calcify companies. You have to ask yourself, “Why is
it that big companies keep getting beaten up by little com-
panies?” Old companies get beaten up by little, new compa-
nies. How can that be?
I’d say the answer is that big, old companies get totally
analytical, and they focus on honing and refining what it is
that they’re currently doing. The little companies come along
and challenge that which now exists, and they blow the big,
old companies completely out of the water. I think that phe-
nomenon is a direct function of the predominance of analyti-
cal thinking in these big companies. The problem is less about
the world having changed; it is more about the intensity of
analytical thinking.
JE: That’s very interesting. You don’t attribute disruption to
faster movement of technology and shorter cycle times for
products, but rather to the reification of analytical thinking
in business.
RM: More so. I can’t believe that there is a lot of truth to the
pace of technology explanation. Henry Mintzberg gave a talk
at a conference 20 or 25 years ago where he put up a slide
with a quote about how things are moving so fast, techno-
logical advances are happening as never before, etc. It’s the
greatest we’ve ever seen in history. And he froze the slide
and he asked, “Where’s that from?” And everybody thought
it was from last month’s Wired or something. But it was from
Scientific American. In 1868. And so it’s stuck in my mind that
we have to be careful saying how much the world has
changed, when much of it hasn’t changed at all.
There is an insight of this wacky but brilliant twentieth-
century American analytical philosopher, Charles Sanders
Peirce. He was a contemporary of William James and John
Dewey, but his thinking was ahead of many people. He came
to the conclusion that you cannot prove any new idea
through analytical thinking. He argued that no new idea in
the history of the world has been proven in advance through
inductive or deductive logic.
But there are new ideas in the world. Where do they
come from? They come from another thought process,
which Peirce called abductive logic. And I think he’s just
plain right. People relying on all these analytical method-
ologies do not realize that you cannot use them to demon-
strate any new idea in advance. So if you’re using them,
you’re using them to reinforce existing ideas. They have an
embedded assumption that the future is going to look a lot
like the past.
JE: I hear your point. It’s interesting, because at the same
time that design thinking is becoming a much bigger topic of
discussion, people are also focused on competing on analytics
and big data. Do you think the two are complementary, or do
you think that there are people who just have opposing
points of view of how you create the future?
RM: I think the intensity of interest in analytics by some is
representative of the absolute last gasp of attention that
happens before you get a big change. At least most of the
stuff I see says, “Wow, we’ve got all this data and we need
to redevelop analytics to deal with it.” I think that it’s
more of a symptom of the challenge than a prescription to
answer it.
JE: A kind of interesting synthesis is in the movie Moneyball,
which describes a situation where analytics are deeply im-
portant, but so is throwing reliance on past heuristics out
the door.
Roger Martin, author of The Opposable Mind: Winning through
Integrative Thinking and The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking
is the Next Competitive Advantage, believes that a productive
synthesis of analytic and intuitive insight is required to create successful
breakthroughs.
RM: I do not think that you’re going to be a great business
leader if you are just an analyst. I do not believe you can ana-
lyze your way to business leadership greatness. Some of the
people who quote me imagine that I’m saying that leaders
have to become artists. I don’t believe that’s the case. The dif-
ference between a fine artist and a designer is that a fine art-
ist cares about personal expression and not necessarily what
anybody else cares about, or whether it produces financial
success, whereas a designer has to care about whether what
they’re designing will work and provide the economic bene-
fit that it was designed to deliver.
What great business leaders have to do is become design-
ers in the sense of integrating their intuition in an explicit
way into their decisions, rather than suppressing it, hiding it,
and not making it explicit. That’s what I mean when I say
leaders must become designers. They need to develop their
skills and sensitivity. They need to understand qualitative dis-
tinctions between things. And in that way, they have to
become designers.
JE: Let me push on that a little bit more. In most corpora-
tions, there’s a CEO and a senior management team. And
they’re probably heavily biased toward an analytical ap-
proach to the world. But in addition, they’re likely to have a
variety of intuitions on a given issue that they may or may
not be able to express effectively to others. How do you

RM: I could describe that as design thinking, which is the pro-

ductive combination of both of those. Take advantage of ev-
ery bit of past data that you have, but then add some artistry
What great business leaders have to
to that in order to imagine a future that is productively differ-
ent from the past. do is become designers in the sense of
integrating their intuition in an explicit
JE: In your book, you say that business leaders don’t need
just to understand designers and how they think and how way into their decisions.
they talk and what they do, but they need to become design-
ers. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Conversations May—June 2012 | 11


That’s a user-friendly way for
management teams to practice design
thinking and impart their ability to
create a future to the next level.
manage the team dynamic? In the end, are you going to end
up relying heavily on the intuition of just the CEO in making
things happen?
RM: There’s where I think excellent management is going to
play out. You put your finger very much on it. I think a great
leader is going to be a leader who makes it both legitimate
and safe to put your intuitive thoughts on the table rather
than dismissing them as being of lesser value than the ana-
lytical thoughts. That’s one thing.
And second, a leader helps people develop a language for
discussing these things. A great modern leader will do this
and not let a discussion at the board table be entirely analyti-
cally driven. Otherwise, the intuition of the team is going to
be hidden and the intuitions of the CEO will dominate.
JE: Do you think that design thinking can be taught or
learned?
RM: Absolutely, positively. There isn’t a question in my mind.
JE: Under what conditions will that happen? It really is a dis-
tinct way of thinking.
RM: This is one of the most interesting things in my work.
People seem to think that something that is untaught is un-
teachable. And other than in a few places, business design
thinking is untaught. The assumption that it’s unteachable is
staggering to me. We’re teaching it here at Rotman, and it’s
totally teachable. Most people in the world of business—cer-
tainly in the world of technology—stopped doing anything
abductive very early in their education. They took an English
literature course maybe in grade 11 or 12, and they haven’t
taken a single thing that would exercise one iota of their ab-
ductive logical capability since. Then they go work at an en-
gineering firm, and 15 years later they would appear totally
incapable of having any kind of design capability. But it’s be-
cause they haven’t exercised it for a long, long time.
JE: So what can you do with a senior management team to
get them to the point where they can actually express their
intuitions and work with them and have a discussion about
them? Suppose three out of the seven people on the man-
agement team go to a week-long course in design thinking.
They’re going to have awareness, but that’s about it. How do
you help an organization move from one where you might
12 | Research-Technology Management
have an inspired leader to one where you have an organiza-
tional capability?
RM: Procter & Gamble is a good case in point. I worked inti-
mately with them in an effort to make them a design-thinking
company. It took time, but we created a customized process for
taking category teams through the design thinking process.
We would take one category at a time. The first one we
took through the process was global hair care, and then we
did global laundry, skin care, and a whole bunch of others.
We took the senior management teams through a process
that taught them about design thinking, and they actually
applied those principles to the decisions and challenges in
their company and in their category at that time. And we did
eight or nine of them ourselves, and then trained the Procter
people to be able to do it. Now they have a couple of hundred
facilitators who can facilitate the approach.
That’s a user-friendly way for management teams to prac-
tice design thinking and impart their ability to create a future
to the next level. The result is a change in the dialogue at se-
nior management team meetings. They all know the lan-
guage that they’re using and how they came up with ideas.
They’ve been told that if you ever say “prove it” to anybody,
it guarantees that you won’t get anything new happening.
JE: What are you teaching in these sessions? Ways of being
aware of and listening to your intuition? Qualitative data col-
lection? Customer insight? Prototyping? What kinds of
things are you helping people get better at?
RM: All of those things. Design thinking includes helping
people get a deeper understanding of customers using more
qualitative approaches. So we teach how to do that and how
to legitimize qualitative research. We also teach some kind of
tools for how to create ideas that may make sense, how you
prototype them, and then how you convert them into strat-
egy. That last step is one of the things that is unique about the
approach that I developed for Procter and that we now teach
at Rotman.
What I think is missing in the design field is how to con-
vert design thinking into a winning strategy—one that puts
the pieces together. The key tools are customer understand-
ing, visualization, prototyping, and strategic business design.
It’s fun to watch the combination at work.
JE: Let’s dig deeper into what leaders need to do to create
environments where these intuitive leaps can happen—
environments that are hospitable to the leaps happening.
Even if you’re not ever going to be a genius design thinker,
you might be able to create an environment in which design
can survive and have a significant voice. When I worked
with designers, their biggest complaint was they just felt
like their concerns didn’t get heard until they were re-
phrased by someone with a different background or way of
talking. I’m trying to understand what people need to do
to make design effective in their organizations, even if it
doesn’t become predominant.
Conversations
RM: My view is that there are subtle things that can be easily
done that make a big difference. One of the things that A. G.
Lafley and I engineered at Procter & Gamble was a relatively
modest change in the way strategy planning meetings were
run. It wasn’t an expansive change; it was kind of a small
change, but it created an environment that allowed for the
possibility of design thinking.
Traditionally at Procter & Gamble, every September all the
categories would come forward to the senior management—
the CEO, the COO, the CFO—to have their strategies re-
viewed. The category teams would come in with big, long
strategy presentations in a PowerPoint deck. They would
come in with many little loops of three to five slides each to
respond to every question they could anticipate. “It’s funny
that you should ask that. Here are the three answers to that
question specifically.” The whole goal of these meetings from
the respective categories was—and they used this term for
it—to “get in and get out.” It was a successful meeting if you
could get in and get out unscathed. Nothing changed; there
was no more work to be done.
So that was the goal, with senior management kind of
taking the critic’s role. “We’re going to ask tough questions
and you’d better have the answers.”
If that’s your goal, what are you going to generate? You’re
going to have a totally analytical meeting where you try to
prove things so that you can “get in and get out.” We said,
“From here on in, you will send us whatever material you
want to include two weeks in advance. We’ll read it and we’ll
issue you three to five questions that we would like to have
dialogue on in your strategy review meeting. You’re not al-
lowed to bring more than three 8 ½ x 11 inch additional
pages into the meeting, because we don’t want you to create
another presentation that provides “perfect answers” to all of
our questions. We actually want to have a generative discus-
sion of these issues. There’ll be no presentation. We will
think together and come up with better solutions that way.
That’s how we’re going to run the meeting.”
That changed the meetings to meetings that were actually
discussions about what might be—What could we do here?
What might be a good idea?—rather than a discussion about
proving or disproving what the leaders said about their strat-
egies. That changed things tremendously; it created an enor-
mous change in what goes on in those meetings and how
productive those meetings are. They’re now meetings about
imagining what could be, what could be different, what
could be better, instead of meetings about the past.
JE: That’s great. I’m sure A. G. Lafley’s leadership made that
happen.
RM: Absolutely. And it was profoundly disturbing to the ex-
ecutives, profoundly disturbing. They were conditioned to
getting hammered for not having everything perfect. A. G.
had to prove over time that he actually wanted a dialogue; he
actually wanted a discussion about what might be and what
could be. We first did that in 2001. Now, I don’t think they
could go back. If they went back to the old approach, it would
Conversations
be so depressing for people, so disconcerting, that it would be
really hard.
JE: They still have to make decisions, for example that they’re
going to invest $200 million in this area and not in that area.
How do they get to the point where they’re willing to make
those bets about a world that may not be?
RM: There’s just more recognition that that’s how all impor-
tant decisions are made. There is no proof. It’s a matter of
getting out of this fool-proof mode.
That’s what I hate about the “competing on analytics”
idea. You’ve got to prove everything to be right before you
can do it. But the things that you can prove to be right or
wrong tend to be the most inconsequential things in the en-
tire decision. The things you cannot prove at all are the most
consequential elements of any decision. That’s what you get
paid the big bucks for.
JE: I guess another way to look at it is that a lot of business
teams are focused on not making the decision to invest in a
bad initiative and less focused on failing to invest in a good
initiative. There are two types of errors, right?
RM: Yes. And certainly one is more correlated with the use of
analytical techniques. Analysis makes you overconfident
with the impulse to keep on doing what you’re doing. So
that’s what we get in many businesses today. We get lots of
people confidently doing more of the same. You have Gen-
eral Motors confidently having their production plan for
2008 be more pickup trucks and more full-sized sport-utility
vehicles. Was that stupid? No. If you analyzed the past and
extrapolated it into 2008, 2009, you could extrapolate the
SUV and pickup truck demand, and you could say we should
gear up to make many more of these vehicles. There’s an
overconfidence created by the analysis of the past.
JE: How do companies that you’ve worked with achieve
the right balance? It may be difficult for one person to be
both a great intuitive thinker and a good placer of bets on
something that isn’t so certain. How do companies create
a successful synthesis, or what you call the productive
synthesis?
But the things that you can prove to
be right or wrong tend to be the most
inconsequential things in the entire
decision. The things you cannot prove at
all are the most consequential elements
of any decision.
May—June 2012 | 13

Design thinking is a way of thinking.
RM: I think a whole lot of it has to do with respect for the
other side. The best intuitive thinkers understand the limita-
tions of their intuition and give credence to analytical types
and partner with them.
JE: I have just one more question. A lot of the people who
will read this interview are leaders of innovation functions or
R&D labs. What kind of advice would you give them about
design thinking and what they can do to incorporate it into
their worlds?
RM: One of the big problems internal R&D labs have is that
they get very analytical and very reliability focused. That’s
the biggest thing to watch out for. I would say, on average,
I am struck by how conservative and analytical corporate
R&D departments are.
JE: How do you suggest they get beyond it? They’re by na-
ture embedded in a very analytical tradition.
RM: I would stop hiring all analysts. That’s one of the biggest
problems in big companies: their selection criteria are either
implicitly or explicitly driven to focus on analytical talent.
And so they get many analysts, and guess what the analysts
do? They analyze.
Think about actually having your selection criteria in-
clude something about somebody’s intuitive capacity. Think
about it. What do R&D departments look for when they
hire?
JE: They’re looking for the technical disciplines and execu-
tion ability. People in R&D are looking for people who have
made creative contributions, but perhaps—
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14 | Research-Technology Management
RM: Not much. I don’t find that. I find there is a focus on
super-high grade-point averages, and how do you get a
super-high GPA?
JE: You’re very good at what the schools are teaching, which
are the analytical subjects.
RM: And on the final exam, with the big project that’s worth
everything, are people likely to take a leap to do something
wacky and way out there? No, because that one B could be
the difference between a 3.9 and a 3.85, and you’re going to
lose out to some other 3.9. It’s incredibly narrowing conser-
vatism. And we in business select for that. It’s scary.
JE: Just to build further—you can’t hire one or two designers
to create this capability. You’ve got to start getting a critical
mass. So what do you think a critical mass of people with that
sort of background is, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
RM: It would be the first tree I’d bark up. But you don’t need
a design background. Take Claudia Kotchka, Procter & Gam-
ble’s head of design under Lafley. Before going to Procter &
Gamble, she was an Arthur Anderson auditor.
She’s a friend of mine. She’s brilliant. But it’s not about
her having a design education but about having a mind that
was open to design. And she’s learned a lot. She hangs out
with designers; she reads everything about design. So she’s
very knowledgeable. But it doesn’t necessarily take design-
ers. That’s why I make a distinction between designers and
design thinking.
Design thinking is a way of thinking. What you need to be
successful is somebody who encourages a different way of
thinking in the organization. You will end up hiring design-
ers and working with designers because you’ll say, “Wow,
there’s real value in that kind of training and expertise.” But
the training is not the key. There are lots of designers with
great training who are not design thinkers.
JE: I very much appreciate your insights. It’s been a fascinat-
ing discussion.
Conversations