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How Design Works

This website provides a tour of how design works in complex business organizations. It explores the cognitive and social aspects of design – how people think when designing, how design groups operate, and how design can be managed as a result of understanding all of this.

Goal-based design is a myth. Instead, we face emergent design, comprising cycles of inquiry, systemic analysis, organizational & IT change, and evaluation. The best we can do is to agree a scope for action, analyze the problems within that scope and take action, then evaluate whether we made the situation better or worse. Design is emergent because we cannot agree what the problem is, and because we constantly need to change our scope and goals, depending on that evaluation – and on changes to organizational goals in response to a changing business environment.

Design is so complicated, as we need to deal with wicked problems, the type of interrelated, subjective problems that are difficult to define. We can never resolve (or even agree) such complex problems in one go – each stakeholder has a different perspective on what the problems are. As Rittel & Webber (1973) observed, there is no single problem definition – and no stopping point by which to judge if you are finished.

I refer to design as the co-design of business and IT systems. When we design, we are never changing one thing at a time. IT systems change requires that business processes change to accommodate new ways of working. Starting with the IT requirements is like standing a candle on its pointy end. You have to melt a lot of wax to get it alight – and then it won’t stand up. Instead, we need approaches that start with designing effective work-systems.

Organizational change management fails when design is managed as if each project is self-contained. Instead, we need to manage these processes as a single cycle in an ongoing process of managing organizational fit with an evolving business environment. This site (and the book) deal with how design actually works – and how we manage projects as a result of this.