Design a Better Business: New Tools, Skills and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation

When we think of design, most of us think about how a product looks, or what it does. We'll be impressed by something that looks stylish or has great functionality. But the word "design" can refer to much more than just the physical attributes of a product. It describes the process and the mindset that are increasingly being used to create value and build environments in which ideas can evolve and scale, until they become genuine game-changers.

This book helps us all get on board with that idea. It argues that when we have design tools, design skills, and a design mindset, we can be more flexible and resilient, more innovative and creative. Ultimately, we can build better, more successful businesses.

So, who's this book for? Well, "Design a Better Business" is for anyone who's looking to be more innovative. Startup leaders and entrepreneurs will probably gain the most from it, but old dogs can learn plenty of new tricks here too. Whether you run an established company that's under threat from disruptive competitors, or you're looking to hit the ground running with a new business, if you want to be more innovative then this book will interest you.

It's obvious from the cover that this isn't a typical business book, and it shouldn't come as a surprise to find that a book about design is so packed with visuals. But this won't work for everyone. The bold color scheme, the hip cartoons and flipcharts, the huge headlines, and the sometimes-scattered layouts will either energize or frustrate, depending on your point of view.

The good news is that the writing is enthusing and engaging, and it's reinforced with case studies from commercial heavyweights like Audi, Toyota and Intel.

The team behind the book contains strategy designers, educators, authors, and creative directors. Van der Pijil is the CEO of the innovation consultancy firm Business Models Inc. His co-authors, Lokitz and Solomon, are experienced strategy designers and educators.

The visual designers are an equal part of the team behind this book. Van Lieshout and van der Pluijm are the partners and creative directors of a design and creative support agency.

So keep listening to find out what the "double loop" is, how acting like a "fly on the wall" can help you innovate, and how simple questioning can prompt you to produce hundreds of ideas.

"Design a Better Business" weighs in at 269 pages. The book has been written so you can either read it from cover to cover or dip in and out of the sections that interest you.

Each of the seven chapters represents a single stage of the "double loop" design journey, which is the book's umbrella concept. The chapters are constructed fairly consistently, with each one featuring subject overviews, competencies, tools, case studies, and expert insights.

There's also a companion website where you can download copies of the worksheets, or "canvases," that appear throughout the book.

So let's take a closer look at some of the ideas, starting with that umbrella concept, the "double loop."

There's a good chance you've already heard about something called "design thinking." It's an approach to creating value that concentrates on pinpointing what customers want, and designing experiences to meet their needs through repeated development and testing. It's an inclusive, open-minded approach that emphasizes ideation, iteration and a willingness to change direction, or "pivoting."

The "double loop" concept breaks design thinking down, adds to it, and presents it as a new, seven-step cycle. When you follow the double loop, you first prepare your team, your environment and your working methods. You then develop your "point of view" – a vision for the future that will inform your design criteria. Your vision can be of a project, product, company, strategy, idea, or anything else that involves the creation of value.

From there, you seek to understand your customer, the context, and the business. You then generate ideas and make prototypes, before you validate and finally scale up your design.

We like this double loop concept. It's simple, easy to follow and rigorous, and it reinforces the idea that creating value should be a cyclical, ongoing process. For the authors, designing innovation is a ride that you need to keep leaping back onto, a journey you should keep making.

Only by embracing this mindset of continuous growth and learning can you successfully and sustainably innovate. The double loop is a roadmap for doing so.

It's something you can engage with at any point, too. Whether you've got just the genesis of an idea or you're ready to start scaling a product, you can jump into the double loop at the relevant stage and follow the journey from there.

We especially like the section on "Understanding," so let's have a closer look at that.

For a designer, understanding the world in which you do business is essential. You need a firm grasp not just of who your customers are, but of how your organization operates within the wider economic context. Understanding brings insight into what value looks like for customers and into the way your business works. It brings knowledge of the trends, drivers and competitors that influence the way you do business. In short, when you master understanding, you build a richer picture of the world that can more fully inform your designs.

The authors offer two key skills, four tools, and one case study to help you master understanding.

The skills are "Observation" and "Questioning." On the face of it, these seem quite basic requirements, but you might be surprised to find they're not quite as straightforward as they seem. Like many things in life, there are right and wrong ways to observe and question. Get it wrong and at best you'll distort your results. At worst, you could alienate or offend. But do it well, and you can uncover people's needs, wants and ambitions, their values and their rationale for behaving in certain ways – all invaluable information to a business designer.

The authors offer two techniques apiece. To master observation, they suggest "going prepared" and acting as a "fly on the wall." Neither tip is rocket science, but there are some astute points here.

For example, inexperienced observers might simply tell people to go about their business as usual, while they sit in the corner and take notes. But as the authors point out, doctors wouldn't tell a test subject they were giving a placebo, because it would invalidate the experiment. The same idea applies when you observe people. So instead of announcing why you're there, it's important to stay as anonymous as possible.

A crucial point to bear in mind when you question people is that you need to ask the right questions. And the way to ask the right questions is to keep them open-ended. You want people to open up and talk, to have easy, productive conversations, and you won't achieve that by sticking to simple yes/no questions.

We really like the unashamed simplicity of these tips. They're straightforward, but they may not be obvious, and we're given just enough information to help us find an effective way forward without drowning in unnecessary theory.

The authors back up their assertions here with insights from two industry thought leaders, together with some short anecdotes and a longer case study that demonstrate the sometimes-overlooked value of understanding. More practically, they provide us with four tools to help us develop understanding. As in most other chapters, these take the form of four "canvases" – the Customer Journey Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas, the Context Canvas, and the Business Model Canvas.

As an example, the Customer Journey Canvas is a tool that helps us assess and record how customers experience a service or product wherever they come into contact with it. It can provide you with a more detailed picture of the customer journey, so you're better able to resolve their problems and improve their experiences.

Following the four canvas tools, there's a recap and a handy checklist of what we should have accomplished in this chapter. There are also signposts towards our next steps, which in this case are to generate ideas and to apply innovation techniques.

Let's move on to the next chapter, which looks at the art of "Ideation."

Good ideas often come to us when we least expect them, popping into our heads when we're in the shower or out running. And when you have ideas that you can evaluate, prototype and validate, you can work wonders. But many of us struggle to shift into "creative mode" when we need to.

The authors help us to kick-start our creative engines with an in-depth ideation case study from Toyota Financial Services, plus four new tools and six ideation "hacks" – smart tips to get us ideating at a higher level.

To start with, it doesn't matter if the ideas you have are big, bold or bizarre. What matters is having the ability to generate lots of ideas quickly. We learn some quick tips for generating ideas, and some dos and don'ts, like "avoid blocking ideas" and "don't overthink."

The main tools here are the Creative Matrix, the Business Model Canvas, the Wall of Ideas, and the Innovation Matrix. To look at just one, the authors suggest kick-starting a Wall of Ideas session by simply asking "what if?" What if, for example, you offered your product for free? What if you made it a B2B service only? And what if you could eliminate your fixed costs? What difference would that make?

As you challenge your collaborators with trigger questions, the aim is to fill an entire wall with ideas, and cluster them together.

This tool is perhaps the one that best sums up the authors' style. Once again, it's extremely simple, but we think it's a stimulating way of generating new ideas.

The overarching message in this chapter is that ideas are essential starting points for moving forward, but there's no single right way to generate them.

The book closes with an interesting section about how it was produced. We learn that the authors and designers followed their own double loop and went through multiple ideations, iterations and "pivots" – changing direction when necessary. This isn't essential reading, but it's nice to find out about their own journeys and see rare evidence that a book's creators do indeed practice what they preach.

So what's our final word on "Design a Better Business?"

Well, it's a stimulating, informative and beautiful book. It's also a chatty, unstuffy read that forces you to re-evaluate your thinking. Its strength is very much in its simplicity. If you learn nothing else from this book, you can at least be encouraged by knowing that a few simple worksheets, and a supply of marker pens and Post-it Notes, can help you develop the skills and mindset of a designer.

And unlike many business books, the tools here are practical and straightforward. The insights from business figureheads and industry thought leaders are genuinely useful, and the downloadable templates make this a book to be used; not one to be read once and put back on the shelf.

For these reasons alone, we have no problem recommending it.

That said, aside from the "double loop" concept, the information here isn't always new or particularly ground-breaking, and the strategies and tools tend to be high-level. We find it frustrating that the advice sometimes lacks detail. While this book can certainly help you to map out and fulfill a design journey, you'll need to deep-dive elsewhere for more detail.

And despite the wealth of design expertise that went into the book, we sometimes found it a bit confusing. Some layouts are so busy that it's easy to lose your thread. And navigational aids such as icons, color codes, recaps, and tables of content don't help that much. But this may be a matter of personal preference, and the book's unorthodox design could work well for visual learners and for anyone who nods off at the first sight of a traditional business book.

Finally, if all this talk of design puts you off, try to overcome your resistance. As the authors remind us, we're all designers, to some extent, already. Whenever we develop strategies or make decisions based on understanding, we're acting like designers. So, really, design thinking isn't such a new thing for most of us.

"Design a Better Business, New Tools, Skills and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation," written by Patrick van der Pijl, Justin Lokitz and Lisa Kay Solomon, and designed by Erik van der Pluijm and Maarten van Lieshout, is published by Wiley.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.