Two Ways of Thinking that Are Essential for Modern Business

Design thinking to me is the productive combination of two very different forms of thinking.  One is analytical thinking, which uses inductive and deductive logic to crunch the numbers and analyze the past, to understand patterns in the past, to help us see what might happen in the future.

Intuitive thinking is about striving to create something that is wonderful and desirable, that may not now exist.  And if you combine those two things together, you will get the sort of reliability and steadiness that analysis gives you.  

Analytical thinking is not so hot at creating something that does not now exist, that is wonderful. Intuitive thinking is not so hot at keeping the trains running and us keeping from lurching into the ditch. 

And so, especially in the modern corporation, you need a combination of those two things, to have an organization that keeps going and doesn’t go out of business, but also keeps on reinventing itself and not getting stale and old and ossified. 

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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