Design Space Management

Conceptual Overview

Traditionally, management has been built on a technical notion of rationality. One of its founding fathers, Frederick Winslow Taylor, was trained as an engineer and applied the principles of engineering science to management. Arguably, the world has changed and the principles of scientific management have been criticized widely since they were formulated at the beginning of the 20th century. Different fields of study such as critical management studies, postmodern organizational theory, or institutional theory have criticized the technical notion of rationality conceived by Taylor and others. Subsequently, the idea of an organization as a smoothly running machine was deconstructed using other metaphors and ideas. For instance, Mary-Jo Hatch and others have used the concept of jazz improvisation to understand how managing and organizing unfolds. Similarly, Simon has argued for a design attitude in management that would help to understand organizations differently. As proposed by Boland and Collopy, managers would create more functional products, services, and processes if they applied similar problem-solving principles as those designers do. In their view, the manager becomes an ideas generator who gives shape to ideas using a well-developed understanding of design. Rather than working like a creative artist, the manager-designer is engaged with creating functional products, services, and processes. From this perspective, creativity provides energy but design provides the direction for development.

Such an understanding of design in the context of organizations can be a useful driver of innovation. As successful product developments (e.g., the iPod) show, design questions the functionality of things, develops ideas for change, and gives shape to these ideas. Whether it is a new building, a new office space, or a new service, in each case the principles of design create functional and aesthetic solutions. It is this visualization of ideas that makes design a powerful and interesting [Page 381]management concept. Visualizing ideas through artifacts such as buildings, models, drawings, presentations, sketches, maps, or even stories is an important step in the process of changing organizations and communicating such change. As Karl Weick put it, managing as designing means the monitoring, containing, and reversing of sensemaking processes (he uses the phrase “compounded abstraction”). In this understanding, design moves between structured order and chaos, between being and becoming, decision making and sensemaking, and perception and conception.

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