Here is an especially valuable blog post from Marty Neumeier who is among the thought leaders whom I’ve been privileged to interview. Neumeier’s professional mission is to “incite business revolution by unleashing the power of design thinking.” He does this by writing books, conducting workshops, and speaking internationally on brand, innovation, and design. He began his career as a brand designer, and later added writing and business strategy to his skills, working variously as a communications director, magazine publisher, and brand consultant. By the mid-1990s he had developed hundreds of brand identities and architectures for companies such as Apple, Netscape, Kodak, and Hewlett-Packard. In 1996 he launched Critique, the magazine of design thinking, which quickly became the leading journal for improving design effectiveness through analysis and criticism.

In editing Critique, Neumeier joined the growing conversation about bridging the gap between business strategy and customer experience, which leddirectly to the ideas in his bestselling “whiteboard overview” books, The Brand Gap, Zag, and The Designful Company. The Brand Gap was named Fast Company’s “Surprise Book of the Year,” and Zag was listed as one of “The Top 100 Business Books of All Time.” He recently released a 45-minute video called Marty Neumeier’s Innovation Workshop, based on his three books.

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As I said in my book The Designful Company, if you want to innovate, you have to design. Yet design is a foreign language to most business managers. This is because the principles of traditional business management principles evolved to serve the needs of the industrial age. They rely on a mechanical two-step process for making decisions: knowing and doing. You “know” something—from a past experience, a case study, or a best practice—and then you “do” something.

The problem with this process is that what you “know” is limited to either “what is” or “what was,” while innovation is all about “what could be.” It’s impossible to know what could be without the process of design. To generate new ideas, the design process inserts a middle step: making.

Through the act of prototyping—using sketches, models, maps, mockups, simulations—the “making” step puts options on the table that weren’t there before. It pushes back on what we think we know, and also changes what we’re likely to do. It shifts the emphasis from “deciding” the future to “designing” the future. In a business climate that requires perpetual innovation, industrial-age thinking is useful, but woefully inadequate. We also need design thinking. Here’s a simple pair of slides you can throw into your presentations when you build a case for a more innovative culture. You are welcome to download some slides.

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Click here to subscribe to Marty’s blog and access all the resources he provides, including the slides to which he refers: http://www.liquidbrandexchange.com/knowing-making-doing/.