As originally published in BusinessWeek, this is the fourth and final installment in a series that talks about embracing design-shop approaches to problem-solving and how that means having to shed some key characteristics of how traditional companies work. Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

LOVE THOSE CONSTRAINTS. By contrast, design shops’ dominant mind-set is: “There’s nothing that can’t be done.” If something can’t be done yet, it is only because the thinking hasn’t yet been creative and inspired enough. For Buckminster Fuller, the problem of buildings getting proportionally heavier, weaker, and more expensive as they got larger in scale did not qualify as intractable. It remained intractable only until he created the design of the geodesic dome, which gets proportionally lighter, stronger, and less expensive as it grows larger in scale.

For designers, constraints never constitute the enemy. On the contrary, they serve to increase the challenge and excitement level of the task at hand. In fact, given the source of status in these organizations, constraints actually increase the level of a problem’s “wickedness,” making its potential solution that much more rewarding. Hence designers would rarely say: “That simply can’t be done” or “We don’t have the budget for that.” Rather, they’d proclaim: “Bring it on!”

The Journey from Appending to Embedding
It is both unrealistic and unproductive to think that traditional companies will ever transform their organizations entirely into those of design consultancies However, given today’s design-centric environment, traditional firms can – and should – make subtle but important changes in their values to deeply embed and exploit design, rather than append it as nothing more than the latest management fad.

The linchpin of the required change lies in the wicked problem. A traditional firm’s values result in assuming away wicked problems as the product of immutable constraints with which the firm must live: Managers avoid working on wicked problems, because status comes from elsewhere, and concentrating on ongoing tasks crowds out working on, and thinking about, wicked problems. Even if a traditional firm takes on a wicked problem, the lack of appreciation of both abductive reasoning and iterative/collaborate work makes it less likely that it will be productively tackled.

REWARDING WITH WICKEDNESS. If instead, traditional firms recognize that the wicked problems that present themselves represent their biggest opportunities for value creation, they will see that tackling them requires a project-based approach and that the important role of projects in company life must not be protected from the tyranny of ongoing tasks.

They will be more inclined to assign their best and brightest to tackling wicked projects, which will signal that solving wicked problems is a high-status activity. And by recognizing these issues explicitly as wicked problems, the corporation will in greater likelihood recognize that abductive logic as well as iterative/collaborative process is needed.

Companies that truly want to embed design into their fundamental operations need to wade into wicked problems. “Bring it on” needs to replace “nothing can be done” as the response to these problems. Wading into wicked problems using the approaches described here will provide the catalyst for introducing key design characteristics into an established company.

And as many of today’s most successful corporations have shown, infusing an organization with design principles can pay big dividends in value creation.

Read this story in its entirety at BusinessWeek.com.

Whatever your line of work, do you feel constrained by certain limitations or problems? Do you feel like you’re at the mercy of bigwigs who will or will not permit you to dig into those wicked problems? Or does your company as a whole ignore the wicked problems and focus strongly on ongoing tasks as a measure of avoidance and good old perseverance?