The past two decades have seen a dramatic acceleration in the pace of marketplace change. Companies have abandoned the old hierarchical model, with its clean functional divisions and clear lines of authority, and adopted flatter, less bureaucratic structures. But if most organizations have begun to adapt to the uncertainty of rapid change, most managers have not. That approach works in stable markets and even in markets that change in predictable ways. Today's markets, however, are increasingly unstable and unpredictable.
Managers can never know precisely what they're trying to achieve or how best to achieve it.
They can't even define the problem, much less engineer a solution. The challenges facing the general manager in these circumstances, the authors argue, resemble those typically confronted by design managers. In the unpredictable world of research and design, neither the flow of the development process nor its end point can be defined at the outset. Rather than the traditional analytical approach to management, the design world requires an interpretive one. And that approach is equally well suited to rapidly changing, unpredictable markets.