Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
Designing versus doing
Fred Collopy discusses the difference between designing and doing, and why you'd choose one over the other.
From the Managing as designing videos:
Fred CollopyOne wonders, why design at all? Why not just do the thing? And the answer is because it’s bigger than you can do in one fell swoop. It either involves more people or it involves you for a longer period of time than you can keep it clearly in your head.
And so you design. You do drawings or schematics, you write about it. You do some intermediate step between your idea and your realization of your idea.
Improvisation is quite the opposite. It’s where you’re able to pull it off right now in the moment and do it now. And it requires a different attitude and set of tools, perhaps, than designing does.
And it’s another one of these dimensions where I think extraordinary leaders and managers are going to be capable of a balance. Of knowing when the organization should be improvising, of when they as a senior manager should be improvising and when a design attitude is called for.
(Via Victor Lombardi)
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