Is your company designerly enough?

Today a lot of organizations are excited by the notion of design and the ways a designerly approach can enhance their business. Some companies even label themselves as "design companies" or state that they want to be seen as designerly companies. This is all well, but what does it mean and how do you know if and when you actually are designerly enough?

In many areas we have seen different forms of maturity models. A maturity model is supposed to help people "measure" and establish how mature they are in relation to some aspects. Examples are plenty, such as capability maturity models for software, project planning maturity models, risk maturity models, etc.

One of the fundamental ideas that underlie maturity models (even though not always stated) is that any progress in an area has to be built on a solid foundation. Without a solid foundation, any introduction of new tools, methods, approaches or procedures will probably over time fail.

So, does your organization have a solid foundation that can support the development of a designerly culture and improved design thinking and action? And do you have the knowledge and tools to find that out?

There are ways to assess an organization when it comes to how designerly they are and the level of their design maturity. Unfortunately, I see a lot of organizations that try to build a design culture without caring about the foundation. Instead, they start to implement (simplistic) tools and methods locally without the appropriate support and without any intentional effort in developing a strong and solid foundation that can support such initiatives. Not surprisingly, many of these initiatives fail and lead to a negative experience, and to a negative view of what a design approach can do.

So, organizations should (1) engage in assessing how designerly they are and (2) develop and use a design maturity model to better understand where they are and what needs to be done to successfully transform into a design-oriented organization.