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Ted Mininni, President of Design Force, Inc., a metro New York consultancy, has some interesting things to say over at Marketing Profs today about how innovation and creativity are changing today’s business climate. In his article, “Left Brain, Right Brain: Creating a New Business Model”, he begins by pointing out “In fact, business leaders are embracing, with great impact, the concept of integrating analytical abilities and creativity.”

(Right brain thinking, for those who have been living under a rock, is associated with creativity, innovation, intuitiveness, subjectivity, and big-picture thinking. Left brain activity, by contrast, is where the logical, rational, objective and rational thinking occurs.)

Ted takes it even further, and argues that organizations should use creativity and design (right brain thinking) to revamp the entire organization. “Imbuing an entire company with a design-centric (read: creative) culture,” he writes, “can make a profound difference in the way companies meet these new challenges.”

Fortune magazine is talking about it. President Bush, in his most recent State of the Union address, announced a new “American Competitiveness Initiative. Even B-schools such Harvard, Stanford & Northwestern are getting in on it, offering courses like product design, product innovation, or even an Institute of Design (Stanford) in order to enhance right-brain capabilities in new graduates.

What we’re talking about is design (organizational design, process design, etc.), which is inherently right brain activity. Perhaps a useful way to combine right + left brain thinking is to consider, as Tom Peters wrote in a Fast Company article, that “all work is project work.”

I suggest engineering firms may have a leg up on this one, and it’s because in the engineering world, essentially all work (at least all core business work) is project work. And what makes a project work is the fact that it is usually executed according to work processes that are designed from the ground up. (This also helps identify lessons learned when things go wrong.)

It takes a combination of right and left brain thinking to make project work successful. All projects start with specific goals (otherwise it’s not a really a project), but to meet them successfully requires considerable creativity on the part of the design team. After all, there’s a lot more to designing and building a facility than cold hard calculations. Creativity, innovation, big-picture view – these are all inherent in good engineering.

My suggestion: when it comes to redesigning your organization, take some pointers from companies that do project work well, and consider adding project management techniques to your work processes. You may find some useful tools in unexpected places.

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