What’s the single biggest challenge holding design back as a key business strategy? Is the term “design thinking” what we should be using to explain the power of design to the C-suite?

Paula Scher:

The biggest thing holding design back as a key business strategy has nothing to do with "strategy" or "design." It has to do with various people within corporations and organizations making commitments and decisions about things that they really don't know how to decide about. It has to do with the inherent arbitrariness of certain decisions that always seem to boil down to personal taste.

Design can follow all sorts of strategies to appeal to all kinds of audiences. A business can use successful design as a tool to enhance their brand image to whomever, but sooner or later someone will have to make a decision and a financial commitment about what constitutes the "successful" design. Therein is the problem. In too many instances, I've seen a corporate executive abandon strategy and research because they just didn't like a color, or a shape, or a material, or a typeface. They just don't like what the thing looks like, or behaves like, regardless of the process and research that helped achieve it.

In the end, design strategy works for businesses when the ultimate decision maker likes the final design. Decision makers who like the final design generally have an ability to appreciate successful design when then see it, and are also capable of making decisions and taking risks. There are too few of these types out there, and I don't know how we make more of them.