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Digital technologies are enabling us to develop systems with huge numbers of interconnected components and sophisticated software that infuses them with seemingly unlimited capabilities. They are penetrating just about every nook and cranny of the economy and of society in general. And, they are profoundly changing the way all organizations operate, as well as our working and personal lives.

Do we all look at the world in the same way? Hardly. We can each look at the same scene and focus our attention on something completely different. Individual idiosyncrasies definitely play a role, but broader patterns of perception are at work as well. Are certain patterns of perception more or less helpful in these rapidly changing times? Most definitely - in fact, they may determine who succeeds and who fails.

Design and "design thinking" is gaining recognition as an important integrative concept in management practice and education. But it will fail to have a lasting impact, unless we learn from the mistakes of earlier, related ideas. For instance, "system thinking", which shares many of the conceptual foundations of "design thinking", promised to be a powerful guide to management practice, but it has never achieved the success its proponents hoped for. If systems thinking had been successful in gaining a foothold in management education over the last half of the 20th century, there would be no manage by designing movement, or calls for integrative or design thinking.