Seeds of a mission

I've pondered the similarities between chemistry thinking and design thinking in previous posts, so it should come as no surprise that I heard echoes of chemistry thinking in reading Hugh McCracken's contention that design thinking is significant to the future of business. McCracken holds up design thinking as effective training to deal with messy data and ambiguous problems. A good chemist is equally adept at handling problems that require novel analysis and creative insight. Of course, designers are trained to think of themselves as creative people with the capacity to solve a multitude of problems. Chemists are trained to apply their skills to narrow research problems.

If businesses, well, organizations in general, are going to need people who can handle messy, nonlinear problems, chemistry departments or R&D groups should be the first place recruiters look when trying to find people with these skills. They don't do this now because they're not aware of this capacity in good chemists. The real tragedy is that most good chemists don't recognize this capacity in themselves. Chemistry skills can be applied in to business problems just as easily as they can be applied to research programs. Research programs actually provide a fantastic avenue to develop those thinking skills.

Too many people focus on the laboratory skills that they develop in graduate school. The real training comes in thinking about data, asking questions and designing experiments to solve those problems, and developing a data based explanation and interpretation of the research problem. I can't think of many business challenges that could be any messier than that.

Chemistry departments are focused on developing the next generation of people to work in chemistry departments. Why aren't they geared toward developing leaders? Chemistry is the ideal training ground for creative thinking that can be used to effectively understand and solve complicated problems. What can I do to get other chemists to realize their potential as the big problem solvers we need to resolve the complex challenges of the future (and now)?