The Missing Link in Understanding Design Thinking: Abductive Reasoning

Discover the Third Method of Thinking That Will Save Your Design Thinking.

The reason anyone buys a product or service is to fulfill a need. Be it emotional or logical people will always look after their need to fulfill a need.

Now, the bulk of this article follows the presupposition that most purchase decisions are emotionally based. This makes being in the product and service game hard.

Most product people are professional gamblers

As long as I’ve been in the industry, it doesn’t matter if the person is an IVY League MBA, a street smart designer, or a data-driven business analyst. Most product decisions I’ve seen made are complete bets. No matter how hard we pull the data or build OKRs based on broad demographic data. Many releases still are not successful.

Even after doing the vaunted “design thinking” workshops, products still fail to deliver.

Why design thinking can fall short

Design thinking exercises will always fall short as long as it’s treated as a guaranteed process, or political theatre.

It sounds obvious, but design thinking methods and practices cannot be seen as the activities that drive the revenue themselves. They are a lateral movement, a side quest to help the team be more likely positioned for success, and are practiced in order to help generate something that you normally cannot get through normal business processes.

The ‘Why’ of Design Thinking

There are two common ways humans think. Inductively (most common) and deductively.

Induction - I see a bucket of marbles, I grab one marble at a time, and after I grab 10 marbles, they are all red. If I grab one more marble, it will probably be red.

Induction is based on pattern recognition based on past experience. This is the most efficient way to get about in life. It’s low effort and pretty reliable to get by. But the problem is that people’s inductions are based on their past experience, which varies greatly from person to person. It may be the most efficient but it isn’t the most effective way to win in life or product.

Yet so many decisions in products are based on inductions.

Deduction - I see a bucket of red marbles, all of them are red. If I grab a marble, it will be red.

A deduction is based on a verified truth claim and is actually really rare despite what pop culture and Sherlock Holmes have taught us. Deductions are the result of a good scientific process, where the results are from repeatable and peer-reviewed experimentation. It is very inefficient, takes an investment of time and resources, and for most product work is too expensive to do correctly, despite what analysts tell you.

Most deductions used are those that are generated by the scientific community, even then, the science can change with new insights from a new experiment. Deductions can be used in a business and that business can still fail.

We are not in the business of contributing to the broader scientific knowledge base, we are here to make money and if you are like me, also want to make customers raving fans while you do it.

I’m not saying scientific reasoning and deduction hold little value, what I’m saying is you don’t need to get to the point of a deduction to make a great product. There is a third method of thinking which is the process scientists use to work their way to deductions: Abductive Reasoning.

Abduction - I see marble on the opposite side of the room from a bucket of marbles. This marble must’ve come from that bucket.

Abduction is a connection felt, but not seen yet. It is an inference for the best possible explanation of something happening. It’s these unseen connections, these logical leaps, that open the door for systems thinking, and understanding the problem space of the customer.

The purpose, the “why”, of design thinking, is to get to solid abductions and then experiment to see if those abductions drive the needle.

We need more Abductive Reasoning to save Design Thinking

Unlike science, where the goal of the experiments is to establish the truth. The goal of experiments in business is to see if a product or service can make money, and if you are idealistic like I am, I want to make raving fans of my work in the process of making money.

The rest of this article follows the presupposition that you are idealistic and want fans of your profitable products and services. Let’s not just play to not lose, let’s play to win. It’s more fun that way!

Most people think Sherlock Holmes is a deductive reasoner, but technically he is an abductive reasoner. It’s not until the cases are closed that his abductions are proven and become a deduction.

Guessing that someone is a suspect based on their tattoo or judging where someone has been based on the soot on their pants are huge logical leaps. And are not proven to be true until an experiment is run in the form of an investigation.

Three things are usually at fault when a design think initiative fails.

1. There is no experimentation to vet abductions. (aka The Build Trap)

2. There are no abductions defined. Meaning all builds are likely based on inductions. (aka Inductive Fallacy)

3. Or both, there are a bunch of inductions from some half-formed post-it note brainstorming session and no experimentation to de-risk those assumptions.

Design Thinking is more of a philosophy than a process. It believes that unseen connections exist that could explain your customer’s erratic behavior. And it believes that respecting those unseen connections with diligent prototyping and testing will increase the odds of the customer desiring your product or service.