Episode Description — Designing Dominance: A Parallel History of Commercial and Military Design Methodologies
Why do modern militaries—armed with immense resources and cutting-edge technology—so often struggle to adapt to today’s complex conflicts? The answer lies in a surprising parallel history of commercial and military design.
In this episode, we trace how both disciplines were born from the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, forged in the same mechanistic worldview that treated problems as solvable machines. But while commercial design evolved toward human-centered, complexity-embracing approaches, the military doubled down on rigid, reductionist planning—creating a hardened war machine ill-suited for the wicked problems of modern warfare.
We explore:
The shared industrial DNA that linked mass production with mass destruction.
The Bauhaus legacy as a reaction to industrialized war and a reminder of design’s disruptive power.
The great divergence — human-centered design in business vs. bureaucratic rationalism in the military.
The Israeli “heresy” of Systemic Operational Design (SOD) — how postmodern and systems theory briefly upended traditional doctrine before being purged.
The American assimilation — how radical ideas were diluted into the Army Design Methodology (ADM) and the Marine Corps’ problem-framing process.
Global experiments — Canada’s “agnostic” embrace of multiple methods vs. Australia’s cautious “proto-design.”
The ongoing insurgency — the battle between “purists” who see design as transformative and “pragmatists” who tame it into doctrine-friendly tools.
The story of design in war is one of heresy, assimilation, and insurgency. At its heart is a paradox: militaries desperately need the adaptability design provides, yet their very nature resists the disruptive change it demands. The future of warfare may depend on whether a new generation of leaders can “drop their tools” and embrace design not as a checklist—but as a way of thinking.