Why Business Design Fails Creatives
Before you build, you have to design. But the old design tools don’t work for creatives.
Welcome to The Workshop–a weekly series where I show creatives tools and methods to build businesses that serve real human stories. Starting with your own.
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Just like anything you create, before you know what to build, you have to design it.
Business education is full of tools that claim to help you do that. Canvases. Templates. Frameworks. Jargon.
But here’s the truth: those tools weren’t made for you.
If you’ve ever cracked open a business book and thought, “This doesn’t speak to me at all,” you’re not wrong. These tools were designed for a different kind of builder, one who wants scale above all costs.
They miss one critical insight:
Businesses don’t serve customers with wallets. They serve human lives in motion.
Your creative work does that too. So why design your business using tools that flatten the very humanity you’re trying to reach?
Tools for the Industrial Era
Most traditional business tools were built for the industrial era. For mass manufacturing, stable markets, and passive consumers.
Drink soda for your stomach? Makes sense. Car explodes on impact? Driver error. Luxury carpet over your hardwood floor? Why not.
The assumptions behind these tools worked because customers didn’t question businesses. They trusted authority. They believed advertising. They didn’t have better options.
That world is gone.
Your customers are discerning, skeptical, overloaded, and hungry for something real. They don’t want mass-produced messages. They want meaning.
Yet business education still hands you tools built for an assembly line.
Attempts to Evolve
Sure, there’ve been attempts to modernize: Design thinking. Innovation labs. Empathy workshops.
But somehow, it all circles back to the same industrial-era question:
How do we sell more stuff to more people?
That’s not your mission.
You’re not trying to flood the market. You’re trying to earn your way into someone’s story. That’s a different challenge and it needs a different approach.
A New Way
Business design hasn’t kept pace with human life. But here’s the good news:
You don’t have to start with their frameworks. You can design your business with the same creativity you bring to your art.
In the next post, I’ll introduce a new method that honors your creative voice, meets your customers as people in motion, and positions your business as a meaningful part of their journey.
A method built around story. Around invitation. Around transformation.
Stay tuned.
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And this topic (meaning vs. flooding the market) is so much more important now that AI is on the scene