Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path writes a thought-provoking mini manifesto over at A Brief Message. To summarize, he poses that design thinking versus design thinking+making is creating poorer results, and thus the great thinkers should take back the making. The commodification or outsourcing of the doing is making the ideas weaker. He believes that nyone can concept, but it takes a complete process to yield great work. And finally, he poses that the details are as important as the concept for great design.

We don’t doubt the benefits of making concepts into finished pieces. It’s the backbone of how we try to work at Cinco. We naturally want to be involved in every step of the project to ensure our own perspectives and surprises reach the end user. That’s why everyone here can wear multiple hats: we are all design thinkers and makers.

Making everything yourself can be a self-limiting method for most great design thinkers. There is no way to quickly affect bigger clients if every detail must be applied by the master thinker. For example, delegation of design production allows us to help Microsoft make better brands. Producing the work ourselves would bog a lean company like ours down into a single project for three years. Instead, we have affected a greater part of the company in the same time—even if some details applied by far away agencies don’t always come out how we envisioned. We wish that we could put the finishing touches on every piece of communication for them. It just isn’t possible to do both at such scale and impact. We would miss the chance to be partners in bigger brand changes.

What it all comes down to is craft and trust. If the best thinkers trust their craft-makers to find surprises and great solutions themselves, then she or he is able to lead even deeper towards greater insight. It is the best way for a group of people to grow together, all thriving on each other’s strengths.

Example A—Windows Live. We gave them the tools to create a fresh campaign for their biggest internet push in years. Once the thinking reached the end of the globe, we took a survey and refined the messages to get even better work from Microsoft’s other partners. Meanwhile, we have helped four other parts of Microsoft with similar challenges.

Example B—Nixon product. We concept and design the form and function of the watches we make, then give the results to partners in Asia to produce and engineer. Each year we become more adept at what the manufacturers can do and challenge what it means to build a watch.

Example C—Nike Lance Tour Icons. The opposite is sometimes true as well. We weren’t the first designers working with Nike to launch Lance Armstrong. Instead we took assets and new work from others and brought into an executable package that was better than its parts. Nike trusts us to work within their system so that their great thinkers can manage a bigger brand picture. And we are proud of our ability to find our own surprises within bigger initiatives.