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Published on
March 17, 2026
There's a phrase that tends to raise eyebrows in boardrooms: supply chain design requires fun.
Not fun as a perk or a culture buzzword. Fun as a business imperative — one that directly determines whether your design work produces breakthroughs or just re-optimizes the status quo.
That's the argument Don Hicks, CEO and founder of Optilogic, makes without apology. And once you follow the logic, it's hard to disagree.
When a supply chain engineer runs an optimization model and wonders why the results aren't dramatically better, the answer is almost always the same: the model is constrained by the alternatives already in the system. You can't optimize your way to a breakthrough if the breakthrough requires imagining something that doesn't yet exist.
Optimization asks: given what I have, what's the best I can do?
Design asks something different: what if we changed the game entirely?
According to Don, “If you're just doing the same old stuff, you're not really designing anything. You're just optimizing the current situation.”
Design means considering suppliers not yet in your database, transportation modes you're not currently using, fulfillment strategies you've never tried. If your team can't think beyond the current system, you're not designing — you're just planning with a longer time horizon.
Herbert Simon defined design as the act of changing your current situation into a preferred one. That sounds simple. But it requires something most operations-focused teams rarely give themselves permission to exercise: imagination.
Imagination means deliberately considering things you're not doing today. Looking at the same problem from an unfamiliar angle. Creating space for the unexpected idea. None of that happens in a culture that's purely heads-down and serious.
There was even imagination used in the naming of Optilogic’s flagship design solution, Cosmic Frog.
“I had a picture in my head of a being sitting in the middle of where the past and the present meet the future,” says Don. “I'm looking at all the possible futures. And that being had big buggy eyes — staring into the starry night, able to see clearly all the different supply chains that we could be.”
Cosmic Frog is sitting at the intersection of present and future, eyes wide open, able to see all the possible supply chains that could exist so a company can choose which one to move toward. You need that wide-angle perspective to do genuine design work.
Supply chain practitioners are high-accountability people. When decisions go wrong, the consequences are immediate and visible. That reality creates a culture oriented toward the urgent — and rightfully so.
But that orientation can crowd out the work only design can do.
Planning asks: how do I make the best decisions today? Design asks: is this even the right system to be operating? They require different mindsets and different people in different modes.
The instinct to hand a planner a design project on top of their existing responsibilities is a common mistake. Someone managing the day-to-day operation of a complex network doesn't have the bandwidth to simultaneously question its fundamental structure. If you're flying the plane, fly the plane. Design work requires getting out of the cockpit entirely.
The organizations that have paid the steepest price are usually those that stopped designing.
Companies that shifted manufacturing to China in the early 2000s gained real competitive advantage — their supply chains were built for that world. Then the world changed. Geopolitical risk, rising costs, and pandemic-induced fragility exposed how brittle those same networks had become. Not because of bad execution, but because design had been treated as a one-time event.
The supply chains that looked rational in 2001 looked poorly suited by 2020. The pattern keeps repeating — and the environment will keep changing.
So what does it take to do supply chain design well — continuously, not periodically?
It takes permission to question the current system without it being read as criticism of the people who operate it.
“You're going to get the breakthroughs from the discarded ideas, from the guys who are thinking weird stuff, from the gals who read something on a blog and said, let me try this in this model. That's how you get the breakthroughs. And that is the core and the heart of design.”
Supply chain teams shouldn’t be less rigorous. It's that rigor without imagination produces incremental improvements, not transformation. The companies that get genuinely different results build cultures where people are curious, playful in their thinking, and willing to consider what doesn't yet exist.
Too many companies still treat supply chain design as something you do every few years — rerun the model, update the warehouse locations, move on. That approach is no longer sufficient.
As Don puts it, it’s a “continual renewal”--never finished, never checked off.
“I always get a kick out of it when people say, 'We do one of those studies every three years or so. We just rerun the model and get the new warehouse locations.' That is so old school. It's so last millennium.”
The gap between companies that design continuously and those that don't is widening.
Tariffs, climate disruption, shifting labor markets, evolving consumer expectations, geopolitical instability — none of these wait for a scheduled network study. The organizations that treat design as an always-on capability are the ones positioned to respond to change before it becomes a crisis, rather than after.
The question for supply chain executives isn't whether to invest in design. It's whether the culture, the team structure, and the energy in the room support the kind of imaginative thinking design demands.
That might mean giving your team permission to think like a cosmic frog — eyes wide open, scanning all the possible futures, genuinely curious about which one to build toward.
“Supply chain design is the critical business function that lets you alter the structure, alter the system — to be suited for the new environment. But you still have to keep running your current system. You have to do both.”
There's a phrase that tends to raise eyebrows in boardrooms: supply chain design requires fun.
Not fun as a perk or a culture buzzword. Fun as a business imperative — one that directly determines whether your design work produces breakthroughs or just re-optimizes the status quo.
That's the argument Don Hicks, CEO and founder of Optilogic, makes without apology. And once you follow the logic, it's hard to disagree.
When a supply chain engineer runs an optimization model and wonders why the results aren't dramatically better, the answer is almost always the same: the model is constrained by the alternatives already in the system. You can't optimize your way to a breakthrough if the breakthrough requires imagining something that doesn't yet exist.
Optimization asks: given what I have, what's the best I can do?
Design asks something different: what if we changed the game entirely?
According to Don, “If you're just doing the same old stuff, you're not really designing anything. You're just optimizing the current situation.”
Design means considering suppliers not yet in your database, transportation modes you're not currently using, fulfillment strategies you've never tried. If your team can't think beyond the current system, you're not designing — you're just planning with a longer time horizon.
Herbert Simon defined design as the act of changing your current situation into a preferred one. That sounds simple. But it requires something most operations-focused teams rarely give themselves permission to exercise: imagination.
Imagination means deliberately considering things you're not doing today. Looking at the same problem from an unfamiliar angle. Creating space for the unexpected idea. None of that happens in a culture that's purely heads-down and serious.
There was even imagination used in the naming of Optilogic’s flagship design solution, Cosmic Frog.
“I had a picture in my head of a being sitting in the middle of where the past and the present meet the future,” says Don. “I'm looking at all the possible futures. And that being had big buggy eyes — staring into the starry night, able to see clearly all the different supply chains that we could be.”
Cosmic Frog is sitting at the intersection of present and future, eyes wide open, able to see all the possible supply chains that could exist so a company can choose which one to move toward. You need that wide-angle perspective to do genuine design work.
Supply chain practitioners are high-accountability people. When decisions go wrong, the consequences are immediate and visible. That reality creates a culture oriented toward the urgent — and rightfully so.
But that orientation can crowd out the work only design can do.
Planning asks: how do I make the best decisions today? Design asks: is this even the right system to be operating? They require different mindsets and different people in different modes.
The instinct to hand a planner a design project on top of their existing responsibilities is a common mistake. Someone managing the day-to-day operation of a complex network doesn't have the bandwidth to simultaneously question its fundamental structure. If you're flying the plane, fly the plane. Design work requires getting out of the cockpit entirely.
The organizations that have paid the steepest price are usually those that stopped designing.
Companies that shifted manufacturing to China in the early 2000s gained real competitive advantage — their supply chains were built for that world. Then the world changed. Geopolitical risk, rising costs, and pandemic-induced fragility exposed how brittle those same networks had become. Not because of bad execution, but because design had been treated as a one-time event.
The supply chains that looked rational in 2001 looked poorly suited by 2020. The pattern keeps repeating — and the environment will keep changing.
So what does it take to do supply chain design well — continuously, not periodically?
It takes permission to question the current system without it being read as criticism of the people who operate it.
“You're going to get the breakthroughs from the discarded ideas, from the guys who are thinking weird stuff, from the gals who read something on a blog and said, let me try this in this model. That's how you get the breakthroughs. And that is the core and the heart of design.”
Supply chain teams shouldn’t be less rigorous. It's that rigor without imagination produces incremental improvements, not transformation. The companies that get genuinely different results build cultures where people are curious, playful in their thinking, and willing to consider what doesn't yet exist.
Too many companies still treat supply chain design as something you do every few years — rerun the model, update the warehouse locations, move on. That approach is no longer sufficient.
As Don puts it, it’s a “continual renewal”--never finished, never checked off.
“I always get a kick out of it when people say, 'We do one of those studies every three years or so. We just rerun the model and get the new warehouse locations.' That is so old school. It's so last millennium.”
The gap between companies that design continuously and those that don't is widening.
Tariffs, climate disruption, shifting labor markets, evolving consumer expectations, geopolitical instability — none of these wait for a scheduled network study. The organizations that treat design as an always-on capability are the ones positioned to respond to change before it becomes a crisis, rather than after.
The question for supply chain executives isn't whether to invest in design. It's whether the culture, the team structure, and the energy in the room support the kind of imaginative thinking design demands.
That might mean giving your team permission to think like a cosmic frog — eyes wide open, scanning all the possible futures, genuinely curious about which one to build toward.
“Supply chain design is the critical business function that lets you alter the structure, alter the system — to be suited for the new environment. But you still have to keep running your current system. You have to do both.”
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