Designerly design, e.g. design as taught in professional design schools, is becoming a mainstay within the world’s executive suites, where it is being used to form organisational structures, strategy, change, policy and more. The speed and extent of its uptake have come as quite a surprise to the traditional, analytically driven design disciplines within business studies; as is sometimes said of earthquakes, no one saw it coming. A watershed moment was when the American Broadcasting Corporation aired its ‘Deep Dive’ documentary on IDEO in 1999. The programme’s implication that design was ideal for innovation, that it could be applied to anything and the sometimes evangelical tide of design thinking literature that followed created a tectonic pull within business practice and education. I argue that this was due in part to a ‘Candy Man’ effect, where executives longing for easy, sure-fired innovation saw ABC’s sunny depiction of design, read the popular press articles and books on design thinking and swarmed in – often with unrealistic expectations and subsequent disappointment. I further suggest that we treat design thinking’s mixed reception as a call to reconsider where and how it might be applied to strategic level concerns, perhaps thinking of it as we might high end desserts and less like fields of candy canes for mass consumption.