Welcome to Censemaking: Making Sense of Change
Censemaking helps you to learn how to change and innovate by design.
The Bricolage of Innovation And A Kit of Parts
While much is made of purposeful innovation labs and high tech solutions, much innovation happens by cobbling things together on the go and seeing what works. When we’re looking to respond to a changing situation, innovation, and create something new to serve the examples often shared are dissatisfying. That’s how I feel about most case …
Strategic Design For What’s Now, Next and Beyond
“Set it and forget it” might be a phrase that works with late-night infomercial products, but it’s not fitting for modern design. Next is now and that requires a new way to seeing, thinking, and making. Let me start by saying that this article ends with practical options for action and suggestions, but I need …
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Do You Know What Your Big Skill Set Is?
Big Skills describe something that outwardly seems like an impressive singular act but is actually made up of many small ones, sometimes done modestly. Knowing what these might be for you can take small things and make them grow. It’s tempting to want to find the one big skill that will set you apart. But …
Designing for Trust: The Critical Skill for The Future
Trust has never been worth more than it is now – and its value is only increasing. Designing for trust will be the most focus of our organizations in the months and years to come. Trust-making is going to be the design skill for the future. That’s my prediction. You might be inclined to say …
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The Folly of Analytics in Strategy
More data does not always bring deeper insights, and the confusion between having good information, making a good decision, and taking the best action creates more folly than foresight. A strategy is a narrative about what you do, how you (intend to) do it, and what you expect to accomplish. Analytics are a way to …
Remembering Our Future End: Strategic Considerations For Better Living
How do we remember something that has yet to happen? One way is to project backward from an imagined time when we know the outcome and see where it leads us – like death. Kevin Kelly recently sat down with Shane Parrish on the Knowledge Project podcast and spoke about life lessons. Kelly’s recently published …
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How To Evaluate Design (Thinking)
Design and Design Thinking are foundational pathways to change-making and innovation. How do we know what we’ve created is doing what we think it is and whether it’s making a positive difference? Design and Design Thinking comprise the bedrock of good innovation. Design is the intentional creation of things to serve a purpose, and like …
Blue Zones of Social Innovation
What if we learned lessons from how people live a long and healthy life and applied it to social innovation? Could we create blue zones of social innovation and learn from them to create more sustainable, adaptive communities of learning and innovation?
The Three Variables Underlying Every Significant Change Project
No matter what tools, methods, or approaches you take to create a change, time, care, and attention ultimately affect the outcome as much as anything else. When people ask about what is the one thing that most influence change efforts I offer not one, but three: time, care, and attention. Many things affect intentional change, …
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Designing for Your Spheres of Influence
Knowing what you have influence over, what you don’t, and what’s in between can be the difference in creating possibility and hope or despair and confusion. The term sphere of influence was coined to refer to nation’s geopolitical power and used as a guide to frame a given country’s social, economic, political and military strategy. …