Futures work is a branch of design that seeks to translate trends, ideas, and imagination based on data into visions of where we might go. What happens when we bring psychologists along? The popular deployment of generative AI tools has put ‘futures thinking’ into our collective imagination front and centre. We humans love futures thinking …
Much of what we believe about behaviour change is based on myth, fallacies, and some poor science and yet these beliefs flourish. It’s time to apply some change-making to itself. It is fair to say that much of the foundation of my profession is bent out of shape. Behavioural psychology is a mess. It’s not …
Repairing Our Broken Assumptions About Change-Making Read More »
The proliferation of ‘tips and tricks’ for boosting change-making and innovation efforts obscures the craft and commitment that transformation requires. Visit sites like Medium, search YouTube, or scroll through your Twitter feed and you’ll find endless sources of tips and tricks to innovate, transform, or learn. Tips and tricks work for formatting files with software. …
Business thrives on habits formed by customers, but what happens when those habits change? That’s what Roger Martin speaks to and why we need to think like designers if we want to re-claim customers by helping re-set their habits (and the business processes we use to serve them). Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman …
Principles of movement, speed, and position can render our traditional sensemaking approaches useless if we’re not careful. Think of the words we use to describe our connection to values or strategy — like ‘grounded’, ‘rooted in’, or ‘anchored’ — they all imply some type of static metaphor. The implication is that we are operating from …
Seeing the road ahead isn’t the same as doing something to get there: it’s a lesson that foresight and strategy aren’t the same things Seeing the future isn’t the same as meeting it with preparation. “These lineups were scary” said one woman who had twice before attempted to get a COVID test at a Toronto-area …
Big change might come from small actions and the trust-building that comes from making those actions visible. Here’s how to make a big difference as one person.
Want to make a new start or a big change this year? Consider looking at your systems, not yourself, first. It’s the time of year when people look at what was done and what is to come in the months ahead. The change of season, the changing calendar, and now the changing decade combined with …
An emerging look at evolutionary behaviour is suggesting that we are better suited for survival by working together than in competition. This cooperation imperative has been called “survival of the kindness” which risks lumping affective social generosity and goodwill with effectiveness and desirability and, in doing so, risks the entire enterprise of collaboration-based efforts.
Many academics are so far removed from the real world that we’ve left little reason for the public to WANT to engage us. But the downside is that we’ve taken many of the methods and tools that we’ve honed over centuries and do produce some good data and synthesis with us. Designers need us to help them step up their game as much as we need designers to help behavioural scientists step up theirs.
