Saying something is complex was once an admission we didn’t have expertise, now it’s a cover for not committing to something. What does it mean when we undermine the meaningfulness of the term complexity? If you were involved in business operations or social innovation 15 years ago, you might remember when people rarely used “complex” …
Design has its own distinct language, which is tied to how it’s organized. What does it mean to talk about design, do design, and speak about design products? In today’s post, we speak to the language of design. Every field of practice has its own language. Within the field are disciplines and sub-disciplines, and they …
Innovation has likely never been more important and that’s why its study and practice is no laughing matter. The systemic changes that are underway and amplified by the pandemic that arrived in 2020 has meant enormous changes for sectors across society and the world — one’s that will require attention for the decade to come. …
Replace the word ‘but’ with ‘and’ to change not only your language, but your worldview, too.
Leadership through complexity requires strategies that match our situation: they are flexible, diverse, and creative. “He had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method of “Zen” navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. …
Developmental evaluation holds promise for product and service designers looking to understand the process, outcomes, and strategies of innovation and link them to effects. It’s the great promise of DE that is also the reason to be most wary of it and beware the traps that are set for those unaware. Developmental evaluation (DE), when …
The quest for excellence within social programs relies on knowing what excellence means and how programs compare against others. Benchmarks can enable us to compare one program to another if we have quality comparators and an evaluation culture to generate them – something we currently lack. A benchmark is something used by surveyors to provide a …
When does common sense make little sense? How do we sense-make evidence when it seems to make little sense? The answers could lie in getting inside the heads of those we seek to influence and designing our communications for empathy and health. Evidence in public / health Last week there was a brief uproar in …
The same might be true of design, evaluation and complexity if we let it. It’s not a surprise that these three concepts are intimately tied together, as those training to apply design thinking and strategic foresight learn. Perhaps its time to start giving these ideas away, but to do so we first need to rehab their image and apply some design thinking and brand development strategy to all three ideas. As practitioners in any or all of these fields, giving away what we do by educating, reinforcing, and ensuring that the work we do is of the highest quality is a way to lead by example. None of us is likely to change things by ourselves, but together we can do wonders.
From August 19-20th, dozens of design-oriented people from different backgrounds came together in Vancouver to meet and discuss the concept of design thinking: its meaning, its application, and its future. These are some reflections on what I took away from the two day event. Design thinking is becoming a hot topic — or term — …
