Design Thinking is not only a means to innovate, but as a means to heal and grow. After a year that by most people’s standards was ugly beyond any others in recent memory, our need for beauty, sustainable and responsible businesses, supportive communities, and viable, service-forward industries needs this.
Design Thinking’s Triple-B Future Read More »
Inspiration is a primary outcome for design thinking and leadership is the vehicle to deliver it. In a previous post I mentioned an assertion by Bruce Mau that the principal outcome of design is inspiration: without it nothing goes forward. Second to this is leadership. Leadership is the means of converting inspiration into action. While
Design Thinking and Leadership Read More »
Design thinking is best approached as a habit, not as an exercise. Just as ‘critical thinking’ isn’t meant to be applied sporadically to one’s life, neither is design thinking.
Design Thinking: From Cognition to Craft Read More »
When we confuse expertise in one thing with another we risk distrusting experts altogether and losing what they bring. An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until finally he knows everything about nothing. This tongue-in-cheek quote from Henry Mintzberg has much truth to it. As I’ve developed as a
Mistaken Expertise Read More »
What if the best way to accomplish a goal was to not have one or to keep it changing? That’s innovation. If you tightly define what you want, and succeed, all you get is exactly what you expected. You are limited by your own goal. – Robert Poynton I was recently speaking with one of my
Shifting Your Innovation Goals & Goalposts Read More »
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.
Leadership Skills for Complex Times Read More »
In a quest for getting more, faster we pursue strategies that aim to compress and challenge the physics of time. Education is one of these areas where the quest to learn more, faster and ‘better’ may actually be taking us away from knowledge and speeding us to folly. What would you say or do if your
The Myth of Fast-tracking Learning Read More »
Innovators transform the world around them in big and small ways and while a successful effort can be lauded by pundits, politicians and the public there is a long road to making change happen. That road is also a lonely one and doing things different means more than just innovating and experiencing what it means to be
Isolation: The New Innovator’s Dilemma Read More »
Individuals, organizations and networks are living with unprecedented social complexity requiring more attention than ever on fostering resiliency at all levels to not only thrive, but survive. Not all of these levels are equal and where we choose to focus our energies makes an enormous difference for whether we design change intentionally (lead) or have
The Resilient Tribe: Designing Leadership For Complexity Read More »
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.
Kindness Confusion in Collaboration and Co-creation Read More »
