This week, the world is noticing what happens when we ignore climate change. The alarms are (literally) ringing, and designers must answer the call. I am not arrogant enough to presume I know what to do to solve our issues of the day. But I know enough to suggest hundreds of things that can make …
Energy — our ability to generate and convert inspiration and enthusiasm into action — is at the heart of designing for change. Just like Design itself, we need to design for it to make it happen. There’s a great analogy about juggling that suggests success is as much about how many balls you have in …
In this final series on designing for well-being, we look at the application of a design framework to achieving the core aspects of health and care for people. We’ve outlined the role of well-being in supporting a healthy organization and the core aspects of well-being itself in the workplace. Now, we turn to asking: what …
Systems Thinking is a field that brings many different perspectives on science, philosophy, sociology and design, and while this diversity adds richness, it also sews confusion. You might have heard about something called Systems Thinking (and read about it among the many posts on Censemaking) but don’t really know what it is in practice. Let’s …
Whether it is our organizations, teams or ourselves we need to heal. What’s made this such a complicated challenge is that we must do this as individuals and groups. We also must do this by having shared and unique experiences. This is the design challenge for our age. There’s little need to point out our …
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. …
Evaluation is a term that requires some rehabilitation. The term isn’t incorrect or outdated, just poorly understood and not much appreciated. That is unfortunate because it is a field, practice, and habit that every innovator and change-maker could benefit from knowing intimately. In this article, I’m going to outline why and what we might do …
It’s easy to say a lesson was learned and far more difficult to show it to be true. What can we do to best to learn from what’s happened to us and not allow often difficult, painful, hard-fought lessons to go unlearned? When the student is ready, the teacher will appear Unknown A lesson is …
What if we viewed our strategy as a vehicle for shaping our services rather than the other way around? By looking at a strategy as more than a plan, but as a service design we can better align what we want with what we do. We begin this look by considering what kind of questions …
It’s remarkable how a term can grow and change over time and that is no less true for the term innovation. What innovation is now is not what I used to and that’s probably as innovative of an idea as it gets. Just as nature’s seasons change, it’s time to update that definition. I’ve been …
