Psychological momentum leverages performance, motivation, attention, and confidence for sustained change. Harnessing it and leveraging it effectively is a way to improve outcomes. and impact. If you’ve ever seen a team on a hot streak, you know about the power of momentum. Psychological momentum takes the idea first formed in physics and applies it to […]
Psychological Momentum and Sustained Performance Read More »
Ecology is a term that refers to an interconnected environment but is also challenging to conceptualize in practice. Let’s start by exploring a way to view individuals and systems together. Ecology is one of those ‘million-dollar words’. It’s a sophisticated term and can be used in myriad ways, and few people challenge you when you
Psychology, Ecology, and Organizations: Understanding Systems Read More »
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
Psychological Futures and Human Behaviour Read More »
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”
When Did Complexity Change Its Meaning? Read More »
The coming years will test our ability to design for the unseen, familiar, and pervasive issues tied to mental health and well-being. Are we up to the challenge? I recently attended my first public event where I felt I had been transported to 2019 – the year before the pandemic (“Beforetimes”). It was a small
Designing for Unhealthy Time Horizons Read More »
What happens when the global pandemic gets forgotten, and our organizations, communities and bodies still remember? How might we design institutions that help us recover from what’s happened and thrive in what’s to come? The World Health Organization is meeting this week to discuss whether the emergency phase of the global COVID-19 pandemic response is
What Design For Recovery Might Look Like Read More »
A myth of behaviour change is that we must be motivated before we act. Behavioural Activation shows us how doing can lead to new thinking and better change-making. Much of the literature on behaviour is predicated on the belief that we need to change our minds to change our behaviour. However, if you’re depressed, anxious,
Action Before Motivation Read More »
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
Disruption and the Energy of Change Read More »
Strategic Foresight can do more than help us to see what might come, it can help us to live better lives today. Using the example of well-being we look at how design with foresight can help us create a better present while shaping our preferred future. What if we could live in the future today?
Living Our Future Selves Today With Foresight Read More »
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
The Design of Well-Being in Practice Read More »
