More data does not always bring deeper insights, and the confusion between having good information, making a good decision, and taking the best action creates more folly than foresight. A strategy is a narrative about what you do, how you (intend to) do it, and what you expect to accomplish. Analytics are a way to …
Winter provides a literal and metaphorical season ripe for sense-making if the other seasons are different Winter creates a natural opportunity to reflect. The cold weather, darkness, and general lack of ability to grow crops has meant that people traditionally spent this season telling stories and making sense of the world as they awaited the …
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 …
Our ability to affect change in organizations and systems is based heavily on our assumptions about similarities and differences between people. Unpacking and testing these assumptions require methods and tools that can identify and distinguish these patterns in a manner that allows us to take advantage of diversity and commonalities, not be limited by them. …
Developmental evaluation is an approach (much like design thinking) to program assessment and valuation in domains of high complexity, change, and innovation. These three terms are used often, but poorly understood in real terms for evaluators to make much use of. This first in a series looks at the term complexity and what it means …
For the last few years Censemaking has been a forum for exploring ideas around complexity, systems, design and social innovation. It has been a space for ideas and considering some of social and evaluative ramifications of complexity as it plays out in human systems. This long-form blog has allowed for in-depth reflection on the issues …
Earlier this week I has the pleasure of attending talks from Bryan Boyer from the Helsinki Design Lab and learning about the remarkable work they are doing in applying design to government and community life in Finland. While the focus of the audience for the talks was on their application of design thinking, I found myself …
If design thinking is to escape the trap of being trendy towards impactful, the methods that it uses must improve their rigour and testing. This post explores the challenges and opportunities for design thinking to consider it as more than thinking, but also of action.
Are we making progress in knowledge translation in the health sciences or are our methods and approaches just doing the wrong things righter? This post looks at the issue in relation to the recent NIH Conference on the Science of Dissemination and Implementation.
Our tweets and Facebook posts provide us with new ways to tell stories that can be as rich as traditional methods. By viewing these narrative fragments in context, we can learn a lot about our world and the way that we communicate.
