Knowing what you have influence over, what you don’t, and what’s in between can be the difference in creating possibility and hope or despair and confusion. The term sphere of influence was coined to refer to nation’s geopolitical power and used as a guide to frame a given country’s social, economic, political and military strategy. …
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” …
In this final installment on Principles Focused Evaluation, we look at how to connect our data with our designs. If I have principles and don’t follow them, do I have them at all? This question is something that Principles Focused Evaluation can help us to answer. It’s at the core of our work. The vehicle …
Principled or values-driven approaches to strategy only have value when we can put them into practice. In this latest post in our series on Principles-Focused Evaluation, we look at the nuts and bolts of putting principles into practice. It is a lot easier to speak of principles and values than to live by them. I …
Data-driven strategy and decision-making are only as good as the processes we have to gather, synthesize and use to inform action. I am a strong advocate for using data to inform decisions. Good quality data, appropriately gathered and focused, can reveal patterns that save time, money, and even lives. But data is also another method …
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 …
Re-opening and returning to some kind of post-COVID reality will require some healing. Where do we start? This post we look at laying the groundwork for designing a process for post-pandemic healing in your organization. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on us all in ways that are both shared and …
Sensemaking is having its day – but how much of that is a good thing? In this post I ask whether its popularity and spread is actually making less sense of the world than more. In his book The End of Education Neil Postman explores the purpose of our educational system and what it actually does. His critique is …
Sensemaking practice is social, interactive, and focused on strategies to work through what we think, know, and imagine. In our previous post we introduced the idea of sensemaking and it’s connection to the process of design. In this post we look at the practical aspects of doing sensemaking and why it matters. Sensemaking is about …
Sensemaking allows us to make meaning of what we sense to guide what we can do next. In a previous post, I proposed a simplified explanation of what design is all about. There has been so much written about design and much of it is confusing and it need not be this way. Much of …
