Seth Godin’s recently published book, The Song of Significance, looks at how we organize our work and the message is profound if we’re ready to hear the song. I’ve written about Seth Godin many times in this space. Seth has written about the issues of work and education and making a difference in thousands of …
Canadian wildfires are ravaging millions of hectares of forests prompting the evacuation of thousands of people and smoke plumes that are affecting millions. It’s a case study in how we address the psychology of climate change, invoke systems thinking about health, and apply what we know about design to it all. In a recent interview …
Wildfires: When Sparks Lead to Flames Across Systems Read More »
What if we learned lessons from how people live a long and healthy life and applied it to social innovation? Could we create blue zones of social innovation and learn from them to create more sustainable, adaptive communities of learning and innovation?
We can think of organizations as part of systems or ecologies, but what does it mean to make them fit for humans? Today, we look at the psychology and design of organizations for humans. An organization is much more than a group of people working together; it’s a system. The whole — the organization — …
Humans and their Organizations: A Psychological Design Perspective 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 »
Climate change will continue to pose ever-greater challenges to how we live, work, and organize ourselves. A recent conference has helped inspire some ways to think about how we might do this better. Natural systems are all around us, even if they are hidden. In urban centres, much of what we call ‘nature’ is reduced …
A new term has been circulating in policy circles that reflects a changing way of viewing conflict, crisis, and complexity: polycrisis. Let’s look at what it might mean for people looking to plan, evaluate, and act in a world filled with turmoil. Polycrisis is not a term that inspires much hope. I’m not one for …
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” …
Two simple words can make the difference between seeing something that just “is” to something that could be almost anything we want. Noema Magazine recently published an article from Yakov Feygin and Nils Gilman entitled The Designer Economy. Feygin and Gilman are not traditional designers looking at products and services, they are business writers and …
Censemaking helps you to learn how to change and innovate by design.
