We can’t change what we don’t understand and can’t understand what we can’t make sense of. Design is the discipline of innovation. Innovation is the means of taking what we know and learn and transforming it into value. Sensemaking is what allows us to derive meaning from what we see and experience. Together, these three …
Our information landscape has been compared with our diets providing an ample opportunity to compare what we ‘consume’ with how we prepare food and perhaps draw on the analogy of the frog and the boiling point of water. Are we slowly killing our ability to produce independent thought through vehicles like blogs as we draw …
An emerging look at evolutionary behaviour is suggesting that we are better suited for survival by working together than in competition. This cooperation imperative has been called “survival of the kindness” which risks lumping affective social generosity and goodwill with effectiveness and desirability and, in doing so, risks the entire enterprise of collaboration-based efforts.
If design is everywhere humans are and shapes our interactions in the built environment, which dictates how we interact with the world around us should it not be considered important enough to be a part of public health? I recently picked up a copy of the architecturally-inspired Arcade Magazine because of its theme on Science, …
When does common sense make little sense? How do we sense-make evidence when it seems to make little sense? The answers could lie in getting inside the heads of those we seek to influence and designing our communications for empathy and health. Evidence in public / health Last week there was a brief uproar in …
A brilliant and comprehensive new book has been launched that brings together the best scholars working in the area of systems thinking and complexity and applying it to health. The book description can be found here along with a link to the abstract for a chapter I co-authored with Andrea Yip looking at the overlap …
It is time to pull design thinking from the embers of hyperbole and placed under the microscope and macroscope of reflective practice and research. Once there, we might better comment on what this idea means for business, social innovation, human services and our overall wellbeing by pointing to something other than an exclamation mark to make our point.
Is it time to move on or shall we try to invigorate the discussion of concepts like innovation and design thinking with dialogue, evidence and (self-referentially) some innovation and design thinking to advance not only the discourse on these topics, but also their adoption, study and adaptation to help us tackle the complex, wicked and pervasive problems that seem to be growing in our world each day.
At issue is that wicked problems are made more so by having both complex and non-complex elements working together, requiring a level of strategy development that is far more sophisticated than many first thought. Even a review of the better management texts using complexity give short shrift to the relationship between the complex, the simple and the complicated working simultaneously in environments and how we plan for that.
Until we recognize this complexity — no pun intended — in the way we plan, there is great risk of replicating the hype cycle when our sole use complexity-based models yield poor results of a different nature than the poor results we are seeing from traditional linear, reductionist thinking models applied to many of the problems we deem as wicked today.
Women are no longer satisfied (nor should they be) with the roles assigned to them by men, but are shaping and crafting new ones for themselves and reclaiming and challenging outdated, sexist ones. As societies, we will (and do) need leaders and innovators who know how to manage complexity well and design solutions and women may be the first place to look because they are doing it already.
