Archives For strategic thinking

Reflections on Davos 2013

February 5, 2013 — 1 Comment

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I recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The overall sentiment there was one of cautious optimism. While there is a long list of major problems to be tackled, the immediate prospects for the global economy seem reasonably good and there is a sense that most economies will grow this year.

The theme of the week was resilience—the question being, how do companies and countries weather the increasing volatility of markets, society, and climate? One obvious conclusion is that resilience requires the ability to rapidly react and innovate in changing circumstances. Creativity and design can help make organizations more resilient.

Another theme was the growing focus on tackling global problems that are associated with basic human needs. I couldn’t help but reflect upon the Designing for Life’s Necessities post in December. Access to healthy food and clean water, achieving active healthy lifestyles, redesigning broken healthcare and education systems, creating new jobs, supporting aging communities, and mitigating the effects of global warming—these were all topics of discussion in Davos. My sense is that in the next year more large corporations, governments, and NGOs will be looking for creative ways to address these issues.

Davos is a place to meet intellectual superstars and I was fortunate to spend time with both Daniel Kahneman (father of behavioral economics) and Clayton Christensen (of The Innovator’s Dilemma fame). They both offered wise words about purpose, success, and happiness—while commenting on the dangers of taking a conventional view of success and happiness. In particular, how companies measure success today in terms of return on capital.

How will you measure purpose, success, and happiness this year?

(Posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)

In design for education, design of government, design thinking, designing for impact, economic recovery, emergent design, organizational design, social impact, strategic thinking ,
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To Boost Creative Thinking, Ask This Question

December 6, 2012 — Leave a comment

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Recently I posted one design thinking tip from Change By Design: Once a Day, Deeply Observe the Ordinary. Here’s another:

Don’t Ask “What?” Ask “Why?”
Instead of accepting a given constraint, ask whether this is the right problem to be solving.

Every parent knows how infuriating 5-year-olds can be with their constantly questioning “Why?” But for design thinkers, asking “Why?” is an opportunity to reframe a problem, redefine the constraints, and open the field to a more innovative answer.

For example Will Work For, the design provocation I wrote about earlier this week, questions the core motivations for why we work.

There is nothing more frustrating than coming up with the right answer to the wrong question. This is true whether you’re designing a new company strategy or designing the next week of your life.

A willingness to ask “Why?” will annoy your colleagues in the short run, but in the long run it will improve your chances of spending energy on the right problems.

What will you ask “Why?” about this week?

(Photo from Thoughtless Acts by Jane Fulton Suri / Posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)

In design thinking, strategic thinking , ,
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Does the Media Have a Negative Effect on Innovation?

October 30, 2012 — 2 Comments

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A recent article by Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Perils of Always Ignoring the Bright Side“ got me thinking. Using the examples of GM crops and shale gas, Ridley makes the argument that the media’s singular interest in reporting negative outcomes has caused us to miss the potentially significant benefits of these two innovations. “Good news is deemed less newsworthy than the bad,” he writes, and as a result new technologies are harder than ever to get adopted.

It seems to me that this doesn’t just apply to innovations—where there may need to be a balancing of negative and positive—but also to new ideas that are clearly good. If good news is uninteresting to the media, then one of our most powerful tools for spreading new ideas and speeding the uptake of new approaches is lost to us. At a time when some of the most pressing problems are, at their root, issues of behavior it is tragic that the single most powerful tool for affecting behavior, storytelling, is being underutilized because the business of media perceives bad news to be the only way to engage an audience.

What are the alternatives? It is interesting to me that arguably the most successful new media venture of the last decade takes an almost entirely positive view on storytelling. TED has evolved from a cloistered conference for the technological elite to a storytelling machine consisting of hundreds of TEDx conferences a year and millions of downloads of TED talk videos. The success of this venture, and the appeal it seems to have with the young, suggests that a more optimistic approach has a market and is capable of inspiring engagement and action. Continue Reading…

In design thinking, strategic thinking , , , , , ,
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Design for Complexity: The Hidden Power of Networks

October 16, 2012 — Leave a comment

I recently moderated a fascinating session at the World Economic Forum ‘Summer Davos‘ in Tianjin, China. Two network scientists, Cesar Hidalgo of MIT and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi of Harvard, discussed the underlying science of how networks operate and how this knowledge might be applied to business and economics.

At the outset of network science a key question was raised: are networks random? If so, all nodes would be more or less similar to each other. But that is not the case. The reality is that certain nodes have more connections than others and play the role of hubs. New nodes in a pre-existing network tend to connect with highly connected nodes. After a certain threshold, the removal of highly connected nodes can make a whole network fall apart. Thus interconnectivity is beneficial but also brings in vulnerability: if you and I are connected we can share resources; meanwhile your problems can become mine, and vice versa. This happens in many different kinds of networks, from financial systems to social media to electrical power grids. Numerous complex systems can be mapped and analyzed, such as transportation and biological systems.

Network science and tools are readily available to shed light on factors that were not considered in the past and to inform decisions in many different sectors and organizations. The adoption of network science and tools for decision-making are especially powerful when designing for complexity. Hidalgo even proposed that the future economic growth of nations can be predicted based on an analysis of networks of production.

In our own organizations, network visualizations and analyses can be used to inform management decisions by looking at how employees connect to each other and how information flows through networks.

Here’s more from the session on the power of networks: weforum.org/sessions/summary/power-networks.

(posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)

In design of government, design thinking, designing for impact, economic recovery, organizational design, science and design, strategic thinking, visual design , , , ,
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What Great Leaders Know About Designing for Impact

October 4, 2012 — Leave a comment

Recently I had the honor of speaking about design for impact during the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York. In the audience were some of the most influential, action-oriented, and socially responsible leaders in the world. It was a wonderful opportunity to talk with Fast Company editor Linda Tischler about design’s role in creating positive change. Here are five key takeaways from our conversation on stage:

• Design at its essence is about being intentional.

• Great design is anything that meets the need of the community that it is developed for.

• To design for impact, we must deeply understand the communities that we serve.

• Being embedded in a community allows designers to get insights that may lead to products or services that serve that community.

• One trend we see is that designers are not just visiting communities-in-need to do ethnographic research. Instead, designers just stay and start prototyping in the field in collaboration with the community. This allows an idea to evolve to the best solution within a particular community.

I expand on a few of these ideas in Linda’s subsequent Co.Design article: 5 Reasons Global Firms Should Serve The Developing World.

IDEO and IDEO.org‘s Fred Dust, Patrice Martin, Sandy Speicher, and Jocelyn Wyatt also spoke at CGI 2012. Watch them—and see my full conversation with Linda during the plenary opening session—here.

Beyond the inspiring and provocative talks, CGI hosted five interactive Design Lab sessions this year with the goal of spurring new commitments to turn ideas into action. A number of other great designers focused on the social sector participated in the labs, including John Cary from Public Interest Design, Heather Fleming from Catapult Design, Krista Donaldson from D-Rev, Liz Ogbu from California College of the Arts, Kate Canales from Southern Methodist University, and Sarah Stein Greenberg and David Janka from the Stanford d.school. Design Lab participants worked to generate solutions to specific “how” questions, such as: How might we design healthier urban environments that help prevent chronic diseases?

More than $2 billion in funds were committed by the end of the CGI conference to a wide range of solutions expected to benefit nearly 22 million people. Now that’s impact.

(posted also on my LinkedIn Thought Leader blog)

In designing for impact, organizational design, social impact, strategic thinking , , , ,
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