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although the phrase design thinking has become popular in many business circles today, its meaning is still not clearly understood.
in many cases design thinking has become like a stylized fire extinguisher of change that, like most fire extinguishers, sits silently behind protective glass as if on display.
transformation is the journey of those who are in power, who need to move from being gatekeepers to being servant leaders.
You can absolutely be creative even if the world told you it’s not for you. Unfortunately, for many of us, creativity has been stripped from us as we mature in our professions. Whether it was formal education or assimilating into our professional lanes, our creativity may have fallen in deference to other traditional norms, customs, and structure.
My journey revealed many lessons on how to cultivate creativity inside of teams, especially when design is a strategic thought partner and equal contributor.
19% into the book, not a single hint of anything useful whatsoever.
Despite the circumstances of our times, always stay curious. Always take moments to look up and question where you’re heading.
Does your present direction resonate with what your heart is longing for you to achieve? Listen to your voice and open your aperture to see a lot more options in your path.
Same old "follow your heart" bullshit.
Based on your curiosity, invest some energy to explore what’s possible. Speak to someone, flush out your idea, or make something and test it. Experiments breed evidence to further inform your path. Sometimes, the evidence leads you to a bigger decision that requires a deeper commitment.
Your path is your own. Own it. Life is more than just throwing experiments at the wind. Through introspection, distill the convictions that motivate you and inform your values. Let that inform your career vision for yourself, and use th...
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What I really grew to appreciate was Nike’s investment in their product triad model: a product line manager (i.e., product marketer or product manager), a development engineer (who engages with factory partners with an eye toward downstream manufacturing challenges), and a footwear designer had equal standing in their collaboration as a triad unit. No footwear design moves forward without the intimate involvement of these multidisciplinary triads or pods. Every role was critical, and one discipline could not dominate the other.
These C-level leaders had design organizations reporting to them, but they usually did not have an equal creative contemporary (i.e., a peer-level creative executive) problem-solving alongside them.
In my opinion, design thinking represents two things: A philosophy or mindset that focuses our attention on unmet needs and frictions facing the humans we’re serving in our business or institution An invitation for other disciplines to enter a professional creative’s problem-solving process, which includes diverging and converging activities in the discovery of needs and the solutioning against them
Design should elevate beyond the historic precedent of being merely transacted, to become an equal thought partner in both business strategy and final implementation.
Design thinking helps, but we should address its perceptions to make the philosophy hold more weight through better structuring of design and innovation capabilities within our organizations.
the dominant share of business influence is owned by two pedigree groups. The first group includes those folks that come from investment banking (e.g., Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, etc.), with their ability to leverage financials and the promise of financial upside as a means of influence to steer organizations forward. The second group represents those that come from top-tier management consulting firms of the likes of BCG, McKinsey, or Bain. When you peel back the curtain on most C-level executive biographies, they typically have done a major stint in one of these two groups at some point
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I strongly believe that multidisciplinary team collaboration is the currency that will create future innovation. If we were to peer through a looking glass toward a distant time horizon (see figure 4.2), a multidisciplinary team could “see the future” through a number of different vantage points.
We can see the future through the lens of people and their value criteria, both static and dynamic. We can see the future through the lens of industry and ask challenging questions that shake up the present consensus on how our given industry is supposed to behave. We can look to trends and exemplars (i.e., living examples of those trends in flight) to inspire potential solutions that are more intuitively positioned for a dynamic and uncertain future.
the multidisciplinary team can problem solve together and immerse itself in all of these diverse realities, signals, and forecasts to find mutually agreeable opportunities to investigate together.
Instinctively, creativity is an act of making connections naturally among existing information in our purview.
“You can’t innovate at gunpoint.”
teams about following overly structured approaches that might risk forcing a team’s creative hand to rapidly create solutions in some arbitrary context versus allowing them to be immersed i...
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exercising creativity has to feel natural. Although we all have to respect our project milestones, you have to give t...
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any talk of future visions is often published in a binder, discounted as theoretical, and never revisited again because most of the enterprise’s attention is focused on the here and now.
a multidisciplinary team should use the full extent of their capabilities and diversity to see into the future and anticipate all types of change.
A lot of company strategy decks will highlight detailed segmentation and population sizes of target markets, but they rarely do a good job of answering who we are able to reach (or who we could reach) at a deep human level.
some value criteria may shift (a concept known as value migration, inspired by Adrian Slywotzky and exposed to me in GradID) and we have to be ready for that.
Value criteria that shift become a form of value migration. Anticipating how values will potentially migrate allows us to forecast how we might be able to respond in future contexts by anticipating changing needs.
What do we mean by first principles? These are the core and foundational assumptions that characterize how business is successfully garnered in a given industry.
Craig Walmsley, a senior director of customer experience and innovation consulting at Publicis Sapient, spoke on the morality behind our design decisions and introduced the Impact Canvas as a tool to provoke important conversations (see figure 4.5).
Craig’s Impact Canvas encourages us to think about these additional facets of our ecology.
One framework that I have found helpful is STEEP. This framework is simply giving credit to all the different social, technological, economic, environmental, and political/regulatory/legal trends that might be at play within an industry sector or across sectors.
Quantitative understanding (“quant” as shorthand) can serve as the scaffolding to help us understand where we need to prioritize our time digging for latent insights.
Once we know where to spend some time, the qualitative understanding (“qual”) we uncover serves as the thick clay to help us shape a relevant experience that really taps into the value criteria of our audiences.
Quant is the scaffolding; qual is the clay. They can feed off each other, balancing conclusive framing with the need for uncovering deeper insights. We should organize our research approach to allow that symbiosis.
How do we foster and channel those sparks and connections? As designers and innovators, we tell stories. We can do that at any time.
We should ensure a designer is present as we navigate key inflection points at which trade-offs need to be negotiated across the lenses of desirability, feasibility, and viability for our offering to realize itself through the build.
In my experience, design and innovation capabilities shine best along two dimensions, which I will call breadth and depth from now on. Breadth speaks to the multidisciplinary team’s ability to communicate, collaborate, and strategically align with other disciplines to foster multidisciplinary, creative problem-solving. Depth speaks to each team member’s ability to leverage their deep subject matter expertise to create thoughtful concepts, prototypes, investigations, or validated learning exercises.
Breadth can easily be interpreted as the capability of design when we are merely scratching the surface. In new multidisciplinary settings, many designers get sucked into the role of jockeying the Post-it notes and the whiteboard, and their bandwidth to actually produce great design collapses from the pressure derived from this misunderstanding.
Post-it notes and whiteboarding do not represent the deeper rigor I’m encouraging us to protect. The deep work proves itself to be a superpower when we give the designer some room to breathe.
I could bucket my time in three categories: stakeholder management, production, and actual problem-solving (i.e., the critical work to figure out).
I found myself more and more concerned about the third category. The first two categories of time can easily collapse the third if we’re not careful.
Table 7.1 Where are you on the spectrum between gatekeeping and servant leadership?
leadership can’t be all talk. Sometimes folks need to see you step in and untangle a difficult knot so they can learn from you. Trust is won in these moments.
Ultimately, you just can’t promote more of the same or more of what you’ve found comfortable in the past. You have to lead with courage when it comes to transformation. Courage begets trust, and trust begets followership for your vision. Lead with courage. Lead in service to your team.
Very few organizations prioritize design within every level and within every department.
Transformation requires a cohesive strategy. We have opportunities to drive empowerment for our people, inclusive of role clarity, rolling up to a hopeful mission, vision, and purpose.
Methodologies need to be designed that appreciate both top-down and frontline perspectives, with an eye toward always evolving them. We also need teams to respect these methodologies as guideposts and not vehicles of authority themselves. Methodologies are meant to be broken and improved.
