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September 1 - September 3, 2022
Experiments breed evidence to further inform your path. Sometimes, the evidence leads you to a bigger decision that requires a deeper commitment.
Despite having design departments within their ranks, the purpose of those departments varied inside. Some supported marketing, some were devoted to research and development, and others helped design the next widget to launch within the core business.
There were times I probably was too silent and felt the group wondering where I sat on things.
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
Some design disciplines skew toward the implementation end of the spectrum with a heightened focus on craft (e.g., visual design, motion, communication design, etc.), and other disciplines skew toward strategic problem-solving (e.g., strategic design, service design, UX, etc.).
Design should elevate beyond the historic precedent of being merely transacted, to become an equal thought partner in both business strategy and final implementation.
Organizations like IDEO, Stanford’s d.school, and most innovation agencies describe this convergence in a holistic sense across “desirability, feasibility and viability.”
The lone entrepreneur is probably the designer, salesperson, and coder all at the same time. That is survival.
As organizations mature, internal politics increase, and crossing interdepartmental boundaries is not always a welcome tactic.
most companies are not IDEO the more I journey forward as a multidisciplinary designer. I believe it’s very important to be more up-front about the hard realities we will face as innovators and still push ourselves forward with a sense of optimism and courage.
At the same time, we must recognize that bringing together different team members (who likely haven’t worked alongside each other before) may introduce an enormous amount of friction, no matter the intentions at play.
“Who will lead?” might be the next natural question to ask.
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,
business disciplines have generally enjoyed the lion’s share of influence since the dawn of enterprises.
Over time, industrial technology sectors and Silicon Valley garnered a major share of influence on business, leveraging their pioneering forays into deep engineering and computer science.
Design can feel fragmented depending on the capability we are talking about. The landscape is also scattered with design agencies and freelancers of every type, making the search for the right capability a difficult task.
Customer attitudes toward COVID-19, climate change, societal imbalance, and data privacy are fitting examples that apply pressure to what people actually care about.
Although we all have to respect our project milestones, you have to give team members some room to breathe.
Maybe one or two days are dedicated for spending time in the field to distill value criteria.
Mentions of the future might draw accusations of being naive. The business has real needs right now.
What I’ve experienced is that 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.
