Welcome the fool, embrace a design attitude
For businesses to bottle the kind of experiences that focus minds and intoxicate hearts “[they] need to be designers. They’ll need to think like designers, feel like designers, work like designers. – Roger Martin
Organizations that survive and prosper over the long term learn to operate more like an adaptive organism within a complex ecosystem than a machine optimized for efficiency. They find a way to offset a natural tendency to become more and more bureaucratic.
They learn to tolerate and even embrace activities on the margin: outliers, experiments, and eccentricities which stretch their understanding of possibilities.
They welcome the fool within their midst.
But only the fool that remains connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.
Gordon McKenzie calls these people fools, Seth Godin calls them tribal leaders, and Roger Martin calls them design thinkers. Whatever we call them, they’re essential to the health, vibrancy, and future of an organization.
Fools, tribal leaders, and design thinkers alike all embrace a design attitude
To embrace a design attitude:
- Banish the fear of failure
- Embrace uncertainty, unpredictability, and the fuzzy front end of wicked problems
- Question the status quo
- Get over a preoccupation with hierarchy, status, and job titles
- See errors and mistakes as necessary learning opportunities
- Be willing to jump to solutions before problems are completely defined
- Embrace rapid-prototyping and the spirit of iteration to think through and test ideas
- Embrace the magic of intuition
- Reach across organizational silos and into the wider community to collaborate
- Use visual thinking to break down complex ideas and synthesize them into something meaningful
- Recognize that all things interconnect within larger ecosystems
- Investigate the evolution of socio-cultural models
- Be an expert at knowing what questions to ask
- Put the same weight on emotional factors as functional ones
- Explore the real meanings people give to things
- Be hybrids who speak different languages – from sales, to marketing, to anthropology, to design
- Get passionate about customers
- Become storytellers
- Search for simplicity
When you’re trapped in the giant hairball I mentioned in my previous post (and aren’t most of us) you can simply seek to survive. Or you can embrace a design attitude and use that hairball as a source of creative tension.
Design thinking isn’t what you think about. It’s about the attitude you bring to what you do.
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