Sensemaking in a changing world
The best in art and life comes from a center – something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that’s very hard to [...] Read more »
There’s been a regrettable lack of discussion on the challenges of designing usable, engaging experiences for enterprise software. Often the business problems solved by B2B vendors were compelling enough that whether or not they were easy to use organizations were willing to put up with poor design. Companies purchasing the software have traditionally been more [...] Read more »
Economies right now are fundamentally becoming less about physical objects and more about creating ideas and experiences… We now have a new challenge: we have to meet a new emphasis on improving experiences instead of objects, and we need to improve the flow of interactions between customers and service providers. – Daniel Pink, Business Thinking [...] Read more »
In Designing in hostile territory I talked about injecting design thinking into your organization using a subversive, bottom-up approach. But to really benefit from design thinking, to create products and services that delight customers, an organization has to build design into their DNA, like many of the world’s most innovative companies have done. Some of these companies have [...] Read more »
The tactics outlined in the fun little book Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics provide you with a subversive's bottom up guide to sneaking user experience into an organization. Like Roger Martin in his article Designing in Hostile Territory, John Rhodes challenges us to apply our skills as designers to the challenge of integrating design into an organization. Replace user experience with design thinking in the tactics outlined below and you're good to go. Read more »
[Design thinking] is the ability to create new options and build new products, services and experiences that gives design so much power. It is the ability to understand deeply cultures from digital social media networks to small villages in southern India that gives design its power. – Bruce Nussbaum I first came across the term [...] Read more »
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 [...] Read more »
Organizations need to innovate to survive and prosper or they face extinction (average lifespan is only 40-50 years). Many companies have failed to survive. Why? An organization’s natural mind set is to focus on protecting and repeating past successes. As a result, they become more and more inward facing. And as they become more and [...] Read more »