innovation playground Idris Mootee

Design Thinking Is A Cognitive And Intellectual Process That Balances The Rational And Emotional. Not Included With Your MBA.

What is Design Thinking? Because of the word “design” and many automatically associate it with the craft of design or design as a profession. Actually it is less to do with “design” and more with “system”. There are many ways to define "design thinking" and this list is not exhaustive:

• A way to instill customer-centricity and empathy
• A framework for exploration and experimentation
• An approach to sense-making and problem solving
• A methodology to foster exploration and experimentation
• A design buzzword to tell you a designer can do more than design
• A management buzzword sold as the “next” strategic tool
• A marketing slogan or tag line
• A self-gratifying term for those who think they are creative

The term “design thinkers” implies that designers are craftsmen and not thinkers, which is NOT always the case. It is also a stretch for traditional industrial or brand/graphic design firms to claim to be able to use "design thinking" to solve complex strategic issues. These firms need to go through a radical transformation and close a big capability gap before they can even attempt to implement it for others.

Today, "design thinking" is frequently compared and contrasted to business. This is often an over simplification that forces us into predetermined roles along with their associated rules, conventions, behaviors and formal expectations. It Is important to recognize that "design thinking" is NOT exclusive to designers or unattainable to those in another discipline. Design thinking is natural and inherent in all of us who are smart and creative.

"Design thinking" is a cognitive and intellectual process that balances the rational and emotional – in effect combining left brain and right brain thinking. When applied, it harmonizes with other modes of thinking and closes knowledge and information gaps, creating order and refining meaning. Because "design thinking" is a dynamic, constructive process that is iterative in nature, developing ideas requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation and assessment.

To achieve those tangible outcomes, you need to open the process to multiple participants and socialize the process and outcomes, visualization is a very critical part of the process, not an outcome. Even the Department of Defence recognizes the needs to train "design thinkers" that are capable of critical and creative thinking to plan operations in dynamic environments with fast-changing uncertainties in extremely complex conditions.

People who are capable of using "design thinking" to identify and develop different military response options within the context of a big strategy are crucial to successful military operations. The development of such skills requires a shift in their focus from the operational and tactical environments to the strategic environment. This is an extremely challenging undertaking given that many military officers spend the majority of their career starting at lower levels and their advancement depends upon how well they perform tactically. This is very much like managers in large organizations who were promoted based on their ability to execute tactically.

To develop senior commanding officers with "design thinking" capabilities require DOF to train them new skills including analysis as well as synthesis. "Design thinkers" possess the ability to think critically on a "system" level; break concepts into simpler parts and mapping out their relationship and system impact before rearranging the elements into a new whole; in other words, to produce something through imaginative skills and quick experiments. And yes, imagination is always needed.

Design Thinking And Creating Social Capital. Here's An Example From Tampiquito, Mexico.

Creativity happens everywhere. Not only in design firms or creative agencies. And you can easily find the results of creativity all around you; you don’t need to seek out a gallery. People think creativity only happens in art schools and innovation don't usually happens only in a lab. Design Thinking and Strategic Creaitivty is all around us and funny enough many don't it Design Thinking. In fact, they happen more often than in a design environment. Design is not Design Thinking.

Creativity is everywhere and you need the eyes to see them. One example is PARK(ing) Day, an annual, worldwide event that invites citizens everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good. The beauty of these guerrilla installations is in their ability to engage and energize people. If all advertisers take 5% of their ad budget and use it for street installations, I think it would be a very valuable addition to their media mix. Imagine using this space for activation in creating social capital?

Meet Luis Alvarez who is an engineer by training and owns and runs a car repair shop, Autocity, in Tampiquito, Mexico. Luis also run an art gallery and an Artist-in-Residence program that aims to engage young local and international artists in projects for the development of the neighborhood’s social capital. Both the Gallery and Art Studio are located within his auto repair shop. Yes, people create art to the sounds of auto equipment and mechanics shouting, the entire process blends into a performance all its own.

It is a first for sure. And It brings me to the question, why doesn’t this happen in other spaces? In other places of business? What about shopping malls? This is one of the most creative ideas I’ve come across this year and I think Luis’ idea has legs. So far, two Artists-in-Residence projects have started up in Tampiquito. In 2009, the urban artist Eltono came to Tampiquito, stayed for two months, and painted the facades of about 50 houses in the neighborhood.

In 2010, Luis and his friends, El Narval, invited the Colombian sculptor Ana J. Haugwitz to join them. She also stayed for two months and worked together with the neighborhood’s craftsmen. The result was a collection of nine works of art, which were exhibited publicly in the neighborhood. Each work of art reflected the young artist’s collaboration with the talent she found in the workshops. I think art itself needs innovation more than anything else. It should get out of the studio and galleries and be part of our everyday lives. We can use a few more Luis in every neighborhood.

Let's Be A Little More Creative About Creativity. And What Does Collective Creativity Means?

What is creativity? According to Wikipedia: Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new (a product, a solution, a work of art, a novel, a joke, etc.) that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs. What counts as "valuable" is similarly defined in a variety of ways. BTW the above picture was taken at the annual Sausalito Art Festival just this weekend.

Scholarly interest in creativity ranges widely: Topics to which it is relevant include the relationship between creativity and general intelligence; the mental and neurological processes associated with creative activity; the relationship between personality type and creative ability; the relationship between creativity and mental health; the potential for fostering creativity through education and training, especially as augmented by technology; and the application of an individual's existing creative resources to improve the effectiveness of learning processes and of the teaching processes tailored to them.

Creativity and creative thinking are studied across many disciplines from psychology to cognitive science, art, education, philosophy, technology, theology, sociology, linguistics, business studies, and economics. As a result, there are a multitude of definitions and it all depends how you use it. What’s the motivation for people to be creative? Or people just want to be creative because they are creative? Sometimes this is the case and sometimes people are motivated by problems that need to be solved or jobs that need to get done and conventional approach is not effective.

Creativity comes in all shapes and sizes. Often we are not creative enough about what's creativity is or who is considered a 'creative' person. Sometime people can just pull an idea out from nowhere; and sometimes people scan for alternatives and quickly come to what they believe the best idea. It is sometimes a quality game and sometimes a quantity game - good idea versus lots of ideas. When creativity requires analysis and other more qualities of thinking, such as flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity or unpredictability, is that still consider creativity? Or it should be called 'Design Thinking?' Does creativity be just novel or it is not enough for it to be novel; it must have value, or be appropriate to the cognitive demands of the situation and the context.

The creative domain is basically nested in culture - the symbolic knowledge shred by a particular groups, society or by humanity as a whole (visual arts, performance art, craft-based professions etc.) and then there are gatekeepers (curators and producers). The person who involves in the act of creativity includes musicians, engineers, designers, architects, business strategists etc. But being in one of these professions, does one automatically qualify as a member of the ‘creative class?’ This one I am not sure.

Creative people have a great deal of energy; an urge to look at things differently but they also have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. The best creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy on one end, and rooted sense of reality at the other. And what about ‘collective creativity?’ We need to be more creative about what's creativity? What about creativity and co-creation', that’s a topic for another post.

Strategic Innovation And The Quest For Breakthrough Ideas

Innovation is now a very hot topic at the C-Suites. I have speaking a lot on the subect the last 5 years. The funny part is I am talking about Strategic Innovation and many still talk about Technology Innovation as if it was the sole source of innovation. People are very interested in my interpretation of Build-to-Last and the idea of Build-to-Fail-Fast. (Photos by Anddres Ahues)

Every large companies is thinking about it and most have little idea how to integrate that with the organization’s strategic intent; how to make it work within certain organizational structure; how to decide which project to fund; how to create a balance between reenergizing the core and attaching white space; what types of people to staff the innovation function; or simply what capabilities gap are needed to fill.

We just finished a comprehensive study of 42 top companies across 5 industries to understand what challenges and barriers that exist as well as little success stories. Generally speaking there are less success stories as we dig deeper but it is fine since they are at the early stage of the learning curve. We codified the knowledge in lessons learned as well design and implementation options as well as capabilities gap and how to fill them. It is not a 50,000 ft view but a very pragmatic understand of the situations and every company can learn from it.

The most common mistakes fell within the following:

• Focus too much on break-though ideas or staying too close to the core
• Not focus enough on creating break-through ideas and results in only incremental ideas
• Using existing (advertising and market research) vendors and infrastructures as well as toolkits that are not designed for innovation but apply them anyway and not getting the results desired.
• Fail to articulate the core purpose of innovation and how it is driven by the strategic intent and value creation
• Totally don’t understand the concept of ‘whitespace mapping’ let along the sense-making process behind it, and just called it ‘brainstorming’
• Fail to create a space that allow people to play and experiment and fail safely. A physical space that people with shared interest to play with ideas.

The idea of an innovation space is a good one. Even Microsoft has a space called Garage, a place opened last week that gives their staff access to tools such as a soldering bench, a laser cutter and a 3D printer to make prototypes and connect people with shared interest.

The Garage is in one of the oldest Microsoft buildings in campus but lots of windows. They filled the building with new "pods," basically temporary work spaces where teams of 2-6 employees can set up shop to collaborate on projects for a couple of weeks.

It is an attempt to create a safe place to fail. Fail as much as you like that and you wont get demerit points. Like all large companies, any good idea can get lost quickly because the initial market size is too small or it is threat to the core. Every company should explore having a space like this. Or they can house them in one of our offices that are even better.

The Economics of Co-Creation. Can What Happened To Microbrewery Happens To The Auto Industry?

A lot of talk and interest around the concept of co-creation. It is no question that this is going to have asting implications of how products and experiences are designed, developed and marketed. In 3-5 years, customer co-creation will be the part the norm of everyday business. Much like early days of ecommerce when people struggled with the legal, technical, operational issues. Slowly these issues will work their way out and we would look back and say “that’s simple…. makes perfect sese.”

What’s a great example of co-creation? Let’s first try to define it here as sometimes people refers it to anything from idea crowd-sourcing to technical expert groups to simple product/service/marketing customization. One good example of real co-creation is a company called Loco Motor.

I met Jay Rogers (founder and CEO) at the PDMA Co-creation Conference when I was moderating a panel. He was hosting the event and I was extremely impressed with what he is trying to do and has achieved to date. It is the first co-creative automobile design and purchase experience in the world. Just as the auto industry is dying for new ideas and change and Detroit needs a new strategy and it is more than making a better car. There are many structural issues to deal with and it is complicated. Jay is attempting to disrupt the auto industry by using co-creation as the strategic core.

The people in the car industry that have tried to innovate in the last 100 years and mostly fail, what makes him think he has a chance? Perhaps Detroit should concentrate on redesigning the business model and the whole experience before redesigning cars.

The first product Rally Fighter sells for just under $60,000. It’s an incredible car that looks like a life size HotWheel and gives me fond memory of my childhood. Remember the Hot Wheels yellow track?

The Rally Fighter is designed by the online community and ismanufacture at the microfactory in Phoenix, Arizona with a sustainable and highly efficient process. Jay wanted to build cars all his life, after raising $10 million seed capital, he launched the company with a simple idea that is extremely difficult to pull off. Loco Motors hosts a passionate online group of car-lovers or fanatics who compete to design vehicles for some regional communities in contests that run about once a month. The winning designs is then produced and sold to the communities.

There is more than to the flexible and customizable micro-factory, the concept here is when you give people tools, a strong community network with shared passion, some inspiration, small incentive you are in game. In fact, he is reinventing the customer co-creation experience for automotive. There are more than needs to be done in order to reinvent the economics of the industry. I think every business should look at Loco Motots and see what is relevant for their industries.

Will Loco Motors remains to be a niche business or eventually springing into a platform that supports a auto-cottage industries I don’t know. But we also need to think how we reduce traffic including rethinking local supplies network for certain products and cutting down unnecessary traffic.

An example is to look at how we replace pizza or UPS delivery with perhaps flying delivery drones – pizza right through to your windows. I am not sure if someone has thought about flying delivery drones man by 14 year old part-time students that doesn’t even have a driving license. The military drones can be converted to do the job. It is more realistic than flying personal transport, because in the event of an accident the worst is you don’t get your pizza. May be this is another idea of Jay, his Marine Corps background can be very useful. A central drone delivery operations theater that supports the nation’s takeout industry.

Great M/I/S/C Launch Party Last Night! Post Party Radom Thoughts On Innovation, Organization Design And Design Thinking Cuture.

Great party last night for my magazine M/I/S/C lunch party held at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. And Karin Wall (editor-in-chief) from Innovation Management joined us all the way from Sweden to co-launch their hard copy of Innovation Management with M/I/S/C. Cool people and great venue and not to mention good food. Exhausted after talking to 200+ people and there were about 20 people whom I last talked to was 7 years ago and actually never met in person and then there were some friends whom I have not seen for years. Oh what a night! And the girs at the office did a great job. I am thinking we should add 'party planning' to our innovation offerings. Anyhow, I have a lot of treat feedback on the magazine. Onto the next one!

I was watching the film ‘Inception’ on a long flight last week and I remembered one interesting dialogue from the film “How do you translate business strategy into emotion?”. I was not really watching as I was editing the next issue of M/I/S/C magazine, but the line caught my attention. I rewound it back and tried to make sure if I’ve heard it right. Yes. Translate business strategy into emotion!

That’s a great question and I am not sure people realize how important that question is. We’re human beings. And it is our emotion that makes us human. In business, we’re taught in business school about rational decision-making and fact-based decision making etc. etc. When it comes to design thinking and innovation, we realized how little we could apply these decision-making models. It is about the organizational culture as much as it is about process, framework and creativity.

The concept of organizational culture has drawn attention to the long-neglected, pretty subjective or the ‘soft’ side of organizational design. And many aspects of organizational culture, emotion and its relationship with design thinking have not received enough attention. Instead, emphasis has been placed primarily on the cultural and symbolic aspects that are relevant in an instrumental/pragmatic context. Organization culture is treated as a management tool and a instrument designed by management to shape employees' behavior. The idea of emotion is largely ignored.

The method of identifying organizational culture characteristics that foster innovation through design thinking is an interesting one. The more visible and tangible manifestations of culture are the artifacts. These may be easy to identify and observe but difficult to decipher. Values and state-of-mind tend to remain hidden and may only reflect rationalizations or aspirations. So often design thinking values are hidden deep within an organization and there are those who should design thinking and innovation and there is nothing beyond marketing slogans.

Can you pick a piece of documentation from an organization somewhere that can elicit some tacit aspects of design thinking and innovation culture? The idea is to provide a stimulus back to the organization so that they can reflect on an interpretation that is based on their cultural framework rather than on the corporate ethnography? What stimulus is required for the corporate ethnographer to get the dialogue flowing and what is need to provide a specific context but leave enough latitude for interpretation. This was achieved by asking the team members to discuss the concrete examples of successful and less successful application of design thinking in the context of their everyday work.

Starting with data gathering and analysis, the idea is to gather data for any example of design thinking applications experienced by the team and allow the team members to talk about their experiences of application. The interviews were semi-structured and cognitive mapping techniques were used to capture the views of each participant.

The individual cognitive maps were individually validated and conflated into a single map to represent the company’s collective cognition. The single map was further validated and refined. In a parallel process each of the transcripts was analyzed and codes were produced from transcript content analysis that represented the aspects of organizational culture that influenced radical product innovation. This resulted in the clustering of codes into aggregate themes (higher level codes) that represented aspects of the design thinking culture that were collectively considered to be positively associated with the facilitation of innovative outcomes.

This type of work is still in an early stage but I believe it will be extremely useful for organization to understand how design thinking (and to what extend) is embedding in an organizational culture. Without this understands, they are talking about more design and prettier things, not more design thinking.

Officially Launching The First And Only Design Thinking And Innovation Magazine - M/I/S/C. Available In 18 Countires. Now Reviewing Proposals For Foreign Language Editions.

Great lacunch party last night for M/I/S/C, second launch party in San Francisco in a few weeks..and then Shanghai. 200+ cool people showed up. Food is good..and the cupcakes too. Special thanks to the folks who pulled this off in such a short time..Ashely, Lucy, Marla, Sherry, Jessica, Christian, Brooke and a few others... great job! The food was great, food catered by Caplansky's Delicatessan, speciality bite-size cupcakes by Cutlepiecupcakes. Speical thanks to Umbra for hosting us. Let's do another one soon.

I was once a "magazine junkie"; now after rehabitation I am now a very selective reader or not having the luxury for not being one. I cut my magazine subscriptions from 105 periodicals a fewyears back to 10. I have to cut one if I want to add a new one (I learned this from someone...). So it will always be 10.

Last year we’ve seen the changing hands and closing of some of the most prestige and long established business magazines including Business Week and Newsweek and some new one such as Portfolio which I find the positioning odd. So people ask me if I am crazy or foolish publishing another new magazine.

I am kind of both I guess. I think there is a future in magazines, but it won’t be like the old one. I love Business Week, but it is not a sustainable business model. It is an educated-consumer read: venerable, timely, credible, respected, well packaged and produced. Which is another way to say, in new media: slow, old, closed and expensive to produce. And it is still based on an old publishing model.

Newsstand sales for the almost 500 consumer magazines in the US measured by the Audit Bureau of Circulations have been on a steady decline last three years between 8-12% for consumer magazines. Many publishers didn’t make it through the rapid decline in advertising dollars and struggling with integrating with the Internet thing. And the iPad thing turned the publishing upside down and changing the game quietly.

I have been having problems with mainstream publishing anyway so I don’t see this as an entirely bad thing. The whole thing about “culture of mass media” or “popular culture” is moving our society backward or at least stopping us from moving forward. Let's take the "mass" or "popular" out of "mass media" or "popular media". Just look at what magazines they are selling at Walmart and you understand what I am talking about.

To some extend it is the same case for TV. JTV and JP (Junk TV and Junk Publishing) are hurting us and thanks to the Internet, many of us can do without TV and same for these poorly produced magazines. Many don't worth the trees they killed.

What is M/I/S/C magazine? I came up with the idea one night flying redeye. I said to myself I am trying to pick up what Bruce Nussbaum left behind at Business Week. I really like that supplement when he was the editor-in-chief of that section. 

Inpsired by Nussbaum's vision, M/I/S/C will be a new global media brand designed to take over when he left unfinished at Business Week, the mission is make design thinking and innovation practices accessible to a broader readership; the magazine will be positioned on newsstands alongside the other cutting-edge cool titles such as Monocle and Fast Company. I can't name another cool magazine, there are a bunch of good design and architecture magazines and not much that gets me excited. Bring me back Industry Standard, not sure if anyone remember that short-lived one. 

M/I/S/C is basically organized around four key concepts: Movement / Intuition / Structure / Complexity, M/I/S/C blurs the boundaries between business, innovation, design, technology, art and culture. I want to show the world we can produce a world-class product in 30 days with limited resources. M/I/S/C will always be in Beta. I never promise you a finished product, there wont' be one.

Theodor Adorno said it right, "Standardization, moreover, means the strengthening of the lasting domination of the listening public and of their conditioned reflexes. They are expected to want that to which they have become accustomed and to become enraged whenever their expectations are disappointed and fulfillment, which they regard as the customer's inalienable right, is denied, and even if there were attempts to introduce anything really different into light music, they would be deceived from the start by virtue of economic concentration."

Actually Adorno's critique was not directed against popular culture per se, but the specific kind of mass culture produced under monopoly capitalism which our system is designed to encouoraged in order to get market power. Consolidation of industry that drives efficiencies also takes out the heart and soul of the culture business. Take a look around us and see how popular culutre media = junk.

Popular culture posses a threat to innovation by destroying niche and novelties and sensibility of micro-cultures, which are essential to innovation. Many of today’s mass culture was not ‘mass’, these mass culture was imposed from marketers and media owners rather than derived from the people. Is there something called "mass culture" or it is just the advertisers that liked us to believe that.

I need to get back to my day job and this weekend I will start looking at content for the next issue.  Now onto the next one – the Future issue. The future is exciting.

 

Can You Teach MBAs To Be More Creative? Or Can Creativity Can Be Taught At All? I Think So. Same For Making Good Cupcakes.

The picture above is the Valentine's Day cupcakes Sarah Yoon (an IC designer) designed and produced, limied edition and no photoshop. Yum. I am happy to discover that many of our folks have talents outside their work and formal training. One guy makes bowtie and another one makes coasters. I think it is important that people should possess an artistic craft outside of Adobe CS5 and Power Point.

As the Harvard B-School’s MBA class of 2010 celebrated their graduation outside Baker’s Library last summer, they were listening to speech by John W. Coleman (also a member of the grauating class and getting a joint degree from the Kennedy School). Lots of talk around the need to think outside the box and be creative. I always wonder how much more creative you can become before and after B-schools.

I think generally speaking people are less creative post B-schools as they pick up more management concpets.  “As we cross the stage tomorrow and step out into the world beyond this school, what if it’s more important than ever to recapture that child-like sense of imagination?” Coleman said. “What if, in a world so vastly transformed by crisis that it barely resembles the one we left in 2008, what matters most is not Excel proficiency or accounting acumen, but a passion and capacity for creativity?” It is very true, the question remains what do you need to do? May be start with cupcakes.

Not many B-schools, if any, treat business creativity seriously (let alone they understand what it means). Even No.1 schools (three years in a row) like London Business School, there are nothing in the curriculum that teaches students to be creative. What they have is a Centre for Creative Business, a not-for-profit joint venture between London Business School and University of the Arts London, which exists to educate and equip creative industry (TV, music, arts and film etc.) management teams, that’s very different from applying creativity in everyday managerial capacity.

In today hyper-competitive cut-throat business environment, creativity in business is really the most important capability. I am interested to know how many MBA and other Master programs are teaching the personal AND professional tools of creativity and methods for applied creativity in problem solving? Telling students to think outside the box is one thing, being able to teach them how to think outside the box but within a bigger box is the art – we all work with constrains. This is where design thinking comes into play.

The second biggest challenge is teaching them to be creative but also a good team worker. Creative people are generally speaking not good team worker. I get pissed every time people try to tell me “I come up with the idea!” and I wished I have taped the session and play them back where the idea actually came from. Being creative AND collaborative is another big bridge to cross.

And the third one, B-school profs struggle to understand creativity, let alone teach them. There is no point sceamibng out-of-the-box thinking and then talking about compliances and accounting policies. I am 100% sure that we can teach creativity (which I've done for decades), once you get slightly above an average I.Q. and a resonably interesting person (I cannot help you if you are a super boring person, there may be a medication for that but I am not sure). I can teach you applied design thinking. Intelligence and creativity are not directly correlated. So you could be a genius and display little creativity or have fairly average intelligence and wield artistic talent and amazing creative powers.

Creativity is a learned behavior. I can teach and train people to be creative. But I cannot teach style and taste. Buying a Chanel cupcake doesn't mean you appreaciate one. That’s a different post another day.

A creative manager needs to have the courage to try new things and risk failure and understand calculated failure. It is like understanding there is a chance your parachute will not open and have a spare one. The not-so-strategic creative types will end up dropping from the sky without a parachute, the strategic creatives know how to handle risks and also understand the risk/reward relationships. They are not interested in doing crazy thing with no reward or knowing the reward is not big enough. These strategic creative people are innovators.

What Creative People Can Learn From Jazz On Time and Rhythm Management. There Are No Reasons Why A Creative Person Cannot Also Be A Professional.

I was talking to a publishing veteran from New York and showed him my new magazine M/I/S/C which will be in stores this week in US and next two weeks in 18 countries, he loved it and believed we have a winner here. Then he asked me how big is the team working in this and for how long? I quickly answered 4 people including me and all part time and it took 4 weeks. He looked surprised and said it would have taken him 5-6 full time people for 6 months to produce one issue, he couldn’t understand how we could move that fast. I said that’s the speed we operate. He was very impressed.

One thing that many creative people don’t understand, they assume that 1/ they are as the only individual tasked with coming up with the ideas 2/they have all the time in the world 3/they are thinking of something that no one has thought of it before. All three are wrong.

I don’t believe any good ideas come from one person (rare exception). It might be sparked by one person but immediately followed by other people’s ideas and then the idea begins to take shape through dialogues. It is easy to think that an idea come from one individual but that's never the case.

Then when given a task or problem to solve, they would assume that it is the only thing they do and then the world stops and wait for them to come up with the answers. Sorry, the world continues to move forward while you spin. Some design schools are very good in teaching people to spin than to produce.

And then the last one is it is simply a foolish notion to think that whatever you come up with has never been considered before. It is not out there doesn’t mean no one has come up with the ideas. It is like the first time a kid visit Disneyland and everything there were new, only to them. Most of the characters have been around for decades. I’d like to talk more about the second one in this post – time management. This is the worst one.

Time management is common among for us who are in the business of ‘ideas’. For most creative folks, being organized, having defined objectives and some structure seems to threaten their creativity and take the mystery out of the box. There is no mystery. They hate to be bound by time allocation and don’t know how to manage it. That’s why project managers are needed. It shouldn’t be the case, but they have become the necessary evil. The project management role is critical dealing with complex co-ordination of multi-disciplinary teams and technology projects, but less in the creative process. It is not the best use of their time to manage creative folks in the early phase and creative folks should understand what ‘deadline’ means. I think it is unfair that their lack of self-discipline continue to be a burden to others and other has to accomodate it. A creative person can be a professional. I don't buy the artist BS.

So how can creative people improve their time management? The truth of the matter is that focus and self-discipline is vital to the creative process. I know many world-class design thinkers who are also excellent time managers – from architects, urban planners to industrial designers.

Creative people’s main challenge is they don’t have the habits of planning ahead and very bad is dealing with interruptions. These interruptions and the many tasks at hand stand to eat away their productivity and their discussions often steer them to other out-of-scope areas. I am saying you should have a calendar with time allocated by the hour. You need to think like a play producer. There will be a time you need to rehearse whether you finished the script of not and there will be time when audience start entering the theater whether you’re ready or not. And you can’t ask them to wait outside.

The best way to deal with this is to compose a task list and manage the task list like you manage a jazz session. It is a time process as well as a creative jamming process. Understand who plays what role and make sure it is sticking to the rhythm. Be prepared for these jamming and make sure you have the right people. Jamming with the wrong people is a waste of time.

First, know what I call your "power time". It's important to know what time of day you are most alert. This is high value time and treats it as such. Use a good portion of this time to work on your most important assignments. Each person has a best time. You can discover yours by monitoring your productivity over a period of time. Then you need to manage your schedule to keep your best time free for your most important work.

When planning your day, set other times of the day for tasks that don't require as much of your energy and concentration. Know what time of the day is least productive for you and use those time for other non-creative tasks such as prioritizing things that are important but not urgent or cleaning away your admin stuff or expense report etc. Assign a time to read you email (other than the urgent ones) and randomly spending time on your inbox can detail you. And don’t go to YouTube, do that at night. YouTube is the number one time-stealer. Your time in the office should be about interactions; otherwise you should be working from home. Always keep a notebook (or a piece of paper in my case) handy so that you can quickly jot down things that need to be done or your to-do-list. This will keep you focused on what you are doing and keep those things that need to be done in front of you.

Time (or rhythm) management is a skill badly needed for anyone who is in the knowledge business and particularly for creative folks. Here’s a take away for you - six steps to creative productivity:

1. What's the job? - Generating a long list of perceived problems or opportunities relating to the project and to select only the key "problems" to address. Invest your time smartly.
2. What’s the learning curve? – Understand what is needed to get up to speed and it is need to be proportion to the project time. You can’t spend 7 days learning a project and only have 2 days to work on it. Learning should be no more than 20% of the total project time.
3. What's the deliverable? – Think like a consultant, think deliverable, think about the end product not only what they look like but how they will be used.
4. What's the Information we have to work with? – Think about what information you will have to work with and what do you know and what you don't know.
5. Who's Involved? – Need to know who are your team mates and their individual role.
6. What's the rhythm? – Remember to set up the rhythm and get everyone into it. There is a lot you can learn from Jazz. As Jazz rhythms tend to be syncopated, meaning they contain unexpected accents. 

In addiiton to Jazz, it is important to understand the concept of swing, which has to do with creating a sense of momentum and danceability (good ideas dance). Some styles of jazz make use of counterpoint, which occurs when several melodies with different rhythms are played simultaneously. Together, the attributes of syncopation, swing, and counterpoint create a rich rhythmic background that is one of the most important elements of jazz. If you don’t like Jazz, you can’t be a good productive creative person. Hip-hop is the opposite and not recommended.

Adorno Refuses To Choose Between Music And Philosophy. Now Idea Couture Refuses To Choose Between Design And Business. We Wanted Both.

My dining room as well as other 6 rooms in the house are now turned into back office and soon we will move in the SAP servers. Between my work, hobby and personal projects my life is a mess and I really have no time to eat and sleep. The paper monster is taking over the house and the kitchen is the last defense…not for long.

On another note, I am very excited to recieve the advance copy of my magazine M/I/S/T which will be in newsstands in London, Germany, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney and every Barnes and Noble and Borders in a few weeks. I love the cover design and it stands out among other magazines. Why another magazine? I don’t know but I think it is just a good idea. What's next after a magazine? I have another idea.

I wanted to see a design-thinking magazine that talks about design and business as one. Design and business is part of our culture. Question for myself is if I have to ask Therodor Adorno what magazine should I publish, I think this is it. M/I/S/C is a about ideas, it is about culture, it is a magazine about business innovation and design thinking.

Every issue the content are organized around four key concepts: Movement / Intuition / Structure / Complexity (I jsut thought of the name one night while having ice-cream) The magazine original idea was originally devised as a straightforward collection of random thoughts around innovation, design thinking, business, culture and technology. It is for exploration of creativity, collaboration and co-created meanings that sits at the intersections between the culture of art, design, business, filtered by an unique editorial lens.

When it comes to media, I think I belong to the Frankfurt School. It has been more than 20 years since I last read the English translation of Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (1947 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno). The English title is called Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.

My favorite part of the book is what Horkheimer and Adorno called the culture industry. It was their contention that the culture industry was the result of an historical process that with an increase in technology (including mass communication technology or social media of today if you wish) there was an increase in the ability to produce commodities, which then enabled increased consumption of goods.

The consumption of mechanically reproduced cultural products—predominantly magazines and film—led to formulas of producing them for entertainment purposes, and it did not occur to consumers to question the idea that the entertainment presented to them had an ideological purpose or purposes. Consumers adapted their needs around these cultural products, and in doing so no longer knew of anything else that they might desire, or that there might be anything else they could desire. While we’re all part of the Facebook culture and occupied with media streams from everywhere, we don’t even notice that we are being manipulated (maybe there is a better word) and in fact even our lives are going through a commodization process.

According to Thomas Mann, Adorno refused to choose between music and philosophy throughout his entire life, believing that he was pursuing the same objective in two disparate fields. Sometimes I think about myself, I have been pursuing business and design my entire life and for a long time I kept them separate as two disparate fields. Now I realize it is one. Business is not just about the economies or making money, it is a great part of our culture, just look at Fast Company or better Monocle. Now business, design and technology are co-producing our culture and it is to be debated whether we’re destroying authenticity or promoting it. For Adorno, popular culture on film and radio did not bother to present itself as art. They were instead a business, and this in turn became an ideology “to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce”. Can we say the same for social media?

Design Thinking, Visual Sensemaking And Personal Transformation. Can't Separate The Three.

I was listening to John Seely Brown’s presentation last week in SF on his ideas about the future of learning and education. He is extremely well respected, now retired and a visiting scholar at the USC. His view of the world is very tech bias naturally as a scientist, struggling a bit in terms of understanding the world of large organizations’ behavior and decision-making. He was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of the famous Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for many years, it is worth a debate whether PARC was worth the investments from Xerox’s perspective but nevertheless it was a place where the smartest people worked on the coolest projects that still influencing us in our everyday life.

His perspectives on education is probably more interesting that his ideas on business. His ideas of learning mainly evolve around social learning, not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in a field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice. He put a lot of emphasis on tacit learning and use examples such as the studio system in architecture represents a good example of social learning under the guidance of an established practitioner. In this system, students work together in a common space and peripherally participate in each other’s design process; hence they can benefit from their instructors’ comments on and critiques of other students’ projects and not just from comments on their own work. This sounds exactly like how we work at Idea Couture.

Clients often put an over-emphasis on the processes and transfer of explicit knowledge in the innovation process and neglect or avoid dealing with tacit learning and sensemaking. It is the opposite of what business schools teach and many find themselves uncomfortable dealing with what they perceived as unknowns. Those are not exactly unknowns, may be uncodified and unstructured.

Dreaming up scenarios and sensemaking of these scenarios are often the toughest part. Seeing bits and pieces of data and the ability to connect them together to develop visible “data maps” of what are making sense around us, it is the learning organization at work and often requires some degree of personal transformations or basic shifts in how we think, frame and interpret.

As Edwards Deming says, nothing happens without "personal transformation." And at IC, we’re trying hard to provide a safe space to allow for this transformation as a social learning community. Everyone is encourage to dream, but also asked to anchor themselves on the reality of business dynamics and competitive forces. In additional to imagining, we use design thinking and system thinking to avoid the quick-fix mentality that makes us "system blind."

Think about it, many of today's problems come from yesterdays what were considered creative solutions, and many of today's creative solutions will become tomorrow's wicked problems. The most perplexing thing is that many quick fixes are being implemented by snart people even though no one actually believes they address underlying problems or they work at all. But we still feel compelled to implement these "solutions" just to show progress.

Hey a bad decision is a bad decision, whether it takes a second or a month to make that decision. We need to learn to apply design thinking and sensemaking as part of our everyday life decisions approach and learn to use unstructured data to enhance human decisions rather than automate them. The mortgage crisis is partially due to the automation of calling the loans even though it may not be necessary. On that note, next month we will have training sessions on strategic framing and sensemaking for our folks ... design thinking at work.

 

I Miss Bruce Nussabum's Business Week's Innovation Pullout So Much That I Decided To Publish A Magazine Focus On Design And Innovation.

I was having a casual dialogue with a friend/client in London about strategy making and paradox of resources management between investing in today’s business vs. tomorrow’s business. As usual I went into explaining the 50 reasons why innovation is so hard for larger organizations (and the 50 tactics to deal with each of them). There is no simple and quick answer to that question; it is like asking how a company can become more profitable. The answer is growing your top-line and control your bottom-line. That doesn’t help. The same for innovation, the quick answer from consultants is separate the business and treat it like a new venture. Well yes and no. If only if it is that simple.

The answer lies in how strategic planning is being carried out today and company quickly ignore any of non-quantitative and non-financial data. And there are a lack of tools for them to collectively imagine the futures and sense-making of massive data in large organizational settings is another challenge. And how different organizational designs can allow the strategic agility needed to cope with external shocks. There are so many things in our current management practices that are outdated and even business schools are behind. 

My friend was complaining that he didn’t find magazines such as Harvard Business Review useful or interesting to read anymore. For me, I stopped reading that about 3-4 years ago, especially after they switched to monthly from quarterly or bi-monthly and the quality of the editorial was not as good as before. At least 90% of the content are not of interest to me anymore. Not sure if it is me or it is them. But I am sure they are doing well from an advertising revenue perspectives as well as circulation, it has gone mainstream and mass market and did a great job optimization every revenue opportunities from the content. But it is no longer a publication for senior management at least that’s not what I think. But it is a solid publishing business with a healthy bottom line.

On the other hand, MIT Sloan Management Review and California Management Review have not been able to get beyond being academic journals but produce very high quality academic content. Both are more managerially friendlier than the other 100 plus academic journals basically catered for small academic communities.

Strategy+Business is the shinning star and has remained to be extremely relevant for senior corporate managers and the editorial and layout design is far better than HBR and others. I think it is the only magazine that circulation was still growing last year.  I think they get it right. I personally like the editorial direction, design and the format. There's a very consistent senior management perspective across all issues and riogr in editorial selection. And it is not academic, very practical in everysense.

Rotman’s magazine offers a lot of fresh ideas and has the most up-to-date ideas on management, although the design is pretty bad from a readability perspective. It is just difficult for me to read. I suspect their circulation base is very small.  LBS' Business Strategy Review has gone through a completely redesign and not sure why they decided to go for a smaller size, but it has become less academic and more managerially relevant, always there is a seriousness in it the LBS style. Very global in nature and almost aims solely at the C-suite and policy makers.

And then there are Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes and Business Week.  Other than Fast Company, all are very traditional business magazines and other than Fast Company, everyone is getting a bit boring. I don’t have time to read magazines, but I always love having a copy of Fast Company lying around and occasionally pick it up and scan for 5 minutes. There are also a dozen of local magazines un the UK, Netherlands and Australia on design and innovation, but they are very local in nature.

In view of that, I decided to publish our own magazines.  Here’s what I think is needed: We need a magazine that talks about innovation including design, art and business, which have traditionally been viewed as three totally different domains. There is no innovation magazine out there, Business Week used to have an innovation section which I like so much when Bruce Nussbaum was still there. That should be the future of Business Week. They missed that opporunity big time. Unfortunately Bruce left and there was a big restructuring. So far, only Fast Company is the sole business magazine that bridges the gap between design and business.

The idea of this new magazine is bring design and business together - the d-shool meets b-school idea. I want to see a magazine that is easy to read, non-academic and professionally relevant, provides alternative concepts and ideas on design, strategy and innovation, blurs the boundaries of design and business, talks design not in technical sense or as a craft but as a way of problems solving, introduce new innovation frameworks and processes to power up strategy, illustrated by contemporary photography and delivered in a cool and edgy editorial design. Some one mentioned it will be Wallpaper plus business and innovation and minus furnitures and fashion. Interesting. I do want a nice cover that makes you want to leave it on your coffee table. That’s kind of the implicit goals and will probably take us a few issues before we get it right.

Here's a frist glimpse of the cover, the cover pic was shot in Milan and the cover model was chosen from a dozen of models to best reflect elegance. The magazine name MISC stands for Movement/Intuition/Structure/Complexity. The name just came to me one night while I was talking on a conference call with a client, but I like it. First issue in newstands late Jan/early Feb 2011 in UK, US, Canada, France, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Here is a preview of the different cover designs. I am excited about it. And I really need to get some sleep.

 

 

 

Spend A Few Hours Here Should Earn You 2 Credits For Your BA In Design. i Want To Make This Place My Office.

Whenever I go I love to hand around cool places ..and cool people. As the last stop of the 5 countires business trip (Germany,Italy,Japan,China and Korea), I get half a day to visit a few cool places. Seoul is not Paris or London, but I still manage to find a few unique places to do some work. This is aA Design Musem/Cafe, and it is a must see in Seoul, you need places like this to remind you there is life beyond concrete buildings.

It is not so easy to find but it is worth the trouble. It is located in a side street between HAPJEONG and HONGDAE, you will see an old three storied building and go up stairs you will see the entrance. Everywhere is full of chairs and I love chairs and I have collected a few dozens over the years, but this guy the owner is a chair lunatic. You can practically find any chairs you can imagine (except the electric one) from different periods from modern vintage to modern Bauhaus to Scandinavian and art nouveau.

The café is nice with both small tables and a few communal tables and there is a parquet floor (like a raised ‘study area’ in a library) for people to sit and work with their laptops and provides the best view of the entrance and main seating area below. The café floor is a cavernous, double height room with exposed cement walls; there is also an outdoor space that is roughly half the size of the ground level and covered with a solid canopy.

The place is not busy, I am not sure becaue I was visiting in a Monday or because the museum hasn't yet opened. Their plan is to have shop, bookstore and exhibition space. This is no Dean and Deluca, this is one of the coolest cafés I’ve seen in the world, yes I’ve seen many. The menu is small but good enough.

This is not a place that wants to be famous for its food. The basement will be used for the museum space, which won’t open until June 2011. The curator Jung Kyung Suh gave me a quick tour and it is a treasure room, everywhere scattered with funky furniture pieces and there is a giant hanging shark in the middle of the space. Unfortunately it was dark there so I couldn’t take more photos.

This will be my hang out place in Seoul just as Ace in New York. My social space is getting smaller and smaller, we’re talking about a dozen of places in major cities. What do I care, as long as there is Facebook.

You Can Criticize South Koreans For The Lack Of Creativity, But You Cannot Criticize Their Hospitality. I Think They Beat The Japanese.

Seoul is really a surprisingly friendly place. It was a surprise even for me as I am so used to different hospitable culture. Despite the city is a little too much concrete and dull, the younger generations of Koreans are bringing life to the city. They are different from the Shinsedae (means new generation in Korea in the 80s) who are now older, the current generation of young people is technologically savvy, heavily immersed in consumption both material and cultural and they are the first generation who have the opportunity to travel abroad for visit or study with the liberalization of overseas travel and the advent of an era of information and communications. Funny after the first day of meeting till 7pm started right when I arrived the afternoon, my Korean friends conmplained the next day they were tired and I worked them too hard. Funny coming from a Korean.

I think the Korean hospitality is worth a mention, here are my three stories happened the last few days. Despite the language barrier, people went all the way to help me as a foreigner. There is something about Korean hospitality that is little known.

I was looking for the location of University of Seoul and I went into a tailor shop to ask for direction, he didn’t understand what I was saying so he bought me to another tailor shop (custom made suit) and the guy called another person to the store. After 5 minutes of Korean conversation (no idea what they were saying), he picked up the phone and then there was a male voice speaking English on the other side. I told him where I was going and next thing was, the tailor shop owner closed the shop and walked 30 minutes to show me where the school is. I felt bad he actually had to walk that far to show me the place. He was probably around 45, and didn’t speak a word of English.

Then the next day I was looking for this tiny place that I was supposed to meet my friends after they’re done with the G20, no taxi driver can find it even with detail address. I stopped and asked 2 young guys on the street, they pulled out their iPhones and then looked it up for me, didn’t get it as I might not have the English spelling of the street right, then he stopped another two girls on the street, in 5 minutes I have 4 people searching on their iPhones to help me to locate the place. Not sure you will get the same service in a 5 stars hotel in the US or Europe. So when you travel to Seoul, there is no need to bring a map. These young people can communicate in English and all equipped with smart phones to help. Anything you need they have a widget for it.

Yesterday, The third one is I was having a quick lunch in a small Italian place before rushing to a meeting, there was a song playing in the restaurant that I really like. So I asked the waiter who’s the singer. Two minutes later the chef came out and turned on an app in his iPhone, he said it listened and then searched for the artist name. Didn’t work for the first time, then he bought out another person with the same app and tried again near the speakers, it worked this time. The hospitality is not trained, it is truly authentic. He is not a hotel concierge he is the chef.

I feel there is no distance between them and me even there is a language barrier. I have never experienced that level of authentic and sincere hospitality. And yes, they even give out free hugs. I didn't experience thta as I was in a rush, next time. Also, I'd prefer to have a few girls to chose from. This is no Thailand or Japan where everyone is polite and smiles at you. They did that because you’re a tourist or a customer or because they were taught to be polite, this is not the case. The only disappointment is taxi drivers usually don’t speak any English and don’t know the city well. In London, they know the city inside out, but not here. I don’t know why Samsung or LG can easily solve this problem, a voice based language translator in every taxi. Type in the text on your mobile phone and it will be translated and broadcasted to the taxi’s radio.

But in generally, there is still a deep-rooted conservatism in the Korean culture, even for the young people. The government is doing everything they can to encourage creativity and entrepreneurialism, with some success, but still a long way to go.

When Obama praised the Korean education system came as a surprise to many South Koreans at that time as the country's education system has been under intensed public criticism due to its lack of creativity and heavy dependence on private tutoring. In fact, very common among Asia. Keep in mind that Western social and political values such as democracy, individualism, the equality of the sexes, and national self-determination were only introduced by late 19th century Korean reformers and foreign missionaries, who made profound, affect upon the development of Korean education and cultural values. These concepts have played an increasingly prominent role in South Korean life the last few decades. Have talked to more a half dozen of local design professionals to get a sense of their views on design and art and the changing Korean culture, that’s a next post. Need to catch my flight.

Maison Moschino Milano - Il Mio Tipo Di Hotel! The Boutique Hotel Craps From Big Chains Are Bascially 4 Stars Fast Food.

Boutique hotel is my thing, it is not about being cool or be seen, I’ve passed that stage and it is not about the brand. Do I care if it is W or X or Y? I am sick of staying at the Sheraton or Marriot of the world, it is not only depressing, it reminds me that I am another those global travelers without a life. Although that’s not quite the case. I travel around the world for a reason, a good one. It is my job. And I am a byproduct of globalization. With a handful of passports, hotel loyalty cards and Facebook contacts (used to be Roladex), I am at home anywhere in the world.

I like boutique hotels because it reminds me that life can be special, there is more to it. It is about reflecting individual’s style, it is about efficiencies and it is about design. For me, I have a handful of favorites but ACE is on my top ten lists, Morgan’s is nice. I am definitely add Moschino Milano to the list. And that’s where I am staying this week. Maison Moschino is located in the old neoclassical railway station on Viale Monte Grappa. The four (or five?)story building has 54 and a few suites each with its own unique look. Rossella Jardini and the Moschino creatives designed the space themselves with whimsical fairy-tale rooms like the petal bedroom shown at right. I think there are 16 styles of rooms (vs. one in Sheraton or Marriot) My favorite is the box room.

The next one for me to check out will be the Christian Lacroix hotel. I love the flouncy and bright fashion style, the Hotel du Petit Moulin is in the Marais district of Paris. Lacroix has decorated each of the boutique hotel's 17 rooms . differently mixing various time periods and styles in riotous combination. Toile on one wall, a space mural on the next, a lipstick red bathroom and liberal use of color is cool. It is the opposite of the minimalist style which I still like.

And for London, I don’t stay in hotel there (since I usually stay with family) so no luck to taste the best in boutique hotels. The one that I really want to try is 40 winks. It is a great idea by interior designer David Carter. It is a great place for magazine photograhy. Carter is now offering his two spare bedrooms to paying guests on a B&B basis. Yes two rooms and no TVs. Carter is also happy to arrange visits from beauty therapists and reflexologists for those in need. If I am living in London, that’s probably what I would do two, rent out two rooms and one is D-school room and the other is you-know-what, B-school room. The dining room is where D-school meets B-school. I can arrange visits from organizational psychologists and behavioral economists for those in need.

Honestly, I have enough of the boutique craps from the big chains, they are still better than their main stream brands. Those are killing the minute I walk into a lobby. They are like 3 stars fast food chain that offers a bed too. Another big problems are the fact that all hotels seem identical, few incorporating local features or better to say local flavors.