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.

There Is An Inherent Conflict Between Logic, Emotion And Creativity. So How Should We Deal With It?

When peope ask the quesion "Do you know the correct answer?" I don't like that question at all. It is not a smart question as a start. The biggest problem with our formal education systems is our over-emphasis on finding the correct answer to a particular problem. While the quest for correct answers helps us to function at work, it also impedes us when it comes to making the bigger, more important decisions, largely because many bigger, real-life business issues are ambiguous, complex and dynamic. If you have been around for over 50 years and have travelled to more than 20 countries and speak a few languages and have a few degrees under your belt, you probably know there is no right answer, may be a lot of wrong answers.

Creativity is not a license to be wrong (you have been reading too much Fast Company), strategy is not a license to be boring or lack of imagination (Reading too much HBR). A PhD degree is not a license to overintellectualize and being irrelevant to the real world and use words that you need to explain what you mean. And an MBA is not an automatic license to make key business decision, you need to earn it.

However an MBA does teach you a few important concepts if only if you understand how to apply them. You should know how to re-org your in-laws into a 'team-based family.' You learn to refer having babies as pilot market testing. You should understand the cost structure and sytem implications of starting a family. You know the cost of capital when your spouse decided to purchase a Hermes Birkin. And most of all, you know how to talk about your past relationships as ‘sunk costs.’

I definitely school needs to teach more creativity. Not the crazy useless exercises but applied creativity and design thinking in everyday life from science to economics. Today (and I should say it has always been) creative thinking is critical to business strategy and innovation; however, If you look at the top 20 MBA programs around the world, you will be challenged to find any courses, core or elective, which teach, train or even inspire students to be truly creative. Instead, most MBA programs and courses focus on numbers, analysis and the logic of deductive reasoning.

There is an inherent conflict between this kind of logic and creativity, and in most business settings, logic is usually quick to get in the way of creativity. Creative ideas can run into the walls of business logic because 1/ it does not quickly, clearly or at all connect to 2/ business strategists often operate within the boundaries of defined roles, and decisions are made based on those boundaries – they draw on what they know and what they have learned including formulaic behaviors, processes and the “best practices” that have evolved through mass consensus – to shape how they think and act.

That explains how many MBA students had Adam Smith on their reading list. The 18th Century idea that people – given their limited time, information, resources and budgets – act purposefully to maximize their own satisfaction is epistemologically central to business thinking. In Smith’s view, all human behavior is rationally self-interested and we are innately selfish. Thanks to this model convinces many how “easy” it is to predict individual or organizational behavior. It is not quite that simple.

When it comes to human behavior, this is where many economic principles, particularly Smith’s, break down. I am not rational (ask those people who work wiht me) and many of us are not. The economist's notion that people act rationally only implies that they try to act in ways that are consistent with their own personal objectives, even if those objectives seem absurd to outsiders. That's the beauty of being human. Read more about creativity in this coming issue of M/I/S/C - The Creativity Issue.

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.

Can We Really Quantify Future Innovation Opportunities? Or Is It Just A False Sense Of Predictability?

What a month, from Phoenix to Cincinnati, then New York City, then Monterrey (Mexico) to Moscow and now in London. Meetings after meetings and I don't know where I am. It is like that guy in the movie. I need to have a week sitting down and do some work. Perhaps next week. Saw my magazines in Selfrides and it is flying off the shelves everywhere. We still need to expand the distribution from the current 22 countries to 30. And getting the iPad version out. This has been a productive couple of days in London. I realized I haven't have the chance to work with Morgan for a long while. We just finished our deck for tomorrow's presentation. It is going to be a good one. And really looking forward to meet some of the people there again. Just adding a few more slides on intuition. I always love talking about this topic. And I like Morgan's Burberry shirt.

Henry Mintzberg once suggested some twenty years ago that managers need more than just analytical skills to do their jobs well; they also needed the intuitive (right brain thinking), he was right but he didn’t write a book about it. He should have.

Intuition is hard for many and good use of intuition often requires deep introspection. Chester Barnard in The Functions of the Executive (1968) suggested that managers use non-logical decision-making, which balances rational and intuitive.

“I have found it convenient and significant for practical purposes to consider these mental processes consist of two groups, which I shall call ‘non-logical’ and ‘logical’. These are not scientific classifications, but I shall ask you to keep them in your minds for the present, as I shall use them throughout this lecture. In ordinary experience the two classes of intellectual operations are not clearly separated but meld into each other. By ‘logical processes’ I mean conscious thinking which could be expressed in words or other symbols, that is, reasoning. By ‘non-logical processes’ I mean those not capable of being expressed in words or as reasoning, which is only known by judgment, decision or action."

Not that I suggest we need to start a MA degree in Strategic Intuition. Although it might attract a good number of students, I think it should be part of business school foundational teachings. I teach this at my Harvard Design Thinking Program and other in-company programs, people were excited as if they have just discovered this untapped potential. Intuition is something that should be reorganized and managed like any other element in the decision-making environment, particularly in a team environment.

The over reliance on quantitative analytics are common, numbers are very important, but it needs to be combined with other things. Often the most promising innovative ideas with long-term strategic upside are exactly those that are impossible to quantify. And they ended up being shelved.

Freek Vermeulen of London Business School just wrote a very good piece on how insisting on early quantitative validation is creating a problem. He said the reason why companies are still so eager to see numbers because the long-term, uncertain aspects of strategic investment decisions make us rather insecure whether we’d be doing the right thing; therefore, we really would like to see some numbers to lull ourselves into the belief that we’ve been thorough and have uncovered the facts and have a solid basis on which we’re accepting or rejecting the proposed course of action. Of course that’s just make-belief (you can make numbers say whatever you want them to say) and may make you quite myopic; missing the things that are difficult to quantify but just as important.

He is obviously not suggesting that we should get rid of numbers in strategy altogether. Heck no; forcing yourself to go through some sort of quantifying exercise can sometimes make you uncover and realize things that you hadn’t thought of before. He suggests that once we’ve carefully and painstakingly produced all the numbers then toss them aside and sort of make a decision based on our gut feel and experience. Very good advice.

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.

Do You Know The Difference Between Design Engineering And Engineering Design?

Went to the Made in Brunel opening last week, Made in Brunel showcases creations from within Brunel University’s School of Engineering and Design. The show was held at the Bargehouse, four storey building on the South Bank featuring an array of technological, sustainable, humanistic and virtual innovation concepts and prototypes.

Many wonder where the name Brunel comes from, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 -1859) who was a leading British civil engineer, famed for his bridges and dockyards, and the construction of the first major British railway, the Great Western Railway; and a series of famous steamships, including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship. The school has a very good brand management program which is rare as a degree program.

There are a lot of work showcased in the Made In Brunel show and as always the quality of ideas varies. A few ones caught my attention including some concept explorations for Foursquare – the location social network by Chris Strickland, a graduate of product design engineering school. A number of mini appliance prototypes that allow people to play with information physically with their hands. By physically with the pods, people are able to combine different forms of content.

Foursquare Gaze has two components including the six Pods provide the interaction with up to the minute information and the Home which keeps the Pods charged and provides a safe place to store them. When each pod is taken away from Home, wireless connections ensure that they are kept up to date with the latest information. In this way the experience can be taken anywhere in the home.

Another interesting one is a concept to use physical items to manage utility costs at home (perfect for the modern couple) by Nick Sardar, a product design graduate. It is a physical interface (see photo below) where each cylinder is assigned to a financial aspect of your life. It is like open books household budget management.

There has always been confusions among people between industrial/engineering design and design engineering. And the same confusion applies to art school and design school which the lines are often blurred. Standford D-school was originally a engineering school, Brunel is an engineering school, Rhode Island is an art school, Arts Center is a deisgn school, RCA is an art school but certain grad programs are more like design engineering school. The lines are fast blurring. Many students are confused.

Here are what the definitions from Wikipedia but probably can use some modifications: Industrial Design (ID) is an applied art whereby the aesthetics and usability of products may be improved. Design aspects specified by the industrial designer may include the overall shape of the object, the location of details with respect to one another, colors, texture, sounds, and aspects concerning the use of the product ergonomics. Design Engineering (DE) is a discipline that creates and transforms ideas and concepts into a product definition that satisfies customer requirements.

The definitions of these two categories of design have a fundamental difference between them: ID is an applied art, whereas DE is a discipline. This means that industrial designers have more room to dream, immerse, create, interpret or expand an idea than design engineers to design everything that they or their customers want. And for design engineers, the job is explore material, heat, modularity and other engineering constrains and at the end is to make it work. Many are still confused as to which one does what. Even prototyping means very different thing for each of the two. Although in some cases the line is not clear.

Design Thinking And Growth: What’s The Connection? Why Do We Need Growth?

The Harvard Design Thinking Semina was a great one. High quality particiapants and great turn out with beatiful New York City spring weather. Lunch on the rooftop is way better than a banquet room or a faculty's dining hall. No place on earth can beat the view of New York City. So much energy and creativity. Many participants came all the way from China, Argentina, Mexico and Korea. Thinking of the nex one outisde US, perhaps somewhere Europe and Asia?

Growth is a funny word and often misunderstood just like other words such as strategy or innovation. I have heard from people from 25 year old young smart people to 45 year old seasoned executives and often they struggle with the idea of growth. Why we need to relentlessly achieve growth and what growth means?

Growth is often perceived as a proactive (not defensive) strategy, as the Red Queen says in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, “Here it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” We're at a point that you can't run faster anymore and is close to the physical limit of how fast we can run. Both organizations and even economies. We ned to develop out talent pool to match the economy of the future and harness the full capabilities of the our human capital and technological progress and to reverse the damage we've done to the environment. Now it's time to reinvent the wheels.

Growth is perhaps the most important word on CEOs’ minds, small companies or large enterprises. Small firms want to get big and big firms want to get bigger.  Scale brings resources, market power, improving employees’ standard of living and it gives you currency to acquire.  Today, quality growth is hard to come by, and responsible growth is more difficult. Every company needs a grow strategy or you are waiting to die to be acquired or planning to exit. It is like swimming up stream a river, there is nothing call stay put. Either you swim to go upstream or washed down the river.

Philip Crosby, author of  The Eternally Successful Organization says that growth is unavoidable, "if for no other reason than to accommodate the increased expenses that develop over the years. Inflation also raises the cost of everything, and retaliatory price increases are not always possible. Salaries rise as employees gain seniority. The costs of benefits rises because of their very structure, and it is difficult to take any back. Therefore cost eliminations and profit improvement must be conducted on a continuing basis, and the revenues of the organization must continue to increase in order to broaden the base."  When a person ask you why do we need to grow? Ask him or her whether he or she is preparing not to have any promotion, personal development and increase in income and responsibility for the next 10 years.   If a company stop growing, there won’t be opportunities for everyone. Period.

The challenges are 1/ How to grow responsibility? 2/ How to grow purposefully? 3/ How to ensure your growth is sustainable? That’s where design thinking comes into play.  Design thinking can help create a compelling story of the future, anchored on the needs of customers (and societies) and bring a future orientation on strategy development and an empathetic manner to how company think about its customers. Through storytelling, we can unveil the aspirations and natural inclinations of an organization and we can get a sense of what feels right. The story of a company is what can truly determine its value, and the right story will always be more substantial than the right strategy. This is primarily because strategies are susceptible to the ingenuity of competitors, disruptive industry shifts and bad luck, while stories are impervious.  

Spreadsheets and power points don’t tell story. The Design Thinking approach believes that stories are fantastically useful in their ability to bring people onto the same page (unify attention), organize information and present it in an efficient and easy to access manner. Stories help organizational stakeholders access and understand the logic, reasons, motives and intent that surround a potential vision or context for growth. Stories can help reveal the choices presented to an organization, its possible behaviors, courses of action and their potential outcomes. Perhaps most importantly though, stories significantly improve cognition and comprehension. A well-crafted story or narrative can help make contexts and strategies for growth more accessible so they can be questioned, debated, shared and recounted.  

So what’s your growth story? Not only your company needs one. Amercia needs one. And every country needs one too. Design Thinking can help goverments and cities to rethink growth and development which mostly comes from productivity growth, which reflects multiple factors — but the biggest factor is technology.Yes tehcnology is the key driver of grwoth.

Indeed, the dominant role of technological development in economic growth has been well-documented ever since Nobel Laureate Robert Solow published his seminal paper in 1956, “The Economic Record,” which demonstrated that technological progress drove at least 80% of economic growth in the United States between 1909 to 1949. That's why I have faith in the US economy because the US is still the most technologically advanced country in the world. At least for now.

Design Thinking, Business Transformation And The Creative Enterprise.

It is time to take a look at the report card of our design for business organization, management and strategy. After half a century of quality movement, brand management, marketing and catefory management, globalization, customer service automation and organizational design fine-tuning, we should have a pretty good of idea of what is working and what is not. As a result of all suboptimization efforts over past decades, we begin to see the impact on the whole system.

The idea is that optimizing the outcome for a subsystem will in general not optimize the outcome for the system as a whole. Some porodcts, brands, businesses are better at the expense of other things. This intrinsic difficulty may degenerate into the "tragedy of the commons": the exhaustion of shared resources because of competition between the subsystems. This is exactly what had been happening in different business units and functions including product design, marketing, operations and sales/channel management. The principle of suboptimization states that suboptimization in general does not lead to global optimization, and as whole businesses and societies are far worse. Here comes Design Thiking.

Finally, this is the Design Thinking Workbook for the Harvard Design Thinking Seminar. It ook us a week to put this together. Coming together nicely. Design Thinking allows us to to rethink, reimagaine and reset the game. I am not saying every company needs to make radical changes in its core business itself, and a lot of instances the case for change becomes desperately obvious – as in the case of Blockbuster, it came too late.

Business model redesign is driven by of strategic innovation (to play a new game). This means complete or partial transformation—of the organization, its core offerings, structure, systems, culture and capabilities—to create, deliver and capture value at the new way not in a sub-systems level.

Business model transformation may include a strategic decisions to move up-market or down-market or sideways along the value chain or shift from products to services or solutions when the pace of commoditization continues to accelerate or the industry boundaries is opening up for new entrants. The idea is to apply visual sense making as part of the Design Thinking tool kit to reimagine new value ecosystem and value chain reconfigurations.

Vvisual thinking can play a very vital part in the business design process. The key to successfully design a capital-efficient business model is to visually identifying assets, risks, and cash flows by their distinct risk characteristics and then visually modeling them and retaining only those that are central to how a company creates value.

The Harvard Design Thinking for Business Creativity Seminar in NYC tomorrow, for the first time I will be introducing these applications to people outside Idea Couture and expecting a large group of very senior executives and looking forward to a great day of intensive discussions. Here’s the workbook as takeaway together with the 150 slides. Here’s a first glance at the workbook and workshop material. Planning to bring this seminar to Europe and Asia next.

Design Thinking Has Inspired Multi-disciplinary, Interdisciplinary and Trans-disciplinary Approaches To Problem Solving. This Is Just The Beginning Of A New Discipline.

Prague is mystical with a mix of medieval, Renaissance, and Art Nouveau architecture and the design scene is slowly taking shape. You still see traces of history of what communism had done to the city even after these buildings are completely restored. It is where Renaissance meets neo-Gothic and the baroque structures from the 18th centuries.

You can see shadow of cubist touches, which thrived in Bohemia more so in the neighborhood near Vysehrad Park. The public housing or “rabbit huts” as they called it, cheap but highly functional (the Walmart of architecture), provides a stark contrast to the Bohemia style. It is the featureless nature but with modern plumbing and heating were once considered the politically correct way to live. Or at that time, politically sustainable living as I would have called it.

I stayed at the Hotel Josef, a nine-year-old modern boutique hotel that was one of the first in Prague and still the most popular one. It is centrally located in the old Jewish quarter and right next to the Parizka Street. I don’t like the word boutique hotel, as it doesn’t mean much other than small and not part of a big chain. I rather use the word design hotel.

I was really impressed with the design and how it holds up over the years – now that’s design at its finest. There was not a thing to make you feel that it is getting out of fashion, in fact, the hotel design concept is to provide guests with a break from the fascinating baroque architectural surrounding the hotel and give them space to step back and relax in a soothing, and luminous environment. I enjoyed the hours and hours I spent sitting in the lobby lounge doing work with my Macbook while occasionally looking out the windows.

When you’re in Prague, you can’t avoid talking architecture. I’m not trained as an architect but always fascinated about the design process as well as the visual artifacts architect employs. Architects are considered designers and probably fair to say that they required the most rigor training both in art and art history compare to other design discipline such as graphic, fashion or industrial. They probably attracted a very different type of design mind than those of other design disciplines. I wonder what would happen if first year MBA students were required to spend 3 to 6 months studying the history of architecture and design, at the same time learning some basic drawing skills. I think that would drastically widen their perspectives as well as picking up some drawing skills that they can use for life.

Today, most MBAs can’t even draw simple diagrams. The pre-MBA studies are mainly statistics and accounting. There is plenty of time for accounting later in the program. The abilities to communicate using simple diagrams are extremely useful for business problem solving, strategic communications and visual sensemaking (strategic modeling and business model design). Architects use diagrams to explain their visions, elements and relationships between them. Business people can use abstract visuals to show business model options, new value chain design or customer interactions. Once business persons/design thinkers are supplied with visuals to making connections, they can see the relationships between different components better and in return easier to see something otherwise too complicated to express.

Visual sensemaking is quietly changing decision theory, it is also influencing design thinking and theories of design-oriented problem solving as a manifestation of pattern recognition. It is hard to say whether sensemaking is influencing design thinking or system thinking is influencing design thinking and in turn influencing sensemaking. It is a fact that design thinking has inspired multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches to problem solving. I will explore the application of this in my coming Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation seminar organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Design in NYC this month. 25% discount for early registrations and affiliates of a list of design and business schools. Now hoping on a train to Wien.

Design Thinking Is A Dynamic Constructive Process As Much As An Organization Culture.

I was visiting the biggest modern art gallery DOC (Centre for Contemporary Arts) in Holešovice, Prague. It was first opened in Oct 2008 and now going through some interior work and will be re-opening the other half in a week. It was developed by architect Ivan Kroupa and the idea was to reconstruct old factory buildings from the19th century and to build new ones interconnecting as an art gallery. It is like Idea Couture’s office in Toronto where three historic buildings were interconnected.

I am a big fan of contemporary art particular when it stretches the boundaries and interconnecting art, design, culture, media and technology. I am not an art for art sake person. I will add business to art, design and culture. That's what my magazine M/I/S/C is about.

The current exhibits include Petr Kvíčala’s collection of his older paintings and his Zig Zag Corridor paintings on the wall which creates optical effects on the big space – a 22m long corridor. Adding my pink shirt I feel like I am part of the exhibition. The newer works are more accurate or precise and resemble computer generated graphics guided by an algorithm expressible in mathematics.  He is probably one of the most popular Czech abstract painter and artist.  For the last 15 years, he has undertaken commissions for architecture-related projects which he collaborated with a number of leading architects both from the Czech Republic and abroad. The best part I like about his work was often the topics were initiated through rhythmical repetition of nature-based details.

Spent half a day at the museum and met some new friends there who were well connected with the design scene there, so I am thinking may be a future section for M/I/S/C magazine on Prague design.  But for the next two days, I need to finish my Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation Program in three weeks. I need to start putting the lecture material together the next few days before I have to jump into another project and another.

Looking at Petr Kvíčala’s work and to some extent his paintings that are determined by the surrounding space, I can relate that back to Design Thinking. It is disappointing for me to see consultants that barely understand the core values of Design Thinking but quickly turn that into a product/process and oversimplfy it into a few phases including observation, visualization/prototyping and business design. This is Design Thinking kindergarten level and barely scratches the surface of Design Thinking.

Design thinking itself is a dynamic constructive process that is iterative in nature. It requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation, assessment, experimentation and visualization. It is a continuous learning experience arising out of a need to obtain and correctly apply knowledge and insights to achieve goals that may change as more in depth knowledge of the problem and its context is acquired and new behaviors unfold. Here, prototyping and the creation of tangible “sharable” artifacts becomes an import piece of the design thinking tool kit. The art of what/when/how/why of prototyping is barely understood by these consultants. Everyone throw the word “prototyping” around without knowing the answers to the what/when/how/why at all.  What it is not a white board brain storming session sponsored by 3M sticky notes.

Design Thinking should be part of an organizational culture and can bring enterprise knowledge management to the next level. It helps to foster a creative intelligent culture that embraces questioning, challenge and discovery including frequent reflection-in-action, celebrating creativity, embracing ambiguity and visual sense making (interactions with physical objects as well as people). A Design Thinking organization creates strong “inspirationalization” and “creative bonding” to give tangibility to the emotional contract that employees that can have with the organizations.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design "Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation" Seminar Is Officially Open For Registration. Spaces Are Limited.

I finally have started on designing for the new executive program for the Harvard Graduate School of Design - Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation. I have been getting a lot of request to speak on this topic and beyond curiosity, many are interested to see how they can apply these concepts not in product development or design but in complex problem solving. After three years of practive devopment and finally put them all together in one seminar. Plan to take this to Europe and Asia later in the year. This is what powers a Senior Designer/Desigh Thinker/Creative Professional to gain a seat in board level stragetic discussions.

The seminar allows participants to learn how to apply the framework and cognitive processes of Design Thinking to connect with your own creativity, frame specific problems, generate innovative ideas, and convert those ideas into tangible business opportunities. In terms of pedagogy, Design Thinking is a lot more than just a human-centered, rapid prototyping design methods, in fact Design Thinking should be less about design, more about thinking.

The program is designed to show how Design Thinking are used by a remarkably diverse range of global organizations across all industry sectors in creating tangibility in insights, foresights, meanings and strategies. Design Thinking is gaining popularity for many reasons. Mainly corporations are facing crises on several fronts and not only from the obvious such as low cost competition, disruptive technologies, economic sustainability, and social development.

Business executives,non-profit and government leaders are also experiencing a profound crisis of trust and legitimacy and all these factors have triggered a loss of confidence in traditional ways of planning and doing things. The very core of many management theories are being questioned and “management” is close to a point of failure. These leaders are looking to find something new to grasp onto in order to make sense of what’s going on and are looking to organize for a future of unprecedented uncertainties. Large established institutions have been battered by system level economic failure, extreme uncertainties, and the failure of traditional forms of leadership and management. These wounds have left businesses gazing hopefully towards design thinking as a new management wonder drug that will help them make sense of what is going on and secure their next big bonus or promotion.

Design Thinking comes just-in-time. Design thinking is bringing a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- however, design thinking is far from a cure-all. You can register here for The Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation Program, please make sure you check if you qualify for affiliate discount. It will held at the Harvard Club in Newe York City third week of May.

This is for executives (both creative and management professionals) who wish to learn how to apply Design Thinking methods beyond the noise and cliché and many of which are myths that are simply not true. It is my pleasure to have Dr. Scott Robiner (Assistant Professor at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons and holds a Doctorate and Master Degree in Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design) as a guest speaker. He brings his perspectives of Design Thinking from a cross-discipline designer perspective and will faciliate an interesting dialogue among participants.

More next few days. Need to board a plane to Frankfurt.

Do You Practice Intuition? If So, Do You Know Where It Comes From? Do You Keep It Secret?

Do you trust your intuition? And if so why? Intuition is most practiced and least understood. And why some people are betting at it and some not? Can intuition be rational and strategic? Is there something called ‘strategic intuition?’ What makes your intuition strategic and mine not?

Most see an interesting connection between innovation, imagination and intuition. Often intuition may even exert a paranormal or even magical influence on everything new and unknown. What do we mean by intuition. In Educating Intuition Robin Hogarth describes various ways we can improve our intuition. He points out two notable impediments to the education of intuition. One is the presence of confusing or “wicked” environments where feedback is unreliable. The other is the limited scope or “domain specific” nature of intuition. Intuition can therefore inhibit innovation because such obstacles exist.

• A person who has a giant database of ideas and insights and supported by fast access to those information as the brain processes these knowledge in a non-linear way and as a result the person is more likely to guess correctly in a more educated than others who do not posses the data points and fast access. In another word, a large database, faster access like a SSD drive and better classification of data.
• A person who has a strong theoretical or philosophical understanding of why things happen through life experiences or as a scholar and therefore can quickly draw on those theories and associated metaphor and as a result can look at these very complex problems and not overwhelmed by its complexity. Getting right to the core and a possible decision pops out disguised as intuition. They perceive wholes and compress much into a flash. Philosophers and prophets are often intuitive. It is wisdom secretly disguised as intuition.
• A person who has a strong logical and deductive reasoning capabilities and it to eliminate the impossibilities and therefore left with the more realistic options and by probability the person is in a better position to conclude. This can be dangerous as the person can be very wrong if the answers lie outside conventional logic. But in 90% of the time, the guess is correct due to the narrow nature of the problems. It is fast logic disguised as intuition.

Intuition is a very general word, it is not taught in school (may be art school) and we don’t know what prompt some rely more on it more and some completely ignore it.  The value of intuition is not celebrated in the world of scientific management but commonly practice in the world of design thinking. Many CEOs made important decisions based on it but won't admit it. In the world of data-dominance, it is not easy to find a place for intuition, you can still use it discreetly. Or just call it innovation or sense-making.

Design Thinking And Value Creation. Two Things That Every School Must Teach.

I believe design thinking is less about design and more about creative ways to create value. It should not reside in any particular type of schools. Any schools should be training people to recognize value when they see it or creative means to create them. Business schools may have an advantage of teaching people to capture value. We didn't teach students enough about what creating value means.

Idea Couture is now becoming more and more like a school, we’re training (or retraining) our people from wrong practices everyday. We’re also helping clients to look for hidden value and show them how to unlock them. We’re also starting external programs on design thinking so people can learn what it is beyond that yellow stickies and fancy buzz words.

I see Idea Couture as a place of design thinking projects, everything is a project and some shorter and some longer, always on and always moving, and always something to learn for everyone. There is no office, only project spaces, and workshop spaces. People work long hours sometimes, travel across the world, constantly learning from others and collectively pushing each other. High trust and high pressure. Plenty of fun and plenty of caffeine. Everyone needs to earn his or her credibility here; it doesn’t matter where you came from. Everyone is passionate about insight, design, strategy and innovation.

We will be broadening our partnerships this year with two schools and will be working with other to develop educational programs and events. We are operating in different intersections between design thinking and social thinking; strategic innovation and design innovation; strategic foresights and emerging behaviors. And I am making sure that we always have a few our own projects running all the time parallel to client projects.

Design thinking is part of our day-to-day problem-framing-and solving approach - in another word it is work. It is something that we preach and breathe. It is no buzzword or marketing slogan here, it is real. Design thinking is where D-school meets B-school. Why is design thinking unique?

Design thinking proposes a cross-discipline learning-by-doing experience. It allows us to accommodate varied interests and abilities through project/action learning experiences. The good and bad thing about it is that it is not a subject area you find in a textbook.

Design thinking integrates imagination into the strategy process. It opens up the future and invites us to look at uncertainties and allow us to be comfortable and working with many unknowns. Design thinking expects us to cope with inadequate information and multiple levels of unknowns in order to create a tangible outcome.

Design thinking is a dynamic constructive process in nature. It requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation, assessment and visualization. It is a continuous learning experience arising out of a need to obtain and correctly apply knowledge to achieve goals that may change as knowledge of the problem; its context is acquired and new behavior unfolds.

Design thinking promotes empathy. It encourage the use of tools to put us in the shoes of customers and allows us to observe and identify any unarticulated and unmet needs. It puts users at the very core of everything. And we can use these insights to develop new knowledge through creative learning and experimentation.

Design thinking can create meanings. Power Point and Excel spreadsheets cannot not create meanings. Creating meaning is the hardest part of the design process; you're not going to get it right the first time. But you can iterate it, again and again. And you need to have something to touch and feel. Design thinking allows you to create things that you can experiment with and see what happens.. and in the process you may be able to find meanings.

I can go on and on. but have a plane to catch.

Where Can You Get The Best Design Education These Days? Here's My Ranking. Is There A Good Place That Teaches D-Schools+B-Schools Thinking?

I've spent a good half-day in London at the Royal College of Art this week and lunch with Nick Leon of Design London. We exchange views of design thinking and the world of design and where it is going. Also met with some other faculties and plan to feature some of their work in the upcomming issue of the M/I/S/C magazine. Will write more on this next week.

Design thinking can power up strategic business innovation and change design education, but no one can agree on how to teach its methods. It is not exactly a very good time to be graduating from design schools as thousands of graduates pour into the job market this year and many industries are still in a flux. But the positive side is design is gaining importance in business probably the first time since the early days of the industrial revolution.

There are reasons to be optimistic but also concerns. I’ve interviewed about 30 designers/job applicants the last two weeks and come to the same realization that most of then are not equipped for the real world. Many design schools are struggling to find the balance between craft and thinking and some schools have not idea of what real world skills they would need. Lacking in formal and rigor methodologies is a still a challenge; some still resist the idea of needing a methodology. There are plenty of designers out there, industrial, graphic, architecture, urban planning, interactive (not enough information and service design) and definitely not many design thinkers. It is easy to assume that coming out from a design program one must be a design thinker. Not true at all, it is definitely not the case.

You don’t need to study in design school to be a design thinker, many young designers graduated with aspirations to use design to drive change and realized they are just in the business of communications – a poster (even a really good one) don’t change the world. “Design for Social Change,” sounds exciting, and when I ask them “How?” I usually get 5 minute of dead silence.

Everywhere graduates are emerging from new interdisciplinary graduate programs that integrate art, design, technology, and business. These young men and women are supposed to be trained in "design thinking." but mainly are just new ways of pushing creativity rather than thinking about new ways to solve problem. They are two very different missions.

Some schools simply bring students together from different schools or departments and allow them to do some cross-disciplinary project work. Example would be the exchange program hosted at INSEAD for Art Center students to take MBA courses for 4 months. INSEAD students can study with the design students in the eight-week 'Strategies for Product and Service' elective, offered through the 10-month MBA program. 

To train people in truly D-schools meets B-schools, the Royal College of Art is way ahead of the game in terms of training design thinkers of tomorrow. I would say this is the best graduate level design thinking education you can get today, compare to anywhere in the world. The Master's in Design program from IIT (Chicago) is also worth a mention for those who prefer wind than rain.

The Cox Review: Creativity in Business was commissioned by the UK Treasury to look at enhancing UK business productivity and resulted in the forming of Design London, an international centre for interdisciplinary design led innovation that teaches, researches and delivers radical new practices, tools and processes to transform the way organizations innovate. Design London brings together creativity and expertise in design from the Royal College of Art, engineering from Imperial College's Faculty of Engineering and the business of innovation from Imperial College Business School.

It was the first and still one of the very few schools where design is a core component of every MBA students curriculum, not just an elective course, and where MBA students, postgraduate students of design from the RCA and engineers and scientists from Imperial complete a common program which includes executing challenging innovation projects over several months.

I was excited to hear from Nicolas Neon at the RCA in London what they are doing there and it is almost exactly how we want to train our people at Idea Couture. I think this is the model where other schools should replicate.

Since RCA only offers graduate (Master or Doctorate) programs, if you want to have a good design foundation, here are the lists of best design schools in US and UK for you to consider (there are many good ones outside UK and US and I don't know enough about them):

UK Top Ranking Art and Design Schools 2010 ratings (Source: Guardian Top 10 list)

• No.1  University College London
• No.2  Oxford
• No.3  Brunel

US Top Industrial Design Schools 2010 (Source: The Idris Mootee's ranking) Stanford is considered more of an engineering school rather than industrial design school and that’s why I did not add it to the list, you can add that to the list probably as one of the top three. And then I have two No.3s)

• No.1 Art Center
• No.2 RISD
• No.3 Carnegie Mellon
• No.3 Pratt Institute