What Government Bureaucracy Taught me About Creativity

I had the privilege of speaking at Ignite Seattle #35 this past week. It was the shortest talk I've ever given, but by far the most stressful. What I didn't anticipate is that a five minute Ignite talk is more of a performance than a talk, and those who do the best are those who memorize their talks, like memorizing lines for a play. This is impossible for me - my brain has never worked this way. So whether lecturing in academic settings or speaking at design conferences, I've always spoken to an outline of material I know really well, knowing that I can fudge my timeline. With Ignite, this is not the case – and I was the only speaker to go over my allotted five minutes (by 20 seconds). The big takeaway – I learned that short format performances are not my strength. 

Each talk was tremendous, and I was really impressed with the diversity of thought and perspective represented at Ignite 35. I suggest you watch each of them. I also suggest you submit an idea for a talk for Ignite 36 – preparing an Ignite talk is a great learning experience, a fantastic opportunity to meet interesting people, and substantial personal achievement. You won't regret it.

//

My talk was titled What Government Bureaucracy Taught me About Creativity.  Below is my talk, followed by my original outline, which contains a bit more content.

You are creative.

I believe that. But chances are, you don’t. 

A study by Steelcase in 2017 found that 72% of knowledge workers believe their future success is dependent upon their ability to be creative.

But a study by Adobe found that only 25% of us actually believe we are living up to our creative potential.  

So why the disparity? What is getting in the way of our creativity? And what do we do about it? As someone who has worked in creative roles for most of my career, these are questions I constantly wrestle with. 

These questions became especially acute when I went to work for government.  It was an amazing privilege to work for the Mayor’s office. I had the opportunity to meet some brilliant, passionate, and hard working public servants that have dedicated their lives to serving our city.

But it was also an excruciating 22 months. Bureaucracy made some things really clear as to why creativity is so hard. 

Here’s why:

1. Opposition to risk
And for good reason, right? Government has the enormous responsibility of spending our tax dollars. But this opposition to risk doesn’t just manifest in process-oriented things like checks and balances, it manifests in the beliefs, attitudes, and values of the organization. Ultimately what you get is an environment that rewards consistency over change, sameness over divergence

2. Hierarchy
In an environment where an individual cannot make a decision on their own, they begin to doubt their intuition. Intuition becomes something to question, challenge, and silence. This system replaces trust in people with trust in a hierarchy. Hierarchy subverts self agency and self efficacy. It allocates people to becoming a mechanism of efficiency, not of effectiveness.

3. Posturing
Holding the cards close. Constantly trying to anticipate your opponent’s next move. Even among colleagues, there is an assumed competition. Posturing is a product of hierarchy, because in hierarchy, the bottom exists for the top, the top doesn’t exist to support the bottom. So at every step of the way, if you want to get ahead it’s up to you as an individual.  You come to believe that to make it, you have to put yourself first. It become viciously competitive. Everything becomes about leverage. Aspirations become something you bury deep down, instead of out in the open where they can be supported and encouraged.

These are key characteristics of bureaucracy, but in reality I think these things are universal. The truth is that while government shone a spotlight on these things, these are conditions of resistance we all face. Whether you’re an overworked and under resourced bureaucrat, or a highly paid and highly resourced techie. 

What government bureaucracy afforded me was a stark contrast that highlighted the necessary conditions for creativity. Conditions that no design thinking guru had ever mentioned.

There are three big conditions necessary for creativity that I want to share with you. 

1. Belonging
Belonging is about safety. It’s about knowing that you have the job you have because there’s something about your true self that is seen and valued. Belonging recognizes the messiness of the human condition and says all of you is welcome here. This is a safe place. We’re for you, and we want you to succeed. This kind of belonging negates the fear of risk. This kind of free merit is powerful, and intrinsically out-motivates any carrot on any stick. 

2. Trust
Trust is a necessary ingredient for individual empowerment, for individual autonomy. Trust is necessary to advance and change the status quo, because at the end of the day you need to know that if the system isn’t there to watch your back, the person next to you is. Trust is necessary for the work of creativity and innovation because creativity and innovation are innately oriented towards making what doesn’t’t exist, exist. When you begin a creative venture, you often don’t know what the outcome is, to go along this journey into the unknown means that you can’t place your confidence in an outcome, instead it must be placed in another. Trust empowers self agency and self efficacy. Trust creates the critical space necessary to voice and follow your intuition.

3. Integrity
Finally, trust instills integrity. Integrity encourages transparency. Integrity really anchors all of this, because integrity means that you say what you mean. You can be trusted. Integrity is the line drawn around belonging. With integrity, your thoughts, hopes, and actions all align. Integrity implies united strength, it is the trait of being undivided. When you are trustworthy and undivided as a human, you are someone who can focus and channel the energy necessary to accomplish great things.

All of this is very human work. These aren’t things you will learn about in a design thinking web course, at the root of belonging, trust and integrity is about identifying where shame exists and snuffing it out, in yourself and in the culture you are responsible for. 

Of course, this isn’t a prescription. There are always more factors, but if you focus on cultivating a culture instead of building a system, creativity will flourish. You will come to realize your creative potential. And your creative world turn from black and white to color.

You are creative. I hope you discover the belonging, trust, and integrity necessary to see your creativity flourish.

The World is Not Ending

"Software is eating the world!"

"Yesterday's advantage is today's table-stakes!"

"Exponential change!"

"AI is going to wipe out humans!"

"Ahhhhhhhh!"

My social feeds are full of these refrains. The sentiment is ubiquitous; the world is ending, and if you don't 'hire me' or 'buy my solution' you won't survive!"

You'll be done with.

Extinct.

Irrelevant.

A loser.

This is especially true for those of us who are designers, strategists, and innovation consultants. The majority of 'innovation thought leadership' out there is merely presenting a vision of the future cast under a cloud of anxiety, pregnant with the rain of irrelevance. And the umbrella just happens to be whatever the author is selling, namely their creativity model/framework/tool/best practice.

But I want you to know, the world is not ending.

It. will. be. ok.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying the world is crazy. And I'm not denying that your job is really hard. I'm not denying the competition is stiff. I'm not denying that we all operate under immense pressure everyday.

What I am proposing is that there is more. There is more to living and working than the constant fear of survival. The world is not happening to you, it's happening throughyou. The pursuit of relevance driven by the impulse to survive is characteristic of people who feel the world is happening to them. But for for those who believe the world is happening through them, the richness of work, relationships, and play is driven by opportunity, not survival. This is the more – the belief that beyond survival there is the opportunity to thrive.

Creativity. Innovation. These notions aren't merely an answer to the threat of irrelevance, they are the means to realizing opportunity. An opportunity to elevate the joy of human experience. An opportunity to participate in the becoming-ness of our world. An opportunity to be moved by beauty and imagination. An opportunity to discover fulfillment and meaning. An opportunity to envision the 'oughtness' of our reality – how things ought to be.

So stop peddling fear.

Instead, make imagination, optimism, and hope contagious. As a creative, that's your imperative.

Study these subjects to be a good human / designer.

Being a good *human centered designer is a lifelong pursuit of understanding how humans operate. Two questions to fuel this pursuit – (1) What does it mean to be human? (2) How do humans make sense of the world? 

To get started, introduce yourself to the field of epistemology, and read this book. If you want to dive deeper into the intersection of epistemology and creativity, follow up 'Little Manual' with this series of brilliant essays by Bruce Voljak.

Then, begin answering the first question. Sapiens and The Social Animal are a great place to start. (You might also see what the religions of the world have to say on the matter.)

Adjacently, or as you begin answering the second question, I would begin studying these fields of thought:

• Syncretism
• Critical Theory
• Embodied Cognition
• Worldview
• Intersectionality
• Metaphysics
• Semiotics
• Phenomenology
• Aesthetics
• Human evolution and technology

Two of the most prolific design theory books I've read in recent years are Design for Dasein and Design: Invention of Desire. Both of these books will be much richer if you've primed yourself on the fields of study above.

Finally, pursue beauty and inspiration. Do things for no reason other than the pure pleasure of them. Note what you find interesting in the world. Be curious, and even better, be curious about your curiosity. Practice observation like you would practice a sport. Ask lots of questions.

Leather Wrapped Door Handle

Last year the renown Juanita Cafe underwent a major remodel. The updated space was designed by Heliotrope Architects and built by Krekow Jennings, who asked me to make a custom leather wrap for the entrance door. Of course I jumped at the chance to craft a piece that, while a very small contribution, would be the first haptic interaction every guest would have with the restaurant. 

I used waterproof six-ounce Horween Chromexcel leather, tanned in Chicago. Chromexcel is produced using a bark retannage from a proprietary recipe over 100 years old, and then hot stuffed with Horween's secret blend of natural oils and greases. The door handle wrap was stitched with waxed linen thread, and hand rubbed for a finish that will develop a beautiful patina with time. 

It was an honor to be one of hundreds of craftsmen who built out the new Cafe Jaunita. For more pictures of the beautiful project, check out Heliotrope's portfolio.

Mockups I provided to the design team.

Business Strategy Rooted in Design Thinking

For the majority of large businesses today, strategy is executed on the basis of several presuppositions:

1. Refining process and consistent optimization is the clearest route towards competitive advantage. Unfortunately this just isn't true. As Roger Martin explains in The Design of Business, scientific management is moving from a skill that creates competitive advantage to an ante that gives companies the right to play the game. The bottom line is that it’s no longer a viable tactic for a long term competitive edge. There are many reasons for this that many have already considered in depth. Dan Pink did a great job unpacking this in his book A Whole New Mind.
2. The best toolkits for process refinement and optimization are rooted in deductive and inductive logic, regressive analysis, big data, and the pursuit of reliability (think Six Sigma and other management principles). While most Ivy League and upper crust business schools are still spitting out MBAs with this outdated toolset, some have realized that the future of business, the global economy, and Western society are dependent on the exploration of the unknown, not the exploitation of the familiar (or 0 - 1, not 1 - N as Peter Thiel would put it). Stanford has founded d.School, MIT has a long operating design lab, Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto has built an entirely new curriculum called DesignWorks, Carnagie Mellon has a design oriented MBA, Harvard Business School has entered the conversation, and dozens of others around the world are beginning to merge traditionally analytical coursework with creativity, design, and innovation classes with the knowledge that more and more analytical thinking is being replaced by technology and outsourcing.
3. Strategists and analysts must prove the validity of ideas before they are implemented and remove bias from decision making. Esther Meek writes beautifully in her book A Little Manual for Knowing that to go about the process of knowing (that is, knowing what to do next in business) this way is detrimental to what it means to be human - imagination and bias as shaped by personal experience are intrinsic to the beauty of who we are as humans. About separating analysis from imagination she writes “It has a lot of appeal, because it [analysis aside from imagination] is quantifiable, measurable, assessable, and commodifiable. It offers control and power. But we’ll see that the knowledge-as-information vision is actually defective and damaging. It distorts reality and humanness, and it get in the way of good knowing.” If business strategy is “knowing” how to do business, then in Meek’s eyes pitting what is against what could be is destructive. To sum this up, it will be necessary for tomorrow’s enterprises to embrace the unknown and bring intuition back to decision making if they are to make a dent of any kind in our universe.

Strategy and Innovation Rooted in Design Thinking

When building strategy practices upon the presuppositions above, the future that will be predicted will closely resemble the past, differing in degree but not in kind. Innovation and strategy based in Design Thinking on the other hand constantly seeks a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between science and art, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation. Abductive logic posits that the origins of new ideas do not emerge from the conventional forms of declarative logic, but by logical leaps of the mind. The first true step of reasoning is not observation but wondering and imagination, looking for new data points, challenging accepted explanations, and inferring possible new worlds.

Roger Martin writes in The Design of Business:

"A business that is overweighted toward reliability will erect organizational structures, processes, and norms that drive out the pursuit of of valid answers to new questions. It fails to balance its pursuit of reliability with the equally important pursuit of validity, leaving it ill-positioned to solve mysteries and move knowledge along the funnel. Such organizations inevitably come to see the maintenance of the status quo as an end in itself, short circuiting their ability to design and redesign themselves continuously. This wouldn’t be such a big problem if the world never changed."

He goes on a bit further...

"...embracing a form of logic that doesn’t generate proof and operates in the realm of what might be is a risk that many leaders won’t take. Innovation is not consistent or reliable, and does not faithfully adhere to predetermined budgets. But the far greater risk is to maintain an environment hostile to adductive reasoning, the proverbial lifeblood of design thinking and the design of business. Without the logic of what might be, a corporation can only refine it’s current algorithm, leaving it at the mercy of competitors that look upstream to find a more powerful route out of the mystery or a clever new way to drive the prevailing heuristic to algorithm."

It’s understandable this approach to strategy scares the hell out of business people. But embracing strategy and innovation rooted in Design Thinking is in the interest of every business who wants to prosper in a future economy built on qualifiables not quantifiables.

My Lecture at Seattle University's Institute of Public Service

Seattle University students – Thank you for letting me share Human Centered Design (HCD) with you (my slides can be seen here).  If you'd like to further explore HCD, the following resources are great places to start. Additionally, if you have further questions don't hesitate to reach out.

Online:

• Designing Public Services – This guide was created by Nesta and IDEO and is a great introduction to the tools of design as they relate to 3rd sector programming. Print this out and study it, you won't regret it.
• designkit.org - Design Kit is an online resource for all things HCD, produced by IDEO. On this site, you can find resources including training videos, case studies, and a seven-week online course to help you develop HCD mindsets and skillsets.
• Stanford d.School - Stanford d.School was founded in the Engineering School at Stanford to equip the next generation of innovators with design-centric skills to solve some of the most challenging issues our society. They are a great resource for learning HCD and design-thinking methods.
• Epic People - Epic is the leading online facilitator of knowledge sharing  and resources when it comes to qualitative ethnographic research. Search "government" and all kinds of great stuff will come up.

Books:

• Human Centered Design Toolkit, by IDEO
• Innovating for People, by LUMA Institute
• The Art & Science of Portraiture, by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, et al
• The Design of Business, by Roger Martin
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
• A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger
• Creative Confidence, by Tom Kelley & David Kelley
• Design for Dasein by Thomas Wendt

Case Studies & Miscellaneous 

• Public Policy Lab Design Blog
• Design for Public Policy by Christian Bason
• Article about the State Department Innovation Lab
• How a public sector org in SF used design to create better services
• Article outlining Human Centered Design + The Coast Guard + The White House
• Human Centered Design saves federal government $600m

Further resources on design can be found in my design thinking resource guide.

The Assembly Line of the Conceptual Era

There are several meta shifts at the nexus of business, society, and capitalism that I believe are setting the stage for creativity to be for our world what the assembly line was to the 20th century age of industrialism. I've outlined four big reasons below.

(1) Knowledge has become a commodity. As access to knowledge becomes equitably flat, the specialization that marked the information age will lose it's value. The next era (the conceptual age as Daniel Pink describes it) of value creation will belong to generalists, creatives, and empathizers – those who know how to connect seemingly disparate ideas to each other will be those who get ahead. Synthesis as opposed to analysis will become the primary responsibility of leaders who are shaping the future as technology continues to take over the work of analysis.

This idea was proven by an MIT study showed the best teams of the future aren't those with the highest IQs, but those that can effectively share knowledge and identify with users. Right brain thinking is critical to competitive advantage.

(2) The future viability of human civilization will require us to execute more big ideas. Neal Stephenson writing for The World Policy Institute speaks to this notion: "Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done."

As markets and society demand more from from both the private and public sectors, the ability to develop and deliver big ideas will become paramount. Peter Thiel speaks to this idea in his book Zero–One, and many prominent thought leaders both in academia and in business share this belief.

(3) Exponential change and exponential complexity. Because of what futurist Ray Kurzwel calls the law of accelerating returns, or what Harvard professor Zubiah Shinoff calls the complexity gap, management theory and business strategy are changing radically. Retaining a "sustainable advantage" is no longer about proprietary systems and processes, but by capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. Business models that do not allow for this to account for the rapid changes that are now a reality for business will become increasingly irrelevant.

(4) Purpose and meaning are now tied to the bottom line. The paradox of prosperity is that while standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven’t budged. That’s why more people – liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it – are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning. The path towards increased meaning that many including The World Economic Forum and Gallup are prescribing corporate America includes greater workplace autonomy and ownership – effectively distributing the imperative to create value and solve complex problems from the top management to the rest of the organization. It is no secret that organizations who want to innovate consistently must also shift towards this model of distributed ownership – meaning and innovation go hand in hand.

Design-Lead Innovation Process Model

There are literally hundreds of "double diamond" design process models – many ascribe the original model to the British Design Council, but the model is so ubiquitous today it's almost impossible to find any two that are the same. 

This model however, is the best I've seen. Created by my friends on the Long Beach Innovation Team, it was inspired by other existing models, but some of the language was tailored to be relevant in their specific context of city government. Visually representing the design process is a super helpful way to communicate what design looks like in organizations that traditionally are not familiar with the processes. Additionally, it gives non-designers the opportunity to connect design vocabulary to a process that they can clearly understand. As design and innovation is often ambiguous and non-linear, this approach is very helpful.

Web Series Prototype

My friend David and I were talking over margaritas one day that we should create a web series about creativity. So we made a prototype to see what form this short informational film could take. I picked a topic, wrote a script, and David basically did the rest – the final product shown above.

We learned some good stuff. Namely, we don't have time to do this on a regular basis. But also that a teleprompter would be super helpful, the writing could use some work, and branding this kind of thing takes a lot of work.

At the end of the day it was just super fun to have an idea and to act on it. It's always satisfying to create something, regardless if it turns into anything.

Dickie lives! ;)

Designing for Dignity

Design is already a convoluted term with abstract definitions, so let’s start by acknowledging the plurality of theory and practice of design and move forward with the assumption that design is intentional decision making. Yes, this is about as broad as it gets, but think about it for a second with me. You made an intentional decision about the clothes you wore today, did you not? So you designed your outfit. Did you make an intentional decision about how to get to the office? Car, bus, Uber, walk, or bike? Which route did you take? The sum of these decisions is a design — the design of a journey. What about the meeting itinerary you wrote? You decided which topics your team would discuss, how long they would discuss them, and who would take point on which topics. You just designed a meeting. Maybe you’re an executive of a large organization and your decisions effect thousands of people. The sum of your decisions about who to hire and who to fire, how to engage your customers, how to create value, and how cultivate organizational culture all lead to a corporate design. How are these decisions different than the decisions a traditional designer would make about the form, feature, and functions of artifacts such as digital interfaces, ephemera, consumer products, and the experiences thereof? In each case, one utilizes human creativity to conceive and plan something (whether an experience or an artifact) that helps accomplish a goal or fulfill a purpose.

The truth is we are all designers, though the principles on which build our approach to the design of our ‘everyday’ varies vastly. These principles do not only implicate the path we take to a desired outcome, but they determine our starting point — the perspective from which we view our path towards the horizon of our desired outcome. This is where the “human centered” of Human Centered Design comes in. Human Centered Design starts with human considerations, not institutional considerations — principles of practicality, economics, business mechanics, and technology. The celebrated design professor and theorist Dr. Richard Buchanan spoke well to this notion when he stated “the principles that guide our work are not exhausted when we have finished our ergonomic, psychological, sociological, and anthropological studies of what fits the human body and mind. Human centered design is fundamentally an affirmation of human dignity. It is an ongoing search for what can be done to support and strengthen the dignity of human beings as they act out their lives in varied social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances.”

Human dignity is the ethos of Human Centered Design, and it is the first principle that guides the work of the Innovation Team here in the Mayor’s Office. That’s why when the Mayor asked us spend our first nine months on the job addressing the educational, employment, and justice system disparities that face young men of color, we made it our number one priority to listen — to listen to the young black men in our community, their stories, hopes and dreams, and candid thoughts about the realities of injustice they face every day. These conversations weren’t intended to only narrowly understand the mechanics of the lives of young black men, but to glean the insights only they could provide in creating an entirely new framework for understanding how injustice takes shape, evolves, and embodies itself in our society. Additionally, this approach wasn’t just a front-end research component intended to kick off a design process, it’s an ongoing posture we apply to the development of our work. It’s a way of working that sees the problem and the solution as synthetic, as opposed to the traditionally linear approach.

What we’ve discovered through this work is that while young black men in our community are very concerned with access to economic opportunity and equitable treatment in the justice system, there lies a deeper fundamental concern about how these things affect personal dignity and value. Our conversations tended to veer towards ideas of hope, value, meaning and purpose. When these young men were describing what thriving looked like to them, they painted a picture in which economic stability and equitable opportunity gave shape to their vision, but the texture, nuance, and color came from the haunting question — “is hope only reserved for the privileged?”

This compelled us to ask, “how does one access things like hope, value, and meaning?” Without getting to far into the weeds of an existential diatribe, we learned that these things were easier to find in the relational as opposed to the transactional, and in the sustainable as opposed to the provisional. For example, if a summer job training program provided a young man with a new professional network and mentorship that could open doors for him down the road, it was immensely more valuable than the summer job training program where he was utilized as cheap labor. If a place to sleep came with an environment and resources to cultivate stability, it was immensely more valuable than a bed whose welcome came with an expiration date. If an encounter with the police lead to an opportunity to work with a mentor and leverage art as a means of relational and social restoration, it was immensely more valuable than being booked in a detention center.

The only problem is that the qualitative difference between the relational and the transactional, the sustainable and the provisional, hasn’t really been measured cumulatively in Seattle. The places where hope and value are being created every day in our city are numerous, but they are mostly invisible except to those immersed in the work. This is where Human Centered Design is embodied in the charge given to us by the Mayor — it is the imperative of Human Centered Design to anchor human dignity in the development of policy and programs, but if there is no means of institutionalizing this value then our ideas, no matter how innovative, will not have the impact we hope for.

So how do we begin to close the gap between the lived experience of the community and the policies designed in our institutions? That’s coming next — in part two of this blog series we’ll look at some of the specific recommendations that the Innovation Team is making to the Mayor, and how they reflect these principles and values of Human Centered Design.

Human Centered Design / Context, Theory, & Practice

I recently gave a presentation to the Seattle Mayor's Office of Policy & Innovation on the Context (image above), theory, and practice of Human Centered Design (HCD). As a high-level overview, the presentation was intended to provide a general understanding of the value of HCD, as well as a few tips on how to begin thinking like a designer.

The full presentation can be viewed on Slideshare.

How To Thrive In The Midst Of Exponential Change: Ask Questions

"Questions are the engine of intellect.” - David Hackett Fischer, Pulitzer Prize Winning Historian 

"One of the keys to scientific discovery is the willingness of scientists to embrace ignorance–and to use questions as the means of navigating through it to new discoveries. One good question can give rise to several layers of answers, can inspire decades-long searches for solutions, can generate whole new fields of inquiry, and can prompt changes in entrenched thinking." - Stuart Fierstein, Author of Ignorance: How it Shapes Science

"Questions trump answers." - John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist at Xerox Corporation and recently cofounder of of the innovation think-tank Deloitte Center for the Edge.

"The most important thing that business leaders must do today is to be the chief question asker for their organization." - Warren Berger, Author of A More Beautiful Question

"My greatest strength is to be ignorant and ask few questions." - Peter Drucker, Known as the father of modern management.

“The most common source of management mistakes is not the failure to find the right answers. It is the failure to ask the right questions… Nothing is more dangerous in business than the right answer to the wrong question” - Peter Drucker

"For any company that needs to innovate or adapt to shifting market conditions, new competition, and other disruptive forces, a questioning culture is critical because it can help ensure that creativity and fresh, adaptive thinking flows throughout the organization. Todays companies are often tackling complex challenges that require collaborative, multidisciplinary problem solving. Creative thinking must come from all parts of the company. When a business culture is inquisitive, the questioning, learning, and sharing of information becomes contagious––and gives people permission to explore new ideas across boundaries and silos." - Warren Berger, Author of A More Beautiful Question

"Questioning is central to testing out new ideas to see what works." - Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup

“In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today’s dynamic, lean economy, it’s more about asking the right questions.” - Eric Ries

“In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers…" - Dan Pink, Author of To Sell is Human

Design Thinking's Exponential Growth

According to Google Trends, Design Thinking as a field of study has grown exponentially since 2005. While this graph does not convey absolute search volumes, it does speak to the growth in popularity of inquisitive and iterative problem solving. As this market grows, it will be interesting to see what kinds of new products and services are created to make Design Thinking more readily accessible at scale to the hundreds of thousands of companies who need to approach their problems with a fresh perspective. 

Interestingly enough, change management has exponentially decreased. 

When 'Designers' Build a Company Worth $13 Billion

"[Silicon Valley] didn't think a designer could build and run a company. They were straight up about it. We weren't MBAs, we weren't two PhD students from Stanford. being designers they thought we were people who worked for people that ran companies." - BRIAN CHESKY, Co-Founder of AirBNB / via Dezeen 

According to a recent report by KPCD, 10 design agencies and 27 startups that were co-founded by designers have been acquired since 2010 by companies like Google, Facebook, Adobe, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Yahoo. More impressive numbers follow - twenty percent (20%) of the top cumulative-funded VC-backed  ventures that have raised additional capital since 2013 have designers as co-founders. Five startups co-founded by designers have raised more than $2.75 billion, and six VC firms have invited designers onto their teams - for the first time - in the last year.

It's clear that as tech matures, the role of design (not just the aesthetic, but the mindset) will continue to be necessary for value creation. 

See the full report by @KPCB and @johnmaeda here. 

*Though why is the report slide deck poorly designed?

Job Posting: Investor Wanted

The Future is now seeking full time Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists to join their team of dreamers, inventors, astronauts, artists, pioneers, and explorers. The Investor will partner with The Future to implement an extraordinarily ambitious vision for the future of business. Interested in transformational technologies that augment the best of human creativity and imagination, you won’t be building weather apps or role playing games; you’ll be building audacious companies who want to make a dent in the universe. Your job will be to ensure other investors who join your team are passionate about funding the future, not features. A bit contrarian, you'll advocate unpopular investments that may be hard to assess, but have exponential potential for being enormously valuable. You’ll use decades, not months, to measure your window of opportunity. 

Qualifications and Characteristics: You must - 

• Have experience creating something new, preferably new markets, but this experience may also include new technology and businesses
• Be comfortable with and interested in the tensions of money and meaning, transaction and transcendence
• Believe in teams as much as ideas, and have a track record of empowering founding teams, not firing them
• Have rolled the dice on creative businesses with the potential to change the world, and won
• Want to build a business culture and brand that posits intuition and creativity
• Be connected to a network of the world’s greatest technical talent, as well as the most renown creative minds in design thinking
• Have experience aligning wild-eyed passion with humble wisdom
• Have at least 10 years experience seeking out breathtaking beauty in the world on a daily basis
• Like solving hard and interesting problems, like how to inspire the next generation of innovators to create a yet-to-be-imagined world 
• Have as many art, poetry, and design books in your library as you do business books
• Always be ready to argue that the internet is not dead, but is ready to rock and roll
• Masters of Business Futures or equivalent degree or experience

If this sounds like you or if you’re looking for a team to build a time machine, we look forward to hearing from you!

Design Thinking Resource Guide

“Aspects of both analytical and intuitive thinking are necessary but not sufficient for optimal business performance. The most successful businesses in the years to come will balance analytical mastery and intuitive originality in a dynamic interplay that I call Design Thinking.”

— Roger Martin

Design Thinking has now permeated design and business cultures well enough to be known by name, but what it is exactly is still fuzzy to most. Some would say design thinkers are "first-class noticers" - those who see the world with unique empathy that informs their understanding of the bigger picture.  As a 'business designer' with a background in brand strategy and organizational design, I have my own thoughts about how design thinking plays into the world of business, innovation, and culture - and I'd love to address the question "oh, you're a designer, you do websites right?" But I'll save that for another post (or for a intro to this thinking see my post on being a generalist).

This post exists because I am often asked for reading suggestions or resources for learning more about design thinking, so I thought I would make a complete list here of the books, articles, blogs, and other resources that have shaped my understanding of design thinking. *Not all these resources directly cover design thinking, but if they are listed it because they exemplify design thinking in some way.

What would you add?

BOOKS

• The Design of Business, by Roger Martin
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
• A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger
• Design: The Invention of Desire by Jessica Helfand
• Change by Design, by Tim Brown
• Creative Confidence, by Tom Kelley & David Kelley
• A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink
• Zero to One, by Peter Thiel
• Design Thinking, by Nigel Cross
• The Designful Company, by Marty Neumeier
• Wired to Care, by Dev Patnaik
• Design Transitions, by Joyce Lee, et al 
• Design Thinking, by Thomas Lockwood
• The Universal Traveler, by Don Koberg
• Emotional Design, by Don Norman
• Solving Problems with Design Thinking, by Jeanne Liedtka, et al
• Soft Systems Methodology in Action, by Peter Checkland, et al
• Experience Design, by Patrick Newberry, et al
• The Little Book of Design Research Ethics by IDEO
• Experience Maps by Robert Curedale
• Wired to Create by Scott Kaufman & Carolyn Gregiore
• Design for Dasein by Thomas Wendt

ONLINE

• Human Centered Design: Context, Theory, and Practice
• Wicked Problems in Design Thinking by Richard Buchanan
• Design Thinking Overview by Tim Brown for HBR
• Forbes Innovation Column by Henry Doss
• 18036720.no Blog by Helge Tenno
• David Kelley on Design Thinking for FastCompany
• Design Management Institute
• Capitalism Needs Design Thinking on HBR
• Tim Brown's Design Thinking Blog
• 165 Ways Design is Changing Your Life
• How Design Thinking Can Help Social Entrepreneurs
• 10 Lessons for Design Driven Success on FastCoDesign
• Design Thinking Wikipedia Entry
• Beyond the Toolbox: What Ethnographic Thinking Can Offer in a Shifting Marketplace
• A Human Centered Framework for Design by Richard Buchanan

HIGHER LEARNING ...organizations teaching design thinking.

• Stanford d.School
• Experience Institute
• Konstfack University College of Art, Crafts and Design
• Domaine de Boisbuchet

TOOLS ...useful for implementing design thinking into your work

• Design Sprint Roadmap
• Human Centered Design Toolkit
• Design Thinking Process Guide

COMPANIES ...doing interesting things and applying design thinking

• IDEO (the obvious titan and propagator of design thinking)
• Breakfast NY
• Undercurrent
• Gensler
• Gravitytank
• Stone Yamashita
• Intentional Futures
• Artifact Group
• Frog Design

FastCo Calls Our Project "World's Coolest."

I've been working with an extensive and super talented team here at NBBJ on a project for Seattle City Light. Recently, FastCo Design called it the "world's coolest electrical substation." Read the article here to see why.

[12/8/15] Update : This project has gone on to win multiple awards over the last year, including the International Interior Design Association's award for best concept (see award ceremony video here at minute 56), and was named a finalist in Fast Company's 2015 Global Innovation by Design competition.

It's really powerful to see how story translates into an experiential strategy that designers employ to create a space like this. I'm really honored to have been a part of this project, and to have developed a narrative strategy that has played a part in shaping the urban fabric of our city.

More photos:

Considerations for Workplace Design

I put together a list of considerations for companies investing in Workplace Design with my ever-brilliant colleague Jacob Simons, what else do you think should be considered?

The New Meaning of Place for Young People. Place is no longer a physical place, but through digital media place transcends physicality. e.g. "I'll meet you online" versus "I'll meet you at the mall."

Work Trends Perpetuated by Millennials. For example: BYOD (bring your own device), ubiquitous access to data, the app approach to technology, hackable systems, work-life integration (as opposed to work-life balance), rhythms of autonomy, purpose driven work, social media, etc...

Strategic Future-Casting. alent is a marketplace like any other. And just like any marketplace, the talent market requires sophisticated strategies and investments for future-employee engagement to ensure competitive advantage at recruiting time.

Urbanization and population density. With the influx if young populations, our cities are changing. This means the businesses in the city need to be aware of what kind jobs will most appeal to savvy young city dwellers. Creating a platform for civic engagement, accommodating urban transportation, cultivating diversity, ensuring safety, engaging public space, and making room for the arts are all strategies for future-minded urban businesses to consider.

The New Workday. There is a shifting attitude about what a "work-day" looks like – larks, owls, hyper mobility, zero-office workplace strategies, etc.

Community. Social identity paradigms and status signaling have changed with younger generations. The corner office doesn't mean as much as it used too, employee loyalty is no longer earned through perks but through the bonds of relationship. Motivation and accountability systems live and die by autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

The New School. MOOC's and experiential learning represent the shifting cultural value of traditional education. This means on the job learning is now expected of competitive employers.

Technology. The internet of everything, as well as other tech advances like fog computing, augmented reality, and distributed networks are shaping a new infrastructure for collaboration, productivity, and innovation.

Sustainable Working. The environment has never been as front as mind as it is today, but sustainability efforts go beyond place to technology, processes, and individuals. A new methodology for sustainable work takes a broader look at how people work (culture), not just where they work (built environment).

Information Symmetry. The decline of specialists and growth of generalists, as it relates to an individual's capacity to add value to an organization, is an important factor to consider when staffing, planning adjacencies, creating creative culture, and forming teams. Today's savvy business needs to design space that brings analysis and imagination together in harmonious ways.

New Capital Success Metrics. Capital has been redefined. It is the imperative of today's business to create organizational wealth, creative wealth, emotional wealth, physical wellbeing, etc... GDP is out, Social Progress Index is in. There is an extreme need and increasing demand for commitments between employee and employer to create this wealth.

Transition Planning. Millennials are the talk of the town, but not much has been said about retiring boomers. There are massive implications on corporate culture and knowledge/expertise loss with this generational exodus that must be planned for though strategy and design.

Engagement, not incentives. This means an employee's understanding of, and association with, the brand is critical to talent attraction and retention, as well as employee productivity and profitability.  People, process, technology, and place are all implicated by purpose. If purpose is not the driving factor for the four components of workplace design, then the outcomes will be agnostic to the enterprise objectives of our client. Furthermore, starting with purpose ensures congruence of workplace strategies across the various dimensions of the organization.

*photo by Norman Ai, used with permission

On Being a Generalist

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert A. Heinlein

Timothy Ferriss recently released a short podcast (episode 19) that outlined the benefits of being a generalist. It struck a deep cord and I thought I would share his five reasons to be a generalist here, in descending order:

5. "Jack of trades, master of none" is a false dichotomy.

• Mastering a skill is different than perfecting a skill
• 80/20 rule - 20% of the knowledge gives 80% return
• Study to the point of, but not beyond, rapidly declining return
• 10k hour rule has been discredited, correlation does not mean causation
• It is possible to be world class in any skill in 1 year

4. In a world of dogmatic specialists, its often the generalist who ends up running the show.

• Knowledge has been democratized, we have access to intellectual capital when we need it
• Generalist can predict and innovate faster
• Proper leaders must weave everything together
• Leadership requires multiple perspectives

3. Boredom is failure.

• The opposite of happiness is not sadness, but boredom
• Lack of intellectual stimulation drives us to depression
• Over specialization almost guarantees boredom
• Leaders never have an identity born from one skill set

2. Diversity of intellectual playgrounds breeds confidence instead of fear.

• Contentedness is related to embracing confidence
• Diversity of knowledge breeds empathy with broadest range of human conditions and experiences

1. It's more fun.

• The jack of all trades maximizes his number of peak experiences in life
• He enjoys the pursuit of excellence while discovering what he is built to dominate in    
• He looks at the same problems that have been ‘solved’ and sees something different

---

In the spirit of this post, I mapped my experience and skills in the hopes that it would help me to better understand how I describe what I do (post disciplinary design and strategy). While I still have a hard time describing what I do, this was a fun exercise.