To succeed in a future we cannot yet grasp, we must re-think thinking.
In the past week, my son and I made balloon animals on my phone. I checked in for my Vancouver flight online and, the next day, received a reassuring text message with updated departure and gate information. Thanksgiving was saved when I learned how to make gravy on YouTube. I discovered via a podcast that “Mutually Assured Destruction” kept us safe during the Cold War, and via Facebook that my Cold War era classmate is excited about her new flatware.
We all have similar stories. Yet we’re so immersed in this rapidly evolving modernity that we can lose sight of our time’s singular truth – our worlds have become hyper accessible and interactive in ways that none could have predicted.
When today’s leaders look forward into this complexity to divine the next breakthroughs, they do so with an alarmingly high assumption-to-knowledge ratio, one that effectively undermines traditional analysis and business thinking. To quote Rita McGrath of Columbia Business School, “it is increasingly difficult to plan by extrapolating from a platform of past experience.”
So how do we prepare for a future we cannot yet fully grasp? One approach is to learn “Design Thinking”.
The design profession is focused on creating innovative solutions that are by definition outside of our experience. As a consequence, Design Thinking (and its manifest methods and tools) is optimized for the purposeful discovery of possibilities amidst complexity. Designers don’t predict the future so much as they quickly learn their way into novel solutions that are simultaneously desirable, technically feasible, and financially viable.
Start here.
© 2009 IDEO
Design Thinking has helped deliver safe drinking water in Africa, create category revitalizing products for P&G, improve the quality and accuracy of patient care in hospitals, increase commitment among casual blood donors, and much, much more.
And what’s the best way to learn Design Thinking? One must experience it.
Therefore ExperiencePoint knew we had a role to play in the democratization of Design Thinking. We sought out the leader in the field, IDEO, a global consultancy that “creates impact through design” and over the past year have worked in partnership to create an energizing game that introduces the essentials of Design Thinking.
The result is “Design Thinker”. In this workshop experience, competing teams flex their Design Thinking skills to solve a realistic and complex challenge. In so doing, they engage with the terms, techniques, and thought patterns of designers. Participants leave ready and able to affect meaningful change back on-the-job.
We are excited to share Design Thinker with the world and will be making it available in January 2010. We hope you will be among those who join us in this re-think of thinking. The world will be the better for it.
