As promised, here’s the video of Erik Kiaer’s presentation at the Design Management Institute-organized conference, Balancing Extremes, held last month in Portland. Erik tells the history of navigation while making the case for bringing discipline to innovation efforts by reframing each and every challenge.
Stories, moments, people and ideas of interest from within the worlds of innovation and design, spotted and written about by Helen Walters, design writer, editor, and ideas editor at TED. Attitude, errors and opinions obviously all the writer's own.
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July 12, 2012
July 11, 2012
Check this out. My colleague Erik Kiaer presented recently at the Design Management Institute-organized conference, “Balancing Extremes,” held in Portland. In his presentation, entitled “Powers of Ten: Building Transformational Capital,” he ran through the history of navigation, all in the name of his broader point: that innovation requires the reframing of a problem, as well as thoughtful, systemic disciplined efforts. Video to follow shortly.
December 7, 2011
Video from the recent Design Management Institute conference, Design at Scale (of which I was co-chair.) My colleagues, Brian Quinn and Ryan Pikkel were on the hook to unveil the latest version of Doblin’s iconic framework, the Ten Types of Innovation. As you can see in the film, they did a great job of explaining why the Ten Types provide a really useful way to start thinking about the innovation process.
November 2, 2011
20 Ways to Protect and Nurture Design
Lorna Ross is the design manager at Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation. She gave an insight into running a small design team within a very large organization (one dominated by clinicians and physicians, to boot) at the recent Design at Scale conference. She concluded with 11 ways she thinks about protecting and nurturing design, culled from a longer list of 20 ideas. She shared that longer list with me, and I in turn share it with you here. It contains some gems applicable in disciplines way beyond design:
- Move beyond needing to be understood. Focus on being valued.
- Do not react to every situation. By allowing the dynamics to play out there is deeper learning. Designers self regulate through experience.
- There is a thin line between being understood and being irrelevant. (If busy people have to validate you they will opt to ignore you instead and move on.)
- Get your team comfortable with discomfort.
- You may want to direct the work but your team may need you more as a decoy. Go where the need is greatest.
- Make every team member feel empowered, trusted, respected…. and accountable.
- Communicate zero tolerance for liabilities. One dysfunctional person can bring down your whole team, and you.
- Never make excuses for your team. You will be seen as biased.
- Make difficult and unpopular decisions with the same confidence and conviction that you make the easy ones.
- Do not get too wrapped up in being liked by your team. They need you less as a friend and more as a leader.
- Examine your own prejudices.
- Scare everyone you hire. Carefully design the most effective interview process to really know who you are bringing onto your team.
- Pay close attention to feedback and always be seen to value it.
- Choose your battles. Know what you can affect and what you cannot.
- The almost toxic levels of adrenaline needed to function in “hostile” or chaotic environments can tip a team into :battle mode” where there can be considerable collateral damage. It is your job to watch for this and interrupt it very carefully.
- In a conservative culture, passion, determination and conviction can often be perceived as arrogance. Humility is a skill that you and your team need to master.
- Value integrity and honest above everything else. Trust amongst the group is critical.
- Learn to function without praise or validation. Not because you don’t deserve it but because it may never come. Determine and declare your own success metrics.
- Never wait to be surprised by feedback. Seek it out.
- Never gossip. It’s a luxury you cannot afford.
September 20, 2011
I’m a writer, not a presenter, and I am quite resigned to the fact that I’m often better at writing words than speaking them. Nonetheless, I think Redglass Pictures did a knockout job putting together this trailer for the upcoming DMI conference, Design at Scale. In it, my co-chairs and I talk about the theme of the event, while Jake Barton of Local Projects makes a guest appearance too. Thanks to Smart Design for organizing a lovely evening… if that’s a signal of how the two day conference will be, we’re all in for a treat.
September 1, 2011
Issues of Scale
In October, I’m co-chair, with GE’s Beth Comstock and Richard Whitehall of Smart Design, of the DMI-organized conference, Design at Scale. It’s shaping up to be a super event, with a ton of amazing speakers who will all add unique insight into this difficult topic. Questions of scale — how to do it, when to do it, why it’s apparently so enormously difficult — seem to dog the design industry. So I was interested to read this piece by Atlas Venture partner, Fred Destin, who writes about how premature scaling all too often kills startups stone dead. He’s writing from a technology standpoint, but it’s worth thinking about in terms of the design entrepreneurship that seems to be bubbling up right now. In particular, I liked his explanations of why startups scale before they’re really ready:
Well worth a read. Story via new DMI president, Karen Reuther.
