So, I.D. magazine published this trolling article, and I can’t resist linking to Down with Innovation, precisely because it (unintentionally) makes so many of my points about business fluency for me.
I sympathize that design thinking is getting a lot of attention the business press, leaving design doing without the love it deserves. But this sort […]

A thought that’s come up a few times lately - I believe that the opportunity for design and user experience to increase our influence is not about finding better methods for working with users, but in better methods for working with business. Not that new methods for generating insight, prototyping, and defining solutions aren’t useful. […]

Folks, it’s been public for a while but I haven’t talked about it here on bplusd - I’m speaking at one of the best user experience conferences around: Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week. When I was invited to join the program, I was thrilled - UX Week not only gathers together solid fundamentals, but pushes […]

So Pete Mortensen comments that the reason we don’t see more coverage of sideways innovation is that it simply isn’t sexy.
I agree - my point isn’t that sideways innovation never happens. It’s that it doesn’t seem to happen systematically in most organizations. As I pointed out in my original post, Procter & Gamble have […]

So, I wrote in 2005 about why most designers aren’t design thinkers, yet. Unfortunately, I think that the rising popularity of design, innovation, and design thinking has actually been detrimental and limiting the growth of the industry’s design maturity.
The reason: as more and more coverage has been devoted to these topics, many designers have assumed […]

I’m excited that my colleague Yvonne and I are going to be sharing some of our methods and practice at the upcoming IA Summit. Here’s what our one day session is going to cover:
Accelerator workshops compress work that could take weeks or even months into a matter of days. Using rapid facilitation techniques, practitioners can […]

When Bruce Nussbaum pimped a post about Design Is the New Management Consultancy I was disappointed. It showed the kind of breathless rah-rah that characterizes a sort of design thinking bubble - a look at design that lacks critical thinking, or understanding of what’s really involved in management consulting.
Fortunately, the thoughtful and articulate Victor Lombardi […]

Found via the anonymous blog Managing Innovation Thinking + Design comes this 2004 Finnish study on helping (mostly small) design firms transition to more strategic consulting offerings (PDF, 59 pages).

Reflecting on how we can help ourselves and others improve design thinking ability, I was struck by the need to address mindset and skillset exercises.
Mindset deals with things like design maturity. How do we change our thinking to address things like

Framing
Problem Solving
Form and Function
Abductive Thinking (generating multiple possibilities)

Skillset deals with specific activities, methods or tools […]

One of the dangers of design thinking is that it’s easy to focus on theory, not practice. Embedded in the term itself is a bias towards, well, thinking. And that often correlates to “not doing”. However, if all design thinking has to offer is a bunch of theory, then there’s really no intersection with business, […]