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AUTHORS
Is there a better way to do business planning?
By Julian Jenkins, 24/11/2011
I was talking to a client recently, and the conversation turned to the planning system. As I have often found before in similar conversations, the client was frustrated by his experiences, and wondering how on earth a process could be so lengthy and onerous, and yet produce little real value for their day-to-day work. Like others before him, he perceived the annual plan as a bureaucratic requirement imposed by a distant corporate office, not as an engaging...
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Five Questions to Stimulate Conversations when Scoping the Design of Human Systems
By Ruben O'Campo, 15/11/2011
I’ve found that people leading product development initiatives have an advanced toolkit to define the problem they are trying to solve, the resources they are willing to commit, and the outcomes they want to achieve. But when the object of design is a human system rather than a product – for example an organisational model or a new customer experience – articulating the problem and desired outcomes becomes a lot more difficult.
And, if your ambitions are...
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Two modes of Engagement
By Mark Strom, 15/11/2011
Have you ever witnessed the ‘roll-out’ or ‘cascading’ of a cultural change or employee engagement initiative? Maybe you have led such programs, or been on the receiving end of them.
I remember a CEO presenting fifty-five slides covering vision, mission, values, principles, and who-knows-what-else with the aim of engaging his top 100 managers in changing the culture of the business. Each manager then received their own slide pack to repeat the...
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From the Drawing Board to the Board Room: Generating
By Quinn Chow, 14/11/2011
The following expands on my article originally appearing in bbetween 3, published by the Billy Blue College of Design in 2010.
I confess. I’m a doodle-holic. While in a board room the other day I caught myself. It was a pressure-cooked space, where we were deciding some fundamental strategies with a client. But there I was ‘mindlessly’ drawing. Heck I...
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Designing Things Designers Traditionally Don’t Design
By Quinn Chow, 04/10/2011
I was a panellist at the 2011 Design Thinking unConference in Vancouver, and I came away feeling both energised and dismayed. Many of the participants were young Designers who believed Design Thinking could bring new and innovative solutions to wicked problems. This filled me with energy. However, my dismay came when I saw the examples of design being discussed. They were the same, old problems Designers have been trotting out since…...
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Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities
By Tony Golsby-Smith, 16/09/2011
How many people in your organisation are innovative thinkers who can help with your thorniest strategy problems? How many have a keen understanding of customer needs? How many understand what it takes to assure that employees are engaged at work? If the answer is "not many," welcome to the club. Business leaders around the world have told me that they despair of finding people who can help them solve wicked problems - or even get their heads around them. It's not that firms don't have...
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The Secret Ingredient of Using Market Research to Drive Innovation: Design Research
By Tim Fife, 26/08/2011
I regularly find myself in conversations with Australian clients who are keen to build innovation capabilities into their organisations, and believe that they already have all the in-house research capabilities they’ll need to generate the powerful customer insights that are part and parcel of being an innovative company. However, it is frequently the case that their research capabilities fall short, often due to the fact that their market research groups have yet to embrace (or even be...
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Making it visual
By Tony Weir, 05/07/2011
I'm struck again by the great power in this really simple act of making the topic of discussion into a visual artefact - into a thing we can discuss. Sometimes it seems like such a straightforward thing. But then again, we can fumble around for hours with a 'meeting' and not get far. I think it is that we (that is we people in general) often mistake ourselves and have a bit of an over-inflated sense of our abilities. We are so good at thinking in so many ways, but so limited in other...
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Three Questions that Will Kill Innovation
By Tony Golsby-Smith, 04/07/2011
A big insurance company I know of wants to design a radical new future, so they have committed significant resources to large-scale innovation. But as the board and executive committee are learning, embracing innovation means starting to ask a whole new set of questions. Here are three toxic questions that you probably ask that are guaranteed to kill innovation: "What is the return on investment on this project?" This question scares innovation team and forces them to tell lies. They...
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Hold conversations, not meetings
By Tony Weir, 19/06/2011
I once knew a consultant who was hired by a major corporation at the senior level. Within days of his arrival, his diary was filled with appointments and meetings that he knew nothing about and over which he had no control. He wanted nothing more than to attend to this mandate, but instead he found his days filled up by pointless meetings that had little to do with the bigger strategic picture. If you're anything like this executive, you'd probably be glad to skip most of the meetings...
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Is Your Budgeting Process Killing Your Strategy?
By Tony Golsby-Smith, 10/05/2011
A friend of mine who had taken over running a major government department noticed right away how abused the word "strategy" was. "Everything has to be a strategy in order to get noticed," he told me. "You practically need a strategy for visiting the restroom." The second thing he noticed was that nobody was actually thinking strategically. The more the word was used, he said, the less meaningful it became. It was as if "strategy" was synonymous with a long-drawn-out, badly managed...
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A simple heuristic that's saving lives
By Tony Weir, 03/01/2011
Lots of lives. A group of hospitals in eight cities around the globe has successfully demonstrated that the use of a simple surgical checklist during major operations can lower the incidence of deaths and complications by more than one-third. It is a simple checklist, to be used at three critical points of the path from admission to discharge from the hospital. I'm not for every document that makes a marked improvement being called a checklist, but this surely is: a heuristic is a...
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