The only thing we have to fear…

Image of man leaping across a wide gap

It’s ok to be scared. There is a prevailing sentiment out there that fear is a sign of weakness, but the truth is, fear can be a productive thing. Understanding our fears and engaging with them is the healthy way to move forward. Cancerland taught me a lot about fear: about my own, which was abject and all-consuming at first; …

‘Why’ beats ‘what’

Photo of calipers

How are you doing?  I’m still not dead yet. But that doesn’t tell you anything useful about how I’m doing – I might be scaling mountains at the weekend; I might be bed-bound and miserable. ‘Not dead yet’ doesn’t tell you much – just like a company’s revenue, margin and active users don’t reveal all that much about how they’re …

Design Thinking: the Baby vs. the Bathwater

Photo of a drain emptying with swirling water

There’s a lot of talk around here lately about ‘the Death of Design Thinking’ as IDEO goes through a massive round of layoffs and restructuring. “Is Design Thinking dead?” everyone is asking, and for a lot of people the answer seems to be an enthusiastic YES. But there is a big difference between Design Thinking(TM), a specific service offered and …

Cake or Death

Lemon poppyseed cake photo by James Ransom

Can we all agree that how we experience the world is important?  So why do so many businesses still see experience design as an optional extra? This has come across my desk often enough this week for me to feel a need to post about it. Too many designers are still fighting for the right to do the jobs they …

What’s the point?

Partially completed puzzle of a DNA double helix

Articulate your purpose. Sounds obvious, right? Every business I’ve ever worked with has struggled with this on some level. Sometimes it amounted to not much more than a communication hiccup, but in most cases it ended up having deep impact on the company in some way, whether that was in customer trust, talent, time to market or lost revenue. Large …

Introducing Superventions

Over the past several years, I’ve been engaged with the startup community on a bunch of levels – mentor, interim C suite, sounding board, product/experience/design consultant. At the same time I’ve been honing and documenting the Superhuman toolkit, which contains frameworks for addressing a range of issues that most (if not all) businesses face at some point. And since I …

Messy relationships [living with AI]

Artificial Intelligence is all over the news these days, and now even the Big Boys are talking about how important it is to consider the social impact. Obviously I agree, but I think there’s still a big fat chunk of that impact that nobody’s really considering yet. Back in April, I helped facilitate a couple of workshops at the Royal …