It has been a while since I posted a blog entry directly to blogger.com (though I hope that some people are enjoying my weekly roundup of interesting findings via diigo.com).
I finally have the beginnings of a plan for a bunch of entries that will hopefully say something interesting about the connections between systems thinking, design thinking, agile methods and business modeling.
I suspect that it is going to take quite a while for me to formulate this out (think years rather than months), but I just watched a talk by Tim Harford (known from the "undercover economist" books and newspaper columns) at TED Global 2011, that I think is a good way to kick things off, since it made a lot of sense to me and brings together the iterative and exploratory methods of both agile and design thinking for innovation with a degree of structure:
The basic premise is a simple one; the world is too complex for us to be able to find solutions to issues by thought and analysis alone, we need to accept that we do not understand everything and, more importantly, accept that trial and error is a valid way to find solutions. As Harford says, this is obvious, but not accepted (check out some of my earlier posts on common sense solutions not necessarily being applied).
Having accepted this premise, the key thing in my eyes is to work out how to become great (and efficient) at trial and error - that is, learning incrementally from what we do and the agile, design thinking worlds have a lot to offer on that front, be it sprints, retrospectives, exploratory design, customer centric learning. Add to this the rigour of systems thinking approaches to build better understanding of complexity to building or support decision-making frameworks and you have a winning combination.
More to follow.
Here is the video:
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