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:
Showing posts with label ideation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ideation. Show all posts
Saturday, 23 July 2011
Monday, 24 May 2010
Blue ocean strategy in 8 slides
Another short posting today.
When I first read "Blue Ocean Strategy" a few years back, I was not so impressed - it was a good synthesis of thinking that had preceded it, but I failed to see what is new...
Several years on, I haven't really changed my mind about the content - it isn't new - but I guess I have gained an appreciation for what a professor during my undergraduate days used to call "masterful synthesis" ("there are no new ideas, just new configurations of old ideas", paraphrasing Audre Lorde) and I suspect I am a good deal more open to the fact that even small changes and innovations in business can be truly difficult to achieve.
BlueOceanStrategy.com is a really nice website that covers the core tools and techniques from the book; the strategy canvas,the "four actions" framework and others. If you haven't read the book, go here first!
And even "better", there is an 8-page summary deck. Now all that I have to do is work out where the blue ocean is in the IT consulting space.. which turns out to actually be quite difficult even with the nice tools.
Darn!
When I first read "Blue Ocean Strategy" a few years back, I was not so impressed - it was a good synthesis of thinking that had preceded it, but I failed to see what is new...
Several years on, I haven't really changed my mind about the content - it isn't new - but I guess I have gained an appreciation for what a professor during my undergraduate days used to call "masterful synthesis" ("there are no new ideas, just new configurations of old ideas", paraphrasing Audre Lorde) and I suspect I am a good deal more open to the fact that even small changes and innovations in business can be truly difficult to achieve.
BlueOceanStrategy.com is a really nice website that covers the core tools and techniques from the book; the strategy canvas,the "four actions" framework and others. If you haven't read the book, go here first!
And even "better", there is an 8-page summary deck. Now all that I have to do is work out where the blue ocean is in the IT consulting space.. which turns out to actually be quite difficult even with the nice tools.
Darn!
Saturday, 20 March 2010
Design thinking & strategy - a book review
As threatened in an earlier post, this entry is another book review.
"Design thinking; integrating innovation, customer experience and brand value", edited by Thomas Lockwood (of course, available via amazon), brings together a bunch of big names in design management and provides a nicely balanced overview of current ideas about the role of design in innovation, service delivery, but in particular in developing brands.
I especially liked the contributions by Kevin Clark & Ron Smith from IBM Corporate Markting (on the value of leveraging design professionals and skills to provide insights in all aspects of the business), Erik Abbing & Christa van Gessel (who provide a 4-step method for brand-driven innovation) and Mark Jones & Fran Samalionis from IDEO (who have put together a nice framework to design new service innvoations).
Despite the many interesting essays, I was underwhelmed by the book as a whole. I guess it is my nature (or background, or both), but I was looking for a more complete answer, showing how design thinking can be applied / integrated into the business - beyond the straightforward application of ideation and visualisation techniques to the product and brand development process.
Using design thinking (and at the very least design techniques) combined with more analytical/structured methods in the business strategy space to bring the "outside-in approach" into an organisation and to give those ideas traction feels like an idea on the brink of maturity - in a couple of years this is going to be entirely mainstream.
Nevertheless, if this book was anything to go on, there is a lot of work to be done before then. The tools need to mature to be applied in the broader business strategy arena (ie. outside of the product development space where they are most at home). It feels like progress is being made quickly (with new blogs and companies popping up daily) - it is a fun time to dig into this space!
Given my own more analytical background, I personally find it rather frustrating trying to create rather than deduce, but also all the more rewarding when it pays off - I hope to be posting later this year on the topic of design thinking in the context of business architecture as my ideas mature.
As such any help that can be found in books like this on methods and approaches are thoroughly welcome!
"Design thinking; integrating innovation, customer experience and brand value", edited by Thomas Lockwood (of course, available via amazon), brings together a bunch of big names in design management and provides a nicely balanced overview of current ideas about the role of design in innovation, service delivery, but in particular in developing brands.
I especially liked the contributions by Kevin Clark & Ron Smith from IBM Corporate Markting (on the value of leveraging design professionals and skills to provide insights in all aspects of the business), Erik Abbing & Christa van Gessel (who provide a 4-step method for brand-driven innovation) and Mark Jones & Fran Samalionis from IDEO (who have put together a nice framework to design new service innvoations).
Despite the many interesting essays, I was underwhelmed by the book as a whole. I guess it is my nature (or background, or both), but I was looking for a more complete answer, showing how design thinking can be applied / integrated into the business - beyond the straightforward application of ideation and visualisation techniques to the product and brand development process.
Using design thinking (and at the very least design techniques) combined with more analytical/structured methods in the business strategy space to bring the "outside-in approach" into an organisation and to give those ideas traction feels like an idea on the brink of maturity - in a couple of years this is going to be entirely mainstream.
Nevertheless, if this book was anything to go on, there is a lot of work to be done before then. The tools need to mature to be applied in the broader business strategy arena (ie. outside of the product development space where they are most at home). It feels like progress is being made quickly (with new blogs and companies popping up daily) - it is a fun time to dig into this space!
Given my own more analytical background, I personally find it rather frustrating trying to create rather than deduce, but also all the more rewarding when it pays off - I hope to be posting later this year on the topic of design thinking in the context of business architecture as my ideas mature.
As such any help that can be found in books like this on methods and approaches are thoroughly welcome!
Thursday, 18 March 2010
"Save the online damsel, save the world!"
Having recently posted a presentation from the somewhat frightening Jane McGonigal (games designer and director at the Institue for the Future), I have been on the lookout for more from her that perhaps backs up her claims regarding the user experience of reality.
I am very pleased to be able to write that her voice-over on the presentation (well, at least on a very similar presentation that she gave at TED recently - see below), is much more positive and pretty convincing - the basic message is as follows; millions and millions of people are spending serious amounts of time building "virtuoso" skills (her word not mine) in these online games and they can be harnessed to achieve breakthroughs in the "real world" (ie. the non-digital part of the world). She goes on to give some nice examples of games adjusting behaviours in the real world.
At the very least, the presentation was uplifting (and made me think back to the notion of passionate engagement that I posted on recently).
I am intuitively enthusiastic about her belief in the online generation, the value of "MMORPGs" in developing real skills and am absolutely convinced in her assertion on human need for meaningful exertion (ie. for a valuable cause, for an "epic" in her words), rather than "just" work.
On her website she sums it up nicely: "What the world needs now is an epic win." - So finally my younger brothers have all the justification that they need to get back online and start gaming.
Thanks Dr McGonigal!
Here is the post from TED:
I am very pleased to be able to write that her voice-over on the presentation (well, at least on a very similar presentation that she gave at TED recently - see below), is much more positive and pretty convincing - the basic message is as follows; millions and millions of people are spending serious amounts of time building "virtuoso" skills (her word not mine) in these online games and they can be harnessed to achieve breakthroughs in the "real world" (ie. the non-digital part of the world). She goes on to give some nice examples of games adjusting behaviours in the real world.
At the very least, the presentation was uplifting (and made me think back to the notion of passionate engagement that I posted on recently).
I am intuitively enthusiastic about her belief in the online generation, the value of "MMORPGs" in developing real skills and am absolutely convinced in her assertion on human need for meaningful exertion (ie. for a valuable cause, for an "epic" in her words), rather than "just" work.
On her website she sums it up nicely: "What the world needs now is an epic win." - So finally my younger brothers have all the justification that they need to get back online and start gaming.
Thanks Dr McGonigal!
Here is the post from TED:
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Tribes, passion & getting ideas off the ground
Following on from the previous post on "Tribes" and the power of passionate leadership, I stumbled across a great site, the99percent.com that focuses on getting ideas off the ground. One videocast that jumped out was by Ji Lee (Director of Google Creative Lab) - he talks about the transformative power of personal projects (and the fact that the professional and personal world inevitably intersect if we are passionate about what we do, even if we like the idea of keeping them separate).
Posted using ShareThis
Posted using ShareThis
Sunday, 7 September 2008
Documenting a business model
I am always interested in finding good ways of documenting/ explaining/modeling/translating business models (delete as appropriate, depending on your understanding of the role of the business analyst ;-)). A colleague pointed me in the direction of Alex Osterwalder. He has created a nice framework for thinking about business model, with a focus on identifying areas for innovation.
I have to be honest; I haven't really got to grips with the details of his approach, but from first examination it feels like it is a good baseline. Hopefully, I will get a chance in the coming months to try it out myself - more to follow on that here!
Here is a taster, but there is loads more available at Osterwalder's own blog, or on www.slideshare.net (a wonderful source of interesting presentations!):
I have to be honest; I haven't really got to grips with the details of his approach, but from first examination it feels like it is a good baseline. Hopefully, I will get a chance in the coming months to try it out myself - more to follow on that here!
Here is a taster, but there is loads more available at Osterwalder's own blog, or on www.slideshare.net (a wonderful source of interesting presentations!):
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)