Trial and error - a beautiful thing

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:

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Visually Launches To Automate The Making Of Infographics | TechCrunch

  I was sure that I had already posted on this.. must be getting old. Love the site, love the direction - one to subscribe to if you enjoy simple visualisations of complex data!

• Communicate Hope: Using Games and Play to Improve Productivity - 42projects | Management Innovation eXchange

  Another cracker on gamification from management exchange

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• YouTube - ‪Thundercats (2011) - Official Trailer [HD]‬‏

  A blast from the past.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Agile Connect 2011 - Keynote: The Essential Product Owner - Partnering with the Team

  Not sure this warrants a keynote, but a good presentation nonetheless.

• Cool Infographics - Blog - Britain's Changing High Street Businesses

  Another great infographic. Simple and easy to understand.

• Lego Takes Crowdsourcing up a Notch | ClickZ

  Cool!

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• blog thing | written by Stephan | User Experience Consultant at a Canadian IT service provider working and living in Germany

  tags: Shameless plug for a colleagues new blog.

• The 12 Best Evidence-Based Marketing Tools | Evidence-Based Marketing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Ultimate Wallboard Winner - an interactive backlog board

  Nice combination of technology and good old post-its on this development project to show project progress

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Real-time local Twitter trends - Trendsmap

  A cracking site mapping twitter trend terms onto a map.

• Authors@Google: Brian Dunning Skeptoids

  Entertaining presentation on urban myths

• InfoQ: Using Design Thinking to Stop Building Worthless Software

  Less impressive than I had hoped, but a good solid presentation connecting design thinking and agility in product development

• YouTube - 35 years of CGI: milestones and fiscal 2010 highlights

  I think it best, I let this presentation speak for itself ;-)

• SINNRAUM - Willkommen auf der Homepage von Gunter Dueck

  I spotted this link on the skype profile of a very thoughtful colleague - this blogger is a published philosopher, maths professor and chief technologist at IBM. Will definitely be exploring further ;-)...

• How to design your Business Model as a Lean Startup | Methodologist

  Interesting that Osterwalder's canvas really does seem to be getting traction - great little blog article on a lead startup business model

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.