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The art and science of the possible

~ A celebration of non-zero sum thinking

The art and science of the possible

Category Archives: design thinking

Forget IDEO’s T-shaped thinkers – enter “Meta”

31 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by lnedelescu in business, consulting, design thinking, human capital, innovation, knowledge, learning, Organizational Development

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Design Thinking, IDEO, Meta, Tim Brown

fuller_artzy

If you follow the latest in business thinking, you would have come across the popular – or should I say “populist” – Design Thinking (DT) movement. You might have even heard of IDEO. They are the company that turned the rather loose notion of business as “art” into a profitable consulting model. You’ve probably heard of so called “T-shaped thinkers”. According to Tim Brown and others at IDEO, T-shaped thinkers are the new Da Vincis. They master both the ability to think broadly and deeply. They are generalists and specialists at the same time.

The beauty of simple models, like IDEO’s T-shaped thinkers is they are simple to convey and remember. Their marketing power is undeniable, and they serve the consulting model superbly. But the drawback is they are often too simplistic to be accurate. In fact, I say the T-shaped thinker model is quite poor in capturing the generalist-specialist dichotomy.

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Introducing the World to Generative Management

09 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in business, design thinking, management, strategy

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Analytics, Big Data, business, Clay Christensen, Design Thinking, disruptive innovation, Generative Management, George Gilder, integrative thinking, Kevin Kelly, Nassim Taleb, operations, Peter Drucker, Roger Martin, Russell Ackoff, strategy, thought leaders

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Like yin and yang, human enterprise has two facets: closed-loop activities and open-ended endeavors. In management we call these two operations and strategy.

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A consulting industry first: strategy architected around complexity principles

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, consulting, design thinking, innovation, knowledge, management, problem solving, strategy

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Alignment, complexity, Criteria, Innovation, Performance, Peter Drucker, phase transitions, Portfolio, Qualitative Leaps, Quantitative, strategy

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When people ask me what it is that I do, they often act surprised and sometimes suspicious upon hearing my answer: “I solve wicked problems with undefined parameters”; yes, really.

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Tools are only as effective as the mindsets that employ them

13 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, design thinking, Organizational Development, technology

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CES 2014, Common Sense, complexity, Design Thinking, Karl Popper, Network Theory, Organizational Development, Roger Martin, Technologization, Tools

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With the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas attracting worldwide media coverage last week, let me be the one to posit that technological innovation is only as effective as our mental models are able to keep up.

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Algoristics – the mindset of the possible

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in design thinking, problem solving, society, Uncategorized

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Algoristics, Algorithms, Breaking Through, bureaucracy, Entrepreneurship, Heuristics, Mindset, Possibility, Validity

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“Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.” – R. Buckminster Fuller

We live in a world where rules and regulations are multiplying every day. It’s as if the more complex the world becomes, the more rules we throw at it hoping that we’ll be able to make it function like a neat clockwork algorithm. And so it’s tempting when looking to start a new venture (personal, professional, or otherwise) to see the world, and particularly the developed world, as a rigid mesh of algorithms that cannot be bent. It is in part because of this belief for example that I quit my corporate job in the U.S. to start a business in an emerging economy seven years ago.

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A visual tribute to design and creativity, and to the unity of art and science in the human spirit

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in design thinking, human capital, innovation, society

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Art, Brancusi, Buckminster, Celibidache, Dali, Human Spirit, science, Society, Tesla, Zuze

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In order of appearance: Buckminster, Brancusi, Dali, Celibidache, Tesla, Zuze

A significant update to my list of foundational thinkers: F. Buckmister Fuller

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, capitalism, complexity, design thinking, future, human capital, society

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architecture, Buckmister Fuller, complexity, Design, Foundational Thinkers, specialization of labor vs. holism, Systems

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I have just come across the incarnation into words of a beautiful positivist and humanist mind of the highest caliber: F Buckminster Fuller. Apparently he is 50 years ahead of my timid attempts at using the converged wisdom of complexity, design and systems to contemplate our society’s potential pitfalls and ways to overcome them. And so, my initial list of foundational thinkers (Ackoff, Jaques, Prigogine and Vester) has just been expanded. I will be studying the implications of Fuller’s profound insights in the near future, but, for now, here is a quotation that takes the duality of my caution-opportunity message in the discontinuity disorder and post-causality pieces even further:

“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war“. – F. Buckminster Fuller

Why it may take crisis to become a better integrative thinker

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, Crisis, design thinking

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Creative Tension, Crisis, integrative thinking, problem solving, Roger Martin, Short Term vs. Long term

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They say mistakes are key to learning. Having had my share, I couldn’t agree more. But I would say while mistakes are great learning experiences, crises exercise a unique mental capacity for (wicked) problem solving: integrative thinking.

Roger Martin defines integrative thinking as the “ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative solution of the tensions in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superiors to each”.

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The irony of supply and demand in emerging economies as seen through the eyes of design thinking

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, design thinking, Emerging Markets, human capital, society

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Abductive Reasoning, Absurdity, Advanced Economies, Centralized Economies, Centralized Planning, Design Thinking, Emerging Markets, Globalization, Ilf and Petrov, Information Technology, Innovation, Multinationals, Roger Martin, Supply-Demand, Validity Thinking

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Many of the countries now part of the emerging economies club can trace their recent history to totalitarian regimes and centralized economies. What centralized political and economic paradigms have proven to have in common is a proliferation of material shortages coupled with propaganda driven, unrealistic plans. And so, under such regimes, populations found creative ways to adapt by learning to by-pass absurd rules and plans and to find ways of obtaining much needed resources outside of official distribution channels.

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It all depends: the art of problem solving

10 Friday May 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in consulting, design thinking, innovation, knowledge, learning, paradox, problem solving

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Chaos, complexity, Consulting, Dave Snowden, Disruption, Entrepreneurship, Globalization, Innovation, Intractable Problems, Introspection, Knowledge, Learning, Methodology, Open Mind, Relativity, Risk, Roger Martin, Russell Ackoff, Self-Awareness, Wicked Problems

It all Depends

Over the last decade, I’ve lived globalization, entrepreneurship, change and crisis, complexity and chaos. I must have run into at least a dozen intractable, impossible, show-stopper, nerve-racking, all-or-nothing situations and at least several orders higher magnitude wicked problems. I also ran into the entire spectrum of human behavior, what the Clint Eastwood character would call the “good, the bad, and the ugly” (I would actually add the “irrational”).

About five years ago I also started an in depth study of the cutting edge thinking related to complexity and disorder. Finally I also studied and noted my own behaviors and responses in such circumstances; like Hansel and Gretel I traced my steps into the wilderness in case I ever had to find my way back. This ability to not only act but rationalize the act has served me well, substantially increasing my awareness and lowering my stress when faced with the new and unfamiliar. It has also resulted in a problem solving and sense-making body of work which I think rivals the best of what’s available on the market. I have yet to capitalize on all this, but I have learned to be patient.

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