Are you letting data from the past drive your future strategy?
Yesterday, I was deep inside Google looking for datapoints to connect that would add up to give me a sense of what was going on in these turbulent times, and I came across this insightful article on strategy. It was clear the author felt as obsolete as I did about the way strategic planning for… Read More »
Book Review: The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse is a lucid, well-written synopsis that rapidly introduces the reader to the legacy of the colonial and imperial narratives that destroyed Indigenous ways of living with the natural environment and the living planet, for profit, trade, and glory. I was moved last night to bookmark various passages from Ghosh’s book… Read More »
Spanning Boundaries and Transgressing Disciplines: Insights for Post-Pandemic Innovation
“The Bauhaus School was deliberately designed to foster innovation by crossing boundaries, including boundaries between school and work and disciplinary boundaries. The School faced ongoing criticism because its innovative approaches and activities were seen to be transgressive (Bayer et al., 1938). Yet transgressive practice disrupts established knowledge and can generate new knowledge (Haraway, 2008). Despite… Read More »
Sustainable Design Thinking (SDT)
Practitioners and scholars have long been aware of the limitations of Design Thinking (DT) as has been adopted by private sector and non-profits for their own applications. At some point around 2008, the early batch of design thinking bloggers, particularly those exploring the interstitial spaces between business and design, went silent as the dominant narrative… Read More »
In the process of launching a new venture
In East Africa’s regional informal trade networks, the business development strategy that works for the constraints and conditions of the operating environment is one of selective diversification in lines of business, and, upgrading from B2C retail to B2B micro-wholesale. It was an aspiration for every ambitious shopkeeper, to have women come and purchase from her… Read More »
Only when I laugh
I was hired by The Second City in August 1998. The letter above was issued for a visa application to visit Canada. Has it truly been a lifetime and a century since I learnt to improvise as a professional? I can only say that I must have embedded the skills and techniques so deeply in… Read More »
Sensemaking sparks creativity
The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over. ~ Charles Eames This… Read More »
Exploring the edge of the abyss
Design is but a form of applied creativity, as is art or music or dance. You’d think I’d know this by now. Funnily enough, its taken literature review on creativity in adversity to bring home to me that the engine of change and transformation is not design but our own capacity and agency for creative… Read More »
Transformative Research and its Discontents: A design practitioner reflects
[ Personal and societal transformation] are intertwined and that personal transformation is a necessary component of research that is designed to support change at the societal level […] if we design our research so that it explicitly addresses issues of discrimination and oppression that the probability of personal and social transformation increases. (Mertens, 2017) This… Read More »