Have you ever happened across an idea or invention and thought, “Why didn’t I think of that! It’s just so perfect!”

Well, John Goscha’s IdeaPaint is my “I shoulda thought of that” idea. The product is simply a paint that can turn just about surface into a dry-erase board, giving you the space to collaborate, educate, interact and explore group creativity. Imagine making any surface your hub of creativity—your 360-degree inspirational environment.

Brilliant!

What are the benefits:

1. The ability to brainstorm on almost every inch of your office

2. IdeaPaint is half the cost of whiteboard and better-performing

3. You can leave marks up indefinitely—and they won’t stain the wall

4. And the best—there is no carbon footprint (vs. manufacturing and shipping a whiteboard)

Check out the IdeaPaint installation video and take special notice of the really cool “This” and “That” packaging (for all you marketers and designers out there).

That’s it for today. Now…how do I go about turning my dining room table into an ideation space?

The video is a bit lengthy at 8 minutes, but I would never ask you to watch something I didn’t think was valuable. At the core, you’ll see why the IDEO design thinking process works.

David Kelley, IDEO founder and Stanford Professor explains, “The point is that we’re not experts at any given area. We’re experts on the process of how you design stuff. So we don’t care if you give us a toothpaste tube, a tractor, a space shuttle or a chair it’s all the same to us…we want to innovate by using our process applying it.”

In the group, you’ll see an eclectic mix of folks—a Stanford Engineer, a Harvard MBA, a linguist, a marketing expert, a psychologist, and a biology major that’s put off medical school 3 times because, well, he’s having too much fun at IDEO!

Kelley says, “In a very innovative culture you can’t have a hierarchy of “here’s the boss”…and the next person down and the next person down…because it’s impossible that the boss is the one that’s had the insightful experience with shopping carts [or whatever]…it’s just not possible.”

Check out the full video to see how IDEO applies their design process and you’ll see how, even in the face of chaos and failure, creativity and success emerges. The concept really does work!

The IEEE Spectrum firm’s KfW Bankengruppe office building, in Frankfurt, has the world’s first “pressure ring” facade. “Sensor-controlled ventilators on the outer skin open and close throughout the day in response to temperature, wind direction and speed…throwing a ring of positive pressure around the building. That air is drawn into offices through floor vents and windows along an inner facade workers control; then, it’s exhausted into the building core. So a system of natural ventilation eliminates the need for AC and heat in the fall and spring. And in extreme weather, when you need an artificial bump, the pressure balance won’t throw your heating and cooling systems out of whack,” says IEEE Spectrum’s Peter Fairley.

The high-tech skin is expected to help the building consume a third of the energy that a typical American office building would consume.

Nicely put Mark!

At MFX Partners, we believe that no matter what industry you’re in—financial, engineering, sales, marketing—when design thinking principles are applied to your problem- solving processes, the success rate for innovation drastically improves.

This is because a design thinking mind-set is not problem-focused—it’s solution focused. It focuses on the action, the outcome, the solution, using both analytic (left brain) and imaginative (right brain) thinking. This is why design thinking can be applied to find:

* Order in chaos

* People-centered solutions

*Emotional/desired appeals

* Memorable, human experiences (scenarios/stories)

* Unseen/overlooked opportunities

* Possibilities for the future

* Prototypes for solutions

Henry Mintzberg, the internationally renowned academic and author on business and management who wrote the influential book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, says, “Leaders and managers need to think like designers…Design and leadership are fundamentally about actively creating the future rather than reacting to the present.” And he points to companies like Apple, Starbucks, Sony, and Virgin, all large, successful companies that have applied designed thinking to the ways they lead, manage, market, create and innovate.

Is their success proof enough to make you a design thinking believer?

Because engagement, or “human-centered design” (HCD) is a process we use to create new, sustainable solutions that will better the world—be it through products, services, cultures of innovation and digital experiences.

This process was deemed “human-centered” by IDEO, the design thinking pioneers and renowned design and consultancy firm founded by Stanford University professor, David Kelley, Bill Moggridge and Mike Nuttall.

According to IDEO, HDC will help your organization:

1. Connect better with your customers

2. Transform data into actionable ideas

3. See new opportunities

4. Increase the speed and effectiveness of creating new solutions

To help us understand HCD a little bit better, IDEO created the three-lens model as a guide to help us during the design process.

As you can see, the HCD process begins with listening and understanding the people we want to affect with our solutions through the first lens, the Desirability lens. As we examine their needs, dreams, and behaviors we can come to identify a range of what is desirable to them. We can then start to view our ideas and solutions through the lenses of Feasibility (what is technically and organizationally feasible) and Viability (What is financially viable?) like this:

As you can see from the graphic, the most effective ideas and solutions that come out of this Human-Centered Design approach will overlap all three lenses.

A few years back we were called in to help a local community health centre that asked, “How can we help our employees fully embrace our new structure?”

After meeting with the management team, we learned that the fast growth and a new structure was causing unrest within the organization. In the past all employees worked in one building. There was a strong internal community built thanks to this close working environment and employees created rituals such as regular potluck lunches, etc. However, in response to the growing demand for health services, the organization received government funding and added a number of satellite offices. This expansion changed the working environment and some employees were not managing the change as well as others.

To help the organization, we led a half day session with all employees where we utilized a number of design thinking techniques including role playing and change mapping. We also used a culture indicator survey based on 12 archetypes as a framework to help individuals better understand their roles and why some were struggling with the change more than others.

Looking back on the success of the session, the most powerful aspect of our time with the organization was providing a safe environment that allowed employees to express how they felt about the changes taking place.

Change Mapping

This exercise was particularly useful. We drew three vertical lines on a flip chart representing three stages of change based on the work of internationally known speaker, author and consultant, William Bridges. The three stages are:

Endings – This stage involves high stress, shock and denial for many people.

Neutral Zone – This is a foggy place between the old way and the new way of being, a middle zone that’s often disorienting and confusing.

Beginnings – When clarity of the new way of being surfaces.

After explaining the model, we asked each employee to place a dot on the chart to represent what stage they were at. There was a fairly even distribution of dots with about a third of the employees still in the endings zone, another third in the neutral zone and the rest had made it to the beginnings stage of change.

This simple visualization exercise helped everyone realize where they were at as a group and assured them that, whatever stage they were in, it was completely normal. This new awareness sparked a rich discussion session by the management team, helping to identify solutions to move people forward.

Our work with the community health care centre reinforced the simple, but often forgotten need to find safe and playful ways to allow people to express themselves and work together to help each other through the fog—towards the bright, energizing new beginnings that await.

Now, I work with some very talented thinkers on a daily basis, and I’ve collaborated with designers in the past, but I wasn’t accustomed to the habit of sketching and white boarding every thought in images. This is really effective no matter what the project or meeting is, and it’s fantastic for relaying abstract thoughts, when trying to sell an idea, or to generate more ideas from a group. It really is effective because it adds weight to your thoughts and ideas—and what’s great about it is that you don’t have to be an artist to utilize it effectively.

Why is visual communication so effective?

1.The brain, by nature, tends to remember visual depictions more often than text.

2. Images break the details of a project up into digestible bits of information—which are much easier to take in and understand.

3. Images also function as a checklist to verify details between project stakeholders and us.

4. This way, project point-of-view can be referenced to at-a-glance.

5. Keep the visual communication in everyone’s view to keep the project on track.

6. Post-Its allow things to be easily updated with new information.

Now, can you “picture” how using visualization in your projects can engage additional parts of the brain and help you and your colleagues break out of old thought patterns?

Permanente says, “We do this by finding the few folks early on who want to share their dreams, their desires, their pain points with us. Then we observe them through a shadowing process in their expertise areas … and take them through the ideation phase where front line staff are inspired to release all of the great ideas inside of them.” To Permanente seeing those low fidelity prototypes (ideas) put into action in a hospital within few weeks is truly powerful stuff.

And thanks to this engagement with frontline staff and patients, human-centered design has created solutions that solve universal problems in health care— medication administration error, nurse shift handoff and pain management—and improve the quality of health care.

Elizabeth Johansen, the Director of Product Development at Design that Matters, a company that creates new products and services for the poor in developing countries is passionate about creating positive social impact through design. In a blog post for CoLab Radio, she calls this group exercise cultivating “the group mind”.

No, it’s not a matter of everyone involved thinking alike and following each other like sheep. Rather, it’s a collaborative experience where members of the group are comfortable and free to be themselves and meld individual ideas and personalities together to become a collective that opens new doors they would never have discovered without the help of the whole. I should also mention that Johansen worked as a product designer at IDEO for 8 years—so she knows her stuff.

When it comes to forming a solid “group mind”, Johansen recommends taking advice from Truth in Comedy or what’s known as the improv comedy bible by authors Charna Halpern, Del Close, and Kim Johnson. The book claims that a “group mind” is formed, “Once [a participant] puts his own ego out of the way…stops judging the ideas of others—instead, he considers them brilliant…pays close attention to each other, hearing and remembering everything, and respecting all that they hear. The goal…is to connect the information created out of the group ideas—so it’s easily capable of brilliance.”

Truth in Comedy goes on to recommend the “yes, &…” approach, which is one of the most concrete techniques for cultivating “group mind”. The approach is described as follows:

“[Participants] agree with each other to the Nth degree. If one asks the other a question, the other must respond positively…answering “No” leads nowhere… Each new initiation furthers the last one, and the scene progresses. The acceptance of each other’s ideas brings the players together, and engenders a “group mind.”

Bertie County is one of the poorest counties in the U.S., where 80 percent of students live in poverty, and your best chance of employment will be a low-skilled job in agriculture or biotechnology.

The 16 teenagers in grade 11 have committed to attending an experimental design course called Studio H (which stands for Humanity, Habitats, Health and Happiness) for three hours every day this coming school year. The once abandoned car body shop behind the school has been converted into a classroom, studio and workshop to house Studio H and it’s students. During the school year the students will be tasked with designing a community farmers’ market to sell locally gown produce.

Emily Pilloton, the founder of Studio H, recently moved to Bertie County from San Franciso—along with project architect, Matthew Miller—with the hopes that social and humanitarian design initiatives will in some way help the people living here. If Studio H is successful in Bertie County, Pilloton and Miller plan to introduce it to other poor rural schools.

Because of Bertie County’s poverty, “very few of these kids will become designers,” says Pilloton, “Lots of people in poor rural communities like this have no idea what design means…but we’ll be teaching the students design thinking, leadership skills, shop skills and citizenship. Hopefully they’ll think of design as a different way of thinking, seeing and tackling problems. If they go on to work in, say, agriculture, it’s a great way of understanding why they might plant in a different way.”

Read the full New York Times article about design thinking in Bertie County.