(Posted this month on the Strategic Innovation Lab site). We are rolling out the Systemic Design Research Network, a cooperative educational group founded in 2011 whose aims are: To advance the practice of systemic design as an integrated discipline of systems thinking and systems-oriented design To convene an annual international symposium, Relating Systems Thinking to Design (RSD) To advance the knowledge, theory, and publications in the domains of systems-oriented design and industrial and social systems design methods in systemic practice. We are an OCADU research group located within the Strategic Innovation Lab. As Prof. Jeremy Bowes and Dr. Peter Jones have developed the primary courses in Systemic Design for OCADU’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program, we have trialed (and erred) enough to recognize and validate highly effective approaches to quickly and powerfully combine social research, expert studies, stakeholder workshops and mapping to inform systemic services and societal innovations. We have …
Reproduction of Disruption
How Innovation Regimes Reproduce Culture Media Ecology Association, Toronto, June 20, 2014 “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” John Culkin, SJ (Usually attributed to his friend, Marshall McLuhan) We live in a technogenic culture – a society that generates ever more technology, whether necessary or not. Mainstream culture celebrates the economic value of technological ingenuity, and worships innovation. Our desires become captured and entranced by the tools of tech. In this post-age of ubiquitous smart-things, everyone now “owns technology,” or gadgets – whether a smartphone, stack of computers, soon personal robots. For the first time in history perhaps, there is little differentiation between generational ownership – children, the elderly, very poor people – all have similar gadgets. There may finally be little or no cachet to having the latest hardware or gadget. The desirable commodity has become the capacity to produce technology. The capacity for mass …
Roger Martin on Strategy by Discovery
Roger Martin’s current post on the HBR Blog offers a brief discussion on the profound concept and method of interactive strategy. Help Leaders Be Less Useless at Strategy suggests managers (and those of us aiding them) adopt a early review of framing, strategic challenges, and priorities and options. Consistent with “Decision Design,” Roger shows how an iterative, cyclic, feedback-driven approach to strategy making would help organizational leaders build more focused and resilient strategies that avoid blind alleys, fixation, the garden path of easy approvals. We will be well-served if the companies (and societal services) we care about take this approach seriously. The recommendations in a nutshell: Instead, construct a more productive series of interactions on strategy: Go early with the framing of the strategy challenge that you want to tackle. Ask your leader whether there is a different way he or she would frame the challenge that you should be …
The Healthcare Innovator’s Challenge
Adapted from Design for Care (page 253 ) The innovator’s challenge in healthcare is not a technological fix – it is more to understand and preserve core values of human care while changing practices for durable social and economic benefit. Although economic value is often a pivotal driver of innovation adoption, cost management is not itself a core value but a sustainability factor to be evaluated in decision making. The related social innovation challenge is a macro policy problem, not a design issue. An immediate challenge is convincing organizations that accessible patient-centred, value-based care is actually possible with a business model change. (Then new care service models can be designed). It will be the rare organization with the cost buffers and patience that reconfigures care models in advance of a new business model. Using …
