So where do our conversations over these past four weeks leave us? I think with a very clear set of opportunities. And I'd like to talk about how we can take advantage of those opportunities at a strategic level now. For me, the first thing to recognize is the importance of staying in the question. The power of refraining is foremost among designs gifts, but to get it, you have to be willing to stay in the question. Now, this is not a new thought. Long before I even knew what design thinking was, or even that it existed, I was fascinated by a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke. Now I know what he was suggesting so long ago when he said, have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions. Perhaps then, you will gradually, even without noticing it, live your way into the answer. And a similar thought was echoed in some recent research I did, by an Irishman who helped to bring design thinking to the city of Dublin. He told us, we all have a tendency to jump to solution mode far too quickly. Design thinking approaches force you to really live in this unclear, sometimes very muddy place to get a better understanding. This ends up producing a much better understanding of the problem and the challenges that you're trying to solve. So design thinking can help us to ask better deeper questions. Questions that expand the boundaries of the search itself. To the extent that the path to innovative solutions begins by asking innovative questions, the contribution here is significant. One of the most serious challenges we face in our quest for innovation is our own impatience, which makes us rush to solve, instead of taking the time to understand. And it's design's insistence that we stay in the question, that is so very valuable. The second opportunity I'd like to talk about is to search for higher ground, not common ground. Why do we settle for common ground? Because we don't know how to get to higher ground. That diversity of perspectives and experience that brings with it the potential for real innovation, also brings with it at the same time the potential for tremendous conflict in groups. One of the best kept secrets about design thinking, I think, is its power as a collaboration tool. These tools can help people who are different from one another co-create with one another. How do they do that? Well, I've always loved the concept of satisficing, a term coined by Herbert Simon. Satisficing happens when we pick the least worst solution that we can all agree on. And it is a fact of life in business organizations. Why? Because we get tired of the endless debates that go nowhere and we get stuck in our differences and can't find any way out, other than to compromise. And sadly, the resulting solution from those compromises is rarely as good as some of the ones that individuals came in with. Satisficing lowers everybody's game to the least common denominator. Optimizing, on the other hand, is finding the solution that best meets our design criteria. And the tools of design can help us get there. The communal tools of design can raise everyone's game by leveraging difference as a positive force. Design thinking succeeds in part because it refuses to get caught up in debates and either or thinking. Instead, it insists that we develop shared insights and ambitions before trying to generate ideas. And that we use data from experiments, rather than debates in conference rooms to determine the most effective course of action. Let me talk about a third opportunity, I think that design thinking represents. It's less discussed, but it's important, I think. And it's the contribution of design thinking to help us curate. To drill down to the essence of an issue and see what really matters. This is an increasingly important role in today's business environment. In fact curation has become a new buzz word. Wired magazine even announced recently that we have entered the age of curation. And why is that? Well, according to Wired, we're surrounded by too much music, too much software, too many websites, too many feeds, too may people, too many of their opinions, and so on. Now, we know that too much of a good thing can be bad for us. In fact, research demonstrates that too much information actually degrades the quality of our decisions. But is all that information bombardment we live in likely to let up soon? I don't think so. I predict that the future will place even more value on the ability of a design process to cut through the complexity and find those nuggets of wisdom. But what is it really mean behind that buzz word, to curate? Well, I like to think of it in terms of what a museum curator actually does. First, they survey what's out there to make sure that all of the important works have been identified. And we've got designed thinking tools like ethnography to help us uncover the hidden but essential insights. Then museum curators make judgments about what matters and what doesn't. Here are design criteria keep us focused on the essential qualities of solutions, rather than letting us get distracted by what doesn't really matter, or what our boss instead of our customer thinks of something. Then curators assemble some combination of items, and that combination works together in a special way to create value. That's how brainstorming can help us create new concepts instead of just creating a big batch of individual post-it note. Concepts in which the elements work together to create a powerful effect. Like wheels on luggage. And finally, curators tell great stories. Stories that inform and educate. We've all visited museum exhibits that leave us feeling dazed and confused. How different it is to visit one that presents a compelling story of an artist and his or her ambitions and accomplishments? And you know, in this crazy world, where the most scarce resource may be just our own limited time and attention. Design can help us figure out what to pay attention to and tell us what really matters. Another opportunity. And I think it comes from putting all of these other things we've talked about together. When you put the factors that we've talked about, aligning us around a common definition of the problem and the criteria of a great solution. Getting full engagement on everyone's part in the creation process, and focusing on what really matters versus what doesn't. They all add up to an enormously valuable quality in today's environment and that is speed. Imagine what happens when we can replace inertia with engagement. When we can replace playing politics with alignment and we can replace the confusion of information overload with cultivated curation. What's happened? You've created fast, where you used to have slow. In most organizations I work with the highest payoff is not innovating the solution itself, but in innovating how people work together to implement the new possibilities they see, amid organizational lethargy, bureaucracy, and risk aversion. Design's ability to deliver engagement and alignment and curation greatly enhances speed by removing the friction and the drag created by trying to unite people with different views of the world around a new idea. By drilling down to core insights and building a shared mind map of the current state, and then translating that into design criteria. The debates so common over new ideas tend to just go away. Because the question becomes whether or not the idea meets the criteria with sufficient rigor to be moved into experimentation. And that is a far more straight forward and fact based discussion than the kind we get when people evaluate a new idea from their own individual perspectives without a shared view grounded in stakeholders needs and desires. And there is just one more opportunity I want to talk about that I think design brings. It is perhaps the fuzziest of all of them, but that is design's comfort with emptiness. With leaving space in the emergence of a solution, so that many can contribute to it. As managers, we are often taught the importance of finishing something. Making it complete. But artists know better than that. To finish a work? Picasso said, to finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul. German philosopher, Martin Heidegger talked about accessing the withheld, the better self within each of us, who waits to be made present. But only if the space and the invitation are provided. In organizations, employees want to be invited to be part of works in progress, to feel the sense of discovery as they unfold. Why do we love game shows and sporting events and even mystifyingly, reality television? Because we don't know the outcome. Design thinking builds these possibilities into every step of the process. If only we can reduce our own discomfort and anxiety enough to allow the intrigue of discovering to take over. You know it's a wonderful paradox, that same ambiguity that makes us so anxious and uncomfortable, it turns out, also has the potential to unleash a level of energy we rarely experience when presented with a finished product. Leaving space for stakeholders to be part of the discovery of new ideas, to be part of the emergence of innovation gives meaning to their efforts and has tremendous power. Involvement also confers a sense of ownership, rather than feeling coerced into accepting someone else's answer, I get to be part of the journey. In one of my favorite cities, Barcelona, is one of the most compelling buildings I've ever entered. It is Antoni Gaudi's great unfinished cathedral, Sagrada Familia. Now, visiting cathedrals is intended to be a surreal experience. The visitor feels dwarfed and awed by the grandeur of the space, and by implication, by the grandeur of God. One is awed and feels one's insignificance and impermanence. Just as the architect intended. But you know, awe is not usually the quality we hope to create when we're in the business of inventing new futures. Making the future feel real to people, real enough so that they work towards its creation, that is what is key. And Segrada Familia, I think, because it remains under construction, feels real. Rather than awe, a visit to Segrada Familia inspires energy. I'm exhilarated by the sense of being part of something truly significant in the making. The din of the jackhammers, competing with the buzz of the wandering tourists, combine to make the church a living, breathing place. And it is the continuing emergence of the Spanish cathedral, that gives it life and that brings admirers back year after year to follow its progress. I believe that even more so then in architecture, in organizations people want to be part of that kind of working process. To feel a sense of discovery as it unfolds. And yet leaving things unfinished is one of the hardest things for a manager to do but also one of the most important. And on that note I'm going to leave you. In our time together my goal has been to demystify the idea of the design thinking and give you a sense of its power and possibilities. But you know, talking has its limits. Even watching other people, in other organizations, use designed thinking has its limits. In order to build the capability, you have to do it. You have to move into action. You have to put yourself out there and try. And, even fail sometimes. But, there is so much more for you to discover. And maybe, in our next class, it will be your story that I get to tell. [MUSIC]
