It's time to get to work. Let's begin by talking about what design thinking is, and equally important, why we need it. We live in a world of increasingly wicked problems. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the social sector. Whether we look at private or public efforts across sectors like healthcare, education, and government, globally or locally, organizations of all sizes and stripes are struggling with a set of really tough issues. We often have a collection of stakeholders who can't even agree on the problem, much less the solution. We have employees who are reluctant to change behavior and take risks, who've been rewarded, more for compliance than performance. We have decision makers who have too much data, but little of the kind they really need. And leaders who are more likely to have short tenures and whose every move is scrutinized by funders, politicians, and the media, and users of their services, students, patients, customers, citizens, whose expectations are sometimes rising as fast as the resources to meet them are declining. To add to this situation, let's consider what innovators have to work with. Mostly, it's an outmoded toolkit that assumes predictability and control in a world that offers us less and less of either. Our goal in this course is to offer you something new. A new set of tools. Ones that are much better suited to the complexity and the messiness of the challenges that you face. Because, let's face it. Standing still is no more an option in the social sector than it is in the for-profit world. Innovation is an imperative. But how does design thinking really help us to deal with all of this? Well, design thinking is a problem-solving approach with, I think, a unique set of four qualities. It's human-centered, it's possibility-driven, it's option-focused, and it's iterative. Let's unpack those qualities one at a time. Human-centered is always where we start, with real people, not numbers. Design thinking emphasizes the importance of deep exploration into the lives and the problems of the people whose lives we want to improve before we start generating solutions. It uses market research methodologies that are qualitative and what researchers call empathic. And as we go, it's enthusiastic about the potential to change even our definition of the problem itself as we learn more. And then, to engage our stakeholders in what designers call co-creation. Design thinking is also intensely possibility-driven. We ask the question, "What if anything were possible?" as we begin to generate ideas. And I think that is the most powerful question I know. As we answer the what-if-anything-were-possible question, we want to generate multiple options and avoid putting all our eggs in any one particular basket. Because we are always guessing about stakeholders needs and wants, we also expect to be wrong sometimes. So, we want to put multiple irons in the fire and then let our stakeholders tell us which ones work for them. We want to manage a portfolio of new ideas. Finally, the process is iterative. We'll conduct real world experiments to refine our ideas rather than running analyses using historic data. We don't expect to get it right the first time, we expect to learn our way to success. And that's design thinking.