What gets in the way?
As part of a four-city event tour with Certus Solutions in Australia and New Zealand, James Hartwright and I offered an interactive experience that brought together design thinking and data science. To drag some of the dark obstacles to innovation into the light with possible antidotes, we created a matrix that addressed three different levels of every organization – mindset, culture and brand – across three general design phases: explore, ideate, and validate.
What interferes with the transformation and connection necessary for innovation to flourish? The answer is probably more simple than anyone would like to believe. It’s you. It’s me. It’s us. It’s what we can’t, don’t or won’t let ourselves feel and reveal. It’s what we deny and protect. It’s what we avoid and resist. Time and again, I've seen that an innovation strategy is only as valuable, and successful, as the business' ability to act on it.
Begin where you are.
Decide where you want to go.
Be led by what you learn.
As part of my work with Cognition, I developed a maturity assessment for organizations to self-diagnose their organization's design thinking maturity, inform their innovation strategy and see where design thinking shows up within their organization. The Design Thinking Maturity Assessment (DTMA) was created to help organisations establish a baseline measure to set goals, track improvement and activate innovation. It looks at design thinking maturity in eight functional areas: (1) Strategy & Roadmap (2) Customer Experience (3) Technology (4) Sales & Marketing (5) Products & Services (6) Culture (7) Operations (8) Performance.
