Great feedback is worth its weight in gold. That’s probably why it’s in such short supply. Every time someone shares work with you, they are (or should be) sharing a small part of themselves with you. It is the work equivalent of getting on stage. The presenter or sharer is…

The best design sprint I’ve run (yet) ended in what I would consider complete failure. We had a clear business challenge, one that had existed for years, despite best efforts to tame it. We had a diverse, engaged, talented team who also had the time (a whole week!) …

Here’s what I often run into in my design work: We get a service design/customer experience project from the client. We do qualitative research, create actionable insights, and reframes. We present to our clients, typically mid-level divisions or customer/communication specialist. And after our presentation, one or several members of the…

We’ve all had that feeling that design thinking was…special. There is something…indescribable about it. It feels like when we do it well, we are tapping into an amazingly powerful…force. I know that the Kelley brothers and Tim Brown and others would like to lay claim to the popularity of design…

What’s in a title? Is it important that we use precise language to describe what we do? I think it is. Critical even as we designers try to explain to our workmates, and the world, the value of the work we do. …

I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you. Sometimes someone has deliver the bad news and right now it’s me. Sure, you’ve been to inspirational meetings where leadership exalts the team to act innovatively, to disrupt the status quo and to reach for the stars. Maybe you’ve…

What makes one organization or service better designed than others? What makes a business’ value proposition stand out against the competition? I got into a brief discussion about that in a discussion with the excellent service designer Marc Fonteyn who created and runs the Service Design Show. Marc created an…

Leadership/design alignment can mean the difference of success or divorce Someone asked me recently why certain design/innovations succeeded while others languished or failed. There are a lot of ways to answer that, some better than others. …

Do we even know what we mean when we talk about service design? Here’s an observation that’s been gestating for the four years I’ve been back in Sweden: many organizations use the term service design as loose term for design research. I’m not sure if this is because most Swedish…