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Map Out Positive and Negative Stories of Your Future
To effectively envision future business directions, engage your team in scenario planning that balances optimism and pessimism, assigning groups to explore both best-case and worst-case outcomes, ultimately leading to a more calibrated and research-driven strategy.
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Create a Growth Board for Vetting Ideas
To cultivate a culture of innovation, organizations should establish a dedicated “growth board” that acts like an in-house venture capital team, evaluating new ideas against strategic priorities and fostering collaboration across departments to drive change and ownership among all employees.
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Interrogate Ideas
Effective brainstorming in business innovation requires a two-phase approach: an expansive, criticism-free brainstorming session followed by “agitated inquiry,” where diverse perspectives challenge ideas through structured debate to ensure sound decision-making and prevent groupthink.
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Spot Market Trends to Shape the Future of Your Business
Businesses should prioritize internal trendspotting and innovation by leveraging their marketing departments, fostering a culture of discovery, and inviting external provocateurs to challenge conventional thinking, ultimately positioning marketing as a strategic driver for future growth.
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Invigorate Your Audience with “Aha” Moments
Derek Thompson’s concept of “aha” moments, where disfluency transitions to fluency, is key to engaging audiences and enhancing their experience with our offerings, prompting us to explore how to integrate these moments into our storytelling, product education, and marketing.
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Case Studies in Product Hits and Flops
In this video lesson, Derek Thompson explores the concept of MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable), illustrating how successful products balance familiarity and surprise, using examples like Star Wars and the iPhone, while highlighting the pitfalls of innovations like Google Glass that failed to resonate with consumers.
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Remix, Reframe, and Repurpose
Natalie Nixon emphasizes the importance of remixes and mashups in business creativity through the SCAMPER method, which encourages innovation by substituting, combining, adapting, modifying, repurposing, eliminating, and reversing traditional ideas and processes.
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The 3i Creativity Model (Improvisation)
Successful teams, much like jazz ensembles, thrive on fluidity and adaptability, embracing mistakes as opportunities for growth while fostering a culture of improvisation and collaboration to navigate constantly changing environments.
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The 3i Creativity Method (Inquiry)
Natalie Nixon emphasizes the importance of questioning for creativity, advocating for a blend of divergent, convergent, and hybrid questions while embracing ambiguity to foster collaboration and innovation within teams.
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The Engine for Innovation
Natalie Nixon emphasizes that nurturing creativity—defined as the ability to balance wonder and rigor—is essential for individuals and organizations to thrive in the 4th Industrial Revolution, where automation and AI are prevalent, and introduces the 3i Creativity Model to foster this skill.
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Guiding Principles
In this lesson, Lawrence Summers outlines two key principles for decision-making: prioritize reversible over irreversible errors and conduct a cost-benefit analysis during implementation to ensure that changes are beneficial rather than detrimental.
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The Three D’s of Open Thinking
Open thinking, as defined by leadership strategist Dan Pontefract, is a cyclical process involving three stages—Dream, Decide, and Do—that fosters creativity, critical thinking, and action to achieve positive results through iterative improvement.
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Mastering Creative and Critical Thinking
Leadership strategist Dan Pontefract argues that effective workers balance action with reflection, taking time to introspect, learn from mistakes, and prioritize tasks, emphasizing that the best workers think as much as they do.
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Assessing What You See
Optical illusions, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, highlight how easily our perceptions can be distorted by light, angles, and personal experiences, prompting art historian Amy Herman to encourage viewers to critically assess their own interpretations of what they see.
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“Wildcards”
Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO of FutureThink, teaches how to lead teams through her “Wildcards” thought experiment, which encourages agile responses to change by having small groups tackle a problem and adapt to unexpected shifts in its definition.
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“Little Bigs”
Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink, emphasizes overcoming inertia in change management through “Little Bigs”—small exercises that encourage innovative thinking and behavior shifts, such as brainstorming risky ideas, involving outsiders in problem-solving, and empowering team members to make independent decisions.
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“Killer Queries”
Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO of FutureThink, emphasizes that the key to innovation lies not in access to information but in improving our questioning skills, advocating for provocative thought experiments to elicit meaningful insights.
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“Kill A Stupid Rule”
Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO of FutureThink, discusses her “Kill a Simple Rule” exercise, which empowers teams to challenge existing rules and foster innovative cultures by allowing them to change two rules while identifying non-negotiable ones.
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“Kill Your Company”
In this video, FutureThink’s Lisa Bodell presents a team exercise that encourages companies to adopt their competitor’s perspective, identify their weaknesses, and strategize on how to leverage those insights for innovation and change.
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A Framework for Creating a Culture of Innovation
Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO of FutureThink, outlines effective strategies for managers to embrace and implement change, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, identifying competitive weaknesses, and fostering a culture where change is collectively supported and simplified.
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How to Conduct a Sludge Audit
Professor Cass Sunstein highlights that “sludge,” or bureaucratic frictions like excessive paperwork and waiting times, hinders access to benefits, and suggests conducting a sludge audit to streamline workflows and improve quality of life by identifying and reducing these inefficiencies.
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Key Considerations for Designing Inclusive Services
Ethical companies should consider the cognitive burden their products impose, as limited bandwidth can hinder marginalized populations from navigating administrative barriers, leading to distributional unfairness and potential human rights violations, necessitating thoughtful design to ensure equitable access.
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Understand the Power of Choice Architecture—and Its Shadow Side
Professor Cass Sunstein discusses how companies use “sludge” to complicate unsubscribing, manipulating consumer behavior against their interests, while advocating for “choice architecture” that promotes beneficial defaults and simplifies decision-making while preserving user freedom.
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How Designers Can Work with—or Against—Consumer Biases
In a video lesson, professor Cass Sunstein discusses how inertia and various cognitive biases, such as present bias and status quo bias, affect consumer behavior, offering insights on how designers can structure products and services to better engage customers and highlight important features.
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What Kind of Designer Are You?
In a video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein discusses three types of designers—manipulative, naive, and human-centered—highlighting how the latter prioritizes user experience by minimizing “sludge” and fostering customer satisfaction.
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An Introduction to Sludge
In this video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein explores the concept of “sludge”—the bureaucratic obstacles that hinder access to essential services—using Kafka’s “The Trial” and a COVID-19 case study to illustrate how reducing these barriers can improve people’s lives.
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Getting Unstuck at Work
Professor Cass Sunstein defines “sludge” as the unnecessary bureaucracy and frictions, like long wait times and excessive paperwork, that hinder access to desired outcomes, suggesting organizations can improve experiences by minimizing these obstacles.
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The 5 Phases of a Successful Redesign
In her video lesson, brand designer Debbie Millman outlines five essential phases for a successful organizational redesign: diagnostic, projective, exploratory, implementation, and launch, emphasizing the extensive work behind visible changes like new logos and packaging.