I think that this session provides a fantastic, fun taster of what design thinking is all about and why building empathy, prototyping, seeking feedback and iterating are critical to reaching good design outcomes. But perhaps more importantly what I love about this course is that it helps people to uncover (or discover?) their own creative potential. People walk into the course thinking ‘I’m not a designer’, ‘I can’t draw’, ‘I’m not creative’, but through the course they do design, draw and generate creative solutions.

The d.school make it super easy for facilitators by providing them with pretty much all of the materials you need for the course – facilitator guide, participant worksheets, and post-course handouts (which you can download and use for free under the CC BY-NC-SA licence here) . Note – the recently released virtual crash course makes it even easier as they effectively provide the facilitator too!

1. 

   Prototyping materials

   Prototyping materials. Along with the printouts of the facilitator guide & participant handout, the only other materials that the facilitator needs to organise are the prototyping materials. I did this fairly simply, cheaply and easily – I raided the stationary cupboard and my own drawers at home to find things like: scraps of wrapping paper, foil, rubber bands, coloured paper, old coloured manila folders, plus plenty of recycled packaging materials (toilet rolls, cardboard boxes, egg cartons etc). I also took plenty of coloured textas, glue sticks, blue-tak, plasticine and paperclips. Basically – whatever I could easily find. If I’d had more time, I would have been keen to add things like pipe-cleaners and other craft type supplies (I tried Officeworks, but they didn’t seem to stock these materials. A colleague later suggested Lincraft or Hot Dollar type stores which I’ll try next time).

2. Printing the participant handouts. Make sure you select the ‘collate’ option on the photocopier  when printing out the participant guides! I ended up spending quite a bit of time manually collating the print outs ’cause I failed to do this (why collate isn’t the default option on all printers/photocopiers baffles me).
   

   Manually collating the participant handouts

3. Music/timer. While the course recommends that you display a timer and play music, we didn’t have access to a projector/speakers (plus there was a large formal meeting happening in the room next door so we tried to keep the noise levels down). I just kept time using the stopwatch on my iPhone and it worked fine for our small group.
4. Group size. There were 9 people in the group, which was a really good size for running through the course for the first time. I’d definitely recommend that first time facilitators try out the course with a group of 8-12. The odd number of participants wasn’t ideal – in the end we had a group of three (which didn’t work perfectly but still gave everyone a taste of the design experience) and I juggled timeframes and instructions slightly to try to make it work. This is why a co-facilitator (or some floating ‘helpers’) could be really helpful – if there was an odd number of participants, one of the co-facilitators could participate rather than facilitate.
5. Timing. Overall, I think the timing worked okay – we were finished (including wrap-up/debrief) in 90 minutes as planned. It definitely felt rushed at times (and the participants clearly felt uncomfortable about this), so I think it’s worth emphasising this up front and letting participants know in advance that the course is going to feel like this.
6. Warm up. It took a while for participants to warm up and really get into the experience. I observed that the initial ‘interviews’ were quite formal, quiet, and there were a few uncertain faces. But as people moved further and deeper into the conversations and begun to get some clarity about possible ideas/solutions, the conversations became much more animated and enthusiastic. If I was running a session again with a group of participants that didn’t know each other that well I’d try to run a quick warm up activity once the pairs were established – something fun and quick to get participants thinking creatively and build some initial connection/trust/rapport.
7. Instruction. Although the aim of the exercise is to redesign the experience of giving a gift, some of the participants still gravitated toward designing a better gift for their partner to give. This is probably in part because it feels easier to design and physically prototype a product rather than a service. Also, in the initial interview step participants are prompted to ask each other about the last time they gave a gift – so some of my participants focused on creating a better gift for that particular scenario. Next time, I’ll provide a more generic instruction to participants and perhaps encourage them to share a couple of experiences (the most recent gift giving experience, the most positive experience, a time when giving a gift was difficult or frustrating) rather than focusing only on the most recent experience. It’s also something to watch out for as a facilitator and keep reminding participants that they’re designing an experience rather than a gift.

So, they were my key learnings as facilitator…. But what about the key learnings/thoughts of the participants…

Six things I like about the new Pocket…

1. Seamless update from Read it Later. I simply updated my existing app (Read it Later Pro) and the new Pocket (with all of my existing content) was installed. The existing bookmarklets and settings in my third-party apps continue to work without update/changes.
2. New Chrome extension. There was a third-party extension available for Chrome (which I’ve recently switched to from Firefox), but it’s nice to see that Pocket has now released an official extension for Chrome. Clean, simple, easy-to-use, and so far, it works.
3. Automatically filtering saved content into articles, video and images. In my view, this is probably the biggest enhancement. I do my reading and video watching at different times and in different places. Previously with Read it Later it was hard to distinguish between video content and text-based articles in my reading list which meant that often I’d click on a video link when I was in reading mode.
4. New design. The Read it Later design was functional, but not all that attractive. Pocket’s design is simpler, cleaner, and makes greater use of images (a thumbnail of the content you’ve saved is included to make it easier to see what you’ve saved).
5. Bulk edit / improved search. I don’t use these features much (as I save all the content I want to retain on my Pinboard), but for those users who want to use Pocket not only as an app to save content to read/watch later but also as a way of easily recalling the content that they’ve previously read/watched, then these improvements could be useful.
6. Save to Pocket directly from email. I don’t know if this is a new feature (or perhaps I just didn’t notice it in Read it Later) but you can simply send a link via email to save it in your Pocket. I think this will be particularly useful for me when I find something I want to read later while using the computers at work (which don’t have the Pocket extension installed). Previously I would email links to my personal email account to read later. The ability to send them to Pocket instead keeps everything in one place.

And a couple of further suggestions for improvement…

1. As I save a lot of content to Pocket from Twitter on my phone, one of the things that I really like about the app is that it saves the source tweet as well as the link. When I share content that I’ve found, I like to attribute the source from which I found it. When viewing saved content in a web browser this info isn’t included. I think it’d be great if it could also appear at the top of the page as it does in the iPhone app.
   

   Articles viewed in the Pocket iPhone app show the source tweet at the top of the screen.

   

   Articles viewed in a web browser don't contain any information about where the article was saved from.

2. Ability to save content directly from Facebook. Increasingly the content that I’m saving to read later is sourced from Facebook so a way to save to Pocket with a single click would be great (just like the functionality that exists for many of the Twitter apps). At the moment I have to click on the link to view the content, then select ‘Open in Safari’ and then save to Pocket using the mobile Safari bookmarklet. I know that adding this functionality probably rests with Facebook rather than Pocket, but it’s definitely something that would increase Pocket’s utility for me.

Apart from feeling a little uneasy about the fact that companies are collecting and using this kind of personal information in what seems to be quite a manipulative marketing approach, what made me more frustrated was that this was another example of clearly seriously smart people (in this case the Target mathematicians and statisticians analysing this consumer behaviour) spending their time (and their intellect and talents) trying to figure out how to get people to buy more stuff (that they probably don’t need or even want).

This has got me pondering and reflecting on a number of recent articles/podcasts that have raised similar issues. Like the Panel at last year’s SXSW Interactive on the topic ‘Techies Can Save the World, Why Aren’t They?‘ in which panelist Jack Hidary commented…

There is a lot of talent being attracted to all the great game companies and the great app companies and it’s fantastic but the fact is that we have major challenges to solve. Renewable energy, mobility, transportation, all these big areas are really left unsolved.

And the article, ‘This Tech Bubble is Different‘, about maths genius and former Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”

And another focusing on the important role that designers can play in solving problems that matter, ‘If We’re All Smart, Why Aren’t We Solving Problems?‘:

How do we help move our discipline out of the realm of software, websites, furniture, and aesthetic based work to the realm of the type of thought, synthesis, and observation we can provide. We’re not designers of aesthetic, we’re not designers of marketing tools, we not designers of landfill materials, we are designers; period. We are critical thinkers who can help provide less disease, better education, better housing, and better solutions. In the end, we can help.

And finally, a piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, about the challenges of attracting talented people into leadership roles in the NFP sector – ‘Searching for Jane Goodall‘:

A child was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she wanted to work for the Red Cross. In shock, her teacher responded, “Oh no, dear. You are far too smart to work for a nonprofit!” True story. Ask college students who their social heroes are. “Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi . . .” Wait. How about someone who is alive? Silence.

So, why aren’t the smart people solving problems that matter? How can we encourage bright, talented, young people to want to work on social and environmental problems and not just consumer problems?

This got me thinking (and fuming a little) about how many staff fail to take control of their job options, and instead expect that organisations will serve up potential new roles like they’re at some kind of buffet waiting to peruse the options and make their choice! Now, don’t get me wrong – I support merit selection and transparency in recruitment decisions, but I also believe that staff should be able to (and be expected to) be more proactive about pursuing roles of interest to them without the need for or expectation of formal, organisation-initiated recruitment processes.

I don’t think I’ve seen a staff survey, outcomes from a Divisional planning day, or Divisional ‘action plan’ that doesn’t propose the creation of some sort of job swap/staff mobility program to provide staff who have been in their position for a while and are seeking a change in role, with a facilitated opportunity to move to a different one. That said, for all the proposals I’ve seen, I’m not actually aware of a single program that has actually been successfully rolled out. I find myself frustrated at staff who continually ask for these mobility programs to be created to facilitate their movement. These staff seem to feel stuck and helpless and dependent on the organisation to set out a series of opportunities for them.

People have far more control over their jobs than they believe. If you want to be in a different role in your organisation (regardless of whether or not that role currently exists) you have enormous power to make it happen. How? Really, all you have to do is ask…

If you have an area identified that you’d like to work in (or person identified that you’d like to work for – I always tend to pick the person first and role second), ring or email the manager of the area, tell them that you’re interested in what they do and ask if you can buy them coffee. I tend to pick people that I’m attracted to working for, rather than subject areas, and have initiated a couple of new job opportunities (and developed a number of good mentoring relationships) simply by sending an email that said ‘I’m interested in what you do and like how you do it, can I buy you a cup of coffee?’ (of course it’s important that you are in fact genuinely interested in what they do and like how they do it!). The worst that they can say is no. And even then, you’re likely to get points for being proactive (and for a little bit of flattery), which doesn’t hurt in building your profile in the organisation.

When you meet for coffee, have a couple of questions prepared. Be interested in finding out about the content of the work and the team/manager. Tell them honestly why you’ve approached them. Explain how you think your skills/knowledge could add value to their area and ask if there are any current (or likely future) opportunities that might align.

And don’t limit your thinking to the roles that currently exist in the organisation. My last role didn’t exist before I filled it. I had grown tired of what I was doing (probably a little burnt-out too) and didn’t think the work best aligned with my areas of strength. However, I liked working for my Branch Head, believed in the importance of the work that the area was doing, identified a number of areas for improvement in the way the Branch operated, and felt that I could add value through addressing these areas of improvement in a role that aligned more closely with interests and strengths. I pitched the idea to the senior management team. And they said yes. I worked in the role for 18 months, grew the team from 1 (me) to three, delivered (what I think were) pretty substantial business improvements, learned lots and enjoyed a number of new personal and professional challenges.

Not sure what you want to do or what possible roles exist in the organisation? Well, that’s your job to figure out. Get to seminars and meetings. Read staff bulletins. Talk to your colleagues. If all you’re doing is sitting around waiting for your dream job (or even just your next job!) to be advertised, you’re greatly reducing your chances of ever finding it.

As a manager, I’m very open to interested employees cold-calling me. If you want to work for me, don’t wait for me to advertise a job. Call me, and tell me how you could contribute (which may be in a way that I hadn’t even thought of). Sure, there’s a risk that there might be others out there that have equivalent (or even better) skills/experience, but frankly, if you’ve self-identified the opportunity and are proactive enough to pursue it, then that definitely counts in your favour. It’s in my interest to ensure that my work and my leadership is visible to others, to increase the chances that great potential staff are aware of what we do and might contact me to explore opportunities for working together.

So, don’t wait for your dream job to be advertised. Chances are it won’t be. Identify it (or create it) and go and make it happen.

[Note - Anne-Marie Slaughter has a great post on a similar topic on the HBR blog - Design Your Own Profession.]

There are only two ingredients: 2 cups self-raising flour and 1 cup natural/Greek yoghurt. Yep, that’s it!

Mix the ingredients together and knead into a ball. Cover and refrigerate for 1/2 an hour. Roll out dough to desired thickness (remembering that it’ll rise a little bit on cooking). We use a little bit of salsa over the base (which has a lighter flavour than tomato paste or pizza sauce) and then top with whatever we’ve got handy (fresh basil, tomato and mozzarella is always a winner!).

Delicious!

One of the core drivers of success in business is also among the most ignored elements: ALIGNMENT.

If you want to own your career, your business, your life, you need to align 4 elements:

1. What makes you come alive (people, process, content, culture, mission & setting)
2. Your preferred mode of service (live, remote, video, text, audio, interactive or transmission, private, small group,mass audience)
3. What you either are good at, or are capable of and interested in becoming good at, and
4. What people will line up to pay you enough to live well in the world for.

If there are major gaps in any of the above elements, you will either:

• Fail completely
• Succeed at making money,but hate your business and maybe even your life, or
• Love what you do to earn a living, but hate how it never gives you the money needed to live well in the world or the freedom to do your “art” full-time.

If you don’t work with a high-level of alignment, you’ll very likely never come close to your personal or professional potential, your businesses will continually cap out and you’ll never understand why. It’s also immensely draining, on a personal level, to live a life where your personal and professional “selves” aren’t well aligned. Presenting as different people in different scenarios is, over the long haul, a gutting experience.

Tonight, as we sat around my dining room table while he put the finishing touches on his Grim Reaper-esque ‘gang’ jacket (a prop for the shoot), Andy told us about his day. The conversation went something like… ‘I didn’t have time to get to the post office to pick up my Styrofoam sculpting kit which I need to make five shark fins and a bee-hive, but I did manage to call our agent about organising a taxidermied polar bear, and I arranged for a fake palm tree to be delivered from Queensland’.

Umm… even on my most interesting, surprising days I couldn’t come close to topping that!

I’ve taken the test a total of 7 times between August 2007 and today (January 2012). The signature strengths that topped today’s test are as follows:

1. Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
 (signature strength in 7/7 tests taken)
   Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.
2. Love of learning
 (signature strength in 7/7 tests taken)
   You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.
3. Capacity to love and be loved
 (signature strength in 2/7 tests taken)
   You value close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated. The people to whom you feel most close are the same people who feel most close to you.
4. Curiosity and interest in the world
 (signature strength in 5/7 tests taken)
   You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.
5. Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness (signature strength in 6/7 tests taken)
   Thinking things through and examining them from all sides are important aspects of who you are. You do not jump to conclusions, and you rely only on solid evidence to make your decisions. You are able to change your mind.

Overall, I think my test results are pretty consistent – with the exception of the ‘capacity to love and be loved’ strength. This strength has only appeared as one of my signature strengths in the last two tests taken (it was ranked 8, 7, 15, 14, 7 in the previous tests) which I think reflects a growing comfortableness with myself and deepening of a number of important relationships (Jason and I got married last year too!).

I didn’t deliberately set out to regularly take the test or monitor my test results over a number of years but I’m glad I have (and grateful that the Authentic Happiness site keeps all the previous test results – I would have surely lost track of them otherwise). Looking back, the results seem to provide both confirmation of the key elements of my character/personality and evidence of how I’ve grown and changed over time.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My notes from Rapt

[Disclaimer: The notes below are rough, and may be a mixture of direct quotes, paraphrasing, and my own thoughts/ideas/reminders. They're written here primarily for me (so they may not make much sense out of context, especially for those who haven't read the book)].

(10) That little piece of reality that you tune in on is literally and figuratively far sketchier and more subjective than you assume.

Top-down attention (conscious choice) vs Bottom-up attention (biased toward most salient thing/signal). Competition for attention.

(18) Drawback of sharpening focus on a target = shrinking larger experience. FOCUS EXPERIENCE.

(28) To enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than enduring the kind that you feel stuck with, you have to take charge of your attention.

(31) Main advantage of paying attention to an unhappy emotion is that it attunes you to a potential threat or loss and pressures you to avoid or relieve the pain by solving the associated problem.

(35) Carl Jung – ‘There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course, Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.’

Paying attention to positive emotions literally expands you world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it.

(36) When you feel frightened, angry or sad reality contracts until whatever is upsetting you takes up your whole world. Bad feelings – shrink focus. In a potentially ominous situation, homing in and reacting to trouble is more important than taking time to get the big picture. Good feelings – widen focus. Expand into new territory. Think more flexibly and creatively.

(38) Reactive, behavioural and reflective elements of the brain. Conflict when two or more of these networks insist you focus on different things.

(50) Older people – increased skill in focusing on things that foster feelings of contentment. William James – wisdom is ‘the art of knowing what to overlook’.

(52) Directing attention away from negative experiences can be a superior coping strategy.

(53) Treat your mind as a private garden – being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there.

(67) Who you are affects what attracts your attention, but what you focus on also affects who you are.

(85) When employees focus on how their efforts affect other people, rather than just on the details of their tasks, their sense of relationship boosts both their satisfaction and productivity.

(88-89) Approaches to / importance of dinner time. In a perfect world – parents would focus everyone on nonconfrontational conversation. They’d encourage anyone so inclined to raise a topic and invite feedback, and be able to accept ‘just listening’.

(91-93) When you live with someone it’s easy to assume you share the same reality. Story about couple having pre-marriage counselling during a hot summer. She – ‘Things have changed, we barely have sex anymore’. He – ‘I thought we weren’t having sex because the airconditioner is broken’.

(96) Happy couples – resolute focus on the positive.

(98) Relationships – must commit to effort of seeing that person’s often very different world.

(101) Nicholas Hobbs (mid 20th century psychologist) – way to ensure calm but heightened attention to the matter at hand is to choose activities that push you so close to the edge of your competence that the demand your absolute focus. Select projects that are just manageable. Too easy – lose focus and get bored. Too hard – become anxious, overwhelmed and unable to concentrate.

(106) Happiness is a later reflection of flow, rather than the result of the experience at the time.

(107) Turning chores into play.

(108) Deciding what to do with leisure time – avoid the temporal equivalent of junk food.

(109) Antidote to leisure-time ennui is to pay as much attention to scheduling a productive evening or weekend as you do your workday.

(110) Set goals that are fun but also stretch you in some way.

(118-119) How you experience your lie is what you think about your life. There is a gap between your real life and the stories you tell yourself about it. Experiencing vs remembering self.

(127) Attentional conflict. When you first think about a long-term project you focus on the goal and barely consider the matter of how you’ll get to that point – why we over commit ourselves.

(151-155) Problems with multitasking.

(158) Brain Fitness program – effort builds and strengthens neural pathways.

(159) Breath focused mindfulness meditation.

(161) Energy flows where attention goes.

(166-167) ADHD.

(178) Grit – involves motivation and perseverance in pursuit of goal, but also maintaining consistent interest in a project or idea over time.

(181) Life is relatively short, so don’t labor under the delusion that you can keep switching your focus from goal to goal and get anywhere.

(183) Practice/rehearse in your head how you’ll react ahead of time – when trying to stick to a goal and faced with a difficult/stressful situation (giving a speech/attending a banquet when you’re dieting).

(184) Conflict between voices. Temporarily but strongly inclined to pay attention and choose the behaviour that brings the quickest rewards.

(189) Life is a creation rather than a reaction.

(205) William James – ‘I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing’.

(213) Working on being a better person. “Wouldn’t it be great if instead of just working out at the gym, we’d go off and focus on doing something that makes us better people.”

(215) You see what you look for. And you can train yourself to attend to the joy out there waiting to be had, instead of passively waiting for it to come to you.

More and more business leaders and management writers are realising that failure is a necessary (and even desirable) part of innovation. To innovate means to try new things, to have a go. But anytime we try something new there is a risk that it won’t turn out as we hope or expect, and that we’ll get it wrong. But as Ken Robinson notes in his humorous, inspiring and powerful TED talk “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

While we might know that risking failure is part of the innovation process, there’s still something quite uncomfortable about it (the title of this blog post pretty much sums it up – ‘Failure Sucks But Instructs‘). To me, failure is kind of like debt. It’s what you do with it that determines whether or not it’s a positive or negative thing – whether or not is allows you to grow and build, or weakens and depletes you. So, with that in mind, here are a few articles that may be helpful in thinking about how we build our own resilience to and understanding of failure (and that of our staff) to ensure that it positively enhances our personal and organisational innovation capability.

• In this article, Seth Godin points out that not all failures are the same and proposes a hierarchy of failure from ‘good all the way’ to ‘please don’t'! A hierarchy of failure worth following – http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/07/a-hierarchy-of-failure.html
• And in another post, Seth shares six ideas to help you fail better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside. How to fail – http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/04/how-to-fai.html
• Dealing with failure is part of being a leader. Rather than expend enormous energy to avoid it, this HBR blog post (part of the recent failure series) suggests you should build an organisation that is resilient in the face of inevitable failures by taking the following three steps: create a culture of sharing failures as well as successes, reward the act of risk-taking, and define the limits. For fans of good stories, this post also has a great story about how Domino’s Pizza admitted and addressed a major failure. The Art of Admitting Failure – http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/the_art_of_admitting_failure.html
• On the topic of good stories, in this post regular HBR contributor and master storyteller Peter Bregman shares a personal story about kayaking rapids in the Grand Canyon to highlight the power of visualising failure. Visualize Failure – http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2011/03/visualize-failure.html

There are many other HBR blog posts published as part of the special issue on failure which are listed here – http://hbr.org/special-collections/spotlights/2011/apr

The Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research’s Innovation Blog has also recently published a piece (and started a discussion) about how we share lessons from failure – http://innovation.govspace.gov.au/2011/04/15/how-do-we-share-lessons-from-failures/.