A friend recently asked me: “you can help others see patterns in situations, and find clear ways through difficulties. So how come you can’t do it for yourself?” (I am going through a what-do-I-want-to-do-with-my-life phase…)

Many designers find it hard to design for themselves. The removal of many of the constraints associated with clients, plus working with personal, emotionally-charged requirements, can be debilitating for a designer.

The same situation exists …

When it comes to choosing to work with big or small suppliers (say a global advertising agency versus a local web developer), businesses tend to swing in cycles.

Say a business is looking to set up their website. They may choose to go with a large global agency for the sake of “safety” and stability.

Over time they come to realise that the large agency has policies and practices …

I had the unfortunate cause to visit the Eye Centre and Surgery in the Gleneagles Medical Centre in Singapore several weeks ago.

I turned up on an extremely busy Friday afternoon. The small waiting area was packed. The small staff was clearly fully occupied. Patients were being moved between the different treatment rooms and diagnostic stations. Staff were calling out to each other. Patients were milling around. In addition …

This example of the failure to think sufficiently and reasonably ahead is obvious to probably everyone. Ha ha funny etc.

Sadly, there’re more less obvious but as ridiculous examples everywhere in business practice today. Some are systemic. Others are unique to individual sectors or businesses.

Such silliness seem to stem from choosing to take a reactive and short term approach to meeting challenges. It is human …

Here are my takeaways from a recent McKinsey interview with Alberto Alessi, head of his family’s iconic design factory.

Two ways to get new ideas for new products:

Come up with a product/service idea internally then brief designers.
Create a culture that opens you to receive and engage with ideas from outside your organisation.

Craftsmanship/artisanship comes from within, not from market research:
“Imagine Picasso waking up in the 1920s on a nice, sunny …

If you can stand up in a court of law and say confidently, that in your capacity as the director of your business, you have done everything reasonable that can be expected of you to protect your business, then you have done a good enough job at risk management.

What do you think?

Some people think of risk management as going to the nth degree to remove ALL risk. This …

“cos it’s about the classic problem of focussing on one “cost” and ignoring the other implications.” said Stilgherrian.

This is another example of compartmentalised or siloed thinking. Short term, local gain at the expense of long term, larger-than-local loss and larger scale negative impact.

A 20% savings in construction costs now could potentially lead to thousands of dollars of costs elsewhere wlsewhen – staff turnover, productivity losses, sick …

I sent Stilgherrian and email several weeks ago about the Australian government’s obsession with censoring the Internet. (Stilgherrian has written several interesting articles on this matter which are all well worth a read.)

I thought the following extract and thoughts may be useful to share here..

On 23/01/2009, at 3:57 PM, Zern Liew wrote:
I wonder… is this Internet censorship thing a red herring? What else is happening just …

We can choose to work with, work around, exploit, or temper (better?) the innate characteristics of being human. The advertising industry has certainly turned the exploitation angle into an art. We can also choose to deny them. Many business processes and systems fail because they do not account for such human nature.

One of these characteristics is the temptation of cheating. This has the combined rewards of discovering a …

Here’re some tips that caught my attention while reading The Ten Faces of Innovation – Strategies for heightening creativity by Tom Ford with Jonathan Littman, ISBN978-1-84668-031-1.

When fact finding, don’t ask people to generalise or stereotype a situation. They will idealise the situation or behaviour rather than tell you what really happens. There is no such thing as “typical”.
To improve something, watch people struggle and …