Out with the old: Design Thinking, and in with the new: Creative Intelligence (CQ)

Bruce Nussbaum from Co Design speaks about the 'ossification' of design thinking:

"Design Thinking originally offered the world of big business--which is defined by a culture of process efficiency--a whole new process that promised to deliver creativity. By packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.

There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation.
CEOs in particular, took to the process side of Design Thinking, implementing it like Six Sigma and other efficiency-based processes.

Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low.

Yet, the contributions of Design Thinking to the field of design and to society at large are immense. By formalizing the tacit values and behaviors of design, Design Thinking was able to move designers and the power of design from a focus on artifact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society."

What we're after is creativity...

"That scaffolding of Design Thinking, that collection of behaviors is the heart and sole of creativity. It includes being attuned to the people and culture you are immersed in and having the experience, wisdom, and knowledge to frame the real problem and--most important of all perhaps--the ability to create and enact solutions.


Design Thinking broke design out of its specialized, narrow, and limited base and connected it to more important issues and a wider universe of profit and non-profit organizations. I believe the concept of Creative Intelligence expands that social engagement even further.

It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space--our lives today.


At this point, I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. You can have a low or high ability to frame and solve problems, but these two capacities are key and they can be learned. I place CQ within the intellectual space of gaming, scenario planning, systems thinking and, of course, design thinking. It is a sociological approach in which creativity emerges from group activity, not a psychological approach of development stages and individual genius"

The marriage between Design and Science

Quoted straight from IDEO founder Tim Brown's blog, and I couldn't agree more:


"I wonder how much might be gained if designers had a deeper understanding of the science behind synthetic biology and genomics? Or nanotechnology? Or robotics? Could designers help scientists better see the implications and opportunities of the technologies they are creating? Might better educated and aware designers be in a position to challenge the assumptions of the science or reinterpret them in innovative ways? Might they do a better job of fitting the new science into our lives so that we can gain more benefit?

If scientists were more comfortable with intuitive nature of design might they ask more interesting questions? The best scientists often show great leaps of intuition as they develop new hypotheses and yet so much modern science seems to be a dreary methodical process that answers ever more incremental questions. If scientists had some of the skills of designers might they be better able to communicate their new discoveries to the public?"

Now, how do we begin the marriage?

Figuring out what I don't know

This past week has been difficult for me in communicating to my team as the point person for the incubator group.  At first, I thought I just wasn't organized - this was part of it - my email was a mess.  I fixed that and still have to go through the some 40-50 emails that have been firing back and forth within the Network.

But the larger underlying problem, or, zinger, that was holding me back...which I finally realized after a week of anguish not knowing what my stress was being caused by was that everyone on my team uses design and/or systems thinking towards business...and I frankly had no practiced knowledge of what those two concepts were!  I thus didn't know how to identify who my teammates were in order to create action items for us to move forward and work synergistically together.

I am now foraging through articles like mad trying to figure out all of this in the context of management (which is where the core of my team bases their expertise in).  More to come soon!  Hold on to your hats folks, it's gonna be a speed-of-light paced ride of learning. Zoom zoom!