There are two reasons I care about business:

1. My circumstances make engagement in business non-optional, and I have to care in order to engage.
2. Business is the sole remaining opportunity in our society for sustained collaborative thought.

I have to find opportunities for sustained collaborative thought in order to engage and function and preserve my circumstances. I’m not one of those lucky people who can function just because they have to, or who can care because caring is expedient.

I care by figuring out how to care.

When business does not provide opportunities for sustained collaborative thought, my life becomes precarious.

We like sporadic deep chatting that goes nowhere because going nowhere it takes us nowhere.

We are encouraged to read admired thinkers and to join in admiring them.

I have mixed feelings about Bruce Nussbaum’s “Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?”

On one hand, I agree with every word of it. For instance, this statement is dead-on: “Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.”

Design thinking more or less had to bow to the business management mindset and its demand that all practices be limited to techniques arranged in sequential processes. When such practices yield success or failure the outcome is attributed to the efficacy of the techniques and processes.

Nussbaum continues: “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.”

What Nussbaum is pointing out is a bit taboo: even when the design thinking process seems to work, it is not the process that produces the innovations. Something else smuggled in with process does the real work when innovation happens. And if that active ingredient is missing, the process produces only trivial, incremental advances.

Nussbaum then gives a name to this active ingredient: Creative Intelligence or CQ.

Nussbaum presents CQ as a faculty which can be cultivated. “Above all, CQ is about abilities. I can call them literacies or fluencies. If you walk into one of Katie Salen’s Quest to Learn classes or a business strategy class at the Rotman School of Management, you can see people being taught behaviors that raise their CQ. You can see it in the military, corporations, and sports teams. 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.”

The faculty is bound up with the ability to see problems from multiple angles, and to discover new practical responses: “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 agree with Nussbaum that some of the abilities he associates with CQ are rooted in capabilities of individuals, some of which is based in talent and much of which can be cultivated. Some individuals have a tendency to reflect on problems and look at them from multiple angles, find it natural to experiment with different approaches to solving them. These are the people who get reputations for being “creative thinkers” in an organization.

However, I still think much remains to be done at the level of management to support CQ beyond what has been covered by Marty Neumeier, Tim Brown and especially Roger Martin in their books on design thinking.

Especially neglected is the work around problem reframing, and also the ways organizations accidentally discourage it — and not only for the usual reasons (unpredictability, inefficiency, etc.).

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Here I will transition to a post I am considering putting on the LinkedIn Design Thinking group:

A week ago Steve Sato asked an interesting question: “If Systems Thinking optimizes for the whole and part, then what does Design Thinking optimize for?”

What makes the question interesting is that it cannot be answered as asked. Design thinking does not optimize for any particular thing, but for many things at once in response to what the problem requires.

Design thinking re-opens the question: “what are we optimizing for?” and includes all stakeholders in reformulating the question and answering it.

This open-endedness is what makes DT so unnerving to so many professionals. It creates enormous anxiety to suspend one’s own ideals and to pursue a new one that is inconceivable right up to the second it is conceived.

We don’t mind not having the answer to a question. We do mind — intensely — not having a question to work at answering. (For Thomas Kuhn fans, this is the difference between normal and extraordinary science.) Another name for this state is perplexity.

Anxiety and perplexity is the cause of tension in creative teams. Far too often it is misdiagnosed as unhealthy conflict. When the perplexity is foreclosed (usually in the name of time-urgency or team harmony), it destroys a team’s ability to find deeply creative solutions to problems.

Back in April, Bruce Nussbaum wrote a provocative little article publicly declaring the death of design thinking, and isolating the true active ingredient of design thinking: CQ, or creative intelligence, “the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions.” Exactly.

CQ is bound up with the ability to let go of an older conception of a problem, to immerse in perplexity and, never looking back, to navigate to the other side of it to an unprecedented solution.

I think Nussbaum overstated his case to stimulate conversation, so I won’t take the bait and try to argue that design thinking is still relevant and vital. Instead, I want to try to outdo Nussbaum by unmasking CQ for what it really is. Quoting Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ “If you want design thinking to produce deep innovations, try putting a philosopher on your team.

New ideas do not bother us.

What bothers us is having to unthink old ideas in order to understand a new one.

When we unthink an idea we make space for a new, as yet uncomprehended idea.

In the gap between the unthought old idea and the not-yet-thought new idea is sheer anxiety.

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When a group tries to work out a problem and no resolution is in sight, this generates horrible anxiety.

It is tempting to force a resolution — either an old one, or a new one favored by one party.

Forced resolutions in the face of anxiety is what makes groups unimaginative and sterile.

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If a group learns to tolerate anxiety and to navigate chaos, its creativity can surpass that of an individual.

Group-think will eventually lose its pejorative meaning.

First, however, we will have to rethink the meaning of anxiety and creativity.

That means we will have to unthink our ideas around creativity and appropriate work conduct.

Humankind can no longer afford to accept naive realism in its leaders.

Naive realism was acceptable back when collective action was confined to the scale of tribes. Each tribe had its god, its reality, its way, and to it, that was the way.

Contemporary societies are too big, diverse and powerful to be left in the hands of people who are blind to the fact of pluralism.

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All the qualities we admire in a leader — resoluteness, firmness, constancy, perseverance — can result from either insightful adjustment into the human condition or from naive realism. In other words, the first and the last can closely resemble one another. And until very recently, the last has been counted first. The inversion of this order is already underway.

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Naive realism exists in both idealist and materialist forms. (“Reality is essentially spiritual.” “Reality is essentially physical.”)

Many people are “converted”, “reborn” or “enlightened” from one to the other, but nothing of much importance is accomplished in such shifts from “apparent reality” to “real reality”. And shifts from realism (in general) to skepticism toward all realism is also common and trivial.

However, as common and trivial as these transfiguration experiences are, when they occur to an individual they always and inevitably feel intensely important, unprecedented and final.

Why? Because until they occur, they are, by definition, inconceivable. Prior to the conversion, all talk about conversion is dragged into the horizons of naive realism, explained in terms acceptable to that naive realist worldview (conversion is an opinion change, or a superior explanation, or some sort of magic or supernatural shift in status) and thus stripped of its essential meaning. One’s first exposure to transfiguration is necessarily surprising, disorienting and temporarily intellectually isolating. It’s always the real deal, as opposed to what everyone else had been talking about…

Arresting the process at this point means staying merely “born again” — to remain permanently in the infancy of one’s rebirth. One must mature into this new reality and become a spiritual adult.

The failure to mature past the mere fact of rebith is “spiritual danger”.

To believe one is the first — to fail to recognize the universality of the experience — is to succumb to spiritual retardation.

My own distillation of Liz Sander‘s brilliant UX triad (pdf of 1992 paper):

• Useful: The design satisfies functional needs.
• Usable: The design minimizes functional obstacles.
• Desirable: The design is valuable beyond its function.

If physicists could interview quarks and ask them questions that would help them uncover new paradigms and conduct new, more productive experiments, they would do it.

Physicists are strictly etic out of sheer necessity. Consequently, they have gotten really good at working around this limitation — but again, not because this is an intrinsically superior approach, but because there’s no other option available.

Meanwhile some social researchers, who have the advantage of being able to converse freely with those they are researching, not only fail to do so, but actually take pride in renouncing this advantage. It makes them feel rigorous because they resemble the hard sciences.

Pragmatism is the philosophy underlying the science of Actor-Network Theory and the technology of User Experience. Design Thinking defines the scope of application of User Experience to the entire realm of wicked problems.

As chaos theory has shown that most apparent linear equations are only approximate descriptions of non-linear processes, I’m certain that someday we will recognize that all human problems that appear “tame” are only approximate comprehensions of wicked problems.

Understanding + system = science

Science + application = technology

Technology + intent = engineering

Engineering + signification = design

Design + use = experience

Experience + organization = brand

In my direct experience with both public and private education, I’ve observed one big difference between public and private school administrators:

• Public school administrators are trying to attract distant public money with aggregated quantitative data.
• Private school administrators are trying to attract money from individual parents who want to see qualitative proof that their money is well-spent.

If a private school parent sees that his child is bored, unhappy, lethargic or stagnant, that school will lose funding from that parent. Consequently, private schools focus all their effort on making students interested, happy, energized and engaged. They don’t attempt to quantify any of this, because the outcome is immediately present to the decision-maker.

In contrast, if a public school parent sees problems with their student, they can lobby, complain, threaten and escalate issues all day, but it will not affect the bottom line. Generally, the most convenient lever for making a change is harassing and blaming the individual teachers. Escalating issues to administrators is a means of pressuring teachers, not in effecting change to administration to to the design of the system.

Public school administrators focus most on serving the only stakeholders that really matter: the bureaucrats above them who scrutinize their numbers and dispense reward or punishment. The numbers are what matter, so numbers are the real product of public schools, and the students are only a means to making those numbers.

To the public school system, if something isn’t quantified, it doesn’t exist. However, though some indicators of educational success are quantifiable, at bottom education is an essentially qualitative endeavor. Education cannot be reduced to quantitative terms without destroying it. But because we insist on trying to control it centrally from a distance, the more we try to take centralized control of it, the more the system falls apart.

For this reason I actually agree with conservatives on the desirability of school vouchers. I have not any progressive thinker take the concept seriously and try to find ways to make school vouchers less abusable by the rich. I don’t think the problems with vouchers are insurmountable.

Chaos might be blackness, or blindness — or it might be white noise.

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Chaos might be inarticulate meaningless phenomena waiting to be given articulate meaning by an interpreter.

Or, chaos might be infinitely meaningful phenomena which overwhelms us until we choose one definitive articulation — or a plurality of compatible and harmonious interpretations.

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Many people think truth is like a mirror of reality.

Another optical metaphor: Truth can be seen as a prism to help us stratify superabundance of meaning into layers of understanding.

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In everyday situations where chaos reigns, isn’t that chaos composed of too many competing and conflicting orders — but partial orders, which suffer from blind spots, fuzzy patches, distortions and gaps? And don’t these orders perceive differing patterns of relevance, which justify the deficiencies as acceptable? The real problem is not to remove the deficiencies, but to come to an agreement on which deficiencies matter more and which matter less.

We feel most free when we exercise our best judgment.

When our judgment is displaced by formal processes, we feel unfree.

If it is shown that this unfreedom is ultimately beneficial, sometimes we find the sacrifice of freedom valuable.

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When sacrifice of freedom is demanded without justification, or the justifications given offend our best judgment — we are forced into unfreedom rather than persuaded to voluntary sacrifice — this is experienced as tyranny.

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It doesn’t matter who does it, any power that forces unfreedom upon us is tyrannical.

This is why the enemy is not “big government” but any concentration of power that allows one group to impose its will on another.

This is why we should be as wary of corporatism — the tyranny of the corporate executive — as we are of bolshevism or fascism.

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We’ve got to get over our vulgar fixation on prejudices of soil, skin color, genitalia, sexual preference and religious affiliation.

Many other forms of prejudice exist as well, and our prejudices in respect to what constitutes prejudice permits prejudices of temperament and philosophical orientation to run rampant.