A few months ago  I was asked by the  Ignite Institute  to produce  this “living workshop” – a series of online courses dedicated to “wisdom leadership”. They  intend it  for a community of passionate change makers seeking social transformation towards justice . I am excited to be a part of this growing community.

The workshop – called Wise Design Leadership – consists of 6 modules of about ten minutes each. At the end of each I set a reflection to help the participant internalize the lens of intentional creativity for  their growth as a leader.

 

You can get the full Ignite experience by clicking the image above. You will find all Ignites  offerings and be able to sign up to receive updates when they post new  content  in development.

Alternately, you can see the workshop modules below – just click on any of the links:

Module 1: Introduction (10:27)

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At the beginning of the semester teaching “Design for Business Leaders” at Hult I presented a reprise of the lecture I have previously posted here that I delivered at SFSU College of Business. It’s similar in outline, but quite different in the specific narrative – as is to be expected of material that is still in development. Each of these is a prototype that I hope to bring to focus and clarity in the book about design consciousness that is my ongoing project.

I’m currently preparing to deliver an updated version of it at the Pacific School of Religion that I’m looking forward to.

I have broken the lecture that was delivered via Zoom during the Covid lockdown in San Francisco, into 4 parts – to make it more digestible, and to allow me to cut out sections where we took a break but didn’t pause recording.

Part 1: Introduction to Design Consciousness

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We’ve just wrapped up a difficult semester at Hult in DES328: Design for Business Leaders – a design course that was Zoomed to business students on every continent who have never been exposed to studio culture – the work habits of designers. The course was directed to giving students a process awareness without getting bogged down in design craft – though it is impossible to learn design process without doing some design. And impossible to do design  without some amount of craft.

So I decided to keep it simple – have student work in dyads and have each design a “personal brand” for the other.  My hope/expectation was that out of this relationship, a deeper experience of empathy would be gained for someone who was at the same time “client” and “user”.

I was blown away by the results – the depth of (empathic) relationship that did manifest, the creative energy, and, in the cases of a good number of students, the commitment to the art of design and willingness to push through their deficit in drawing, CAD and prototyping skills.

Francesco de Conto an Italian student captured this energy in his final presentation that he prepared as a 6+ minute movie. He managed to encapsulate the intent and lessons of the course in a way I never could.

So, if  you want to know anything about what future business leaders need to know about design, take a look:

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In 2001 Tom Williams co-founder Point Forward, “a pioneer in helping companies understand the texture of human experience and why it matters to their business”.

Sixteen years earlier, In 1985, Tom worked with me on a project at the Herman Miller Research Corporation in Ann Arbor. We were doing a project with the Burroughs Corporation in Detroit, MI just before they merged with Sperry to form Unisys. We were trying to understand how the personal computer was going to impact the nature of office work and the environments in which it would be done.

We set up a tricked out office suite for 10 members of Burrough’s industrial design and human factors group – with networked personal computer in each cubicle made easily moveable and adjustable on a system of rails and pneumatic lift arms. For 2 weeks we observed them at work taking photographs of every workstation from two angles at 15 minute intervals. We gathered mountains of data and concluded that computers were going to increase the volume of paper and reference materials that would be littered around the office.    We were right about that but that wasn’t enough to save Burroughs. Geoff Hollington drew on our insights to design a desk with an adjustable display shelf built in.

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Maria Giudice has been a longtime and powerful advocate for design insight, if not designers themselves, to be in the C-Suite. She drove this point, and more, home to students of DSN 328 at Hult International School of Business.