This piece comes from my good friend Bill Pacheco, former design leader at Cybex and Keurig Dr Pepper, and currently Senior Innovation and Design Thinking Fellow at Trinity College.

This terrific insight comes from my good friend Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the d.school’s University Innovation Fellows program.

This insightful approach comes from my good friend Marcus Hollinger, SVP of Marketing at Reach Records and the Head of Marketing at Portrait Coffee (no big deal…).

Second City has launched the careers of Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Adam McKay, Seth Meyers, and Amy Poehler, just to name a few. They’re masters at the art of ideation and experimentation. When they’re developing their shows, one of the most dependable tactics they employ is known as “Taboo Day.”

It’s astounding to me how many of the most prolific individuals across history have been fastidious about capturing ideas. “That’s all well and good for those creative, artsy types,” one might reply. “But I’m a hedge fund manager.” Not so fast, my friend. I happened across a fantastic detail about a famous hedge fund manager, a guy named Jeff Bezos…

By now, you’ve probably heard about Beeple’s record-shattering sale of “Everydays” for over $69 million. But do you know how the sale came to pass? Perry and I had an opportunity to talk to the team inside Christie’s who pulled off the landmark transaction…

Ato Essandoh is a New York-based actor and the co-host of the podcast Radio Zamunda. I was instantly drawn to his warm, openness, and curiosity. He told me about his regular Friday night gatherings of artists and friends in New York. They often challenge themselves to make something together, without regard for the final product: “It's OK if it looks like we made a mistake…”

My friend and mentor Bernie Roth teaches a classic tool called “Reframing” in our Transformative Design class at Stanford. It goes something like this: 1) what’s something you’re stuck on? (could be a challenge, an objective, a question, a goal, an unknown, etc) 2) what would it do for you if you were no longer stuck? (what would the impact be?)…

If you’re exploring, efficiency shouldn’t be your goal. Efficiency is for black belts; it is not for special operations. Exploration, by definition, is not efficient. As Paul Graham has famously said, “Do Things That Don’t Scale.” But if you’re not careful, the conditioning of the efficiency-oriented part of the organization will influence your objectives.

“Both Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso filled their studios with a chaotic jumble of objects that ranged from fine art to salvaged junk. While some objects served purely as sources of inspiration, others were utilized as materials for their sculptures. Calder’s biographer observed: ‘The studio was a sacred dumping ground, from which new inventions emerged in unexpected ways.’”

Block time to commission and review experiments because routine responsibilities are constantly calling, and so the “new” has a tendency to get pushed to the fringes. It’s very easy to deprioritize an uncertain new thing in the light of a certain fire drill.

We spend so much time talking about the merits of new ideas, and the potential gains associated with them, that it’s easy to forget the impact of the conviction to NOT do something. But those are equally valuable insights! My feeling is that those points belong on the scoreboard every bit as much as the data that suggests “success.”

“Ever since then, I try to question things that seem, on the surface, to be obvious. Most things are, but occasionally when things don’t add up, there is usually an innocent looking, perfectly reasonable assumption that is wrong. And when you explore and poke around in corners where no one is looking, you’ll find the answers…”

Does your idea stink if you design an experimental offer and no one takes you up on it? It’s entirely possible. But before you judge the idea, you should judge the experiment. A classic pitfall that trips innovation teams up, that keeps them from learning about the quality of their ideas: poorly designed experiments.

“Nothing stifles the spirit of discovery more effectively than the assumption that miracles have ceased. In other words, most people do not make discoveries because they do not expect to. Discovery has in it not only exacting precision but absurd aspiration; it weighs hairs and expect miracles…”

For years, we have been trying to get past the hexagon-based visualization of the design thinking process. Yes, the one we popularized almost 10 years ago. You might wonder why. “Isn’t that like Nike abandoning the swoosh? Like Coca-Cola jettisoning the classic red ribbon? Like a zebra trying to ditch its stripes?” Au contraire, mon frere…

Whereas when one person learns in isolation — or even if many learn, but all in isolation — learning is largely linear, when many folks learn in parallel, and come back together to share, the learning curve is exponential…

“We get a lot of yellow lights around here. Not really a red light, but not a clear green light either. We kinda don’t really know what to do… It takes a long time to get clarity.” Interviewing employees on behalf of a leader whom I advise — who wants to improve her ability to lead her team in exploring new ways to create value — this theme came up repeatedly.

“The underlying neural process of creativity is taking some things we already know and combining them in a new way… The brain is not capable of producing new material from scratch...” Knowing this fact dramatically impacts one’s creative output! Folks who receive neuroscience training outperform non-neuro-trained counterparts by almost 30%!

Design thinking has contributed two significant advances on conventional problem solving. Whereas most organizational problem solving boils down to “implement this solution to this problem,” design says, “Are we sure this is the right solution?” and proceeds to generate options before settling on the best solution. Perhaps more importantly, though, the other thing that makes a design driven approach to problem solving so special is that design says, “Are we sure this is the right problem?”…