A few weeks ago I attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.
One of the standout presentations was by Gentry Underwood of IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm.
In his presentation, Gentry spoke about the concept of Design Thinking. According to Gentry, Design Thinking is the overlap of business need, technological ability, and a user’s needs and desires.
Far too often in HR, we ignore our two most important markets – the business and the people who user our products.
Let’s fix that.
I’m a huge fan of design thinking. I think it’s a great under-pinning to what we do and how we frame work. To that end, a lot of design thinking is just systems thinking which is just a fancy way of saying we’re all connected. Which Walt Whitman wrote about already in Leaves of Grass, right? My point is where there is overlap across disciplines or people is where things become interesting. And there is overlap everywhere.