Category Archives: Design

Leveraging Human-Centered Design to Improve Productivity

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Human-centered design (HCD) is an approach to designing products and services that focuses on the needs, values, and preferences of the people who use them. It is a process of creating solutions that are tailored to the needs of the user and can be used to create innovative products, services, and experiences that are both meaningful and useful. By leveraging HCD, businesses can improve their productivity and create a more enjoyable work environment for their employees. Here are five ways to do this:

1. Identify user needs: The first step to leveraging HCD is to identify the needs of the user. This can be done through user research, surveys, interviews, and other methods. By understanding the needs of the user, businesses can create products and services that are tailored to those needs and have a better chance of achieving the desired results.

2. Create prototypes: Once the user needs have been identified, businesses can create prototypes of their products and services. Prototypes allow businesses to test out their ideas and make adjustments before launching them into the market. This can save time and resources in the long run and ensure that the product or service meets the needs of the user.

3. User testing: User testing is another important step in the HCD process. It allows businesses to gain feedback from users on how their products and services are functioning and how they can be improved. This can lead to better products and services that are more likely to be successful.

4. Iterative design: Iterative design is the process of making multiple iterations of a product or service in order to improve it. This allows businesses to make adjustments based on feedback from users and improve the product or service over time.

5. Continuous improvement: Finally, businesses should strive to continuously improve their products and services by leveraging user feedback and data. This can help businesses stay ahead of the competition and ensure that their products and services remain relevant and useful.

By leveraging HCD, businesses can create products and services that are tailored to their users and can be used to improve productivity and create a more enjoyable work environment for their employees. Through user research, prototypes, user testing, iterative design, and continuous improvement, businesses can ensure that their products and services are always up-to-date and useful.

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8 Design Thinking Flaws and How to Fix Them

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8 Design Thinking Flaws and How to Fix Them

by Braden Kelley and Adam Radziszewski

Design Thinking attempts to extract the mindset of a designer, an artist, a creator, or even a child into a series of steps that can be applied to any discipline (even business or politics) to solve human-centered problems. Its steps are so logical that we can’t imagine anyone opposing them.

Why wouldn’t you speak with customers and observe them?
Why wouldn’t you collect diverse perspectives and research before choosing a problem to solve?
Why wouldn’t you come up with lots of ideas, prototype the most promising and test those prototypes?
If you’re selling to people, to humans, why wouldn’t you use a human-centric approach?

Because people can quickly understand the power (or promise) of Design Thinking, companies, consultants, and universities have latched on to the methodology and quickly accelerated it to the top of the hype curve. This has created a lot of problems for both expert Design Thinking practitioners and for the methodology itself.

So, let’s look at eight Design Thinking flaws and how to fix them:

Click here to continue reading on CustomerThink.com

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7 Steps to Building Stronger Sales Relationships with Human-Centric Problem Solving

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7 Steps to Building Stronger Sales Relationships with Human-Centric Problem Solving

by Braden Kelley and Adam Radziszewski

Building strong sales relationships is all about trust and demonstrating how the product/solution will make the customer’s life better. But is traditional selling getting you where you want to go?

If you’re looking to close more business and feeling stuck, try injecting some human-centric problem solving into your sales process.

What is human-centric problem solving?

Human-centric problem solving goes beyond what people say they do. Instead, it looks for what people actually do.

The approach helps you investigate the distinctly human elements that go beyond what sales tools can tell you about a prospect. It can also help you discover the true problem worth solving for the prospect.

Sometimes, you’ll even find a new problem the customer doesn’t even know they have.

Click here to continue reading on Sales Hacker

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Scaling Design Thinking in the Enterprise

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From Workshops to Widespread Impact

LAST UPDATED: November 23, 2025 at 12:01PM

Scaling Design Thinking in the Enterprise

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

Design Thinking has become the lingua franca of modern innovation. Millions of employees globally have attended multi-day workshops, enthusiastically sticky-noted their way through empathy maps, and built rudimentary prototypes. However, for most large organizations, the enthusiasm generated in the workshop vanishes the moment employees return to their desks, colliding with entrenched silos, risk-averse processes, and a lack of executive sponsorship. The result is a common disappointment: brilliant workshops, minimal widespread impact.

The failure isn’t with Design Thinking itself; it’s with the Change Management Strategy used to scale it. We’ve treated it as a training problem when it is fundamentally a cultural and structural one. True competitive advantage comes not from having a few Design Thinking experts, but from embedding a Human-Centered Mindset into every department, from Finance to Operations, making it a routine part of daily decision-making.

Scaling Design Thinking requires a deliberate shift from the isolated “Workshop Model” to an integrated Enterprise Capability Model. It moves the focus from facilitating a methodology to engineering a culture that automatically prioritizes empathy, rapid iteration, and co-creation across all functions.

The Three Barriers to Scaling Design Thinking

Before scaling, leaders must dismantle the internal barriers that cause Design Thinking efforts to stall:

The “Innovation Theater” Trap: Treating Design Thinking as a visible, feel-good event (the workshop) rather than a rigorous, measurable business practice. This leads to team burnout when the fun activities don’t translate to real P&L impact.
The Skill Silo: Confining the practice to specific units (e.g., the Innovation Lab or UX team). When Design Thinking is seen as “someone else’s job,” functional areas like HR, Legal, or IT revert to old, process-first mindsets, resisting human-centered solutions.
The Hand-Off Hurdle: The most critical failure point is the transition from the Design Thinking team’s validated prototype (the idea) to the Operations team’s execution (the build). Without shared language and metrics, the hand-off is often rejected due to cultural dissonance as “too risky” or “not scalable.”

The Three Steps to Achieving Enterprise Capability

To move beyond these barriers, human-centered change leaders must implement a phased approach focusing on structural and cultural enablement:

1. Establish the Center of Gravity (The Design Guild)

Create a small, cross-functional internal community of practice, often called a Design Guild or Innovation Coaches Network. This group’s mission is not to run all the workshops, but to train, coach, and govern the practice across the enterprise. They codify the methodology, create standard, context-specific tools, and ensure consistency. Crucially, they serve as internal consultants, helping functional leaders translate a vague business challenge into a structured Design Thinking project that matters to their unit.

2. Integrate into Decision Metrics (Operationalizing Empathy)

The methodology must be linked directly to how the company measures and rewards behavior. This involves two actions:

First, mandate that Stage Gate Reviews for all major product, process, or system changes must include verifiable evidence of user empathy (e.g., ethnographic field notes, validated low-fidelity prototypes with customer feedback loops). Second, tie incentive and bonus programs for mid-level managers to demonstrating behavioral commitment to the methodology (e.g., actively allocating time for customer interviews, funding small-scale rapid prototyping). This ensures Design Thinking is a required part of the Process of Innovation, not just an optional tool.

3. Embed into Functional DNA (The T-Shaped Workforce)

This is the final, essential step: making Design Thinking part of every function’s core competency. Design Thinking shouldn’t be a separate skill but the horizontal bar of a T-Shaped Professional. For example, a Finance analyst should be trained not just in spreadsheets, but in how to apply Design Thinking to simplify employee expense reports. An HR leader should use Design Thinking to map the employee experience when on-boarding. This widespread application transforms the methodology from an innovation tool into a Operational Improvement Framework.

Case Study 1: The Global Manufacturer and the Core Capability

Challenge: Inconsistent Product Quality and Adoption Across Regions

A global manufacturer faced a problem common to large, successful firms: R&D invented great products, but regional operations adapted or rejected them, leading to inconsistent quality and slow market adoption. The issue wasn’t the product; it was a lack of shared empathy for the regional user’s context and constraints.

Scaling Design Thinking Intervention:

The manufacturer strategically abandoned the corporate-led workshop model and created a decentralized Design Mastery Program. Instead of bringing hundreds of employees to HQ, they identified one or two high-potential leaders in 20 different regions and certified them as Design Coaches (Step 1). These coaches were then required to dedicate 25% of their time to running local, problem-specific Design Sprints focused on regional adoption challenges (e.g., “Why is Product X adoption 40% lower in Asia than Europe?”).

Key Benefits and Characteristics:

Decentralized Ownership: Ownership shifted from a central lab to local operational leaders, integrating the methodology into the regional P&L (Step 3).
Metrics Integration: Success was measured by the regional reduction in operational friction (fewer reworks, faster local adaptation time) resulting from the Design Sprints (Step 2).
The Human-Centered Lesson: By making the coaches accountable to their regional P&L and focusing the sprints on operational pain points, Design Thinking quickly became indispensable, transforming from a “nice-to-have” training to a core operational capability driving tangible efficiency gains and better user adoption.

Case Study 2: The Healthcare Insurer and the Back Office

Challenge: Employee Churn and Administrative Cost in Claims Processing

A large healthcare insurer suffered from extremely high employee turnover in its claims processing centers, which drove high costs and error rates. Management assumed the problem was pay or management style, but the root cause was systemic complexity (the “internal user experience”). Design Thinking was initially only used on customer-facing digital tools.

Scaling Design Thinking Intervention:

The insurer created a dedicated Process Innovation Team led by internal Design Thinking coaches (Step 1). Their mandate was to apply the Design Thinking methodology not to the customer, but to the employee journey (the internal user). Teams from Legal, Compliance, and IT were forced to sit with claims processors and literally map their daily tasks, focusing on points of frustration (the internal user’s empathy map).

Key Benefits and Characteristics:

Horizontal Application: The methodology was applied horizontally across traditionally siloed functions (HR, IT, Legal), forcing them to co-create solutions focused on the processor’s experience (Step 3).
Metric Shift: The success metric was shifted from “Claims Processed per Hour” to “Reduction in Processor Frustration Score (PFS),” derived from employee feedback post-sprint (Step 2).
The Human-Centered Lesson: By applying the empathy phase to internal employees, the teams discovered complex legacy system hurdles that wasted 40% of the processors’ time. The solutions co-created by the teams led to a 35% reduction in employee churn in those centers within a year, demonstrating the massive ROI of applying Design Thinking to the internal user experience. Design Thinking became synonymous with operational excellence, not just product innovation.

The Human-Centered Call to Action

Design Thinking is too powerful to be confined to a single team or a one-off event. It is the necessary framework for continuous, human-centered change. To achieve widespread impact, leaders must recognize that they are not buying a training session; they are engineering a culture of pervasive empathy and experimentation.

The scaling challenge is not a logistical one, but a leadership one. Are you ready to shift resources and rewards to make this methodology a non-negotiable part of how every function, from the front line to the back office, makes decisions?

“If Design Thinking is isolated to the innovation lab, your company is only doing innovation theater. True innovation happens when empathy becomes a non-negotiable pursuit for the whole enterprise.” — Braden Kelley

Frequently Asked Questions About Scaling Design Thinking

1. What is the biggest mistake organizations make when trying to scale Design Thinking?

The biggest mistake is treating Design Thinking as purely a training problem (the “Workshop Model”) rather than a cultural and structural change management challenge. This leads to isolated enthusiasm that quickly fades when confronted with risk-averse processes and a lack of accountability in daily work.

2. What is the role of the “Design Guild” in scaling the methodology?

The Design Guild serves as the internal center of gravity. Its role is not to run every workshop, but to standardize the methodology, certify and coach internal practitioners across functions, and govern the quality of the practice, ensuring consistency and integration into strategic projects enterprise-wide.

3. How do you measure the impact of Design Thinking beyond product innovation?

Impact must be measured using operational metrics tied to the specific problem being solved. For back-office functions, this can include metrics like “Reduction in Employee Frustration Score,” “Decrease in Process Cycle Time,” “Reduction in Rework,” or “Time Saved on Cross-Functional Handoffs.” The key is measuring the reduction of friction for the user, whether internal or external.

Your first step toward scaling Design Thinking: Identify a high-impact, non-product challenge in a back-office function (e.g., HR on-boarding, finance expense reporting, legal compliance documentation). Partner with the leader of that function and commit to running one small, highly focused Design Sprint to address the internal user experience of that process. Focus the success metric on reducing internal employee friction, not saving cost. Use this success story to model Design Thinking as a powerful operational tool, not just an innovation toy.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Pexels

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Re-Centering Human Connection in Digital Design

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From Screen Time to Real Time

LAST UPDATED: November 17, 2025 at 12:29PM

Re-Centering Human Connection in Digital Design

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

We live in an age of unprecedented digital connectivity. From instant messaging to global video calls, social media feeds to virtual reality, our lives are increasingly mediated by screens. While these technologies promise to bring us closer, many of us feel a growing sense of isolation, distraction, and even a loss of authentic human interaction. The paradox is stark: the more “connected” we become digitally, the more disconnected we can feel in real life.

This isn’t an indictment of technology itself, but a call to action for its designers and leaders. As human-centered change advocates, we must ask: Are we designing digital experiences that genuinely foster connection, or merely amplify convenience and fleeting engagement? The imperative is to shift our focus from maximizing “screen time” to optimizing “real time” — to design digital tools that intentionally guide us back to meaningful human connection, not away from it.

Re-centering human connection in digital design isn’t just about ethics; it’s about building products and services that truly resonate, create deeper loyalty, and solve fundamental human needs in a world saturated with digital noise.

The Disconnect: How Digital Design Can Go Astray

Often, digital design prioritizes:

Efficiency over Empathy: Streamlining tasks can inadvertently strip away opportunities for nuanced human interaction.
Engagement over Well-being: Algorithms optimized for attention can lead to addictive patterns and social comparison, diminishing mental health.
Broadcasting over Belonging: Social platforms often favor one-to-many communication, diluting the intimacy and reciprocity of one-to-one or small-group interaction.
Convenience over Consequence: Easy digital interaction can reduce the effort — and thus the perceived value — of real-world encounters, making authentic connection feel less necessary.

The goal is not to eliminate these digital conveniences, but to embed human connection into their core, making it an intended outcome, not an accidental byproduct.

Key Characteristics of Connection-Centered Digital Design

Designing for real human connection means integrating specific principles into every aspect of digital product development, making human needs the central focus:

Intentional Friction: Introducing small, deliberate barriers that encourage thoughtfulness or shift interaction to real life (e.g., prompting users to consider who they’re sending a message to, or suggesting a real-world meet-up).
Empathy-Driven Interfaces: Using language, visuals, and interaction patterns that feel genuinely supportive, understanding, and non-judgmental, mirroring positive human interaction.
Facilitating Offline Action: Designing features that explicitly encourage and enable users to transition from online interaction to real-world engagement (e.g., event planning tools, local group discovery, “put your phone down” prompts).
Valuing Deep Engagement Over Fleeting: Prioritizing meaningful, sustained interactions over superficial likes or endless scrolling, fostering true intellectual and emotional investment.
Transparency in Algorithms: Helping users understand how their digital environment is curated, fostering a sense of control and agency over their experience, rather than feeling manipulated.
Supporting Micro-Communities: Building tools that empower small, intimate groups to connect and collaborate effectively, fostering true belonging and mutual support.

Key Benefits of Re-Centering Human Connection

When digital design prioritizes genuine connection, the benefits extend far beyond immediate user satisfaction, impacting loyalty, well-being, and brand reputation:

Increased Loyalty & Retention: Users who feel genuinely connected to a platform or community, and through it to other humans, are more likely to stay, engage deeply, and advocate for it.
Enhanced Well-being: Products that foster healthy, real-world connections contribute positively to user mental and social health, leading to more sustainable, positive usage patterns.
De-risked Reputation: Companies known for building “human-first” digital experiences cultivate trust and differentiate themselves in a crowded, often criticized, digital landscape, building resilience against negative sentiment.
Deeper Innovation: Understanding the true human need for connection leads to more profound product insights and breakthrough designs that address fundamental human desires, rather than superficial wants.
Stronger Communities: Digital platforms can become true enablers of robust, resilient real-world communities, driving collective action, shared value, and a sense of shared purpose.

Case Study 1: The “Local Connect” Feature in a Retail App

Challenge: Declining Foot Traffic & Online Anonymity

A national retail chain with local stores was struggling with declining foot traffic, despite a strong e-commerce presence. Their existing app focused solely on online shopping and product discovery, leaving customers feeling disconnected from their local community stores.

Connection-Centered Intervention:

The chain introduced a “Local Connect” feature into their existing retail app. This feature didn’t just show local store hours; it allowed customers to:

See local store events (workshops, product launches) and RSVP directly.
Connect with local store associates for personalized product recommendations or styling advice via moderated, time-bound chat (encouraging an in-store follow-up).
Join interest-based “local circles” (e.g., “Gardening Enthusiasts,” “Book Clubbers”) hosted by local store staff, facilitating real-world meet-ups and discussions.

The Human-Centered Lesson:

This re-design recognized that physical retail thrives on community. The app moved beyond just being a shopping portal to a facilitator of local human interaction. It created “intentional friction” by making personal connections online that were designed to culminate in real-world interactions. This led to a measurable increase in local store foot traffic, higher conversion rates on specific products, and a stronger sense of community among customers, proving that digital can indeed drive real-world connection and breathe new life into traditional retail.

Case Study 2: The “Digital Detox Buddy” App

Challenge: Pervasive Digital Distraction in Personal Relationships

Many couples and families struggled with constant digital distraction during quality time together. Existing “digital detox” apps were often punitive or solo-focused, failing to address the social dynamic of putting down devices.

Connection-Centered Intervention:

A new app emerged, “Digital Detox Buddy,” designed explicitly for small groups (couples, families, friends). Instead of just blocking apps, it gamified shared, screen-free time. Users would “commit” to a screen-free period together, placing their phones face-down on a shared digital “mat” in the app. If anyone picked up their phone before the timer ended, a fun, agreed-upon “penalty” (e.g., buying coffee for the group, doing a silly dance) was activated, recorded by the app. The app also provided conversation starters and suggestions for offline activities for the group.

The Human-Centered Lesson:

This app successfully leveraged digital design to reduce screen time and increase real-world connection. By introducing shared accountability and positive reinforcement through gamification, it turned a solo struggle into a collective goal. It understood that human connection is often about shared experience and lighthearted challenge, using digital means to achieve a profoundly analog outcome: deeper, uninterrupted time with loved ones. It created an interface for putting interfaces away, intelligently using technology to foster human presence.

Designing for a More Connected Future

Re-centering human connection in digital design isn’t about shunning technology; it’s about elevating it to its highest purpose. It requires empathy, intentionality, and a willingness to challenge established norms of “engagement” metrics in favor of deeper, more meaningful outcomes. We must continually ask ourselves:

Does this feature encourage face-to-face interaction or inadvertently replace it?
Does this experience foster genuine empathy and understanding or superficial judgment?
Does this tool help users feel more connected to other humans, or more isolated in a digital crowd?

By consciously integrating these principles, we can design a digital future that not only connects us more efficiently but also more profoundly, enabling us to thrive in both our screen time and, most importantly, our real time. This is the essence of truly human-centered digital innovation.

“The most human-centered digital designs are those that eventually get us to look up from our screens and truly see each other.”

Your first step toward connection-centered design: Identify one digital interaction your product or service currently offers that could lead to a richer, real-world connection but doesn’t. Brainstorm three small, intentional design changes — perhaps a prompt, a suggested action, or a subtle gamification — that could encourage users to transition from screen time to real time in that specific scenario. Focus on how digital can be a bridge, not a barrier.

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The Venture Client Model

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Bringing the Outside In for Internal Disruption

LAST UPDATED: November 13, 2025 at 1:23PM
The Venture Client Model

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For decades, large corporations have wrestled with a critical innovation problem: how to access the speed and agility of the startup ecosystem without choking it with bureaucracy or overpaying through premature acquisition. Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) offered a financial window, but often failed to translate investment into operational change. The solution is not more capital; it’s a new engagement model built on a human-centered relationship: the Venture Client Model.

The Venture Client Model transforms the relationship between the corporation and the startup. Instead of acting as a passive investor, the large company acts as a first, paying client — a crucial lighthouse customer. The startup receives a contract (not just equity) and the opportunity to pilot its technology within a real, complex industrial environment. The corporation, in turn, gains early, de-risked access to disruptive solutions and the ability to test future technologies for internal applications.

This model is inherently human-centered because it focuses on solving real, internal pain points with external ingenuity, forcing a necessary friction between established internal process and external disruptive speed. It moves innovation from the periphery of financial investment directly into the core of operational value creation, where change truly impacts the customer and the bottom line.

The Three Pillars of the Venture Client Advantage

The success of the Venture Client Model hinges on its unique structure, which addresses the primary failures of traditional internal R&D and CVC:

1. De-Risked Operational Access (The Speed Multiplier)

Traditional procurement processes are an innovation killer. They are designed for stability, not speed. The Venture Client Unit (VCU) operates with its own streamlined legal and commercial framework, allowing for the rapid deployment of proof-of-concept projects. This structure allows a startup solution to enter the corporate environment in weeks, not months, dramatically accelerating the time-to-value.

2. Focused Pain Point Sourcing (The Value Anchor)

Unlike traditional CVC, which often chases market hype, the VCU starts by rigorously identifying the top five systemic pain points within the parent organization (e.g., slow supply chain traceability, high energy consumption in a factory). They then source startups specifically to solve those problems. This ensures that every pilot project is anchored to an immediate, quantifiable operational return, overcoming internal resistance by delivering proven, tangible value right away.

3. Internal Cultural Catalyst (The Mindset Shift)

The most profound impact of the Venture Client Model is internal. When a lean, external solution fixes a multi-million-dollar internal process in six weeks, it creates a powerful cultural catalyst. It shows internal teams what is possible outside the traditional, risk-averse framework, directly increasing the Adaptability Quotient (AQ) of the workforce. It changes the mindset from “we can’t do that” to “who outside can help us do this?”

Case Study 1: The Automotive OEM and Process Optimization

Challenge: Inefficient Factory Floor Logistics

A major European automotive manufacturer was suffering from production bottlenecks due to outdated manual logistics tracking on its assembly lines. Traditional internal R&D struggled to find a quick, cost-effective solution that could integrate with decades-old legacy systems. The internal solution required a full-scale IT overhaul, demanding years and hundreds of millions.

Venture Client Intervention:

The manufacturer’s VCU identified a small startup specializing in computer vision-based inventory tracking. Within a specialized procurement sandbox, the VCU ran a three-month pilot. The startup’s off-the-shelf software was integrated with existing CCTV infrastructure to track component flow automatically. The result was a 15% reduction in assembly-line bottlenecks and an immediate, visible ROI. The manufacturer then scaled the solution across five factories within the next year.

The Human-Centered Lesson:

The success was not just technological; it was methodological. The Venture Client process forced internal operations teams to collaborate with a nimble external party on a real, immediate problem, breaking down “Not Invented Here” bias and proving the viability of external solutions.

The Crucial Distinction: Client vs. Investor

The Venture Client is fundamentally different from Corporate Venture Capital (CVC). CVC focuses on a financial return in 5-7 years, often funding startups outside the corporation’s direct operational sphere. The Venture Client focuses on an operational return in 6-12 months. The contract is for a product or service (not equity), though VCU often has an option for future equity if the pilot is successful. This immediate operational focus ensures that the initiative remains aligned with core business needs, securing necessary internal sponsorship.

Case Study 2: The Infrastructure Firm and Predictive Maintenance

Challenge: Reactive Maintenance in Remote Infrastructure

A global energy infrastructure firm maintained thousands of remote assets (pipelines, wind farms) and relied on scheduled or reactive maintenance, leading to costly downtime and emergency fixes. The internal data science team was too small and too focused on existing predictive models to develop a radically new solution.

Venture Client Intervention:

The VCU scouted a specialized startup utilizing acoustic sensing and advanced machine learning to detect micro-leaks and component wear in real-time, long before traditional vibration sensors flagged an issue. The firm acted as the first commercial client, providing the startup with critical, large-scale training data from their assets. The pilot demonstrated an increase in lead time for critical fixes by three weeks. The firm then moved from a pilot contract to a large-scale, multi-year vendor contract, securing a strategic advantage in predictive asset management.

The Human-Centered Lesson:

This highlights the mutual value exchange. The corporation gained a strategic, proprietary solution and validated a technology stream. The startup gained a massive, credible reference customer and the data necessary to rapidly mature its AI model. It’s a win-win built on the human-centered need for speed (startup) and stability (corporation).

Conclusion: Scaling External Ingenuity

The Venture Client Model is the ultimate tool for scaling external ingenuity for internal disruption. It turns the largest corporate asset — its scale, its budget, and its pain points — into a magnet for innovation. By establishing a dedicated, de-risked commercial channel, corporations can access game-changing technologies on their own terms, transforming innovation from a high-stakes financial bet into a continuous portfolio of strategic pilots that accelerate organizational learning.

“Stop waiting for the big acquisition to disrupt your business. Start paying the right startups to solve your most urgent problems today. That is the Venture Client Model.” — Braden Kelley

Your first step toward building a Venture Client capability: Identify the single biggest operational bottleneck in your organization that costs over $5 million annually, and commit to finding an external startup solution to pilot it within 90 days.

Image credit: Pexels

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Fix the Problem or Design it Out?

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Fix the Problem or Design it Out?

Let’s start with the problem.

According to The Plastic Pollution Coalition (January 3, 2017) – “It’s National Drinking Straw Day! Each day, more than 500 million plastic straws are used and discarded in the U.S. alone. Plastic straws consistently make the top ten list of items found, according to Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup data. In the last three years, plastic straws have climbed the list to the Number 5 spot.”

The Paper Straw Movement

In response to this growing problem, in January California made it illegal to give customers plastic straws unless they expressly request one.

Another way some restaurants have tried to to fix this problem has been to replace plastic straws with paper straws.

Or then there is the tasty fix to the problem, the cookie straw.

Starbucks Cookie Straw

But there is another way to approach problem solving, and that is to design out the problem instead of trying to fix it.

Recently a barista at Starbucks accidentally gave me a lid on my water cup that I wasn’t expecting.

I had heard that Starbucks was planning to reduce their use of the iconic green plastic straw, but I kind of assumed that meant they were shifting to paper straws like some other quick serve restaurants, but that is not what they have in mind at all.

Starbucks is instead planning to eliminate the plastic straw.

Instead of focusing on the straw they instead chose to focus on the lid and design it in a way that a straw isn’t even necessary.

Starbucks Sippy Cup

So, next time you’re wrestling with a problem and trying to solve it, look at it in a slightly different way just for fun, try asking yourself how you could design the product, service, or experience (or all three) in order to design out the problem.

You may or may not get to a more viable, desirable, and feasible solution than trying to fix the problem.

But, looking at the problem from a range of different perspectives is always worth the effort.

Keep innovating!

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Cars Don’t Have to Be Beige and Boring – Nobe 100

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Cars Don't Have to Be Beige and Boring - Nobe 100

Estonia is known for pushing the boundaries as it tries to establish itself as a haven for innovation, and out of Estonia comes the latest in a string of interesting electric car projects. This one is super sexy for those of us that think that cars have gotten BORING. Check out the video to see what I mean.

Below you’ll find a second video that digs a little deeper into the project and provides more of an editorial.

But before you check it out you might want to investigate a bit more about what Estonia is trying to do to make itself an innovation powerhouse.

Is the design so sexy that you’ll want to lick it? I’ll leave that for you to decide, but I do like the idea of a removable battery. I’m surprised this is the first electric car that I’ve seen that touts this as a feature. I always assumed that the gas pumps at service stations would be replaced by racks of batteries eventually, but that has yet to happen and it is kind of hard for such a transition to start taking place if none of the electric car manufacturers are making cars with removable batteries. Whether or not it was necessary to go to the extreme of making the removable battery look like a nostalgic leather suitcase I’m not quite sure, but it does keep the experience consistent.

This is a crowdfunding project so if it excites you, check out their investment page.

So, only one question remains… Innovation or not?

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Service Redesign – Lost T-Mobile Smartphone

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Service Redesign - Lost T-Mobile Smartphone

Given the health risks of carrying a smartphone (or any kind of mobile device) too close to the body for extended periods, I try to always remove electronic devices from my pockets whenever I can. For ten years this has never caused a problem until Saturday. This marked the first time in more than a decade that I walked off and forgot my smartphone.

Now I’ve had the joy of reporting my lost phone to T-Mobile and getting a less than helpful response. Not because the agent I spoke with didn’t try to be helpful, but because the customer service representative was trapped inside of a service experience that wasn’t designed to meet the goals of the customer.

First I must mention that I don’t have a find my phone type app installed on my phone because I don’t like the idea of someone tracking me all the time. Second, yes, I know that even with location awareness or GPS turned off that my phone is being tracked anyways, but I still like to maintain the illusion that my every move isn’t being tracked. So, please humor me.

The fact is that T-Mobile could tell me exactly where my phone is even without such an app, but then they would have to breach the illusion and admit that they’re always tracking where every phone is at all times. Not such a good customer experience.

Redesigning the Lost Smartphone Experience

I’m only one person so this list won’t be as good as if I was working on this with a small team and prototyping with customers, but let’s ignore that for now and try to come up with a list of customer goals (and thus opportunities to delight) in the lost smartphone scenario:

I don’t want someone to use my phone after I lose it to make calls that I’ll have to pay for (international calls, premium calls, etc.)
I don’t want someone to buy anything (apps, music or other content that I’ll have to pay for)
I don’t want someone to call my contacts
I don’t want someone to use my apps and make in app purchases
I don’t want someone to use my texting function (SMS) – read, send, etc.
I don’t want someone to use my email – read, send, etc.
I don’t want someone accessing my photos
I don’t want someone to steal information about my contacts
I want to be able to call my phone to try and speak with the person who found it so I can try and get it back
I want the person to be able to call me or T-Mobile to let me know that they’ve found my phone

In short, I don’t want someone who finds my phone to be able to do anything other than contact me to let me know when and where I can come pick it up.

But, when I called to T-Mobile to report my phone lost the only option was to have the phone disabled. Prior to doing so, calling my phone was going straight to voicemail, and maybe I should have left a voicemail, but I didn’t, I thought I would try again later. After they disabled my phone, instead of getting voicemail I got a message saying the phone has been reported lost and that I wouldn’t be able to leave a voicemail. This is partially helpful, but not completely. Now I can’t call the phone and if someone has found the phone, they can’t try to contact anyone to arrange a pickup.

T-Mobile has met goal #1 (and possibly #2-4), but likely they could access #5-8 (able to read but probably not to send).

But, there are many other goals that have not been met. Most importantly, T-Mobile has actually made it less likely that I will get my phone back because I have no way of communicating with the person who may have my phone.

What could T-Mobile do to make this experience better?

Simple.

When a phone is reported lost, T-Mobile should make it so that the phone can only call T-Mobile. If the person calls, then T-Mobile knows which number is calling, can get information from the caller to connect the two parties to arrange a pickup, and pass on the contact details to the subscriber via pre-arranged methods.

Second, T-Mobile should allow designated numbers to call the phone, so that the subscriber can try to get in touch with whoever found the phone.

Third, T-Mobile could call the phone every 15-30min with a robot until someone answers and connect them with a T-Mobile representative.

These three small changes to their lost phone service design would make an immediate positive impact in the customer experience for thousands of customers.

How else could T-Mobile make the experience better?

Image credit: easyhacker.com

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