Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds | Video on TED.com

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds | Video on TED.com

Tim Brown urges designers to think big | Video on TED.com

Tim Brown urges designers to think big | Video on TED.com


We generally have a confusion between design thinking and design or designers.

This video helps to provide a very clear perspective on the issue as to how consumers and designers collaborate together to produce systems and processes of lasting value having competitive impacts.

Why thinking anew is difficult?

To institute a culture of innovative thinking is usually very difficult if not impossible for most organisations.

This is because all employees in an organisation are tied to wage slavery from which one finds it difficult to come out.

The difficulty lies in freeing oneself from the rigid constraints of Time and Space imposed by Wage Slavery, which is so necessary to create something anew.

So what is the way out?

Being Practical

Is China a communist state? Most of us would tend to believe this.

But a closer look would reveal that it is neither believes in communism nor in capitalism. It is somewhere in between depending on the situation.

The average age of the population is around 25. Hence it strongly focuses on the issue of providing jobs for the young people and making their lives better. No ideology whatsoever.

In a way you may call it practicalism or an excellent example of application of a special case of moving logic, where x can be anywhere between A and B but not exactly A or B.

Averages kill

As a company grows it starts looking at averages rather than specifics. Management decisions are then based on averages rather than on specifics.

There is an interesting saying on 'averages'. It says that the concept of average is like a bikini. What it reveals is interesting but what it hides is vital.

So as the company grows the vital things get hidden from the management's view. The management stops seeing the right things. And as a result sooner or later the company trips over and falls flat on its face either breaking a bone or eventually dying in the process.

The photograph shows how the 'law of triangulation' and the 'law of putting small things together to improve performance' work in increasing the stiffness (performance) of a structure.

This structure has been constructed out of very thin sheets (3 mm) of corrogated plastic material. Individually, each sheet can be crumpled up by the pressure of one hand. A five year old can do that easily.

But a miracle happens when such thin sheets are cleverly placed on top of each other and glued together to form innumerable small triangles. When constructed like this the material as a whole suddendly gains enormous strength. The structure does not give way under the load of six to seven adults standing or dancing on the fabricated structure.

The principle of 'triangulation' and the principle of 'putting small things together to change performance' come in handy to engineers to find creative solutions to their problems.

Organisational Awareness

Today I conducted a Review Test on System Reliability at Phoenix Yule. My idea was to test the participants on their understanding of the concepts, which might be realized from their individual scores. That is what I thought.

But the participants did something more intelligent than that. They put down all the scores (question wise) for all participants on an Excel worksheet and tried to look for some emerging patterns.

And soon they found many. I was simply amazed by the way they critically and openly examined their own shortcomings and organizational loopholes. They realised all by themselves that they and the organisation as a whole did not realize that keen and good quality observation was the key to solve 80 % of their problems.

They didn't stop at that. They then went forward to create a simple plan (I am a great believer of simple plans) to take care of their problems.

The lesson I learnt was that a group of eager and empowered people would go to any extent to make them and their organisation successful.

The other important lesson I took to heart is to freely part with your knowledge but not to thrust your ideas upon others. Only then people feel empowered and act on their new found knowledge.

Goodbye for now!