Erika Harrison

This fun animation provides a vision of what a post-consumer society could look like, with people working fewer hours and pursuing re-skilling, homesteading, and small-scale enterprises that can help reduce the overall size and impact of the consumer economy. Narrated by economist and best-selling author Juliet Schor

Is Design Thinking Dead? Hell No

Bruce Nussbaum may have delivered his eulogy, but design thinking—in its best forms—still has a lot to offer.

Recently, Bruce Nussbaum rang the bell on design thinking and told us he is moving on. I was surprised at this. Nussbaum is one reason why design thinking exists in the first place. Following his lead, people staked their careers on design thinking. Corporations like Procter & Gamble have invested, hired, and re-organized to accommodate it. Yale created a course, Stanford a program, and the University of Toronto reshaped its B-school curriculum. IDEO and Jump nailed their colors to the mast.

Why the recantation? He says he’s got grounds. First, design thinking “has given the design profession and society at large all the benefits it has to offer.” Second, the corporation attempted to mechanize design thinking, diminishing it in the process.

Is Nussbaum right? Has design thinking delivered all the benefits it has to offer? Should we move on?

Design thinking empowered versatile problem solvers who worked well with messy data.

Design thinking brought something precious to the corporation: versatile problem solvers who worked well with messy data, complicated problem sets, and shifting business models. The corporation was beginning to grasp the immortal words of Van Morrison: “No guru, no method.” It was beginning to see that no simple orthodoxy (from McKinsey or elsewhere) was going to get the job done. Designers were good at mixing and matching perspectives and solutions. They were good at what Roger Martin called “opposable” analysis. They appeared to cross the hemispheric divide between left and right brains at will. They could “speak” the languages of “creativity” and “analysis” with something like equal fluency. As it stands, designers are the odds-on favorites for the Daniel Pink award in intellectual mobility.

This is not to say that design thinking is without fault. Take it from an anthropologist, some of the work it calls “ethnography” is fraudulently bad. The training is substandard, the practice is sloppy, and the true promise of ethnography—the nuanced understanding of how people think and feel—too often goes undelivered. Designers talk a good game about culture, but it is rare to see them address this critical deficit of the design-thinking model. As the Peter Arnell-Tropicana debacle shows, designers are sometimes still more interested in design culture than American culture. The designer can’t realistically talk about knowing culture unless this is made a systematic study, the object of a complete mapping. And I don’t ever hear the design community taking up this challenge. We can only imagine what design thinking could be if it put these things right.

The corporation is headed for open water and a perfect storm.

Still, this might be the wrong time to declare the design-thinking era over. The corporation, after all, is facing a new order of difficulty. It is headed for open water and a perfect storm, a great confusion filled with black swans and blindside hits. CEOs as accomplished as Andy Grove and thinkers as brilliant as Michael Raynor have declared the future inscrutable. Innovations once optional are now obligatory. New opportunities (a.k.a. blue oceans or white spaces) and constant self-transformation have become structural necessities. The business of management was once rule-bound, hierarchically organized, defined by precedent, governed by gurus. Now, it feels more like operating an aircraft carrier at night without the benefit of arc lights or radar. It’s scary out there.

In this world, designers can continue to create extraordinary value. They are the people who have, or could have, the laterality needed to solve problems, the sensing skills needed to hear what the world wants, and the databases required to build for the long haul and the big trajectories. Designers can be definers, making the world more intelligible, more habitable. But this won’t happen if, confronted by the inevitable difficulty of the early days, they take their balls and go home.

In sum, it is wrong to say that design thinking has given us “all the benefits it has to offer,” and it’s wrong to call it a “failed experiment.” I think we should be arguing that design thinking is just getting started. And a good thing, too; we need this approach more than we ever did.

[Image: Flickr user jcoterhals]

Grant McCracken

Grant McCracken holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. He is the author of Culture and Consumption, Culture and Consumption II, Plenitude, … Read more

<div class=”disqus-noscript”>View the discussion thread.</div>

The original Mad Men

What can OWS learn from a defunct French avant-garde group?
BY GARY KAMIYA

Strange bedfellows don’t get any stranger than this. To the joy of a few dozen graduate students and culture jammers, and the utter bemusement of just about everybody else, the most significant American protest movement in years has been spending time under the sheets with an obscure French avant-garde movement whose ideas are so crazily millenarian they make Jacques Derrida look like Mitt Romney.

I’m referring to the peculiar liaison between Occupy Wall Street and the Situationists – creators of one of those whacked-out intellectual commodities that have constituted France’s most lucrative cultural exports for more than a century.

The link between Occupy Wall Street and the Situationists is the Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine and organization Adbusters, whose call to occupy Wall Street kicked off the now-global protests. In a recent interview, Adbusters co-founder and editor Kalle Lassn told Salon’s Justin Elliott, “We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement.”

…

via salon.com

13 Books on the Future of Money & New Economy

10 Aug

I tapped the twittersphere the other day for the best books on the ‘future of money’ and the new/emerging economy & infrastructures. Here’s what you came up with. Attribution below each book. Other suggestions welcome! I’m getting ready for a deep dive into this content area this fall, and appreciate all the guidance you can provide!

1. The Future of Money – Bernard Lietaer 

free PDF download

tweeted recommendation via @woodholmes

Random House Press Release: A brilliantly clear-sighted analysis of how on-going money innovations in dozens of countries around the world are proving that they can resolve key societal problems such as: jobless growth, community breakdown,  the economic consequences of an aging society, the conflict between short-term financial thinking and long-term sustainability, and monetary instability itself. This book provides pragmatic solutions to each one of these issues.

2. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth – Juliet Schor

tweeted recommendation via @keirholl, @jdevoo

from schor’s website: In Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, economist and bestselling author Juliet B. Schor offers a groundbreaking intellectual statement about the economics and sociology of ecological decline, suggesting a radical change in how we think about consumer goods, value, and ways to live.

3. Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth – David Korten

tweeted recommendation via @complexified

from amazon: Today’s economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. However, as David Korten shows, the steps being taken to address it do nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system. It’s like treating cancer with a bandage. Korten identifies the deeper sources of the failure: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating “wealth” without producing anything of real value: phantom wealth. Our hope lies not with Wall Street, Korten argues, but with Main Street, which creates real wealth from real resources to meet real needs. He outlines an agenda to create a new economy– locally based, community oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all, not simply increasing profits. It will require changes to how we measure economic success, organize our financial system, even the very way we create money, an agenda Korten summarizes in his version of the economic address to the nation he wishes Barack Obama were able to deliver.

4. The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education - W. Edwards Deming

tweeted recommendation via @complexified

from amazon: ”… competition, we see now, is destructive. It would be better if everyone would work together as a system, with the aim for everybody to win. What we need is cooperation and transformation to a new style of management.”In this book W. Edwards Deming details the system of transformation that underlies the 14 Points for Management presented in Out of the Crisis. The system of profound knowledge, as it is called, consists of four parts: appreciation for a system, knowledge about variation, theory of knowledge, and psychology. Describing prevailing management style as a prison, Deming shows how a style based on cooperation rather than competition can help people develop joy in work and learning at the same time that it brings about long-term success in the market. Indicative of Deming’s philosophy is his advice to abolish performance reviews on the job and grades in school.previously published by MIT-CAES

5. Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now - Margaret Wheatley

tweet recommendation via @complexified

from walkoutwalkon site: In Walk Out Walk On, authors Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze invite you on a learning journey to seven communities around the world to meet people who have walked out of limiting beliefs and assumptions and walked on to create healthy and resilient communities. These Walk Outs Who Walk On use their ingenuity and caring to figure out how to work with what they have to create what they need.

6. The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business – Umair Haque

tweeted recommendation via @complexified

from amazon: In this manifesto-style book, radical economist and strategist Umair Haque calls for the end of the corrupt business ideals that exemplify business as usual. His passionate vision for “Capitalism 2.0,” or “constructive capitalism,” is one in which old paradigms of wasteful growth, inefficient competition, and self-destructive ideals are left far behind at this reset moment. According the Haque, the economic crisis was not a market failure or even a financial crisis, but an institutional one.

7. The Gupta State Failure Management Archive - Vinay Gupta (ok, this one is not a book.)

tweeted recommendation via @leashless

4.3gb of files on State Failure and contingency management released into the public domain athttp://Archive.org by Vinay Gupta. The Archive focuses on physical infrastructure like water plants and power stations, and on how we govern those assets at both a practical and a political level. It is designed to highlight the governance questions around running critical infrastructure during long emergencies like financial collapses, but applies equally well to trying to puzzle out how to manage our 21st century economies and their complex technical assets.

8. Debt: The First 5,000 Years – David Graeber

tweeted recommendation via @hewhocutsdown

from amazon: Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

9. The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience – Robin Hopkins

outline of book with notes

tweeted recommendation via @jdevoo

from amazon: We live in an oil-dependent world, and have got to this level of dependency in a very short space of time, using vast reserves of oil in the process – without planning for when the supply is not so plentiful. Most of us avoid thinking about what happens when oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead can have a positive outcome. These changes can lead to the rebirth of local communities, which will grow more of their own food, generate their own power, and build their own houses using local materials. They can also encourage the development of local currencies, to keep money in the local area.

10. Local Money: How To Make It Happen In Your Community – Peter North

tweeted recommendation via @jdevoo

from amazon: Local Money is an exciting and practical guide to creating local currencies – showing how they can help us unleash the power of our communities to build a resilient economic future. The economic crisis and the bailing out of the banks by taxpayers has made us all aware of the vulnerability of our financial system. We need to think urgently about how to reclaim the power that the bankers hold. In past recessions and depressions across the world, communities have done just that – by creating their own forms of money. Local Money shows how this is possible. This book is an inspiring guide that helps you understand what money is and how you can create money that stays in the community – building loyalty between consumers and local traders rather than losing wealth to the corporate chain stores. It explains how alternative currencies can work with local banks and credit unions to strengthen the local economy, supporting the local production of necessities such as food and energy while helping to reduce the community-s carbon emissions. Local Money draws on the long history of local currencies, from Local Exchange Trading Systems and -time banks- to paper currencies such as BerkShares, Ithaca -Hours- and German regional currencies, which circulate between local businesses as an alternative to their losing trade to the -big box- retailers. The story culminates in the development of the first Transition currencies, the Totnes, Lewes, Stroud and Brixton Pounds.

11. Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure – Daniel Quinn

tweeted recommendation via @sedicious

from amazon: Futurist Daniel Quinn (Ishmael) dares to imagine a new approach to saving the world that involves deconstructing civilization. Quinn asks the radical yet fundamental questions about humanity such as, Why does civilization grow food, lock it up, and then make people earn money to buy it back? Why not progress “beyond civilization” and abandon the hierarchical lifestyles that cause many of our social problems? He challenges the “old mind” thinking that believes problems should be fixed with social programs. “Old minds think: How do we stop these bad things from happening?” Quinn writes. “New minds think: How do we make things the way we want them to be?”

12. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution – Paul Hawken

tweeted recommendation via @sedicious

from amazon: Hawken (The Ecology of Commerce) and Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank, have put together an ambitious, visionary monster of a book advocating “natural capitalism.” The short answer to the logical question (What is natural capitalism?) is that it is a way of thinking that seeks to apply market principles to all sources of material value, most importantly natural resources. The authors have two related goals: first, to show the vast array of ecologically smart options available to businesses; second, to argue that it is possible for society and industry to adopt them. Hawken and the Lovinses acknowledge such barriers as the high initial costs of some techniques, lack of knowledge of alternatives, entrenched ways of thinking and other cultural factors. In looking at options for transportation (including the development of ultralight, electricity-powered automobiles), energy use, building design, and waste reduction and disposal, the book’s reach is phenomenal. It belongs to the galvanizing tradition of Frances Moore Lapp?’s Diet for a Small Planet and Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog. Whether all that the authors have organized and presented so earnestly here can be assimilated and acted on by the people who run the world is open to question. But readers with a capacity for judicious browsing and grazing can surely learn enough in these pages to apply well-reasoned pressure.

13. Post-Capitalist Society – Peter Drucker

tweeted recommendation via @mikeriddell62

from amazon: Drucker’s vision of a “post-capitalist society”–one in which knowledge is the basic resource and nation-states compete with transnational, regional and tribal structures–is hardly original. What is new in this invigorating essay is his far-reaching analysis of the economic crisis of militarized, wasteful “megastates” like the United States and the former Soviet Union, which have failed to bring about a meaningful redistribution of income. Improving American productivity, he writes, will require investment in human resources and infrastructure (as Japan, Germany, Korea and Taiwan have done) and a drastic restructuring of organizations, including the elimination of most management layers. The federal goverment, Drucker asserts, should contract out tasks in the social sphere, confining itself to the role of policymaker. Among his other provocative proposals: jettison military aid to other countries; create a public audit agency to eliminate pork-barrel deals and special-interest politics; and hold schools accountable for students’ performance. He also urges the creation of transnational institutions to cope with the environment, terrorism and arms control.

update: The Lights in the Tunnel – Martin Ford (free eBook download) via @keirholl

–

please share your recommendations!

The Call of Our Times

Submitted by blietaer on September 3, 2010 – 1:38 am

Humanity is at a critical juncture.  As Paul Hawken succinctly put it in his memorable address to Portland University’s graduate class in May of 2009, “civilization needs a new operating system,” and fast.  Why?  Because many of the socio-economic rules under which we operate were created under a worldview that failed to recognize that the earth is a living system and that every form of life has its unique and valuable place and purpose in sustaining the larger web of life.  By ignoring the conditions that support the health of our ecosystems and communities, we have inadvertently fouled our nest, and jeopardized the future of our children.  We are now awakening to the fact that the ways of thinking, strategies and systems that made the industrial age possible, have also fueled the myriad crises that are now upon us: great financial instability, the breakdown of community, growing disparities of wealth, resource wars, alarming rates of species extinction and ecosystem depletion, and accelerating symptoms of climate change.  As our food, energy, health, education, economic and financial systems show increasing signs of failing us, we are being collectively called to harness our creativity and resources to take a major evolutionary leap.  Transitioning from our self-destructive ways to life-affirming understandings, lifestyles and systems is indeed the great work of our times.

The Great Work

How do we turn things around?  How can we reverse the downward spiral in which much of our world has been caught?  The good news is that a fast growing movement of communities, businesses, not-for-profits, and governments around the world is hard at work on this very question.  Many experiments are under way on all continents, and there are already many success stories and inspiring new models to point to.   Neither creativity nor good intentions are lacking, so why is it that so many change makers around the world often feel that they are swimming upstream?  Is there a better and more effective way to harness and direct all the creativity and energy unleashed by our current predicament?  My answer is ‘yes,’ but only if we start paying attention to a piece of the puzzle that is currently not on our radar: our monetary system.

Re-inventing our monetary system

For the growing movement of communities, organizations and governments working to turn things around, the most daunting challenge often revolves around money: How do we find the money needed to transform our energy, food and health infrastructures, to eradicate unemployment and create green jobs, clean up the environment, and ensure that people have proper access to housing, education and meaningful work?   Have you ever wondered why cash shortage so bottlenecks our best efforts and initiatives when we actually live in a world where there is neither a shortage of  things needing to get done, nor a shortage of people wanting to do them?

The answer to this question has to do with the monopoly of the kind of money system we use, which is the source of the scarcity which so many people experience, and the root cause of a great number of our problems.   Our money system was designed a long time ago and is now out of date.  It is particularly ill equipped to help us solve the pervasive socio-economic and ecological challenges facing us today.   In a bird’s eye view of both my work and this website, I explain why the transformation of our money system is critical to resolving the challenges of our times and many of the issues you care about.   I also explain that monetary diversity is just as important to human survival as bio-diversity is to the fate of the earth.

A number of pioneering governments, businesses and communities around the world have successfully experimented with new monetary systems for years, and with great results.  We have at our disposal all the monetary tools we need to reduce poverty, clean up the environment, and provide access to meaningful work, housing and health care.  It is now time to use them on a larger scale.  A  world of sustainable abundance is actually possible, but only if we are willing to upgrade our monetary system so that we can begin to leverage true human wealth, which is our energy and creativity.  Will you please join me in making sure that we do not miss this opportunity?   Your own future, the future of your children,  and of this extraordinary planet is at stake.

Bernard Lietaer

There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics – This Index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life.

via oecdbetterlifeindex.org

There are times when it seems like the eco­nomics of the web seem to boil down to:

1. Find some white space on your site.
2. Fill it with an ad.
3. There is no number three. Check out these great dis­count air fares!

It starts inno­cently enough, with a few AdSense text place­ments. But before you know it, you have one of those Flash-based mon­stros­ities lurking in your sidebar — the kind you don’t dare roll over, because if you do it spawns some demonic window that extends outside the bound­aries of your monitor and knocks over fur­niture in your family room, while playing The Macarena at 130% volume.

It’s kind of nice, then, when a player in the — oh, god, what do we call it nowadays? ah, yes: the content industry — manages to come up with a revenue stream that’s a little more win-win than just hurling ads in readers’ faces. This week I stumbled across The Wash­ington Post’s Master Class series: online courses that put the expertise of Post writers at your disposal.

It launched last month, and the tuition fees aren’t small; they’re along the lines of what you’d pay for a decent con­tinuing ed class at your local college or uni­ver­sity. That puts them in a dif­ferent price bracket from most of the approaches I’ve seen news­pa­pers take to finding a new source of income, like sub­scrip­tions or pay-per-article fees.

I wish them luck. Any­thing to avoid another banner ad.