As part of the Design & Critical Thinking community, Krasi Bozhinkova and Daiana Zavate from Owtcome agency organised a deep collaboration workshop for the community to reflect on the concept of “Support”. Here are the insights gathered through the session, during which two groups collaborated to create a shared understanding of the concept.

The Workshop.

Product innovation is an essential part of most today’s business models. The pace of change led by the digital space makes it hard for teams to grasp and align all the different moving parts, both within and outside the organisation, required to improve or deliver a great product.

Meet Klaus-Peter Frahm and Michael Schieben, who will present The Product Field, a sense-making framework for teams and organizations that build products.

The Product Field helps you navigate the complexity of your product, align the perspectives of all stakeholders, find your focus, and make the right decisions to help you create positive impacts for everyone.

🔥 Join us for this free event👇

Dear readers and fellow Design & Critical thinkers,

I hope you are all well & safe! 🙏

Making sense of the complex and generating the time & space for opportunities are exercises tightly linked to innovation and design.

Senseframing, as introduced here by Daiana Zavate, is an important aspect of how we approach what we do, impacting our sensemaking and the type of opportunities we’re able to foresee:

Are we observing what truly emerges from the field or do we seek for anticipated patterns through the lense of some pre-determined paradigms?

Recently, following several discussions with the Design & Critical…

The explorer’s metaphor is a series of articles that aim to provide an introduction to sensemaking and complexity management for designers, managers, and decision-makers. Read here part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Explorers should not be seen as lonely individuals. As part of a larger system, they are components of the network that represent their organisation, and distribution is a necessary feature of the network.

Not everyone in an organization has knowledge of or is aware of the same things, at the same time, in the same way. …

The explorer’s metaphor is a series of articles that aim to provide an introduction to sensemaking and complexity management for designers, managers, and decision-makers. Read here part 1 and part 2.

Topography is the study of the forms and features of land surfaces. The topography of an area could refer to the surface forms and features themselves, or a description (especially their depiction in maps).

Territory mapping

Sensemaking is about creating a coherent approximation of the terrain. It is the act of creating an understanding of an unclear situation or context.

The territory here is an abstract construction (not to be taken…

The explorer’s metaphor is a series of articles that aim to provide an introduction to sensemaking and complexity management for designers, managers, and decision-makers. Read part 1 here.

You are explorers. You are navigating on (more or less) calm seas and see on the horizon an island. You don’t know how big the island is, or what to find there. If you were to land on its shore, you wouldn’t know where you are because you don’t have any point of reference yet. …

An invitation to be explorers, not just problem-solvers

We tend to see design and innovation as problem-solving spaces. This engineering and sometimes mechanistic approach is not bad in itself but brings a lot of limitations, one major being to quickly frame whatever challenge into a narrow, finite, solution.

When facing uncertainty, designers, and changemakers might feel unempowered. We look for recipes and pre-packaged generalist solutions — “the answer”, that sells an illusion of certainty through the economy of speed — to help us disambiguate our very specific contexts.

Problem-solvers look for answers. Explorers look for better questions.

Rather, challenges should elicit curiosity to bring diversity in perspectives because…

🔥 TL;DR;

The main claim is that the Design Sprint (Jake Knapp, Google) is a great tool for gaining a deep understanding of the problem context and users' motivations, if well executed. I reply that this not a matter of execution but goals and that it was never the point for the Design Sprint to gain a deep understanding of anything.

The Design Sprints' main goal is to move quickly from idea to materialization, with a minimum understanding of the problem, to validate it (the metric is speed), which make (kinda) sense in the context it was invented in (Google Ventures).

📝 Long reply

I…