As today’s world advances, modern society brings a new set of complexities that the same thought processes of yesterday cannot solve. Long established solutions may not effectively cope with the changing environment.

This is where Design Thinking steps in to create better solutions, services, and experiences to solve our current problems. 

“Design Thinking enables organizations, and people to solve problems with a human-centered approach intertwined with scientific methods.”

At the root of effective Design Thinking methodologies is empathy and emotional intelligence. When leveraged correctly, Design Thinking can bring about innovations through the following:

● Providing a new definition of value

● Approaching human-centered innovation

● Improving quality of life

● Addressing problems affecting diversity of people

● Issues related to corporate culture and new technology

● Redesigning markets and behaviors

● Manage social and market changes

● Recreating business models for our times

● Addressing the changes and complexity in society and resolving them

● Giving priority to teamwork to solve problems

● Advancing towards entrepreneurial initiatives in the educational and medical sectors

● Examining and solving the issues left unresolved by data

Tackle Challenges

Design Thinking is the best approach to issues at the intersection of multiple sectors like society and business, emotions and logic, creative and rational thinking, addressing economic demands and needs, and systems and individuals.

However, we would not need Design Thinking to handle fundamental problems with fixed and known solutions. Instead, we need Design Thinking for an innovative approach to issues with different aims where traditional methods have failed.

Human-Centered Approach Innovation

Design Thinking is adapted to work on human needs irrespective of the authority or the scale of the challenge. A controlled, technical, or conventional approach cannot deal with or resolve modern society’s complex and sensitive needs.

Therefore, Design Thinking can spark a sense of innovation that only occurs with the intention, need, or desire for a better situation or state. We can move from just dream of a feasible path to solving problems to executing sustainable innovation.

“Design Thinking equips us with the tools that undoubtedly lead us to explore what could be.”

Society Disruptions

The Industrial Revolution has disrupted human development, as a result analysts have been searching for ways to help business production, and economic sectors cope. They aim to extract the most benefit from the least number of resources and time.

However, even though their processes have brought out successes in productivity and efficiency, they could not bring out the needed innovation throughout the required sectors.

Design Thinking breaks us free from the older mold of doing things and gives us a fresh outlook. As a human-centered approach to change how we explore and find solutions, it provides us new insights to tackle issues.

In addition to the ongoing struggles between the creative and analytical worlds, other aspects have impacted the lens through which we see, perceive, experience, and interpret the things around us.

With the advancement of technology, consumers’ demands are constantly evolving, requiring updated information and the constant pursuit of novel innovation.

Focus on Humans Not Users

People are looking for products that connect with them in a meaningful way or directly match their needs and experiences. This is where Design Thinking approach to business and social innovations offer the best solutions.

“Design Thinking enables us to look for alternatives values, solely focusing on solutions based on human needs and experience.”

Innovative solutions require solving a plethora of complex challenges like massive disruptions that affect human resources, sustainability, economic constraints, education, and energy that cannot be resolved with existing method.

Design Thinking for Innovation

Forming the right mindset, creating the right team, and setting up an environment for innovation are the three factors to foster successful innovation for society. 

These are the primary factors that must occur within organizations and companies to achieve successful innovation. 

Let us discuss these aspects in detail:

Forming the Right Mind for Innovation

To initiate innovation, forming the right kind of mind is a crucial aspect of Design Thinking. These days, it is perceived that creativity and lateral thinking can be learned by implementing the processes and taking the proper steps to forming the necessary mindset.

This can help resolve the ongoing, most tricky, and complex problems. 

The challenge is that most modern organizational and corporate settings tend to kill creativity. Therefore, it is crucial to incorporate Design Thinking to help us develop collaborative, open, and explorative mindsets and cultures that readily combines imagination, logic, and creativity to bring out innovations.

Forming the Right Team

Design Thinking promotes cross-disciplinary collaboration where creativity, logic, and talent are not boxed. Different disciplines such as business analysts, designers, marketers, and ethnographers form a team to bring out revolutionary ideas based on complex problems. 

Therefore, it is crucial to facilitate Design Thinking by collaborating with different departments to achieve novel innovation.

Set up Environments Conducive to Innovation

The inhabited environment plays a vital role in shaping our thought processes, perceiving things, and the ability to innovate. Innovative companies like Google create workspaces with equipment and toys to develop the creative thinking of team members. 

It helps to develop workspaces where the members can embrace change, develop the ability to think creatively, work together, and develop innovative solutions.

It’s About People

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that integrates the needs of people, the possibilities of converging technologies, and the intentionality for measurable success.

To be effective you must invest in observing how people interact with their environments to create innovative solutions. Organizations need to focus on the human-centric approach where evidence is collected and prioritized into the thought process that empathically informs all decisions based on people’s needs and desire for memorable experiences.

Developing a well-organized structure and collaborative approach to achieving goals is the key to creating a great company. Can the same apply to society? The effort to liberate people at work can bring out the enthusiasm, creativity and potential that is otherwise locked away in individuals.

Therefore, self-management structures like Teal, WorldBlu, Sociocracy and others work well, they are rooted in collective connectedness. 

“Collectively connected emotional intelligence structures enable empowered people to level up and become the best they can be.”

How can we establish more connectedness at work and in society?

This is the topic of a recent Society 2045 interview. Society 2045 has an ongoing series of interviews with change-makers seeking to improve the way society works.

Society 2045 is a community of people from around the world seeking to co-discover a vision for the year 2045. The goal is to connect with leaders of emerging communities and movements across society and come together to co-create a better future

In an interview with George Por, we talked about enlivenment that can change society. George Por is President of Campus Co-Evolve, a collective researcher, mentor to ecosystem catalysts/ enliveners, emergence creator, social radical, and an independent scholar.

Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence according to George, is a capacity or an emergent property of collective entities that shape the path to their desired future by using progressive mechanisms such as differentiation and integration. These mechanisms help people use such possibilities of having collective memory, collective self-reflection, sense-making, and choice making.

Collective intelligence can be brought to existence through sound human practices. George mentions that the information becomes knowledge when worked on collaboratively, otherwise it’s just a piece of information in the knowledge garden.

“Knowledge becomes collective intelligence when weaved together through collaborative action.”

For instance, there are hyper trails in any well-designed knowledge garden. It is a series of links that are recorded. It is a recorded path that a person has followed to explore or create something.

These records then become available and functional at the same time for other members of the community. Furthermore, all the recorded hyper trails can be circulated within the community.

If people want to develop collective intelligence, then questions like “What is important to you?” or “What do you care about?” or “How can we support each other?” should arise. This kind of caring comes from collective intelligence. Why would we care or be a part of anything if we do not care?

Enlivenment Theory of Change

The enlivenment theory of change comes from caring. It is a universal human attribute that human beings care for something. But caring is not only human.

For instance, mothers feed their children in all mammal species. But human care is based on having a moral imagination that inspires or acts of solidarity with the disenfranchised who can’t meet their basic needs.

“When people’s caring grows even more profound, they begin to care for society.”

They start with questions like what it would take to change the system that turned otherwise happy inclined humans into disenfranchised humans, and what measures can we take to reverse the situation.

Emancipatory enlivenment can result in human emancipation driven by the desire for alive inspiration that connects people. It can give people an environment of having enlivened systems and institutions and ultimately lead people to have more aliveness and be part of more vibrant environments.

The Vision for 2045

Society needs to become antifragile, decentralized, non-rivalrous, and self-organizing. It can grow stronger with the best practices by every challenge. To attain such a society, the best approach would be to practice more connectedness based and collective emotional intelligence.

The Problem

Decentralized autonomous organizations need a well-organized structure to flow the concept of value that includes trust and financial resources. The channel through which it flows needs to be deepened and connected. It also depends on how well the nervous system is connected and how it flows into the community to enliven the people.

If there is any rapture in the community, it can be noticed if the connection is deep enough. The way a human body is aligned and interdependent, similarly the community could organize itself to feel the connectedness and let the value flow through.

The Solution

The decentralized autonomous organization can create an intensity of social creativity, which ultimately liberates people.

“People with a chance to collaborate in a connected and emotionally intelligent charged way, work with enthusiasm, creativity, and joy knowing they have ownership and shared governance authority.”

The future of work needs to be decentralized and autonomous, and this also needs to extend to society. People will feel the flow of inspirations and co-creations in an environment like that.

Por’s vision for a connected emotionally intelligent society in 2045 is groundbreaking. It will be amazing if we are able to achieve his vision in the coming years. Check out the interview here:

To experience better relationships, it is crucial to create an atmosphere where collaboration and co-creation are possible. Integration among people of society can help us come together, solve problems, and create a greater level of perceptibility.

This is the topic of a recent Society 2045 interview. Society 2045 has an ongoing series of interviews with change-makers seeking to improve the way society works.

Society 2045 is a community of people from around the world seeking to co-discover a vision for the year 2045. The goal is to connect with leaders of emerging communities and movements across society and come together to co-create a better future.

Recently, we had an interview with Tine Bieber, and we talked about how purpose and integration can positively impact society. Tine Bieber is Co-Founder of UNI Emotion, an application that invites everyone in the organization, leaders, and employees, to actively participate in the mission of creating and caring for a mentally healthy environment centered on emotional intelligence.

The Vision for 2045

People naturally live in diversity in terms of characters or needs because everyone follows their cultures differently. Sadly, our differences often cause interpersonal conflict mostly because of a lack of mutual understanding and respect.

“Rooted in interpersonal conflicts is a lack of self-awareness.”

We need to co-create a society more emotional aware that will help people manage their emotions intelligently. Managing emotions would then lead to maintaining healthy relationships, assisting people to co-create and collaborate. In addition, the concept of decentralization, as discussed in last week’s blog, comes into prevalence because initiatives are going on in organizations and workspaces to accomplish it. By 2045, people could get to a place where decentralization is a natural concept implemented as a standard operating model it in their workplaces.

People have a natural tendency to accept and live in diversity; similarly, in the future, people could practice integrating naturally and bring it into the organizational context.

“Integrated cultures bring about more collaboration and innovation.”

Self-Accountability

Decentralization needs other variables to work. It is crucial to be more self-aware, which will undoubtedly lead people to be more self-accountable. Hierarchies and power relationships are in place in most workplaces and organizations today, however decentralizing the systems will break us free of hierarchy and power relations, creating more room for collaboration, creativity, and innovation.

How to Align Organizational Purpose

As an organization or an individual, it is crucial to focus on purpose as a form of direction. Personal purpose is just a part of the organizational purpose.

Tine believes in an integrated approach to balance out the whole system. She states that emotional intelligence and happiness go together, where happiness means stability.

“EQ leads to more happiness. Happiness leads to mindset stability, and better societal experiences.”

For example, the ongoing invasion of Russia and Ukraine has had a significant impact on people in the region, but also worldwide. Because not all people think from the same perspective, their emotions get triggered differently.

An integrated system can impact people on different emotional levels. However, the thing that is ongoing somewhere else does not need to define all of us. Therefore, it is essential to create emotional boundaries even while we show solidarity with other fellow humans.

“The feeling of having a boundary and showing solidarity at the same time can cause centering and alignment.”

This empowerment of self with the help of integration helps us manage our emotions and grow stronger relationships. As a result, everything can go together when different people come together.

Collaboration and integration can help us stabilize our emotions by giving a different perspective and empowering us at the same time. For this to be effective people must be open to getting empowered and perceiving different perspectives.

The Concept of Wholeness

Today, most people only strived to achieve success individually. The pandemic has pushed many crucial things to the surface, like relationships. Where things are not going great in terms of structures and politics and other systems but also the internal structures. It is there where purpose comes when people question themselves about their desires.

People have come to know that it feels better when people do things together. In this generation, the change of mindset and perspective is visible where people strive to accomplish their purpose together. According to Tine, nowadays there is more of a sense and desire for co-creation and collaboration.

The Problem

There is a fine line between personal purpose and organizational purpose. While one’s personal purpose can be motivating, inspiring and direction-providing to the organizational level can contribute to being part of a greater purpose, and the individual purpose becomes secondary.

On the other hand, it is considered abstract when an organizational purpose is interpreted with everybody’s involvement and opinion. It creates a sense of not speaking the same language anymore.

The problem arises when you are unable to voice your opinion, there is no chance of co-creation and collaboration. The inability to fully participate in how a company operates can have a significant negative impact on productivity, efficiency, and creativity.

The Solution

A solution can be determined on the level of integration. It is again a part of the system. Society can be better if every aspect of the community comes together and integrates better on a deeper level. As an individual has needed, so does an organization that can impact society.

Aligning these altogether by breaking the barriers can bring out integration of the individual needs and create outstanding results, as if it was magic.

For example, if we take supply chain where everybody works in isolation, bringing them together will create dialogue the same way at an organizational level with all the components coming together.

The idea of wholeness brings everything together, instead of just playing loose roles in isolation with the feeling of disconnection.

Tine’s vision for a more collaborative and self-aware society in 2045 is groundbreaking. It will be amazing if we are able to achieve her vision in the coming years. Check out the interview here:

Developing connections and interdependence is key to creating a better economic system in the business world. 

However, people do not have fully transparent views when purchasing anything about the ecosystem of how a product made it to the store shelves. They mostly don’t know how things have been created nor who created them. 

Only a few at the top get the recognition from the efforts of many hardworking and creative people. 

Is it time to decentralize the system and acknowledge the people involved for their contribution and worth?

This is the topic of a recent Society 2045 interview. Society 2045 has an ongoing series of interviews with change-makers seeking to improve the way society works.

Society 2045 is a community of people from around the world seeking to co-discover a vision for the year 2045. The goal is to connect with leaders of emerging communities and movements across society and come together to co-create a better future.

We had an interview with Rachel Sheila Kan about the future of the fashion industry. Rachel Sheila Kan has been a designer and design manager in the fashion business for 23 years, promoting sustainability for the past five years.

Change of Perspective

When there is interaction, there will be interconnectedness. Today, more people want to have a transparent view of how the things they purchase come to be. Over time, people grow an attachment with the things they are buying, and in many cases to brands.

“Interconnectedness occurs only when we understand how things are made, who made them, and where all the components come from.”

Rachel gave the example of how earlier, people thought that products in the fashion industry were made by machine and robots and not by people. However, we have read of many cases where the fashion industry has been accused of child labor and sweatshop business practices.

Having transparency of the products we purchase gives us the people in-depth knowledge about where everything is from and how they are made, ultimately creating a connection based on aligned personal values.

Utilization

The food and fashion industry seem to cause most of today’s waste. However, keeping the state of the planet in mind, if we work towards utilizing the waste taken from one system to another, it will bring about a profound change. 

For example, fashion industrial waste can be used in making seat belts, bags, and other products for everyday use.

There are two stages of utilizing waste. The first step is to give it a new life, and the next is to find a regenerative way of doing it with the most longevity.

This is where the idea of collaboration comes in. The importance of collaborative action among disparate systems can contribute to a better society.

“Through collaboration, we can share ideas with people and work on bettering the future by improving systems that impact the economy.”

Vision for 2045

Rachel Sheila Kan envisions that the industrial system of the future will be just and fair. People will create an ecosystem based on fairness focused on maintaining circular sustainability.

Everybody will get equal attention and acknowledgement. Local creativity will be given more priority. 

The people with innate potential and skills in the locality, rather than looking to the farthest of places, will be given a chance to thrive. The focus will be on the interaction and interconnectivity of everyone about everything.

Decentralization of the Fashion Industry

People will feel free to go to the nearest designers, pattern makers or machinists in their local area rather than faraway places. The interdependence and connectedness will evolve because different systems are interconnected in smaller locations. Therefore, it will make for a better-connected community as well.

The Problem

Today, the system performs mechanically where only one or very few get a seat at the table and are known for their worth and contribution. The problem is that too many people are stuck in that system. 

People are not decentralizing the system, not acknowledging the locality, mostly because we are obsessed with GDP growth rather than “how everyone feels or how the ecological ceiling goes”.

“Obsessive focus on GDP growth in the economic system is holding people back from interconnected progress.”

The Solution

According to Rachel, the interconnection process can transform the fashion industry and society.

“Interconnection and interdependence can be a human-centric approach to a better society.”

People are working on different aspects of society, ultimately influencing society, and helping to change how communities work. Interconnecting different systems can build an environment space to utilize waste. 

For example, we can use other systems’ waste, and they can use ours in what they are doing, thereby leading to interconnectedness. It can also create a form of regenerative leadership like a glue bringing systems together.

Grounding oneself into nature will also give new insights into bringing the living systems into healing. Connecting every system to nature is crucial to start a healing process. 

In addition, by creating a decentralized society, people will feel acknowledged. They will feel heard and seen for their contribution and worth.

“It is important to have economic fluidity for the way we create things and how we build structures within those creations.”

Rachel’s vision for a decentralized society in 2045 is ground-breaking. It will be amazing if we are able to achieve her vision in the coming years. Check out the interview here:

An infant who needs attention will throw things, cry, scream, and create chaos. We see the infant as seeking care and love, not as being a troublemaker.

As adults, sadly, many often continue their infant ways, except they use more manipulative, and shrewd methods to get attention. However, if you learn to see past the sarcasm, attitude, anger, and control tactics, you’ll see another human being looking for someone to care about them.

The same holds true with megalomaniacs. You know — the type who wants the world to revolve around them.

They are the leaders who fire people for having an opinion contrary to their own, and they are the ones who promote those in the organization who regularly stroke their egos.

Here is the secret of a megalomaniac: They are insecure, unfulfilled, and living a life based on checking off the boxes to validate themselves. They are disconnected from authenticity, and too scared to be vulnerable.

Eventually, this individual, if fortunate enough, will experience a major failure that will awaken their humanity and dignity for others, opening their hearts to being real and genuine. I know this person well because I was one.

Most of us are simply trying to have a better life, we are neither megalomaniac nor victims. One thing we can be sure of is that self-awareness is a key component to become better people, and leaders.

“Becoming a better leader starts with how we lead our own lives and how we perceive reality.”

Own Your Experience

When things get difficult, for example, it’s easy to have the tendency to feel sorry for ourselves, and to feel as though we are victims.

These feelings don’t serve us, because they are designed to keep us from not only finding, but even bothering to look for what is needed for us to take responsibility to overcome our challenges.

We are responsible for what we choose to experience. We choose the feelings we experience, and we decide upon the goals we choose to achieve.

Everything that seems to happen to us is created by us, including the people we choose to surround ourselves with, which contribute or take away from our success.

“Our actions impact the kind of life we experience and the type of leader we become.”

What You Emanate Is What You Experience

When you perform a positive action, you receive a gift immediately because what you bestow onto others will be your immediate reality and what you experience.

Every action causes a reaction. Give, share, care, and you cause similar reactions in your own life — what you wish for others will channel through you.

“The practice of caring for others is the most powerful way to enhance your own life.”

Gratitude Attracts All the Goodness of Life

Gratitude can help in altering a bad mood. Just by appreciating your health, talents, children, or simply a beautiful object, you begin to want to emanate happiness and care, rather than fear.

Why is gratitude so important to your success in life, especially as a leader?

We spend hours and countless amounts of money strategizing, planning, and scheming with consultants about how to achieve success, when the most basic formula you must have as your foundation is gratitude.

How do you develop more gratitude?

By emanating it to others, you will experience it. By appreciating your spouse, children, friends, family, co-workers, employees, clients, vendors, and yourself.

“Leading with gratitude is the secret to uncovering truly lasting, fulfilling success.”

Next time an employee does their job, don’t just treat them like that’s what you pay them for; say thank you.

They don’t have to work for you, they could be somewhere else. Your appreciation of their work will increase your employees’ loyalty.

Gratitude will not only make them feel appreciated and motivated to do more for you, but it will create a positive movement everyone in the organization will operate from.

Clients don’t just do business with you because you have the right product or price point; they do business with you because they experience something they value.

“Everyone alive values gratitude.”

It is the single most unifying force in existence that attracts wealth, beauty, and all the goodness life has to offer.

As a leader, you want to be a no problem leader, you want to disrupt the status quo, you want to be organized and manage your time with precision, and you want to inspire teamwork. The unifying principle to all the others is gratitude.

“The one principle of a good leader, above all the others, that is guaranteed to enable everything to flow smoothly and shift an organization forward is gratitude”.

Gratitude Leads to Empathy

According to American psychologist Daniel Goleman, who assisted in popularizing the emotional intelligence idea, empathy is an important quality of emotional intelligence.

An emotionally intelligent leader uses empathy to understand positions, situations, and the feelings of other people. Empathy is also the key ingredient to a more modern approach to design thinking. This quality increases as you develop more self-awareness, and gratitude.

Emotionally intelligent leaders are keen on monitoring employees’ concerns, and well-being. The benefit of empathy is that when employees feel that you care about their feelings and professional challenges, they tend to respect you more and put more effort into what they do.

Gratitude and empathy go hand in hand. The more gratitude you practice the more empathy you develop. The more empathy you practice the more you learn to be grateful.

If you’ve ever been accused of not showing empathy, it might be time to do some self-reflection and see where you are lacking gratitude.

The truth of the matter is that it’s not enough to simply say “I am grateful for this, for that, or the other” the proof of increased gratitude is practiced with the empathy we show others.

“Empathy helps us care for others and gratitude creates the desire to practice empathy.”

The more you practice gratitude by showing empathy, the more authentic human being you become, and ultimately an emotionally intelligent better leader.

The world we live in is home to several species that coexist on a planet that supplies all that we need to thrive. However, the human species has not been so kind to our planet in the recent century, which begs the questions: How can we have a promising future, considering the mess we are currently in?

This is the topic of a recent Society 2045 interview. Society 2045 has an ongoing series of interviews with change-makers seeking to improve the way society works.

Society 2045 is a community of people from around the world seeking to co-discover a vision for the year 2045. The goal is to connect with leaders of emerging communities and movements across society and come together to co-create a better future.

In an interview with Doug Breitbart, a card-carrying member of the New York bar, we discussed developing visions from across the world to building an excellent future for the year 2045. Doug Breitbart is a speaker, musician, transformation consultant, lawyer, and the Co-founder, Principal at Being in Systems LLC, and 2BElemental LLC.

It Starts with You

To be able to envision a better future we must first ask: What does our world look like? What do we want it to look like? Do we want it to be human-centered, founded on plenty, rather than fear and scarcity?

We all desire a future based on love and abundance, with everyone in service to themselves, to each other, and the planet. We wish for everyone to be pulling in the same direction, caring for and in service to the collective.

The ideal future according to Doug cannot be based on scarcity, and competitiveness in addition to artificial self-generated injustices.

“A better future starts with our personal mindset and the intimate relationship we have with our surroundings, founded on respect and love.”

The Vision

Every fundamentalist believes that their well is the only one with water. But unfortunately, they also feel that everyone else’s well has poison. According to Doug the problem is figuring out how to accept the entire river, which results from how we work on integrated consciousness.

We understand how to merge consciousness. It’s only that each group is attempting to mix awareness for themselves rather than for the totality of the entire ecosystem.

The Current Scenario

Most of us understand that everything will be measured at some point, but Doug believes it is less understood how this will make us less free. For the last century or two, we’ve been moving toward a society in which we incur rising expenses due to other people’s actions.

People, and organizations need to stop and ask themselves: What are we in service to do, and what needs are we attempting to fill? Are we generating one value at the price of another, implying that it is extractive or destructive?

The Main Course

Doug describes how he and his colleagues have a wide range of product offers spread among three separate corporations, two of which share the same concepts. These were deliberately crafted to bridge the gap between their aims and how the business world wants to feel when they purchase advisory services.

As a result, they’ve built a lot of bridges. For example, the foundation of the value provides a service known as a values audit. During the contracting phase is when the transforming power begins. They have an extremely high bar for clients to clear, in order to work with them, with all kinds of rules and conditions that are meant to safeguard the internal staff.

The Problem

When you remove the traditional hierarchy-based leadership within organizations, you also remove the command and control authority. What you end up with is a shared-authority model that significantly adds value because it has become the nervous system for supporting, monitoring, and assisting the flow through the company by being in between all the moving and living pieces.

“Too many decisions hinge on a few people in charge, rather than a collective consciousness of the wisdom that comes from a multitude of people.”

The Solution

In a shared authority-based society all the artificial and self-created scarcity and inequity are gone. It becomes an all of us or none of us mindset sharing one planet which we collectively take care of.

We end up with a healthy regenerative planet to spark a global awakening that reconnects people to their humanity. When we approach everything in life with awareness, we may make a difference as a society by becoming more sensitive to each other’s differences, needs, goals, and human faults.

Doug’s vision for a positive human-centric tomorrow is groundbreaking. It will be amazing if we can achieve his vision in the coming years. Check out the interview here: