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Publications
Linked In Editorial
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We live in the age of distraction. It’s estimated that a knowledge worker on any given day will check their email between 50 to 100 times and be assaulted multiple times per hour by instant messages and application alerts. The cumulative effect is that knowledge workers find it difficult to focus, are increasingly stressed and are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety.
So what would happen to those same knowledge workers if these distractions unexpectedly disappeared for two consecutive days? Earlier this summer, a natural experiment occurred at my New York City office that allowed me to discover first-hand how myself and my colleagues would respond and cope when faced with the absence of modern communication.
Royal Fireworks Press
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A YA Mystery co-authored by mother and son and based on a true story from Dan Seewald's childhood.
The day the strange letter came and everything started was just an ordinary day in Phil's life: he'd gone through the ritual and routine of high school classes, survived the slings and arrows of his indignant, 14-year-old sister, and was awaiting the arrival of his two working parents before closing in on dinner in a bedroom community of Central New Jersey. But the letter from his fifth grade best friend, Robert, who moved away after his mother died, brought with it mystery and a sense of foreboding suspense.
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It was typed, yet carried an urgent tone, asking for a secret meeting. Phil believed it to be bogus, a prank from the guys, even as news of it spread through the school and his friends prodded him to respond to its terms. A second typed letter offered a little more information.
Linked In Editorial
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Innovation has become the single most over-used and difficult to define word in the corporate lexicon. Yet it still remains one of the most important words. When corporate leaders invoke the term innovation, often they are alluding to creative product design, research and development or perhaps emerging technologies.
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And although each of these are important components to a thriving corporate innovation ecosystem, the underlying foundation of innovation must always come back to the organizational culture. Without cultivating the mindset and ethos of an innovation driven organization, everything else merely becomes tactics without a purposeful strategy.
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Innovation Leader Journal
Winter 2017
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I’m a big believer in the benefits of design thinking, but many people get so excited about its potential that they want to take the wheel and set off for adventure before they’re really ready. I want to share with you three measures that can help your organization avoid several little-known design thinking hazards.
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Design thinking, which traces its roots back nearly 50 years, has exploded onto the corporate scene over the past decade and is in use in many Fortune 500 companies. The essence of the design thinking movement is deep understanding of, and empathy with, the customer’s attitudes, behaviors, and unmet needs. By embedding this capability within an organization, businesses become more adept at creating solutions that solve problems and “delight” customers. But the design thinking approach demands that your design thinkers are well versed and trained in the art of questioning, listening, and learning from customers.
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Medical Marketing Media (MM&M)
Fall 2015
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One of the key elements in the innovation program is that innovation teaching and facilitating are led by internally trained facilitators who are distributed across businesses and markets.
While recruiting and training these facilitators were no small feats, the resilience of the program truly rested on the innovation team’s ability to provide ongoing coaching and skill development for our global network of facilitators. And while the ratio of innovation team members to internal innovation facilitators was prohibitively disproportionate, we faced a fundamental challenge in sustaining the skill level of the network and program.
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Borrowing from the insights of coaching, we began to run a couple of small experiments by creating our own Montessori-like system for facilitators. Internally hiring a few full-time facilitators from within our network of facilitators, we began to buddy up our volunteer force of facilitators with the full-time facilitators.
Innovation Leader Journal
Fall 2018
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Modern crowdsourcing relies on software platforms that expand your reach, forming crowds of problem solvers who can perform complex and creative tasks at significantly reduced cost. And while crowdsourcing can certainly be used as a stand-alone solution, such as predicting the weight of your farm animal, its greater value is realized when it is used as a complement to design thinking. In particular, crowdsourcing in advance of a design session can be the difference between a mediocre session and a high-impact one. I like to say that the battle to deliver a great human-centered design session is won or lost before the session is ever conducted.
Over the years, I have found that the most effective ways to incorporate crowdsourcing into my design thinking sessions include:
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Understanding and clarifying the problem
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Spotting previously undetected insights in advance of the session, and
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Generating and evaluating novel ideas to be built upon in the session.
Let’s explore each of these ways that you can use crowdsourcing to augment the work of an innovation team before a workshop even begins.
