Communicating The New: Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation

1

Finding the conceptual center

MODELS AND FRAMEWORKS

BUILD-TO-THINK PROTOTYPES

LISTS AND OPEN-ENDED WRITING

OBJECTIVES AT THIS STAGE:

Externalize thinking.

Achieve clarity around what's known, what's desired, and what's proposed.

Build alignment and shared meaning among team members.

We have a condition, when creating The New, of needing to process the mess of inputs we have gathered. We have quantitative data, qualitative data, industry reports, trend reports, rumors, stories, our own experiences. We've read it all. We may have lived it through direct experience with users and their lives. Now we must make sense of the soup. And we must make meaning from it. How do we decide which of all the things we have lived, read, and seen really matter most to the challenge at hand?

HOW TO “KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW”

Neuroscientists tell us 95 percent of brain activity is unconscious. For the sake of argument, let's say most of that activity is not worth conscious thought—digestion, walking, and cell division likely work better without our input. But while our brain's ability to operate and store information unconsciously makes us efficient, it may also be a problem: What if we need some of that 95 percent? What if some of what we have sublimated is important to the challenge at hand? An important first step in creating The New is finding a way to surface and organize the massive number of inputs our brains have so efficiently and automatically stored. We need to make it all top of mind again. ...