A thoroughly researched, effectively communicated persona can change the culture of an organization. Without that persona, all the other design assets are just a bunch of pretty pictures.

Designers product journey maps because executives love them and are willing to pay for them. Not because they are the best tool for the situation.

The global supply chain is the result of an evolution toward profit. The global supply chain was not intentionally designed, and its evolution did not consider the impact on humanity. It evolved as a mechanism for exploiting savings, and, as with any evolution, evolving to select for one factor results in a brittle system.

Strategy is quite often a lie because the necessary work is not done.

Modern organizations operate on two principles of digital transformation:

1. Everything that could be made to connect to the internet (including both products and services) should be connected to the internet.

2. All accessible data may prove useful/valuable and should be collected and stored.

There appears to be little debate about the negative consequences of these two principles. They are assumed to be beyond refute.

Organizations forget there is a third principle of digital transformation:

Everything can, and eventually will, be hacked.

While the current era is not as unprecedented as the media likes to (hyperbolically) claim, what comes next is difficult if not impossible to predict. What happens when trust in the system breaks down completely? When people no longer trust companies, governments, institutional religions?

The concept of a renaissance education with a background in science, mathematics, history, art, sociology, and biology has been replaced by a focus on the micro, a hyper specialization on one facet of a segment of a component. In this environment, is it any wonder that our actions result in avalanches of unintented and deleterious consequences?

Organizations will no longer be able to escape the negative repercussion of a North American, western geo-centric mindset.

In the future, it may be that all products come with a repair kit and instructions for not just making a repair, but for beautifying the repair, thereby increasing the value of the original item by highlighting the item’s age and use

Many of the problems I work on with well-established organizations stem from the use of off-the-shelf models. The organization adopts a model that worked elsewhere. They evolve the organization to fit the model. It is almost always a bad fit that limits the organization.