“They need to be agile, creative problem solvers who draw their knowledge from multiple perspectives both domestic and global, who approach the world with empathy, and who are ready to act with others to improve the quality of life for all.

“Another name for these graduates is democratic citizens.”
A National Call for Action: A Crucible Moment

National Association of Colleges and Employers: Ranked List of Important Candidate Skills and Qualities

1. Ability to work in a team structure
2. Ability to verbally communicate with persons inside and outside the organization
3. Ability to make decisions and solve problems
4. Ability to obtain and process information
5. Ability to plan, organize, and prioritize work
6. Ability to analyze quantitative data
7. Technical knowledge related to the job
8. Proficiency with computer software programs
9. Ability to create and/or edit written reports
10. Ability to sell or influence others

Job Outlook 2012 Survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (the full report, unfortunately is almost $50 for non-members)

“I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the conditions, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.”
Thomas Jefferson to Cornelius Camden Blatchly 1822

I have to credit Ken O’Donnell for assembling the above quotes (the cited material from the talk is available on Google docs if you click the link on his About page.

According to one IBM report, today more than 70 percent of the U.S. labor force is engaged in service delivery. New technology has enabled internationally tradable services. We are at a tipping point. A huge portion of the economy is now focused on knowledge-based information services. I believe that as we shift to this service-centered society, it won’t be good enough to view services from a purely management or operations-based perspective. Companies will need to turn to service design and innovation to differentiate themselves in increasingly competitive markets and to create opportunities that address new challenges in the service sector.

How is designing a service different than designing a product?

When designing a product, much of the focus is on mediating the interaction between the person and the artifact. Great product designers consider more of the context in their design. In service design, designers must create resources that connect people to people, people to machines, and machines to machines. You must consider the environment, the channel, the touchpoint. Designing for service becomes a systems problem and often even a system of systems challenge. The elements or resources that designers need to create to mediate the interactions must work on all these levels and at the same time facilitate connections that are deeply personal, open to participation and change, and drop-dead stunning.

(link)

Shelly Everson, School of Design @ Carnegie Mellon University

Core concepts of design thinking in the health care context:
Understanding
Integration
Openness
Attention
Exploration
Envisioning
-Shelly Everson, School of Design @ Carnegie Mellon University

Explanation of design thinking concepts as applied to health care services:
Understanding (in the small and large) a focus on deeply understanding people’s expressed and latent needs viewed in the context of broader social, economic, and technical trends.
Integration the ability to organize and integrate disparate information into something many stakeholders–with different viewpoints–believe is better.
Openness fearless with regard to listening to another person
or learning from another discipline or division’s perspective
Attention respect for emotion and its importance in driving rational choice and satisfaction.
Exploration letting creative extremes take you into ever richer solutions spaces.
Envisioning leaps of faith as to what might work and creating quick, tangible examples of it,
while being unafraid to discard design options along the way.
-Shelly Everson, School of Design @ Carnegie Mellon University

3 Big Needs:
New methods for modeling customer experience.
New models for skilling everyday people to become active participants in their care.
Innovative prototyping for exploring new healthcare service delivery systems
-Shelly Everson, School of Design @ Carnegie Mellon University

You can learn more about design thinking in the medical context at the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation here.

Finding out and learning
Learning about clients, contexts, the service provider, & providing insights.

Giving strategic direction
Strategic and analytic tasks the that help identify, plan, set, review, & analyze and give project direction.

Developing concepts
Developing relevant, innovative ideas and concepts. Creating solutions

Selecting the best
Selecting ideas and combining concepts. Evaluating results and solutions.

Enabling understanding
Sensualization and mapping. Making concepts tangible, showing future possibilities, and giving overview.

Making it happen
Implementing and delivery. Providing guidelines and plans.

Based on Practical Access to Service Design

Selected Bibliography for Design Thinking in Management from Richard Buchanan & Fred Collopy

Readings will be assigned from time to time and distributed in class or placed on the class Blackboard site.
The following books are recommended for your study during and after the course. Life is long. Learn to read widely.

Matteson, Michael T. & John M. Ivancevich, eds. Management and Organizational Behavior Classics.
Shafritz, Jay M. & J. Steven Ott, eds. Classics of Organization Theory. Natemeyer, Walter E. & Jay S. Gilberg, eds. Classics of Organizational Behavior.
Design, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation
Boland, Richard J. & Fred Collopy, eds. Managing as Designing.
Buchanan, Richard & Victor Margolin, eds. Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies.
Diller, Steve, Nathan Shedroff, & Darrel Rhea. Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences.
Drucker, Peter F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Martin, Roger, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive
Advantage. Pine, B. Joseph & James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theater & Every

Business a Stage.
Schon, Donald A., The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action.
Verganti, Roberto, Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean.
Management & Organization Theory Drucker, Peter F. The Practice of Management. ________. Concept of the Corporation. George, Claude S. The History of Management Thought. [Excellent brief history]
March, James & Herbert Simon. Organizations.
Senge, Peter M., The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.
Wren, Daniel A. The History of Management Thought. [More detailed and sophissticated than Claude S. George’s history, but also more academic and theoretic in emphasis, minimizing some practically important figures.]
Economics Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.

Visualization
Buxton, Bill. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design.
Harris, Robert L. Information Graphics: Visual Tools for Analyzing, Managing, and Communicating: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference.
Horn, Robert E. Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century. Hyerle, David. Visual Tools for Constructing Knowledge. [Useful overview of tools] Novak, Joseph D. & D. Bob Gowin. Learning How to Learn. [Highly recommended]
General Themes Whitbeck, Caroline. Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research.

You can find the rest of the syllabuses here from the re-thinking the MBA book from the Harvard Business School (Buchanan also sees design entrepreneurship as important in addition to design as management or vice versa).

1. Dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth.

2. Neither grants nor markets alone will solve the problems of poverty.

3. Poverty is a description of someone’s economic situation, it does not describe who someone is.

4. We won’t succeed in the long term without cultivating local leaders, local money, and strong local communities.

5. Great people, every time, no exceptions.

6. Great technology alone is not the answer.

7. If failing is not an option, you’ve ruled out success as well.

8. Governments rarely invent solutions, but they can scale what works.

9. There is no currency like trust, and there are no shortcuts to earning it.

10. Patient capital investing is built upon a system of values; it is not a series of steps to be followed.

You can read the full report here which explains her methodology and philosophy for BOP social change. [Note: its a PDF download]

1. the people
2. the community
3. the methodology & systems
4. results

How do you best check how you are investing in these areas?

Credibility of Organization:
Do I know the person running or working at the organization? How long have I known the person? *
Have I seen and heard the stories of real people effected by their programs?
Impact Evaluation & Data Transparency for Results:
Can they track results? Do they track results?
Are they transparent about results?
Can they provide data input & output (ie effectiveness and/or impact evaluation)?
Do they have a track record of success?
Are they a high impact organization? Is there a big ripple effect?
Goals, Objectives & Personal Sync:
Do I have multiple goals for my investment?

There may be better ways to evaluate organization….but I though these questions could be focused into 3 to 4 core questions for each individual–and provide a credible and effective criteria for impact investment in non-profit organizations. I hope this list can help you provide a criteria to increase the impact of your investments. I’ve also included this article on evaluating nonprofit organizations which I published earlier on Compassion in Politics.

* This is not to discourage investment in overseas organization–but just to think through those decisions to ensure you are working with a credible organization. I primarily am interested in avoiding political orgs/non-profit orgs that are basically sales letter driven but can’t effectively demonstrate impact, transparency, data, or credibility.

“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
— Stephen Fry

1. Influence versus control distinction lost on scientists. This distinction is important (and much of the neuroscience and philosophical theory from determinists around free will likely can’t tell the full scope of the nuance). Further, to suggest that Da Vinci, Einstein, Bach, Lincoln, and the rest of the heros of history are just molecules bouncing around and don’t have meaningful selves….seems to belie both history and fundamental notions of rationality and common sense.
2. Burden of proof on the scientists or philosophers who suggest we are 100% determined, with no meaningful free choice or agency. How much 10%, 25, 50, 75, 85, 95, 100% influenced/controlled by external forces? (how many types of human behavior can we predict? how credible or reliable are those predictions?)
3. Question begging–science isn’t meant to find agency (this is huge–aka the data don’t prove anything about agency)
4. Not mutual exclusive to have atoms bouncing around and for those same atoms to have free will. Like seeing a ship and assuming things about the engine room or the captains chambers without seeing, hearing, and feeling the experience first hand.
5. Determinism destroys ethics and personal responsibility. This is not only meaningful for our notions of retribution and punishment, but also our internal capacity to deal with the world. Without a system of punishment and reward–and one thats “worked” for 2000+ years–we’re left with cultural, social, and personal anarchy.
6. Your studies are flawed. Ask Alfred Mele. And there are many models of human behavior short of absolute determinism (chart here, which emphasizes a high burden of proof for absolute determinists).
7. Your conclusions are flawed. They fit the data like bad suits. The map doesn’t fit the territory (also see #1 and #3). If anything they prove that the universe works in a cause and effect way. Also Thomas Kuhn in the “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” answers your argument (its sometimes difficult for 2 worldview modes to dialog).
8. Quantum mechanics answers your misguided neurobiology arguments.
9. Performative contradiction. The act of science is an act of free will.
10. Determinism is a no-win solution. Free will is just better. You have to act like free will exists–its best for action, sanity, purpose, meaning, ethics, and everything human. Humans without prioritization and meaning can’t function (its almost humans without math).
11. Determinism is non-falsifiable. (similar to are we in a dream….as such its not a productive discussion. Or for instance, you could use the allegory of the fish in a stream and have the fish project what they think is outside the stream. this mirrors the boat metaphor ).
12. Motivational & Biases [worldview bias]:
a. money
b. control
c. media and book sales
d. publish or perish
e. agnosticism, atheism, or need to prove the lack of a self or a soul.
13. You give too much credit to science and underestimate the ability of other disciplines to create knowledge. This unicausal framework (particularly when wedded with the bad suit metaphor) isn’t a good way to try to address the most important questions–of human value and sacredness. Plus its toolbox is limited. Would you use a woodworkers tools to attempt to perform mental health or medical health? Generally, in 99% of cases thats probably a bad idea (nails, hammers, and screwdrivers aren’t appropriate or even optimal for solving these problems–and at a bare minimum any solution would come from a fusion of ideas and knowledge–not just carpenter knowledge. My guess is many engineers profit from expanding their wings beyond just the sciences for knowledge, insight, and perspective.)
14. Personal experience verifies the self and choice. The contrast between choice and control and addiction is rather distinct. Disregarding this experience based data is a terrible error, because its the most verifiable. (the feeling and experience of free will is ethically important. and we understand ourselves as selfs. whether you can chart that out like a chemistry chart doesn’t deny that we are selves, and meaningfully so)
15. Brain mapping & fMRI studies are imperfect and flawed (fMRI stands for functional magnetic imaging).
a) Measures indirectly–oxygenation flow–not the actual brain firings:

fMRI is a decidedly indirect measure of brain activity, as it does not measure “thinking” processes or even neural changes directly, but merely oxygenated blood flow. Scientists have even discovered that blood flow through astrocytes, glial cells that are thought to play a largely supportive role in the brain, are the main source of the fMRI signal, not neurons. In other words, the BOLD signal may not be the unquestionably valid representation of cognitive processes that researchers sometimes claim it is.

(Source).
b) Suffer from circular logic:

The problem arises when researchers then go on to provide their readers with a quantitative measure of the correlation magnitude measured just within the voxels they have pre-selected for having a high correlation. This two-step procedure is circular: it chooses voxels that have a high correlation, and then estimates a high average correlation. This practice inflates the correlation measurement because it selects those voxels that have benefited from chance, as well as any real underlying correlation, pushing up the numbers.

(Jonah Lehrer in Scientific American from the article “Voo Doo Correlations in Neuroscience” available here–to be fair the truth may lie a bit in between)
c) For instance, the fMRI data doesn’t meet lie detection standards yet:

Elizabeth Phelps, a neuroscientist at New York University, agreed there is little evidence that fMRI is more reliable than previous lie-detection methods.
“When you build a model based on people in the laboratory, it may or may not be that applicable to someone who has practiced their lie over and over, or someone who has been accused of something,” Phelps said. “I don’t think that we have any standard of evidence that this data is going to be reliable in the way that the courts should be admitting.”

(Link)
d) Its application to criminal justice may be more hype than not (particularly with current crude science in its early stages) (link):

Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather he determines himself whether he give in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Therefore, we can predict his future only within the large framework of statistical survey referring to a whole group; the individual personality, however, remains unpredictable. The basis of any prediction would be represented by biological, psychological, or sociological conditions. Yet one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.
What he becomes–within the limits of endowment and environment–he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.

Victor Frankl, Professor in Neurology and Psychology
Using life experience, including living in 4 concentration camps as his evidence
Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 131 to 134

“Philosophers play with the word like a child with a doll…It does not mean that everything in life is relative.”

Stanford professors Chip and Dan Heath point out in Switch:

“In fact, its actual meaning was essentially the opposite. The theory was designed to explain how the laws of physics are identical in every frame of reference. From Einstein’s view, things’ don’t look unpredictable; they look surprisingly orderly.”

*David Bodanis, E=Mc 2 A Biography of the Worlds Most Famous Equation

Science is not philosophy. I have no problem generally with Lisa Randall’s explanations concerning the state of knowledge in the field of physics today. It is her field of expertise. I have no problem with her claim that empirical science is about the material universe. My problem is with her jump into the area of philosophy or as R.G. Collingwood put it: the field of absolute presuppositions.

Proposition: The material universe is all there is to reality. That is a metaphysical presupposition not a scientific question. Science cannot resolve it.It is true that empirical scientific knowledge is restricted to conclusions that are dependent on sensible consequences. Scientific explanations are ruled by the canons of parsimony and sensible consequences. But if there are realities that do not produce sensible consequences, then they elude empirical scientific knowledge. Empirical science is restricted to first level questions and cannot deal with second level issues like What constitutes scientific knowledge? In what sense does it attain the real?

Proposition: Science can refute the objection of reductionism by appealing to “scales” of explanations. The problem the criticism of reductionism makes explicit is the philosophical problem of what constitutes a THING which in turn is about different viewpoints not just different “sizes.” For example are the things physics investigates and explains the same things that biology investigates and explains? While living things are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, the laws of biology are not reducible to more complicated laws of physics or chemistry because the sciences are determined by the viewpoint that they take on THINGS. A thing is a unity identity whole understood from a determinate point of view and is accessed through judgments based on evidence appropriate to the viewpoint of the science.

Proposition: Science and religion are opposed in principle. Is it true and in what sense? A philosophical question not a scientific one. When science is set up as the ultimate criteria of all knowledge, science becomes scientism, an ideology. Ideologies are forms of dogmatism. Science cannot answer questions concerning the existence or nature of God. They are philosophical or theological questions. For example if God is transcendent to the universe that does not imply God is external to it. External/Internal are not categories applicable to a Being that creates reality out of nothing and holds it in existence every moment. That proposition can be rejected as untrue because it lacks empirical evidence, but the quest for appropriate evidence cannot be explained by science without the explanation falling into a vicious circle or the fallacy of begging the question. If there is a transcendent being who accounts for why there is something rather than nothing or the mystery of existence and if such a being is said to be a cause, then its causality would transcend space and time. Does the universe depend for it’s existence on something beyond itself? Or is it ultimately unintelligible? That is not an argument from design which presupposes an intermundane version of causality. Why do human beings seek explanations if ultimately existence is no different than nothing and order is no different than chaos or total randomness? These are philosophical questions not scientific ones.

Proposition: Lisa Randall is a brilliant professor of physics who should stay within her expertise.
Granted. Her reference to scientists who are naive fundamentalists prove nothing concerning the conflict of science and religion. What makes humans religious is the fact that we cannot avoid the question of ultimacy: Is human existence a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing ultimately. If the answer is YES, then the atheist is taking a religious position.

In his biography of another great physicist Walter Isaacson’s description of Albert Einstein’s cosmic religion captures something of the assumptions of the first philosophers: “A spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble,” Einstein wrote. “In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe. This is the defining quality of a “God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.” Einstein considered this feeling of reverence, this cosmic religion, to be the wellspring of all true art and science. It was what guided him. “When I am judging a theory,” he said, “I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such away.” It is also what graced him with his beautiful mix of confidence and awe..”

This occurs at 3 levels:
Top = Vision
Middle = Strategy
Bottom = Execution

* They are all potentially relative to your competitive set or marketplace.

You can watch the full video here. Here is the short version of the video of Geoffry Moores talk at the Stanford Business School. (6 minutes versus 60 minutes)