Typically when we think of self-improvement there are three main buckets: Body, Mind, and Spirit. You could also add a fourth bucket of Economics. Every bucket also contains subcategories. For instance, Economics would include things like occupation, debt/savings, investments, etc. Each of these buckets and their subcategories creates potential for brands to build strong relationships with their end-user by helping them grow in the areas that fit with their core brand.

Like friends, brands will most likely ping on multiple buckets and subcategories. Take Nike for example, they clearly deliver products that encourage people to exercise and reach personal health goals. In doing so, they also help people reach new heights mentally – “Just do it” – encourages your mental toughness and discipline.

Innovation is a good judge of how truly dedicated a brand is to improving the lives of its end-users. Transparency has been a strong buzzword, pushing companies to be open and honest. A company’s innovation pipeline shows where they are putting their money. Are they just making claims or are they actually trying to deliver solutions that better the life of the consumer?

For brands, there are a few main reasons why they need to start thinking like a best friend. First, it is getting harder and harder to compete on technology. The rate at which technology advances is increasing at an astonishing pace, which means it is also becoming less expensive and more accessible to other brands. Secondly, consumers are demanding transparency out of their brands and their access to information allows them to check the brand’s honesty.

By focusing on building relationships through innovation brands can deliver long-term growth opportunities. Over the next few posts we’ll look at those four main buckets (Body, Mind, Spirit, Economic), their subcategories, and what it means to brands.

Sitting in church last Sunday I started to think about how many times the Bible talks about the importance of fearing God, but also the peace that God brings. Fear and peace seem to be polar opposites at first, but putting it in a business perspective helps to make sense of it all.

In business and your career there are times when you have to take a risk – either by choice or by force you have to jump off the ledge. Should you change jobs? Which direction should you steer your company? Are you willing to take a chance and recommend a product line that goes beyond incremental changes? If so, are you willing to bet your career on it? For many people that kind of risk is a scary thing. Change can be daunting even when its welcome change.

God can be pretty intimidating as well. He’s so far beyond us and is always asking us to take chances on Him so that we can grow. This can create fear, but this is also where peace comes in. Even when our backs are against the wall and there is no way out except to take it on the chin He provides love through trust and hope – and that in turn creates peace.

When making a decision about your career or company, it is important to first do your homework. Do it rigorously. Eventually you’ll still have to jump off that ledge and take a risk, but you can find peace in knowing you made your decision from a sound place.

The balance of fear and peace is a dynamic one, but the discomfort it causes only makes the reward that much better.

Stage-Gate is a wonderfully linear process and works just like it sounds – there are stages followed by gates where progress is assessed before moving on. Some of the benefits of this process is that it can be extremely efficient, is easy to apply, and is a process that most people feel comfortable in because of its linear progression. It’s Achilles heal is that because of it’s linear format, the outcome is only as good as the inputs at the very beginning. So in order to have a highly successful outcome from the Stage-Gate process you need to make sure you have all your inputs correct before you start.

The Design Thinking process is much different. This process typically includes seven steps: 1. Define, 2. Research, 3. Ideation, 4. Prototype, 5. Objectives, 6. Implement, 7. Learn. We won’t get in to the nuts and bolts of each step in this post, but the key take-away is that this process is mostly based on flexing between convergence and divergence to refine your innovation efforts and the seven steps provide a structure. The balance between divergence and convergence is like a camera zooming in and zooming out. This allows us to revisit or bring in new insights as we move through the seven steps – much different from Stage-Gate. The downfall to this process is that it can make people uncomfortable as we zoom in and zoom out, moving between divergence and convergence. The upside is that your outcome has a higher chance of creating solutions that are more in tune with your target segment and make a bigger impact in the market.

WHEN TO USE WHICH

Let’s start with Design Thinking. Because of its dynamic nature Design Thinking is your best option when trying to target new growth opportunities, new breakthrough innovations (think iTunes and iPods). It can also be incredibly effective when creating your overall innovation strategy as it will paint the vision for your organization and help you see how to get there.

Stage-Gate is best to use when trying to achieve incremental innovation; you’re not trying to invent the next big market, but simply trying to get some more mileage out of your current portfolio (think line extensions).

Stage-Gate can make a nice follow-up to Design Thinking. Design Thinking  helps you create an overall innovation strategy, cultivates new places to play, and helps you understand how to win. It’s the pioneer, the Lewis and Clark of innovation. Once the map has been developed and a road has been set, Stage-Gate is a nice way to pave that road so you can get the most out of it until it’s time to explore new places to play and how to win. Both methods have a place and a purpose and can be pretty magical companions when used in harmony.

“So let us come boldly to the throne of God” (Hebrews 4:16) – And that’s exactly what Henry Ford did! Well, I don’t know about the “throne of God” part, but he did come boldly. In his autobiography, “My Life and Work,” he describes his conviction for reducing people’s workload so that they could spend more time enjoying nature, friends, and family. Of course this eventually led him to the automobile. While our convictions may be refined as we gain experiences, time spent understanding them can produce success in our careers and in business. An important part to cultivating your convictions is to align your business and personal life convictions.

Matching your business and personal life convictions helps you be bold. No one wants to hear a Braveheart speech every Tuesday morning, but having an opinion goes a long way. Basing those opinions out of your convictions gives you a sound position and helps you stick out from the crowd in a positive way, hopefully.

Spending time cultivating those convictions is an investment in your career and personal life that will pay off. In business school we were tasked with writing down everything we could remember about our lives from day one. As I wrote down memory after memory I started to see patterns and themes emerge. These themes helped me better understand what my convictions are. Think back on your life, what do you see come up consistently? Do you notice repeated drivers in your life or actions that you are naturally drawn to?

Returning to Henry Ford, his conviction for reducing workloads so people can have more time to enjoy life was combined with his passion for mechanics. As a result, Ford achieved personal satisfaction in his work, which, to me, is more notable than the history that is filed under his name. Aligning your life  and business convictions can help you gain satisfaction in your work and a point of differentiation within your field.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). But you have to know what to ask for, what to seek, and when you knock on that door – knock hard!

Earlier this year I was able interview a head designer for a locally-based furniture manufacturer. He talked about timeless truths and how technology and design can help us interact with those truths in new ways.

He gave an example regarding sunsets. Whether it was 100 years ago or 100 years from now, people will still find sunsets beautiful. That is the inherent truth. A healthy mix of design and technology can alter the way people interact with a sunset, hopefully for the better. The same thinking applies to businesses. The consistent differentiators for companies, whether it was 100 years ago or 100 years from now, will be their relationship with the consumer.

Everyone likes to go to the business where everybody knows their name (play Cheers theme song). People like brands that they can get behind and identify with. Thanks to the rapid advancement of technology even global companies are able to interact with their consumers on a personal level. My favorite example of this is what Ford is doing with social media.

Scott Monty, Ford’s social media guru, has changed the way Ford is connecting with their consumers and potential buyers on a personal level — giving a global giant the feel of a mom-n’-pop shop. CEO Alan Mullaly has been known to hold conversations via Twitter and has even made personal phone calls to potential Average Joe buyers. Ford has used technology to open up honest and frank two-way communication with the public. The company has also used human-centered research to enhance their vehicle designs.

By opening the brand up for more meaningful relationships backed by well-designed products it has differentiated itself from the rest of the pack.

The Fiesta Movement campaign

Thinking is natural, we all think (probably debatable). We’ll hear something on the news and say, “Oh how terrible” or “What they should do is…”. But often times those are knee jerk responses. We generally do not take a lot of time to examine the information we receive from multiple angles. We don’t think about how one event connects with another that may at first seem completely separate and how/what that might effect. There’s a deeper level of contemplation that takes time we do not regularly have. The more connected we are with cell phones, entertainment and news; the less time we have for heavy thinking. Let’s take walking for example.

Long, long ago when people went for walks the only thing they would hear would be the people and nature around them. Other than that, they were left to their thoughts. Then came things like the Walkman and portable CD players, MP3 players, and now phones that play TV shows and movies. Granted, some of these things can inspire creative thinking, but a lot of it simply makes time go by faster by turning our brains off.

I’m not sure about this. I know some bits of information or entertainment have served as great catalysts for creative thinking, but the speed of life and to be inundated with information makes me think we could be loosing something. But no worries, I’m sure Apple will invent something to help us organize and analyze all the information we absorb in a meaningful way – and I can’t wait to buy it!

The first strand is about your personal identity. It’s the age-old question, “Who am I?” I’m sure it can be argued that we are on a lifelong journey to answer that question and perhaps never get there. But I think it’s safe to say we find bits and pieces of ourselves along the way. Perhaps the most important thing is to be honest about your journey; your failures, your successes, your likes, your dislikes.

This relates to design, because I think, I’m not sure, but I think that in order to be a good designer you have to have some sort of honesty about your identity. What are you curious about? What are you passionate about? What are your beliefs and values? What do you have absolutely no experience in? How were you raised?

Whether you are designing anything as a statement of yourself or if designing for an outside company, identity is the filter all of your observations pass through. If you are not honest about your identity, then you will not be able to see the project you are working on holistically. Again, this does not mean that you have to have a concrete understanding of who you are, but simply be honest about what you understand and don’t understand about yourself.

The second strand, which I guess I’ll call reflection identity, has to do with the identity of companies (or other people). There is so much I’ve learned about myself through the comments of others. “Jake, you’re balding,” a reality I was blind to for much longer than I probably should have been. Sometimes we can identify characteristics in others that they may not see themselves.

When designing for a company, it’s important that their true identity and their perception of their identity are kept in mind. It is also important that designers be a pure reflection to those companies and point out the gaps between who they are and who they think they are. This is not to be cruel, but it is to help that company align itself with its own core beliefs as well as identify opportunities.

Those are the two strands of identity within design, self-identity and reflection-identity. I’m really starting to believe identity should be a treasure hunt for so many designers, both for themselves and the companies they serve.

Just as many people as a buzzword can excite, it can turn away. It can also imply a certain level of loftiness and that you need an “expert” to carry out all that the buzzword means. Buzzwords are known for being short lived as well. There are varying degrees of truth to all of these statements, but when it comes to the word “design” or “design thinking” many of these stereotypes should be broken down.

So what is “design thinking”? There are people who have developed a lifetime to developing this and I have only taken a few classes, but in its simplest form I believe “design thinking” is merely an approach to problem solving. What makes it different is the method used to solve a problem. The biggest difference in the method is the emphasis on keeping the end user in mind; keeping it human

Sometimes research has a habit of taking the human perspective out of the statistics. It’s the story of qualitative research versus quantitative. Both are equally important, but one method alone rarely solves a problem holistically. The key to “design thinking” or being “human-centered” is empathy. Have you really put yourself in the shoes of the end-user? Often times by changing our perspectives we see problems in new ways that open doors to incredible solutions.

My favorite example of this solving a problem with “design thinking” comes out of Whirpool’s Duet washer and dryer. Whirlpool made the effort to keep the end user in mind when conducting its research and started doing home studies. The purpose of the home study was to see how people used their washers and dryers. If they would have simply done a focus group or sent out a survey they would have gotten some great feedback that would have led to some great improvements. If you ask someone how they like their washer they’ll say great and maybe have a few complaints, but there is so much that is not being said. By going in and observing how people use washers and dryers Whirpool was able to create game-changing innovations.

Two easy examples came out of Whirlpool’s study. First, most people were not purchasing washers and dryers together. Every washer and dryer was white and they all pretty much looked the same. Not much excitement. By making these new washers and dryers in different colors, people were now buying them in sets. The other great innovation that came out of observation was the pedestal. During a home study the user had her dryer stacked up on a few palettes so she didn’t have to bend down every time she changed a load.

Here’s a link to a case study done by Design West Michigan that describes the Whirlpool journey much better: http://www.designwestmichigan.com/video.cfm

Now here is where we demystify “design thinking” — you already do it. Every person on a day-to-day basis is asked to step into someone else’s shoes. We are taught empathy from birth. It is innate in us. It’s why we cry at sad movies or instinctively reach out to steady a stumbling person. We’ve been taught how to use the tool of empathy to resolve relational conflicts, but seldom do we use it to solve problems in business and even rarer is using empathy to create innovations for our company.

For one reason or another we have been taught to put empathy down when we pick up our coffee and go to work.

As “design” and “design thinking” become more of a buzzword tagged with “innovation” we think a specialist is the only person who can do such a thing as design. It’s true that some are more empathetic than others and if you train yourself to think the way a designer does, you will probably be better at this approach than another. Personally, I am terrible with colors and can hardly match my clothe in the morning. If I have a problem that involves colors and graphics it’s probably best left up to a graphic designer. That said, everyone is a designer; but not every business.

In my day job as a reporter I have been working on a few different stories that look at upcoming trends in technology as well as another story on a new era of political marketing. The two cars of politics and technology along with the school bus of design in sustainability have finally collided in my brain causing my eye to twitch as well as a loss of voice control. But it also brought up an interesting question, what does the politician of tomorrow look like and how will the government operate?

Traditionally, politics trail business in terms of innovation. With the Obama campaign we saw a huge jump for politics in campaign methods. Those methods are now being picked up and adopted by politicians on local levels and design firms are helping them attack this new approach. While design is starting to play an important role with how politicians conduct campaigns, I wonder when design will influence the way politicians operate in office?

You would be hard pressed to find a taxpaying citizen who doesn’t have at least one complaint about the way government operates. This tells us that there is definitely room for innovation and design can help with that.

Most people think of design as a way to create pretty packaging, products or messages; but exploring the world through the lens of design can also open up new ways to look at systems. By bringing a human-centered approach to research we can begin to understand where some of the breakdowns with our political system are. No doubt we definitely need the highly valued statistical research we are so used to, but what is the story behind those numbers and how can we improve on them?

What better way to end an idealistic article with a “what if”: What if we examined how business and people interact with the government system and how government interacts with itself? While surveys and focus groups are great, can we also add heavy observation and interviews? What kinds of gaps would we discover and how could we design a better system to address those gaps?

Here’s a great link to a case study on the topic done by the U.K. Design Council:

http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/Case-Studies/All-Case-Studies/Design-your-MP/

More recently, the TBL has gained a fourth arm — “cultural vitality” (AIGA: http://bit.ly/bXYRzj ). This fourth arm has caused a renaming of the Triple Bottom Line to yep, you guessed it, the Quadruple Bottom Line.

The significance of adding cultural vitality is to value the role a culture plays in bringing to life the other three aspects of sustainability.