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YOU NOW HAVE . . .
YOUR INVESTMENT READINESS LEVEL DEFINED
A CLEAR PICTURE OF YOUR NEXT STEP
NEXT STEPS
GO BACK INTO THE LOOP
Work on the next investment readiness level
SHARE YOUR JOURNEY
Tell us about your journey online
RECAP
DISTRUST KILLS INNOVATION.
ACCELERATORS ARE THE NEW HUNTING GROUND FOR SCALE.
FUTURE LEADERS ARE DESIGNERS.
JUST START!
A CORPORATE SEES RISKS WHERE A STARTUP SEES OPPORTUNITIES.
FOR PEOPLE IN EXECUTION, THE INNOVATION PROCESS SEEMS FUZZY.
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GO BIG OR
GO HOME.
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NEW FUTURES.
NEW COMPANIES.
NEW PEOPLE.
“The world is changing so quickly that by the time new college students graduate, much of what they have learned is far less relevant and in many cases obsolete. This means knowledge and experience are no longer the primary commodity. Instead, what is far more valuable is to have the ability to learn and to apply those learnings into new and unique scenarios.”
// Jacob Morgan, The Future of Work
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Who would have imagined that despite the growth of digital medium by which to communicate, collaborate, connect, and track information, coupling simple tools, like sticky notes and markers, with the skills and mindset of a designer, would enable us to harness uncertainty in order to design better businesses for tomorrow?
Never before has there existed a business environment whereby companies scramble just to keep up with the change around them. And the speed of change is only accelerating. As large companies continue to execute known business models from their past, startups and other design-oriented companies are challenging the status quo. As they do, entire industries are emerging while others are being torn apart.
BEYOND THE DEGREE
For the last couple of centuries, special degrees and business acumen have been the foundations by which large organizations have grown and created new market categories. However, as the Internet continues to provide open and instant access to knowledge – plus a global forum by which to connect – formal qualifications have become less and less important. Even today, there are many that challenge the very notion of obtaining business knowledge through education. In a world where anyone can learn to design, develop, market, and sell a product simply by watching YouTube videos, formal degrees and pedigree are becoming less important. In fact, the tide is already turning: today people with practical design skills are often more sought after than those who possess only business theories.
What’s more, as the world continues to become more connected, people will solve problems and address human ambitions in entirely new ways. And they will do so through collaboration and design. Change will no longer come from the lone genius or the knowledge and experience of the individual, but from the wisdom of the crowd. After all, it’s not about working harder. It’s about working smarter.
THINK AND WORK LIKE A DESIGNER
The new, smarter way of working is that of a designer. Companies that embrace design will learn that growth doesn’t come from pushing back against change or continually reducing costs to increase the margin. Rather, by empowering people to take a human-centered point of view with a strong focus on the customer, smaller teams of people will be able to accomplish so much more.
These companies will uncover huge opportunities in the face of uncertainty. Multitalented teams of designers – the unusual suspects – will create new products and services that improve people’s lives and the bottom line, as well as the planet. The people (designers) creating these changes will value personal interaction more than the desks in the office. They will value quick, cyclical iterations – understanding, ideating, prototyping, validating, and scaling – to monolithic, linear strategies.
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IT ALL
STARTS
WITH YOU.
IT ALL STARTS WITH YOU
The change in your company, your product, service, and mindset starts with you. True change requires that you take the role of the rebel and step outside your comfort zone. You can start small or you can start big. But whatever you do, you must embody the change you want to see in your organization. Only then can change truly happen. 
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Keep searching, learning, and informing your point of view using your new tools, skills, and mindset.
Share your stories about change with us: www.designabetterbusiness.com
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THE MAKING OF A BOOK IN 100 DAYS
Hidden in our “dungeon” for three months in Amsterdam, the making of this book was a journey in and of itself. We want to share with you the messy process we went through: following our own double loop and killing many darlings. Looking back, we clearly see that the double loop shows up in our own design journey as well – as it should!
DESIGN FIRST
As this book is about design, we wanted to make that a major part of the end result. We used an unorthodox approach to do this and started to work design-first. Every spread in the book started as a blank page with the whole team using sticky notes defining the content and ideas for the looks.
We worked visually, and had all of the spreads on a big wall in our office, so the team could see the flow and put sticky notes with remarks and ideas on there. From these sketched spreads we’d make prototype designs in Indesign. Only then was actual text written, tailored as much as possible to the space on the page. And we would select among these prototypes, either judging them ourselves or having others give feedback first.
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ISLANDS
To explain the design journey, we started with the metaphor of islands. People seemed to like it, so we started to make detailed designs.
Yet when we had made a dummy of the book with the island sturcture, the proofreaders felt it was too gimmicky. It was too complex to tell the story with that metaphor.
KILL YOUR DARLINGS
We wanted to make a book that was easily navigable and had a clear structure, and we spent a lot of attention on getting that right, or so we thought. Three times our proofreaders told us that they were completely lost in the book. And three times we had to restructure the book and change the navigation. Each time we learned more and could improve the product. We had to throw away good stuff to get there.
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IT’S NOT A LINEAR PROCESS
Designing anything, including a book, is not a linear process. Not only in terms of iterations, pivots, and finding the right direction, but also in terms of planning and progress.
The progress is exponential: the first chapter took a whole month. The second chapter went twice as fast, and in the home stretch we rebuilt the entire book in a week. In the beginning, we used a lot of time to decide and explore. In the end, the blueprint was totally clear. Knowing that, we could plan the design process to finish exactly on time!
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SCALE
The last stretch is much more about details and hard work, dominated by checklists, consistency, and finalizing texts and visuals, making everything pixel perfect.