Ten Design Thinking Quotes From Marty Neumeier

Thanks to a retweet by Daniel McKenzie I stumbled across Marty Neumeier‘s twitter feed and discovered a stream of insight related to design thinking. I have selected my favorite ten.

Ten Design Thinking Quotes From Marty Neumeier

“In an era of perpetual innovation, you’re either revolutionizing or commoditizing.”
Marty Neumeier

This reminds me of the “walking up the down escalator” model from Geoffrey Moore’s “Dealing with Darwin” if you are not continually innovating your core then you are overwhelmed by context and carried down by commodization.

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“Belief is a placeholder for knowledge.”
Marty Neumeier

I really like this one. You have to start from your beliefs, acknowledging them before you can construct hypotheses to lead you to knowledge.

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“Like a flywheel, a culture of innovation builds momentum with small inputs, but releases great energy when needed.”
Marty Neumeier

The discipline of a steady accumulation of small improvements is as important as a breakthrough idea. Here is a longer version the tweet was extracted from:

“With the efficiency of a flywheel, a culture of innovation builds momentum with very small inputs, but can release large amounts of stored energy when needed. A culture of innovation combines a deep bench with a lightning response time.”
Marty Neumeier in “The Designful Company“

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“The current management model is a veritable thrift store of hand-me-down concepts, designed for a previous need and a previous era.”
Marty Neumeier

Looking at business practices in 2010, I think they are going to have the following differences in operating requirements:

Incessant / Real-Time
Global / Globally Connected
Transparent / Seamless Linkages With Customers & Suppliers

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“The secret to collaboration is finding a rhythm that alternates between team creativity and individual creativity.”
Marty Neumeier

We use this rhythm between individual thinking, pairwise collaboration, and group discussion in our workshops to help attendees arrive at more creative solutions. I first heard this approach described by Doug Hall as an approach to brainstorming sessions that allowed introverts to more fully participate and to generate more candidate ideas because the first phase allows everyone to contribute simultaneously.

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“A designer is anyone who plots change for the better.”
Marty Neumeier

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“We can no longer decide the way forward. Today we have to design the way forward.”
Marty Neumeier

This is also effectuation in a nutshell.

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“Talented people love to collaborate when roles are defined, goals are clear, and the bar is high.”
Marty Neumeier

I think this is a succinct recipe for fostering collaboration: clear goals, clear roles, and a level of challenge requires teamwork to surmount.

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“A rule is a scar from a previous bad experience.”
Marty Neumeier

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“The biggest hurdle to innovation is a corporate longing for certainty.”
Marty Neumeier

I think founding teams that start with a focus on convincing investors instead of customers suffer from this same longing for certainty, thinking “if we can convince professional investors then our plan must be good.”