Recently our team posed a fascinating question: How does any company experiencing trouble get started on an innovation project? Our answers felt clumsy and fragmented. From all we could determine, businesses have no common way forward when faced with a controversial situation. What kind of controversy, exactly? The existential kind…

Comparing Design for Change with Design for Continuity. — Alain de Botton publishes a deck of 100 Questions for a Meaningful Life. Chosen at random, the first card I ever pulled asked: ‘When you are older, what big things will you do differently than your own parents?’ Whoa. As I followed his approach, my first question was about angst…

Over time, any organization will lose touch with the people it ought to be serving. We call that the Value Gap: the confusing divide between what it is you do, and what people need from you. Big Human explores that blind spot to help teams like yours uncover new value. If internal ideas haven’t kept up with how people are living now, clients ask us to explain and reconcile the differences. In response, we bring research, tools, and training (drawn from the fields of anthropology and sociology) which encourage organizations into moments of collective discovery. Our approach to design-planning then works to include the employees who will put changes in place, today and tomorrow.

A disaster named Yolanda — and its sequel. The other day my heart sank when I learned that another ‘super-typhoon’ is heading toward the Philippines. Some days I think we have it all wrong about natural disasters. We think of them as ‘once in a lifetime’ or ‘once in a century’ events. In truth there are almost 400…