ADT 201: Exercise #1
Define your Systems & Frameworks
Through this program I’d like you to think of something to apply Design Thinking to: a professional goal, a career goal, or a project you’re working on right now. It could be personal too.
It could be a goal that takes 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or 9 months to accomplish. Applied Design Thinking will help you plan an approach to deeply understand how to achieve success for this goal.
So pick something– a WICKED problem to solve.
Exercise 1
Step 1: Write down your goal, or your wicked problem.This can be a couple of sentences to explain to us your project, professional, or personal goal / problem you’re trying to solve.
Step 2: For your goal, define your systems and frameworks. What are systems you currently work within for that goal? What are the frameworks that you use? What are your resources? Give an abstraction about all of this (get meta, what does it all mean, and why does it matter?). Now tell us what problems you’re holistically trying to solve?
Write this down in a Medium post, private, or public, and share it. You’ll use this paragraph as a jumping point during the next 9 lessons to map out a system and build a framework around your wicked problem using context, building narratives and solutions based thinking.
Next lesson: Context
We’re going to explore context, what it means to you, and why it is the most important thing to think about. We’ll explore contextual models to:
- identify goals and qualify their value for ourselves and for our professional world.
- review 5 w’s of ourselves in the professional world — affinity diagraming.
- explore contextual relationships — inter-contextuality
We’ll also map context according to People, places, & things:
- who are the stakeholders in our professional world?
- who are the stakeholders of our organizations and ecosystem?
- how can we contextualize all of this according to our goals?
Stay in the loop and subscribe to the free course below. We’ll email you once a week with a digest of lessons to work though, with examples of how we’re applying them every day.
You’ve been reading Lesson 1, exercise 1 of Applied Design Thinking by Mustefa Jo’shen. Sign-up above to receive an email every week with a lesson in Applied Design thinking.
If you’re responsible for bringing innovative change to your organization, you can connect with me directly to discuss organizational programs and executive workshops in applied design thinking: mustefa@cfndrs.com.
