Designing Conversations to Unlock Strategic Foresight and Innovation with Kevin Bethune

<p dir="ltr">I’m excited to share my conversation with Kevin Bethune, a multidisciplinary design executive, entrepreneur, best-selling author and keynote speaker based in Redondo Beach, California. He’s been a VP of Strategic design at BCG Digital, A global process product manager at Nike and a Nuclear Engineer at Westinghouse. He currently leads his own firm, <a href= "https://dreamsdesignandlife.com/">https://dreamsdesignandlife.com/</a></p> <p dir="ltr">One of his key ideas is “Open your aperture.” -ie, shifting the lens that you are looking at a problem from or through. Design and Design Thinking has so many tools to help us do just that, and find creative approaches to our biggest challenges.</p> <p dir="ltr">In our conversation, we discussed the importance of embracing creative approaches (since our habitual approaches most likely can’t solve them!) and the need for bold leadership to optimize for curiosity and creativity - because going with business as usual is usually a lot easier than spending time on curiosity.</p> <p dir="ltr">It takes a willingness to slow down to optimize for curiosity in a business environment that is often so focused on quarterly capitalism.</p> <p dir="ltr">We also highlight the lack of diversity in design and innovation, particularly in black representation, and the cognitive dissonance of claiming to serve certain communities without actually representing them - an unresolved critique of many innovation firms.</p> <p><strong id= "docs-internal-guid-7d2982e9-7fff-d9b5-fd35-a47bc0046ac7">The S-Curve and the Cone of Possibility</strong></p> <p dir="ltr">Kevin’s book, Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation, is CHOCK A BLOCK with diagrams (and I love diagrams!) that will stretch your thinking, but we spent some time on one diagram in particular that combines two classic models of thinking: The cone of possibility and the s-curve.</p> <p dir="ltr">The Cone of possibility is a cone on its side, with the tip at the present, and the sides of the cone stretching out like rays