April 2023

Welcome to the Anniversary Edition of Inflexion Point. 

The newsletter started in April 2008, when I was working with Wipro, in the firm's CTO Office. From an audience base of 35, the monthly has now grown to over 20,000 recipients, globally. All this, organically. 

In the interim, I would engage with thousands on innovation and creativity, through my talks, workshops, writings, lecturing and mentoring. The last good count was 550 workshops in over 170 organizations in 5 countries. Here's the list of engagements www.InflexionPoint.net 

In this edition of Inflexion Point, we look at why design thinking is failing, how the brain overlooks this one technique of problem solving, why not all innovation is disruptive, how we are endangering our kids' imagination, and should every startup scale?

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

In this thought provoking article, Rebecca Ackermann argues that design thinking's downfall could be explained by its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas often resulting in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. Many complain that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn’t usually lead to built products or solutions of any kind. From a social and civics construct, the issue is not generating new ideas but figuring out how to implement and pay for them. There is a premium on empathy over expertise, on possibilities over profitability. (Source: MIT Tech Review)

Our Brain Typically Overlooks This Brilliant Problem-Solving Strategy

People often limit their creativity by continually adding new features to a design rather than removing existing ones. However, creativity by omission is the simplest and the most radical way of creativity. Afterall, a good design is not about what else, but what less. But why are minimalist designs so uncommon? Psychologists explain that when confronted with a problem, we tend to add features than to remove apparently essential components away. We are more likely to remove features when given more opportunities to consider alternative ways to address a problem. Afterall, simplification is complicated. (Source: Scientific American)

Innovation Doesn’t Have to Be Disruptive

The celebrated authors of the book, Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that innovation need not always be disruptive. It can be congenial and offer value without necessarily destroying a company, industry or society. Market creation isn't always disruptive. A case in point is the $22-billion sanitary pads industry which has taken out the stigma and pain of the menstrual cycles. Or, the Sesame Street which has been teaching kids how to count and learn colors in over 150 countries without displacing schools. Such non-disruptive innovations: 1) emerge from existing technologies, 2) are applicable across geos and market-stratas, and 3) needn't be new-to-the-world. (Source: HBR)  

How We're Endangering our Kids' Imaginations

Our kids are overstimulated, over-scheduled and under pressure to perform academically and beyond school. Creativity and inventiveness gets stifled when kids are not allowed time for curiosity and exploration. We pack our kids' time and consequently, they have more planned activities and passive entertainment at their fingertips than ever before, but less free time to dream, make-believe and focus on what they truly love. The panacea is to make time for 'nothing'. It's critical to encourage imagination by introducing some chaos and randomness in the day, putting a limit on the screen time (for yourself, to begin with), and leaving things little bit unplanned. (Source: Time)

Should Every Startup Scale?

In the startup arena, it's often deemed that if you don't scale you perish. So the most popular question is -- how big is your team? Or, how much capital have you raised? These are false pressures, avoidable at best, if one wishes to remain true to the calling of doing something meaningful. In the face of fragmentation of supply chains and economies of expertise, it is much sensible to create and dominate a niche. The article offers heft to the notion of remaining small and competitive, and avoiding the urge to scale meaninglessly. This is especially vital for women entrepreneurs, who don't necessarily seek scale or are comfortable managing scale, and yet are measured on these yardsticks. (Source: YourStory)