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No organization understands volatility and disruption better than the U.S. military. This is why the Army disrupted its own planning methodology, the Field Manual, to include design thinking in order to help leaders develop adaptive thinking, alternative operation plans, and increased agility in a landscape of fast-changing, increasingly complex conflicts.

One of the mandatory classes places students in studio classes where they are given a client and a prompt to solve an open-ended problem using human-centered design.

The current client is Café Momentum, a nonprofit restaurant that trains and hires juvenile offenders. The problem students have to solve is that many of the young men who work at Café Momentum are unable to get a lease or live in unaffordable housing because of their age.

Students can take two elective courses in almost any subject as long as they can justify why they are taking the classes. She also emphasized that MADI is for anyone.

Keeping pace with the hockey stick curve of exponential change requires being deliberate about evolving as a leader.

Too many leaders — both at the top and across organizations — are taking a linear perspective that focuses on small incremental gains, often achieved by squeezing harder on what they already know. The problem is that, in a world of exponential change, a linear path is an exit ramp.

RADAR believes that “new normal” captures the emerging truth that change and volatility will continue to accelerate and intensify. Equally important, we believe many leaders have been led to think that new normal means things will level out again, and that there will once again be stable times they can get their arms around.

Why what people think matters more than where they’re from

The truth is my tribe is eclectic.

Since this may be a new practice, here’s a formula you can follow to begin figuring out what it is you believe. Just fill in the blanks of this statement: “Every [BLANK] can/should [BLANK]”

institutional inertia seems relatively simple: institutions, organizations, and people tend to remain at rest (i.e. satisfied with the status quo) or in uniform motion (i.e. slightly tweaking the status quo over time), unless that state is changed by an external force (i.e. transformation).

“Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace,”

the gravitational pull of the status quo is so incredibly strong, that escaping it can be a monumental task.

Design thinking has come a long way since I wrote about it here in 2008. The most valuable company in the world places design at the center of everything it does. Designers are on the founding team of countless disruptive startups. Domains such as healthcare, education, and government have begun to prototype, iterate, and build more nimbly with a human-centered focus. Now that design thinking is everywhere, it’s tempting to simply declare it dead—to ordain something new in its place. It’s a methodology always in pursuit of unforeseen innovation, so reinventing itself might seem like the smart way forward. But in practice, design thinking is a set of tools that can grow old with us.

And I’d argue that in order to create sustained competitive advantage, businesses must be not just practitioners, but masters of the art.

Umpqua