Glossary of Common Terms

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Balanced Scorecard:
A process introduced by Robert S. Kaplan and David Norton in 1992 designed to give managers tools for measuring the performance of a business from a:
• Financial perspective,
• Customer perspective,
• Business process perspective, and a
• Learning and growth perspective

Biomimicry:
A discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.

Bootstrapping:
Refers to starting a business with limited capital and growing it based primarily on internally-generated profit instead of external investment.

Brand Experience:
Often confused with a corporate identity or package design, a brand experience is the total interaction of customers with a company, product, service, or other offering through all senses, media, and touch
points (such as television advertising, customer service, product use, etc.).

Closed-Loop Supply Chain:
Ideally, a zero-waste supply chain that completely reuses, recycles, or composts all materials. However, the term can also be used to refer to corporate take-back programs, where companies that produce a good are also responsible for its disposal.

Collaborative Design:
Involving stakeholders, other disciplines, and related organizations in the design of a group process, communication, or change.

Context Map:
A visual display showing all the forces and factors surrounding a team or organization.

Corporate Social Responsibility:
A business outlook that acknowledges responsibilities to stakeholders not traditionally accepted, including suppliers, customers, and employees as well as local and international communities in which it operates and the natural environment. There are few accepted standards and practices so far, but a growing concern that the actions organizations take have no unintended consequences outside the business, whether driven by concern, philanthropy, or a desire for an authentic brand and public relations.

Customer Experience:
The entire experience a customer has with an organization’s product or service as important to the value that product, service, or brand has to the customer, as well as the relationship built between the product, service, or organization that provides it.

Design:
Design is a set of fields for problem-solving that uses user-centric approaches to understand user needs (as well as business, economic, environmental, social, and other requirements) to create successful solutions that solve real problems. Design is often used as a process to create real change within a system or market.

Design Strategy:
Design Strategy is the field and approach of developing strategic policies, usually at a high level within a company or organization, in order to better realize the ongoing creation of successful Design created for users, audiences, participants, or customers.

Design Thinking:
A methodology for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result. The ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success. Unlike analytical thinking, design thinking is a creative process based around the “building up” of ideas. In organization and management theory, design thinking forms part of the Architecture/Design/Anthropology (A/D/A) paradigm, which characterizes innovative, human-centered enterprises. This paradigm also focuses on a collaborative and iterative style of work and an abductive mode of thinking.

Design Thinking Process:
Process of seven stages: define, research, ideate, prototype, choose, implement, and learn. Within these seven steps, problems can be framed, the right questions can be asked, more ideas can be created, and the best answers can be chosen. The steps aren’t linear; they can occur simultaneously and can be repeated. Although design is always subject to personal taste, design thinkers share a common set of values that drive innovation: these values are mainly creativity, ambidextrous thinking, teamwork, end-user focus, and curiosity.

Dot Voting:
Using sticky dots to poll a group by having them apply the dots to the items of information they are most interested in.

Ethnomics:
Ethical Economics; a hybrid of technology, design, and social responsibility.

Experience Design:
An approach to creating successful experiences for people in any medium. This approach includes consideration and design in all 3 spatial dimensions, over time, all five common senses, and interactivity, as well as customer value, personal meaning, and emotional context.

Experience Strategy:
The field and approach of developing strategic policies, usually at a high level within a company or organization, in order to better realize the ongoing creation of successful experiences created for users, audiences, participants, or customers.

Graphic Recording:
Documenting a group’s conversation and key ideas in real time on flip charts, large poster paper, graphic templates, murals, tablet PCs, and other visual media. Also known as “scribing.”

Human Capital:
One of at least four forms of capital used by people, organizations, corporations, and governments, to build and maintain their livelihoods. Human Capital is the sum total of knowledge, experience, “good will,” intellectual property, and labor available to an organization or society. While many organizations value their people, many do not manage or measure human capital in sustainable terms.

Icon:
A simple graphic image used to represent a concept, digital file, or element in a larger diagram.

Ideograph:
A simple graphic image that symbolizes a concept but does not look like the thing it represents (such as a heart as a symbol for love).

Information Architecture (Also Information Design):
A field and approach to designing clear, understandable communications by giving care to structure, context, and presentation of data and information. There is no difference between the two terms. Some designers refer to information Architecture as concerning “high-level” issues and Information Design as concerning “low-level” or visual issues but it is not possible to separate the two in developing clear communications, regardless of medium.

Innovation:
True innovation requires cultural change throughout the organization to sustain as well as participation by as many stakeholders as possible. Ultimately, innovation can be a source of transformation for a company that can increase effectiveness of all operations and processes but requires understanding and value placed on its products as well as a tolerance for change.

Integrated Bottom Line:
A process, described by Theo Furgusson, for integrating financial, environmental, and social costs and benefits into a unified measure of business activity.

Meaning:
A distinct level of cognitive significance that represents how people understand the world around them–literally, the reality they construct in their minds that explains the world they experience. Meaning is the deepest level of this understanding and is distinct from Values, Emotions, and functional or financial benefits:
• Meaning (our sense of reality)
• Values (our sense of identity)
• Emotions
• Value (our sense of what something is “worth,” financial benefits)
• Features (functional benefits)

Mind Map:
A diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid to studying and organizing information, solving problems, making decisions, and writing. The elements of a given mind map are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts, and are classified into groupings, branches, or areas, with the goal of representing semantic or other connections between portions of information.

Mission Statement:
The core purpose of a person, team, or organization, expressed in writing.

Natural Capital:
One of at least four forms of capital used by people, organizations, corporations, and governments, to build and maintain their livelihoods. Natural Capital includes all forms of resources from the environment, including minerals, water, air, sunlight, heat, plants, animals, and other organic matter.

Negotiation:
Allowing stakeholders to share their interests and positions bit by bit until they reach a mutually acceptable resolution.

Norms:
Standards of behavior shared by a group or organization.

Process Design:
The organization of a sequence of activities into a visual time frame used to guide a group process, project, or longer change process.

Process Improvement:
A sequence of activities designed to make a service or product more efficient.

Process Map:
A graphic representation of a group meeting agenda or schedule of activities over time.

Resiliency/Resilience:
The ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change

Roadmap:
A visual showing the key streams of activity a person, team, or organization needs to complete to achieve set objectives, usually keyed to a specific time line.

Service Design:
The field concerned with the development of services to meet specific needs. These services may make use of different communication media (including online, telephone, in-person, etc.), may or may not be automated, and may or may not use products as part of the service experience. A service usually includes a Service Ecology that allows the service operate successfully.

Service Ecology:
A system of interactions and actors that, together, create a sustainable and successful service. Service Ecologies often include several companies or organizations that specialize in delivering one part of the total service. These may or may not be distinct to the user of the service. Successful Service Ecologies must realistically allow each company or organization to create and realize value for their part in the service in order for the Ecology to be both successful (from a user perspective) and sustainable (from a system perspective).

Social Return On Investment:
An approach to understanding and managing the impacts of a project, organization or policy. It is based on stakeholders and puts financial value on the important impacts identified by stakeholders that do not have market values.

Stakeholder:
An individual who has some kind of interest in the outcomes of a group process.

Strategy:
The high-level approach or plan for how a person, team, or organization intends to achieve its mission and goals.

Story Map:
A panoramic visual history, context map, strategy map, vision, or roadmap created to help leaders and managers tell consistent, compelling stories that sustain aligned action.

Sustainability:
Meeting the economic, ecological and social needs of the day without impairing the chances or development of future generations. (UN-Conference, Rio de Janeiro, 1992)

Sustainable Design:
The process of developing products, services, and organizations that comply with the principles of economic, social, and ecological sustainability. There are many principles of sustainable design, including a customer-centric approach, dematerialization, transmaterialization, and biomimicry.

Systems Thinking:
An approach to problem solving that assumes the individual problem is part of a much larger system, and with that in mind, endeavors a solution that does not create further problems down the road. This approach is particularly important in complex systems where we do not always understand the inter-connection between parts.

The Tragedy of the Commons:
A term used to illustrate the conflict between individual interests and the common good, based on the assumption that when individuals use a public good, they do not consider the impact – or externalities – of their use on the good itself; as a result, public resources become over-exploited. The term was popularized by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which used a hypothetical example of English Commons, shared plots of grassland used by all livestock farmers in a village. In this hypothetical, each farmer keeps adding more livestock to graze on the Commons, because it costs him nothing to do so. In a few years, the soil is depleted by overgrazing, the Commons becomes unusable, and the village perishes.

Triple Bottom Line:
An expanded baseline for measuring performance, adding social and environmental dimensions to the traditional monetary benchmark. Triple bottom line, or TBL, is often expressed through examples: People Planet, Profit; or Ecology, Economy, Equality.

Values:
Expressions of deep, culturally supported orientations that drive decisions and behavior.

Value Chain:
The sequence of suppliers, designers, manufacturers, and distributors that take raw materials and convert them into usable products.

Value Proposition:
A statement of the complete value that an organization offers its customers through its products and services. Answers the question, “Why should I buy this?”

Value Web:
The network of suppliers, dealers, manufacturers, resellers, and associated firms that combine to create a total offering to customers.

Virtual Teams:
Groups that are separated geographically and so must communicate by telephone, email, and computer conference.

Vision:
A detailed picture of a future state of a person, team, or organization.

Visual Listening:
Another name for the graphic recording of a group process.

Visual Literacy:
The ability to read and interpret visual information in print, electronic, and other media.

Visual Thinking:
Using drawing, graphic displays, and imagery to see patterns of meaning in information.

Work Group:
People who share a common leader and set of goals but can complete their work individually without a great deal of interaction.

With thanks to the Creative Commons, Nathan Shedroff, The Living Principles, Wikipedia, The Grove Consultancy and Merriam-Webster.com.