Mood Boards are visual guidelines for brand experiences and the ideal accompaniment to Brand DNA maps. They are relevant for any medium and are particularly useful in the digital space, as my friend and colleague Pete Sena from Digital Surgeons deftly explains in this latest post on CreativeBloq.com. Take a few minutes to absorb his thoughts and check out the resources he provides. Excellent stuff, really.

Join Us!
The FIRST Community Caldo is scheduled in San Antonio, Texas at Madhatters Tea House & Cafe for Tuesday, January 31, 6pm – 8pm. For only $8 you’ll enjoy a delicious dinner of soup, bread and tea. The communication, connection and collaboration are free! Click here to register!

What is Community Caldo?
A project of Resilient by Design, Community Caldo creates the opportunity and facilitates the community; the groups that organically arise take action. I anticipate gathering being co-created by those in attendance, likely taking form of a cross between a mixer and speed dating. I’ll facilitate introductions, conversations around the passions of those present, the current challenges of the city, etc. And we’ll have large flip charts organized by topic on which folks can brainstorm. Organically attendees may meet someone to later meet up with over coffee and take on a project or develop an idea together.

Keep in Touch
Want to stay informed and get an early heads-up on the next Community Caldo? Just email us at CommunityCaldo (at) gmail (dot) com to be added to our mailing list.

On Wednesday, October 19th @ 10am Central time, two of the authors of the newly released book, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, will be presenting a FREE audio webinar to share their secrets for cultivating innovation.

Webinar Overview
Some people are natural innovators, right? They discover new products, services, and entire businesses with little effort, while the rest of us can’t keep up. Wrong.

Innovative capabilities are not innate, argues HBS Professor Clay Christensen and INSEAD Professor Hal Gregersen and their co-author in The Innovator’s DNA. Anyone can master disruptive innovation by developing five skills:

1. Associating: Drawing connections among questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields.
2. Questioning: Posing queries that challenge common wisdom.
3. Observing: Scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things.
4. Experimenting: Constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge.
5. Networking: Mixing with people who have different ideas and perspectives.

In this interactive Harvard Business Review webinar on October 19, Professors Christensen and Gregersen will explain how you and your team can cultivate these skills to become more innovative.

Professors Christensen and Gregersen will share how to generate ideas using these skills, collaborate with “delivery-driven” colleagues to implement ideas, and build innovation strength throughout an organization. Attendees will learn to rate their own “Innovator’s DNA.”

Having coined the term and the concept “disruptive innovation,” Professor Christensen is a world-renowned expert on innovation. Gather your team on October 19 to hear Professors Christensen and Gregersen detail how your company can use his insights to your advantage. No team seeking to develop its innovation prowess should skip this opportunity.

Register online here.

If you own, operate or manage a small- or medium-size business, Resilient By Design can help you tap into the innovation and strategy necessary to grow. Contact Bev to learn more!

At its root, the word Simplexity is a combination of “simple” and “complex”. As a theoretical framework, Simplexity posits a complimentary relationship between simplicity and complexity. As jargon, Simplexity stands to be the next new hot button.

Design Strategy embodies the nature of Simplexity. For all intents and purposes, they are two peas in a pod. Design Strategy lives at the intersection of complexity and simplicity, where difficult, intriguing and game-changing challenges can taunt even the most successful business leaders. When business leaders find themselves faced with challenges rife with Simplexity that take them into uncharted territory, Design Strategy is the most effective approach to developing solutions to those challenges.

If you’re a business leader reading this, you’re thinking, “Great. But what exactly is Design Strategy and how do I use it?”

In the next post – Part 2 – I’ll outline how to recognize a Simplexity challenge, the basics of Design Strategy, and a few easy steps to integrate Design Strategy into everyday business operations. Stay tuned!