A visionary road map offering insights, design concepts, and guidance to leaders implementing change.
A manual outlines an approach to executing change, highlighting how design principles can help develop an inclusive and dynamic process that is essential in the modern era.
The future needs assistance; a new approach to change is emerging; and design—in its broadest sense—is a key component, assert Guidice and Ireland. The authors have run design firms and consulted in the tech and consumer goods industries. In this book, they posit the need to move away from “outdated approaches” that are “traditional, siloed, hierarchical, and linear” and “anticipate that the next approach to change will be design-driven, and its leaders—at all levels and in a wide range of circumstances—will be changemakers.” These changemakers will be leaders who can view the future of communities, companies, and even countries as a design problem: “An opportunity space that can be clearly defined, intentionally studied, and reliably addressed.” Following an introductory chapter setting out this thesis, the volume outlines how to become this kind of changemaker, including clarifying your values to “guide your behavior, attract like-minded people, and steer group decision-making.” The work then proceeds to “Co-Creating Change” and engaging in activities to “Discover What’s Possible.” The manual encourages readers to learn from what works and what doesn’t and to keep “Evolving by Design.” The authors mention an assortment of useful design tools and practices, including the Double Diamond process (which emphasizes customer and stakeholder input in “Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver” stages) and the use of “comps” (which involves tweaks and/or a rejection of various options). Each chapter concludes with a “Takeaways” summary and a “Take it Further” reading list. The authors make a compelling argument that a social, design-driven approach is especially critical in a world where “unquestioning support has disappeared, along with the assumption of a positive trajectory.” While the theoretical and process details can be overwhelming at times, important help is found, unsurprisingly, in the book’s design, which includes graphics of the volume’s ideas and bold highlighting of its major statements and points.
A visionary road map offering insights, design concepts, and guidance to leaders implementing change.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781959029144
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Two Waves Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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