Connect through purpose: Design doing and exercising empathy

by Leah Lundquist
follow me on Twitter: @leahlundquist

Watching fellow board member Nathan Magel’s great collection of videos focused on ideation last month got me thinking. A few years ago, the best kept secrets of the design world took off in the business world. Top managers sought to foster creative confidence in their employees and crack open space for abductive logic (what might be) amidst the deductive logic (what is) and inductive logic (what should be) that traditionally fill the work day. The fad continues. TED talks tagged with “innovation” or “creativity” still get millions of hits and best sellers on design thinking continue to fly off airport bookshelves.

When a concept gets too much buzz, I admittedly find myself turned off. But when a colleague of mine recently introduced me to the design thinking concept of “professional empathy” - being more user-focused with your colleagues and those you serve on the job - I got intrigued. I decided to try to get beyond the “CliffsNotes” on design thinking.

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Creating leader-full spaces

by Leah Lundquist
follow me on Twitter: @leahlundquist

YNPN Twin Cities was fortunate to get a visit recently from YNPN National’s first ever formal director, Trish Tchume. She is an all-around amazing leader and has been doing ridiculously great things for YNPN’s sector-wide visibility. That being said, the emergence of a formal director for an organization that has been in existence for 15 years—with a highly distributed leadership structure—raises an interesting question: how do organizations strike the elegant balance of structuring just enough of a container for great ideas and action to flow in and out, but not so much that individuals feel like cogs in the machinery?

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Mind Mapping Your Professional Development

Mind Mapping Your Professional Development from ElevenOlives Creative on Vimeo.

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Just ask.

So you made it through the first month of the New Year! How are those professional goals of yours going? Over the course of January, I’ve felt a new goal emerging—one that seems so simple on the surface yet has been really challenging to put into practice. I’m trying to ask more questions.

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To grad school or not?

Against a lot of people’s better advice, I’m cracking the old textbook spine again. Well, actually, I’m ordering my eTextbooks or searching for open-source options this time around. Wow, how much has changed since I graduated from my undergrad over four years ago! And the changes aren’t just relegated to the logistics of how much we’re willing to pay for a textbook, but the very perception of the value of a graduate degree.

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