These readings are basically a million weeks old, so I apologize for that. I’ll slowly be crawling through the entire month of October to get you guys current…

1. How Do Innovators Think? by Bronwyn Fryer
   Fryer did an interview with professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of Insead, asking to explain the “Innovator’s DNA.” This stuff just fascinates me. I love the details about questioning. I think the ability to question allows one to start looking at things in a new light. And while I agree that associating is important, I often wonder if associating is over emphasized at the moment (also in Roger Martin’s “The Opposable Mind”), because while it is a powerful tool, I do think that it’s just one of many. Unfortunately, I have yet to canvas creativity in a way that allows me to make a more aggressive argument than that. I would be interested to see how this same study would compare with say, engineers and designers versus executives.
2. Innovation Starts with Empathy by Dev Patnaik
   I think Dev is a really smart guy, but often fails to communicate his process and ideas in a way that are actionable for his audience. I know this is something I struggled with when taking his class at Stanford. But, once I figured it out, I was blown away by how well thought out it was. Jump would do well to emphasize that clear design process, but nevertheless, they’ve decided to talk about empathy. His book gets better in describing how to incorporate empathy into your work, and some of the stories in this article incorporate the best from his book - I particularly loved the Daimler/Mercedes story. Well worth a read.
3. The College Calculation by David Leonhardt
   Ah, college. When I was in high school, I got the sense that most of my teachers weren’t really thinking about pedagogy. I got the sense that they assigned tests and grades and homeworks and papers because hey, that’s what you do. There were some notable exceptions, but on the whole, there wasn’t a question about whether these activities really lead to learning. And then I got to college. And in college, well, it got ugly. I’m often surprised that in all our talk about needing to develop a more competitive workforce, there’s no discussion over whether we’re really teaching the students we have in ways that make them competitive. I started freshman year in an advising group of 5-10 girls all interested in pursuing careers in engineering. I believe me and one other girl were the only ones to graduate with an engineering degree. To me, that’s just unfortunate.
4. Understanding the Anxious Mind by Robin Marantz Henig 
   Here’s a really interesting expose on the anxious mind. What makes some people more nervous than others? What effect does that have on their lives? How does one go around studying it? I’m a big psychology and neuroscience person, so I enjoyed reading this article quite a bit.
5. Backwards Net Neutrality by Andrew Parker
   I enjoyed this little blog post because it’s just so unexpected. While we’re going after a problem in the big, obvious ways, it’s mutating into all sorts of other versions of itself.
6. Design without personas by James Page
   Here’s a quick view of a user-centric/human-centric design process. What attracted me to this was the crucial distinction that a human-centric design process is not just about thinking about people as you design. A human-centric design process is about thinking about people in ways that create designs centered on real needs and behaviors. To stereotype and assume isn’t really human centric, and doesn’t lead to the kinds of insights that produce meaningful products and services.