There is this behavioural pattern; I’ll call it the ‘Chakravyuh Effect.’ It occurs when parents hold one set of rules for their children while having lived by another, failing to communicate the intentionality behind their own choices. In India, it’s not uncommon to meet couples who had a love marriage but quietly oppose the idea…
There is something quietly telling about how modern songs are put together. The average English song repeats its central hook three to four times. More recently though, that number seems to have crept up to ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty. This isn’t just a modern creative trend. It exploits a behavioural principle called mere-exposure effect. The…
The world has massive problems with “cool” solutions that create even bigger disasters. From the 1950s, we solved convenience with plastic, and now we’re literally breathing it. We solved the fossil fuel headache with Electric Vehicles, only to hand the next generation nightmare fields the toxic battery disposal. This is what happens when you have…
There’s a particular frame of time I’m sure you have experienced. You have a big presentation later today, or you’re travelling for a week, and suddenly you have a mental clarity that’s often missing from daily routines. When you know you’ll be away, pending tasks become crystal clear. You remember to have someone feed the…
In the past year, customer experience has taken a real nosedive. Big brand products and services making baffling choices. Let’s start with recent Panasonic/Google TVs. With any TV including the good old ones, adjust the volume and it takes about 2 seconds for the volume bar to disappear. Before that if you clicked on any…
A lot of people go from lighthearted when young to bitter and caustic or indifferent as they get older. They might remain adequately friendly and cheerful in public, knowing well not to cross boundaries or publicly display animosity or show which side they are on. But inside, many of them tend to remain suspicious, angry,…
A few days ago, I shared how one re-framed question unlocked a breakthrough solution for a pediatric hospital project, and opened up a contest for you to share YOUR transformational questions. I’ve been thinking about the questions sitting unasked in your minds. The ones that shifted a project’s direction. The ones that helped a struggling…
My “potato book” was feeling left out with all the posts and coupons for the two design thinking books. So here’s a coupon for Main Batata Hoon, a collection of short stories written in a conversational style, about the amusing and often counterintuitive ways our views, assumptions and behaviours shape both our personal lives and…
This story here has been a favourite for many years now, and I have probably sent it to hundreds of you around this time of the year, either as part of my work mailers or WhatsApp seasons’ greetings. What I love about it is how the illusion of miracles and magic gets taken from a…
It’s easy to look at a finished book and forget the chaos it came from. Recently when rummaging through an old box of papers, I found this (top left, circular diagram thing). That was from one evening in early 2018 where I was working on the design thinking structure and flow for Design the Future,…
One of my favourite fictional characters is Poirot. In the 2023 film A Haunting in Venice, when explaining his method, he says: “When a crime has been committed, I can, by application of order and method and the slow extinguishing of my own soul, find without fail or doubt, whodunit.” The slow extinguishing of my…
Most of us don’t read enough. And those who do, often fall into a numbers game: how many books can I finish this year? In this mindset, re-reading an already finished book feels almost wasteful. Two thoughts on this. First, some stories are so elegantly simple that they invite re-reading and creative interpretation. Take Philip…
Back when I was researching for my book, ‘Design the Future’, that simplifies design thinking for businesses and curious individuals, I noticed something striking. The popular 5-step Stanford design thinking model closely mirrors DMAIC, a much older and effective quality improvement tool. (My book simplifies the Stanford process, btw). Having studied some quality improvement, I…
Startups often struggle to find a healthy balance between becoming and staying relevant, with marketing and sales, and competition and growth. Their efforts and struggle, while not necessarily always logical, is usually understandable. However, one cannot extend a similar courtesy of understanding to large corporate giants in mature sectors who miss the forest for the…
I recently watched the 2006 political action thriller, ‘The Sentinel.’ It had a character follow this practice that is old, obvious and practical, but is hardly used nowadays. In the movie, a senior Secret Service agent tasked with managing the US President’s movement from point A to point B, (obviously) has two or three options…