Human Centered Design

Notes on building toward the future when the future has not yet arrived

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When I speak with leaders today, people often ask whether we are living through the greatest time of change in the history of our species?

Look at the words that have entered everyday conversation in just the last few years. Generative AI. LLMs. Drone warfare. Decarbonization. Quantum computing. Pandemics. Extreme weather. Great-powers competition. Robotics. Decentralized finance. Cyber currency. Genetic engineering. Autonomous control. Disinformation. Income inequality. The decline of the United States.

While it is tempting to believe this time is unique, we are probably not technically right. There have been other vertiginous eras, yes, that is a word, meaning dizzying pace that can cause vertigo, the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, the world wars. But the perception is nearly universal, and that perception is the salient fact. Most people sense, somewhere below words, that they no longer fully understand the world they live in.

We are living in a time between times. The old world is behind us, and the new one has not yet taken shape. That in-between state is always disorienting, not because it is unfamiliar, but because it removes the comfortable illusion of stability.

What’s Actually New: Complexity and Velocity, at Once

Here is what I think is genuinely new.

Throughout history, humans have learned to handle two different kinds of difficult problems. We solve complex problems, discovering a new drug, designing a nuclear submarine, writing a tax code, modeling climate change, with methods that are slow but disciplined. And we handle high-velocity problems, a Formula 1 pitstop, a stock trade, a bank transaction, getting a Coca-Cola onto every shelf in the world, with systems and automation. One demands depth. The other demands speed.

What is different now is that the problems we most need to solve are both at once.

Drone swarms over Ukraine evolve every single night, in a domain that is also strategically and ethically complex. Climate dynamics demand decade-long thinking and same-week response. AI capabilities advance in weeks, while the institutional questions they raise are some of the deepest we have ever faced. Supply chain shocks ripple through systems no single mind can hold. Externalities, climate shifts, tariffs, pandemics, arrive without warning and can rewrite the premise of an entire business in a quarter.

Velocity and complexity, together, is a condition our institutions, our methods, and arguably our own minds were not designed for.

That is the real disorientation. And it is also why the instinct to wait and analyze, which served us in slower times, now backfires. You cannot stand still in a stream that is running this fast.

There is a different way to move through it. Not by predicting the future, but by building toward it.

Standing in Between

Many years ago, when I was trying to better understand how to help organizations navigate transitions, I met Gail and Matt Taylor. Their work left a deep impression on me because it refused the simplicity of choosing between the old and the new. Instead, they focused on preparing what they called “transition managers,” people capable of standing in between. In their Transition Manager’s Creed, they described the discipline this requires. To navigate change, one must “maintain the ability to operate in two different, and often hostile, environments” and remain free from “entrapment by either the old or the new.” It is a demanding stance, one that asks you to hold multiple truths at once and move forward without attachment to a predetermined outcome.

When I first moved to Chicago, I did what I tend to do whenever I am looking for new ideas. I tapped into my network and asked to be introduced to the most interesting thinkers people knew. One name kept coming up: Patrick Whitney, who was leading the Institute of Design. Through him, I encountered a lineage that traces back to the Bauhaus, the early 20th-century school that redefined design as a way to shape how people live, not just how things look.

The designers who came out of that tradition were not focused on objects. They were trying to understand people, systems, and behavior. They were building a way of thinking.

What stood out was not just what they knew, but how they approached problems. They were comfortable in ambiguity. They did not start with answers or try to define everything upfront. Instead, they moved by building, testing, and learning. They worked their way into clarity.

Thanks to Patrick, I was introduced to Larry Keeley, Denis Weil, and a host of talented leaders in the field. Together we collaborated on many critical projects ranging from the political to the commercial. I co-lectured with Larry on a few classes and had the honor of giving the commencement address for the 2015 graduating class. These experiences shaped how I approach problems and the search for their solutions.

Years later, one of my daughters was unsure where she belonged academically. I encouraged her to spend time at the Institute, and she immediately was drawn to that amazing community of changemakers.

That is often how clarity works. Not through analysis alone, but through contact. You step into an environment, and something in you responds.

The Problems That Don’t Yield to Analysis

Not all problems are created equal.

Some are straightforward. If your car is dirty, you wash it. If you want to catch a train, you plan your time, leave early, and arrive before it departs. Cause and effect are clear.

But many of the most important problems in our lives, and in our world, do not work that way. They are messy and interconnected. The variables are constantly interacting. The data you would need to solve them does not yet exist. The solution lives in a future that has not yet arrived.

Take something like love. There is no formula. No linear path. You do not find your life partner through thinking and planning alone. You discover the person by taking action, by getting into the arena.

You see the same pattern in important creative work. Arthur Brooks, who has written extensively on happiness and meaning, recently published a book called The Meaning of Your Life and admitted it was the hardest book he has ever tried to write. Not because it required more effort, but because it was not the kind of problem that yields to analysis. It required returning to the same questions again and again, writing, rewriting, testing ideas against lived experience. It also required long periods of silence, reflection, and contemplation. Not solving the problem so much as discovering it over time.

In these situations, the goal shifts. You do not know what you are building until you begin. Sometimes not even until you are deep in the messy middle.

As Bill Burnett and Dave Evans put it, life is something you live your way into, not something you solve. You cannot think your way to the answer. You have to engage with it, testing, adjusting, learning, and adjusting again.

When Action Wins the Argument

I learned this the hard way.

Early in my time at McDonald’s, I became convinced that the company could do well by doing good. At the time, this was not a popular idea.

I was criticized from both sides. Some questioned whether it was sincere. Others believed it diluted capitalism. There was no playbook, no consensus, no validation. And if I am honest, there were moments when I wondered if I was completely wrong.

So we did not try to solve everything at once. We started small.

One of the first things we did was introduce waste separation in our restaurants. It sounds obvious today, but at the time it was not. Customers had to learn it. Operators had to adapt. It required change across the system.

But it worked.

It improved outcomes, reduced costs, and proved that doing good could also be good business. So we did the next thing. And then the next.

Over time, a pattern emerged. You do not always have to win the argument to take action. More often, action ends up winning the argument.

Just because something is contested does not mean it is wrong. Often, it just means it is early. And the only way to find out if it will work is to put it to the test.

A Word on Design Thinking

What I am trying to introduce here is a different way of approaching the unknown.

Our default is linear. We take what we know and extend it forward. That logic works when the world behaves predictably. It fails when it does not.

Human-centered design starts from a different assumption. You do not understand the future by thinking harder about it. You understand it by engaging with it. By building, testing, observing, and adjusting.

Some have chosen to call this “design thinking.” The label is helpful, up to a point. Like calling something rock or rap, it gives you a quick mental model.

But it also oversimplifies. It flattens something that is inherently rich and situational. And when that happens, something important gets lost. The practice becomes easier to talk about, but harder to truly understand.

The term has become enormously popular, and inside the field that birthed it, it is also contested. Many of the practitioners I most respect are wary of it. Their objection is twofold. First, design thinking is something of a misnomer. It is not really thinking. It is a set of practices and protocols that, once managed well, allow you to act in the face of uncertainty, embrace your humility, and find a path to testable progress. Second, the method, applied alone, often produces mediocre outcomes when the problem is genuinely hard.

I believe both of those things are true.

Where the practice excels is where most leaders need help: in user empathy, in observing actual behavior rather than imagined behavior, in being willing to prototype rather than pontificate, and in modifying solutions based on what real people actually do. Its core value is the humanity and humility to let solutions emerge.

Where it falls short is when leaders treat it as the entire toolkit. Design thinking is not nearly enough on its own to address modern problems that are complex and fast-moving. It does not, by itself, give you a way to operate at the speeds AI, autonomous systems, or modern threats now demand. For those, you need to augment it with sharper problem framing, AI augmented sensing, faster cycle times, and a portfolio of innovation methods rather than a single one. The defense world has been wrestling with a related question for decades through the language of OODA loops (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). The AI labs are wrestling with it now in real time. The rest of us should be paying attention.

I still find design thinking a useful starting practice. It teaches you to act when you do not know enough, to trust contact over abstraction, to build before you decide. That is valuable. Just do not mistake it for the whole answer.

Becoming Less Wrong Over Time

In statistics, we talk about updating your priors. You start with a belief, test it against reality, and adjust. The goal is not perfection. It is becoming less wrong over time.

That is essentially what prototyping is. It is not about having the answer upfront. It is about improving your understanding by building something and learning from what happens.

In a world this volatile, this is a critical skill. Most of us are still operating on outdated mental models. It is as if our human operating system has not been updated in thousands of years. The environment has changed. Our internal software has not kept up.

Our goal is not certainty. It is the ability to continuously adjust.

This is also where the AI revolution becomes more than a buzzword. We now have, for the first time in history, tools that can sense, simulate, and synthesize at machine speed. Used well, they can compress the cycle of learning, let you run more experiments, get faster feedback, and revise priors at a pace that would have been unimaginable even three years ago. Used poorly, without judgment, without skepticism, without humility, they can also accelerate confidently in the wrong direction.

Either way, you cannot opt out. The leaders who thrive in this decade will be the ones who learn to partner with these tools, the way prior generations learned to partner with calculators, then spreadsheets, then search. The ones who do not will fall behind, quietly, in ways they will not perceive in real time.

Diverge Before Converge

In complex, uncertain environments, thinking before acting often does not lead to the best results. You have to act first and let action inform your thinking.

Designers describe this with the image of a double diamond. The first phase is divergence, generating many ideas, exploring broadly, testing more options than you are comfortable with, deliberately bringing in differing perspectives. Over time, patterns form. Certain ideas keep showing up. Others fall away. The discipline here is to resist judging an idea by your initial sense of its practicality, feasibility, or attractiveness. Let them just be ideas. Good or bad. Let them sit alongside one another.

Then comes the second phase, convergence. Deciding what actually works and what is worth building on.

Most people skip the first phase. They want to arrive at the answer before they have explored the question. That is where good ideas get eliminated too early.

The strongest ideas rarely arrive fully formed. They often show up incomplete, slightly awkward, easy to dismiss. But there is usually a signal inside them. The work is to recognize it and build from there.

The most powerful aspect of this process is something subtler. You discover aspects of one idea that can be married to aspects of another. You find linkages between them. The real idea often lives in the connective tissue between ideas, not in any of them alone.

Start Smaller Than You Think

One thing I have learned over time is that context matters. The way you approach change depends on what you are trying to change. A personal decision is not the same as shifting a large organization.

But across all of these situations, one pattern holds. People resist big change. Not because they are unwilling, but because it feels abstract, risky, and too far removed from where they are today.

This is why small experiments matter.

If you can design a step that is simple, low cost, and easy to try, you lower the barrier to action. You make movement possible. And once movement starts, feedback follows, confidence builds, and momentum takes over.

Every meaningful shift I have been part of, in business or in life, started that way. Not with a grand plan, but with something small enough to try. We act ourselves into a new way of thinking far more reliably than we think ourselves into a new way of acting. Motion is lotion as they say.

There is a related idea that matters just as much.

Distance distorts judgment. Proximity sharpens it.

The closer you are to the people affected by a decision, the easier it becomes to design something that actually works. Which is why most real change does not happen in boardrooms. It happens in the field.

It is worth saying out loud, at a moment when phones, screens, and remote work have pulled us further from one another, that proximity is becoming harder to come by. We may be in a time when we are more in need of new collaborations than ever, while doing less of the close contact work that produces them. Worth noticing.

You Don’t Plan Your Way to Meaning

Viktor Frankl observed that happiness cannot be pursued directly. It must ensue. You do not find it by chasing it. You find it by committing yourself to something that matters and allowing it to emerge as a consequence.

The biggest questions in life work the same way. Instead of asking what you will do for the next twenty years, a better question might be: what could you test in the next ninety days? What is one small step that would teach you something you do not yet know?

How do you get started on the big, hairy goals?

One way is what I think of as the deathbed test. At the end of your life, what would you want to have been true? Who would you want there? What would you want them to say? What would you want to have given, built, or experienced?

The answers tend to be surprisingly consistent. Not identical, but similar in spirit. Most people want to be loved, to have strong relationships, and to be remembered as someone who made a difference.

Once you have a sense of your version of this, the path becomes less rigid. You are no longer trying to get everything right. You are trying to move in a direction aligned with what matters.

There is no single right answer. There are many good ones.

From Reaction to Agency

If you feel stuck, the first step out of a rut is simpler than most people think: do something.

Stop thinking and analyzing. Get moving. Action is a prerequisite for clarity.

That is the shift. From observing to building. From waiting to participating. From spectator to architect.

Because the path is not something you find. It is something you build.

And if you learn to design your work, your thinking, and your life, you gain something incredibly powerful: agency.

You stop reacting to the future. You start creating it.

The only way it ever happens is this:

Dream big. Start small. Move fast.

Your Turn

Where are you waiting for clarity? What is one small step you could take today instead?

Alongside this piece is a song I wrote called ‘Wake Up.’ It explores the same idea at the heart of this essay: that the future is not something we passively inherit, but something we help create through action, experimentation, and courage.