Adam Zeiner

The modern organization is rooted in military history—at the time, the most efficient model for coordinating large groups of people to achieve strategic objectives.

- Identify the most relevant trends.- Plan a desirable ecosystem and identify the value pools.- Tightly define the core value proposition.

What I've come to recognise as core to my practice is the challenge of taking an extraordinarily complex, integrated, incomplete problem and wrapping my arms around it conceptually in a way that helps and empowers practitioners to actually do things about it.

And though it's useful to be able to tell them apart, design is about strategic and tactical work happening together. At the heart of many stubborn design projects and unimpressive outcomes are people coming in with an incompatible mental models; overplaying strategy or tactics, and neglecting the other.

I’m sure that a strange land is possible in which we would all have access to the tools and practices to help us respond to the challenge of incompleteness, but I, for one, have not come across it yet.

Systems analysis at the ‘front end’ of service design can help us to better understand complex social problems and identify opportunities to respond more effectively and profoundly.

In building my own boundary objects and enabling others to do the same, I have become increasingly infatuated with Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice and the characteristics that enable particular artefacts to act as boundary objects