Dynamic Design and Innovation Arena
Our vision: We are a catalyst for leadership excellence, team performance, and organizational spirit inspired by horses, nature, the arts and design for sustainable economic, societal and ecological success.
We believe that in this time of rapid change, complex choices and difficult decisions, that we learn best through relevant, real-time, real-world experiences.
Our purpose is to prepare people for these challenges through hands on learning with horses, experiences in nature, the arts and design innovation.
The Dynamic Design and Innovation Arena (DIA) is an opportunity for Northeast Ohio organizations to build capacity for innovation through “dynamic design” –- a term coined by DIA that refers to a process of generating breakthrough ideas in out-of-context settings through the integration of business principles with design thinking, creative arts and experiential learning.
DIA’s higher purpose is to contribute to the vitality of Northeast Ohio’s economy by supporting its businesses and institutions to thrive in new ways. To this end, we support leaders and teams to transform unsolvable problems into manageable dilemmas, exciting possibilities and effective solutions.
Amidst the current economic climate of uncertainty, despair and low morale, we aim to inspire hope and innovation by opening new ways of collectively perceiving, dreaming, thinking and behaving. In other words, our mission is to expand the generative capacities necessary for creating breakthrough positive change.
Throughout history, business has turned to design for competitive advantage in products, packaging and advertising. Today, leading-edge business schools such as Case Western Reserve University, MIT and Harvard are asking a bigger question: How can business and design inform and enhance one another in service of changing our world for the better?
DIA explores this question – in theory and in action. Though our work is highly action- and outcome-oriented, it is grounded in cutting-edge theories and methodologies drawn from business, leadership, organizational change, design and the creative arts
We prepare people for leadership, and innovatio teamwork by offering experiences for people to engage creatively with others, learn from nature, partner with horses, and to translate through design form through the arts into ideas and ideas into form.
Partnering with horses people learn about leadership and teamwork as they establish communication and trust with the horse, lead a horse through challenges, and work as a team to move a herd of horses towards a common direction or goal.
The benefit of learning with horses is that horses respond to credible, enthusiastic and forward thinking leadership and coherent, committed and engaging team work. Their response offers immediate feedback about your leadership presence and team effectiveness. With this “felt sense” you can fine tune your leadership style, work in your team successfully and experience a sense of morale, loyalty and belonging in your organization.
The deliverable result is that you will take with you a better ability to act decisively in uncertain situations, resolve conflict with more success, listen and engage in useful communication, build team cohesion and collaboration and expand leadership capacity.
Horses embody power, beauty and freedom but the Spirit of Leadership and the Dynamic Design and Innovation Arena is not about horses
—it is about you.
- Can you engage others and lead change through conscious leadership and compelling presence?
- How can you prepare people to face personal and relationship challenges with respect and courage—and without fear.
- How can you create a work setting in which people are engaged, committed, creative collaborative and caring?
- How can you support a design and innovation attitude and outcome?
Dynamic Design Innovation Arena’s “secret sucess”
DIA supports clients to transform traditional business thinking and leadership behavior into business and leadership “by design.” We do this by moving into unfamiliar territory, experimenting with new ways of seeing and thinking, and stretching the limits of what’s possible.
Innovation is a dynamic, evolutionary learning process -- not a static, one-off event. As such, AIDD aims to develop clients’ creative capacities, attitudes and culture in such a way that transcends and outlives their engagement with AIDD.
We help organizations to build their capacity for innovation through a holistic approach that includes:
providing new contexts in which fresh perspectives can emerge;
designing immersive experiences and processes that support creative experimentation; and
developing creative competencies such as perspective-taking, curiosity, empathy, and creative agility.
Creating innovative contexts
In modern organizations, most ideas are developed and problems are solved in sensory-deprived offices and conference rooms. Western culture reveres technology but while technology offers many advantages, its overuse can limit our exposure to other ways of learning and knowing.
To stimulate fresh perspectives, we must shift the context from the familiar to the unknown. To this end, AIDD takes clients out of their familiar workplaces to innovation arenas (another term coined by AIDD). Here, clients find themselves out of context in an unfamiliar venue and are encouraged to access the intelligence available from disciplines unrelated to their own.
Innovation arenas create “white space” – a key element in successful design. White space provides a blank slate from which to start anew, permission to wander away from entrenched patterns, and opportunities to learn and discover. In this space, clients are able to shift their perceptions and see what they could not see before.
DIA’s primary innovation arena is located at Pebble Ledge Ranch in Novelty, Ohio. Here, clients can work outdoors in the woods and horse pastures or indoors in the barn, covered horse arena or quiet country cottage.
Based on the needs of the client, DIA also will create customized, offsite innovation arenas in collaboration with and presented by organizations in various economic sectors such as: arts/culture, manufacturing, health care, financial services, government, energy, nonprofits, education, etc.
For example, we might take a corporate manufacturing team challenged with stiff competition to an Aikido dojo, where members could learn to redirect aggressive energy into fuel for innovation. We might take a senior leadership team from a newly merged company to the Cleveland Orchestra to learn how to create a masterpiece through collaboration and harmony. Or we might take a group of hospital administrators challenged with the nursing shortage to a solar panel manufacturing company to learn about attracting and retaining talent.
Designing immersive experiences
When we are immersed in experience, we become so deeply absorbed in a situation or problem such that everything else fades to the background. This sort of intense engagement often leads to a heightened sense of awareness that psychologist Mihayli Czsentmihayli describes as “flow,” an optimal state of intrinsic motivation in which a person is energized by and fully focused on what he or she is doing. It is from this flow state that innovative ideas emerge.
DIA’s dynamic design process uses rich, challenging, learning experiences to induce a flow state. This supports clients to develop insights and capacities for working with complex challenges that would not otherwise be possible.
Building creative capacity
The previous two sections describe how DIA supports innovation from the outside in by creating external contexts/experiences/processes that support the development of new ideas.
Our holistic approach also develops the capacity for innovation from the inside out by exercising and building the internal “muscles” that are required for innovation and design thinking: perspective-taking, curiosity, empathy and creative agility.
To this end, DIA’s comprehensive approach includes pre-work -- learning sessions designed to prepare clients for the powerful dynamic design process – as well as follow-up sessions that equip clients continue developing their skills over time.
Why is DIA Necessary?
Fear and discouragement abound during times of economic recession, and this fear discourages expansive thinking and bold action. Under stress, we often turn to our success formulas -- habitual ways of responding to challenges that have worked well in the past –– only to realize that our attempts to extend and defend these strategies further entrenches us in the problem.
Clearly, the past cannot sufficiently predict the future nor inform the present. In the face of uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change, what’s needed most is creative agility – the capacity to adapt, to see possibilities, and to solve ill-structured problems.
Only with these capacities can we build the relationships, structures and strategies to meet the challenges of our time.
ntegrate diverse perspectives
bring people together “out of context”
focuse on strengths and opportunities
inspire creativity
tap the power of design thinking
DIA provides an integrated approach to support innovation by combining the best of design, leadership, management and strategy. DIA offers rare opportunities for interdisciplinary, cross-functional design teams to change Northeast Ohio’s businesses, institutions and communities for the better.
In the corporate world, most strategy and innovation work is based on thinking, power point presentations, research and thoughtful conversations among leaders and project teams. It is less about gathering multiple perspectives from different vantage points, creating living breathing experiences, experimenting with the unknown and cultivating the intuitive process of discovery.
What might be possible when analysis and strategy enter into dialog with intuitive creative process -- and the two inform one another in service of creating something entirely new? Mapping a business question into a design question gives tangible structure to abstract issues and exponentially increases the choices and possibilities to successfully address problems and dilemmas.
DIA’s work is not meant to teach people what to do or how to do it, nor to create an end product. Our intent is to expand the work of innovation from a mechanistic problem-solving mindset (a valuable yet partial approach) to an attitude of collaboration, discovery and design.
“The significant problems of today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.” Albert Einstein