...In Excelsis Deo!

On Monday night, the Commonwealth Club speaker was Tim Brown, from IDEO (an innovation-minded company, rather than a terrorist organization from a Saturday morning cartoon). Brown was advocating "design thinking", although his interlocutor seemed skeptical and was hardballing the interview. I found that attitude a refreshing change from the much softer Commonwealth Club interview at the Fairmont of the authors of Superfreakonomics, at which I felt the interviewer could have coaxed the authors to talk about matters above and beyond that which could be found already in their book.

It seemed to me that Brown presented a convincing case of his own belief in his idea, but was not going to seduce the entire audience, but just the majority. The problem was not so much the validity of the idea and the associated strategems, as the zeal with which he pitched it, and possibly a detour into overhype, the boom of the idea economy. This reminded me of the way that new academic paradigms, even if they are applied initially to a subset of the discipline, become the new, best way to analyze anything within the discipline and a rebuttal to the intellectual status quo. Sometimes the status quo is so firmly planted that it becomes necessary to use excessive force to dislodge it; but such vehemence can mask the mediocrity of an apparently brilliant idea. "Design thinking" seems to be a valid and effective methodology, but perhaps not as earth-shattering as its most zealous proponents would claim.