Name: A Non-Linear Approach to Coping with Chaos
Uploaded: 2025-12-03
Duration: 16 min 24 s
Description: A multidisciplinary designer & innovation executive shares strategies for leaning into uncertain times and embracing ambiguity to unlock innovation and new learning.

A multidisciplinary designer & innovation executive shares strategies for leaning into uncertain times and embracing ambiguity to unlock innovation and new learning.

A Non-Linear Approach to Coping with Chaos

Conferences

So, while Yan speaks for the trees, our next presenter invites us to enter a different type of forest, the forest of ambiguity. Kevin Bethune calls himself a multidisciplinary misfit. Good name. His career has taken a few zigs and a few zags. Starting as a nuclear power mechanical engineer. To producing sneakers for Nike, which then led him to invest in a design degree. Now he's a design executive and an innovation advisor. He's an author and a TV presenter. To cope with chaos, he shares a non-linear approach that leans into uncertainty in order to unlock learning and innovation. Please join me in welcoming Kevin Bethune. Uncertainty. We're all feeling it. We're all navigating choppy waters, with the questioning what to secure, what to throw overboard. And how to stay the course. I want to share some critical perspectives with you on how we can build our creative intuition to navigate the chaos. Call it nonlinearity off the back of my second book which launched earlier this year, nonlinear Navigating Design with Curiosity and conviction. But before I dive in, Let's just first take a beat. And recognize that no matter the policy, No matter the business, the brand, the experience, even the built environment. Things are the way they are by design. They were informed by someone, right, wrong or indifferent, and as we think about what's next and who shapes what's next, who's at that table absolutely matters. And if you're familiar with any of my work or writings, I'm a big proponent of multidisciplinary collaboration. And the accelerating power that diversity can bring to innovation. But when I mention diversity, I'm very careful to say that I can only speak for me. We're all intersectional. As a black man who's navigated corporate America through some unique multidisciplinary leaps, I can understand what marginalization feels like, especially when it's feedback that's of a subjective place. As a male when I enter an executive arena, and I'm cognizant of how my voice carries when I enter the room. I have to be cognizant of the privilege that I have when my voice is given the benefit of the doubt compared to my peers of other genders. So when we think about teaming and teaming evolution in that respect. The big but here is that that's not enough. The teaming isn't enough. We have to appreciate. Actually, how we navigate the work itself, how we navigate is important because when it comes to innovation, To create anything new and novel, we have to be prepared to do things differently. So I want to provide a little bit of context in terms of where these perspectives are coming from. By sharing a little bit of my lived experience personally and professionally. I like to say that I found design mid-career and design found me. But I'm very thankful for the timing, the way the world has evolved. So I started my career as a mechanical engineer in the nuclear power generation industry. It's where I cut my teeth on product, learn how to work with high performing teams. Fast forward, a curiosity for business crept in, led to getting an MBA. And I told myself I want to join a company that has not only a strategy and technical aspects but also creativity as well. So the MBA led me to Nike Inc. so very thankful to start there. I started in a business planning capacity, but the product person within, I quickly networked my way over to the to the global footwear product engine of Nike. And that's when I encountered professional design in practice for the first time in my career, and I just started leaning into that, asking questions. Questions led to opportunities to actually moonlight on the side and learn how to design shoes for a couple of categories that were willing to give me a shot. Very thankful for that experience. But I also noticed the world outside of Nike was changing to appreciate this notion of multidisciplinary convergence. And a few shoe projects were great, but it didn't necessarily answer my creative foundation, so I made the difficult decision to leave Nike and in more grad schooling to solidify my creative foundation. And in doing so, I've been able to serve as a creative co-founder to help build design and innovation capabilities and spaces that hadn't previously appreciated the power of creative problem solving. And I had a chance to share the learning, the lessons learned on different platforms in terms of what it was like to really reimagine design and stand it up in those spaces. That led to the genesis of the practice that I run today in dreams, design, and life. So we work hard to bring disparate disciplines around the table to problem solve the future in a uniquely different ways together, and then we leverage the depth of design craft to ensure that the affordances that we're working on are actually coherent and resonant against the ecologies and futures that we're uncovering together as a team. Whether it's consumer electronics in the space of dynamic crypto markets to bridging and marrying deep science and human centered behavior change in the realm of biotech and making sure that we're working on ecologies that actually meet people where they are and in this case providing members of this platform an affordance that allows them a superior diagnostic of what's happening in their health and wellness based on the science in the human breath. And helping a multitude of different businesses of all shapes and sizes to unlock innovation opportunities strategically leveraging design in the right way. So this leads to this notion of a nonlinear approach. What do I mean by that? Well, hopefully from those anecdotes, you realize how much of a fervent believer I am in the power of this collaboration and bringing disciplines together. I believe the collaboration is the currency that informs future innovation. And the question becomes What, what happens from that collaboration? And we have to be cognizant of every design and business decision from that as it cascades onto the broader ecology. So beyond the business and customer concern, what are the impacts of those decisions on sustainability, data ethics, privacy, and the like, and that's not enough. We have to think about the role societal imbalance has played in a lot of the target audiences that we profess to serve. And societal imbalance is a difficult one, and for me it's personal. Looping back to the anecdote I shared about diversity, the next image I'm about to share is a difficult one for my own family's lived experience and origin story. It's a picture of my mother when she was 2 years old being held by my late grandmother. This shot made the newspaper at that time. The family had just returned home from church one Sunday morning to have found their home had been burned to the ground by white supremacist aggression in the area in which they were living. Overt assault on humanity, absolutely. But behind the scenes there were a lot of covert forces at play and that there are a lot of commercial and government forces trying to intimidate black land landowning families from from their properties to make way for local infrastructure like highways and you hear about redlining and these kind of things. Well, this is just one anecdote of many anecdotes of my family origin story. So again we have to be brave about how we Induce a collaboration model that unravels these variables is really important. And the question becomes if we team this way, what does it give us the ability to do? In my view, we can see the future I'm holding up a looking glass, looking at the distant time horizon. Together we can see the future through different vantage points. We can see the future through the lens of people and really interrogating needs and value criteria. We can see it through industry and really just questioning some of the foundational assumptions of how an industry is supposed to behave and really interrogating those assumptions and then bringing a whole host of trends and exemplars to inspire the art of what's possible. Now if I take that lens and move it to the side along the axis of time, The cool thing is, as designers we can play games and allow the paradigms, the ebb and flow of different trends and paradigms as they intersect over time. We can interrogate and imagine a multitude of different future scenarios. So imagine getting to design future contexts before we even think about solutions. Really exciting stuff to be able to diverge that way. And when we do this, we're priming our teams to be able to make natural sparks and connections across this diversity of observations, data points, and inspirations that we uncover in that, and we can think of new stories and systems that capture the imagination and flow that into any product creation and innovation process or method. And here I'm showing a rubric that's very familiar to a lot of us, the double diamond, one of many. And sometimes I cringe a little bit at the simplicity of such frameworks because in the face of complexity, they can be perceived to be inadequate. Things can fall down. And what I'm arguing for is for us to really appreciate the nuances that go beyond the simple framework because reality is chaotic, complexity is real. And despite everyone's good intention, If I apply a method on this project, I expect it to work on the next 10 projects the same way, and it doesn't necessarily work that way, and we get formulaic when things happen to work the first time on the next project on the line. And when we do that, we beat risk out of the approach. So instead I'm arguing for this notion of a forest of ambiguity, literally, and I, and I drew a map in my second book, um. So no matter where we are in that forest, and this is just a representation of the landscape. No matter where I am, I can establish a position and say I'm going to take a step, any step, and appreciate the choices that I have in the form of what I'm characterizing as a vector and magnitude of effort in a given direction, and I have many choices in terms of what I can do at that moment. I can take stock in what I know. I can take stock in what I don't know. I can say, hey, what can I make? I'm a designer. I can make, I can always make something and it doesn't have to be a solution. I can offer a speculation or a probe to ask deeper questions. And as I move through that forest, what do I stand to learn? And insights and opportunities can guide my way as I move along. Oftentimes we hear at the start of a project, what does the data say? And I'm not here to scoff at data, data can be helpful. We need boundary conditions and some of those initial vectors might be involve gathering the data that's at our fingertips to characterize where we should play and to market where we should play in the landscape versus where we maybe shouldn't play and potentially waste time. In my experience, many projects are often missing the thicker substance next to the complimentary notion of conclusive data that we may already have. The thick data. Is the attitudes, the behaviors, the idiosyncrasies, the cultural norms, the things that make us human, and it takes spending a considerably larger amount of time with a limited subset of people to get after that thick stuff. And again it can run and complement with the conclusive or quantified data that we have from statistically significant audience sizes of people. We can dig for the substance and we do that. This next rubric is based on the great work of Liz Sanders and Peter Stappers. It's just mapping the research landscape to get us to appreciate that we have choices. When it comes to qualitative insight as we look for it and uncover it, oftentimes companies might resort to focus groups and one on one interviews with their target audiences, but we need to consider the multitude of different investigative approaches that come from different mindsets where there's design led, expert led, research led, and the like. There's a full litany of choices that we have at our disposal to interrogate how what people are actually doing, how our target audience is actually feeling, thinking, and who they actually self-prescribe themselves to be in any given context. And so if I were to ask this person referencing the biotech example, if I were to reference, hey, you know, tell me about your relationship with health and wellness in your life, that's such an open-ended question. She might have a hard time actually engaging that question. But instead if I pick a particular technique and said, hey, I want you to draw me a picture of your relationship with health and wellness over the course of your life, through your life journey, through the ebbs and flows and inflection points, draw me a picture for 10 minutes, we come back together and we talk about it, we discuss it. Just evoking her muscle memory, anchoring and visuals, we can have a conversation that exposes and uncovers a litany of latent insights and nuances that we can better appreciate. Quan is the framing vehicle, qualitative insight is the clay, and we can start shaping that substance through rigorous design ideation and get somewhere through that forest and take the different vectors where they take us along that journey. So a few final thoughts as I wrap up. Change is hard. Non-linear change is even harder. And we could attempt to dimensionalize it. This 2 by 2 is just a rough characterization. On the vertical axis is sort of the observable behavior that we feel from teams, individuals and organizations. In the midst of change, people are either reacting, they're on their heels, they're in a defensive posture, or there's others that are actually playing some offense and they're garnering their agency and getting ahead of the change. On the horizontal axis is the nature of change itself. Sometimes change is predictable, linear, or it might be runaway beyond our comprehension, non-linear, and we can just add some qualifiers to each of these quadrants. In the predictable defensive quadrant we might see risk aversion. Risk is bad. Failure is bad, gatekeeping, protecting the status quo, zero-sum thinking. As we move to the right, change gets harder. He in the sand behavior, populism. Perhaps people taking advantage of the confusion with nefarious agendas. Generative AI in this context might skew to the doom and gloom narratives that are problematic. As we move up to the productive offensive side on predictable change, there might be an appreciation of the balance between risk and reward. Systems thinking, people are going to appreciate the macro and micro. We might be able to crack through the glass ceiling in some ways to create opportunities for change. But what I get most excited about is the upper right hand quadrant, this notion of Doubling down on nonlinearity, encouraging multidisciplinary collaboration, celebrating diversity, we can actually expand the playing field. We can use our creativity to address the multitudes, not just the one. We can have a growth mindset. We can embrace failure, generative AI in this respect. We can get excited about how AI could amplify our creativity. And we can be better attuned to culture. So that's the executive mindset that I hope we all carry forward in our work moving forward. So I just want to encourage each of us to stay curious in our work, divide convention where you see it, and to be nonlinear. Thank you.