Intentions
Welcome to 2025
Intention
It’s the new year, and whether you’re still warming back up to work or you started the year with the gas pedal down and clear goals ahead, January is a common time of year to talk about intention.
I have been focusing on my own intentions. This publication, Creative Collisions (formerly known as Design Thinking for All), has grown and expanded so much since its founding, and I intend to continue to allow it to flourish — with intention.
With that in mind, as we kick off 2025, I want to share a great interview from the Design Better podcast. In this interview, Alistair Simpson, VP of Design at Dropbox, discusses his journey to Dropbox and how he’s currently approaching his work. A quote:
“I’m trying to be hyper-intentional with everything that I choose to do… I don’t think anyone starts out trying to be unintentional but life happens, we get busy, we forget to step out and look at that bigger picture.”
The bigger picture is where we should be focused, what’s going to make the most significant impact, and how we’re going to accomplish what we want to accomplish for ourselves, our customers, and our company.
He continues:
“We all start out with the best intentions… to craft experiences with excellence, to simplify or make really thoughtful user experiences to be really customer-centric…but somewhere along the way, things can start to slip… we end up not speaking to customers every week,.. design critiques slip from critique to seeking consensus…”
Having intentions is easy. Following through and maintaining our intentions can be more challenging. You may already feel that way about intentions you’ve set for 2025!
Which led me to wonder, what if we turned our intentions into practice? Could it bridge the gap between a mental aspiration and the behavior required to achieve it?
And, if we turned our intentions into practices, could they also be called methods or tools?
One thing intentions, practices, methods, and tools all have in common is they allow us to step into the unknown, the unpredictable, or the intentionally ambiguous without being wholly lost.
They enable thoughtful exploration, moving forward with a guide that doesn’t predetermine your path, the stops along the way, or what the outcome or ‘end’ looks like, but it allows you to get started in a thoughtful direction.
If you pursue this line of thinking, ‘intentions as a practice’ is similar to the tools or methods we use in design sprints or throughout the design thinking double diamond used by designers, strategists, innovators, and entrepreneurs.
We start a project or a workshop with an intention — to pursue a specific space, a specific topic, or a specific problem to solve or industry — but we don’t yet know where we’ll end up. If we’re starting with a ‘How might we…”?” we are explicitly saying that we don’t know how we’ll get to our outcome or what that outcome will be.
We’re starting with intention and then using a method as a guide, but also allowing the unexpected or the unknown to take us forward before we ultimately act(!) to (hopefully) create value.
So, as you begin your year, are you moving forward with intention? Are you bringing the right tools, methods, and practices into your days, weeks, and months to help guide and inform your efforts and your time, yet leaving room for the unexpected?
“Intentions as a Practice”
With this framing and reframing —
- How do you think of your intentions?
- What about your practices, tools, or methods?
- How might they help you accomplish your work or goals?
References:
- Design Better- Alastair Simpson: From professional soccer to leading design at Dropbox (18:44 is where he discusses intentions)
News and Updates!
- The team at Northome has been doing a lot of interesting work around serendipity! Simply put, it is the practice of seeking, encountering, connecting, and activating to create value. (see examples of Penicillin, among others)
- It is a practice you can bring into your every day to increase your changes of a serendipitious encounter, and to activate it and explore it when it happens. If you’re if you’re interested in serendipity, check out more on noraguerrera.com, where we share insight and ideas for fostering serendipity.
- You can also subscribe to Practicing Serendipist to get insights, ideas, and stories delivered to your inbox!
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Thanks for being part of this community! — NG
