This book was written as a response to the positive and heartening reception to a series of articles published (online and print) on innovative interventions in organizations. The core message of We Tried to Warn You is that every day, micro-failures of communication and their cover-ups can accumulate, and enable a network of decisions that lead to systemic-level failures of organizations. I report on first hand experiences as an organizational participant, and more recently as a design/management consultant, informed by the substantive research published over the years by key authors I have learned from, and cite in the book. I focus emphasis on the knowledge-based practices that enable organizations to sense and make decisions from critical feedback from customers in the field, especially the multidisciplinary field now known as "user experience" (or UX).
Peter H. Jones, Ph.D.
Peter Jones is an innovation research consultant, having conducted human and organizational research and design for services, software/IT systems, and decision support resources since 1990. An experienced design research and strategy consultant, he founded Redesign Research in 2001, focusing on depth research for human-centered innovation. Peter has designed market-leading Internet-based information resources for legal, medical, business, and scientific applications.
Peter wrote We Tried to Warn You: Innovations in Leadership for the Learning Organization, published in 2009 by Nimble Books.
He published Team Design: A Practitioner's Guide to Collaborative Innovation in 1998, revised 2002.
He is currently writing Designing for Care: Design as a Critical Healthcare Profession, to be published by Rosenfeld in 2010 (http://designforcare.com )
Peter completed a doctorate in Design and Innovation Management at the Union Institute, 2000, and is currently a visiting scholar at The University of Toronto and is advisor and on faculty for the M.Des in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto.
Articles are available at his blog site at: http://designdialogues.com
Selected Publications
Jones, P.H. (2008). We tried to warn you! Innovations in leadership for the learning organization. Ann Arbor, MI: Nimble Books.
Jones, P.H. (2008). Socialization of practices in a process world: Toward participatory organizations. In Proceedings of Participatory Design 2008. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.
Jones, P.H. (2008). Socializing a Knowledge Strategy. In E. Abou-Zeid (Ed.) Knowledge Management and Business Strategies: Theoretical Frameworks and Empirical Research. Hershey, PA: Idea Group. (In press).
Jones, P.H. (2005). Information practices and cognitive artifacts in scientific research. Cognition, Technology, and Work, 7, 88-100.
Jones, P.H., Chisalita, C. and van der Veer, G.C. (2005). Special Issue on Collaboration in Context: Cognitive and Organizational Artefacts. Cognition, Technology, and Work, 7, 70-75.
Jones, P.H. and Nemeth, C.P. (2005). Cognitive artifacts in complex work. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, LNAI 3345, 152-183.
Jones, P.H. (2002). When successful products prevent strategic innovation. Design Management Journal, 13 (2), 30.
Jones, P.H. (2002) Team Design: A Practitioner's Guide to Collaborative Innovation. Philadelphia: Xlibris.
