Become a Design Thinker

Humility is essential when we want to serve others. But there is a subtle danger: we can learn to look humble without genuinely becoming more humble. We can speak modestly, acknowledge our weaknesses, and appear to put others first, yet still be driven by our need for recognition, reassurance, or control. This is the nature of fake humility. It may look like we are putting others first, but deep d...

As we become more experienced, certainty can become one of our greatest strengths. We have seen problems before. We have worked with different people, different clients, and different situations. We have made mistakes, learned lessons, and developed our own ways of doing things. So when someone comes to us with a problem, our instinct can be very quick: “I know this. I’ve seen this before. I know...

Prototyping in design thinking is the practice of building low-cost, experimental models of a product, service, or concept to test ideas, gather feedback, and iterate before full production. It turns abstract concepts into tangible artifacts so teams can validate assumptions early. Prototyping your persona means creating specific, structured touchpoints to test who you are becoming—before making a...

When we have spent decades building a career, our professional identity becomes familiar. We know how to describe ourselves. We know what we are good at. We know what people usually come to us for. We know our qualifications, our experience, and our achievements. And precisely because these things are familiar, they can become constraints. Our experience can become a boundary around our imaginatio...

A problem statement is a clear, concise description of an issue that needs to be addressed or a condition that needs to be improved. It defines the gap between the current state (the reality) and the desired state (the goal),  A problem statement serves as the starting point for problem-solving in design thinking. Before you can design a new persona, you have to define the problem you are actually...

In design thinking, we start a project by collecting the data. When we decide to design our persona, the first thing is to collect the data of our current persona. From the data, we can discover the gap that we should fill in or bridge, so that we can migrate to a new persona that we aspire to be.  But the question is, What is the data of our persona?  And how can we collect our persona data? Down...

When you brainstorm your next persona, you are no longer allowed to just "wish" for a better version of yourself. You are a design thinker. You are different.  Today, we will go through 4 rules for our brainstorming process. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-second-act We are deeply grateful if you could take a moment to share your thoughts, ide...

Design thinkers rebuild our persona by design. It is about rebuilding our current persona into a new one that we aspire to be. In a design process, designers won't design something from scratch. They start with a design brief.  In this episode, we will look into: How do we draft a design brief when we've decided to rebuild our persona? Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thi...

Design Your Second Act This is a theme that describes our personal growth across the 4 regions: Comfort Zone. In this zone, we have to fight against our stronghold to create a breakthrough.  Exploration Zone,  where we identify and transform our capability assets to forage the adjacent possibilities.  Becoming Zone , where we are prototyping our new possible personas Significance Zone , where we s...

A good network will provide the necessary knowledge and support in our daily work or long-term goals. They can be someone who can give us good advice, share successful or unsuccessful experiences, and provide a safety net for us to fail small and fast. If we can build our network wisely, our network will make you thrive. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-...

Our experience is so important, especially if you want to elevate your work to a higher level or move to a new working environment. The problem is, how can we recognize our experience instead of a list of companies' names, positions, and no. of years? And how can we let our co-worker know what our experience is? Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-seco...

Skills are about how well you can apply your knowledge in practice. Anyone can learn and apply a skill in one narrow context. But what makes us become outstanding and significant is the ability to transplant that skill to a new context and transcend it to a higher level of work. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-second-act We are deeply grateful if you co...

How can we transform our newly acquired knowledge into our new competitive edge? In our workplace, knowledge is not what we know. It is what we can do with what we know, how reliably we can do it, and how well we can teach others to do it. Today, we will answer this question from 3 aspects of knowledge transformation. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-sec...

After we have stepped out of our comfort zone, we may suddenly open up to a wide and clear spectrum. It seems like we can go in any direction. The problem is, where should we go? To navigate, our strategy is to identify our Capability Asset to explore our adjacent possibilities.  Today, we will touch base on three of those Capability Assets: Knowledge, Experience, and Skills. Download the AI Promp...

Everyone may have different strongholds that hold up our growth. These strongholds would blind our self-awareness, lead us to follow the repeated pattern, and lock us in our comfort zone.  Today, we have generalized different types of strongholds and discussed the strategies to tear them down. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-second-act We are deeply gra...

Our old self is our biggest enemy to fight against if we decide to depart from our comfort zone.  We strongly believe our previous success is built on our belief system that drives our daily decision-making process. We used to believe that we had made the best choice. Although we may sometimes regret it, we still believe that our own mind is our best partner to make decisions for us. Our ME strong...

Fear influences our choices. We fear uncertainty. This dictates us choosing a familiar path and reduces our risk exposure. The consequence of not taking risks will limit our identity rebuilding. Fear shrinks vision and opportunity. Therefore, if we want to build an identity that we aspire to be, we need to control our risk exposure by design. We call this: Design our Risk Appetite. A balanced risk...

Our sunk cost stronghold is like an anchor that holds us from departing from our comfort zone. To depart, to start a new journey, we need to bring along our assets. But the problem is, our anchors and our assets sometimes look very similar. In this episode, we will discuss how to distinguish your anchor and asset, and take respective actions on them. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-desig...

Sunk cost is the emotional debt from when we built our first act.  Today, we’re going to look into a critical factor that will hold us back, keep us pinned to that foundation even when we know it’s time to move - The Sunk Cost Stronghold. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-second-act We are deeply grateful if you could take a moment to share your thoughts,...

We  launch the theme in 2026:  Design Your Second Act "Design your Second Act" is a design process to help you navigate from a stagnation stage to becoming significant in your world. And we call it a design process because you can't just think your way there. You can't solve a new future with the old playbook. Design starts with empathy—for yourself and the problem you want to...

We are coming to the end of 2025. Today, we will have a special episode - a reprise of our episodes in 2025. If you want to download the diagram for the 4-stages of transformation, here is the download link: https://join.bdesignthinker.com/growth Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-second-act We are deeply grateful if you could take a moment to share your t...

Most of you will think that strengths make us thrive. Weaknesses hold us back. It is half true.  If we do not reveal the shadow of strength - our pride, our ego, our bias we will face a bottleneck at some point of our growth journey.  If we accept our weaknesses as our vulnerability and ask for help, we may achieve unbelievable results. Weakness is not a bad thing always. But lacking the awareness...

Like a fortress building on a spot that has a military advantage, where the army can easily defend the spot, our stronghold is built under the shadow of our strength, so that we are difficult to defeat.   We need to find a way to destroy our stronghold that is holding us back.  We used an analogy of a sapper to describe our strategies in tackling our stronghold.  We are fighting the enemy in our m...

Bill Shander is an author, educator, and information designer.  His courses in data storytelling, information design, and data visualization are on LinkedIn Learning and workshops around the world. He is a keynote speaker and has lectured for graduate and undergraduate students and staff at Harvard, Northeastern, Stanford, and more.  In this interview, we have a conversation around his book, Stake...

Stronghold is a mindset that prisons our growth mindset and forces us to believe that the current situation cannot be changed.  A stronghold refers to a self-limiting belief system shaped by upbringing, culture, and past experiences. It becomes a cognitive prison—a mindset that worked before but now blocks our growth, discourages risk-taking, and reinforces the idea that “things can't change”...