Press

8 Questions for ULRICH WEINBERG(乌尔里希•温伯格)
SD Original, November 30. 1999
Dear Prof. Weinberg, what have you been busy with lately?
There is a growing interest in German society in the Design Thinking approach and I get invited a lot to give lectures about our activities. Even governmental institutions are approaching us to train administration executives in Design Thinking and recently we did a workshop with representatives of the lutheran church with some bishops being involved.
What does Design Thinking mean?
Design Thinking is a new approach, which helps people and organizations to do the transition from the old, analog world of disconnected, competitive thinking and acting, towards a neworked, collaborative mode, which is much more appropriate to a digital world we are living in. We focus on three elements which fundamentally define the learning and working culture: the place, the process and the people. We focus on the power of teams more than the power of individuals, we train new, nonlinear work processes and we build new flexible spaces to support the first ponits. Sounds easy but our education systems unfortunately does prepare us for the complete opposite.
What are the objectives of the School of Design Thinking
We started 2007 to train students from all different disciplines in Design Thinking with a special two semester program which is fully project based, offers no grades and no official academic degree. The learning is very intense and initiates entrepreneurial behaviour – we have seen more than 70 spin-offs and start-ups growing out of our program. Through the last years we started training programs also for professional and we have 2.500 executives running through specially designed workshops besides the 240 students per year.
You come to China on a regular basis. What are your impressions? Are you working on any projects with Chinese partners right now?
Since more than 10 years I get the chance to visit China every year. It is really amazing to watch this fascinating country to develop in a breathtaking way. Even if I did not manage to learn Chinese language during the years, China feels like my second home. Through the last years we started even the first School of Design Thinking in China, based at the CUC Communication University of China in the east of Beijing. We did already several joint workshops and conferences and some German companies are using both schools for student projects and professional training.
Your latest book is called “Network Thinking”, what is the book about? Is there going to be a Chinese version of the book?
My book "Network Thinking" tries to help people and organizations to better understand the huge transformation, our society is in right now. I came up with a very simple visual metaphor to illustrate the paradigm shift from the old „Brockhaus“ (encyclopaedic)-model of thinking and doing based on individual performance measurements (IQ) towards a new networked mode of thinking and doing, focusing on we-qualities (WeQ). It contains lots of stories of companies and institutions being on that transformation process right now.
Do you think that printed books will be reduced to a niche in the future?
My wife is a librarian, we have several thousand books at home and we both love books. But we both are over 50 now and if I look at the behavior of our seven year old son, I see significant changes. Yes, he loves books, but he loves even more mobile devices which offer him lots of new experiences, including the reading experience. We will have books in the future besides the E-books, but it will be less than now and some will fully disappear physically, encyclopaedias for example and pure text books.
In terms of digital transformation, where do you see the latest hotspots in Europe?
I watch carefully what large global companies, like car manufacturers and engineering companies are trying to do to survive the transformation process. There are some, like Bosch, which are doing significant steps in the right direction like building strong bridges between departments and re-designing the incentive models for executives. Others are just waking up. And the term „Industry 4.0“ is now heavily discussed among SMEs, which have a great chance to move forward in a significant speed with not only adapting new technologies but also changing management practices.
What kind of effect can government initiatives to support the creative industries have? What do you think China can learn from the German example?
What I like in Germany regarding creative industries is that there is a broad consensus, that also niche products should be supported not only in film but also in games, theater, opera, music and dance with public funding. This enables a great variety of creative products, offers and competitions and enriches the culture experiences, specially in cities like Berlin.
ULRICH WEINBERG(乌尔里希•温伯格) will be speaking at the StoryDrive Conference in Beijing (29 -30 May 2016).