Although even the highest levels of uncertainty don’t prevent businesses from analyzing predicaments rationally, says author Hugh Courtney, the financial crisis has shown us the limits of our tools—and minds.

Editor's Note: quite topical, but still an interesting read...

In interviews conducted before his untimely death, C.K. Prahalad — the sage of core competencies and the bottom of the pyramid — looked back on his career and talked about the way ideas evolve.

In trying to make sense of economic uncertainty, it pays to look beyond conventional wisdom for an explanatory theory of the hidden fundamentals that can drive or hinder growth. Hence this interview.

Mark Anderson is the editor, publisher, and chief correspondent of the Strategic News Service newsletter, one of the most incisive publications in its field. Ostensibly about the future of the computer and communications industries, it covers a broad range of factors that affect and are affected by those businesses: everything from technological advances to capital flows to government policies to educational innovations to advances in physics.

Anderson, a former venture capitalist and founder of two software companies and a hedge fund, is known for his knowledgeable readers (who often contribute to the newsletter) and his prescience: He tracks his published predictions and claims a 90 percent success rate. In this interview, he goes out on a limb. He believes that human beings, flawed though their decisions may be, have the will and the ability to avoid further crisis — or at least to bounce back from crisis in the long run.

Few organizations, Tim Brown says, are set up to allow much creative collaboration, and even those are often afflicted by a culture that mishandles the results. “Too many ideas that get through to the market make it there because somebody senior is the one sponsoring them,” he says, “not because they’re necessarily the best ideas.”

Brown, president and CEO of Palo Alto-based IDEO, looks to “design thinking” as an answer: incorporating designers’ problem-solving and idea-generation methods into a traditional organization, working with—and occasionally against—traditional R&D. The idea is to broaden horizons and instill a more innovative orientation, especially in a period of economic crisis. “In times when we’re scared,” Brown remarks, “we tend to get tunnel vision, don’t we?” He elaborates on design-thinking concepts and practices in a new book, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (HarperBusiness).

Brown, 47, spoke during a recent visit to The Conference Board’s New York offices.