Better Practice is pleased to be contributing to the City Doctors Global Forum in Barcelona, November 7, 8 and 9, 2018. Joe Slatter, in collaboration with colleagues John B. Lazar and Guillermo Mazier will present Design Thinking & Collaboration for Disruptive Innovation.

For centuries, cities, governments and the people who make them work have often struggled with what can best be described as wicked problems. From crime and affordable housing to hyper-tourism and global workforce shortages, cities have a myriad of challenges that often involve diverse sets of stakeholders with different perspectives, interests, needs, expectations and demands. These make a city's problems extraordinarily complex.

What's more, there is no one person who really "owns" a city and its challenges. With the rapid evolution of automation and technology, disruption is now commonplace in cities all over the world, though not necessarily with uniformly positive impact. For this session, participants will take an innovative look at how we can apply design thinking and meta-collaboration to solve complex community problems, together.

Design thinking and metacollaboration are ways of expanding our thinking about the practice of improving performance and achieving extraordinary results for people and the places where they live. How do we design behaviors and capabilities for ourselves for a "new normal" - where alternative mindsets, perspectives and arguments are not only more common, but an inevitable, desperately needed expression? How do we engage in ways that influence and inspire better collaboration that can be sustained?

This session is an interactive, principles-based journey to shared context, content and method. Participants will learn about practical, elegant, fun, and powerful principles, concepts, and methods for approaching the most challenging of problems, together.