DD Johnice, CEO/Chief Strategy Officer, The Wonder Guild Companies
Wisdom Begins With Wonder
Some of my earliest memories involve me disassembling my parents’ electronics while they slept, interrogating my neighbors as I peeked through the hole in our shared fence, and requiring a wagon to take my library book haul home. Wonder kept me up at night then—and it’s stolen many a restful hour from me since.
Wonder is an insatiable desire to solve problems that matter.
When I founded The Wonder Guild, I wondered…what if businesses could still deliver stellar financial returns for shareholders by creating great products/services/models that solve seemingly intractable social, environmental and economic problems?
In hindsight, I’ve been solving aspects of this problem for many years, and through many vehicles. I founded a design, a co-op advertising, and an affiliate marketing agency (one of which sold) and an Internet cafe (sold); hustled countless side projects including investing in real estate and startups, and developing an inventory management system for businesses with outside sales forces; and led corporate innovation teams in healthcare, business services, education and marketing.
Through this, I’ve learned and built a practice of speculative design and inclusive innovation that includes disciplined experimental design, holistic analysis via systems thinking, vivid visioning born of diverse perspectives and multidisciplinary collaboration, agile test and learn cycles, and rapid prototyping of artifacts from clients’ preferred futures.
And now, I have a diverse, global team and network (20 countries represented) of deliciously clever, passionate, high-velocity learners turned designers, strategists, analysts, makers, and content producers eager to guide clients to boldly invent the future.
Are you done merely optimizing? Begin with Wonder.