Peter Jones's Page

I live and work in Toronto, and spend time working with Redesign Research and clients in the US and Europe. I am a visiting scholar working with collaborative informatics in healthcare at The University of Toronto. I am also a Fellow of the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) at OCAD, and am an advisor and faculty member of the new MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation program.

I started Redesign Research in 2001 to focus on user experience research, information product design, and organizational innovation. We continue to lead the design and user understanding research for market-leading information services. I have designed user experience and information architectures for products used in professional and intellectual practices, including (over the years) sciencedirect.com, ProceduresConsult.com, and CaseMap.

My Union Institute doctorate (2000) inspired continuing research into the organizational dynamics of innovation, collaborative information practices, and how people think with and use information. My current management research involves changing organizational practices to enable reflective renewal to improve innovation and facilitate transformation.

With interests in the organizational foundations for innovation, I have published observations about the relationship between organizational behavior, strategic alignment, and process design. I’ve documented the effectiveness of a socialization process for diffusing desired organizational values, styles and practices to accelerate innovation, enhance everyday work, and promote shared, interdependent leadership. This work has been published in book chapters, conferences, and a new business book, We Tried to Warn You, published by Nimble Books.

As a board member of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras, I work with a worldwide practice network to advance the principles of dialogic design for inclusive, multi-stakeholder participation in solution creation for complex problems. As a non-profit, the Agoras Institute focuses on global and civil society issues primarily. I founded Dialogic Design International with Alexander Christakis and two partners in 2007 to develop Dr. Christakis’ Structured Dialogic Design process for strategic dialogue for complex organizational problems. These enterprises are developing collaborative tools for participatory whole system design for problem systems, products and services design, and decisionmaking in social systems.

I wrote Team Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to Collaborative Innovation in 1998 (McGraw-Hill) and revised it in 2002. In summary, my lifelong professional and social interests are to humanize systems and institutions, enabling harmonious futures co-created through collective wisdom.