Natalie Nixon is a proponent of chaordic systems thinking, the idea that chaos and order (or, randomness and structure) can exist in harmony. Design thinking involves processes that distill ambiguity into something concrete, she says.
Paradoxically, design thinking relies on the intangible sense of intuition, a feeling that a pattern exists somewhere in the fogginess ahead. Moving on one’s intuition takes time and self-trust, Nixon says: “The application is when you mull on your intuition a bit, let it marinate, and then you actually have to act.”