You write: “This collaborative effort requires a rather enlightened design team.” I suggest that such successful collaborations require a more suitable and more deliberate approach. Perhaps the word ‘enlightened’ is appropriate but I prefer differently informed and deliberate.

Design is one of the ultimate appreciative inquiries - focusing on a positive solution to either a vexing problem or a largely invisible opportunity. And those who specialize in Appreciative Inquiry methods struggle with implementing their positively focused, solution-oriented designs - due to a lack of positively designed project approaches.

Those approaches exist but get drowned out by the overly structured, top down, predictively focused orientation of traditional project management methods or, these days, by single and often simple-minded focus on anorexia producing lean or myopic agile approaches. Each of these approaches is useful - in some contexts. Designing a successful project considers first the actual context of the project and adaptively matches methods (note plural) to project needs.

Perhaps we should start marketing our adaptive approach to project design as ‘enlightened’!