The Clinton Global Initiative

CGI: Designing—and Powering—a Better World

The Clinton Global Initiative kicks off with a paean to the importance of designing solutions that can scale up.

By BRYAN WALSH | @bryanrwalsh | September 24, 2012 | 1

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Global problems—in health, in the economy, in the environment—begin and end with design. An intelligently designed system can make success inevitable, and a poorly designed one can make it impossible. Too often we react to global threats after the fact, our responses hamstrung by underperforming and outmoded systems. If we’re going to fix the world—and it takes only a cursory glance at the headlines to reveal that it needs fixing—we need to start with design.

That was the takeaway message as the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) opened up its annual meeting in New York. The theme this year: “designing for impact.” Former President Bill Clinton put it simply in his opening address: “Today we want to talk about how you can design your actions in advance to make it more likely they will succeed.”/.../