A selection of clients, articles, industry-specific reporting, editing, and my books.
Client: Project Management Institute
Building and Leading High-Performing Teams
Thought Leadership Special Report: November 2023
How can project managers build and maintain high-performing teams? By focusing on culture, empowerment, engagement and resilience.
Key Topics: Empowerment, Team Building, Resilience, Culture
How to Build a Change-Ready Mindset Across Teams
Despite pivot after pivot, organizations still have work to do to build change-ready teams. From implementing new tools or scaling a new process for teams to follow, project leaders must create a culture and a mindset that allows teams to adapt seamlessly and quickly.
Key Topics: Team Building, Global and Regional Team Culture, Managing Change, New Process and Tools Implementation
Global Project Management Job Trends 2023
Outlook for 2023 Global Project Management Talent Trends analyzing regional GDP growth forecasts and key industry employment and job market trends. Research and specific contribution to Southeast Asia forecast.
Key Topics: Market trends, Research, Forecasting, Talent Trends
Special Report: Rethinking Risk (and Opportunity)
The margin of error has narrowed across the business world. Organizations must find a way to pursue the innovation that drives growth while still navigating a gauntlet of risks: climate change, geopolitical unrest, supply chain upheaval, inflation, shifting regulations, talent gaps, and even those buzzy tech trends.
Key Topics: Risk Management, Opportunity Discovery, Agile Supply Chains, Managing Talent Gaps
Client: Skanska
Sweden’s largest construction and development company commissioned me to write a piece helping developers think outside the box when searching for potential development sites. The result was “Se stadens dolda potential” (The city’s hidden potential).
Key Topics: Discovering Opportunity, New Thinking, Changing Paradigms
Client: The Guardian
Can Urban Innovation Meet Growing Needs?
“To unlock the full potential of our cities and solve pressing problems, we must re-imagine the existing urban infrastructure writes Scott Burnham”
Book: Six Steps for Resourceful Innovation
“A masterclass in the art of possibility.” – Fiona Luis
Resourceful innovation is about discovering opportunities others miss, working with the flow as resources and situations change, and unlocking hidden potential from everything around you – including yourself.
Client: Premsela, Netherlands Institute for Design
Research, Editorial, Writing: Trust and Design
Served as Editor and Project Director for Trust Design, a research project exploring the relationship between trust and design. The result was a four-part publication series in collaboration with Volume Magazine and teaching at Design Academy Eindhoven.
Key Topics: Design Research, Building Trust, Designing Trust
Various Articles on Ecology, Cities, Infrastructure
Earth Island Journal
Innovative infrastructure projects find inspiration in the wild to restore urban air, waterways, and coastlines.
Architizer
NatureStructure: Design That Plays on the Same Team as Nature
“Instead of combating natural forces, NatureStructure represents a new generation of innovative infrastructure that uses the powers and processes of nature as components, providing a framework for a sustainable and coexistent future.”
Metropolis
“Scott Burnham writes that in our era of limited budgets and resources, increasing the functionality of existing infrastructure is a necessary path forward.”
NurtureStructure
Restore Ecosystems by Rethinking Cemeteries
“To preserve species, increase biodiversity, and restore ecosystems, cemeteries may be our safest bet. Scott Burnham writes that it is time to reconsider the role they can play.”
Architizer / Reprogramming the City
Design With the City, Not For It: How to Discover Unlimited Urban Potential
“The city has all the resources it needs; the key to unlocking these resources is seeing the urban landscape not as the end result of a previous creative process, but as the beginning of a new one. Learning to design with the city is appreciating that there is a landscape full of resources to work with, not to remove and discard.”
ArchitectureBoston
From bus shelters to classrooms, a Swedish energy company sees the light with therapy bulbs.
My Books
“Scott’s books are filled with simple-yet-powerful insights. They highlight aspects that were staring me in the face all along but I was too blind to see. Now I can’t unsee them.”
– Vishal Kataria
An exploration of ways in which the city’s waste and byproducts can be recovered, reimagined, and used in new ways – illustrating the potential of overlooked and unsung operations of the city.
This Could: How to Create Opportunity, Increase Creativity, and Reduce Waste
Strategies and tools for companies, cities, and individuals to create solutions and future opportunities using objects, assets, and materials in new ways.
“A masterclass in the art of possibility.” – Fiona Luis
Reprogramming the City: Adaptive Reuse and Repurposing Urban Objects
44 projects from 17 countries showing how people are making cities more livable and resilient by using existing urban objects in new ways.
“A hopeful anthology of solutions for our hot, crowded planet.” – Renée Loth
NatureStructure: Infrastructure for Nature
A new generation of nature-centric design and infrastructure. Projects that nurture and restore ecosystems, employing nature and natural processes to address the problems human development has created for itself.
Design Hacking: Resourceful Innovation and Sustainable Self-Reliance
Design hacking is the individual stepping in when products and systems fall short. It is a democratization of design, enabling the user to be part of the design process and not only on the receiving end of it. “Exceedingly well written and comprehensive.” – Core77