This document outlines methods and mindsets for facilitating exploration. It discusses assumptions around facilitation, setting boundaries, contextual awareness, and mapping problems. It then covers techniques like externalization, divergence, convergence, and ritual dissent to generate and refine ideas. The goal is to guide groups through a praxis of purposeful action by starting with the context, using tight iterative cycles, and applying constraints to spur novel solutions. The overall approach emphasizes reflection, abstraction, displacement of ideas, and experimentation to solve complex problems in a collaborative way.
New Models of Purpose-Driven Exploration in Knowledge WorkWilliam Evans
The last 20 years have been a period of radical disruption and transformation in knowledge work. The "why, what, and how" of new value creation and delivery in knowledge-intensive work is shifting and the power has moved from the center to the edges. In his talk, Evans will explore the emergence of new methods of exploration, abductive ideation, and empirical validation that is changing how value creation happens. The very idea first introduced by Buckminster Fuller, when he said that everything was becoming ephemeralized—doing "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing"—or more recently when Marc Andreessen said, "software is eating the world," has had a direct impact on information-seeking and information-synthesizing behaviors. Evans will unpack how many of these models and methods are really the exaptation of Lean, Systems Thinking, and Design Thinking principles, transplanted from the world of manufacturing into the ephemeral world of knowledge work and knowledge management. He'll finish by showing how these models can frame the challenges posed by sense-making (experiential) change in knowledge work.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, Theory of Constraints, and Service Design with global enterprises from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer, he works with a select group of clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will earned his Jonah® from AGI, and serves on the Board of Advisors for Rutgers CX (Customer Experience) Program. Formerly, he was Design Thinker-In-Residence at NYU Stern.
Introduction to UX Research: Conducting Focus GroupsWilliam Evans
Let’s dispense with this little turd blossom right up front: Henry Ford never said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse,”
– it’s simply an myth
This is an introduction to the fundamentals of doing customer research with an emphasis on Focus Groups. This is part of the introduction to ux research series. In this talk we walk through the basics of focus groups, types of focus groups, as well as an in-depth explanation of process and pitfalls.
Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product. In addition, focus groups seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences in using existing products and brands.
Empowering Agile Self-Organized Teams With Design ThinkingWilliam Evans
My experience and research has shown that design thinking empowers employees and teams, enabling them to create a more resilient, value-focused organizational culture.
Innovation-driven growth at the organizational level requires a multidisciplinary approach to designing systems that create the right conditions for self-organizing teams to explore and create while maintaining system hygiene. To achieve that growth, leaders and managers must adopt a strategy for fostering new thinking, practices, and processes that convert strategy both laterally and vertically into new value. To foster the right kind of environment, you must manage the boundaries of the teams, establishing the right cadence and rituals to ensure trust and psychological safety.
“Organizations that operate from the authoritarian, hierarchical, command and control model, where the top leaders control the work, information, decisions, and allocation of resources, produce employees that are less empowered, less creative, and less reductive.” – Journal of Strategic Studies, Creativity and Innovation: The Leadership Dynamics.
In this talk, we’ll discuss boundaries, policies, cadence for self-organizing teams, then cover the key principles and practices of design thinking and how it can be leveraged by agile teams to collaboratively test new options and create new value. Design thinking all comes down to the collaboration utilizing divergence and convergence: acquire and synthesize insights, formulate hypotheses, prototype solutions, and ruthlessly test them with real customers.
We’ll cover that with a case study of how an infrastructure engineering team transformed themselves from waterfall to agile, while learning the key practices of design thinking to reduce the lead time for delivering services and systems from 9 months to days, and in some cases, hours.
The key aspects of Design Thinking we’ll cover:
The importance of trust, boundaries, and candor for team dynamics;
Customer-Centricity. Who are they? What are their challenges? What are their ‘jobs-to-be-done’?
Empathy and Understanding to engaging with customers in their context;
Validate through experimentation that the team is solving the right problem;
Bringing the whole team together to collaboratively explore the problem space and engage in divergent and convergent exercises;
Prototype lightweight solution hypotheses to ensure that the problems are solved before scaling out and investing in delivering the product or service to customers;
When design thinking is appropriate, and when it’s a waste of time (when a user story is simple, simply do it!)
To understand LeanUX, we'll introduce Lean, Lean Systems, and Lean Startup to situate LeanUX in context. This introduction and discussion will use Kanban to explore various aspects and ideas of LeanUX such as hypothesis formulation, assumptions gathering, multi-hypothesis testing and designing / running experiments to create tight feedback loops of customer insight.
We'll cover aspects of LeanUX research, which is conducted to gain a validated understanding of the user's problem hypothesis to understand if the problem we think customers have, is something they actually have before spending months and tens of thousands of dollars doing wasteful UX research & design time on a concept that delivers no customer value.
We'll also discuss lightweight techniques for sharing the research process with the entire team, covering the basics of customer research, interviewing, cognitive biases in user research, and how to create light-weight, rapid personas for solution hypothesis validation. We'll then cover collaborative ideation, designer pairing, and how lean teams work together to reduce batch size and increase the flow of customer business value increments - concepts mostly unheard of in product development teams following agile or waterfall ideologies.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he has brought Lean Startup, LeanUX, and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference, and is the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.
How can focus help our business, our teams, ourselves? This presentation disassembles the difficulty we have in achieving various kinds of focus (vision, goal, users, pragmatism, attention, calm) and gives practical tips on how to approach and improve each of them.
This talk was originally prepared for ThemeConf (themeconf.com) and From the Front (2015.fromthefront.it).
What happens when an organisation commits itself to 'humanity above bureaucracy'?
Bureaucracy and traditional power structures hinder organisations from harnessing the power of their employees, their intelligence, ideas and passions.
New models seem necessary to build a truly human organisation, one that balances scale and speed, efficiency and creativity, control and experimentation.
Working remotely has many benefits but also some obvious and non-obvious challenges. Discussions about remote work also often tend to be generic, however each discipline require its own kind of variations, and design isn’t different.
A lot of the tools available to designers are meant to be used in person, but what if we happen to work remotely, or we want to switch a product team to being remote? How to build trust, gather feedback and craft a unified vision? This talk takes inspiration from some of the practices of Automattic’s teams to overcome some of the unique challenges of remote working.
These solutions will also be beneficial to any designer who desires to engage with open source projects, as they are by definition remote.
This talk was done the first time at WordCamp Brighton 2017.
New Models of Purpose-Driven Exploration in Knowledge WorkWilliam Evans
The last 20 years have been a period of radical disruption and transformation in knowledge work. The "why, what, and how" of new value creation and delivery in knowledge-intensive work is shifting and the power has moved from the center to the edges. In his talk, Evans will explore the emergence of new methods of exploration, abductive ideation, and empirical validation that is changing how value creation happens. The very idea first introduced by Buckminster Fuller, when he said that everything was becoming ephemeralized—doing "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing"—or more recently when Marc Andreessen said, "software is eating the world," has had a direct impact on information-seeking and information-synthesizing behaviors. Evans will unpack how many of these models and methods are really the exaptation of Lean, Systems Thinking, and Design Thinking principles, transplanted from the world of manufacturing into the ephemeral world of knowledge work and knowledge management. He'll finish by showing how these models can frame the challenges posed by sense-making (experiential) change in knowledge work.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, Theory of Constraints, and Service Design with global enterprises from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer, he works with a select group of clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will earned his Jonah® from AGI, and serves on the Board of Advisors for Rutgers CX (Customer Experience) Program. Formerly, he was Design Thinker-In-Residence at NYU Stern.
Introduction to UX Research: Conducting Focus GroupsWilliam Evans
Let’s dispense with this little turd blossom right up front: Henry Ford never said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse,”
– it’s simply an myth
This is an introduction to the fundamentals of doing customer research with an emphasis on Focus Groups. This is part of the introduction to ux research series. In this talk we walk through the basics of focus groups, types of focus groups, as well as an in-depth explanation of process and pitfalls.
Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product. In addition, focus groups seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences in using existing products and brands.
Empowering Agile Self-Organized Teams With Design ThinkingWilliam Evans
My experience and research has shown that design thinking empowers employees and teams, enabling them to create a more resilient, value-focused organizational culture.
Innovation-driven growth at the organizational level requires a multidisciplinary approach to designing systems that create the right conditions for self-organizing teams to explore and create while maintaining system hygiene. To achieve that growth, leaders and managers must adopt a strategy for fostering new thinking, practices, and processes that convert strategy both laterally and vertically into new value. To foster the right kind of environment, you must manage the boundaries of the teams, establishing the right cadence and rituals to ensure trust and psychological safety.
“Organizations that operate from the authoritarian, hierarchical, command and control model, where the top leaders control the work, information, decisions, and allocation of resources, produce employees that are less empowered, less creative, and less reductive.” – Journal of Strategic Studies, Creativity and Innovation: The Leadership Dynamics.
In this talk, we’ll discuss boundaries, policies, cadence for self-organizing teams, then cover the key principles and practices of design thinking and how it can be leveraged by agile teams to collaboratively test new options and create new value. Design thinking all comes down to the collaboration utilizing divergence and convergence: acquire and synthesize insights, formulate hypotheses, prototype solutions, and ruthlessly test them with real customers.
We’ll cover that with a case study of how an infrastructure engineering team transformed themselves from waterfall to agile, while learning the key practices of design thinking to reduce the lead time for delivering services and systems from 9 months to days, and in some cases, hours.
The key aspects of Design Thinking we’ll cover:
The importance of trust, boundaries, and candor for team dynamics;
Customer-Centricity. Who are they? What are their challenges? What are their ‘jobs-to-be-done’?
Empathy and Understanding to engaging with customers in their context;
Validate through experimentation that the team is solving the right problem;
Bringing the whole team together to collaboratively explore the problem space and engage in divergent and convergent exercises;
Prototype lightweight solution hypotheses to ensure that the problems are solved before scaling out and investing in delivering the product or service to customers;
When design thinking is appropriate, and when it’s a waste of time (when a user story is simple, simply do it!)
To understand LeanUX, we'll introduce Lean, Lean Systems, and Lean Startup to situate LeanUX in context. This introduction and discussion will use Kanban to explore various aspects and ideas of LeanUX such as hypothesis formulation, assumptions gathering, multi-hypothesis testing and designing / running experiments to create tight feedback loops of customer insight.
We'll cover aspects of LeanUX research, which is conducted to gain a validated understanding of the user's problem hypothesis to understand if the problem we think customers have, is something they actually have before spending months and tens of thousands of dollars doing wasteful UX research & design time on a concept that delivers no customer value.
We'll also discuss lightweight techniques for sharing the research process with the entire team, covering the basics of customer research, interviewing, cognitive biases in user research, and how to create light-weight, rapid personas for solution hypothesis validation. We'll then cover collaborative ideation, designer pairing, and how lean teams work together to reduce batch size and increase the flow of customer business value increments - concepts mostly unheard of in product development teams following agile or waterfall ideologies.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he has brought Lean Startup, LeanUX, and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference, and is the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.
How can focus help our business, our teams, ourselves? This presentation disassembles the difficulty we have in achieving various kinds of focus (vision, goal, users, pragmatism, attention, calm) and gives practical tips on how to approach and improve each of them.
This talk was originally prepared for ThemeConf (themeconf.com) and From the Front (2015.fromthefront.it).
What happens when an organisation commits itself to 'humanity above bureaucracy'?
Bureaucracy and traditional power structures hinder organisations from harnessing the power of their employees, their intelligence, ideas and passions.
New models seem necessary to build a truly human organisation, one that balances scale and speed, efficiency and creativity, control and experimentation.
Working remotely has many benefits but also some obvious and non-obvious challenges. Discussions about remote work also often tend to be generic, however each discipline require its own kind of variations, and design isn’t different.
A lot of the tools available to designers are meant to be used in person, but what if we happen to work remotely, or we want to switch a product team to being remote? How to build trust, gather feedback and craft a unified vision? This talk takes inspiration from some of the practices of Automattic’s teams to overcome some of the unique challenges of remote working.
These solutions will also be beneficial to any designer who desires to engage with open source projects, as they are by definition remote.
This talk was done the first time at WordCamp Brighton 2017.
Why Design Thinking is Important for Innovation? - Favarin Vitillo - ViewConf...Simone Favarin
Design is a way of thinking, of determining people's true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them. This is the starting about Design. The meaning of the concept.
VR is a new technology that is entering in many industrial and creative processes: nowadays many company and people are experimenting with VR, because it opens new possibilities and it allows costs and time reduction. It is important to understand what is the current status of the technology, the future projections and especially its applications.
Intro to Liberating Structures - Making Meetings Suck LessZachary Cohn
Wonful ran a workshop for the State of Washington's Department of Retirement Services on using Liberating Structures to brainstorm, work as groups, and make meetings suck less!
The Complexity Curve: How to Design for Simplicity (SXSW, March 2012)Dave Hogue
Interfaces and devices are providing more and more power and functionality to people, and in many cases this additional power is accompanied by increasing complexity. Although people have more experience and are more sophisticated, it still takes time to learn new interfaces, information, and interactions. Although we are able to learn and use these often difficult interfaces, we increasingly seek and appreciate simplicity.
The Complexity Curve describes how a project moves from boundless opportunity and wonderful ideas to requirements checklists and constraints then finally (but only rarely) to simplicity and elegance. Where many projects call themselves complete when the necessary features have been included, few push forward and strive to deliver the pleasing and delightful experiences that arise from simplicity, focus, and purpose.
David M. Hogue, Ph.D. - VP of Experience Design, applied psychologist, and adjunct faculty member at San Francisco State University - introduces the Complexity Curve, discuss why our innovative ideas seem to fade over the course of a project, explain why "feature complete" is not the same as "optimal experience", and offer some methods for driving projects toward simplicity and elegance.
Comments on twitter at #SXsimplerUX
Audio available at:
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP13657
Faulty by Design: A Psychological Examination of How Our Decisions Are Guided...UXPA International
In this talk, we will examine the psychological variables influencing decision making and highlight how these factors affect a user’s performance navigating the many decisions embedded in our products and services. The heart of the problem is that the act of complex decision making often exceeds our thinking capacity. To accommodate this resource shortfall, the mind regularly employs a wide array of simplifying heuristics and biases that are typically “good enough” for the more mundane aspects of life but that result in less-than-optimum decisions in critical situations. And while we design assuming a logical, rational decision-making agent, we will also address the debilitating effects of emotions on decisions. Building on this psychological foundation, we will offer examples of how user experience designers can address these issues. You will learn how to facilitate more effective decisions through a variety of design practices.
Buck the System: Consulting Through the Lens of Complexity. Presentation at the 2d international conference on complexity in business, Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, November 12th 2010.
Delegating is hard. It's even harder when we keep anchoring ourselves to old ideas of what management is and what skills requires, without realizing how different is the job of a manager. And then, we become managers ourselves. One of the hurdles that every manager has to overcome at some point in their career, often very early, is the ability to delegate and manage this delegation. This talk will look into the various delegation issues, and how we can revise the idea of management in a new light to acquire new tools to succeed.
Talk done at WEBdeLDN.
Facilitating Complexity: A Pervert's Guide to ExplorationWilliam Evans
A talk given at the Melbourne Cynefin meetup. A set of riffs on how to facilitate teams exploring the Complex Domain.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, DevOps, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at New York University's Stern Graduate School of Management.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he brought LeanUX and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in service design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network alanysis & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect working in Knowledge Management, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference now in it’s 6th year, founded the LEAD SUMMIT NYC, and was also the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.
Talk on how to repair the digital divide among political factions. Suggested socio-technical pattern language for intelligent discourse. John C. Thomas
Why Design Thinking is Important for Innovation? - Favarin Vitillo - ViewConf...Simone Favarin
Design is a way of thinking, of determining people's true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them. This is the starting about Design. The meaning of the concept.
VR is a new technology that is entering in many industrial and creative processes: nowadays many company and people are experimenting with VR, because it opens new possibilities and it allows costs and time reduction. It is important to understand what is the current status of the technology, the future projections and especially its applications.
Intro to Liberating Structures - Making Meetings Suck LessZachary Cohn
Wonful ran a workshop for the State of Washington's Department of Retirement Services on using Liberating Structures to brainstorm, work as groups, and make meetings suck less!
The Complexity Curve: How to Design for Simplicity (SXSW, March 2012)Dave Hogue
Interfaces and devices are providing more and more power and functionality to people, and in many cases this additional power is accompanied by increasing complexity. Although people have more experience and are more sophisticated, it still takes time to learn new interfaces, information, and interactions. Although we are able to learn and use these often difficult interfaces, we increasingly seek and appreciate simplicity.
The Complexity Curve describes how a project moves from boundless opportunity and wonderful ideas to requirements checklists and constraints then finally (but only rarely) to simplicity and elegance. Where many projects call themselves complete when the necessary features have been included, few push forward and strive to deliver the pleasing and delightful experiences that arise from simplicity, focus, and purpose.
David M. Hogue, Ph.D. - VP of Experience Design, applied psychologist, and adjunct faculty member at San Francisco State University - introduces the Complexity Curve, discuss why our innovative ideas seem to fade over the course of a project, explain why "feature complete" is not the same as "optimal experience", and offer some methods for driving projects toward simplicity and elegance.
Comments on twitter at #SXsimplerUX
Audio available at:
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP13657
Faulty by Design: A Psychological Examination of How Our Decisions Are Guided...UXPA International
In this talk, we will examine the psychological variables influencing decision making and highlight how these factors affect a user’s performance navigating the many decisions embedded in our products and services. The heart of the problem is that the act of complex decision making often exceeds our thinking capacity. To accommodate this resource shortfall, the mind regularly employs a wide array of simplifying heuristics and biases that are typically “good enough” for the more mundane aspects of life but that result in less-than-optimum decisions in critical situations. And while we design assuming a logical, rational decision-making agent, we will also address the debilitating effects of emotions on decisions. Building on this psychological foundation, we will offer examples of how user experience designers can address these issues. You will learn how to facilitate more effective decisions through a variety of design practices.
Buck the System: Consulting Through the Lens of Complexity. Presentation at the 2d international conference on complexity in business, Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, November 12th 2010.
Delegating is hard. It's even harder when we keep anchoring ourselves to old ideas of what management is and what skills requires, without realizing how different is the job of a manager. And then, we become managers ourselves. One of the hurdles that every manager has to overcome at some point in their career, often very early, is the ability to delegate and manage this delegation. This talk will look into the various delegation issues, and how we can revise the idea of management in a new light to acquire new tools to succeed.
Talk done at WEBdeLDN.
Facilitating Complexity: A Pervert's Guide to ExplorationWilliam Evans
A talk given at the Melbourne Cynefin meetup. A set of riffs on how to facilitate teams exploring the Complex Domain.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, DevOps, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at New York University's Stern Graduate School of Management.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he brought LeanUX and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in service design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network alanysis & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect working in Knowledge Management, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference now in it’s 6th year, founded the LEAD SUMMIT NYC, and was also the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.
Talk on how to repair the digital divide among political factions. Suggested socio-technical pattern language for intelligent discourse. John C. Thomas
A Tour through Open Space by the Center for Collaborative Awarenessmaureenkmccarthy
Open Space is one way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired meetings and events. It then goes on to create inspired organizations where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity.
In Open Space meetings, participants create and manage their own agenda around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy that all stakeholders in the organization can support and work together to create? OR How can we re-ignite passion in our company and look forward to building a future that engages all?
Open Space is one way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired meetings and events. It then goes on to create inspired organizations where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity.
In Open Space meetings, participants create and manage their own agenda around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy that all stakeholders in the organization can support and work together to create? OR How can we re-ignite passion in our company and look forward to building a future that engages all?
A Tour through Open Space by the Center for Collaborative Awarenessmaureenkmccarthy
Open Space is one way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired meetings and events. It then goes on to create inspired organizations where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity.
In Open Space meetings, participants create and manage their own agenda around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy that all stakeholders in the organization can support and work together to create? OR How can we re-ignite passion in our company and look forward to building a future that engages all?
You’ve been to your fair share of meetings and conferences where you either leave uninspired, or you’re energized while you’re there, but the energy fails to translate long term back at the office.
Open Space replaces traditional meeting methods and brings life back to the organization and the organization back to life.
Open Space enables all kinds of people, in any type of organization, to create inspired communities, where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity.
Open Space can be scheduled for 3 hours to 3+ days, and can include 5 to 2500+ people.
Open Space works best when:
• the work to be done is complex
• the people and ideas involved are diverse
• the passion for ideas and resolution (and even potential for conflict) are high
• and the time to get it done was yesterday
Participants create and manage their own agenda around a central theme of strategic importance, such as:
What is the plan of action that all stakeholders in the organization can support and work together to create?
OR
How can we re-ignite passion in our company and look forward to building a future that engages all?
Open Space is one way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired meetings and events. It then goes on to create inspired organizations where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity.
In Open Space meetings, participants create and manage their own agenda around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy that all stakeholders in the organization can support and work together to create? OR How can we re-ignite passion in our company and look forward to building a future that engages all?
"Innovative Problem Solving: Getting Unstuck In Your Thinking"Sherisse Steward
New ideas are the currency of influence and advancement in organizations. While not every great idea makes it to the marketplace, sometimes even creating those ideas can be a challenge for the individual and the organization. This session will help participants build skills to overcome personal blind spots and common organizational challenges, so your collaborative more effectively and solve businses problems.
Leading Organizational Design and TransformationWilliam Evans
In this talk, Organizational Designer and Strategy consultant Will Evans poses these five provocative questions which he will explore with wit, a bit of biting sarcasm, and a healthy dose of compassion:
How can companies develop product design processes that help the organization adapt to change when nobody likes change?
How can companies foster emergent innovation within the organization while spending all day in countless meetings?
How can leading enterprises approach digital transformation when they all seem to fail miserably at it?
What are the principles of a resilience strategy for companies that can’t seem to figure out what the hell they are doing?
Why is becoming a “Design-Driven Organization,” so damn hard, probably a pipe dream, and why most advice from experts, consultants, and UX thought-leaders isn’t just wrong, it’s probably a fraud?
Learn new frames to revitalize your product design organization, to gain cooperation, to improve strategic thinking and creative problem solving, to boost performance, and to extract maximum benefit from new options.
In this talk, we’ll hope to discuss:
Designing organizational resilience.
Move from competing agendas to organizational alignment.
See the “big picture” of the complexities of systems-wide change.
Enable creativity and flexibility in problem solving.
Leverage problems & dilemmas to enhance organizational strategy.
Ready your organization to create new options.
On Context: Methods and Mindsets for Situational AwarenessWilliam Evans
It could be argued that tribes, communities of practice, organizations, and societies accrete symbolic systems that forge a common language over time to accomplish tasks usually related to the preservation, extension of power, and access to resources needed to continue to flourish and allow these networks within boundaries to feel a sense of agency and empowerment. Indeed, when one group or tribe within a larger ecosystem feels threatened or produces radical new ideas, the heretical rebels leverage common metaphors, symbols, and tactics to achieve strategic goals – at first rebelling against the existing power structure (writing manifestos, throwing molotov cocktail), supplanting the existing “high priests”. Eventually, though, they develop the same rituals that previous power structure utilized to maintain and extend their power base – the heretics eventually become the high priests of a new caste system and then anoint their own saints.
We have seen this evolution in social systems and the accretion of ‘webs of signification’ in the context of IT in general and software design and development in particular. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz said that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs,” which can inform our understanding of tribes in a software enterprise setting. With each new principled-based movement within IT, from RUP to Agile, to Lean Software, to Lean UX and more recently DevOps and Lean Startup, the new tribe has the need to extend it’s power base beyond the context for which it was originally intended. Even if each tribe armed with their own methods and practices makes sense at a given time and place, this does not necessarily mean it’s appropriate or strategic from a systems, wholistic, enterprise, or societal perspective.
This notion is important in making strategic decisions from an enterprise perspective in terms of which ideology to deploy, how to allocate resources, and how to ensure that across the portfolio of potential ‘bets’ the appropriate methods are deployed. This tension – between tribes that wish to enjoy greater agency by proselytizing their ideology and methods into other domains, and the needs of the organization, which seeks balance across multiple competing factions to actually achieve enterprise-wide goals, is the primary challenge faced by leaders.
We’ll explore these notions, and seek to understand the various roles, practices, and methods that are either local-optima or more global in perspective, to seek to provide a framework for decision-making in uncertain and turbulent times. We’ll unpack the relationship between different horizons from probable to possible, and provide some heuristics for when things like Design Thinking or LeanUX are most appropriate, and when Agile, PMBOK, or ITIL frameworks might be the most authentic satisficing lens through which to make decisions.
Dispositioning Advantage: A Pervert's Guide to Strategy DesignWilliam Evans
Strategy. The identification and exploitation of an opponent’s weakness. Before you can have Strategy Deployment (Policy Deployment, Hoshin Kanri), it tends to reason that you probably need a strategy to deploy. But how do you do that? What are the mechanisms? What are the methods? What are the principles that allow an organization to design a meaningful strategy?
This lively 45 (to 60 minute) romp will introduce you to the history of strategy in organizations (it’s dark, perverse, and full of dragons) from Porter to Rumelt, to Dettmer, and Boyd. Few will remember that in the early days of strategy, there was only one: drive down the experience curve and be the low-cost provider with a stream-lined supply chain. The talk will unpack what strategy actually is and more importantly, what it is not. It will painstakingly deconstruct how the term is ritually abused and misused, and then methodically introduce how strategy is a design problem, but too important to be left to the designers in their plaid shirts, funky glasses, and ernest but ultimately vapid proclamations about human-centered blah blah, validating blah, blah, buzzword bingo verbal diarrhea inventing flaccid constructs like ‘design strategy, content strategy, ux strategy’ and ‘strategic planning’.
The talk will introduce some conceptual frameworks used in military strategy and maneuver warfare, which dates back over 2,300 years to the time of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. We’ll explore how the time-tested principles of economic and military competition can be applied to social and commercial ventures, such as software and service delivery leading to considerable benefits in coherence, focus. and profit. We’ll then introduces a reasonable, systematic set of methods to help you translate current market uncertainty, fast changing customer needs, and ever-changing technological disruptions into a meaningful strategy and organizational capability ready for Hoshin Kanri.
Good Design is Honest: Cognitive Science to UX Design PrinciplesWilliam Evans
This is a simple introduction to the cognitive science of perception leading into an exploration of user experience design principles as well as fundamentals of visual design.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, Theory of Constraints, and Service Design with global enterprises from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer, he works with a select group of clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will earned his Jonah® from AGI, and serves on the Board of Advisors for Rutgers CX (Customer Experience) Program. Formerly, he was Design Thinker-In-Residence at NYU Stern.
Will was previously the Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow. Before that, he served as Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world’s leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he brought LeanUX, Lean and Kanban to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl – a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
Recent talks:
Introducing The Theory of Constraints
Exploration & Exploitation Mindsets in Design-Driven Enterprises
Redesigned to Disrupt: A Systems Thinking Approach
Design Thinking: Beyond the Bounds of Your Own Head
Introduction to Kanban for Creative Agencies
Framing LeanUX: Epistemology and Complexity in Product Design
Introduction to Lean UX Branding
NOTE: All the *experts* say you shouldn't have text on slides. This presentation has no text on slides.
New principles and methods like UX, Design Thinking and Lean Startup have proven themselves useful for many organizations at the tactical level, but larger organizations are still governed at the strategic decision-making level by outmoded management theories which have difficultly handling uncertainty and constant change. Introducing ideas like UX, Lean and content strategy at the operational and tactical levels of the organization may only allow for incremental change to existing offerings - innovation at the fingertips, but not the core of their business which is being disrupted. If large media companies are going to mitigate the risk of future disruption, they will need to learn to be disruptive themselves.
Evans will explore the application of systems and design thinking as well as Lean Startup in the content publishing space and showcase real world examples of innovation applied at all three levels of organizations: strategic, operational and tactical.
Introduction to Kanban for Creative AgenciesWilliam Evans
This is an introduction to Kanban. Creative agencies, like most organizations that do knowledge work, are defined by the projects they deliver that (hopefully) delivers value for the clients. Most agencies also struggle with multiple competing stakeholders, multiple client engagements, tight deadlines and long hours – it’s amazing any creative work happens at all. Most projects – brand campaigns, websites, landing pages, social, pr, direct, everything, can be viewed as a process - a series of steps or tasks that achieve some desired result – delivery of the project, a happy client, drinks in Tribeca. There are all kinds of processes - simple and complex, individual and team, quick and time-consuming. Sometimes large or over-arching processes consist of a series of smaller processes.
Kanban is a tool for managing the flow of materials or information (or whatever) in a process. Not having the materials, whether it is a part, a document, or customer information, at the time you need it causes delay and waste. On the other hand, having too many parts (too much design, creative briefs, design assets, code) on hand or too much work in process (WIP) is also a form of waste. Kanban is a tool to learn and manage an optimal flow of work within the process. It can also (potentially) make working in agencies a more human, and humane, place to do one’s best work.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he has brought Lean Startup, LeanUX, and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference, and is the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.
By WIll Evans, Director of User Experience Design, TLC Labs
"What people say is not what people do" - Cheskin
There has been a lot of hot air about "getting out of the building", and "just go talk to customers", but rarely are those statements backed up with strategic and tactical advice about HOW and WHY. Well, this talk is meant to help. Honestly, getting out of the building and talking to customers is only valuable when done right. As my old martial arts sensei used to say, "practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect!"
Design Ethnography is usually conducted to gain a *deep* understanding of the our target customers in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the product strategy. Design ethnography takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable, locally specific as well as intersubjectively reflexive.
One primary difference between ethnography and other methods of user research is that ethnography assumes that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons they give for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, before we can assign to their actions and behaviors interpretations drawn from our own experiences.
Many people believe that design ethnography is only viable in the context of "Big Upfront Design", while many Agile and Lean teams believe they simply don't have the time, or that big upfront design is synonymous with waste. During this talk, we'll explore various myths, methods of ethnography, and ways in which agile or lean teams may use it to gain deeper insights into customer behaviors to create richer experiences without waste.
Questions I may answer in this talk:
What is design ethnography?
What are some of the qualitative and quantitative methods?
Isn't Design Ethnography and LeanUX contradictory?
When and where is design ethnography appropriate for teams?
Is Design Ethnography appropriate only with Big Upfront Design Research?
How can teams use Design Ethnography for sense-making?
What are the practical steps for engaging in design ethnography tomorrow?
Will Evans is the Director of User Experience Design and Research at The Library Corporation as well as TLCLabs, the enterprise innovation lab. At TLC, Will is responsible for working across the organization to create extraordinary user experiences and new product innovations.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy. His experiences include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com.
Mr. Evans’ research and design has been featured in numerous publications including Business Week, The Econom
Introduction to UX Research: Conducting Focus GroupsWilliam Evans
Let’s dispense with this little turd blossom right up front: Henry Ford never said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse,”
– it’s simply an myth
This is an introduction to the fundamentals of doing customer research with an emphasis on Focus Groups. This is part of the introduction to ux research series. In this talk we walk through the basics of focus groups, types of focus groups, as well as an in-depth explanation of process and pitfalls.
Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product. In addition, focus groups seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences in using existing products and brands.
Introduction to AgileUX: Fundamentals of Customer ResearchWilliam Evans
This is an introduction to the fundamentals of doing customer research for AgileUX teams. We talk about the reasons for doing real research, how to conduct on-site contextual interviews, the process to use, and how to analyze and social the results from the research.
Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product in the context of an Agile development process. In addition, research seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers user products in their particular context and feed those findings immediately into the scrum's decision-making and development process.
User Research takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable, locally specific as well as intersubjectively reflexive. In AgileUX Product design, contextual inquiry and other methods of user research asserts that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, so that AgileUX Teams are always making product design decisions on actual customer feedback and behavior, and not opinion or instinct.
Modeling Leadership & Traversing Power StructuresWilliam Evans
Modeling Leadership & Traversing Power Structures
“By its very nature, design is about exploring, about options, about embracing many disciplines and multiple points of view.Within this sometimes confusing and often contradictory diversity, leadership is the ability to discern vistas and pathways.”
This talk started out as a stone in my shoe. I had been reading on the various UX related lists including the IxDA and IA Institutes mailing lists people complaining about the lack of empowerment they felt in their jobs within organizations. Some of these posts bordered on whiny kvetch-fests saying in essence that they had no influence within the organization; their ideas where not considered; engineering had all the power; or they simply had no seat at the table.
This got me thinking about influence and power, because I knew that over the years, the user experience profession had developed a powerful set of tools for understanding problem spaces, and designing innovative solutions to those problems.
Why complain? Not to put too fine a point on it, but why whine like little bitches suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Why couldn’t we take activities, methods, and processes from UX itself and try to solve for this problem space. This talk presents a history of management theory, and exploration of the philosophy of power, a deep dive into the attributes of successful leaders, and a list of key attributes that designers seeking power can use to become the leaders that have the ability to become.
Communities of Care - Strategic Social Interaction Design in the HealthcareWilliam Evans
Social Interaction Design is not web design. It's not interaction design. It's about designing complex ecosystems that support conversation, collaboration, intimacy -- in short, community. Problem is, many people - even in the IxD world - don't understand what conversation is, or how to create engaging communities.
Many healthcare providers and startups are rushing to deliver on the promise of creating supportive online communities for people while simultaneously trumpeting personal health records and electronic health records at the same time creating potential privacy and trust issues.
To design Communities of Care, you must commit to writing a narrative of human behavior mediated through time and space. While great strides have been made over the last 40 years drawing on a rich history of Cybernetics and Human-Computer Interaction, those models of interaction are limited in explaining social and psychological modalities of social interaction in physical space and particularly in mediated online spaces which is becoming more the norm for collective and collaborative group social interactions in the healthcare industry.
The case study discusses the potential of drone delivery and the challenges that need to be addressed before it becomes widespread.
Key takeaways:
Drone delivery is in its early stages: Amazon's trial in the UK demonstrates the potential for faster deliveries, but it's still limited by regulations and technology.
Regulations are a major hurdle: Safety concerns around drone collisions with airplanes and people have led to restrictions on flight height and location.
Other challenges exist: Who will use drone delivery the most? Is it cost-effective compared to traditional delivery trucks?
Discussion questions:
Managerial challenges: Integrating drones requires planning for new infrastructure, training staff, and navigating regulations. There are also marketing and recruitment considerations specific to this technology.
External forces vary by country: Regulations, consumer acceptance, and infrastructure all differ between countries.
Demographics matter: Younger generations might be more receptive to drone delivery, while older populations might have concerns.
Stakeholders for Amazon: Customers, regulators, aviation authorities, and competitors are all stakeholders. Regulators likely hold the greatest influence as they determine the feasibility of drone delivery.
Senior Project and Engineering Leader Jim Smith.pdfJim Smith
I am a Project and Engineering Leader with extensive experience as a Business Operations Leader, Technical Project Manager, Engineering Manager and Operations Experience for Domestic and International companies such as Electrolux, Carrier, and Deutz. I have developed new products using Stage Gate development/MS Project/JIRA, for the pro-duction of Medical Equipment, Large Commercial Refrigeration Systems, Appliances, HVAC, and Diesel engines.
My experience includes:
Managed customized engineered refrigeration system projects with high voltage power panels from quote to ship, coordinating actions between electrical engineering, mechanical design and application engineering, purchasing, production, test, quality assurance and field installation. Managed projects $25k to $1M per project; 4-8 per month. (Hussmann refrigeration)
Successfully developed the $15-20M yearly corporate capital strategy for manufacturing, with the Executive Team and key stakeholders. Created project scope and specifications, business case, ROI, managed project plans with key personnel for nine consumer product manufacturing and distribution sites; to support the company’s strategic sales plan.
Over 15 years of experience managing and developing cost improvement projects with key Stakeholders, site Manufacturing Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Maintenance, and facility support personnel to optimize pro-duction operations, safety, EHS, and new product development. (BioLab, Deutz, Caire)
Experience working as a Technical Manager developing new products with chemical engineers and packaging engineers to enhance and reduce the cost of retail products. I have led the activities of multiple engineering groups with diverse backgrounds.
Great experience managing the product development of products which utilize complex electrical controls, high voltage power panels, product testing, and commissioning.
Created project scope, business case, ROI for multiple capital projects to support electrotechnical assembly and CPG goods. Identified project cost, risk, success criteria, and performed equipment qualifications. (Carrier, Electrolux, Biolab, Price, Hussmann)
Created detailed projects plans using MS Project, Gant charts in excel, and updated new product development in Jira for stakeholders and project team members including critical path.
Great knowledge of ISO9001, NFPA, OSHA regulations.
User level knowledge of MRP/SAP, MS Project, Powerpoint, Visio, Mastercontrol, JIRA, Power BI and Tableau.
I appreciate your consideration, and look forward to discussing this role with you, and how I can lead your company’s growth and profitability. I can be contacted via LinkedIn via phone or E Mail.
Jim Smith
678-993-7195
jimsmith30024@gmail.com
Oprah Winfrey: A Leader in Media, Philanthropy, and Empowerment | CIO Women M...CIOWomenMagazine
This person is none other than Oprah Winfrey, a highly influential figure whose impact extends beyond television. This article will delve into the remarkable life and lasting legacy of Oprah. Her story serves as a reminder of the importance of perseverance, compassion, and firm determination.
The Team Member and Guest Experience - Lead and Take Care of your restaurant team. They are the people closest to and delivering Hospitality to your paying Guests!
Make the call, and we can assist you.
408-784-7371
Foodservice Consulting + Design
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities to radically reinvent the way we do business. This study explores how CEOs and top decision makers around the world are responding to the transformative potential of AI.
2. “For apart from inquiry, apart from the
praxis, individuals cannot be truly human.
Knowledge emerges only through
invention and re-invention, through the
restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful
inquiry human beings pursue in the world,
with the world, and with each other.”
- PAU LO F RE IRE
4. Assumptions
We all exist and work within complex social systems.
We are all responsible for the design, development, and
maintenance of purposeful systems.
To build a great team, you must have an organization
design that enables teams to design great customer
experiences.
Before you can design an amazing customer
experience, you must design a team to create the
customer experience.
The most accute constraint organizations current face
is that their organizational design is incongruent with
their strategy; places to many policies, procedures,
reporting lines, and queues between the teams
delivering great experiences for their customers.
“Rational discussion is useful only
when there is a significant base of
shared assumptions.”
– Noam Chomsky
5. On Doubt
“If a man will begin with
certainties, he shall end in doubts;
but if he will be content to begin
with doubts, he shall end in
certainties.”
— Sir Francis Bacon
6. The process by which theory,
lesson, or skill is enacted,
practiced, embodied, realized,
reified and reflected in & through
action.
Facilitation is ultimately about
guiding agents through the
praxis of purposeful action.
On Praxis
SEMANTIC FOUNDRY ATELIERMADE WITH LOVE
7. Ontological Design is the
design of ways of being —
not just the purposeful
creation of mental
scafolding, but rather
facilitating the evolution
of human capability
within social systems.
Social systems focused on catalyzing,
facilitating, and enabling situated and
embodied human cognition and action.
Ontological Design
“To begin simply, ontological designing is a way of
characterising the relation between human
beings and lifeworlds.” - Anne-Marie Willis
8. Problematizing Facilitation
Think about the last exploration
session, meeting, brainstorming
meeting that you held.
Think about what the purpose of that
meeting was. Think about:
§ Who facilitated it?
§ Why were you there?
§ What decisions had to be made?
9. Use Post-its
§ On Post-its
§ 1 idea per post-it
§ 3-5 Words
§ All Caps
10. Question One
Write on a post-it silently*:
What problem arose during facilitation,
which prevented the group from
moving forward, for which there was a
simple, easy solution that everyone
could see?
* Do not discuss. Brainstorm quietly.
1 MINUTE
11. Question Two
Write on a post-it silently:
What problem arose during facilitation,
which prevented the group from
moving forward, which required
someone with deep expertise?
1 MINUTE
12. Question Three
Write on a post-it silently:
What problem arose during facilitation,
which prevented the group from moving
forward, which required the meeting to
gather more data before a positive outcome
could be achieved?
1 MINUTE
13. Question Four
Write on a post-it silently:
What problem arose during facilitation, which
caused the whole session to go sideways, where
there was no clear outcome, no goal, and people
just felt like they were wasting time?
1 MINUTE
14. BOUNDARIES
“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was
built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could
look right over it, and even a child could climb it.
Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate
it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of
boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For
seven generations there had been nothing in the world
more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was
inside it and what was outside it depended upon which
side of it you were on.”
— Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
SEMANTIC FOUNDRY ATELIERMADE WITH LOVE
15. Setting Boundaries
§ Be on time
§ No laptops or cellphones
§ Respect each other (Don’t dominate
conversations, Don’t talk over someone).
§ Write your questions on post-its
§ Chatham House Rules
§ Follow instructions
§ No laptops or cellphones.
M ET A:
“Is there any reason you can’t be
100% present for the entirety of
the next 90 minutes?.”
“The purpose of this session is
to create Options, not
Solutions.”
“Do we have the right people in
the room?”
16. “Ultimately, all organizations are
socio-technical systems in which the
manner of external adaptation and
the solution of internal integration
problems are interdependent”
— Edgar Schein
Sensemaking Systems
FROM “ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND CULTURE,” EDGAR SCHEIN
17. Discuss Problems
With the people at your table, present all
the problems that people came up with
on their post-its.
Try to quickly process all the post-its
while giving enough time for people to
understand the nature of the problem.
1 MINUTE
18. CO M P LEX
Cause and effect are only coherent
in retrospect and do not repeat
Pattern management
Perspective filters
Complex adaptive systems
Probe-Sense-Respond
Exploring
Complexity
CO M P LI CAT ED
Cause and effect separated
overtime and space
Analytical / Reductionist
Scenario Planning
Systems Thinking
Sense-Analyze-Respond
CH AO S
No cause and effect
relationships perceivable
Stability-focused intervention
Enactment tools
Crisis Management
Act-Sense-Respond
OB V I OUS
Cause and effect relations
repeatable, perceivable, and
predictable
Legitimate best practice
Standard operating procedure
Process reengineering
Sense-Categorize-Respond
20. “The notion of context has been adapted to
computing from its original use referring
to language, which is reflected in the
structure of the word itself: con(with) text,
either written or oral, intended to be
interpreted by one or more people.
The text is not an encapsulated
representation of meaning, but rather a
cue that allows the anticipated audience to
construct appropriate meanings.”
- TERRY WINOGRAD
SEMANTIC FOUNDRY ATELIERMADE WITH LOVE
21. Three Horizons View
FROM “EXPLORATION VERSUS EXPLOITATION IN DESIGN-DRIVEN ENTERPRISES,” WILL EVANS
24. Contextual Awareness
What are requisite variety of dispositions and
practices for pioneers (heretics), as well as the
processes and methods deployed which are
fundementally different in the Complex Domain?
25. Contextual Awareness
What are requisite variety of dispositions and
practices for pioneers (heretics), as well as the
processes and methods deployed which are
fundementally different in the Complex Domain?
It’s about the movement between domains, and the
interactions between teams and across domains
where novelty can turn into capability.
26. Contextual Awareness
What are requisite variety of dispositions and
practices for pioneers (heretics*), as well as the
processes and methods deployed which are
fundementally different in the Complex Domain?
It’s about the movement between domains, and the
interactions between teams and across domains
where novelty can turn into capability.
Exploration is expensive, and must be managed
through the appropriate application of constraints.
27. Mapping
§ Spend 10 minutes clustering all the problems together
that seem to be similar.
§ All the ones where the problem / solution was
relatively obvious.
§ Ones that required an expert to help out.
§ Ones that needed more information, more data,
perhaps some experimentation.
§ Ones that seemed completely hopeless, no one knew
what to do, why they were there, what the goal was.
10 MINUTES
28. Constraints
“Just as the constraints of syntax allow
meaning to be expressed, constraints on
behavior thus make meaningful actions
possible.”
- A LIC IA J U A RRE RO
FROM “ENABLING CONSTRAINTS,” ALICIA JUARRERO, LEANUX15
29. Constraints
•Within different groups, introduce
new constraints related to context,
channel, customer, budget,
timeframe to spur new ideas.
•Introducing different contexts can
catalyze exaptative innovation
(application of a solution from one
context into a totally new context).
Ex a m pl e :
“You team’s solution cannot rely
upon digital devices, smart phones,
or the internet. Only analog solutions
you can buy at a hardware store.”
“Your concept cannot use language
or words to provide affordance to
the customer/user.”
“Your concept should be something
the team can execute in 5 days.”
30. “A frame is, simplistically, a point of view;
often, and particularly in technical situations,
this point of view is deemed “irrelevant” or
“biasing” because it implicitly references a
non-objective way of considering a situation
or idea.
But a frame – while certainly subjective and
often biasing – is of critical use to the
designer, as it is something that is shaped over
the long-term aggregation of thoughts and
experiences.”
— Jon Kolko
31. Timeboxing
The first constraint to apply in
facilitating co-creative activities in the
complex domain is time.
It is better to have 4 cycles of 10
minutes than 1 60 minute cycle.
32. Externalization
By taking ideas, concepts, perspectives out
of the cognitive domain (your head),
removing it from the linguistic realm
(oral/aural/ talk), and making it tangible in
the physical world in one cohesive visual
structure (post-it, sketch, wall), designers
are freed of the natural memory limitations
of the brain and teams can begin to map
visualizations to internal patterns and
mental models.
Ex a m pl e :
Sketch concepts that solve for
the problem. No bulleted lists, no
sentences. Just sketches that
solve the problem. If it’s not in
the sketch, the element doesn’t
exist.
33. Divergence
Abduction goes upon the hope that there
is sufficient affinity between the reasoner’s
mind and nature’s to render guessing not
altogether hopeless, provided each guess is
checked by comparison with observation…
The effort should therefore be to make
each hypothesis…as near an even bet as
possible.”
— charles pierce
Ex a m pl e :
Quantity over quality.
Generate at least 6 different
concepts that solve for the
problem. Each concept must be
unique.
34. Assent and Expansion
In the first few rounds of critique, only
positive aspects of the concepts can be
commented on.
Similar to Improv’s “Yes, and…”
Absolutely nothing negative can be said.
Only positive additions to the design.
Ex a m pl e :
“Highlight two concepts you
absolutely love, or elements
that you would steal, integrate
into your own concept.”
35. Cognitive Displacement
In the second round of generative
ideation, it’s important to seed the
ideas of one person into the head of
another.
The easiest way to do this is through
“Cognitive Displacement,” or having a
person pitch a designed concept they
have not created.
Ex a m pl e :
“Hand your concept to the
person to your left. You cannot
explain it and you cannot look
them in the eye. They have 5
minutes to pitch your concept
back to you.”
This allows the person who’s
work is being presented to
check their concept for
coherence and identify gaps in
their communication. It also
has the benefit of building
empathy.
36. Convergence
Convergence is the slow contraction
of available options through the
application of constraints and the
checking for coherence.
Does a concept or designed element
make sense? How does it solve the
problem? Of all possible options,
which are most elegant?
Ex a m pl e :
You have 4 minutes, using
coloured dots, to indicate only
the designs and elements that
should be carried forward to
the next round. These may be
integrated with other
concepts, with weaker ideas
falling behind.
37. Ritual Dissent
“A complex problem is not the sum of its
parts. It cannot be broken down with each
solution aggregated; it must be solved as a
whole. Another issue is that of
entrainment, especially in consensus-
seeking environments. The more time we
spend in a group, the more groupthink sets
in, and we can create our own reality, only
to suffer a rude awakening when we
engage with the external world.”
— Dave Snowden
FROM ” EVERYTHING IS FRAGMENTED—THE ART OF “RITUAL DISSENT”, DAVID SNOWDEN
38. Ritual Dissent
• The approach involves a spokesperson (for a
team) presenting a series of concepts to a
group of stakeholders who listens in silence.
• Spokesperson only has 5 minutes to prepare,
5 minutes to present
• Team must imagine they are a group of
stakeholders hearing a pitch to fund a new
initiative to be added to the portfolio
• No questions can be asked of the
spokesperson
• Spokesperson must face away from
stakeholders, and listen whilst taking notes.
They cannot challenge any critique.
• Stakeholders must find all the things wrong
with the concept, why it solves no problem,
the problem is not worth solving, the concept
is not elegant, requires too many resources,
etc…
• Absolutely nothing positive can be said
about the solution
• Only dissent the concept, not the people.
FROM ” EVERYTHING IS FRAGMENTED—THE ART OF “RITUAL DISSENT”, DAVID SNOWDEN
39. SEMANTIC FOUNDRY ATELIERMADE WITH LOVE
ACTIVITY
Phase
EXPLORE
Research
SELECT
Synthesis
EXPERIMENT
Ideation
SELECT & SCALE
Execution
A
Solving the right problems Solving problems the right way
WE KNOW
Should Be
WE GUESS
Could Be
B
40. Design Studio Process
1. Framing the Problem
2. Solo Ideation (Silent, 8 Concepts)
5 minutes
3. Generative Critique (Yes, and…)
5 minutes
4. Steal & Integrate
5. Solo Ideation (Silent, 1 Concept, 5 minutes)
5 minutes
6. Cognitive Displacement
(Pitch another’s concept)
5 Minutes
7. Solo Ideation (1 Concept, 10 minutes)
8. Transference & Seeding
9. Synthesis (Team Design, 1 Concept)
30 minutes
10. Ritual Dissent (Only Negative)
10 Minutes
11. Active Decision Making
(Ignore, Innovate, Remove, Best Practice)
10 Minutes
12. Kill Your Babies
13. Final Design, Ritual Assent
60 minutess
FROM “THE DESIGN STUDIO METHODOLOGY,” WILL EVANS
41. “It is hardly possible to overrate the
value… of placing human beings in
contact with persons dissimilar to
themselves, with modes of thought
and action unlike those with which
they are familiar.”
— John Stewart Mill
SEMANTIC FOUNDRY ATELIERMADE WITH LOVE
42. Final Thoughts
§ Start with the context
§ Concrete Experience, Reflective Observation,
Abstraction, Active Experimentation
§ Start by explicitly stating freedoms, removing
tacit constraints
§ Clearly articulate the problem
§ Tight cycles, Timeboxed
§ Adjacencies & Exaptations
§ Displacement & Coherence
§ Optionality & Experimentation