Archive

Strategy design

Reactionary work dominates the daily agenda

May 30, 2012
architecture, Strategy design, workplace design
Leave a Comment

Perhaps the domain of “creatives” needs further definition, yet the results of this survey are interesting in the characterization of the nature of creative work today. (here)

There are a number of good insights or, perhaps, confirmations of what we already know and experience.

Buried in the article reporting the results, however, is one of those pokes at the open office environment, again. The observation of what most workspaces are like may be accurate. But the fact that most open office spaces are not designed well is not a case against the benefits (also acknowledged here) of the forms of communication that are most effective for creative work and that are confirmed in the survey.

A well-designed open office is not a simple thing. How visual connections affect disruptive behavior, how sound masking supports attention in the midst of buzz, how a choice of alternative settings also provides places for focus, and other concepts support the interactions of productive team work yet also the solitude and focus of productive individual work should be part of the exploration that creative organizations make before making the error of believing the design of workplace is a binary, open-or-closed choice, or even that the problems of conventional open approaches are a given.

Of course, while blaming the setting, most of the disruptions people experience, most of the sources of “reactionary work,” are not from the noise in the environment but the “noise” on the screen – email, instant messaging, twitter traffic, “insecurity work,” etc. And the fact that these interruptions are self-generated is getting a lot of attention these days (as here and here and here).

Sketching and testing to develop rich solutions leanly

May 29, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design
Leave a Comment

This was a nice diagram in David Aycan’s article, “Don’t Let the Minimum Win Over the Viable,” in the Harvard Business Review blogs.

Although written around the idea of “lean startups” and specifically around the concept of the “minimum viable product” to release, it has potential application in other creation contexts, as well.

via http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/dont_let_the_minimum_win_over.html

I liked especially this observation from Aycan:

“Sketching or mocking up experiential prototypes and then testing them with consumers or potential partners, while also explicitly jotting down your operating and business assumptions and using them to discuss the business with industry experts, allows you both to pick a promising route to invest in the development sprint and to pivot with confidence”.

What resonated most with me was the implication of the value in this periodic interchange between “experiential prototypes” and “operating and business assumptions.” Of course, in almost any well-managed project for the development of physical stuff, a periodic touch on cost as business assumption is de rigeur. However, in many projects, once the design concept has been proposed and accepted, only the internal production metrics guide its development forward.

Aycan’s sketch illustrates a recommended approach contrasted with diagrams of “traditional linear” and “standard sequential pivot” approaches.

In workspace design projects, that consideration of the “experiential” – logically at the center of the project’s purpose – is rarely evoked. The prototypes actually developed are sketches that try to capture spatial experience but not working experience. The various phases of project development, more akin to Aycan’s diagrams of “traditional” or “standard” processes, are checkpoints of scope and cost, only. It is atypical that a conversation is started by the tougher question of how it is that this concept continues to be relevant and valuable to the purposes for which it was intended.

However, rich solutions, leanly developed, evolve from a process that is continuously and progressively curious about delivering benefits to the organization and its customers and stakeholders. Aycan notes that, “Like a product feature, the idea is not to perfect the economic model prior to building the MVP, but to have some idea that the economics you are proposing will set the venture up for eventual profitability and a low-friction scaling process.”

Most importantly, the process of sketching and testing alternatives generates insights and builds a shared mental model among the design and delivery team and with the client. This approach typically assures alignment with the organization’s values and nurtures the “personal, passion-igniting elements” that are at the core of great projects.

Care

May 28, 2012
Design strategy, Strategy design
Leave a Comment

There’s a nice quote in this interview of Jonathan Ive in the Telegraph.In it he says,

“We’re keenly aware that when we develop and make something and bring it to market that it really does speak to a set of values. And what preoccupies us is that sense of care, and what our products will not speak to is a schedule, what our products will not speak to is trying to respond to some corporate or competitive agenda.”

I like that concept of pace as a critical component of care, itself a critical component of great and valuable design.

Changing the lexicon…again

May 27, 2012
innovation, Strategy design
Leave a Comment

There is this progressive devaluation of language, as in “innovation” and “collaboration.”

Organizations look to others and seek to emulate their success. They cloak themselves in the terms that others use, but do not look critically behind them to understand how they achieved their value. Colloquial use makes the terms, then, cheap, irrelevant, meaningless.

Carefully observe and assess the behaviors that characterize the terms in order to sustain their meaning – and their motivation – in your organization.

Everything about the design of the office has just changed

May 26, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design
Leave a Comment
Everything about the design of the office has just changed

Via Wired.com comes a bit of news that changes everything about the design of the workplace and, I’d offer, everything about conventional corporate real estate.

“Steve Ballmer has an 80-inch tablet in his office. He’s got rid of his phone, he’s got rid of his note paper. It’s touch-enabled and it’s hung on his wall…It’s his whiteboard, his e-mail machine…and it’s a device we’re going to sell.

“The idea that there should be a screen that’s not a computer, we’ll laugh at that in two years.

“Every screen should be touch, every screen should be a computer and should be able to see out as well as see in. That is the way the world is heading [and] those screens are going to be big, small, wall-sized and desk-sized.”

Imagine an “office” with a tool of this scale. Imagine what teamwork looks like with tools like this. Heck, imagine what “individual” work looks like if you don’t have tools like this.

What’s a desk anymore? Really. Imagine working in a piddling 10′ x 15′ office with your IT department’s standard issue. Imagine being left out as everybody else gathers around the people manipulating the 80″ displays. Heck, imagine what “individual” work is, anymore.

Okay. Now imagine work under an 8-foot ceiling.

Everything about work has changed, but very little of the workplace has.

Now, it will.

4 approaches to slowing things down in order to get out front

May 26, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, Strategy design, workplace design
1 Comment
4 approaches to slowing things down in order to get out front

Weeknotes, May 26, 2012

unknown source

Yet again this week, considerations about being “ahead” of our clients were in our thinking. This is a relatively complex place to be.

Being ahead of our clients is a condition of being ready to propose concepts and solutions before they have come to an awareness or comprehension of the information that they need in order to make good decisions.

Being ahead of our clients is also an issue of envisioning the concepts and solutions that we are confident will be greatly helpful to them in their enterprise, while they may not yet be ready to accept the “risk” of investing in concepts that leap over the intervening decades of development in workspace thinking since their last workplace design project.

They are typically constrained by a variety of factors – low confidence in making a bold move, perceptions of politics in the organization that may imply risk in bringing new ideas forward, lack of exposure or familiarity with the benefits that could be captured from available concepts and potentials, and other factors. Most of these, it seems, arise from having spent too long in one place managing an existing set of resources without having contact with a world of workplace management thinking and workspace design insight that has moved place-making rapidly forward.

We, however, are generally unconstrained as we enter the situation. We have been working for decades on similar issues. We bring to the current context a cumulative set of investigation, speculation, experimentation, innovation and implementation derived from a succession of clients from a spectrum of domains and with diverse challenges and objectives. This body of experience makes us eager to apply what we’ve learned to each new project.

The challenge, then, is how to reconcile these two very different states of readiness. How do we avoid, as we begin to understand our client’s mindset, adjusting our approach to aim only for the middle or getting stuck in the middle because we must produce while our client learns? How do we, realizing we’ll be unable to achieve the excitement and satisfactions from delivering an advanced concept, avoid disappointment and disinterest in the current context? How does our client avoid disappointment and disillusionment with the eventual realization, on moving in, that they could have aimed further out, should have been carried further out by their designers?

Slowing the process to get out front – 4 approaches

There may be other approaches that can help resolve this dilemma, but here are four to think about and test –

What has your experience been? Have you used these approaches and have they been successful? What other approaches would you suggest? Let us know in the comments, or by email.

Slow the conversation to enrich the solution – In most of our experience, the design team comes to a much more satisfying solution if our client has engaged a creative “consulting” team first. The biggest barrier to breakthrough results is a poorly defined problem. And a poorly defined problem is typically a facilities problem – deliver so much square feet of space for this many people at this budget for this fee in this time. None of that problem definition says anything about what you are trying to do as an organization as you strive to bring value to the world. Start by engaging a curious team who want to know more about your company, your culture, your purpose, and how you are different. Engage a team that is especially interested in your perception of the behaviors of your staff that represent your leadership goals, and the experiences you think they should have that will engage them in achieving your purposes.
Develop, and rigorously apply, a set of guiding principles and success metrics – The goal of your project is not to be “on time and on budget.” Goals and objectives like that mean that the project team is working only for themselves. Instead, prepare and present a briefing on the mission of your organization, the values it holds dear, the purpose it fulfills for its customers, and the challenges it faces. Then engage your design team in an extended discussion around those subjects and ask them to generate a set of guiding principles that will lead them to measurable solutions targeted to advance your organization’s purpose.
Generate and test a good range of alternative concepts – Allocate sufficient resources inside and outside the organization to explore alternatives. Alternative concepts can help to more rigorously define the problem, significantly clarify intentions and develop metrics that matter, engage more in the process and uncover latent or politically hidden problems that restrain organizational performance, and develop solutions that are more creative and more innovative and that return much more for the investment about to be made.
Build a network of inputs around outcomes – I believe that, among the most important disciplines of those who seek to serve their organizational purposes better, one is to build a rich network with others who have done, or who themselves are in the midst of, a workspace transformation project. There can be rich rewards in asking tough questions about what the workspace is intended to do, what link there is between those purposes and what was designed, and what now is taking place in the organization as a result. I have been especially surprised that, in more than two decades of practice, I have never heard of a potential client calling one of references, inviting him or her out to lunch, and asking about how their organization is performing as a result of our work.

Postscript

As a postscript, there is, in all of this, the inherent problem of corporate purchasing. Inherent in projects solicited by an RFP and awarded through competing proposals are faults of trust and speed. The people who will ultimately occupy the spaces we design will have been, usually, poorly served by an internal function that uses a process that squeezes resources for everybody engaged in the process. The spareness of resource allocation demanded by the procurement process means a speed in execution that, in turn, means that users will not be engaged in the discovery and design process, facility managers will be unable to change direction or enrich the planning and design process as their awareness of the mis-aimed intentions of the RFP become revealed, and we as designers will be unable to do much more than speculate about the real organizational purpose and goal and apply a templated solution and cross our fingers in hopes of the best for all.

This is an unfair characterization of TED talks

May 11, 2012
Strategy design
Leave a Comment

To quote others –

Q: What’s better than watching a dotcom millionaire repeat the words “dream”, “causality” and “accomplishment” into a bubble-mic?
A: 1,204 dotcom millionaires repeating the words “dream”, “causality” and “accomplishment” into bubble-mics.

This is an unfair characterization of TED talks, yet a good reference point to reflect on today’s lunch conversation.

A colleague spoke of an ongoing struggle in his firm to understand why it moves as it does and to try to find the catalysts to enhanced performance. Inside the firm, held values such as “collegiality” are invoked as a resisting factor, and the retiring CEO’s messages to “relax” are a significant retarding influence, as well. When interviewing young applicants, this executive said that he tells them that employment in his firm should be the last job they seek in their lives, not the first.

That is, while the firm promises clients an intentionality to move their world forward, the people responsible for delivering on that intention are embedded in a culture of behavioral modes and values restraining mutual challenge except, perhaps, on the golf course at 3:00 p.m every Thursday.

I do not think that seeking dotcom millions is the right quest for my friend. Yet I, for him, am envious of that quest. I am envious of the money, for sure, but more envious of the power and potential of an innovative and creative idea, and the extraordinary attractiveness of the passion and commitment of the leadership and team behind its promotion.

I found this delicious interchange this week on Quora about the experience of pitching at YCombinator. Paul Bucheit said –

…the first thing I seek to establish when interviewing someone is whether or not we are able to communicate. A founder who can’t communicate will have trouble raising money, talking to users, selling to customers, etc. Furthermore, if we are not able to productively communicate with the founders, then the YC experience will be mutually frustrating and unproductive for both us and the founders, so we avoid those situations. Unfortunately, many people, especially those who have spent a long time inside of big companies, are stuck in BS mode and are either incapable of or unwilling to give direct answers. If I have to ask the exact same question five times, that’s a bad sign for you.

Beyond communication, I also want to know why the founders believe the things that they do. Too many people simply repeat what they’ve been told or read somewhere. If you’re really going to innovate and produce exceptional outcomes, you need to see past the noise and groupthink. So the question becomes, can you actually see the truth, or are you just repeating what you’ve been told?

That is, I would advise my friend to get past the “stuck in BS mode” and to move toward the model of the dotcom millionaires on TED Talks – not in envy of the reward but to find the power and potential in the personal passion and purposeful pursuit of “truth” on the way to the reward.

Company lunch

April 29, 2012
architecture, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design
Leave a Comment

lunch at google hq by henry balanon via instagram

With a tongue-in-cheek tone, Nick Bilton recently made a rather interesting observation about life at the headquarters of internet giants like google and facebook. Noting that the amenities in these workplaces were so good and so extensive that people never had to leave the building, he wondered if this absence fro the experience of the life the rest of us lead actually reduced the innovation potential at these companies.

Last year, as Larry Page was retaking the helm at Google as chief executive, he told Claire Cain Miller of The New York Times, “One of the primary goals I have is to get Google to be a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion and speed of a start-up.”

Nimbleness is fine, but most start-ups I visit don’t have heated toilet seats and on-site dry cleaning.

If you look at the hottest start-ups and social companies today, they don’t even have real Web sites. Path, Draw Something and Instagram are all primarily mobile experiences. Other social apps like Viddy and Pair, which are quickly gaining in popularity, are also strictly mobile.

But this is the rhythm of Silicon Valley. It is, indeed, its life force. The bold start-up grows, gets comfortable and misses the next big thing, which the newest hungry start-up spots while working among the rest of us.

Coincidentally in the same week, Apple posted updated plans for its new headquarters in Cupertino. By now, everybody has seen the “spaceship” concept, a huge circular building with everything, it would seem, that Apple employees would want.

Apple employees apparently want to eat out, however. So Apple is now planning an off-campus restaurant for its staff, where they can get away from headquarters…but not in contact with others. The planned restaurant will be unmarked and open only to Apple employees.

“We like to provide a level of security so that people and employees can feel comfortable talking about their business, their research and whatever project they’re engineering without fear of competition sort of overhearing their conversations.

That is a real issue today in Cupertino because we’ve got other companies here in our same business.”

Moving design from object to system

April 29, 2012
architecture, Design strategy, innovation, Strategy design
Leave a Comment

Well, again, the workload has slowed down my ability to get things written and out there. So, as before, I’ll post a few morsels from other places while I get back to a normal schedule.

looney110693 via instagram

First of these is this reflection from Helen Walters, who works with Doblin. She was digging around in their archives and found a great article by Jay Doblin on the “Seven Levels of Design.” I hope she doesn’t mind a substantial quote here –

…In it, he lays out how the changing levels of design give different opportunities to innovate, and uses the redesign of a gas pump as an example. Check this out:

  • LEVEL 1: The designer accepts the pump’s performance but shortens and cleans up its form.
  • LEVEL 2: Performance improvements are made. Either money, gallonage, or fillip can be punched directly. Inserted credit card automatically bills the customer.
  • LEVEL 3: Changes the basic mechanism. The station is like a parking lot where hoses are pulled from trap doors below ground. All the controls are on the nozzle.
  • LEVEL 4: Involves products which are outside the company’s control. No liquid fuel is pumped; pressurized cartridges are inserted into the car. One cartridge fits all cars (like sealed beam headlamps), a one-price sale.
  • LEVEL 5: The service performed is changed; there are no more gas stations. Fuel cartridges are bought anywhere, like beer.
  • LEVEL 6: The service is eliminated; cars never need refueling, they run indefinitely on atomic power.
  • LEVEL 7: Transportation is eliminated; all human contact is by telecommunications.

So, apart from making me wish I’d had the chance to meet Jay, what does this mean? Well, it means that 35 years ago, designers were thinking about increasing their scope from object to system, about how to elevate themselves from beyond providing the superficial aesthetic appeal of a product to considering its strategic consequences, even its point of existence. And honestly I think it’s telling and somewhat depressing that we’re still struggling with this whole discussion today.

Thanks, Helen!

Will Instagram displace Apple as the great strategic story of the decade?

April 16, 2012
Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design
Leave a Comment
Will Instagram displace Apple as the great strategic story of the decade?

 

The most important part of the Instagram story may not be the billion dollar purchase prize, but the transformational influence that Kodak’s failure in the light of Instagram’s success may have on corporate strategy and design.

Corporate cultures are influenced by short horizons. In a recent Forbes assessment of the Kodak bankruptcy, Larry Keeley observed this condition –

At least once a week, top executives tell me that new growth businesses in their firms are intriguing and potentially important, but they simply “don’t move the needle.” Said in plain American: “The hot new thing simply cannot produce enough revenues this quarter to improve my bonus as a senior executive.” So those projects are starved of resources instead of nurtured.

And in the New York Times, Nick Bilton observes that –

Even if Polaroid or Kodak could have developed Instagram, it’s likely that the project would have been killed anyway. What would be the reaction of almost any executive presented with a business plan to save the company with an iPhone app that had no prospect for revenue?

We’ve become very interested in this concept of “stock and flow” from other influences, but highlighted by the Instagram story.

What are your experiences with this “stock and flow” pattern?

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,599 other followers