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Solita

James Box publishing other people’s stuff as if it were his own. Ask me stuff.

“

The answer is iterative interaction with the decision maker. This means going to the responsible executive early on and saying, “We think this is the problem we need to solve; to what extent does that match your view?” Soon thereafter the strategy designers go back again and say, “Here are the possibilities we want to explore, given the problem definition we agreed on; to what extent are they the possibilities you imagine? Are we missing some, and are any we’re considering nonstarters for you?” Later the designers return one more time to say, “We plan to do these analyses on the possibilities that we’ve agreed are worth exploring; to what extent are they analyses that you would want done, and are we missing any?

With this approach, the final step of actually introducing a new strategy is almost a formality. The executive responsible for green-lighting it has helped define the problem, confirm the possibilities, and affirm the analyses. The proposed direction is no longer a jolt from left field. It has gradually won commitment throughout the process of its creation.

”

– https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-for-action

Metadesign
image

We keep stumbling into the term ‘metadesign’ so we decided to have a little pow–wow on the subject. John used bagels to persuade Willsh and Fraser to come in and chat about it. 

So what is metadesign? Here’s my starter–for–ten.

Metadesign creates the conditions and context within which collaborative, divergent–thinking can be externalised, explored and learned from. 

What a mouthful.

Instead I keep returning to the metaphor of scaffolding. In its most primitive form I mean the temporary structures we use when creating new buildings. Just–enough of a platform to allow a new thing to emerge. 

The temporary bit is important. It’s only there to help give form to something else, but ultimately becomes redundant as the thing itself earns its own independence. 

Optimal Newness

Mikey shared an interesting article on why ‘experts’ reject creativity.

“The researchers found that new ideas—those that remixed information in surprising ways—got worse scores from everyone, but they were particularly punished by experts. “Everyone dislikes novelty,” Lakhami explained to me, but “experts tend to be over-critical of proposals in their own domain.” Knowledge doesn’t just turn us into critical thinkers. It maybe turns us into over-critical thinkers.”

The answer? Be slightly more novel than what preceded you. Or, at the very least, frame it that way:

“How should creative people fight this widespread prejudice against creativity? Perhaps by disguising their new ideas as old ideas. If people are attracted to the familiar, it’s crucial for creative people to frame their ideas in ways that seem recognizable, predictable, and safe…The trick is learning to frame new ideas as old ideas—to make your creativity seem, well, not quite so creative.”

Disappointingly good advice.

“I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it’s quite easy to figure out where it came from. It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. [“The British Empire”] Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. But the Victorians actually did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other. They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional. The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that it’s still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. The empire is gone, so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it?”

– Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud | Talk Video | TED.com

“Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton, is careful to distinguish bullshit from lies, pointing out that bullshit is “not designed primarily to give its audience a false belief about whatever state of affairs may be the topic, but that its primary intention is rather to give its audience a false impression concerning what is going on in the mind of the speaker…It follows that every design presentation is inevitably, at least in part, an exercise in bullshit…In discussing design work with their clients, designers are direct about the functional parts of their solutions and obfuscate like mad about the intuitive parts, having learned early on that telling the simple truth — "I don’t know, I just like it that way” — simply won’t do. So into this vacuum rushes the bullshit: theories about the symbolic qualities of colors or typefaces; unprovable claims about the historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard-headed business goals…Before I could commit to a design decision, I needed to have an intellectual rationale worked out in my mind. I discovered in short order that most clients seemed grateful for the rationale as well. It put aside arguments about taste; it helped them make the leap of faith that any design decision requires; it made the design understandable to wider audiences. If pressed, however, I’d still have to admit that even my most beautifully wrought, bulletproof rationales still fit Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit.”

– On (Design) Bullshit: Design Observer

“Using our imagination is harder than we’ve been led to believe. The problem is not that it quickly “runs wild”, or that we have “too much imagination”. The problem is that our imagination is so crippled by the fear of making mistakes, it quickly runs after easy patterns, and jumps on stereotypes.”

– Putting Thought Into Things | Information Architects

“Watching Fouad teaches me how to move through public spaces. You never stop to let people through; you just adjust your pace and path to squeeze by as necessary. People in tight spaces will flow like a liquid, and it turns out that if everyone presses forward, the system works. The only way to screw up is by being unpredictable in your movements, or trying to apologize. People who need to get through more urgently will yell or honk as they’re coming up behind you.”

– Sana'a

“I have spent the past 15 years, first as a management consultant and now as the dean of a business school, studying leaders with exemplary records. Over the past six years, I have interviewed more than 50 such leaders, some for as long as eight hours, and found that most of them share a somewhat unusual trait: They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both. This process of consideration and synthesis can be termed integrative thinking.”

– How Successful Leaders Think

Ebb and Flow

Innovation requires imagination.
Imagination requires space.
Space for ideas to emerge, to evolve.
To break apart, to recombine.
To decay, to endure.

There are no guarantees,
Innovation is rarely deductive.
Yet given the space for ebb and for flow,
Candidates will emerge.

The richer the dialogue,
The broader the perspective,
The stronger the candidates,
The greater the confidence of the team.

And so without this space, all we have is stasis.
We offer little more than we already know.
What are you doing to create and maintain that space?

How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers »

Dipping my toes into Holacracy. It’s often compared to an operating system, something about its adaptability, scalability and ‘object-orientatedness’ appeals. 

“This emphasis on organic growth has a side benefit of distributing authority. In Holacratic systems, individuals operate without managers because many of them have decision-making power in a particular area. And since everything is made as explicitly as possible, everyone in the organization knows who has authority over what. “It’s much better to have power distributed as widely as possible so more people can make more decisions to move forward,” Stirman explains. “This structure leads more toward moving fast, trying new things, and adjusting as needed. You don’t have to wait for everyone up a ladder to sign off. This can take weeks or months, when Holacracy says, ‘You know what, we’re going to hire the best people we know and trust them to make decisions for us.’ All day people make decisions, own parts of the company, and act on them. The momentum this creates far outweighs someone making a bad decision. You also have the momentum to change course quickly.”

I enjoyed Barry’s homage to Lean Startup in The Economist. Especially the juxtaposition of Kodak & Amazon. 

Highlights:

The odds are important:

“Winning organisations are continually experimenting, testing theories to learn what works and what does not. The reality is that fewer than one in ten of these new ideas or products will work, but the ones which do pass the litmus test could have a massive impact on the business’ future fortunes.”

And I know a few organisations who could learn from this too:

“Give your initiatives enough money to do something, but not enough to do nothing. Focus on frequent demonstrable value and validated learning before further investment.”

Banking != Banks

We’ve just finished an interesting piece of work with a bank. I never thought I’d hear myself saying that, but scratch beneath the surface and there’s a fair bit of ‘disruptive’ stuff happening. Most of it design–led. 

It’s hardy surprising. Banks used to represent the most trusted of all industries but through a combination of complacency and overt–greed, we’re now in a position where technology companies have replaced them. 

Most of the changes are happening at the edges, not from the banks themselves. Bank Simple (they’re not a ‘bank’) are the posterchild, but there are a bunch of others trying to ride the wave. And then there’s Square, whose most recent service is a great example of how to differentiate on experience.

This article from Jin Zwicky is worth a read if you’re interested in this stuff. The focus on simplicity is something most organisations can rally around and has shown demonstrable benefits:

“We saw double-digit increases in sales in investment and insurance products when we simplified the communications material. We saw 100% adoption rate in using the digital needs analysis tool in our top branches after we simplified the tool. We increased customers’ satisfaction in our account opening experience by simplifying the system. Finally, our simplified website was not only listed as The More Gorgeous and Simple Banking Website, but also we could save about 0.5 million dollars per year by reducing the number of pages in the website.”

But, for me, the stuff that really resonates is the emphasis on cultural change.

“I came to believe that ‘simplicity’ is not just a project. It is not just a team of simplicity specialists. It is a capability that we have to cultivate! Furthermore, it is an organizational culture that we have to create in order to achieve simplicity.”

This is the real challenge for ‘institutions’. It’ll be interesting to see if any of the old-guard can grok this and start innovating at the rate of people like Square.