complexityevaluationsocial innovation

Developmental Evaluation’s Traps

on April 19, 2018

IMG_0868.jpg

Developmental evaluation holds promise for product and service designers looking to understand the process, outcomes, and strategies of innovation and link them to effects. It’s the great promise of DE that is also the reason to be most wary of it and beware the traps that are set for those unaware.  

Developmental evaluation (DE), when used to support innovation, is about weaving design with data and strategy. It’s about taking a systematic, structured approach to paying attention to what you’re doing, what is being produced (and how), and anchoring it to why you’re doing it by using monitoring and evaluation data. DE helps to identify potentially promising practices or products and guide the strategic decision-making process that comes with innovation. When embedded within a design process, DE provides evidence to support the innovation process from ideation through to business model execution and product delivery.

This evidence might include the kind of information that helps an organization know when to scale up effort, change direction (“pivot”), or abandon a strategy altogether.

Powerful stuff.

Except, it can also be a trap.

It’s a Trap!

Star Wars fans will recognize the phrase “It’s a Trap!” as one of special — and much parodied — significance. Much like the Rebel fleet’s jeopardized quest to destroy the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, embarking on a DE is no easy or simple task.

DE was developed by Michael Quinn Patton and others working in the social innovation sector in response to the needs of programs operating in areas of high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in helping them function better within this environment through evaluation. This meant providing the kind of useful data that recognized the context, allowed for strategic decision making with rigorous evaluation and not using tools that are ill-suited for complexity to simply do the ‘wrong thing righter‘.

The following are some of ‘traps’ that I’ve seen organizations fall into when approaching DE. A parallel set of posts exploring the practicalities of these traps are going up on the Cense site along with tips and tools to use to avoid and navigate them.

A trap is something that is usually camouflaged and employs some type of lure to draw people into it. It is, by its nature, deceptive and intended to ensnare those that come into it. By knowing what the traps are and what to look for, you might just avoid falling into them.

A different approach, same resourcing

A major trap is going into a DE is thinking that it is just another type of evaluation and thus requires the same resources as one might put toward a standard evaluation. Wrong.

DE most often requires more resources to design and manage than a standard program evaluation for many reasons. One the most important is that DE is about evaluation + strategy + design (the emphasis is on the ‘+’s). In a DE budget, one needs to account for the fact that three activities that were normally treated separately are now coming together. It may not mean that the costs are necessarily more (they often are), but that the work required will span multiple budget lines.

This also means that operationally one cannot simply have an evaluator, a strategist, and a program designer work separately. There must be some collaboration and time spent interacting for DE to be useful. That requires coordination costs.

Another big issue is that DE data can be ‘fuzzy’ or ambiguous — even if collected with a strong design and method — because the innovation activity usually has to be contextualized. Further complicating things is that the DE datastream is bidirectional. DE data comes from the program products and process as well as the strategic decision-making and design choices. This mutually influencing process generates more data, but also requires sensemaking to sort through and understand what the data means in the context of its use.

The biggest resource that gets missed? Time. This means not giving enough time to have the conversations about the data to make sense of its meaning. Setting aside regular time at intervals appropriate to the problem context is a must and too often organizations don’t budget this in.

The second? Focus. While a DE approach can capture an enormous wealth of data about the process, outcomes, strategic choices, and design innovations there is a need to temper the amount collected. More is not always better. More can be a sign of a lack of focus and lead organizations to collect data for data’s sake, not for a strategic purpose. If you don’t have a strategic intent, more data isn’t going to help.

The pivot problem

The term pivot comes from the Lean Startup approach and is found in Agile and other product development systems that rely on short-burst, iterative cycles with accompanying feedback. A pivot is a change of direction based on feedback. Collect the data, see the results, and if the results don’t yield what you want, make a change and adapt. Sounds good, right?

It is, except when the results aren’t well-grounded in data. DE has given cover to organizations for making arbitrary decisions based on the idea of pivoting when they really haven’t executed well or given things enough time to determine if a change of direction is warranted. I once heard the explanation given by an educator about how his team was so good at pivoting their strategy for how they were training their clients and students. They were taking a developmental approach to the course (because it was on complexity and social innovation). Yet, I knew that the team — a group of highly skilled educators — hadn’t spent nearly enough time coordinating and planning the course.

There are times when a presenter is putting things last minute into a presentation to capitalize on something that emerged from the situation to add to the quality of the presentation and then there is someone who has not put the time and thought into what they are doing and rushing at the last minute. One is about a pivot to contribute to excellence, the other is not executing properly. The trap is confusing the two.

Fearing success

“If you can’t get over your fear of the stuff that’s working, then I think you need to give up and do something else” – Seth Godin

A truly successful innovation changes things — mindsets, workflows, systems, and outcomes. Innovation affects the things it touches in ways that might not be foreseen. It also means recognizing that things will have to change in order to accommodate the success of whatever innovation you develop. But change can be hard to adjust to even when it is what you wanted.

It’s a strange truth that many non-profits are designed to put themselves out of business. If there were no more political injustices or human rights violations around the world there would be no Amnesty International. The World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace wouldn’t exist if the natural world were deemed safe and protected. Conversely, there are no prominent NGO’s developed to eradicate polio anymore because pretty much have….or did we?

Self-sabotage exists for many reasons including a discomfort with change (staying the same is easier than changing), preservation of status, and a variety of inter-personal, relational reasons as psychologist Ellen Hendrikson explains.

Seth Godin suggests you need to find something else if you’re afraid of success and that might work. I’d prefer that organizations do the kind of innovation therapy with themselves, engage in organizational mindfulness, and do the emotional, strategic, and reflective work to ensure they are prepared for success — as well as failure, which is a big part of the innovation journey.

DE is a strong tool for capturing success (in whatever form that takes) within the complexity of a situation and the trap is when the focus is on too many parts or ones that aren’t providing useful information. It’s not always possible to know this at the start, but there are things that can be done to hone things over time. As the saying goes: when everything is in focus, nothing is in focus.

Keeping the parking brake on

And you may win this war that’s coming
But would you tolerate the peace? – “This War” by Sting

You can’t drive far or well with your parking brake on. However, if innovation is meant to change the systems. You can’t keep the same thinking and structures in place and still expect to move forward. Developmental evaluation is not just for understanding your product or service, it’s also meant to inform the ways in which that entire process influences your organization. They are symbiotic: one affects the other.

Just as we might fear success, we may also not prepare (or tolerate) it when it comes. Success with one goal means having to set new goals. It changes the goal posts. It also means that one needs to reframe what success means going ahead. Sports teams face this problem in reframing their mission after winning a championship. The same thing is true for organizations.

This is why building a culture of innovation is so important with DE embedded within that culture. Innovation can’t be considered a ‘one-off’, rather it needs to be part of the fabric of the organization. If you set yourself up for change, real change, as a developmental organization, you’re more likely to be ready for the peace after the war is over as the lyric above asks.

Sealing the trap door

Learning — which is at the heart of DE — fails in bad systems. Preventing the traps discussed above requires building a developmental mindset within an organization along with doing a DE. Without the mindset, its unlikely anyone will avoid falling through the traps described above. Change your mind, and you can change the world.

It’s a reminder of the needs to put in the work to make change real and that DE is not just plug-and-play. To quote Martin Luther King Jr:

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.”

 

For more on how Developmental Evaluation can help you to innovate, contact Cense Ltd and let them show you what’s possible.  

Image credit: Author

behaviour changebusinesspublic healthsocial mediasystems science

Genetic engineering for your brand

on April 5, 2018

shutterstock_551281720.jpg

DNA doesn’t predetermine our future as biological beings, but it does powerfully influence it. Some have applied the concept of ‘DNA’ to a company or organization, in the same way, it’s applied to biological organisms. Firms like PWC have been at the forefront of this approach, developing organizational DNA assessments and outlining the principles that shape the DNA of an organization. A good brand is an identity that you communicate with yourself and the world around you. A healthy brand is built on healthy DNA.

Tech entrepreneur and writer Om Malik sees DNA as being comprised of those people that form the organization:

DNA contains the genetic instructions used to build out the cells that make up an organism. I have often argued that companies are very much like living organisms, comprised of the people who work there. What companies make, how they sell and how they invent are merely an outcome of the people who work there. They define the company.

The analogy between the DNA of a company as being that of those who make it up is apt because, as he points out, organizations reflect the values, habits, mindsets, and focus of those who run them. For that reason, understanding your organizations’ DNA structure might be critical to shaping the corporate direction, brand and promoting any type of change, as we see from the case of Facebook.

DNA dilemma: The case of Facebook

Facebook is under fire these days. To anyone paying enough attention to the social media giant the issue with Facebook isn’t that it’s happening now, but why it hasn’t happened sooner? Back when the site was first opened up to allow non-university students to have accounts (signaling what would become the global brand it is today) privacy was a big concern. I still recall listening to a Facebook VP interviewed on a popular tech podcast who basically sloughed off any concerns the interviewer had about privacy saying the usual “we take this seriously” stuff but offering no example of how that was true just as the world was about to jump on the platform. I’ve heard that same kind of interview repeated dozens of times since the mid-2000’s, including just nine months before Mark Zuckerberg’s recent ‘mea culpa’ tour.

Facebook has never been one to show much (real) attention to privacy because its business model is all about ensuring that users’ are as open as possible to collect as much data as possible from them to sell as many services to them, through them, about them, and for others to manipulate. The Cambridge Analytica story simply exposed what’s been happening for years to the world.

Anyone who’s tried to change their privacy settings knows that you need more than a Ph.D. to navigate them* and, even then, you’re unlikely to be successful. Just look at the case of Bobbi Duncan and Katie McCormick who were outed as gay to their families through Facebook even though they had locked down their own individual privacy settings. This is all part of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the folks at Facebook refer to as “connecting the social graph.”

The corporate biology of addiction

In a prescient post, Om Malik wrote about Facebook’s addiction to its business model based on sharing, openness, and exploitation of its users’ information mere weeks before the Cambridge Analytica story came out.

Facebook’s DNA is that of a social platform addicted to growth and engagement. At its very core, every policy, every decision, every strategy is based on growth (at any cost) and engagement (at any cost). More growth and more engagement means more data — which means the company can make more advertising dollars, which gives it a nosebleed valuation on the stock market, which in turn allows it to remain competitive and stay ahead of its rivals.

Whether he knew it or not, Malik was describing an epigenetic model of addiction. Much emerging research on addiction has pointed to a relationship between genes and addictive behaviour. This is a two-way street where genes influence behaviour and behaviour influences a person’s genes (something called epigenetics). The more Facebook seeks to connect through its model, the more it reinforces the behaviour, the more it feels a ‘need’ to do it and therefore repeats it.

In systems terms, this is called a reinforcing loop and is part of a larger field of systems science called systems dynamics. Systems dynamics have been applied to public health and show how we can get caught in traps and the means we use to get out of them.  By applying an addiction model and system dynamics to the organization, we might better understand how some organizations change and how some don’t.

Innovation therapy

The first step toward any behaviour change for an addiction is to recognize the addiction in the first place. Without acknowledgment of a problem, there can’t be much in the way of self-support. This acknowledgment has to be authentic, which is why there is still reason to question whether Facebook will change.

There are many paths to addiction treatment, but the lessons from treating some of the most pernicious behaviours like cigarette smoking and alcohol suggest that it is likely to succeed when a series of small, continuous, persistent changes are made and done so in a supportive environment. One needs to learn from each step taken (i.e., evaluate progress and outcomes from each step), to integrate that learning, and continue through the inevitable cycling through stages (non-linear change) that sometimes involves moving backward or not knowing where along the change journey you are.

Having regulations or external pressures to change can help, but too much can paralyze action and stymie creativity. And while being motivated to change is important, sometimes it helps to just take action and let the motivation follow.

If this sounds a lot like the process of innovation, you’re right.

Principled for change

Inspiring change in an organization, particularly one where there is a clear addiction to a business model (a way of doing things, seeing things, and acting) requires the kind of therapy that we might see in addiction support programs. Like those programs, there isn’t one way to do it, but there are principles that are common. These include:

  1. Recognize the emotional triggers involved. Most people suffering from addictions can rationalize the reasons to change, but the emotional reasons are a lot harder. Fear, attraction, and the risk of doing things differently can bubble up when you least expect it. You need to understand these triggers, deal with the emotional aspects of them — the baggage we all bring.
  2. Change your mindset. Successful innovation involves a change of practice and a change of mindset. The innovator’s mindset goes from a linear focus on problems, success, and failure to a non-linear focus on opportunities, learning, and developmental design.  This allows you to spot the reinforcing looping behaviour and addiction pathways as well as what other pathways are open to you.
  3. Create better systems, not just different behaviour. Complex systems have path-dependencies — those ruts that shape our actions, often unconsciously and out of habit. Consider ways you organize yourself, your organization’s jobs and roles, the income streams, the system of rewards and recognitions, the feedback and learning you engage with, and composition of your team.  This rethinking and reorganization are what changes DNA, otherwise, it will continue to express itself through your organization in the same way.
  4. Make change visible. Use evaluation as a means to document what you do and what it produces and continue to structure your work to serve the learning from this. Inertia comes from having no direction and nothing to work toward. We are beings geared towards constant motion and making things — it’s what makes us human. Make a change, by design. Make it visible through evaluation and visual thinking – including the ups, downs, sideways. A journey involves knowing where you are — even if that’s lost — and where you’re going (even if that changes).

Change is far more difficult than people often think. Change initiatives that are rooted solely in motivation are unlikely to produce anything sustainable. You need to get to the root, the DNA, of your organization and build the infrastructure around it to enable it to do the work with you, not against you. That, in Facebook terms, is something your brand and its champions will truly ‘Like’.

 

* Seriously. I have a Ph.D. and am reasonably tech literate and have sat down with others with similar educational backgrounds — Ph.D.’s, masters degrees, tech startup founders — and we collectively still couldn’t figure out the privacy settings as a group.

References: For those interested in system dynamics or causal loop modeling, check out this great primer from Nate Osgood at the University of Saskatchewan. His work is top-notch. Daniel Kim has also written some excellent, useful, and practical stuff on applying system dynamics to a variety of issues.

Image credit: Shutterstock used under license.

design thinkingpsychologyresearch

Elevating Design & Design Thinking

on October 25, 2017

 

ElevateDesignLoft2.jpgDesign thinking has brought the language of design into popular discourse across different fields, but it’s failings threaten to undermine the benefits it brings if they aren’t addressed. In this third post in a series, we look at how Design (and Design Thinking) can elevate themselves above their failings and match the hype with real impact. 

In two previous posts, I called out ‘design thinkers’ to get the practice out of it’s ‘bullshit’ phase, characterized by high levels of enthusiastic banter, hype, and promotion and low evidence, evaluation or systematic practice.

Despite the criticism, it’s time for Design Thinking (and the field of Design more specifically) to be elevated beyond its current station. I’ve been critical of Design Thinking for years: its popularity has been helpful in some ways, problematic in others.  Others have, too. Bill Storage, writing in 2012 (now unavailable), said:

Design Thinking is hopelessly contaminated. There’s too much sleaze in the field. Let’s bury it and get back to basics like good design.

Bruce Nussbaum, who helped popularize Design Thinking in the early 2000’s called it a ‘failed experiment’, seeking to promote the concept of Creative Intelligence instead. While many have called for Design Thinking to die, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Since first publishing a piece on Design Thinking’s problems five years ago the practice has only grown. Design Thinking is going to continue to grow, despite its failings and that’s why it matters that we pay attention to it — and seek to make it better.

Lack of quality control, standardization or documentation of methods, and evidence of impact are among the biggest problems facing Design Thinking if it is to achieve anything substantive beyond generating money for those promoting it.

Giving design away, better

It’s hard to imagine that the concepts of personality, psychosis, motivation, and performance measurement from psychology were once unknown to most people. Yet, before the 1980’s, much of the public’s understanding of psychology was confined to largely distorted beliefs about Freudian psychoanalysis, mental illness, and rat mazes. Psychology is now firmly ensconced in business, education, marketing, public policy, and many other professions and fields. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work applying psychological and cognitive science to economic decision making.

The reason for this has much to do with George Miller who, as President of the American Psychological Association, used his position to advocate that professional psychology ‘give away’ its knowledge to ensure its benefits were more widespread. This included creating better means of communicating psychological concepts to non-psychologists and generating the kind of evidence that could show its benefits.

Design Thinking is at a stage where we are seeing similar broad adoption beyond professional design to these same fields of business, education, the military and beyond. While there has been much debate about whether design thinking as practiced by non-designers (like MBA’s) is good for the field as a whole, there is little debate that its become popular just as psychology has.

What psychology did poorly is that it gave so much away that it failed to engage other disciplines enough to support quality adoption and promotion and, simultaneously, managed to weaken itself as newfound enthusiasts pursued training in these other disciplines. Now, some of the best psychological practice is done by social workers and the most relevant research comes from areas like organizational science and new ‘sub-disciplines’ like behavioural economics, for example.

Design Thinking is already being taught, promoted, and practiced by non-designers. What these non-designers often lack is the ‘crit’ and craft of design to elevate their designs. And what Design lacks is the evaluation, evidence, and transparency to elevate its work beyond itself.

So what next?

BalloonsEgypt.jpg

Elevating Design

As Design moves beyond its traditional realms of products and structures to services and systems (enabled partly by Design Thinking’s popularity) the implications are enormous — as are the dangers. Poorly thought-through designs have the potential to exacerbate problems rather than solve them.

Charles Eames knew this. He argued that innovation (which is what design is all about) should be a last resort and that it is the quality of the connections (ideas, people, disciplines and more) we create that determine what we produce and their impact on the world. Eames and his wife Ray deserve credit for contributing to the elevation of the practice of design through their myriad creations and their steadfast documentation of their work. The Eames’ did not allow themselves to be confined by labels such as product designer, interior designer, or artist. They stretched their profession by applying craft, learning with others, and practicing what they preached in terms of interdisciplinarity.

It’s now time for another elevation moment. Designers can no longer be satisfied with client approval as the key criteria for success. Sustainability, social impact, and learning and adaptation through behaviour change are now criteria that many designers will need to embrace if they are to operate beyond the fields’ traditional domains (as we are now seeing more often). This requires that designers know how to evaluate and study their work. They need to communicate with their clients better on these issues and they must make what they do more transparent. In short: designers need to give away design (and not just through a weekend design thinking seminar).

Not every designer must get a Ph.D. in behavioural science, but they will need to know something about that domain if they are to work on matters of social and service design, for example. Designers don’t have to become professional evaluators, but they will need to know how to document and measure what they do and what impact it has on those touched by their designs. Understanding research — that includes a basic understanding of statistics, quantitative and qualitative methods — is another area that requires shoring up.

Designers don’t need to become researchers, but they must have research or evaluation literacy. Just as it is becoming increasingly unacceptable that program designers from fields like public policy and administration, public health, social services, and medicine lack understanding of design principles, so is it no longer feasible for designers to be ignorant of proper research methods.

It’s not impossible. Clinical psychologists went from being mostly practitioners to scientist-practitioners. Professional social workers are now well-versed in research even if they typically focus on policy and practice. Elevating the field of Design means accepting that being an effective professional requires certain skills and research and evaluation are now part of that skill set.

DesignWindow2.jpeg

Designing for elevated design

This doesn’t have to fall on designers to take up research — it can come from the very people who are attracted to Design Thinking. Psychologists, physicians, and organizational scientists (among others) all can provide the means to support designers in building their literacy in this area.

Adding research courses that go beyond ethnography and observation to give design students exposure to survey methods, secondary data analysis, ‘big data’, Grounded Theory approaches, and blended models for data collection are all options. Bring the behavioural and data scientists into the curriculum (and get designers into the curriculum training those professionals).

Create opportunities for designers to do research, publish, and present their research using the same ‘crit’ that they bring to their designs. Just as behavioural scientists expose themselves to peer review of their research, designers can do the same with their research. This is a golden opportunity for an exchange of ideas and skills between the design community and those in the program evaluation and research domains.

This last point is what the Design Loft initiative has sought to do. Now in its second year, the Design Loft is a training program aimed at exposing professional evaluators to design methods and tools. It’s not to train them as designers, but to increase their literacy and confidence in engaging with Design. The Design Loft can do the same thing with designers, training them in the methods and tools of evaluation. It’s but one example.

In an age where interdisciplinarity is spoken of frequently this provides the means to practically do it and in a way that offers a chance to elevate design much like the Eames’ did, Milton Glaser did, and how George Miller did for psychology. The time is now.

If you are interested in learning more about the Design Loft initiative, connect with Cense. If you’re a professional evaluator attending the 2017 American Evaluation Association conference in Washington, the Design Loft will be held on Friday, November 10th. 

Image Credit: Author

design thinkingevaluationinnovation

Beyond Bullshit for Design Thinking

on October 4, 2017

QuestionLook.jpg

Design thinking is in its ‘bullshit’ phase, a time characterized by wild hype, popularity and little evidence of what it does, how it does it, or whether it can possibly deliver what it promises on a consistent basis. If design thinking is to be more than a fad it needs to get serious about answering some important questions and going from bullshit to bullish in tackling important innovation problems and the time is now. 

In a previous article, I described design thinking as being in its BS phase and that it was time for it to move on from that. Here, I articulate things that can help us there.

The title of that original piece was inspired by a recent talk by Pentagram partner, Natasha Jen, where she called out design thinking as “bullshit.” Design thinking offers much to those who haven’t been given or taken creative license in their work before. Its offered organizations that never saw themselves as ‘innovative’ a means to generate products and services that extend beyond the bounds of what they thought was possible. While design thinking has inspired people worldwide (as evidenced by the thousands of resources, websites, meetups, courses, and discussions devoted to the topic) the extent of its impact is largely unknown, overstated, and most certainly oversold as it has become a marketable commodity.

The comments and reaction to my related post on LinkedIn from designers around the world suggest that many agree with me.

So now what? Design thinking, like many fads and technologies that fit the hype cycle, is beset with a problem of inflated expectations driven by optimism and the market forces that bring a lot of poorly-conceived, untested products supported by ill-prepared and sometimes unscrupulous actors into the marketplace. To invoke Natasha Jen: there’s a lot of bullshit out there.

But there is also promising stuff. How do we nurture the positive benefits of this overall approach to problem finding, framing and solving and fix the deficiencies, misconceptions, and mistakes to make it better?

Let’s look at a few things that have the potential to transform design thinking from an over-hyped trend to something that brings demonstrable value to enterprises.

Show the work

ShowtheWork.jpg

The journey from science to design is a lesson in culture shock. Science typically begins its journey toward problem-solving by looking at what has been done before whereas a designer typically starts with what they know about materials and craft. Thus, an industrial designer may have never made a coffee mug before, but they know how to build things that meet clients’ desires within a set of constraints and thus feel comfortable undertaking this job. This wouldn’t happen in science.

Design typically uses a simple criterion above all others to judge the outcomes of its work: Is the client satisfied? So long as the time, budget, and other requirements are met, the key is ensuring that the client likes the product. Because this criterion is so heavily weighted on the outcome, designers often have little need to capture or share how they arrived at the outcome, just that they do it. Designers may also be reluctant to share this because this is their competitive advantage so there is an industry-specific culture that prevents people from opening their process to scrutiny.

Science requires that researchers open up their methods, tools, observations, and analytical strategy to view for others. The entire notion of peer review — which has its own set of flaws — is predicated on the notion that other qualified professionals can see how a solution was derived and provide comment on it. Scientific peer review is typically geared toward encouraging replication, however, it is also to allow others to assess the reasonableness of the claims. This is the critical part of peer review that requires scientists to adhere to a certain set of standards and show their work.

As design moves into a more social realm, designing systems, services, and policies for populations for whom there is no single ‘client’ and many diverse users, the need to show the work becomes imperative. Showing the work also allows for others to build the method. For example, design thinking speaks of ‘prototyping’, yet without a clear sense of what is prototyped, how it is prototyped, what means of assessing the value of the prototype is, and what options were considered (or discarded) in developing the prototype, it is impossible to tell if this was really the best idea of many or the one decided most feasible to try.

This might not matter for a coffee cup, but it matters a lot if you are designing a social housing plan, a transportation system, or a health service. Designers can borrow from scientists and become better at documenting what they do along the way, what ideas are generated (and dismissed), how decisions are made, and what creative avenues are explored along the route to a particular design choice. This not only improves accountability but increases the likelihood of better input and ‘crit’ from peers. This absence of ‘crit’ in design thinking is among the biggest ‘bullshit’ issues that Natasha Jen spoke of.

Articulate the skillset and toolset

Creating2.jpeg

What does it take to do ‘design thinking’? The caricature is that of the Post-it Notes, Lego, and whiteboards. These are valuable tools, but so are markers, paper, computer modeling software, communication tools like Slack or Trello, cameras, stickers…just about anything that allows data, ideas, and insights to be captured, organized, visualized, and transformed.

Using these tools also takes skill (despite how simple they are).

Facilitation is a key design skill when working with people and human-focused programs and services. So is conflict resolution. The ability to negotiate, discuss, sense-make, and reflect within the context of a group, a deadline, and other constraints is critical for bringing a design to life. These skills are not just for designers, but they have to reside within a design team.

There are other skills related to shaping aesthetics, manufacturing, service design, communication, and visual representation that can all contribute to a great design team and these need to be articulated as part of a design thinking process. Many ‘design thinkers’ will point to the ABC Nightline segment that aired in 1999 titled “The Deep Dive” as their first exposure to ‘design thinking’. It is also what thrust the design firm IDEO into the spotlight who, more than any single organization, is credited with popularizing design thinking through their work.

What gets forgotten when people look at this program where designers created a shopping cart in just a few days was that IDEO brought together a highly skilled interdisciplinary team that included engineers, business analysts, and a psychologist. Much of the design thinking advocacy work out there talks about ‘diversity’, but that matters only when you have a diversity of perspectives, but also technical and scholarly expertise to make use of those perspectives. How often are design teams taking on human service programs aimed at changing behaviour without any behavioural scientists involved? How often are products created without any care to the aesthetics of the product because there wasn’t a graphic designer or artist on the team?

Does this matter if you’re using design thinking to shape the company holiday party? Probably not. Does it if you are shaping how to deliver healthcare to an underserved community? Yes.

Design thinking can require general and specific skillsets and toolsets and these are not generic.

Develop theory

DesignerUserManufacturer.jpg

A theory is not just the provenance of eggheaded nerds and something you had to endure in your college courses on social science. It matters when it’s done well. Why? As Kurt Lewin, one of the most influential applied social psychologists of the 20th century said: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.”

A theory allows you to explain why something happens, how causal connections may form, and what the implications of specific actions are in the world. They are ideas, often grounded in evidence and other theories, about how things work. Good theories can guide what we do and help us focus what we need to pay attention to. They can be wrong or incomplete, but when done well a theory provides us the means to explain what happens and can happen. Without it, we are left trying to explain the outcomes of actions and have little recourse for repeating, correcting, or redesigning what we do because we have no idea why something happened. Rarely — in human systems — is evidence for cause-and-effect so clear cut without some theorizing.

Design thinking is not entirely without theory. Some scholars have pulled together evidence and theory to articulate ways to generate ideas, decision rules for focusing attention, and there are some well-documented examples for guiding prototype development. However, design thinking itself — like much of design — is not strong on theory. There isn’t a strong theoretical basis to ascertain why something produces an effect based on a particular social process, or tool, or approach. As such, it’s hard to replicate such things, determine where something succeeded or where improvements need to be made.

It’s also hard to explain why design thinking should be any better than anything else that aims to enkindle innovation. By developing theory, designers and design thinkers will be better equipped to advance its practice and guide the focus of evaluation. Further, it will help explain what design thinking does, can do, and why it might be suited (or ill-suited) to a particular problem set.

It also helps guide the development of research and evaluation scholarship that will build the evidence for design thinking.

Create and use evidence

Research2Narrow.jpg

Jeanne Leidtka and her colleagues at the Darden School of Business have been among the few to conduct systematic research into the use of design thinking and its impact. The early research suggests it offers benefit to companies and non-profits seeking to innovate. This is a start, but far more research is needed by more groups if we are to build a real corpus of knowledge to shape practice more fully. Leidtka’s work is setting the pace for where we can go and design thinkers owe her much thanks for getting things moving. It’s time for designers, researchers and their clients to join her.

Research typically begins with taking ‘ideal’ cases to ensure sufficient control, influence and explanatory power become more possible. If programs are ill-defined, poorly resourced, focus on complex or dynamic problems, have no clear timeline for delivery or expected outcomes, and lack the resources or leadership that has them documenting the work that is done, it is difficult to impossible to tell what kind of role design thinking plays amid myriad factors.

An increasing amount of design thinking — in education, international development, social innovation, public policy to name a few domains of practice — is applied in this environmental context. This is the messy area of life where research aimed at looking for linear cause-and-effect relationships and ‘proof’ falters, yet it’s also where the need for evidence is great. Researchers tend to avoid looking at these contexts because the results are rarely clear, the study designs require much energy, money, talent, and sophistication, and the ability to publish findings in top-tier journals all the more compromised as a result.

Despite this, there is enormous potential for qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method, and even simulation research that isn’t being conducted into design thinking. This is partly because designers aren’t trained in these methods, but also because (I suspect) there is a reticence by many to opening up design thinking to scrutiny. Like anything on the hype cycle: design thinking is a victim of over-inflated claims of what it does, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not offering a lot.

Design schools need to start training students in research methods beyond (in my opinion) the weak, simplistic approaches to ethnographic methods, surveys and interviews that are currently on offer. If design thinking is to be considered serious, it requires serious methodological training. Further, designers don’t need to be the most skilled researchers on the team: that’s what behavioural scientists bring. Bringing in the kind of expertise required to do the work necessary is important if design thinking is to grow beyond it’s ‘bullshit’ phase.

Evaluate impact

DesignSavingtheWorld

From Just Design by Christopher Simmons

Lastly, if we are going to claim that design is going to change the world, we need to back that up with evaluation data. Changes are, design thinking is changing the world, but maybe not in the ways we always think or hope, or in the quantity or quality we expect. Without evaluation, we simply don’t know.

Evaluation is about understanding how something operates in the world and what its impact is. Evaluators help articulate the value that something brings and can support innovators (design thinkers?) in making strategic decisions about what to do when to do it, and how to allocate resources.

The only time evaluation was used in my professional design training was when I mentioned it in class. That’s it. Few design programs of any discipline offer exposure to the methods and approaches of evaluation, which is unfortunate. Until last year, professional evaluators weren’t much better with most having limited exposure to design and design thinking.

That changed with the development of the Design Loft initiative that is now in its second year. The Design Loft was a pop-up conference designed and delivered by me (Cameron Norman) and co-developed with John Gargani, then President of the American Evaluation Association. The event provided a series of short-burst workshops on select design methods and tools as a means of orienting evaluators to design and how they might apply it to their work.

This is part of a larger effort to bring design and evaluation closer together. Design and design thinking offers an enormous amount of potential for innovation creation and evaluation brings the tools to assess what kind of impact those innovations have.

Getting bullish on design

I’ve witnessed firsthand how design (and the design thinking approach) has inspired people who didn’t think of themselves as creative, innovative, or change-makers do things that brought joy to their work. Design thinking can be transformative for those who are exposed to new ways of seeing problems, conceptualizing solutions, and building something. I’d hate to see that passion disappear.

That will happen once design thinking starts losing out to the next fad. Remember the lean methodology? How about Agile? Maybe the design sprint? These are distinct approaches, but share much in common with design thinking. Depending on who you talk to they might be the same thing. Blackbelts, unconferences, design jams, innovation labs, and beyond are all part of the hodgepodge of offerings competing for the attention of companies, governments, healthcare, and non-profits seeking to innovate.

What matters most is adding value. Whether this is through ‘design thinking’ or something else, what matters is that design — the creation of products, services, policies, and experiences that people value — is part of the innovation equation. It’s why I like the term ‘design thinking’ relative to others operating in the innovation development space simply because it acknowledges the practice of design in its name.

Designers rightfully can claim ‘design thinking’ as a concept that is — broadly defined –central, but far from complete to their work. Working with the very groups that have taken the idea of our design and applied it to business, education, and so many other sectors, it’s time those with a stake in seeing better design and better thinking about what we design flourish to take design thinking beyond its bullshit phase and make it bullish about innovation.

For those interested in evaluation and design, check out the 2017 Design Loft micro-conference taking place on Friday, November 10th within the American Evaluation Association’s annual convention in Washington, DC . Look for additional events, training and support for design thinking, evaluation and strategy by following @CenseLtd on Twitter with updates about the Design Loft and visiting Cense online. 

Image credits: Author. The ‘Design Will Save The World’ images were taken from the pages of Christopher Simmons’ book Just Design.

design thinkinginnovation

Design thinking is BS (and other harsh truths)

on September 19, 2017

Ideas&Stairs

Design thinking continues to gain popularity as a means for creative problem-solving and innovation across business and social sectors. Time to take stock and consider what ‘design thinking’ is and whether it’s a real solution option for addressing complex problems, over-hyped BS, or both. 

Design thinking has pushed its way from the outside to the front and centre of discussions on innovation development and creative problem-solving. Books, seminars, certificate programs, and even films are being produced to showcase design thinking and inspire those who seek to become more creative in their approach to problem framing, finding and solving.

Just looking through the Censemaking archives will find considerable work on design thinking and its application to a variety of issues. While I’ve always been enthusiastic about design thinking’s promise, I’ve also been wary of the hype, preferring to use the term design over design thinking when possible.

What’s been most attractive about design thinking has been that it’s introduced the creative benefits of design to non-designers. Design thinking has made ‘making things’ more tangible to people who may have distanced themselves from making or stopped seeing themselves as creative. Design thinking has also introduced a new language that can help people think more concretely about the process of innovation.

Design thinking: success or BS?

We now see designers elevated to the C-suite — including the role of university president in the case of leading designer John Maeda — and as thought leaders in technology, education, non-profit work and business in large part because of design thinking. So it might have surprised many to see Natasha Jen, a partner at the prestigious design firm Pentagram, do the unthinkable in a recent public talk: trash design thinking.

Speaking at the 99u Conference in New York this past summer, Jen calls out what she sees as the ‘bullshit’ of design thinking and how it betrays much of the fundamentals of what makes good design.

One of Jen’s criticisms of design thinking is how it involves the absence of what designers call ‘crit’: the process of having peers — other skilled designers — critique design work early and often. While design thinking models typically include some form of ‘evaluation’ in them, this is hardly a rigorous process. There are few guidelines for how to do it, how to deliver feedback and little recognition of who is best able to deliver the crit to peers (there are even guides for those who don’t know about the critique process in design). It’s not even clear who the best ‘peers’ are for such a thing.

The design thinking movement has emphasized how ‘everyone is a designer.’ This has the positive consequences of encouraging creative engagement in innovation from everyone, increasing the pool of diverse perspectives that can be brought to bear on a topic. What it ignores is that the craft of design involves real skill and just as everyone can dance or sing, not everyone can do it well. What has been lost in much of the hype around design thinking is the respect for craft and its implications, particularly in terms of evaluation.

Evaluating design thinking’s impact

When I was doing my professional design training I once got into an argument* with a professor who said: “We know design thinking works“. I challenged back: “Do we? How?” To which he responded: “Of course we do, it just does — look around.” (pointing to the room of my fellow students presumably using ‘design thinking’ in our studio course).

End of discussion.

Needless to say, the argument was — in his eyes — about him being right and me being a fool for not seeing the obvious. For me, it was about the fact that, while I believed in the power of the approach that was loosely called ‘design thinking’ offered something better than the traditional methods of addressing many complex challenges, I couldn’t say for sure that it ‘works’ and does ‘better’ than the alternatives. It felt like he was saying hockey is better than knitting.

One of the reasons we don’t know is that solid evaluation isn’t typically done in design. The criteria that designers typically use is client satisfaction with the product given the constraints (e.g., time, budget, style, user expectations). If a client says: “I love it!” that’s about all that matters.

Another problem is that design thinking is often used to tackle more complex challenges for which there may be inadequate examples to compare. We are not able to use a randomized controlled trial, the ‘gold-standard’ research approach, to test whether design thinking is better than ‘non-design thinking.’ The result is that we don’t really know what design thinking’s impact is in the products, services, and processes that it is used to create or at least enough to compare it other ways of working.

Showing the work

In grade school math class it wasn’t sufficient to arrive at an answer and simply declare it without showing your work. The broad field of design (and the practice of design thinking) emphasizes developing and testing prototypes, but ultimately it is the final product that is assessed. What is done on the way to the final product is rarely given much, if any attention. Little evaluation is done on the process used to create a design using design thinking (or another approach).

The result of this is that we have little idea of the fidelity of implementation of a ‘model’ or approach when someone says they used design thinking. There is hardly any understanding of the dosage (amount), the techniques, the situations and the human factors (e.g., skill level, cooperation, openness to ideas, personality, etc..) that contribute to the designed product and little of the discussion in design reports are made of such things.

Some might argue that such rigorous attention to these aspects of design takes away from the ‘art’ of design or that it is not amenable to such scrutiny. While the creative/creation process is not a science, that doesn’t mean it can’t be observed and documented. It may be that comparative studies are impractical, but how do we know if we don’t try? What processes like the ‘crit’ does is open creators — teams or individuals — to feedback, alternative perspectives and new ideas that could prevent poor or weak ideas from moving forward.

Bringing evaluation into the design process is a way to do this.

Going past the hype cycle

Gartner has popularized the concept of the hype cycle, which illustrates how ‘hot’ ideas, technologies and other innovations get over-sold, under-appreciated and eventually adopted in a more realistic manner relative to their impact over time.

 

1200px-Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg.png

Gartner Hype Cycle (source: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Design thinking is most likely somewhere past the peak of inflated expectations, but still near the top of the curve. For designers like Natasha Jen, design thinking is well into the Trough of Disillusionment (and may never escape). Design thinking is currently stuck in its ‘bullshit’ phase and until it embraces more openness into the processes used under its banner, attention to the skill required to design well, and evaluation of the outcomes that design thinking generates, outspoken designers like Jen will continue to be dissatisfied.

We need people like Jen involved in design thinking. The world could benefit from approaches to critical design that produces better, more humane and impactful products and services that benefit more people with less impact on the world. We could benefit greatly from having more people inspired to create and open to sharing their experience, expertise and diverse perspectives on problems. Design thinking has this promise if it open to applying some its methods to itself.

*argument implies that the other person was open to hearing my perspective, engage in dialogue, and provide counter-points to mine. This was not the case.

If you’re interested in learning more about what an evaluation-supported, critical, and impactful approach to design and design thinking could look like for your organization or problem, contact Cense and see how they can help you out. 

Image Credit: Author

complexityeducation & learningpsychologysystems thinking

Complex problems and social learning

on September 14, 2017

6023780563_12f559a73f_o.jpg

Adaptation, evolution, innovation, and growth all require that we gain new knowledge and apply it to our circumstances, or learn. While much focus in education is on how individuals attend, process and integrate information to create knowledge, it is the social part of learning that may best determine whether we simply add information to our brains or truly learn. 

Organizations are scrambling to convert what they do and what they are exposed to into tangible value. In other words: learn. A 2016 report from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) found that “organizations spent an average of $1,252 per employee on training and development initiatives in 2015”, which works out to an average cost per learning hour of $82 based on an average of 33 hours spent in training programs per year. Learning and innovation are expensive.

The massive marketplace for seminars, keynote addresses, TED talks, conferences, and workshops points to a deep pool of opportunities for exposure to content, yet when we look past these events to where and how such learning is converted into changes at the organizational level we see far fewer examples.

Instead of building more educational offerings like seminars, webinars, retreats, and courses, what might happen if they devoted resources to creating cultures for learning to take place? Consider how often you may have been sent off to some learning event, perhaps taken in some workshops or seen an engaging keynote speaker, been momentarily inspired and then returned home to find that yourself no better off in the long run. The reason is that you have no system — time, resources, organizational support, social opportunities in which to discuss and process the new information — and thus, turn a potential learning opportunity into neural ephemera.

Or consider how you may have read an article on something interesting, relevant and important to what you do, only to find that you have no avenue to apply or explore it further. Where do the ideas go? Do they get logged in your head with all the other content that you’re exposed to every day from various sources, lost?

Technical vs. Social

My colleague and friend John Wenger recently wrote about what we need to learn, stating that our quest for technical knowledge to serve as learning might be missing a bigger point: what we need at this moment. Wenger suggests shifting our focus from mere knowledge to capability and states:

What is the #1 capability we should be learning?  Answer: the one (or ones) that WE most need; right now in our lives, taking account of what we already know and know how to do and our current situations in life.

Wenger argues that, while technical knowledge is necessary to improve our work, it’s our personal capabilities that require attention to be sufficient for learning to take hold. These capabilities are always contingent as we humans exist in situated lives and thus our learning must further be applied to what we, in our situation, require. It’s not about what the best practice is in the abstract, but what is best for us, now, at this moment. The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to is decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of what our situation is.

The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to under the guise of learning is so often decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of how, whether, or why it matters to us in our present situation.

To illustrate, I teach a course on program evaluation for public health students. No matter how many examples, references, anecdotes, or colourful illustrations I provide them, most of my students struggle to integrate what they are exposed to into anything substantive from a practical standpoint. At least, not at first. Without the ability to apply what they are learning, expose the method to the realities of a client, colleague, or context’s situation, they are left abstracting from the classroom to a hypothetical situation.

But, as Mike Tyson said so truthfully and brutally: “Every fighter has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

In a reflection on that quote years later, Tyson elaborated saying:

“Everybody has a plan until they get hit. Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze.”

Tyson’s quote applies to much more than boxing and complements Wenger’s assertions around learning for capability. If you develop a plan knowing that it will fail the moment you get hit (and you know you’re going to get hit), then you learn for the capability to adapt. You build on another quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said:

“I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

Better social, better learning

Plans don’t exist in a vacuum, which is why they don’t always turn out. While sometimes a failed plan is due to poor planning, it is more likely due to complexity when dealing with human systems. Complexity requires learning strategies that are different than those typically employed in so many educational settings: social connection.

When information is technical, it may be simple or complicated, but it has a degree of linearity to it where one can connect different pieces together through logic and persistence to arrive a particular set of knowledge outcomes. Thus, didactic classroom learning or many online course modules that require reading, viewing or listening to a lesson work well to this effect. However, human systems require attention to changing conditions that are created largely in social situations. Thus, learning itself requires some form of ‘social’ to fully integrate information and to know what information is worth attending to in the first place. This is the kind of capabilities that Wenger was talking about.

My capabilities within my context may look very much like that of my colleagues, but the kind of relationships I have with others, the experiences I bring and the way I scaffold what I’ve learned in the past with what I require in the present is going to be completely different. The better organizations can create the social contexts for people to explore this, learn together, verify what they learn and apply it the more likely they can reap far greater benefits from the investment of time and money they spend on education.

Design for learning, not just education

We need a means to support learning and support the intentional integration of what we learn into what we do: it fails in bad systems.

It also means getting serious about learning, meaning we need to invest in it from a social, leadership and financial standpoint. Most importantly, we need to emotionally invest in it. Emotional investment is the kind of attractor that motivates people to act. It’s why we often attend to the small, yet insignificant, ‘goals’ of every day like responding to email or attending meetings at the expense of larger, substantial, yet long-term goals.

As an organization, you need to set yourself up to support learning. This means creating and encouraging social connections, time to dialogue and explore ideas, the organizational space to integrate, share and test out lessons learned from things like conferences or workshops (even if they may not be as useful as first thought), and to structurally build moments of reflection and attention to ongoing data to serve as developmental lessons and feedback.

If learning is meant to take place at retreats, conferences or discrete events, you’re not learning for human systems. By designing systems that foster real learning focused on the needs and capabilities of those in that system, you’re more likely to reap the true benefit of education and grow accordingly. That is an enormous return on investment.

Learning requires a plan and one that recognizes you’re going to get punched in the mouth (and do just fine).

Can this be done for real? Yes, it can. For more information on how to create a true learning culture in your organization and what kind of data and strategy can support that, contact Cense and they’ll show you what’s possible. 

Image credit: Social by JD Hancock used under Creative Commons license.

businessinnovationpsychologyscience & technologysocial systems

The logic of a $1000 iPhone

on September 12, 2017

TimePhone.jpg

Today Apple is expected to release a new series of iPhone handsets with the base price for one set at more than $1000. While many commentators are focusing on the price, the bigger issue is less about what these new handsets cost, but what value they’ll hold. 

The idea that a handset — once called a phone — that is the size of a piece of bread could cost upward of $1000 seems mind-boggling to anyone who grew up with a conventional telephone. The new handsets coming to market have more computing power built into them than was required for the entire Apollo space missions and dwarf even the most powerful personal computers from just a few years ago. And to think that this computing power all fits into your pocket or purse.

The iPhone pictured above was ‘state of the art’ when it was purchased a few years ago and has now been retired to make way for the latest (until today) version required not because the handset broke, but because it could no longer handle the demands placed on it from the software that powered it and the storage space required to house it all. This was never an issue when people used a conventional telephone because it always worked and it did just one thing really well: allowed people to talk to each other at a distance.

Changing form, transforming functions

The iPhone is as much about technology as it is a vector of change in social life that is a product of and contributor to new ways of interacting. The iPhone (and its handset competitors) did not create the habits of text messaging, photo sharing, tagging, social chat, augmented reality, but it also wasn’t just responding to humans desire to communicate, either. Adam Alter’s recent book Irresistible outlines how technology has been a contributor to behaviours that we would now call addictive. This includes a persistent ‘need’ to look at one’s phone while doing other things, constant social media checking, and an inability to be fully present in many social situations without touching their handset.

Alter presents the evidence from a variety of studies and clinical reports that shows how tools like the iPhone and the many apps that run on it are engineered to encourage the kind of addictive behaviour we see permeating through society. Everything from the design of the interface, to the type of information an app offers a user (and when it provides it), to the architecture of social tools that encourage a type of reliance and engagement that draws people back to their phone, all create the conditions for a device that no longer sits as a mere tool, but has the potential to play a central role in many aspects of life.

These roles may be considered good or bad for social welfare, but in labelling such behaviours or outcomes in this way we risk losing the bigger picture of what is happening in our praise or condemnation. Dismissing something as ‘bad’ can mean we ignore social trends and the deeper meaning behind why people do things. By labelling things as ‘good’ we risk missing the harm that our tools and technology are doing and how they can be mitigated or prevented outright.

PhoneLookingCrowd.jpg

Changing functions, transforming forms

Since the iPhone was first launched, it’s moved from being a phone with a built in calendar and music player to something that now can power a business, serve as a home theatre system, and function as a tour guide. As apps and software evolve to accommodate mobile technology, the ‘clunkiness’ of doing many things on the go like accounting, take high-quality photos, or manage data files has been removed. Now, laptops seem bulky and even tablets, which have evolved in their power and performance to mimic desktops, are feeling big.

The handset is now serving as the tether to each other and creates a connected world. Who wants to lug cables and peripherals with them to and from the office when you can do much of the work in your hand? It is now possible to run a business without a computer. It’s still awkward, but it’s genuinely possible. Financial tools like Freshbooks or Quickbooks allow entrepreneurs to do their books from anywhere and tools like Shopify can transform a blog into a full-fledged e-commerce site.

Tools like Apple Pay have turned your phone into a wallet. Paying with your handset is now a viable option in an increasing number of places.

This wasn’t practical before and now it is. With today’s release from Apple, new tools like 3-D imaging, greatly-improved augmented reality support and enhanced image capture will all be added to the users’ toolkit.

Combine all of this with the social functions of text, chat, and media sharing and the handset has now transformed from a device to a social connector, business driver and entertainment device. There is little that can be done digitally that can’t be done on a handset.

Why does this matter?

It’s easy to get wrapped up in all of this as technological hype, but to do so is to miss some important trends. We may have concern over the addictive behaviours these tools engender, the changes in social decorum the phone instigates, and the fact that it becomes harder to escape the social world when the handset is also serving as your navigation tool, emergency response system, and as an e-reader. But these demands to have everything in your pocket and not strapped to your back, sitting on your desk (and your kitchen table) and scattered all over different tools and devices comes from a desire for simplicity and convenience.

In the midst of the discussion about whether these tools are good or bad, we often forget to ask what they are useful for and not useful for. Socially, they are useful for maintaining connections, but they have shown to be not so useful for building lasting, human connections at depth. They are useful for providing us with near-time and real-time data, but not as useful at allowing us to focus on the present moment. These handsets free us from our desk, but also keep us ‘tied’ to our work.

At the same time, losing your handset has enormous social, economic and (potentially) security consequences. It’s no longer about missing your music or not being able to text someone, when most of one’s communications, business, and social navigation functions are routed through a singular device the implications for losing that device becomes enormous.

Useful and not useful/good and bad

By asking how a technology is useful and not useful we can escape the dichotomy of good and bad, which gets us to miss the bigger picture of the trends we see. Our technologies are principally useful for connecting people to each other (even if it might be highly superficial), enabling quick action on simple tasks (e.g., shopping, making a reservation), finding simple information (e.g., Google search), and navigating unknown territory with known features (e.g., navigation systems). This is based on a desire for connection a need for data and information, and alleviating fear.

Those underlying qualities are what makes the iPhone and other devices worth paying attention to. What other means have we to enhance connection, provide information and help people to be secure? Asking these questions is one way in which we shape the future and provide either an alternative to technologies like the iPhone or better amplify these tools’ offerings. The choice is ours.

There may be other ways we can address these issues, but thus far haven’t found any that are as compelling. Until we do, a $1000 for a piece of technology that does this might be a bargain.

Seeing trends and developing a strategy to meet them is what foresight is all about. To learn more about how better data and strategy through foresight can help you contact Cense. 

Image credits: Author

 

1 2 3 … 57