Sensemaking in a changing world

Stories surround us

The world we see today is the legacy of people noticing the world and commenting on it in forms that have been preserved. Art & Fear

Story is how we make sense of the world. Each piece of art we create tells a story. Each story we share contributes to the meaning that shapes our world.

Story was the theme of PAB 2011, a gathering of artists who spent the weekend exploring storytelling across all forms of new media. 

After struggling to summarize my experience, I decided adding a constraint would be the perfect way to push through my writer’s block. I’ve captured my reflections in 4 sets of 5.

Five takeaways from PAB

• Stories surround you. Listen for them. Capture them. Share them. Risks if we don’t? Voices lost from history. Explosions from people whose stories aren’t heard (great JOLT @RobinBrowne!).
• Be naked. Reveal yourself. Take risks. @scarboroughdude was the most naked presenter, lounging in an armchair sharing his stories in the spirit of the original PAB as if participating in a fireside chat. Although @JohnMeadows vied for the title in a different way, pushing his limits with his photography.
• Just hit publish. It’s hard to hit publish if you’re forever worrying about whether you have anything interesting to say or whether it’s good enough. If you don’t hit publish, you’ll never know what your audience finds interesting or valuable. I admire the mindset of my son who created and published his first 3 tutorial videos in 3 hours, sharing his learnings with each video published.
• See the moments. Why use a film or view camera for photography when digital is available? Because it forces you to focus in on the moment. On the story you want to capture. This resonated with me as I’d just finished the book Zen of Seeing by Frederick Franck, who describes seeing this way: “Open your eyes and focus on whatever you observed before – that plant or leaf or dandelion. Look it in the eye, until you feel it looking back at you. Feel that you are alone with it on Earth! That it is the most important thing in the universe, that it contains all the riddle of life and death. It does! You are no longer looking, you are SEEING…” By learning to see the moments, you’ll discover stories everywhere.
• Treat a conference as a conversation. Intimate. Safe to be naked. Open space for conversation and forming new friendships. @markblevis and @bobgoyetche did a phenomenal job curating and facilitating PAB. It was forged seven years ago with a campfire in mind and they’ve stuck with that format, the current fireside being Stage 4 of the National Arts Centre. There was far more conversation than at other conferences I’ve attended, and it was during those conversations that meaning was shared and new relationships were begun.

Five things I learned by presenting at PAB

We learn by creating, sharing our creations, and then listening to the feedback shared by our audience. Here are a few things I learned about how I can improve future presentations, thanks to the opportunity to present at PAB.

• Cut. Cut. Then cut even more. Even though stories resonate more powerfully than facts, I still have a tendency to sprinkle too many supporting facts (references to studies) into a presentation. Too many facts distract the audience and dilute your core message.
• Ground yourself to reassure your lizard brain. Presenting triggers the flight, fright, flee response of the lizard brain for most of us. Someone shared with me a centering technique from yoga I’ll use in the future to reassure my lizard brain that it’s safe. Stand with your legs shoulder width apart. Lift your toes, spread them out, then anchor them to the floor. Imagine yourself as a tree, sending roots deep into the soil. Take a deep, yogic breath (inflating your belly). Exhale forcefully through an open mouth (making sure your mike is off).
• Slow down. Give people time to absorb each slide. Each visual, each slide, is part of the story you’re telling. Hurrying through slides leaves people wondering what they’ve missed.
• Invite your audience in. This was one of the tips @acedtect shared in his top 5 ways to engage the audience. How could I have done this better at PAB? Kept my presentation shorter. Then I could have facilitated an autobiography exercise, asking a few people to stand up and share. Then if there was time, followed that with an Inciting Incident exercise, again asking people to stand up and share. Story brings the audience in. Leaving space gives more opportunities for their stories to emerge.
• Reveal the meaning. It’s not what something is about (the facts). It’s about what it means to you (the story). This is related to presenting naked. Someone mentioned their surprise at how interested people seemed in some of the books I mentioned. He reflected that maybe this was because I referred to what the books meant to me, how they changed my thinking, rather than simply saying what they were about (his usual approach). In his wrap @markblevis said the creators aren’t the people who decide what the benefit is of their creation to others. Rather, it’s about what it means to your audience. I was surprised by the variety of conversations I had with people about what my presentation meant to them. The meaning and what resonated varied widely (from finding personal meaning to organizational applications). That’s the power of story. It provides space for conversation. It provides space for meaning to emerge.

I’ll be uploading my presentation, It’s All Invented, to slideshare next week.

Five things I’m going to do as result of attending PAB

The best conferences spark ideas and inspire action. As a result of my experience at PAB 2011, I’m going to do the following five things:

• Capture stories with video and audio. I confess my lizard brain has hindered me from reaching out to people and asking them whether I can record conversations. And yet unless I get over this fear I can’t share their stories. I’m going to bring my video camera and audio recorder to Content World 2011 and ask people to share their stories, featuring them in the Adoption Community.  
• Write a book on life lessons I’ve learned through gardening.  During my talk, I teased the audience with a few slides featuring my garden. Gardening has taught me so much about design, experimentation, persistence, emergence, serendipity… the list could go on. The number of stories it holds is huge. I started Ktown Gardener in January to capture thoughts and images of my garden, but didn’t stick with it. Thanks to PAB I’m reviving Ktown Gardener. I’ll post several times a week, using the blog as a garden journal to capture stories and images that resonate with me along with mistakes, successes, and learnings. I’ll also use it as a vehicle to help me develop my skills in drawing, photography, and video. And Ktown Gardener will become the  shitty first draft of the book.
• Seek out Kingston creatives. Artists (creators, designers) need other artists for inspiration and support. PAB has a wonderfully supportive atmosphere. While it’s awesome to travel to an event like PAB (and I plan on attending again next year) I’d like to connect with artists in the Kingston area. If you’re interested, send me an email or a tweet.
• Capture family stories. @zedcaster shared the story of Ada, his great grandmother, mother of 15 and lifelong swimmer. A cassette of her stories was almost lost. Someone discovered it at a garage sale, recognized its value, and tracked down her family so they could return it. Much to my regret, I have no stories of my great grandmother. But I still have the opportunity to capture the stories of my parents for future generations.
• Haul one or both of my kids off on an adventure. One of our family highlights is the month we spent exploring China when the kids were 12 and 14. We took Mandarin lessons together, then set off on our adventure. Since then I’ve assumed the kids are too old to head out with us again (they’re 17 and 19 now). But inspired by @scarboroughdude’s story of his cross Canada bonding trips with each of his sons and Christopher Griffin‘s tale of his family’s trip to India and his experience casting bronze elephants, I’ll be seeking out an adventure to share with my kids.

Five phrases from PAB that captured my imagination

• Fruitful incompletion
• Story showers
• Dead time between mistakes gives space for better ideas to emerge
• We’re not channels, we’re tubes
• Shiver moment

What images do these phrases evoke for you?

Interviewing as listening

Listening is the root of collaboration, root-cause analysis, and effective teamwork. It is also the single greatest source of establishing unity from top to bottom and bottom to top. – David Shaner, The Seven Arts of Change

With deep listening.

Adopting a beginner’s mind.

And a design attitude.

Too often, we allow our preconceptions, mental models, and perceptions of the other person to run interference. Instead of listening, we’re silently arguing, editing what the other person is saying to fit our own mental models, or worrying about our next question.

Consider what the joke about the designer and the light bulb reveals about a design attitude.

How many designers does it take to change a light bulb?

Why a light bulb?  

Turn off your ego

Approach each interview with that why foremost in your mind.

Who is this person? What do they care about? Why? Why do they see the world that way? What does it mean? What hypotheses can I test?

Listening is not an automatic pilot. It is a conscious decision… STOP EVERYTHING YOU’RE THINKING and listen. Suspend your own frame of reference. Focus externally. Turn off your ego. Quit thinking everything revolves around your opinion. Give the stage in your head to someone else! – Sunni Brown

You don’t have to be a designer to have a design attitude or a buddist to have a beginner’s mind. Test your attitude by asking yourself:

• Am I putting aside my assumptions?
• Am I trying to understand how this person sees themselves and their world?
• Do I allow myself to ask stupid questions?
• Am I suspending judgment, holding my analytical mind in check?
• Am I digging below surface-level facts, explanations, or generalizations to uncover the underlying story?
• Can I look past the words themselves to the meaning or story hidden in the spaces between the words?

The process of listening so others will talk,  developed by  Carl Rogers, is called reflective listening. Reflective listening involves shifting your mindset from “how do I see this person?” to “How does this person see themselves and their situation?” Your goal when interviewing is to see the world from the other person’s point of view. Using reflective listening techniques  (which I’ll dig into in more detail in a future post) you’ll reduce defensiveness, build trust, make a person feel understood, and increase insight. 

Probe for meaning

If you’ve familiar with the analogy of the Elephant and the Rider, adopting a design attitude when interviewing allows you to probe beneath the interviewee’s Rider, the portion of their brain that excels at generalizations, rationalizations, and explanations (expressed knowledge) and dig for the rich meaning held by the Elephant, the portion of the brain operating outside our conscious awareness that holds a goldmine of tacit and fertile knowledge.

You’re in discovery mode. Not just discovery of facts, but more importantly discovery of the context or story which weaves together those facts to infuse a particular meaning into how that person views the organization and their work. For it’s the story or meaning they assign to facts that determines their behavior and drives their decisions.   

Shift yourself into the right mindset by approaching each interview with deep curiosity, imagining each person as the keeper of a mystery to uncover. As Malcolm Gladwell said: “Everyone has a story. When people are talking about something they know well and do well, they’re almost always interesting. And if they’re not, it’s generally your fault because you’re not asking the right questions and you haven’t made them comfortable.”

There is so much power in this small act [of listening] because it can immediately establish trust and diffuse the negative energy exuding from individuals at the outset of change. No speech, act, or intervention can accomplish such a deep measure of trust in such as short time. And trust is what you’re after. – David Shaner, The Seven Arts of Change

Interviewing as emotional due diligence

The important thing is not to stop questioning. – Albert Einstein

During a recent interview, the executive sponsor of an ECM deployment said “We expected 100% user adoption. But we’re not seeing that.” Like many organizations which implement enterprise software, this organization deployed the software, sent out some communications, did some classroom training, and then waited for people to adopt the software along with new information management behaviors. But instead of the 100% adoption they expected, they ended up with spotty adoption and unhappy users.

What went wrong?

No one was responsible for talking to the people expected to change their behaviours and adopt the software. No one was responsible for listening for their stories. No one was responsbile for performing emotional due diligence.

• Interviewed department heads or managers to uncover their use cases, objectives, and constraints
• Interviewed the knowledge workers expected to use the software to understand their work, the pressures they worked under, and what was important to them

 After deploying, no one:

• Checked back with department heads or managers to see whether the deployed solution was helping them achieve their business objectives
• Checked back with knowledge workers to see whether they were using it, how they were using it, whether they understood what was expected of them, and whether they perceived any value

The unintentional story told by this approach was “you aren’t important.” They fell into this trap because the dominant mentality of today’s corporate culture is telling, not asking.

Because they neglected their emotional due diligence, they failed to deploy in a way that took into account the way people worked. It’s likely the project was initially declared a success if it delivered against documented requirements on time and on budget. But, because adoption is the real measure of success, the project failed in delivering the expected value.

Here be dragons

I stumbled on the phrase emotional due diligence in Tell to Win, where Peter Gruber shares the story of how Tom Werner succeeded as chairman of the Boston Red Sox after  failing as owner of the San Diego Padres. When he arrived in Boston, he was pressured to tear down the Fenway Park. But the fans said that if he destroyed Fenway Park, he would destroy their story. He did his emotional due diligence, getting to know the fans and their story. After getting to know the emotional landscape of Fenway Park, he concluded that the proposition wasn’t “Build it and they will come, but rather Tear it down and they won’t come.” He decided Fenway Park was the most valuable element of the Red Sox story and that his job was to protect and refuel the flame of Fenway to ensure core story was neverending. By 2008 Fenway sold out 388 consecutive home games, the second longest streak in baseball history. And they reversed the Curse of the Bambino to win the World Series after an 86 year drought.

You can perform your own emotional due diligence when introducing change (any enterprise software deployment will introduce significant change) by reaching out to people to discover their stories, motivations and passions – mapping the emotional landscape of your organization.

Each time you conduct an interview, run a survey, or facilitate a workshop, think of yourself as an explorer charting unfamiliar territories in your organization’s emotional landscape. For in unfamiliar territories here be dragons that can either capsize your change effort or surface opportunities you can leverage to accelerate change.

As we shift from command and control organizations to adaptive organizations, we need to get better at navigating the emotional landscapes of our organizations.  And that means we need to become experts at interviewing as a technique for performing emotional due diligence.

In future posts, I’ll dig deeper into the art and science of interviewing for emotional due diligence.

Designing experiences with content

What’s the worst customer experience you’ve ever had?

In this presentation from Content World, I (partially) chronicle my own worst ever customer experience using a simplified customer experience journey map. While it wasn’t the worst in terms of any one interaction, the overall experience as it unfolded over time, across multiple interactions, and through multiple touchpoints made it the winner.

Too often, when an organization looks at interaction design, process design, touchpoint design, or content design, they do it in the context of a single interaction, a single process, a single touchpoint, or a single piece of content. They don’t look at the way the interactions weave together over time and across touchpoints. They don’t look at the interconnections between the employee experience and the backend systems they work with and the customer experience. They don’t think in terms of a holistic customer experience. As a result, while they may deliver a great experience at one touchpoint, the overall experience may still suck.  

Content has a significant role to play when we approach the design of the customer experience holistically. And yet content has long been neglected. It’s time to change that. Content strategy, by designing experiences with content, can have a significant impact on an organization’s bottom line.

By the way, the tale of my worst experience continues. As I was editing this presentation, the phone range. For some reason, I picked it up even though I usually ignore phone calls during the day (assuming they’re spam). Sure enough, it was spam. But in a twisted kind of way I was glad I answered because it supplied me with yet another thread in the narrative of my most worst ever customer experience.

On the line was a call center representative. They were phoning to offer me the opportunity to purchase an extended warranty on my dishwasher (“oh” the woman on the phone says, “you own two dishwashers?”).

“Actually no.” I respond. “I have one dishwasher. It’s the replacement for the other one that caused me no end of frustration with multiple service calls and a damaged floor.”

 “I’ll correct your record” she offers. Then she starts back into her pitch. Having only so much patience, I confess that I hung up before she could finish.

Applying the Switch framework to two change efforts

In  to succeed with change, tap into the power of the mind I summarized my takeaways from Switch. In this post, I’ll try applying the Switch framework to two very different types of change efforts. The first is a personal change effort many of us struggle with. The second is an organizational change effort.

Losing weight

Direct the rider: When it comes to losing weight, convincing the rider isn’t usually a problem. Rationally, we know being overweight affects our health. Most of us want to eat healthier and exercise more. So how can we find ways to direct the rider and stay on course? Find bright spots (family, friends, colleagues, or bloggers who succeeded) and discover how they did it. Think back to times you’ve followed healthier behaviours and see if you can figure out why and how to duplicate that success more consistently. Create simple rules (if it contains high fructose corn syrup, you can’t pronounce some of the ingredients, or it’s made with white flour don’t eat it). Plan ahead with simple easy to prepare menus. Teach the rider distraction techniques (when craving something sweet, eat a carrot, take a walk, talk to someone in your support network, or read something motivational).

Motivate the elephant: Instead of viewing it as a problem (stop being overweight), reframe it as a positive goal, a new state of being (be healthy). Visualize how you look and feel as a healthy person. Set micro goals (15 minute daily walk, a healthy breakfast) and celebrate each success. Plan ahead for falling off the wagon (“I blew it today, but that’s ok because I’m a healthy person so tomorrow I’ll just return to my healthy habits” rather than “I blew it today, I’m a failure, I might as well just give up”). And if you’re trying to motivate the elephant to act, watch Jamie Oliver’s excellent TED talk teach every child about food.

Shape the path: Set action triggers (put on running shoes every morning and go outside, drink a glass of water before every meal) to help build habits (daily exercise, drinking 8 glasses of water a day). Tweak the environment (don’t keep ice cream in the house, use smaller plates, purchase home exercise equipment, weigh yourself every morning). Rally the herd by sharing your goals with family and friends and reporting publicly on your progress. Weight gain is contagious, so build a social network of people with similar heath goals. 

Using less paper

Direct the rider: Paint the vision of a future with less paper. Connect that future to a meaningful strategic goal or purpose that resonates (such as becoming a more sustainable organization or one which consistently delights customers). Demonstrate the impact of the current state (amount of paper created or stored yearly, amount of time wasted digging through file cabinets or requesting boxes from storage, poor customer service caused by the lack of a consolidated electronic view of previous customer interactions). Find the bright spots (employees, departments, or teams who have found new ways of working that involve less paper) and share their stories. Script critical moves. Scan, file electronically, and then throw away incoming paper immediately. Instead of emailing and printing to edit, store documents in a document repository and use track changes and electronic versioning to edit. Instead of using printed manuals for policies and procedures, use wikis.

Motivate the elephant: Create visuals (images of file cabinets and piles of paper cluttering offices and hallways) of all the paper the current behaviours are generating. Circulate before and after video clips or stories of people frustrated and exchanging multiple emails trying to chase down answers before making the change and their success when using the new paperless option after the change. Figure out how many trees are cut down annually because of the reliance on paper and share that number. Set targets to reduce that number then visually show how the number changes over time as people change their behaviours (could even break this down departmentally to leverage social influence). Host fun events such as a bulk loading party to migrate documents into the electronic library.

Shape the path: Introduce structural elements that constrain the use of paper. Provide an electronic library or repository that replaces physical alternatives. Ensure people can easily file and find documents  electronically. Review processes and reshape them so they naturally lead people towards working electronically otherwise they’ll continue to follow old habits. Introduce digital workflows. Replace paper forms with electronic ones and physical signatures with electronic ones. Make printers scarce – if a printer is difficult to get to, people are less likely to print. Provide dual monitors – the easier content is to work with online, the less likely people are to print. Make scanners convenient and provide checklists to make it easy to scan incoming or source content into the library.

Personally, one of the biggest factors in changing my own behavior to use less paper was structural. Like many people, I would often print to read, edit, or review documents. At the office, I had easy access to fast printers. Then I moved to a home office. While I do have access to a printer at home, I didn’t know how to connect to it over the network using an IP address. Although I could have easily figured it out by doing a web search, I didn’t bother for almost a year (procrastination in action). As a result, because I couldn’t easily print, I adjusted to reading, reviewing, and editing electronically. And even though I finally set up the connection so that I am able to print at home, my new habits are ingrained and I’ve become a long term convert to using less paper.

To succeed with change, tap into the power of the mind

Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: can you get people to start behaving in a new way? For individual’s behavior to change, you’ve got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds. – Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip & Dan Heath

In the past couple of years I’ve read widely in the area of behavioral economics.  Insights from this field can be applied to a wide range of challenges from the design of software, policy, communications, services, organizations, and change. And so I was delighted when reading Dan and Chip Heath’s book on change, Switch, to see them apply the new theories of the brain to the challenge of change.

Whether it’s trying to change our own habits, the habits of a team, or the habits of an organization the people who succeed in effecting change, whether through design, intuition, or by accident, tap into the power of how the mind actually works. And much of that power resides in understanding the tension between the Elephant and the Rider.

The analogy of the Elephant and the Rider used in Switch reveals the power emotion exerts over our behavior and captures the tension between the emotional and rational sides of our brains.

Motivate the Elephant – our emotional brain

The conscious part of our mind (the rider) is like the tip of an iceberg, dwarfed by the remainder (the elephant) that operates outside our conscious awareness. Both because we’ve been seduced by the illusion of homo economicus and because the elephant is hard to measure and study, we’ve neglected the importance of the elephant when designing for lasting change. And yet, for change that sticks, we need to engage the elephant.

According to John Kotter, “people change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.” In other words, rather than analyze-think-change (targeting the rider) we need a see-feel-change approach (targeting the elephant). The heart of change is emotion.

So what exactly is the elephant? The elephant:

• Consists of gut feelings, emotions, and intuitions.
• Is the source of our energy & passion.
• Gets things done.
• Has ingrained habits that are tough to change.
• Really, really hates to fail.
• Needs motivation to act.
• Is easily demoralized, spooked, and derailed.
• Hungers for instant gratification.

In a change effort, because we want to harness the elephant’s energy and power for action, we need strategies to motivate the elephant, give it confidence, and keep it moving forward along the path set out by the rider. You can do this either by shrinking the change or growing people:

• Forget facts and figures, they’ll never convince the elephant. Instead, make it visceral, make it emotional. Use anecdotes, stories, direct experiences, or imagery.
• Provide a compelling, clear, and concrete vision of the desired end stage.
• Don’t get caught up analyzing the source of the problem. To the elephant, root causes are true but useless.
• Get them started on the path by asking for something small.
• Provide reassurance, even for the very first step.
• Set micro milestones. With each milestone, the elephant feels less scared and less reluctant because they’re succeeding.
• Elephants wander. Watch for triggers that cause it to wander, then lead it back.
• Although elephants hate to fail, if you create the expectation of failure as part of learning and growth, you reassure the elephant.
• Elephants have a herd mindset. Cultivate a sense of identity –  a tribe and cause the elephant can believe in.  

Direct the Rider – our rational brain

The rider is the conscious part of our brain. Perched on top of the elephant, the rider holds the reigns and seems to be in control. But when it comes to a  disagreement, the tiny rider is no match for the massive elephant. And the bigger the change, the harder it is for the rider to steer the elephant. 

When the elephant rambles off course, the rider explains away the behavior of the elephant by spinning a story about why the elephant behaved the way it did – a confabulation which may bear little resemblance to what actually happened.

So what exactly is the rider? The rider:

• Is a thinker and a planner that looks into the future.
• Advises the elephant and helps it to make better choices. But when push comes to shove, caves to the elephant’s greater strength unless it’s able to distract the elephant.
• Creates stories to justify and rationalize the actions (decisions) of the elephant.
• Loves to contemplate, obsess, and overanalyze.
• Focuses on problems rather than bright spots.
• Often thinks about what’s easy to think about, rather than what’s right to think about.
• Spins its wheels, so tends to lead elephant in circles.
• Needs to remain vigilant to keep the elephant on course until new habits replace the old.
• Tires easily (only works optimally about four hours a day).

In a change effort, because the rider is so easily lead around by the elephant, we need strategies to keep it steering in the right direction and to arm the rider for its ongoing struggles with the elephant:

• Point the rider to its destination (this is where a compelling vision and BHAGs are so powerful).
• Don’t overwhelm the rider, it has limited resources and is easily exhausted in its struggles with the elephant. Carefully focus it on what’s most important.
• Script critical moves (clear policies & guidelines, stop doing/start doing scripts, quick references).
• Be on the lookout for the rider spinning tales and making excuses for what the elephant has done (“I don’t have time…” “it’s too slow…” “I need it at my fingertips…”).
• Teach the rider strategies to recognize when the elephant is getting the upper hand by developing emotional intelligence. Think of emotional intelligence is a skillful rider who is able to distract the elephant.
• Develop social intelligence. Think of social intelligence is a skillful rider who is able to reach the elephants of those around them.

Shape the path – modify the environment

Everything has underlying structure.  Structure can be physical (an office, an interface, an online community, a city). Or nonphysical  (plot of a novel, flow of a process, culture of an organization, measures and incentives).

We make different choices in a cafeteria based on how the food is displayed, the order it’s displayed in, the choice of food offered, price, and the ambience of the seating area. We behave differently on Facebook than when using Outlook at work. Yet due to the fundamental attribution error we often ignore the structural forces that shape behavior, attributing behavior to the way people are rather than to the situation they’re in. What may look like a people problem is often a situation problem.

So what exactly is the path? The path:

• Consists of the structural forces surrounding the changes we’re trying to effect.
• Exerts pull to attract or push to compel.
• Is shaped by social networks.
• Is subject to three degrees of influence.
• Influences choices and actions.
• Reinforces or deters habits.

The challenge is to shape the path of least resistance to be the one that leads to the change you want to effect:

• Tweak the environment to make the right behaviors easier and the wrong behaviors harder.
• Provide physical or virtual spaces (communities, meeting rooms, project spaces, coffee corners) that attract.
• Provide checklists to show the way and help build habits.
• Set triggers to create instant habits (do x when y happens). For example, share a story about great customer service at the beginning of every team meeting. Blog action items or key learnings immediately following a meeting.
• Apply principles of social influence. For example, make progress visible using gauges, thermometers, or other visualizations.
• Rally the support of champions who could in turn influence others. 
• Craft language to build tribes and shape culture such as the core values Netflix rallies around or the design principles that guide decision making such as the ten principles that contribute to a Googley user experience.
• Build momentum by structuring a series of smaller successes on the way to a larger goal.

In my next post, I’ll apply the framework from Switch to two different types of change efforts – one personal and one organizational.

To err is human: apologizing brings the human side back into business

Apology is not just a social nicety. It is an important ritual, a way of showing respect and empathy for the wronged person. It is also a way of acknowledging an act that, if otherwise left unnoticed, might compromise the relationship. Apology has the ability to disarm others of their anger and to prevent further misunderstandings. While an apology cannot undo harmful past actions, if done sincerely and effectively, it can undo the negative effects of those actions. –  The Power of Apology Beverly Engel, Psychology Today

During a recent webinar I gave on common resistance behaviours organizations face during a technology deployment, one participant asked whether apologies had a role when they encounter resistance. While they didn’t give the background behind the question, it immediately tweaked my interest as I had included a slide in my deck with an image of a surgical team on the role of apology when faced with resistance.

I’d been sparked to include that slide because of a conversation earlier that month. The person I was talking with had been using Content Server for about four years and had experienced a series of disappointments which really colored their perception of its usefulness and usability.

Their department had been one of the first to transition from a shared drive onto Content Server. During the early stages of an enterprise wide deployment, the project team had left it to each department to design their own taxonomy. The departments had no experience in taxonomy design. Nor did the project team. The resulting taxonomy was difficult to use – deep and lacking clarity. As a result, they were often uncertain where to file or find content. They wasted a lot of time clicking around and complained it was hard to use.

That was enough to colour their perception and spark resistance. But on top of that, an experience that upset them even more and is still fresh in their mind several years later is the schedule by which they were expected to make the change and the “stick” that was applied when imposed deadlines weren’t met. The implementation had strong executive support and a tight schedule as to how much a department was expected to migrate each week. As they described this experience, their voice still resonated with hurt and anger about how, despite the fact that while their department had mission critical work that had to be done, if they missed a weekly target they received an email that was cc’d several levels up the chain, including to an executive. “It really pissed us off. Are you kidding? You really sent it to [                ]? So all would know my group wasn’t doing their work.”

Since then, the project team has radically changed their approach. They are careful to fit into a department’s schedule and avoid crunch periods. They developed expertise in taxonomy design and work closely with each department to develop a usable taxonomy and then support them throughout the migration.  

However, the hurt lingers on for this particular person. As a result they’re a resistor. They’re a resistor because emotion strongly colours perception, behaviour, acceptance, and action. Even if the user experience was dead simple (we’re making progress on improving the user experience but yes, we still have work to do) and the taxonomy design was flawless, they would still be a resistor. And as a resistor, they’ll be the one at the water cooler telling people who just joined the company or someone from another department next on the slate to migrate that the system sucks. They’ll infect others with their negative emotions, starting them down the path to resistance before they have a chance to judge for themselves. They’ll resist learning (“I don’t have time”). They won’t innovate how they work with content. They won’t offer constructive ideas on how to use the system to improve collaboration across departments. Their perception has become reality – the system sucks.

A situation like this could be the perfect opportunity to try an apology. Maybe the project team already tried this when they changed their approach. An apology won’t always mend a relationship or undo the negative effects caused by a mistake. Or perhaps they never considered an apology because we’re not used to apologizing in the business world and as a result most people are unaware of the power a simple apology can have in changing someone’s perceptions (and correspondingly, their behaviour).

How to give a meaningful apology

A good apology should make the person wronged think, “Yes, she understands.” Often what the offended person wants is accountability and vigilance; he wants to know that it won’t happen again. The Art of the Apology, HBS

If you do decide to try an apology, in always apologize, always explain, Dr. Martha Beck suggests the following approach:

• Acknowledge the offense (say what you did wrong and acknowledge that it was wrong)
• Explain (don’t make excuses)
• Genuinely express remorse
• Do repair work (if there’s nothing tangible you can repair, focus on repairing their dignity)

For a true apology, you need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. You need the empathy to imagine and experience the wrong from their perspective. And you must truly believe you have something to apologize for. If you don’t feel you did anything wrong, don’t apologize. If you have kids, you’ll recognize how this one works. One kid hits the other. You try and get the hitter to apologize. If they feel the other deserved it and thus has done nothing that needs apologizing for, you’ll get a non-apology apology that does neither party any good… “I’m sorry you made me hit you.”

Benefit of admitting mistakes

When you apologize, you’re admitting you made a mistake. Traditionally in business mistakes are frowned on. But as businesses become more human centered they’re empowering employees and encouraging them to take risks. Taking risks means making mistakes. Mistakes are how learning happens.

Recently admitting mistakes has been a hot topic in the medical community. Some medical institutions in the United States are experimenting with reporting medical mistakes and apologizing to patients or families when they do make a mistake. At the University of Michigan “The program included a procedure for telling patients and their families about errors; explaining who made the error, how it occurred and what steps were taken to prevent a similar mistake in the future; making a sincere apology to the patient or their family; and offering fair compensation for harm when at fault.”

The result was fewer lawsuits, faster dispute resolution, and lower legal costs – though these weren’t the goal of the program and in fact there was some worry when the program was introduced that lawsuits would increase.

This all started because of the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report on medical errors. Health care realized until the legal system changed, [doctors, nurses, and technicians] were not going to come forward and be transparent about errors, which meant the health care system wasn’t going to be able to improve. Once it’s safe to come forward, health care workers can start talking openly about making changes. The fact the apology reduces litigation is an unexpected benefit. – The Art and Power of the Apology

This also sparked the formation of the coalition SorryWorks! which “believes and advocates that the litigation crisis is largely a customer service crisis – not a legal problem.”

Apologizing brings the human side back into business

Apologizing is a skill we need to master as we bring the human element back into how we do business.

And apologizing isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also good business. Our deepest relationships are often those in which there has been conflict. Our most loyal customers are often those who experienced an issue or problem. Because when a conflict surfaces or a problem arises, it can generate meaningful dialog and provide an opportunity to address the problem – strengthening the relationship and possibily converting a resistor to a champion. In fact, according to Strategic Customer Service, when complaining customers are converted from dissatisfied to satisfied, loyalty increases by between 25-60%.

So next time you do a wrong, work on the art of the apology.

People are the heart of a conference experience: conversation by design

The family is shaped by the direction in which it points its conversation. It can focus on its memories and basically keep on saying: “this is the way we are, this is what the different members of the family have done and are doing.” Or it may treat itself as a base from which its members set out to explore the outside world, and to which they return with something new to say, so that conversation is constantly enriched by outside as well as inside happenings. We become the prisoners of our families, our genes, our memories, only if we wish to be prisoners. It is by conversations with others, by mixing different voices with our own, that we can turn our individual life into an original work of art. -  Theodore Zeldin, Conversation

What makes or break a conference experience? People – their ideas, stories, and the resulting conversations. Some of this conversation happens during the conference sessions themselves. But more often it happens in the hallways during breaks, over lunch, or during informal events.

If hallway conversations are often the best part of a conference experience, how can we extend and play on the value of hallway conversations?

If a good presentation at a conference is merely a conversation starter, how can we extend the avenues available to us to continue those conversations?

If conversations build communities and keep refreshing them with new ideas, how can we use the conference experience to build, nurture, and welcome new members to a community?

Ever since he published the influential book Beyond Bullet Points, Cliff Atkinson has been trying to get people to rethink the way they do presentations. In The Backchannel he argues that presentations can become much more than a one-time information transfer event with limited opportunities for interaction. Instead he suggests that through the use of social media presentations can instead become part of an extended conversation.

Last year in the Innovation Lab at Open Text Content World we began a conversation around the challenge of adoption. During focus groups, usability tests, surveys, and in follow-up conversations with customers we’ve been exploring the extent of the adoption challenge faced by organizations. What we’ve discovered is that the various facets that influence adoption are poorly understood. Only a minority of organizations measure adoption. Few deploy with an adoption strategy in mind. ECM is too often treated as a technology platform and deployed with little understanding of the business context. Kyle McNabb from Forrester suggests that:

Most implementations fail to take into consideration business context… implementation teams know who their users are, but they know very little about the people that will use the technology. 

Gartner predicts:

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in over a 70 percent failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives. Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets around designing and delivering social media solutions. Until this happens, failure rates will remain high.

Like the presentation pyramid above, ECM technology is just the tip of iceberg. One of the most common mistakes organizations make when they deploy ECM is thinking they’re done once the deployment is rolled out. And yet, if you consider the adoption experience, deployment is only one step along the path of gaining traction across the organization. Think of deploying ECM in your organization as the beginning of an extended conversation with the people you expect to use it every day as part of their jobs and with the business to whom you’re delivering specific business value. Or, as one customer phrased it, think of it as moving from a ‘launch and leave’ to a ‘launch, listen, learn, and never leave’ philosophy.

In the Adoption Track at Content World this year, we’re going to continue the conversation around adoption. We’ll discuss what it means to take a people-centric approach to deploying ECM and how design thinking can help. And in keeping with the theme, we’re going to experiment with people-centric approaches to the design of the sessions and the track experience itself, using the Adoption Community to extend the experience before and after the conference.

At the heart of the the Adoption Track are conversations about people-centric topics, including:

• the problem with requirements
• ‘the GUI sucks’ – role of the interface in adoption
• what prevents people from sharing knowledge
• discovering how opportunities for innovation can come from putting people first
• role of knowledge champions as agents of change
• moving from a training to a learning culture
• nudges, mind control, and the psychology of adoption
• measuring adoption
• usability testing

If you’re interested in bringing a more people-centric approach to deploying ECM solutions and giving your right brain a workout, join in the conversation at #OTCW. And let me know if you’re interested in participating on a panel, presenting a case study, or have ideas for additional topics of conversation.

And in the spirit of Beyond Bullet Points, we promise not to brain-damage anyone attending sessions in the Adoption Track with boring presentations packed with bullet points.

Visualizing the adoption experience

Earlier I blogged about visualizing the customer experience using customer experience journey maps. The experience I’m currently trying to understand and visualize is the experience people go through when adopting a new application at work. The challenge of people adopting of new applications in an organization is a much different challenge than the one of people adopting new applications in their personal lives.

People don’t like being changed. Yet new applications force people to change their behavior. This has a significant psychological effect (illustrated in the technology adoption cycle) due to our many cognitive biases. One important cognitive bias that comes into play when it comes to the challenge of adoption is that we overvalue what we have. For a great background on cognitive biases and other ways in which people are predictably irrational, check out Dan Ariely’s great book of the same name.

Just how big is this psychological effect? John Gourville, in the must read article Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New Product Adoption published in the Harvard Business Review, says that people tend to overvalue what they currently use by a factor of three. And businesses have a corresponding tendency to overvalue a technology’s benefits by a factor of three. This results in a significant hurdle when, for example, organizations try to shift employees from shared drives and email to shared document repositories and collaborative applications.

What are the stages people go through when adopting new applications in a business context? Below is a diagram illustrating my first take at visualizing the adoption experience for ECM (click on the image for a full size version).

Two important sources that informed this draft of the adoption experience are the Experience Cycle and the ADKAR change management model.

The Experience Cycle updates the sales cycle and the traditional marketing funnel with a more holistic, customer-centric point of view. The stages illustrated in the Experience Cycle, however, are incomplete when it comes to the challenge organizations face when deploying enterprise software. With enterprise software, there’s another layer of complexity. Instead of the direct Producer to Customer experience discussed in the article, there’s a Producer > Organization > Internal Customer experience. The organization has its own goals, its own internal customers, and must be actively involved in designing and supporting the adoption experience.

ADKAR is a goal-oriented change management model focused on the people dimension of change. A change management model that brings in the people dimension is important because businesses want employees to adopt new applications in order to support their business goals. But enterprise applications such as ECM are difficult to mandate. As a result, organizations need to explicitly plan for and design behaviour change into the adoption experience.

This attempt to visualize the adoption experience is just a starting point and I would love some feedback and ideas on how to improve and extend it. I also plan on creating a version based on a specific persona as the adoption experience will differ based on the behavioural patterns and goals of different personas.

Taking a people-centric approach to the design and deployment of enterprise software

There’s been a regrettable lack of discussion on the challenges of designing usable, engaging experiences for enterprise software. Often the business problems solved by B2B vendors were compelling enough that whether or not they were easy to use organizations were willing to put up with poor design. Companies purchasing the software have traditionally been more demanding of features rather than good GUI. The pace of change is also slower in organizations which means trends that impact B2C software take time to make their into their B2B counterparts. I think there’s also traditionally been a perception that management could simply tell people to use something or adopt new behaviours through policies, incentives, and punishments as it was considered part of the job. And when designing enterprise software, there’s usually a complex ecosystem of roles to support around planning, configuration, administration, deployment, and supporting the software.

After the purchase, organizations have the equally complex task of designing and deploying solutions based on that software within their own organization. And those responsible, IT (like B2B vendors themselves) have traditionally had a very technology focused mindset.

The socio-digital revolution, the experience economy, the rise of mobile, the impact of the changing demographics within the workforce, and the failure of so many enterprise deployments to reach their objectives call for a new focus on understanding people’s relationship with technology within organizations.

If we want people to adopt the solutions we design and deploy, we need to adopt new approaches to the design and delivery of those solutions. Approaches that start with people. This means shifting from treating people as rational users of technology (one-dimensional) to people with goals, hopes, dreams, and complex relationships (multi-dimensional). And finally, it means shifting from evaluating human performance as if people were cogs in a factory assembly line whose behaviour we can adjust through a simplistic carrot and stick reward system (one-dimensional) to researching experience and designing for behaviour change (multi-dimensional).

This requires a two-pronged strategy:

• Designing technology to adapt to people
• Designing for behaviour change in order to adapt people to technology

While these strategies may at first glance seem contradictory, they are actually both equally important and form a creative tension. If technology isn’t designed and deployed with people in mind, then it can be a frustrating failure. On the other hand, no matter how compelling the value proposition and how well designed, any new technology requires behaviour change. And while there are always early adopters who eagerly learn the technology and shift their behaviors to incorporate the technology into the way they do things, for most it’s a more complex challenge as illustrated by the technology adoption curve first defined in 1941 which, fascinatingly enough, was developed to illustrate the diffusion of corn hybrid seed (illustration from the excellent article Design Strategies for Technology Adoption).

These strategies call for a people-centric design and deployment approach that considers:

• values people hold and how these impact behaviour, decisions, performance, and adoption
• organizational culture in which people work and it’s impact on people’s behaviour
• people’s motivations and how these affect behavior, decisions, performance, and adoption
• activities people perform and how technology (products, business processes, procedures) can support, enhance, or change these activities
• goals and aspirations and how these affect the choice of the activities people engage in
• social relationships people have both within and outside of the organization, the pressures they exert and opportunities they enable, and how they’re transforming the way we work
• approaches to how we design and deploy solutions and how these approaches reflect organizational values and impact the resulting adoption of the solutions
• transformation in work practices we hope to effect through the technology so that we are designing for where thing are going rather than where they have been
• experiences and the ideas, emotions, and memories we hope to evoke through our solutions
• constraints of how our brains work and how to take these constraints into account when we design technologies, processes, services, or behavior change

Designing solutions that promote changes in the way people work requires us to look beyond traditional user-centered design (an approach most enterprises never actually adopted) to a people-centric holistic experience design approach which ensures that solutions are culturally relevant, emotionally engaging, easy-to-use as well as more readily adopted to promote desired transformations in culture and work practice. By placing people at the core of our thinking we can:

• Deliver more holistic, engaging experiences that accelerate the adoption process
• More effectively manage risk
• Ensure solutions achieve their business objectives by aligning people, process, technology, and content with business objectives
• Make organizations better places to work
• More rapidly transform business (see the recent discussions around social business design)

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