If We Want To Change The World, We Need To Change Our Tools

We’ve heard enough about how complex and fast-paced the world for companies has become. There are a couple of challenges all businesses face in one way or another:

• User Experience (customer intimacy): there are a lot of developments in the world that are increasing the need to get close to your customers. Not only does 24 hours a day access, digitization, increased competition from other industries and rising User Experience demands shake things up. But also an increasing need for meaning and the growing allergy to fake marketing messages demands a fundamental re-think of business operations.
• Agility (Operational excellence): in order to keep up with the ever-increasing pace, organizations need to be able to move fast, change when needed. Traditional linear ways of working are becoming ineffective because of their inability to accommodate change. To keep the performance of teams and organizations up, organizations need to become more agile and lean.
• Creativity (product innovation): the ability of an organization to distinguish itself from its competitors depends on the creativity of an organization. Copying best practices in a time when those best practices are easily available to your competitors is not a sustainable solution anymore. If you need unique selling points, you need creativity.

Demands for our tools

Working on these challenges requires tools. Just like the people traditionally working on business process design invented tools like BPMN (Business Process and Model Notation) and people traditionally working on designing databases invented ERD (Entity Relationship Diagrams) and DFD (Data Flow Diagrams), the people who want to unite design, technology and business to solve the business challenges of today need tools. The challenges above lead to a couple of demands for the tools we need:

• Seeing the customer: we need to see the customer in our tools. We have to solve problems for our users, so we need to see what the problems they face are, how they experience them. Tools like Customer Journey Maps are great for viewing the world through the eyes of your customer and seeing the big picture of all the touch points through which you interact.
• Seeing the other stakeholders: the users are not the only stakeholders in the services. The business and technology also need to be taken into consideration. If you turn your Customer Journey Map into a Service Blueprint, you add in the back-end services and technology that is needed for the service. That is good. The problem that could arise is that the user is the primary stakeholder and the other stakeholders are secondary. And although it’s good to focus on the user, not taking into account the experience of employees, the needs of the business and the possibilities of the technology, typically leads to suboptimal solutions: Service Blueprints that solve the problem for the user but never get implemented because it doesn’t work for the business and/or technology.
• Work in the proper medium: if we are (re)designing product and services we are not only working on the products and the interfaces but also on business processes. If you spend your time on tools that focus on the visual side of products and services, you are missing a fundamental part of the thing you are supposed to be designing. The same goes for the opposite. If you just look at business processes without the visual side of things, you are not seeing the whole picture.
• Deal with complexity: the problems and challenges are complex and we need a way to deal with this complexity without losing essential details. Creating simplicity involves seeing the big picture, developing a vision, and validation of the choices in reality. Business process diagrams tend to get complex fast. But a picture is worth a thousand words. Images are a great way to deal with complexity because they can contain a lot of information in a limited amount of visuals. Diagrams seem to occupy a position in the middle, but lack the power of other visual images like photographs or interface designs.
• Create the right mindset: using a tool or diagram also creates a certain mindset. If you use a complex diagramming tool, you automatically adopt a left-brain, technocratic mindset. If you use a tool on a computer you enter a different mindset then if you draw with a pen on paper. If you use a visual tool, you get into a right-brain, visual storytelling mindset. This goes for the individual but also for the project team, the organization, the world. If you want a mindset that is both creative and analytical, you need to think carefully about the effect tools have on the mindset.
• Facilitate flexibility: one of the things people, projects, and organizations need is agility. You want to incorporate progressive insights into your projects. And if you have created complex diagrams that are really hard to change on a fundamental level, agility is lost. If you create points of no return in your tools, you lose agility. If the tool dictates if you can go back on decisions of the past, you lose agility. In order to respond quickly to changes and new information, you need tools that do not limit you in the amount and timing of the changes a project needs.

My personal set-up

To do the things one needs to do to move people, projects, and organizations forward, one needs a mind-, skill- and toolset. The three work together. A toolset can create the right mindset but requires a certain skill set. A mindset creates the right skillset that can get the most out of a toolset. A skillset and mindset let one gravitate towards a toolset.

In my work as a strategic design consultant, aiming to unite design, business and technology to help organizations become more creative, flexible and deliver a better user experience, I use the following set-up of tools:

• Hand draw diagrams (thinking visually): drawing with pen and paper allows me to associate freely, explore different ideas, think in images. It creates a mindset of creativity, flexibility, exploration. Engaging the right side of your brain in addition to the left side is quintessential and drawing helps with that. It’s my first step in dealing with complexity: find relations, see important elements and trying to find the big picture. If I want to collaborate and be able to move things around more easily, I use a tool called Mural. Customer Journey Maps also fall into this category for me.
• Computer diagrams (specification): free association and discovering patterns are good to do on paper, but at some point, I want to force myself to get more specific, to see if these ideas work. Paper can be very patient and forgiving. So at some point, I’ll make a business process diagram of sorts to see if my ideas work in the reality of business processes, stakeholders, information flows etc. I tried drawing diagrams in generic visual tools like Illustrator from Adobe or collaboration tools like Mural, but I recently discovered a great tool from Elements. This tool uses a simple notation that is called Universal Process Notation (NPM). For me, this is a place to validate my hand-drawn ideas, but also a place to discover new insights. If you can hold on to the level of flexibility you need in a certain phase, these tools can be a great addition.
• Prototyping (visualization of interaction): another tool that is good for checking my ideas with reality and collecting insights is prototyping. Anytime I have a great idea on how to solve a business challenge, I make a prototype. I take a journey into the visual side, make it real. This is also about both validation and discovery of new ideas. Ideas need to go through rough hand-drawn concepts, to business models, to the reality of a prototype. I prefer hand coded prototyping to feel the resistance and opportunities of the medium, but prototyping tools like Adobe XD and the InVision app are the next best thing.
• Powerpoint (storytelling): dealing with complexity for me is in large part about discovering, crafting and validating a story. It’s about creating a narrative about what is important, how to position yourself, what your vision is and how things relate to each other for the challenge you are facing. I find that stories also have enough flexibility to adapt to new information. Stories are also essential if you want to engage and move people. I tell stories based on insights and visuals. I also like to write to learn, to think through ideas. In the end, this results in making powerpoint presentations to stakeholders, telling, discovering, validating, crafting the story of a project.

Mix it up

I don’t use these tools in a linear order. I jump from tool to tool, back and forth. Some of these tools are tools that fit naturally into a business setting like Powerpoint and business process diagrams. Other tools come from the design world like drawing and prototyping. I think it’s crucial to mix business and design tools up to validate your ideas in both areas and to use the possibilities for insights in both areas. But also to introduce business people to design tools and vice versa. Integration between these two fields is quintessential and showing people how the tools of both trades can be mixed is one way of working towards synergy.

Open it up

I think another important aspect is how you use the tools. I use them to explore and design. I allow insecurity and keep the process as open as possible, creating a set-up that facilitates co-creation. I see a lot of consultants using their tools to portray a sense of control, certainty, and expertise. Using complex diagrams can be used to make people dependent on your expertise to craft and read the diagrams. Confusing people with fancy tools can distract people from the fact that you don’t know it all. But admitting you don’t have all the answers is crucial for creativity, flexibility and getting rid of the assumptions you have about users and stakeholders.

New tool development

Lots of people are working on developing new tools. Companies like Adobe are constantly rethinking their toolset to accommodate the changing needs of visual designers. Newcomers like InVision are using their lack of legacy to completely rethink the designers’ workflow. Startups like Mural and Elements are trying to bridge the gaps others leave open. I personally love the fact that all these companies are thinking about new tools because if we want to change the world, we need to change our tools. That was true when we were inventing arrowheads in the stone ages and is true today. When humans face challenges, we design tools to help us face these challenges. Consciousness about the biases in these tools and the mindset and mental space they create is crucial. The tools are not innocent. The tools we design end up designing us.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan

I’m curious about your setup. Let me know in the comments how you roll.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, don’t forget to hit the clap button. I will dive deeper into the topics of Design Leadership in upcoming articles. If you follow me here on Medium, you will see them pop up on your Medium homepage. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.