Dealing with complex realities
Some thoughts to resume the event on Creative Collaboration organised by DesignMakeDo. I had the pleasure to speak along Richard Watkins, Steve McInerny and Peter Mandeno.
Nowadays delivering innovative products requires an important level of teamwork. Product development involves the work of multiple types of competences within different teams. It is inevitable that the process gets complexified. So if we want to deliver relevant products, collaboration is a must, it is not an option anymore.
In Technicolor for example, like in other big organisations, we are faced to interact with many teams all along the design process. Although the complexity starts when these teams are based in multiple locations, countries or even continents. Simple tasks like gathering feedback from different people, in different teams, in different locations and living in different time zones can take too much time and energy.
At the same time, even if English is our working language, each location’s local language and cultural background have an impact on these interactions as well. It is not just a matter of getting hold of everyone but as well to ensure communication works both sides. Has the other team on the other side of the world understood your comment?. Or even the use of silences during a call. How to interpret them? Did a silence response implied an agreement or maybe it was the discomfort to express a disagreement? Sometimes what we miss to express is as important as what we say.
Moreover, another layer of complexity is the internal structure of an organisation. Back in 1967, a computer programmer named Melvin Conway, crystallised an idea that tried to explain how the structure of software teams influenced their own outputs: “Organisations which design systems… are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organisations.” Hence, something we should be aware of, a company’s organisational complexity can easily end up being reflected on the products it makes.
So what should we do to navigate these complex realities and to ensure our projects success? As Peter Mandeno puts it, is all about the human connection. It is about over communicating and repeat as many times as needed, to ensure everyone is on the same page. It is about meeting face to face as early as possible. The more we invest in connecting with the people we want to work with the easier to collaborate with them it should be.
Easier said than done. When it comes to dealing with people sometimes things don’t always go the way we expected. Richard Watkins nicely resumes some of the views we discussed during the evening on his text, the darker side of collaboration. Expect that people will not always want to collaborate.
In a similar line Steve McInerny talked about the importance of embracing disagreement. We should never be shy when it comes to defend our ideas or points of view. Disagreement is part of any creative collaboration process.
In summary, before collaboration can even start we should invest in building relationships between individuals and teams.
Miquel Mora is Design Director at Technicolor. Currently exploring, with the help of a multi skilled team, the near futures of connected objects & services for the home.
