Clarity of Mission

Our DSD course kicked off on Monday, and it showed again the value of spending time clarifying, polishing, writing down, and explaining the objectives of design work: what is the business objective and why is it important?

If I had to choose one thing among all the stuff I’ve learned as a service designer, it is working and re-working these two questions over and over before and during the design work.

Boiling your mashed thoughts creates distilled sticky notes.

Once everyone knows the what and the why, pretty much everything else falls into place. No matter if you are a corporation, startup or a team of students.

However, this Monday coaching our DSD teams together with Tuomo, we made few notes about this “mission clarifying process” that tend to be forgotten. Mainly about sticky note procedures :)

1. People do not necessarily know what to write on the sticky notes. Are they supposed to be personal notes as in a notebook? Are they raw data that captures all the details discussed about the objectives? Am I writing for myself or the group? The team will eventually find its own way of using post-its, but why not speed it a little by suggesting that the sticky notes are for everyone to read and not unrefined personal notes.
2. Clarify the process of the clarification (sic). Before the sticky notes start piling up like autumn leaves on the ground, it is good to remind the team, that at the end there should be only a few sticky notes with clear messages on them. In other words, all the discussions and individual notes should be distilled pretty rapidly into sticky notes that summarise the answers in an understandable language and handwriting. One trick is to use really big notes, so that there is room for only one clear answer.
3. Give yourselves in the team some time to learn your own ways of working. Obviously, a group of people who have never worked together as a team won’t have their sticky note procedures and practices polished to perfection.

Do this minor details matter? Yes, they do.

At the end of the day, the wall or canvas should have good enough answers (best guesses) that all the relevant stakeholders can agree to: the team doing the design work and the person/people responsible for funding the design work (i.e., the person who decides whether the team is successful or not).

And then keep on refining and redoing the answers to these questions as the team gets smarter and more information is created as the design work proceeds.