Designing space to think
I’ve been doing a lot of consultancy work again recently, specifically around transformation and education for the Co-op here in Manchester, UK.
We’ve been trying to show amongst other things how design works, how it’s different to people’s current ways of working in the wider business and why it can be useful to help understand or address issues they are having.
Part of this has been teaching existing methods and tools to people. One of the things that’s occurred to me throughout doing this is that there’s actually a pretty big gap in how we typically explain a design process to people.
There are lots of different ways that a design process can be explained. Popular ones such as IDEO’s Design Thinking, Stanford D School’s take or the British Design Council’s Double Diamond… they’re all pretty much saying the same thing.
The double diamond gets rolled out a lot. It’s useful in explaining the switches between divergent and convergent thinking. It’s also good at showing the different stages that we go through — discover, define, develop, deliver. Which can be loosely interpreted as: start with a problem, see what’s happening, make sense of it, come up with a bunch of ideas that might address the problem and then build stuff to test some of those ideas.
The problem with the double diamond is that it doesn’t promote the need for space to think and define how we might do those things as a team or group of people. In my experience, defining how we do these things is the single greatest accelerator towards producing unbelievable work.
This is the Content Process Model from the Swedish Defence College, taught as part of their leadership program. They found that when moving from A to B in fast changing and often chaotic environments; the most efficient way to get there successfully is by spending as much time focusing on how you’re doing something (Process) as you do on what you’re actually doing (Content).
The first time I saw this I dismissed it as it seemed super obvious, but the more I come back to it, the more I realise that it’s not.
Lets say that the content in this model is actually what we’re talking about when we talk about the design process as a double diamond.
Process (or How) is how we work together as a team to achieve that goal — how we get from A to B. For example: How will we form principles and make decisions, how we prioritise one thing over another, how we communicate and so on.
The majority of the time, these things are taken for granted. Lost in the unspoken social contract that is created and signed when people start working together.
Part of this might be deciding which tools we use to communicate. But its more about how do we create the space and time to improve how we’re working together. How we develop that shared understanding across our team and organisation and how we align ourselves around a common purpose.
Super important stuff. I was lucky enough to go for a beer with Jared M. Spool after a great talk he gave a few months ago when he visited Manchester — he calls these things “Power Skills”. Which I think is much better than “soft skills” as they’re more commonly known, which seems inept as they’re actually quite hard.
And yet — they are talked about and applied much less often than other, more “Content” based tools or methods. Probably because they are harder. Or maybe because “it’s someone else’s job.”
Without space in the process for these things to take place, it makes it harder for there to be constructive conversations about things like the implications of what we’re doing. Questions like “how it could impact the people we’re designing for and the world around them?” or “what happens if this goes horribly wrong?” become harder to ask.
Without that space, there is no discussion about the ethics, philosophy or politics of what we’re doing — or where we’re going
Without that space, there is no discussion about the ethics, philosophy or politics of what we’re doing, or where we’re going. Fewer opportunities to learn. Fewer opportunities to challenge and be challenged.
So, what does that look like? And what happened to all the tools?! The tools here are really intended to give space to the sometimes difficult conversations that need to happen in support of working together in the best way we can and getting the most out of the time we spend together in teams.
Team formation
Let’s start with Team Formation. This is a good opportunity to align the group around it’s purpose and goals. Whenever a new group of people comes together for the first time, we form invisible social contracts to which we hold each other accountable. Sometimes problems can arise when aspects of this contract are not understood, often when individuals have unspoken expectations of others which are not met.
The Team Canvas is a great tool to facilitate a conversation to get these expectations out in the open, push back and challenge these agreements and hold each other to account over the course of the project. This is something that evolves over time and should be revisited and updated throughout your time together.
Team Development
Susan Wheelan came up with a theory around Group Dynamics and the phases they go through as they reach maturity. I think this is useful to reference here, but I also find it reassuring personally when things get tense.
I think this is more descriptive than Storming, Norming, Performing etc because it actually describes what it feels like to be in each stage pretty well. It’s a bit like the development of a person: As a child, you’re dependant on your parents, then as a teenager you get a bit angsty, then as a young adult you begin to establishing your boundaries, then as a mature adult you reach a higher level of autonomy and just crack on with it.
Most teams get stuck at stage one. Its a bit scary to open yourself up to fighting, and people (certainly in the UK) feel rather awkward about conflict and tend to avoid it at all costs. But you need to get through this to grow as a team. It doesn’t always have to be terrible and as the individuals collectively get better at it, it becomes easier.
So the question is this: How do you move beyond stage two constructively?
This is where teams benefit from a some core skills: Active listening, non violent communication and a reflective cycle. Everybody starts out doing the best they can with what they have available to them. Over time — through feedback and reflection — the teams performance and experience of working gets better and better until you’re at stage four.
Regular Team “Retros” (short for retrospective) are a concept from agile software development which gives us a forum for this stuff to happen. Often the conversations are around what’s working in the team and the context of the project, what’s not working and things to try to make it better.
Retro’s in this fashion can be good at bringing to light things at a team level, but lack granularity in addressing interpersonal relationships between different team members — which is important in getting to the upper levels in Wheelan’s model.
Feedback and reflection on an individual level can be pretty uncomfortable at first. “I’m not going to tell you what I really think because I might hurt your feelings and we might fall out.” For this reason, most teams get stuck in stage one and never realise their potential; often producing work they’re not happy with, which leads to never really feeling like you’ve done your best work.
You need to be able to clearly communicate what you want to get to where you need to be. People will always work it out if they listen to each others needs, share a common purpose or goal and this process is facilitated. Group development in this way is not the result of a happy accident or just the right group of people. It is a repeatable process that anyone can be guided through.
Group development in this way is not the result of a happy accident or just the right group of people. It is a repeatable process that anyone can be guided through
Below are some of the core skills and repeatable methods to enable this within teams. I’ve linked off to resources or workshops which hopefully give you enough information and confidence for you to pick up and run with.
Core skills
Repeatable methods
Communicating intent
Below is something called The Pyramid of Beliefs from one of the best books I’ve read in shaping how I think about people — Liminal Thinking, by Dave Gray.
When we group together in teams we start to form beliefs. Its really hard to challenge these beliefs (as we’ve all accepted them) and sometimes, even newcomers to the team will adopt those beliefs rather than challenge them.
This can lead us to make face-palmingly bad decisions, which in hindsight seem insane, but probably made complete sense at the time. I’ve written before about why diversity in teams is so important as one way to mitigate the risk of this happening.
Another way it to increase the size of your bubble in a manageable way. We do this by exposing what we’re doing to as many people — and perspectives — as possible; while you’re doing it. This is great for a number of things beyond sanity checking.
In larger organisations communicating your intent breaks down silos and can help you keep distant stakeholders informed, or discover if other similar initiatives are in play. It also creates opportunities to build communities around the work you’re doing outside of your organisation — which is great for learning as you go, or building a customer base if you’re working on a new project.
There are different methods that can be useful for communicating with different audiences. One thing to bear in mind is how will you collect feedback and create a two way dialogue with the people you’re communicating with, before you get started.
People from Co-op Digital and the Government Digital Service here in the UK are the best people I’ve worked with at doing this, and introduced me to the concepts.
Here are some of the methods or rituals they use to communicate their intent:
- Within you team: Daily stand-up
- With your organisation: Show and tells and Week notes
- With the outside world: Blogs and public week notes
I hope that’s helpful in some way and would love to hear about your journey through trying these approaches out. Having this space in the design process to think about the consequences of our actions, alongside learning from and challenging each other are so important. Not just to the quality of the work we do, but also to our well being and development as individuals as we’re doing it.
Let’s make sure we’re not forgetting to design the space for that to happen. Thanks for reading!
