Evaluating change through disruption

Using disruptive behaviour to evaluate how change will impact our society and the world around us

In June this year (2019), I took three of my colleagues to Service Design Days ((SDD in short). Whenever I visit this conference, I am always amazed at how many people I meet who share the same values and ideas, but who also have the same thoughts keeping them awake at night.

One of the main topics at SDD this year was "how can we prepare ourselves for the future?". How can we make sure that what we decide and design today, is in line with how we believe the future will evolve? And how can we make sure that we leave the world in a better state than we found it in?

On the very first day, one of the speakers launched a question that had my mind spinning…

"How can we evaluate the impact of what we do?"

The discussion that the Keynote attendants and I had, made me realise a variety of things. So many things even, that I realised it might be easier to write a blog post about it.

So, here we are…

Understanding human psychology

One of the concepts I came across in my years at University was called “cognitive dissonance”, and this insight has always stayed with me.

Cognitive dissonance is the psychological behaviour we display when we look for information in the world around us that confirms something we already believe.

What this means, is that we subconsciously seek information that confirms our beliefs and we ignore or neglect information that goes against our beliefs.

This is why we seek out people who are like-minded and we feel better and safer when we're around them. It is also the reason why we find it so hard to predict the impact of what we do because it's hard to step outside of our own beliefs.

The nature of Service Design

When you think about it, Service Design is based entirely on cognitive dissonance. As a company, we decide who we want to target. We go out there and we bring a group of people together who have similar thoughts and beliefs, and then we make assumptions based on what they tell us.

This customer-centric approach, as we call it in Service Design, also means that we sometimes fail to see the impact on people who are not part of the group we researched. If we solely focus on people with similar beliefs, we cannot see this would impact others (who might not feel the same way).

Looking at some new methodologies in Service Design, such as the human-centric approach, we are faced with the same problem.

In a human-centric approach, Service Designers do their best to think beyond their own solution. In this approach, the whole community is involved, in order to bring about a change that benefits them or society as a whole. Human-centricity projects also includes research on the impact of their work for humanity in general, so that the impact of their solution is evaluated on a larger scale than just the direct feedback.

However, researchers are not immune to cognitive dissonance and also fall prey to this paradigm.

We might focus on the feedback we receive that verifies our beliefs, or we might single out the research that confirms what we have in mind.

Enter the planet-centric approach. In this approach, researchers try to look beyond only the human needs and consider the effect that the solution will have on our planet. If you ask me, we should have considered this for the past 150 years but better late than never, I guess.

Even here though, it's hard to be unbiased about the impact of your solution on the planet. We all have a certain cultural upbringing and, thanks to the internet, we can hardly see the effect of our actions anymore, so how can we evaluate the impact of our actions on the planet?

The invisible impact

When you think about it, something as simple as e-commerce has had a disastrous effect on our planet. With just the click of a button, we force someone in another country to produce something at a wage way below our own minimum, get it loaded on a plane, flown over, loaded into a truck, and then delivered to our front door.

The carbon tax of e-commerce is enormous, and yet no one seems to care. Because, from a consumer perspective, door-to-door delivery is just so damn effortless. And, from a company perspective, it's just so damn profitable.

So many actions in our lives are now part of an interface and we no longer see what happens beyond that interface. Since we can't see the effect, we also have no incentive to change our actions, as we know or see that they are causing a problem.

How can we see the hidden impact of our work? How can we know what our actions locally will bring about globally? How can we evaluate the impact of our lifestyle, of the things we believe are so normal nowadays?

Inviting disruption

The answer, I believe, lies in inviting disruption in your project cycle. After speaking to one group of target users, your user personas, try to see which group would have the most negative reaction to what you are launching. Invite them. Ask them how they feel about your solution.

Don't ignore what they tell you, don't simply tell yourself that they are afraid of the potential of your solution or the fact that they would have to change something. Truly listen to what they have to say with an open mind and try to see things from their perspective.

In Sociocracy 3.0 (S3 in short), when users are invited to vote on a solution, they have three options. They can agree by giving the thumbs up, they can indicate doubt but not fundamentally enough to block the process from continuing by giving a wavy hand gesture, or they can reach out to the group with information they believe is blocking the process from continuing further by reaching out an open hand.

The founders of S3 believe that every piece of information that is important enough to block the proceedings, is worth listening to, and thus a gift to the other participants within the process.

I believe inviting disruption and criticism into your research is a gift too.

You invite people who can gift you with knowledge that you would have otherwise never have gathered. This can be the knowledge that your solution will have a negative effect on someone or something, or it can be the knowledge that your solution could become even better because your critical audience may see solutions that you or your group of user personas never even considered.

By inviting disruption into your projects, your solution will be fine-tuned and optimised in a way that you would never have been able to without the input of this critical audience.