LEADING by STORYLISTENING
In 2003, my co-founders and I had just come off several years of large systems integration and management consultancies where we fought steep upward battles to get UX up and downstream of the design phase of every engagement. Not because we were greedy control freaks trying to get our fingers in every piece of the engagement… but because we believed that design leadership and post deployment product management starts and ends with listening.
In founding Limina, we seized the opportunity to define a new model of software development that embraced open observation and analysis from project inception, throughout design, during development and beyond deployment. We believed fervently that software development not only could, but must begin and end with listening to the users
It was some years later that we articulated our design model which wrapped the standard software development lifecycle with user centered design processes, activities, and deliverables. This was easier to achieve in the older waterfall model where UCD was a natural fit.
Hi-5's
We were all fairly confident this was the right way to ensure that we could clearly articulate the needs of the user and translate them through design and development and beyond. This model marked the achievement of our collective UX leadership and branded our consultancy with the aim to drive all of our projects through a user centered design approach. And while were busy patting each other on back, a new model was emerging.
Time to Start Listening
In 2005 we were invited into our first scrum session. Our client’s technical lead pulled us aside and said.. “we’re trying something different called Extreme Programming, but we need your help to make sure we keep the integrity of the user interface intact. Can you help us”?
The initial reaction was to hold up our design process diagram and try to corral them into what we knew how to do best… but it was clear, Agile was coming and there was no time to argue. We needed to explode our model and figure it out or risk obsolescence. So we listened.
The scrum master explained how their continuous integration model worked, when they conducted release planning, and how their 2 week sprints would culminate in user stories, feature reviews and backlog triage. They expected documentation to be light and only frequent and dense as absolutely necessary to build the feature.
Back to the Drawing-board
Right off the bat we realized that there would be no room for a 2–4 week observation and analysis phase, no requirements gathering phase, we had to completely rethink how to optimize the intent of user centered design with the speed and agility of extreme programming with as little degradation of design integrity as possible.
I’d be lying if I told you listening and some group think sessions pulled us through the other side of UCD process re-engineering. It took several projects with engineering teams at the same client, some initial missteps and re-alignment but eventually we got a working model.
The trick was to realize that discrete user centered tasks and deliverables could be segmented to meet the needs of the project, release, iteration, or sprint. We realized that building user stories and storyboards could be equally iterative and segmented into abstract, low fidelity and high fidelity functional specifications and that testing could be equally agile with spot user tests and UX quality reviews. The result was a model that we are still using today just about a decade later.
Many of our clients are in a hybrid state of employing a waterfall-like discovery phase, phase zero or whatever you want to call it, and then using discovery outputs into sprint planning. Our most successful engagements favor the phase zero approach. “Wagile”.
The point of StoryListening is really huge here, (I’ll include John Maeda’s talk below…) it taught us to pull back from the precipice of fighting against the tsunami of agile development. By listening first, we moved rapidly from resisting extreme programming which we felt flew in the face of user centered best practice to embracing the freedom of lean and agile UX.
Dog-Fooding
We don’t just take this practice internally on our own business… we lead with listening, we employ it at every touchpoint of our engagements which end in a lessons learned, sunset review or postmortem… to ensure that everyone on the team has a chance to tell their story… air their grievances, celebrate their successes and recognize growth through any failure that might have happened in the process.
Extreme Listening
I’m reminded of a talk Daniel Mall gave a few years ago in DC titled “Design-ish” where he stood and blew my mind by talking about the “Adjacent Possible”, a phrase that until then, I not only had never heard, but didn’t even conceive of. As he went on to explain all the instances where the adjacent possible had unlocked something truly amazing… it became clear that this stance, this mindset, is an extreme form of listening - where you broaden your awareness and open-mindedness to the abundant field of whats possible and mash up something totally new.
I give you: Kutiman:
And with that… I leave you with this epic gem from John Maeda:
I encourage you all to, at least once a day, take off your headphones, put down your device, and listen.
