Now is the right time to recommit to a culture of innovation.
or, four techniques and one tip to help you transform your business into one that’s more productive, profitable, and rewarding.
Things are weird. We’re working from home, companies are clutching budgets close to their chests, and we don’t have weekend plans. Sounds like a good time for business people and creatives of all stripes to consider a healthy retrospective and recommit ourselves to being innovative.
How? We performed an agency-wide retrospective at the end of 2019 with an eye toward how we can continue to foster a productive, profitable, and rewarding environment for our team and for our clients. What we identified in ourselves are a few techniques anyone can use to improve how they think through and deliver innovative solutions:
- Learning to love complex problems
- Practicing unbiased empathy for real people
- Fearlessly sharing ideas
- Selflessly assessing process
- Getting help if you need it
Learn to love complex problems.
The workaday problems and challenges most of us face are increasingly complex. This might be the result of new technology, new industries, or changes in business. Lately, it might even arise from the clashing demands of working from home.
But complexity can be a good thing. Even an exciting thing! As long as it isn’t complicated.
Complexity and complication aren’t synonyms. Complexity is the reality of a multivariate world with countless moving pieces. It’s intellectually stimulating and sometimes beautiful. Complication, however, is disorder. It blocks utility and inhibits joy.
Many systems exist in a byzantine state of complication by design. Consider the cancellation processes for many subscription services: Adding complications to this customer journey meets a business goal (deterring cancellation) while frustrating a user goal (ending a relationship). Just today, for instance, I spent 15 minutes getting lectured to over the phone by a bot from an online school. Why did I need to make a phone call to close a website account? Because the additional touch-point, badgering, and hassle introduce complications designed to mitigate my goal. And as a result, by the end of the call, I’d never wanted to cancel anything more.
Most often, though, systems are complicated simply because time and effort wasn’t set aside to design them. Or perhaps the cycle of innovation, consolidation, and scaling introduced and combined disparate systems in haste. In either case, the result is a complex system that doesn’t match the mindset, workflow, or taxonomy of its users.
Some of the most profound innovations in recent history weren’t new products. They were design solutions that rendered the arcane sane and the complicated usable. Consider the operating-system war between Apple and Microsoft: Apple didn’t win by creating anything new, per se. We have Xerox to thank for that. Rather, the OS designers and engineers at Apple made the complex world of computers easy to understand and use, embracing complexity while minimizing complication.
So rather than recoil from complexity, we need to lean into it. We need to map every turn and decision in a user or process flow and allow ourselves to get excited by every connection we make and use case we derive. Exploring complexity takes a number of forms: analytics, business analysis, comparative analysis, competitive analysis, contextual inquiry, current-state analysis, market analysis, etc. The list could go on. But allowing yourself and your team the time to fully immerse in a complex problem — and to understand it — is the first step in solving any problem.
Practice unbiased empathy for real people.
Talking to people is hard. Having real empathy for real people, on the other hand, is the easiest thing you can do.
Working at an innovation agency, it was eye-opening to see how many of our team tested in the introvert-range on a recent Myers-Briggs personality profile test. Myself included (INFJ for the win!). But it was equally eye-opening to see how many of those self-diagnosed introverts eagerly jump on user interview calls or make masterful synthesis of user feedback.
My takeaway from this observation is a simple but — I think — profound: Empathy ≠ Extroversion.
Which is to say, you’ve no excuse to not practice empathy.
Professional empathy is simply a method where you acknowledge, you are not the user of the solutions and innovations you create. Furthermore, you actively inquire who the user is and then sympathize with them. And through it all, you critically scrutinize your inquiry and synthesis to remove any and all bias, however slight.
And what kind of biases should you watch out for: Confirmation bias, confounding variables, selection bias, outliers, over/under-fitting, just talking to your FB friends… the list goes on. But in all cases, being mindful of bias and making best-efforts to mitigate them goes a long way. And being transparent about your data sources and methods helps peers and colleagues assess bias for themselves.
The goal of this technique is often to create a functional touchstone you or your team can use throughout the creative process as a constant reminder of the user or customer you’re creating something for. Often, this takes the form of personae or user requirements.
But there’s a wonderful side effect to professional empathy: once you get used to practicing empathy at work, it has a way of bleeding into every aspect of your life. You’ll start to see spouses and spices, kids and colleagues, and even your pets in a new light. You’ll internalize a profound, overview-esque, feeling of sonder.
noun. sonder (uncountable) (neologism) The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it. (Wiktionary)
Fearlessly share ideas.
As a junior designer, I favored turning my screen away from my peers so they couldn’t see what I was working on until it was ready. Until it was fully baked.
What I failed to appreciate at the time was, the sooner an idea is socialized and vetted by as diverse a group of people as possible, the more design and development debt we could avoid. And the better the idea would become through repeated cycles of scrutiny.
What is design and development debt? It’s the accumulation of costs — time, resources, dollars — that occur as a result of siloed activities and a lack of constructive criticism. It’s the cost of building an unscrutinized solution only to realize, too late, there’s no market and the assumed requirements were wrong.
Once we embrace complexity and empathy, we have to share our ideas — without ego — to make sure we’re building the right thing, solving the right problem, and avoiding a self-serving bias.
We use a variety of tools to promote sharing and to invite criticism of our work. First among these is asking, “Is this a good time for feedback?” Because if the presentation is in a few minutes, maybe wait til later. Beyond that, we use heatmap critiques (pictured above), internal reviews, mid-sprint check-ins with the client, regular work shares, usability testing, and a lot of talking. We use these tools and techniques as early as possible in a project. And as late as we’re able.
We also involve a wide variety of people in the early stages of a project, not just designers and strategists. Good ideas and excellent critiques can come from any member of the team. Even project managers.
Selflessly assess your process—every time.
Having a defined process is awesome. You document it, share it around, codify it in some management docs and estimating worksheets. Great stuff. But if you adhere to your process as too rigid a framework, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
A work process is not a checklist. It’s a toolbox. And every time you earn a new engagement or start a new project, you have to ask yourself, what tools from the toolbox do I need to solve this problem?
Consider an agile approach to a pure-design project as opposed to an agile approach to a design-and-development project. The latter might use nearly every tool in your toolbox. The former, far fewer. And that difference demands a reconsideration of how tasks are tracked (e.g. Jira, for instance, isn’t particularly good at tracking tasks in a pure design project), how presentations are handled (e.g. in lieu of code bundles, are we using Keynote or prototypes or whiteboards to show work?), and what resources should be assigned to the team (e.g. a technical PM versus a creative PM).
Because, if you’re not reassessing your process every time you start a project, then you’re not practicing agile. You’re also potentially setting up unnecessary blocks and hurdles for the team. And you’re probably going to end up shoehorning edge-case tasks into your prescribed process, further blinding you to the natural evolution of your team’s toolbox.
Get help from a partner.
Implementing changes in business or among teams — big or small — can be quite an undertaking. Sometimes, leadership will champion the change and transformation becomes possible by mandate. More often, transformation bubbles up from teams or is the result of sudden and dramatic changes in the economy. We’re beginning to see plenty of the latter, these days.
In either situation, it’s often helpful to reach out for a partner who has experience with innovative processes and business transformation.
First, the selfless advice…
If you’re looking for a partner to help you implement techniques such as those above, find a mentor at a meetup, on LinkedIn, or at a bootcamp school or startup incubator. Most design and innovation professionals are game to talk shop with anyone who’ll listen. Sometimes, all it takes is a lunch.
Second, the shameless promo…
If you’re not sure who you can reach out to, reach out. My teams understand the challenges your business is going through as we band together to tackle the biggest crisis in a generation. And we’re excited to show you how our nimble and diverse team of creative problem solvers is the right team to help.
TL;DR
If you can master these four techniques—and enlist a partner to help guide you through your transformation—you’ll create a culture of innovation that can consistently exceed yours and your customers’ expectations. You’ll find yourself effortless focusing on the real problems real people have and—almost by accident—start improving peoples’ lives. And if you can make these four techniques an ongoing part of your team culture, you’ll create a rewarding place for problem solvers to work and thrive. And you’ll probably even make a ton of money.
Stay safe. Stay healthy.
At Sharpen, innovation is our only business.
Sharpen is an omnichannel experience-design agency whose nimble and diverse team of veteran creatives use empathy and design-thinking to create exceptional solutions for real problems.
Our design-thinking approach identifies the sweet spot between business needs, technical requirements, and user insights. And our veteran design teams create those unique experiences for users and customers across any platform. And behind the scenes.
Explore our capabilities and results at www.sharpen.partners.
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