Reflecting on 2023
I made a few New Years Work Resolutions, one of which was to start doing what I tell everyone else to do and working in the open. Publishing more often, documenting progress rather than showcasing projects. I absolutely buy into the value of this, even just the reflecting and writing of it is hugely valuable, and sharing it publicly I think will be even more so. But it does mean i’ve got to fight all the instincts that i’ve learned and practised for a long time, so please bear with me.
To kick off I’ve done a bit of a reflection on our last year in wove — the work we did and ways we worked, the shifts we observed and tracked, and the ideas that changed the way we saw things.
Work we did
Bootcamps
We ran a number of bootcamps last year. It’s a format that allows people and teams to get focused fast, to cut through a lot of noise, get aligned on what’s important and valuable, clarify approaches to delivery and establish roadmaps in a short space of time, saving them months (sometimes many months) of dead ends and head scratching.
Felt like we delivered a lot of value with these last year so we’ll keep offering them. They were still mainly delivered online, which suited the people we were working with in a lot of cases, but think they could be even more impactful in person. The ones we’ve done for business models and digital strategies are well oiled, would love to do more brand, service, product and content bootcamps. Need to get better at following up after the sprint ends to get feedback and offer any useful guidance. Would like to add a ‘library of ideas’ as something we hand off, to keep them inspired as well as on track.
Strategic Design
This is our main work and where we feel we’re making real impact with people, and also that there’s so much opportunity for more positive impact. This work is much more bespoke, although we use recurring approaches and frameworks which are well broken in at this stage, the substance is always different, challenges are always nuanced and contexts always particular. That’s where the real value of this work is though, meeting people where they are, bringing our skillset to their challenges and helping them design ways forward that are particular to their needs, capabilities and capacity, rather than generic off the shelf ‘solutions’.
Particularly interested in helping institutions shift and reshape to work better in the digital age. Some of the most rewarding work this year was in this space and I see so much of it elsewhere. So much of the change in the last 20 years has been to invisible systems and models and so it all felt like business as usual for a lot of organisations, but it was the classic ‘change happens slowly then all of a sudden’, and last year there was a lot of evidence of traditional institutional models really struggling.
The work we do here in visualising models, helping make the abstract stuff more concrete, helping people see their situations in new ways is always particularly impactful, so continuing to build on this, and exploring ways to bring creativity in and make it compelling, exciting and useful for a much wider audience. At the moment it tends to only be used/seen by those working with us and its work that has a lot more potential currently untapped. Actually as I think of this, we need to make the work we do across the board much more visible. I’ve been cautious about this since we started because I wanted people to have no confusion that what we do isn’t some sort of ‘visual design of outputs’, so have kept everything in a minimal, almost ugly, wireframe form, but it’s very clear that making these invisible layers and forces tangible is where we can unlock real progress for people, so time to make them look as important and as exciting as they are.
Transformation and transition (Design for change)
Is this different from strategic design? No, this is the why and strategic design is the how. However I think we need to keep both of them in the mix in terms of how we discuss our work. No one knows what strategic design is but they understand it’s related to strategy (just done different). And often in that mindset people don’t want to think that it’s a process dealing with change, even though it always is. In those situations a huge part of our role is making people comfortable and confident about the change, and if not using the C word is part of that, then that’s OK with me.
That said some of the work does start from a clear point of change, and also i’m particularly encouraged to see the 2 t’s — transformation and transition being used more widely to describe work needed in the spaces we work in so we’ll talk more about this work and seek more opportunities to undertake it. We hope to see this thinking continue to grow, there’s a lot of change needed if we’re to see a just transition, and a green transition, and it’ll need bravery on the part of those that need to lead it, and care, creativity and thoughtfulness on the part of those, like us, working as catalysts, guides, conveners in the process.
Co-design
We describe most everything we do as co-design, we’re committed in every project to empower and involve those tasked with doing the work and driving the change, and those served and impacted by that work. That said there is still plenty of room for us to build on, and deepen this practice. It still feels like early days for this approach in Ireland, quite often we’re trying to push a desire for engagement into something deeper and more meaningful. We’d love to be doing more substantial co-creation work and so will continue to push for it, gently.
Strategic vehicles
What are the vehicles that help drive change? That shift it from being a dry, technical (often scary) process and turns it into a project everyone wants to get involved in, and that drives the change without them really noticing. This is something we’re always looking for when we’re working on projects, and when we’ve advocated for them they always really deliver. However I’d say we have them as a 3 on the agenda when we should have them turned up to 9, there’s so much potential for impact here. Again I think we’ve been really cautious about pushing these harder and think we just need to be much more confident.
Shifts we want to see more of
Signals > Stories
Something we read at the end of last year made a case for not focusing on ‘signals’ to discern where change might happen, but to tune into ‘stories’. Change doesn’t come from nowhere, it’s always happening. What’s new to you is very old news to someone else. Signals as a mental model means that we prioritise the short term and the speculative. Looking for a few new blips on the radar. The results have been clear for the last few years, as signals were interpreted as next big things only to never really get off the ground. Looking for more context, understanding the signal within the story — where it’s coming from, how it got here, where it’s working and where it’s not. These all help to give a more grounded understanding on where things are at and what might be viable next chapters in the story. Less boom and bust, more narrative arc.
Perfect > Progress
Speaking of which, the shift in mental models from perfect to progress is a story we’ve been tuned into for a number of years, and feels like it’s starting to gather some momentum. When we work with people interrogating how to tackle a shift to sustainability in their organisations this is the key hurdle they have to overcome. They’re conditioned to think of it as a task that they have to get done, and get perfect, right now. And of course this is overwhelming, creating huge inertia, and blinding them to great work they’re already doing. It’s not ‘done’ or ‘perfect’ and so it doesn’t feel valuable. Of course there will still be perfect things in the world, and in certain areas the need to strive for perfection, but for so much of what we do in our lives now, striving for positive progress is more healthy, more sustainable, more helpful and ultimately much, much more impactful.
Reductionism > Pluralism
OK, maybe this is more of something i’d like to see the shift in than something i’m actually seeing a shift in. ‘This is the way’ is how the Mandelorians state their allegiance to their cause, and visiting Linkedin or Medium you will drown in a rising sea of ‘one true ways’. I’ve spent the year reading articles discussing how design thinking turned out to not be ‘the solution to our knotty problems’. I don’t have beef with design thinking, but I also never believed it was the one true way, just A way, a useful approach, sometimes applicable to parts of problems. I do have beef with most of those articles though, because they decry design thinkings failures only to promote some other one true way. This is just one version of something I see everywhere, I guess you could call it solutionism. It has more to do with making things easier to sell than it does with being committed to solving a problem. The kinds of challenges and problems we need to tackle span departments, industries, even generations, so we’re going to have to open the doors, lower the gates, dismantle the walls, be a bit more agnostic in our ‘ways’, and a bit more generous and collaborative in our thinking and doing if we want to really get things done.
More with less > Better with less
In almost every project we work on we’re seeing the negative effects of the idea of ‘do more with less’. People are overwhelmed and burned out in every industry we work in. They feel they’re being drained and depleted in every aspect of their lives. This necessitates a shift to a new approach (one that connects with the first shift in our list — Perfect > Progress). A shift from filling lives with more and more tasks that need doing asap, towards an impact mindset. Focusing where you can make real difference, measuring in progress made rather than tasks completed, effectiveness over efficiency. This in many ways is the trickiest shift here with just so much of the systems that govern our lives geared towards quantity rather than quality. While we see the seeds of this shift, much work will need to be done to untangle these challenges to unlock a meaningful shift from the quantifiable.
As with most things that we encounter in our work, all of these shifts are really inter-related. They overlap and inter twine at multiple points. A shift or progress in one of them unlocks the chance of progress in another. So while these are framed as individual shifts reading as a whole tells us of a deeper shift which i’d describe as -
Exhaustive > Sustainable
I was going to say extractive rather than exhaustive, but extraction is a vehicle for depletion. We’ve never been more of these factors, both because we’re hearing about them a lot more, in many parts of our lives. And we’re hearing about them more because we really have no option other than to make this shift. As painful and challenging as it might be we need to move from the idea that we have endless resources, to being clear that we have to live within them. And that the poorly designed systems, long standing structural inequity, and just plain human greed that depletes of our human, planetary and financial resources has to change.
Growth > Sustenance
Which also means that we need to transition from the idea that drives this exhaustion — growth. This is a tough one, who doesn’t want growth? So many of our ideas of who we are and models for how we attain that are built on top of this. We could have marked this shift as Growth > Degrowth, we’ve certainly seen that idea move more into the mainstream in a promising way. However in its current form it won’t get the job done. The shift can’t be from something positive (growth) to something negative, maybe even damaging (degrowth), even if all the arguments, research, modelling and suggestions can work. To unlock this shift we need to ensure people understand the benefits emotionally and intuitively. I’ve utilised the idea of sustenance here, is that the right mental model to move things forward? I don’t know, but I do think it needs to play into what we’re seeing everywhere in our projects. An exhaustion with the way things work and a deep aching desire for something more positive, nourishing and sustaining.
Ideas that changed how we saw things
Enshittification
This was hands down the biggest stonker of an idea all year. In fairness Cory Doctorow is really good at those, and continued to fill the world with powerful, meaningful and useful ideas that help us understand how our digitally driven world works. And this was the bright shiny star at the top of the pile. His ability to surface, articulate and explain something we’re all feeling and give it a catchy name that makes it easy to share far and wide is incredible, and what the world needs a lot more of right now. In this particular case he pumped radioactive material into the veins of big tech business models to help us see clearly why everything on the internet feels so rubbish these days. It was one of those right ideas at the right time that caught the wind and travelled far and wide. If 5 years ago everything was about being ‘the AirBNB of Y’ then in 2023 Cory’s new word allowed us to discuss ‘the enshittification of A, B and C all the way to X’ (literally and metaphorically). Thank you Mr Doctorow.
The Liberated Method
This was a very close second, and should maybe really be the first, while Cory provided us an idea to help us discuss how the world was getting worse, the Liberated Method was a simple, mindblowing idea of how to make the world much, much better. Simply put it’s a model of user-centred, demand led delivery. Changing Futures Northumberland established an approach that on face value seems counter-intuitive, but that delivered astonishing results. The idea at it’s heart is that making services difficult to understand and access for people ends up costing a lot of money, so rather than forcing people to navigate them, this takes the approach of partnering them with a practitioner who understands the system, and can pull the right supports for the right needs at the right time. It really highlights how alienating service systems can be, and that we’ve managed to convince ourselves that dedicated people solving problems is inefficient and expensive. Spoiler alert, this work showed that the opposite is true. Optimising for short term efficiencies just gets people lost in an endless system that works out incredibly costly. Whereas this (counter intuitive) approach is effective, moving people out of the system in a relatively short space of time, which of course costs much, much less. Actually I should probably add efficiency > effectiveness to the shifts above… maybe next year.
Head, heart and hands
Very much not new, but new to me. And a good reason why ‘stories’ is a better mental model than ‘signals’. This was an idea about how we could/should learn from about 150 years ago, but that has been finding new relevance in recent years as building more equitable systems that support a more diverse range of individuals becomes more important. It was an idea that we should be able to approach education from whichever direction best suited our strengths. Heart — empathy, curiosity, understanding others. Head — problem solving, critical thinking. Hands — creativity, doing, action. And that the interplay of these different approaches would strengthen learning, while also creating a more inclusive and fair world of learning and work. Needless to say it didn’t disrupt traditional education which was developed to prioritise Head and devalue the others. Making these categories of work and learning rather than approaches, and establishing a hierarchy that puts Head workers above Heart (caring professions) and Hand (building, craft and creative professions). Sometimes an idea is just (way, way, way) ahead of its time.
Imagination Infrastructures
Who gets to imagine the future? Well surely anyone can imagine the future, right? Unfortunately not. Only the most privileged of us get to do so, and currently it’s become almost the sole concern of tech companies which is entirely problematic because those futures turn their agendas and biases into everyones reality. ‘Imagination is a prerequisite for changing the world for the better’ and imagination infrastructuring is about building the structures, systems and spaces to support it happening. The power of the idea is that it makes clear that imagination isn’t some soft, fluffy, ‘nice to have’ thing, but a fundamental aspect of transforming situations, communities, and society. And that its democratisation is entirely necessary to ensure more equitable futures built for the many not the few.
Systems Convening
This was one of those ideas that helped bring into sharp focus a bunch of seemingly disconnected things that were on our minds constantly. In this case all related to a lot of the shifts we outlined above. If more and more of the problems we need to solve span teams, companies, industries, communities and countries, how on earth can we do anything about them!? Well you need people who’s role (or ideally job) it is to act as connector, navigator, translator — convener. People have played this role forever, but it didn’t really have a name, and definitely wasn’t a job. Working in spaces between categories and designations has traditionally been invisible and unvalued (and considered unprofessional — jack of all trades etc etc.) We no longer have that luxury though, navigating the spaces in between, and bringing people together across boundaries to make meaningful progress on common challenges is a critical need.
Here’s to 2024, lets hope for the best and plan for the completely unexpected.
