Catherine Shinners

Crash course in design thinking - an immersive afternoon at the Stanford d.school

If you're like many people working in businesses or organizations, you might find that you spend most of your days behind a desk, in front of a computer, attending a somewhat endless array of meetings, working through agenda and actions items, often mired in a miasma of email...and sometimes you're not sure that things are coming together, or headed in the right direction.

Perhaps what you need is to inject a little design thinking into your life! 

 On a recent Friday afternoon, I had the chance to do just that by participating in a "Crash Course in Desgin Thinking" at the Stanford d.school -- (the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford).

The crash course was a two-hour immersive cycle into the design process -- with about 130 people enrolled -- and we all crammed into thre d.school garage space for a brief orientation to the design mindset and process.   

This visual outlines the seven aspects of design mindsets -- 

 

Our 'crash course' of 130 participants was distilled down to groups of six and then into pairs to work through a design challenge that took us through the entire design process in about 60 minutes -- here's the five steps in the design process.

• Empathize -- as a basic foundation of human centered design it's all about
  
   
  • Observe - watch and learn about your users in their own contexts
  • Engage - interact and interview both in formal and 'intercept' events
  • Immerse - experience the context yourself
• Define - This is where you come up with an actionable problem statement - with that deep understanding of your users and the overall design space after doing the work of the empathize phase.
• Ideate - and ideate some more.  Think of this as a 'flaring' step - generate ideas, lots of them and rapidly to explore solutions to the actionable problem statement.   This is a very visual, fast paced stage, and I found myself challenged to keep drawing new concepts, and move past my comfort zone of pausing and refining too soon.
• Prototype - this is moving the ideas into the physical realm - the pipecleaners and paste stage.  By bringing the ideas into a tangible, physical space, helps the design team and the users interact, respond and engage in ways that people can't do with words on a page.  In our sub-group, one team made a visual model of a smart phone app with contstruction paper and tin foil.   But we all understood the intended user experience.  A prototype grows in sophistication and refinement as the project progresses (we only had one hour for all five design stages) but the process of getting it into the physical world is definitely part of the 'show, don't tell' mindset.
• Test - it's about validating, refining or findout out that you might have to go back to the beginning, because you really didn't understand your users needs, or you haven't framed the problem correctly.

I found the process stimulating and invigorating -- and uncomfortable -- as our facilitators said it should be.   The design process is meant to keep you expanding, refining, refocusing on the right problem set (through that empathic human-centered design), and to keeping an active flow through prototyping and test. 

The design challnge process encouraged me to have that 'bias toward action' and to draw and visualize more in the ideate phase, and finally to bring a physical prototype to life (where I usually rely on words, I had to grab a fistful of pipe-cleaners, popsicle sticks, construction paper and tape and start building!).

The d.school website offers this 47-page design process Bootcamp Bootleg guide*.

This guide and IDEO's Human Centered Design Toolkit are excellent references to the design process that can give you some new insight and infuse a dynamic, human-centered approach to problem-solving and solutions design.

The d.school space is housed in an open, airy building on the Stanford campus, with modular spaces, lots of easy moveable chairs, workbenches, tables of various sizes, whiteboards on wheels, to allow for creative, flexible, adaptable, collaborative workspaces on-the-fly.  The d.school offers tours twice-monthly and if you live or visit the San Francisco Bay area, it's worth a look.

 

 

 

 

*The bootcamp bootleg is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.  To view a copy of this license, 
visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

End of the End User – Open the Pod-Bay Doors, HAL

  At the Enterprise 2.0 conference main stage, vendor presentations were classic Marketing 1.0.  IBM had added a new social computing bundle, and the mashup environment looked promising. Microsoft drove everybody from the room with a “death by PowerPoint” presentation that was uninspired. SAP came across looking absolutely swell following MSFT. Cisco’s vision and offerings seemed overblown and heavy, especially when compared with the beautifully simple presentation of Dr. Milton Chen of VSee Lab.  Milton did a "when is a smile  a smile”  demo of VSee's free videoconferencing and appsharing service in the workshop “10% technology, 90% people” moderated by Jessica Lipnack of NetAge.   

The nature of Web 2.0 is that knowledge workers are not “end-users” anymore. They are "Web Practitioners” , not passive recipients of whatever the IT department bought this year, but an active professional with their own network of colleagues, and needing to grasp and assemble a variety of collaboration and communication tools to do work and innovate, more often than not in an “extra-prise,” not solely enterprise context.

Many of the corporate-style presentations at E 2.0 were oriented with classic messages to IT Directors and CIOs, designed more as a sop to the status quo, than providing vision and leadership in regards to the impact the these technologies have on collaboration and innovation.  The tone of the presentations seemed to be the software industry’s response along the lines of HAL to Dave, the astronaut, when he tried to get back on the mother-ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”    What the Enterprise 2.0 attendees needed to see was some clear examples of how their offerings enabled this new class of “Web Practitioner. “ Seeing is believing, and next year, all of them should bring a couple of “Web 2.0 Practioners”  to the main stage with them with real-life examples.

Web 2.0 is the about power of the participative network, allowing collective intelligence to flourish through increased transparency and interaction.  The consumer and SMB market may be showing the way, unfettered by the inertia of prior infrastructures.  One-way corporate vendor messages do not exemplify the impact of the relational web, but sound like HAL-speak.

   
 

 

Daisy, Daisy...

Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Moving from the Tacit to the Explicit

It’s good to meet face to face once in a while. While the focus of Enterprise 2.0 is on the collaborative and social computing technologies and tools that foster and enable collaborative work and interaction.  The attendees at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week in Boston, enthusiastically expressed their penchant for in-person interactivity too.
Jessica Lipnack,  CEO of NetAge, in the final wrap up session , indicated she’d never gotten more business cards exchanged at a conference. This is a group of folks that want to connect!

Andrew McAfee, credited with articulating the definition of Enterprise 2.0 in a March 2006, MIT/Sloan Management Review  piece,  gave an overall assessment for the E2.0 attendees. For McAfee, both the technology and the market definitions have made enormous headway in only 15 months.  But there’s still not enough real-life examples and “how to” stories to guide implementation of both the technologies and the practical use and acceptance in business practice.  Or, as Peter Rip now of Crosslink Capital, said at last October’s Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, “there’s a lot of ‘what’ but not enough ‘how’.”

So McAfee issued a challenge and call to action to begin assembling Enterprise 2.0 case studies and success stories, and jumped in to be the first volunteer towards this effort.  I couldn’t agree more, but I spoke with McAfee and conference chair Steve Wylie, with a note of caution that lot of enterprise users at the conference were still grappling with the problem set not the results yet.  One way to keep the momentum going from the conference would be to aggregate the problem sets as well as successful case studies.   Creating a collaborative mechanism for both case studies, and early definition of the problem sets would be a good thing for attendees and the E2.0 conference advisory board to jump on.

At a high level,Enterprise 2.0 is about moving the enormous value of the tacit assets of the knowledge worker into explicit assets embodied in completed projects, innovation and problem solving for businesses and organization. (see earlier blog post on “Collaboration – So What?”)

But as someone from the podium mentioned. “You don’t know what your knowledge workers know.”  And, I might add, you don’t know who they know either. Each knowledge worker is a mechanism to the network effect in and of themselves.  In essence, the value is not just tacit, but contextual. Even though an employee may have a role and a job title, his or her knowledge and skill set could be far reaching, well-networked, and only in the context of a business problem can it be manifested to full value.  The collaboration and social computing tools are meant to “unchain” those tacit values.

I'll be commenting on some of the solutions and conference workshops in the next few blog posts.

 

 

Enterprise 2.0 Conf. in Boston

Tomorrow starts the three-day Enterprise 2.0 Conference here in Boston.  As the use of social media and collaborative tools increases, this year's conference will showcase case studies as well as analyst views and companies providing the tools.   I'm headed to Dion Hinchliffe's half-day tutorial on social computing tomorrow morning, and will post my observations daily on events and side conversations.  The pre-show social networking service has been a real plus so far, and I particularly like the "People Map," orienting the users interest with others who've submitted their profiles prior to the show.   Stay tuned.

Enterprise 2.0: The Long Tail Within

The Long Tail market concept, (Chris Anderson), is now familiar to many observers of the Web’s impact on markets and commerce. From the point of view of external markets, it often represented like this.

The mass market culture has been fundamentally changed by the Web and the economies of the Long Tail. Companies often focus on bringing products and services to market with mass penetration being required to meet the demands of making a profit over the cost of sales and distribution. The Web has provided a channel that greatly expands exposure and lowers the cost of distribution and delivery. Many small niche markets are now more and more attractive to reach, and in aggregate are attractively profitable.

 The Web has also provided for broader social networks, and capacities for individuals to self-identify their interests and preferences and create new, marketable content themselves in what is called an “architecture of participation.”

However,

within the enterprise, there exists an untapped Long Tail.

  Companies focus on strategic plans and annual business plans – identifying the resources and organizational piorities that need to be devoted and aligned to achieve business results. Those piorities are likely focused on the front, large end of the tail and as such are high cost transactions. While focus and alignment are important, it can also diminish the opportunity for innovation and ideas that might be slightly off-topic to high level priorities, but nonetheless can alone or in aggregate yield productive ideas, streamlined or new economies in business process enhancements,  or better customer engagement.

I recently re-read an article from the July-August 2005 Harvard Business Review, an issue dedicated to and titled The High Performance Organization. In the article entitled Collaboration Rules, Philip Evans and Bob Wolf postulate that extraordinary results from collaborative teams can be more the norm than out-of-the-ordinary, or in the realm of hyper-achievers only.

When collaboration is fostered by both access to simple, adaptable tools and technologies, and a cultural and management approach that supports collaborative work styles, productive ideas and work habits can flourish.

A collaborative environment is one that fosters lots of “cheap, plentiful transactions,” of ideas, innovative ad hoc projects, or simply accelerate every-day project work.

Evans and Wolf explore this notion in two case study examples as disparate as the Linux open source community, and Toyota.   They recommend the following collaboration guidelines to advance productive collaboration, rules that I've posted in a mind map format.  Like many powerful notions, these helpful "rules" are simple and direct, but perhaps not common enough.

   

 

Where collaborative Enterprise 2.0 tools and practices are used, both team members and managers can and must evolve to functioning in an increasingly networked and participative model, where some key people become hubs in a team, while others, especially managers, become links to wider networks of people and expertise.

 

Enterprise 2.0: Mining McAfee's Empty Quarter

In his 7 November blog post, Andrew McAfee noted that currently the uptake in Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and participation technologies seems to be confined to two primary user communities he calls “the newbies” and “the techies.” The newbies refer to the pool of younger entrants to the job market who have used Web 2.0 technologies in high school and college years. The techies are typically tech savvy IT staffers and a diaspora of tech advanced people in outposts across a company or organization.

But as McAfee’s chart points out there’s a Montana-sized quadrant of non-adopter knowledge workers out there that have yet to participate in or uptake Enterprise 2.0. The Young Turks might say “so what, we’re taking over now.” Managers might say, “so what, we have email.” But business leaders and highly skilled knowledge workers should care because, as McAfee points out, “a high amount of the company’s accumulated knowledge and expertise resides nowhere else except in the heads of the empty quarter’s inhabitants.” In other words, the Empty Quarter is an untapped gold mine of potential innovation, competitiveness and market value.

The problem is this too much of the gold in the mine (and minds) is trapped under the rubble of corporate email. Email is, as a technology and application, designed as a communication tool.  Unfortunately, it’s also now a document management system, light-weight workflow system, and knowledge workers spend an inordinate amount of time (read money) managing the miasma of content and project flows through various email chains.

In email channels important business thoughts get lost and therefore lack persistence or re-use potential.   Enterprise 2.0 technologies and applications get at the Empty Quarter gold mine by:

• Making the information exchange among knowledge workers more widely visible.
• Allowing for better persistence and therefore re-use of information
• Catalyzing  broader ideation and knowledge transfer
• Accelerating project and collaboration processes
• Characterizing and capturing unstructured information in early stages of project conception before formal project management and content management applications are needed.

The dynamics of Enterprise 2.0 tools and use practices mine the gold (n of the skills and (often tacit) knowledge trapped in the McAfee's Empty Quarter.    Smart companies and knowledge workers will see the use of Enterprise  2.0  as this era’s mining technology of the 21^st century gold rush for innovation and market competitiveness.