bplusd

I’ve been thinking about the challenges of scaling authenticity. Here’s an example:

I bought olive oil and balsamic vinegar from Francesco Sammarelli today. He was offering samples at the urban grocery near the office. Unlike most folks offering up food samples, he has a namesake company, Sammarelli, and alongside the bread and fig spread at his sample stand is a photo album of his olive estates in Italy. There’s a deep connection visiting with him about his work, how he splits time between Vancouver and Italy, and the techniques that he uses to create great products. When I chose two bottles, I wasn’t just choosing great product, I was choosing to be part of a story and extend an authentic experience from a five minute visit into something that will last for a few months at home.

Scaling authenticity is a challenge that social networks, Twitter, and other connector services all claim. But the typical experience of a Twitter stream or a Sammarelli blog wouldn’t have the same power of story and connection. Are there options that would offer that level of connection? Or is it only the dedication of the Fransceso’s of the world that can offer that level of authenticity? What do you think?

Lots and lots of nasty comment spam that Dreamhost is now noticing on the database that runs bplusd. At their suggestion, I’m upgrading to the latest version of wordpress, which will break my theme and some IA.

UPDATE: looks like it broke more than that (category names didn’t come over, so they are all blank, and posts aren’t showing up)

However, having over 22 thousand comment spam in moderation makes the argument for technological progress even if design suffers. Silver lining - I’ve been noodling on a redesign, and this is a good motivator. In the meantime, I’ll stick with a prebaked theme….

I’m in the Bay Area to moderate an IxDA panel “What is the Worth of Design” on Wednesday, June 25 and also visit with some friends and colleagues in business/design/innovation. I’m excited about the panel - we’ve got some super smart panelists - Brandon Schauer, Nathan Shedroff, and Rajan Dev all have strong perspectives on business + design and I’m looking forward to a great conversation. Thanks to dani malik for inviting me to participate…

If you can make it tomorrow night, be sure to say ‘hi’!

So Adam Richardson and I had a chance to chat for about 45 minutes last month. Instead of waiting until I can edit it down or transcribe the conversation, here’s a link to the complete mp3 file. (39mb until I figure out better compression utility).

It was a fascinating conversation, and we covered a range of topics. Some highlights:

• Chatting about the strategy practice at frog. Differences between traditional strategy offering from McKinsey or Bain. The advantages of integrating strategy with a more holistic practice including industrial and interaction designers, engineers, and others.
• Discussion of Org 2.0 companies and how they are better able to take on innovation and create compelling experience-based products, services, and systems. If you’re in an Org 1.0 company, start with a skunk works.
• Dealing with the innovation surplus. Companies that have embraced innovation now have no shortage of fantastic ideas. Now the challenge is prioritization and execution.
• Core insights. Like core competencies, core insights emerge from the unique combination of experience, skills, information, and activities of your organization. Core insights are hard to duplicate in the market, and offer significant competitive advantages.
• Some thoughts on influencing innovation - how can aspiring innovators escape the gravity well of the status quo? If you’re not in a company that embraces innovation, what can you do? Adam comes back to skunk works as one way to build momentum. Look for much more on this topic at bplusd in the coming weeks and months.

Thanks Adam for the chance to chat!

Here’s the slides from my Business of Experience workshop at DocTrain West….

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I’m teaching a 1/2 day workshop Business of Experience: Hands-On Methods to Increase Your Influence at DocTrain West this Friday…if you’re in Vancouver and want to hang out, I’m around a bit Thursday evening and Friday afternoon….

So, I.D. magazine published this trolling article, and I can’t resist linking to Down with Innovation, precisely because it (unintentionally) makes so many of my points about business fluency for me.

I sympathize that design thinking is getting a lot of attention the business press, leaving design doing without the love it deserves. But this sort of reaction is counterproductive. We’re here to co-opt innovation, not throw a tantrum because we aren’t understood. From the article:

"The problem that designers face now is the same problem they have faced all along: how to communicate with clients who lack a basic grounding in the visual arts and don’t seem to think it matters. Businesspeople don’t need to become designers. They need to learn that there are types of awareness and understanding expressed through visual form…"

The problem isn’t business people who don’t care. That’s just juvenile abdication. The real problem is designers who don’t care enough about business to understand how to communicate the value of their work. That’s why business fluency is so important. Until designers get there, complaining about business not getting it is just venting. Instead we could spend our time inventing better ways to work with business, even if that means embracing innovation and design thinking.
thanks Black Belt Jones for the link

Here’s the simple model that I use to explain the design approach: Understand, Solve, and Evaluate (U.S.E.). This model generalizes to all kinds of framing and problem solving situations, not just product design. If you’d like to use the diagram yourself, I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. Here’s a Slideshare link where you can download the diagram in PPT. I’ll work on building out a small deck that describes each of the three parts, but for now it’s just the diagram itself.

Eating lunch with my friend Matthew Milan last week in Miami, he turned to me and said "you need to blog more". Thanks for the encouragement :) I completely agree, and to build some personal momentum will be surfacing some of my ongoing interests and themes that got bplusd started three years ago this month.

Something that I’ve talked about for a few years is the idea of business fluency. I chaired a panel on speaking the language of business at the 2005 IA Summit, and and wrote about business fluency in Stanford d.school’s Ambidextrous magazine. To have greater influence in the organizations that we work with, design innovators need to cultivate an understanding of business - not that we need to get MBAs, but that we need to relate our efforts to business goals and context if we’re going to practice value centered design. Until we understand business, we’re arrogant hypocrites if (when) we complain about business ‘not getting it.’ Not getting it is just a reflection of someone operating from a different frame - and understanding and reframing are strong points for design and innovation. We have no excuses for ignoring business fluency, or expecting that business decision makers should learn our lingo instead.

When we do turn to business fluency, much of the conversation is about facts, figures, and formulas. This conceptual fluency is important, but often secondary to understanding networks, power, and motivations in an organization. That kind of cultural fluency is what really gets things done in an organization—ROI is often a red herring when the real issues are cultural.

So, a lot of our early work with clients and stakeholders involves creating artifacts that symbolize the system, rather than the literal representation of a prototype or sketch. That includes things like stories, or design the box and other design games. I see this in a lot of the generative methods that Liz Sanders shares with the community.

I’m interested in finding a good word to describe the practice of creating these artifacts, distinct from prototypes. It’s different than codesign or participatory design (which describes *who* is involved, rather than the output of the effort). Artifacting (vs. prototyping) gets at what I’m interested in, but sounds silly. Maybe with enough repetition I’ll come to love it…or if you have a brilliant alternative, let me know in the comments…I’ll keep thinking too.