archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Noth­ing like being blind­folded and lost in the woods to teach you how things look from the out­side…
Dur­ing an Out­ward Bound ses­sion last week, I was part of a group of IAs and Design­ers tasked with walk­ing a short dis­tance through the woods to a com­mon meet­ing point while blind­folded. We had twenty min­utes to pre­pare and twenty min­utes to fin­ish; the total dis­tance was about 50 yards.
After the clock started, I took my blind­fold off to look around. I saw a dozen peo­ple stag­ger­ing through the woods, with their arms wav­ing around and sticks in their hands, fum­bling through brush and trip­ping over logs. It was really funny. And a bit sad.
It was also a very good les­son in how silly things can look to some­one on the out­side. Shift­ing con­texts to the realm of IA, I’d have been upset if I were pay­ing for high-class con­sult­ing time from ‘experts’, and this is what I thought saw them doing.
Of course, from the inside, what we were doing made per­fect sense: we were simul­ta­ne­ously using dif­fer­ent meth­ods of tak­ing on a prob­lem com­pletely new to all of us. But you wouldn’t know that unless you’d either spent some time in the woods bind­folded before, or you’d watched us exper­i­ment with many, many, options for find­ing a tree (which all seem to feel exactly alike) dur­ing our prepa­ra­tion time.
We made it in the end, but it was as much luck as the result of our ‘opti­mized wayfind­ing strate­gies port­fo­lio’ — which is surely how you’d have to label a bunch of peo­ple wan­der­ing blind­folded in the woods in order to per­suade some­one to pay money for them to do so.

No related posts.