experience design, emerging media, business and technology [circa 2014…]
I’ve just started a new ‘Organizational Architecture‘ group on Slideshare, to explore links to user experience, and questions like these:
Join now!
Comment » | Information Architecture, Networks and Systems, User Experience (UX)
The culture, structure, and workings of an organization often pose greater challenges for User Experience practitioners than any technical or design questions at hand. If you’d like to know more about the factors behind these situations, be sure to check out We Tried To Warn You: The Organizational Architecture of Failure, by Peter Jones, just published by Boxes and Arrows.
Peter is an independent consultant with deep expertise in research, product design, and strategy. His talk for the panel on failure at the 2007 IA Summit was insightful and in-depth, and this two-part series offers quite a bit more very useful material on the roots and warning signs of organizational failure (by comparison, consider the very brief post I put up on the same subject a few years ago.)
Peter’s is the second written feature to come out of the failure panel (my missive on the parallels between entrepreneurial and societal failure was the first). I’m looking forward to part two of We Tried To Warn You, as well as additional features from the remaining two panelists, Christian Crumlish and Lorelei Brown!
Here’s a snippet, to whet your appetite:
How do we even know when an organization fails? What are the differences between a major product failure (involving function or adoption) and a business failure that threatens the organization? An organizational-level failure is a recognizable event, one which typically follows a series of antecedent events or decisions that led to the large-scale breakdown. My working definition: When significant initiatives critical to business strategy fail to meet their highest-priority stated goals.”
For regular readers wondering about the recent quiet here, a notice that Boxes and Arrows will shortly publish an article I’ve been working on for a while in the background, titled, “It Seemed Like the Thing To Do At the Time: The Power of State of Mind”. This is the written version of my panel presentation Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs from the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas.
I’ve written about organizations and failure – Signs of Crisis and Decline In Organizations – in this blog before (a while ago, but still a popular posting), and wanted to consider the subject on a larger level. With the rapid spread of social software / social media and the rise of complex social dynamics in on-line environments, exploring failure at the level of an entire society is timely.
In The Fishbowl
Failed or failing societies are an excellent fishbowl for observers seeking patterns related to social media, for two reasons. First, the high intensity of failure situations reveals much of what is ordinarily hidden in social structures and patterns: Impending collapse leads people to dispense with carefully maintained social constructions.
One source of this heightened intensity is the greatly increased stakes of societal failure (vs. most other kinds), which often means sudden and dramatic disruptions to basic living and economic patterns, the decline of cities and urban concentrations, and dramatic population decrease. Another source is the very broad scope of the aftereffects; because a failing society involves an entire culture, the affects are comprehensive, touching everyone and everything.
Secondly, societies often command substantial qualitative and quantitative resources that can help them manage crisis or challenges, thereby averting failure. Smaller, less sophisticated entities lack the resource base of a complex social organism, and consequently cannot put up as much of a fight.
Examples of resources available at the level of a society include:
Despite these mitigating resources, the historical and archeological records overflow with examples of failed societies. Once we read those records, the question of how these societies defined themselves seems to bear directly on quite a few of the outcomes.
I discuss three societies in the article: Easter Island, Tikopia, and my own small startup company. We have insight into the fate of Easter Island society thanks to a rich archeological record that has been extensively studied, and descriptions of the Rapa Nui society in written records kept by European explorers visiting since 1722. Tikopia of course is still a functioning culture. My startup was a tiny affair that serves as a useful foil because it shows all the mistakes societies make in a compressed span of time, and on a scale that’s easy to examine. The Norse colonies in North America and Greenland are another good example, though space constraints didn’t allow discussion of their failed society in the article.
Read the article to see what happens to all three!
Semi Random Assortment of Quotations
In the meantime, enjoy this sampling of quotations about failure, knowledge, and self, from some well-known – and mostly successful! – people.
“Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – CHARLES DARWIN
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” – EPICTETUS
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – THOMAS EDISON
“It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.” – HAVELOCK ELLIS
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.” – ANAIS NIN
“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.” – RABINDRANATH TAGORE
“Whoever longs to rescue quickly both himself and others should practice the supreme mystery: exchange of self and other.” – SHANTIDEVA
“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” – JOHN DEWEY
For those in the enterprise IA / UX space, The next frontier in IT strategy: A McKinsey Survey centered on the idea that “…IT strategy is maturing from a reactive to a proactive stance”is worth a look.
This nicely parallels a point made about the reactive mindset common to IT in many large organizations, in discussion on the IAI mailing list last month. Lou Rosenfeld’s post Information architects on communicating to IT managers, summarizes the original discussion in the IAI thread, and is worth reading as a companion piece.
Lou’s summary of information architecture and user experience voices in the enterprise arena is noteworthy for including many examples of strong correspondence between McKinsey’s understanding of how IT strategy will mature (a traditional management consulting view), and the collected IA / UX viewpoints on addressing IT leadership – typical buyers for enterprise anything – and innovation.
Dialogs that show convergence of understanding like this serve as positive signs for the future. At present, a large set of deeply rooted cultural assumptions (at their best inaccurate, usually reductive, sometimes even damaging) about the roles of IT, business, and design combine with the historical legacies of corporate structures to needlessly limit what’s possible for User Experience and IA in the enterprise landscape. In practical terms, I’m thinking of those limitations as barriers to the strategy table; constraining who can talk to who, and about which important topics, such as how to spend money, and where the business should go.
Considering the gulf that separated UX and IT viewpoints ten – or even five – years ago, this kind of emerging common understanding is a good sign that the cultural obstacles to a holistic view of the modern enterprise are waning. We know that a holistic view will rely on deep understanding of the user experience aspects of business at all levels to support innovation in products and services. I’m hoping the rest of the players come to understand this soon.
Another good sign is that CIO’s have won a seat at the strategy table, after consistent effort:
Further evidence of IT’s collaborative role in shaping business strategy is the fact that so many CIOs now have a seat at the table with senior management. They report to the CEO in 44 percent of all cases; an additional 42 percent report to either the chief operating officer or the chief financial officer.
Looking ahead, information architecture and user experience viewpoints and practitioners should work toward a similar growth path. We fill a critical and missing strategic role that other traditional viewpoints are not as well positioned to supply.
Quoting McKinsey again:
IT strategy in most companies has not yet reached its full potential, which in our experience involves exploiting innovation to drive constant improvement in the operations of a business and to give it a real advantage over competitors with new products and capabilities. Fewer than two-thirds of the survey respondents say that technological innovation shapes their strategy. Only 43 percent say they are either very or extremely effective at identifying areas where IT can add the most value.
User Experience can and should have a leading voice in setting the agenda for innovation, and shaping understandings of where IT and other groups can add the most value in the enterprise. To this end, I’ll quote Peter Merholz (with apologies for not asking in advance):
“…we’ve reached a point where we’ve maximized efficiency until we can’t maximize no more, and that in order to realize new top-line value, we need to innovate… And right now, innovations are coming from engaging with the experiences people want to have and satisfying *that*.”
McKinsey isn’t making the connection between strategic user experience perspectives and innovation – at least not yet. That’s most likely a consequence of the fact that management consulting firms base their own ways of thinking, organizational models, and product offerings (services, intellectual property, etc.) on addressing buyers who are themselves deeply entrenched in traditional corporate structures and worldviews. And in those worlds, everything is far from miscellaneous, as a glance at the category options available demonstrates; your menu here includes Corporate Finance, Information Technology, Marketing, Operations, Strategy…
BTW: if you weren’t convinced already, this should demonstrate the value of the $40 IAI annual membership fee, or of simply reading Bloug, which is free, over paying for subscriptions to management journals 
Comment » | Customer Experiences, Enterprise, Information Architecture, User Experience (UX)
Mark Blumenthal, of Pollster.com, recently posted a set of text clouds showing the words used by each candidate in the Democratic presidential debate Thursday night. The clouds were generated from transcripts of the debate, using Daniel Steinbock’s Tag Crowd tool.
Candidates’ Text Clouds
In the screenshot of Mark’s posting, it’s easy to see this is a great example of a collection of text clouds used for comparative visualization and interpretation. The goal is to enhance understanding of the meaning and content of the candidate’s overall conversations during the debate, an idea I explored briefly last year.
Just a month ago, in a post that identified text clouds as a new and distinct tag cloud variant, I suggested:
text clouds may become a generally applied tool for managing growing information overload by using automated synthesis and summarization. In the information saturated future (or the information saturated present), text clouds are the common executive summary on steroids
Supporting the comparison and interpretation of political speeches is an inventive, timely, and resourceful application that could make text clouds a regular part of the new personal and professional toolkit for effectively handling the torrents of information overwhelming people in important situations like vetting political candidates.
I especially like the way this use of text clouds helps neatly sidestep the disheartening ubiquity of the soundbite, by aggregating, distilling, and summarizing all the things the candidates said. I suspect few – if any – of the campaigns realize the potential for text clouds, but they definitely know the detrimental power of soundbites:
“It’s a mess,” said an exasperated-sounding Mr. Prince, Mr. Edwards’s deputy campaign manager. “Debates are important, but in these big multicandidate races they end up not being an exchange of ideas, but just an exchange of sound bites. They have become a distraction.”
From Debates Losing a Bit of Luster in a Big Field
The value of a collection of soundbites over an insightful dialog is – apologies for the pun – debatable. But even if a simple exchange of soundbites is what the new shortened formats of many debates yields us, text clouds may help derive some value and insight from the results. The combined deconstructive and reconstructive approach that text clouds employ should make it possible to balance the weight of single remarks of candidates by placing them in a larger and more useful context.
History Repeats Itself
In the longer term view of the history of our responses to the problems of information overload, the appearance of text clouds may mark the emergence of a new general puprose tool for visualizing ever greater quantities of information to support some qualitatively beneficial end (like picking a good candidate for President, which we sorely need).
The underlying pattern – a consistent oscillation between managing effectively and ineffectively coping, depending on the balance between information quantity and tool quality – remains the same. Yet there is also value in knowing the cycles that shape our experience of handling the information crucial to making decisions, especially decisions as important as who leads the country.
The NY Times transcript of the debate is available here.
I’m trying something new for the 2007 IA summit – a panel! I am one of four presenters for a panel titled Lessons from Failure: or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs. We have a promising set of speakers: Christian Crumlish, Peter Jones, Lorelei Brown and myself.
My portion of the panel will focus on how states of mind, cultural outlooks, and unspoken assumptions about problems and their proper resolution shape responses to failure – on both small and large scales. Our goal is maximum audience participation and minimum talkingheaditis, so please don’t be shy about sharing examples and joining the discussion.
Of course, we’re one among many reasons to attend. Quite a few things look especially interesting on this year’s schedule, including several of the pre-conference sessions that touch on rapidly evolving areas of practice such as designing for social architectures and enterprise efforts.
Hope to see you in Vegas!
A few months ago I came across a presentation titled Organizations in Crisis and Decline, by Randall Dunham. After giving examples of organizations in crisis and decline that include Kmart, General Motors, United Airlines, and Michael Jackson. (interesting example of an enterprise…), Dunham goes on to summarize typical symptoms of crisis, the strategic consequences of decline, and 10 behaviors of unhealthy organizations.
I came across this while doing some research on how the structures and cultures of organizations influence modes of thinking, resilience, and decision making, so this is related to some of my postings on enterprise software. It might be a while before I have the chance to write up all the ideas, so I’ll share Dunham’s material now.
Why is this of note to IAs? Quite a few Information architects (practitioners, not just those with the title…) are actively looking for effective tools and modes of understanding to help frame and manage enterprise problems.
Understanding the signs of decline and crisis in organizations can help information architects and other change agents understand the environmental context of a situation in the critical early stages of setting expectations and roles, and before it’s “too late”, when everyone at the management table has strong opinions they must defend. In other words, before making a leap is into an active project, a planning and budgeting cycle, a strategic vision session, etc.
I see (at least) two very important aspects of a situation that Dunham’s warning signs could help identify; how healthy an organization is, and what latitude for activity and change is available. Building on this, these criteria can help identify situations to avoid or be wary of. Of course, organizations in crisis and decline can present opportunities as well as risks, but sometimes the ship is going down no matter how much you try to patch the holes…
For those without powerpoint, I’m going to present some of the material here as text, with acknowledgment that I’m borrowing directly from Dunham, who himself credits this source: Mische, M.A. (2001). Ten warning signs of strategic Decline. In Strategic Renewal: Becoming a High-Performance Organization (pp. 25-30). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Typical Symptoms of Crisis/Decline
Strategic Consequences of Crisis/Decline
10 Behaviors that Signal Decline
Key Factors that Contribute to Decline
Success Can Drive Crisis
It’s true these are quite general. Naturally, the art is in knowing how to apply them as criteria, or interperet what you found. As a quick test of accuracy, I’ve used the behaviors and warning signs to retrospectively review several of the organizations I’ve seen from the inside. When those organizations showed several of the behaviors and warning signs at an aggregate level (not necessarily my group, but the whole enterprise) then the strategic consequence dunham mentioned were visible at the same time.
From a practical perspective, a rating scale or some indicators of relative degree would be very useful. In order to gauge whether to stay or go, you need to understand the intensity of the decline or crisis and what action you can take: for example, do you have time to go back to the cabin to save your handwritten screenplay before the ship sinks?
I first mentioned the ailing fortunes of the major U.S. auto makers as an example of the same pattern of decline common to old-style industrial organizations that’s starting in the enterprise software space. I chose American auto makers as an example of failing systemic health that offers insight because they are a visible cultural reference point, and not because I thought their demise was imminent.
But recent news from Ford and Daimler-Chrysler announcing dramatic job cuts and plant closures seems to point at exactly this in an eerie way. The article on Ford’s announcement even includes this quote from Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass, “This may not be the end, but it is certainly the beginning of the end of the automobile industry as we knew it”.
It seems the Iraq reconstruction effort is turning out to be another example of an enterprise infrastructure effort gone awry, in the real world. In the NY Times article Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled, U.S. Report Finds James Glanz writes “…gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs” contributed to the ineffectiveness of the reconstruction effort.
That sounds like a classic enterprise software deployment to me
Glanz continues, “After years of shifting authority, agencies that have come into and out of existence and that experienced constant staff turnover, the rebuilding went through another permutation last month with almost no public notice.”
To close the circle and return to the realm of enterprise software, let’s compare the NY Times assessment of the reconstruction planning — “Mr. Bush said the early focus of the rebuilding program on huge public works projects – largely overseen by the office, the Project and Contracting Office – had been flawed.” — with James Roberts simple but very relevant question in Grand enterprise projects: why are we wasting our time?: “Instead of trying to eat the elephant whole, perhaps the better way is to take one bite at a time?”
Someone should have asked the same question in the early stages of planning the Iraq reconstruction effort, when the basic approach — bureaucratic, top-down, poorly structured — crystallized and was put into action.
Related posts: