Comments on: We Tried To Warn You, Part 1

By: maxlord

maxlord — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t have anything meaningful to contribute to this article, but as a Bostonian, I am excited by any use of the “wicked problem” terminology.

By: cwodtke

cwodtke — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Too often designers stand aside when they see organizational problems, preferring to stay within the safety of the user needs/content venn diagram. But copanies are ecosystems, and sickness moves quickly from one part of the process to another; it’s dangerous to stand idly by. I’m happy to see this article so that more folks in the previously sheltered roles of designer/IA/IxD can learn what to watch for and how to speak up.

By: david_more

david_more — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Great choice of topic – and some excellent insights into it. In particular, the magnifying effects of ‘organisational defenses’ are well-explained.
I do wonder about the ‘problem’ perspective, though, because it seems to me that (as with Bush and Iraq) often the tragedy is the result of ill-advised action in a complex situation. In a dynamic, reactive world perhaps we need to think of ecologies rather than problems.
Similarly, Peter’s observation that ‘good planning keeps organizations from failing’ seems based on an assumption that is worth examining. Maybe the success of ‘planning’ has more to do with informing the judgement of the actors than somehow controlling the situation?

By: redesign

redesign — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

David – I totally agree with your expression of organizations as ecologies rather than problems, in terms of dynamics. In terms of failures, organizations are wired up for self-defense, and their ecological network turns inward to defend itself from internal breakdown. A full ecological description is very hard to render as well, within a case study.

This is an attempt at an ecological description, while keeping it simple. That’s the point of the timeline figure, to illustrate interactions that occur between processes and projects. And it is still a fairly long, 2-part article at that! The second part may shed some more light on the inter-system interactions, by continuing with a case study.

Yes on your point about planning as well. The very act of planning helps the organization create artifacts that aid distributed cognition and maintain a series of anchors (in time and location) that inform participants about expectations and agreements. Like Eisenhower said “The plan is nothing. Planning is everything.” Creating insightful planning aids can lead to powerful consensus and commitment to action, perhaps to back up Christina’s point, an effective contribution we can make to organizational IA.

By: sladner

sladner — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

An excellent summary of the interaction (ahem!) between communication, organization and design. I find it a bold statement to suggest that IA can be the vanguard of organizational change. Not that I necessarily disagree but I have to wonder, where are the organization’s leaders? Where is the CEO or senior managers? And WHERE is the human resources department?

I think systematic distortion is part of the issue. Are we training our organizational leaders to distort information rather than shine sunlight onto problems? One could argue that this has always been the case, but is Peter suggesting that it is particularly bad “these days” and the IAs have a better eye or training to spot this?

By: sladner

sladner — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

By: sladner

sladner — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

By: redesign

redesign — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, Sam – I am suggesting that things are particularly bad, from my perspective. And there is distortion when people have something to gain. I’ve watched (and studied) North American organizational culture over a career that’s longer than I care to mention. And large organizations dealt with change and failure better in the early 90′s, for example, when the quality movement still ruled in many firms and “associates” were given lots of training, development, and respect. Team development, process improvement – these management trends, while pooh-poohed by many, helped create a more collegial environment than I observe in those same firms now.

Where is HR? Seriously downsized in many places, and lacking authority in most others. But the large-scale failures I’m pointing to are more ecological, and happen over time. They are wicked problems in that each mini-failure is just a symptom of another, and nobody has line-of-sight over the whole system. Decisions made in one domain (e.g., marketing) affect another (say, product development) with such a duration gap that there may be no opportunity to challenge the decisions once the impact starts showing up.

Why UX (rather than IA, really) can have an impact is that product design decisions can be tied to customer experience and real customer data. We can take a stand, over and over again, until other stakeholders realize the customer-centered stand makes good business sense. We don’t need our own C-levels to accomplish this – I’ve done this through a kind of socialization of UX practices through significant projects that build new routines in the organization. It takes time, but it builds highly resilient lateral decision networks. Some of this is in Part II.

By: patrickwalsh

patrickwalsh — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Peter,
Excellent article. As someone who has spent many years at the sharp end of automotive quality it is nice to hear a good word said for the quality approach in organisations. I go back a long way and can still remember some of the incredible foul ups that used to occur before Quality was taken seriously.
Quality is still a very high priority in the automotive sector due to lean manufacturing and JIT (just in time) practices that must be adopted if automotive companies are to stay competitive. A failure in supplying any one of the 1000s of parts that make up a modern car could prove catastrophic. To that end the large automotive companies have tended to work very closely and supportively with their suppliers but have also insisted on suppliers using tools such as Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) at every stage, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), capacity analysis, rigorous protyping and proving of all production processes before a single production part can be made. In other words the majority of the activity for any project is very much in the early stages and, in most cases in my experience, by the time you get to the first off production part its quite a straight forward process.
Do you think that this approach would have any value in the world of web design?

Looking forward to Part 2

Patrick

By: adampolansky

adampolansky — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nice preface. There’s the particularly juicy bit about organizations seeing pesky UX observations as a threat because of the common practice of time-boxing projects before an effort has been qualified across technology and customer experience.

One nagging reality that we deal with is accountability. A business stakeholder is usually on the hook for some sort of measurable performance indication specific to generating revenue or saving costs where the UX professional is not. As a result, the stakeholders relegate the UXers to the wrongly percieved role of “touchy-feely, non-business-savvy, navel-gazing designer-type”, or “clip-board carrying, out-of-touch-with-the-real-world intellectual” (See: Max Mayfield) making it easy to marginalize their input. “This isn’t your money we’re spending so it’s easy for you to say we need to re-think this!”

Because we don’t own the P&L statement for a business unit, we often find ourselves in an uphill struggle when it becomes clear (to us) that an application is on the wrong track.

This may be jumping ahead to Part II but I hope you have some ideas on how to increase the UX voice within the enterprise.

-AP