Paul McKey - Synergistic Design

Redbean - A recent trip for a regular cardiac stress test gave me a real world example of just how important experience design is to our lives. Not only were the usual physician and coronary-care nurse/ecg technician in attendance but on this day they were trialling a new cardiac test machine and so we had a sales representative with us as well.

The first ‘insight’ was during the echo stress test when the sonographer struggled to manipulate both the ultrasound transducer on my chest, with her right hand, as well as the computer mouse with her left hand. “Are you left handed?” I enquired. “No” was her curt reply as she manoeuvred to co-ordinate the recording of my heart via a menu-driven interface. Lying on my left side as required I empathised with her while she worked against a layout that forced her to work back to front with a totally inappropriate interface and means of interacting.

A quick search of the net would have shown that someone has thought about this and you can purchase special beds to alleviate the problems of “left lateral decubitis” (laying on your left side) sonography , which even have arm supports to alleviate sonographer fatigue and (this is a nice touch) solid oak legs. ( Solid Oak Legs - Echocardiography bed )

Then it was on to the new integrated ECG monitor and treadmill. After hooking me up with the mandatory 12 leads coming from the PC to my upper body we started the treadmill. “What do I do with the leads?” I asked. “Oh, can you just hang on to them while you are running?” Well I had to as there was nowhere for them to go. A small oversight? Now when I had prepared for this test by running up and down the hills near my home I hadn’t been carrying a brick in one hand. I should have. The weight and inconvenience of these 12 leads only became worse as the test progressed (for over 13 minutes).

I would have complained but was too absorbed by gasping for air and the interaction between the physician and the sales rep. Everytime the doc pointed out a problem or had a query the sales rep had a well rehearsed comeback. He used all the classic used car sales techniques. Except this device cost more than a new car and was meant to be ’state of the art’. Most of the doctor’s objections were to do with the poor interface (again), lack of a touch screen and so being forced to use a mouse, and the lack of customisation available (all customisations required return to factory to complete). The interface was obviously based on Windows 2000 or so and the rep told us they used it because it was stable. Thus they had inherited all the crude chunky graphics and poor interaction design of that era.

I spoke with the physician afterwards and we both agreed he could do a lot to improve the experience of both staff and patient in what is a naturally high stress (no pun intended) environment. Struggling with poor design, both virtual, spatial and physical, is the last thing you need when carrying out an important medical procedure. Yet some basic observation and design of the whole experience would show the obvious (and often easy to fix) problems. The need for Experience Design is everywhere, if only we want to look.

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Have a great 2008 everyone!

Redbean - Australia’s change of government and its intention to immediately ratify the Kyoto protocol will leave only the US Government still in the dark (pun intended) on matters of climate change. Yet elsewhere in the USA much action towards sustainability is already in progress. Not the least in the business sector.

Recently in San Francisco I attended the “Designing a Sustainable Future” conference where over 1350 businesses, non-profits and government leaders from nearly 50 countries gathered. This, the largest conference of its kind, reflected examples of sustainability in practice and served as a catalyst for new ideas and initiatives.

What is a sustainable business? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Isn’t business designed to encourage blind consumerism beyond our daily needs? Well certainly the business models of many of the world’s dinosaurs is still predicated around unbridled growth. Yet equally, many are finding both a better future and more business in sustained growth, environmental innovation and corporate social responsibility (CSR). In between are the conmen, shysters and straight out frauds who partake in greenwashing - the practice of companies and governments which advertise positive environmental practices while actually acting in the opposite manner.

I personally see this push to make business, and all human activity, sustainable as a dawning of a new era of intelligent innovation as humans combine, across borders and old divides, to tackle perhaps one of their greatest challenges. The opportunities will be enormous for those smart businesses that can take advantage of the changes. And when seeking those opportunities it may be worthwhile asking this question: is this actually about changing the planet or is it about changing us? Hmmmmmm. I’ll just slip into my saffron robes…

For a good overview on what business is currently doing and what you can do to go beyond greenwashing here is a worthwhile article:

Beyond Neutrality - Moving your company toward climate leadership

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Redbean - I’ll be on the road for the rest of October with a full itinerary in North America.

New York is first stop for the Hunger Project Africa Prize Dinner at the Hilton Hotel http://africaprize.org/).

Next stop is Quebec City to deliver a paper and catch up on the latest at eLearn 2007.

Then it is on to Lansing Michigan to work with the team at MSUGlobal before heading back to Boston to visit Phil Long and the MIT iLabs which are Internet-based remote laboratories in areas such as microelectronics, chemical engineering and polymer crystallization.

Finally I will get to San Francisco and catch up with numerous people and projects while collecting case studies for an upcoming book (synopsis).

There is a lot going on in the areas of business improvement and learning and performance including the renewed buzz around sustainability so the conference Designing a Sustainable Future will be a must in San Francisco.

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Redbean August 2007 - Is innovation one of the most misconstrued terms in the English language?

I am looking forward to a new Innovation conference in Melbourne at the end of August which will include guest speakers like Tom Kelley from IDEO.

www.innofuture.com.au

Yet what sort of innovation will be on show? If I go looking for the meaning of the word innovation I can get numerous responses. One thing I can be certain about is that innovation is a process. It describes the steps taken to get from a creative idea/invention to an object or process of value to someone. It may require more creativity along the way. It will invariably require a hefty amount of design, another misconstrued term, yet what I would describe as problem solving or creative development within a set of constraints (like time, money gravity etc.).

Unfortunately the term innovation has been hijacked by every government and repeated in every second organisational mission statement on earth. Many put all their eggs in the innovation basket. However Getz and Robinson argue the mantra of “innovate or die” is misleading and there is more to success than innovation alone. They also show that relying on just innovation is akin to gambling with a 3,000:1 chance of success (after spending a lot of time and money).
Innovate or Die: Is that a Fact?

Increasingly, while organisations give lip service to terms like creativity and innovation they rarely set up the environment for success in these areas. Brilliant product designs or innovative business processes come from employees 80% of the time and through planned improvement activities only 20% of the time. (Getz and Robinson) So establishing a means for ‘everyday’ ideas to flow is more important than trying to forge new unique ideas.

And why do we innovate? Just to have a new model car every three years? That sounds like consumption madness. Nathan Shedroff has been working in this area for some time and has a great site dedicated to all things innovative. Nathan.com
In his latest book (Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences, co-authored with Steve Diller and Darrel Rhea) he looks beyond the simple catch phrases of invention, innovation, design and gets to what people really seek, meaning.

“We envision a time when customers increasingly make their purchase decisions based on deeply valued meanings that companies evoke for them through their products and services—in other words, meaningful consumption—as opposed to simply responding based on features, price, brand identity, and emotional pitches. We hope to persuade business leaders that combining and integrating the power of invention, design, and marketing to create meaningful experiences for their customers provides a blueprint to achieving sustained, stable growth.”

This aligns with my personal concept of why we create, innovate and design. I suspect I will find this ‘flavour’ of innovation in Melbourne at the end of the month, not the washed out “let’s build a better mousetrap” flavour.

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Redbean July 2007 - I deal a lot with setting strategic direction for organisations and projects alike. Setting vision and mission is an important part of that. Yet it is never easy if it is to be meaningful.

Had John F Kennedy been a CEO he might have said “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centred innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives.”

Luckily he knew that a message like that would inspire nobody. So instead, in 1961, he aspired to “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.” Everyone understood that message.

A new book “Made to Stick - Why some ideas survive while others die” uses this example to outline the six principles of sticky ideas.
1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

Unfortunately many of the vision and mission statements we read fail on most of these points which leaves the listeners with a lack of clarity and little passion for achieving the goals.

So the next time you gloss over the need for a compelling vision, which will possibly be required to drive your organisation or project forward for years into the future, take a little time to make it simple, compelling and sticky.

“Made to Stick”, Chip and Dan Heath, 2007, Random House, ISBN 978-1-4000-6428-1.

Redbean - Back in “the valley” after a several year break it has been good tapping into the sort of hard intellectual thinking that Americans do so well. They think hard about things like politics, education and many other issues. (Sure, they could probably think harder about global warming.) But they think particularly hard about business, its benefits, its impact and downside and the many subtleties of how it works. Almost anyone in the Bay area around San Francisco can be engaged in a knowledgeable conversation about the latest business topics, trends and opportunities.

So it was great to attend a think tank on global learning with many feisty educators, economists, designers and technologists up in the Santa Cruz mountains (more on this later). Just as interesting has been my catching up with Apple colleagues for an injection of technology trends and futures. Yet it wasn’t their technology that impressed me. It was their business models.

Apple is on a roll. It has what every company, small or large, should desire in its revenue stream, diversity. In the iPod it has a winning product, doing sales of 40M per annum, while in iTunes it has a winning service with 2006 sales of 1,200M songs. That’s over five million songs a day at US99 cents each.

In addition the two winners are joined at the hip by an array of well designed and powerful computers and the most elegant and efficient operating system available, MacOSX.

Sure I have been a Macintosh user for twenty years and even an employee for several years. But my biases apart you can’t deny that what Apple has done is build a phenomenal business strategy that allows a “digital lifestyle” consumer a one-stop-shopping experience. This holistic view of the market place is almost unique in the digital world and possibly only matched by the product-services co-dependence of the automotive and fuel industries or newspapers and classifieds (which Google Ads modernised).

Now Apple has been around for a long time and this dominance has not occurred overnight. And I am sure Steve Jobs has read Geoffrey Moore’s classic “Crossing the Chasm” where just such a strategy was described in 1993.

Holistic product-service matchings are one of my primary design principles for a Smart Business. They are often hard to develop and hard to protect once established, since look-alikes will try to enter your market, but when done well they have a synergistic effect where sales in one area should increase usage in other areas. Most importantly they complete the offering to the consumer which increases yield and drives repeat business through rich relationships.

You can develop and offer synergies yourself (coffee and cakes/cafes), or use partnering and/or co-existence models (think airline, rental car). Look for complements that are either required or desired by the customer.

To not consider the complementary product-service pairings that your customers need is to put your standalone product or service at risk since if the gap is left unfulfilled a competitor will fill it or the customer will simply go elsewhere.

So whether you currently provide either product, services or both you should, like Apple, be thinking hard about all the possible connections and complementary offerings your customers and clients need and then working out both how to offer them and make some money at the same time. That is by thinking about your client’s success you will help deliver your own.

The Australian Financial Review (AFR) reported on Tuesday last week of a software implementation project being carried out by Bearing Point Australia for Canon that went horribly wrong.

The result was the former CEO being sentenced for one count of falsifying his former company’s books and one of misleading auditors. These offences occurred in 2004 and according to the AFR the evidence cited showed that “big technology projects are just as much about people and corporate politics as about computer code”.

Well hallelujah! Sometimes the obvious just needs to be stated. This is the exact reason why Synergistic Design was developed, to help decrease the high failure rate of technology centric projects by creating synergy between all the critical perspectives of a project. One barrister described these perspectives as “various underlying agendas and different interest groups” Well perhaps this is news to Bearing Point but they exist in every project. Ignore them at your peril. It appears this project failed on a number of fronts;

1. Business - Interference and politics were the order of the day from the head offices of both sides. Early finance estimates were locked in yet became impossible to meet.

2. Purpose - Canon wanted to change its business practices to take advantage of the technology capability. The brief kept expanding and the original work contracts and consulting estimates were now being disputed by both parties. Who was doing what for how much now became the focus of the contract.

3. Technology - The Oracle software involved was new. Yet it was decided to extend its use beyond the original ERP(enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) to include payroll and human resources.

4. People - As the AFR article states “Canon wanted big changes made to its business as well, which meant convincing people to change the way they worked.”

And there probably lies the biggest yet least attended variable in the mix of a successful technology implementation, the people. When a contract is focussed on the politics and finances, the work, and the capability the technology can provide, it is very easy to lose sight of the most critical success factor, the people. Building the organisational change in the from the outset and not creating a technology driven project will always lead to improved outcomes. New technology can possibly create more problems than it solves. It is poor business to compete on the price of technology alone while leaving your project vulnerable to risk on all other fronts.

Bearing Point wrote off AU$9.3M against the project. A figure that Synergistic Design could have lessened and perhaps even turned positive.

Congratulations! Your e/online/innovative learning program has been given the nod but now you have been assigned a project manager from Finance or Operations. Or even worse they just made you the project manager and provided four ring binders of processes to follow before you can start. Immediately you feel the left hemisphere sucking up all the blood supply to your brain while the right hemisphere goes into hibernation along with your creativity, passion and enthusiasm. Yes, processes and software such as Microsoft Project, designed for building linear/parallel complex structures such as bridges and power stations, are now dominating your program.

Bridges are complex. Yet they are linear. And once the designer/engineer has applied the creative bit it gets down to A goes into B goes into C. We have been building these things for several thousand years.

Implementation of new learning and performance programs on the other hand are not only complex but also complicated with multiple unknowns. Why? Because they involve people. And even harder, they involve changing people. Unfortunately we can’t apply the laws of physics to humans (except perhaps in car accidents…) and so we can’t predict the outcomes of our efforts with any great surety. In addition to individuals being unpredictable in the face of change, so too are teams, divisions and even whole organisations as they take on the attributes of the people who make up their numbers. That is organisational culture is also unpredictable. Some new technology, process or programs succeed. Many fail or don’t deliver expected outcomes. Often we can’t predict which will occur. This is why I have been applying Synergistic Design to organisational change. To try and reduce the number of failures and provide increased confidence about the chance for success. It doesn’t mean I have all the answers. Though there is one thing I am zeroing in on. That is the evidence that Project management will not improve your chance of success in complicated organisational change projects. And that means virtually any learning, process or cultural initiative one carries out inside an organisation. All learning produces change. All change is about learning.

In a recent learning program I implemented for a client Change Management was a one line item in the task list of the project manager’s to do list. When I questioned how that would happen she replied that someone from HR would do that. There was a date by when this magical event had to be completed. (I was hoping for a wizard with a wand but instead we just got someone from HR).

The process for allowing people to accept the need for change, investigate how to and then finally shift their beliefs, behaviours and actions to accommodate change is always complex yet it can be a wonderful and exhilirating event. It can also be an unmitigated disaster if dominated by timelines, budget and organisational convenience. Flexibility, compassion and support are the required ingredients for successful change. You may want to use project management as the hard chocolate in the centre. But it must have a soft marshmallow coating if you are going to entice the population to ’suck it and see’.

And there are alternatives to the rigid nature of project management. Instead of following linear algorithmns think heuristically in pursuit of your goals. Give people the communication and the time to change. Use newer methods for management such as Agile Project Management which is based around a collaborative approach as is Synergistic Design. You may just find that people want and enjoy change. Yet I bet they will want to feel in control of their change rather than being part of some project manager’s chronological, budget-centric megalomania!

Some more information on Agile Project techniques� is here on Scott Ambler’s site. Scott Ambler - Agile Project Planning

Creating successful organisations with innovative online learning and performance support.

Synergistic Design is the process of designing and developing improved outcomes for any organisation, project or team by analysing and managing the naturally competing forces and perspectives that provide synergistic outcomes instead of conflict.

Resources, people and projects in conflict create waste, increase costs and reduce profit. The same elements in synergy create a whole greater than the sum of the parts. It is within this framework that we evaluate how learning and performance support systems can contribute positively to the well being and success of organisations. Whether for profit, or non-profit we show that by replacing the training-as-a-cost, with a learning-as-an-investment ethos you can deliver not only competitive advantage yet also increased efficiency and improved outcomes. This is good business.

Previously I have identified three competing priorities, or perspectives, influencing any organisation - the business (why), purpose (what) and technology (how). I contend that these three perspectives, in addition to people, form a synergistic relationship where changes in one will directly influence the other two perspectives. By continually evaluating any organisational change, and in particular learning and development programs, from these perspectives ensures change programs can remain responsive and current to the organisational needs.

In addition Learning and Performance Support Systems (LPSS) and processes have the capability to revolutionise the way organisations manage their people. Yet the failure rate of technology related change programs in organisations is notoriously high. For example the current wave of Learning and Content Management Systems fail for numerous reasons, including poor requirements, ad hoc implementation and under-funded content development. Online learning programs are no different. The failure rate of most eLearning or technology assisted programs is high for many of the same reasons. Roger Schank recently summed this up perfectly:

“What is being offered by the e-Learning companies is text on screen followed by a test. Worthless junk. No simulations. No doing. No mentoring. No figuring things out for yourself. No practice. In short, no learning”. (Schank, 2005, p254, Lessons in Learning, eLearning and Training”, Pfeiffer.)

So what makes some learning and development programs succeed? Why do some organisations competing in the same sector far outperform their counterparts in the implementation of new technology assisted processes? What are the critical factors leading to success in online learning and performance support programs? How can we improve eLearning? How can we be assured of not only engaging learning environments and quality content and but also successful implementation which meets all our business, purpose, technology and people goals?

This blog will discuss in detail each of the specific elements that make successful synergistic learning organisations as well as the overall process for developing synergistic outcomes and instigating this ethos into organisations, large and small. We will look at innovations in ideas and practices in each of the key categories of Synergistic Design - Business, Purpose, Technolgy and People.