For those who think the role of design in the executive branch ends at improving tax forms, voting ballots and Whitehouse.gov, consider this piece of advice to president Obama from Bob Woodward:
Presidents get contradictory data, and they need a rigorous way to sort it out.
In 2004-06, the CIA was reporting that Iraq was getting more violent and less stable. By mid-2006, Bush’s own NSC deputy for Iraq, Meghan O’Sullivan, had a blunt assessment of conditions in Baghdad: “It’s hell, Mr. President.” But the Pentagon remained optimistic and reported that a strategy of drawing down U.S. troops and turning security over to the Iraqis would end in “self-reliance” in 2009. As best I could discover, the president never insisted that the contradiction between “hell” and “self-reliance” be resolved.
It is the sixth of 10 “take-aways” for the incoming president Woodward wrote about in the Washington Post in January, based on nearly a decade of interviews with the outgoing administration.
Woodward’s story for this particular piece of advice–the contradiction in accounts of the Iraq war–focuses on qualitative data. (After all, by some accounts “self-reliance” is a sort of hell.) Packed beneath the surface of those assessments, however, is layers upon layers of real data, of information that an interested president could use to have a perhaps more nuanced view of the situation.
In the coming years, the amount of data will not diminish: That is clear from a mere glance at the state of information technology today. President Obama’s insistence on having a BlackBerry speaks not only to our culture’s increasing symbiosis between people and communications technology, but also to the need to be close to information. I’ll be curious to see how the assorted hamstringing policies and lawyer-imposed technological constraints affect the president.
Some people have called for instituting a national design policy. While the mission is admirable, if not ambitious, there’s something missing. The fourth bullet perhaps comes closest:
Policy as designed to address design’s role in making American democratic values tangible to the people.
The design policy people have a collection of 10 initiatives. The second is:
Set guidelines for legibility, literacy, and accessibility for all government communications.
What neither the mission nor this initiative state is the use of design in making the government more efficient internally. Design, broadly speaking, and information design more specifically dovetails nicely with the new administration’s overall philosophy of transparency. But there’s more to the opportunity.
Most government agencies have an office of the inspector general (OIG), a group dedicated to ensuring that the agency is meeting their objectives and operating ethically. Agencies have other groups (office of civil rights, for example) to ensure that they are meeting other external requirements. Agencies also have internal service bureaus (chief counsel’s office and office of communications for example) which provide services to other operational parts of the agency. There are, therefore, many models for incorporating these high-touch disciplines into the work of the executive branch.
I’m imagining a communications design manager responsible for visualizing all the information–quantitative and qualitative–that is produced by the agency. This role might sit in some sort of service bureau or might be dedicated to each operational part of the agency. (In a separate bureau, though, the manager may be divorced from the organizational politics that can obscure and undermine effective data displays.) The role of this person would be–at best–to oversee the design of work product destined for the desks of higher-ups, or–at worst–provide consulting on the design of the work product.
Such a manager would also be responsible for facilitating brainstorming meetings, those whose agenda is to comb through lots of information and pull out the relevant stuff. They would work with subject matter experts and policy makers to make sure ideas are clearly expressed, portable, and comparable.
- Clearly expressed ideas are generally free from editorializing. At best, a good visualization can separate the facts from interpretting the facts. At worst, it admits the bias of interpretation. Good plots of data amplify the patterns in the data, call attention to the stuff that matters, and invite interpretation based on facts.
- Making ideas portable means that the person with the ideas does not have to be present to express them. A portable idea is expressed succinctly and in a self-contained way such that anyone looking at the visualization can understand its story.
- Ideas need to be comparable, such that people can make decisions not with single data points from here and there, but from a symphony of well-coordinated information. The federal government silos knowledge based on subject matter. This is operationally convenient, but challenging when trying to pull together a complete picture.
The government is not ripe for this sort of position. Its responsibilities would require going against the cultural grain, once characterized by a deputy director from the State Department under Powell as a “need to know culture”. It is a culture that thrives on holding information close to the chest, on marking things “top secret”, and on politicizing information. It is a government where power is determined by how much you know, not how much you contribute. The same deputy director insisted that a shift was necessary, from need to know to a “need to share culture”.
Making information accessible, meaningful, and share-able, is the role of a designer. The distinction between this proposal and the broad initiative suggested by the national design policy people is one of audience. While the American people are the primary audience for government communications in terms of priority, they are not in terms of usage. Ultimately, the audience for communications is an audience of one: the president.
You know what’s hard? Convincing a four-year-old she needs to put on sunscreen before going out to the playground to play. This is how I spent most of my summers in junior high, high school, and college. I worked for a nursery school’s summer program. I had kids who would sit on other kids to get their way. Kids who would stick things up their nose. Kids who would clog toilets with toilet paper claiming, “I made a big poop!” As a teenager, I found these antics frustrating, but also understood the delicate balance of the emotional life of a four-year-old. Lose patience and I’d just make things worse.
Sometimes I’ll be on a conference call, listening to a client revise his requirements for a project for the third time and I think about those moments. This is the hardest part of our jobs as designers—working with other people. Imagining new products, tweaking design details, and analyzing research to understand how users perceive or engage with a product–these are the reasons we got into the business. But compromising on design ideas to “realize the vision” of a client, managing stubborn team members, chasing down the boss for feedback are the tasks that take up the bulk of our time.
And it’s where most designers are least prepared.
It’s this thought process that led me and my colleague Chris Detzi to propose a workshop for this year’s IA Summit on People Skills. Though we’ve recast the session as “Mastering Difficult Conversations” to align it with the Summit’s overall marketing, it’s more than that. In this workshop, we want to help participants to reflect on their communications style and establish an overall philosophy. By giving yourself some parameters, understanding your strengths and weaknesses, you can become a better communicator overall.
Of course, this doesn’t mean the end of every difficult conversation. But perhaps by focusing on these skills, those difficult conversations can be (a) more productive and (b) less riddled with anxiety. The other side of this coin is that communication skills are important not just for the difficult clients and colleagues. Even for your favorite customers and collaborators, you want to make sure you communicate your ideas succinctly and sensitively because they’re the ones you want to stick around, right?
In our first brainstorming meeting, Chris and I had a great time thinking through all the personality traits we’d encountered over the years: clients who float with the breeze, designers who miss the forest for the leaves, bosses who can’t be bothered to provide constructive feedback. But what started to materialize was a framework for thinking about these soft skills. Chris and I started with a handful of basic concepts–people, skills, artifacts–and I left the meeting hoping to turn this basic set of ideas into a meaningful diagram. As I pushed on it, a few other concepts emerged, and this is the picture as it stands:
(If you couldn’t tell, I’ve been reading Dan Roam’s Back of the Napkin. Though I’ve barely scratched the surface, it’s definitely encouraged me to use rough sketches. So though I’m generally more of a vector art, large format kinda guy, I’m getting back to basics.)
This diagram might not say anything particularly revolutionary, but it does provide a framework for thinking about the different aspects of a situation and how I might influence them. Here are the basic components:
- Circumstances: There’s always a situation that serves as the backdrop for any interpersonal communication. The circumstance can be passive–it only provides a context and setting for the communication. Or it can be active, whereby surrounding events trigger the communication. It’s also clear that circumstances are nested. The immediate circumstance might be a meeting, which is inside a project, which is inside the corporate culture. Crucial skills are being perceptive of circumstances
- Agenda: People come to a situation with an agenda or objective. They may have something specific that they want to accomplish, or they may simply have an underlying philosophy, approach, or vision that’s driving their decisions. Agendas may affect the circumstances. That is, the situation may be the way that it is because of someone’s vision. Alternatively, as new situations arise, people may have new short-term objectives in response to them. Crucial skills are anticipating other people’s agendas and being aware of your own agenda.
- Messages: In this diagram, the message is what is said. The crucial skill here is knowing what to say. While not the only ingredient to successfully managing an situation, the content of a message is central to it.
- Tools and Artifacts: Simply put, these are the mechanisms we use to deliver messages to each other. The crucial skills here are knowing which medium is most effective for a given message and situation, and how to best use that medium. A passionate speech about a design is more effective over the phone or in person than it is written out in prose.
- Traits and Habits: People have different personalities, manifested in their traits and habits, two related notions that I haven’t yet picked apart. These might be as superficial as “late for every meeting” or as deep as “doesn’t take responsibility”. These aren’t represented in the diagram explicitly, but it’s a person’s traits and habits that will influence his agenda, his choice of message and communication tool, and his perception of the situation.
- Skills: Skills are our means for overcoming our own personality traits and bad habits. By learning appropriate skills, we can make considered decisions, incorporating not only our gut reaction, but thoughtful perceptions of the situation and participants.
Obviously, reality is much more complex. There are messages delivered through other people. Messages withheld, never delivered at all. There’s unproductive but perhaps necessary activities like gossiping or complaining. But to help practicing designers, the model gives us the most relevant aspects we need to consider and can influence. Plus, it’s only a four-hour workshop.
I’m not sure if Chris and I will unpack this model further in the workshop. Our intent is to make it not so theoretical and more fun and cathartic.
Interested in this stuff? Sign up for our workshop!
Note: the registration form says the workshop is Wednesday afternoon. It will actually be on Thursday afternoon!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
~ Arthur C. Clarke, The Third Law of Prediction
Perhaps it’s getting older. Perhaps it’s truly magical advancements in technology. For the first time I can ever remember, I experienced three technologies in 2008 that seemed fantastic, in the genuine sense of that word.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve used technologies that are life-changing. The oft-referenced DVR, for example, has fundamentally altered my expectations around entertainment. But as someone who grew up with VCRs, I see them as an advancement that simply better meets user needs. Netflix, while equally revolutionary, never seemed magical. The inner-workings were always more or less in plain sight. In fact, technologies that don’t perform quite as expected or make obvious compromises of course lose that magical quality. (For me, for some reason, it’s the proliferation of barcodes on Netflix DVDs and packaging.)
The introduction of third-party applications on the iPhone, however, has created a space for technologies that seem magical. They’re useful, work as expected, and are at times delightful.
(My apologies in advance for the iPhone bias. I’m not the thing’s biggest fan, having my fair share of frustrations with it. At the same time, the simplicity of the platform makes it a ripe place for magic.)
- Shazam: Hear a song on the radio you don’t recognize? Fire up Shazam. It’ll grab a sample, spin its wheels for a moment, and then tell you exactly what it is, complete with links to buy the song. (This even worked with ambient music in a crowded coffee shop.) While I can probably guess how this is done, there’s something about the application that seems magical. It has what appears to be a vast knowledge of popular culture, and ability to perceive its surroundings, and the capacity to put it all together.
- Pandora Radio: On your desktop, Pandora is a custom radio station. Enter a few artists or songs you like and it will consult its database to find similar-sounding music. I’ve gravitated toward Pandora on the desktop because it’s easy to use, and has successfully introduced me to some new and interesting music. Their iPhone app isn’t much different than what you experience on the desktop. There’s something about being able to take all that customized music with me wherever I go, though, that’s exciting. (Some people I know experienced delays or interruptions in the music streaming, but I’ve never had that problem.)
- Amazon Remembers: I recently discovered this little feature in Amazon’s iPhone app. Take a picture of anything and the app will find the product in Amazon’s store. What I appreciate about this feature is that it leverages a habit I already have: taking pictures of things I want to remember. The app then makes it easy for me to take the next step.
There’s something about explaining them all here, in writing, that kind of takes the magic away. While there are no obvious bar codes exposed, the inner-workings are not too hard to figure out. Amazon even describes the process, lest we grow suspicious of sending them all kinds of pictures.
So, what makes these applications magical? We designers revel in products that delight. I don’t think there’s much beyond that going on here, but the applications are each a perfect storm of traits.
- Simple: It’s pretty easy to explain what the trick is, even if I have no idea how it’s done.
- Inhuman: It would take a savant to be able to name any song, anywhere, any time, or to find a relevant product among the millions that Amazon sells.
- Personal: These applications are very much about who I am, where I am, and what I’m doing.
The purpose of each application is one that’s imaginable, and we might have even thought about it at some point in a “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” moment. In those moments we conceive of something simple and personal, but know that such a task would be impossible. It’s when technology transcends that imagined threshold–a boundary that comes only from our biased impressions of the State of Technology Today–that it wakes up the child inside each of us.
