Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Peter Jones

Peter Jones — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:20:38 GMT

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.

Peter Jones — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:11:08 GMT

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.

Peter Jones — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:20:58 GMT

I’d like to post a couple of responses to the most recent comments. Thanks all for really reading the article – I was concerned of its length for B&A, and its more of an organizational studies article than a trad IA piece. Part II is up already now thanks to your responses! Marianna had contested the poisition of UX in the figure – I should clarify that the org processes indicated there are part of a real company in the case study, and are not in any way recommended for any other organization. But this is a traditional position for a large development company – and in this firm a weak position from which to promote organizational and product change. And, even as a small group without much authority, UX was able to assert real changes in the overall process across product lines through this organizational interaction style (not a method or process) we call socialization.

This also helps address Praveen’s comment. I guess it depends where you work and whether you take your job as defined in the organization, or are willing to take responsibility for helping push some of the changes that allow IA and UX to influence product strategy, marketing, and development. At this point, design decisions can be seen as not just user-centered, but as commitments from your firm to your users. Keeping a product healthy in the marketplace is everyone’s job, and as part of an organizational ecology, it takes a healthy organization to sustain a healthy product line in a competitive marketplace. Just like “innovation” is something everyone can do, standing up for the right decisions is part of our everyday jobs. There are also decisions that only we can see when they are happening, and they can reveal a lot. I’m just pointing out these types of organizational interactions from a real case to share some of how large-scale failure is a wicked problem that has no single cause, but we all have a part to play in detecting and raising the issues from our understanding as a situation emerges.

Peter Jones — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:59:22 GMT

James, Masood – Thanks for your comments. There’s a lot more to tell, but we were unsure about an article as long as this in the first place. And as you’ve intuited, creating an organic demand for UX is the key thing in a socialization approach. You know It’s working when – you find others around the organization are seeking you out and trying to work it out with your boss to get you on their team! I am familiar with a number of large organizations, and the socialization takes off when UX people are given the organizational support to diffuse the practice and your value to other product lines and new projects in their planning phases. Even giving informal presentations outside of your reporting line helps spread the value of UX practices. But in practical terms, we need to find ways to be advocates and part-time advisors to other projects, which will create demand back to the UX organization. I’ve seen this work with only 2 UX people in a large organization. Gotta go now, I’ll try to say some more later!