Holism - The WHOLE rises faster than the sum of its PARTS - because of the CONNECTIONS

Trending Towards VALUE - Whole Child, Whole Person, Whole Communities, Whole Society

Whole Child Development Is Undervalued

APRIL 3, 2015

Child development should inspire lifelong learning across different spaces and communities.

Research suggests that "whole child development," not routine or standardized classroom-based learning, empowers children as creative and engaged citizens who can strengthen the wellbeing of a whole society. It is crucial, then, to nurture their creative abilities to express themselves, understand others, and navigate complex amounts of information so that they can confidently solve the problems of a world that's changing faster than ever.

The question is how to make such an approach both systemic and sustainable.

Whole Person

Socio-emotional, physical, creative, and cognitive capacities are deeply intertwined and equally important in ensuring a child's wellbeing, learning, and growth. (That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone studying or supporting children's learning.)

Nobel laureate James Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, has shown that the non-cognitive skills emerging in early childhood are among the strongest predictors of adult outcomes. And Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, has continued to emphasize the crucial role that soft skills play in character formation and building on persistence, curiosity, and even grit -- the "passion and perseverance for very long-term goals," according to psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth.

The development of these qualities, which rely on an individual's self-worth and self-control, critically outperform any other positive measures of children's long-term outcomes, whether academically or intellectually.

The most impactful way of supporting such skills is associated with helping children feel in control of their learning process. This can be done by talking with children about the best approach to a particular task and having them describe the strategy they intend to test, for example, or asking the child to consider what could go wrong and how they might improve a task if completing it again.

Using relevant playful and experimental activities in the classroom require the teacher not only to encourage the learner to plan, monitor, and evaluate his or her own processes, but also to support the learner with tools like storyboarding, mind maps, and narrative structures.

Whole Communities

Institutions like Reggio Emilia in Italy, or High Tech High in San Diego, California are grounding their pedagogy in approaches that integrate the resources of a strong, local community. They remind us that healthy human development is often achieved through a child's interactions and experiences in a stimulating environment.

The schools that are most effective take children to museums and art galleries, use the local environment, including local parks, and invite members of local business, sports, or arts communities to play active roles in children's experiences.

Harvard Professor Jack Shonkoff pulled together evidence a decade ago describing that a child's interaction with communities strongly influences cognitive development, and in particular, that the most significant influences on healthy growth and psychological wellbeing stem from attachment to parents and caregivers, the role of early exploration, and the transmission of beliefs and values from caring others.

The three most effective ways for educators to respond to children's need and support their connection to the surrounding environment are:

1. Applying flexible use of time and space, as children need sufficient time to dive into an activity and work at their own pace without pressure
2. Ensuring strong opportunities for peer collaboration by, for example, using meaningful group projects to build teamwork skills
3. Building a respectful relationship between teachers and learners, where dialogue and inquiries are encouraged.

New technologies and project-based activities greatly enhance these opportunities, like the Scratch platform from the MIT Media Lab, which allows for a safe community of peers to actively comment, support. and hack each other's creations. Also, a more radical shift toward the use of new digital communities for learning is illustrated by Michael Wesch. He says that there is no longer any real reason why young people shouldn't experiment with technologies as if they were researchers diving into the world of information, document what they do, and use social media as a pedagogical tool to receive feedback from peers and encourage critical thinking.

Whole Societies

At a societal level, these changes seem radical, but they fundamentally rely on how adults imagine the purpose of children in society. Phillipe Aries retraced the history of childhood, from the European medieval to the 20th century, and found that it was not until the industrial revolution that the idea of "childhood as we know it" settled in. Children were seen as fragile beings (to be protected and safeguarded), as unruly spirits (to be disciplined), as empty vessels (to be filled), or as incomplete adults (to be trained).

In modern society, we have to pay attention to children's own thoughts, needs, and rights as individuals. Children are eager to learn and participate, and should be considered citizens at the moment of birth -- they are born curious and competent, connected to the world with ethical thinking, and in a perpetual state of active learning. Maintaining early childhood's playfulness, curiosity, and experimentation throughout schooling is critical in developing the collaborative culture, problem-solving skills, and independent goal-setting that we expect from adults.

Educators and adults can support lifelong learning environments by following practical suggestions found in the recent Cultures of Creativity study:

• Novel solutions should be encouraged, praised, and rewarded, and teachers and adults play a key role in modeling creative behavior.
• Experts are key to learning but are less powerful than a learner's own desire to learn, and the ability to succeed in difficult circumstances; thus even experts need to remain open to new ideas and see things from the perspective of children.
• Positive attitudes toward experimentation, risk-taking, and curiosity are key to opening an environment to new experiences that support the fundamental interest in learning new things.
• Provide opportunities for children to express themselves -- and promote tools to document and present what they are doing.

Nurturing both desire to learn and effective ways of experimenting with things and ideas are at the heart of a whole child approach, but require a whole culture around the child to extend this into schooling and adult life.

Editor’s Note: This post is inspired by one of the eight patterns appearing in educators' innovative approaches in the Future of Learning report, "Equipping Adults to be Changemakers in Learning," by Ashoka and the LEGO Foundation.

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Creativity in Teaching Practice

In collaboration with Ashoka Changemakers and the Lego Foundation, this series explores eight case studies that will help define the future of learning.

Holawhat?? Holacracy, a Piece of the Holonomy Puzzle (Fast Company)

HOLAWHAT? MEET THE ALT-MANAGEMENT SYSTEM INVENTED BY A PROGRAMMER AND USED BY ZAPPOS

ZAPPOS, MEDIUM, AND DAVID ALLEN HAVE ALL EMBRACED THE NON-HIERARCHICAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. SHOULD YOUR COMPANY ADOPT IT TOO?

BY REBECCA GREENFIELD

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh offered his nearly 4,000 employees an ultimatum last week: accept Holacracy or leave.

While the word may conjur images of a new-age cult, Holacracy is an alternative organizational structure that has been adopted by companies around the world—including Medium, the alt-publishing platform from Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, and the David Allen Company, the productivity consultants. It sheds traditional hierarchies for self-governing teams that get work done through tactical meetings. Zappos is the largest company to have adopted the system, and the transition hasn't been entirely smooth. By multiple reports and now an admission in an internal memo, first posted by Quartz and obtained by Fast Company, people don't love the idea of relinquishing their manager titles.

Nevertheless, Hsieh is anxious to fully embrace Holacracy, and is going all-in on the new structure by offering three months severance to people who don't want to adapt. "We've been operating partially under Holacracy and partially under the legacy management hierarchy in parallel for over a year now," Hsieh writes in the memo. "Having one foot in one world while having the other foot in the other world has slowed down our transformation towards self-management and self-organization."

I THINK IT USED TO BE HOLAWHAT? THAT SOUNDS LIKE A CULT.

Adopting Holacracy isn't cheap or easy. The system has its own set of rules and lingo, and is complicated to implement. The Holacracy parent company, HolacracyOne, helps companies transition by offering consulting services that run from $50,000 to $500,000, depending on how long it takes to achieve self-sufficiency. Even for much smaller companies, like Medium, which implemented Holacracy when it was just a couple dozen people in 2012, the journey takes multiple years and has a steep learning curve.

Holacracy was invented by Brian Robertson, a 35-year-old former programmer with barely any management experience. He created Holacracy in 2007 because he had a "burning sense that there has to be a better way to work together," he said in an interview with Fast Company. Robertson, who describes himself as a coding savant, says he taught himself to program at age 6. By the time he was 13, he says he was charging $25 an hour for software development through the Sierra Network, an early competitor to AOL. "They had no idea how old I was" Robertson said. "I didn’t even know enough to name my business."

A HOLACRACY DICTIONARY

Circle: In a Holacracy, people work within circles that represent different aspects of a company's work.
Role: A job with a specific mandate within a circle. The person who empowers a given role has autonomy over that domain. 
Governance: A regimented meeting where the structure of the organization—circles, roles—is decided. These can happen as often as an organization thinks is necessary.
Tactical Meeting: A replacement for weekly team meetings, during which circle members "process tensions" until they're resolved. 
Tension: "Dissonance between what is (current reality) and what could be (the purpose)." In other words: the problem someone has with the work.
Tension Processing: Each person talks out his problem with the group until he who raised the tension is satisfied with a next step.

After dropping out of the Stevens Institute of Technology, 17-year-old Robertson managed to get a job at Analytical Graphics, an aerospace company known for its perk-laced work culture. "You couldn’t beat the benefits, the environment, the culture. From a conventional view, they were really cool" he said. They had free meals, a gym, and a game room. Robertson had a great boss, who he still considers a friend and mentor. Analytical Graphics even won an award for being one of the best small companies to work for in the U.S. by the Great Place to Work Institute.

Robertson hated it.

"The bureaucracy seemed to be set up in a way that people couldn't use their gifts, their talents," Robertson said. In 2001, he started his own company to figure out a better way to run one.

Robertson certainly isn't alone in his disdain for top-down order. Holacracy comes out of and operates within a milieu of unconventional ways to work that have become more popular in the last decade as younger and more visionary CEOs eschew tradition and seek out a new way of working. Among the options are sociocracy, Freedom at Work, the Morning Star Self Management System, and the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE). Each of those systems, including Holacracy, has a distinct approach to the same general problem. "The industrial age operating system is no longer compatible," said Traci Fenton, the founder and CEO of WorldBlu, which preaches the Freedom at Work method used by hundreds of companies worldwide, including Zappos before it adopted Holacracy. (Zappos still uses WorldBlu's services, which aren't incompatible with Holacracy.*) "You have to move into the new age to realize we've outgrown the clothes."

The hierarchical organization dates back to the industrial revolution, when companies wanted to preserve accountability while employing large numbers of people. "It was a way of organizing labor such that the division of labor would be more productive and would be able to do tasks better repeatedly in a predictable way," says Ethan Bernstein, who studies organizational behavior at Harvard Business School.

THE INDUSTRIAL AGE OPERATING SYSTEM IS NO LONGER COMPATIBLE.

As the American workforce moved away from the assembly line and into the cubicle, work no longer required people to repeatedly complete specific tasks. The information economy prizes ideas, creativity, and collaboration—all of which gets stifled by hierarchy. One Stanford study that looked at 80 different teams, both real world and lab simulated, found that hierarchy led to conflict at higher levels of management. "I found they didn’t reach as good of a collective or a group solution," says Lindred Greer, who studies hierarchy at the Stanford School of Business.

As a result, the relationship between manager and employee has organically shifted over the last few decades. Almost half of the CEOs interviewed for a 2015 report by the London brand consultancy Wolff Olins said they had structured their companies to give employees more autonomy. The modern company is more of a conversation than a mandate.

But while the hierarchy may be flattening in many companies, the latest wave of non-traditional structures argue for more radical changes. The video game maker Valve, perhaps the most extreme example, forgoes titles and managers altogether. In an ideal Holacracy, it's impossible to tell who the CEO is.

Robertson spent six years exploring these different alternative organizational systems, picking and choosing the aspects he liked best—and trying them out on the 12 employees who he hired to build software products. He borrowed theories from the agile software movement and David Allen's Getting Things Done. By 2007, Robertson took the "early embryo" of Holacracy and along with his business partner Tom Thomison, a former management consultant, founded HolacracyOne, the Pennsylvania based organization that acts as a kind of consulting firm for companies that want to adopt the system.

Along with the personal consulting services, HolacracyOne offers seminars that can cost up to $4,000 a seat, and it sells an organizational software application called GlassFrog that runs $500 a month. The software is optional, but both Medium and Zappos use it. HolacracyOne also has a healthy business training third-party coaches. Robertson is writing a book slated to come out this summer.

the upcoming Holacracy Book

Unlike some of its contemporaries, Holacracy doesn't advocate for a flat organization. Holacracy organizes work (and people) around circles within circles within circles. People within those circles have "roles" that give certain team members complete control over their domains. Someone at Medium, for example, is in charge of fonts and makes all font-related decisions. Contrary to headlines (including one on this website), Medium still has managers, because each circle has a leader. But unlike a traditional manager, not all decisions have to go through that one person, and that person can change—the structure of a Holacracy is very fluid. That's why people don't have titles, they have roles that often do change. The main objective is to distribute authority throughout an organization. Fewer decisions bottleneck through a boss, meaning faster decision making and in theory faster innovation. All of that makes Holacracy particularly appealing to companies that want to retain the benefits of fast-moving startups as they grow.

"Holacracy is not going to take a bad business idea and make it succeed. It’s not going to take a team that doesn’t have the skills and make it brilliant," Robertson said. "It's more of an accelerant," he said. He likens Holacracy to getting a new computer. Generally, self-management systems promise happier employees, healthier workforces, and as a result a more successful company. Hsieh is so eager to ditch hierarchy because he wants his company to operate with the efficiency of a bustling metropolis, not a clunky corporate behemoth. Cities when they double in size get 15% more productive, companies lose productivity as they grow.

Completely restructuring a company from the standard org chart tree to circles is one of the reasons the transition to Holacracy tends to be rocky. To create circles and roles requires a very regimented process, called a governance meeting. Then, there's a separate, also very systematic meeting for assigning particular people to particular jobs. Holacracy doesn't have any rules for firing or compensation. Some companies, like Medium, create special circles that handle HR. Another approach is to give people roles that empower them to fire and promote. Companies can spend a lot of time thinking about their structure, rather than doing actual work, especially in the beginning.

HOLACRACY IS NOT GOING TO TAKE A BAD BUSINESS IDEA AND MAKE IT SUCCEED.

All of the confusing rules and terminology tend to scare people, but that's intentional. Obscurity, Robertson says, is part of a strategy to hook the right converts. "My sales approach is to try to talk people out of it," he says. The Holacracy website doesn't make it easy to understand what a company might be getting into. The "in plain English" version of the Holacracy Constitution is multiple mouse scrolls long. Robertson likens his method to that of Nigerian email scammers. "They are filtering out all the people that are not ridiculously gullible, only the ones that are really good targets are left. For us, it's the positive version of that." Robertson wants to attract people that get it, like Hsieh and Medium CEO Ev Williams.

Of course, just because bosses can overlook the eccentricities of Holacracy for its potential, employees aren't always as open. The name alone is off-putting. When Williams first introduced Holacracy to Medium, multiple employees thought it sounded cultish. "I think it used to be Holawhat? That sounds like a cult," Jean Hsu, an engineer at Medium told me.

Accepting Holacracy is like learning a complicated strategy game, like Settlers of Catan, says Robertson. "If you've ever learned to play a complex board game, all you see are a bunch of rules," he says. "That said, if you play the game with people who have played it before they walk you through it, eventually the rules totally fade to the background." Similarly, the best way to learn Holacracy is by playing. For new converts, Holacracy runs a taster week, during which a consultant simulates tactical and governance meetings.

INSIDE HOLACRACY

• How Zappos Ditched The Old Corporate Structure For Something New
• An Alternative To Holacracy: Unlocking Ideas For The Best Results
• Can Holacracy Work? How Medium Functions Without Managers

Medium, which implemented Holacracy about three years ago, had a rough adjustment phase, too. Governance meetings can take hours. People got stressed about understanding the system, and began neglecting their jobs as a result. "Being bad at something is frustrating," Williams told me. "To do that something else that we're good at actually, we have to do this thing we’re bad at. As a group, we’re going to do this awkward dance. It’s hard and messy and it causes stress, and you’re like, 'why are we doing this?'"

The tactical meetings, a replacement for your standard, generally very painful weekly team gathering, won over Medium's staff—and it's easy to see why, they're fast and efficient. This February I sat in on one at Medium's San Francisco headquarters, and while from the outside it looked like a normal meeting, the process was incredibly regimented. An engineer with a clump of curls named Koop facilitated, ensuring that conversations stayed on track. The heart of the tactical meeting is a process called tension processing, where, one by one, team members talk out their "tensions," which in Holacracy land means any issue someone might have. In Medium's case tensions ranged from the design of the site to the circle's name. Because of Koop, the group stayed on track, getting through 20 issues in about 25 minutes. The meeting also moves quickly because "processing a tension" just means deciding on a next step, not coming to a solution.

Over half a dozen current and former employees I spoke with—even ones who didn't like Holacracy in general—mentioned the benefits of tactical meetings. Having sat through one at Medium, I can confirm that they are way better than standard team meetings. Stuff gets done, fast.

At this point, it's too early to tell if Holacracy is working for either Zappos or Medium, says Robertson. Holacracy, however, uses the David Allen Company as a case study. Although, even CEO Mike Williams considers it "a work in progress." Unlike Zappos, Medium has a less dramatic relationship with Holacracy. Most people I talked to at the company like it. (Although they're very self conscious about how weird it sounds. Questions about Holacracy are often met with awkward laughs.) "We could be organizing a different way, but I kind of couldn't imagine it given what we're trying to do," Kate Lee, a senior editor at Medium, told me. Then again, the company is much smaller (about 80 people), implemented Holacracy early on, and has a few more years practice. Also, Medium isn't successful by the most standard of metrics: it makes no money. "It's [Holacracy] not a complete system. It's not the answer," in and of itself, added Bernstein.

By Hsieh's standards, Zappos hasn't reached its potential. The journey takes about five years and chaos at the beginning is expected, says Robertson. "When I see everything that's going on at Zappos, it's all part of the shift."

This post has been updated to clarify Zappos on going relationship with WorldBlu. 

[Photo: Tony Maj, Getty Images]

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REBECCA GREENFIELD

Rebecca Greenfield is a Staff Writer at Fast Company, where she covers creative people doing creative things.

CONTINUE

March 30, 2015 | 6:00 AM

Overview: Memes for Design Thinking and Doing Incubator

INTRODUCTION

There is a perpetuated myth within the design community, that a single visionary is required to build great products. Rubbish. Great teams build great products; moreover, in my experience, the greatest teams prioritize and nurture a healthy and positive internal culture because they understand it is critical to the design process itself.

In 20 years of leading design studios and teams, ranging from a small boutique consultancy to several in global corporations, I have become obsessed with the differences between a successful studio and a merely effective one. Inevitably what makes or breaks a studio depends on its ability to evolve skills and competencies while remaining fastidiously creative. However, simple adaptability is not enough. In an ever-changing hyper-competitive landscape, what I’ve found to be even more important is the value of laughter, empathy, a collective responsibility and a distinct lack of ego.

My measure of success — beyond incredible products — has been creating studios and a studio culture where the creative capacity of the collective team is palpable; where designers love to come to work, and visitors remark how positive and creative it feels.

The following, is an attempt to create a guide for the (often-overlooked, humanist leaning) behaviors that make a studio happy, functional and sustainable. I believe there is a straight line between how the studio feels, how we as designers treat each other, and the innovative impact of the team. The value of articulating the characteristics of an effective studio will hopefully make each team member a more conscientious contributor. Of course, these characteristics will ebb and flow to varying degrees and should not be considered concrete rules. Rather, these behaviors serve as a guideline for creating a consistently positive, and as a result, a consistently more creative place to work.

I know it sounds a bit crap, but politeness dictates that when you walk into a room that you say “Hello” and when you leave say “Goodbye.” It’s not that complicated. But this common courtesy is as important and plays functional role in a studio.

Because design work is naturally collaborative there needs to be some type of announcement that declares, “Here I am. I am going to contribute.” As someone who leads/listens to a team, I often use the way in which somebody says “Good morning” as a barometer of their mood. It tells me how they are feeling without me having to ask.

Alternatively, it is important that we end the day with “Goodnight, I am leaving.” Practically speaking it is good to know when someone leaves because you don’t know…if they will return the next morning. Seriously though, “Goodnight” is something we tell our children, our domestic partners and our parents. Invoking a ‘goodnight’ upon departure subliminally colors the studio with a similar familial spirit.

I also think it’s important to shake hands before business trips. I know this sounds weird, but it’s both a powerful and intimate gesture. People going on these trips often take work that represents the entire team; It’s an opportunity to look in one another’s eyes and say, “Godspeed and I hope it goes well.”

And when they return, it’s a moment of celebration. We are a team, so when people are away from the team, they are missed. When they return, the collective team is restored. It’s good. Let’s celebrate it.

While it may appear trivial, the act of observing (and even encouraging) these subtle cultural rituals increases a studio’s functionality by making it more personal.

Designers know that great design requires constant iteration. Iteration means failure and repeated failure. The challenge then becomes, “How do you deal with repeated failure during the design process? ”

Design, through a humanist’s lens, sees optimism as a choice and creativity as an optimistic act. Therefore, constant optimism is a key ingredient to iteration. It fuels the persistence and tenacity necessary for sustaining the creative process, especially during challenging times. For example, the difficulty of innovating within a large corporation reflects a work environment where people often say, “No” or “I don’t understand” because change in corporate culture is often uncomfortable and slow. As a result, negativity must be confronted and countered — not just in a brainstorming session or during a proposal — but on a daily basis.

The role of laughter in an effective studio also cannot be understated. Laughter can be exclusive or inclusive: how one defines the role of laughter within the studio defines the studio itself. If we cannot laugh at and laugh with, then we cannot function.

Laughter deflates conflict when a moment becomes too serious.

Laughter invites participation and draws a team closer together.

Laughter offers a rallying cry (“Laughing in the face of adversity’), especially when “The Business” asks the team to “do more with less.”

Laughter leads to creativity.

Laughter is serious business.

What applies to a family often applies to a studio. I was raised in a household that believes, “A family that eats together stays together.” There is something so natural and primitive about coming together to eat. People (even overly serious, so-called managers) let their guard down when they eat — and that’s a good thing. History supports this observation. Great bands, movements and many great ventures have all started around a kitchen table — invariably with wine — but we’ll save “The Value of Alcohol” for another essay.

Lunchtime marks a natural pause in the day and becomes a great opportunity for conversation and ultimately creativity. Eating at your desk or in one’s cubicle seems so awful to me and far too solitary for a culture tied so closely to collaboration. Instead, find a table so that members of the team can eat together as a group — doing so will bring a team together. Therefore, a studio should prioritize eating together. You are bound to learn something about your colleagues or yourself.

But it’s worth going one step further so let me tell you a quick story…

Team events within a big corporation are set up to facilitate these informal conversations but often do the opposite: you go to a nice restaurant, everyone orders expensive food and lots of wine, they drink until they get drunk, and you go back to your hotel room. One year, our budget ran low so we thought, “What if we did the opposite? Go to the wilderness, buy food, and cook for each other.”

What happened next was amazing! Somebody invariably took responsibility for cooking, another for preparing food, and someone else for laying the table. Without much discussion the whole team was buzzing around the kitchen, like a hive working towards a common goal. There’s something inherently vulnerable about cooking together and for each other. It’s humbling to serve and to be served.

It is important when you walk into any studio that you feel as much as see what is being built — the studio should crackle with creative energy. Specifically, I believe you can determine the health of any design studio simply by looking at its walls.

The benefit of getting work up and out of your computer and onto the walls of a studio are as follows:

Increases Visibility: Walls move work from the virtual to the physical world, allowing it to become even more visible, interactive, tangible, and environmental.

Facilitate Conversations: Walls facilitate conversation and informal reviews because people naturally gather in front of them.

Grows Collective Ownership: Walls create a culture of collective ownership because they invite people to literally build upon the ideas of others.

Facilitates Iteration: Walls with heavy layering reflect healthy projects because they show that there have been several iterations to the work.

Clarifies Ideas: When Walls get too complicated they can be torn down and re-built again. What sticks, sticks.

Creates Connections: Walls also allow people to draw connections in non-linear ways because they allow you to see areas of tension, synergy, and overlap that you might not see otherwise. They allow you to see the whole picture through its individual elements.

Simplifies Thinking: Other times, out of the seemingly visual complexity of images, the wall flips and a singular vision emerges.

Inspires: When people are trying to envision new things they draw from the well of what they know. Often times ideas blossoms from our immediate environment such as walls or the bric-a-brac on desks.

A studio’s walls are living walls. Their viability depends on gardening and nurturing to foster creativity and productivity. This analogy extends to both their creation and destruction — both tilling and harvesting.

Books add to the overall feel of a studio’s environment. A studio filled with books gives the impression that its designers are thoughtful, intelligent, and resourceful — so at the very least they give the studio an intellectual appearance, ha!

It seems that every design studio feels compelled to line its shelves with how to be more creative, how to be a design hero, how everyone else does everything better than us, and that is fine. However, I offer an alternative take.

As designers we are often asking people to take a leap of faith and to picture a world that doesn’t quite exist. We are, at our essence, doing nothing more than creating fiction and telling good stories — an essential part of human communication. Wouldn’t it then make sense to, at the very least, invite fiction into the studio or at the most encourage it to flourish?

Storytelling is a craft. It’s emotional and it’s part of the design process. We should therefore read and study fiction.

There’s one very simple rule when innovating: design the process to fit the project.

In the world of consulting, customizing the design process is easy because every project is different. But in big corporations every project can be more or less the same — you are essentially designing another product very similar to the last one. Design within big corporations needs, therefore, to behave a little like it is consulting.

Regardless of where you work, the challenge becomes how to modify the design process. That process begins by designing a metaphoric window, frame, or filter for people to see the world the way you see it: which requires designing itself.

If people can understand your vision of the project through this lens, then empower them to be experts of it — allowing them to apply this view to various parts of a project. If you can do this, a project has enormous potential.

I believe creative people want “to make”. In corporations or complex projects, the products we make often take an inordinate amount of time. As a result, I assume that most designers (myself included) work on fringe projects — creative projects made outside of the studio.

What’s interesting is that many of these fringe projects are regularly the complete antithesis of what we do internally. These projects exemplify raw creativity and are quicker, usually made by hand, and very personal in nature. People often pick fringe projects that fill a gap in a skill that they’ve lost, forgotten, or simply don’t possess. Examples of fringe projects in our studio included birdhouses, brewing beer and complete custom bike frames, to name a few.

To be clear, this isn’t a “Fun Friday” or a 20% approach where fringe projects eventually become studio projects. I believe that 100% of people’s time should be focused on product and program work.

But instead of fighting or formalizing these, we celebrated our fringe projects by publishing them, whether they were in our quarterly magazine or simply by talking about them openly. Much like the aforementioned studio walls, fringe projects became part of the fabric of studio and made us sharper. And I think the fact that they are so different added that color and richness, that vibrancy, to compliment and enhance what was going on in the studio.

Language defines the territory of projects. It is therefore important to constantly check that people share the same understanding of a word, phrase or name. Ideally at the outset of the project you should define the language, almost to the point of giving each person on the team a list: when we say this, this is what ‘this’ means. This pedantic approach is particularly important in multicultural studios where a diverse language encourages multiple, sometimes volatile, interpretations

Language also comes out of projects. Sometime you need to invent words to communicate the needs of a project. Other times, you need to be acutely aware how words, and their meanings, evolve during the design process. In our studio, we documented language in two ways. ‘Talk of the Studio,’ a weekly email, included overheard quotes in and around the studio. We also published a list of a project’s words, and their meanings, in the lexicon section of our quarterly magazine.

Finally, I think language is as revealing as body language. The repeated words and phrases are as significant as open shoulders or a furrowed brow. I am very sensitive to how people say things and why they say them because it reveals a lot about their mindset and motivations.

There are very few highly confidential things in an effective studio, so why go in a room and close the door? Instead, move most conversations out in the open. They will be better as a result.

Conversations in the open allow others to tune in, tune out or overhear what is going on. Sometimes people, not initially part of the conversation, will spontaneously jump in, taking the conversation in a new and more interesting direction.

Moreover, if there are difficult things that people need to say, maybe they will pick their words a little more carefully if conversations take place out in the open. The potential for damage and offense is much greater behind closed doors, than out in the open.

I don’t believe you should bind line management with creative leadership. If you do, a team will quickly become subservient and will design only what they are instructed to design.

This style of management also contradicts the very nature of creative projects, which at their heart are amorphous, tangible, evolving things. They are physical (I always do this funny, bowl shape hand gesture about a project). You can shape them and deflect them and nudge them in the right direction. They need to be “fed, watered and nurtured.” Sometimes they are weak and sometimes they are robust, but they always need love.

At any point everyone should feel the responsibility, or the opportunity, to lead. It is so important to be collectively responsible. No one person can lead these dynamic projects effectively in a studio because they are never two-dimensional.

This also creates collective accountability, generating a feeling that at least one piece of a project belongs to an individual. Thus, at any moment a member of the team should be able to point to the project as say, “We made this. I did that.”

Designing products for people requires that you get inside their minds, feelings, motivations and values. To do so, a smart designer must invert their own worldview and see the world through someone else’s eyes in order to empathize with them. This ability to empathize with others, a very humanist behavior, is perhaps the most important capability and characteristic of both a studio and a designer.

Competition motivates a team, that’s a given. But betting on shit seems to be galvanizing and brings a team together.

Successful office pools that maintain clear rules and occur regularly and quickly generate excitement. Most importantly, they should feel inclusive, allowing everyone a fair shot at winning regardless of the bet.

Besides setting the stakes, establishing deadlines and collecting money, a good office bookie is a good communicator. This includes regular, engaging emails that summarize the competition and the betting. Most importantly, the office bookie maintains enthusiasm and keeps the betting friendly.

From personal experience, the sheer prospect of winning something is thrilling. After winning the only bet I have ever won in the studio I went out a bought a pair of sunglasses, something I couldn’t have gotten away with normally, but it was 100 dollars cash and my wife was none the wiser. Ha!

We spend most of our time with our colleagues at work rather than with our partners or families. So whether we like it or not, we are all going through this life together. We should embrace that fact.

Yes, I understand people value privacy and you must respect that boundary. But the reality of the modern studio is that boundaries often blur. In fact, I think it is good that they are blurred. Children, pets, and hobbies — shared human connections and interests — promote this intimacy.

For example, my job at Nokia demanded I regularly go to Finland to see my guv’nor, Marko. Personally, it was important that my family knew who Marko was because my job demanded I leave them for another person. When Marko visited I invited him over for dinner so my wife and children could get to know him. My world became smaller.

I go somewhere everyday; they go somewhere everyday. I ask them about their friends; they ask about mine. By putting a face with a name, what I do becomes more relevant to them.

This relationship cuts both ways. For the studio it is important for the team to know my family as well: when you get me, you get the family. There are all these management books that say, “You should be the first one in and the last one to leave.”

Bullshit.

I often had to leave earlier as my son had a football match. Basically, it’s important the team knows what is important to me and I know what is important to the team.

Really!

My definition of a dickhead is a person whose ambition for themselves or their own career is greater than their ambition for the project or team.

If you have a Dickhead in the studio then the entire environment, the productivity, the creativity, and the product decisions themselves skew away from the product or team goals. As a result, the product is a vehicle for their ego, and it should be the inverse.

I also don’t believe that you have to be a Dickhead to lead people, studios, and projects. Some of the most brilliant people I’ve worked with are also some of the most open, generous, and humane people — people who have the ability to draw creativity out of others and who listen more than they talk.

I believe it is a perpetuated myth that great products are built by a single visionary. Often the people who think they are visionaries are just egomaniacal Dickheads. I honestly believe that great teams build great products and that careers are made by people that prioritize great products first, not their own ambition. End of rant.

The studio mirror is a distinct role and a job title. In our studio Luke’s role was to archive our work and reflect it back to the team in a unique way, much like the documentation of these principles. Pursued with persistence and the eye of a journalist, the Studio Mirror should capture not only WHAT is being made but HOW and by WHOM. This isn’t simply dumping files on a server but rather curating the content in a way that is compelling and consumable for the team. For example, our studio created a quarterly magazine. You can read ADQ2.1: The Launch Issue here.

There are many reasons to identify a single person to own the documentation process. First and foremost, the details of a project are easy to forget, especially when projects last several years. Archiving work is both productive and functional; a reflective studio believes that the work can always be done a little better. Finally, a well-documented project also makes it easier for new studio members to enter a project quickly and efficiently.

But perhaps the most important value for persistently documenting the collective work of a studio is that it is a sound investment in the future. The longer I work the more I have come to appreciate how people behave throughout the entire design process. Thus, the story of the product is not only how the product itself evolves, but also how the individuals and team grew while making it.

In a world which demands so much in the present, I value that at some point in the future I can look back through our quarterly magazines with a glass of whiskey in my hand, examining the process of what was made and how we made it, and think, “That was a good place to work, I learned something and we made great things.”

ABOUT US

Rhys Newman is a designer, artist, cyclist, and founder of OMATA Inc. He was VP of Everyday Adventure for HERE, a Nokia Company, and was previously responsible for building Nokia’s Advanced Design team. He is also a designer in residence at several tech companies, where he helps build happy and motivated studios where designers want to work, creativity is the priority and innovation happens. He is also co-writing and illustrating the Universal Truths of Cycling.

Luke Johnson is an Internal Communications Strategist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Before that, he worked as a design researcher and principle designer on HERE’s Everyday Adventure’s design team with Rhys. He was also the team’s Studio Mirror. Luke’s embedded approach to design produces tangle artifacts that visualize and communicate internal culture, builds community and celebrates how individuals and teams add value to organizations.

Read more about our Wall in a joint research project conducted by Stanford University and Helsinki University of Technology here.