Clearletter from Clearleft — Black Boxen
Good stuff on design ethics.
Author: Mike Dunn
10 Lessons Learned From Implementing The World-Famous Buurtzorg Mode
Many books about organisational change will refer to the ‘third principle’. The principle is that you will have a third of your workforce who are immediately on board, excited, inspired and raring to go. You will have a third who want to sit back and watch and let others go first before they’re convinced of the need to change and you will have a third who are absolutely resistant to change and in some cases actively undermining what you are trying to achieve.
The leaders at Cornerstone made the initial mistake of putting all their energy into trying to convert the latter third. However they learned quite quickly that their energy was better placed in supporting and encouraging the first third. These people were their Local Cornerstone champions, the pioneers who built the momentum required for others to follow.
Getting partners on board with research findings
A better approach in sharing user research findings with a partner is “findings, consensus, and recommendations.” Share your research findings, develop a shared understanding of those findings with your partner, and then develop recommendations that are informed by the partner’s priorities and constraints.
At present, the IOED [Illusion of Explanatory Depth] is profoundly pervasive given that we have infinite access to information, but consume information in a largely superficial fashion. A 2014 survey found that approximately six in ten Americans read news headlines and nothing more. Major geopolitical issues from civil wars in the Middle East to the latest climate change research advances are distilled into tweets, viral videos, memes, “explainer” websites, soundbites on comedy news shows, and daily e-newsletters that get inadvertently re-routed to the spam folder. We consume knowledge widely, but not deeply.
Circle discussions, the KJ-Method, and evolutionary purpose
For the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose.
Like many people I’ve been inspired by Frederic Laloux’s work on next-stage organisations. ‘Evolutionary purpose’, along with self-management and ‘wholeness’, is one of the three big elements of next-stage organisations. Purpose is:
a powerful drive to do work that has meaning and purpose. The concept of ‘being the best’ becomes a hollow aim unless the organization is doing something worthy of the energy, talents and creativity of the people who work there.
The Reinventing Organizations wiki
I help run a meetup called Reinventing Work: Bristol. We agreed early on that we didn’t want this meetup to become a talking shop. But we did feel we needed to start by defining what we were meeting up for. So we decided to spend our first couple of sessions defining our group’s purpose. These are my thoughts on that process.