Experience Engineering
“Scholars really have nothing to teach you. But from the soft touch of the eyelashes of a woman you will know all there is to know about happiness.” ― Omar Khayyam
This is going to be one of the most weird posts perhaps I've ever written, it is like all over the places. I apologize for it but it is hard to write a simple article on how to build an experience for your company. I am journeying on various topics such as agile, patterns, mental models, systematic thinking, experience design, HR, culture and software engineering in order to address one thing. How organizations in all industries can build an Experience. As Vilém Flusser, Czech-born philosopher said: "The new human being does not wish to do or to have but to experience. He wishes to experience, to know and, above all, to enjoy."
In my humble opinion, this is the journey that organizations which wants to cause a unique Experience need to take. I am not saying this is the only journey but I strongly claim if this journey is taken and implemented accurately, firms can cause a great Experience for their customers, users or employees.
Step 1. Transformation that happens from Mental Model level across C-Suite
Step 2. Building an Agile Organization
Step 3. Implementation of Business & Software Solutions Architecture
Step 4. Implementation of Employee Journey Mapping
Step 5. Building an Organizational Culture like a Nation
Step 6. Building an Experience
Step 1. Transformation that happens from Mental Model level across C-Suite
C-Suite in every organization must transform into systematic thinking model. According to Peter Senge, learning organizations encourage a holistic approach called systems thinking. Systems thinking stems from the tenets of system theory where each process integrates with all the others. Basically, it means the ability to see the big picture and to be able to see the interrelationships between what might, at first, seem to be completely unrelated. Systems thinking relies on a collective intelligence, believing that a group of people are smarter than one or two smart people. In systems thinking there's a commitment within this process to real learning, and an agreement that occasionally, the group may be wrong. This process requires that individuals listen to every idea that's put forward and that there are no wrong or bad ideas. While one idea may initially seem off the wall, it may result in someone else thinking outside the box and coming up with a really good idea.
In his book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990), Senge defined learning organizations as those organizations that encourage adaptive and generative learning, encouraging their employees to think outside the box and work in conjunction with other employees to find the best answer to any problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXdzKBWDraM
There are five characteristics of a learning organization:
Personal mastery, or how the individual looks at the world
Mental models, or an individual's deeply ingrained assumptions
Shared vision, which encourages experimentation and innovation among multiple members
Team learning, or more than one person acting together; two heads are better than one
Systems thinking, looking at the whole picture rather than the individual problem
Within each of these characteristics there are three levels of approaches, including
Practice, or what the individual does, which is the lowest level
Principles, or what the individual does in keeping with the guiding ideas of the organization
Essences, or what the individual automatically thinks in terms of the whole organization, which is the highest level of mastery
The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand. The more models you have—the bigger your toolbox—the more likely you are to have the right models to see reality. It turns out that when it comes to improving your ability to make decisions variety matters. We also need to be aware of our cognitive biases as well. Most of us, however, are specialists. Instead of a latticework of mental models, we have a few from our discipline. Each specialist sees something different. By default, a typical Engineer will think in systems. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A biologist will think in terms of evolution. By putting these disciplines together in our head, we can walk around a problem in a three dimensional way. If we’re only looking at the problem one way, we’ve got a blind spot. You can read more about how to think better in my last blog where I have put together series of mental models I have been using which is gathered from all over internet.
Image credit: https://www.nwei.org/iceberg/
The iceberg model allows us to explore a more complete picture of the different factors that may be at play in any given situation of your organization. Think of a problem that you’re currently facing at your company. What you see at the top of the iceberg is the “event” where that problem manifests e.g. “Someone in my team has called in sick every week recently.”
But look below the event level to consider what might be contributing to causing the visible event. Firstly, what are the patterns/trends over time? e.g. “This increased absence rate started at the end of the summer.”
Next, identify what underlying structures may be influencing the trends e.g. “Over the summer senior management announced that funding for two major projects was up for review at the end of Q3.”
Finally, consider what mental models those involved may have about the situation e.g. “Team members think that funding is going to be cut for their projects and feel like they weren’t consulted and may be about to lose their jobs. As a result they have lost motivation.” and “Senior management doesn’t necessarily intend to cut funding but would like to shift to quarterly reviews of specific deliverables but don’t think it’s a priority to communicate this to staff.”
This analysis might suggest some actions to take to address the absence rate – maybe a consultation where staff can ask senior management questions and be reassured about the new process and where management can learn what information staff require to stay engaged.
If an organization wants to offer better experience, they need to start having transformation in mental model level (look at the above figure and example). You can also use many of tools provide here: https://toolbox.hyperisland.com/
Step 2. Building an Agile Organization
When you want to buy a house or apartment, the very first rule of investment would be: location, location and location. When it comes to organization, the very first rule would be: action, action and action.
The dominant “traditional” organization (designed primarily for stability) is a static, siloed, structural hierarchy – goals and decisions rights flow down the hierarchy, with the most powerful governance bodies at the top (i.e., the top team). It operates through linear planning and control in order to capture value for shareholders. The skeletal structure is strong, but often rigid and slow moving.
In contrast, an agile organization (designed for both stability and dynamism) is a network of teams within a people-centered culture that operates in rapid learning and fast decision cycles which are enabled by technology, and that is guided by a powerful common purpose to co-create value for all stakeholders. Such an agile operating model has the ability to quickly and efficiently reconfigure strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology toward value-creating and value-protecting opportunities. An agile organization thus adds velocity and adaptability to stability, creating a critical source of competitive advantage.
I had reflection on my agile implementation experience in VietnamWorks, iCare Benefits, F88, Precita and Mekong Capital. In all I started it at Engineering, the interesting result was the agile engineering in those contexts disrupted other departments as well and put them in a position to change as well. Clearly not all departments or teams started following agile but they had no choice to change and get better. You can read my article about Agile Organization in here.
Tool : https://toolbox.hyperisland.com/alignment-autonomy Purpose: A workshop to support your business and teams by minimizing barriers to being agile & flexible and maximizing alignment & autonomy - enabling teams to adapt to change to achieve better results faster. Use this to help yourself and others work in a collaborative, committed culture. Inspired by Peter Smith's model of Alignment & Autonomy, also called Alignment & Personal Responsibility.
Step 3. Implementation of Business & Software Solutions Architecture
A common problem in today’s business: the upstream corporate vision fails to get successfully translated into actionable objectives. Downstream, critical coordination fails amongst business units, as well as between the business and IT. Business Architecture serves to properly align the organization. Business Architecture reveals how an organization is structured and can clearly demonstrate how elements such as capabilities, processes, organization and information fit together.
To simplify any business or company, I usually try to define them in 3 layers, in following figure I have shared my model of thinking:
You can continue reading the detail post on how I defined and built a software architecture for a fintech business in this post. Also I have followed the same method on defining an architecture for a retail business. In software engineering, a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem. A design pattern isn't a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations. Design patterns can speed up the development process by providing tested, proven development paradigms. Effective software design requires considering issues that may not become visible until later in the implementation. Reusing design patterns helps to prevent subtle issues that can cause major problems and improves code readability for coders and architects familiar with the patterns. Read more on How Tech can Simply Enable Retail in my last blog post.
Retail = Unlimited Loop of [ Execution + Generate Data + Analytics + Experiment]
Step 4. Implementation of Employee Journey Mapping
If you do not take good care of your employees, they won't care about your customers. Diana Dosik shares her experiences turning the tables of customer research and experience onto employees to create smarter and better companies to build a better Employee Experience by removing pain points using Employee Journey Mapping.
HR must follow Design Thinking and Employee Journey Mapping in order to evolve and stay meaningful to employees life. My proposal is pretty simple and consist of few steps which are:
Develop a Candidate Persona. A candidate persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal candidate. This persona is formed by defining the characteristics, skills, and traits that make up your perfect hire. Creating personas help guide and make your hiring process easier.
Develop an Employee Value Proposition (EVP). EVPs are the complete experience of working at a company. This experience is a combination of 5 key elements: Compensation, Benefits, Career, Work Environment and Culture.
Build an Employee Journey Mapping. A journey map visually describes an employee’s journey as she attempts to achieve a goal. It depicts a timeline of the employee experience; key touch-points; what the employee is feeling, thinking and doing; pain points, and opportunities.
You can read more on this topic and use the templates I have created in Re-Thinking HR article.
Rebecca Werres
Step 5. Building an Organizational Culture like a Nation
The term “organizational culture,” or “company culture,” is a recent addition to our vocabulary from the 80s. Most simply, organizational culture involves how an organization functions and expresses itself. It’s the personality of an organization and encompasses these basic components:
Values: what a company does, its mission, and how it represents itself
Assumptions: the attitudes, often unconscious, formed through company processes and actions that inform what employees think
Artifacts: what a company represents in the form of products, technologies, publications, processes, dress code, location, and architecture
Cultural change doesn’t happen by accident; it requires a well-planned agile change management process. Cultural change generally arises in three forms as shared in below. All of these forms are useful in different company stages. You cannot rule out one style because of its nature, you need to identify which form matches the best with your company growth stage.
Evolutionary. Allowing change to occur slowly over time with sights set on company-wide transformation;
Focused. Involving measures exacted upon only certain elements or subcultures;
Revolutionary. Forcing an entire organization to change course drastically
Cultures are not static. They are living systems that evolve, sometimes devolve and rarely stay the same. Culture ideally should enable the aspirations, strategy and purpose of an organization. The more adaptive the culture, the more likely the organization is to be able to successfully respond to disruptions and changes. And, over time, to become the disruptor rather than the disrupted. You can read more in details in my: Lean Corporate Culture Framework which has the framework, step-by-step guide, tools and sample. I also highly recommend to read this book as well: How to Make a Nation Monocle Guide.
This the list of actions that you can do in your organization that fosters culture:
Offer a budget aid or design some company tour to museums and galleries.
Launch an internal "free press" whether online or printed. Encourage employees to own the press inside your organization and let these press to be boisterous, argumentative, creating and entertaining. They should be free to write whatever your employee wants.
Launch Movie nights. Watch national or imported drama movies together.
Fund culture events such as: ballet, theatre, symphony orchestra and etc.
Build a library and book sharing sessions
Bring authors of books into your organization, something like Talks at Google.
Launch art festivals.
Launch training on drama, art and music.
Hire actors or artists to perform in your organization.
Launch live events, everywhere and all the time. Foster such environment like small coffee shop or pub.
Build your organization visual identities and use it to create passport (employee card)
Use your visual identities and launch internal currency.
Choose your favorite leaders or heroes and build statue of them. Place these statues across various employee touch-points and tag a simple story why this hero (would be great if it is mapped to your core value or culture you want to advocate).
Step 6. Building an Experience
Finally, build an experience. If you're wondering what is experience and how to architect one, please read my last blog called: Architecting an Experience and Lean Architecture.
Experience is everywhere like Eating Experience Design (EXD). EXD is about designing ways to interact with our food, and using it as a method to communicate an idea, tell a story, or bring people together. The diagram below shows how this is broken down:
The Italian designer, starting from a functional consideration of cutlery, has hypothesised the consequences of a new way of eating that excludes their use. In an experimental way, she has studied the sensorial, social and cultural effects of a meal with no plates or cutlery. http://www.contattoexperience.com/
Her approach is not totally unprecedented. Eating with hands, just like when we were children, triggers a series of interesting and healthy consequences. We get rid of inhibitions and social constraints; we taste food in an unusual way, through the sense of touch, which allows us to perceive food’s texture and temperature before bring it to the mouth. So it all focuses on senses and perception, allowing us to recover the primordial relationship between our hands and mouth. In a hypothetical tactile restaurant, the experience would inevitably give life to new, intimate gestures and relations between the cook and the eater, thus creating new gestures – challenging the existing ones – and a new vocabulary.
We also have Learner Experience Design (LXD). Instructional design is now approaching a similar transition. Most student consumers have yet to experience great learning design, but the commoditization of online learning is forcing colleges and universities to think differently about how they construct digital courses. Courseware is enabling the development of new modalities and pedagogical shifts. An abundance of data now enables instructional designers to decode learning patterns. As a result, we are witnessing the growth of a new field: Learner Experience Design. What exactly makes for great learning design, and how can instructional designers ensure they remain competitive in this new era of student-centric education?
Design-thinking principles drive “learner experience design.” Image Credit: iDesign
If you cannot open this gif, click here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uvnayau608bl212/lxd%20anim.gif?dl=0
We can’t really design experiences as a formal independent entity. However, we can design the conditions of an intended experience. A more elegant way of articulating this concept comes from Gill Wildman in her belief that “experience design is about creating opportunities”. This description resonates with me because it strips away notions of process, methods, or tools and instead focuses on the paradigmatic shift of what design might mean in an experience economy. We are left with a grander notion of what design can enable, beyond an interface or physical product, and into a space of possibility that lets human behavior flourish. We create opportunities to connect, to imagine, to communicate, to learn, to delight.
“Experience design is about creating opportunities”
The focus of experience design then is not about the things we make (design as artifice) it’s about the mediation of these things and how they shape our experiences (Hassenzahl).
Phenomenology is a discipline that “studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view” (Smith). A phenomenological approach is valuable in the context of experience design because it provides a way of looking at design that “explores our physical and social environments, including the things and instruments in such environments [that] matter for experience…” (Gallagher, 2016). Instead of trying to look at experiences themselves, phenomenology helps us look at the conditions that create the experience. “At its core, phenomenology is concerned with how we make sense of the world… [and] we use design to interpret the world” (Thomas Wendt’s book “Design for Dasein”).
In order to design for a particular experience, we must know what that experience is like. This is where primary, qualitative research comes into practice as a foundation for experience design. As a surface level example, designers will use a particular product or website when they need to redesign it in order to understand what that experience is like. As an example, we can say that we’d like to research the experience of going to the cinema. A unit can be defined by the moment the customer enters the cinema and when they leave, but we can’t begin to study the travel to and fro the cinema and their house. However, digital technology no longer constrains this unity by time and space. A customer might purchase their tickets online at home, or look up the show times printed in the newspaper. After the movie they might write a review of the movie itself. While this isn’t connected with the immediate experience at the cinema, it can be thought of as a sub-unit of experience.
Experience can therefore be many things. To paraphrase Hassenzahl, ‘experience’ can be a structure, reflection, or even something shared and subjective. Hassenzahl’s concept of experience suggests 4 key properties, highlighting its diverse meaning.
Rebecca Werres
So next time you’re designing that interface, or the ergonomics of a new product, think about the other experiences surrounding that product / service you’re designing, and you’ll find that by considering them you’re designing something of greater value to more people other than just your customer. (Click here to read more about Collective Experience)
A more wholesome example would be the redesign of a hospital visit. To design a patient experience, we must visit and spend time in the hospital. We need to have an embodied experience in this particular context (Data, Context and Interaction mental model) to understand what this experience is like in order to discuss it on a level that is akin to a real patient. It’s easy to know the context of a hospital from assumed or past knowledge, but it’s imperative to know the materiality and dimensions of the experience in a particular context. Embodiment as a designer helps to answer questions like: How does time play out? What are the sights, sounds, smells of the place? What is it like to interact with the different touch points of the current experience? What’s the relationship to other people in this context? These are all questions that must be felt and experienced to be understood. Not only will you gain the knowledge to understand the materials and dimensions of the experience, but you can also generate empathy with the people that actually live this experience.
However, as designers we must recognize that there are limits to embodiment. We can only go so deep into what we can know. We can attempt to recreate the same journey a patient might go through, but we can never truly understand the same experiences. This is one of the reasons a designer is never truly an end user. If we’ve never had to undergo dialysis we can’t really understand the effect of having this treatment for four hours a day, three times a week. It’s important to remember that these are not just touch-points to be designed, but a lived reality that deeply impacts a person’s life. This is why embodiment as understanding, whilst important, is not enough. Designing with and not just for the people of these experiences is crucial to the experience design process. Without getting into the details of co-design and co-creation, these methodologies and ways of working should therefore be placed at the centre in our ways of working.
The hospital system does not consider the user any more as a generic and standardized customer, but it takes conscience of the psychological factors able to condition and affect positively not only on the lasting, but also the recovery itself. The patient is not deprived any more of his characteristics, identity and culture, and it is considered lending attention to his necessities, given both by the subjective characteristics of the individual, and by the illness itself.
More precisely, the background is focussed on the patient of the department of oculistics, what following an accident or illness, and consequent operation, temporarily has a severe sight loss, or not seeing, but also to the patient whose sight is degenerating without possibility of recovery.