Handling Communication and Collaboration Challenges as a Design Leader

As you progress in your journey towards becoming a design leader, you will face nexus points where the way forward is unclear. At moments like this, the Assess, Plan, Act framework assists in moving through these challenges. It is useful when facing a number of difficult situations:

1. Problems without obvious solutions
2. Confusion around direction forward
3. Questions around whether the team is caught up chasing a local maximum
4. Uninspiring solutions to the problems
5. Significant information uncovered around the domain or the users

The Assess, Plan, Act structure is straightforward and similar to the OODA loop fighter pilots use to assess their situation:

1. Assess Look at the current situation, the people involved, and the desired outcome. Seek to separate the signal from the noise. Observe your surroundings and orient towards reality.
2. Plan See the situation as it really is and identify barriers. Ask, “What am I assuming,” then look past the assumption. Invite participation from stakeholders and practice partnership with them. Make the decision on what to pursue.
3. Act Decide what needs to happen first and set a date to act on it.

We’ll examine these stages in more detail below.

Assess

Your job here is to clarify the problem and the environment. What are you observing? What aspects of the challenge are a distraction? What is the core of the issue? There are a couple of excellent techniques to help you nail this down. The first is called Vu Ja De. Think of it like the opposite of Déjà Vu—instead of feeling a sense of familiarity of a place you’ve never been, you see an everyday experience as strange. Carolyn Hou suggests diagnosing issues starting with the Business Model Canvas, an image of the business as a system with inflows and outflows. Doing this exercise together with the rest of the team builds a valuable shared understanding of where possible issues exist.

Besides clarifying the problem, it is also important to identify how you may be contributing to the issue you’re seeing. Kerry Patterson et. Al. in their book Crucial Confrontations (2005) call this “Work on me first.” Particularly, we need to look out for the Fundamental Attribution Error, which they describe as “Assuming that others do contrary things because it’s in their makeup or they actually enjoy doing them and then ignoring any other potential motivational forces is a mistake.” (Patterson, 2005, p. 60). Correcting for this error helps us orient towards reality and develop better decisions. 

Design cuts across many boundaries, therefore we also need to identify who we’re working with. The following questions will start you towards discovering their perspective.

1. Who is involved?
2. What are they concerned with?
3. What does progress look like to them?
4. What are they worried about?
5. What do they listen for in meetings?
6. Where does their motivation come from?

Don’t leave out your own cross-functional team, the product manager, engineering leads, and business stakeholders will have a perspective on the issue too. Knowing what everyone cares about allows us to assess the desired outcomes. 

Don’t forget about the people side of the equation. Patterson (2005) suggests asking what you want and what you don’t want out of a potential discussion. This must be factored in to your approach to the problem.

Switching to addressing the content of the problem, consider who is involved and what matters to them. The OODA loop calls this “orient,” where you look for how things really are, correcting for your assumptions. Begin to define what success looks like and how to measure it. You may be able to begin making guesses about ways to measure success, at least from the business’ point of view. One way to engage the team and stakeholders is through future visioning techniques such as “Time Machine to the Future.” In this exercise, lead the team through envisioning the product as shipped and fully formed. There are numerous variations on this—drawing a magazine cover from the future, outlining a TV ad, or writing a news story about the product’s success. These methods, together with information from your user & domain analysis, set up what Jared Spool calls a “flag in the sand,” a near future vision for the product. These shared visions are critical to formulate a good strategy to move forward to Plan and Act.

Plan

The next step is to construct a plan to address the situation—to make a decision of how to tackle the problem. Consider these diagnostic questions to guide your efforts.

1. What does success look like?
2. Based on your assessment (Observing and Orienting), what gaps do you need to address?
3. How can you think strategically? Make options clear? Ensure you’re sharing the critical problem? Helping your partners succeed?
4. What materials do you need to move forward?
5. What is the first step?

You may find that this gives you a large goal to aim for, but to be useful, you need to break it down into smaller chunks of you can find the next right step. Think of this like making a hypothesis of what you think might happen. If there are several options, choose one, but don’t keep choosing the same one.

Act

Once you have decided, it is time to take the first step. Make a commitment to take the first action and get after it. Taking action is not the end, as you circle back around to Assess, updating for what you learn after you act. Set a date and commit to taking action.

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Concluding Thoughts on Design Leadership

This series invited you to consider how to break free from Assignments and chart your own path forward for the good of others, the users, and yourself. We’ve covered:

• Thinking strategically – Influence is not dependent on positional hierarchy. Design leaders draw influence by pointing first to the why behind a product or service.
• Make it Clear – Leveraging research, design leaders know the design vision. They then marshal forces to clear the cruft out of the way and deliver a product users love.
• Discover the Critical Problems –  Design leaders know what problems are worth chasing and which are not because they’ve done the work of research. Knowing the users points to the types of problems they need to solve most.
• Help your partners be valuable – A design leader seeks opportunities to lift up their partners. Applying the UX mirror to themselves, they utilize the same skillset they use with users with stakeholders to understand their needs, frustrations, behaviors, and goals.

Throughout  the series, I’ve used the idea of The Assignment to represent a pattern many designers follow by default. Design maturity comes when you no longer wait to be told what to do and start to discover what you should do. You have the tools as a designer to play an important role in the organization. Will you commit to taking the first step?

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References

Hou, C. (2021, October 20). Business Thinking for UXers [Conference]. https://rosenfeldmedia.com/courses/business-thinking-for-uxers/

Parrish, S. (2021, March 15). The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions. Farnam Street. https://fs.blog/ooda-loop/

Patterson, K. (Ed.). (2005). Crucial confrontations: Tools for resolving broken promises, violated expectations, and bad behavior. McGraw-Hill.

Shimmell, K., Hayes, J., & Curkowicz, K. (2014, March 27). Design Leadership.

One final note

A special thanks to my Dad, Don Baker, for editing my early drafts of this series. He is the one who first suggested I had too much content for one post and then helped me further whittle it all down. Thanks Dad!

You can read his weekly writing on life at LifeByTheBook.faith.