Breathe Water - Blog

A Closer Look at Design Thinking

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 17:00:23 GMT

Last week, I wrote about my experiences with Design Thinking and my belief in the untapped potential to bring breakthrough solutions to small businesses, non-profits, and local government projects. The general notion of design as a way of thinking has evolved over several decades, with roots going back more than half a century.

I referred specifically to IBM Design Thinking because that's where I gained my exposure and experience. It was also noteworthy because of recent IBM announcements to share the IBM Design Thinking framework with the world. This talk by IBM design principal Doug Powell of IBM elaborates on some of the basics I shared last week:

IBM's is one of many different frameworks for organizing Design Thinking activities and producing user-centered outcomes. The case study below from the "Good Kitchen" project in Denmark uses a slightly different framework, but the principles are the same. University of Virginia Darden Graduate School of Business professor Jeanne Liedtka explains how a Design Thinking focus on the problem and not preconceived solutions generated far more impactful results:

As you can see, these techniques are not just for mass-produced products or software. Both the principles and the practice can be scaled to problem solving in any walk of life. Contact us and let's find those breakthrough solutions for you.

Breakthrough Design Thinking: It's Working for IBM and It Can Work for You

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 20:00:46 GMT

They’re two words so mundane it’s difficult to grasp the significance. If “design” implies to you simply an activity in building something, then “Design Thinking” sounds like nothing special. My experience tells me otherwise.

Perhaps the challenge to convey breakthrough potential is why we were schooled at IBM to always be mindful of the branding. We weren’t just practicing design thinking, we were applying IBM Design Thinking. We were taking proven practices from various disciplines and shaping them to work at the speed and scale of one of the world’s largest companies. It started in 2013 as an internal transformation targeting the core of the company’s culture and philosophy. Today, IBM is telling that story and sharing their framework with the world.

I founded Breathe Water with the dream of using techniques practiced in my corporate career to help small businesses, communities, and non-profits solve their weightiest problems and seize the biggest opportunities. By publishing the IBM Design Thinking framework, Big Blue is making it easier for believers like me to bring that experience to the world.

From the fall of 2014 until my retirement from IBM at the end of 2015, I was fortunate to be part of that first wave of fundamental change inside IBM. As Transformation Leader for an initiative reshaping how we serviced clients across our $3B/year North America Application Management Services business, I knew we needed Agile techniques to improve our time to value for new outsourcing clients. I was exposed to IBM Design Thinking by accident, while seeking internal consultants to help us with Agile.

Those of us leading the transformation recognized both the risk and opportunity in what we had undertaken. Agile might help us deliver incremental value faster and with less waste, but it wouldn’t radically change our ability to find the greatest opportunities and most sustainable ways to deliver that value.

With IBM Design Thinking, we were able to pull together a strong, cross-functional team and collaborate to identify the highest impact outcomes we could achieve. We defined these using the Design Thinking technique called Hills. We also identified key users and surfaced their greatest needs using techniques like Sponsor Users and Empathy Mapping. We deepened our insights by mapping out as-is and to-be scenarios, and we tested those beliefs constantly with Playbacks.

Outside of my professional career, I’ve been an activist and engaged volunteer in my community for over a decade. I’ve worked with local elected officials, citizen groups, and non-profit organizations to tackle difficult problems and embrace exciting opportunities.

Design Thinking is a powerful practice to dramatically enhance the ability of such groups to achieve meaningful, focused, sustainable change and to “restlessly reinvent” the world in which we live. With its focus on well-defined outcomes and empathy for end users as human beings, Design Thinking is a great recipe for gaining clarity about community needs. It also helps with synthesizing wants and needs across different constituencies. The basis in multi-disciplinary teams is a wonderful way to engage all segments of a community or business environment in getting to the heart of the matter and designing real solutions to the right problems. The endless loop of Observe/Reflect/Make is a blueprint for weaving those features into the fabric of how we operate.

I’m grateful to my former employer for sharing their story, this framework, and the key practices used. I’m also excited to work with clients eager to tap the potential. Just as IBM is proving Design Thinking works on the largest of scales, my community and non-profit experience tells me it can also scale to work for you. Drop me a line, and let’s talk!

This Mind Reading Exercise Will Have You Thinking Twice

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 22:08:30 GMT

At an Atlanta Regional Commission workshop this week, keynote speaker Simran Noor gave a demonstration that still has me thinking. It should make you think too.

Speaking about racial equity to a room of community planning professionals, the Center for Social Inclusion’s Vice President of Policy & Programs gave audience members a lesson in mind reading. I can teach you too, but let me prove it first by having you follow these steps:

Think of a number from 1 to 10.
Multiply that number by 9.
If the number is a 2-digit number, add the digits together.
Now subtract 5.
Determine which letter of the alphabet corresponds to the number you ended up with (example: 1=a, 2=b, 3=c, etc.).
Think of a country that starts with that letter.
Remember the last letter of the name of that country.
Think of the name of an animal that starts with that letter.
Remember the last letter in the name of that animal.
Think of the name of a fruit that starts with that letter.

If necessary, write it down as you go.

Now the mind reading…

Have you been feeding oranges to kangaroos in Denmark? If not, you answered different from ~98% of people. In our conference room, dozens of raised hands, shaking heads, and puzzled looks proved it.

Part of the trick is simple math: any number from 1-10 multiplied by 9 yields a result (09, 18, 27, etc.) whose digits sum to 9. Subtract 5 and you always get 4. So, everyone has “D” to start.

From there, the options expanded in theory. Yet, consistently, the vast majority of people make the same choices.

Denmark comes to mind over Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). Kangaroo hops up far more than kiwi, koala, kestrel, killdeer, Komodo dragon, kookaburra, kingsnake, katydid, etc. And orange is a foregone conclusion. Depending on what you count as an animal and a fruit, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of possible combinations. Yet, people arrive over and over at only one conclusion.

It was a perfect illustration for Noor’s point about preconceived notions and unconscious bias limiting thinking and restricting outcomes in a group, organization, or society -- especially as it relates to race. It also left me pondering the critical importance of encouraging divergent thinking at each step when analyzing any situation or deciding a course of action.

Race, gender, age, birthplace, religion, political affiliation, accent, dress, appearance, and so on… Each triggers at least some bias or predisposition in humans, no matter how much we train ourselves to expand our thinking. The effect is greatest when forced (or choosing) to go with the first thing that pops into our head.

What if I’d asked you to list all countries starting with your letter (D) and then select one? Or to identify all animals with names that begin with K before choosing? The outcomes would have been different and definitely more diverse.

It’s an important lesson to take to heart in our civic, professional, and personal lives. It's hard to "think outside the box" when we're totally unaware the box exists.

The next time someone asks you for a quick answer, think twice.

Image courtesy of bandrat at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Strategic or Tactical? Yes and Yes.

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 13:00:10 GMT

Enough teasing, let's finally talk about Tactical Urbanism, as I've been promising. Like the last two posts on Agile and showing vs. telling, this post shares effective ways to bring about change.

My intent is not to cover urbanism as a philosophy, but rather to show how well-chosen short-term (tactical) actions can help achieve long-term (strategic) objectives.

In this context, urbanism refers to a movement formalized in 1993 by the Congress for the New Urbanism. CNU describes itself as "the leading organization promoting walkable, mixed-use neighborhood development, sustainable communities and healthier living conditions."

The term "Tactical Urbanism" was coined in late 2010 when Mike Lydon and other planning professionals gathered in New Orleans for a CNU spinoff called NextGen. During the retreat, Lydon presented personal experiences and other stories about an emerging phenomenon -- communities staging low-cost, tactical interventions to promote and gain traction for long-term visions.

Following that collaboration, through the Streets Plan Collaborative, Lydon and his colleagues published a free, downloadable PDF book in early 2011 titled Tactical Urbanism Volume 1: Short Term Action || Long Term Change. After several online updates, the latest edition coauthored with Anthony Garcia is available now in print through Island Press and various retailers.

Tactical Urbanism is not a single method, but rather an accumulation of proven ideas and successful approaches from around the world. Yet, they all share a similar premise that top-down, centrally managed, large-scale transformation programs often fail to deliver. And many times, low-cost, bottoms-up, incremental actions can move the ball significantly forward.

One example is Open Streets, an event where communities temporarily close streets to automobile traffic, allowing people to use them for walking, bicycling, dancing, playing, and socializing. The idea was inspired in the mid 1970s by Bogota, Colombia's "Ciclovia" -- a weekly event going strong after more than 40 years. Each Sunday, 70+ miles of roadway are closed to car traffic, turning the streets over to an estimated two million people on bikes and/or foot.

In the United States, the Open Streets Project has identified more than 100 documented open streets events. At a low cost in a short amount of time, these festivals demonstrate on a large scale what we were trying to accomplish with the rail trail project mentioned in my last post. Open Streets events provide safe, accessible places for people to experience biking, walking, dancing, skateboarding, and all manner of fun, healthy outdoor recreation. They also prove to civic leaders the public demand for such spaces.

My hometown Atlanta holds several events each year in different neighborhoods under the banner Atlanta Streets Alive. In 2013, I wrote a column saying Let's Go Dancing In the Streets after my personal experiences biking down Atlanta's busiest thoroughfare -- Peachtree Street.

Other Tactical Urbanism interventions with this same spirit include:

PARK(ing) Day -- temporarily converting on-street parking into park-like spaces.
Intersection Repair -- using traffic cones and other temporary structures to show how road space could be reallocated for greater safety and access.
Build a Better Block -- where streets are temporarily transformed using food carts, pop-up cafes, tables, temporary bike lanes, and other low-cost items to demonstrate alternative designs for the space. (For a great example, read about the the Hampline on Broad Avenue in Memphis.)
Pavement to Plazas -- an intervention made famous on Memorial Day weekend 2009, when New York City transformed Times Square overnight into a make-shift pedestrian plaza free of cars. The proof of concept has since been made permanent.
Little Free Library -- a grassroots movement of the sharing economy, wherein private citizens create small boxes (usually decoratively painted) and fill them with used books and the motto "Take a Book, Return a Book."

These Tactical Urbanism interventions work because these are not just random events. To realize progress towards long-term objectives, these actions are targeted to create the right experiences to change hearts and minds and move a community together towards a now more tangible vision.

Regardless of your mission, Tactical Urbanism and its successes hold useful lessons for all of us. You can tell people what you're trying to do, and maybe a few will follow. But, show them, let them experience it, touch their hearts...

Now you're going somewhere!

Show More, Tell Less to Change the World (or Anything Else)

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 12:46:09 GMT

"I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do.
So I'll leave it up to you."
-- Alvin Lee & Ten Years After, 1971
"I'd Love to Change the World"

Perhaps you're not out to change the world, or maybe you are. But, no matter what the mission, every organization seeks change on some level -- be it improving a community, transforming a culture, or altering market perceptions. Regardless of scale or motive, experience shows:

     To change the world, change minds
     To change minds, change hearts
     To change hearts, change experiences

This dependency on experiences takes us back to something I mentioned at the end of my last post, which is "Tactical Urbanism." Authors and practitioners Mike Lydon & Anthony Garcia describe it as "neighborhood building and activation using short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions and policies." Think of it in the same vein as "seeing is believing" or "actions speak louder than words.:

In Tactical Urbanism, business methods like Agile, Lean Startup, and Continuous Improvement are changing the game in public policy and community activism. Likewise, the success communities are having with these methods can reshape how businesses and non-profits pursue objectives. But, before we delve deeper, let's revisit the fundamentals of change to reinforce why showing is so much better than telling.

Changing Minds

To alter a situation, you must change people's minds. That's why we live in a world of debating ideas and people working to argue others over to "their side." On difficult issues like race relations, climate science, gun control, gay marriage, and economic policy, we're barraged by arguments from many viewpoints. Yet, how many people really change their opinion through this reasoning? Very few.

Changing Hearts

To change minds, you must change hearts. Even with an advanced ability to reason, human decision making is governed by emotions. We accept this, but generally only to the extent we perceive it as lack of intellectual maturity in others. A temporary inconvenience to overcome -- with yet more reasoning.

But, as neurologist Antonio Damasio showed in his 1994 book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, the role of emotion in human reasoning is more hardwired than we realize. Damasio illustrates this using case studies of brain-damaged individuals who've lost connection between the rational and emotional parts of their brains. Without access to feelings, these individuals are unable to make even basic everyday decisions using only data.

Arguing with facts is pointless if your information conflicts with the emotional reaction in others. When fear, anxiety, anger, or suspicion are present, all data to the contrary is of little to no significance.

I learned this a few years ago trying to persuade my community to acquire an inactive railroad corridor to convert into a walking and biking trail.

Opponents were quick to fill newspapers and public meetings with allegations about crime, drug use, murder, rape, and "all manner of evil that man can think of" they claimed would accompany such an undertaking. I and others responded with mountains of data to counter those fears -- including testimonials from law enforcement, elected officials, and adjacent landowners along trails in other communities. But, our rational argument missed the mark by failing to address emotions already stirred.

When I look back through news accounts and opinion pieces from that time, even I'm struck by the in-your-face, visceral arguments against the trail. Our fact-filled, pro-trail arguments were simply no match for the intense emotions aroused against us.

We eventually wised up and came back to the emotions driving our desire to see a rail trail built. We refocused from combating fear mongering to emphasizing the positive emotional connection of excited young people and active families using our trails. We celebrated uplifting stories of people making healthy changes in their lives by getting outdoors and becoming physically active.

Changing Experiences

To tap into those good emotions, we had to bring people a different experience. Instead of fear and uncertainty, we needed them to see the smile on a child's face biking down a trail. We needed them to hear the laughter and feel the warmth of a father strolling with a young son perched on his shoulders while a mother walks alongside her daughter loosely holding hands.

In time, we were fortunate to get a different, shorter trail built in our community. It quickly became a place where anyone could experience such scenes any day of the year. And, that experience changed hearts and minds, keeping alive the potential for acquiring the rail corridor for a longer trail.

Too Much, Too Late?

But, that shorter trail took 10 years to fund, design, and build. It almost didn't happen and was nearly too late to change community perception before the inactive rail line was abandoned and the opportunity lost forever. Something quicker and cheaper would have served our needs much better.

In my next post, I'll explain "Tactical Urbanism" -- a set of interventions community leaders and activists are using to create positive experiences faster and at a lower initial cost to gain traction for long-term change. It's an approach with relevance for any organization or cause.

Agile Finds Sweet Spot Between Strategic Vision and Tactical Execution

Wed, 15 Apr 2015 21:06:36 GMT

agile adjective ag·ile \ˈa-jəl, -ˌjī(-ə)l\

1 : marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace agile dancer>
2 : having a quick resourceful and adaptable character agile mind>

Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Image courtesy of Feelart at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

An essential element of the Breathe Water way is accepting change. But, mere acceptance is not enough. To thrive, we need methods to anticipate, plan for, and leverage change for positive, sustainable outcomes.

A sweet spot exists between the intensive, top-down planning of larger businesses and the bottoms-up, reactive execution of smaller grass-roots efforts. The former often produces plans that are grand in scope and detail, but too unwieldy to accomplish ends while they still matter. Yet, swift actions are of little use when not consistently focused on essential outcomes.

To excel, organizations must find that sweet spot. This is why we coach leaders to embrace change and focus on what matters most. We teach them to be agile.

This was the problem to be solved in 2001 when leading software development minds gathered to produce the Agile Software Development Manifesto -- a set of values and principles for delivering greater value through software in the face of ever-changing business needs.

"But, I'm not developing software," you might say. Yet, these same values, principles, and practices are being applied increasingly outside the technical realm to solve a variety of business problems. Organizations are embracing the underlying mindset as a way of clarifying critical outcomes, fostering collaboration, and improving speed to market.

Agile is an alternative to traditional "waterfall" methods which presume requirements can be exhaustively defined and implemented through meticulous designs and detailed, stepwise planning. With a history of disappointed stakeholders, costly rework, and chronic inability to achieve business benefits, persisting with a waterfall approach is the essence of what we mean by treading water. Project or program managers in a waterfall approach see change as something to be managed. They implement rigorous control around requirements and designs, allowing projects to complete on schedule -- but with results falling well short of business needs. Or, they accept an endless litany of new and changing requirements, while never managing to deliver an end product. In either case, intended outcomes are not achieved and stakeholders lose faith in the process and the players.

Agile is a Breathe Water approach, embracinging change as an integral part of the process. Agile methods rely on clearly establishing required business outcomes and empowering small teams of motivated individuals to collaborate and create the most critical capabilities through iteratively developed prototypes delivered in small increments. While planning is still essential, it is ongoing, collaborative, and attuned to evolving business needs.

There's a reason businesses are making Agile part of their fabric and not just a software method. In every facet of modern life, demands, expectations, and pace of change are accelerating. For businesses large and small, clients, suppliers, partners, shareholders, and employees demand more -- and they want it yesterday! It's a pressure everyone should recognize.

Consultant Mike Richardson called this stressful dynamic the "agility gap" in his 2011 talk at TEDxLaJolla, accurately describing the "chaos and crises" that "bubble up" when businesses are unable to keep pace with demand.

This phenomenon is not limited to businesses. Across our society, we see governments, communities, organizations, and individuals struggling to adapt. The popular debate of our time is Big Government vs. Big Business, but the real problem is not so much government or business -- it's Big. Or, at least Big Thinking, which cripples our ability to effectively produce results in a dynamic environment.

Agile thinking and practices are creeping into many facets of modern life. In the next post, we'll discuss one of these major trends -- Tactical Urbanism -- which is changing how city planners, policy makers, and citizens detect and respond to current and future community needs.

And You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 17:31:10 GMT

I've shared elsewhere how the "breathe water" phrase originated. But, the "breathe and thrive" response to change developed over a longer time and a diverse set of experiences. More than anything, my 33 years in the Information Technology (IT) field taught me to continuously reinvent myself.

It started from the beginning. Graduating in late 1981 with a journalism degree, I entered the job market in what would, until 2008, be called the "worst economic downturn since the Great Depression." With unemployment approaching 11%, I didn't have a buffet of opportunities to choose from.

Soon to be married, I also realized newspaper pay and working hours weren't aligned with the life my fiance and I imagined living. So, I set my sights searching for a technical writing assignment, which I finally landed in the Spring of 1982.

I knew nothing about computers, so I crammed furiously for my interview, reading any book I could find on Electronic Data Processing. (There was no World-Wide Web or Google!) It was enough to secure a job with NCR writing technical documentation and user manuals for software used by banks and other businesses to sort checks and other items.

It was to be the first of many reinventions, setting me on the path to a 33-year career in a field I knew nothing about until that moment of necessity.

Along the way, I went from documenting to creating software design specs. I began designing user interfaces and reports, learning just enough programming to prototype designs. My journey took me through stints deploying advanced technologies and methodologies for two large national banks and eventually to IBM, where I've spent the last 19 years in program leadership, service delivery, and consulting.

I bring up my journalism education and abrupt, unplanned pivot to IT because it taught me not to define myself by the job I'm doing, but rather by the capabilities I have -- and more importantly, can develop quickly -- to stay marketable and valued.

IT is a world of constant technical change -- from mainframes, to PCs, to graphical user interfaces, to client/server-networked systems, to the internet and world-wide web, mobile computing, smartphones, and now embedded computers, software, and networked services in just about anything you buy. Today's hot skill is tomorrow's commodity. Narrowly defining yourself in a deep technical specialty can pay off handsomely in the short run, but bubbles burst and adaptation can be difficult when you define yourself by a technical skill. I watched many COBOL programmers lose their way in the dot com boom of the late 90s. And, later, many of the java programmers who replaced them suffered a similar fate.

Technology is volatile enough. But, the most disruptive trend of my IT tenure has been global outsourcing and offshoring of jobs -- initially to India, but these days to just about everywhere. It started with support and help desk roles, but quickly escalated to programming, design, architecture, project and program management, and now everything end-to-end.

In my first job at NCR, we were 20 or so employees in a satellite operation in Atlanta, far-removed from Corporate Headquarters in Dayton. We worked in cubicles; our interactions were side-by-side at a desk or in a conference room. In my last major project for IBM, I managed a team of more than 270 people spread across 72 locations in 16 countries and 11 time zones.

Globally integrated software development and service delivery are huge advantages for business -- in terms of the labor cost savings and the ability to "follow the sun" with around-the-clock support. But, it's been extremely disruptive to many careers. I've seen talented, hardworking people walk out the door.

Globalization is the kind of sea change I'm talking about with Breathe Water. It started slowly enough in the 1990s, but has accelerated and will not be reversed. As a manager, I've had to coach and mentor employees whose work was moving half-way around the world. I've had to tell technical employees the skills they've honed are no longer in demand.

Being human, many employees wanted to cling to the past. If they were programmers, support analysts, or software designers, then that's what they wanted to keep doing. They felt frustrated and wronged by a system disregarding their skills. They took it personal.

I started talking with these employees, though, about the difference between treading water and breathing water. Clinging to work no longer in demand locally was treading water. The best of the best might find assignments in their preferred field for a while, but there was a randomness to even that. And, eventually, they would grow tired of the diminishing opportunities.

Instead, I encouraged them to imagine breathing water. In a globally distributed model, working across space and time was still a major challenge. These employees they had that experience. They were already collaborating in a team spread around the globe. They knew how to lead in that environment, they understood how to be sensitive to societal and cultural differences across countries, they had mentored, coached, and taught people on the other side of the globe to do this work.

Rather than fight globalization ( a tread water response), I encouraged them to embrace their unique set of skills that could make them them valued leaders and contributors helping businesses everywhere make the same journey. They had to let go of current notions of what made them valuable in order to thrive in a changing world.

Reinventing yourself isn't pretending to be someone you're not. It's about realizing when the most critical capabilities you have are different from what they used to be. It's about rethinking yourself and repackaging what you have to offer.

A would-be journalist became an IT leader. Analysts and programmers became globalization specialists.

That, my friends, is breathing water!