Suddenly, we’re surrounded. From internet-enabled speakers to just-in-time text messages to AI-powered bots of all flavors, we have daily interactions through conversational user interactions. And as with any technology in its infancy, many of those interactions are flawed. They turn up at the wrong time, offer the wrong tone, don’t understand what we’re asking for, or don’t solve our problem as intended. How do you begin to create well-designed conversational interactions that take into account both the intent and context?
One source to turn to is Erika Hall’s Conversational Design, which introduces the thought-provoking issues and practical considerations inherent to conversational interactions. The book covers principles and practice, the role of personality, and how organizations can plan for getting it done. It’s the last of these that fascinates me: how can organizations deliver the content capability for these new forms? All these interactions require new kinds of content, and organizations need first to create a culture and practice of strong verbal design as part of an overall content strategy to fuel these interactions.
Three preliminary takeaways:
New interactions require deep understanding of customer behavior, learned through user testing. Find ways for the content team to embed with product to participate in that questioning and learning process. What are the edge cases to bear in mind? How do you develop personas that move beyond task to develop empathy for user context? Are there overall content lessons learned that may be applicable to other interfaces, like social? How is that information shared?
Ensure your organization has voice and tone guides appropriate for this new kind of interaction design. For example, there should be considerations for ways to marry words and imagery; a reasoned approach to pacing and pauses through artificial wait times; options for setting the tone of the customer’s response options correctly.
Hall points to the pitfalls of bland mimicry of other experiences — at worst you get your own voice hideously wrong, and at best, you sound like content created by committee. But that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook from looking outward: she suggests you collect voice samples. When you’re in the build process, bring together a cross-section of people to listen to the voice samples and evaluate. What’s working and what’s not?
It took us a couple of decades of the commercial web to move beyond the design team throwing PhotoShop documents over the transom to the developers, a practice that resulted in a lot of disconnects evident to users. With the rise of conversational interfaces across the web, we have the opportunity to bring teams together early on for a customer-first content strategy to support effective and engaging conversational interactions.
A wheel design to eliminate road ruts for American farmers. A new reseller model bringing internet access to villages in rural Mexico. A radar device that allows first responders and military to see through walls before entering a building. These are just a few of the pitches from teams competing in the Idaho Entrepreneurship Challenge held at Boise State College of Innovation & Design. 63 talented students on 24 teams from five Idaho colleges participated in the final round, and met up with judges with deep and varied experience in tech innovation and product leadership.
Students are natural idea generators. Exposed to new concepts, people, and settings, students are in a learning mindset and readily apply their minds to solving problems on campus, locally, and even globally. But how can campuses build on this natural inclination to help students take their ideas a step further? It takes work to create and nurture a culture that fosters student entrepreneurship, whether that’s toward commercial or social good. Reflecting on the entrepreneurship challenge in Boise, as well as my experience at Harvard University and Junior Achievement, I’ve observed consistent patterns — patterns that apply to corporate campuses as well as college ones.
Build on the learning mindset — not just the educational one. Students attending university have been focused on concrete, measurable outcomes: final grades and university acceptances. And these milestones matter. But as entrepreneurs, students will find out that most ideas fail, and that learning to fail quickly, adapt their approach based on these mistakes, and start again with improved information is critical. As one young mechanical engineer explained to me, “We know how not to build it one million times. And we’re getting closer each time.” To encourage this thinking, campuses are developing labs settings, like Harvard’s Innovation Labs, and bringing in professors of practice to offer applied guidance. Sometimes these initiatives come with credit hours or other academic benefit.
Organizations as diverse as Fidelity Investments and the New York Public Library are also adopting this tactic. While lean startup is a well-known principle in parts of the working world, to paraphrase William Gibson, this future is still not evenly distributed. Done right, a labs environment can provide a pathway to a new kind of learning. A critical part of this learning stems from transparency: organizations used to sweeping failed projects under the rug are now sharing them via processes like blameless post-mortems to capture lessons and encourage experimentation. Popular new books like Radical Candor and Principles emphasize the benefits of rapid and transparent feedback as a driver of a growth mindset.
Green Mind demo. Photo credit Madison Park, Boise State University
Encourage entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to start with what they know. The media covers innovation in selective ways: the latest dating app is going to get a lot more airtime than a transformative technology in the construction industry. But don’t let that drive you to chase the next media-friendly tool and dismiss the power of what you know. Pitches that stood out in Boise included phrases like, “Because I grew up on a farm, I know that …” and “As a father of six children under twelve, I identified the need …”
How can this extend to your organization? Mine employee creativity with hackathons or challenges addressing topics specific to your organization or industry. And don’t let top-down lead: work with employees tackling these problems head on to generate that list of topics.
Enable and reward cross-disciplinary learning. Media interest in formalized online learning, or “peak MOOC,” occurred in about 2012, and with it the mandate that everyone must learn to code. Today, the interpretation is more nuanced: Quantitative literacy and understanding how software works are vital skills, but not everyone will become a software developer. There’s a renewed appreciation for the liberal arts, especially now as we are confronted by the repercussions of our rapid transformation to a tech-enabled society. On campuses, academic leaders are facilitating multidisciplinary study through curriculum reform, and entrepreneurship centers are making a concerted effort to bring together students across disciplines to solve problems.
Similarly, training across an organization can encourage horizontal thinking — employees prepared to tackle challenges in new ways, and think across silos. A product leadership approach can unite teams with different skill sets, limiting the Balkanization of disciplines like design and engineering. And organizations are increasingly supportive of all kinds of learning: a successful entrepreneur in the not-for-profit education industry once shared with me that when his organization was growing, it took him a while to understand why offering tuition reimbursement for French classes might matter to his SaaS business. In the end he concluded that these courses were well worth the investment — he reaped the reward of engaged employees in a more creative, learning mindset.
Set the stage for formal and informal mentor networks. Formal networks are offered by many career services departments: students should not overlook the ability to trade on alumni loyalty for a conversation. But in a hyper-networked world, formal programs should not prevent students from reaching out directly to someone they admire, whether that’s a recent grad or an established leader. As fellow judge Peter Boyce observed, there’s tremendous power in a carefully crafted message sent from an .edu email address — an otherwise overcommitted exec will sometimes make time for students.
Organizations can provide formal mentor pairings or brown-bag lunches, and reverse-mentoring programs around digital capabilities encourage bi-directional learning. But there’s also benefit in teaching employees how to build their informal networks, to reach out beyond organizational walls to experts and colleagues within and beyond their industry.
Lumineye demo. Photo credit: Madison Park, Boise State University
Recognize that entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. We all know what a smart tech entrepreneur looks like, right? Hollywood and innumerable stock art images have taught us that it’s a young white guy in a hoodie, usually writing an inscrutable formula on a piece of glass. Great ideas don’t discriminate, so encourage others who may be dissuaded from the conversation based on that image to up your organization’s innovation IQ. In an academic or a workplace setting, providing coaching on how to tell your story about your idea is invaluable. I’ve seen both pull and push initiatives work: for the former, providing data-driven evidence on the performance of diverse teams; for the latter, consider what your organization’s version of an inclusion rider might be.
Gordon Jones, the dean of the Boise State College of Innovation & Design and founding managing director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, convened the Idaho entrepreneurship challenge. Several times, Jones referenced “blue turf thinking” — a term associated with the creativity of the Boise State athletics department, home of the famous blue turf. I’d argue that the term is also useful in framing innovation efforts more broadly: successful innovation is about both thinking different and staying true to your roots.
We’re in an environment where we all need to keep learning — agility and adaptation are the critical skills needed for 21st century knowledge workers. As education expands from episodic and location-based to lifelong and virtual, we need to value both sustained scholarship and lean learning approaches. Learning cultures enabling creative execution through transparency and cross-boundary thinking are the new competitive advantage.
Failure in the workplace can take many shapes. The budget cycle ended, and your prized initiative was the only one on the chopping block. Or the client called and abruptly cancelled your agency’s long-term contract. Maybe the star employee you recruited into your company turned out to be less than stellar, and you participated in a string of HR discussions culminating in termination. In any of these cases and many more, you experienced a demoralizing, public failure.
First of all, congratulations! If every single one of your projects succeeded, it would mean you were coasting. Failing once in a while is a good sign. While failure can certainly come from inattention or poor decision-making, it often is associated with experimentation and innovation. No one seeks out the sting of a failure and its repercussions, but smart professionals embrace failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.
Loic Tallon, Chief Digital Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, makes a compelling case that digital is a horizontal function — a collective responsibility that transcends the work of any single, dedicated department. While a digital department can serve a purpose — as umbrella or at times a bunker for those charged with stewarding net new digital projects or institution-wide initiatives — the responsibility for digital transformation is shared with leadership and the many strategic and operational departments. My work in educational and cultural institutions puts me in violent agreement with these observations; the more digital can be shrugged off or delegated to a single team, the less success the enterprise will have with genuine transformation.
Loic refers to the Drucker quote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” which I interpret as all the fancy PowerPoint decks in the world won’t save you if you’ve failed to bring the lifeblood of an institution — its people — along in a substantive and not superficial way. In my experience, the biggest misstep institutions make while embarking on digital transformation is excessive focus on technology. Choosing the right platform and application stack is important, but far more initiatives have failed from underinvestment in people. And that’s not recruiting in digital rockstars or social media gurus — instead, it’s equipping people in your own organization everywhere from procurement to fundraising. Digital transformation is not an obvious or overnight journey; it requires significant investment in education for people at every level. And creating a cultural expectation of constant learning is a practice that will serve not only the institution but all its staff well.
Secondly, the role of leadership can’t be overstated. Explicit and implicit support for digital initiatives has to be signaled, and best way to do this is optimizing for a return on failure. Any organization claiming a 100% digital initiative success rate is either a operating from a playbook a decade behind or burying the bodies. Leadership that encourages smart experimentation and embraces “fail forward” thinking will show the organization both their determination and their support. The resulting attitudinal shift will end up being as or more important as the enterprise obsession with formulating the right org chart.
Finally, I’d add a sixth question for all cultural organizations to ask as they consider how to move forward with digital: how will engagement with external constituents continuously inform strategy? We live in an era of declining trust in all institutions, including higher education and the cultural sector. What are the ways institutions will empower employees to engage externally substantively and broadly? What quantitative and qualitative mechanisms can be put in place to derive insights in to inform progress?
The challenges for facilitating true digital advancement across an educational or cultural institution are enormous, and Loic’s thoughtful analysis identifies seminal issues to be tackled along the way. As these institutions fight for relevance in an attention economy against a backdrop of an increasingly distrustful environment, taking digital horizontal is a C-suite imperative.
Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick
“Work with a mentor” is right up there with “maximize your 401K contributions” and “no more than one drink at the office holiday party” on the list of common advice given to young professionals at the beginning of their careers. Harder to find are answers to questions such as, What is the best way to build a mentor relationship? How can you make the most of your interactions? And how can you sustain a meaningful connection over time?
But I’ve found that it’s the mentees who consider these questions who make the most of a mentoring relationship. Mentorship functions best as a project that two people work on together, rather than a lecture series for which only the mentor is responsible.
Digital transformation is challenging — and there are many “red herring” candidates for the toughest. Technology is tough — choosing the right approaches and platforms, and then implementing these intelligently. Talent is hard to come by — the necessary skills seems to be in short supply, and new talent brought in needs to complement and enhance existing institutional knowledge. But the real challenge is creating sustained cultural change: assembling and leading the right teams with the right mindset that work to build bridges within and beyond and organization, to implement successful transformative rather than incremental programs, and to disseminate learning and practice across the enterprise. In the end, it’s all about culture.
Is Snapchat’s somewhat impenetrable experience design a feature and not a bug? Josh Elman explains the difference between intuitive design and shareable design. The latter reflects the deeply social nature of how humans learn, and capitalizes on people’s desires to learn and to teach.
Just when I finally mastered NYC’s Whole Foods color-coded checkout lines, Amazon Go opened in Seattle: a new store with no checkout, no lines, and a lot of technology. There will be missteps on the way to brick and mortar, but its success with seamless Alexa makes me think this thing has legs. [video]
Consumed: Way too much prosciutto and delicious branzino (which is Spanish either for European seabass or 40 bucks an entree) at Regional.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Sign up for a weekly email.
The Harvard Business Review launched a Slack bot to deliver insights from more than 200 best-practice articles, neatly chunked into do’s and don’ts (an editorial feat I don’t envy.) The bot will send you daily articles, and serves up related case and article links.
Google’s flight-searching tool is my go-to for delays and gates — I’ve had airlines notify me of a flight delay an hour into a wait on the tarmac. Google has now beefed up its travel tracking with flight price notifications, handy if you’re late for booking tickets for the holidays this year.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Sign up for a weekly email.
No one ever sits you down to teach you how to write an email, but they probably should. Here are three tips for writing effective emails — number three is my personal bête noire: propose something specific!
In an age of constant interruption, there is nothing more challenging or worthwhile than time management. Julie Zhou shares her tips, and advocates for at least six, three-hour chunks for designers and other makers to get work completed. I’d argue that managers need at least half that, and that we’re all responsible for changing culture to make it possible.
New enhancements to Google Photos now can turn them right side up, and make your moments into GIFs. It’s also banking on nostalgia with a “rediscovering your memories” feature.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Sign up for a weekly email.
Chatbots still have a long way to go, but Duolingo has identified a great application: bots for language learning. You might be embarrassed to try a new French word with a colleague, but a robot won’t judge. Not yet, anyway.
A recent release of the Facebook Messenger app has enabled end-to-end encryption, which is a fancy way of saying that the messages are indecipherable en route and only the communicating users can read them. Just update your app, create a new message and click on the word” Secret ” in the top, right-hand corner. Opting in for each message is onerous, but overall it’s a useful feature for users who send 1B messages/month via the iOS app alone.
Photographers, iPhone 7 users, and anyone interested in understanding how the computing power informs the camera in your pocket should read this.
Per the trope, all companies are now tech companies — so how do you attract top talent? McKinsey outlines some of roles you’ll need from agility coaches to experience designers, and shares effective tactics to bring them in. Could not agree more with the “anchor hire” principle, or the need to rethink recruiting far beyond the “post and pray” tactic of the digital job boards of the 1990s.
Weekend fun: Looking for a small, feel-good fix as the days grow shorter here in the northern hemisphere? This is rather nice. And FYI if you’re on my Christmas list, here’s what you are getting.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Sign up for a weekly email.
One source to turn to is Erika Hall’s Conversational Design, which introduces the thought-provoking issues and practical considerations inherent to conversational interactions. The book covers principles and practice, the role of personality, and how organizations can plan for getting it done. It’s the last of these that fascinates me: how can organizations deliver the content capability for these new forms? All these interactions require new kinds of content, and organizations need first to create a culture and practice of strong verbal design as part of an overall content strategy to fuel these interactions.
