I started thinking about context a few years ago during graduate studies when I kept reading and hearing things like “context matters” and “it depends on the context.” Of course it does. My own professional experience gave me a keen appreciation of context when working on technology design and adoption problems.

So ok. But exactly what do we mean by “context?” When you ask people to describe the context of some situation, they are clearly including some things while ignoring others. But how do we decide what to include or not include in “The Context” when you are looking at some situation? Whose definition of context are we using here?

So I did some reading and research on how people who think about context actually define it (which actually had a big influence on how I thought about my final graduate thesis work, and what I do and teach today). The result: We should appreciate “context” as a set of specific cues selected by a practitioner or researcher to analyze or understand a situation. Cues tend to fall in a few big buckets — social factors, physical factors (think architecture), time, desired outcomes, etc. But “selected” is the key here. It’s a hypothesis. A way of seeing. A way of creating a coherent story to explain some behavior or outcome. Change one or more of the selected cues and the context suddenly becomes different. (Think about time as one element in setting the context. We look at some organizational practice over a period of weeks. We look at that same practice over a 3-year period and now the context is changed).

I went down this context rabbit hole after listening to David Snowden’s talk this week at #change11 Change: Education, Learning and Technology MOOC. I also shared some thoughts in commentary to Jenny Mackness’s thoughtful blog posts about some of the more interesting bits Snowden shared during the talk, which emerge from his Cynefin framework and work in adapting complexity theory to improve decision making.

Anyone who has heard Snowden knows that he is as entertaining as he is innovative and thought provoking. And during the session he challenged us to question our belief that facilitation techniques can elicit a truly broad and diverse set of ideas. If you really want diversity of ideas you need a process — specifically a process that ritualizes dissent — rather than facilitation, which dampens dissent in favor of convergence.

I know I am oversimplifying the ideas discussed, but Snowden’s point put me in mind of a dialogue I heard at a panel discussion featuring expert practitioners from the design field. Someone in the audience asked the panel how they learned to ‘check their biases at the door’ when observing an environment in the early stages of some design project (trying to understand the context before coming up with potential solution design options). One panelist said they really didn’t/couldn’t check their biases – the solution was to make sure you had different-minded people on your team, doing the observation with you.

Now – that might be more of an interesting practice than a real process, but the idea (I think) is the same. Accept cognitive bias a part of the human condition and build some process work-around to deal with it in situations where you want diversity of ideas.

That lead to the comments/discussion on Mackness’ blog about context. Does the goal of ensuring ample dissent vary by context? For example: Are we talking about decision making, idea generation or some other outcome? (Different outcome goals create different contexts) Open networks or some other structure (my small-team of designers, for example)? And within the structure, what might be important underlying principles of the way we gather together (learner autonomy in MOOC’s, common professional practice in the case of designers)? Each of these questions – my view – is an example of trying to be more explicit about defining cues we look for to define context. Snowden’s Cynefin Framework could be viewed as another aspect of this context-defining: Are we talking about a complex or complicated environment? Chaotic or simple?

In the end, I’m confused. I am continually amazed by the subtleties that thoughtful practitioners pick up as cues that are very likely important to the situation being observed or analyzed — and in many cases, clearly important to the participants involved (my bias is to give higher weight to these). This capability is a really critical skill.

Perhaps what I’m landing on this. We need to agree on the attributes that help us define the context; and there we begin to have a shared framework for understanding. That practice should not change our efforts to continually consider new cues. But let’s define how we define context first.

At one point in his talk, Bates is discussing examples of technology use in academic settings.

“We see some instructors flipping the lectures. So they will record the lecture…and then ask the students to come in afterward. But that hasn’t really changed the model. What I would like to see is a rethinking of the curriculum so you work out very clearly why you need to be in front of the student and what students need to do on the campus that you count as really critical for their learning, and then design around that and do the rest online. That means thinking completely differently about it.”

This is exactly the idea behind the concept of gathering with purpose that I explored in an earlier post. And I am beginning to see the concept as key to driving change in the way we think about technology and learning. Why? One reason: It doesn’t drive an artificial wedge between “online” and face-to-face interactions. It simply forces us to think more deeply about what role each plays.

At the end of the week I had two blinding glimpses of the obvious.

If design is generating a lot of interest as a next next-thing, it is because design is about finding opportunities. It’s positive. Forward-moving. It’s the polar opposite of intractable group gridlock characterized by position-taking and turf-holding.

Spend any time at IDEO’s offices and with IDEO people and you feel the difference. Spend any time with DFA students and their advisors and it’s the same. They believe in their ability to see and find opportunity where others just see problems and gaps. And the thing is: They all understand that designing effective solutions is difficult, challenging work. But they also seem to understand that finding a forward-moving way out begins by hearing and seeing. IDEO’s Human Centered Design process begins with “hear” – a focus on really listening and observing the situation/context in which a challenge exists. Olson coined the phrase outsight during her CIW talk to describe the ability to find a new possibility – a path – in part by getting out in the world. Both IDEO’s “hear” and Olson’s “outsight” are to me rooted in making an authentic attempt to suspend judgment and bias and work very hard, first, to understand. What a concept.

My second blinding glimpse of the obvious relates to the title of this post. In touring IDEO’s offices, one of the things you are struck by is the very physical presence of ideas and insights. This is not just knowledge stored digitally. It’s physical. You work surrounded by ideas posted on walls – informally and formally.

One of IDEOs most interesting ways of expressing insights is via patterns. Here’s how IDEO describes patterns:

“When you’ve got many talented people working on many complex challenges at once, it’s often difficult for the vast amounts of knowledge generated to be shared in any meaningful or useful way.

PATTERNS is one of IDEO’s means to solve for that.

PATTERNS are how we capture and share some of the common insights we see bubbling up across projects, as well as out and about in the world. They are a foundation for intuition. A way to elevate insights to the level of cultural impact. And a way to tap into IDEO’s collective intelligence to do better work for our clients—even faster.” 

At the Chicago office, IDEO has a wall dedicated to one-page versions of patterns submitted by employees. Anyone who has tried to condense complex thinking into tightly designed one-pagers knows how difficult it can be – but also how it helps you think clearly about the challenge. Imagine a wall of these. Then add to that several walls of photographs depicting the exploratory stages of various projects. Large digital displays rotating photographs from IDEO offices worldwide, each intended to share some moment or insight that could create a serendipitous event.

I saw something very similar to this at another creative agency — Upshot — where you literally work among physical and digital displays of ideas and insights.

Now add to this the design process. You seek to understand (hear, outsight). You generate a lot of insights and ideas and use structured methods to capture, categorize and whittle them down into concepts that are feasible. You are connecting and collaborating with a broad group of stakeholders in this whole process. And you are doing it in a physical space where you are surrounded by knowledge and insight represented in physical and digital form. You create a prototype of your concept and learn from it. You share more insights and generate new knowledge. At the end of this whole process you’ve created something that did not exist previously.

That, to me, sounds like a vision for next-generation knowledge management.

Arrrgh. I hate that term.

And I’d argue it’s done more harm than good in the quest to get learning & development professionals to think more creatively and broadly about learning.

ALL learning is blended. It’s social, it requires applied practice and tapping into all sorts of forms of content. Why can’t we just stop this silly labeling nonsense and just declare that the entire organizational workplace is our learning environment – and that includes all the ‘blend’ of rich activities, connections and technologies that make up the workplace?

I’m done now. Thanks.

Several of my MSLOC colleagues were/are deeply involved in the startup of the program at Northwestern University and its subsequent expansion. Jeanne Olson writes eloquently about that growth in Design for America: Co-Creating with Tomorrow’s Designers (an article also published this week) in Core77. Sami Nerenberg, a designer and currently graduate student at MSLOC, is currently Director of Operations at DFA and has a huge hand in spreading the program to other universities (Cornell’s DFA activities were profiled by Fast Company). Other colleagues have been coaches and advisors, or in the case of alumni Katy Mess, were there in the very beginning making the vision real.

Olson’s Core77 piece offers a great look at the back story of how the program co-creates the learning environment with its students. And the result is not only real know-how about design – but incredible impact on the communities in which the DFA students operate. Anyone who is drawn to the idea that education should start and end with actual practice (doing the work of real practitioners) should study the design and growth of DFA. When students get this excited about their education, we need to pay attention.

Liz’s talk covers her thinking on how we can use design processes as a way to change people’s belief in their ability to innovate and create change. And not just any innovation and change — but how we address some of the more difficult challenges facing society (for example, the obesity epidemic).

In the the video, Liz makes the comment that when discussing social change issues, you often hear non-designers say things like “I don’t know how to solve that problem,” or “I don’t know where to start.” But rarely do you hear something like that from a designer. Designers seem to have a fearlessness (Gerber’s word) when confronted with challenges that might require them to experiment and fail before finding a solution. So how do we teach people to have the fearlessness that ultimately leads to innovation?

Gerber’s answer is a mastery experience — actually doing design for social change. And in her case it takes the form of Design for America, a program for undergraduates at Northwestern where cross-disciplinary teams of students collaborate with local community groups and non-profits to solve real problems.

There is a great moment in the video during which one of the DfA students relates his experience and the impact it has had on his “innovation self-efficacy.” I’ve had the opportunity to meet some of these students as they work on their projects and his story and insights are common across them all. It is easy to be affected not only by the enthusiasm, but the real results that are coming out of their efforts.

For me, the challenge of learning from design process is first learning how to turn off your natural inclination to jump to a solution. There is a real payoff in dedicated empathic observation, and in combining observation with smart data gathering and analysis, before you begin to brainstorm potential solutions. Challenge #2 is in learning from prototype. Again, it’s a skill to detach your emotions from a prototype design and learn from how your target population actually engages with the prototype before moving forward. It’s good to fail. You learn. And you learn to become fearless.

Photo Mazaltan Diver Sequence By Jennifer Williams from Hayward, USA (Mazatlan Diver Sequence) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

There is a lot of interesting activity going on in this space — especially interesting to those of us who believe that design process and methodologies provide a rich tool set to deal with the organic, ambiguous, complex nature of organizations. I’m not the only one who routinely uses a phase like “assume that you are always in prototype” or “live your life in beta.” It’s a mindset that is helpful in learning how to disengage from the idea that you can actually have a “solution” and reframe the challenge by learning how to be smart about experimenting, probing and adjusting.

Jeanne’s piece is a must-read because — professionally and academically — she bridges both worlds (design and organizational change). It is written for designers  but equally valuable in my mind to anyone interested in applying design methods to organizational change.

Image by Nationaal Archief via Flickr

Do the extreme makeover. That is where I am landing.

In the past few weeks I’ve had conversations with both for-profit organizations and nonprofits. The substance of the conversation is always around “getting more” out of training, or how the training organization can become a more integrated and valuable piece of the business.

And my point-of-view in these conversations is: Stop focusing on the training course. Focus on the workplace and actual work practices, then decide how – or if – a training course is a worthwhile activity.

A recent McKinsey Quarterly article (“Getting more from your training”) takes us part of the way there. (A sidebar comment here: Did I miss something? When did McKinsey start to become concerned about training organizations?). The authors make the case that getting more out of the $100B spent annually on training programs requires looking at what happens before and after the training events.

Before training:

• Help people want to learn
• Uncover harmful mindsets
• Get leaders on board

After training:

• Reinforce new skills
• Measure the impact

The examples the authors use to illustrate their points are actually pretty insightful. In explaining “harmful mindsets,” the authors point to a retailer that initiated training designed to improve the customer focus of its sales people. Participants completed the training successfully and passed certification tests. But customer feedback remained unsatisfactory.

Research uncovered two mindsets that were getting in the way of sales people changing their actual work practices. First, sales people firmly believed (incorrectly) that customers browsed in stores and then bought online — making any engagement with customers at the store a low-payoff activity. Second, sales people assessed customer potential unproductively by relying on age, gender and racial stereotypes.

After the retailer uncovered these mindsets, they retooled the training to include open discussion to address them directly and data to help expose them as myths. Sales practices changed and customer results improved significantly.

Examples cited by the authors to illustrate their other points are similar: Training program designers simply missed some important element of the workplace context.

And there’s the point. How does the training profession continue to miss those contextual elements – year after year? This is by no means a new issue. It has vexed the profession for years.

You can point to tools or methods or “new models” that might improve the performance of training organizations. (Anyone care to talk about how integrating social media and “training” will save the day?).

But I think the issue is more fundamental than that. Training organizations need to look in the mirror and admit they need an extreme makeover. As with any major change effort, you first need to declare the old way finished. Then go on the journey to create the new way.

That new way begins by focusing on developing a deep and nuanced understanding of workplace practices; hypothesizing how those practices impact performance; and designing solutions to improve performance that combine a suite of options that ranks “training programs” as a might-need rather than a must-have.

The first (shared by KM blogger Jack Vinson) is a thoughtful piece from John Bordeaux of Bordeaux Associates: On Change, or Why They Hate You. The second is a video link shared by Michelle Frisque, who I know as a graduate student in the Master’s Program in Learning & Organizational Change at Northwestern University. It’s an example of using design (and fun) to change people’s behaviors – in this case, encouraging people to take the stairs rather than an escalator.

Take a look at both. Ok: Now discuss.

This is a particularly relevant issue — in my view — for non-profits like The Talking Farm that operate in an environment characterized by a rich landscape of other non-profits or public organizations working on the same fundamental issue. In this case, it’s the desire to impact the local food system. Dozens of organizations in the Chicago area are addressing food system issues, albeit in different communities and with slightly different approaches or goals. Layer on top of that national organizations such as Slow Food USA or the National Farm-to-School Network, Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, etc. and you begin to see a network of abundant resources.

So is the question really about scaling to achieve greater impact, or being more strategic about learning how to collaborate within a large network of resources? And if it’s the latter, what does that look like, exactly?

I am beginning to think that “what it looks like” is something like strategic hypothesis testing and prototyping. It seems beneficial to first be clear about an operating hypothesis: “Locating a 3-acre, production farm within an urban setting provides a leverage point for food-system issue awareness, education, jobs and new venture development.” But determining how best to collaborate with the larger network of resources — to drive the greatest social impact — also takes a bit of hypothesizing (“what is our most impactful role among the network of resources?”) and then prototyping some thoughtful collaborations with like-minded organizations. Hypothesize > prototype > learn > adapt.

We’ll see if this applies to The Talking Farm’s strategic planning over the next several weeks.

For two excellent pieces exploring the issues around scale and impact for non-profits, I recommend:

Driving Change: It’s not just about size by Sally Osberg, President and CEO of Skoll Foundation (published in the McKinsey & Co. blog What Matters.)

Scaling Impact: How to get 100x the results with 2x the organization by Jeffrey Bradach, cofounder and managing partner of the Bridgespan Group (published online in the Stanford Social Innovation Review)