How can project-based teams and leaders within large organisations accelerate their work and value, to align with the pace of change in the external environment?

This article looks at the power of ‘making things’ to:

Drive faster and more informed decision-making by project sponsors
Accelerate discussion from conceptual to practical
Uncover the unknown-unknowns that can derail a project early

A designer thrown into the world of big business

Several years ago, luck and fate combined to propel me from working within a design and branding agency to working within an Innovation Team in a large Government organisation.

The agency environment had been fast-paced and highly focused on delivery. Good design firms focus on creating quickly to elicit responses, establishing what succeeds and fails by exposing concepts to user and client audiences.

In the first months of my transition I found myself engulfed in long, circular conversations, that involved people sharing opinions, with no guarantee that every other party either followed, or formed, the same understanding.

Secondly, these conversations were filled with assumptions, which informed decisions and project plans. Projects were designed with 12-month plans, taking 6 months to move towards a pilot and then, further time to run the pilot prior to any evaluation.

It could then lead to 8 months of work, only to discover fundamental flaws in the solution.

This struck me as risky.

The need to learn quickly

In a world that is ever-increasingly complex, filled with barriers to progress and driven by a relentless pace of change, it is essential that we identify and exploit ways to drive decisions and uncover unknown-unknowns quickly and efficiently, to provide any hope of delivering value.

There is a rapidly-growing disparity between the pace a large organisation can implement change-based projects and the pace of change in the external environment.

Customer expectations, technology and political environments can all change in the time between a project’s commencement and completion.

Secondly, the complexity of interdependencies and unforeseen obstacles is ever-increasing as our world, too, becomes more complex.

There is a need, in organisations, for projects to accelerate their validation, learnings and iteration to align with real-world needs.

There is a need to deliver value more quickly and reduce the ‘fat’ that often tends to come from ‘doing business with one’s self’ — found in traditional approaches to project design, management and engagement.

Not accelerating can ultimately lead to a point where the gap between progress and reality becomes too great and it loses relevance with its market.

This is obviously not a good thing.

Making things to help drive decisions

‘Building to learn’ is an approach embraced by Lean practitioners, to gain immediate feedback from customers to a new product or service, feature or business model.

My experience, working as a strategic designer within a large organisation, has shown how this approach can be used to navigate complexity, and provoke reactions and decisions, for people and teams working on change-based projects.

‘Building/making to learn’ and ‘building/making to provoke’ are approaches that teams working on change-based projects can utilise immediately, with low effort and with instant results.

Recently, in my team, we made the decision to start building things quickly, so that when we took a proposal or question to a stakeholder group we could speak to and share a tangible artefact. Everyone could visually ‘see’ our thoughts and were able to critique, question and discuss while referencing a real, tactile line in the sand.

We found discussion moved much more quickly from circular opinions, where everyone waited for their turn to share their own thoughts, on to constructive discussion, feedback and decisions.

The pace of progress was quite stunning.

A second, and equally valuable, outcome of taking tangible provocations into discussions was that their ability to quickly move from hypothetical, to real, possible change and impact, which forced stakeholders to consider the implications on their own area of work.

This resulted in our team uncovering a myriad of considerations, constraints, implications and complexities that were previously hidden from view.

These factors would have inevitably surfaced themselves at some stage of the project, however, would likely come much later, when it would be much more difficult to adapt.

Building things helped to rapidly progress from vague discussion to targeted and actionable feedback that could be responded to immediately.

These two benefits — faster, more informed decisions and discussion, and the early uncovering of hidden considerations and potential blockers, enable us to move from planning to action in days-weeks, rather than months.

Extrapolate this out over a portfolio of projects across a series of teams and this simple technique can unlock a lot of value.

What ‘things’ should you build? An example.

You may think that designing and making ‘things’ is beyond the reach of your capabilities, unless you possess or have access to those skillsets.

I strongly disagree.

The ‘things’ you build can be incredibly low in quality and fidelity, as long as they tangibly explain your proposition in a way that is easily understood.

For example, a recent project saw us proposing a completely new end-to-end process for our organisation’s frontline workers to interact with customers. It involved new technology, new procedures and several actors.

Rather than developing a prototype of the technical solution to showcase, we used free images sourced from Unsplash and simple, line-and-box (known as wireframe) mockups to create seven static slides showing the key moments in the proposed solution. This could be done completely using a program like Microsoft Powerpoint.

Example of our simple storyboard with images and voiceover script

To bring the story to life we then recorded a voiceover using the sound recorder built into our work laptop and, using iMovie (we are on Apple Macbook Pros), added the voiceover to our clicking through the slides.

It took less than one day to create and could be shared both during and after the meeting.

When we shared this simple storyboard with our stakeholders, immediately the discussion moved beyond trying to understand the concept to discussing the policy, legal, technical and operational considerations we must address.

We moved from concept understanding to considered direction, as well as unpacking previously unknown considerations in the time a more traditional approach would have taken just to hear each stakeholders opinion on why the project should or should not exist.

This is the pace progress must take in today’s world.

Other ideas for ‘making’ visualisation of concepts to aid discussion:

It’s not about being beautiful, it’s about communicating your idea visually, so that everyone can see what you mean and they don’t have to imagine or interpret it for themselves (which is where things can become lost in translation).

Draw an app ‘screen’ with a sharpie and take a photo of it, so you can open it up as an image and it looks like the app is on your phone

Print out a series of square boxes and sketch a storyboard with simple annotations to see a product/process/service in use with a ‘real person’
Buy an existing product that is similar to your idea and stick a new label on it
Use some sticky tape, paper, pipe cleaners and glue to create a simple ‘prototype’

Resources to help you start making things to accelerate your project

Read

‘Dark Matter and Trojan Horses’ by Dan Hill

Dan Hill, a strategic designer working with engineering firm Arup, wrote a rather deep essay on how he likes to make ‘trojan horses’ — little projects to unlock bigger ideas and eventually unearth and provoke large outcomes that would have been non-feasible if attacked straight up.

This is quite heavy reading, but worthwhile.

Watch

‘The Right It’ by Alberto Savoia

This entertaining 30-minute video talks about making things to evaluate new ideas and elicit your own data, in order to evaluate a concept’s validity. This describes the process relative to testing new products or services with customers. However, it is equally applicable to making for internal stakeholders.

Subscribe

‘Field Notes’ by Tilt_Shift

Tilt_Shift publishes a weekly newsletter that contains real experiences of practitioners testing this method, along with a myriad of contemporary ways of working for project-based teams, to drive new opportunities, or change.

Tools

Unsplash — free images

Fiverr — for voiceovers and quick graphic design work if you aren’t comfortable

Vyond — easy animation tool for process stories

Written by Cam Birrell
@CamBirrell

Why project managers and teams should become ‘makers’