Apparently I have a penchant for being ahead of the curve. It's not so much that I over-prepare for every impending catastrophe. It's more that I can see patterns forming and shift to meet them when they become clear or begin to shift.
While seeing patterns is a natural gift that not everyone has, anyone can get better at discovering them. It is a matter of continuous learning. Reading, listening to, or taking courses by the people who are doing the research and setting the best practices. Not being content with the status quo. Being curious about how to solve a problem. Gaining courage and confidence to try something new and being willing to fail. Recognizing that it is more risky to not change than to keep going.
This post is written in the midst of a worldwide pandemic of coronavirus (COVID-19) where people around the world are quarantined, self-isolating, and stepping up their handwashing. If we're honest, we all knew this was coming. It couldn't have been prevented, but we should have been more prepared than we seem to have been collectively.
And so we are completely disrupted. Either you are working more or working less. Most certainly you are working differently. Because you are forced to, not because you wanted to. When you get back to the new normal (because after this much disruption "normal" is going to look a lot different), take time to reflect on the lessons learned. Here are a few for my professional peers and colleagues in content strategy, UX /web/product design, information architecture, web/product development, and project/product management.
Lesson 1 - It's better to change before you have to
Change is hard. It is harder when it's forced upon you. In 2015 artificial intelligence (AI) was the purview of a few who were thinking about it narrowly. AI is mainstream in 2020, with most organizations thinking about how to harness it.
Gartner’s Hype Cycle graph showing “a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.” Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle
Take a look at Garner's 2019 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. Are you prepared for the things on the Innovation Trigger side of the slope of rising expectations?
- Decentralized web
- DigitalOps
- Knowledge Graphs
- Decentralized autonomous organizations
- Explainable AI
- Adaptive machine learning
The size of an organization does not matter. All of these things matter to all organizations. The scale to which they affect an organization varies. The thing that matters is that the world is moving on. No one can afford to keep doing things the way they've always been done.
A system of structured content is essential to meet the demands of the 21st century. And folks, we are already two decades in! If you aren't ahead, you're behind.
The shift to a system of components that can be mixed and matched is as much a mindset shift as it is operational. When everyone involved—from the executive level to the junior designers—is used to monolithic ecosystems, it means that everyone has to learn a new way of thinking and operating. People have to learn to keep the big picture in mind while occupying their place in it with finesse, constantly adjusting for the movements of the internal and external shifts that happen. That does not happen on its own. It takes leadership (and a different style of management) to make that change.
Systems thinking—breaking things down into their component parts to understand them—helps people and organizations make the shift. With this shift, your ecosystem is modular rather than monolithic. Changing one item doesn't mean rebuilding the entire system. It's a long and winding road to that place, but it's refreshing once you're there.
I imagine there are a lot of web teams who have had to scramble to figure out how to accommodate crisis messaging and content into their websites that were built to be maintained just as they were built. Meanwhile the teams that have design systems and structured content in place could adjust a few pieces of their puzzle, swap some in and take others out, to meet the current needs.
If you didn't need to update much about your content or interfaces, you need to be thinking about how to make changes now so that you are ready for your disruption. It's easier to do the work when you aren't under pressure.
Lesson 2 - Technology is way ahead of human's ability to harness it
We have more computing power than we need at this point. Computers (of all types) are no longer marketed as being "faster" like in previous decades. Few of us can tell the difference in processing speed anymore. Our data storage is ever increasing as we create more and more of it. But if we did a better job of deleting things we don't need or want, we would be good with what we've got. (A 1 terabyte capacity on a $300 laptop? Those 1995 floppy disks that held 1.44 megabytes are envious!)
Websites that were once painstakingly created by typing every single line of HTML and CSS every time they needed to be updated can now be updated with a few clicks and taps. If you have a question about how to do something, you go to any one of your devices, open a browser or app and type the question in and in less than a second, possible answers appear. Or maybe you just ask the question out loud and get an answer from a voice assistant! You don't have to go to the bookstore or library. You can follow (in many online places) people who are constantly doing research and trying new things. Most of them share their work freely. Listen to/learn from them!
Technology is more advanced than ever before. So let's not blame technology for our problems.
Lesson 3 - It's about the people
What is a problem is that there aren't enough people who have learned the lessons of the digital experience practice that has been around for well over two decades to create useful and usable interfaces for the technology.
The problem is people. Humans are notoriously hard-headed. We joke about our lizard or monkey brains. There's truth in those jokes. As much as we like to think we are rational creatures, our emotions often get the best of us. And so we stay stuck where we are—individually and collectively.
Now that we have had a big disruption, more people than ever before are ready to change the way things have always been done. We digital professionals are poised to help them.
If you work with or for organizations that have had to learn the hard way that they were not prepared for shifting the focus of the website or marketing campaigns, you are positioned to learn directly from that and apply new strategies to avoid those problems in the future.
If you are fortunate to have an organization that has mostly kept to business as usual, though maybe everyone working from home, this is the time to make plans to adapt before it's your turn to be on the front lines.
Whichever situation you find yourself in, be empathetic with those around you. Make safe spaces to talk about what needs to change—starting with the ways people have to behave differently. How can you put content operations or design operations in place to allow for continuity and flexibility during a crisis? Spell out your processes and the people who make them work. This will not be easy, but clear is kind. (Thanks Brené Brown!)
Set expectations for what is possible in design and development. Stop taking orders. Now more than ever business leaders need design and development leaders to work with them to make sure everything is synced up. Businesses who were able to make big shifts in how they operated during the pandemic surely already had strategies and systems in place that allowed them to make those shifts relatively easily. Those that did not are probably going out of business.
Since people like examples and case studies, find those. They already existed (some big ones: the initial HealthCare.gov rollout, Hertz, 2020 Iowa Caucus app) and more are sure to come. Scope matters. So does solving the right problem and having the proper resources. These are things design and development leaders need to insist upon if we are to avoid the next disruption.
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”