I return to paper and a pen. That usually lasts for a few months.

Then someone hands me a tricky problem to solve. Or I get excited about a new idea that requires me to think in a complex way.

Do you ever have these moments? When your mind mulls over and over one idea?

During those times, even if I start the thinking with a paper and pen, I often give the tablet a try.

Why Tablets Are Great For Complex Thinking

Don Norman, author of the Design of Everyday Things, uses the term ‘affordance’. An affordance refers to the properties of an object that make certain behaviours possible.

For example, a chair has an affordance that allows people to sit. The two loops of scissors have an affordance for fingers and a thumb so we can cut.

A tablet (via the combination of the device, a stylus and notetaking software) provide affordances for certain interactions that help with complex thinking.

4 Unique Interactions Not Possible With Pen & Paper

Consider this. On a tablet we can:

1. Move a drawing (eg. select and move a sketched object to change its order)
2. Scale a drawing (eg. make a single sketched object smaller or larger)
3. Zoom in/out (eg. we can zoom in to add further, finer detail to a sketched object)
4. Change art-board or paper (eg. if the size of digital paper we are sketching on is A4, we could enlarge the art-board to A3 or A2 , so more can be fit on the page)

This is exciting, not because of the technology itself, but because these interactions offer new possibilities to deepen our thinking compared with paper.

And any tool that helps our brains interact with and simplify complex information is worth knowing about.

Examples Of Activities Where This May Apply

Some activities suit this style of thinking better than others.

In my experience, any activity that requires most or all of the following is helped by a tablet:

• iterative thinking
• lots of information or data
• classification and re-classification of information
• relationships between objects and ideas
• a sense of sequence or flow
• sketchnoting and visual thinking

As examples, these activities benefit from thinking on a tablet:

• User Journeys: presenting many steps that a typical user takes in order to complete a task;
• Prioritizing, Categorizing & Coding: working with ideas or data that require coding, categorization and/or prioritization, as with this with a recent article on effective projects;
• Systems Maps: using a visual language to describe all the aspects and interactions of a complex system. Leyla Acaroglu teaches systems thinking and provides some useful tips on other tools to help with systems maps;
• Roadmaps: charting the course of delivery and execution plans, including detailed dependencies between tasks;
• Integrated Frameworks: bringing together diverse and seemingly separate themes and ideas into a coordinated framework (eg. Operating Models, Design Systems, Spotify’s Scaling Agile Framework)

Tablets do have downsides compared to paper. Most don’t give the sensation of friction when a pen moves across paper and the backlight of the screen can cause fatigue.

Overall, they present some unique possibilities that can enhance personal thinking and productivity.

What do you think? Consider sharing your thoughts by adding a comment below.

The video used in the header of this page can be viewed from the video page of this site.

The post How Tablets Can Accelerate Complex Thinking appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Whether this is a project at work, an initiative for a team, or a crusade in our personal lives….sometimes we nail it and sometimes we don’t. So what makes the difference between these outcomes?

Every initiative has a start and an end point. Between these two points are lots of smaller steps. We call these milestones, deliverables or tasks. They  are waypoints along our journey.

Sometimes these waypoints are needed. They take us closer to our destination. Other times they are miscalculations which lead us in the wrong direction, and we’re forced to go back to get on track again.

For many people, the way to get work done is a process of trial and error. We wait until we hit a waypoint, see what we can learn from it, and then either continue or trace-back to find our correct path. In doing so, we may learn along the way, but we lose time and expend effort. In the end this costs us.

Poorly executed pathways look like this.

Well executed pathways look like this.

The key question, is what makes the difference between these pathways?

3 Principles That Will Improve Any Initiative

Recently I met with a number of colleagues and asked them to describe what makes their work most effective.

One of these people manages very substantial, complex projects in a multinational company. Another is involved in a successful technology venture. The third leads an incredibly balanced personal life and has contributed greatly in their community.

From the conversation, we defined three overarching principles that make a world of difference.

These principles are:

1. Take advantage of knowledge of the past,
2. Use best practice in the present, and
3. Learn from the future before it happens.

The more we spoke about the various activities we do to support great work, the more we realised each activity fell under one of these principles.

Apply These Principles To Activities

For example, one of the members of the group had just completed advanced agile training. We defined training as a way to build knowledge from the past, because most training is based on some discipline that has gone before it. The training would help him to run his projects more effectively.

The friend who works in the scaling technology venture said she spends time focusing on what’s essential. This involves thinking about what’s a priority and what can wait until later. This is an example of sharpening practice in the present.

The third colleague asks a simple question of any initiative; ‘what will this work mean and for who?’. This is a way of learning from the future, because it forces them to cast their mind forward and define how the work will result in good in the community when the work is complete.

The conversation was so meaningful I summarized it in this drawing (which you can download here as a high resolution PDF. Feel free to use it in your work and with teams).

So, For Your Next Initiative, Ask These Questions

You can use these principles also. For your next endeavour, ask:

• How can I…..

a) use knowledge from the past…or

b) refine my practice in the present…or

c) learn from the future, before it happens…

• …to make the pathway for this work more successful, more efficient and more meaningful for myself, the people I’m working with, and those who finally benefit from the initiative.

You might also plan how much time you will spend considering these principles before, during and after the work.

These principles are dynamic. They can be accessed at any stage of an initiative, based upon your need at the time.

The goal is to do the work in an optimal way, avoiding headaches and misspent time.

I hope this article is useful. If so, please let me know your feedback directly or share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

—

Note: I also had many comments on this framework from a post on Linked In. Thanks to all those who gave their view.

The post The 2 Minute Cheat Sheet To Make Any Initiative More Effective appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

We look for a pattern in our improvement.

There are three patterns for high performance we might expect, but there is also a fourth pattern that, from my experience, we rarely think about. And it’s this last pattern that makes us feel frustrated, sometimes enough to give up our goal.

When we track our progress with a new development activity, ideally we look for small gains in our performance, every time we practice the activity.

The runner wants to see their time steadily decrease for a selected distance. The weightlifter aims to increase weight for each new session. The leader might want to see their team’s output increase over time.

It’s human nature to expect the measure to get better, whatever it may be –speed, time, weight, distance,  volume, quality. We feel a sense of achievement when we see these measures improving over time.

The four patterns I’m about to share with you are linear improvement, diminishing returns, accelerating gains and the zig-zag pattern.

These patterns won’t apply for a one-off task. But for habits or routines that we’re looking to embed into our regular practice to boost performance, knowing these patterns can mean the difference between success and failure.

Linear pattern for high performance

In linear progress, performance increases at a constant rate.

Let’s say you took on the task of writing, with the aim of writing 1,000 words a day, and increasing that amount by 10 words per day. On day one you would write 1,000 words. By the end of the first year of writing, you would write 4,640 words per day.

This is completely possible within a first year of writing. The performance trend would look something like this, progressing in a linear, even line.

Advice: in linear patterns, steady increases yield strong gains overtime. The key is to be patient, and allow the passage of time and small increases to reveal significant change.

Diminishing Returns pattern for high performance

In the second pattern, after an initial burst of gains, it becomes more difficult to realise increases in performance when compared with prior periods.

This is a pattern of diminishing returns – while we’re using the same amount of energy, we’re seeing smaller increases in the performance measure we’re tracking.

This occurs when we start to move closer toward a natural limit or threshold.

As an example, professional weight lifters who commence training see high gains in the initial phase of their training. As their strength increases, they lift higher and higher weights.

As they approach the limits of what their body can lift, they still realise gains through hard training, but these gains are likely to be smaller and smaller, requiring more and more effort to realise. The same is true in many sports.

Usain Bolt set the Olympic World Record for the 100m of 9.63 seconds in Jamaica in 2012. Before that, in 2008, he set a new record of 9.69 seconds, which beat Donovan Bailey’s previous time of 9.84 seconds in 1996.¹⁾

To realise these small gains required enormous effort, and that is the nature of competition in such sports, where fractions of a second mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Often when elite athletes reach these limits, they seek new knowledge, in order to break-through their limits. This is why many athletes seek new coaches at important times in their careers.

Advice: when we’re doing activities that result in diminishing returns, we need to do two things. The first is to realise smaller gains are not necessarily an outcome of our efforts. We need not be disappointed, because we’re reaching a threshold that is often not of our own making. The second is to seek new knowledge (whether that be in the form of a coach, our network, or self-learning) to move through this threshold.

Accelerating Gains pattern for high performance

Accelerating gains occur when the measure we’re tracking increases with every new day of practice. This is a pattern of rapid expansion and growth.

We often think of this type of gain in terms of the share market. A new stock may go through a burst in valuation, creating a steep rise in growth.

We don’t always think about it in terms of our personal development. But in life we can go through these periods.

When Steve Jobs rejoined as Apple CEO in 1997, the company had $1 billion of loses from the previous year. The next phase of growth he started for the company was one of accelerated growth.  This must have been an exhilarating time, but also one where everything moved with incredible speed, and where Jobs himself likely faced accelerated growth. ²⁾

We can see the same accelerating gains pattern in our own lives. If we read for thirty minutes every day for six months, likely we would go through a pattern of accelerated gains. Because it’s not just the new knowledge we’d acquire from each book, but the connections between this material, that would make the sum greater than the parts.

Warren Buffet told students at a Columbia Business School:

“Read 500 pages…every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” ³⁾

Advice: the struggle during accelerated growth may be to keep up with the pace of change, and also keep oneself steady and balanced. Questions like, “am I keeping up with this speed, how am I keeping myself steady with all that’s happening around me, am I focused on a ‘true north / mission / vision’ to guide myself through this pace” can be very helpful.

Zig Zag  pattern for high performance

While the three earlier patterns are well known to you and I, from my experience we think less about this final pattern.

The Zig Zag pattern for personal development involves a pathway of twists and turns and ups and downs that are far less predictable and stable to the earlier patterns.

This pattern can be observed in business as well as sports.

A collaboration of four researchers from Australia and Canada found the zig zag pattern when studying 256 athletes across 27 different sports, as they pursued pathways through amateur and professional sports.

The research uncovered that “more than half of the athletes (57.4%) descended from a higher junior competition to a lower senior competition level in order to eventually progress to Senior Elite competition.” ⁴⁾

34% all athletes in the study had at least one dip in their trajectory, with majority of this number experiencing two or more downturns in their trajectory.

This staggered pathway applied to both Olympians and non-Olympians. There were no significant differences between these groups, suggesting that the zig zag pattern of improvement is indiscriminate.

The study found that “trajectories of development are mostly characterised by non-linear patterns, with highly variable oscillations between and within the junior and senior competition levels.”

If we extend this thinking to our own personal development, we could expect to see a dip in performance, right before we see an uplift in improved performance.

The zig zag pattern is a classic rollercoaster of ups and downs, of breakdowns and breakthroughs.

As you’re reading this, you may remember a time when you have gone through a pattern that looked a lot like this. Perhaps you remember a particular moment, where you evaluated whether continue with the activity or do something else entirely.

In my own training, in a sport I’ve done for over ten years, I recall times where I saw little progress.

It would feel as though I was in a slump, like I’d hit a wall for my development in that area. It would be tough work emotionally and physically.

And then one week, everything would fall into place, and I would go through an accelerated path of growth.

At these times it was not unusual for other people I trained with to say, ‘something has changed in your training’, ‘things are just clicking for you at the moment’.

When we’re in the downward path of the zig-zag pattern, it can feel like our efforts are getting us nowhere and things are hard work.

This is where we need to rely on habits most of all. Because it’s by practicing regular activities that eventually the downward pattern will subside, and we’ll find ourselves again on an upward trend.

In fact, if there is one comfort in the zig-zag pattern, it’s that it feels very different to the other patterns.

Rather than a slowdown in the gains you are making, the zig zag patterns feels likes our performance is actually dropping off.

Those are the signals we’re in the zig-zag pattern. It’s also the signal that our mind is re-ordering what it knows, and is getting ready for the next big push.

Unfortunately often people become disillusioned during this stage. From entrepreneurs to athletes, when the zig-zag pattern feels tough, it’s tempting to stop the activity that causes us to feel like this.  But this is where persistence is actually most needed.

History is full of examples where people have experienced a zig-zag pattern and have continued anyway. They have been able to push through a temporary dip in performance, to then reach the next upward trend in gains.

In 1974, Spencer Silver invented a strange adhesive. He spent five years trying to interest colleagues in it. He could have easily given up. But he persisted. In 1977 he met Arthur Fry who gave him the idea to market the product as an adhesive for paper, and so Post It notes became a marketable product.

In 1936 a little-known writer created a book while working as a cartoonist for Judge Magazine. He shopped his book around and wracked up 27 rejection letters, before he bumped into a friend who encouraged him to submit one last time to Vanguard Press, who then went on to published his first book. That writer was Dr Seuss, who eventually published A Cat in The Hat in 1957 with great success.

Brian Acton was the software engineer that Facebook and Twitter rejected in 2009. Just five years later, Facebook bought the company he co-founded, What’s App, for $16 billion.⁵⁾

Imagine if these and many others had given up? What would the world be like without all of the outcomes which we have come to know and love, many of which resulted when people pushed through the zig zag pattern.

Advice: One thing that is incredibly important when we’re faced with a zig-zag pattern is to keep our enduring purpose front of mind. For us as individuals, this might be in the form of a goal or objective. For companies, mission and vision statements act as a reminder for what teams strive for in the face of adversity. It might be worth considering what makes a great mission statement and vision statement.

If you enjoyed this article, I would love to hear. Please consider leaving a comment below.

The post 4 Patterns For High Performance (And One Many People Miss Completely) appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

I’m sure you have asked yourself the question many times ‘what do I think is great leadership’?  There are so many examples of great leaders, but it’s sometimes harder to pick out the strong leadership principles we can adopt into our own life.

In this post, I share three personal perspectives on leadership principles that shifted the way I think, and may be helpful to you too.

Leadership As Consistent Practice

In a recent interview Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, spoke about how leadership is often observed over the long term, not the short term. He uses analogies to illustrate his point.

“When did you first know you loved your wife#8221;. The chances are it wasn’t at a specific moment, but instead it was felt overtime. Similarly, if we went to the gym and expect to see results instantly, we’d likely never go back.  Instead, physical fitness is seen over time, after a regular practice of attending.

In Sinek’s view, leadership is the same, “there’s nothing I can tell you, you have to do, so that people will trust you…it’s an accumulation of lots and lots of little things that any one by themselves is innocuous and useless….if you do it consistently and do it in combination with lots of other little things, like saying good morning to someone…..it’s those things that you do over and over and over; people will say ‘I love my job’.”

In this, Sinek suggests we challenge our assumptions about leadership.

Leadership is not something that is observable only in the moment, but rather can also be seen overtime, in the hundreds of small things that have occurred over an extended period. If we act in this way, leadership is not only about the highly visible and infrequent moment, it is about every moment, practiced on a consistent basis. It involves us assuming a perspective of continuous improvement and action.

Leadership As Interdependence & Cooperation

In his book the Culture Code, Daniel Coyle argues that the very best leaders are those who are comfortable questioning themselves and allowing others within their teams to do the same.

In so doing, leaders are able to better tap into the collective wisdom of teams, troubleshoot issues that they themselves do not see, and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

This shift involves establishing the right conditions where teams move away from an authority bias toward greater interdependence and cooperation. As leaders we cannot simply tell our teams to function like this, we have to provide them with the signals and environment that indicate it’s okay to do so.

Coyle provides plenty examples of this, from SEAL teams operating in high pressure situations, through to airline pilots who wrestle with highly unlikely and potentially catastrophic events, sharing split-second information and to avoid disaster.

In companies, we sometimes confuse the terms consensus with cooperation, where consensus is occasionally labelled as group thinking or agreement for the sake of it. What Coyle talks about is very different, where cooperation and interdependence is actually about people having the courage to say when something is wrong, based on their expertise and previous experiences. Creating bravery within our teams for people to speak their mind so we can pursue common goals is fundamentally what leadership is about, isn’t it?

This requires building leadership at all levels of a company, and starts with the leader establishing the conditions where this can occur and having the strength to be open to ideas. The impact of these subtle redefinitions and adjustments in leadership cannot be underestimated.

Leadership As Repeatable Rituals For Best Success

In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande documents how a simple checklist was rolled out to a pilot group of hospitals in both developed and underdeveloped nations, to curb the rising tide of millions of surgical complications that occur worldwide.

While the checklist was important, the way it was executed was equally so, often involving a simple principle that upturned the contemporary practice of many hospitals – if the pre-surgery checklist had not been satisfied, the nurse in charge could prevent the surgeon from proceeding with the operation.

This change inverts the unspoken hierarchy, allowing the person whose responsibility it is to sequence the checklist, to put patient-care above all else.  But beyond being a formulaic, process-driven step, it also reminds all people in the specific surgery that they are part of a team where each person is accountable, and that it is not their role to simply ‘follow the leader’.

The way the checklist is implemented creates a continuous practice of leadership as Simon Sinek suggests, and also fosters the interdependence and cooperation that Coyle observed in high performing teams.  Gawande’s checklist does many others things to reinforce these principles, such as also asking each person in the surgical team to introduce themselves to one another at the start of the case.

In this way the checklist is a guide for everyone, no matter what their role, to adhere to a regular pattern of what works and provides the very best outcomes. It brings together the collective intelligence of both experts and the data of thousands of earlier cases to deliver a repeatable pattern that increases the likelihood for success and reduces unnecessary risks.  The checklist also asks experts to pause their spontaneous perspective of what may be right, and to consider a tool that has been proven to work.

As a result of the checklist, in several years major complications in eight hospitals fell by 36 percent, infections halved and death from surgery fell by 47 percent.  Improvements weren’t just observed in developing nations, but also in some of the best hospitals in the world.

According to Gawande, “we have an opportunity, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavour. Even amongst the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place.”

Continuously Refining Our View Of Leadership

These examples remind us that great leadership requires us to continually refine our pre-conceptions about what leadership is and what it isn’t.

They serve as a call to take a broader and longer term view of leadership, that could include everything from how leaders work with teams through to ensuring a strong diversity of leadership styles in teams.

Elsewhere I’ve looked at wider concepts, such as resilience in leadership, how leaders can mentor others, questions leaders may ask of new staff, and also how mission and vision statements can help leaders define the purpose of companies; but these are just some directions, and I’m sure you will have many of your own.

As individuals you and I can also take simple steps to affect change in our own lives, by:

• reviewing our assumptions about what great leadership represents
• continually building upon our view of leadership through reflection and taking note of the times we have been in the presence of great leadership or exhibited strong leadership ourselves
• fostering diverse leadership styles within the organisations where we work, so that these may become exemplars, in which emerging talent may see themselves and plan for their future
• seek the views of others and create an environment where others can contribute their expertise without caution or fear

If you found this article useful or would like to share your view on leadership, please considering leaving a comment below.

The post 3 Expert Views On Leadership Principles That Changed My Own appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

But we don’t have to be frustrated by this question. I’m just happy when people ask.

That’s because there’s a bigger risk when we think that CX and UX are the same thing.

They are related, but they’re also very different.  And both are highly relevant to helping companies compete in the experience economy.

Unfortunately ‘digital’ as a specialisation has not been kind when it comes to buzz words. When we talk about things that sound the same – like User Interface and User Interaction and User Experience – it’s easy to see why our specialisation is confusing to many people. Likewise, it’s no wonder customer experience and user experience are often intertwined.

In this post I share my perspective on how CX and UX fit together. These principles are not set in stone….rather they’re intended as a guide to help clarify these concepts and avoid confusion.

How to Define Customer Experience and User Experience

Customer Experience is an umbrella concept encompassing all channels and all products and how people feel and place value on experiences (broad or narrow) with a brand.  It involves a broad concept of experience, where CX “encompasses the sum of all interactions between an organisation and a customer over the entire relationship”.¹

User Experience refers to a “person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service”.² The term became more widely used in the 90s but has origins that stem from the machine-age.

While User Experience can relate to physical products, it is most commonly aligned with computers and, even more recently, the development of interfaces that have emerged via websites, smartphones and mobile apps. As a result, User Experience is (in the majority) focused on digital experiences and is concerned with the question ‘how can the end user achieve their goals’.  It’s worth taking a look at Peter Morville’s seven perspectives of user experience that can help explore and validate product design.

The practice of User Experience supports a brand to design digital journeys that solve the “right problem for the end consumer in an efficient and enjoyable manner.”³

Okay, But What Are The Practical Distinctions?

If we stick with the definitions only, we risk missing the distinctions between CX and UX. So here I’ve considered CX and UX across a variety of dimensions.

Now these are generalisations, so please don’t be upset with me if these are not 100% accurate. Generalisations are useful, but they do not always capture the full reality. I recommend a soft focus when we consider these to help us spot the larger differences between CX and UX:

A Working Example….

While CX and UX can be pursued as seperate activities, better value is achieved when they’re used together.

Let’s consider an example.

Several years ago I worked with a team to design a new mobile app. We used CX to conduct high level data gathering about what might be important to people when using this future service, which interactions these customers performed frequently, how a new service could help them with these behaviours, whether they would use the new service when at home, the office or on the go. (For interest, Designing CX has some excellent resources for CX journey mapping.)

We also explored with customers whether they would place value in a mobile app and what features they would expect to see within an app. We used this information to develop some broad concepts of what the mobile app might do, and then explored through focus groups how these concepts could fit into peoples’ lives. I would consider all of this work to be Customer Experience.

When we shortlisted features for the app, we developed paper wireframes for the app’s main screens as well as some typical tasks we might expect users to do (like ‘register for an account’). We used these paper wireframes to run one-on-one user research sessions with customers, the input from which we used to refine our designs. From paper wireframes, we created an interactive prototype. Again we tested this with users, using the prototype to ask users to try a series of tasks.  We asked users to score how ‘usable’ they found the prototype. We also used these results and insights to refine the prototype further. Eventually we did a final round of testing before launch of the app. I would consider all of these activities User Experience.

Both CX and UX worked together in this project. Without CX we would not have known whether a mobile app would be useful to customers and how it would naturally fit into and complement their lives. Without User Experience, we may have built an app that was not fit-for-purpose and didn’t help customers to perform tasks as simply as possible.

This example shows how both CX and UX are discreet activities but add value to one another when used in combination.

I found Digitalgov‘s article on the differences between CX and UX particularly useful. However, I would adapt their model to show CX and UX overlapping (as is shown under the ‘Bingo!’ heading).  While both can operate together, both also have their own specific disciplines and practices, and thus can operate separately.  I suggest showing UX as a smaller discipline, to reflect it’s narrower focus when compared to CX.

Exceptions That Challenge CX and UX Conventions

These guidelines are not fixed in stone. While the insights above are useful, it’s important to point out some exceptions and emerging issues.

Recently I’ve been thinking about three examples that provoke new thinking.

#1 ChatBots:
According to Business Insider, the global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025.⁴ ChatBot’s go well beyond simple screen design, relying on content and conversation to respond to customers. While ChatBots occur within a digital experience, the ways in which ChatBots engage with users departs from many of the conventions of user experience.

#2 Voice (eg. Google Home)
The emergence of voice-enabled computing and artificial intelligence, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, also challenge the concept of user experience. Customers understand these services because they are an extension of services we have come to know that are primarily digital. For example, ordering an Amazon product on Alexa is an extension of ordering an Amazon product on their eCommerce website. However, over time these services will create completely new interactions and services. These products blend digital and physical interactions and require a larger concept of experience. While the specific task we seek these products to perform on our behalf might be considered User Experience, the study of how we use voice-enabled devices in the home and how these change our perception of convenience, are really questions for Customer Experience.

#3 Digital, Data and Push services
Services that blend digital experiences, with rich data and proactive notifications, will also stretch our perceptions of UX and CX. User experience is often concerned with solving a customer pain point or increasing customer delight. Yet, many of these new services focus on small increases of convenience. For example, when Google Now prompts you to try a different restaurant from the one you’ve eaten at last week, this may uncover a problem the user didn’t know they had (eg. the need for more variety / something novel). Whereas people used to either ask friends for recommendations of restaurants or turn toward review aggregation sites to discover new restaurants, this interaction pattern blends these two worlds with Google’s understanding of the user’s previous behaviour (eg. in this interaction, Google is the trusted friend and review source). Though the interaction may be digital, the ways in which it challenges existing behaviour redefines the concept of ‘looking for a restaurant’ which challenges broader concepts of customer experience.

These three examples aren’t cause to throw out the models above, but they do point out some of the emerging trends to consider.

That’s a wrap! I would love to hear how you view CX and UX. You can share your thoughts using the comments area below :).

References:

1. Understanding Customer Experience, HBR.  https://hbr.org/2007/02/understanding-customer-experience
2. User Experience vs Customer Experience: What’s the Dif, Digital Gov. https://www.digitalgov.gov/2014/07/07/user-experience-ux-vs-customer-experience-cx-whats-the-dif/
3. User Experience, Wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience
4. The latest market research, trends & landscape in the growing AI chatbot industry, Business Insider. http://www.businessinsider.com/chatbot-market-stats-trends-size-ecosystem-research-2017-10/

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Over the last year I’ve been reflecting and studying what makes a Digital organisation great. This has been a process of re-considering past experiences, interviewing current digital leaders in their fields, and reading books that exemplify digital practice.

Through this process there are 7 processes that stand out of the world’s best Digital companies.

Whether it be “pure-play” digital operators or established organisations that are doing more than ever with digital, these competencies separate some organisations from the pack.

These processes complement how to think like a strategist.

#1. Focus on The Customer

Building a capacity to focus on the customer is fundamental to doing digital well. This goes beyond talking about customers. It involves developing a deep understanding of customer wants and preferences by involving them in listening processes (whether this is using focus groups, interviews or observational research).

The best digital organisations connect the design and development of digital products directly with customer insights. How does this work on a day-to-day level? We would know we’ve reached this point when any developer building software can pick up the phone or write an email to a customer and seek immediate feedback on their work.

This connection is so important because it links the act of product development directly with the audience the product is intended for, and it does this in a meaningful way. This has become one of the principles for how Digital companies create extraordinary products.

#2. Service Design

Service Design has been around for some time. In the last few years we’ve seen this discipline develop new energy. I personally believe service design (including Human Centered Design) will be one of the largest growth trends for organisations in the next five years.

To do service design well involves developing specific competencies in this area. It involves taking an entire view of customer journeys throughout the cycle of product purchase and use (both online and offline), putting ourselves in the shoes of people we’re trying to reach, and developing deeper insights about the needs serviced by the products we create.

Service design also involves building multi-disciplined teams that have the remit to explore and innovate on what is present today.

#3. Digital is Everyone’s Role and a Specialisation

As more and more customer interactions migrate online, digital is becoming central to organisational strategy. Whilst previously digital used to be the role of a single team, now all areas of an organisation need to think about ideas. This is a much needed shift in organisational behaviour. In the past we have seen the same trends emerge in other areas – marketing, operations, fulfillment – all have surfaced as disciplines in their own right. Today Digital is also making this journey.

It’s important to distinguish between how ideas are conceived and how work gets done. While all areas of businesses can conceive and contribute ideas for digital, doing digital work does require an aspect of specialisation.

Mature digital organisations leverage many areas of expertise such as release planning, user experience, visual design, coding, development, and so on. While these specialisations can be established in pockets across an organisation, they can be accelerated by centralisation.

As a result, the hallmark of a mature (or maturing) digital practice is evidence of these competencies being centralised.

The concept of centralisation does not necessarily mean people sitting in the same place or reporting to the same person. Modern work-practices (eg. remote working, collaboration tools, etc) lend to far more fluid interpretations of centralisation. An example of this is a Guild within Agile frameworks. Guilds bring people together that share common interests so they may share knowledge, tools and practices. In so doing Guilds centralise knowledge across potentially geographically dispersed teams.

#4. “Agilification”

Agile has become a buzz word in many organisations. But beyond the hype there are several principles embodied in Agile that make a real difference to how teams work.

These principles are: i) breaking down work into discreet chunks of activity, ii) structuring work based on dedicated capacity, iii) making work (and progress) visual.

The characteristics of Agile are important because they respond to three very ‘human’ questions about how attention and feedback is structured:

– what do we need to work on?
– how can we ensure we are focused on the work at hand?
– how can we receive feedback on our progress (particularly with complex projects)?

When organisations help their people know how to respond to these questions, teams are generally more focused and fulfilled.

#5. Focus on “Ways of Working”

Every digital team adopts tools and frameworks to get their work done. This is one of the keys to building an effective team.

Sometimes these are new training programs to educate new staff about which methods they’ll need as part of their day-to-day activities.

There is an important difference though between learning a method from a text book and learning how that method is used within a specific company.

‘Ways of working’ go beyond the method, looking also at the cultural nuances of the tools and frameworks used in an organisation.

For example, ‘backlog’ is a tool. But whether backlog is captured in software or handwritten onto cards and stuck on the wall, has as much to do about an organisation’s way of working as the theory of managing a backlog.

In the best digital companies, theory and practices are enriched and kept alive through meaningful ways of working.

#6. Blend Process & Creativity

Getting digital done right involves left brain and right brain activities.

Structuring releases for new mobile apps can be relatively complex, requiring detailed process and planning skills. But developing new interface designs for a mobile app requires creativity.

Almost all aspects of digital work require a blend of ‘creativity’ and ‘process’. When organisations try to structure digital teams with too much process, design can become hamstrung and bland. But when there is no process, creativity can become whimsical and design lacks alignment and focus.

For this reason, the best digital organisations blend process and creativity; from the environments they create for their people, to the way work is approached.

#7. People as a Strategic Capability

In the last decade, digital has grown rapidly as more companies shift operations and selling processes online. This has been further accelerated by a groundswell of adjacent trends, including the shift toward mobile handsets (compared with desktop internet use), a surge in mobile apps and changes in human behaviour.

Fortunately, with all this demand for digital, we’ve seen new career types emerge. Social media managers, paid search specialists, digital product owners… many of these roles did not exist some time ago. Right now there are more opportunities than ever for people entering the workforce to consider a career in Digital.

The downside for organisations is that the growth in talent does not always outstrip demand. So in some industries and geographies, it’s increasingly difficult for organisations to attract and retain strong digital people.

The best digital organisations recognise that ‘people’ are a strategic capability. As such, in these organisations people strategies look beyond recruitment alone, to also consider how people are engaged and grown.

This involves activities at all levels of the organisation – from connecting teams to the company’s mission or vision statement, so they can understand how their work has meaning, through to giving them unique opportunities to grow their skills in the business.

The post How 7 Strategies Lift the Top Digital Companies appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

I first started sketchnoting based on my annual experiment methodology of learning a new skill. Since then I’ve been continuously refining this craft.  It’s highly useful for working with digital teams to explore new opportunities.

Sketchnoting and visual thinking can use used for many purposes, from accelerating big thinking through to generating wireframes for prototypes, to creating strategy presentations. I’ve even used it as a method to interview mentors across industries.

In one of the sections of the guide we look at practical tools for skecthnoting.  It’s easy to build your own toolkit to carry with you on a daily basis.  Below is a photo of what I take with me. Everything (except the sketchbooks of course) fits in a neat case from Cordura.

Favorite tools are Mitisubishi Pencil Company Pens, TomBow ABT Dual Brush Pens, Rotring Pencils and Mnemosyne Notebooks.

If you have any questions about sketchnoting or your own experiences from sketchnoting, why not share your thoughts by adding a comment below.

The post How To Build Your Own Sketchnote Toolkit appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

I’ve been a strategist for over a decade. During this time I’ve worked in specific strategy roles, as well as other roles where I’ve used strategy skills acquired over time. I’ve studied strategy, been mentored by established strategists, and also lectured in strategy.

The question as it was written on Quora appealed because it reminds us strategy is also about ‘training the mind’ (or put another way, ‘how we look at things’) as much as it is about ‘getting the job done’.  Here are six lessons on how to think like a strategist.

1. Understand the core strategy process

There are thousands of books on developing strategy. And there are thousands of strategic models. However, there is an essential process that is core to any strategic work, and that is:

• gathering inputs and data
• analysing this information
• exploring possible futures
• identifying (and evaluating) options for action
• putting in place a plan for action

A previous lecturer of mine, Dr Joseph Voros, wrote about this process in ‘The Generic Foresight Process‘. I first read this paper many years ago and its concepts have stuck with me to this day. Almost every question that has been asked of me as a strategist, I have answered by starting with this process.

2. Build Your toolkit

Every strategist has acquired their own toolkit over the years. Mine blends strong strategic process with design thinking and collaborating with teams. This just happens be very well suited to the rapid growth of online opportunities and challenges faced by many businesses. I draw upon various methods as part of this toolkit (market analysis, experience reviews, desktop research, scenario planning, etc).

All strategists have toolkits that fit with their unique approach. No toolkit is the same. Each toolkit is developed overtime.

So whatever your toolkit, start adding to it. Even if this means trying methodologies you have not tried before. Within a few years you will have plenty of methods and frameworks to leverage in your particular form of strategy.

3. Develop A Skill In Understanding Drivers

Every strategy starts with a question. What market should we enter? Is this idea commercially viable? What would happen if we didn’t launch this product?

Sometimes you will be the one responsible for asking these questions. Sometimes people will come to you with a question, and you will help them to understand what their question involves.

Because of this it’s worth developing your ability to understand the drivers of businesses and teams. Some teams are motivated by creating commercial returns. Some teams are motivated by improving offerings for customers. Some teams want to create social good.

Whatever the motivation, if you understand what is driving a strategic question, you will also be equipped to explore what is obscured by specific motivations.

For example, the person who wants to launch a product to generate commercial returns, may also need help see what customers expect for the product to be truly attractive.

4. Be Curious

Strategists take pleasure in solving problems and exploring opportunities. They are curious at heart. And if they’re not curious to begin with, they train themselves to be.

I would not say I am naturally curious. But over the years I’ve learnt to enjoy being curious. I’ve learnt a great deal because of that simple word.

When teams say they need to figure out their 18 month plan, offer to help. When leaders tell you they have a hunch there is an opportunity in a new business idea, offer to flesh it out.

Being curious is just one of the many reasons I started to write this blog.

Curiosity is developed by knowing there are many things we don’t know, and venturing into the unknown with a sense of enjoyment to find out more. This is in the mind of the strategist.

5. Practice Visual Strategy

Strategy is about helping people visualise possible futures for action, based on the evidence they have at hand today.

Because the future is intangible (ie. it cannot be held in our hands like the present, or seen like a photograph shows us the past), any way we can help others picture the future will benefit strategy.

Visual strategy is an essential competency for the next era of strategists. Whether this is whiteboarding various pathways for action or creating rich pictures of scenarios, the art of making strategy visual is a competency gaining increasing value.

Dan Roam’s book the ‘The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures‘ is a good example of how to develop skills in this area.

6. Connect Challenges and Opportunities with Commercial Outcomes

Learning all of the skills above will make you a good strategist. I’ve known many good strategists that posses these skills.

If you wish to become a strategist in business, this last lesson is what makes a top strategist.

Any challenge or opportunity can be linked to a commercial outcome. If you can connect questions with commercial outcomes (whether they be negative or positive) you will not be just a good strategist…you will be a great strategist.

This doesn’t mean you have to do this thinking yourself. Great strategists also connect people and knowledge, often relying on mentors, advisors and coaches along the way.

With the complex and accelerating issues and opportunities present in the world today, we certainly need keen strategists and thinkers.  Whether you wish to draw upon strategy skills as part of your daily work, or develop a career in strategy, I wish you the best of success.

The post How To Think Like a Strategist appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

I tried Asana. Then I switched. I tried to match any application I could to David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. For a while, the other options were good. Then recently when Asana upgraded it’s interface, I decided to give it another try.

I love the new Asana.

The interface is clean and useful, without being distracting. The iPhone app gives me what I need when I’m in the moment, and the Desktop platform adds even more utility, with the expanded real estate of a large screen monitor.

Here are 9 features of Asana that make it a stand-out product in my view:

1. The Asana Interface Makes You Feel Like You Want to Get Stuff Done

The look and feel of Asana is beautiful. It provides functionality, without overwhelm. And many of Asana’s tools (open task detail, select projects, edit task detail) are just a click away. Many of the panels within Asana can be expanded or collapsed (there’s also a full screen view for tasks) which means you can focus on the things that make most sense to you.

2. Focus on Projects or Tasks…You Choose

The Projects panel on the left of the screen seems simple, but together with ‘My Tasks’, it really boosts the capability of this platform. I use the ‘My Tasks’ view to see everything I need to get done for the next 7 days. This keeps me focused on the things that matter during the week. But I also like to see the overall context for projects. So by going into individual projects, I can see all the milestones that need to be achieved to deliver that project. When a project milestone is due (and assigned to me), the task automatically drops into My Tasks, so I never miss a thing. Switching views between 7 Day Focus and Project views are incredibly valuable.

3. The Notes Panel is Incredibly Useful, Especially with Rich Text

The notes panel is where I keep all my notes on tasks. If I’m working on a task that spans multiple days, I add updates to the task status in the notes section. I also wrote this blog and others in the notes section of Asana. With a few keyboard shortcuts, Rich Text can be used easily, which helps to bring some of the functionality of a word processor (eg. bold items, add bullet points, etc).

4. Make Tasks Private or Collaborative

Any task in Asana can be made Private or Collaborative. By setting up Private Projects, users can store tasks they do not wish to be seen by others within Asana. But, if you want to collaborate with other members of your team, you can setup and assign tasks to team members that are not private. While at first this seems bizarre (because you are blending private and collaborative tasks in one platform) it makes sense after some practice, because any productivity tool should help the user accomplish all things, not just some things.

5. The Collaboration Features Help Teams Organise

Asana has some excellent collaboration features to help teams work together. Team members can assign tasks to each other, have text conversations, share files and update task notes. This takes work away from email (which everyone struggles to cope with these days) and into a central place where people can share, discuss and progress tasks. Asana is free for teams to 15 people, which makes it incredibly useful for small teams. This is especially relevant for non-profits, which often work with very distributed committees.

6. Switch Between Life’s Contexts

One of the features of Asana is to setup and manage different workspaces. So you can have a workspace for your Personal projects, another one for the Community Organisation you’re involved with, and another for your place of Work. Whatever life’s contexts, you can setup a work space for it. According to Asana “a Workspace is a collection of people that collaborate on projects and tasks”. As a Workspace Member, you can administer the workspace, including inviting or removing Workspace Guests.

7. Sections Give Amazing Flexibility

It would be easy to underrate the power of Sections in Asana. As a user you can create a section by adding a column to the end of any task title. Sections can be moved up or down in any task list. Here are some of the things you can use headings for:

• to categorise tasks lists (eg. grouping tasks that relate to each other, like ‘things to buy when shopping’)
• to categorise priority (eg. breaking task lists into high, medium and low)
• to setup processes and sequences (eg. when organising a picnic, setting up Sections for things to do before the picnic, at the picnic, after the picnic)
• to categorise activities (eg. fundraising, website, administration, etc)

Get the idea? Sections make Asana infinitely flexible not just for task management, but all types of organisation.

8. Leverage Repeatable Processes, Not Just Tasks

One of the features of Asana is to ‘archive’ and ‘copy’ projects. So if you run a particular process this year (say ‘Setup and run an Annual General Meeting) and that process will be just as relevant next year, you can easily copy and re-use the process. This saves tremendous amounts of time for processes that are repeatable. It means we no longer have to ‘rethink’ activities, but instead can search for similar activities we’ve run in the past, and benefit from that prior thought. Very neat!

9. Search, Search, Search

Finding notes or tasks quickly and easily is a dream with Asana. The search bar is exactly where it should be. Front and center in the top panel of the screen, the faint grey lines hinting at you, just in case you need it. You don’t even notice the search bar unless you’re looking for it, and as soon as you are, it’s there! Presto! Fantastic design. When you’re managing hundreds of tasks due soon or a year into the future, search helps you deal with the complexity of your bold plans. And it does this extremely well.

Photo Credit: Jeff Sheldon unsplash.com/photos/9SyOKYrq-rE

The post Why Asana is the Ultimate Productivity Platform appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

The question that sparked my interest was what learning strategies do “quick learners” follow.  Here is my response, which was republished on Inc.com.

***

Your question is a great one. And it forced me to reflect about the things I have learned across my interests in business, personal development, and martial arts.

Let me tell you, I’ve seen many slow learners understand subjects in far greater detail than people who can learn at a fast pace. If fact, slow learners can bring a deliberateness that sometimes is lacking in fast learners. So this can certainly be an advantage for you also.

Having said that, these are principles I’ve applied in my own learning that I feel are universal.

#1. Repetition.

I firmly believe repetition leads to mastery. When learning a new skill, practice that skill often. When learning a new theory, apply it wherever you can.

As Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Any skill refined through continuous practice over time will become formidable.

#2. Focus.

With so many distractions today–social media, multitasking, open-plan offices–we’re receiving constant stimuli.

We’ve lost the ability to focus. Yet focus is what is required to truly understand and absorb any subject.

To learn a new skill, I find time to focus on it in an environment free from distraction. When I’m reading about it, I’ll listen to music without lyrics, so the music does not distract me from the content of what I’m reading.

Steve Jobs said, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

#3. Context and detail.

To understand a specific subject, I find it useful to look at the big picture first. I like to understand the context of things.

So in a book I’ll read the table of contents before I look at the pages. This way I get a sense for where the overall context is headed. And when I read the details, I’ll understand how one theme relates to another. Detail is important, but at the right time.

Start too early on the details and you’ll miss the context of the whole. Miss details altogether, and understanding only stays superficial.

So I switch between context and detail so I learn the surface and the depth.

#4. Relationship.

Learning by understanding context and detail (the prior point) gives me a sense of the relationships among information. And this is very important for retained learning.

This is one of the reasons why, to recall the order of a full deck of cards, many people tell themselves a story involving all the characters in the cards. The story details the relationships of the cards to one another.

Building a meaningful relationship across the themes you’re studying is one of the best ways to accelerate and retain learning.

#5. Pace.

Pace is an excellent variable to play with.

For example, if you’re listening to a lecture, you could speed up the pace of the lecture x2.

Pace also serves another important function. It puts us under different types of pressure, and because of this, we adjust our learning method.

Putting ourselves through this variability builds our capacity, much in the same way that a long-distance runner may do hill sprints to work on his or her overall fitness.

In my own case, if I’m working on a presentation, I’ll try to say it at twice the speed on the final practices, to ensure that I can recall all the information I need under pressure.

If I can recall it at double the speed, I know it will be available to me at normal speed without stress.

This isn’t just about recall; it is about changing the dynamics of how we learn, to build flexibility into our learning methods.

I hope these are helpful to you. Best of luck with your own personal development.

The post 5 Ways to Learn and Remember Absolutely Anything appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.