Tag: soft systems thinking

Strategy — fourth of five IA Summit 2007 themes

(Here’s the fourth post on the 2007 IA Sum­mit. You can find the first one that intro­duces the series and describes the first theme ‘tan­gi­ble’ here, the sec­ond one on ‘social’ here and the third one on ‘web of data’ here.)

Like oth­er design dis­ci­plines, IAs are typ­i­cal­ly brought in to solve a prob­lem. The extent to which the design prob­lem is defined and expli­cat­ed is a huge deter­min­ing fac­tor in the suc­cess of their under­tak­ing. More often than not, an IA would take a prob­lem and run with it, not think­ing whether this is the right prob­lem to solve, or even a prob­lem at all!

This has always seemed like a sil­ly sit­u­a­tion to me. Some of the most enjoy­able ses­sions at the sum­mit there­fore were the ones that dis­cussed ways in which IAs can join in on strate­gic think­ing. This way, we can help dis­cov­er the actu­al prob­lem that needs solv­ing, which gives us a bet­ter chance of actu­al­ly deliv­er­ing a suc­cess­ful and valu­able solution.

Gene Smith and Matthew Milan dis­cussed con­cep­tu­al mod­els (which I’ve been play­ing around with for a while) and the more involved rich map­ping, from soft sys­tems think­ing. Key take­away for me was when mod­el­ling a sys­tem we should also describe its con­text (includ­ing the project itself). Oth­er good stuff by peo­ple of Crit­i­cal Mass (Milan again togeth­er with Sam Lad­ner) was pro­vid­ed in the form of ‘back­cast­ing’, a very visu­al brain­storm­ing method to be used in a work­shop ses­sion with a client in order to envi­sion desired project out­comes and map paths from the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion to those out­comes (notes at The Chick­en Test).

Peo­ple from Avenue A Razor­fish (Gar­rick Schmitt, Marisa Gal­lagher) talked about their frame­work for tying togeth­er lots of dif­fer­ent user research such as click stream analy­sis, search logs, eye track­ing and oth­ers. This remind­ed me of Jared Folkmann’s excel­lent talk at last year’s Euro IA Sum­mit in Berlin.

Final­ly, I attend­ed one nice talk (by James Robert­son) on the val­ue of con­tex­tu­al enquiries, which if noth­ing else has made me all the more deter­mined to try this myself the next time an oppor­tu­ni­ty presents itself.