- Design of great products and services
today is team-based, and teams need to
fully engage with creative ambiguity in order
to push what's possible.
Having a goal provides structure that helps
the team decide where to apply that push best.
But goals can be tricky.
Goals must be open for evolution
so that a breakthrough solution may be found.
But in the moment, they often need to be
focused enough for the team to do
their best thinking.
So balancing immediate focus and momentum
with longer-term ambiguity can really
be challenging.
To balance these needs, set a recurring cycle
of reflection, where the team looks at the
work so far and asks if the core program goal
has shifted, and when it has, the team takes
the time to integrate new thinking into the
next cycle of experimentation.
For example, we've been asked to design
a collaboration space, and had met with
our stakeholders in an alignment workshop
to set success criteria and explore that
goal in more depth.
We did a mission countdown activity
which is shared elsewhere in this course
and moved from the generic "Design a
"collaboration space" to a much more targeted
mission of "Accelerate Health Through Relationships"
which provided us more focus on why
a space would exist, to accelerate health,
and how it might do that, by facilitating
relationships.
As a team, we took the time to ask,
"How does this new goal reframe what we
need to do in our next week?"
It was clear that the most important area
for the next week would be to understand
relationships.
Who could the relationships be with?
What might be the reasons they would
come to this space?
And to gather that, we'd need to talk
to the members of the local medical community,
and people in the healthcare start-up community.
But our project plan listed brand principle definition.
And that wasn't what we needed to do at this point.
So together, we made the shift and discussed
the activities we wanted to do to gather the input
we needed.
This list of activities guided our Monday team meeting
but what mattered most was that everyone,
the Interaction Designer, the Technologist,
the Industrial Designer, knew how the activities
we were going to do related to the bigger goal
of the program.
Doing this regularly helps keep a team of
different skillsets moving toward the same goal
and helps manage the ambiguity of doing
visionary work or focused design/develop iterations.
And the frequency you do it will depend on your team
but if it isn't being done weekly, it's particularly useful
after major milestones, like direct research with
the people using your product, or workshops
with your stakeholders, where significant
new information has come in and might have
shifted the goal.
Finding this cadence will be as useful for you
and your team as it is for you with your stakeholders
as you try to manage the ambiguity and the
ongoing evolution of the team's work for them.
Effective active alignment activities should support
the team's design thinking mindset by
being open to change, by recognizing that
while the product or service may still be
ambiguous, the team's thinking has evolved.
By engaging all the disciplines and shaping
the solution.
And by framing the questions to be addressed
in the next iteration of exploration.
It also helps you keep track of both
the long view and the near term details.
So finding an activity for active alignment
that works for your working style is important
and it may require a bit of exploration to find
one that you really like.
But a good place to start would be the
Check Your Goal activity that's included
in this course.