Weeknotes 267

Photo of the week:

What I did this week:

A gateway or a ladder

Neuroscience tells us that what makes human minds special is our sense of narrative and being able to sequence events. It’s what allowed us grasp complex cause and effect relationships which are the foundation for science and rational logic. Telling stories and using metaphors to explain concepts is a useful and well-accepted method of communication, but perhaps less so within organisations. My writing is usually quite technical and concrete, but this is changing as I explore other ways to help people understand my work, and make better decisions from it.

I’ve been working on ways of making identity verification better. It has quite a bit of complexity to it, with the user experience of having to provide documents with personal information, the technicalities of managing the systems that store the document files and record progress as they are check and verified, and the processes that collect, validate and verify a person’s identity. So, to communicate the different ways we could approach identity verification I used the metaphors of a gateway and a ladder. The gateway is the same for everyone, once their identity is verified they can pass through. The ladder has different steps that someone can be on if their identity is verified to different degrees. Hopefully the metaphor can be used as shortcuts to discuss both options.

Designing for privacy and protection

I’ve been working on how we might implement the Age Appropriate Design Code. It requires some quite critical questioning of the code and our systems and processes. As we progress with this work I’m keen that rather than designing for the most likely and usual, and then designing other processes that deal with the deviations, we take the approach of designing ways that work for everyone. Those product managers who spend their time trying to push the needle on user retention don’t know they’re born. Charity product management is where it’s at. It’s the extreme sport of product management.

Breaking down hierarchies

I went to a really good virtual meetup about hierarchies and networks by the Barnardo’s Innovation Team. Apart from being a really good idea to get people together to share ideas it also opened my eyes to different ways of thinking about hierarchies and networks.

Work together better by knowing more about how others work

I have a hypothesis that multi-disciplinary and cross-functional teams aren’t as effective as they could be because thy create mini silos of specialisms within the team. I think if every role had some understanding of each of the adjacent roles, the team would have better shared language, more effective conversations and make more considered decisions. In an attempt to do something about this I’m trying out the idea of users guides for digital roles for those who aren’t specialists in those roles, which I’m calling Adjacencies.

Thought about this week:

Transitional states

A colleague set me a link to a video about ‘transitional safeguarding‘, a phrase used to describe the problem of thinking in binary ways about childhood and adulthood and the gap it creates in the way young people receive support as they transition from childhood to adulthood. This made me think about two things; 1) how I’m really interesting in digital safeguarding as a foundation for all online interactions but that it’s really broad and complicated area to understand, and 2) that thinking about how people interact with digital services as in-flux transitions rather than beginning or ending fixed states opens more possibilities to meet people where they are but is also really complicated. Our language doesn’t lend itself to describing things that are changing, so then how do we even talk about it, let alone develop the mental models to understand transitions deeply. Every user interface shows the fixed states between the transitions (however temporary they may be). I don’t even know how to start thinking about this.

Creating a writing habit

I write quite a lot. I write documents at work, weeknotes every week, and occasional blog posts. These are quite formalised, so I wanted to try to create more of a habit of writing more freely and spontaneously. So I decided I’m going to try to write a blog post every day throughout October. Of course, in my usual way I started planning what I would write about each day, collecting research, making notes, and completely missing the point of building a habit of writing spontaneously. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes.

And read about:

Liberating structures

I’ve reading through the Liberating Structures menu to think more about how virtual meetings might be better, if they can’t be done asynchronously, of course.

Digital nomads

As I’ve been considering starting up my Digital Nomad Newsletter again I’ve been reading other digital nomad newsletters, including Playing with ideas, Wayward Wayfarer, Nomad Hacker, The History of Digital Nomading and Diary of a Digital Nomad.

My growth area:

Giving feedback

I was asked to give feedback for a colleague. I thought about it for a couple of days, I looked at this, and thought more about number ten: understanding what they value, and then wrote my feedback. I couldn’t provide feedback that helps them improve in their discipline. I could only help them apply their discipline towards making a better product. But this is my objective. It might not be theirs, but they didn’t tell me what there’s is. I’m left thinking that my feedback is less than useful because I don’t have any context in which to provide it. So, my growth area this week is to try to understand what the point of providing feedback is, what is it suppose to achieve.

Free speech

Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia was in Oxford yesterday at the launch of an Oxford project which aims to generate global debate about free speech. Along with Wikipedia’s blackout in protest of SOPA, which I don’t know enough about to comment, it seems the citizens of the internet are feeling the ground start to shake with rumble of tanks rolling into their territory. I guess it’s always the nature of government to want to control the people, and without a government for the internet, governments of countries will attempt to fill that gap and control the people on the internet within their geographic boundaries.

And then today, Megaupload and Megavideo have been shut down for piracy with the sites owners facing court and most likely jail. But I wonder what the charges will be against them? If it’s not paying tax on their earnings from the site, then that’s justifiable in my book. But it’s the piracy bit which is more messy. I think it comes down to a clash of world views.   Virtual vs. real. Trying to apply the way the real world works to the online world is never going to succeed in any clear or satisfactory way.

I think this realisation is going to have to be one of the big things that comes out of the information age. The online world that we exist in as online citizens is to all intents and purposes a separate country from the geographic countries we live in, and as such has it’s own language, customs, cultures, currency. Not accepting this and dealing with people as if they are only physical entities, and not virtual ones too, is not only an out-dated way to consider a human being, but is also destined to fail because of that. Maybe the UN needs to look at and recognise the Human Rights of the virtual aspect of the citizens of the world.