Weeknotes 355
This week I did:
Creating the space for innovation
Practice changes are pretty easy. You just make them and be consistent with them until other’s do them too. But innovation isn’t the same. Doing new things, things that are risky, can’t be done in the same way. I’ve been doing a bit of work on the future of legacy giving, including the possibility of cryptocurrency being part of that future. It requires a lot of other work to get set up for doing the work, and that in itself takes a lot of work.
No feedback
Getting good feedback on designs is difficult. It’s difficult to know what to ask for and difficult to know what to say other than, I like that. So, we’re trying a different approach. Rather than starting with a vague idea of what is to be designed, doing the designs and then asking for feedback, we’re starting with a clearer definition of the problems to be solved. Then, rather than asking for feedback on how the designs look, we can ask, do they solve the problems.
And I read:
A proposed taxonomy for systems thinking
Interesting article on what constitutes systems thinking. Even more interesting for how it maps systems thinking to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.
Put down all behaviour hurtful to informality!
“Productive informality might just be a critical dividing line for our time.” Hellyeah to that.
Neurodiversity and designing for difference
This is a brilliant post by Nia Campbell about designing content for neurodiversity and making it more accessible to more people.
I thought about:
Constraints
Following on from last week’s thoughts about organisations making improvement their number one priority, I’ve been thinking about constraints, which are the things to be improved. I wonder if understanding organisational constraints is more important than understanding risks. And I wonder if removing constraints has any causal impact on reducing risk. I’m pretty confident that lots of large, disorganised constraints reduces the fast flow of value, making it choppy. If a continuous improvement approach was applied, then those constraints could be ordered and removed to improve the fast flow of value.
Build it and they will come
I mean, we all know that’s nonsense, right? Building a product, however good it might be, doesn’t result in people using it. Adoption is a whole other problem. But it’s a hard one to face up to. It’s much easier to focus on the output of building something than the outcome of people using and getting value from it. I guess the only way is to have people who know this and are willing to do the difficult thing.