Justin Stach

Emotional design (or the Hallmark Cards approach to interfaces)

2012-02-07T00:00:00Z

Why design for emotion?

It's no longer enough for an interface to be usable, it needs to be an expression of the personality of the business behind it. Today's audiences are not just more sophisticated, more social and more expectant of a human face to their technology, they want nothing less than pleasure from their digital services.

The careful use of emotion in our interfaces can make them more forgivable, more human. They can create a genuine connection with our audiences.

The argument for emotional interfaces

Association with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - this is something you'll see a lot and is a kind of fallacy of false attribution. You can see it here in a good article arguing the case for the existence and value of emotional interface design is Aarron Walter's piece on Think Vitamin. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is appealing in it's simplicity and the model lends itself to being recomposed in ways that suit someone's assertion. The problem is that Maslow's work here is contentious, very specific to Maslow's culture and lacks decent evidence to back it up. However, it does sound impressive...

Another argument for emotional interfaces is more subtle and seems to be structured around the idea that as we engage with our interfaces as though they were people we should therefore try and make our interfaces as personable and likeable as possible. The problem with this is that whilst it would be lovely if our interfaces could behave like beings with emotion, it isn't actually true. Investing our tools with human characteristics is a very peculiar form of anthropomorphism, pretending that our shiny chunks of technology are in any way like us diminishes what it is to be a person.

"When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears."
Generation Why? by Zadie Smith

That's not what an interface is for

It's pretty rare that anybody actually wants anything from the interface itself (other than we freaks who design them), what we actually want is something which lies beyond the interface – most usually these are described in terms of needs. The interface isn't a destination, it's a means to an end.

You can have emotional content - literature, film, art often conceived to affect the reader or viewer's emotions but the interface's role here is to stay out of the way, to disappear and allow the content to reach its intended audience.

Tools with emotion

The trouble with designing for affect is that it's incredibly dependent on the viewer - their context, their emotional state. The cardinal example is Microsoft's Clippy which while well-intended as a way to soften the learning curve, and help the user understand how to get more out of the product ended up being excruciatingly irritating.

“Ghastly,” continued Marvin, “it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door,” he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. “All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”
From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

A brand whose values were about recognition - seeking to understand ways in which they could better recognise their customers. It's a noble aim, but the reason we advised not to pursue this too hard was the potential for recognition to become annoying or even creepy. Sometimes you don't want to be recognised, and there's all sorts of reasons for this – the problem would be that it's approaching impossible to genuinely not recognise someone when you've made every effort to design a system that's capable of recognising people.

Tools which understand our emotions?

As a human being understanding the emotional state and mood of another person is an incredibly nuanced thing, there's no way that our technology is anywhere even close to being able to respond and react to our emotions.

Who wants emotional interfaces?

As usual, a lot of this is the usual fluff that we designers and consultants like to talk up to help differentiate our offering to clients, "We're different because we think about the emotional qualities of the interface" sounds great, it sounds compelling (and it sounds like the sort of thing you'd have to pay a bit more for...)

Another reason we like it is that it gives us another reason to go back and talk to the client (that is to say, sell) with a story which – backed up with a touch of Maslow – would run along the lines of, “Now that your site's functionally usable, how about we introduce some personality and emotion into it?”

Sadly, genuine emotion has very little to do with it.

The trouble with emotion

Manipulative interfaces – do we really want to create the equivalent of greetings cards with trite messages about love and care, shorthand for genuine emotion. Unless we're creating something very bespoke for a few people we're intimately familiar with, creating any sort of interface is going to end up in front of people you have very little understanding about, and while all those personae and user stories will help get you in the right place, they simply don't give you enough information to make informed design decisions about how to move the emotions of a person you've never met.

Literature is a good example of content that has the potential to move us emotionally, but as anyone who's discussed their favourite books with like-minded friends will know, the responses that people have to books can vary wildly - our responses are personal and unique to each of us. Aside from the problem that interfaces simply aren't content, the idea that we can create something as emotionally engaging which won't piss-off at least as many people as it will 'delight and enchant' is ridiculous.

Please say what you mean

It's another way to sell the same old thing: good design created with thought and care which understands its role in meeting its audience's need.

Why is this not enough, why are we constantly seeking to redefine what good design means?

Sadly, I suspect it's because, out of fear and insecurity we feel the need to mystify design and protect our positions. This is sad because it's an unnecessary waste of energy – good design is incredibly difficult: having the strength and rigour to ruthlessly follow the path towards goodness isn't easy.

It's hard for a designer to seek to become invisible, to leave no fingerprints.

Design Process - The DDL

2016-03-14T00:00:00Z

Digital Design Language phases and why we have an iterative design process

We’re building Tesco's Digital Design Language (the DDL) like a product, using iterative design to continually optimise the guidance on the toolkit.

This means that we’re open to hearing how the toolkit, which is where we publish the specification can be improved. DDL is a collaborative project with teams across Tesco participating in its creation. It’s not a case of ‘us’ setting guidelines and ‘them’ picking holes in it: we all work together to produce the best design language that works for the whole of Tesco. We bake this into the development of the guidelines by incorporating people across the business into the studio team, as well as having weekly critiques with the heads of design. We reinforce this by gathering feedback once we have guidelines we feel are ready to implement.

That’s why we don’t go straight into publishing guidance on the toolkit and designating it as The Release. We have a beta phase for each element of at least four weeks during which we look closely at how the DDL element is working in practice for our various digital properties. We do stress test designs extensively during the design and development process so we’re confident in the guidance but there’s no substitute for real world evidence.

Most guidance you see on the toolkit is in at least beta testing, but here’s information on what each status means.

Pre-alpha

Pre-alpha is the design phase, lasing four weeks.

While in pre-alpha, we scope exactly what elements are in scope, before designing the elements. As part of this work, the team looks at how the designs would change how current and known future sites look. They’ll also look at logical groups of elements together, to test that they make wider contextual sense.

We do not typically publish work in progress during this phase. Instead, we hold weekly heads of design meetings to gather feedback.

Alpha

Something designated as ‘Alpha’ on the toolkit has gone through the design phase and is currently in development, meaning that it’s being coded up in the DDL prototype and the guidance being finalised.

Typically, if guidance on an element is published while it’s in alpha, it will be the design PSDs or presentations that give a sense of the design work that’s gone into the element.

Alpha guidance is subject to some change, depending on how the interactions work in the browser. We don’t usually expect the look of a design to change at this stage, however.

Beta

Something shown as ‘Beta’ on the toolkit is reference design and code, available for consumption by early adopters and anyone else. As it’s beta, we might refine the guidance based on results from testing.

If you’re using beta elements, let us know, as it’s really important to have the results from real-world usage feed into the toolkit.

Live

When we’re confident that the guidance is stable and not subject to change from testing, we designate it ‘live’. It can be considered the stable release version of the guidance.

Making Tesco’s websites more helpful by design

2016-05-12T00:00:00Z

Before and after

Customers using Tesco online probably aren’t aware that our digital estate includes over 100 different websites and dozens of apps. But they do notice when something blocks them from getting what they need. They’ve been telling us they often find it difficult to move between different Tesco sites, and struggle with having to do things differently on each different platform.

So we’re changing. Last week the Tesco PLC website got a new look. This is just the first of many of our sites and apps changing in line with a new Tesco style: we call it Tesco’s Digital Design Language.

The Digital Design Language is a toolkit to help Tesco teams create websites and apps in a way that ensures they’re recognisably ‘Tesco’ and designed to be helpful for customers. How? We’re doing this by creating a set of commonly used elements (like forms and buttons) along with some basic rules for colour, fonts and layouts that help teams to build quickly and consistently.

Everything we design is guided by how we can serve shoppers better; such as making sure that the ‘Menu’ option is always in the same place so it’s easy to navigate around our sites. And every element is tested with customers so we make sure we’re implementing the easiest, most user-friendly elements. We've defined colour and sizing rules to make clear the difference between words that are there to help people navigate (such as ‘Next’) and words that are part of the content of the page. On their own these are little things, but when they add up they will make a big difference to our customers just by making their online experience smoother.

As you can see in the PLC site, the new style is much simpler, and less-cluttered. This means the stuff that’s most important to our customers, our products and content, is easy to find.

This is just the first of many improvements and marks an important stage in Tesco’s digital maturity. In the past we’ve worked hard to create many different ways to meet our customers’ needs wherever and whenever they arise, and it’s now time for us to start joining those various pieces together into a simple, more consistent, more joined up experience for customers. Watch this space.

Why we do customer research

2016-08-05T00:00:00Z

We’re used to using market research in Tesco, which is a powerful tool for building insight about large groups of customers or target markets. With our service design approach, we use customer research from the bottom-up and look closely at how representative customers interact with our existing or our possible products and services.

As a team, our purpose is to improve the way Tesco designs services, aiming for a joined-up and consistent customer experience. To be able to improve our products and services, we need to understand:

Who the people are that use them
What they’re using them for
How they currently use them

Using customer research helps us understand how the products and services we’re designing will fit into the lives of the people they’re intended for.

Customer research doesn’t tell us what to build, but it can help us understand if the thing we’re building is going to be successful. It can also be used to help us understand where people are being underserved by the existing service. The work of taking this understanding and using it to improve the products and services that create Tesco’s customer experience requires careful, considered analysis and design.

So the role of customer research as a tool in service design is for illumination rather than validation: it doesn’t tell us if we’re right or wrong, it just helps us ensure we’re headed in the right direction and continually increasing our chances of improving the customer experience.

Why this approach?

There is a difference between research to learn about what people say they do (attitude), and what people actually do (behaviour).

Attitudinal research helps us understand what people think about things by exploring their opinions and stated beliefs, often in groups. This type of research is helpful in getting a broad understanding of how markets and audiences are responding to our products and services.

We tend to focus more on behavioural research: by observing how customers use our products and services in their lives we are more likely to be able to understand how to make them more appealing or valuable. The purpose of this research is to increase our understanding of how to make our products and services better for the type of customer we’re designing it for.

Key differences between market and customer research

Customer research (What people do)

understand how people are solving the problems they have (these might be opportunities for new product/service dev)
understand what needs customers have
understand how we might help meet those needs
to check our own assumptions and biases
to understand how customers use our products and services
Looking up close at how representative customers interact with our service.

Market research (What people say)

Big picture or broad brush view of who will use a product
look for patterns in consumer audiences and the market
to segment demographics and buying behaviours
Size market demand for a product or service
Identify gaps in the market

Observations, explanations and confidence

2017-07-24T00:00:00Z

We’re in the process of creating an alpha for the store locator on Tesco.com, and we’re getting pretty close to the point where we’re ready to move into beta. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been building a prototype in the browser that allows us to test the decisions we’ve been making about the UI and to make sure we’re reducing the risk around moving into beta and production code.

Early last week, the team watched our researcher take people through some familiar scenarios in the browser and used a simple framework to collaboratively capture observations and insights from each session. As customers worked with the different variations of the alpha, the team wrote down positive, neutral and negative observations along with emergent research questions on colour coded Post-its which after each session were talked through and grouped on the wall. As you’d imagine, this method drives out a lot of observations and we weren’t exactly short by the end of the two days.

Many, many Post-its

In the process of reviewing the work, I’ve noticed that while we’re doing a good job of rolling this product forward and we’re improving the experience we’re giving our customers, we might not be being as effective as we can be in meeting one of the higher purposes of product designers which is to continually create better explanations of customer behaviours and their needs. If we don’t have solid, defensible explanations for why customers behave in specific interactions with our products, we’re at risk of jumping into the wrong solutions. In the spirit of continuously improving our working practices, we’re going to try out a revised summary report for product testing.

The new summary report

The act of creating explanations also requires us to state our confidence in those explanations: when we notice that customers are struggling to zoom in on maps in a UI we could explain this in several ways: the map is too small, the affordance to access a larger map is being missed, the gesture to zoom the map is unknown to the customer, or even that the scenario we’re looking at is biasing our research towards an unnecessary map interaction. For each of those cases, we can make assertion about how confident we are as a team with this explanation.

A statement of our confidence in any given observation allows the team to make a decision about whether we need further research, and also helps us decide what kind of testing at what fidelity we need.

Confidence vs applicablefidelity graph

One final point: even when we’re making positive observations about our products, these need to be accompanied by explanations: the explanation for why ‘The map view helped customers to identify closest store’ will be valuable to any other teams designing products that use maps and helps them to make better decisions when design their UI. By sharing our explanations we allow other teams to validate them and to build upon them, and create still better explanations which in turn leads to better product design and customer experience.

Big design

2017-08-07T00:00:00Z

When a company as large as Tesco creates digital products and services, they’re used by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. As a brand we're unashamedly mass market and aim to meet the needs and support the lives of the whole country. Designing for such a broad range of customers creates a fairly unique set of constraints and considerations on our product design teams including

scalability
usability
desirability
inclusivity.

I'll leave the first three points for another day and focus instead on that last one.

Inclusivity

This is a huge opportunity for large brands like Tesco. Moving from a technical mindset of meeting a set of accessibility criteria/checkpoints towards identifying and designing open, inclusive products that improve lives and benefit everyone.

Our design language and accessibility

I'm often asked whether Tesco’s digital design language is accessible, or ensures that a product built to the standard specification will be accessible. While the building blocks of user interface elements in the design language are designed to be accessible and follow industry best practice, it’s down to the consuming product design teams to put these blocks together in ways that create accessible, inclusive products. The simple fact is that it's rarely possible to get accessibility for free - it has to be a explicit objective for the product team.

A better approach to inclusivity

A better way to approach this is to step back from the accessibility question and think more about the overall inclusivity of their product. Again, as a brand which is at some point part of the lives of most of the people in this country, it’s on us to make sure we're ensuring that the products we create work brilliantly for the largest possible number of people.

One of the simplest things we can do here is to make sure our own biases don’t drive the design of the products we create: it’s very easy to use ourselves as a stand-in for our customers (think of those personas who are tech-savvy, time-poor, foodies) but when we do so, we often exclude whole groups of people who use the same technology but in very different ways to us, and often in ways that we haven’t accommodated in the design of our products.

When we design inclusively, we’re not designing a one-size-fits-all solution or creating a compromised lowest common denominator product. Designing inclusively means creating products that work for the diversity of ways people interact with them and the context they’re using them in.

For example, when we create effective products for people with a permanent disability such as having one arm, it benefits people with a temporary wrist injury or someone carrying a child. It was exactly this situation that we uncovered when we were working on a mobile version of our Scan as you Shop product: what we found was that customers carrying baskets are effectively situationally disabled and need a mobile app that’s optimised toward single handed use.

Approaching product development from this perspective opens up huge value-creation opportunities for not just existing customers, but whole new audiences too.

Rent-seeking leadership

2017-12-13T00:00:00Z

I’ve been thinking about value creation for the last week or so. I had beers with a friend and he made the crazily provocative statement that he felt like in his career there were only a couple of times where he felt that he was actually putting new value into the world, rather than just moving it around.

Hmm…

His line of thinking was that most of our working activity is spent moving value from one place to another, and that it’s rare that we ever actually put new value into the world. We talked about how design agencies we’ve worked at seemed to do a pretty good job of creating value for the founders/owners, which is nice but not exactly what we signed up for - despite my cynical tendencies, I fundamentally believe that the work I do is about adding value into the wider world rather than a few individuals.

Since then I’ve been thinking about how the larger organisations I’ve worked for might better be understood as systems designed to distribute power and money to the people at the top of the organisation rather than as systems to bring new value into the world.

The thought crystallised around the idea of rent-seeking, and the tendency I’ve seen amongst some senior managers and leaders to focus more on increasing their share of personal power and reward from their position than in creating new value from their position.

What does this look like in practice?

I think there are some common behaviours that you can attribute to rent-seeking leaders.

Prioritising the appearance of productivity over progress
Hiring of generalists and jack-of-all-trades
Deep dissatisfaction in the team
Focus on increasing the size of the team
Excessive, often unnecessary knowledge brokering (usually between effective parties)
Participant inflation in meetings

Appearance of productivity over progress

When a team is led by a rent-seeking manager, you can expect to see a lot of talk about progress and examples of interesting or innovative thinking. Out of context these seem impressive but don’t bear up under scrutiny and will mask a lack of significant progress. There will of course be explanations for this, often attributed to rogue team members or external factors.

Hiring generalists

A rent-seeking leader will tend to prefer team members who they can move around as a fungible resource. This allows them to appear effective by putting people where the most noise or demand is, rather than where they’re needed. By doing this, they avoid the accusation of bad hiring or the risk of their team being a bottleneck.

Dissatisfied team

Related to the previous point, this is the outcome when your team is treated as resources to be moved around to keep other people (and with the rent-seeking leader that usually means superiors) happy. Expect to see people complaining about the cost of context switching, feeling like they’re skimming the surface of a problem, and in permanent fire-fighting mode.

Focus on increasing the size of the team

It’s pretty rare that anyone is specifically paid to have a larger and larger team, but a rent-seeking leader will almost certainly make this their core objective. Having a large team justifies their existence, and of course a large team is an effective tactic to gaining seniority in a big org. A large team also gives you plausible deniability (“I’m over-worked managing the team”) and people to lose should the business tighten its belt.

Unnecessary knowledge brokering

To get the most rent from your team, it’s important not to let other people get too much directly from them. Rent-seeking leader will place themselves between the team and other parties, controlling the information flows to ensure that they are perceived as the valuable contact.

Participant inflation in meetings

Rather than attending, processing and disseminating information from meetings this kind of leader will tend to pull in their team into as many meetings as possible. For the leader this means that their role in the meeting is simply one of presence, rather than adding knowledge, making decisions or saving time.

One way not to be a rent-seeker

Writing these down was easier than I expected, partly because I’ve spent enough time alongside and working for people like this, but never really managed to capture why I was so irritated by them.

Going back to my friend’s observation, and having thought about him and the work he does I’d suggest that one of the things he does, as a good leader is to invest his time and energy into helping his team become better practitioners and in creating an environment where they can explore and grow. That to me is a very tangible kind of value being created that might otherwise not come into the world.

How we made the country’s most accessible grocery shopping app (without anyone noticing).

2018-03-27T00:00:00Z

Feedback we live for

Getting buy-in

Make a compelling business case showing the large underserved market of customers to which no supermarket is making any attempt to capture
Show how inclusive design and accessibility make the product better for everyone regardless of disability or impairment
Let your leadership teams hear from customers who are being excluded from your services and how disappointed and frustrated they are by the experience
Connect the work with your company’s values and mission - for example, pointing out that building accessible products and services is literally a ‘little help’
Point out the legal requirements and argue the need to protect the business from needless risk of litigation
Articulate how the careful design of well-designed, accessible, modular UI components means that while there’s an additional cost to their individual creation, the savings created by their re-use at scale are huge
Talk about ethics - because fuck it, it’s a hot topic and why not use that too.

NOTE: none of this worked.

So good luck to you if you can make it work, but my experience is that while everyone will nod along and make the right noises, it’s rare that you’ll get the buy-in you’re after. At the very best people will ignore you and leave you to get on with things. So we just chose to do it and we were lucky enough to have a team of people that for various reasons didn’t care about what our bosses thought. In all other conversations that we’d had with Directors and leaders, we’d walked away with a the usual ‘it’s nice to have but it’s not a priority right now’. We all knew from past experience that our ethical arguments, our assertions about the Tesco brand, its values and our business cases would simply be ignored.

The reality was that I and a few others in the team knew we were fucking-off and so didn’t bother seeking permission.

Dumb luck and good timing

After yet another reorg, I found myself in the position of leading the design of Tesco Apps at a time when we were replatforming away from Xamarin and towards fully native Android/iOS apps. The state of the product design when I moved over to the team wasn’t great, and the team had been allowed to wander off deep into the weeds^[1] and were about to replatform and redesign the entire app. We quickly knocked that on the head, and moved to a far less stupid strategy of replatform then worry about redesigning anything, which meant a couple of things:

Our focus moved from uncertainty about what the app might be to the specifics of what was worth keeping in the replatforming - we were now looking at the same app our customers were looking at.
We released design effort from going into the act of creating certainty from possibility, which meant freed-up capacity for the team that could be directed elsewhere

So where did this capacity go? The team wanted to use it to lay down some strong foundations for the app in preparation for later iterations and change. There was a real sense in the team that the work we needed to do was to establish some clear principles and norms that would ensure that the app could respond quickly to our customers’ needs and expectations without creating unmanageable debt: the team wanted to make sure that we were making the most of that rare opportunity to start afresh.

Shit umbrellas

The fact that we had people in the team who had already decided that they weren’t planning on sticking around definitely helped, and those of us who fell in that group were happy to provide the necessary cover for the team to do the work they believed in. For an ~~overhead~~ manager like me, this meant shielding the team from too much attention and pitching the work as dull, pedestrian grunt-work that nobody would want to get too involved with. Telling people that ‘we’re literally just copying the old app’ meant the show-ponies and portfolio-building types saw no shiny thing and so ran a mile, and the perceived dullness of the venture meant that the programme folks twitchy about risk were reassured sufficiently to let things roll forward without endless status updates.

Accessibility, Parsimony and Utility

If I had to characterise those core principles that we wanted to establish, they were accessibility, parsimony and utility. One of the team, Rob did a little bit of genius-work and saw a way to link these to Tesco’s strapline of ‘every little helps’ and created a mnemonic which we came back to often.

Every = is it designed for everyone? Little = have we pared this back to its essentials? And, Helps = are we maximising for usefulness?

So right there, in our principles for the product was the intent to ensure that the app we were working on was accessible to everyone.

One of the things that we got for free when we started using native UI frameworks, was much deeper integration with the OS accessibility support. Given our principles, we’d have been idiots not to have made use of those and everyone in the team was interested and keen to use these hooks. I think we were particularly fortunate to be working with The App Business who provided pretty much everyone in the team working on engineering, testing and delivery as well as some truly great designers. TAB totally understood what we were trying to do, and the whole team there were as passionate and interested as we were about making the new app accessible to everyone - rather than seeing accessibility as an option or an aspiration, they shared our belief that it needed to baked in from the very beginning: in our UI design, in our development process, and in our tests and reviews. The team chose to use accessibility and inclusion as healthy constraints which guided us towards building a better product.

And more...

Some lessons

Belief matters: everyone in the team felt that we had a duty to ensure that the new app worked for everyone: we had a strongly held shared belief
Work with interested people. We had a team of people who were deeply interested in the mission we had set ourselves: to be the most accessible shopping app in the UK
Choose the right constraints to guide the product development towards goodness - for us, that was accessibility, parsimony and utility. YMMV
Trust and safety. We had a team that could be left to their own devices - I knew my role was to create the space for the them to make the right decisions, and ensure they felt safe to work in freedom

Tinder, but for grocery shopping anyone? ↩︎

Design Systems, brand and identity (part one)

2018-04-19T00:00:00Z

Here is the issue

Our digital estate grew very quickly and tactically: when Tesco saw an opportunity to meet its customers in a new channel we went for it - groceries, sofas, kitchens, GM, carpets, wine by the case, media streaming, and so on.

Every time we did this we followed the same pattern, we set up something small and we rolled it into something bigger and better, or we closed it down. This pattern is more or less the same for every large organisation and it’s proven to be a good approach for going out into an unknown territory like digital.

Now that digital isn’t the hot new thing and the channel is maturing, businesses are looking at their digital channels and taking stock of where they’re at and what they’ve got to work with. We’ve moved from being a hedging bet on the future to a point where our leaders are asking when we’re going to start contributing to the bottom line.

Add to this the increasing understanding business leaders have of the importance of customer experience and the value of managing our customer journeys. It’s no longer sufficient to simply have a website or an app for a specific proposition; it needs to be adding value to the whole business and playing an active role in improving the customer journey for all our brand’s customers.

This is the challenge

So here’s the challenge - we’re under scrutiny from all sides.

Our investors are looking for signs in our digital estate that we’re ready to face the onslaught of Amazon, that we’re set up to move quickly and able to sense and respond to opportunities and threats in the wider market.

Our business leaders are looking to us to reduce the costs and complexity of managing our digital channels. Every different website or product that we have pointing at our customers has a cost, and we’ve got an awful lot of them.

Our customers want to get on with their shopping, and while a lot of them are loyal to our brand their expectation on digital is set elsewhere: search needs to be as good as Google, we need to be as inspiring as Instagram, and checkout needs to be as frictionless as Amazon: we don’t get a free-pass for being Tesco.

{>|} SIDE NOTE Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. Story of Abraham Wald in WWII and where to reinforce aircraft coming back from bombing missions.

At the same time, we have to attend to the legacy we’ve created - too many websites and apps all competing for the same customers’ attention. It might make sense to us inside the building to have our teams and websites divided up into grocery, and another one for GM, and another for store locator, and another for our homepage (our homepage!), and another for general help (but not specific help), but it makes zero sense for our customers. It’s just confusing. To our customers there is only one Tesco.

So, the most we can say is that our most loyal customers have learnt over time how to negotiate the insane structures we've put between them and the shopping they want to do, but crucially we have very little idea about how many other people (or in business-speak: potential customers) that we've put off before they even get close to shopping with us.

In the next section I'm going to step aback and define some terms: one thing I've learnt is that people get very, very confused when they start dealing with concepts like brand and identity and this uncertainty gets in the way of understanding how design works at large scale.

Design Systems, brand and identity (part two)

2018-04-20T00:00:00Z

This was intended to be about a talk design systems and how they relate to Tesco's brand and identity. So let me start defining some terms:

Brand

Our brand is what people believe about us. It’s how our customers think about us, and how they talk to other people about us on the other side it’s about how we present our organisation to the world: are we a plucky underdog you want to win, a ball of energy transforming the everyday, or a giant moving mountains?

Our brand is not what we tell customers we are, it’s how we show ourselves to be. When people talk about brand within the business, what they’re talking about is the practice of making sure that the way we behave, communicate and express ourselves is consistent with our purpose. Just as we dress for work, become a little less sweary and don’t sit around with our feet on the desks, our business has thought about and decided how we as an organisation should present itself to our customers and investors.

We’ve invested a huge amount of time and money into revitalising our brand and defining what we really are as a business. We’ve made it simpler to understand what Tesco stands for: we’ve introduced clarity into what was a mess of competing brands and sub-brands. Again, for our customers there’s only ever one Tesco, so living up to this meant making decisions about how strong some of our sub-brands needed to be.

Identity

From our brand comes our identity. Our identity is how our customers recognise Tesco in its appearance and voice, it’s how we present ourselves to the world. Hopefully everyone’s seen our new brand expression, but if you haven’t then it’s exactly what you would expect: it’s how our new brand is expressed.

Our identity is important for a couple of reasons, one customer and one organisational. From an organisational perspective having a consistent, managed identity means that we are able to protect our business from people copying or passing themselves off as Tesco. The more diffuse our identity, the harder that becomes. And don’t underestimate the value of a well-managed identity…

From a customer perspective a clear identity helps establish and build trust. There’s an interesting psychological effect at play here: as animals we’re hardwired to look for signs of health and wellbeing, and more specifically to avoid any signs of ill-health: our brains like symmetrical faces for just this reason. When we see things that show harmony and order, our brains associate this with care and attention - we confer positive values on the thing we’re seeing.

There’s another bit of psychology going on here.

There's a story about a magician called Vernon who was tasked with watching a great magician called Malini over the course of an evening’s dinner performance to try and pin down the great man’s sleight-of-hand secrets - in particular the block-of-ice-under-the-hat trick. Throughout the full evening’s meal, Malini never left the table. Malini then proceeded to perform the trick and when Malini lifted the hat, a block of ice the size of four fists lay in the centre of the table. While the regular audience members wondered how the ice got under the hat, Vernon was dumbfounded as to how the ice got to the table at all.

"Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

If you take this practice to the extreme you see brands like Apple spending ridiculous amounts on very small details - In psychology this is called ‘costly signalling theory’, but really all it means is showing that you are healthy enough to care deeply.

What I want is for us to see these details for what they are: creating protectable shapes and patterns, and creating the impression in others that we're strong enough to worry about the tiny details our competitors aren't able to care about. Do not underestimate the value of investing in identity.

So, to summarise: our brand has a way of presenting itself, that’s the new brand expression. This explains our tone of voice, how we shoot photography, the colours we use and in what proportions, the way we create signs and icons, our typeface and so on. This brand expression is what underpins the look and feel of everything we create: from packaging to store design to websites.

In the final part of this talk I want to talk about how we created the design system that ensures that Tesco's digital channels look and feel consistent, considered and beautiful.

Design Systems, brand and identity (part three)

2018-04-21T00:00:00Z

Previously I've outlined why we needed to create a more systemic approach to building our digital UI and described how brand and identity play a role in this, in this final part I'll talk about the design system that we built, which we called Tesco's Digital Design Language and of course immediately gave the three letter acronym of DDL.

We created the DDL as a visual design system to address the challenge of our look and feel being utterly inconsistent across our digital estate, in fact we were often inconsistent within a product. The DDL is an initiative that was initally proposed to answer the question: how should our digital estate look to our customers? By getting the many design teams and stakeholders together we would create a specification for our most common user interface elements. By having standardised versions of these elements we created the ability to optimise and improve them for everyone, rather than at a local isolated instance - in effect, we created a feedback mechanism for our look and feel.

The second thing design systems like the DDL create is the ability to stop endless low-value debates about things such as, ‘should a button be red, orange, blue, rainbow sparkles’, ‘should a carousel have a stop button’, ‘how big are our headlines meant to be’, ‘how should we set up images to work responsively’ and so on. By having a standard, default specification, we allow our teams to focus on high-value problem solving and meeting customer needs.

Design systems like the DDL are a hot topic right now - businesses are recognising them as a way to consolidate and rationalise their digital channels, and using them to drive down operational costs, time to decision making, time to delivery and of course improving customer perception and trust. Indeed, some of the more pioneering businesses are open sourcing their design systems so that they get used, tested and improved by as many people as possible. Remember that Bootstrap was Twitter’s design system long before it became the web’s default UI.

These initiatives parallel similar system-wide approaches in engineering: shared architectural practices, code libraries and code standards. They all share the same idea of setting a common set of practices to allow greater autonomy and distributed decision-making within teams by trusting that they work from shared standards and removing gatekeeping.

Which brings us to the last piece of the naming puzzle - where visual design systems become UI design systems or libraries. We started the DDL as a system for designers, we avoided code other than where it was helpful to document how a particular interaction worked. But the thing we heard time and time again was from people wanting the code that the created the DDL elements so they could build with it. Engineers and developers are generally pretty sensible folks who like nothing more than a quick starting point. ‘Can you make a DDL version of Bootstrap?’ became something I had to regularly answer.

Late in 2017 we started work with the Technolgy function to extend the design system of the DDL into a library of UI components that are agnostic of the products they get used in. Technology leadership decided that they needed to build a set of core UI components that would enable distributed, autonomous teams to reuse, extend and contribute improvements to. Our collaboration with them created the foundations of a library, a distributed way of working centred around Github and the start of a workflow that ensures that everyone can participate and improve the library.

The power of having a living design system like this is that it allows us to very quickly build in a consistent way. Here’s an example of pulling together a set of off-the-shelf components to create a prototype of something like a new brand expression compliant Delivery Saver website.

Note that’s using production-ready code pulled from the Github repo. The editor you see around it isn’t ready for everyone to use, but you can easily imagine this being the starting point for a lot of our teams to experiment with different layouts and see how they respond across viewports. Tools and design standards like these mean that the domain experts in marketing or comms can solve their own problems and take a design all the way through to a viable solution that is potentially shippable.

This leaves our specialist design and engineering teams free to focus on the higher-value, higher-order problems. Design systems like the DDL won’t ever tell us how best to handle some of our unique experience problems like how we present delivery or fulfilment options, but they will free us up to stay focussed on that rather than redesigning yet another button.

Authenticity and integrity

2018-05-21T00:00:00Z

I’ve had a problem with the use of authentic when it comes to describing some sort of aspired behaviour or way of being, but hadn’t quite got around to pinning it down until this tweet from the estimable John Cutler, who if you don't already follow should do.

Often at work we sabotage our own goals/credibility by letting people get under our skin.

You can be authentic without falling into the trap.#teams #prodmgmt #communication pic.twitter.com/NFFG9UWhLR
— John Cutler (@johncutlefish) May 21, 2018

First up - this is purely about my personal reaction to the use of authenticity and I’m well aware that I’m blundering into semantics and risking a whole pile of dictionary-splaining. That aside, when someone talks about a person being authentic, it comes with an unstated set of ideas about what they’re assessed against: when a type of food is described in terms of being authentic cuisine, it’s because it’s been prepared or made in a way that someone or some group have defined as canonical.

To be authentic, the subject needs to be evaluated in regard to something else. It’s specifically that measureing-up which I find uncomfortable. To be authentic someone has to meet someone else’s set of criteria for authenticity rather than find their own.

When I work with my teams and helping people grow in their roles, I’m far more interested in people finding out and reaching their own potential, and I actively avoid the trap of tainting this process with my own pre-determined ideas about what I think someone could or should be. Obviously I can talk about what I’ve observed in others and relate my experiences, but fundamentally I believe that it’s more important that people find a way of being and a way of doing that works for them in a positive, healthy way.

I’ve found that rather than talk about this in terms of authenticity, that the concept of integrity yields a more valuable discussion: how do you live in a way that is sustainable and enables you to continue to develop freely? For me, the concept of integrity doesn’t carry any sense of a stopping condition - something can grow forever as long as it doesn’t collapse (i.e. lose its integrity), whereas authentic implies that movement away from the bounds of what’s acceptable causes a loss of authenticity.

The shit chute

2018-05-31T00:00:00Z

You’re a small team who are trying to change culture and practice within a large org. You’ve been set up well (like many other digital transformational teams) with strong, capable people who have done this shit before.

You know through experience that showing results, and showing a clear, detailed vision of what the ambition might look like gets attention and builds trust with the high-ups.

Build a case study, create an exemplar. So you start ranging around the org, looking for potential partners, people you can help make look brilliant by adding a little magic, bringing a bit of digital. And there you find the team, that one who get it, but just haven’t had the right people or investment to really move things along – they’re the one who are working diligently on that unloved, unsexy but deeply important thing that never had the chance to think about, let alone run as a product team. They’re excited, you’re excited.

But then word gets around, there’s a team who can help with design. They’re helping some bullshit team buried in the org, so surely there’s an easy argument that they can give a bit of time to that big, high-profile, super-important project that isn’t moving as fast as the high-ups want. So it begins.

“Why isn’t it working?”

“What do you know about your users?”

“How does this work with that?”

But the super-important project team don’t want those questions - they want you to pull together a deck that shows the vision (their vision). They want you to show what the thing looks like with that nice design system you’ve been building. They already know what their users need they’ve been working on this for years…

So you negotiate, a bit of the shiny for a chance to show them how they could be doing things better. Quid pro quo. You’ll help them with the short term if they open the door to the possibility of Doing Things Differently™.

And now, you’re part of the problem. Welcome to codependency.

When this project fails to deliver, when it continues to stagger around in circles, collapsing and spraying its dying guts all over the org, you and your team are going to have that shit all over you, just like everyone else who went near it with good intentions. Everyone will be to blame, so nobody will. But all that capital you built up in the team is pissing away because you got everyone’s hopes up and turned out to be just another bunch of bright folks who talk a good game.

So, what do you do next time?

You make a shit chute.

The shit chute is a process for making sure that if you have to deal with toxic projects, HiPPOs, JFDIs etc is that you get it through your team without ending up covered in shit.

Fundamentally, this means you accept that this will happen (because you’re a strong, capable team who get things done) and that you won’t always have the luxury of saying no. It operates on the following principles:

You get this done and you do it fast, the metric here is speed. Treat it like a bullshit project at an agency.
You don’t try and change the course, question the rationale, or challenge the process. This isn’t the hill you want to die on.
You protect yourself from the shit by being clear about what’s being asked and delivering accurately and precisely (again, ex-agency people who have been good account handlers in a past life will be useful in your team).

If you can’t swallow this as an approach, then think about it as a sort of chaos monkey - this is a test of your team’s resilience and ability to handle randomness. This is about making sure your team live to fight another day.

It might be that you need to make this a more formal part of your team’s charter, that it’s part of the way that you all work: sometimes you’re on 20% time, and sometimes you’re helping on the shit chute. Point is that you don’t make this another team - it needs to be part of what the team does^[1].

Last of all, another of the potential upsides for this along with the resilience test is that if the project manages not to collapse your team looks responsive, you’ve just built trust and a little bit of capital with those HiPPOs that you can save for later.

Final thoughts

Yes, this is a weird thing to do. When I've spoken to people about this the reactions tend to be either uncomfortable laughter or disbelief. I think that's because as designers we tend to want to make things better, and we belive that things would be better if only people listened to us and did things the right (ie. our) way. It plays against the narrative of designer as saviour because it speaks of the designer as shit-shoveller, which is precisely what all those Medium treatises and LinkedIn motivational posts tell us design really ought not to be.

I prefer a different approach, I believe that you have to accept the world (and more close to home, the products you're working on) as it really is. If you really have no choice, then accept that fact and attend to it. Fighting against the reality of a situation, pretending that somewhere there's something better out there that only you can bring to life doesn't really change things in the world (or the org) you're in.

If the shit is flying, then let it fly through chutes so your team is somewhat protected and maybe even makes them stronger.

You’d have be some kind of monster if you created a dedicated shit chute team deliberately. It’s of course perfectly acceptable to create shit chute teams unconsciously and is in fact is fairly common. Look at most large orgs. ↩︎

A tool to help get your organisation into shape

2018-07-02T00:00:00Z

Doctrine Grid Tool

Updated 2020.09.04: Purkis Layout added.

I wanted to use Simon Wardley’s very helpful set of universally useful patterns (aka Wardley’s Doctrine) in some forthcoming research I’m planning to do with a large organisation. When I’ve used it in the past it’s been pretty much as described in this tweet.

X : Any strategy tips?
Me : Yes ... Don't.
a) Get 10-15 ppl in your org to colour the chart (attached) which will probably look "all red" (see banking).
b) Take action to make it "more green"
c) When it looks more like the "e-commerce" giant, you'll be ready to discuss strategy. pic.twitter.com/fahBubkvx4
— Simon Wardley (@swardley) June 2, 2018

Print out some black and white grids, ask the person to colour each pattern in to denote how well developed the pattern is within the organisation (in that participant’s opinion) and then aggregate the data and use that to identify where next to focus attention. It’s a really simple, but very powerful tool.

So of course I wanted to make it a little bit more powerful, and because I’ve got a bit of time on my hands after quitting Tesco, decided to see if I could make a tool that captured everything using a form and held it all in a spreadsheet. My line of thinking here was it might be interesting to compare how different parts of the organisation saw things. It also meant that I’d find it easier when working across different countries.

Anyway, here’s where I got to with it - it’s very rough and ready, but it’s good enough. I’ve used Google Forms and Google Sheets. The form simply asks the respondent to assign a value (Good, Unknown/neutral, Weak, or Warning) for each of the patterns. The spreadsheet does the fun stuff, capturing everyone’s responses on the first sheet (with a summary result for each pattern) and on the second sheet taking all of the organisations’ responses and putting them into one of Simon’s original grids.

Some links

The form builder: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13xFw7PoTEwHXd82UeuOC9p0et3CbiDACS295ZXKWfmA/edit?usp=sharing
An example of the form: https://goo.gl/forms/XTh6t6UjRJVCe34a2
The spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lHtLfnWY8vyV8Pt7W_fflkqo3rPq9GTx5OZ8WQg0U9U/edit?usp=sharing

Please feel free to create your own copies for your own use. The easiest (I think, I’ve yet to confirm this) way to do this is to:

Make a copy of the form builder
Make a copy of the spreadsheet
In the form builder, relink the form to your copy

Of course I’d really love any feedback or advice on improving the tool and I’d be completely overjoyed to hear if you do use them yourself, you can always find me grumbling about product and design on Twitter.

What needs improving

I really don’t like the way I’ve aggregated each pattern’s score for the grid, this is because I’ve no idea how best to handle things when half the respondents score a pattern as Good and half score it as Warning - clearly something interesting is going on here, but how best to represent it? With my information design hat on I’m thinking that there probably needs to be a better way to show the underlying detail rather than blocking it off with a single ‘score’.

When I was creating this, one thought in my head was, ‘people aren’t going to understand all these patterns without me being there to explain’. And when I asked for feedback from my friend Richard Warner who’s another keen Wardley mapper, he said (after doing some impromptu user research with his wife) that she was confused by some of the terminology and labels, such as Warning.

So yes, clearly room for improvement, but like I said it’s good enough for now. Like I said, let me know if you find it useful.

Update 2020.09.04

I've finally got around to reworking the summary so that you can see both the Simon's original layout and the improved Steve Purkis version.

Purkis layout in Wardley Doctrine Grid Tool

Calculating my family’s carbon footprint

2020-01-04T00:00:00Z

Short version: I used 4 different calculators to try and get an understanding of how big my family’s carbon footprint is so that I can buy some carbon offsets. I got wildly differing results ranging from 14.1 tonnes of CO2 for my family up to 32.4 tonnes for just me.

WWF carbon calculator

Calculator 1: WWF - https://footprint.wwf.org.uk

This is a personal carbon calculator rather than a family/household calculator, went into quite a lot of detail and very easy to use. Only thing that I couldn’t answer properly was around the type of heating fuel we use, but that’s because we live in a new area which uses shared hot water from a central point of production. It also advised me that the 2020 target impact for carbon is 10.5 tonnes.

My results were 32.4 tonnes (309% of target) against what looked like around 10 tonnes as the UK average. Helpfully it gives you the ability to drill into where the footprint is heaviest - in my case that’s travel, which I have to do a lot of for work. The good news here is that Farfetch are serious about being more sustainable as a business^[1] so I’ll be picking this up at work to check whether my travel is currently being offset and if not, why not. Recalculating using my own travel and excluding work results in 16.5 tonnes (157% of target). Drilling down I can still see that carbon footprint is still mostly down to travel (45%). There’s also a good chunk (18%) in the ‘stuff’ category which is caused by all the purchases we’ve made because of our recent house move.

Overall, this is a really helpful calculator and it’s very usable. It’d be nice to be able to work out my family’s footprint instead of just mine, but other than that it’s good.

Carbon Footprint calculator

Calculator 2: Carbon Footprint - https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx

This calculator does allow you to work out your family footprint and even though the UI for the calculator is a little bit rudimentary, it does the trick. You’ll need to have a fair amount of data at hand (or be prepared to take well-informed guesses) to complete it though.

Results on this calculator showed that my family footprint was 16.85 tonnes. They say that the average UK footprint is 6.5 tonnes so we’re way over that.

Carbon Independent calculator FB

Calculator 3: Carbon Independent - https://www.carbonindependent.org

The data for this calculator was updated in 2019 which is encouraging and again allows you to work out a family footprint. I really liked this calculator as it used informed default figures and allowed you to work from these if you didn’t have access to your own data. It also used simple language in the form and showed the immediate affect of your answer as tonnes. For example, when asking about your food miles you’re given good old fashioned radio buttons with labels of ‘very little’, ‘average’, ‘above average’ and ‘almost all’ and as soon as you select you see the amount of tonnes of CO2 that causes.

According to this site the UK average is 14.1 tonnes and our result on this site was 15.34 tonnes.

United Nations Carbon Offset Platform calculator

Calculator 4: United Nations Carbon Offset Platform - https://offset.climateneutralnow.org/footprintcalc

Another household calculator and this one’s pretty easy to use too. It’s nice to look at and you can see that there’s been care shown in the look and feel. The calculator breaks into 3 sections; household, transport, and lifestyle and you can get to an answer pretty quickly.

The breakdown on this calculator suggested that 65% of my footprint was caused by a knife and fork symbol - the rest going on symbols for a lightning strike, a car and a plane. I’m not sure how these link to the 3 sections in the calculator, but I suppose it’s saying my lifestyle is the biggest driver here. Going back into the calculator the questions here are about diet, local and responsible consumption and how we handle waste.

Result: 23.53 tonnes against a UK average of 32.49 tonnes.

Conclusions

Mostly, I'm pretty confused still about what our carbon footprint is, as the figures are pretty inconsistent. I don't know if we're a particularly good or bad producer of CO2 in comparison to the rest of the UK (however as I live in Europe I can say I know we're bad when compared to the rest of the planet). What I have taken away from the calculators is that I should do something about the work travel and that we can be better on the food side of things.

In terms of a figure for the carbon offsets, I'm going to use the UK average figure from the UN which would more than cover the calculated impact from 2 of the other calculators and equals the personal impact of the WWF.

Update 2020.01.06 - Farfetch will be offsetting flights. ↩︎

Offsetting our carbon dioxide

2020-01-05T00:00:00Z

Note: this is the second part of my notes about how I offset my family’s expected CO2 footprint for 2020. The first part describes how we calculated the footprint.

I decided to use the UN Carbon Offset Platform because I’d seen it referenced a few times on other sites when I was looking at calculators. It allows you to look through lots of projects and select ones based on various criteria such as country or continent as well as by local impact on things like jobs and welfare. Just as important (to me) was that this platform ensures 100% of the contribution goes directly to the projects I pick.

I spent some time looking through these and decided that rather than put all my offsetting on one project I would build a portfolio of projects: partly because this just felt more interesting to me, but also to spread the risk of any dodgy projects.

I initially tried to create the portfolio on the site by adding more than one offset project to my basket, but unfortunately it’s not allowed, so I opened up a spreadsheet and started collecting them together there and working things out within the rough budget I set myself.

The six projects I selected were in South America, Asia and Africa and are doing things like replacing traditional cooking fires with fuel efficient cook stoves, using rice husk as biomass fuel for electricity generation in Cambodia along with helping to build hydroelectric and wind power projects.

The portfolio approach meant that I was able to offset more than the 35 tonnes of CO2 that I originally planned and in the end we’ve offset 50 tonnes.

My standard sourdough bread recipe

2023-02-11T00:00:00Z

The purpose of writing-up this recipe is that I wanted to share a simple, no-nonsense daily bake that tastes great and doesn't require a ridiculous amount of process or effort. I reckon there's not much more than 15 minutes of working time required, and the final results are great.

Example output

The crumb of the output

Ingredients

Starter (at 100% hydration) - 100g
Water at room temperature - 300g (can go up to 330g)
Flour (I use Shipton Mill Strong White) - 450g
Salt - 12g

100% hydration means that the starter is fed with equal amounts of flour and water. I tend not to feed the starter between bakes as I'm usually baking often-enough that it stays fairly lively, but if I've not baked for a while I'll feed it a few days before I'm planning on baking.

Preparation (2 days before you want your loaf)

Feed the starter before you go to bed with 50g water and 50g flour (I tend to use light rye flour). Don't put this in the fridge, leave it on the counter.

Start - the morning of the day before you want your loaf

Ensure the starter is lively - check with a float test by dropping a small amount of the starter into water and checking to see it floats
In a large wide-mouthed mixing bowl mix the starter into the water until dispersed throughout
Add flour and salt, mix to shaggy mess
Mist with water and cover bowl with towel

+30mins (30min elapsed)

Wet hands
Stretch and fold the dough about a dozen times in the bowl, you should feel the structure change from rough to smooth
Cover again

+2h (2h 30min elapsed)

Wet hands
Stretch and fold the dough about a dozen times in the bowl
Changes are less significant now
Cover again

+2h (4h 30min elapsed)

Wet hands
Stretch and fold about a half dozen times, expect the structure to be well-developed now, pull and tighten into a dome
Cover again

+1h (5h 30min elapsed)

Dust hands and surface with flour
Use dough blade to turn the dough out on to surface carefully
Pull gently to a square
Book fold, flip over and then add tension to dome by turning and pulling the dough under itself
Cover with an upturned bowl - I use the bowl I've been proving the dough in

+1h (6h 30min elapsed)

Dust hands and dough with flour (I dust the banneton over the dough and my hands so any excess covers the dough and surface)
Use dough blade to turn the dough over onto its dusted topside
Book fold and then add tension to dome
Carefully put the dough into the banneton with the good side down
Dust again, care to get edges where the dough will rise
Put in fridge overnight

Next day (the day you want your loaf)

Heat oven with Dutch Oven inside to 270°C for 30mins
Turn out the dough from the banneton on to a sheet of greaseproof
Score the dough
Put the dough into the Dutch Oven and then into the oven
15-20mins at 270°C
Remove lid and cook at 210°C for a further 20-25mins

Operating principles

2023-04-14T00:00:00Z

I've had a growing list of these in Notes rounding-up the rules I try and live by. I'll add more as I find them (last updated 2023.04.15)

Spend more time really understanding the present and making it better than you do predicting or designing the future (the now is undervalued)
Make things better - always leave things in a better state than you found them
Decentralise the decisions, centralise the vision and principles
Automate routine stuff, leave the complicated stuff to humans
Find (or create) and reinforce positive feedback loops
~~Don’t worry about predicting the future, focus on understanding the present~~
Make it safe to change your plans
Do the work to make the work work
Avoid creating bottlenecks, never be a gatekeeper
Avoid big, attention-seeking, resource hungry projects: find the little things with unnoticed potential that don’t need lots of energy - set a few of these going
(Plan your) measure twice; cut (confidently) once - inspired by Chris
Your job is not to make decisions, it’s to ensure that the people around you are able to make good decisions
Power rarely acts against its own interests - recognise where power lies and where your plans are working with or against it.