A Manifesto for Maturing the Making of Meaningful Work, Part 1

Reflections on This Story

This is a pretty standard story for a bus journey whose goal is to get you home, and there are moments along the way that either are helpful or present obstacles to your getting home. There were helpful features of the bus system that delivered a positive experience, but also clear disconnects between the information about the journey in the mobile app and on the bus.

The driver had added to the problem by stating that he was not responsible for the representation of the route in the mobile app or on the bus and has nothing to do with that part of the business. Plus, you found it frustrating that he told you to call customer service and wasn’t open to taking feedback to pass along to right people in the business so they could improve the bus journey next time. Again, he said this was not part of his job.

Let’s take a step back and look at this problem holistically, in an integrated fashion. To address this problem, we’d need answers to the following questions:

• What are the bus company’s organizational culture and practices that impacted the driver’s attitude and choices?
• What rewards would have motivated the driver to offer his help? What rewards would be counterproductive?
• Who in the organization is responsible for the consistency—or lack thereof—between the maps in the mobile app and on the TV on the bus?
• What would motivate the driver to pass on passengers’ feedback to the relevant people and teams?
• How could the bus company better define and strengthen the feedback loops between passengers, drivers, the mobile app team, and other relevant stakeholders in the bus company to set them up for both meaningful work and success?
• Did the bus company empower and enable their drivers to take decisions, deviating from the predetermined script?

The Importance of Feedback Loops

When you are awake and aware, you’ll readily notice that the conversations and interactions companies have in a narrative with their customers and the moments customers experience with products or services often break.

The feedback loops in the bus-journey story we related earlier were broken, and the company had no intention of subsequently fixing the issues for other passengers. The driver’s lack of care and respect for passengers shows that he was sleepwalking to a degree and probably did not notice the issues.

Over many years of working on projects, we have observed that there are common contributors to such interruptions in service narratives, as follows:

• People are unclear on both the overall narrative and the priorities for what they must do. Sometimes, there is a real lack of strategic understanding, and people do not know why they need to complete specific work. Often, the people working on a project cannot perceive a product’s or service’s interconnected moments—thus, teams do not know how to prioritize features.
• Companies do not understand customer motivations or local needs. For the most part, companies do not consult or involve customers when designing products and services, and they create solutions without any consideration of local needs. Why?
  
  • Business requirements are poorly written.
  • There is limited customer understanding, if any.
  • Product teams have no understanding of the people for whom they’re designing a product—whether employees, users, or society at large.
  • Ego-driven design results in the creation of features or technologies that sound intriguing, but no one will use.
  • Teams use out-of-the-box solutions and platforms without taking customer needs into account.
• False assumptions are widespread. People tend to make false assumptions about customers’ needs, injecting their own biases, opinions, and egos into their decisions about what they think customers need.
  

• There is a lack of clarity on the problems teams needs to solve. When a team lacks a deeper understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve, they sometimes focus on the wrong problems or fail to see interrelated problems. This makes their intention unclear.
  

• Sheer waste results in failure. Companies waste enormous amounts of resources in making products and services that customers do not need or want. We have seen them waste literally millions of dollars because of a lack of planning, not taking sufficient time to consider what problem they’re trying to solve, and not listening or being able to make sense of customers’ concerns. Instead of committing the time and resources necessary to experiment, many companies suffer from a lack of strategic clarity over many years, so their people work on crap that does not help anyone, especially themselves. Imagine how much better it would be if we could devote these wasted resources to doing things like dealing with global energy resources and poverty-related issues.

Fulfilling the Intention to Make Meaningful Work

These observations made us assume that the bus driver in the story we told earlier didn’t understand the overall narrative, so he could see only what he must do in his role as a bus driver for the company. Problems occurred when there were gaps between the expectations of the passengers and the intentions of the driver.

Silos and other divisions that exist in a business prevent their people and project teams from delivering their best work. Silos create roadblocks that deter deep conversations and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Now, let’s consider how the intention of making meaningful work impacts projects. Fulfilling this intention would require getting answers to the following questions:

• How do we help people—independent of their role in a business—to be able to see and understand their role in the narrative?
• How can we increase people’s trust so they can find the courage to go beyond the boundaries of their own jobs and make experiences better for themselves and the people they serve?
• How can we see all of the moments in a narrative and help connect the dots?
• How can we provide feedback loops at the most important moments to strengthen opportunities for improvement?
• How can we strengthen existing feedback loops to ensure that we see gaps as opportunities for continuous learning and improvement?
• How do we look for gaps and bridge them so we can strengthen the intersections in a journey?
• How can we rally people around a way of thinking and making that helps ensure the people for whom we design are omnipresent in our daily discussions and interactions?
• On projects, how do we ensure everyone is taking responsibility for gaining clarity on who we’re designing for?
• How do we support businesses in getting back to their original intent of providing value to their communities, instead of exploiting them?
• How would a manifesto and best practices help establish optimal routines for project work, if they would? Knowing what routines would be good for us to practice as a group involves the following:
  
  • defining our intentions
  • identifying prior assumptions
  • generating experiments in advance of judgment
  • sharing situational observations
  • interpreting everyone’s observations

Defining Our Manifesto

A manifesto is a “a public declaration of policy and aims”—and a mission statement of sorts. So what is our draft mission statement for making meaningful work.

What if we could enable continuous, self-reflective moments in work and life to help people take the time they need to continuously awaken and learn, in the pursuit of continuous improvement? By establishing supporting routines and practices that help people and teams to glide from sleepwalking, or being stuck, to sparkle, or flow, we can collectively clarify how we can make meaningful work together.

Employing an Integrated Practice Framework

A narrative that lacks clarity can lead to misalignment. As work proceeds on a project team, it’s all too easy for misalignment to creep in. Misalignments are caused by a lack of communication, limited time, poor project management, and micro and macro issues that get addressed too late and cause friction between people.

How can we make our work practices contribute to the intention of wellness for people, work, projects, communities, and economies in an enlightened future society? To make meaningful work, a supporting, integrated framework of work practices—including roles, routines, tools, artifacts, and soft skills—must exist to help people. This integrated practice framework helps us do the following:

• See and understand the narrative and connect the dots, or moments.
• Understand the importance of people’s roles—not just their job functions—in the overall narrative.
• Define the important moments in the narrative, where key interactions and conversations take place.
• Connect the moments in the narrative to achieve the narrative’s intention and goals.
• Define feedback loops.
• Strengthen feedback loops to ensure feedback gets to the people who need it, at the right time to improve both the connections between moments and the overall narrative.
• Strengthen relationships through trust and shared, or aggregated, goodwill.
• Create a caring and respectful work environment in which people can safely seek continuous learning and opportunities for improvement.
• Create spaces for sensemaking of data.
• Gain clarity of intention. (See Jared Spool’s “Design Is the Rendering of Intent.”)
• Define the core meaning of your everyday work.

Conclusion

In the first part of this two-article series, we’ve established the need for a manifesto for the making of meaningful work and described some of the obstacles that companies must overcome to achieve this intent. We’ve also shown the importance of feedback loops, outlined what companies need to do to fulfill their intention of making meaningful work, and described the value of defining an integrated practice framework. In Part 2, we’ll define the eight best practices that this integrated practice framework comprises, as well as four roles that foster the making of meaningful experiences. 

About Sparkle School—We would like to announce Sparkle School, a space where we identify people in the audience who are often silent and invite them to come forward and choose a topic from a wide selection of themes, then help facilitate and connect conversations on that topic, helping us to discover how can we can make meaningful work. We are hoping that this will give more people opportunities to share, contribute, and help all of us practice the skills we need to make our work more meaningful. We are piloting Sparkle School in Hong Kong, in 2017, and will let you know what we learn.

UX Hong Kong 2017—Dan and Jo founded UX Hong Kong in 2011. It is an annual event that fosters and promotes User Experience and related disciplines such as design, product management, and business leadership and strategy within the community. We’re now planning the 7th year of UX Hong Kong as we curate the program for 2017. UX Hong Kong attendees come from all over the world.