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Personas: A hack used by professionals to imagine people they don’t know well

Posted by: Jo Jordan on: November 21, 2009

In: hacks
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Shooting in the dark ~ I don’t know these people!

I want you to imagine any situation in which you are preparing to work with someone who you don’t know well.

You are going to hire someone and you must write an advert
You are going for a job interview
You are taking a new class
You are going to a party and your host is relying on you to get the party going
You are scouting for new business and you are all but cold calling

Personas

In any of the situations, it really helps to write a persona.

We write down a little story of where the person has come from and where they are going to. How many children do they have? Who is their partner? What is their immediate concern? What are the values that have guided their choice in the past?

Sometimes the persona just won’t flow

Once we start writing, sometimes we realize that our expectations don’t hang together. We can’t make the story “come together.”

That is the real core of our sense that we don’t ‘know’ people. We must be able to imagine a coherent story to be comfortable.

Use a character builder

When I get stuck, I find a “character builder” online, fill out the questionnaires, and resolve in my mind all the little details I expect about the person.

The version that I use suggests a Myers-Briggs profile. It is very good for settling on one persona.

Once I have a coherent picture of someone, then I can imagine what I am going to love about them, and also what I am not going to like.

Here is the key to resolving my ‘stuckness.’ What will I not like about the person? Where must my approach change to be reasonable?

Once I’ve got past this point, I can complete the scenario and write a few more, including scenarios of the person in the context of home, play and work. Who else will be there and what are their personas?

Useful hack

I hope that’s useful: Use a character builder to help your write personas to understand people you don’t know well

Tags: business hacks, character builders, design thinking, marketing, personas, recruitment

If you care enough, you can build it, and they will come

Posted by: Jo Jordan on: November 6, 2009

I am amazed by what I wrote months and months ago. You really should keep a blog and write and write. At the time, your posts may be rough, but they will clarify and when you reread them months late, you will be surprised by your insights.

It seems that some months ago, I jotted down some of my thoughts on using Twitter in classrooms. In the course of the post, I jotted down three critical features of developing flourishing communities like thriving classrooms.

#1 Conversations

Talk to someone. Work with someone. If there is no one else, feel the ground under your feet. Listen to the birds. Pay attention! As we pay attention to the world, we ourselves come alive and the world pays attention to us.

Managers & designers: Start the conversation. Provide tools and opportunities for people to talk to each other. Watch the range of conversations and help people join in. Also watch the content of conversations and help people extend their conversations – to more people in and outside the organization.

#2 Community

Be positive. I don’t mean gushy and airy-fairy. I mean talk to the facts, including your own negative emotions, but don’t exclude other stories. We should own our negative experience but not think they are the whole story. Keep a gratitude diary because if you don’t, with the best will in the world, when shit-happens, and it does, you might find you cannot see the good with the bad.

Managers & designers: Set up “positive” procedures – which are procedures that allow us to recognize negative events, which ensure that we never disrespect anyone by ignoring how events impact on them, yet which acknowledge what is good and true and that we want to do more of. Abandoning the negative art of “gap management” takes thought and disciplined work. Falling out of love with our own tempers takes practice and like-minded friends. But unless and until we can achieve positivity : negativity ratios of 5:1 when things are going badly, we will not predictably sustain communities where we will flourish. The key to flourishing communities begins with us and our loyalty to our members.

#3 Meta-cognition (talking about)

As people settle in, watch out for discussion of the “rules of engagement” and the purpose of our existence. Everyone will have an idea and they need to be heard. We need to listen to others to allow them to hear themselves and to help them relax sufficiently to hear others. We need to be patient because this takes time and some people aren’t good at it. Once advocacy is balanced with curiosity, the group might begin to thrive as a group. Blogging, of course, as a form of talking-about – of putting our experiences into words and making sense of them.

Managers & designers: Help the group move through the five stages of group formation (forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning) and move as fast or as slow as they do extending the conversations appropriately but listening to the relevant concerns that people have at each stage though, quite rightly, these concerns are very different from yours. People move on faster when they are allowed to complete each stage to their satisfaction.

Leading takes work. No doubt about that! It is not as glamorous as it looks.

If you have read this far, you’ll have noticed that I am making little distinction between classrooms, businesses and for that matter, my own life. I don’t. I think the three points

talk to others
keep faith with others (even when it taxes your patience)
and put into words what we are thinking and experience

these three simple points are guides to building any community that you care enough to build.

Tags: collective efficacy, community, conversations, design thinking, five stages of group formation, flourishing, leadership, management, meta-cognition, organizational development, talking about, teaching, thriving

3 Easy Sunday Ways to Master the 3 Principles of Design

Posted by: Jo Jordan on: August 30, 2009

It is Sunday today, and I want you to do three things for me.

1 Watch Dan Pink’s TED lecture on Motivation

2 Flick through Jane McGonigal’s slides for SXSW 2008 or fixing reality.

If you have seen them before, remind yourself of slides 22 through 24.

3 Login in to Facebook and play FarmVille.

Why?

First, today is Sunday. I know you want to catch up with your reading but you should also be having fun.

Dan Pink, former speech writer, speaks good too. Jane McGonigal’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) is to win a Nobel prize for games design and she designs games that ‘give a damn’. And FarmVille, though childish looking, is actually fun, and will probably get you chatting with a couple of old friends over your farmyard gate.

Learn about the Ryan and Deci (2000) 3 principles of design (ARC) in an enjoyable way

But mainly, because if your goal today was to keep up-to-date with what the gurus are saying, you should know that leading gurus are popularizing the research results of Ryan & Deci (2000).

Ryan & Deci boiled down the principles for designing for work, games and events that are compelling, engaging and ‘moreish’ to

Autonomy. Can we make our decisions in this place?

Competence. Does the game, work, or event help us learn, and do the conditions keep pace with our growing ability?

Relatedness. Can we play with others? Is this event socially-rewarding?

Dan Pink and Jane McGonigal may use slightly different terms, but these are the 3 attributes that are being described.

9m people are playing FarmVille (for free) on Facebook

As you play FarmVille, you can admire the ‘assets’ the games have deployed for our leisure and imagination and marvel that 9 million people will seriously attend to their farmyard online and nip over to their neighbours to chase the cows out of the strawberries.

You can also admire the way FarmVille draws you into the game by appealing to your autonomy. This is your farm and your avatar. They gently guide you through the possibilities and in a short time, you are as keen as mustard to develop some competence.

FarmVille has levels. I mysteriously found myself at level 3 – possibly it starts at three. There is clear feedback that tells you how well you are doing and lets you work out the best strategies. There are rewards that entice you to make an effort. And there are levels that are both badges of honour and opportunities to try new things. FarmVille even throws in some random rewards which, of course, are massively reinforcing.

And it is social. You can see at a glance whom of your friends are playing. You can send them free gifts. And they can reciprocate. You can visit their yards and admire their work (and aspire to catch up.) You can ask them to be your neighbour. You can rush over to help on their farm when you they are out and something urgent needs doing.

So a Sunday well spent?

Master the Deci & Ryan model. When the gurus start propagating a model, you know it will become common knowledge very fast. Everyone will be quoting Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness soon (ARC).

And when we are all talking about the psychology of design and trying and learning to use ARC in our own work, Jane McGonigal will achieve her dream of seeing our ‘broken reality’ fixed and become a lot more like a game.

Will you fix reality with the 3 principles of design?

Will you be up there with the games designers, event managers and entrepreneurs who can design work and play worth living?

Or at least understand why some tasks are tedious beyond belief and others bring a light to your eyes, a bounce to your step, and a gentle smile, if not the singing of your soul?

Have a good Sunday, and if you are in the UK, a good Bank Holiday weekend.

Tags: ARC, autonomy, BHAG, Big Hairy Audacious Goal, competence, design, design thinking, event design, FarmVille, game design, play, playfulness, principles of design, principles of work design, psychology, relatedness, word design

Complicated is horrible. Complexity is beautiful.

Posted by: Jo Jordan on: January 15, 2009

In: business & communities
1 Comment

Oh, I am so irritated. I’ve been doing tax returns all day. They have to be one of the most irritating things in life, and not because someone is taking money off us. They are irritating because they are convoluted, fiddly, and complicated.

There are plenty of other complicated things in life too. Airports with signs that send you anywhere except where you want to go. Bosses who change their minds quicker than change their socks. And road signs! Zemanta, the Firefox Addon which searches the web while you write your blog, found this humbdinger of signage from Toronto, dubbed ‘The Audacity of Nope‘.

The opposite of complicated is complex

Instead of the stop-start sensation we get when details are allowed to disrupt the flow of the whole, complexity is when the parts come together to make something bigger themselves – like the mexican wave in a home crowd.

Is eliminating complicatedness and creating complexity the essence of professional life?

Do architects create buildings where we flow, never having to stop and scratch our heads, or to backtrack?

Do brilliant writers grab attention our attention in the first line and take us with them into a world where we follow the story without distraction from out of place detail?

Do leaders describe our group accomplishment, and draw us into a collective adventure, to play our part without constant prodding and cajoling?

How do you create complexity in your work?

In what ways do you help us experience the whole where parts fit in without discord?

What is the ‘whole’ thing that you make? If you can’t name it, can you visualize it, or hear it?

What are the essential parts of the whole, and the linkages between the parts that are essential to form the whole?

What are the signs that you look out for that the whole is ‘forming’, or ‘not forming’, as it should?

What are the extra bits of help that from time-to-time you add for the whole to come to fruition?

I’m interested in the complexity you manage, and the beautiful and satisfying experiences you add to the world.

Come with me

Share your experiences with us?

Gadling Take Five: Oct. 17–Oct. 23 (gadling.com)

Tags: beauty, Chaos theory, competence, complexity, Complexity Theory, complicatedness, design thinking, feedback, goal setting, goals, management, positive psychology, psychology, systems theory, systems thinking, work

Personal coaches are designers of the future

Posted by: Jo Jordan on: April 8, 2008

Design thinking is all the rage. I like it too. Instead of thinking about what is “right” or “wrong”, we think about how we will use something and when and where we will use it.

Designers though, aren’t that keen on design!

Die Zeit interview with French designer Philippe Starke

This was my conclusion. There won’t be any designers. The designer of the future will be the personal coach, the fitness trainer, the nutritionis! That’s all!

What do you think?

Starck says Design is Dead, yet Again? [via Zemanta]
Philippe Starck, Designer [via Zemanta]

Tags: coaching, design school, design thinking, management by design, Philippe Stark