Edge Perspectives with John Hagel

Anticipating the Next Wave of Experience Design

We live in a world defined by increasing time pressure and more and more things competing for our attention. In such a frenetic world, it is understandable that we place more value on the quality of our experience. We want to make the most of the time we have.

Experience design has emerged in part as a response to this growing need we all have.  It is no longer enough to design products and services so that they have aesthetic appeal and perform well.  We demand a more satisfying broader experience when interacting with these products and services so that we more effectively pull out the true potential of these products and services.

The next wave

But this is just the beginning.  We are on the cusp of another major shift in the focus of experience design, one that moves far beyond the impact of individual products and services. What if, instead of pulling out the full potential of our products and services, we focused instead on pulling out the full potential of ourselves? What if we could apply the tools and principles of experience design to help each of us to more effectively drive more rapid waves of learning and performance improvement by working together?  What if those experiences were not only helpful to us, but also provided a deeply engaging and pleasurable experience? What if these experiences became deeper and more powerful as more and more participants engaged with us? What would those experiences look like?

What benefits would accrue to those who could offer such experiences? They would surely attract sustained attention and interaction with more people. These experiences would likely earn a degree of trust and loyalty from participants that would far exceed more narrowly entertaining or useful experiences.  The providers of these experiences would likely enjoy significant and sustained benefits in the intensifying competition for attention.

From diminishing returns to increasing returns

What is the full potential here? By taking experience design to the next level, we may for the first time have the opportunity to shift diminishing returns performance curves into increasing returns performance curves.

What does this mean? Think of the well-known experience curve, developed and popularized by Boston Consulting Group.  Over the years, they have demonstrated that it applies to an awesome array of industries, ranging from semiconductors to Japanese beer and toilet paper.  It is a remarkably accurate description of operating performance improvement in many industries.  But it is a diminishing returns curve – the more experience an industry accumulates, the longer and harder people have to work to get the next increment of performance improvement.  Perhaps this helps to explain the increasing stress most of us are experiencing.

What if there were an alternative? What if we could turn this diminishing returns curve on its side and unleash an increasing returns curve, one where the more people who join in, the faster everyone would learn? What would that require?

Well, for one thing, it would require a major shift in our beliefs and practices – a key dimension of what we call the Big Shift – and a corresponding shift in design focus.

Shifting from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows

To begin with, we would need to shift our beliefs about what is required to create economic value. Our large companies were built on the belief that the source of economic value resided in knowledge stocks – creating proprietary knowledge, aggressively protecting that knowledge from access by anyone else and then as efficiently as possible, extracting economic value from that knowledge and delivering it to the marketplace for as long as possible.  As we plunge into an era when knowledge stocks depreciate in value at an accelerating rate, we need to shift our focus to knowledge flows.  Increasingly, the source of economic value resides in effective participation in a larger, richer and more diverse set of knowledge flows to refresh knowledge stocks at an accelerating rate. (See The Power of Pull for a more detailed discussion of this shift.)

The design challenge becomes how to design experiences that maximize flow. In this context, the constructal design theories of Adrian Bejan and Sylvie Lorente may be particularly relevant.  They have build a design perspective based on a “constructal law” that they have observed in action across physical, biological and social systems.  In order to survive, all of these systems must evolve to provide greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it.  Whether we are talking about river basins, trees, lung design or our cities, it turns out they all obey this constructal law.  The systems that survive and thrive are those that evolve most rapidly and effectively to enhance flows.

These constructal design theories have profound implications.  Designing for flows becomes the core of system design.  The emphasis also shifts from design of static systems to design of evolving systems. Rather than optimizing for the present, the challenge becomes designing in ways that accelerate evolution.

What would it mean to design the systems we live and work in to continually evolve our ability to experience more and more flow, especially the flow of people and ideas? Aerotropolis, an intriguing new book by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, suggests that increasingly our cities will be designed around massive airport facilities that help to maximize the flow of people from city to city and reduce the risk of cities turning inward as they grow in scale.

Shifting from push to pull

There’s a second shift that will shape this next wave of experience design.  We are moving from a world of push to a world of pull, another theme developed more fully in The Power of Pull. In thinking about the implications for experience design, it is important to differentiate three levels of pull:

• Access – seeking out and connecting with people and resources when and where needed – think of Google and other search engines

• Attract – shaping serendipity to increase the quantity and quality of unexpected encounters, drawing people and resources to you that you were not even aware existed but that turn out to be extraordinarily relevant and helpful.  In this context, what are serendipity rich experience designs?

• Achieve – pulling out of each of us and out of our institutions our full potential  - how would we design experiences that enhance this?

Across all three levels of pull, the key question is how to design scalable pull experiences - not just experiences with a few close friends or co-workers, but with a growing number of participants on a global scale.

I confess that I don’t have the answers to these questions. I don’t think anyone does at this point.  I am hoping to intrigue and tease enough of you with the opportunity that you will come up with the answers to these questions.

While I don’t have the answers, I can frame some of the questions that need to be answered. In particular, I want to highlight two dimensions of the challenge – platforms and pathways

• What are platform designs that would accelerate scalable peer to peer learning?
• How can we design pathways that will help us get pragmatically from a world of push to a world of scalable peer to peer learning?

 

Platform design – the first design challenge

We all know that teams become incredibly rich environments for accelerated peer to peer learning and there has been some attention to how to more effectively design team environment. This is particularly important because the most valuable knowledge flows involve tacit knowledge. Yet, tacit knowledge does not really flow – it is, in the words of my colleague, John Seely Brown, remarkably sticky. However, tacit knowledge can be accessed in the context of deep trust based relationships that often emerge in team settings.

But here’s the challenge – teams don’t scale. So, how do we embed teams in increasingly rich platforms that will scale by encouraging the formation of  more and more teams. How do we then motivate and help these teams to connect with and learn from each other? What would these platforms look like?

For inspiration, we might look at some unlikely places

• World of Warcraft – this online gaming environment now engages 12 million participants. Most of these participants are organized into high performing teams (known as guilds), yet the participants stay richly connected with others outside their teams through rich networks of discussion forums, video repositories and social relationships that transcend individual teams

• Extreme sports like big wave surfing –These sports are characterized by intense engagement with local physical environments – for example, specific surf breaks are where big wave surfing practices evolve. While these physical environments serve as gathering spots for a limited number of practitioners, scalability of learning is achieved through rich virtual networks that help participants to learn from each other, regardless of where they are physically. Again, broader learning platforms leverage discussion forums, video repositories and extended social networks to create global reach.

Designing pragmatic pathways – the second design challenge

Scalable platforms are the ultimate goal, but the key is how to start small, designing relatively narrow experiences that can scale over time to include much richer and much broader interactions. I have written a lot about the SAP Developer Network (SDN) as an interesting platform for scalable peer to peer learning. Equally important are the lessons for designing a pathway that is pragmatic and provides short-term value while also building the foundations for much more powerful long-term learning and performance improvement.

Follow a trajectory. First, the SDN started relatively modestly as an online environment focusing on simple problem solving transactions – software developers could post a coding problem they were wrestling with and see if anyone else had encountered a similar problem and had a possible solution to offer. On both sides limited investment of time and effort was required but positive reinforcement was quickly achieved. As problem-solvers started to build reputation, others with similar interests in the SDN began to seek them out and the discussions that ensued started to build sustaining, trust-based relationships. Ultimately, these trust-based relationships led to the formation of global teams of software developers seeking to develop entirely new applications. This trajectory – from narrow transactions to reputation and relationships and ultimately to sustained, long-term performance improvement initiatives – defines a pathway that many collaborative learning platforms have traveled.

Iterate rapidly. Second, the SDN started with a relatively modest platform with limited functionality and evolved through rapid iteration of design, based on careful observation of how participants used the platform and where the opportunities for enhancement seemed most promising.

Stay on the edge. Third, the SDN started on the edge of a very large enterprise, initially focusing on reaching out to and connecting third party software developers operating in SAP’s channel partners and customers.  Over time, it pulled in more and more of SAP’s own developers and employees. The early introduction of new experience platforms often works best on the edge of larger institutions where practices, processes and policies are less well defined and there is more motivation to experiment with new approaches.

Focus on performance improvement. Fourth, the pathway pursued by SDN was carefully shaped by explicit performance metrics. This enabled the designers to regularly assess their progress and learn from the experiences they had created.  The key questions here are: what are people trying to get better at?  How would one measure this in terms of performance improvement as a proxy for learning? What would be leading indicators to determine whether this performance improvement is likely to materialize?

The bottom line

If we get these platforms and pathways right, we have a significant opportunity ahead. But it isn’t just an opportunity – it is an imperative.  We live in a world of mounting economic pressure – pressure that our current institutions are simply not prepared to address. This is graphically confirmed by the sustained deterioration in return on assets that all public companies in the US have experienced since 1965. We are running faster and faster but, unlike the Red Queen, we are not simply staying in the same place – we are falling farther and farther behind.  In the face of this increasing economic pressure, we simply don’t have a choice. The experience designers who master the techniques required to address this growing challenge will be richly rewarded.

But I want to end by focusing on the real opportunity. I began this post by suggesting the opportunity to unleash increasing returns. When we take on this design challenge and crack the very difficult problems it raises for designers, we will find ourselves on the edge of a whole new wave of design activity.

As we begin to see the potential, we might be motivated to take on an even greater challenge.  Rather than focusing on sustainability, we might pursue “thrivability” as described by my friend Jean Russell – how do we generate more and more sustainable prosperity from the limited natural resources that our planet has been endowed with?  It’s not just our business that depends on this; it is our planet.

(This posting is an adaptation of a talk that I gave at the MX Conference hosted by Adaptive Path in San Francisco on March 6-7, 2011)

Revolution from the Edge

What fills you with wonder? What do you wonder about? These different, but related questions were posed often during the TED event last week.  The annual TED event that I attended was organized around the broad theme of the rediscovery of wonder.

As always, TED catalyzed deep thinking and deep emotion as I navigated through awesome sessions and stimulating conversations lasting late into the night. Before too much time passes, I want to step back and reflect on what fills me with wonder. It was only peripherally addressed in the TED sessions, but like many catalysts it helped to coalesce and amplify some thoughts that have been coming together over the past couple of months.

I am filled with wonder by many things, but in recent days I have been especially awed by the revolution that is taking shape before our very eyes.  It has been gathering force for quite some time but it began to erupt in a serious way with the intensifying turmoil in the Middle East.  Most people observing these events from the outside have been guardedly optimistic that these revolutions will be a peaceful force for change in the Middle East.

They seriously under-estimate what is going on. We are witnessing one dimension of the Big Shift that will shake and shape our world in ways that we can only begin to imagine.

The convergence of edges

How to describe this dimension of the Big Shift? It is the convergence of multiple edges, erupting with a force that will be felt in the most distant parts of our globe. What do I mean? The force of this eruption is shaped by three edges coming together: geographic, generational and technological.

• The Middle East and North Africa is a geographic edge defined by the intersection of three continents. In economic terms, this region is part of the developing economies operating on the edge of more developed economies.

• This region containing a large and very rapidly growing concentration of a well educated younger generation - a generational edge. These young people has been systematically excluded from meaningful jobs capable of developing their talents. Growing unemployment rates within the younger generation have been the catalyst to set the movement in motion.

• That younger generation has embraced new technological edges – especially the Internet and online social networks – to connect in ways that had not been feasible before, not just within their individual countries, but across the region. They have shared news and inspiration in ways that gave them the courage to proceed and helped them to focus the attention of the rest of the world on their quest.

It is an explosive convergence. One of the many things about it that fill me with wonder is that so far has been playing out with minimal violence from the youth movement.  They are simply gathering in ever larger numbers to demand an end to regimes that have blocked them from expressing themselves and from pursuing meaningful work. Their example of conviction, courage and commitment has pulled others into the streets and squares, not just in their own countries but in a spreading ring of countries in the region.

Why the youth?

Who knows how far this will spread in the short-term? It may not spread too widely at the outset as leaders of a growing range of countries mobilize around a pincer movement of military deployments and “reforms” to try to preempt similar uprisings.  But this I know. In the long-term, this movement will prevail, catalyzing cascades of change in countries occupying the geographic edge and ultimately spreading into the core of the developed economies.

So, what gives this movement the power to prevail in the long-term in the face of military forces that seek to preserve the status quo?  Well, let’s start with the fact that these military forces largely consist of a younger generation who share the same frustrations of their brothers and sisters (sometimes literally) facing them in the streets and squares. And then let’s add in the growing confidence that comes with the demonstrated ability to make change happen.

But those are not the real reasons. This movement is giving voice to something that is profoundly global. You see, the older generation that I belong to has systematically opted for limited, short-term benefits at the expense of sustainable, long-term growth and prosperity.  We have done this in multiple ways that, in aggregate, have put up global barriers to progress for the younger generation.  These barriers include

• Widespread corruption
• Rapidly mounting government debt
• Environmental degradation that generates increasingly harmful long-term effects

Now, the relative importance of these barriers differs depending on the part of the world we are in.  As a broad generalization, youth in the developing economies suffer most from the first two barriers while the youth from developed economies feel the effect of the last two barriers the most. The youth in natural resource rich countries around the world confront the first and third barriers most severely. But wherever we are in the world, these conditions are not sustainable.

To put it in Marxist terms (and, no, I am not a Marxist, or even a Hegelian), the subjective conditions are aligning with the objective conditions.  Youth, led by those in the Middle East, are beginning to wake up to the realization that they are inheriting a world that is simply not sustainable. When subjective conditions align with objective conditions, revolution generally ensues. And, if I am right about the global presence of objective conditions, the revolution will eventually spread as younger generations around the world wake up to the lack of sustainability in every country.

The agenda for change

The spreading youth-driven revolution will have three agenda items:

• The first item on their agenda will be to confront and oppose the obstacles to sustainability that have been put in their way by the older generation.

• But in order to do that, they will have to embark on a more positive journey – an effort to re-think all of our institutions through the lens of talent development.  If we took seriously the priority of accelerating talent development and realized that education and training programs are only a small part of the answer, how would all of our institutions need to change to become platforms for talent development?  What would corporations, schools, NGO’s and government agencies look like? What would be required to foster a new culture of learning?

• And that leads to a third item, how would we re-think public policy - all public policy, not just education - through the lens of talent development?  What public policies would we adopt in areas like immigration, trade, financial regulation, intellectual property, etc. if our goal were really to accelerate talent development?

Few, if any, of the youth rebels in the Middle East are explicitly focused at this point on the broader issue of talent development. They have more immediate obstacles to address.  But this is the natural issue for youth – they have the most to gain from talent development – and the most to lose if they simply have to fall back on what they learned in school. The world is changing too rapidly to compress learning into a few years of prescribed courses that will barely prepare them for the world of today, much less the world of tomorrow. With most of their lives ahead of them, they will be the most at risk if they don’t address these needs quickly and effectively.

Accelerated talent development will also be required to effectively overcome the enormous burdens that our generation has placed upon the shoulders of the younger generation. These are global and complex issues – wicked problems.  The younger generation has no hope of resolving them if they do not come together and collectively focus on talent development. They need to get better faster by working together.

The deep forces driving the revolution

This revolution is taking shape on the edge.  That is where all true revolutions begin.  It is easy to dismiss or diminish in importance because it is "over there", just as Mubarak a short time ago dismissed the youth of Egypt gathered in Internet cafes and around their mobile phones, far from the centers of power in Cairo.  But the core is never safe as revolutions gather force. If the revolution is shaped by fundamental forces, it will ultimately prevail, even in the core. The older generation in power in the developed economies of the world, muttering about their sons and daughters spending all their time online, will not see it coming until it is too late.

And this revolution is shaped by fundamental forces.  We are living in a world where flow will prevail and topple any obstacles in its way.  As flow gains momentum, it underdemines the precious knowledge stocks that in the past gave us security and wealth. It calls us to learn faster by working together and to pull out of ourselves more of our true potential, both individually and collectively. It excites us with the possibilities that can only be realized by participating in a broadeer range of flows. That is the essence of the Big Shift.

A couple of years ago, I offered a Manifesto for Passionate Creatives. Perhaps it is time for a broader manifesto for the younger generation seeking to throw off the shackles of the older generation.

The TED question

These thoughts were stimulated by a variety of the talks I heard at TED over the past week.  In particular, Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, gave an eloquent view of the bravery of the youth movement in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst, talked about the revolution he is leading from the edge in the world of education to foster student-driven learning. Sarah Kay, a woman in her early twenties, took my breath away with the passion and energy that surged forth from her spoken word poetry.  And finally, Roger Ebert, one of my heroes, moved me to tears with his grace, humor and passion in the face of debilitating illness that has stolen his voice. Eyes twinkling, he shared with us his quest to find a synthetic voice that would make it possible for him to speak again – he simply would not surrender his voice. There were more, many more experiences at TED but these stand out in terms of the passion, commitment and courage that will stoke the fires of the global revolution ahead.

In the face of all of this, it amazes me that so many in the US are focused on the latest rant of Charlie Sheen rather than the events in the Middle East. Many of us seem to be mesmerized by the progressive breakdown of a human being.  Perhaps he is an unconscious symbol for many of us of the progressive breakdown of a social order that is not sustainable. It is time that we shift our focus to the social order that is struggling to emerge from the corruption, debt and environmental degradation that saps the energy of our planet.  It is time for all of us to ask what can we do to help? That is the question that TED left me with this year.