I’ve spent the last week writing up my notes from the excellent LeanUX NYC Conference held on the 10th-12th April 2014. The great news is that all of the speakers were recorded and these will be progressively released on the LeanUX NYC site. Below are just a few things that I enjoyed learning about.
Interactivism – a model of planning where we ask what we would want to design right now that would work – instead of an ideal future state. We then identify the constraints impeding us from achieving that now and manage those constraints. From the opening keynote by Jabe Bloom.
Alistair Croll mentioned that innovation is the opposite of what the large company is designed to do and therefore innovators are seen as things like bad listeners and job killers etc…
The three things that lead to success are
- Intention – manifested as a decision
- Process – a means/routine
- Practice – right practice, deliberate practice
This is from John Shook who spoke about Lean Change
Thomas Wendt mentioned that testing can reveal coping strategies – things that people do to cope with poor design – I really liked this insight.
In a complex adaptive system, messy resilience is better than neat stability. The idea of boundary conditions as membranes not walls. These two items from Alicia Juarrero.
Bill Beard talked about branding moments such as making a wrong password failure a bit more fun instead of the plain ‘invalid password’ response – but only to do these sorts of things if your product is not broken. A very important point.
A complex adaptive system is modulated – not driven. It is non-causal and is dispositional. Also, frameworks are scaffolding and are meant to be taken away. These are from Dave Snowden who provided an excellent closing to the first day.
Markus Andrezak pointed out that the constraints applied to a work environment meant for creation and creativity would be harmful to a production work environment and vice versa.
The above are a sampler of the take-aways that I am finding useful to ponder about – and I would encourage you to watch the videos when they are posted. The conference was intense and informative and a great way to meet people who are leading our thinking about improving the ways that we work.
Hi Kim,
The point about constraints on creativity work vs production work is a critical point that many large corporates struggle with – and that’s one of the reasons why true innovation is difficult in these organisations.
Chris