Dealing with Uncertainty and Ambiguity

Learning to entertain uncertainty and welcome it is a key ingredient for success. When we’re faced with uncertainty and ambiguity, we need to learn how to use it as a source of inspiration and creativity.

Knowing that uncertainty and ambiguity are permanent parts of innovation projects, designers and strategists can take steps to minimize their impact on the product development process and develop strategies for dealing with them effectively and productively.

In this post, I will explore how designers should deal with uncertainty and ambiguity by using a set of tools that combine design thinking and facilitation techniques. The aim is to enable designers to apply these methods in their daily work and help them tackle complex problems more effectively.

TL;DR

• The quest for certainty is a survival instinct, which is totally awesome! But it gives us a bias toward certainty and away from uncertainty. We have a natural tendency to prefer knowing over not knowing. We are all wired to fear the downsides of uncertainty, but we forget that change, creation, transformation, and innovation rarely show up without some measure of it.
• This is to say that this anxiety you are experiencing in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity is natural! You are not less competent or “weak” because of it! The first step towards building emotional resilience is acknowledging you are not your emotions! It’s our job as designers to resist the chemical bias for certainty!
• If you’re creating something new, you will have to wrestle with ambiguity at some point. Engaging ambiguity isn’t a choice; it’s inherent in achieving any great outcome.
• If we accept that we’re always starting with assumptions, the key to dealing with complexity is to focus on having good conversations about uncovering assumptions.
• You cannot provide certainty as a leader, not because you’re not a good leader! It’s because certainty resides in a realm you have no control over: the future! In times of uncertainty, it is more important to know what to do than what will happen!
• The way you state your problems frames your decisions. It determines the alternatives you consider and the way you evaluate them. Posing the right problem removes ambiguity and drives everything else. If you can define the problem differently than everybody else in the industry, you can generate alternatives that others aren’t thinking about!
• The mindset of deciding must embrace uncertainty; the mindset of action must replace uncertainty with a certitude of purpose: “Let’s get on with it.”
• Facilitation techniques help teams deal with Uncertainty and Ambiguity by providing a foundation of organizational structures that allows a team to be creative and explore options together but also make decisions, perform at a high functioning level, and deliver on specific outcomes.

TL;DV;

Watch the highlights of this article in less than 9 minutes!

Design is at the core of successful innovation. While working on innovation projects, designers have to deal with the uncertainty associated with complexity, multi-disciplinarity, and fluid desired outcomes that, in the early phases, are not – and are not supposed to be – foreseeable (Daalhuizen, J., Badke-Schaub, P., & Batill, S. M., Dealing with Uncertainty in Design Practice, 2009).

I’ve worked on innovative projects for well-known companies for over 25 years and observed that people vary widely regarding their ability to handle uncertainty. Some colleagues find comfort in knowing everything beforehand, while others thrive with a fuzzy notion of what they should do. The irony is that people who faced uncertainty well were usually more successful than those who didn’t.

In the first half of this post, we will cover techniques to build emotional resilience as an individual; in the second half, we will talk about some facilitation techniques to help teams deal with uncertainty and ambiguity.

Understand the difference between Ambiguity and Uncertainty

Evolutionarily, the brain dislikes uncertainty, regarding it as a type of pain. The brain, therefore, tries to avoid uncertainty and in its place, creates story upon story to explain it away (Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity, 2022).

This natural instinct to live is totally awesome. But it gives us a bias toward certainty and away from uncertainty. We have a natural tendency to prefer knowing over not knowing.

Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity (2022)

In 2016, researchers at University College London ran a shocking little experiment measuring how uncertainty affects people. Research participants were asked to lift rocks in a video game. If a snake was under the rock, they received a nonvirtual, very real electric shock via an electrode on the back of their left hand. The participants’ stress was tracked through physiological signs, like sweating and pupil dilation, and saying things like “please, no more, make it stop” (we’re guessing). The “game” was designed to keep participants fluctuating between confidence and uncertainty about what was under the rock. This study uncovered a fundamental aspect of psychology: stress peaks when uncertainty peaks when people were the most unsure about what was under the rock. It feels more stressful to be uncertain than it does to feel certain about something bad. We prefer to know, even if it’s not good (Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity, 2022)

Stress peaks when uncertainty peaks when people were the most unsure about what was under the rock. It feels more stressful to be uncertain than it does to feel certain about something bad. We prefer to know, even if it’s not good

Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity (2022)

For example, it can feel more stressful not knowing how a critique will go than knowing you’re definitely about to get chewed out. Or not knowing whether you’ll get the role or funding or project. The waiting game can feel more stressful than the potential bad outcome itself (Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity , 2022)

We are all wired to fear the downsides of uncertainty, but we forget that change, creation, transformation, and innovation rarely show up without some measure of it.

Furr, N., The upside of uncertainty (2022)

This is to say that this anxiety you are experiencing in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity is natural! You are not less competent or “weak” because of it! The first step towards building emotional resilience is acknowledging you are not your emotions!

It’s our job as designers to resist the chemical bias for certainty. Your brain naturally builds limiting beliefs about what is happening, and you must continually break through these ingrained beliefs to imagine something new. “And though that’s not particularly comfortable,” Patrice Martin, designer and former creative director at IDEO.org, says, “it allows us to open up creatively, to pursue lots of different ideas, and to arrive at unexpected solutions.” (Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity, 2022).

While I’ll provide some practical tips for dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity, I suggest you look inside yourself, take a deep breath, and not worry! You might be saying, That’s easy for you to say, “Don’t worry! Don’t be anxious?” You will say it’s easier said than done, so you might want to listen to someone a lot wiser than me:

“That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?”

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:25-27 NLT

That said, not worrying doesn’t make the world less uncertain and ambiguous, so you will need to learn to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity and not be paralysed by them!

Uncertainty and Ambiguity are Increasing

According to the World Uncertainty Index, created by economists at Stanford and the International Monetary Fund to capture economic and policy uncertainty, uncertainty has been rising steadily over recent decades (Furr, N., The upside of uncertainty, 2022).

For people who like the linear route forward, life is getting harder and harder, in any field!

Jostein Solheim, former CEO at Ben and Jerry’s.

It’s getting harder because there is no linear route forward in a world where up to 65 percent of elementary-school-age children may work in jobs that don’t even exist yet (Leopold, T. A., Ratcheva, V., & Zahidi, S., The Future of Jobs, 2016).

Technology has only magnified the uncertainty, lowering the barriers to participation in many industries, and increasing the pace of change. And while we learn many things in school, from mathematics and biology to personal finance, we do not learn how to prepare for and face uncertainty. Without the right tools, we fall into maladaptive traps such as threat rigidity, unproductive rumination, premature certainty, and misinvention (Furr, N., The upside of uncertainty, 2022).

Ambiguity is different from Uncertainty

Ambiguity may contain uncertainty, but they’re different. Dictionaries define uncertainty as something that is not clearly or precisely determined; something unknown, vague, indistinct, or subject to change. Uncertainty implies that there is something to be certain about. An absolute truth or fact exists. It’s more black and white. With ambiguity, there’s no singular, correct answer. It allows for layers of meaning on anything. No absolute truth or fact exists. Your mind is free to explore–and to imagine possibilities that are unknown or don’t currently exist (Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity, 2022).

That said, I would argue that there is good ambiguity (there are no “right” answers and infinite ways to interpret the problem and creatively respond) and bad ambiguity (where we automatically fall back to vagueness as an excuse for speed).

Uncertainty is natural; Ambiguity is people-made

Martin, K., Clarity first (2018)

Ambiguity is a condition we sink into because it is automatic, and it provides short-term benefits that manifest in a number of ways. The manager who posts a vague job description is able to put off defining the specific responsibilities for the role. The project launched with ambiguous purpose leaves the project manager free to interpret results to his advantage (Martin, K., Clarity first, 2018).

Learn to tolerate Uncertainty and Ambiguity

Numerous studies across academic fields suggest that people comfortable with uncertainty are more creative and are more successful as entrepreneurs and more effective as leaders (Furr, N., The upside of uncertainty, 2022).

The key to building the emotional resilience to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity is acknowledging you are not your emotions! One way to do that is to become aware of your tolerance to uncertainty and ambiguity by being mindful of your preferences and behaviours.

Intolerance for ambiguity is characterized by*	Tolerance for Ambiguity is characterized by**
Need for categorization	No need for categorization
Need for certainty	Need for curiosity
Inability to allow good and bad traits to exist simultaneously	Encouragement of good and bad traits to exist simultaneously
Acceptance of attitudes representing black-and-white life views	Rejection of attitudes representing black-and-white life views
A preference for familiar over unfamiliar	A preference for unfamiliar over familiar
Rejection of the unusual or different	Celebration of the unusual or different
Early selection and maintenance of one solution	Generation and exploration of many ideas
Premature closure	Patience

Instead of fearing and avoiding the unknown, you recognize and embrace it as the origin of possibility. It’s that simple.

Furr, N., The upside of uncertainty (2022)

Every person, process, and product has passed through countless uncertainties before arriving at the current “known” iteration. Even if something wonderful seems to fall into our life (a fabulous career opportunity, a long-awaited pregnancy, a great new restaurant in our neighborhood, an inspiring political candidate, a mended relationship), either we are not seeing the uncertainty that preceded it, or it’s about to bring tons of uncertainty … and sometimes both are true (Furr, N., The upside of uncertainty, 2022).

Attitudes about Ambiguity

In 2017, Andrea Small and Kelly Schmutte enlisted hundreds of their students in an experiment to understand how people relate to ambiguity. They asked the students to think of a recent time they experienced ambiguity or some unknown (Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity, 2022):

• Your next steps were unclear.
• You faced more questions than answers.
• You recognized multiple pathways or possibilities.
• Your idea of a single right outcome was challenged.
• You wrestled with some existential challenge.
• You pondered ambiguity for too long.
• Your perception of the grand illusion was shattered.

Then Small and Schmutte asked their students How did they feel? How did they respond? Why? Based on that experience, what metaphor captures their attitude about ambiguity and the unknown (Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity, 2022).

They tried this exercise with a large swath of their student body. Their metaphors were illuminating. We got some obvious ones: fog, water, clouds. But many stretched their minds: toothpaste, mice, a jar (no bad ideas, etcetera). Small and Schmutte saw some interesting patterns emerge across their metaphors:

• [ENDURE] Do you prioritize a defined conclusion? Do you push through ambiguity as fast as possible? Ambiguity is something that comes between you and a solution. It’s antagonistic to your objective. It must be conquered or eliminated to reach a goal.
• [ENGAGE] Do you dip in and out of ambiguity? Do you see it as an appealing challenge? Ambiguity is an off-road adventure, an alternate path to a goal. It might be rewarding and helpful or dangerous and detrimental. Its value is a chosen gamble. Exhilaration and exhaustion are equally expected.
• [EMBRACE] Do you rely on the existence of ambiguity? Do you thrive in the unknown? Ambiguity is oceanic and ever-present. Exploration is a challenge and an opportunity. The longer you spend in it, the more likely you are to discover something new. Every direction is a possibility. Navigation isn’t simple.It requires patience and practice.

Embracing Ambiguity

Human-centered design is a problem-solving process that focuses on creating solutions for people’s real needs. When we start, we are immersed in not knowing … not knowing the solution, not knowing the answers, and sometimes not even knowing if you’re barking up the right tree. Who are you solving for? What is the context? What do people want or need?After a problem is defined, the questions continue as the focus shifts to solving the problem. What feels most pressing or exciting? What happens if you just try it? What can you do in the time you have? There are no “right” answers and infinite ways to interpret the problem and creatively respond. This is full-on ambiguity territory (Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity, 2022).

If you’re creating something new to the world, you will definitely have to wrestle with ambiguity at some point. Engaging ambiguity isn’t a choice; it’s inherent in the process of getting to any great outcome.

Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity (2022).

When your abilities to act and adapt are both low, you must endure ambiguity — keep your nose down and tough it out. It’s not ideal, but it’s reality. As your abilities to act and to adapt increase, that’s when you can engage and even embrace ambiguity (Small, A., & Schmutte, K., Navigating ambiguity, 2022)

Uncertainty as Possibility

The value of changing how you see uncertainty (or reframing uncertainty), has strong roots in empirical research and practice. There is even an entire business school in Denmark, Kaospilot (shout out to my good old friend Simon Kavanagh), dedicated to teaching students how to deal with uncertainty.

During their program, students at Kaospilot are given challenging tasks, like redesigning water delivery in the Sahara, but never with enough time, resources, or skills. The key, according to the head of school Christer Windelov-Lidzélius, is that they learn to see themselves as chaos pilots: “We believe everyone has unlimited potential, but tapping into that unlimited potential begins with your perspective.” Graduates have gone on to create Tibet’s first football team, live video-casting platform Bambuser, and a global coding program for refugees (Furr, N., The upside of uncertainty, 2022).

To start reframing uncertainty (including your situation and your current preparation or lack thereof) as the shadow of possibility, we would like to encourage you to use the tools briefly summarized in the table below (Furr, N., The upside of uncertainty, 2022):

Tool	Description
Framing	When you frame uncertainty as possibility, your ability to navigate it increases because our experience shifts from the fear of loss to the anticipation of gain.
Reverse Insurance	An instinctual fear of uncertainty sometimes leads us to forget that we also need uncertainty. Humans need surprise, spontaneity, and change -and those things are inherently uncertain.
Frontiers	Frontiers can feel daunting, but they are where we do our best work. There are myriad accessible frontiers awaiting us that could transform our daily lives.
Adiacent Possible	Adjacent possibles are the infinite ways in which the future can be reinvented, hovering at the edge of our awareness, waiting to be discovered.
Infinite Game	Infinite players learn to question the boundaries, the rules, and the game itself, reinventing both the games they are playing and themselves.
Stories	We live by stories, but you need to think about what kind of story you are writing each day and what you would like to be able to pull off the shelf at the end of this year -or at the end of your life.
Regret Minimization	How do you make decisions when you don’t know the outcome? Simple frameworks used by innovators help you to make wise choices.
Aplomb (Doubting Self-Doubt)	Self-doubt accompanies the unknown. What we don’t realize is how many people, including our heroes and geniuses, share it. There is a better way.
Uncertainty Manifesto	A personal uncertainty manifesto or aspirational beliefs in the face of uncertainty can provide resilience when the going gets rough.

So far, we’ve covered aspects of dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity at the individual level. And while it is important to build emotional resilience to navigate complexity, what comes next are some key mindsets we need to adopt at the team level.

Navigating Uncertainty and Ambiguity with Psychological Safety

Earlier in this series, I mentioned my experience has been that — more often than not — it is not for the lack of ideas that teams cannot innovate but because of all the friction or drag created by not having a shared vision and understanding of what the problems they are trying to solve (which creates a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity!) Now, let’s talk about how psychological safety is a prerequisite for creating shared understanding and some tools for building the trust required to create a psychologically safe team climate.

Just to make sure I’m not misunderstood: it doesn’t matter at that point if the team lacks a vision or the vision is just poorly communicated, the result is the same: the team will lack engagement and slowly drift apart.

When teams share an understanding, everyone knows what they’re working on, why it’s important, and what the outcome will look like.

Govella, A., Collaborative Product Design (2019)

It’s very easy to verify if the team lacks understanding of the problem it is trying to solve. Just ask fundamental questions in your next meeting, like “what is the problem we are trying to solve”? “And for whom”?”

If you get different answers from key stakeholders, it is probably a good indication that you should jump in and help facilitate the discussion that will help the team to align.

Collaboration means shifting from thinking big ideas alone to moving into the real-mess of thinking with others.

Van Der Meulen, M., Counterintuitivity: Making Meaningful Innovation (2019)

Changing the behavior to a “we think together” model is the central activity of collaboration. Because thinking together closes a gap people can now act without checking back in because there were there when the decision was made. They’ve already had debates about all the trade-offs that actually make something work. This may appear a case of “when all was said and done, a lot more was said than done.” However, time needs to be spent in the messy and time-consuming front-loaded process of thinking through possibilities in order to inform the decisions that need to be made (Van Der Meulen, M., Counterintuitivity: Making Meaningful Innovation, 2019).

That said, psychological safety is a prerequisite for creating team climates where “we think together”. Let’s see why.

Unsafe Team Climate undermines Innovation

In psychologically unsafe environments, team members protect themselves from embarrassment and other possible threats by remaining silent when they don’t feel safe. The team doesn’t engage in collective learning behaviors, and that results in poor team performance (Mastrogiacomo, S., Osterwalder, A., Smith, A., & Papadakos, T., High-impact tools for teams, 2021):

• Low common ground: the team’s shared understanding is not updated. Perception gaps increase between team members and the team relies on outdated information.
• Low team learning: habitual or automatic behaviors keep being repeated, despite the changes in context.
• Low team performance: Assumptions are not received and are not correct. The work performed is not in line with the actual situation and the delivered outcomes become inadequate.

Teamwork in Psychologically Safe Climate

Team members are not afraid to speak up when the climate is psychologically safe. Team members engage in a productive dialog that fosters the proactive learning behaviors required to understand the environments and the clients and solve problems together efficiently (Mastrogiacomo, S., Osterwalder, A., Smith, A., & Papadakos, T., High-impact tools for teams, 2021):

• High Common Ground: the team’ shared understanding is regularly updated with new and fresh information.
• High team learning: new information helps the team learn and adapt. Learning behaviors help the team make changes in assumptions and plans.
• High team performance: open communications help the team coordinate effectively. Constant integration of learning and adaptation to changes in the context results in relevant work.

Creating Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is the belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. That one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes (Edmondson, A. C., The fearless organization, 2018).

Conflict arises in every team, but psychological safety makes it possible to channel that energy into productive interaction, that is, constructive disagreement, and an open exchange of ideas, and learning from different points of view.

Edmondson, A. C., The fearless organization (2018).

Creating psychological safety is not about being nice to each other or reducing performance standards, but rather about creating a culture of openness where teammates can share learning, be direct, take risks, admit they “screwed up,” and are willing to ask for help when they’re in over their head (Mastrogiacomo, S., Osterwalder, A., Smith, A., & Papadakos, T., High-impact tools for teams, 2021).

Teammates will not open up or challenge each other when they don’t trust each other. When it comes to teams, trust is about vulnerability. Team members who trust one another learn to be comfortable being open — even exposed — to one another about their failures, weaknesses, and even fears. (Lencioni, P. M., The five dysfunctions of a team, 2013).

Psychological Safety, Experimentation, and Permission to Fail

Another reason for individuals and teams to get paralysed — which is tightly coupled with uncertainty and ambiguity — is their feature of failure. After all, many innovation projects have little or no predictable outcomes, and the uncertainty of no guaranteed results can create a lot of anxiety.

Fear of failure is basically a fear of shame, and it looks different for everyone. Some people experience feelings of avoidance, anxiety, helplessness and loss of control. You may underestimate your own abilities to avoid feeling disappointed or even tell people that you’ll probably fail to manage expectations.

Castrillon, C., How to cope with the fear of failure (2022)

Most change efforts fail, even when experienced people are involved, and even when the environment is relatively trusting and safe. We should approach improvement like we approach product—using thoughtful experiments and disciplined, intentional learning (Cutler, J. Making things better with enabling constraints, 2022).

Our goal: better experiments, better outcomes, and a happier (and engaged) team.

Cutler, J. Making things better with enabling constraints (2022)

For a learning culture to thrive, your teams must feel safe to experiment. Experiments are how we learn, but experiments — by nature — fail frequently. In a good experiment, you learn as much from failure as from success. If failure is stigmatized, teams will take few risks (Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J., Sense and respond. 2017).

Navigating Uncertainty and Ambiguity with Premortems

The scientist and decision-making expert Gary Klein is a proponent of using “premortems” (doing a postmortem in advance to envision what a potential failure might look like so that you can then consider the possible reasons for that failure. To put the premortem into question form, you might ask: If we were to fail, what might be the reasons for that failure? Decision researchers say using premortems can temper excessive optimism and encourage a more realistic assessment of risk (Berger, W., The book of beautiful questions, 2019).

The main benefit of thinking about failure in advance is that it tends lessen the fear and uncertainty surrounding possible failure, if you can begin to envision it, you may see it’s not necessarily catastrophic and that there are ways to respond if it actually happens. 

Berger, W., The book of beautiful questions (2019)

While you’re envisioning the possibility of failure, be sure to consider the opposite, as well, by asking: What if we succeed — what would that look like? Jonathan Fields points out that this question is important because it can help counter the negativity bias. Fields recommends visualizing, in detail, what would be likely to happen in a best-case scenario (more on that in the Importance of Vision). The reality may not live up to that, but that vision can provide an incentive strong enough to encourage taking a risk (Berger, W., The book of beautiful questions, 2019).

Questions you can use to help overcome the fear of failure (Berger, W., The book of beautiful questions, 2019):

• What would we try if we knew we could not fail? start with this favorite Silicon Valley question to help identify bold possibilities.
• What is the worst that could happen? This may seem negative, but the question forces the team to confront hazy fears and consider them in a more specific way (which usually makes them less scary).
• If we did fail, what would be the likely causes? Try the premortem exercise I’ve mentioned earlier, listing some of the potential causes of failure. This should — at least — create a list of pitfalls for you to avoid.
• … and how would we recover from that failure? Just thinking about how we would pick up the pieces if we fail tends to lessen the fear of that possibility.
• What if we succeed — what would that look like? Now shift from the worst-case to the best-case scenario. Visualizing success breeds confidence — and provides motivation for moving forward.
• How can we take one small step into the breach? Consider whether there are “baby steps” that could lead up to taking a leap.

You can learn more about how psychological safety is a prerequisite for creating shared understanding.

Clarity is the next best thing to Certainty

When you feel uncertain, it’s easy to fall into old habits of thinking—like trying to predict the future or find the one right answer. This leads to a lot of stress and anxiety because our ability to accurately predict the future is limited at best!

As a leader, you cannot provide certainty, not because you’re not a good leader! It’s because certainty resides in a realm you have no control over: the future!

Andy Stanley

A mindset set shift I’ve been adopting lately is to believe the opposite of uncertainty is not certainty; it’s clarity!

Clarity is a simple concept and yet strikingly elusive. Lack of clarity collectively costs companies, educational institutions, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations billions of dollars per year, inserts unnecessary risk into every decision or action, drains organizations of the energy needed for productive effort, and causes customers to question whether the organization is capable of delivering value.

Martin, K., Clarity first (2018)

Clarity addresses uncertainty. It doesn’t remove it. While you can’t remove uncertainty, clarity is your best bet for equipping our families, our coworkers, and our communities to navigate it. Clarity says, “I don’t know what the future holds, but here’s what we’re gonna do in the meantime.” Clarity says, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but we’re gonna prepare for whatever happens.” Clarity says, “Here’s the plan for now, and we will adjust the plan as circumstances demand” (Andy Stanley, Leading with Clarity, 2022).

The absence of clarity also creates an opportunity for biases and assumptions to influence how people interpret information. Ambiguity tempts organizations to be reactive: instead of addressing the most important issues, they address those attracting attention at this moment. Ambiguity prevents organizations from operating with focus, discipline, and engagement (Martin, K., Clarity first, 2018).

In times of uncertainty, is more important to know what to do than to know what is going to happen!

Andy Stanley

If your personality and temperament set you up to be all sunshine and roses and kind of dance around the brutal facts, you set people up for disappointment. On the other hand, if you want to bury people under the facts, the statistics, and the forecasts and “woe is me,” you leave people with no option but despair (Andy Stanley, Leading with Clarity, 2022).

When you’re a leader, people look to you for certainty. But when that’s no longer an option, you can still offer them the next best thing: clarity! Learn how to from Andy Stanley’s Leading with Clarity

Now that we’ve learned that clarity is the next best thing to certainty, let’s look at some strategies for creating clarity at the team level.

Strategies for helping teams deal with Uncertainty and Ambiguity

But how do we deal with this uncertainty? How do we cope? How can we learn to use it as a source of inspiration and creativity instead of fearing it?

The techniques we covered so far an invaluable to help you as an individual to build emotional resilience. Now we will cover the facilitation techniques that can help teams deal with uncertainty and ambiguity.

That said, facilitation techniques are usually the highest form of enabling teams to paddle in the same direction. While some might be — in concept — easy to understand, they might be hard work to put into practice. So, I’ve listed them below in order (1 through 8), going from what I consider the minimum required for successfully dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity in a project set up in one end (“1”) to masterfully influencing product decisions and driving product vision forward (“9”) in the other end:

1. Involve Stakeholders: Most projects in global companies — an area of design I’ve been practicing for more than 20 years — are plagued with communication issues. Designers need to continuously review and agree on stakeholder expectations to mitigate issues caused by virtual, international projects; find effective communication channels; ensure stakeholders are communicating effectively.
2. The Art of Asking Questions: asking questions is a powerful tool to uncover misalignments and misunderstandings and raise awareness of the need for facilitation.
3. Visualize Information: Design problems and solutions can often not be described explicitly, written, or verbally during the process. This might lead to communication problems with various stakeholders. Designers can help the team synthesize and build a rich understanding of problems, products, and customers by using a variety of methods from their toolbox, including on storytelling and visual thinking.
4. Uncover Assumptions and Testing Hypotheses: Every project begins with assumptions. There’s no getting around this fact. That said, flawed assumptions are one of the worst barriers to innovation. They make us think we know all the facts when we don’t. Uncovering assumptions and testing hypotheses thoroughly, regardless of how great they may seem in theory, is a way to mitigate the risks of being wrong.
5. Framing (and Reframing) of the Problem: Design problems are often complex and ambiguous. This can cause vague descriptions of the problem and goals in a design brief or problem statement, leading to miscommunication and even failure. Designers should frame the problem explicitly, preferably even together with the client. Agreeing that the frame of reference is the defined starting point of a project provides a basis for communication and decision-making throughout a project.
6. Articulate Business Value: At some people in your career, you have, you are, or you will be in a project that teams start without a clear vision or focusing on which problems to solve and for whom. You catch yourself in the middle of a project asking people you work with, “why are we working on this?” I’ve seen too many teams deciding by asking, “What can we implement with the least effort” or “What are we able to implement,” instead of “what brings value to the user.” You will need to help the team to arrive at a common definition of value.
7. Facilitating Good Decisions: If designers want to influence the decisions that shape strategy — they must become skilled facilitators that respond, prod, encourage, guide, coach, and teach as they guide individuals and groups to make decisions that are critical in the business world through effective processes.
8. The Importance of Vision: In my experience — more often than not — projects (and organizations, for that matter) lack an inspiring vision. As a rallying cry, a clear and compelling vision provides direction in everything you and your colleagues do. Clarity of vision reduces uncertainty and ambiguity by narrowing down the options of exploration! Ask each other this question at every decision point: “does this action, activity, experiment, or project get us close to realizing our vision?” If the answer is “no,” don’t waste time, energy, and money on it.
9. Take Ownership of the Project: Design projects with higher degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity tend to be worked on by teams with a less hierarchical structure. While this might benefit an open-team climate, it can cause situations where no one takes responsibility for the whole project. In these cases, designers can help teams deal with uncertainty and ambiguity by taking ownership of a project and introducing a coherent structure.

If you are at a stage in your career (or in a position in your organization) where you don’t feel comfortable pushing yourself to step up to the plate and facilitating teams to make good decisions, I would still encourage your to work on the skills 1 through 5 (Involve Stakeholders, Ask Questions, Visualise Information, Uncover Assumptions, Frame and Reframe Problems) since these should feel close to home based on what I would consider good design education.

If you’re ready to step up to the plate and facilitating teams to make good decisions, let’s deep dive on what it takes!

Involve Stakeholders

Most projects in global companies — an area of design I’ve been practicing for more than 20 years — are plagued with communication issues. An influential strategist will need to review and agree on stakeholder expectations continuously. Therefore, strategists will need Stakeholder Analysis and Management skills to:

• Mitigate issues caused by virtual, international projects
• Find effective channels of communication
• Ensure stakeholders are communicating effectively

Leadership and Influence

To achieve these, Strategy and Stakeholder Management must become inseparable. To that end, I found it necessary that designers understand the correlation between communication and relationships and the importance of building trust.

The single most important thing you can do to improve communication between you and your stakeholders is to improve those relationships, earn trust, and establish rapport.

“Stakeholders are People Too” in Articulating Design Decisions, Greever, T., 2020

These will speak more for you than the words that come from your mouth in a meeting. I couldn’t agree more with Greever (2020) when he says that it’s ironic that UXers are so good at putting the user first, garnering empathy for and attempting to see the interface from the user’s perspective. Yet, we often fail to do the same thing for the people who hold the key to our success.

That involves a few key soft skills, particularly influencing without authority.

The True Measure of Leadership is Influence – Nothing more, Nothing less.

Maxwell, J.C., “The Law of Influence” in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, (2007)

Be relational, not positional: barking order is positional, It assumes that your employees will rush to obey simply because you’re in charge. But remember, leadership is influence. Be tuned into their culture, background, education, etc. Then adapt your communication to them personally (“The Law of Influence” in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, Maxwell, J.C., 2007).

Building Credibility with Leaders and Stakeholders

In her recent book Impact Players, Liz Wiseman polled managers about what reduces employees’ credibility in their eyes. Two of their top responses were “When they just do their job without considering the bigger picture” (the fourth-highest-ranked frustration) and “When they wait for the boss to tell them what to do” (the second-highest-ranked frustration). Though we often think of bosses as power-hungry dictators, the truth is that most managers dislike having to tell people what to do. She asked the same group of managers what employee behaviors they most appreciate. Their number one response? “When people do things without being asked.” See the chart below for how to build (or kill) your credibility when dealing with messy problems. The most effective professionals look above their roles and go beyond their job to get the real job done (Wiseman, L. Impact players, 2021)

Credibility Killers	Waiting for managers to tell you what to do Ignoring the bigger picture Telling your manager that it’s not your job
Credibility Builders	Doing Things without being asked Anticipating problems and having a plan

Building credibility with Leaders and Stakeholders (Wiseman, L. Impact players, 2021)

When we interviewed managers, they consistently described Impact Players as problem solvers. They told us about people who sought out hard problems and solved them all the way from strategy to detail.

Wiseman, L. Impact players (2021)

They said things like, He solves gnarly problems. He can be pointed at anything. She’s the one I turn to when work is difficult. She takes hard projects and crises and turns them around. In his free time, he’ll just go out and solve problems. These contributors see messy problems as opportunities to serve where they are most needed. Unattended problems make them agitated, like unattended baggage in a crowded airport. They see themselves as first responders — empathetic and skillful heroes who are willing to inconvenience themselves to help others (Wiseman, L. Impact players, 2021).

Credibility, Integrity and Confidence

Confidence is a cornerstone of good leadership. Especially in times of uncertainty, upheaval, or crisis, believing in yourself and making the right decisions will give you credibility and integrity, which in turn will enhance the organization’s reputation and build trust in all stakeholders. Here are a few tips to improve your confidence (Kindersley, D. The Essential Manager’s Handbook, 2016):

• Being prepared. Confidence can come in several different ways. It comes from experience as your track record as a leader improves. It comes from having well-formed plans and anticipating challenges, and it comes from the knowledge that you have a strong business built on productive working relationships.
• Acknowledging ideas. Your inner confidence will grow when you behave confidently and gain the trust of your team and colleagues. An ability and a willingness to devolve power and decision-making is one vital characteristic that marks out a confident leader, so take every opportunity to involve others and empower them to act on their ideas. Be open about what is not working for you, your customers, suppliers, or employees; your frankness will be interpreted as an expression of confidence because you approach success and adversity with equal zeal. Encourage people to discover and understand situations for themselves rather than spoon-feeding them issues and answers-remember your power increases as you give it away.
• Being consistent. As a leader, your every word and action is scrutinized by your team and could be given far more significance than you intended. Conscious or unconscious slips can undermine perceptions of you as a confident leader, so try to measure the kind of signals you send out. Consistency and calmness in adversity are characteristics that most people will perceive as confidence.

Learn more about the skills required for design strategists to influence the decisions that drive design vision forward in Strategy and Stakeholder Management.

The Art of Asking Questions

Earlier in this series, I mentioned I’ve found that — more often than not — it is not for the lack of ideas that teams cannot innovate but because of all the friction or drag created by not having a shared vision and understanding of what the problems they are trying to solve.

To make sure I’m understood: it doesn’t matter at that point if the team lacks a vision or the vision is just poorly communicated; the result is the same: the team will lack engagement and slowly drift apart.

It’s straightforward to verify if the team lacks understanding of the problem it is trying to solve. Just ask fundamental questions in your next meeting, like “what is the problem we are trying to solve”? “And for whom”?” “why are we working on this”?

Suppose you get different answers from critical stakeholders. In that case, it is probably a good indication that you should jump in and help facilitate the discussion that will help the team to align: asking questions is a powerful tool to uncover misalignments and misunderstandings and raise awareness of the need for facilitation.

Perhaps nothing is more important to exploration and discovery than the art of asking good questions. Questions are fire-starters: they ignite people’s passions and energy; they create heat; and they illuminate things that were previously obscure.

Gray, D., Brown, S., Macanufo, J., “Core Gamestorming Skills” in Gamestorming (2010)

Questions are powerful. And the words we choose for them are critical because changing just one word can change your answers (Shapiro, S., Invisible solutions: 25 Lenses that reframe and help solve difficult business problems, 2020):

• Questions impact your thought process: Asking the right question in the right way is the surest way to accelerate finding better solutions. Sometimes a tiny change can have a significant impact on the way you find the problem.
• Questions impact your emotional state: they impact not just the solution and the thought process but also how we feel. Unfortunately, we tend to ask questions that are not effective or impactful.

When people frame their strategic exploration as questions rather than as concerns or problems, a conversation begins where everyone can learn something new together, rather than having the normal stale debates over issues.

Brown, J., & Isaacs, D., The world cafe: Shaping our futures through conversations that matter (2005)

A power question (Brown, J., & Isaacs, D., The world cafe: Shaping our futures through conversations that matter, 2005):

• Is thought-provoking
• Challenges assumptions
• Generates energy
• Focuses on inquiry and reflection
• Touches a deeper meaning
• Evokes related questions

Asking Questions and Process Awareness

In my experience, the most significant disconnect between the work designers need to do, and the mindset of every other team member in a team is usually about how quickly we tend — when not facilitated — to jump to solutions instead of contemplating and exploring the problem space a little longer.

I think designers should facilitate the discussions and help others raise awareness around the creative and problem-solving process instead of complaining that everyone else is jumping to solutions too quickly.

From that perspective, I find it incredibly important that designers need to ask good questions that foster divergent thinking, explore multiple solutions, and — probably the most critical — help teams converge and align on the direction they should go (Gray, D., Brown, S., & Macanufo, J., “What is a Game?” in Gamestorming, 2010).

Following a pattern that leads with divergent thinking and concludes with convergent thinking helps you manage those tangents. Tangents can feel frustrating, but good tangents are one of the best things that come out of meetings. Good, novel ideas come from diverse opinions and experiences. Going off on tangents is a way to get to those ideas. They won’t all be great ideas, but a few of them could be better than what you might come up with working alone (Hoffman, K. M. Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers, and Everyone. 2018).

Knowing when the team should be diverging, when they should be exploring, and when they should be closing will help ensure they get the best out of their collective brainstorming and the power of multiple perspectives to keep the team engaged.

It would be best if you steered a conversation by asking the right kinds of questions based on the problem you’re trying to solve. In some cases, you’ll want to expand your view of the problem rather than keeping it narrowly focused (Pohlmann, T., & Thomas, N. M., Relearning the art of asking questions, 2015):

• Clarifying questions help us better understand what has been said. In many conversations, people speak past one another. Asking clarifying questions can help uncover the real intent behind what is said. These help us understand each other better and lead us toward relevant follow-up questions. “Can you tell me more?” and “Why do you say so?” both fall into this category. People often don’t ask these questions because they tend to make assumptions and complete any missing parts themselves.
• Adjoining questions are used to explore related aspects of the problem that are ignored in the conversation. Questions such as, “How would this concept apply in a different context?” or “What are the related uses of this technology?” fall into this category. For example, asking “How would these insights apply in Canada?” during a discussion on customer lifetime value in the U.S. can open a useful discussion on behavioral differences between customers in the U.S. and Canada. Our laser-like focus on immediate tasks often inhibits our asking more of these exploratory questions, but taking time to ask them can help us gain a broader understanding of something.
• Funneling questions are used to dive deeper. We ask these to understand how an answer was derived, to challenge assumptions, and to understand the root causes of problems. Examples include: “How did you do the analysis?” and “Why did you not include this step?” Funneling can naturally follow the design of an organization and its offerings, such as, “Can we take this analysis of outdoor products and drive it down to a certain brand of lawn furniture?” Most analytical teams – especially those embedded in business operations – do an excellent job of using these questions.
• Elevating questions raises broader issues and highlights the bigger picture. They help you zoom out. Being immersed in an immediate problem makes it harder to see its overall context. So you can ask, “Taking a step back, what are the larger issues?” or “Are we even addressing the right question?” For example, a discussion on margin decline and decreasing customer satisfaction could turn into a broader discussion of corporate strategy with an elevating question: “Instead of discussing these issues separately, what are the larger trends we should be concerned about? How do they all tie together?” These questions take us to a higher playing field where we can better see connections between individual problems.

Learn how to ask questions that ensure teams make good decisions in Strategy, Facilitation, and the Art of Asking Questions.

Visualize Information

Design problems and solutions can often not be described explicitly, written or verbal during the process. This might lead to communication problems with various stakeholders (Daalhuizen, J., Badke-Schaub, P., & Batill, S. M., Dealing with Uncertainty in Design Practice, 2009).

Designers can help the team synthesize and build a rich understanding of problem, product and customers by using variety of methods from their toolbox, including on storytelling, visualization, and facilitation. Visual Thinking tools like Alignment diagrams or models serve as a hinge upon we can pivot from the problem space to the solutions space.

Visual Thinking

Mark Dziersk is convinces that “design” and “strategy” traditionally reflect two very disparate realms within the world of business. He urges designers to communicate with those responsible for strategy by using their talent for visualisation and storytelling — “languages” that can powerfully convey content in such areas as the DNA of the consumer experience, innovation option, and approaches to decision making (Dziersk, M., “Visual Thinking: A leadership Strategy” in Building Design Strategy, Lockwood, T., & Walton, T., 2010).

Visual Thinking and collaboration techniques can help you achieve goals better and faster by unlocking the whole brain function.

Brand, W., Visual thinking: Empowering people & organizations through visual collaboration, (2017)

Visualizing thought processes can help break down complex problems. It empowers teams and staff to build on one another’s ideas, fosters collaboration, jump-starts co-creation and boosts innovation.

Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity with Visual Thinking and Visualisations

Four properties are crucial in the creation of visualisations (Lewrick, M., Link, P., & Leifer, L., The design thinking playbook. 2018):

• We focus on what’s important: leaving all that’s unnecessary.
• We are specific: we don’t create vague drawings.
• We make our picture comprehensible: we can make linkages to the content.
• We kindle interest: it is delightful to look at the pictures.

In my experience, the greatest power of visual thinking is its ability to create alignment!

Misalignment impacts the entire enterprise: teams lack a common purpose, solutions are built that are detached from reality, and strategy is short-sighted (Kalbach, J., ”Visualizing Value: Aligning Outside-in” in Mapping Experiences, 2021).

Alignment Diagrams coordinates insights from the outside world with the teams inside an organization who create products and services to meet market needs.

In other words, Alignment diagrams or models serve as a hinge upon we can pivot from the problem space to the solutions space.

Alignment diagrams refer to any map, diagram, or visualization that reveals both sides (Business and Users) of value creation in a single overview. They are a category of diagram that illustrates the interaction between people and organizations (Kalbach, J., ”Visualizing Value: Aligning Outside-in” in Mapping Experiences, 2021).

Customer Journey Maps are visual thinking artifacts that help you get insight into, track, and discuss how a customer experiences a problem you are trying to solve. How does this problem or opportunity show up in their lives? How do they experience it? How do they interact with you? (Lewrick, M., Link, P., & Leifer, L., The design thinking playbook. 2018).

Experience Maps look at a broader context of human behavior. They reverse the relationship and show how the organization fits into a person’s life (Kalbach, J., ”Visualizing Value: Aligning Outside-in” in Mapping Experiences, 2021).

User story mapping is a visual exercise that helps product managers and their development teams define the work that will create the most delightful user experience. User Story Mapping allows teams to create a dynamic outline of a set of representative user’s interactions with the product, evaluate which steps have the most benefit for the user, and prioritise what should be built next (Patton, J.,  User Story Mapping: Discover the whole story, build the right product, 2014).

Opportunity Solution Trees are a simple way of visually representing the paths you might take to reach a desired outcome (Torres, T., Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value, 2021)

Service Blueprints are visual thinking artifacts that help to capture the big picture and interconnections, and are a way to plan out projects and relate service design decisions back to the original research insights. The blueprint is different from the service ecology in that it includes specific detail about the elements, experiences, and delivery within the service itself (Polaine, A., Løvlie, L., & Reason, B., Service design: From insight to implementation, 2013).

Strategy Canvas help you compare how well competitors meet costumer buying criteria or desired outcomes. To create your own strategy canvas, list the 10-12 most important functional desired outcomes — or buying criteria — on the x-axis. On the y-ais, list the 3-5 most common competitors (direct, indirect, alternative solutions and multi-tools solutions) for the job. (Garbugli, É., Solving Product, 2020).

Visualizing strategic design thinking is the key to effectively communicating. Learn how in Strategy, Facilitation and Visual Thinking.

Uncover Assumptions and Testing Hypotheses

Every project begins with assumptions. There’s no getting around this fact. We assume we know our customers (and who our future customers will be). We assume we know what the competition is doing and where our industry is headed. We assume we can price the stability of our markets. These assumptions are predicated on our ability to predict the future. (Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J., Sense and respond, 2017).

If we accept that we’re always starting with assumptions, the real question becomes, What do we do about the risk of being wrong?

Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J., Sense and respond (2017).

Many companies try to deal with complexity with analytical firepower and sophisticated mathematics. That is unfortunate since the most essential elements of creating a hypothesis can typically be communicated through simple pencil-and-paper sketches (Govindarajan, V., & Trimble, C., The other side of innovation, 2010.)

The key to dealing with complexity is to focus on having good conversations about assumptions.

Break Down the Hypothesis in The other side of innovation, Govindarajan, V., & Trimble, C., (2010)

That said, flawed assumptions are one of the worst barriers to innovation. They’re invisible, chronic, and insidious, and we’re all ruled by them in one situation or another. How do they hold us back? (Griffiths, C., & Costi, M., The Creative Thinking Handbook, 2019):

• They make us think we know all the facts when we don’t. Assumptions such as We have to launch a new range of products every year to keep up with competitors’ should be checked for validity.
• They cause us to become trapped by our own self-imposed limits and specializations, for example, Xerox’s failure to capture the personal computing market by limiting itself to making better copiers.
• Rules, like assumptions, keep us stuck in outdated patterns. The more entrenched the rule is, the greater the chance it’s no longer valid. Sometimes, we need to shake up or reverse our existing patterns to stand out from everyone else.

Usually, we want to start with the biggest questions and work our way down into the details. Typically, you would start with questions like these (Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J., Sense and respond, 2017):

• Does the business problem exist?
• Does the customer need exist?
• How do we know whether this feature or service will address that need?

As you sit down with your teams to plan out your next initiative, ask them these questions (Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J., Sense and respond. 2017):

• What is the most important thing (or things) we need to learn first?
• What is the fastest, most efficient way to learn that?

Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity by Testing Hypotheses

If you only have one hypothesis to test, it’s clear where to spend the time you have to do discovery work. If you have many hypotheses, how do you decide where your precious discovery hours should be spent? Which hypotheses should be tested? Which ones should be de-prioritized or just thrown away? To help answer this question, Jeff Gothelf put together the Hypothesis Prioritisation Canvas (Gothelf, J., The hypothesis prioritization canvas, 2019):

You test the most important hypothesis with appropriate experiments. Each experiment generates evidence and insights that allow you to learn and decide. Based on the evidence and your insights, you either adapt your idea if you learn that you were on the wrong path or continue testing other aspects of your ideas if the evidence supports your direction (Bland, D. J., & Osterwalder, Testing Business Ideas, 2019).

A successful project is not deemed successful because it is delivered accordant to a plan but because it stands the test of reality.

“Walk the walk” in The decision maker’s playbook. Mueller, S., & Dhar, J. (2019)

Learning through experimentation has several benefits (Mueller, S., & Dhar, J., The decision maker’s playbook, 2019):

• It allows you to focus on actual outcomes: a successful project is not deemed successful because it is delivered according to a plan but because it stands the test of reality.
• It decreases re-work: because the feedback cycles are short, potential errors or problems are spotted quickly and can be smoothed out faster than conventional planning.
• It reduces risks: because of increased transparency throughout the implementation process, risks can be better managed than in conventional projects.

One way to help the team think through experiments is to think about how we are going to answer the following questions (Croll, A., & Yoskovitz, B. Lean Analytics. 2013):

• What do you want to learn and why?
• What is the underlying problem we are trying to solve, and who is feeling the pain? This helps everyone involved have empathy for what we are doing.
• What is our hypothesis?
• How will we run the experiment, and what will we build to support it?
• Is the experiment safe to run?
• How will we conclude the experiment, and what steps will be taken to mitigate issues resulting from the conclusion?
• What measures will we use to invalidate our hypothesis with data? Include what measures will indicate the experiment isn’t safe to continue.

Testing Business Ideas thoroughly, regardless of how great they may seem in theory, is a way to mitigate the risks of your hypothesis being wrong.

Framing (and Reframing) of the Problem

Design problems are often complex and ambiguous. This can cause vague descriptions of the problem and goals in a design brief or problem statement, leading to miscommunication and even failure. Designers should frame the problem explicitly, preferably even together with the client. Agreeing that the frame of reference is the defined starting point of a project provides a basis for communication and decision-making throughout a project. (Daalhuizen, J., Badke-Schaub, P., & Batill, S. M., Dealing with Uncertainty in Design Practice, 2009).

The way you frame the problem determines which solutions you come up with (Wedell-Wedellsborg, T.,  What’s Your Problem?, 2020)

The art of designing solutions starts with the frame. Where you draw the boundaries of an investigation will determine — in large part — what your conclusions will be and what kind of process you’ll use to get there.

Neumeier, M., Metaskills: Five talents for the future of work (2013)

Are there any universal technique for drawing the edges of a problem? Luckily, there are. Here’s a short course in the art of framing (Neumeier, M., Metaskills: Five talents for the future of work, 2013):

1. View the problem from multiple angles. Like it or not, we all get stuck in our own belief systems. The easiest way to get free is to look a the problem from three positions: our own viewpoint (known as first position), other people’s viewpoints (known as second position), and the viewpoint from a higher-order system (known as metaposition).
2. Develop a problem statement. Brevity and simplicity are key!
3. List the knowns and unknowns. What are the known parameters of the problem? Can you visualise and name the parts? What are the relationships between the parts? What is the nature of the problem? Is it a simple problem? A complex problem? A structural problem? A communication problem? What remedies have been attempted in the past, and what they failed? Why bother solving the problem in the first place?
4. Change the frame. What happens when you make the frame bigger or smaller? Or even swap it for another one?
5. Make a simple model. Constructing a model is a practical way of visualising the key elements of a problem. Statistician George Box once said, “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”.

In practice, it starts with someone asking “What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?” The resulting statement — ideally written
down — is your first framing of the problem (Wedell-Wedellsborg, T., What’s Your Problem?, 2020).

That said, there are a few things you need to be aware of while writing your problem statement.

The Problem With Problem Statements

In the effort to bring clarity and shared understanding of what problems we are trying to solve, I’ve seen many organizations try to be more systematic and adopt artifacts like Problem Statements.

Problem statements are widely used by most businesses and organizations to execute process improvement projects. A simple and well-defined problem statement will be used by the project team to understand the problem and work toward developing a solution. It will also provide management with specific insights into the problem so that they can make appropriate project-approving decisions. As such, it is crucial for the problem statement to be clear and unambiguous (Annamalai, Nagappan; Kamaruddin, Shahrul; Azid, Ishak Abdul; Yeoh, TS, 2013).

The way you state your problems frames your decisions. It determines the alternatives you consider and the way you evaluate them. Posing the right problem drives everything else.

“Problem” in Smart choices: A practical guide to making better decisions, Hammond, J. S., Keeney, R. L., & Raiffa, H. (2015)

The problem with problem statements (pun intended) that I’ve found is that there are many thinking traps and decision biases that stakeholders and team members might not even be aware of.

The most classic is to bake the solution into the problem statement. This has been illustrated really well by Marc Rettig:

Design a Vase
Design a better way for young families to enjoy flowers in their home

Rettig, M., (2010) “Design a Vase”, in An evening of conversation about Design, Interaction, Work and Life, May 25th, 2010, IxDA Gathering, 399, Pu DianRoad, Pudong New District, Shanghai, 200122, P.R. China

In another example, a company with a leadership development issue brainstormed “how can we more effectively use 360-degree feedback?” That’s a solution masquerading as a question, so they completely missed alternative methods. When the company asked “how can we create powerful leaders”? instead, this more abstract question opened up a wider range of possible solutions. Of course, this then needed to be deconstructed into smaller and more solvable problems (Shapiro, S., Invisible solutions: 25 Lenses that reframe and help solve difficult business problems, 2020).

Problem Statements and Decision Biases

In part, we fail to make good decisions because of glitches in our thinking , including deep-seated biases that produce troubling lapses in logic. Each of us fall prey to these glitches to some degree, no matter how logical or open-minded we believe ourselves to be (Riel, J., & Martin, R. L., Creating great choices. 2017).

One way to avoid such traps is to beware of such biases and keep asking questions.

With regards to biases, here are a few to be aware of (Hammond, et al. The Hidden Traps in Decision Making, 2013):

• The Anchoring Trap lead us to give disproportionate weight to the first information we receive.
• The Status-quo Trap biases us towards maintaining the current situation – even when better alternatives exist.
• The Sunk-Cost Trap inclines us to make choices in the way that justifies past choices, even when these were mistakes.
• The Confirming-Evidence Trap leads us to seek out information supporting an existing predilection and to discount opposing information.
• The Framing Trap occurs when we misstate a problem, undermining the entire decision-making process.
• The Overconfidence Trap makes us overestimate the accuracy of our forecasts.
• The Prudence Trap leads us to be overcautious when we make estimates about uncertain events.
• The Recallability Trap prompts us to give undue weight to recent, dramatic events.

With these biases in mind, you should tigger team discussions before they make any big decision (Kahneman, D., Lovallo, D., & Sibony, O., “The Big Idea: Before You Make That Big Decision” in HBR’s 10 must reads on making smart decisions, 2013).

Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity with Problem Framing and Reframing

Sometimes, to solve a hard problem, you have to stop looking for solutions to it. Instead, you must turn your attentions to the problem itself – not just to analyze it, but to shift the way you frame it. Reframing is seeing the current situation from a different perspective, which can be tremendously helpful in solving problems, making decision and learning. When people get stuck in a recurring issue, for example in a complex situation or in solving a complex problem, it is rarely because they are missing a certain step-by-step procedure to fix things. Instead, it is often because they are stuck in how they see situation (Wedell-Wedellsborg, T., What’s Your Problem?, 2020).

It’s important to note that reframing is different from analyzing a problem. Analysis — as I use the term here, is when you ask — “Why is the elevator slow?” and try to understand the various factors that influence the speed. Being good at analysis is about being precise, methodical, detail-oriented, and good with numbers (Wedell-Wedellsborg, T., What’s Your Problem?, 2020).

Reframing is a higher-level activity. It is when you ask, Is the speed of the elevator the right thing to focus on? Being good at reframing is not necessarily about the details. It is more about seeing the big picture and having the ability to consider situations from multiple perspectives

Wedell-Wedellsborg, T., What’s Your Problem? (2020)

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group, has delivered some hilarious, yet insightful TED Talks. In ‘Life lessons from an Ad man,’ he brings up the question of “How do we make the journey from London to Paris better?”

The engineering solution is to spend six billion pounds to build completely new tracks so that about 40 minutes can be saved from the three-and-half-hour journey time.

Rory’s imaginative way improving a train journey is not about making the journey shorter. His solution is…

Employ all of the world’s top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. Now, people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.

Rory Sutherland

If you can define the problem differently than everybody else in the industry, you can generate alternatives that others aren’t thinking about.

Roger Martin

Reframing also helps to simplify a problem to stimulate new thinking. We can get stuck in complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity when we’re overburdened with a problem. This often happens when we feel we know a problem inside out – we’ve spent plenty of time on it and have gone through the whole convoluted process of dismantling it, searching it, and verifying that it’s the correct one (Griffiths, C., & Costi, M., The Creative Thinking Handbook, 2019).

There are five nested strategies can help you find these alternative framing of the problem (Wedell-Wedellsborg, T., What’s Your Problem?, 2020):

• Look outside the frame. Are there elements we are not considering? Is there anything outside the frame that we are not currently paying attention?
• Rethink the goal. Is there a better goal to pursue?
• Examine bright spots. Have we already solved the problem at least once? Are there positive outliers in the group? Who else deals with this type of problem? Can we broadcast the problem widely?
• Look in the mirror. What is my/our role in creating this problem? Scale the problem down to your level. Get an outside view of yourself.
• Take their perspective. You will get people wrong unless you invest genuine effort in trying to understand them. List the parties and listen to them. Escape your own emotions. Look for reasonable explanations.

Learn more about problem-framing techniques that can help you get team alignment by creating clarity of what problems they are trying to solve.

Articulate Business Value

As a designer, you feel you’ve made it. You got a seat at the table; stakeholders want your opinion while prioritizing features; you can finally bring the user needs to the center of innovation practices and product development decisions.

However, you feel these user needs are not making their way into your projects/product roadmaps. Teams start without a clear vision or focusing on which problems to solve and for whom. You catch yourself in the middle of a project asking people you work with, “why are we working on this?”

Meanwhile, even when projects have a clear vision and focus on which problem to solve, the execution gap seems to widen as the release date approaches.

Suppose the design discipline is growing in importance, and more and more business leaders are embracing design as a competitive advantage. Why are users’ needs still not making their way into projects/product roadmaps?

I’ll argue that designers haven’t found the vocabulary and tools to frame users’ problems in a way that aligns with stakeholder business strategies and priorities.

From that perspective, the role of designers must change. We must move from focusing only on specific innovation projects and design briefs to involvement in strategic decisions that influence and shape organizational strategy.

While in the past designers would concentrate on enhancing desirability, the emerging strategic role of designers means they have to balance desirability, feasibility and viability simultaneously. Designers need to expand their profiles and master a whole new set of strategic practices.”

“Strategic Designers: Capital T-shaped professionals” in Strategic Design (Calabretta et al., 2016)

If designers are to take a more active role in shaping organizational strategy, how can they do that? Further, what skill set do they need to acquire to think more strategically?

Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity by Arriving at a Common Definition of Value

As I mentioned in a previous post, designers must become skilled facilitators that respond, prod, encourage, guide, coach, and teach as they guide individuals and groups to make decisions critical in the business world through effective processes. Few decisions are more challenging than deciding how to prioritize.

I’ve seen too many teams deciding by asking, “What can we implement with the least effort” or “What are we able to implement,” instead of “what brings value to the user.”

From a user-centered perspective, the most crucial pivot that needs to happen in the conversation between designers and business stakeholders is the framing of value:

• Business value
• User value
• Value to designers (sense of self-realization? Did I positively impact someone’s life?)

The mistake I’ve seen many designers make is to look at prioritization discussion as a zero-sum game. Our user-centered design tools set may have focused too much on the user’s needs at the expense of business needs and technological constraints.

That said, there is a case to be made that designers should worry about strategy because it helps shape the decisions that create value for users and employees. And here is why.

Companies that achieve enduring financial success create substantial value for their customers, their employees, and their suppliers.

Oberholzer-Gee, F. (2021). Better, simpler strategy (2021)

Therefore, a strategic initiative is worthwhile only if it does one of the following (Oberholzer-Gee, F. (2021). Better, simpler strategy. 2021):

• Creates value for customers by raising their willingness to pay (WTP): If companies find ways to innovate or improve existing products, people will be willing to pay more. In many product categories, Apple gets to charge a price premium because the company raises the customers’ WTP by designing beautiful products that are easy to use, for example. WTP is the most a customer would ever be willing to pay. Think of it as the customer’s walk-away point: Charge one cent more than someone’s WTP, and that person is better off not buying. Too often, managers focus on top-line growth rather than increasing willingness to pay. A growth-focused manager asks, “What will help me sell more?” A person concerned with WTP wants to make her customers clap and cheer. A sales-centric manager analyzes purchase decisions and hopes to sway customers. In contrast, a value-focused manager searches for ways to increase WTP at every stage of the customer’s journey, earning the customer’s trust and loyalty. A value-focused company convinces its customers in every interaction that it has their best interests at heart.
• Creates value for employees by making work more appealing: When companies make work more interesting, motivating, and flexible, they can attract talent even if they do not offer industry-leading compensation. Paying employees more is often the right thing to do, of course. But remember that more-generous compensation does not create value in and of itself; it simply shifts resources from the business to the workforce. By contrast, offering better jobs creates value. It lowers the minimum compensation you have to offer to attract talent to your business, or what we call an employee’s willingness-to-sell (WTS) wage. Offer a prospective employee even a little less than her WTS, and she will reject your job offer; she is better off staying with her current firm. As is the case with prices and WTP, value-focused organizations never confuse compensation and WTS. Value-focused businesses think holistically about the needs of their employees (or the factors that drive WTS).
• Creates value for suppliers by reducing their operating costs: Like employees, suppliers expect a minimum level of compensation for their products. A company creates value for its suppliers by helping them raise their productivity. As suppliers’ costs go down, the lowest price they would be willing to accept for their goods—what we call their willingness-to-sell (WTS) price—falls. When Nike, for example, created a training center in Sri Lanka to teach its Asian suppliers lean manufacturing, the improved production techniques helped suppliers reap better profits, which they then shared with Nike.

The Value Stick is an interesting tool that provides insight into where the value is in a product or service. It relates directly to Michael Porter’s Five Forces, reflecting how strong those forces are: Willingness to Pay (WTP), Price, Cost, and Willingness to Sell (WTS). The difference between Willingness to Pay (WTP) and Willingness to Sell (WTS) — the length of the stick — is the value that a firm creates (Oberholzer-Gee, F., Better, simpler strategy, 2021)

This idea is captured in a simple graph called a value stick. WTP sits at the top, and WTS at the bottom. When companies find ways to increase customer delight, employee satisfaction, and supplier surplus (the difference between the price of goods and the lowest amount the supplier would be willing to accept for them), they expand the total amount of value created and position themselves for extraordinary financial performance. 

Organizations that exemplify value-based strategy demonstrate some key behaviors (Oberholzer-Gee, F., “Eliminate Strategic Overload” in Harvard Business Review, 2021):

• They focus on value, not profit. Perhaps surprisingly, value-focused managers are not overly concerned with the immediate financial consequences of their decisions. They are confident that superior value creation will improve financial performance over time.
• They attract the employees and customers whom they serve best. As companies find ways to move WTP or WTS, they make themselves more appealing to customers and employees who particularly like how they add value.
• They create value for customers, employees, or suppliers (or some combination) simultaneously. Traditional thinking, informed by our early understanding of success in manufacturing, holds that costs for companies will rise if they boost consumers’ willingness to pay—that is, it takes more costly inputs to create a better product. But value-focused organizations find ways to defy that logic.

When companies find ways to increase customer delight and increase employee satisfaction and supplier surplus, they expand the total amount of value created and position themselves for extraordinary financial performance.

Oberholzer-Gee, F., Better, simpler strategy (2021)

I don’t know about you, but I’m not in this (only) for the money: I want my work to mean something, create value, and change people’s lives! For the better! We need to bring users’ needs to the conversation and influence the decisions that increase our customer’s Willingness to Pay (WTS) by — for example — increasing customers’ delight so that we can create products and services we are proud to bring into the world!

So this is when Jobs to be Done (JTBD) becomes a really powerful tool to arrive at a common definition of value: when the team engages in endless discussions around which customer/user problems we should be focusing on, Jobs becomes a unit of analysis that helps teams have facilitated discussions around finding ways to remove (or at least reduce) subjectivity while assessing value, especially while we are devising ways to test our hypothesis.

The challenge of arriving at a business definition for human needs starts with language. An agreed-on language is fundamental to success in any discipline, yet confusion has permeated product development because companies continue to define “requirements” as any kind of customer input: customer wants, needs, benefits, solutions, ideas, desires, demands, specifications, and so on. But really, those are all different types of inputs, none of which can be used predictably to ensure success (Ulwick, A. W., What customers want, 2005).

Part of the challenge is that people’s decisions and actions are seemingly unpredictable. Resting your growth strategy on fuzzy concepts like “needs” and “empathy” is daunting. While psychology and other fields (including design) have precise definitions of human needs, business does not. As a result, risk-averse organizations struggle to grasp the customer perspective and align to it.

Kalbach, J., Jobs to be Done Playbook (2020)

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a new way to think about the innovation process. Three key tenets define this approach (Ulwick, A. W., What customers want, 2005):

• Customers buy products and services to help them get jobs done. In our study of new and existing markets, we find that customers (both people and companies) have “jobs” with functional dimensions to them that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of such a job, they look around for a product or service that will help them get the job done. We know, for example, that people buy mowers so they can cut their lawns; and they buy insurance to limit their financial risks; Corn farmers, to take another example, buy corn seed, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers to help them grow corn. Carpenters buy circular saws to cut wood. Virtually all products and services are acquired to help get a job done.
• Customers use a set of metrics (performance measures) to judge how well a job is getting done and how a product performs. Just as companies use metrics to measure the output quality of a business process, customers use metrics to measure success in getting a job done. Customers have these metrics in their minds, but they seldom articulate them, and companies rarely understand them. We call these metrics the customers’ desired outcomes. They are the fundamental measures of performance inherent to the execution of a specific job. When cutting wood with a circular saw, carpenters may judge products for their ability to minimize the likelihood of losing sight of the cut line, the time it takes to adjust the depth of the blade or the frequency of kickbacks. Only when all the metrics for a given job are well satisfied are customers able to execute the job perfectly. Ironically, these metrics are overlooked in the customer-driven world because they are not revealed by listening to the “voice of the customer.
• These customer metrics make possible the systematic and predictable creation of breakthrough products and services. With the proper inputs, companies dramatically improve their ability to execute all other downstream activities in the innovation process, including identifying opportunities for growth, segment markets, conducting competitive analysis, generating and evaluating ideas, and communicating value to customers and measure customer satisfaction.

In the outcome-driven paradigm the focus is not on the customer, it is on the job: the job is the unit of analysis. When companies focus on helping the customer get a job done faster, more conveniently, and less expensively than before, they are more likely to create products and services that the customer wants.

Ulwick, A. W., What customers want (2005)

At its core, the concept of JTBD is a straightforward focus on people’s objectives independent of the means used to accomplish them. Only after a company chooses to focus on the job, not the customer, are they capable of reliably creating customer value. Through this lens, JTBD offers a structured way of understanding customer needs, helping to predict better how customers might act in the future (Kalbach, J. Jobs to be Done Playbook, 2020).

Facilitating Good Decisions

No matter what kind of organization, team structure, or project types you’ve worked on, you’ve probably had experienced problems working with teams, such as:

• drifting focus
• misunderstood communications
• uneven participation
• Conflict
• struggles for power and control
• difficulties reaching consensus
• frustrations with obtaining commitment to follow up action.

This is not by ill-intent: Patrick Lencioni posits that making a team high performing – i.e. high-functioning, collaborative, cohesive, aspiring, engaging – requires self-discipline, courage and stamina (Lencioni, P. M., Overcoming the five dysfunctions of a team, 2011).

In the first post of this series, I’ve argued that — if designers want to influence and translate strategy in ways that drive their user experience vision forward — they must become both business-savvy analysts and synthesizers. Now I’m trying to make the case for the Need for Facilitation in the sense that — if designers want to influence the decisions that shape strategy — they must become skilled facilitators that respond, prod, encourage, guide, coach and teach as they guide individuals and groups to make decisions that are critical in the business world through effective processes.

Facilitation is a deceptively familiar word, because it sounds like something you know, but means different things in different workplaces. For the purposes of this conversation, a definition of facilitation consists of two things (Hoffman, K. M.,  Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers, and Everyone, 2018):

• Facilitation is an explicitly designated role for managing conflict. That role is filled by a single individual, or multiple individuals when you have multiple small groups, with each group having its own facilitator.
• Facilitators create a productive pattern of conversation, built on divergence and convergence. This pattern encourages tangents, but also manages tangents to direct the conversation toward decisions.

Facilitation provides a foundation of organization that allows a team to be creative and explore options together, but also make decisions, perform at a highly functioning level, and deliver on specific outcomes.

Harned, B., Project Management for Humans: Helping People Get Things Done (2017)

It’s been my experience that — left to chance — it’s only natural that teams will stray from vision and goals. Helping teams paddle in the same direction requires not only good vision and goals, but also leadership, and intentional facilitation.

Facilitating is a way to help people move forward together that harnesses contribution, connection, and equity.

Kahane, A. Facilitating breakthrough (2021)

Facilitation provides a foundation of an organization that allows a team to be creative and explore options together, but also make decisions, perform at a high functioning level, and deliver on specific outcomes. (Harned, B., Project Management for Humans, 2017).

Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity by Making Good Decisions

The connection among decisions you make lies not in what you decide, but how you decide. An effective decision-making process takes in consideration these 8 elements (Hammond, J. S., Keeney, R. L., & Raiffa, H., Smart choices: A practical guide to making better decisions. 2015):

• Work on the right decision problem: framing your decision at the outset can make all the difference. To choose well, you must state your decision problems carefully, acknowledging their complexity and avoiding unwarranted assumptions and option-limiting prejudices (learn more about problem framing).
• Specify your objectives: ask yourself what you most want to accomplish and which of your interests, values, concerns, fears, and aspirations are most relevant to achieving your goal. Thinking through your objectives will guide your decision-making (learn more about the importance of vision).
• Create imaginative alternatives: your alternatives represent the different courses of action you must choose. Your devious can Ben no better than your best alternative (learn more about the Art of Creating Choices).
• Understand the consequences: how well do your alternatives satisfy your objectives? Assessing the consequences of each alternative frankly will help you to identify those that best me your alternatives — all your alternatives (learn more about discussing consequences in Feedback and Design Reviews).
• Think hard about your risk tolerance: people vary in their tolerance of risks and, depending on the stakes involved, in the risks they will accept from one decision to the next. A conscious awareness of your willingness to accept risk will make your decision-making process smoother and more effective (learn more about risk tolerance in Strategy, Pivot and Risk Mitigation).
• Consider linked decisions: what you decide today could influence your choices tomorrow, and your goals for tomorrow should influence your choices today. Thus many important decisions are linked over time. The key to dealing effectively with linked decisions is to isolate and resolve near-term issues while gathering the information needed to result in future problems. By sequencing your actions to exploit what you learn along the way, you will be doing your best to make smarter choices despite all the uncertainty and ambiguity in the world.

Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity through Commitment to Action

At some point in the decision making process, we know what we should do. We have clear intentions, but that is not the same as doing it. Without action, the value of the best alternative is nothing more than potential value. Converting potential value into real value requires action (Spetzler, C., Winter, H., & Meyer, J., Decision quality: Value creation from better business decisions, 2016).

Without commitment, advice giving is merely the expression of opinions.

Maister, D. H., Galford, R., & Green, C., “Commitment” in The trusted advisor, 2021

A decision isn’t truly made until resources have been irrevocably allocated to its execution. And so we need a commitment to action and a mental shift from thinking to doing. Thinking and doing are two different mindsets. If a business decision has the potential for a bad outcome (as nearly all of them do), a leader may hesitate to commit to action. It can even be financially risky for a decision-maker to act since incentives generally reward good outcomes rather than good decisions (Spetzler, C., Winter, H., & Meyer, J., Decision quality: Value creation from better business decisions, 2016).

Without action, the value potential in a decision cannot be realised.

Spetzler, C., Winter, H., & Meyer, J., Decision quality: Value creation from better business decisions (2016)

Shifting between the two mindsets is especially difficult for action-oriented executives and managers who get bogged down in the complexities and uncertainties of decision making. But to be effective, they must learn to operate in both modes — deciding and executing-moving rapidly from one mode to the other. A shift from thought to action can be emotional and may require courage. It also requires a shift from one skill set to another. During the decision-making process, conflict is fuel, encouraging a diverse set of alternatives, values, and perspectives. When it is time for action, we need alignment and buy-in (Spetzler, C., Winter, H., & Meyer, J., Decision quality: Value creation from better business decisions, 2016).

The mindset of deciding must embrace uncertainty; the mindset of action must replace uncertainty with certitude of purpose: “Let’s get on with it.”

Spetzler, C., Winter, H., & Meyer, J., Decision quality: Value creation from better business decisions (2016)

Shifting between the two mindsets is especially difficult for action-oriented executives and managers who get bogged down in the complexities and uncertainties of decision-making. But to be effective, they must learn to operate in both modes–deciding and executing-moving rapidly from one mode to the other. Unlike the rapid action of detailed operational adjustments, strategy decisions involve less detail, have long delays before the outcome is observed, and may be very expensive or impossible to adjust once execution is launched (Spetzler, C., Winter, H., & Meyer, J., Decision quality: Value creation from better business decisions, 2016).

Learn how designers and strategists can respond, prod, encourage, guide, coach, and teach as they guide individuals and groups to make good decisions that are critical in the business.

The Importance of Vision

In my experience — more often than not — lots of projects (and organizations, for that matter) lack an inspiring vision.

A global study conducted in 2012 involving 300,000 employees found that just over half did not really understand the basics of their organizations’ strategies (Zook, C., & Allen, J., Repeatability, 2012). Given the effort applied to strategy development, there is a massive disconnect here. The opportunity to reconnect a firm with its strategy lies in how the strategy is communicated and understood (Callahan, S., Putting Stories to Work, 2016).

The first thing most people do when they hear the word “vision” in a business context is a yawn. That’s because visions are vague, unclear, and – frankly – nothing to get excited about. Well-designed visions should be rally cries for action, invention, and innovation (Van Der Pijl, P., Lokitz, J., & Solomon, L. K., Design a better business: New tools, skills, and mindset for strategy and innovation, 2016).

Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity through Clarity of Vision

The beauty of a shared vision is that it motivates and unites people: it acts as the product’s true north, facilitates collaboration, and provides continuity in an ever-changing world (Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z.,  Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations, 2017).

Shared vision creates the common language that helps you work together.

Govella, A., Collaborative Product Design (2019)

Making sure organizations and designers share the same vision is crucial to the success of any design project. A “shared project vision” means (Calabretta, G., Erp, J. V., Hille, M., “Designing Transitions: Pivoting Complex Innovation” in Strategic Design, 2016):

• There is widespread clarity in the stakeholders’ and designers’ understanding of the project goals and direction.
• There is widespread clarity in the stakeholders’ and designers’ understanding of the approach taken during project implementation.

The five most important characteristics of good vision are (Berkun, S., Making things happen, 2008):

• Simplifying: a good vision will provide answers to core questions and give everyone a tool for making decisions in their own work. While a vision will raise new questions, these should be fewer in number than ones that no longer need to be asked.
• Intentional (goal-driven): the vision is a project’s first source of goals. It sets the tone for what good goals look like, how many goals there should be in a plan, and how many refinements the goals may need before they are complete.
• Consolidated: for the vision to have any power, it must consolidate ideas from many other places. It should absolve the key thinking from research analysis, strategic planning, or other efforts, and the best representation of those ideas (Tip: I usually start with the Product Vision Board to draft the product vision statement).
• Inspirational: to connect with people, there must be a clear problem in the world that needs to be solved, which the team has some interest or capacity to solve.
• Memorable: being memorable implies two things. First, that ideas make sense; second, that they resonate with readers and will stay with them over the duration of the project. They might not remember more than a few points, but that’s enough for them to feel confident about what they’re doing every day.

As a rallying cry, a clear and compelling vision provides direction in everything you and your colleagues do. Ask each other this question every day: “does this action, activity, experiment, or project get us close to realizing our vision?” If the answer is “no”, then don’t waste time, energy, and money on it.

Van Der Pijl, P., Lokitz, J., & Solomon, L. K., Design a better business: New tools, skills, and mindset for strategy and innovation (2016)

A Vision Statement is a method for describing the result of an innovation project as an overview, showing how the innovation offering is implemented by the organization. Part of the method is to express the innovation intent and its realization in only a minimum set of words or visuals, for example, a title statement as brief as, “We will eradicate breast cancer in the next twenty years.” It contains no specifics, but grounds all innovation efforts (Kumar, V., “Mindsets” in 101 design methods, 2013).

The product vision statement looks forward, describing the change users will experience when the product deployed to the market and what the company hopes to accomplish by developing it.

Podeswa, H., The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning (2021)

A vision statement expresses the value proposition, targeted users, key activities, performance, channels, resources, cost structure, revenue streams, strategy, and similar key factors, distilling all of the research, analysis, and synthesis into a concise expression that summarizes the fulfillment of the innovation intent in an easy to grasp format, especially making it clear to any stakeholder. The Vision Statement is often developed during the process of crafting a Strategy Plan (Kumar, V., “Mindsets” in 101 design methods, 2013).

Product Vision clarifies why are we bringing a product to market in the first place, and what its success will mean to the world and the organization. It’s the destination we want to reach. For example, Google Search’s product vision is “to provide access to the world’s information in one click” — which is derived from the company’s mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Lombardo, C. T., McCarthy, B., Ryan, E., & Connors, M., Product Roadmaps Relaunched, 2017).

For: [target customer]

Who: [target customer’s needs]

The: [product name]

Is a: [product category]

That: [product benefit/reason to buy]

Unlike: [competitors]

Our product: [differentiators]

Here is an example from Microsoft Surface

For the business user who needs to be productive in the office and on the go, the Surface is a convertible tablet that is easy to carry and gives you full computing productivity no matter where you are.

Unlike laptops, Surface serves your on-the-go needs without having to carry an extra device.

280 Group LLC. What is a Product Vision? Methods and Examples (2020)

Designers should advocate for the importance of vision and facilitate the creation of product visions that explain a strategy’s complex connection and express the product’s future intended destination. (Fish, L., Kiekbusch, S., “The State of the Designer” in The Designer’s Guide to Product Vision, 2020).

When you’ve formulated your point of view with an eye toward the future, the vision will guide you and your team toward that north star. A clear vision brings focus and provides an anchor point for making bold strategic decisions (Van Der Pijl, P., Lokitz, J., & Solomon, L. K., Design a better business: New tools, skills, and mindset for strategy and innovation, 2016).

Learn about the importance of vision for creating shared understanding of why we are bringing a product to market in the first place.

Take Ownership of the Project

Design projects with higher degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity tend to be worked on by teams that lack a hierarchical structure. While this might benefit an open-team climate, it can cause situations where no one takes responsibility for the whole project. In these cases, designers can try to take ownership of a project and introduce a coherent structure (Daalhuizen, J., Badke-Schaub, P., & Batill, S. M., Dealing with Uncertainty in Design Practice, 2009).

Collaborations can’t succeed if they are free-for-all discussions without structure. People’s personalities will lead to some dominating the work, or to teams getting lost between defining problems, solving them, and learning how well their solutions work.

Anderson, G., Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive (2019)

Structure is needed to keep teams from devolving or losing focus, especially when facing complex challenges. By understanding how ideas develop and setting up cycles of effort that are timeboxed and iterative, you can help teams de-risk situations and learn to reduce or avoid negative consequences that come from their solutions (Anderson, G., Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive, 2019).

The more freedom you have, the more structure you need

Stickdorn, M. et al, This is Service Design Doing (2018)

The structure you create isn’t meant to govern exactly what teams do or function as a monolithic order, but rather to help the core team and their stakeholders be explicit about where they are in their efforts and manage expectations. Plans should be made visible and revisited periodically to see what’s changed and whether the effort needs a different approach (Anderson, G., Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive, 2019).

In my experience, the simplest way to create structure around collaboration comes from Project Management techniques.

Qualities of Good Project Management

While Strategists are not expected to manage design projects in their area of responsibility fully – picking up some Project Management skills that will prove invaluable for their effectiveness, like (Udo, N., & Koppensteiner, S. What are the core competencies of a successful project manager? 2004):

• Provide vision and direction,
• Coach/mentor team members,
• Negotiation, Issue and Conflict resolution,
• Effective decision making,
• Communication and Stakeholder Management.

From a design management perspective, project management is about how to translate design strategies and processes into a finished result. This entails planning and coordinating the people, stakeholders and resources necessary to get the project built, on time and within a budget (Best, K., Design management: Managing design strategy, process and implementation, 2019).

A successful project manager has the ability to keep projects moving toward successful completion in the face of aggressive schedules and discouraging developments.

Udo, N., & Koppensteiner, S., What are the core competencies of a successful project manager? (2004)

I’ve also mentioned in several posts that I believe designers should step up to the plate and work with stakeholders to facilitate the discussions that will better communicate the vision (or create one if it is lacking) and get teams paddling in the same direction.

Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity with Just Enough Project Management

At this point you might be thinking and asking yourself:

• Isn’t it Someone Else’s job? I’ve had people suggest that a product manager, or a product owner, or a someone in some business capacity should be ensuring the team has a clear vision and goals. That’s probably right! And yet, what I’ve noticed in my practice is that most of the decisions we’ve been talking about here are related to key questions you as a designer would need answers to do your own work: what are the personas we are trying to help? what are their key problems? What do they consider success? From that perspective, I found it more helpful to frame the facilitation discussion as “if we can’t answer these questions as a team, shall we get together and work them through?” Once framed this way, it’s usually the case that teams will not only welcome the facilitation exercise, but also ask for more in the future!
• Even if I had all the skills and mindset above, how am I going to lead the team through these discussions? That involves a few key soft skills, particularly influencing without authority.

The grasp of such important concept is what differentiates people with delegated authority and earned authority: if you had to ask for the team to “let you lead them” through some amount of project management, you will probably find some stakeholder to support you (your manager, a scrum master, or a sympathetic product manager). That approach might work depending on how successful you are in finding (and collaborating with) such stakeholder.

The best way to start is (in my opinion) with a two-pronged approach:

• Find an area you can influence that could benefit from some structure (remember: “the more freedom you have, the more structure you will need”). If nothing else, design strategists should project management their area of responsibility (e.g.: research and concept, design thinking, etc.) and lead by example.
• Instead of going from no-project-management-capability to a six-sigma-black-belt-certification, find a balance of just enough planning to begin with.

There are seven straight-forward practices that — if followed in the planning process — increase the probability of successful strategic plan development and execution (Dobbs, J. H., & Dobbs, J. F., Strategic Planning: A Pragmatic Guide, 2016):

1. Start with a practical, pragmatic approach to planning rather than an academic, theoretical one.
2. Follow a clearly defined, sequential planning model that is decided on in advance and accepted by participants.
3. Ask and answer necessary and sufficient questions at the right times and at each stage in the planning process.
4. Use objective criteria for decision making
5. Create alignment among stakeholders around key facts, assumptions, and decisions.
6. Commit to and manage a reasonable portfolio of strategic actions or initiatives.
7. Acknowledge reality to foster self-honesty.

Learn about basic Project Management skills that will prove invaluable for the effectiveness of design strategists in Strategy, Planning and Project Management.

Becoming a Design Strategist

Suppose you are inspired after learning about all the different techniques to help the team paddle in the same direction. In that case, you are probably on the trajectory of becoming a different kind of designer. One that can move pixels and translate design insights into a currency that business stakeholders can understand.

If designers want to influence and translate strategy in ways that drive their user experience vision forward, they must become both business-savvy analysts and synthesizers. Learn how on Becoming a Design Strategist.

Recommended Reading

Ahir, H, Bloom, N., and Furceri, D. (2019), What the Continued Global Uncertainty Means to You. IMF Blog. Retrieved February 3, 2023, from https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2021/01/19/blog-what-the-continued-global-uncertainty-means-for-you

Anderson, G. (2019). Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive. O’Reilly UK Ltd.

Annamalai, Nagappan; Kamaruddin, Shahrul; Azid, Ishak Abdul; Yeoh, TS (September 2013). “Importance of Problem Statement in Solving Industry Problems”. Applied Mechanics and Materials. Zurich. 421: 857–863. doi:10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.421.857. S2CID 60791623

Berger, W. (2019). The book of beautiful questions: The powerful questions that will help you decide, create, connect, and lead. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Berkun, S. (2008). Making things happen: Mastering project management. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Berry Liberman, “Jostein Solheim: CEO, Futurist, All ‘Round Champ,” October 17, 2017, in Dumbo Feather Podcast, produced by Beth Gibson, MP3 audio, 28:29.

Best, K. (2019). Design management: Managing design strategy, process and implementation. London, England: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Bland, D. J. (2020). How to select the next best test from the experiment library. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from Strategyzer.com website: https://www.strategyzer.com/blog/how-to-select-the-next-best-test-from-the-experiment-library

Bland, D. J., & Osterwalder, A. (2019). Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation. Wiley; 1st edition (November 12, 2019).

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