Design Crux

Information, Captology, Desirability in Design

Designing Culture

STAHL: You are at a college of education. What—what is taught, when teachers go to school, about parents?
Ms. SMREKAR: That they are scary, that they are threats, that they are to be avoided. Colleges of education do not teach teachers to develop productive relationships with parents. It’s not done.
STAHL: That’s a pretty remarkable admission, that teachers are trained to push parents away.
—60 Minutes, Segment: Pentagon Schools (airdate: CBS, Sunday April 21, 2002, 7:00 PM E.S.T.)

Evaluate the following statement: Parents need to be more involved in the schooling of their children.

It sounds just about right, I found myself thinking recently as I watched a television show about American schools. This particular program went into detail about the problem no one talks about. Needless to say it was parental involvement. Quite the opposite of my experience, I can’t recall a discussion about education where the role of parents in the system’s problems went unmentioned.

Nevertheless, parents are the hidden problem within the system. The facts are impressive, with all sorts of data to back up the position children of highly–involved parents do better in school. More important even than more money or a host of other commonly called for advantages. Which is so obviously true, you can almost skip over the small quibble that the description far outweighs the prescription.

Eating Change For Breakfast,
Then Getting Back To The 9 to 5 Business Of Maintaining Status Quo

…the 800–pound gorilla that impaired performance and stifled change was culture.

—Changing the Way We Change

Within the flood of data about how nice increasing parental involvement might be, a small point of information is missing. How do we change the current situation? As well understood as the situation is, and for all the description of the outcome sought, the real hidden problem is the lack of a plan to get from one system state to another. Mistaking data about the problem for information about the solution is, as always, part of what’s wrong. The paralysis by analysis endemic to the information age is not an information age problem, but one of data processing as sole corrective step. In processing data about the system, you find yourself an expert in the assumptions which make the problems seem unchanging and unchangeable.

Change in an ecology is systemic. When one element is changed, effects can be felt throughout the whole system. Local changes can disappear without a trace if they are incompatible with the rest of the system. For example, when schools set new goals for what students must learn in math, they also have to develop new ways of evaluating what the students have learned. Otherwise, teachers will find themselves under pressure to teach the material that was covered on the old tests, and the innovation will fail.
—Information Ecologies: Using Technology With Heart by Boni A. Nardi and Vicki L. O’Day

Systems work in certain ways. First systems maintain status quo. Second in priority is system growth. And only in efficient systems does the reason for the system ever reach third place. Corporate cultures, teams, work processes, and any system you care to imagine all seek these primary objectives. A Harvard Business Review article, Changing the Way We Change, was not talking about schooling when writing “…the 800–pound gorilla that impaired performance and stifled change was culture.”

Moreover, while styling was what kept buyers coming back year after year for the latest edition of their favorite car, Donner could not stand the prima donnas in charge of automotive styling. So, out of touch with where the public wanted the car companies to go in the future and completely dismissive of those inside of GM who did understand the proper evolution of the automobile, Donner slowly but surely led GM off the path to success. And Donner and his protégés in the accounting towers controlled GM’s fate for the next 35 years.
— GM: Cool But Misguided?

Nobody was thinking the same thing at GM and Ford. Both companies consciously declined to trade certain short-term costs, like redesigning and retooling, for possible long-term gains. Not unusual for large, risk-averse corporations. They’d rather be safe than sorry. Let tomorrow take care of itself, is their mindset. You won’t hear them talk that way in public. But despite what American automakers’ TV commercials would have you believe, they got left in the dust, buried in confusion over what the public is clamoring for today.
— Corporate short–termism nets less than the long view

Adam Bosworth extends system thinking to software design “That software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel cored, able to survive and grow while that software which is demanding, abstract, rich but systematized, turns out to collapse in on itself in a slow and grim implosion.”

You Get What The System Is Designed To Produce

We are building complex multimedia smart classrooms without training teachers to teach, learners to learn, and without building the tools and infrastructure necessary for effective learning in the broad learning space. Like a 747 without trained pilots, reservations systems, airports, or an air traffic control system we cannot expect to get off the ground, much less soar.
— New Learning Spaces: Smart Learners, Not Smart Classrooms by Howard Strauss; Campus Technology Magazine

There is an old saying a technology is anything which was developed after you were born. Classrooms, school systems, and even chairs are tools, or technologies so ingrained in a culture their use becomes reflexive, subconscious. When you turn your attention from parents to parental interaction, you find…

Forbidding architectural style
Check–in procedures
A perspective which equates parent involvement with loss of control
Homework not designed for increasing levels of parent involvement
Incomprehensible jargon
The perceptual barrier of intruding on a expert performing their profession
Internal policies which may not anticipate parents need to know how and how much more they could be interacting with the school

When interviewed by members of a parent involvement project called Red Chair, the most frequent response from parents was they were never invited to participate more. Data about the status quo is processed and logged and analyzed and accumulated. Yet where on the school web site is there a section which is accessible, visible, and labeled Parent Involvement? Rethinking the underlying assumption of a tool can turn it back into a technology. A chair can act like a red carpet — an open invitation for parental involvement.

Donella H. Meadows recognized leverage points like rules, rewards and information flows influence the natural self–organizing behaviors of human systems. People waste effort, time and money treating visible symptoms rather than hidden structural leverage points. System thinkers understand something. If you get certain results over and over with minor variation, you’re getting what the system was designed to produce.

If you want a different outcome, design a different culture.

Creating The Captology Information System

Getting Mission Statements and About Us Pages Off The Information Blacklist

Information Work: What Is Context Worth?

Resources

The Most Important User Experience Method “If you really want to become a better user experience practitioner, learn how to work with and change the organization. This is in contrast to most UX books and events, which are endless discussions of *methods*: Card sorting. Remote usability. User profiles”
In Search of High–Performance Firms tries to connect culture and performance. What Is Management’s Role in Innovation? explores the culture of innovation.
“There are smart people in both the FAA and NASA (in fact, people from NASA run key parts of the accident reporting system), but one system is difficult to succeed in because it is crappy. And the other is comparatively easy to succeed in because it is well designed.” Crappy People versus Crappy Systems; Bob Sutton, Work Matters
In a new book, the psychologist who created the Stanford Prison Experiment explains it’s not a few bad apples who spoil the barrel — how you design the barrel (system dynamics) spoils good apples. An article on Countering Perverse Incentives in Project Management explains, “This frequently means that we are spending time and money on activities that, because we have disengaged our brains, don’t benefit the organization even though the organization has endorsed the creation of everything on the checklist.”
Adam Bosworth’s ISCOC04 Talk “When HTML first came out it was unbelievably sloppy and forgiving, permissive and ambiguous. I remember listening many years ago to the head, then and now, of Microsoft Office, saying contemptuously in 1995 that HTML would never succeed because it was so primitive and that Word would win because Word documents were so rich and controlled in their layout. Of course, HTML is today the basic building block for huge swathes of human information.” And Bosworth’s ideas are the basis of persuasion design’s contrast to command and control architectures.
IT: where success fails, and failure succeeds explains how fiefdoms form when the system view is missing from the IT system.
Why Colleges Are So Hard to Change “It should also be noted that technology can also be a major force for significant institutional change. In many instances it can have an impact far beyond what its advocates envisioned, impacting the mission, priorities and the very culture of the college or university.” The College Website Dilemma is, without captology design, organization culture becomes the driving influence of website design.
Data processing a rigid employee script is not the information work of designing the employee experience. The Cultural Design Question: How can experience design be used to promote employee well being in organizational culture?
“Organizations can have amazingly good evidence, but it has no effect on the decisions they make if it conflicts with their ideology.” Prove It; Management needs fewer fads, more reflection; Stanford Magazine
Data Processing: The decline of dedicated physical activity programs in school. Information Work: Understanding Phys Ed programs don’t equal physical activity and why developing a curriculum using physical activity to teach academic content will have nonintuitive (but desirable) system effects.
Question: Does your information system identify strategic inflection points; with technology supporting how the firm must change (captology), not merely locking down the status quo?
NASA’s culture still poses serious problems, underscoring the need to design culture or manage up. Ca Magazine goes a step further, saying “Managing up is a core competency requirement for team leaders.” All too often managers design monocultures to make managment simpler. But management can’t exist without leading individuals with diverse backgrounds, suggesting managing is design. Information systems must test organization state and support management in multiple directions.
How do you set up coursework to develop what an information worker might need? One way is to set up system structure to reward self–organizing behaviors (collaborative teams.) To do this, give each student only a fragment — one piece of the jigsaw — necessary to pass the test. Information skills here are discovery, communication, collaboration.
Contrary to popular opinion, the designer who sits at the head of the decision pyramid of many a system is a dead philosopher, economist, scientist or (in the case of schooling, a dead psychologist.) One of my favorite information workers, Richard Mitchell, has an interesting take on the conceptual kernel underlying the current system and education speak (translation here and here). Information work would center around more than textbook content, choosing instead how textbooks got the way they are and the reason why the sciences and history, even some literature is different in school. Not to mention education’s checkered past when interacting with technology.
A Harvard Business Review article Changing the Way We Change concludes “…the 800–pound gorilla that impaired performance and stifled change was culture.” Understanding what corporate culture is and how to uncover it is a key task for information workers. One overlooked tool for designing culture is the mission statement.
Some of the points of leverage in a complex system: Rules and their flexibility, constraints and numbers, information flows, and the world views from which they arise. Wikipedia has one of the nicer pages on Donella H. Meadows’ twelve leverage points to intervene in a system. The number one leverage point is the context or world view, which William McDonough explains as Cradle to Cradle, the system thinking of the next industrial revolution essentially design thinking.
As Sony retires the Betamax player, every designer should study the tale of the VCR clock. Designers wanted to equip VCRs to decode a time stamp on broadcast signals. Sounds simple. As with most information age problems, the system level picture often goes missing. One big picture technique is assembly of a postmortem database. View a PDF Adobe Acrobat file of the VCR clock postmortem here.
DonorsChoose is a site where teachers lacking funding can propose projects potential donors can evaluate. Those running the site verify the particulars, post the project, and then deliver the materials to the teacher’s school. By funding projects this way, the system changes and so will culture. Wikibooks open content textbooks and Digital Universe acts on other system leverage points. Neither requires entrenched hierarchies be replaced.
New Learning Spaces: Smart Learners, Not Smart Classrooms by Howard Strauss; Campus Technology Magazine “We need smart learners, not smart classrooms; and smart classrooms are not enough to get us there.” The first question of information literacy: What is the system designed to produce? Until this question is answered correctly, with minor variation you will get the same outcome over and over again.
Parents in Connecticut might be the ones getting report cards, in an article which explains the failure or success of such ideas are an issue of interaction design.
A business plan design happens outside the computer document …try designing culture. …Requirements are designed outside the document titled “requirements” …try designing culture. Information workers create new patterns which change culture. Data processors, with cosmetic variation, merely repeat patterns …over …and over again.
If I had to evaluate the web–based materials found, the split would be 99% data processing, a fractional percent information work. A copy of the (long) 60 Minutes Pentagon Schools transcript can be found at The Committee on Education and the Workforce site.

System Thinking