Podcast 079: Speculative use cases
Misleading grumbles, design research skeptics and Play Doh's origin story.
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OK in today’s podcast, we talk about a question posed in Innovation Tactics Slack - about a stakeholder who’s skeptical that design research can help with genuine innovation, and wants to create speculative use cases instead.
Topics we touch on:
Are speculative use cases a “thing”? Is it helpful to imagine people doing something that’s just not happening today? Like, 500 years ago, nobody got their shoelace trapped in an escalator. In 2003, nobody was planning out how they’d price their product on the App Store …
Is it reasonable to be skeptical about design research?
What do you do when you’re working with someone who's already decided what they want and isn’t interested in evidence?
Radical repurposing as an alternative – follow the pathfinders
Snowmobiling as a possible approach – remix the adjacent possible
Jamming with your stakeholder to understand and clarify (with the side effect that you might expose gaps or incoherence)
Bias in research
How to listen:
Or search for Trigger Strategy Podcast in your pod-player of choice
And some quotes:
“You can absolutely go and do the best interviewing in the world and not come back with anything that’s going to be a breakthrough innovation for your company. It may be that your company is not positioned to make a breakthrough innovation.”
“Everyone who has a brilliant idea thinks that their idea is the next big thing. And everyone but one in a million is wrong about that. And even the one in a million tends to be wrong about exactly how it’s going to work.”
“Play Doh was invented, not as a toy for kids, but as a putty for removing coal soot from walls. It was repurposed into the kids’ toy in a panic after people stopped having coal fires.”
“You’re very unlikely to invent something novel that works. You’re very likely to find somebody doing something novel that you can scale.”
“this is the trap that so many people fall into and I’ve heard it more times than I can count. It’s that need to educate the market. Do not, do not try, red flag, back away slowly or run, run speedily off into the distance.”
OK that’s all for today. Have a lovely weekend,
Tom & Corissa x
Transcript
Introduction
Greetings! This is Corissa and Tom on Trigger Strategy Podcast. We are digging into strategy and sense making while walking up a hill in Bournemouth. Whey! Which we like to do. Always. Why do we start recording when we're walking uphill and just getting out of breath? I think we're just really masochistic and or really want to make our listeners feel uncomfortable. And or we don't have a choice because Bournemouth always is uphill, it seems. Good point.
Today’s question from friend of the podcast
Yeah, today we're going to deal with an uphill kind of a question. So, uh, I think I'll share the name. Friend of the podcast, uh, Georgia is a, she's a brilliant researcher. Um, I've worked with her before and shared ideas and stuff, and she came into the Innovation Tactics Pip Decks channel, uh, with an, with a fun challenge. So because this was publicly shared, I think we can share it on the podcast. Lovely.
Innovation Tactics
And just, uh, by way of introduction, Innovation Tactics is your Pip Decks deck of cards. 56 cards with useful things on them, if you are trying to do something new at work. Exactly, and if you're interested in the, the whole … Pipiverse I guess you could call it, they've got a Slack community and there's a bunch of extra material with authors and all this sort of stuff.
without further ado, Georgia's question.
Fun challenge. A stakeholder is building a decentralized technology stack that could be used in many ways. One thing they are personally very excited about is the potential for deriving alternative coordination mechanisms. For example, helping people pool money or split funds for a purchase or group decision making in a way that is totally new to people and doesn't exist today. Yes, this is vague, but that is part of the challenge.
She talks a little bit about her hunch to run a workshop. The stakeholder in question is sceptical that design research can be used to explore, in their own words, speculative use cases. But I suspect that when we get down to it, we'll find that the core problems it solves for exist today in humans.
Is there such a thing as a speculative use case? He imagines that our solution will unlock brand new use cases unknown to us now, and therefore design research cannot help in this area. What do you think?
Wow. Wow. Okay, yeah, wow, there's a lot to process there. A lot to process. And we're just moving away from the loud power tools.Somebody's living their best life right there. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's scaffolding. Oh, exciting. Oh, yeah, scaffolders. The noisiest of all of the workmen types. It's good. It's got a good set of pipes on it as well. Oh, yeah. As in, like, singing pipes. Yeah, nice singing. And a nice pipe over his shoulder. Oh, and here comes a van. Oh, it's all happening, guys. Action! Action packed episode! This was supposed to be a quiet road! Oh well. Uh, best laid plans. Um, okay, so, uh, I'm trying to, like, remember the whole of that. What could you, could you, Tom, boil down the gist of what she's asking for me? So, I think, I think one of the hearts of this is, there are two, sorry about this scaffolding noise, I think two or three really interesting questions here.
Speculative Use Cases – are they a thing?
Uh, one is, speculative use cases, is, what, what are they? Is that a thing? Have you seen that become, like, relevant? Um, the other is So, let me just check I've understood what is meant by that, so, speculative use case is something that you can imagine somebody possibly trying to do, um, but, as far as you're aware, nobody's ever tried to do it yet.
Yeah, it doesn't exist today, people are not familiar with it, etc, etc. Yeah, I think that's that's it. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean Sure, people in future are gonna be needing to solve problems that we're not trying to solve today. I mean, that's a given Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, so there are some Human nature kind of problems that we all deal with that are probably quite timeless But then yeah, oh, I don't know.
So like Oh getting a shoelace trapped in an escalator That's not a thing that happened 500 years ago No, never. It never happened once 500 it? And then as of about, what, 1850, it suddenly was a thing. Yeah, it happened to me more, more than, more than zero times. Yeah, it was a fun day out. A non zero number of shoelace traps.
So, so yeah, I guess in that sense, yes, it's possible. We're touching there on, on Stuart Kaufman's adjacent, adjacent possible idea. But also, but just to let me finish that thought as well. So. Yes, it's possible, but I guess to argue against myself, the idea of getting your shoelace trapped in something is a thing that was a problem that people had before escalators, I'm guessing.
That's true. I don't know what you might get your shoelace trapped in. Between the wheels of a horse and carriage. Yes. A loom! A loom or a mill, all those sorts of things. Right, yeah, okay. Once shoelaces were a thing. I actually don't know when shoelaces were invented. That's it. Probably a long, long, long, long time ago.
Yeah, yeah, I think so. Um, so, so in that sense, maybe it's not, not a reasonable thing. The idea of a speculative use case.
Speculative Design
Yeah, I think I was thinking about this and figured that where I've seen this used, I think most effectively is in speculative design, where you imagine a future where something significant has changed, which might be something in climate, it might be a new.
Uh, technology has made something that was previously impossible is now possible. Maybe there's new regulation, something like that has shifted. Therefore, how, how might you respond in that situation? And it can trigger some fresh thinking. And is it, to use one of your favourite words, is it a question of granularity?
So the idea of a shoelace getting trapped in something is quite a big level of granularity, but a shoelace getting trapped specifically in an escalator, that's slightly different to getting it trapped in something that's not mechanised. Yeah. And therefore, like, the way that you might try to stop that from happening is different.
Yeah. Yeah, that is true. And this is, I think, you're getting it
We suck at predicting the future
One of the major difficulties with this sort of thing, which is you are probably completely wrong about what's going to happen in the future. And if you imagine somebody in 2003, say, who is building an online business and they're imagining 10 years in the future, uh, how are they going to be delivering their service?
They are not imagining the app store on an iPhone. They have no idea the iPhone is going to exist. At best, they're thinking of something in WAP, which If you've never had to deal with, you count yourself lucky, but like thinking about the idea of trying to derive your pricing structure on the app store in 2003 is not something you can even think about.
Okay, so are you saying there's also the question of how far ahead you're trying to look and if you're looking quite close into the future, then maybe it makes sense to try and visualize that. Whereas you, there's just no point trying to visualize something that's 10, 20 years from now. Pretty much. Yeah.
Yeah, I think there are exceptions. I think there is a whole field of, I think, speculative design and futures thinking, which has structured ways to, you know, explore what might happen, but it's usually exploring many possibilities. not trying to come up with a new idea today.
Snowmobiling
Well that's what I was going to say, I'm guessing the way that you would advocate for that is just do a load of random stuff without really knowing why you're doing it, just smash things together, figuratively speaking, and see what comes out of it, rather than thinking I'm going to try and achieve X.
Yeah, yeah, rather than trying to predict what's going to happen in the future, this takes us back to our snowmobiling, uh, episode, doesn't it? Yeah, using the resources you have in front of you today, Yeah. What could you do? How could you use them in a different way to how you've been using them before?
Exactly, yeah. And I think that actually is what this stakeholder is getting at, really. They want to play with the sorts of things that can happen, that they can build today with technology, in the hope that people will use them for something new. Right, which the way you've just put it then is valid. Like that's not unreasonable as a thing to try and do.
Reasonable skepticism about design research
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. I think then you get to the The next question I think is, so are they right to be sceptical of design research in such a, in such a case? I think Georgia herself in her comment says she suspects that if they find a use case that actually does work, it's going to tie back to a real human need that exists today.
Right, and it's, and it's tricky because the answer is yes and no and I suppose the answer is yes. Um, it, like doing so. It's the kind of user interviews which are aimed at, you know, finding ways that people are trying and failing to do something in their lives. That's not an easy thing to do. It's not like usability testing where you're just trying to tell someone, can they achieve, can they go from A to B on a website, for instance, and do they get stuck?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's a thing, can you show me how you use it? Yeah. Whereas trying to uncover, like, what is going on for people deep down, that's just, that's another plane of existence, isn't it? It is. Yeah. And I think I, I said, uh, I think it's, it's true. It's not unreasonable to be sceptical of design research in a certain way.
You can absolutely go and do the best interviewing in the world for over the right number of people and not come back with anything that's going to be a breakthrough innovation for your company. It may be. That your company is not positioned to make a breakthrough innovation. It's just not your, not something you're going to be able to do.
Design research is more about understanding your context
Yeah, and unfair facts of life. Exactly. No amount of quality research can fix that. Um, now, I think what you are going to learn from doing that design research is a lot more about the context you're working in. And a lot more about Uh, you know, the people you want to serve, that sort of thing. Mmm, so it could open other doors, is what you're saying.
It could do, yeah, I think so. And it, the thing that the, I suspect is going on, if I was going to be quite cynical, is that this stakeholder, they just want to do what they think is cool.
They want to play with cool ideas. They don't want to be told what they've probably been told by people before. That it won't work. “Actually, no, we've got evidence that people don't need this.”
Yeah, that sounds familiar. Yeah, and I was just playing through a thought experiment because it became pretty clear early on in, uh, Georgia's question that this stakeholder actually, they already know what they want to build. They want to build a novel collaboration mechanism, a way for group decision making to happen in a way that doesn't happen today.
Just doing something because you think it’s cool can be cool
Yeah, cool. And actually, we, this reminds me of a previous podcast episode that we've published. Which is that just doing something because you think it's cool is totally valid as a way of operating a business. I think where it gets, where it gets, um, difficult is if you are dressing it up as, no, we're going to look for a real need and then figure out how to meet that need, but deep down you just want to do the thing.
Yeah. Um, that is, that's kind of Setting yourself up for, um, trouble at work. That is worth going back into the pain cave there, isn't it? Bringing all your friends with you to the pain cave.
Whereas just saying, hey, look, look, people, I've got an idea and I've got the money to make it, well, to try and make it happen. Are you in?
Sure, some people will be up for it because they think that, you know, maybe you have got a cool thing and they're up for giving it a go. Yeah, yeah, we'll have a gig for a couple of years, building out your cool idea. If it doesn't work out, so be it. We've got paid, you're happy, jobs a goodin
Thought experiment on a guess at what decentralised decision making might mean
Um, but I think I did a quick thought experiment on this kind of group decision making, and reading between the lines, he's talking about decentralised, it's something in the crypto space, it's gonna be game theoretic, it's gonna be that sort of thing.
People are working on these things called DAOs, or Distributed Autonomous Organisations. where what they try to do is protocolise politics. To be a little bit cynical again, these are technologists who don't like messy people and they want to make mathematical rules that make things work better. Right, right, turn a complex thing and make it be complicated instead.
Exactly. Because complicated is easier to understand and solve. Easier to understand and then we can control it, we can feel happy, etc, etc. And so I was thinking about an example where, great, we've got, we've come up with this cool decision making thing where a group of friends all install this cool app and then they one tap connect to their crypto wallets and then they can make a decision to about where to go away for a weekend in a perfectly game theoretic way.
So they're all going to get a little bit of marginal utility from this process and I'm using the sort of language that you get in crypto spaces. It's quite, uh, technical and. It creates a, like a theoretic model of the world. Sounds somewhat appealing. It sounds somewhat appealing, doesn't it? But then you think, OK, let's think of a real group of friends.
And this is where I was channelling, I think, you and some friends that you used to go on walks with. Big up, big up Lairy Hikers! Yeah! And I was just thinking Those were the days.
So you could do that, you could install the app and put some crypto towards, you know, making your bid for where you should go away for the weekend and choose like, second, third choices, all this sort of stuff.
But actually, realistically, you didn't care enough to even open a brochure. You didn't actually care. You actually, you liked to grumble a bit about the person who is the organiser, and the person who's the organiser probably grumbled a bit about having to do all the work. Oh yeah, there was some mutual grumbling going on.
But actually it was a perfectly workable solution for everyone. It worked fine, the organiser liked doing the organising, and we liked just, um, getting up at 5am on a Saturday, being whisked, whisked off to some train station somewhere, and then getting our boots muddy. Exactly. And so actually It looks like there is a rational, better way to do it, using a game theoretic, decentralised app.
But it's going to make everyone's life worse. The organiser don't get to do the organising. Exactly, and the people who don't want to do the organising suddenly have to care about stuff. So, yeah.
Misled by grumbles or by your beliefs about what other people should do
I think it's, yeah, don't be misled by grumbles, don't be misled by your own personal thoughts about how things ought to be better for other people.
I think that's a, that's a watch out, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, and in terms of speculative design, are you saying that this is a good example of where speculative design is not such a good approach? It's interesting, I think, so what I think this stakeholder is doing is, he's, he's speculating about use cases that might be relevant in a universe that’s not our universe.
What conditions would need to be in place for an idea to work?
And so I suppose, actually, this is something I didn't say, but an interesting question to ask him would be, well, what conditions would need to be in place in order for this, you know, game theoretic decision mechanism to be. Obviously the best choice for people. What, what are all the things that would need to be true?
I suppose might be one way. I feel like I've sort of wandered off the train of thought though in that so he, he doesn't want to do speculative design. Well, so I think he is talking about, he doesn't want to do speculative design. He wants to make speculative use cases. He wants to make cool tech and he doesn't want design research to come and be a, like a, A horrible naysayer.
Okay, so he wants to come up with some speculative use cases that he can imagine based on what he knows about the subject matter. And it sounds like he's fairly well informed on the subject matter. And so, why not be the one who comes up with the speculative use cases? And he just doesn't want to bother with any research.
Why are there researchers there if the guy doesn’t want to do any research?
Yeah. So why are there researchers there? I think that's the biggest question of all, isn't it? Why, why get researchers involved if fundamentally this guy is sceptical research from the first place. For the optics? I think that's what you get. It's a, uh, I've been crediting this to Pavel Samsonov but it was actually Jonathan Korman who coined the phrase, uh, decision-driven evidence-making.
He's already decided what he wants to make, the only value of research at this point is to give him evidence to do it. Right, and I think it's fair to say that, uh, there are Researchers and research departments who, like, you kind of understand that that's why you're there and you just get on with it. And it's probably not the most satisfying work you'll ever do in your life.
Oh dear. Excuse me. Yeah, wears a strepsil when you need one. Yeah. Um, but, but yeah, so I think it's a question of have you got the right people for the job there? If you just feel like you do need to do some performance research or whatever. Whatever you want to, research theatre, that's Um, then, I guess, and you just want to go through the motions.
It's not, I mean it's not necessarily terrible to do that. As long as the people are there with their eyes open and they're, you know, they haven't been brought in under false pretences. Which a lot of the time they have. Which a lot of the time, exactly, a lot of the time they have. And that's where you, you get these kind of fractious moments of friction.
Totally, yeah, yeah, rubbing against, rubbing against the limits of what you're allowed to say as a researcher. Being. Told that you're not being helpful, that we need something actionable, et cetera. Anyway, so what is your take then on all this? So it's, it's interesting. I think, uh, what, what I suggested is like that there are, uh, you already touched on it.
Radical Repurposing: Play-Doh and microwaves
There, there are some go-to methods that we use for generating novelty and novel ideas. Snowmobiling is one, radical repurposing is another. I think these are how most. Business innovation really happens. Radical repurposing, another card from Innovation Tactics. To give one example, Play Doh was invented, not as a toy for kids, but as a putty for removing coal mark soot from walls in houses.
And that was a really good seller, it was a great product and it would remove the soot from the walls. But then coal fires fell out of fashion, people got gas fires, we stopped having that as a problem. The business now has an issue. Uh, one of the owners of the business noticed that their kid was playing with the stuff and rather than saying, stop doing that, that's a serious tool.
They thought, Oh, that's an interesting idea. Bingo. Play doh was born. And so then you get this, I mean, a massive pivot for that business. Effectively. Yeah. A lucky escape from certain death. Yep. Uh, we have microwave ovens because a radar engineer. noticed that a bar of chocolate in their pocket was melting when they were working the radar machine, which has a magnetron in it, which is the component that heats up food in a, in a microwave, uh, without that radical repurposing of something in a completely different context, you wouldn't have had that innovation.
Yeah. What's the quote that you often trot out? Is it that a signal of innovation is not that you are conscious that you're doing something new, but that's funny. Who's who is that from? Yeah, the sound of science is not Eureka, but that's funny. Yeah, that's it. I think that was Isaac Asimov. Um, but yeah, no, that's a classic.
It is. Noticing those weird things. Alexander Fleming wasn't trying to invent penicillin. You know, history is littered with this sort of stuff. Right, so what you've got to do is train yourself to notice the things that are unexpected and then be open to, okay, well, what could I use this for? Exactly, yeah.
Follow the pathfinders
And do you know what that goes back to? There is a method of design research, I think, which can be really effective for this radical repurposing, which on the card I call find, follow the pathfinders. And I remember doing this at Qubit. I went and observed a load of our customers with a sort of, I had an idea of what our strategy broadly was, but was open enough about what the vision, where the vision could lead us.
And across. God, I must have chatted with 20 to 30 different customers, went into some of their offices, watched how they were working. And I discovered one team who would cobbled together a bunch of technology in order to do something that we didn't realize people needed to do. They'd put in effort and they'd hacked it.
They'd hacked our software to do things it shouldn't be able to do. And that was a signal that there was a real need there. Right. Cause they are the pathfinders who are Yeah, carving out a new path to do something that they weren't able to do any other way. Exactly. And so that was a really valuable clue that led us to think, well, maybe other companies might need something similar if it were easier for them to do.
Bingo. It actually worked. And I've seen that over and over again. It's, uh, you're very unlikely to invent something novel that works. You're very likely to find somebody doing something novel that you can scale. Mmm. And on that bombshell. Boom, yeah. Is that the end? Is that the end? Is there any more to say about this?
Planning a workshop for Georgia - coherence test the remixed ideas
I feel like, I feel like we've not been of much help to Georgia so far. Well, yeah, so I'll say where I went in the end, which is great. I think she was planning to do a workshop that would be doing something similar to what we've described. Snowmobiling, radical repurposing, let's mash up ideas and see what we come up with.
Create a load of speculative use cases. That's great. Excuse the noise, momentary interlude, Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do do, do.
Okay so, um, certainly what I recommend, what I would, what I suggested is, When you've got that list of speculative use cases, you can put them through a first simple coherence test. very much. Which is, solve for distribution. Can you tell the story of someone who has a struggle that they're trying to make progress with and then they get your thing and it actually helps, makes their life better.
And crucially it's, it's the specifics of how they get your thing. That's the distribution side, isn't it? The distribution side, yeah. Which typically people overlook one side or the other. Or both. Oh yeah, God, almost always. Um, because yeah, if you can invent something cool that could make somebody's life better Yeah.
Yeah. But if they're not experiencing struggle, if they're not trying to improve it, that is not something you can ever sell to them. Which takes us back to, I don't think at any point were you and the Lairy Hikers looking for a better decision making mechanism that you could install on your phones.
Exactly, and also speaking of phones, you have watched me in horror many a time as I Um, as I, as I sort of muddle through using my iPhone without knowing the shortcuts, um, and stuff, and you're like, but, but, but you could just, I'm like, I just don't care enough, I'm sorry. Don't care enough. I'd rather just get mildly frustrated many times a day.
Well, it's another good example where, uh, you, you grumble about it, but you don't want to fix it, you want to grumble. Oh, I feel a bit grotty about that. But that's just human, isn't it? We're all like that. I think I, for me, if I can grumble about some smaller things, I don't feel like I need to grumble about the bigger things.
Make a multiverse map to spot incoherence
There you go. It's a valid need, isn't it? Uh, so yeah, so we've got then this kind of coherence test. And often what I'll do is get people to make a multiverse map of, okay, so what does the customer need to do? They do this, then they do this, then they see this, then they do this, then they see this, then they do this.
Okay. And you map out a bit of a story, and from doing that, often you go, Oh Jesus, that's, that's way more than anyone's going to do. That's too hard, we can't, we can't ask people to do that, it won't work. And that enables you to kill the idea, or to find another way to make it easier, stuff like that. So, that's a great way to start.
Language Market Fit to find what works
Once you've put the idea through a coherence test, then I'd say get them out into a language market fit test. I should test them in the market. Another of your cards in invention tactics? Exactly, yes. A method I stole almost wholesale from a chap called Matt Lerner. But it is, it's advertise it, see if you can get people to sign up for it before you, before you've built it. Can you hook into the demand that's out there? And if you can't, do you really want to be fighting up that hill?
Whatever you do, don’t try to educate the market
Oh gosh, and this is the trap that so many people fall into and I've heard it more times than I can count. It's that need to educate the market. Do not, do not try, red flag, back away slowly or run, run speedily off into the distance.
Educating the market is just, like sure it can be done, but it is going to take so much effort to do. Well yeah, I mean it takes at least 10 years and if you just flip it around and think about yourself, if you think about a product that you really don't want. and then imagine that that product's marketing tries to educate you about why you should want that product actually.
Well, so how much are you going to respond to that? I know, but so even, even if you do educating without being lectury, right? Even if you try to walk someone through what that problem feels like or what that, what that problem is causing for them in their life, even if you do it without educating, without lecturing, people just don't, typically have enough time and attention for you to walk them through that thought exercise.
Yeah. And that's what makes it so hard, like I've tried to do it before and I've been, I've worked with startups that have had to pivot or fold because they were trying to do that and you just don't have enough attention on you. No. To be able to do that. No, it's true, people have got attention for like the three top things that are causing them the most pain right now.
Work on the pain people want to fix now, not the thousand they don’t
Right now. That they want to deal with right now. And there's another thousand things that they could be better at, or that could be better in their lives, and you're never going to get them to care about those things. So yeah. Anyway, there you go. That's where Language Market Fit comes in. It's if you put this offer in front of people, if you try to connect with that problem, does anybody respond?
And you set pivot triggers. How many people do you need to respond in order for it to be worth it? You building the rest of the thing. So, all of that is there. I think that is, that's the way that I would work with a stakeholder who is in this particular position. I have also, as we talked about in previous episodes, it's not a magic bullet, is it?
Sometimes the stakeholder won’t have patience for coherence testing
And it is perfectly possible to try to do that coherence testing with a stakeholder and they have no patience for it. Right, and so I was going to add as well, it depends how much of a challenge you're up for, The path of least resistance would just be to go with the energy of this stakeholder. Kind of just not tell them what they want to hear, but just don't try to swim upstream.
Just go with them and see how far you can get them. Just following the way that they want to go. Yeah, which, which is what we're doing with making a multiverse map.
… that’s fine, jam on their ideas with them and let incoherence emerge
That is, let's, let's jam on this. Great, this sounds cool. Let's talk through what this is going to be like for your customers so that we can make it happen.
Because of course, maybe they're right. Maybe there is a there there. Yeah. Maybe their idea is going to work. Um, so there's nothing wrong with just choosing the path of least resistance. Well, I'd say not only nothing wrong with it. It's probably the only way. If you try again, if you try to educate this stakeholder about why they should care about design research, you are going to fail.
Sure. But I think there's a gradient. So there are some workshops that you've just described where. It is putting in more effort. You are sort of trying harder to crack the door open to them, trying something that maybe they wouldn't necessarily gravitate towards, right? So there, it is a gradient of how much do you want to put in versus how much you just want to be able to go home at six o'clock every day.
That is true, that is true. Yeah, I think, I think, yeah, I'm pretty bullish on the old multiverse map as a way of, it's, you're not only
Multiverse Map first to understand and clarify – but also know its side effects
Or it's, it's primary purpose isn't to, uh, try and persuade them of something different or to, to open the door to research or anything like that. It's primary purpose is to better, uh, understand what it is that's in their head.
Understand the story, the narrative that they've got going on about how this is going to work. And on day one, within, I mean it takes less than an hour to make one with somebody. So it's a very quick way to do it. And you can. exposed gaps that had just not been thought about before, which is helpful for everybody, like it's, it's useful for the stakeholder right now today.
Sure, but the side effect that you often talk about, which is, I know is a big part of why you do this for people, is that it does crack open the door to the idea that maybe, maybe their way isn't necessarily going to work the way they think it's going to. Yeah. And should they be considering something different?
It does, yes. Yeah. That is, that is fair. It's, it would be disingenuous to claim that it was anything else. Uh, yeah. But it's, I've certainly done it where it didn't change anyone's mind. But it was still useful and worth doing. Exactly. Because it just helped clarify bits of, what the, the plan that somebody had in their mind that they hadn't thought about enough, or you know, the kind of gaps in things that would need to happen.
Yep, yep, and it showed, you know, that the team who were going to be building it, what it is that the person wanted in the greater detail.
Behavioural prototype while you’re in the meeting, not in a week long sprint
Really all you're doing is a, uh, it's a very quick behavioural prototype. You're making a prototype with the person right there. You don't have to spend a week doing a design sprint to make it. You just make it with them in the meeting. And the prototype exists in, uh, characters on a screen. It does. Words, words on a page. Yeah, it's, it's, you could call it a narrative prototype as well, I suppose. You can actually, I'll put a link to a video that I made of me in real time making one of these. For us, for myself.
Yes, that would be handy because I think, yeah, when you describe it in abstract it is a little bit hard to visualise. It is. But yeah, there are post its, there are things, things moving around on a whiteboard. Yeah, but fundamentally it's nice and simple. Uh, yeah, we have a video of it and we have a course which you could also sign up for if you are so interested.
Uh, but yeah, with that, there you go, that I think, yeah, does that give us an answer? Yeah. Do we feel like we've, we've nailed down?
Hmm, I mean I'd be interested to hear what anyone who's listening to this thinks. Yeah. Because we're, I mean, we're not the ones who are actually in the weeds of the situation.
No. So, hard to say for sure, isn't it? It is, yeah. I feel like we've, we've kind of scoped out some possible paths. We have, and I think it's fair to say, I hope that it's come across. We can absolutely see this stakeholder's point of view in terms of being skeptical that design research can deliver answers that they need.
It is absolutely true. It might not. And there are limits.
Everyone believes in their idea and most are wrong
Uh, it's also, uh, I think we can see the counter perspective that it is very likely that people who have a brilliant idea. Well, everyone who has a brilliant idea thinks that their idea is the next big thing. Survivorship bias related point.
Everyone but one in a million is wrong about that. And even the one in a million tends to be wrong about exactly how it's going to work. Yeah, and not to throw researchers under the bus at all. But, just again, a point of understanding for this stakeholder.
Bias in research
A lot of speculative research or, you know, user interviews are not done very well, in that they are, the person comes in with an agenda, a personal agenda, maybe they have a real bee in their bonnet about accessibility, for instance, and maybe they have very good reasons for that, but it means that they are not going into those questions as a blank slate.
They're going in, they're asking leading questions, they are trying to guide the person they're talking to towards saying certain things, and understandably, leaders, stakeholders C suite people can get frustrated by that because they're not getting useful stuff out of that. No, they're getting someone else's agenda and opinions backed up with cherry picked data.
Yeah, it's a thing that we've come across many a time. Yeah, yeah, I've personally picked up work because someone was doing that and the client picked up on it and was not happy. Exactly, so, so yeah, it's a tricky one. It is. None of this is simple. I mean if it was simple then everyone would have successful businesses and you wouldn't have any need for podcasts like this.
So yeah, great. And in the distance we have the everything's okay alarm so on that note let's say bye for now.
This is exactly what I meant