Reading :: Doing Dignity

 Doing Dignity: Ethical Praxis and the Politics of Care

By Christa Teston

Christa Teston is well known for doing strong research in the rhetoric of health and medicine. When I found out recently that she was going to give a talk on the UT campus about her new book, I rushed out and bought it so that I could read it before hearing her talk. And of course I’m glad that I did.

Teston starts out by reviewing how the term dignity has been construed and operationalized in various milieux, starting with Cicero. It is not all positive. “For premodern thinkers, dignity was a way of demarcating an individual’s superiority or worth within a community,” she argues (pp.13-14). Working her way forward, Teston demonstrates different legacies of “dignity” that are often invoked together in modern discourse. Ultimately, she concludes, dignity is a rhetorical practice rather than an individual human property, “conditional, not intrinsic” (p.27). 

To investigate further, she examines three case studies:

• “Proning,” in which an oxygen-starved patient is laid prone (face down) to relieve lung pressure and increase oxygenation. Proning is uncomfortable, scary, and undignified. 
• Digital comments on death-with-dignity legislation being considered in two US states. Proponents and opponents of the legislation alike invoked dignity to support their points. Here, she notes that people supporting this legislation often describe what-if stories in which they take advantage of death-with-dignity to save their loved ones from crushing medical debt, and notes the counterargument that it would be better to have a medical system that does not impose such debt.
• An assistive technology clinic, in which people who need assistive technologies (e.g., motorized wheelchairs) interact with clinicians and salespeople.

In her conclusion, Teston argues that we do dignity — that is, we perform it rhetorically — and she offers one example of how this happens. “Dignity therapy” involves “the coauthoring of one’s discursive end-of-life legacy” (p.149). “Fundamentally, I see dignity therapy as a systematized practice of dignified care that uses qualitative research methods such as semi-structured interviews to do dignity” (p.150). Or — this is my characterization, based on the book and what Teston said during her presentation — we might say that dignity therapy leads a dying person to tell their own life story and therefore make sense of their life. They do dignity by describing how they lived their lives, and perhaps how they were the hero of their story.

I see an obvious connection with the second case study. Here, proponents of death-with-dignity legislation frame their arguments by asking: What if I have an expensive terminal illness? Should the law force me to stay alive, and along the way, impoverish my loved ones? Or can I have the agency to lay down my life for my family, to be the hero one last time, to do dignity through my sacrifice? One can certainly argue that this choice should never have to be made, that the US government should socialize medicine. But these commenters recognize the system in which they live, and they spin these speculative stories on the entirely reasonable premise that it won’t change. Under those conditions, they attempt to do dignity, to tell a story in which they can be a hero, just as those in dignity therapy do.

This brings me to a broader question, which I tried to ask at the end of Teston’s talk, but I flubbed. That question is: When we talk about doing dignity, does that mean that we reach (and sometimes fail to reach) an existing goal? Or is it that we do the best that we can, and at the end, we call it (characterize it as, conceptualize it as) dignity? 

Related, is there a difference between the smaller processual indignities that we must endure (e.g., proning, or talking to a med tech salesperson who doesn’t understand our life, or getting our prostate checked) and the larger concept of Dignity at the end of life (e.g., making sense of your life, looking back and being satisfied with how you lived it — and perhaps rising above the many smaller indignities you had to endure)? 

Overall, I found the book to be well researched and (even more importantly) thought-provoking. Definitely pick it up. 

Reading :: Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology

 Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology: Case Studies of Technical Communication in Technology Transfer 

By Stephen Doheny-Farina

I was surprised to see that I hadn’t reviewed this book yet — I’ve been aware of it and one of the underlying case studies, which I read as a graduate student in the 1990s. The book itself, which was published in 1992, represented a fundamental shift in 1990s technical and professional communication studies: it was both an early technical communication study at a time when such studies were rare, and an early qualitative case study of workplaces at a time when most tech comm research was and happening in classrooms. 

In this book, Doheny-Farina describes three case studies: a “high-tech venture” (i.e., a software development company) producing a business plan, a new medical device supported by instructional documentation, and two product design teams attempting to design for users. In other words, he really had his finger on the pulse of the 80s and early 90s, during which technologies were rapidly commercialized and seemingly no one knew how to shape them or design them for actual users. (I remember these times well!)

Of the three case studies, the one that is most immediately applicable to what I’m doing, and the one that caused me to pick up the book, is the first one. As Doheny-Farina begins Chapter 2: 

In January 1982, the United States was deep into a recession, but a small group of what the popular press commonly calls whiz kids were starting an enterprise in the same spirit as the legendary start-ups that fueled Silicon Valley and the Massachusetts Miracle. They were graduate and undergraduate students from a highly respected northeastern university, and they were going to exploit the pending microcomputer revolution, creating a dynamic, high-tech company out of a class project. (p.31)

If you were trying to get rich, this would be a great time to do it. The IBM PC was released in 1981, using an operating system supplied by Microsoft. It, and other personal computers, spread rapidly into both businesses and homes. The technology seemed to provide endless functionalities — mass-market business applications, niche technical applications, games, and quirky hobbyist applications. Riding on this wave, many hobbyists and students jumped into marketing and selling their own software. 

So did “Microware,” the company that is the focus of this case study. (Side note: This is not Microware, the Des Moines-based software company for which I interned in the mid-1990s.) As mentioned above, Microware emerged from a student project in which an enterprising management student (Bill) arranged for an independent study at his university. The independent study was focused on developing a software company, specifically on creating a business plan. Bill was 20. In writing the plan, he organized other students who could develop software, mainly structured around their own interests: games, graphics, and specialty software oriented to the medical market. Doheny-Farina quotes Bill as saying: “Without a product, without money, without furniture, without machines, the business plan is it. That’s your whole case for existence” (p.48).

Let’s take a second to shed a tear for Bill and the students he pulled into this company. It would be a few decades before Steve Blank articulated a case against such business plans. Lean Startup — which is the process we currently teach young entrepreneurs-in-training — was developed as an alternative to an initial business plan, since at the very early stages of a startup, entrepreneurs must investigate many questions before they can confidently put their (and others’) time and money into a startup. What is their offering? Who needs that offering, and do they need it enough to actually pay for it? What problem will that offering solve for them? What competition do you face? What business model will you establish? And on and on. Blank argues that a startup is a temporary organization in search of a hypothesis — a hypothesis that must be validated through lots of feedback loops with lots of stakeholders. So a business plan, which presumes the hypothesis and builds long-term plans based on them, should come at the very end of this process rather than at the beginning.

Since Lean Startup is upfront about the fact that this work is all guesswork, searching for an answer that will work, it drives entrepreneurs to ask those questions, seek answers, and pivot when the answers aren’t positive. It builds in flexibility as an ethos. But back in 1981, Bill had just one way to make a “case for existence” for his startup: The business plan. And since the business plan’s function is to provide answers and certainty, this put Bill in a position that did not serve him well. He had to act certain when he couldn’t be. Doheny-Farina says this more pithily: “External promotion often involved deception” (p.45).

Microware’s executives, who were almost all 22 in 1983, knew how to write programs individually. Bill knew how to promote them, first to a local attorney who was interested in supporting local high-tech companies, then to other investors and a bank. Yet, tragically, no one seemed interested in long-term product strategy. Bill’s business plans (there were two) tended to focus on what he considered to be sexy applications, but internally, people tended to focus on passion projects such as games. The company pursued three different, unintegrated types of software production (different types of products required different types of production). Due to frictions in the group — especially Bill’s tendency to promise things that were not technically feasible — the rest of the leadership team insisted on collaborating with him on writing the new business plan. They also thought seriously about firing him. Instead, they kept him and had him pull together the parts they wrote (which he often ended up watering down). 

I think you can imagine how this story ends. It’s a tragedy — a well-told tragedy that Doheny-Farina supports well with his ethnographic research. If, like me, you’re interested in case studies of entrepreneurship, definitely pick it up.

Reading :: The Challenger Sale

The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation Hardcover – November 10, 2011 
by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

Just a quick review for this one. One of my HDO students recommended this book to me after we discussed how early-stage entrepreneurs seek to understand and address problems faced by a narrowly defined target market, an approach that involves creating a relationship and co-designing a solution. “This sounds like a challenger,” she told me, and in our next class, she brought me the book. She indicated that although it was thick, it would be a fast read. 

And she was right! Like many business books, it was (as a colleague once told me) thin on the inside. The bottom line is that the authors examined sales performance during the pandemic and afterwards, once sales bounced back. They characterized sales reps according to their different behaviors: challengers, hard workers, lone wolves, problem solvers, and relationship builders. And they found that challengers — sales reps who take the time to understand customers’ lived problems, tailor their solutions to better serve these problems, and challenge the customers’ objections in a constructive way — tend to punch above their weight: they make a minority of the sales force, but have disproportionately high sales. Based on this, the authors advocate for hiring many more challengers and letting go many of the other types.

The student added that she thought the idea of only hiring challengers was problematic — and I agree. Challengers seem well suited for advocating for, and co-developing, customized solutions. But that’s near the beginning of the sales funnel, and it’s more applicable for certain types of products and services. It’s not great for maintaining a long-term relationship or for buying commodities rather than solutions. (It would be exhausting to be Challenged every time you want to buy a few boxes of paper from Dunder Mifflin.) 

Still, if you are interested in thinking through situations in which you want to customize a product or service for others, this book provides some good guidance. You don’t have to read it all — believe me — but the authors do a good job of summarizing key messages. Bookmark those pages and you’ll have valuable guidance. 

Reading :: Design Thinking in Technical Communication

Design Thinking in Technical Communication: Solving Problems through Making and Collaborating

By Jason Tham

I’ve been aware of Jason Tham’s work for some time — he publishes on the Design Thinking (DT) methodology in technical communication (TC) journals, and I spoke with him briefly at a conference last summer. Seems like a great guy. And part of what makes him a great guy is that he is deeply interested in solving human problems, which is what this book is about: using DT to improve people’s lives.

The book is relatively slim, at 130pp. plus end matter. And its aim is — well, to me, the aim is a little unclear. The brief description at the beginning (and on Amazon) says it’s “essential reading for instructors, students, and practitioners of technical communication, and can be used as a supplemental text for graduate and undergraduate courses in usability and user-centered design and research.” At the end of each chapter are learning activities, suitable for classrooms, demonstrating ways to take up chapter principles. But the chapters themselves don’t seem oriented to enacting principles; they largely describe principles from an academic standpoint (with lots of citations) and give example cases (which tend to be big-picture rather than granular). For instance, by the end of Chapter 3, “Social Innovation,” I had a good idea of why empathy mapping and journey mapping were a good idea, but I didn’t have any concrete visual examples of either one, nor did I know what steps I should take to create these. My impression is that it would indeed have to serve as a “supplemental text” in a class, one that bridges more concrete DT materials with the concerns of technical communication.

Still, I wanted more connective tissue. For instance, Chapter 2 delves into makerspaces, surveying three makerspaces within TC programs. But makerspaces are not necessarily connected with DT: you can certainly do DT in a makerspace, but you can also use different design approaches or no formal approach whatsoever. I wanted a bit more guidance so that I could understand how the two relate. Here, and throughout the book, I had the sense that for Tham, the connections were obvious — perhaps he easily describes the connections when teaching this material to his classes. But those connections are only hinted at here.

Pulling back, the book as a whole attempts to provide a grand vision of what DT can do for TC. To be clear, I am on board with the broad sweep of this vision: Technical communicators need to both understand the working lives of the people we serve and work with those people to codesign support. That support can’t just be descriptive or instructional: it must account for individuals’ and groups’ workflow, objectives, and values if it is to be used and useful. To understand how information is taken up in a social system such as a workplace, we’ve got to develop it to account for social dynamics and to keep it flexible enough that it can adapt as these social systems change. I think that this is a big part of Tham’s vision.

However, sometimes the line between elucidating current DT practice and advocating for a DT direction is blurry. In one example, on p.71, Tham portrays DT in a Venn diagram, as the overlap between social innovation and social justice. Yes, DT can certainly be deployed that way — and Tham is welcome to advocate for that deployment. But DT does not inherently map onto social justice! When IDEO pulled together DT principles, they indeed characterized themselves as addressing user needs, but in the context of selling products that would work successfully. There’s no inherent DT orientation to social justice per se — one could easily use DT principles to redesign the interface for the Truth Social app, an app whose users would likely scoff at the idea of social justice! 

Another example that jumped out at me is how Tham characterizes early Scandinavian participatory design work: “this participatory design approach aims to be non-selective and invites anyone who are interested in co-designing products and services to participate in the design process” (p.7). No: Scandinavian PD made a point of co-designing with union representatives, who functioned explicitly as political representatives for the users in their union. It wasn’t until PD jumped to the US, with its generally weak unions, that practitioners turned to functional representatives (i.e., everyday, average users). That is, he’s reading later US-based PD orientation back into the history of earlier Scandinavian PD. 

I bring these up, not because I like to nitpick, but because I think it’s really important to understand the different political interests involved in developing methods and methodologies. Absolutely one can advocate for DT being deployed in service of social justice — but to make that happen, one has to think through whose interests have been embedded in current methods and how to redeploy those methods for different interests when necessary. For instance, when you construct an empathy map or a journey map for a user, you’re being compelled to have empathy for them or envision the journey they (want to) take, so you can build a product for those needs. DT doesn’t have an embedded step in which you take stock of those needs and understand how or whether they align with your own values or a broader social justice agenda. It doesn’t stop you from designing an interface for Truth Social or the Proud Boys. To make that social justice work happen, one would have to modify DT further and figure out how to keep realigning to those external standards. It’s not going to just emerge by following the process.

Still, with that caveat, this book does a good job of elaborating on a vision for DT for TC, and I can see using it for a classroom or working team, in concert with more detailed how-to materials. If you’re interested in DT, or design more generally, definitely check it out.

Reading :: The Theory of the Business

The Theory of the Business

By Peter F. Drucker

This slim (47pp.) booklet was mentioned to me by someone who teaches entrepreneurship classes. Since I teach a course on entrepreneurship communication, I decided to check it out.

Drucker is, of course, well known for his thoughts on business. These particular thoughts were originally published in Harvard Business Review in 1994 before being reprinted here in 2017. Drucker makes these points:

• Each business has some underlying theory.
• The business gets into trouble when circumstances change and the theory does not (p.13).
• A theory of business has three parts:
• Assumptions about the organizations’ environment (pp.21-22)
• Assumptions about the organization’s mission (p.22)
• Assumptions about the core competencies needed to achieve that mission (p.23)
• In this theory of business,
• These assumptions must all match reality (p.25).
• These assumptions must fit each other (p.27).
• The theory of the business has to be known and understood across the organization (p.28).
• And it has to be tested constantly (p.29).
• Thus an organization must embrace preventative measures to address when these tests begin to fail. These may include:
• abandonment of what’s not working (p.33)
• study of noncustomers, to understand why they aren’t customers (p.34)
• Signs of crisis in one’s theory of business include:
• achieving one’s objectives (p.37)
• rapid growth (p.38)
• unexpected success (one’s own or a competitor’s) (p.39)
• unexpected failure (p.41)

To be honest, summarizing this booklet in bullets let me get a lot more out of the booklet, which does not signal its points as strongly as this review does. The points are more of an outline or sketch than a fully fleshed out argument — but the booklet itself is fleshed out mainly in that it offers examples rather than additional details. I think Drucker gives us much wisdom here, but the reader really does have to figure out the applications themselves. 

Still, if you are thinking in terms of maintaining a business or, more broadly, in terms of how to develop sustainability in any given organization, I think this booklet is worth reading.

Reading :: The Pyramid Principle

 The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking

By Barbara Minto

I’ve been using variations of the Minto Pyramid ever since I took a proposal writing class from Rich Freed in 1994 or 1995, during my first year in the Iowa State University Ph.D. program. Rich used the pyramid principle for two things: the methodology section (where we focused on “how”) and the qualifications section (where we focused on “why”). I credit this class with helping me to understand task decomposition. It made a big impression on me!

In fact, I’ve been using the Minto Pyramid for a few years now in my one-day workshops to help people understand how to break complex information into smaller pieces. I typically have attendees read short explainers, which are free on the Web. But eventually I decided to read the source material: Minto’s book.

Of course, the book is more complicated than the explainers. Published in 1987 for a general audience, it reads as more rigid and ideological than its adaptations have been. Minto insists that “there are only four possible logical ways in which to order a set of ideas” (deductively, chronologically, structurally, and comparatively; p.16) and her advice throughout the book is primarily focused on using pyramids to produce these logical orders. This advice includes how one sketches out relationships between ideas, checks the logic of these relationships, signals it in the text, writes it into narratives, and checks to make sure that pyramids are mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive (MECE).

I found it useful, but also a bit overwhelming, and perhaps too rigid to account for the many way in which texts can exist. If you’re a hardcore fan of the Minto pyramid, certainly pick it up. But if you just want to use the MP as a tool for improving your writing, I think you can stick to the explainers.