Reading :: We Tried to Warn You

We Tried To Warn You: Innovations In Leadership For The Learning Organization
By Peter H. Jones

In this short book, Peter Jones draws on his background in design research and strategic consulting to address the question of how to form a learning organization -- one that can learn from failures and effectively support customers as well as employees inside the organization. "To navigate the rapid change and complexity in today's wired markets, we can create continuous early innovation and early warning systems. A new organizational role is now possible, whose job is paying attention to weak signals and articulating insights to both suggest innovations and tactfully frame the bad news from the field" (Kindle loc 147). UX is ideally suited for this role. 

To discuss this role, he draws on Weick's notion of sensemaking, pointing out that most orgs don't have a situation room or other mechanism to tell stories about change, "no organizational practices or rituals for organizing their communication and storytelling" (loc 185). Thus "The kind of stories people want to hear get reinforced and repeated" (loc 353). One result is that UX (like technical documentation, honestly) gets introduced into the process late in the lifecycle, negating the foresight that it could bring to the product (loc 436). UX becomes subordinated to project management (loc 482). 

What do we do about this? Jones suggests a few things. One is to build in UX research earlier in the lifecycle, before specifications have hardened, so that it can impact the design of the product at all levels. Another is to make sure that "early warnings" are tolerated and valued in the organization: the organization must become more dialogic and more accepting of disrupting narratives. He adds:

We have outlined a clear value proposition for allowing failure and encouraging dialogue when it happens. Perhaps the best argument is that finding and fixing small failures on an ongoing basis prevents large-scale failures that occur later when we ignore reality. (loc 1041)

The book is a short but dense and rewarding read. If you're thinking through how your organization can become more nimble and oriented toward learning, definitely pick it up.