Season 2, Episode 2: Christina Wodtke
Christina Wodtke is a professor at Stanford University, an author, information architecture pioneer, and leadership development coach with over 20 years of experience that has included past work with LinkedIn, MySpace, Zynga, Yahoo! as well as founding 3 startups.
She is also the author of Radical Focus and, most recently, The Team That Managed Itself and has presented workshops and keynotes on OKRs, design thinking, and team dynamics.
Her work and teachings have had an indelible influence on TUG co-founder, Dan Klyn. Her full exercise and work can be perused on her website.
Dan Klyn: Well heck, there it is, it's 12 o'clock on the second Sunday of February. So I, happy to say that, we can begin this thing, Christina, after we've talked here for the last couple of minutes. My guest is Christina Wodtke who is — I first got to know Christina as the author of a book called Blueprints for the Web. Information Architecture, Blueprints for the Web. And that was in 2001. I want to say, that was when I first saw that book.
And, I have since gotten to know Christina as a lover of the web as a modality that people enjoy, that was one of the first things that I learned about you, Christina, that I thought was different than a lot of other nerds that I knew, is that you love the internet as a thing and got to build a lot of the first expressions of it that people used. Where other people might fetishize about websites or programming languages, Christina was the first person that I met that loved the internet as a modality and wanted to understand its poetics even, which, really gets to me.
So, I'm very excited to have you here, Christina, and, what do you, I haven't read it yet, so…
Christina Wodtke: [Laughs].
Dan Klyn: You can just spoil all, you can spoil whatever, whatever's going on in here, but I'd love to talk about whatever you wanna talk about, including the team that managed itself and did the team that managed itself have to know about or use information architecture to do that?
Christina Wodtke: Hmm. Well, first I wanna definitely say I do love the web still. I don't love everybody on the web. I don't love everything on the web, but I still,
I still love the internet because it's the only territory that's both being created and explored at the same time. It's like Lewis and Clark, if they kept building more parts of the continent as they went along.
Dan Klyn: Well listen, Grommet where Grommet's putting the track in front of the train. Oh my God.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah, except a ton of people are putting those tracks down and every so often you gotta go look at the other tracks and figure out how your track hooks into that one, and do you wanna use the same kind of track or do you wanna use a different kind of track? It's better, but it won't be as interconnected. Oh yeah, I mean the internet as a modality, internet as a place, and the internet is a toolset, I just think it's, it's magic. It's awesome. I still love it despite the fact that there seem to be some tenement houses being put up right now, but too, you know, some brutalist buildings. I'm not a brutalist fan. but still, the internet itself is a pretty great place to be. Just gotta stay away from the scary bits.
Dan Klyn: Well, I've tried to learn from how you've navigated this in your career and you were one of the first people that I knew who went into product management as a way of caring about... as a way of giving a shit about what happens in the semantic environment. And, and I don't remember if that was LinkedIn or what, what that was, or maybe if that was even still at Yahoo or where that was. You can clarify, you can correct my facts here, but the idea that not only can we work on the website, but we can work on the team that works on the website. And, I saw a quote, from a conference a couple of days ago that blew my mind, which is something we've all said, that we've all heard, but this person said it really succinctly and I'm gonna blow it but it's basically the org chart is the first draft of the architecture of whatever shit you're working on.
Christina Wodtke: Oh, yeah.
Dan Klyn: And so, and so I'm curious about the shift... not shift but the evolution of your working on the web from both working on the websites as well as a maybe more impactfully working on the teams that work on the websites.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah. So, hmm. There's two interesting things there. One is you're basically referencing Conway's Law, which was one of the various theories that people posted and it basically says, everything that you build reflects the org structure, and we all have seen the website, but even things down to transistors, which I find kind of crazy, I started going down that little route afterwards. Like the org chart is everywhere.
And I've always thought that software has a point of view. Even people in Silicon Valley often think software is neutral, and there is no software that's neutral. Period. Every piece of software reflects the creator's values. Every piece of software reflects the creator's worldview, every piece of software reveals assumptions by the team. Every piece of software even reflects tensions in the team. you could tell by a piece of software where the team's getting along or not, sometimes. It's kind of crazy. So I think that, you know, you cannot say software is neutral, because just there's no such thing unless you think neutral is 30 year old white guy and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, not really too neutral there. So, there's that.
But, I also tell my students... students ask for my origin story sometimes and, the shortest version of it... as you know, it's quite a journey. The shortest version of it is, I studied painting and then I studied photography, and computer altered photography for one of the early people to use, technology to alter photographs, and way back in 1989, they were going, "Oh my god, what does this mean for truth?" Which seems to be a question that's finally landed pretty hard right now.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: But, I moved to San Francisco because I thought either San Francisco or New York would be good for working on computers, and San Francisco didn't have snow. Apparently a lot of other people came to that same conclusion ‘cause think we ended up being the technical center. And then I went and painted and waited tables cause I hadn't quite got painting out of my system. And it was when the web came along, that a friend of a boyfriend said, "Hey, you wanna build a Yahoo killer?" And I said, "I have no idea what you're talking, but sure." And, we did a, a directory for CNET ‘cause Yahoo was a directory back then, right? And I was like, "Huh, there are a lot of websites. I wonder how hard they are to build." And I taught myself HTML and then I couldn't figure out how to get them off of my computer and into the sky because everybody talked about teaching HTML and nobody talked about FTP. So I sorted that out, I got temp job which became a permanent job at because I could do a the swordfish routine for, with, Groucho Marx and and Chico Marx. I think it's reinforced to others with the founder [laughs]. So—
Dan Klyn: What does that mean? What is that?
Christina Wodtke: I don't, I don't think I can do it anymore, but like, Chico's outside and Groucho's in the inside, it's the speakeasy, and you have to know the password to get in and the password is swordfish. And there's all these funny lines like, "I got it." You know, cause Chico had always that crazy Italian accent. "I got it, Maddie," and, and Gaucho says, "That's not a fish." And Chico says, "She sure drinks like one," and it goes on and on in those silly ways. Like it's just so funny.
Dan Klyn: Oh, it's funny.
Christina Wodtke: And, yeah, just like odd things. You never know when something you love will show up to be useful. And then from there, I became...I was, I was going in the engineer direction, but I was doing a lot of, reviews of the website before we put them out, you know, things...And I'd been reading so much Jacob Neilson, oh my god. Back in that day, you could be on the Bay mailing list and you're like arguing with Jacob Nielsen or Don Norman about ideas or talk and it's just unbelievable. And mailing was without many brains, was an... and now we barely even know about…
Dan Klyn: Or even, or even the modality of mailing list. That was a thing for a very brief time, it seems to me. And the idea that there would be that much action in one's inbox that was not, that was conversation. That was a…
Christina Wodtke: It was a fairly decent amount of time for like 20 years probably, we were able to use it. I mean—
Dan Klyn: How come... why, why don't we do that anymore? Cause it... that was the best conversational modality I've had disintermediated not in real time was the mailing list back in the day.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah. Except for a few bad actors, but yeah.
Dan Klyn: What happened? What, why don't, why can't we have those anymore, Christina?
Christina Wodtke: A combination of walled garden thinking, like if you could own the people. You can't own people, you shouldn't own people. But like Facebook's trying to own the people, and have them in our groups, so then LinkedIn's try to own these people and have them in their groups. And then Slack, people are like, "Let's use for Slack." For what? it wasn't built for social dialogue and then it's a walled garden for the wrong reasons. And so, yeah. we could have it again, we just have to choose to.
Dan Klyn: Can we bring back RSS at the same time? Can we do a two for?
Christina Wodtke: You can work on one and I'll work on the other. So... but yeah the art director or the creative director said, "Hey Christina, don't become an engineer. No, no, don't go to the dark side. Come join us." And I said, "Well, I'm not a designer," cause I wasn't at that time, I was a painter, and a nerd. And he said, "You can….I don't care. You can have any title you want." And I said, "I want the title of information architect," cause I had just read the polar bear book, the first edition. And it had just come out, I think. And I was like, "This sounds like designing without having to make things pretty. Like I just have to make things really usable and find-able and good, and I can work with the rest of the team who know how to make things pretty." and so I became that and then, you know, I left them to start... Oh God, what, what did I do? We had our own, our own startup, Carbon IQ, and then the crash crashed us. I went to work for Yahoo, and I was the first interaction designer hired for search. Interaction designer was the language they used, and I didn't really care if somebody gives me a job. And it was so funny cause I started... I literally started my job a week later, blueprints came out, and so I was having... I was putting up the charts as it climbed up to the top 10 list outside, and it was sort of a weird thing to be an expert on the thing that my title wasn't, but it didn't bother me that much and I was able to... Peter Morville has a photo of it. I was, able to get the title on my Yahoo card cause you could have any title as findability specialist.
Dan Klyn: Wow. That's—
Christina Wodtke: Which was perfect.
Dan Klyn: That's really early for that word.
Christina Wodtke: Yes, it was. Yeah, when Peter Morville saw my card, he's like, "I have to take a photo and you put it up on is this stuff?" I was like, "Sure, why not? I liked it." I mean, you can't ask for a better title for somebody who's working on search. Right?
Dan Klyn: No.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah, fine, it's about finding, so from there I started, another consultancy management innovation group and from there, but then I dropped out to start a product startup with a Danish guy, and then that startup…. Oh, there's so many stories there, but I'll do the short version in which eventually I realized that product market fit wasn't going to happen, and made me happy at the same time. Like, I could've gotten product market fit, but I would have been miserable. So I decided to shop it around, ended up selling it to LinkedIn. It was really with a little bit of code. So it wasn't considered a proper purchase... and I remember Reed saying, you know, "What do you want to do if you've got a big design background, but you've been doing product management, you've been running a company. And I said, "Product management," because I couldn't figure out how shitty things got launched, and one of the reasons I went from consulting to in-house, trying to figure out what happens. Like I make all these great recommendations and then they do something else. So at Yahoo I learned what happens with the something else.
I was like, "Oh, product managers have all the power. If I'm a product manager, I'll have power." No. And I became a general manager at my space and no, you still don't have power. And from there I could see the CEO and the board and I thought, "You know, there's really nobody in charge." It doesn't really matter what your job is, if you can influence it. And if the culture is influenceable.
I was at Zynga, burned out really bad, lay on the floor for a few weeks watching a lot of food TV, went to culinary school for a little bit…
Dan Klyn: That sounds like rather, like not an exaggeration, like literally laid on the floor and watched—
Christina Wodtke: Oh yeah. And I'd been divorced by then too, and I also went to Thailand and Japan cause I was sick of going to France. And really you can get sick of going to France. I know that doesn't sound possible to most people, but if you marry a Frenchmen and you spend all your time in France visiting family, even France can lose its charms over time.
Dan Klyn: It seems believable.
Christina Wodtke: And, and that's when I thought I should use my entrepreneur skills to figure out what to do with my life. So I created some hypothesis, I used OKRs to test it. Being a cook didn’t work out, working for a food startup didn't work out, but what did work out was teaching. And so instead of getting a PhD, I just thought, "Well, where can I do more teaching, GA? Oh, I like this teaching, but I'd like a little more rigor. CCA? No." Here I am, here I am teaching design studio to computer scientists. Fun. I love it, actually, I really love it. The students are unfreakingbelievable. They're so diverse. I have the, I have the best job. I'm really lucky. So lucky.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yeah, before we, started the proper, conversation, public conversation here, we both copped to a recreational use of teaching or, justifying it as a habit or, or, or something along those lines. What's the—
Christina Wodtke: So much for being professional, I'm really hot. The sun is blasting me.
Dan Klyn: I'm sitting here like hugging myself cause it's, blizzarding here in West Michigan. I'm curious if the... did you see teaching as something you wanted to get to eventually? Back in, back in those days? How did you come to... you say you used OKRs. Say more about that. How did you... how do you get from food startup, product management information architecture, interaction design, how did you get to teaching from there?
Christina Wodtke: So, I think, I think what happened is, I just knew I had to get out of industry. I was destroying me, and I wasn't seeing my kid grow up either. And the divorce made being able to have the time I have with her cause we do 50/50 custody, really important. So I knew I had to find a job that made more sense with being with her. I always thought my dad would be a great college professor. He's a lawyer, but he was a very academic views, appellate law lawyer. I always thought he'd be a good law professor. And sometimes you look at yourself and you go, "Wait, why can't I be the law professor or the professor or the instructor or lecturer or whatever."
And so... but I wasn't sure I'd like it. So instead of, like I said, going off to school and getting enough credibility so that I could teach, I just thought, you know, I can probably teach a general assembly cause people are talking about it and it was small, and I taught a night class with them. So what happened is I learned, OKRs at Zynga, right? Zynga is a John Doe company and that's where I learned about it. And then I was using it with the startups I was working with. And so I decided I can use personal OKRs, and I did something that I don't think I've written about and I will in the second edition of radical focus, which I call hypothesis OKRs. Yes, there's radical focus. It's very focussy. Nice. And, I decided to put down a hypothesis, which was live life as a teacher. That's my hypothesis. Or live a happy life, I should say. And I thought, "What would happy, healthy look like?" Well, I measured my happiness, which I do every so often. I don't know if I can show it to you. I have this big... there we go. This, new year calendar over there. I know that, I know, Abby likes a lot and I would just put a face, a little smiley face or sad face or a meh face each day-
Dan Klyn: Oh, wow.
Christina Wodtke: Then the next morning I would look on the day and say, "What was yesterday like? It was pretty happy.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: One of the things I found out is I was not as miserable as I thought. Mostly, I'm pretty okay and/happy. And the other thing is, I found teaching made me more happy, and that was one thing. And then health, you know, was I gaining weight? Was I losing weight? You know, was I... did I have back pain. I've had back pain most of my life, did I have acid reflux. That was another good thing to measure because that was a huge problem at Zynga, and it more or less went away, which I find interesting.
Dan Klyn: Well you and Peter Morville both have similar timelines and it sounds like both have had the stress from doing work turn into the body telling you really important things. And I don't know if you remember Peter's journey with this, but he had the lower back pain of the sort where the doctor says, "We can get you in for surgery in two weeks." And changing his lifestyle addressed it quite handily.
Christina Wodtke: Well, I was at LinkedIn, I was trying to do the research for a new product there and I couldn't walk. I couldn't feel three of my toes. I was walking with a cane, I think I have a photo of me teaching a social workshop leaning on a cane. And they did surgery and there was a slight bulge pushing on my nerves and they trimmed it off, and then I said, "I'm never doing that again." And I do yoga and I take long walks and runs just to keep myself well enough so that doesn't happen. But as soon as I hear anything from my back, it's like, "Oh okay, let's dial up the self-care." Cause it just... I mean I remember doing interviews with people, you know, heads of companies about this flat, on my back, on the phone.
Dan Klyn: Is that a part of your being on the floor after Zinga literally on the floor? Is your back, is that fucked up that you have to be on the floor?
Christina Wodtke: No, I've taken good care of my back since then. I have... my new place for... to keep my stress was my stomach by then. Zynga was was acid reflux. I would, take Tums every day and then I'd wake up every couple of hours to take a Tums cause I was so bad.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: I mean, just, I look at my students now and I see them all hunched over laptops and I think, "You know, you're gonna pay for that, eventually. Perhaps he might want to stop now," but nobody ever believes, nobody ever believes they're gonna have to pay the price. And I've paid the price multiple times.
Dan Klyn: Well, one of the movements in the field of information architecture that has happened, during your practice of it, and that you've been a proponent of and have helped to move forward is embodiment and embodied cognition as one of the crucial lenses that systems people ought to be using. And, is it just... there's like a weird, our interest in and ability to apply embodiment principles to our practice and our body's falling apart and getting fucked up by, what is it? It's work practices that are opposed to our wellbeing. The simultaneity of that seems more than accidental to me but you might remember that I'm prone to conspiracies and simultaneities of all kinds.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah. I mean I think there's multiple things going on here. First of all, there's sort of a capitalist point of view that wants to get as much work out if you s possible. And we see things like Netflix’s no vacation policy where nobody takes vacation because ever... you know, no vacation means you can take off anytime you need to. And yet nobody ever seems to need to, you know, unlimited vacation, they might call it, it's like-
Dan Klyn: Non-existent vacation, yeah.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah, exactly. And then, in a regular company, you start not... you don't take vacation and they're like, "You've gotta take it now or you're gonna lose it." And then you take vacation, which is good for your soul. So there's that. There's also... you and I are both Midwestern Protestants, I think, or products thereof. I'm not a Protestant anymore.
Dan Klyn: I lost most of it, but my people are from Iowa, like yours. So-
Christina Wodtke: And, we believe in suffering.
Dan Klyn: It's poetry, it's, it's, it's indistinguishable from virtue, really. You know the lord suffered greatly.
Christina Wodtke: And if you're enjoying yourself, you're probably fitting in some way that you just haven't tracked down yet. Yeah. So whenever I get way too busy and people need things from me, the first thing I sacrifice is me and you know, I've finally learned to not do that as much. I still fall backwards every so often, but I'm much better about it right now. So I kind of have to claw my way back. So here we have this outward force saying work all the time, here we have this inward force say work all the time, and then we have our poor bodies caught between both going, “excuse me,” [laughing], "I'm running out of fuel. You're gonna have to fix something pretty soon." You know?
They're not... they need more maintenance than your car does and yet we give it less. So you can't do that. You have to, you have to listen to your body. Something crazy we did, I did the Hoffman process, right when I was going through our separation and it's basically a 10 day weekend, a weekend thing. And one of the weird exercises we did...it's a process to get you to examine all the things that you've either adopted or rebelled unconsciously from your parents, and then examine them, determine if they're actually good for you or not, and then get rid of them if they're not, and embrace them as they are, but move from unconscious behavior to conscious behavior.
And one of things I really love that we do is we would stand up and we would say, "Okay, you know, pretend your body is right here. Pretend your mind is right here. Your emotions are right here, and your spirituality is right here. Now look at your body and ask your body what's going on with you.” And then you move into that spot and you tell you exactly what's going on with your body. And you actually get really mad. Like, "Hey, are you listening to me? Man, my back hurts, my stomach hurts, my pants don't fit. What are you thinking?"
And then you go, "Whoa, body, okay. We should talk." And you can do it with all the other four parts, as they call it. But it's really powerful because sometimes we're just not that good at listening to ourselves, and sort of doing this embodied practice makes a huge difference for sort of integrating and respecting the aspects of ourselves that aren't as good as they should be, as healthy as they should be. Not quite sure what to say, but it really works. It really, really works.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: So I got back to embodiment in the end, although I tend to lean toward distributed rather than embodied cause I'm really interested in the role of tools.
Dan Klyn: Well say, say more about that. And I'm curious if you remember what the Os or the KRs were when you made, some of these choices.
Christina Wodtke: Well, they're in the slides of every, creative, every execution or stay alive talk I've given. So, yeah, that was very early and I did a very bad job of forming them, just like all my clients do... and, but they weren't, they weren't tasks. I'm proud of that.
Dan Klyn: Okay.
Christina Wodtke: There was something like, "Make enough money doing work I would do for free and be happy and healthy." And then, yeah, the Ks were things like acid reflux, back pain and a quantity of money I think. Or maybe it was a budget because that was a stretch goal for me.
Dan Klyn: Yup.
Christina Wodtke: It still is, I mean, I usually... I, if I was coaching me, I'd say that's a task, but since I know me, I know would know it's a stretch goal [laughing], because my money's all over the place and I don't pay any attention to it, and it was a lot of work and getting people to work with me to understand my own money cause I have severe dyscalculia. So I actually, I'm bad, I'm bad with numbers in that sometimes it's an eight and sometimes it's a three and sometimes I really can't tell. That's why I was starting to be a sommelier and then the dyscalculia actually, stopped that, which I'm grateful for or else I wouldn't have gotten in the web.
Dan Klyn: Wow. I didn't know that word. I know dysnomia as a dyslexic and dysnomic, but, it sounds like that word you just said is beyond reversals or…
Christina Wodtke: It's a pattern, it's a pattern recognition problem, which is funny. Or symbol recognition, I guess. Symbol recognition.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: So, for me it's, it's mostly numbers and calendars and maps. But words are-
Dan Klyn: Which, which is quite related to what you do for your job. That's, that's the, that's terrific.
Christina Wodtke: Well, you know what they say, you know, all psychiatrists are crazy because they went to school to figure out what was wrong with them and then they graduated and became a psychiatrist. They may still not know what they're... what's [laughing], wrong with them, but they definitely graduated. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: How those things work are really interesting to me.
Dan Klyn: The embodiment. And I'd be happy to get back, to more about embodiment if, if you or anybody else wants to talk about that. But in thinking about other movements in our field that have happened as you've practiced it since basically the beginning of the field, you were among the very first to use places made of information as one of the ways of talking about information architecture and trying to explain what it cares about or what it's for, relative to other people doing other, equally or even more important stuff on websites and user experiences. So I'm curious, and I will observe something, a co-terminus with you talking about places made of information is you starting something at a profoundly awesome place designed by an IA gold medalist, Julia Morgan, along with, some other people in this field, the
Christina Wodtke: Institute for information architecture.
Dan Klyn: Yes.
Christina Wodtke: IIA is a domain.
Dan Klyn: So yeah, so places made of information, you starting something with some folks, at least one of whom, Andrew Hinton, similarly inclined to think about this as, sheltering the activities of man in addition to being lists and, categorization and the more librarianly bit, so, I'm curious if you would like to talk about any of that either as a back then or and, or as a, how you think about it now?
Christina Wodtke: Well, how I think about it now, which is definitely influenced by the thinking that was done, with that crazy group back then, what... is that HCI was very interesting in tools, if you remember. So a lot of software were seen as a tool and you can do things faster, was like their Holy grail of measurement of quality and then as tools become complex, I think that they actually become workspaces or play spaces. So if you think about a workspace like a workshop table, there is a place for you to do your work, there's usually several places to do your work and then those are tools arranged in a way that supports your ability to do the work. Which is reflected with things like Photoshop, right? And so on top of speed of use, you need to be able to support mastery, right? You know, as you become more powerful, which means you start trading ease of use for power of use, which is something I think is forgotten right now. In fact, there's a lot of things forgotten right now.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: Making me crazy. But sometimes you get something else, which is I think a place, I think Facebook is a place, Twitter's a place, sort of a weird little narrow place, but still a place. a lot of the portals as we used to call them were places as well, and they all had a [inaudible], to them. I'm a big fan of Gasto- Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space, which I read in, graduate school, and the idea that an attic has a feeling, a mood, a sense of airiness, memory, thought, history, maybe a place you don't go very often, but you can go, or a basement has your horror, the darkness, those things have stairs that go back and forth, you have thresholds. All these have emotional qualities.
And so when I look at these places that we're making, I start to ask, well, what's their poetics? What emotional qualities are they creating for us? Right? And I think that's, that's something that I, I don't see people consciously designing. I see people about emotion for sure. Right? but it tends to be a bit manipulative or limited.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. More of a neuroaesthetics or behavioral like weaponizing BJ Fogg, more-
Christina Wodtke: Poor BJ.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. And if you made this experience more like a shell, it would, cause people to have the ability to connect with it in these ways, in these shell-like ways.
Christina Wodtke: Absolutely. Absolutely. So with this, we start to think about, how do I consciously choose what my end result's going to be? And that's where after doing this work for a while, I came up with camp and it was post-game design cause I think game design is much more concerned with the emotional resonance of the work because the emotional resonance is everything. We say fun but really there's lots of games that aren't classically fun, but they are emotionally resonant, and… so a game's job is to elicit emotion, period.
Dan Klyn: Well, it's [inaudible], of meaning that, that thing I'm so, interested in myself.
Christina Wodtke: Oh, yeah.
Dan Klyn: Himes and you and Jesse James Garrett, a couple of other folks from the IA community.
Christina Wodtke: And Brown?
Dan Klyn: Very early on, seeing that video game design is one of the one of the wells we need to be drinking from.
Christina Wodtke: But yeah, that's the thing is they've also been spacial for a long time. I finally came across the work of Henry Jenkins who I'm drinking like it's the water fountains can be turned off any second. It's so good. And he just talks about all the different ways that narrative can exist in space, in a digital space and that spatial thinking, which is so natural to game design is a really important one I, I wanna bring over. I feel like the, the most interesting thing I'm doing at Stanford right now is not treating games and HCI as if they're different. and I don't know what the opposite of game design is, mundane design, but I'm trying to, design of everyday things. Everyday design, you know? So, I'm trying to take some of those notions and say, "This is just an idea and you can use it anywhere. And here's another idea, and you can use it anywhere."
So, I was studying MDA, which says if you put a bunch of mat, mechanics together, which I believe Dan Saffer called micro internet interactions, you get dynamics, multiple small things put together, become another thing, and then when people experience it, they have a Sedex and that word was for the eight kinds of fun. You can have fantasy fun or you can have hard fun, or you can have narrative fun, or you can have visceral fun, sensory fun. And so, this idea that you can create these emotions through intelligent architecture of space, actually they almost never talk about architecture, which was something that bugged me.
Dan Klyn: And why is that? Cause, cause…
Christina Wodtke: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: ...that's been my experience too. And what little I've done in those worlds. It's, and I've also noticed there aren't any people trained in urban planning or architecture, and I shouldn't say any, but I have not found as many of those people working in gaming as I would have expected.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah. Well, well, games are really hard to get into cause everybody, so many people wanna do it, they'll do it for free or they'll do it for ridiculously low pay until they become enough of a star to get more pay. So it often doesn't become a sensible thing to do with your life, not the same way that becoming a UX person or an information architect, or an interaction designer is a very sensible thing to do with your life because they're in great demand. They command salaries the same or higher than product management, close to front-end development, yeah.
So, and that's another thing we should probably talk about as well is what's happening with those titles. But Dan Cook is the answer. Basically. Dan Cook did a very influential piece on his article, which Tracy Fullerton put it, put in her textbook that almost all game design programs use, which is talking about loops and arcs, and loops and arcs are really, really simple way to think about the architecture. But it's not everything. So it's the beginning of something, but it's so different from how we think about how people move through these digital spaces. It's, it's really almost more like a roadway planning, you know, traffic planning.
Dan Klyn: Yup.
Christina Wodtke: And that, how are people moving through the space? Are they going in an arc that eventually comes that then falls? So you're moving sort of through a story like experience, whether the story be simply, "I'm beating bigger and bigger things and I'm awesome," Or the story is another one that you can uncover from the... it's been embedded in the, in the narrative, in the game. Or arcs, which are the classic, you know, Fishville I'm given a few eggs, I raise them to be fish, I sell them. I can buy better eggs. I raised them to be fished, I sell them for more money on and on and on.
And that was one of the first ideas I brought from game design over to industry when I was going down that path because, many products don't think about closing the loop, right? You just go, "Here you go." Well, how are you gonna get them back? How are you gonna get them interested again? How do you help them grow in mastery? And then that's another thing game—
Dan Klyn: I have a big piece of paper on the wall that has the user journeys, and we've got the touchpoints here so-
Christina Wodtke: They're very linear, aren't they?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: That's a very linear model. I don't trust linear models. None of them. Except movies. They need to be linear. I don't think they have a choice, but most things aren't. So yeah, I see a linear model and I go, "Can it be a loop?" Cause otherwise I ain't buying it. You know, the design processes, I mean...sorry, design processes should always have loops, but yeah.
Yeah. So, game design is still a great passion and I've got a class called “Serious Games” here at Stanford, and now I'm adding another introduction to game design. And, students can take that as a way of learning. And what's really cool is, my colleague and I, Julie Stanford, we decided that the things students really need is to practice their skills, but they don't like to practice, they like to learn new things instead. So what we do is we have all these 247s and she has service design and design for AI, and I have game design and design for understanding and I'm gonna add behavioral design.
And so... but they all do the same thing. They introduce you to appropriately finding that they're teaching different techniques like longitudinal or griller or whatnot. They all teach information architecture, as is relevant to that subject, but the core theories and ideas get through. They all teach interaction design, they all teach UI. And so it's this idea that by using different lenses you can build up the practice, but you can also see how those core practices change across different contexts. The students who I teach are going off to get important roles in digital companies and my job is to teach them how to be good at that, to make things that are really good for people. And I take that job very seriously.
Dan Klyn: I'm curious about something I saw that you said not too long ago about, Stanford and the environment there that you're teaching in and your students, which is that in that context, design thinking and UX are synonyms.
Christina Wodtke: Oh, it's, it's happening that way and I don't much care for it.
Dan Klyn: Tell me about that because, I, I think I see some of that, but, but maybe not synonyms. Maybe not just swap them out.
Christina Wodtke: Hmm. So Stanford does not have a school of architecture. I find that very shocking. It has lots of architecture, but there's no school of architecture here. There is no school of design. I wanna make sure that's clear. There... What they have is the d.school but the d.school is not a d.school. The d.school is a Hasso Plattner Institute for Design. An Institute is not a school, an Institute can teach some classes, but it can't accept students, it can't confer degrees, it can't do research. And I often compare the d.school to the Minitel, are you familiar with the Minitel?
Dan Klyn: I think so.
Christina Wodtke: So you know that in France, before they had the internet, they had the Minitel and it was this little machine and you could go over there and you could look up shop times, make restaurant reservations, all those sort of little things, it was command line. And so when the internet got big and because I'm old and was married to a French man, I remember this.
Dan Klyn: [Laughs].
Christina Wodtke: Nobody used the internet when everybody—
Dan Klyn: Cause you had Minitel [laughs]. Because you had the French man, you had the local version
Christina Wodtke: And it was French and that's all you need... you know, a French thing.
Dan Klyn: You didn't have all this shit, you just had the information.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah. You just had this sort of very utilitarian object in your house and eventually, you know, the internet got big enough and cool enough that the Minitel is mostly in people's attics, I suppose. Somebody should collect one of those for the computer history museum. But I think because the d.school is here, it's kind of like that same Minitel-like patchwork, it's not really doing the heavy lifting of design.
Dan Klyn: Hmm.
Christina Wodtke: But it's doing kind of enough... and I would love to see it do more. We also have product design and I find that really interesting because as you know, product designers seem to be nibbling away at the UX designer title, and I think that's Stanford, because you know, the product design group was originally industrial designers, but it's become much, much more digital, hardware, software, so we have HDI over here, right? And CS, which I'm part of, we have product design over there in mechanical engineering, which has become designing digital things, which I'm now 25% there, 75% here, and then we have census, which I cannot explain to you what it is. It's interdisciplinary in some fashion.
Dan Klyn: Okay.
Christina Wodtke: ... It comprises people, but without much, as much as the software coding skills. Like my students can actually code things, which changes how you teach radically. So design is so distributed here that there's not a center and because the d.school is so large in people's minds, and you have to apply to take a class at the d.school and they, and it's hard to get in. So it's like a hard to get in thing inside of a hard to get in school.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, yeah. Doubly hard.
Christina Wodtke: It's crazy, right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: And so, everybody says design thinking, and my colleague James Larding teaches 147 and he talks, teaches design thinking and I'm like, "Wait a second." You know, design is not design thinking, design thinking is an aspect for a certain type of problem that is not all of design, which led me to write about design's un-sexy middle bits. Laura and I had been bouncing these ideas back and forth for a while. Mostly, she curses and I drink so it works out. So I don't know. I... that's why 247 is changing because I want this idea that 147 is design thinking and 247 is design doing. And I want people to have that robust attitude because otherwise you see these things that they do in the d.school where they like,
it's always doing things first, which as you know, most of real work is redesigning, remodeling, optimizing, improving, like innovation is just a little bit, right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: So we have that. So they're all there like, "Big picture, how might we," sort of a weird... I probably shouldn't criticize something I'm so close to, but sort of a weird colonial attitude of white savior, "We're here, we're gonna fix your problem. You disabled people, we're going to make your life better. Oh, you people in Africa, we're bringing you lights." I don't know. It gets, it gets do goodie, but in a weird way, in a way that I don't think is entirely healthy, but it's also short. It's like, "Okay, we thought out everything up. Here's a solution. Bye, getting back on the plane." I'm like, "No, no, that's not design, you gotta like make all the pieces work together and you have to improve it, and you have to get rid of that wacky idea that you really love, but nobody actually can figure out." Aah, I'm done. That was a rant. That's how I rant, not on Twitter [laughs].
Dan Klyn: There might be another one necessary here. Based on what I'm gonna ask or say, which is, where's, where does information architecture fit in design thinking, and based on what you just said about where you teach and, and where it's... where design thinking is synonymous with UX. And if there's a second part, which is the doing, where's the... is, is information architecture just in there? Where does it go? Where is it?
Christina Wodtke: No, absolutely. I mean, the thing that I find really interesting is when I started up here and, we were co-teaching 247 at the beginning, Julie and Michael Bernstein, who is, professor here, he just got tenure. Yay, Michael. And he's wonderful. He works mostly on social stuff, actually social work online. But we were like, "Okay, what are we gonna teach?" And we knew that iteration was gonna be the heart of everything, but then when we talked about what we wanted to cover, you know, I'm like, "I do information architecture," and everybody's like, "Oh yeah, definitely." There was like, there was no battle, there was no fight. Like, and Michael knows all the old classic stuff, the information foraging and berry picking and all the, the theory that I think a lot of folks have forgotten about, and Julie's just like me, she, you know, surprised [inaudible], formed in 2000. So she actually cares about information architecture and does it as part of her practice. So it was like some of the world's easiest sell that we should cover, you know, finding an organizing and retrieval and all those questions.
So, and then the design of understanding the sort of more Richard Saul Wurman style was, healthily watched over by Maneesh who does a lot of information visualization questions. And so there also, another professor. So it wasn't like I had to fight at all for it. It was just like, "Information architecture," so everybody's like. "Oh yeah. Yeah." So, I'm hoping that just as we're seeing product designers out there, because of product design and Emmy, I'm hoping we'll start seeing a bunch of people going, "I did information architecture."
I had a moment one class though where, students were building something and one of them was like, "The information architecture isn't right yet." And I was like, "Yay." And then I asked him and I realized he was talking about the information design and I was like, "Yeah, sure [laughing], Go for it." At least he's using the word...I'll get picky with him later. It's a student who's taken me twice and will probably take me a third time and I'll just keep moving him towards... I mean fighting about language is always difficult. Like when do you do it? When do you not do it?
So, I think our information architecture almost disappeared completely, but it's coming back and I think it's coming back strong cause the problems that information architecture speaks to are not gone at all. Like people think search it, is solved. But no, Google works for Google, it doesn't necessarily work for your own site. It doesn't work for certain kinds of queries. Browsing is still a thing despite the hamburger menu, which by the way, nobody should use because there's... it violates recognition over recall, first of all, it's a mobile hack, doesn't belong on the web, and... just stop.
Hick's law says that we can scan junk material faster than we can click down through it. Like there's, there's so much science that says don't hamburger menu and yet, designers. So what are you gonna do? But yeah, so information architecture, it's a thing here. Welcome to Stanford. You're going to learn some IA.
Dan Klyn: What's different, is anything different from the Hot Studio, the understanding business, West Coast, where you live and work. That was, that was one of the places where information architecture was first said out loud, either at Xerox Park or at IBM or with Wurman. What's, is it different?
Christina Wodtke: I don't think anybody is very different anymore. I mean Richard Saul Wurman practiced here of course, and he, and Nathan Shedroff and Maria Judy's, also worked for him and Hot Studio was an information architecture company, they said that, but they really saw themselves like the book, information architects, right, which was a book that looked at everything from how things are organized versus how they're presented to information design. Right? It was like, if you have lots of stuff, somebody has to put it in a form where it can be understood and usage hadn't really shown up yet, when the web became more sophisticated and you could actually do things as opposed to browse on it, that's when the interaction designers started playing with the toy, I think my, in my memory.
Dan Klyn: Mm-hmm.
Christina Wodtke: I was here, so I figure... and I was reading absolutely everything, which I still do. So I figure I'm probably right. But, yeah, I, I think we have this tendency to specialize too early and too quickly, and it's problematic. And then of course we swung back to UX, which I still am gonna hold that rant for a minute longer. But becoming an information architect is rarely enough unless you're talking about very specific kinds of information problems like the kind Madonna Lisa Chan works on where you're really in the guts of a recommendation algorithm, or search, or algorithmically driven navigation, perhaps, things like that. Most information architects also have to have some interaction design, also have to have some UI design. It would be nice if they had at least some graphic design, especially visual hierarchy. Eventually when I was asked to manage the entire design team at Yahoo, that's when I was like, "I can't manage graphic designers if I don't understand graphic design." So I basically read everything and practiced until I made sensible decisions. And, that was a really good part of my life because I think it made me a better information architect. I think there's been a lot of historically screaming and like, "No, I don't draw. No, I can't use color. No, I don't understand type." And it's like, "Knuckle down a little bit, you know, you're not doing anything in the evening except reading... watching Netflix anyway. You might as well draw some typefaces or look through pictures of well designed posters, right?
Dan Klyn: Was that one of the... is that one of the problems is that polar bear IA presented itself as... so this is just another O'Reilly book. You don't have to be good at stuff, you can just do this. And then on the other hand you've got a Wurman and... information architects book curated by Peter Bradford, full of terrific visual execution, meaningful visual, higher art, it seemed like the visual presentation of information had everything to do with IA on that one side, and then on this other side, it's not.
Christina Wodtke: Peter Mare who also came out of, you know, studio archetype and Clement Mok was, you know, early beautiful information architecture... if you... people should all own a copy of Designing Business it's just terrific book with lots of beautiful early information architecture in it.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: And so yeah, we had the library... we had the library people, I called them East Coast, but only if the East Coast starts with Ann Arbor and West Coast—
Dan Klyn: [Laughs].
Christina Wodtke: ... because I was doing a lot of swing dancing back then, and, and, and swing dancing, there's East Coast swing and West Coast swing. So I was like, "Oh yeah, East Coast IA, West Coast IA, same thing." And then-
Dan Klyn: People spread of ju- people spread of Judea.
Christina Wodtke: Exactly. but yeah, I think the West Coasters were also looking at sort of the, the information architecture as a conductor, the way an architect brings together all these people, the contractor and the interior designer and so on. They were really positioning... they liked the architect part of architecture.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, yeah.
Christina Wodtke: And I think the East Coast people liked the planning part of architecture, like, "Here's where everything's gonna go,' and eventually they just talk to each other enough that they squished together. But I think returning understanding to information architecture, it had been lost for a little bit, was a really good choice because understanding is such a critical part of finding and using, that without understanding it just... I don't know, it just doesn't quite work in my mind anyway. And I like understanding problems. Steven and Anderson and I have been like nerding out for like five years now, just constantly sending each other stuff about designing, understanding problems, co-teaching workshops so we can just nerd out in the evenings, talk about it. Like it, it's really important to have a thinking partner.
Dan Klyn: Well, one of my favorite, things that you made is this little booklet here and I'm curious of the—
Christina Wodtke: They grow up to be a big book one day.
Dan Klyn: And so of the, of the ways of using visual explanation that you've learned what's your favorite?
Christina Wodtke: Oh my gosh. You know, I'm, I don't know-
Dan Klyn: Is that a wrong question?
Christina Wodtke: No, no, no. It's, it's, it changed my life so profoundly. It changed my life so profoundly, I can't even begin to tell you. So, as I mentioned, I started from painting. I could draw, life draw, but what's really interesting about life drawing is your job is to shut your brain up. In fact, drawing and meditation are remarkably similar. You look at it and you turn off the noise, cause your noise is full... your head is full of symbols. So if you're hearing the noise about symbols in your head, like, a tree looks like this and you're thinking, "Oh you know the little tree or house looks like this," you literally can't draw a tree or a house cause they don't look anything like their symbol. So, what you have to do is turn off all the symbol, part of your brain, you know the words, the icons and actually see, however, if you wanna visually communicate, it becomes the opposite. You need the symbols, you need the icons. There are things that don't have an iconography so you have to create them. Then you have to create idea graphs, right? I'm so better when I can write and you spell check but you know a language for ideas and things and then you start thinking, this is a big one, you start using space for thinking. And this is absolutely critical. So when I was at the beginning of the journey, and this is what kicked Steven and I off is when I was writing the how to make a concept model, but I was interviewing everybody who, who had that skill. Cause the way I understand things is I have to hear what people do, and then I break it down into frameworks.
Dan Klyn: I remember seeing you having those conversations with people at an IA summit, perhaps.
Christina Wodtke: Absolutely. It was at an IA summit. It was in San Diego.
Dan Klyn: Yep.
Christina Wodtke: And, and then it was just sort of a long slog forward of just trying tons and tons and tons and tons of things. You know, I, I love this size of note card, it's a big index card. It's nice and thick, can handle a Sharpie, which most things can't. Like lots of Sketch noting of things helps me think. But I... if I'm working on a problem, I'll just go through 20 of them, I'll draw something and I'll put it down. I'll draw another thing, I'll put it down, I'll draw another thing and I'll put it down.
And in my life I feel like there's two kinds of creative behavior, if I can call it that. One is painterly where you put down pencil and your marks become stronger as stronger as you begin to understand where your marks look. That's how writing works too, right? You write an outline or you write foreward and you go over and over until you know the marks are right. But, with printmaking, you... this is where I first discovered it, you make many versions of the thing and that's what I feel like this kind of drawing is, is you're making many versions and then you look at all the versions and you go, "This one's more true or this one's less true," and you keep making them. So when I was thinking about teams, I had built up this skill of being able to mark marks in space in order to create meaning. And so I just kept drawing and drawing and eventually... I have a theory which is marks that can be drawn on a white board will go viral over like infographics that are pretty and you wanna send them out.
But I think you want something that people can talk and draw. So I came up with my nine square and then I came up with a bunch of other models, and because I understand things like a pyramid has a poetics, it has a set of meanings which is going upward, the way a pyramid is built, it's built into our minds. Again, the really important things he talks about, about metaphor and how it shapes our thinking, and I was able to make marks that made sense, both to me but also to other people, and then I put them in my slides. And I think that journey, which has been mostly really pleasurable to be honest, writing the book, it's the only book that made me happy the whole time I was writing it. The whole time I was writing it, I was super happy. Actually there's a lot more suffering in writing, but I started it simply by like taking out the years, best... years' best comic scripts or comic books and copying anything I liked, like, "Ooh, that's an interesting way to draw a nose. I'll draw that nose." And I just filled up like three sketchbooks full of those things until I started to see something emerge from me, which was new work. And because I studied painting in Kansas City Art Institute, I'm familiar with that idea that you do a lot of copies and then something emerges and you have to trust that emergence and keep feeding it. And now it's part of my language, my visual language.
Dan Klyn: Well, I've had exclusive access to you for an hour now and we've got some people who have been listening along, so I'm gonna open it up to whoever, would like to, raise an objection to anything that you've said so far or, ask to clarify-
Christina Wodtke: I love being argued with.
Dan Klyn: Or, offer an exhortation of some sort.
Peter: Hello.
Dan Klyn: Peter, hello.
Peter: Good morning and afternoon. Thank you for, the conversation so far. Christina, there are... I basically wanna have another hour just with you. So, that aside, I'm curious, you talked about the d.school, and about innovation and [inaudible], puts in their kind of practical reality that you're trying to teach towards. And this is something I've been thinking about. One of the challenges is we have a lot of people doing digital design who don't understand the basics. You, you just quoted three or four different laws over the course of this conversation that I would argue 95% of people doing digital design don't know anything about. And, this has led me to want to more formally professionalize design, to certify design, to license design like we do architecture, so that those who are creating the interfaces, we can have a reasonable expectation that they know the basics, because when they don't, sometimes the, errors are trivial and you get a hamburger menu in a app for something that doesn't matter, or you get people trying to create touchscreens for steering boats that end up killing people. I'm curious how, given your kind of deeper and deeper forays into academia and more formal practice and teaching, what you think around these matters of licensing and certification, and enforcing a set of standards when it comes to digital interfaces.
Christina Wodtke: I got to say, I've never been particularly for, I don't think I'm particularly against. I do think that anytime there’s safety, there should be an engineering level of skill. But yeah, I don't know. I think it's really hard to talk about because what we've seen here, and this was my rant a little bit, was what we seen here so far is that,
the title UX rose up and it meant a bunch of people who do interaction design and visual design and UI, and I was teaching at CCA and the graphic designers knew very clearly that they could make another 20K or even double their graphic design salary, and could get a job instantly if they were UX designer instead. And so they'd take a class, maybe two to get a little bit of knowledge and then that's what they would label themselves. And so we've had this rise of something I call the pretty awful app. It's pretty and it's awful. Canvas was the first thing I saw that I thought was pretty awful. And that's hugely problematic. Just because graphic designers can't get things right, and if they haven't taken the classes,
Of course, if they'd taken the classes and they've learned how things work underneath and they know the laws, you know, they're absolutely fine. I have nothing against... there's no such thing as a homogenous group of people, but I will say that for pure life reasons, they were kind of forced into faking it till they make it. and I feel for them. And I was just complaining that IA as an interaction designers don't have an official design chops. So I guess I care about all of them. However, I think we have not done a very good job of writing things that actually helps people know how to hire designers effectively. So we, the, the larger group, the huge group of, designers mostly shout at people saying, "It's not, there's a difference between UX and UI," or, "You mean IA, not interaction design." There's been a lot of tone policing, language policing, but there hasn't been a ton of a really accessible books written for non-designers about how to hire a designer, something like a sense in response size book maybe. I think that would help.
And then I think that if we have people designing things that are mission critical, cars, boats, elevators, we need a higher standard for that. But I can't say that I have the expertise to say what needs to be done in that space. I don't like to speak to things that I have not explored thoroughly. So I think I will pass on the pluses and minuses. I do know lots of people who shouldn't offer certifications, offer certifications. That's totally a thing. So you can see why I'm a little cautious and thoughtful at this time.
Peter: Why're you so... why are you gonna slag on Nielsen Norman like that?
Christina Wodtke: They are actually the people I least worry about, trust me. There's much worse out there.
Dan Klyn: Well, I will thank you for your question, Peter, and feel free to, to follow up, further, but I'm curious just by way of extension of Peter's question, Christina, what about organizing the labor of designers? I love the idea of, could there be a way that we could make it more straightforward to hire designers and that you could pick a good one who wouldn't be oblivious to Conway's law or Fitt’s law or... I love that thread that you started on Twitter a couple of days ago of what are the theories that have to do with IA that have helped you? There's a great thread that you started out in that, but I'm wondering—
Christina Wodtke: That thread is most people don't know what a theory is.
Dan Klyn: I like how you were not shy about helping people understand that ideas and theories are not the same thing. But along these same lines, so on the supply side you could, or on the demand side you could teach people how to hire the right designer, but on the supply side, there have been move- movements among us, Ethan Marcott I believe is one of the first, to propose that designers ought to organize so that we could self-create the standards that, would make products and services be good, that, that we've been unable to focus ourselves as individual designers, and that organizing is one of the ways to... how we could have nice things. What do you think about that?
Christina Wodtke: Sure. Good luck with that. Sorry. But, you know, I think one of the things that I've learned is that there are a lot of causes in the world. There are a lot of broken things that need being fixed. And you gotta kind of pick the one that you really care about and you can make the biggest difference at, and then you have to just trust somebody else has the rest to a certain degree or you're just gonna collapse with exhaustion. And as you know, I've got a lot of things I'm working on. You know, I've got women talk design, still helping Danielle find the right product market fit for that, and, I've just blown away at the incredible work that's being done in a two day work... as I was telling you before, we started in it in a two day workshop. At the end, people are literally giving a five minute speech that's as good as anything I've seen at Ignite. They're really incredible.
And I'd like to see that get to more people. Especially, you know, more women and more underrepresented minorities, both. I guess women are an underrepresented majority, so that's kind of, problematic in my life too. I've got things I'm working on and, you know, if people think organization's gonna work, they should try it. I'm a big fan of experiment and measure. And if somebody wants to try to certify, go to town. I started an Institute once. I don't know, but I've got other fish to fry right now and I think as I get older I realize I don't have to have an opinion. Like, there was a point in my life where I thought I had to have an opinion on everything. I don't have to have an opinion on everything. I can talk about the things I'm good at and go, "Huh, that's interesting," to the things I'm not good at. So if Ethan thinks it's a good idea, sure why not? We'll see.
Dan Klyn: I like your answer there. Thank you. other attendees, interested to ask, talk with-
Bruce: I don't know if this is a methodological question, this is Bruce I have a, personal advice question, for work. So, I find that I have some ability to recognize information that needs to get from one place to another and ability to diagram and communicate about it, and then I'm unable to scale the effort. Like if I start to do it, nobody else catches up, I just keep on doing it. And, so I'm wondering if there's any way to deal with colleagues to bring them along so that they can also contribute.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah, there's a lot of things in that question that I'm familiar with. I've always thought one of my grace virtues is impatience, because I get things done, but it obviously is expensive for me emotionally, cause things happen slowly and now I'm in academia. We'll see if anything ever gets done again. No, I'm joking. We're actually making a lot of difference right now, but, there are places to just move more slowly. So, one of the things I noticed is that often when I have a radical idea, which is fairly often, people's first reaction is, "Nope," my students to CEOs, and bosses, I'd be like, "Let's do this," and they'd be like, "Nope," and then a week later they'd be like, "You know, I've been thinking about that thing."
So you have to realize that getting knowledge in to people's heads and a new way of doing things takes time. People have to ruminate on it.
They, you know... I've done things where, when we were hired by the New York Times, it was management innovation group, we were hired by the New York Times way way back when they were like a little startup, and we were brought on to help them with their search because I had a search background. But every time we checked in with the boss, we talked about the tension between design and engineering, which was their biggest problem. And then I remember one day, about four or five weeks into it, we went to talk to the VP and she said, so give me a report about, what you're doing to address the tension between engineering and design. That's, that's what we hired you for." And I was like, "Yup, brainwashing worked." So sometimes it's just that gentle, quietly, "Here's the thing you asked for, and here's the thing you didn't ask for that is important," but not... try to convince him that's important. Just let them know you're on it, letting them know you're thinking about it, slowly letting them know. I mean, that's the pleasure of being in house, right? Is you can do things really slowly and you can also do coalition building, which is huge. You know, have lunch with everybody, have coffee with everybody, so much you're getting things done in a large organization and false, large amounts of beverages.
So, you know, talk it through and on one-on-one they'll tell you what's wrong. They'll tell you what they're against or they'll tell you what they don't understand. You know, that little one on one thing makes a huge difference. And coalition building is great because then when you say, "Okay, it's time to make a decision," you've talked to every single person and you know where they stand and you know where they think. So without knowing your exact problem, I mean, that's a classic human problem and it really, you gotta be a little bit... well, you don't have to be patient, but you have to act as if you are patient. That's all I can do anyway. And just keep nibbling, don't push. People who get pushed push back.
Bruce: I find myself often in the middle, not really sure that I'm answering the questions that I'm being asked, but then something productive comes out of it. So it's very encouraging to have that conversation with you. Thank you.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah, I always find it really interesting that certain phrases sort of appear and I'll see them everywhere. And lately the one I hear all the time is make sense. So people will say, make sense to see and, or people... when you're explaining something, somebody will say, "Make sense," means, "I'm done. Please don't explain to me anymore." And I'm seeing that a lot here and I don't know if that will continue, but I think for us to seek feedback on the things we're explaining is really critical. And you could say, "Make sense," which is easy, or you could say, "Okay, is there anything here that was unclear? I'm not always as clear as I'd like to be."
You know, you can make it a little bit your problem if you want. But simply, you know, closing that feedback loop. I love, Bill Verplank comes by and he draws his little, drawing, you know, where there's a little person and they're touching a button or pulling a knob, and it changes something in the world, and it comes back to them and they start to build a mental model. We need to do that too. We're basically putting words out into the world and then we have to get them back and shape that mental model so we can shape their mental model again. And that loop is really powerful.
Bruce: Okay. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Christina Wodtke: No worries.
Dan Klyn: And I'm Googling Bill Verplank feedback loop and I think I see it.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah. It's his model of interaction design, but yeah. I must have drawn that a million times too, because, when I first came across it, I was in copying everything, I was drawing that a lot. It's probably in pencil, man, but Shamani. Yep. Well, there's this people anyway.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: Verplank sort of people. I assume the whole design is somewhere or another. Yeah, it was one of the great things about these drawings, is they just make things clear in people's brains.
Oh, there it is. Let's see if I can get it to be visible. There you go. How's that?
Dan Klyn: That's great.
Christina Wodtke: Cool [laughs]. But yeah, it's very Google-able.
Dan Klyn: Do other, attendees have, objections, questions, expectations for Christina. I'm curious to know more about this new book and if somebody read Radical Focus is... The Team that Managed Itself for the same person who read and enjoyed Radical Focus? Is it for their boss? Who's, who's the new one for?
Christina Wodtke: Are you asking me or them? [Laughs].
Dan Klyn: You.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah, I would say it's definitely very similar to Radical Focus in that there is a fiction part and a nonfiction bit.
Dan Klyn: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Christina Wodtke: The fiction bit is a lot more like fiction. In the past, we've been, the genre of business fable is considered sort of like little morality plays basically. They tend to have aspects of fiction, they tend to be very, very simple. Patrick Lencioni is the master of it. He does, five, five... Oh God, I can't remember. He's written everything.
Dan Klyn: Well, in Radical Focus, there was a team that was scaling up, a business that sells tea, I recall, isn't that correct?
Christina Wodtke: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Dan Klyn: And there were, it was two founders. It wasn't that big of an enterprise.
Christina Wodtke: They probably hired more people than they should have, but other than that, it was still like under 10, I think. But yeah, it was all about trying to find focus so that you weren't trying to do everything, which startups have a really bad time with here. It's always like, "Oh, we have a meeting with this really famous person, but actually they can't really help me, but we’ve got to do that meeting," and, "Oh, we should probably go to this thing." Yeah, so it's all about focus. The team that manages itself is about teams. So it just took more words to explain it, and I wouldn't say it's all completely explained. But it's really about how, okay, ours are really valuable because, so I was having breakfast with Marty Cagan the other day, and he's amazing. His product management books are amazing. He wrote the foreword to Radical Focus and he talks about the importance of getting to empowered teams versus what he calls feature teams.
So you can think about teams at a couple of different ways. You can think of them as line cooks at McDonald's, right, where you're just constantly just giving them the orders and they complete them and give it to you, or maybe even a kitchen with a very imperious chef who just says, "These are my recipes and you will produce them perfectly." And we see that a lot probably because of the lone genius mythology that's so big in Silicon Valley, right? So we see these people who think they're Steve Jobs. And let me tell you, nobody's Steve Jobs, I'm sorry. Just no, no.
And that means they can be an asshole, and they can boss people around, they can be a perfectionist, which...no. So, but the other kind is when you say, "I have hired very smart people, and I will tell them what I would like to see happen and they will figure it out." And that's a wonderful thing. And okay, I was all about that, right? You say, "Here's what I wanna see happen. You go figure out how to get there," but that's not enough. So one of the things I've seen over and over again with students is they're thrown into teams, and they don't know how to be a team. And when I saw that, I realized my clients were struggling with the same thing, that they don't know how to make a team, a team.
And there's a bunch of things that get in that way. One of them is conflicting norms. So as a Midwesterner you've been raised to be very passive aggressive and super nice and, "Oh well, you know, I don't wanna... I, I really love what you're doing, but this one thing that's kind of... it's not a big deal, but it's kind of bothering me." You know, that means, "You fucker, what the hell are you thinking?" Right? If I can translate that, and I don't—
Dan Klyn: That's what that means, yes.
Christina Wodtke: I seem to have missed that gene. I've been told by Dutch people that I'm Dutch so, well you would know. I'm pretty straight forward. But we have to get together and say, "How are we gonna work together? You know, do we want our criticism to be direct or indirect?" Cause when I was younger I just couldn't take criticism probably for the same Midwestern reason. Now I'm fine with it, took years. Or are we going... what time are we gonna meet? Is 10 o'clock meeting mean 10 or 10... 10:10 because that's how it was at Yahoo, because it was a big campus and you had to get from here to there. You know, there's like so many things that will make up stories about, like, "That person's always late cause they don't care about my team." But the fact is they literally can't get there.
So the more we can externalize norms and agree on how we're gonna behave, the more effective we can be. And then with OKRs and norms, you can't just set and forget. You have to actually live them. So doing retros where you say, what worked, what didn't work? That's really critical. So the team that manages itself is really about how do we get a team to team well,
to use Amy Edmondson's, words. Oh my God, her last book, it's all about, the fearless organization. I love that book so much. I wanna hug it, I want to go to sleep with it at night. Such a good book. It's all about psychological safety, but if you want a team to be effective, they need skills on how to be an effective team and how to become...get better at learning, organizational learning, a lot of stuff. So the team that managed itself is about if you set up this rhythm of discussion, of sharing, of learning, the team can become better and better of a team, faster and faster and faster, which means that if the boss can let go, which is not always a given thing, the team can do amazing things by themselves.
And I think Marty said, he actually tells some companies not to do OKRs because they're too controlling command. He goes, "These are useless for you." And I think people make that mistake with OKR is a lot is they say, "Ooh, OKRs, that way I can really track what my people are doing." No, actually it's the opposite. It's really... that's not what it's about. It's about telling them what the goal is and letting them do it on their own. But you know, people mangle everything. Look what happened to Agile, look what happened to Lean, look what happened to design thinking.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Well certainly what you just described is not perfectly aligned with the measure, what matters way of, OKR even.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah, there are reasons for that. I don't think I can say them in a public space.
Dan Klyn: Fair enough.
Christina Wodtke: But let's just say John Doerr didn't really... I'm not gonna say anything. Let's just say measuring what matters was made in a very complicated situation, and it's beautiful, but it's not as useful as it could have been. The measure of what matters team is awesome. Like I've chatted with them, they're all over it. They're fantastic. But that book just gives me some issues sometimes.
Dan Klyn: That was a generous, critique.
Christina Wodtke: You know, there's so many people in the world that do good. Yesterday I spent a long time talking to a guy at Amazon and he's from South Africa and we talked about our cats. And I talked to a support person at Sonic and we chatted a lot about routing things that I like, I so feel for the people who work at places that have inherent problems, but they take all the yelling, and they don't get to actually make a difference. I just feel for those people so much. So I try to be careful because we all want to do the right thing, but sometimes that is really hard.
Dan Klyn: Yes.
Christina Wodtke: So I've got about five more minutes before I need to go talk to Amy Marquez about an article she's writing on boxes and arrows about the future of information architecture. Apparently this morning is all IA, all the time.
Dan Klyn: Terrific. Well, what's a bite sized thing that you could give us on your way out here? What's, what's the most important thing for information architects to, think about right now?
Christina Wodtke: Hmm. That's a... well, Jesus, I feel like I've been saying a lot of these things for a long time, really fucking long, like since I got here.
Dan Klyn: Well, you have, but, but let me, let me share something that I heard recently from an old guy, that I love, who says the same thing a lot and has done for years and years, is that it's landing differently now.
Christina Wodtke: Hmm.
Dan Klyn: That's something, and I don't know if that's him, rapidly approaching 85 years of age or what it is, but, he thinks that maybe the, there's still movement in the world, and that even if we've railed, we've had our tiny fists at the sky, that maybe we should still say it because it's landing differently now.
Christina Wodtke: Well, I will say that Jeff Wiener used to say to, to us all the time, when I worked for a minute at LinkedIn, "When you're tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it."
Dan Klyn: Ooh.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah. It's pretty good, isn't it?
Dan Klyn: Absol- ooh, that burns.
Christina Wodtke: It's true. And as I told my students, I'm a mom, I'm good at repeating myself. So, the thing is that I still believe that information architects should... a long time ago, I used to call a certain kind of information architect who handcrafted navigation schemes and stuff, cabinet makers—
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Christina Wodtke: Because, it's, if you wanna affect a lot of people,you wanna make a design for Ikea, it'll go out in the world, mixed feelings about Ikea, but whatever. But I think that Dan Brown gave a talk at the AI summit many years ago, which was all about making rules instead of things. Yeah, I loved that talk so much. But I love having my opinions validated, so you know, but being here, AI is arriving. Like it's really clear that the things that feed AI, and I don't mean IA, I mean AI, we have, we just had Faith Haley and Jay Pundit started the Human Centered AI Institute, which is really exciting. I go to the AI salons.
Machine learning is a thing. I think if you're an information architect you really need to understand how things like search, recommendation engines, algorithms work because those spaces desperately need human centered information architecture. And information architecture is not always just a diagram. It's often deciding what the rules are for organization. It's deciding what the rules are for making sure that every human being can find, and understand, and use the things they need. And so I think the number one thing information architects need to do is just very quietly start teaching themselves how those things work.
Just the way I did with drawing. You know, in the evening, pour yourself a big glass of wine and start watching the great courses thing on machine learning, for example, or under... or go pick something up about how to make a recommendation engine. But I think it's just fundamental, if you don't understand algorithms, I don't think you are having the impact that the industry needs you to have.
Dan Klyn: Agreed. Thank you. What a treat. I hope to see you in person sometime soon, Christina. Thank you so much. Thank you to everybody who's listened. Thank you friends. It's so good to see you here, and, again, thank you Christina.
Christina Wodtke: Bye, Dan. Big hug.
Dan Klyn: Hug through the through tubes.