An Approach Driven By Questions

What we do is not unlike the stepwise progression people follow when they build or remodel buildings, moving from what to how: 

To accomplish this, TUG has developed and refined a process to translate your business strategy into digital places that provides experiences that satisfy and even delight the people using them. As shown below, our process works across four phases.

In the Program phase, TUG engages with stakeholders to clarify strategy and elaborate the rationale for change. Understanding must precede action. Clarity at the beginning of a project is attained through stakeholder alignment, strategy, and roadmapping. Key questions answered at this point include: Why are we changing this place? Who is going to use this place? What needs to take place there? How will we measure success? How should we balance priorities? 

We then conduct an Analysis of the as-is environment around the problem and build maps and models to learn about the people, places, and processes that contribute to how things exist today. Gathering evidence from the digital and physical contexts where products and services are used, and analyzing it through activities including audits, system and business process mapping. Clarifying “real-life” usage patterns through various forms of qualitative research and quantitative analysis.

In Synthesis the TUG team iteratively develops and tests new to-be concepts in order to identify a more ideal way to situate information. TUG then delivers a well-tested structural design specification aligned to organizational goals and strategies. Activities include developing conceptual models and interface mock-ups that point toward a solution, then working with the client team to elaborate and improve the concepts into testable constructs with real users. Using moderated and unmoderated testing procedures, prototypes are scenario-tested and iteratively improved.

Of course, digital is never really done. Often we’ll continue working with our clients after the architecture is figured out to help them Sustain and operationalize the new structures for information, and to operate new or improved digital places. Activities include equipping the teams who are building the solution with the blueprints, specifications (or agile backlogs), schematics, and patterns needed to turn research and design into software. TUG will help develop the governance and content strategy needed to successfully operate the improved systems and may also remain involved supporting development teams during the build effort.

What Before How

To architect a digital place that delights and serves visitors requires an architecture where the form takes into account and provides a fit for the forces at play. We don’t have control over the forces, just the form. So it is important to understand the forces so we can shape the form to create a good fit that delights and serves visitors. For most digital places, the three primary forces have to do with:

• The business intent of the digital place and how it is intended to create value

• The operations that feed into the digital place and capabilities of the organization to govern and manage it

• The situation that leads people to visit the digital place, the needs they want to fill and the tasks they need to accomplish to meet the needs

Observe → Model → Align

Throughout our work we employ a simple but powerful method, Observe, Model, Align, to make sense of complexity. We begin by Observing a situation with a beginner’s mind and researching the as-is. We then Model the situation to provoke the discussion necessary to Align around a shared understanding of whatever we are observing, or to explore new ideas. We have found that weaving this method through the various steps of a project ensures alignment throughout the process and avoids gaps in understanding.

Whether conducting internal interviews or external research, our observations will be depicted as a model of some sort that communicates what we are learning. We then meet with the customer team to “play” with these models, adapting and changing them until we agree that the models represent our shared understanding of the situation. Based on the phase and context of the project, the models may be generative of new questions, or evaluative of questions posed. As we progress toward a solution, our primary alignment activities are with end users, to ensure our increasingly detailed models of the place to be built aligns with their ways of thinking and doing (see figure below).

In/Tension Modeling

A project of any scale involves trade-offs and tensions that must be managed. These trade-offs are often positioned as either/or propositions, which sets up a win/lose situation almost guaranteeing tension among stakeholders. TUG has perfected a process for aligning stakeholders that we call In/Tension Modeling, inspired by the urban planning work of Richard Saul Wurman in the 1970s, who noted that many important decisions are not binary but rather involve striking the balance between a continuum of two good things. Do we make it easy for power users to get where they need to go? Yes! Do we make it easy for new people to figure out where to go? Yes! Doing both equally well may be challenging, and maybe today it makes sense to emphasize one over the other … BUT… the decision where to strike the balance is a business decision, not a design decision.

The figure below shows a tension in action. We start with each participant indicating where the organization strikes the balance of a tension today (green chiclets). This lays the groundwork for important discussions around strategy, why opinions vary, and highlights areas where important words mean different things to different people (which is universally the case). Then, voting on where to strike the balance in the future (blue chiclets) establishes a clear sense of direction going forward, and a measure of how much change will be involved in getting there.

An important aspect of In/Tension modeling is that the goal is not to achieve consensus, that elusive state of everyone being in agreement that rarely, if ever, actually happens despite what people say. Instead, borrowing from the principles of sociocracy the goal is to achieve consent from the participants that the overall decision may not be their preference, but having been heard, the decision is tolerable and they can align with the group and consent to the strategy. 

At the end of the exercise, the team will have a set of continuums, each calling for varying degrees of change in how priorities are balanced. Some large, some not at all. By identifying large shifts early and aligning on their importance, the organization is better equipped to implement any necessary change management processes to facilitate the transition. 

We’ve come to trust this methodology after seeing it deliver consistently-actionable results with groups of deciders numbering from just a handful to nearly 50.