Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

We've all been there. In brainstorming you're tossing around seeds of ideas, then faster than you can say "Beelzeboob" some yahoo evokes the evil power. "Let me play Devil's Advocate."

You can throw away the fragile idea. This simple phrase lets people claim no personal responsibility by raising questions and concerns that kill vulnerable ideas. This role is poison to creative thinking and pervasive in the corporate environment. The Devil's Advocate is wily too, often masquerading as a dose of helpful reality.

Reality? Sure. Like delicate children, ideas don't enter the world fully formed. They WILL need development. The WILL need examination. They WILL need challenge. Brainstorming is not the time, though. Let them grow a little first.

Okay, so it's reality but helpful? Not at all. There's no more powerful death to innovation. That role only casts negative doubt with Z-E-R-O investment in progressive thinking. These normally nice people mean no harm. But when possessed, doubt intended to review an idea effectively puts the kibosh on it. It takes far more work to build an idea.

I’m a missionary for Devil's Advocate free zones in concepting and brainstorming. If you summon that evil power I'll exorcise it out of you with the power of Idea Angels.

Can I get a witness?

Figuring out who your users are can be challenging. Many times stakeholders can have varying and conflicting opinions about what users deserve focus. Personas help manage this, but they're products of user research. Prior to research, it's important to provide some direction on who will be studied and in what capacity.

As I was preparing for a brainstorming session, I started thinking about how to start discussion about a business' users without explicitly asking "who do you think your users are?" That approach seemed rife with canned answers; I was looking for something different.

"Hire Your Users" is technique that would be applied in early discovery to start defining these boundaries. Using the metaphor of a hiring process, it helps design strategists and stakeholders collaborate on who the users are, in what order they should be considered, what they need to accomplish, and how they might do so.

In use, a facilitator would guide discussion around the following points:

What's the need?
This first question is used to start translating the business strategy and mission into tactical needs. Like hiring for a position, it uses the business objectives as input and defines how these can be accomplished. Often, this information is known and socialized; hopefully, the facilitator will not need to dwell too long here.

Who do we hire?
This question is starts to map those business needs to user segments and define their characteristics. To do this, we would use a job description to organize and divide the users. Doing so places rigor around each segment to reduce misinterpretation. Within each description are the following:

• Job title - a succinct phrase that defines the user type
• Position summary - this focuses on the core mission and goals of the user
• Responsibilities - the tasks they must perform to support the goals
• Experience - their background, knowledge, traits and capabilities

How will they accomplish this?
This question starts to elicit the features and content that may be needed to support the user's responsibilities. Demonstrating this relationship is important since it helps ensure technology is driven by business need and not the other way around. It should also help ensure that features are justifiable and not simply faddish.

What can we offer?
This question is about trade-offs. For this task, the participants are given a personnel budget of $100,000. Using a divide-the-dollar approach, they apportion that sum among all of the job descriptions. The result is a rough indication of the order and degree of priority of the segments.

 

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I've just hacked together this idea, so I'm hoping to hear your thoughts. Take this further? Abandon it immediately?