Six empowerment strategies to get teams up to speed in complex domains
When you’re thinking about something you don’t understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion… because we’re all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid, trying to figure out how to put the sticks together to reach the banana and we can’t quite make it… I get this feeling all the time that I’m an ape trying to put the two sticks together… Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.
– Richard Feynman (Television interview, 1963)
In my role at IBM, I lead design teams working on projects in emerging technologies. We design experiences that demonstrate and communicate cutting-edge research in areas like artificial intelligence and quantum computing. This means our team is regularly confronted with deeply complex and unfamiliar concepts that can be difficult to explain, even by experts in the field.
As a design leader, my primary responsibility is to guide teams to focus on people (users), not technology. The role of design is to build understanding and empathy for real people in order to design experiences that truly resonate with them. However, it’s equally important for designers to be grounded in the technology concepts to gain a seat at the table and to become trusted collaborators among stakeholders, especially in technology-led organizations like IBM.
When the learning curve is very steep, or when we are dealing with technologies that are so specific or nascent that there is not much general information published, this is easier said than done. For designers it can feel intimidating, insurmountable, even impossible to get started.
I knew this was a shared experience among others at IBM so I began asking around and discovered patterns across practices and behavior.
Here are the six strategies I distilled from conversations with designers, developers and product managers, my own experience, and just for grounding — a little bit of yoga philosophy.
Whether you are working on a project involving some cutting-edge new tech, or something that is just new to you, these strategies will help you cut through the gorp, be able to empower yourself and your team to remove the mental blockers of not knowing, and start making progress.
1. Get curious
Curiosity has a magical effect of helping us get comfortable, productive and engaged. It ignites creativity and eventually guides us toward breakthrough solutions.
Often, curiosity looks like asking questions to experts in a field, or performing a simple Google search. However, when you have little or no knowledge of a topic, how do you even know what to ask, or what keywords to search? And how can I get curious about something I know literally nothing about?
In the early stages of a project, I encourage my team to adopt a “beginner’s mindset.” This is a very powerful tool, because it assists you in asking fundamental questions. Your team may not be confident in asking questions to experts out of fear of looking ignorant. I sometimes take the lead on asking “stupid” questions first in order to break the ice.
Make a list of all your team’s questions and make time for them to share questions they have with each other. More often than not, we have similar questions. If you are lucky enough to have a dedicated design researcher on your team, organizing an activity like this should be right up their alley. But everyone can participate.
A good place to start is exploring the known or potential impacts of a given emerging technology. Questions around why people should care help spark curiosity quickly. Other basic questions to ask the experts to get your team engaged are:
- What might this technology enable in the future?
- What impacts might it have on people or businesses?
- Who might find it valuable and why?
- What problem(s) does it propose to solve?
- Why is that different/better than the way it is done today?
- And finally… How does it work?
You might be surprised how often experts in a highly technical area will immediately start explaining how something works before we have even established why anyone should care. Going off the expertise cliff can overwhelm and quash attention and interest from non-experts. As a design leader, I help focus early conversations on the high-level questions to generate the interest needed in order to forge creative connections.
One designer on my team confirmed by saying this about a recent project:
When we were able to find those connections between humans and this complex space, I could care about it more and get invested.
2. “Explain Like I’m Five”
Most people love feeling smart by teaching novices new things that are second nature to themselves. Simple explanations, use of metaphors, and examples are all quicker routes to understanding for a non-expert — ala the Subreddit explainlikeimfive.
You need to identify the folks who have this ability. That generally means they have both deep understanding of the subject and great communication skills. Leverage your network to identify the right people to help the team learn a new domain or topic. If you ask an expert in to present on a topic, be sure to set these expectations.
You might suggest they use the Feynman technique to prepare. Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was one of the world’s greatest physicists and philosophers and was known as the “Great Explainer.” Give the Feynman Technique a try:
- Choose a concept you want to learn about
- Pretend you are teaching it to a kid
- Identify gaps in your explanation and go back to the source material to better understand it
- Review and simplify
You might also ask your expert to draw a picture, or use a metaphor or visual device like Talia Gershon does in this video to teach quantum computing. She uses five levels of difficulty, starting with a kid. Feynman would dig it.
Metaphors are extremely useful, and work to distill difficult concepts. Kate Blair, a product manager on our team, is brilliant with memorable explanations and offers them up for our team’s benefit. We were recently investigating a project involving artificial intelligence benchmarking. This is how she explained AI benchmarking with story during a meeting:
Imagine you have three purveyors of cinnamon all claiming their cinnamon is the best, and will result in the best baked good. You can think of benchmarking as a bake-off using each cinnamon in the same recipe. You can then judge which one came out the best and know which one to use in the future. Kind of like America’s Test Kitchen.
While surely there is more to AI benchmarking, I now understand and remember the gist and importance of it much better than before the bake-off story.
Developers with strong communication skills can help translate difficult computer science concepts for members of the team who do not have that specific expertise.
Recently we started investigating a project involving reinforcement learning, a subarea of the artificial intelligence field. To help the team onboard, Juan Cruz-Benito, a developer with machine learning expertise on our team, broke this down, starting with the Wikipedia definition of Reinforcement Learning:
An area of machine learning concerned with how software agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize some notion of cumulative reward.
He then put it in simpler terms for us and showed a bunch of examples of it in the real world including Google’s AlphaGo, the game Pong, and autonomous driving systems.
A software agent learns how to behave or solve a problem by receiving positive or negative rewards depending on its actions.
3. Carve out (the right amount of) time for “school mode”
Getting the gist of something versus deep understanding is a broad spectrum. It’s important to first look at the scope, timeframe, and ultimate goals to decide how much effort and time you should commit to learning. Design leaders can help provide this perspective.
There’s a fine balance between going down a rabbit hole to research thoroughly, but not going so far as to get lost. Carve out time for domain immersion that is appropriately scaled for the expectations on you and the duration and scope of the project. IBM designers Julianna Murphy and Mrinali Kamath have a wonderfully-useful perspective on this in their post Designing for tech you don’t get.
Senior design researcher Virginia Gates Honig told me that she found value in going into “school mode” at the beginning of a project, but putting a time box around herself. She said, “The result of that helps inform what I need to ask the experts. It helps generate better questions and make natural connections in the subject matter.”
4. Get organized
Keep a central repository of vetted learning resources up to date for a particular domain or project. This will become super useful when on-boarding new members to your team and will be critical if you are working on something with a longer time frame where team members will enter and exit.
Write down nomenclature and add to it over the course of your project. This could be as simple as a file that everyone can access. Be sure to define acronyms. Technology and corporate cultures are notorious for slinging around obscure abbreviations that can confuse newbs. Ask experts to define the terms they are using.
As members of the team come across new useful resources, like videos and articles, add them to a document with links, and include a brief description or summary which can help guide other members of the team on what to spend their time reviewing.
If you have a longer-term project, you might consider using a tool like Slack with a dedicated channel for learning resources.
5. Get comfortable being uncomfortable
When I was a designer only a few years into my career I was lucky enough to participate in an exploratory, blue-sky design project where the creative director told us “Before we begin: get comfortable being uncomfortable.” I took that advice to heart and it has served me ever since.
Ambiguity, lack of boundaries, and unknowns can inspire deep discomfort for some. Tom and David Kelly describe how uncertainty can be a mental blocker in their book Creative Confidence:
The need for control keeps some people stuck at the planning stage of a project. With creative confidence, they become comfortable with uncertainty and are able to leap into action.
Typically, trained designers are in the fortunate position of repeated exposure to ambiguity, so we eventually learn to get comfortable with it. I see similar perspective in yoga philosophy which teaches that when entering a challenging position, to acknowledge the discomfort as a first a step toward pushing your own boundaries, playing your edge, and eventually finding ease. To apply this to my role as a design leader, I communicate to my team “It’s okay not to know everything, and we should not let it stop us from making progress.” It means that with repetitive exposure, one day I could do a handstand. Or grasp a fundamental understanding of some advanced computer science concept well enough to explain it to my grandparents. Maybe.
Awareness that your domain knowledge is limited is healthy, and design leaders can help by being transparent with stakeholders about their team’s need for time to on-board and get comfortable, so they can move toward making.
6. Make to make progress
In Enterprise Design Thinking, the “Loop” is a mental model that advances our work through a continuous cycle of observing, reflecting, and making. Sometimes designers feel that they have not spent enough time in observation — or performed enough research — in order to make anything, and they stall out.
When you are a designer working in an area that is particularly complex, one way to move forward is to create visuals that reflect your understanding of what you have learned, and put them in the context of a story.
Amanda Shearon, a designer on my team has a superpower of untangling complex concepts and making progress by making. She described her approach on a project involving a complex flow of information:
I thought of the new domain like arriving in a new city without a map. In order to get my bearings, I started by creating my own so I could understand “landmarks” and start to make connections between things. Our role as designers is to help others navigate this domain with the map we create.
Her maps connect technology to job roles, teams, and the flow of information. The narrative that accompanies these maps becomes an important tool for understanding, and for driving productive conversations with subject matter experts.
Another powerful example is the creative process that took place during the development of a game that IBM Research released in 2018. Hello Quantum teaches some of the basic principles of quantum computing to general audiences through a series of puzzles.
The problem was to take complex concepts of quantum computing, keep them high level enough for non-experts, yet scientifically sound and make it fun. This was non-trivial. It was no wonder the project had gone on for a few months and was approaching a stall-out.
Amanda became involved as the primary designer on this project, in collaboration with mobile developers and a quantum expert. Amanda and I talked about how challenging it was to design the game core mechanic, as she was new to the quantum computing domain at the time.
There was a high barrier to entry on this project, so I had to use my beginner’s mindset. I went to the whiteboard and started doodling in order to explore how I could visualize quantum states in the simplest forms. These early sketches became a communication tool, as well as building blocks for the future experience.
Amanda explained how she moved through the process by sharing her sketches with the team, iterating together, and eventually solving the very difficult puzzle of designing a quantum puzzle.
Hello Quantum is a great example of most of the strategies in this article at play. But in particular, taking the risk to put ideas down — regardless of whether they are right, wrong, or somewhere in-between — is what catalyzed a breakthrough on the project.
Consider visual explorations non-precious. They may see multiple revisions, complete overhauls, or the trash. The important part is that you are engaging in making as a way of advancing the work.
Share your strategies for getting up to speed in complex domains
I hope these tips help you bust through complexity, get up to speed quickly, and move toward making progress on your projects. I’d love to hear examples of how you have been able to “reach the banana.” Please leave comments and share your stories!
Continue the dialog in-person! If you are planning to attend SXSW in Austin this year, check out the talk Designing for Tech You Don’t Get by Mrinali Kamath & Julianna Murphy.
Special thanks to both of them for inspiring me to finish this article:)
