Systems thinking makes your content strategy more creative
Start talking about systems and it hits some people like a dose of cold medicine. Besides having little visual interest, there’s an idea that systems are the enemy of creativity. And if you’re a creative person, an enemy of yours. Systems really aren’t though.
Systems design in content strategy
To start off, let’s grab a working definition of systems in the content strategy field. Within Brain Traffic’s content strategy quad, structure and process are the two parts of systems design.
Systems design is the process of defining the architecture, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements. We’re interested in creating repeatable systems — both for machines and for people…
—Kristina Halvorson
No arguments. It’s just pretty tied up with content management systems (another enemy, hehe).
Cheers to Brain Traffic for launching the ship. The content strategy quad provides a model for operationalizing and managing content strategy. I interpret it as breaking the work into the needed parts with team specialization and scope. Kind of like who’s working on what and why.
What if we viewed the whole content strategy quad as a system of content? What if “systems design” isn’t just sitting outside as foundation?
Drawing it out
If it’s freed from the confines of the operation, what are other ways to slice content strategy? (Just going with it here.) My curiosity is in other models of content strategy that may coexist. In particular, what ways can we make sense of content strategy by shifting our perspective? How can we get different perspectives through our way of looking and questioning?
Systems design can encompass more than structure and process as a foundation for content strategy. That is, systems, including computer systems with their workflows and rendering, and “systems” the conceptual point of view, that’s worth study, debate and practice in content strategy.
“Systems of content” (not to be confusing or excluding your CMS)
Taking an abstract, systems perspective is necessary for doing content strategy. This is one thing differentiating it from content creation. We look at content as a body of stuff beyond the screen.
Content strategists zoom and angle their view to consider content as it links many parts to something bigger. We tend to focus on things, mainly because they’re things teams and partner teams deliver. It might even be common to think of these as existing in these layers.
One way toward systems thinking is to first start thinking more holistically.
For example, you might see a piece of content that’s too long for a design component. Without a systems perspective, the solution is to shorten that content. But you could be missing a lot.
You could look at design and learn that your requirements weren’t considered, and none of your real life content fits. You could look at search and find that the topic of your content is conflated. You could look at customers and learn that they’re consuming something else.
Thinking holistically, rather than in fragments, can help your content strategy. But we can push it another step with systems thinking.
Systems don’t kill creativity; they redirect it
Using some of the tools of systems thinking, you can go further with abstraction. It not only helps you understand the whole, but places importance on how the parts interconnect. More specifically, it looks for causality and flow between the parts. The parts are less important.
Here’s an example. If we have desired communication to staff at work, filling a gap in information, it increases the number of email. This affects all the other parts of the system.
If you have to consider how changing one affects whole, designing toward a system’s goal takes creativity. In systems thinking, you look more for relationships, varying them, to think about how it alters the system.
To make it more challenging, the system is vast, dynamic and evolving with an amount of untended, collective resistance and consequences. You may not see the impacts immediately.
As you look at parts and connections of the whole, you uncover more potential, and avoid shifting the problem to someplace else. Working this way has helped my teams find breakdowns and spot to leverage, as well as thread solutions, distribute resources and sequence tasks.
It’s like your team implements a solution and the system responds, “Okay, now solve it riding a unicycle on the moon.”
You might also state this as, because you have less control, you have to be more creative. Creativity is born from the constraint of designing within and between parts that work together to achieve performance targets for your content.
Creativity is in many ways situational, not some inborn faculty or personality trait. Without constraints, the research suggests, we tend instead to simply retrieve exemplary use cases from memory; we typically sit on a chair, so that’s how we think of chairs.
— Scott Sonenshein
That’s the strategy bit in content strategy. The system forces your creativity situationally when being strategic. Figuring out “how to” do content strategy is also part of the work of the strategy. There’s not one way or pure method you follow like a recipe. In my own work, I borrow from system thinking to help.
Producing original, imaginative work
Systems theorists note many creative opportunities from using their approach:
- Create pressure to explore new possibilities
- Focus on bigger decisions/impact and deal with persistent problems
- Up-level skills, knowledge and point of view
- Complement linear thinking
- Provide counterpoint to analysis (or breaking things down)
- See action as experimentation
- Share meaning and purpose by building holistically
- Vet instances and systems against one another, poking at one-off’s
- Find changes in the environment that produce improvements
How do you start?
- First, there’s a ton of great work on systems to learn from. If you haven’t already, head over to my citation and inspiration list of Leyla Acaroglu, Valerie Chanal, Peter Senge or John Gall.
- Change your perspective. If you look only at a piece of content on a screen, you’ll gain a less-than-shallow understanding of how the system works. You’re limiting yourself to what you can see. If you wear prescription glasses, switching your perspective feels like the ophthalmologist asking, “Which lens is better… this or this… this or this…?”
- Keep stepping back. This is Senge’s advice. What all is at play and how does it happen altogether? Start asking repeatedly, “how did this thing get this way?” You can cut out a small area to work within. Knowing what’s outside that area will make the changes within meaningful.
While your artistic creativity is admired, you can also tap into new sources and expressions of creativity when you design systems. Both kinds only make your content better.
