lucid plot

In February I spoke at the Interaction12 Conference in Dublin, the IxDA’s first conference in Europe. Here’s the video of my talk, “Effective Interaction Designers Change Organisations”, which is about the revolutionary changes facing organisations right now. User experience professionals need to help organisations change how they operate, if we have any hope of sustainably delivering appropriate user experiences. I talk about service design, cross-channel user experience, content strategy, web governance, and the lean startup movement.

You can also view the slides on SlideShare (they’ve been viewed over 33,000 times–crazy.)

Jonathan Kahn: Effective Interaction Designers Change Organisations from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Slides

As part of a series of interviews with presenters at the upcoming Together London Masterclasses, May 3-4 2012, I interviewed Randall Snare and Laurence Veale from iQ Content in Dublin about mobile strategy, responsive design, and adaptive content. If you like this interview, don’t miss Randall and Laurence’s masterclass on 4 May in London–tickets are still available.

At iQ Content, how long have clients been asking for mobile websites and apps, in addition to desktop websites?

LV: The last year has seen a massive change so it’s really been the last 12-18 months. They know they need to be mobile, but they’re not sure what the next step is. Should we have an app or a mobile website? So the strategy piece is one that is most needed.

Are your clients aware of the concept of responsive design yet?

LV: That depends, the more technical clients would be, but it’s the same question as we had a couple of years ago regarding web standards. Unless we spell out the benefits of responsive design upfront, then the concept remains just that.

How has the rise of mobile changed the type of work you do, and the processes you need to use?

LV: It complements the existing work we do and most of our process remains the same – i.e. user centred design being one example. So we’re not designing for mobiles, we’re designing for people who use mobiles amongst other things. One thing that I suppose we do more of is rapid prototyping, to get a real feel for how the app or mobile site or responsive design will behave. However, it does add time in terms of designing for “breakpoints” and testing on a host of different devices. Just because it’s a small screen, doesn’t make it easy.

How has the rise of mobile changed clients’ content needs, and how has that changed your work?

RS: I don’t think mobile has changed clients’ content needs; rather, I think mobile has illuminated content problems. There are still very few companies with an on staff web copywriter, and that means content is not suited for the web. That becomes even more obvious on a smaller screen.

I don’t think corporations don’t know this; I think they don’t yet have the resources to have this one web utopia we designers love to talk about. We’re used to working under constraints (i.e. reality) and can recommend the mobile strategy that works in a particular situation, which is usually in the absence of a major UX team behind a digital presence.

Where does a responsive website or app fit within an organisation?

LV: It has to fit within an overall strategy, that’s the first thing and either or both approaches need to be weighed up against objectives, user needs, technical infrastructure, internal team skills and a host of other considerations.

How do you talk about the idea of mobile strategy with clients?

LV: In lots of ways. I sometimes use analytics to demonstrate how mobile users aren’t having as positive an experience as the desktop users (even though analytics can be skewed in favour of smartphones over feature phones). Then we can talk about channels, if you’re doing this for desktop, then you need to think about mobile and then there’s the concept of “one web” – there isn’t a mobile web and a desktop web, there’s just the web, and by creating walls between the two, you could be creating obstacles down the road.

What operational changes do the organisations you come across need to make to successfully implement a mobile strategy?

LV: This sounds boring, but they need to look at a few things in terms of governance and structure.

1. Does mobile fit in with web or digital or is it separate?
2. How do I factor in creating 2, 3, 4 designs when I could have got away with just one before? This means changes to process and workflow. A good example is the adoption of a “mobile first” approach – which forces focus on just the stuff that matters most (they should have been doing this anyway).
3. Budget: Do I need to allocate additional budget for design, and for testing on a whole suite of different devices?
4. Skills: do I have the necessary skills in-house?

What link do you see between content strategy and mobile strategy?

RS: The proliferation of reading platforms has changed publishing. And that’s a combination of content strategy and technology. A lot of the content conversations I’m having now are less about copy and more about how we can get system x and system y to talk to each other or how we can make content granular enough so that there’s an automation in publication. Really that means you can’t talk about content unless you’re talking about the people responsible for it. So, technology = people. The robot revolution is sneaky.

How do you create a mobile strategy that’s sustainable over the medium term—past launch day, that is?

LV: Well, it needs to be flexible to allow for pretty rapid change. The latest iPad and what it does for lower res images on the web is a good example.

You’re leading a masterclass in London called “Mobile content: implementing a mobile strategy”. Who would benefit from attending?

RS: EVERYONE. Particularly people who are in charge of anything web for their company. It’s less about mobile and more about your audience: where they are and what they’re using. If you care about that, then you’d benefit from the workshop.

What will attendees come out of the masterclass being able to do, that they couldn’t do before?

RS: They’ll be able to speak the language of mobile. Some of the terms in mobile, I think, are purposefully ambiguous, and not in an art house way. They’ll be comfortable in the technological solutions that should start at the strategic level. They’ll also be adept at adaptable content, the content that is the link between their company and their customers. Finally, they’ll have a framework in which to create a mobile strategy that complements their business.

Randall on video

Here’s Randall presenting “Content and Creativity” at the London Content Strategy Meetup in March.

Randall Snare: Content and Creativity from Together London on Vimeo.

Don’t miss the masterclass

If you enjoyed this interview, don’t miss Randall and Laurence’s masterclass on 4 May in London–tickets are still available.

As part of a series of interviews with presenters at the upcoming Together London Masterclasses, May 3-4 2012, I interviewed Martin Belam about the value of organising community events, the career benefits of blogging, and the challenges of adapting content to different sized devices. If you like this interview, don’t miss Martin’s masterclass on 3 May in London–tickets are still available.

Why do you put time into organising community events like London IA?

When I was entering the profession I was very lucky that I had good support from where I worked, and I was also sent to speak at events. That meant that I got exposed to a lot of networking and knowledge-sharing, and got to listen to lots of amazing talks that expanded my ideas of what product management, user experience and information architecture could be. I really valued that, and I like to think that events like London IA help people make those first steps in the profession. For students and junior practitioners, events like London IA offer a chance–if you can get a ticket–to see two quality speakers without having to find the cash to go to a big set-piece event.

What have you learnt from organising London IA (and other events)?

That organising events is hard! For London IA we’ve benefitted from having a stable sponsor in Zebra People and a stable host in SenseWorldwide for some time. Ticketing is a constant headache–there are never enough spaces, but we are really committed to keeping the events small and intimate, and free.

You worked in Greece for a few years. How does working in London compare?

I loved working in Greece, although internet penetration there is low and connectivity is poor–certainly where I lived. I ended up dividing a lot of my work between what could be done online, and what could done offline, and doing the online part in internet cafes and bars with wifi. At home I had 28k dial-up access – it was like trying to pretend it was 1997 in 2007. I think that experience of working in busy public spaces has helped erode my concentration span when I’m in an office environment. I still find I like to get my head down and do sketching or writing out of the office. Being based in Kings Place with the Guardian I’ve used the British Library and the Wellcome Centre a lot as remote offices. The Barbican and South Bank Centre are also good places to work with a buzz around you.

The biggest difference with London though is the ability to go to lots of events in the evening. I always advise people coming into the profession to take advantage of that, and to go to as many meet-ups like London IA or the CS meetup or the UPA as possible.

How has writing a regular blog changed your work and how has it affected you career?

I think the blog has mostly been beneficial to my career. Certainly there was a period when I blogged relentlessly about the shortcomings of UK newspaper websites, and became considered an authority on it to the point where one of them hired me. It was very helpful in getting people to notice me and my work whilst I was abroad and freelancing. I might not have given it such a silly name if I’d realised how important it would be.

I believe that writing regularly helps you organise your thoughts–I try to be disciplined about my writing, and I think that makes me more disciplined in other areas of my life. I have a whiteboard in the kitchen where I keep notes of topics I’m planning to write about, and deadlines for presentations, articles, workshops, ebooks and the like. It keeps them all in the forefront of my mind.

A drawback, of course, has been when I’ve worked at places that haven’t been so open to having staff blog about their work. That can feel a bit stifling. I’m at a point in my career now where I presume that anybody who hires me realises that I do have a high profile blog and that is part of what I am about.

You write, “as information architects we’ve had nearly twenty years learning about what works and what doesn’t work on large-scale websites.” How has the rise of mobile platforms and devices changed the practice of IA?

For me the message is to find even more understanding about the context of use, and the best way to present information in an appropriate way. The best products are going to be those that deliver answers and solve problems for users at the moment that they need them on their “tiny mobile computers”–I think phones/tablets/retro-digital-watches-with-wifi fit into that “tiny mobile computer” space.

How do you see IA working with both responsive web design and content strategy to create sustainable user experiences?

The seemingly endless turf war between job titles and disciplines in our area of work disinterests me. I want to produce the best possible product for end users. One that marries a user goal to a business goal. For me IA is crucial to that–whether it’s about organising the information on screen, or organising information during production.

How does your job as an IA relate to organisational change?

I don’t know whether it is the IA part of my job that relates to organisational change, but for most of my career I’ve ended up in the digital outpost of an older company trying to cope with the transformation and disruption that technology is bringing to their business. IA is a useful tool, though, in demonstrating that the kind of constraints that old organisational structures and hierarchies put on information that mean little or nothing to the end user. I think a key aspect is that you always want to test and validate an information architecture scheme with end users, which helps drive user-centred design into a business.

You mentioned in your CS Forum talk that the Guardian’s CMS isn’t locked down, so in theory any user could update the home page, although they’d lose their job in the morning. Does this indicate a more mature attitude to governance than the traditional locked-down IT approach, and is there anything we can learn from it?

I wonder if it is more of an example of taking an agile approach to development. At every stage of building the CMS, faced with the choice of delivering something of value to the end user or of value to the content production team or delivering some workflow security, then training and trust for workflow seemed to be the faster cheaper option. There are some restrictions on what people can do, but eventually you have to make a decision about whether you try and use technology to prevent bad behaviour, or trust your staff not to indulge in bad behaviour.

What do you mean by “responsive IA”?

By “responsive IA” I mean to understand the best way to present information in the context of use and in the context of the device being used.

How does CMS design need to change to enable responsive IA?

I think the CMS approach is very interesting here. I’ve long argued that a good content management system for the end user is often a content authoring tool, not a management tool at all, and I hate presenting users with things that essentially look like a view onto a database. If, however, you are thinking about structuring your content more rigidly to provide differing views depending on the device your user has chosen, you are going to probably need more structure.

You’re leading a masterclass in May called “Responsive information architecture”. Who should come to the masterclass?

I think anyone who is likely to be working on a responsive design project in the near future would benefit, whether they are specifically IAs, UX people, product managers or product owners.

What will attendees come out of the masterclass being able to that they couldn’t do before?

I really want to tackle the underlying structure of information that we present to people. When faced with a small screen it is really easy to strip a design back to a few headlines or links, a tiny logo, and a little bit of navigation. It is easy to decide that you need the user to login to an app, and present them with a tiny facet of the information available based on that login. To me though, the biggest question is this–once you’ve designed a great experience for a small screen, how do you decide what extra information people need as their screen gets bigger? How do you ensure you aren’t just filling up screen real estate rather than adding value for the user? And how do you justify and measure those decisions? It is a fascinating challenge, and one I hope people will enjoy spending a day examining it with me.

Don’t miss the masterclass

If you enjoyed this interview, don’t miss Martin’s masterclass on 3 May in London–tickets are still available.

As part of a series of interviews with presenters at the upcoming Together London Masterclasses, May 3-4 2012, I interviewed Gerry McGovern about grown-up web metrics, organisational change for web management, customer centric thinking, and his “top task management” approach. If you like this interview, don’t miss Gerry’s masterclass on 3 May in London–tickets are still available.

What experiences led you to the Top Task Management approach?

People come to websites to do. That’s what makes the Web so different from other media. They don’t want to be communicated at or marketed to. They want to do, and there is always a small set of top tasks that most customers expect to be able to do quickly and easily. If this is true on the Web, it is even more true for mobile.

At your company Customer Carewords, what does a typical consulting engagement look like?

There are usually two parts. The first is to identify the customer top tasks. This can take up to three months and involves developing a comprehensive list of customer tasks based on research of the current website, search analysis, various customer feedback and research, competitors, social media, etc. Once the task list is complete we get customers to vote. If there are 100 customer tasks then typically the top 5 tasks will get as much of the vote as the bottom 50.

The next step is to measure the performance of the tasks. We create examples of top tasks and using remote testing, get customers to attempt to complete these tasks. We have three core metrics:

1. Success rate: how many customers successfully completed the task.
2. Disaster rate: how many customers thought they had got the right answer, but it’s the wrong answer.
3. Completion time: how long it takes customers to complete tasks.

We say that top task management is about bringing your success rate above 90%, your disaster rate below 5%, and then focusing on helping the customer complete the task in the fastest possible time.

Which companies do you consult for?

Mainly large organizations such as Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Atlas Copco, T-Mobile, etc. There have been over 400 implementations of the top tasks approach.

In large organisations, which departments hire you to do consulting?

Typically, it would be from the central web team which we generally find with the Communications or Marketing departments.

How do you address web problems that cut across organisational silos, and can’t be solved within a single department?

I was with a company recently where someone told me that she wrote the description of “How to redeem a coupon,” but that another part of the organization managed the application that allowed you to redeem the coupon. She had never spoken to anyone from that department.

Silo-fication is a big challenge for large organizations today. It becomes very obvious on the Web that the organization is not collaborating internally. The Web is the place you hang out your dirty linen for everyone to see. One of the benefits of the top tasks approach is that it encourages collaboration. The focus is not on the content or the technology or the organizational unit, but rather on the task of the customer.

In your CS Forum talk you gave the example of NHS Direct, where nobody was responsible for “helping people check symptoms”—people were responsible for content, or technology, or design, but not for helping customers achieve tasks. How does the Top Task Management approach address this type of problem?

It measures outcomes instead of inputs. Focusing on the content is too narrow and often leads to navel-gazing and lots of content professionals telling each other how important content is. Focusing on what your content helps people do changes the whole dynamic. People want to check symptoms. Shouldn’t it be a core objective of a health website to help people check symptoms? It’s not enough to say you have content on symptoms. You have to manage and measure the outcome—whether people can actually check their symptoms.

You also said that most web teams use inappropriate metrics that don’t relate to the success of customers in using the website. If that’s true, how did organisations get into the position of using web metrics that aren’t related to business success? And how would you convince such an organisation that measuring customer task completion is best for the business? That doesn’t seem to have occurred to them yet!

It’s all part of the Cult of Volume. Years ago, when the Web was starting out, web teams were desperately trying to prove that their website was important. So they looked at their statistics and found the biggest number they could find, which was called HITS. Now, HITS stands for How Idiots Track Success.

Most web metrics aren’t much better than HITS. They tell you about what has happened but not why. So, I’m sure BP were delighted by the fact that they had lots of visitors to their website after the oil spill. If most of the customers coming to your website go to Support is that a good thing? If people are spending lots of time on your website maybe it’s because it’s confusing. If people spend lots of time reading content on a particular page does that mean the content is good or bad?

Would you pay sales people based on how much they talked? Yet, that’s how content people are measured—based on how much they write. It’s so often about crude volume measures. These measures are used because they give the impression that something is happening, that some value is being created. But in many situations volume is actually a measure of value destruction. If we do not know what our customers want to do and whether they have been able to do it, how can we really measure or manage anything?

Is it really possible to change the culture of an organisation from organisation-centric to customer-centric? If so, where have you seen this happen successfully, and how long did it take?

Nothing is immovable, nothing is forever. Look at IBM. It managed to change itself from being a hardware company to being a services company. The change is not easy but it’s not impossible. Today, most organizations are still structured for a pre-Web world. They want to tell customers things and they want to get customers to do what the organization wants them to do. They think they can use clever marketing, PR and advertising to do this. That’s not the way the world works today. It’s a customer’s world. Social media is about customer power, not organizational power. It is not a matter of choice for organizations to become more customer centric. Those that don’t will go into decline.

Have you found that running a Top Tasks exercise helps to change organisational culture? If so, how?

When we start a top tasks project many people within the organization will say that they don’t have tasks, that they have tools or information. Showing that every tool has a purpose, that customers always have a task in mind when they look for information, can really turn the light on. All this stuff within the organization should have a purpose—a customer task—and if it doesn’t, then why is it there? It’s the same for intranets. We ask: how does this help employees complete a task?

Actually, once people get used to the tasks concept they often get excited. It’s much more rewarding when you can see your content actually help someone achieve something. When we start focusing on the outcomes that leads to a much more fulfilling career. Because you can see how what you do as a professional impacts on the customer. So, that’s a real driver of change.

You’ve argued that the web is revolutionising marketing, sales, customer service, and support. Are the senior managers you speak to ready to accept these radical changes, or are they still in a state of denial?

Many are still in a state of denial, hoping, I suppose, that they retire before the impact of the revolution truly hits home. But there is progress for sure. Many in senior management saw the Web initially as an IT challenge but that has all changed. It moved over to Marketing or Communications for a while, but I see a growing recognition that the Web is primarily about service—self-service. So, there is a growing sense that a website is not just about pretty pictures and propaganda.

Another trend I see is how organizations are moving slowly away from a model of teams to a model of networks. Instead of setting up a team to deal with a project—with the team nearly always coming from the same department, we now see loose networks being formed that tend to be cross-departmental. This is a very hopeful sign.

You’re leading a masterclass in London called “Creating service-focused websites”. Who is it for, and what will attendees learn?

It is essentially for people involved in managing or running large, complex websites. Where there are a lot of demands on the web team from the tiny tasks (low customer demand but high political clout). The methods in the masterclass will give you the evidence to prioritize and focus. It will give you the capacity to say no to the tiny tasks and to develop a model of continuous improvement for your customers’ top tasks.

Can you share any success stories from previous masterclasses you’ve led?

We do a lot of work with Cisco. A top task of Cisco customers is to download software updates. Working with the Cisco team, the average time for a software download has been reduced from 280 seconds to 100 seconds. In 2011, Cisco was awarded No 1 spot for usability among large technology websites by Site IQ. Microsoft have used to top tasks approach for their Pinpoint site which is a marketplace where you find IT consultancies and third party software vendors. The approach helped them increase customer inquiries from 9% to 25%; so 25% of those visiting the site now end up contacting a Microsoft partner.

Gerry on video

Here’s Gerry’s keynote speech at the Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London.

Gerry McGovern — Keynote: Manage the tasks, not the content from Together London on Vimeo.

Don’t miss the masterclass

If you enjoyed this interview, don’t miss Gerry’s masterclass on 3 May in London–tickets are still available.

I’m excited to announce the first of a series of full-day events we’re organizing: Together London Masterclasses on May 3-4 2012, at the Mermaid Conference Centre at Blackfriars in central London. They’re full-day intensive learning sessions from industry thought leaders, and you won’t want to miss them.

Gerry McGovern—Creating service-focused websites

The future of the web is about self-service: helping people serve themselves quickly and easily. Your web career—your future—is about understanding how to create quality service-focused websites. This masterclass will help you do that. Full description of Gerry’s masterclass.

Martin Belam—Responsive information architecture

How can we apply the principles of information architecture (IA) in a world of proliferating mobile devices, “responsive design”, and “mobile first” projects? Whether your product is content-based or transactional, Martin’s techniques will help you to design for the modern multi-platform web without throwing out the principles of user-centered design—including business goals, user research, stakeholder facilitation, and working with agile development teams. Full description of Martin’s masterclass.

Lisa Welchman—Web governance for your organisation

Who in your organisation gets to make the big decisions about your website? Multiple departments trying to control what goes on the site and conflicting ideas about the site’s purpose are a common recipe for heartache, frustration, wasted opportunities, and worst of all, a confusing digital presence. Full description of Lisa’s masterclass.

Randall Snare & Laurence Veale—Mobile content

You no longer have control over what your content looks like. Aggregators like Instapaper, Readablility, and Flipboard give users the power to read content when, where, and how they like. So we need to start focusing on the purpose and meaning of the content, rather than its layout in the page. To reach your audience in a meaningful way, you need to know how to plan for mobile content. Full description of Randall & Laurence’s masterclass.

Early bird rates available until tomorrow!

The best rates are available until Thursday 5 April, which is tomorrow–so don’t delay, register now! I hope you can make it.

I gave a short talk about web governance at iQ Content’s “lunchtime learning” session on 25 November in Dublin. Here’s a video of my presentation. Big thanks to Randall Snare for inviting me.

If web and user experience agencies want to embrace content strategy, they need to change the way they sell their services, switching from a contractor model to a consulting model. Which means throwing away some unethical working practices. Let’s talk about scoping, selling, and project management.

Three ways to scope a project

Back in October 2010, Stacey King Gordon posted Content strategy and the project pricing dilemma to the content strategy Google group. She posed an insightful question which started a great discussion. Here’s an extract:

…[an agency I collaborate with] work hard to price the end-to-end design project based on assumptions — the client’s, theirs, and mine as the content strategist. However, as I dig in and do my work — content analysis, stakeholder interviews, brand research — the scope of the project inevitably grows. It’s very difficult to be accurate in what the final site will entail until the content strategy work has been done.

It’s worth reading the whole thread. I found this response from Karen McGrane particularly illuminating:

This is a common problem when you try to scope development—both copywriting and technology—without a clear understanding of what will be required. There are really only three options:

1. Only work with clients that will accept a 2-phased project (strategy/design + development)
2. Only deliver work within the bounds of the initial contract
3. Change order, change order, change order

We treat web design like accountancy

Karen’s three-way choice about how to scope projects provides a neat way to explain the changes I’ve noticed in the way UX-like services—web and interaction design, software development, content development, etc.—are bought and sold.

Option 1 implies a consultancy relationship: the client thinks that they need expert help to work out where they are, and where they need to go, before they can start implementation. This is strategy.

Options 2 and 3 are more like a vendor, solution provider, or contractor relationship: the client knows what they want, and they’re shopping around for someone who has the right experience and can agree on terms. This type of relationship is familiar and comfortable for organizations: it’s similar to the relationship they might have with standardized professional services firms like accountants, or software vendors, or even cleaning contractors. This is tactics.

Until recently, most organizations have managed to buy these types of services using options 2 and 3. Need a website redesign? Write a request for proposal (RFP) and send it to some agencies to get quotes. Agencies like selling in this way too. Why is that?

Fixed specs are attractive

Let’s start with the buyer. She works in an organizational silo: maybe it’s marketing, IT, product management, or corporate communications. Although she has organizational goals in mind when she decides to start a web initiative, she’s more focused on her silo’s goals. All of her budget comes from the silo, and her performance is measured based on that silo’s metrics, not on the higher-level goals of the business. From the client’s point of view, it’s much easier to buy a fixed-price, nailed-down contract.

Even if she has some doubts about what should be in the spec, it’s easier to get her manager to fund a clearly-articulated, conservative scope than an open-ended strategic exploration whose results are unknown, and which could easily open a can of worms. For example, it might suggest that the organization needs to change the way it operates in some way. My goodness, we might need to talk to the other departments! Our client wants a quiet life, and that’s scary stuff right there.

We could be forgiven for thinking, “those wretched clients! Why are they so short-sighted?” But that’s only half the story. Web professionals are scared of strategy, and we use the distraction sell to keep projects within our comfort zones. We’re comfortable using option 2, and option 3 is even better, because it allows us to blame those pesky clients for all the faulty assumptions in the original contract. There’s nothing the lizard brain likes better than setting ourselves up for failure.

But fixed specs are dangerous

So what’s wrong with fixed specs? Let’s start with economics. Do you ever see web designers complaining on twitter about crappy RFPs, and how difficult it is to compete on price with the 3000 other web design shops who claim to be able to do great work for peanuts? Have you ever come across a client who decided to outsource their work to a contractor thousands of miles away in a low-cost location? Or have you ever heard copywriters complaining that companies just don’t appreciate the true value of content?

If the spec really is nailed down, if the strategy work’s been done—that is, if the client truly knows what they need—the actual implementation work is less valuable, more price-sensitive, and will eventually become commoditized. Someone else will do it for less, and probably to a good-enough standard. (Jared Spool calls this distinction hands vs. brains.) That’s great if you’re creating a factory-style contracting business in a low cost economy, but if you live in London or San Francisco, eventually you’ll have problems funding your latte and iPad habit.

Many web projects are sold in a murky bait-and-switch fashion, where the agency agrees to an unrealistic fixed spec written by the client, and then hopes that once the problems become obvious, the client will prefer to pay their way out of the mess rather than starting over with a new agency. You’ll recognize this practice from the technology industry, who call it lock-in. (They used to say that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. That isn’t true any more.)

I see the move towards content strategy as part of a slow recognition that this type of sales and project management has mostly been disastrous. Objectives aren’t met, nobody plans for content governance, and projects focus on short-term pizazz instead of achieving business objectives in a sustainable way.

Client: “We want content strategy, but we need to know what it looks like first”

Let’s return to Stacey’s question. We’re competing for a client project, and we want to include a content strategy piece, because we know it’s the right thing to do for the success of the project—and it will also differentiate our proposal. But we’re worried that the client won’t buy a two-phase project, because they want to compare our proposal with all the others. And the RFP has a set budget and timeline.

The tempting option (which Stacey explains in the thread) is to add a line item for “content strategy”, make some assumptions about the outcome of that process, and then bake those assumptions into a single-phase proposal that includes implementation (and presumably a commitment to a fixed delivery date.)

Here’s the problem: if these assumptions are correct, the client isn’t ready for content strategy. They’re not ready to acknowledge a problem that’s bigger than a silo or a delivery channel, or to ask consultants to help them with strategy. It’s much easier to say, “we need technical help with development, design, and web writing” than to say “we need strategic advice, web therapy, and inter-department facilitation.” Crucially, the person buying probably isn’t ready to become an agent of change in their organization. Change hurts, and actively advocating for it scares the hell out of people.

No content strategy? That’s a show-stopper

When a client asks an agency to build a website, and admits to not having a content strategy, that’s a show-stopper. You can’t just graft strategy onto the project and cross your fingers.

Just because a client says they want content strategy, it doesn’t mean that they understand what that actually entails, or that they’re ready to start changing the organization. The best we can do is to explain the problem as clearly as we can, talk about the pain and suffering that will continue to occur if it isn’t addressed, and politely decline work when clients don’t appreciate the value of a strategic approach. They’ll be back, in time.

Good news for content strategy advocates

This is great news for those of us who are tying to raise our game, to leave our comfort zones, and to get our practice to a place where it sustainably serves both business objectives and user needs. (Note: if you’re already there, congrats! Many of us aren’t.)

The sales methods and working practices of many existing agencies (and internal teams too) are threatened by the growing realization among clients that their web initiatives aren’t effective. And the two-stage scoping model is key to understanding this shift. Can traditional agencies hack it?

The skills that a web professional needs are changing: it’s less about design chops, technical prowess, web writing skills–all essential of course, but also widely and cheaply available. The skills that set true web professionals apart are interpersonal skills like facilitation, counseling, advocacy, diplomacy, pragmatism, and patience. And the courage to be an agent of change.

In practice it will take a long time for client-side advocates to lead their organizations into the change management programs they actually need to start to get a hold of their content and web problems. But it’s starting to happen. And those of us who work as consultants should take an active role in the process, by refusing to participate in unethical selling practices.

Good news for web professionals: we’ve hit the big time. There’s nobody worth listening to who still thinks that the rise of the internet is a passing fad, that the web is just another channel, or that its influence on our companies, governments, and social lives isn’t revolutionary.

But our organizations are still set up like none of that has happened. Pre-web processes, job descriptions, culture, attitudes—corporate denial. It’s 1994 all over again.

The impending crisis

Here’s the problem. The disconnection between the way organizations operate and the web’s revolutionary changes is getting so big that it’s causing a crisis. Most organizations still don’t have the basics of web strategy, governance, execution, and measurement covered. Ten years ago that was a competitive disadvantage. Today it’s a set of chronic risks: strategic, financial, regulatory, and legal.

Which is where you come in.

Web governance is nobody’s job, so make it yours

Today, web professionals face a stark choice.

We can keep our heads down while watching this slow-motion train crash from the comfort of our official job descriptions, perhaps taking some perverse pleasure in the fact that we told people this would happen, and they ignored us. This is the way to make ourselves replaceable, outsource-able, fireable—not to mention depressed. The best possible outcome is that someone else decides to take the lead, but a long, painful decline is more likely. This route doesn’t require any courage, but it’s reckless all the same. As Christine Pierpoint puts it, “be careful of what you wish for”.

The alternative is to acknowledge that establishing web governance is nobody’s job, and instead of whining about it, make it our own. That means stepping outside of our comfort zones and job descriptions, speaking up against the status quo, and leading. Scary stuff.

What Seth Godin taught me about web governance

If that makes you think it might be time to leave the web profession and transition to something safer, stay with me for a moment. This problem isn’t exclusive to our profession.

In his masterpiece Linchpin, Seth Godin describes the effect of the end of the industrial era on our organizations:

We have gone from two teams (management and labour) to a third team, the linchpins.

Godin’s linchpin is an indispensable person: an artist, someone who exerts emotional labour to overcome the resistance, who challenges the status quo, who pursues human connection, who makes change by leading and shipping.

We’re living through a period of massive cultural change, and the rise of the web is at the center of it. Organizations need linchpins in order to survive, because they need to change how they operate to fit the realities of the changing world. And when it comes to the web, most organizations have been trying to ignore change for so long that they’re suffering from a serious case of denial.

So if you’re convinced by Godin–and you should be, he makes a strong case–it’s not just web people who face a stark choice. Every professional in the Western world is in a similar situation: if you don’t lead your organization by becoming an agent of change, you’ll become a replaceable cog.

How to talk so management will listen

So what does being a linchpin have to do with web governance, and how can we apply it in practice? Stop whining and start leading.

We’ve all done it: whining about how difficult it is to do our jobs, how nobody appreciates us, how colleagues don’t understand what we do, how our jobs are made impossible by organizational culture. It’s almost standard practice for web professionals. The problem is, whining is the perfect way to get management to write off our concerns as the obsessive-compulsive ranting of geeks with poor interpersonal skills and no understanding of business objectives. We can do better.

When we whine and complain, we’re effectively asking others to give us permission to make the changes we need to do our jobs properly. That permission will never come.

The only way out is to stop waiting for permission, and to start leading. This isn’t technically complex, but it takes courage: the willingness to leave our comfort zones, face our own fear of confronting the status quo, and overcome our resistance to shipping. It also takes a lot of messy interpersonal work: advocacy, facilitation, diplomacy, pragmatism, and patience. This is what Godin calls “emotional labour”. Like it or not, these are the key skills of the modern web professional.

If we want to talk so management will listen, we need to sell to their pain. What risks is the organization taking by ignoring web governance problems? What opportunities is it missing? How could overcoming the challenges we’re facing as web professionals improve the organization’s future prospects, or its competitiveness?

Get out of your comfort zone: ship web governance

This is a time of huge opportunity for web professionals. But if you want to embrace it, you need to leave your comfort zone and start shipping. Become a linchpin, an agent of change, and a web governance advocate. Your organization needs you.

Note: For a longer take on web governance, check out my recent article in A List Apart.

I’ve written an article for A List Apart magazine called “Web Governance: Becoming an Agent of Change”:

The web’s hit the big time in a way few of us imagined possible. So as people who make websites, you’d think we’d be celebrating our repeated successes in designing amazing user experiences, as the organizations we work for become increasingly successful. But many of us have noticed a problem in our work: the user experiences we deliver don’t meet our expectations. Here’s the problem: organizations are the context for our work, and when it comes to the web, organizations are broken.

It’s two weeks since the end of Confab: the Content Strategy Conference, hosted in Minneapolis by the delightful Brain Traffic, but I’m still reeling. It was that good. If you haven’t read some of the 5 billion live-blog posts, recaps, and session notes, you’ll want to do that now. And if you didn’t hear that we toured Fire Station 11 during a tornado warning on Tuesday evening, well, I have evidence.

So what’s the big deal, you ask? Surely the cake-related sugar high has worn off?

First, there’s something magical about seeing so many twitter avatars transformed into real live human beings, all at once. Sure, CS Forum 10 in Paris had some of that, but this was more than twice the size. Second, Confab was the best organized conference I’ve ever attended, thanks to the amazing work of Erik Westra, Clinton Forry, Lauren Cramer, Sean Tubridy, and Kristina Halvorson—who forced the others to take the stage for applause during her keynote. The millions of humorous, practical, cake-and-bourbon-related, or just plain thoughtful touches made us feel welcome and cared for in way I’ve never experienced before. But wait, there’s more.

From push-back to collaborative problem-solving

What actually blew me away was the attendees. Hundreds of people from a huge range of backgrounds—writing, editing, web development, design, technology, marketing, sales—all there either to find out what the content strategy conversation is about, or to learn from others about how to start making change in their organizations. If you’ve read the write-ups, you’ll see a “this isn’t rocket-science” theme: the speakers weren’t revealing new and revolutionary techniques, magic technologies, or simple 7-step programs to content nirvana. As James Callan put it:

Here’s something that surprised me: I was inspired by all of the presenters, but I was not awed by them. (Not all of them all the time, anyway.) I came away from several sessions realizing that I know stuff like that, and I could probably work on doing a better job of sharing that knowledge. (Could? Should.)

This is the first content strategy conference I’ve attended where the attendees didn’t push back against the speakers—they didn’t need to be convinced that our organizations’ content problems are strategic, or that the only way to fix them is to become agents of change. Instead of saying, “no, this couldn’t work for me”, or “I need a rock-solid case study to guarantee my business case”, people were digging into the messy reality of ways they could advocate for content strategy, collaborate with their colleagues, and start to turn the oil tanker around.

My other favorite write-up was Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s “On Confab, Conflict, and Collaboration”:

…But elbows are a short-term game plan. Once you’ve established a bit of voice, it’s time for ears to take over – time to start listening to and collaborating with those people we fought so hard to let us in in the first place.

Once we’ve convinced our stakeholders that a lack of content strategy is a problem, that content is a critical business asset, that we can’t go on like this without taking crazy risks—they’ll ask us what to do about it. And suddenly we’re in the change management business. In their presentations, both Ian Alexander and Karen McGrane called out change management as the real meat of content strategy.

It’s difficult, messy work, and it goes against both our society’s cultural norms and our personal habits as nerds—but ain’t nobody going to make those changes if we don’t. Confab showed me that we have a community of people who are spending their time sharing and learning from each other about how to change their organizations so that they can start to get hold of the overwhelming problems associated with content strategy, web strategy, and web governance.

That’s amazing. What I learned at Confab is that all of us can and should do more to broaden the conversation, involve more people, start to get this change train moving. Brain Traffic and others have led the way: now it’s your turn. Start a meetup, host a work lunch, write a blog post, submit a talk to a conference.

Wrapping up Confab in London

If you can get to London on Tuesday 7 June, a few of us are putting on a special event to do just that, and I’d love it if you could join us. It’s called “Wrapping up Confab, unwrapping CS Forum”:

In a series of lightning-style talks of 5 minutes each (with plenty of pauses for drinks), eight speakers (including two international guests) will fill you in on what they learned at Confab, the groundbreaking U.S. content strategy conference, earlier this month—followed by a sneak peek of what’s to come this September at CS Forum 11 in London.

Hosted in the stunning Mermaid Centre, join us to learn, talk, socialise, discuss, network, pow-wow, postulate and surmise. And did we mention it’s free?

Tickets are free but limited, so get yours while they’re still available.

Come to Content Strategy Forum London

And consider coming to Content Strategy Forum London, 5-7 September. We’re featuring 39 speakers from 11 countries including Norway, Australia, Finland, South Africa, Ireland and the UK, and our headliners are the incomparable Gerry McGovern and Karen McGrane. Attendees have registered from across Europe, and as far away as the USA, Canada, South Africa, and Australia.

Early bird pricing ends on 3 June, which is just over a week away, so register now to get the best rates. See you there!