Extracting the Positives

So in my last post I documented some of the context and reasoning behind my decision to take a break from corporate life. After reading it over, I realized it may have come off as a strong response to a huge negative part of my life, with only one possible outcome for recovery. Although the negatives did culminate in a breaking point event, like everything else in life the journey was way more nuanced than I portrayed and over the next little while I want to touch on a few important positives I will be taking with me from my old life to my new one.

First a quick backgrounder: I’ve been in design and tech for the past 20 years, starting my professional career as a UX Design practitioner with an engineering mindset (although my friends and classmates may rightly contest that!) Having entered the working world at the cusp of Internet and Web technology popularization, I was enamoured with the human side of technology. After all, with connectivity becoming more and more pervasive in our everyday lives, what was the point of all this great tech if nobody could use it?

As a UX Designer I honed my skills in all areas of the practice within digital product design. I helped design products and services for consumers (B2C), for businesses and enterprise (B2B), for ecommerce and SaaS (Software as a Service). Commonly, designers utilize a design process similar to the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond. The Double Diamond is rooted in what we would call Design Thinking -- a methodology for innovation.

Design Thinking for What’s Next

As an advocate and practitioner of design thinking, I’ve come to realize there are many problem spaces you can tackle with design thinking methodology. In the corporate world it has become the norm to apply design thinking to find solutions to business problems. Design thinking is in the most simple terms, applying toolkits and frameworks that designers often use to dive deeper into understanding needs, and then solving for those needs in creative, collaborative ways. Many of us likely apply design thinking approaches to our work lives, but how would you apply it to your own search for self-improvement?

Battling the Hoard

Maybe it’s best to take a simple example -- my battle with clutter and hoarding.

Many of you may have challenges reigning in all of the stuff that comes into our lives. I know I do, and if you ask my wife, she will definitely add some colourful language for punctuation. I believe part of my story begins with an immigrant family upbringing. My parents grew up in some really poor conditions in post-WW2 Hong Kong before moving to Canada. The scarcity mindset was incredibly pervasive in our daily lives, despite my parents building a really solid financial foundation as new Canadians. Saving and penny-pinching was the norm and this attitude transcended monetary measures into physical objects. We never got rid of anything, because god forbid what if we needed it in the future? Then we’d have to spend money to buy it again! And worse yet, with this mindset, it felt like you were throwing away the money you used to pay for that item, even though it was way past its usefulness. Even after eventually being able to afford a larger house, we had rooms full of things that just gathered dust, added cognitive (and physical) load to actually finding things we needed, and took away our ability to use that storage space for much more productive and fulfilling family activities.

I’ve since moved out of my parents house many years ago, but needless to say, those old habits die hard. The rooms dedicated to storage in my own family house are overflowing, disorganized, and just a pain to think about. I’m embarrassed to say a few moving boxes have followed me around unopened for years, and across the country!

Discover

Let’s take the first phase of the Double Diamond -- Discover. A designer’s discovery process is about understanding and empathizing -- getting a solid picture of all of the needs, wants, and pain points, with no biases attached. Many companies employ teams to carry out market and user research activities, customer interviews, and deep dives into product usage data. You’re trying to mix and match the right methodologies to even know what the right questions you should be asking are.

So how does a discovery phase in design thinking help here? Since this is a personal issue and not targeting a customer, there is actually a lot of introspection required in this phase. In this phase you want to ask lots of open ended questions related to your area of discovery. For me trying to unpack my hoarding instincts, I may ask questions like: Why am I like this? What are the root causes? What part of my upbringing and context has affected this part of my psyche, and why? Are there certain things I hoard more than others? Is the majority of the clutter old, untouched stuff or recent things like the pile of paper receipts and unopened mail? What problems is this causing -- lack of space? Visual clutter? Unpaid bills? Could I examine and map the lifecycle of a paper bill or Costco receipt to get a sense of where things end up and why? As part of my data collection I "interviewed" myself and tried to answer these questions.

The deeper you go and the more you document, the more you understand about the factors that are involved. And even though this self-reflection seems to bring up obvious truths, in this case the simple fact of questioning and taking time to think deeply can be quite enlightening. There may be a data aspect to this as well -- even in my case I could take an audit and see the makeup of my clutter, and see if there’s any themes or trends that come to the surface. If this is a different issue such as improving my physical health, there might be a quantified self metric that can come into play to help you understand the bigger picture. An example could be analyzing my sleep quantity over a period of time, or my resting heart rate.

Define

In the Discovery phase, you’ve more than likely come up with more problems than you can shake a stick at! In this next phase we take all of the observations and data we’ve collected and we use that to figure out and focus on the best problem to solve at this moment. This may turn out to be the biggest pain point we’ve uncovered, or one that seems minor but unlocks even more opportunity in the future. To figure out how best to proceed, we need to synthesize and analyze our research results. What we’re looking to do here is pull out recurring themes, journeys, and how those affect your emotions and ability to get to your outcome.

In my clutter example, it might entail taking that audit of my belongings and then realizing a great problem to tackle would be our paperwork, since we already had a long term store (in this case a filing cabinet) and a short term store (our kitchen counter) and nothing was actually getting moved from one to the other. This could be causing a processing problem (e.g. paying bills on time) as well as a retrieval problem (e.g. can’t find that new optical prescription -- shouldn’t it be filed with the other prescriptions?). Another example might be our entryway where everyone invariably dumps their stuff and ends up incredibly cluttered. Is the problem that we don’t have space for the day-to-day stuff and we need to actually find room for it? Is it that we do have room but we don’t have a logical home for everything coming in on the daily, like my son’s hockey gear after a practice? Is the problem around requiring a transition area (for things to dry, like umbrellas and said sweaty hockey gear) before putting them away properly?

After consideration, I might want to tackle the first problem of paperwork, and specifically the processing problem because we were missing out on important timely notices around the kids’ school activities. Even though it sounded just as stress-inducing, the entryway clutter problem (and the rest of the hoarding in other areas of the house) could wait for another day. The point here is to focus on one problem at a time, otherwise it's easy to get overwhelmed and end up doing nothing about anything.

Develop

Now that we’re laser focused on the problem we want to solve, we can get the ideas flowing on possible solutions. This is a creative phase where we want to consider obvious as well as out of the box ideas, and then eventually converge on one that has the best chance of solving the problem we’ve set out to conquer.

This is literally the phase I’m in now with my paper processing problem. Some solutions I’ve considered are around organization: I already have an inbox, but could I organize incoming things by urgency so that I can find the most pressing items quickly? Could I make the most important things (like kids’ school notices and bills) most noticeable by reserving space on the refrigerator door to remind myself every time I grab a snack? Or could some solutions revolve around making time and making sure I’m aware of that time -- could I schedule 10 minutes every night to process the important ones right away, and then ensure any follow-on actions have time budgeted on weekends? Ultimately I want to consider all of the potential solutions I come up with and then evaluate which ones have the best chance of success.

Deliver

This phase is all about action -- we have a problem and a solution, so we need to come up with a plan and execute on it to make the solution happen. In the software world it might entail drafting up detailed designs and working with engineering teams to break down the solution into 2-week sprints until a feature can be launched to customers. In our personal world, it might be committing to a new habit or re-arranging parts of our lives.

In my paper example, I would have to figure out what new materials I need to buy; going out to buy a new inbox with folders, and using our shared family calendar to commit to consistent mail processing times until it becomes a habit. I've already started the latter and I already feel a bit more on top of things. Lots more opportunity to improve that as well as go back to my Discover and Define phases to choose another problem/solution pair to work on next!

Wrapping Up

I know I’ve chosen a simple example, but I hope it’s illustrative of the ways I’m thinking about applying design thinking to improve my life, one area at a time. In the future I'm looking forward to using these innovation practices to improve my health, relationships, and finding more meaning and fulfilment.

Who knows, one day I just might come home to a clutter free home and conquer my old engrained ways. I’ll be sure to report back on my progress!