Interactions - November/December 2017

useful, significant, and purposeful.

It’s meant to be the antithesis of chaos or simply waiting for something to happen. Yet it’s also not just copying a formula or blindly following a recipe.

Instead, good, healthy process involves smartly pursuing useful routines and sensing novel opportunities that present themselves along the way.

There is adaptation against the flexible
arc of a pathway. Process is influenced
by the modeling of actions and best
practices for everyone, and inviting all
to participate—and thus to see and live
the results. For example, posting large
printouts of journey maps on the walls,
or inviting users to your makeshift
lab every Thursday at 3 p.m. with free
cookies, leading feature discussions
by framing them with user goals and
prototypes. By doing so you will enable
a commonality of language that helps
people view and interpret the “stuff”
that gets produced accordingly, such
as wireframes, journey maps, and user
studies. The point is not to strictly
enforce a process—nobody likes to
be policed!—but rather to cultivate
and their interwoven agendas and
power relations than it is about an
organization’s size.

The four vectors are vision, strategy, process, and culture. There may be others to consider, but this serves as the fundamental set.

Why vector Because it’s more than a single moment of force applied at a point in time. Rather, it’s a directional, scaled magnitude of effort that varies over time as situations adjust, whether for or against the designer. Sometimes it will be intense, even confrontational; other times maybe not so much (like, the sprint is done and everyone is more chill). How these vectors correlate and intersect is the real fun! The truly adept designer of masterful influence knows how to be an effective force multiplier by pushing and pulling just the right levers upon people, problems, resources, and so forth—those pragmatic elements of everyday work.

Let’s take a closer look at each vector.

Vision is that painting of a vivid, compelling picture, giving material expression to a nonexistent notion ... or some manipulation of words, images, or sounds for imagined features, all to persuade and communicate that which is fuzzily bouncing around in others’ heads. Influencing a product or business vision is partially achieved by creating artifacts that progressively develop into a vital north star to guide and inspire a team. This could involve rough sketches, mocking up a press release from the future, prototyping a concept car, or shooting a video vividly portraying contexts and outcomes.

The point is to provoke stakeholders to think about what kind of world they want to help create and deliver for their customers, while it plays to their selfish agendas and benefits (for instance, their quarterly bonuses).

Strategy involves long-term foresight
via connecting dots with intent and
clarity—the shaping of a deliberate path
of potentiality, for the business and the
market (or customers). As A.G. Lafley
and Roger Martin have said, it’s about
simply knowing where to play and how
to win [ 1]. That’s it! Well, perhaps just a
bit more; there are volumes of essays and
books every year on this topic. But at the
core of it all, influencing strategy is done
via conversations that enable everyone
to truly understand the models, phases,
and scopes of impact. There’s a give
and take of points and counterpoints,
while surfacing key dependencies,
expectations, and aspirations, which
then draws attention to insights to
pull everyone forward. Want to guide
strategy in a designerly way? Learn how
to facilitate complex, stressful dialogues
and be able to nimbly tie together
disparate points of view or challenge
them via Socratic methods, for example.
Then visualize those points as a model
or map that anchors the dialogue
as it matures and crystallizes with
participation from other domains. Pro
tip: The one with the whiteboard marker
in hand often directs the conversation.
Process is of course the sequence
of actions toward creating something