It's Time to Blink Slower

The world seems to be accelerating faster.

Many leaders are wondering about how the AI-ifying of everything will impact their world, their businesses, their employees and their own careers. Just when we finish a major transformation initiative, the world seems to require that we do it again.

And again. And again.

The AI-human world feels like another change-to-survive-moment.

The state of design

In attempt after attempt to change, we continue to protect a deeply held belief in how and what we design. It's a belief that has created trillions of dollars in value for those who employ it. It's as much about what we are "designing out" as it is what we are truly designing. As a designer, I've felt the undercurrent of this belief in every company.

Design must reduce friction.

It was a quest that began in the early days of human-centered design. Our design systems and approaches have taken this mantra and made it calcified in every user interaction. Usable and useful were the rallying cry. The labels for this have included human factors, UCD (user-centered design), design thinking, user experience, customer experience, and service design, to name a few. Since the emergence of Stanford's design program in 1958, the seeds of usable and useful have grown into an emotionally intelligent design practice. Today, we use our design super powers to evoke feelings within our users to move them from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Let's be honest. It was a smart design strategy. We designed for the scarcest resource we believe we have: time. And we amplified that scarcity through an endless technology war chest of distractions. We added "human relationships" in the valleys of friction to support useful steps that technology couldn't yet fill usably.

What is the current design end game?

We're now in a position where the hockey stick curve of technology disruption has the potential to create a future of near-frictionless operation. Sans humans. The future tradeoff is simple. We will receive more artificial experiences in exchange for our precious time back.

Our systems are constructed with scarcity in mind, attempting to maximize every nanosecond of our day. From AI code in our systems to how AI advises us on our most complex choices.

Are we really closer to achieving our design vision we set so long ago?

Designing for change

We've also built our change strategies and management approaches on the same design chassis. To create this world of frictionless experiences, we've managed change with the same ethos.

How do we create less friction in how we change as an organization?

Take any change measurements from Prosci's maturity model to HBR's DICE and you'll find a common construct architected into how we change. The creation of structures and systems that enable frictionless change, maximizing every second of employee time to "perform."

But design isn't a strategy to create greater value and less friction for our users.

Design is a human capacity to understand the world as it's changing. It's a study in ecology, to understand the world as it evolves. And most importantly, to understand the consequences of our choices on that world. Design helps us imagine a future world, before we turn it into a place that is more useful and usable for us.

Design is curiosity applied with structure to the world in transition.

Change management is control and structure to transition our world.

And it's in our philosophy of change that design is consumed. Speed to organizational competency, in the spirit of scarcity, squeezes out curiosity for design to emerge.

Are your AI change initiatives being prioritized to offer a frictionless experience for your customers and avoid obsolescence at the hands of competitors? Or is your drive for AI change created with space to face the uncomfortable truth of the signal beyond the noise?

In our attempt to design for our increasing scarcity of time, have we forgotten to blink?

Have we failed to accept reality as it truly is?

Designing for change capacity

Carl Jung wrote this in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

"We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”

In his exploration of the unconscious, Jung centered this idea on the capacity of the doctor and the patient to engage in a therapeutic relationship.

Isn't this psychological acceptance also the same acceptance required by our organizations when they ask employees to redesign the world around them and change at the behest of the collective good of the company?

As we think about the capacity for change within our teams, are we expending more and more energy to enact change without creating space to first accept the reality that requires us to change?

As we perceive the world accelerating, it's easy to get stuck in misperceptions. From our study and integration of the Enneagram into teams, we've observed three misperceptions that lead us to over-function and to convince ourselves that we must change faster. These misperceptions, in effect, reduce our energy and capacity to change.

The three misperceptions include:

Illusion
Illusion is the mind’s experience of distorting something that is brand new that is not understood fully.
“I know what’s happening (but I really don’t).”

Chaos
Chaos is the body in overwhelm when the nervous system can’t orient to the speed of change.
“Too much is happening too fast for me.”

Separation
Separation is the relational tension of not identifying with one another before belonging can occur.
“I don’t understand who you/we are anymore.”

As we think about designing for change capacity in ways that aren't built on the scarcity of time, what would change in an interdependent human-AI environment truly look like?

Here are three questions to consider as we find space to sift through the potential misperceptions around a human-AI world:

• Where are we removing human interdependence within our AI vision (illusion)?
• Where are we reacting to the threat of change before we can digest it (chaos)?
• Where are we shrinking the workforce, assuming it is replaceable (separation)?

The only way to change is to first accept the world as it is.

We must redesign design into our change strategies. Scarcity of time is no longer the constraint we are designing around. Instead, we must consider how we design to create the space for curiosity before change.

It requires us to stop blinking so fast as the world changes and to blink a bit slower.

It requires that we create more friction across every part of the organization to share what each of us really sees, blink after blink.

This is coherence, and it takes all of us.

Frictionless design has benefitted all of us. Frictionless execution without friction-full perception collapses coherence.

And it's in this coherence that we can design a better way to change together.

Or perhaps the alternative is to outsource everything to the design subroutine we installed in AI, to create a frictionless world. It's a world where we all have infinite time again.