You're solving at the wrong scale

I met my husband at work nearly 20 years ago. Those times were seriously fun! But as it happens, he wasn't my first love. And no, I'm not talking about that!

I'm talking about human-centered design.

I fell in love with it early. Not in a workshop, but on the front line, as an 18-year-old serving customers and seeing the pain it caused the people in front of me, but also the frustration experienced by employees such as myself, trying to make a clunky systems work with dodgy back office workarounds.

I knew workarounds weren't the solution, just a way of coping with something fundamentally broken. As decisions were made far, far away from the reality of what it actually felt like to use them. Sound familiar, anyone? Ahem.

I didn't have the language for it back then. But then I found human-centered design (HCD), and something clicked.

"Wa whooo, this is it," I thought.

Finally, a way of working that started with people and what they really need, and sometimes don't even know they need (faster horses and all that).

I couldn't unsee bad experiences anymore

I moved role and couldn't unsee bad experiences anymore. I couldn't sit in rooms where decisions were made for people, without ever hearing from them. HCD had taught me how to listen.

But the longer I worked with leaders and teams, the more I noticed we were solving at the wrong scale.

Looking at a handful of humans in front of us, while leaving the system around them untouched. We'd redesign a journey, but not what was driving the behaviour.

And boy, did I find that frustrating.

Making trouble for the system

At times, I was told my feedback was "making trouble." And yes, lessons were learned there, maybe not the ones you'd think.

But I was also told I was a change agent. "Keep going." I was even once called a "drug dealer" dealing out a new way of working. I was less sure about that one.

So I started to ask myself, who exactly was I making trouble for?

The answer: The system.

Because, and anyone who's ever trained with me will have heard me say this, we were playing whack-a-mole!

Fix the bill because customers are calling. Redesign it. Simplify it. HCD the hell out of it. But the bill was never the real issue.

It starts way before that with the systems put in place.

The uncomfortable truth

And the uncomfortable truth? In many cases, the system is built to make the bill confusing. Maybe not on purpose, but the truth is still the truth.

So of course the problems keep coming back.

You need more than empathy

Because to make HCD actually work, you need more than empathy.

You need abstract thinking. You need hypothetical thinking and systems thinking.

Otherwise, what's the point? You're putting your team's time, energy, and money into playing whack-a-mole.

And for me, that starts right at the beginning where we ask, 'what's actually going on here?' Spoken and unspoken.

When organisations, governments, and people are honest about reality, that's when real change happens.

If we don't do this, we're just designing better problems.