Tag Archive for: future humanity

Women discuss change and its impact
Dominique Jaurola

4 steps to understanding change and its impact

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Change can be unpredictable, but how you understand change and its impact doesn’t have to be.

Whether we proactively want to make changes to improve our personal lives, or change is being thrusted upon upon us in a professional context, change can have a huge impact on our well-being. Positive change can improve motivation, drive creativity and generally improve our sense of self, whereas negative change can have the opposite effect – increasing stress and anxiety. 

On some level, all change requires a leap into the unknown, especially when you are not the instigator. But even if you are being proactive, a step away from the status quo can throw up a number of uncertainties and still be nerve-wracking. So how can you better understand change and its impact for better results and a smoother transition?

Making positive change, or mitigating the negative impact of change, requires an understanding of the full picture, or the system that the change is part of, and the various component parts that make up the whole. 

Here are 4 steps to understand change and its impact. 

1. Understand your current position

In order to truly understand change, the first step is to understand your starting point. I’ve previously covered understanding the problem in relation to better decision-making, and the same principle applies here. 

Map out everything you know about where you are now: the status quo, the catalysts for change, the stakeholders involved, etc. For example, you may feel that a career change is on the horizon, but you’re unsure about what direction you want to go in. Do you want a new career because you want more financial stability, or perhaps a better work life balance to spend time with your children? By identifying all the parts that make up your current position, you build a working model to base further analysis on. 

2. Identify the end goal

What is it that you want to achieve by making changes? And if the change hasn’t been instigated by you, what could be the best possible outcome? For example, this could be to better understand your customer behaviors. Identifying the end goal not only gives you something to work towards, it also gives you a better understanding of the current problem. What is it about your current system that prevents you from tracking customer behavior, for example?

At this point, you should also identify the variables that could have an impact on getting from your current position to the end goal. If you implement a new tech solution, will you have to retrain your employees? Does it integrate with your existing tech stack? With an idea of the variables, you can start building an understanding of the ‘moving parts’ of the change.

3. Design your path

How do you get from your current position to the end goal? Plan out the steps and the resources needed to get from your current position to the end goal. Do you need external help, for example? Now is the time to figure out where that may come from. 

Consider how the variables identified impact the steps as you progress – chances are that once you start adjusting one variable, it’ll have a knock-on effect elsewhere. Make sure you’re aware of the possible consequences, especially on those whom the change affects. 

One tip to making sure you’re on the right path is consulting with your stakeholders at this stage. Speaking to the people involved, allowing them to understand change and getting their feedback on your suggested path forward may allow you to consider it’s impact from another perspective. 

For more information about how human-centered design helps build business resilience, check out Mika Raulas’ blog.

4. Implement the steps

You have your base line and where you want to go. You have all the steps in between. It’s now time to implement. As you progress with implementation, monitor the other components that you’ve already identified to see how they develop in line with the changes that you make. 

You may find that it’s plain sailing, but as we all know, change is unpredictable and so keeping an eye out for unintended consequences means that you can react with speed and precision to mitigate any negative effects. Luckily, having mapped out the system that the change is part of, you can understand change in a way that enables you to assess its impact and adjust your approach for the best possible outcomes.

Here are just some perspectives about change. Come add your own to help build a multidimensional understanding of change, and other themes.

 

People rush past each other ignoring each other's humanity
Dominique Jaurola

Social disparity: Is the world growing further apart?

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Last year, we saw many issues that divided the world. The US presidential race, the world-wide Black Lives Matters movement, masks, to name a few.

Of course, this extreme polarization itself isn’t the issue. There will always be people at either the ends of the spectrum of any debate. Social disparity lies with the lack of nuance. The ‘you’re either with us or against us’ attitude. 

We find ourselves in a very black or white world without the many shades of grey that color any healthy debate. Complex issues are boiled down to simply ‘For’ or ‘Against’ and we find ourselves growing further away from those who have a different perspective.

But how have we got to this point, and how can we fix it?

Social media advertising breeds disparity

Mika Raulas talks about the social media advertising model in his blog. Social platforms package up data on users and sell super-targeted advertising to companies who want to reach their perfect customers. 

But these algorithms aren’t designed with the individuals using the platforms in mind, rather those who want to target them.

This is why you often see the same type of content that you’ve engaged with displayed over and over again. The results are an echo chamber where very specific views are played back to the individual, and amplified through their network. 

There becomes very little space for diversity of thought when it appears as though your particular brand of thinking is the main stance on a subject. 

Social disparity hinders problem-solving

Segmented perspectives are great for advertisers, but not so good for problem-solving.

When we consider wicked problems and the systems thinking needed to approach them, polarization makes it harder to come up with a solution. I talk about the future of humanity and how a holistic view helps us understand the full problem, but also how changes to one component affects other areas.

On the other hand, a narrower view removes our ability to address these types of problems. We become so focused on our own view without considering the big picture, and without exercising our curiosity or empathy.

For example, lack of fair access to education is a global issue, a wicked problem, and a symptom of social disparity. Improving access to education requires exploring every perspective to build a better understanding of the issue. 

Diversity in perspectives challenges our own thinking and encourages us to view the world in a different way. It can even make us smarter. It’s here where creativity and innovation are born.

Disparity in gathering information

But even gathering different perspectives to further our thinking, can promote social disparity.

In today’s world, information is fragmented or held in siloes. You might watch a video, or read an article and browse the relevant Wikipedia page to understand an issue. But you may never get access to academic research on the topic or have sight of someone’s private musings.  

Pulling together information to get a true picture of things takes time and money. Gaining understanding becomes about those who have the ability to do so, and those who have not. It also limits the scope of design, problem-solving and decision-making to be geared towards those who have, which widens the gulf further.

If we want to close the gap, we must stop wearing our differences as badges and start embracing our diverse points of views. Once people can be brought together around a theme, we can start building a better society, together.

Here are just some perspectives about social disparity. Come add your own to help build a multidimensional understanding of social disparity, and other themes.

 

Woman blows confetti and celebrates
hunomer

Hunome: the new platform set to revolutionize our understanding of humanity

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Today marks the launch of Hunome, a collective insights platform helping humanity make sense of itself. 

Hunome is a new way to understand all things human. The platform connects and analyzes member perspectives to collectively build smart data around themes that relate to humans and humanity. Using human ingenuity and data analytics as a springboard to better understanding,  Hunome facilitates complex problem-solving and better decision-making for both individuals and organizations, which evolves as more perspectives are added.

Dominique Jaurola, CEO and Founder of Hunome, said: 

“There are many points in life when you need to ‘know’ about humans, whether you’re looking for inspiration, trying to solve a human-centered problem, or simply curious about why something is a certain way. To get a holistic view takes time and money to pull together information that is scattered or siloed across the internet – and often the incomplete picture leads to a simplistic understanding of our humanness. Hunome gives our community the minute detail and the big picture surrounding any theme.”

Members can journey through different perspectives on many themes, while making connections by adding their own points of view.  They can then dig deeper into data-driven insights to get greater understanding on the theme and the people who have contributed to it.

“With Hunome, anyone can see change as it happens, follow a theme as it evolves and grow their understanding alongside it,” Dominique continues, “The world we live in needs solutions that are not meaningful to think about in isolation. Our dream is to create an understanding of who we humans are, why we are, what we would like to change. We want to give our humanness – past, present and future – a voice, and each member a position on the map of this understanding. Our launch today is the first step in our journey to making the world a more perceptive place.”

Start building a better understanding of humanity by signing up for Hunome.

Ends

Contact:

Chantel Gohil-Gray – [email protected] 

About Hunome

Hunome is a collective insights platform helping humanity make sense of itself. We’re revolutionizing our understanding of what it means to be human. Our platform combines connects and analyzes perspectives to collectively build smart data so that anyone can connect perspectives, evolve insights and create new understanding.

www.hunome.com 

Man works in isolation
Mika Raulas

How human-centered design can help companies survive the COVID-19 pandemic

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So here we are. Twelve months on from the global spread of Covid-19 and the end is still a distant, blurry dot on the horizon. The impact that the pandemic has had on society is undeniable, so how can human-centered design help companies get through the uncertainty that lies ahead?

Misconceptions around human-centered (human-aware) design

You may think that a bit of research to understand your stakeholder groups might be enough to give you a path forward through rocky plains. After all, if you run an employee focus group, they’ll tell you how you can motivate them to work from home, right?

Wrong. Dominique Jaurola makes a great case for why understanding humanness can help you make better decisions, but I want to look at how you can use human-centered design to build business resilience during and after the pandemic.

It’s astounding how the word ‘design’ conjures up lofty thoughts of a graphic or product designer doing amazing things. In the context of lean, agile and human-centered business, everything is designed with purpose that revolves around humans.

So let’s look at the four human-centered design principles:

  1. Understand the core problem
  2. Focus on the humans
  3. Everything is a system
  4. Iterate, prototype and test – fast

1. Understand the core problem

It’s easy to spot a problem, but when companies start considering where it stems from and what other areas of the business are impacted, they start to solve the fundamental, underlying issues, not just the symptoms. Researcher, professor and author Don Norman talks about fundamental problems and symptoms of problems, and you can read his take on the four human-centered design principles.

Back in March 2020, when countries began to lockdown, many companies were presented with the problem: can our employees work from home? A quick fix may have been to adopt some kind of video conferencing software, or to ensure that all employees had a work laptop.

While these solutions would have certainly fixed the immediate issue, a human-centered design approach may have addressed the problem like this: do our processes allow for business continuity? A more thorough investigation down this path, would’ve revealed that a new laptop wasn’t the quick solve that was needed. Support and guidance on how to manage one’s timetables, working positions and conditions, etc could have been addressed right away, not just when problems arose later down the line. And how about the customer experience?

2. Focus on the humans

The pandemic has demanded that businesses show their human sides to employees, customers, but other stakeholders also. But in order to show their own humanness, and to truly embrace human-centered design, companies must understand the needs of all the humans who are involved, while taking account of the history, culture, beliefs, and environment of the community.

Companies need to show that they genuinely understand and care about the people that are behind them. This is an idea that we heard time and time again, from companies at WebSummit last year.

While considering your stakeholders needs is crucial, so is bringing them along on the journey. Whether developing a product, finding a solution to a problem, or rolling out a new process, involving the people who are going to be impacted is a sure fire way to get their buy-in. Particularly at a time where companies are having to pivot quickly, following this human-centered design principle enables them to believe in what you are trying to achieve.

3. Everything is a system

Far too often, technology is introduced to solve a particular issue, without considering the implications on other interconnected factors within a system. Rather than focusing on isolated components, companies should consider the entire activity that is impacted.

For example, eagerness to install a chatbot programme to support customer service, may reduce the time a customer has to wait before they receive a response, but it may also increase the number of misdirected customer queries, leading to increased dissatisfaction. It doesn’t matter how good the customer service managers are, being sent off in the wrong direction will almost certainly result in a poor experience.

By considering the whole system, you can design holistically while considering what really matters to the people involved.

4. Iterate, prototype and test – fast

Implementation of changes requires patience to try, rethink and repeat until you find the right combination for what you want to achieve.

We often hear that agility is the key for business growth and innovation, and being flexible is important now, more than ever. The companies that are able to try something new, then go back to the drawing board and repeat, are the ones that have proven their ability to adapt to the instability that Covid-19 has presented.

Two notable examples are Zoom, which has managed to scale up and roll out new features at a phenomenal rate, and AirBnB, which has managed to pivot it’s entire approach to the vacation market, from holidays abroad to home stays.

And of course, those who consult with their stakeholders throughout the process, will find that people are forgiving when something doesn’t work if they can play a part in making it better.

See the problem, and see it well

Philosopher Karl Popper said ‘all life is problem solving’. He was very much on point with the attitude with which we can move forward in tough times. Right now, it may feel like companies are trying to build on shifting sands but taking a human-centered design approach helps to shift the perspective from what is right for the company to what is right for the humans who surround it.

Or as a Hunome member recently put it: ‘See the problem, see it well, from the direction of what matters in the world.’

To see how Hunome can help you apply human-centered (human-aware) design to your business, sign up for Hunome.

 

Woman uses viewfinder to gaze ahead
Dominique Jaurola

What does the future of humanity look like?

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In the past 12 months, our attention has been drawn to many problematic aspects of society. The soft spots in our societies have been exposed as the pandemic stress tested our models. The problems that have arisen are going to impact the future of humanity if we ignore them.

Mika discussed how the social media advertising model promotes segmentation of the consumer base in his last blog. An unintended consequence of this is that segmentation is more apparent in society. If we allow this to continue, the rifts become deeper and the hostility we experience online spills over into everyday society. We’re actually already seeing this taking place – recent protests have made the news world-wide when peaceful demonstrations for a cause spill over into violence. Somehow social media has given us license to be angry, unyielding, and worse, violently hostile towards anyone that has a different point of view from our own. The future of humanity, left unchecked, becomes the stuff of nightmares.

Introducing wicked problems

The deep divide in society is a wicked problem to solve, and what I mean by that is a social or cultural problem that’s difficult to fix (Interaction Design has a great bank of content all about wicked problems). This could be for a number of reasons, incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the financial or economic burden of solving the problem, or even the interconnected nature of this problem with others (think Homer-Dixon’s ingenuity gap that I discuss in my blog about where perspectives come from!).

In fact, the issue of polarization in society is just one of many wicked problems that have arisen over the years. We think about the climate change debate, how to promote equality, or access to education. These are all examples of wicked problems that have existed for sometime, but have been brought into sharp focus in recent years and months. And it’s hard to even know where to begin solving them, but at the same time the consequences of leaving them unaddressed are untenable – the future of humanity depends on us being able to solve these problems.

How to solve humanity’s biggest problems

Design theorist Richard Buchanan was the first to connect design thinking to tackling wicked problems in his 1992 paper. The theory has since developed to suggest that systems thinking, how components of a system influence each other as well as other systems, combined with agile methodology, a collaborative and iterative approach to design and development, can inspire the innovation needed to solve wicked problems.

Simply put, the innovation needed to tackle wicked problems comes from understanding the big picture as well as the detail and context, while working together for continuous improvement. No big deal then.

When I think of the problem of polarization, I often wonder what it’ll take for people to accept other points of view. Perhaps if instead of dividing, platforms worked on creating an inclusive and collaborative environment, different perspectives can be brought together for better understanding of the overall issue. And once we understand the overall issue, we can work together to apply context and meaning. Sound familiar? In the true fashion of interconnected wicked problems, perhaps a solution to one problem, can also help to solve many others.

This is what we’re doing at Hunome. We’ve created a platform that can help address some of the biggest and smallest problems that face the future of humanity, designed for collective sense-making and building better understanding for self or with others. To see where your wicked problems fit in, sign up for Hunome.

Humans pass each other while crossing the road
Dominique Jaurola

Protected: Understanding humanness – a brief history of Hunome

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Humans pass each other while crossing the road
Dominique Jaurola

Understanding humanness – a brief history of Hunome

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I grew up in dual cultures in a monolithic society. The experience of having to always explain my name, my background, my heritage, made me realize at a young age that people thought differently, had different expectations, ideals, values.  Our humanness is fascinating.

It was when I was working at Nokia in the 1990s that this idea of human awareness started taking shape. As a product lead, I sat in meetings, hearing market research results that clashed with the reality of what people got excited about, pondering on the better way.

One situation in particular stands out. A research agency was presenting its results from a global study and had found ‘that US women wouldn’t want a mobile phone that wasn’t black’. These were the 90s and while many women didn’t want to be seen differently to their male counterparts, changeable covers for phones were just around the corner. We knew through validation, that the research was wrong.

Researching what people want in three years, at a time when the experience of owning a mobile phone as a status symbol was becoming obsolete, was proving to be pointless. The answers we were getting didn’t account for the upcoming shift in perceptions, and resulting behaviours.

The everyday human

Nokia set up Future Watch, an internal organization canvassing change and its impact on Nokia, and I was given the Human area to focus on as I was already working on it. My team and I travelled to 30+ countries around the world to understand how cultures, societal norms, economic situations, impacted the way in which people used mobile phones.

For example, in Chinese cities, the majority of our customers rode bikes, so how could we make mobile phones work there? In Colombia, a country where you didn’t stop at a red light or wear jewelry on the street, we landed upon a stealth concept – a way to communicate without the actual device being visible.

In the modern era of human-centered design, this may seem fundamental, but at the time we were only just starting to scratch the surface of how the unique aspects of humans can help develop a product.

When we talk about the human element in a work context, we more often than not are referring to an employee or a consumer. Yes, there are more modern methods of taking a human-centred approach, (IDEO’s fantastic design toolkit is making strides in this area), but on the whole, businesses still look at humans as buyers. The problem with this is that it leaves out the human in everyday life. What their life is like, outside of purchasing the product, what shifts are taking place for them, what brings them to your market.

While I was traveling, the way I saw the world began to shift and the idea for Hunome as a platform was born.

A world, apart

After Nokia, I co-founded an innovation community marketplace, in the early 2000, in the nascent age of social media. I observed (and participated) in this growing trend with great interest. But as the years passed, it became obvious that social media, and the internet as a whole, was becoming more and more polarized. The world began viewing things in black or in white, and not the many, many shades of grey in between. We are now realizing how problematic this is considering the complexity and nuance of understanding humans and human problems.

The other thing I began to notice was that information was harder to come by. It is all there on the internet but it’s scattered and siloed. Bringing that data together is time consuming (manual searching), or expensive (market research), or clumsy (AI aggregation), and the result is often simplistic, and doesn’t show the whole picture. It’s almost like we haven’t moved on from that market research presentation I sat in 25 years ago.

Understanding humanness

We’ve created a world where the need to understand our humanness is more relevant now than ever before. How can we develop as a society without measuring the impact we have on the people within it? Or canvas opinions, when we don’t accept the diversity of thought? How can we come up with an answer, when we don’t understand the question? Or aren’t even asking the right ones?

Hunome has been a long time in the making. But creating a place where multiple ideas and experiences can be brought together to build understanding, was never going to be a straightforward path. In order to give the world a better understanding of our humanness, we need to allow the collective building of knowledge and the evolution of perspectives.

We need our humanness at the heart.