I noticed a comment in a chat today at work, along the lines of:
We used an LLM to categorise the sticky notes from a workshop. It did a really good job, and even colour-coded the notes and aligned them.
To which I shrugged, thought “good on you” and went on with my day.
Later, another colleague tagged me and asked if it was something we could learn from. I replied, rather gnomically:
The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done.
It was a somewhat throwaway comment at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it all day. So I’m trying to round my thoughts up here.
Why do we do workshops and ideation sessions?
The people we recruit to take part in Service Design workshops must, for the most part, find them incredibly tedious.
But we do them because they get thoughts, ideas and experiences out of people’s heads and onto paper or digital facsimiles so that everyone else can see them.
The people who are actual experts in this specialism.
We do that so we can:
- Challenge each others’ point of view
- Bring everyone’s lived experience to the table
- Understand where we agree, and disagree
Most importantly, we do this to make people talk about these things.
I can’t emphasise this enough. The entire point of these sessions is to get people talking to each other. People who have never talked to each other before. Who have never understood, or even been aware of, others’ point of view.
The doing is the work
Sure, you can ask copilot or whatever to sort your ideas. Colour code them. Manoeuvre them into neat columns.
But here’s what you’re missing out on:
- The nuance you get from those “Oh, I wrote that one …” conversations
- The “Is this related to these, or more like this cluster over here?” discussions that drive you deep into the subtleties of what those 5 or 6 words mean
- An appreciation of the human frustrations, pains and needs behind every sticky note
- The experience of actually having done this exercise
And it’s the last point that’s key. Outsourcing this to an LLM (or anything else, for that matter) is a bit like sending them on your holiday instead of going yourself.
Sure, you’ll get a nice report, not terrifically well written, maybe even some entirely fabricated photos in which you have an unpredictable number of fingers.
But you will not have had the experience. You will not have felt that warm sunshine, tasted that chilled rosé, felt that gentle breeze.
When we finish these exercises, we typically create some kind of report or slide deck with key findings. Maybe also some photographic record of the finished board. We play it back, file it away, and in all likelihood no-one – except perhaps an assessor – will ever look at it again.
But that’s OK. Because the point in doing the exercise is to do the exercise, not to produce a report. The exercise is the work. The report is a byproduct. It’s just a record that the exercise was done. The real learning is embedded in you, and everyone else collectively who took part.
The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done.
I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years.
@davidobrien
I’ve worked with many clients on wide ranges of research and UX projects.
I like to teach teach teams that ~85% of the value is in the process: first hand experience with end-users, facilitated conversations with other business stakeholders, seeing how new insights in a service blueprint impact what you thought you knew…
But there will always be a subset of people who just want the 2-pager report to get on with their work and trust that somebody else did the process correctly.
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Quite. My concern is that the 2-pagers used to be the management /governance layer who, quite rightly, didn’t need or want to know anything beyond the work has been done.
But if some of the people who should be immersed in the process begin to adopt the same outlook, we erode the value of the work; of the doing.
And, it follows, we erode the value of our skills, experience and value as practitioners.
@davidobrien Agreed. For better or worse, we’re entering a new era of AI-based automation. Some people will value the process, some only the output.
I think the key here is that ‘experiences shape mental models, and mental models shape outcomes’. Those who participate in the process will take away more.
As facilitators, we have to choose for ourselves and our stakeholders, what can be automated and where is the experience more important.
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