Podcast appearances and mentions of lisa welchman

Andy Vitale shares his experiences as an executive design leader, how he's successfully scaled several design orgs, and why a career in pro wrestling wasn't for him. Highlights include: Why do you create a five year plan for the design orgs you lead? How has Grey's Anatomy informed the design of your design organisations? Why go to the trouble of helping someone who's struggling in an interview? How do you navigate the expectations of being the most senior design leader? How do you feel you've enabled people on your team to speak to you as an equal? ====== Who is Andy Vitale? Andy is the Chief Design Officer of Constant Contact, an automation platform that helps small businesses to simplify and amplify their digital marketing. In this crucial role, Andy is responsible for providing executive leadership for the design organisation. A master when it comes to scaling design teams, while at Rocket Companies Andy grew the design team into a multidisciplinary organisation with over 170 people working across design, research and brand. Aside from his busy day job, Andy is also helping to shape the thinking of future user experience professionals, through his work as an adjunct professor for Kent State University's Masters of Science in User Experience Design programme. Andy is the co-host of the Surfacing Podcast where, alongside Lisa Welchman, he engages designers, technologists, and business leaders in inspiring conversations. He is a member of the Fast Company Executive Board, an Adobe Education Leader, and - believe it or not - he still finds time to mentor designers on ADPList. ====== Find Andy here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyvitale/ Website: https://www.andyvitale.com/ Medium: https://medium.com/@andyvitale X: https://twitter.com/andyvitale ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/ ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/

In this episode of Surfacing, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale talk to Design Leader, Judy Ma. Judy reveals her leadership philosophy, the guidance she gives up-and-coming designers, and how her background in industrial design influences her approach to User Experience Design.   Episode Transcript

In this episode of Surfacing, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale talk to Jaryn Miller. Jaryn leads Service Design at Headspace and is the Co-founder of Oakland Reparations. In this rich conversation, Jaryn discusses mindfulness, his vocational journey, and how adopting an inclusive approach to service design is a win for every human being. Episode transcript

In this episode, hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vital speak to Jose Coronado. Jose is the global head of design operations for JP Morgan and spoke about the career path to his current role. He also spoke about the maturity of design ops in the workplace and how Jose tries to avoid an "exclusion by design" dynamic when establishing recruitment and onboarding processes. Jose also spoke about the myth of the lone superstar designer and the importance of team collaboration. Episode transcript

In this episode, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale have a conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion. They speak about what the terms mean and how the dynamics of D.E.I. play out for them professionally and as colleagues. Episode transcript

Welcome to Surfacing. This episode co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to design leader Aaron Irizarry. Aaron talks about music, his design journey, and his steps to create team environments that create space for the whole person. Andy asked Aaron about building and implementing design systems, and Lisa asked Aaron to talk about how he ensures that being authentic at work is available for every worker. Finally, Aaron gives us tips on how to make the best vegan tacos. Episode transcript

In this episode, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak about leading a digital team. They focus on the interdisciplinary nature of digital teams and the challenges of leading large groups with diverse skillsets. They also talk about the leadership challenges between so-called digital-first organizations and organizations transforming with digital technologies. Finally, they consider how a new generation of digital leaders can use their skills and intuition to turn the tides of digital development in a more positive direction. Episode transcript

In this episode, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale, are joined by leadership coach Margaret Lee. Margaret spoke about her experience as director of UX Community & Culture at Google and offered advice for starting communities of practice. In addition, Margaret reflects on the personal impact of her article and talk, Insights from a Reluctant Leader. Episode transcript

In this episode of Surfacing, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to information architect and educator Jorge Arango. This episode saw a discussion of digital ethics and the roles that designers, business leaders, policymakers, and ethicists play in keeping digital spaces safe. Jorge considers the responsibilities associated with architecting online experiences and offers insight into the dynamics that come with the long arc of technological innovation. Episode transcript About Jorge Arango Jorge Arango is an information architect and strategic designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. In his consulting practice, Jorge partners with product, design, and innovation leaders to create digital places that make people smarter. He has designed information environments for all types of organizations, ranging from developing world non-profits to Fortune 500 corporations. Jorge is a frequent speaker at global UX conferences. He is the author of Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places (Two Waves Books, 2018) and co-author of Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond (O'Reilly Media, 2015). He has also served the global UX community as president and director of the Information Architecture Institute, and as thematic director of the first World IA Day. Besides his consulting practice, Jorge is also an adjunct professor in the Interaction Design program at the California College of the Arts (CCA). Jorge's Personal Links Jorge Arango Website The Informed Life Podcast Jorge Arango on Twitter   Books Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Lou Rosenfeld, Peter Morville & Jorge Arango   Topics Discussed Twitter blocked in Nigeria The Code of Hammurabi Drop-in Audio App Clubhouse is Dying. It Was Fun While It Lasted Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast Simone Biles doing amazing things Platform for the Ethics and Politics of Technology (University of Amsterdam) Clayton Christensen Calvin, God, and Architecture  

Lisa Welchman recognized early in her career that companies would need help managing the business challenges that come with new technologies. In the ensuing 20 years, she has become the leading expert in the new field of digital governance. Today, Lisa helps large enterprises, NGOs, and other companies develop frameworks, policies, and standards that let them collaborate effectively and operate responsibly. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/lisa-welchman/

Lisa Welchman Lisa Welchman recognized early in her career that companies would need help managing the business challenges that come with new technologies. In the ensuing 22 years, she has become the leading expert in the new field of digital governance. Today, Lisa helps large enterprises, NGOs, and other companies develop frameworks, policies, and standards that let them collaborate effectively and operate responsibly. We talked about: her education as a philosopher and how logic and coding were a good professional fit her early work as a front-end web developer at Netscape and Cisco how the "back-pocket skills" she had cultivated earlier in her career helped her succeed in web business her focus on organizational dynamics the difference between understanding technology and managing it as close as you'll ever get to getting a definition of digital governance from her: "creating a collaboration model so that people can intentionally build something together" one of the big challenges of doing governance work: the lack of a common understanding of it across organizations the importance of agreeing on a defintion of "digital governance" before implementing it why she would rather see digital governance capability embedded across and within an organization than ensconced in a silo-ed role like Chief Digital Officer the difference in governance needs between legacy businesses and digital-first businesses how digital-first companies can be immature as business entity even as they use the latest technology how mature legacy organization can often more quickly implement governance frameworks, policies, and standards the maturity curve that she uses to help companies identify where they are in their digital growth a simple accounting method for digital governance how to create a basic governance framework the challenges of integrating digital governance into any kind of organization her gentle reminder to folks who are feeling challenged at work right now: don't get discouraged and "do the best work where you can" Lisa's bio For the over two decades, leaders of global 1000 companies, NGOs, and other organizations have turned to Lisa to analyze and solve their digital governance challenges. Lisa speaks globally on issues related to digital governance, digital safety, and the path to digital maturity in the enterprise. Lisa is the author of Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, and co-host of the Surfacing podcast. Connect with Lisa online LisaWelchman.com LinkedIn Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1o2MlYnu4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 102. There's a big disconnect in many businesses between how well they apply the power of technology and how well they manage their use of it. Governance is the management practice that gives you the frameworks, policies, and standards to make sure that you and your team collaborate effectively and that you're using technology responsibly and ethically. Lisa Welchman is one of the world's leading authorities on this important digital business practice. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 102 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Lisa Welchman. Lisa is a speaker, consultant, and coach, and works in the area of digital governance, which is what we're going to talk about today. So, welcome, Lisa. Tell the folks a little bit more about your background and how you got into digital governance. Lisa: Sure. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I have a kind of interesting background. I was a philosophy major at university, spent a lot of time working with symbolic logic, which is the same thing as code logically in your head. I've always had a affinity for structure. That was in the late eighties when the web sort of ...

Lisa Welchman Lisa Welchman recognized early in her career that companies would need help managing the business challenges that come with new technologies. In the ensuing 22 years, she has become the leading expert in the new field of digital governance. Today, Lisa helps large enterprises, NGOs, and other companies develop frameworks, policies, and standards that let them collaborate effectively and operate responsibly. We talked about: her education as a philosopher and how logic and coding were a good professional fit her early work as a front-end web developer at Netscape and Cisco how the "back-pocket skills" she had cultivated earlier in her career helped her succeed in web business her focus on organizational dynamics the difference between understanding technology and managing it as close as you'll ever get to getting a definition of digital governance from her: "creating a collaboration model so that people can intentionally build something together" one of the big challenges of doing governance work: the lack of a common understanding of it across organizations the importance of agreeing on a defintion of "digital governance" before implementing it why she would rather see digital governance capability embedded across and within an organization than ensconced in a silo-ed role like Chief Digital Officer the difference in governance needs between legacy businesses and digital-first businesses how digital-first companies can be immature as business entity even as they use the latest technology how mature legacy organization can often more quickly implement governance frameworks, policies, and standards the maturity curve that she uses to help companies identify where they are in their digital growth a simple accounting method for digital governance how to create a basic governance framework the challenges of integrating digital governance into any kind of organization her gentle reminder to folks who are feeling challenged at work right now: don't get discouraged and "do the best work where you can" Lisa's bio For the over two decades, leaders of global 1000 companies, NGOs, and other organizations have turned to Lisa to analyze and solve their digital governance challenges. Lisa speaks globally on issues related to digital governance, digital safety, and the path to digital maturity in the enterprise. Lisa is the author of Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, and co-host of the Surfacing podcast. Connect with Lisa online LisaWelchman.com LinkedIn Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1o2MlYnu4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 102. There's a big disconnect in many businesses between how well they apply the power of technology and how well they manage their use of it. Governance is the management practice that gives you the frameworks, policies, and standards to make sure that you and your team collaborate effectively and that you're using technology responsibly and ethically. Lisa Welchman is one of the world's leading authorities on this important digital business practice. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 102 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Lisa Welchman. Lisa is a speaker, consultant, and coach, and works in the area of digital governance, which is what we're going to talk about today. So, welcome, Lisa. Tell the folks a little bit more about your background and how you got into digital governance. Lisa: Sure. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I have a kind of interesting background. I was a philosophy major at university, spent a lot of time working with symbolic logic, which is the same thing as code logically in your head. I've always had a affinity for structure. That was in the late eighties when the web sort of ...

In this episode, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to user experience design expert Laura Klein. Laura is the author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups. Laura spoke about how a lack of reflection and consideration during the product development life cycle contributes to some of our online low-quality experiences. She also reveals how her engineering background and love of logic impact how she approaches user experience design. Episode transcript   About Laura Klein Laura fell in love with technology when she saw her first user research session over 20 years ago. Since then, she's worked as an engineer, user experience designer, and product manager in Silicon Valley for companies of all sizes. She's written two books for product managers, designers, and entrepreneurs, Build Better Products (Rosenfeld Media '16) and UX for Lean Startups (O'Reilly Media '13), and she's a frequent speaker at tech conferences, including SXSW, Lean Startup Conference, and Mind the Product. She is currently Principal at Users Know, a UX design consultancy, and works as a coach and adviser to product teams and startups.   Resources Laura Klein's Website Build Better Products: A Modern Approach to Building Successful User-Centered Products by Laura Klein UX for Lean Startups by Laura Klein What is Wrong with UX Podcast   People and Topics Laura Talks About Kate Rudder How to Build a Task Flow How to Build a Task Flow Part 2: Combining Modules   Follow Laura Klein on Social Media Twitter

In this episode of Surfacing, co-hosts Andy Vitale and Lisa Welchman talk to qualitative researcher and experience strategist Meena Kothandaraman. They talk about understanding qualitative research and why it's essential to be inspired by and learn from people when designing products. Meena also shares advice for teams who face challenges and constraints around getting research integrated into their development process.   About Meena Kothandaraman With 25 years of experience, Meena has consulted to emphasize the strategic value of customer experience across product, space and service. She truly believes that businesses can achieve greater focus by better understanding the behaviors of their customers, and those who create the products from within the business.  Experiencing the journey of conducting research can truly inspire! Apart from her core consulting practice, Meena has lectured in the Bentley University Human Factors and Information Design (HFID) graduate program in her 15 year tenure. She has helped the program to stand as one of the top human factors/user experience programs worldwide.   She holds an M.S. in Information Resources Management from Syracuse University and a B.Com. in MIS from the University of Ottawa, Canada.  Apart from work, Meena has written a children's book, hosts a cooking show, and is a South Indian classical violinist. She has firmly maintained a strong work life balance, and has her two children and husband to thank for making life so rich. Episode transcript Show Notes Meena's Twitter Twig + FIsh Website Twig+Fish Blog Qualitative Research Zarla Ludin Twitter NCredible Framework Bring Your Humanity to Work Bentley University - Information Design & Corporate Communication Course Fluxible Hal Miller-Jacobs  

In this episode, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to Kevin Hoffman, a design industry veteran currently the digital services expert leading design for the Veterans Affairs administration. He is also a speaker and author of Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers, and Everyone. This episode covers a wide variety of topics: how meetings have changed since the shift to working remotely during the pandemic; what can be classified as a meeting--and the group explores different types of meetings, including the meeting where Kevin introduced Lisa and Andy to each other. Episode transcript About Kevin Kevin M. Hoffman is an information architect and design strategist that has been building digital tools since 1995. He holds a deep belief that properly designed and executed time spent together, or a good meeting is a core element of good design. It puts necessary shared understanding and trust in place, enabling teams to make better experiences real. Kevin is regularly hired to facilitate design meetings for web and application design projects. He also speaks and provides workshops on the design of meetings and collaboration all over the world. Show Notes Kevin’s Website  Kevin’s Book  MURAL  Milanote  Miro  SAFe Agile  Marty Cagan  I Am Not a Cat Video  Department of Veteran’s Affairs  Angela Colter Quilting (Twitter)    Social Links Kevin Twitter  Kevin LinkedIn 

In this month's Deep Dive, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale explore a much-debated topic: should designers learn how to code? The conversation took an interesting turn as the two begin to consider how teams are structured around the web and discuss new possibilities about how design and technology teams can work together. Episode transcript Show Notes “A Moment of Time with Editors” - On WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. Lisa’s Execution Atom If you’re bored and want more of this debate    

In this first Surfacing deep dive, host Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale talk about design and governance. Why do designers feel that they don't have a seat at the table when making decisions about creating the customer experience? And what happens when they do? What is the conflict between the designer's role and those that make the rules for the organization, and how can the disciplines of governance and design work together to improve the customer experience and the experience of being on the digital team? Episode transcript About the Hosts Lisa Welchman is a digital governance pioneer who helps organizations become more intentional about operating online. She coaches and trains digital leaders and teams across the globe. Lisa has brought her expertise to some of the most impactful organizations globally, including many of the Global 500, universities and colleges, NGOs, and national governments. An advocate for better digital governance, Lisa’s research interests center around defining a digital safety maturity life cycle that helps organizations understand how to build safer and more ethical web experiences. Lisa speaks at conferences globally and is the author of Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design.   Andy Vitale is the VP of Product Design at Rocket Mortgage, where he instills the importance of design and a human-centered approach to transform the mortgage lending experience. Andy has solved problems for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune-ranked companies. A relentless user experience evangelist, with a passion for cognitive thinking and making technology more human. he is driven by a passion to inspire and empower teams to do their best work. Aside from his primary role at Rocker Mortgage, Andy is an adjunct professor for Kent State University’s User Experience Design graduate program, speaks at conferences and events, and serves on the advisory board for professional organizations and educational institutions.

In this episode, we get to speak with Lisa Welchman & Andy Vitale. We discuss their new podcast and how...

In this classic UX Podcast interview we talk to Lisa Welchman about our responsibility as designers and creators of digital products, services and information. A thought-provoking and philosophical chat about the way we work and should work. “Are you doing your best work right now?” asked Lisa at UXLx back in 2015. A call to... The post #240 Architecting the information age with Lisa Welchman (UXP Classic) appeared first on UX Podcast.

My guest today is Michael J. Metts. Michael designs digital products and services, with a focus on the impact of writing on the user's experience. He and co-author Andy Welfle have written a new book on this subject. In this conversation, Michael and I discuss the relationship between writing and design, and how being more aware of how we use language can make us more effective. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/the-informed-life-episode-24-michael-j-metts.mp3   Show notes Michael J. Metts on Twitter Michael J. Metts on LinkedIn Michael J. Metts on Instagram Michael's blog Writing is Designing: Words and the User Experience, by Michael J. Metts & Andy Welfle Card sorting Tree testing The Informed Life Episode 11: Lisa Welchman on Governance Microsoft Word GOV.UK highlighter method IA Writer Ulysses Markdown Slack Microsoft Teams Read the full transcript Jorge: So, Michael, welcome to the show. Michael: Thanks, it's great to be here. Jorge: Well, it's great to have you. For folks who don't know you, why don't you tell us about yourself. Michael: Well, I have spent the better part of my career now designing digital experiences of different kinds. I initially began in that field as a writer, in terms of what people called me, my title and that kind of thing. And now I have titles like designer, but there's been a lot of crossover between those two worlds throughout my career. Jorge: So, you and your coauthor Andy Welfle have written a book called Writing is Designing, which addresses this subject. How do design and writing relate to each other? Michael: Yeah, I think It's hard for a lot of people to make that connection because you run into a lot of people who tend to be wired one way or the other or feel like they're more capable in one area than the other. But really, if you think about any sort of experience that you interact with, like a mobile app, that's the one we use as an example right in the beginning of the book. Your mobile app, if you open it up and you start tapping through it, you start looking at it, you start to see words everywhere. You're interacting with language just as much as you're interacting with visual elements like menu items and buttons and all those other things. So, our thesis really is just that you should treat those words as part of the design and that you should apply design techniques and practices to those words and how you get there, and not treat them as something that's inconsequential or after the fact. So, we've done that in our own careers, and we've seen how vital it is to building a good experience, and we just want to share that with others. Jorge: I think that the word design for a lot of folks evokes visual artifacts like drawings and sketches and stuff like that. And when you say that you apply design techniques, can you tell us a bit more about what that looks like? Michael: Yeah. So, design, it took me a while in my own career to make that shift from thinking of design as something that was inherently visual. I think the first type of design people interact with usually is graphic design, if you've come across designs of signs and brochures and handouts and different things like that. And you can kind of tell inherently if one is designed well or if it's designed poorly. But you know, the, the thing about it is that the words that make up those artifacts are typically the same, whether it's designed well or designed poorly. So, I think that's why people tend to think of design is like the polish that comes at the end. But the way I think of design, and I think the way a lot of my field thinks about design, is that you design the experience someone has with a thing. And when you frame it that way, then you begin to think of it more broadly, and you begin to think of all the things that impact it. So, it's not just words, it's not just visuals, it's maybe even the business policies that affect how that thing works, or maybe it's the number of steps involved. All those things are critical pieces of the design that you can't even see as the person using it. So that's why, when I talk about design techniques when I'm talking about is thinking of prototyping the language you use and testing it with people to see how they respond. So, a prototype of language can just be some written sentences on a piece of paper that you go and ask people about, you ask them to read through it and ask how they perceive it. Those are all valid ways to design the language we're using rather than just writing it and going forward with it without really thinking about the impact it has or actually getting information about the impact it has on the people who interact with Jorge: You talked about an example of a mobile app and the words that you see in the screen, and that is one way of encountering language. You also have just talked about a sentence, and that strikes me as a very different way of encountering language. The former is within the realm of what I understand of as information architecture, right? Like this notion that you create these structures of language that allow you to understand and move about an information environment. Are you more of a writer of sentences or a writer of user interfaces?  Michael: Even in interfaces, there's always a tension between what the experience is trying to do and how people feel about the language you're working in, whether it's English or any other language. Maybe you feel like those error messages should be sentences, right? And maybe you're applying all the same thoughts that you would when coming up with a sentence for an essay or something to the way you write that error message. But the important thing is that you unpack it and think about why you're thinking that way. Think about what's appropriate for that particular use case and be intentional. Like that's what I mean by designing with words. So, a sentence could be part of that information architecture you're describing, and there's nothing wrong with that, but the important thing is unpacking why and being clear about it. This is something Andy and I do for a living every day, and then we wrote a book about it, which was a very different way of writing and a very different way of expressing our ideas than the type of writing we'd done for these digital products. And so I think we saw a lot of things creep in to our writing that we didn't see every day in our work. So, in trying to string all these sentences together into a book, that was a really interesting exercise and it was very, very different. So, the writing definitely is different. You know, you're writing in a digital product, you're writing to help someone move through a situation, your writing started to be invisible. You're not trying to draw attention to yourself, to talk about the merit of your ideas. I mean, those things. So that to me is where the line is, you know, it's more about your intention and about what you're trying to do with it. Jorge: When you used the mobile app image, the image that it evoked in my mind had to do with things like heading labels and navigation links. But you talked about the error messages. Error messages to me are more prose-like in that you have to give the user a little bit more context of what's going on. Whereas with things like labels, you're peppering words around the thing. You have a little bit less of that kind of sentence structure to play with. And I'm wondering if there's a difference in writing for the one versus the other. Michael: That's interesting. I think people who have jobs like mine are asked to drift in and out of those spaces without thinking about the boundaries. Because it's interesting that, in your mind, there's a very clear boundary between the two, but one of the challenges as someone who writes for a digital product, you have to figure out how to make it seem like there isn't, you have to make it feel like this is a cohesive experience where all this language works together and fits together. So, obviously there are big differences. Like you may have fewer iterations of that structural stuff, like if you think of the items in a navigation, you may do testing — you know, there are really specific testing techniques in the world of information architecture, like cards sorts or tree testing to help you figure out what those things should be. And you're not really trying to mess with them a whole lot after that or iterate on them a whole lot, unless you have reason to believe that they're not working that well, or unless there are changes in the organization. So those are like really big structural things. The rest of the language though, it really has to fit into everything else the user's experiencing. So, examples of the types of writing, you have the error message, you have the push notification, you have onboarding messages, you have a little tips and helpful hints that pop up throughout the experience. That's very specific to the mobile app experience. So then if you have something like a voice experience or a chat bot, then you have dialogue that has to accomplish all those things just as text, as language. So, there are definitely different ways to think about it, different techniques you use when you're working with those things. But they do all have to work together. And that to me is the exciting thing about seeing it come together and practicing this type of work, is that you can start to build a whole ecosystem of language within whenever you're working on. Jorge: How is that ecosystem of language managed? Michael: I think it's different for everyone, you know, every organization. There's a really encouraging trend in design systems recently. I think design systems originally began as pattern libraries where people would put like their front-end code in a place where it was manageable. And then it became a place where you could talk about design standards and visual specs and things like that. And now the latest trend, which is really cool, is that you're describing patterns that are more structural. So, things like the language we use and how we write for certain situations and how you keep it consistent and how you may have a clear voice for your product that comes across. So to me, that's one of the more common ways I've seen it happen. There's also style guides many companies are using and then adapting style guides to their own means. Those tend to be more at the individual word level, word choice or an abbreviation or things like that. I think this trend of design systems is a really neat one. Jorge: Are there any tools that you've seen or used to help do that? Michael: It's an interesting thing, because in websites you have the sort of foregone conclusion is that you have a CMS, right? You have this content management system. Products usually don't, or if they do, it's nothing like their website CMS, which is designed to run an author experience. Okay. So that is interesting. I think it's a space we'll see a lot more, and I think are a few startups and companies that are experimenting with things like that. But honestly, a lot of times when I'm trying to manage content for our product, I will partner with the engineering team and we'll work directly in the code, so they might do some sort of a markup language that makes it easier for me to write and contributing. But that helps us look at like, okay, here's everything that's in the system, and maybe we could just reuse this over again in this situation, or maybe this necessitates a new variation that we haven't thought of before. So, I think it's really an emerging space, which is kind of surprising to me, but at the same time, I guess you're moving so quickly, you're not really thinking about how to control that language. It's easy enough to just put it, to use the code to manage it.  Jorge: And beyond tools, I'm also wondering what is the role in the organization who has the ultimate responsibility for managing language? Michael: That's a really interesting question. I know you had Lisa Welchman on your show a while back, and she was talking about how organizations manage the content governance and the types of things they go through. And I think it's interesting because I don't know how many organizations are thinking of governance, in terms of what shows up in a product, in terms of what shows up in an interactive experience. I feel like it's usually thought of in terms of the static web content. So, I think there's a need for that. And I think what makes it complex is that there's no clear owner and there's no clear role. You know, everyone is capable of writing. Like if you have a job working on one of these digital products, chances are you're fairly competent as a writer, or at least you think so. So, if someone asks you, ” Hey, can you write this?” You'll do your best and you'll get it out there. And all you need is a word processor. You know, you fire up Microsoft Word and get something down. And that's really different from the way design in the traditional sense is practiced now, where you have a tool that's very difficult to learn and has a lot of quirks to it, and you've invested a lot of time in learning that tool, and you can use that tool as a governance mechanism in itself. You can say, “Well, I'm the one who uses the tool. So, I decided the designs.” And I think that's why designers of words have a harder time. In a sense because they're going to have to rely on building relationships and building trust and making a case for why we should use this particular language because it feels so accessible and malleable by just about anyone. If you're a designer with words, you don't have a tool to fall back on and say, “Yeah, this is my complex thing that only I understand that only I can use.” Jorge: So, I'm wondering how you… Like, I would like to hear an example of how you go about designing with words. Like what are the tools that you're using? What is the process? How do you put it in front of people? How do you test it? Michael: So let's walk through an example. So going back to the example of an error message that I talked to at the beginning, if you were asked to write an error message, you could take the scenario that someone gave to you and say, “Well, here's my best effort at what that error message should be.” There's actually a story about this in the book. Someone named Lauren Lucchese, she's a design manager here in Chicago. She talks about the first time that she was asked to dive into writing some error messages for a login screen. And she was given this spreadsheet of 50 error codes and told to write something general that would work for most of the situations, if not all of them. And she started this project just trying to respond to the need that was given to her and trying to make her best effort to write the right error message. But there were a lot of different things in that spreadsheet. There were things like a code for when the user of the account, when records showed that that person was deceased, for example, or when there was a notice of fraudulent activity on their account. So, there could be all sorts of reasons that this person can't get into their account, and some of those merited some unique handling. So, while she started to just write, she realized that that wouldn't meet the needs of the users. And in fact, when some of those initial flows were tested with users, they saw that it wasn't working that well. So, what she did was she started asking questions about these different scenarios and how it would be resolved on the business side. So, for example, if there's fraudulent activity, they could give a phone number that would go directly to the fraud department, then this person could get the help they needed quickly and they wouldn't have to go through a phone tree because they already had identified the person's problem via that error code. So that's an example of how Lauren was able to identify unique needs by asking questions, by being curious. And that's applying… that's an example of applying the design mindset to this. And then when you think of testing, like the tools that you're using for this, a lot of times it's just a text editor. I use a plain text editor for my first passes when I'm designing an interface like this. We're having a conversation as a team about a new feature we want to build out, I'll offer to share my screen and start writing just in big text what we think that feature would be or what we think it will say. And getting it in front of people tends to get some really good reactions that are helpful for the team to process that. It's sort of akin to what you might get by sketching on a piece of paper what the interface might look like. Doing that same thing for the words you write, treating them not as precious, but as something to just to get out there and try to express, is a really practical way to apply design to writing. So, put three options out there that are wildly different, and see where they take you and see what conversations the team has about them. And then beyond that, I use paper a lot for testing. Testing can be pretty complex when you're dealing with a visual interface, but I find there's a lot of value in abstracting the words from an interface and testing them on the run and seeing how people respond to them. So, you can give enough of a setup that people understand the scenario that they'd be facing and then get their reaction. So, one of the methods we talk about in the book was popularized by GOV.UK, they call it the highlighter method. They print off the content just by itself outside of any sort of screen and then they ask people to highlight in green the things that work especially well, and they highlight in red the things that don't work as well. Then they're able to ask follow-up questions about why. You know, why is that working very well? Why is that? Maybe it's confusing, you know. Maybe people didn't understand the language, maybe there was jargon involved. And so that's how you actually make a case for your design decisions using words, by getting it in front of people and getting data from your users. Otherwise, you're just going to have a lot of discussions back and forth with decision-makers and say, “Well, I think it should be this way.” And they say, “I think it should be this way.” Again, that's kind of the. beauty of what a design practice brings to writing: you can start to think about it more objectively and apply some rigor to it that you wouldn't be able to if you just kept writing the way you normally do. Jorge: I can see how that is a more designerly approach to writing. I want to come back to the text editor. You said that that's a tool that you use to do this, and I'm wondering if you have a favorite text editor, and if so, why? Michael: Yeah. I've tried a lot of them. I guess it's like a hobby when you're a writer, you're just downloading text editors constantly. The one that I use as a scratch pad at work is called IA Writer, and I just like it because it gets out of the way pretty easily. You can get the type nice and big for when you're sharing your screen, and that one, it's just simple. And of course, writing the book, I used a different one: I used Ulysses for just because it was easier to organize things. And that's what I use when I'm writing on my own, just to get things down and in an organized way. So, it does nice things there. But IA writer as my favorite just scratch pad with the team, I'm sharing my screen, kind of a text editor. Jorge: Can you talk a little bit more about how you choose one versus the other? When you say scratch pad, does that imply that it's for shorter-form texts? Michael: Yeah, I mean like there's no organization, right? You're just opening individual documents, so it's easy to just open one and then they're automatically saved to a certain folder on my computer so I can just open it, open a new document, and I know it's there, saved to the cloud as soon as I open it. So that's a nice thing about it. And then there's just the simplicity. I think a big trend in those texts editors is that they're like a distraction-free environment. And that's what I look for as well. I don't want anything but the words on the screen when we're looking at it. In full screen in IA Writer, that's all you can see. It does support Markdown as well, which I'm a big fan of. I use that all the time to give hierarchy to the things that I'm working on. That's a nice thing too you can borrow from the design world because you know, there's this idea of hierarchy. How do we apply that to language as well? And that translates pretty well to Markdown. Jorge: Can you speak more, for folks who may not be familiar with Markdown? Can you tell us the elevator pitch for Markdown? Michael: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if anyone needs to be burdened with it, but… the reason I like it is because you can really easily apply some formatting without going overboard. You know? So, like, if you think of the Word document that you may have received from a coworker with all sorts of different colors and fun fonts, that's not the type of formatting I looked for. Markdown, you just put for example, a pound sign in front of a line of text, and that is your largest heading. So, if you put two pound signs, then it's one size smaller, and you can use that to break it up. In this section, you can do italics, you can do underlying, you can do bolding. But it's really minimal formatting that you can easily remove. So that's what I like about it. Jorge: When you were talking about creating variations that you would put in front of people, you used the phrase, “abstracting the words from the interface.” And I'm wondering about the relationship between this designerly way of writing and typography; the actual rendering of the letterforms and words when people encounter them. So, a resignation letter reads very differently if it's set in Times New Roman than if it's set in Comic Sans, right? Michael: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that applies to like the importance of… I don't know, sometimes I worry people hear me talking about how writing is designing, and they think like, “Oh, well you don't care about the visual side of things.” That couldn't be further from the truth. I think that the best design happens when someone whose core skill is language teams up with someone who's core skill is visual design and they work together to build an experience. If you could find both those skills in one person, that's incredible as well, but that's really difficult to do. But I think that's a reason why you have to be in partnership with people. Again, like visual design is another part that dramatically affects the experience people are going to have. So, when you're abstracting from the interface, you've gotta be careful with that. You're not saying this is the final ruling on how this should be. What it does give you is, it gives users a chance to interact with the or language without being burdened by the usability issues of a form, for example. So, you can get information that you know is about the language itself. So that's what's really powerful. You don't want to use it in isolation. You don't want to over rely on a technique like that. my question is, how often do teams actually try that, right? Like how often do they actually get the message in front of people by itself so that they can understand how people in processing it?  Jorge: So, I have one final question for you, just to try to make it actionable for folks who might not be designers using writing as their day-to-day work. All of us have to communicate using language. And I was wondering if you have any tools, tips, techniques to help folks be better writers. Michael: Yeah. So, I think you could still think of writing as designing, even if you're never making it an interface. And what I mean by that is when you write something, when you write an email to a friend, take a step back before you send it. This is common and advice that, that seasoned writers will give people all the time. Take a step back, read it out loud to yourself. Think about the effect it will have on that, that person. And try to put yourself in the place of the reader as often as possible. That's, that's such a good exercise. Think about the effect that the words you have written will have on the audience. And, you can even test it too. That's another neat thing you see it happening where people will be like, they'll come up to you with something like, can you read this? Does this doesn't make sense? Apply those types of thinking to your everyday writing. And, and don't be afraid to get those other perspectives involved. I think what's beneficial about design especially, is this idea of being clear about what you want to learn. So, when you show that to someone else, don't come at it trying to answer, “Is this any good?” You know, like come at it with, “I want to see how this person perceives the way I wrote the greeting.” Or, “I want to learn more about what they think I was trying to get across here.” And make sure that you're really clear about that at every step of the way. I think it's very rare that we take a step back in our own lives and try to look at what we're trying to accomplish with the little things we write every day. Even something as simple as like an instant message to someone on Slack. I see frequently people complaining on Twitter about coworkers who just say, “Hi!” on Slack or Teams or whatever, and then wait 10 minutes for the person to respond before saying whatever they needed. So, there's this emerging idea of having some IM etiquette and saying what you want along with your greeting so that you're not wasting people's time and aren't breaking their concentration, all those things. So, you can do that just by being intentional and being thoughtful and not being so reactionary, right? Like the reason people type “Hi” and just hit send and then go away is because it's really easy. But what would happen if you started to think about the people on the other end more whenever you're writing. I think that's the, that's the direction we want to move in. Jorge: Fantastic, that is great advice. Thank you. The book is available now for preorder, right? It's Writing is Designing. Michael: Yeah. Jorge: It's available in the Rosenfeld Media website. Where can folks follow up with you other than by buying the book? Michael: Well, they could follow on Twitter, LinkedIn — I'll accept connections from people in the field. And I also have Instagram, if you're interested in photography. That's how I began this journey. I think that that side of me is a lot more fun than the writing sides. But yeah, any of those venues. I'm also trying to write a little bit more. The book got me interested in writing outside of work. So, you can follow my blog at mjmetts.com. And I write there just a lot about the methods that I use to help teams work together effectively, how I help people understand my work, and those kinds of things. Jorge: Well, great. I will include all of those in the show notes. Michael, thank you so much for being on the show. Michael: Thanks for having me. It's been great.

Welcome to Power of Ten – a podcast about design operating at many levels, zooming out from thoughtful detail to organisational transformation and to changes in society and the world. I'm your host, Andy Polaine, a designer, educator and writer and currently Group Director of Client Evolution at Fjord. My guest in this episode is Lisa Welchman. Lisa has written and blogged for 16 years about digital governance and wrote the leading book on this critical discipline called Managing Chaos. She also has a wonderful singing voice and a love of jazz, which makes her my new favourite guest. Show Links Lisa Welchman's website Lisa's book, Managing Chaos Lisa Welchman on Twitter Andy's website Andy on Twitter Power of Ten on This is HCD where you will also find a transcript to this episode. Support the show.

Welcome to Power of Ten – a podcast about design operating at many levels, zooming out from thoughtful detail to organisational transformation and to changes in society and the world. I'm your host, Andy Polaine, a designer, educator and writer and currently Group Director of Client Evolution at Fjord. My guest in this episode is Lisa Welchman. Lisa has written and blogged for 16 years about digital governance and wrote the leading book on this critical discipline called Managing Chaos. She also has a wonderful singing voice and a love of jazz, which makes her my new favourite guest. Show Links Lisa Welchman's website Lisa's book, Managing Chaos Lisa Welchman on Twitter Andy's website Andy on Twitter Power of Ten on This is HCD where you will also find a transcript to this episode. Support the show.

My guest today is Rachel Price. Rachel works as a Senior Information Architect at Microsoft and teaches Information Architecture at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. Her background is in music, and in this episode we talk about how structures can serve as a foundation for improvisation. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/the-informed-life-episode-17-rachel-price.mp3   Show notes Rachel Price on LinkedIn Rachel Price on Twitter School of Visual Concepts Magic Eye optical illusions The Informed Life Episode 11: Lisa Welchman on Governance Improvisation: Methods and Models by Jeff Pressing (PDF) Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch New York Times iOS app Screen Time on iOS How to Use App Limits and Downtime in iOS 12 Kind of Blue by Miles Davis Read the full transcript Jorge: Rachel, welcome to the show. Rachel: Thank you for having me. Jorge: Well, it's really great having you here. For folks who don't know who you are, would you introduce yourself, please? Rachel: Sure. So I'm Rachel Price. I am a senior information architect at Microsoft out here in Seattle. I'm also an instructor at the School of Visual Concepts here in Seattle. And then on top of that all I'm a musician. I'm actually a Jazz saxophonist. Jorge: Wow, that's awesome. What are you teaching? Rachel: So right now I teach information architecture at SVC, which is part of a UX certificate program. So I'm teaching really introductory students the world of IA in about six weeks, one night a week. It's a whirlwind. Jorge: That's fantastic. I'm very curious to know what you tell them. Like, how do you introduce information architecture? Rachel: Oh, man. I try to really focus on one really huge concept in many many different ways over the weeks, and that concept is teaching them how to see the world as an information environment and kind of see past that surface level of how many beginning students think of UX or design as just kind of the visual level. So the very first thing we start with is breaking experiences down into information objects. Admittedly, I use a lot of your quotes and I put your head in a tiny little bubble on a lot of screens to help kind of contextualize a lot of the stuff we're doing. But we practice just breaking places and things down into kind of information objects that make them up and the metaphor I use that whole time is like those… Do you remember those Mind's Eye puzzles, where you kind of have to cross your eyes or like look past the puzzle to see the 3D image pop out? Jorge: Yes, I do. Rachel: Yeah. So what I tell my students who are trusting me that all it will all make sense at some point is that we're learning how to kind of look past the surface of things like websites and apps and most of the things we end up building as UX designers and see kind of what's under that service and see those objects really start to pop out. So we do a lot of exercises around developing that vision. And if by the end of six weeks that were the only thing I accomplished with them is their ability to see information objects in the wild, then I'm super happy about that. Jorge: I had not thought of this metaphor with those puzzles. I'm curious. I haven't seen those in a long time, that was… If my memory serves, that was around the early to mid-90s, no? Rachel: I think so. I remember… I feel like I was about, yeah, 10 or 12 when I was playing with them. So far, I haven't had anyone look at me completely confused about what I mean by that but I imagine as I keep teaching I might find a generational gap there. Jorge: So are we talking… Are these like college level students? Rachel: Students who are trying to switch careers. So maybe they finished an undergraduate degree a year or two or five ago and have decided they really want to get into UX design. The School of Visual Concepts has a lot of different programs to help people get into different types of careers. I think it actually started as a way to help people get into artistic careers. I'm not quite sure if that's where they started, I should have reviewed that before starting this sentence. But really it's for people who are interested in exploring different avenues of creative expression. And then also I know they have this UX certificate. Because as you know in Seattle, we have a glut of UX jobs open and there is just a lot of room for new people to enter the field. And so SVC is one of the schools that's trying to kind of do right by students and help them get prepared for that. Jorge: I can easily see how this subject that you're teaching there connects to your job. Just judging from your title, senior information architect. But I'm wondering, you also mentioned that you're a musician, and I was wondering how, if any, that connects. Rachel: That's such a good question and it's frankly one I've been trying to answer for several years now. So I graduated — my undergrad, the music degree — playing jazz saxophone. And like many others in my generation, I graduated right into the recession so… And even not in a recession, you know, being a musician doesn't always pay bills unless you're one of the elite, right? And so, I ended up to kind of help pay my rent, I ended up working in SEO for digital marketing agencies and from there I decided I wanted to pursue my Masters in Library Sciences. So I moved out to Seattle to get my Masters in Library and Information Sciences and discovered IA and became an IA. So the question is really where's the connection? And I've been trying to answer that for quite some time and I think in the last year I've started seeing this pattern where I've been doing a lot of thinking about improvisation and how the ways we learn improvisation as Jazz musicians, there's a framework to it. There are ways to learn improvisation, you know people tend to think it's just this free-for-all or you're either really good at it or you're not and it's just this unpredictable kind of chaos, and the reality is that's not actually true. Improvisation is patterns unfolding over time. And when I started to think about improvisation as this pattern unfolding, seeing patterns everywhere, making connections, developing skill sets so that you can make decisions on the fly, it started to become really clear to me that there's a pretty strong relationship between that kind of thinking and the kind of thinking that we do in IA or UX. I don't think it's any coincidence a lot of people in this field are also musicians. Jorge: Yes, I've had a previous guest on the show — Lisa Welchman — who is also a musician and funny enough, this subject of improvisation within a framework came up as well there. So there is something there. Now, hearing you talk about it, it reminded me when I was a student, I was… I studied architecture, and one of the very first things that I learned, the very first semester I was in school, and which kind of blew my mind, was the notion that creativity thrives on constraints. Rachel: Absolutely. Jorge: I'm wondering if you can elaborate on this theme of improvisation within a framework as it relates to music. Rachel: Yeah, so, I mean there's all flavors of improvisation, you know. Performing musicians prefer different kinds. There is totally free improv, which is completely… Well, mostly outside of a framework beyond call and response, and it's like having a totally open conversation with no goal or theme in mind. But there are more traditional forms of improvisation, when you play over like a set of chord changes, right? The chord changes are the heart of a song. Song has a melody, which is the string of notes that is kind of the core theme of the song, like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, you know, you've got this melody going on. And then under the melody, you've got chord changes, which is just a progression a series of chords that the pianist is playing or the guitar player is playing that set the context for the boundaries of the song and how the song feels and generally how it sounds. When you improvise, you're playing over those chord changes. And what that means is that there's this framework that you're playing inside of, of notes that'll go really well, notes that will be really crazy and dissonant, you've got guide tones in the chords, which are like these little milestones and landmarks for you to land on that really set the context for the notes that you're choosing, you've got song forms, which tell you where you are in a song and how many times it's repeating and that sort of thing. So the improvisation is really making a series of choices about what note to play at a given time, but it's in reaction to a bunch of other input. There's a theory of improvisation in terms of the cognitive aspects of improvisation, I believe was developed by Jeff Pressing in the 80s. That is pretty straightforward. It's improvisation is some sort of sensory input goes into the central nervous system at that point if the player uses all these connections in their head, schemas that they know really well, patterns that they know really well, kind of tools or tricks that they know really well, they make connections. They make a snap decision about what to play. Then they actually play it and then the whole loop starts over again. So now they've created sensory input for someone else or for themselves, and it's just this recruitment repeating cycle of iteration. And so I think that that way of thinking about — it's not necessarily like constraints, things you can't do — but it's this framework of things that are guiding you and giving you context around maybe what makes the most sense or what would sound really cool or what sounds really bizarre if that's what you're trying to do. And so it's this idea that improvisation is not happening in a vacuum, right? There's all sorts of input going into it. Beyond just the notes are choosing to play. Jorge: How does that play out with information architecture work? Rachel: I think this can apply in a lot of different ways. The way I'm currently focusing on it, to me, a really direct parallel is how we talk to people and how in IA a lot of that boils down to user research. Right? It became pretty clear to me when I start thinking about this that when we do user research and were interviewing people, it's this kind of abstract situation or… Not abstract, but kind of ambiguous, right? We don't necessarily know what's going to happen when we talk to people. We don't really know what their mental models are going to be. We don't know how they're going to answer questions, if they're going to understand us. It can be this challenging experience. But so much rides on it because so much of the decisions we make as IAs needs to be based on what people need for my structures and how they understand the world that we're building for them. And so what I'm working on now without giving the whole thing away is actually this is a talk I'll be giving at EuroIA is, how we can use improvisation techniques that jazz musicians use — because they have all these tools and tricks of the trade — and actually employ those to become better research facilitators. I think a lot of what we know about research facilitation today kind of relies on you have this palette of question types, you can ask which is really helpful you've got all these things you can do to prepare for the research, but it's really really hard to practice being comfortable in a conversation with a total stranger which is itself an act of improvisation. You know, I think we're all improvisers when we talk to people and then when you're in a research setting and you're interviewing people, you're improvising with a lot of pressure on you to get the right information and ask the right questions and that can be really heavy feeling. So I think using improvisation, this improvisation framework is a way to think about how we interview people whether that's users. It could be interviewing stakeholders. It could be working through a tough meeting with your team. I think these are all really applicable things. Jorge: When you mentioned user research and this notion of improvisation… I've been in user research sessions where the researchers go in with a script for what they want to ask folks, and some researchers want to be very by the book and stick to the script. Right? And that would be, in my mind, using this analogy, it would be something like playing a piece of classical music where it's all written out for you. Whereas you could also use the script as kind of tent poles or points that you want to hit if you get the time. Like it's a theme that you want to focus on but but that opens up… I guess it's a style where it opens up to more kind of freeform conversation. Rachel: Yeah, I think that thinking of it as a… Like, I think of script as kind of chord changes, right? They're landmarks you're going for and you need to get there eventually, but feeling confident enough to improvise the path between those landmarks is what leads to a more productive, natural, fun conversation for both the researcher and the participant. And I think that's where… I'm not going to remember this quote perfectly, but there's a really great book called Free Play and in it they talk about how improvising with others creates these moments where this other thing gets treated in this third place that neither one of you would have done individually. And that third place, If I'm really going to stretch the metaphor, I don't think it's that far of a stretch, like that third place in music is really equivalent to that deeper level of understanding while talking to others, while doing a user research interview or whatever interview you're doing. So being able to improvise comfortably so you can get to that third place of creation, I think it's really the goal. Jorge: I love this idea of thinking about these conversations as an opportunity to create something new rather than go down some kind of prescribed path. Rachel: Yeah. Because even in classical music, right? The most wonderful classical performers are not just reading off the page, you know? There's a lot of embellishments that happen, a lot of phrasing that they choose to do in their own unique way that really brings a piece to life. And so even if you've got this pretty well scripted script, or set of objectives that you're being really strict about, that's fine. It's the path getting through those, I think that really is what brings research alive. Jorge: One of the reasons that I wanted to talk with you is precisely because I think you're a very thoughtful on these issues, and I'm wondering how if any this way of thinking about it has affected the way that you manage your own information. Rachel: It totally has. This coincides pretty directly with another kind of principle I've been working under for about the last year or so, which is that of radical simplification of the structures I put in place. Right? And so there's a big parallel between this idea of having this super scripted thing that you need to get through versus having landmarks that you need to hit. And I don't know necessarily how I'm gonna get through those, to how I manage the information in my life. I'd say until about a year ago, I really architected how I managed information and how I organized everything both in my personal life and in my projects and at work and all this other stuff. And I realized that by structuring everything to the nth degree, I actually wasn't helping myself anymore. It was really a reaction to stress and anxiety and this idea of like, “If I can just control every little thing, then everything will be fine.” And I realized it was actually backfiring, having that really intense amount of structure was just making the burden heavier. And so I started experimenting with this idea of simplifying, really really simplifying my structures, so that there is more room for creativity and improvisation in almost everything I was doing. I really realized that by structuring things so heavily, It just wasn't giving me any space to do good work or just be and relax and exist in this beautiful world. Jorge: I'm wondering if you can give us an example of how loosening up the structures can has led you to opening space for improvisation and creativity. Rachel: Yeah. So one concrete example is one that I've actually heard from a lot of people, where I used to make these really long, structured to-do lists because I just wanted to monitor my progress on everything, I wanted to feel like I was making progress on stuff and really keep track of every little thing that was going on. What I realized was having those long to-do list was actually just stressing me out even more. I felt like I always had so much to do. When I started shortening my to-do lists, I realized it's not because I suddenly had less to do, It's that I was really forcing a prioritization of what it was I needed to do. So, that's a pretty common one that we hear a lot, is this shortening that to do list. The other thing that I've tried to do is really just… I think I've been calling it like throttling my intake, and just be very selective about the type of information and the channels of information that I'm willing to take in. Because when you create space… You have a finite finite amount of brain space, at least I do. And when you just let anybody or anything fill that space then they'll fill it and it'll be max to capacity. And I realized what I was doing as I wasn't saving any space for myself, which means quiet time, time to be bored, time to sit quietly and just think about something. And so by really throttling my intake what I mean is, I have been practicing checking my email less frequently. I've turned off all notifications on my phone. My phone shuts down all my access to my apps at like 8 o'clock every night. So to help me throttle my intake. I do those short to-do lists. I don't check the news as frequently, and I really get curious when I am trying to pick up some information, if I'm doing it by habit or if I'm doing it intentionally. And if I'm doing it my habit I ask you know, what what am I hoping to get out of taking in this information at this moment? Like why am I doing this? Why am I checking New York Times app for the fifth time? What am I hoping to get out of this? And so that's been a really big part of this kind of experiment and just opening up space for other things that are not about digesting information. Jorge: You mentioned turning off the… I think you said the phone's ability to check email after a certain time. Are you first of all, are you an iPhone or an Android User? Rachel: Yeah, iPhone. Jorge: So are you using like Apple's native… Rachel: Yeah. Yeah, whatever they're calling it. I don't think it's the Do Not Disturb, but it basically… Oh, Screen Time. So I have my down time. There's a there's a part of that called Downtime and then there's a part called app limits and so I've got my Downtime set to start It looks like at nine o'clock at night. So it just shuts all my apps… It like grays out all of my apps and if I try to open one, it asks me. It says hey, “You're supposed to be in down time right now. Like, are you sure you want to do this?” And then usually I say, “You know, what? No, I actually don't really need to look at this right now.” This was an anxious reflex to some thought I had. Now I'm not going to open this because I know I really need to. Or the app limits, you know, I set some limits on social media because I get really sucked in and I waste a lot of time that way and it generates a lot of bad feelings for me. So I have my phone kind of helping me throttle some of that. Be my buddy. It's my buddy and reminding me that, “At one point, you said you didn't want to do this. I'll totally let you do this, but I'm just going to check first. ” Jorge: Yeah, it's somehow you have to opt yourself back into something that you said that you'd committed to not do, right? Rachel: Yeah, or even if you think of it, the way my screen is laid out… I love working. I get in a state of flow, I really enjoy it and that's great. It's a sign that I love my field, I love my job. The problem is that I'm not really great at managing that love of flow when I really do actually want to be doing other things, like at night. Right? I've been really lucky that I've never been in situations with any job I've had where people are pressuring me to work at night or on the weekends or anything like that, but I have a personal tendency to do it because I really enjoy it. So the thing that I'm trying to do is maintain that delicate balance of doing what I love but also I need a little help retaining space for other things that I love that maybe are not so pleasant in my life. You know, like sometimes I need help being reminded to play my instrument or to just sit quietly and not open my email and see if anyone needs my help. Jorge: I don't know too much about jazz, but one of the one of the things that I understand about improvisational jazz — and I think you hinted at this earlier — is a notion that when you're playing your instrument along with a group of other players, with a band say, and all of you have achieved a certain level of mastery over the instruments, you can get into these states of flow where you can improvise over certain structures. In hearing you talk about how you're setting up your personal information environments to wall off your personal time, I'm wondering how, if any, you've found ways of opening up those spaces for you to play along with others to collaborate with other people. Rachel: Yeah, that's a really great question. So if you think of a combo, a group of jazz musicians who are playing something together. They've all agreed at some point on the scenario, right? Like are we playing this particular song are we just free improvising in some particular style? You know, what other kind of the boundaries of what we're trying to do together? And then they move forward and play together. And I think that that really makes a lot of sense. And how I approach collaborating with teammates or with students or with co-presenters at workshops and all this thing is like, what's our shared goal here? What's this scenario we're in? What's the framework? And are there constraints we are working in? And now let's dive in, play together. And you'll you know, if you are an avid jazz listener and you go to live shows, there are definitely moments when some jazz musicians are… They really want to be the star, you know, and you can totally tell they're not really playing by the rules. They're not collaborating super well, and it totally happens because we're all human beings. And so there's also a little in how we collaborate in our work too; there are times when you've got different levels of people who are and are not playing along. And so you learn how to just keep communicating the goal, right? And keep just trying to contribute to that shared improvisation and and you keep iterating and you keep getting feedback from others about how that's going and then at some point you reach the end of the song and and whatever happens happened and you kind of move on from there. Jorge: I remember reading something about the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue. Rachel: Uh-huh. Jorge: Where… And I might be totally off on this, but I think I read this somewhere, that when that album was recorded they basically did all songs in one take, or what you hear on the album is the first take, and there was no music written out. It's just Miles Davis came in with the chord progressions, and he just gave them to the players and said, “This is what we're doing.” And that album essentially captures their improvisations and that's what comes to mind when you're describing this. Rachel: Yeah, totally that idea that chord changes are enough is so cool. Right? It's this idea that this pretty spare framework is just enough context to allow people to communicate with each other meaningfully with some shared intention, but with enough freedom for these incredible unpredictable moments to happen as well. Jorge: Just to bring it all back back together because we are kind of nearing the end of our time together here, I feel like our conversation today has been a little bit of an improvisation like that. Rachel: Yeah. Jorge: In that we had a little bit of a structure. Like I told you well, you know, we're going to be talking for about around 30 minutes, and these are more or less the themes we're going to be touching on. But really the the conversation itself has been emergent and I've learned a lot just from our brief time together, so I wanted to thank you for that. Rachel: Oh, absolutely. You're welcome. It's been really fun talking about this and seeing if the idea falls flat or not. Quite transparently, you know, this is the thing I've been thinking about for a couple months now and I think it has some legs and it's not just me. So it's been really fun to show some of these ideas the light of day and see how well they fare. Jorge: You were mentioning that you're going to be presenting this later this year. Where would be the best place for folks to follow up with you, see what you're up to look into your presentations and such? Rachel: Yeah. So my LinkedIn and Twitter are where I plan to post everything once it's ready. And those are really the only two channels I keep an eye on. And you'll notice, not surprisingly I don't tend to speak much on this. I do a lot of listening. But I'll be publishing decks and an extra materials there when they're ready. Jorge:I'm going to include those in the in the show notes. So thank you for your time, Rachel. This has been great. Rachel: Yeah. Thank you so much.

My guest today is digital governance advocate Lisa Welchman. For the past twenty years, Lisa has helped organizations manage the flow of their digital information. In this episode, she tells us about how content models and governance frameworks can help organizations manage their information more intentionally and safely. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/episode-11-lisa-welchman.mp3   Show notes Lisa Welchman Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, by Lisa Welchman Insight Timer Scientific Eve Read the full transcript Jorge: All right, Lisa, tell us about yourself. Lisa: Not sure what you want to know. Do you want to know technical Lisa, musical Lisa, all of the Lisas? Jorge: Lisa sounds like a very multi-faceted person and I am super intrigued now by everything you've said, so why don't we take those in that order? Lisa: So there's governance Lisa. I don't remember which one I said first. There's governance Lisa, what I really have been doing – it's taken me a while to figure it out – for the last 20 years, is help – usually businesses, but sometimes nonprofits, sometimes higher education, sometimes governments sometimes NGOs – so anyone, I guess – organizations, let's put it that way. I help organizations who are dealing with it sort of multi-faceted online presence figure out how to get organized so that they can make that with better intention, higher quality, and more recently, I've also been saying safely; with safety in mind, right? So as everyone knows, but I'll just say it again, the web sort of crept on organizations particularly ones that already existed prior to the advent of the commercial web, sort of snuck up on people and so they've tried to impose some of their previous work practices. And previous disciplines and domains like marketing, IT. to try to make digital fit within those confines of what this groups already doing. It doesn't really, right? Because while there are a lot of similarities and a lot of things the marketing team could claim as theirs, or an IT team could claim as theirs, there are some unique ways that information flows inside an organization that demands some tweaks to that and even some new things the adage that work model. So that's what I spend most of my time doing. It's really helping these organizations digest digital and integrate those practices in their organization. So that's for one that existed already prior to that. Occasionally, I'll work with dot-coms. Sometimes very different model. They're all digital, right? So they're trying to figure out the reverse which is how they impose structure and any kind of governing practice into a new business model. So the aim is the same which is how can we create and put things online and safe manner and a clear manner and with intention. So that's what I spend most of my time doing. In my spare time, I do all kinds of things. My son says I don't know how to sit still or I'm a production-oriented person. I don't think that's entirely true, but he might be right. And you know, I spend time I make a lot of music and recording music. I posted music on the Insight Meditation timer so I create these interesting meditation pieces and put those online. Creating them helps me relax and I like to share that with other people. And I also quilt which is a fun thing to do. We were mentioning before we hit the record button that quilting is very mathematically oriented geometry in particular. It's just a fun way to relax to sort of design and make those quilts as well. So those are probably the primary things that I do. Jorge: What type of music do you play? Lisa: The first thing I am is a singer. The second thing that I am is a jazz pianist. This is in order of competency. So I sing the best. And I do a lot of that. I was trained as a classical singer and then we do some jazz on the side because I grew up in a time where there were a lot of replays of Cole Porter songbook all the American Songbook, all this classic Gershwin all that sort of thing. So I grew up with that songbook; listening to a lot of Ella Fitzgerald. My dad was a jazz nut. A lot of musicians in my family. And so, I started to Jazz sing probably when I was in my 20s. And I started to get annoyed at not being able to find someone to play the piano for me consistently. And so I learned a little bit piano, taking like five or six years of piano lessons in childhood. And so I thought you know by the time I finish complaining about this I could have learned how to do this myself. So I also play jazz piano, but it's really hard to accompany yourself. So I have a lot of admiration for people who do that. But I do it for pleasure. It's fun. I wanted to talk about when we did this… to talk about just organization in general. Information organization, inside of a business or corporation or whatever you want to call it, school. And then also the organization of the team that makes that information so, you know, I think that's just an important component that I really like to bring out. Because when you asked me to do this it was confusing to me, and I've come to the conclusion – and I may have actually written in this in my book and forgot about it – but there was just this symbiotic relationship between the team that creates the information and the information. And those things need to be architected in complementary ways so that they can support each other. And there's also sort of a chicken and egg thing that comes on. When I work with a lot of digital teams inside of an organization, the number one complaint is usually the content people, right? And they're usually inside the marketing team, and they're upset because they're trying to create some sort of content model – could be an information model – and they're not able to do it consistently because they don't have any authority over the team of people that make that content. That's a complaint. You know what it should be, you know how the information should flow, whether or not that's omni-channel, whether or not it's just a simple modular reuse of certain types of content, chunks not omni-channel. It could be just the reuse of content on a set of websites or single website. They can't get control over that information flowing is usually because the team isn't structured to do so. Jorge: The shape of the team affects the shape of the information, right? Lisa: Or the other way around. In fact, that is what I think is the really interesting question. What's dominant? That's why I'm calling it a symbiotic relationship. So say you're – I don't know – an airplane manufacturer. There's a few of those, like we could be talking about any of them. So you're an airplane manufacturer and you've existed since airplanes have been manufactured and you have work processes and models that are in place to support paper-based content delivery or information delivery. And it's very very controlled in that way and you're conservative. So all of that information comes out of that office of communications or marketing department has reviewed and that's how it gets done. In comes the World Wide Web, into that model, and we all know – I won't tell that story again – the web comes, everyone claims it, and you get a lot of things popping up inside the organization. So maybe one business aspect of the organization thinks they want to have a website that says this, and another says that. And so you get this fragmentation. That's what happened; it's happened to everything on the web. Let's not talk about dot coms right now. Let's just keep that to businesses that existed prior to the web and had the web sort of imposed on them. Right? So all of a sudden here comes the web things start to pop up because you have new rules about how to manage the web in the organization, and then you fast forward 25 years, which is now, and you say something like. Oh, I want to do omni-channel, right? How would you actually get that done? So who's driving that and what's the structure of people to get that done? Say you figure that out; you figure out how to do omni-channel. It means that you need to be consistent about certain content standards across the organization. If you live in an organization that has a highly decentralized behavior, the culture is one of decentralization, and where certain business units are allowed to make certain decisions, they may not like having a consistent content model imposed on them. And you can say, well so what? They don't like it, they still have to do it. But if the culture is that that's not how they do it, they don't actually have to do it. Right? And that's the governing problem that affects the piece: how do you make these people do that? Or you could say, there's another thing you could say: we're going to say it stays decentralized but we still want you to follow this content model, but we don't want you to produce it in a decentralized way, we want you to make your stuff, send it back to headquarters, we'll review it, and we'll clean it up and brush it up and make it the way we want, and then we will deploy it. That's a horrible content model. It creates a bottleneck. But that's a way to get it done. So there's a lot of different ways to get it done. But you have to settle on something and a certain set of compromises that you have to make on the people side and a content side to get it done. That's the struggle. Jorge: For the benefit of our listeners, what is a content model? Lisa: Content model to me is the structures and processes that need to be put in place in order to deliver information to the community of users that you want to deliver, when they want it, how they want it, just in time right in time. How do we best do that serve the mission of the organization? Maybe that might just mean minimal content reuse for folks, right? It may mean highly modular content. One of those exciting things that for me and my career is that I started out at Cisco Systems. And they already had a multichannel delivery in 1999. And I talked about this in my book, but and I keep talking about it, but it's true. Like people come to me now. They still can't do multi-channel content delivery . So we had a content model Framemaker that basically imposed content reuse and they delivered to multiple channels. The channels were to a CD-ROM drive, make a book that you can put in a box – this is 1999 – make a book that you can put in the box with the servers or routers that Cisco sold, and the last one, or the last two ones were push to the web and push to the intranet — basic content information so that the sales team could see the information and they knew what they were selling. And there's a lot of redundancy in that content. So they created a model that you knew what content needed to be used for which delivery whether it's the book, CD-ROM, or the web. So they created that model. And my point is that when you create a content model there's a certain type of workflow that goes along with that content model. If you're going to reuse a title, if you're going to reuse a whole white paper – which at that time was a big deal – you have to think about who needs to touch those things in workflow to get them working particularly well. And my point is that that content model may not fit well with how an organization works culturally. You might be insisting on consistency across multiple business units when they never had to do it before. And that means that they don't have shared work practices. Maybe they don't want to use the same standard. Maybe they don't like the writing style; one business unit doesn't like the writing style that's used for the content and they're used to having their own. And see how this push and pull. And you have to create that sort of symbiotic relationship between a workflow and the content so you get the right balance. It's real challenge. I mean, I'm listening to myself and understand that I'm making this sound really really complicated, but it's not. It's very simple in a lot of ways what's complicated is people. People don't want to do it. Jorge: So the way that you're describing it, it sounds to me like what the content model does, is it brings everyone onto the same playing field when it comes to language, right? Like you said that in the Cisco example, all those various channels by which content got communicated to folks ended up informing the sales team and getting them to a degree of cohesiveness about what they were selling. So I can see how that would influence the culture of the organization because in some ways it's like you're putting rails around the language they use. Lisa: Right. And you know, people don't like that. The interesting thing about the digital space and the web space is that the way that it came out of the box was very sort of wild and unruly. Everyone likes to say “Wild West,” but it is a good example. There weren't any rules. When I was at Cisco, we were making up stuff as we went along. Jorge: I'm wondering about how people did this before the internet because you're talking about the arrival of the web in particular as this kind of turning point of sorts. Lisa: I think yes, if you know what it's just it's… It is a significant inflection point for for humanity, the sharing of information globally and instantly is definitely an inflection point for human beings and I think we're just starting that. We celebrated the 30th anniversary of the web this year who that's really nothing. I say all the time it took, you know, a really really long time for printing to mature, it took a really really long time for the phone to commoditize, it took a long time for people to know how to manufacture cars safely. We're struggling with all these things right now. How do we have consistent standards across the board? Lucky for us, the World Wide Web is standards-based. If you don't follow certain standards, it's just isn't going to push through the browser. It's not going to work. So I'm not talking about the technology. I'm talking about standards within our organization. And people like to say that organizations don't make standards or have standards and that's just not true. Organizations usually have a consistent business card, a consistent brand which includes a consistent mark. They have consistent ways that they use language. They have consistency around the way that they house their employees. They have these big campuses that have consistent layouts that have naming conventions for their conference rooms. So when I walk in and they tell me, ” we don't do standards here.” I'm like, “that's just not true. What you haven't decided is that digital is something that should be in that set of things that you all do in a standardized way”. Right? And part of that is the web has a culture of do what you want when you want. And I grew up in that culture. There were no rules and so the web as a discipline and digital as a discipline needs to mature. Now does that mean that everything has to be sort of choked through this gate of sameness? No. That would be one way to do it, right? But that doesn't mean it just means that an organization needs to be consistent about how they push information through the organization and therefore consistent about how they staff for those positions that move that information. So a lot of times, I'm walking in and there's a digital team that's already formed with names in it: UX; it's usually split somewhere between IT and marketing communications and some loud people in the business units. They all have names, they all have jobs, and they basically are saying “give me a governing framework, but don't change my job.” Right? And that's not how it works. If you want to have an omni-channel experience for your users. You're probably going to have to change the way you create information, which means you're going to have to change the jobs of people that create information and that's really what people are pushing up against, right? They'll all agree that this is a great content model. We want to do this type of delivery scheme for information management for our users. But as soon as you say that means you're going to lose your power or you have to move from here or no marketing, IT does get a say about certain systems, or you need to tell the business units to rein themselves in about making certain choices people get really in a muddle. Right? And so that's really what they're bucking up against and it makes it a very interesting human problem. Jorge: When you're talking about content and communications, I can think of at least two different kinds of communication and content being produced. One is the sort of stuff that goes out to the world. So you're talking for example about marketing and marketing produces content that gets shared with people outside the organization. And then there is content that is meant for internal consumption, just for the folks who work at the company. And I'm guessing that these governance frameworks affect both. Is that the case? Lisa: Well, they often are different governing frameworks. So a governing framework for me is about decision-making. Who gets to make decisions about standards. A content model is a standard for delivering content. Brand has a set of standards that are underneath it. IT has a set of standards. Right? So it's decision-making about standards. In some organizations the internet and the intranet, which is that external and internal content names, which I'm talking about websites just to be simple, right? Those things aren't managed by the same team. It doesn't happen that often. So the governing framework of who makes decisions about standards for the intranet and internet might be similar. In most instances, it's not the same. Some other organization does the internet and some other one does any external-facing things. And so you might have different governing frameworks, and you often do. Right? Because it's who makes decisions about the standards for internally consumed content might be different. Marketing usually doesn't want to have anything to do with that but everything to do with external, right? So those are going to be different types of governing frameworks. However, the types of decision-making that happens in a governance framework are threefold: strategies, policies, and standards. So standards might be made by different people in the group, strategies might be different, but oftentimes the policy-making framework is the same for internet and intranet because it usually has to do with compliance and regulatory aspects and then talking about the legal team or compliance team and that can sort of roll up . But sometimes that can be different as well. So these are just sort of dry things that nobody wants to think about. But it is the thing that people fight about the most. I have a new visual design for the website. Who gets to decide what that is? That's the number one fight. It is the number one fight inside of an organization, used to be what's on the home page. Number one fight, right? So figuring out who makes these decisions about standards is really important and if you can figure that out once for the internet, once for the intranet, once for the extranet, what that decision-making paradigm is, multiple projects and operational teams can flow through that governing framework. But people don't want to do that. It's really fascinating. I've been doing this for 20 years and just now with the sort of blow-ups that you're seeing in the dot-coms are people starting to say, “oh wait, this stuff needs to be governed. There needs to be policy, there needs to be standards, whose supposed to be making rules about safety? How do you make safe online products?” Right? And so it's really fascinating that now after 20 years, I think we've reached a letter level of maturity and another inflection point where were like, okay, you see what we can happen when we blow this stuff up in a very large way. How are we going to govern that from a Global Perspective? Right? That's really the tough question, who's going to make rent rules about how we govern the World Wide Web – not from a technology perspective, but almost behaviorally. What is okay stuff to do on the web and not okay stuff to do? So that challenge can be in a business, in a big dot com, working the inside a for-profit business, in a non-profit, for a government. The way that the web is governed in China is very different than the way the web is governed in France. So this governance thing, not self-serving, I think is central right now. Whether or not you're trying to publish content in a way that makes sense for whether or not you trying to govern the whole web. It's the same problem. Jorge: How has doing this work influenced the way that you use information yourself? Lisa: Do you mean actually doing the work of working with the folks on a governing model? Or just in general, what have I absorbed in my own work practices? Jorge: The latter, because it's a meta thing, right? Like you're advising folks on how to be more intentional about their use of information and I'm wondering if you have picked up any patterns, any best practices that have helped you in your own use of information. Lisa: Probably yes. But I would say what probably is more true is the reverse. So you asked me about myself at the beginning of this podcast and I talked about music and I talked about quilting and I talked about governance. Well, what do all of those things have in common? They are all very highly organized. So despite looking at my not organized home or my not visually organized tasks, which would make some people crazy, in my head I'm very organized. So I studied philosophy in school and people think that when I say that they're thinking of a Jean-Paul Sartre with a beret on their head and smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. Right? And thinking existential thoughts. And I did a little bit of that. But then I got very quickly to symbolic logic. And for every year, which was four years of undergrad in the US and then a year in grad school where I decided didn't want to be a philosophy professor. For every year, I took symbolic logic very very deeply. And I was very interested in semantics. People don't talk about the semantic web anymore for all the reasons we were talking about. Delivering on the semantic web would be very very challenging High degree of organization across the board. So people don't talk about that. So I think what's more happening is my love of organization has led me to this aspect of managing and thinking about digital – so not in a visual, in my face kind of way, where people really need to have visual organization – in fact, I collect art and it's all abstract. All abstract art. Would make people crazy. I'm really trying to impose organization on things, on any type of paradigm that I see, I'm always trying to systematize it and figure out, how does this work? Like add a meta- level, what is going on? What are the dynamics that are happening? That's what I'm really interested in. You know, what are the dynamics of Team? What are the dynamics of the content? How are these two things going to dance together, partner to partner, in a way that's elegant, that gets the job done, but also allows the other one to have its own entity, have its own being. And so that's really what's happened. I love organizational patterns, period. If I can quilt them, if I can chord-progress them through music, absolutely fantastic. One of the interesting things I talk about in my book is how the reason that I like jazz is because it has a structural frame underneath it. Right? And on top of it you can improvise. And that's really, I think, what everybody's trying to get to. Some people want to improvise a little bit, some people a lot. But organizations need that structured frame so that everyone just one understands what the patterns are and then if you get that right and you allow each entity inside the team to maximize what they do well within that frame, then you get the best of both worlds. You get a structured content model that is really well managed. You get people who love their jobs because they're allowed to improvise and freestyle within that framework and do things that they love. And you get this beautiful output that your customers or your citizens, whoever it might be, actually are congruent with. And I'd say in the digital space we see very little of that dance. You just sort of see everybody either trying to freestyle or we see it so locked down that it's not interesting or it's not really delivering. And so that I think is really going to be the challenge of the next 20 or 30 years for the enterprise, which is how to create that balance. How to make my team and marketing work together when they have two very different types of work patterns. There's so much freestyle going on that some of the stuff that's getting delivered is not safe. Right? And so I think we're going to be calming down and actually putting into place governing models in the organization and more broadly across the web, the cross vertical market spaces like healthcare, using that as an example, to make sure that things are operating with intention – I love that word, I use it all the time – and safely. Jorge: When you use this fabulous analogy with jazz – and I think it is fabulous because this notion that the structure is what grants you the freedom to improvise — the fact that it's not turning into a mush because everyone is working off the same underlying structures. When I think of good jazz, they are making amazing music that works with the structure but also feels loose and the players are listening to each other and responding to what the others are doing. And there's this kind of looseness. So there is a balance between the structure and also the looseness of going to where the music takes them. And the notion that popped in my mind is that that requires a certain degree of mastery on the part of the players. Right? Lisa: Yeah, I would say so. One thing is I'll say I'm less judgmental than you are about good jazz. So I like the type of jazz you're talking about and might even lean in your direction personally, but I would also say there's highly scripted jazz. Musicians are in a big band in their reading off of the thing and only occasionally will somebody stand up and solo. But for the most time, they're reading music and they're playing that. Right? And so that's good and true if that's your intention. One of the things that I say when content teams in the corporate structure of an organization do not want to decentralize the creation of content outside of that, they don't want to give it to the business units because they don't trust them to do a good job, and I say,” hire well and train often.” That's a job they don't want to do. You'd be surprised still how much of information and content creation is collateral duty for people who are not trained to do that. So you're going to get kind of crap, right? Just as there are people who are trained to select and deploy web content management systems and to understand how technology stack works. Those people aren't necessarily only in IT or only in marketing. If you know how to do that well you can get a job anywhere because IT and marketing are trying to pick up those things. So there are disciplines and competencies, particularly in the digital space, that need to be written down and then you need to hire well or you need to train people to do something well. And then you get that quality. And that's all the freestyling part that you said that you liked a lot. I like it too because I think that's what most people want. They want to go to work and do something that they love and do it well and be in an environment that supports them in doing that. And then you have happy employees, happy at work. And then you have happy people. When you have happy people, I think you get less of the bad things in the world. If you have people going to jobs that they don't like or that push against their needs that's not going to help anyone globally, or just humanity globally. And maybe I'm just stretching that out a little bit but I think that's important component the human components important when to bring in. Jorge: I love this idea of setting up these structures not necessarily with the objective of constraining people, but to make their work easier and make them happier. I love that. This is actually a great place to wrap it up. So where can folks find you, Lisa? Lisa: Well, they can find a little bit about me and a contact form at lisawelchman.com and they can buy my book Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design either at Rosenfeld Media or on Amazon. Jorge: I'm also wondering where folks can listen to your music. Lisa: If you are a part of the Insight Timer community, I'll tell people a secret: I publish my music under a name, Scientific Eve. So see, even in that even in my arty name there's science. Jorge: Well, fantastic. Thank you for sharing that with us and thank you for sharing just in general what you're doing. It sounds fascinating. Lisa: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. End music: “Good Morning” by Scientific Eve

200 Episodes! Almost 5 days of podcast content recorded over 7 and a half years. To celebrate this milestone, Lisa Welchman and Anna Dahlström host this special episode of UX Podcast. Their guests in Episode 200 are podcasters, designers and web geeks James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom. Lisa and Anna talk to James and Per... The post #200 Retrospective with James Royal-Lawson & Per Axbom appeared first on UX Podcast.

As families travel and gather together for Thanksgiving here in the United States, today, a conversation with two people whose interactions with genetic data bases led to revelations about their family that no one in the family had known before. The story of Lisa Welchman and Daryle Lowden is poignant and heart-warming. Daryle is in his forties. Lisa in in her fifties, and just last spring, they discovered that they are half-brother and sister. Today on Midday, we’ll hear their story and talk about how they came to know each other after decades of not having even the slightest inkling that the other existed. We’ll talk about what it has meant for them, and for the rest of their family.And we’ll also talk about the intended and unintended consequences of the fast-growing consumer genetic testing industry. When we submit our DNA to companies like Ancestery.Com or 23 and Me, do we retain control of how and by whom that information can be used? What is required of these companies when it comes to protecting the privacy of the millions of people who voluntarily share this private information? But first, the incredible story of Daryle Lowden and Lisa Welchman. Daryle Lowden had a 20 year career as a professional musician. He’s now working as a HR consultant. He lives in Kingston Upon Thames, England, just outside of London. He joins us from the studios of the BBC in London…Lisa Welchman lives here in Baltimore. She is a tech entrepreneur, who is considered the world’s leading authority on digital governance. She joins us here in Studio A.

A large organization operating online steps required to define how it manages digital politics: that’s how Facebook happens. Digital governance ensures large organizations can scale in ways that meet ethical standards. Lou talks with Lisa Welchman, digital governance expert and author, who explains the two big factors that lead to governance failures. Learn more about digital governance at Enterprise UX 2018: http://enterpriseux.net/ Follow Lisa Welchman on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lwelchman Follow Rosenfeld Media: https://twitter.com/rosenfeldmedia

This podcast features Lisa Welchman, Author of Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, and her presentation, “Governing with Intention” from the design leadership conference Prototypes, Process & Play on August 10th, 2017. [Prototypes, Process & Play][1] presentation podcasts are sponsored by [Balsamiq][2] - with Balsamiq Mockups, anyone can design great software.

As a digital creator, you may not even think much about the concept of digital governance. Don't worry though -- this week's guest, Lisa Welchman, literally wrote the book on digital governance! Our conversation begins with an overview on the topic, and Lisa describes how she got involved with digital governance. We also get into digital ethics, talk about how companies can apply digital governance to what they do, and a lot more. Lisa also discusses her recent vacation, the things that keeps her inspired and opens up on what she wants to do in the near future. Thank goodness we've got experts like Lisa to help decipher concepts like this that are important to our digital lives! Lisa Welchman's Website Lisa Welchman on Medium Lisa Welchman on LinkedIn Lisa Welchman on Twitter Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design DigitalGovernance.com Help support Revision Path by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon! Pledges start at $1 per month, and you’ll receive special patron-only updates, early access to future episodes, and a lot more! Join today! Get 20% off everything in our store! Sale ends July 7! http://revisionpath.com/store We're on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher as well! Visit http://revisionpath.com/iTunes or http://revisionpath.com/stitcher, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star rating and a review! Thanks so much to all of you who have already rated and reviewed us! Revision Path is brought to you by Facebook Design, MailChimp, Hover, and SiteGround. Save 10% off your first purchase at Hover by visiting hover.com/revisionpath! Get 60% off all hosting plans at SiteGround by visiting siteground.com/revisionpath! Follow Revision Path on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

Speaker: Lisa WelchmanIf this is the information age, what special role do information and user experience architects and play? The rise of industrial aged forced changes in supply chain management for physical goods. What changes do we need to make in the information supply chain in order to make sure information gets to the right, person, in the right place, on the right, device, and at the right time. And, what ethical concerns and considerations does that bring to the table, and whose job is it to resolves those concerns?

[A]'s Cruce Saunders interviews Lisa Welchman, President of Active Standards and author of "Managing Chaos." Welchman shares how standards govern what we do and how we collaborate. In this postcast, Welchman explores the biggest challenges organizations face when confronting digital change, and she addresses the cultural differences between digitally progressive and digitally conservative organizations. In her 20-year career, Lisa Welchman has paved the way in the discipline of digital governance, helping organizations stabilize their complex, multi-stakeholder digital operations. Lisa’s thought leadership focuses on interpreting how the growth of digital impacts organizations, as well as the maturation of digital as a distinct vocational discipline in the enterprise. Currently, Lisa is president of Digital Governance Solutions at ActiveStandards. Lisa began her career in digital in Silicon Valley at Netscape and Cisco Systems before establishing website management consultancy WelchmanPierpoint, which was acquired by ActiveStandards in 2014. Lisa speaks globally on issues related to digital governance, the rise of the Information Age and the role of the information worker. Cruce Saunders is the founder and principal consultant at [A] and author of Content Engineering for a Multi-Channel World. Cruce and his team lead large-scale content engineering engagements in close partnership with agencies and institutional clients. [A] delivers content engineering, CMS implementation, infrastructure, and personalization for complex digital properties. [A] trains the content engineering function into organizations, and enables cross-functional project operations. Cruce has directed upwards of 300 large digital development projects since 1999, including large government, healthcare, education, association, non-profit, and enterprise institutions.For more information contact simplea.com or follow Cruce at @mrcruce or [A] at @simpleateam on Twitter.

Do you spend a lot of time building products and experiences just to have them be poorly implemented or rejected by various factions in your organization? Sometimes the hardest part of your job is getting your whole organization to fall in line and holistically develop and implement a consistent experience. Fighting about control over web pages, mobile interfaces, and every other aspect of an organization’s online presence can leave one frustrated and fatigued. More info at: https://fronteers.nl/congres/2015/sessions/digital-governance-lisa-welchman

Do you spend a lot of time building products and experiences just to have them be poorly implemented or rejected by various factions in your organization? Sometimes the hardest part of your job is getting your whole organization to fall in line and holistically develop and implement a consistent experience. Fighting about control over web pages, mobile interfaces, and every other aspect of an organization’s online presence can leave one frustrated and fatigued. More info at: https://fronteers.nl/congres/2015/sessions/digital-governance-lisa-welchman

Lisa Welchman was the opening speaker on the conference day of UXLx 2015. She posed the question Are we Architecting the Information Age? We talk to her about our responsibility as designers and creators of digital products, services and information. We discuss the need to take a holistic view and have the confidence to stand up for what we...

Lisa Welchman, from Active Standards, joins us to talk about digital governance. How to manage the chaos and put a digital governance framework in place.