Getting comfortable with the unknown

Thank you for joining me this afternoon. And I wanna say congratulations to Steve and John and all the other organizers for such a fantastic event. Let's get into it. Who here has started something new this year? A new project? A new role? Same company, new company?

Maybe even a new chapter of life, parenthood, marriage, divorce. Who's found themselves thinking, what the have I done? I have, yeah, heads up. I have no idea what I'm doing. How did I get here? Why am I here? It's thrilling and terrifying at the same time.

So many unknowns, so many things to learn, so many possibilities or forks in the road. For those of you who haven't felt this new for a while, I'm going to help you. We're gonna change that. And a quick trigger warning for any of us who have phobias or three, the next few slides might be slightly uncomfortable, but trust the process. It's okay, just breathe, don't look down.

It's okay, just keep going. Look ahead, trust me. It's more scared of you than you're scared of it. Don't worry, ignore the big fangs and the fairy legs and the sensation of it crawling on your skin. Just breathe, you've got this.

The elevator will move again in a few minutes. Ignore what that rumbling noise is. What's going on? That person next to me smells. Just breathe, you've got this. Sydney Public Transport, sorry. So trust the process. Did that help? Being told to relax, to breathe, to not look down.

Did any of that make you feel less uncomfortable? For me, yeah, it does not. When you're stressed about something, being told don't worry about it, you've got this, trust the process, it doesn't make that worry going away. That worry go away. You see, never in the history of calming down has someone calmed down by being told to calm down.

In fact, to tell someone not to feel the way they're feeling, it doesn't help. It actually has the opposite effect. It gets people to suppress that emotion And I think of emotion like an energy. And when we suppress the emotion, say, no, it's fine, I'm fine, it's all good, trust the process, that that energy or emotion, it doesn't go away.

It gets compressed and magnifies and it happened, for me anyway, it often bursts out at inopportune moments at minor triggers like my daughter, mommy, mommy, mommy, or my partner washing my brand new merino wool jumper on a cold cycle. So case in point, this is my dog Alfie.

He gets a special fancy wash every few months to get the fur and the stank off him. And every time I tell him, it's okay, I'm right here, nothing to worry about, Do you think it works? No. He sings the song of his people and rouses every dog in a five k radius. So I'm not going to tell you to trust the process.

I'm going to tell you to challenge the process. Following a process blindly, trusting it too much, you might miss the point completely. You may ask the wrong questions, follow the wrong leads, trust the wrong information or the wrong people. Instead, I'm going to ask you to become a two to six year old, and ask a thousand whys.

Never stop asking why. Why are we here? Why are we focusing on this problem? Why these people are not those? Why these users are not those? Why these features or functions? How are we gonna learn what we need to know? Why is that the right way to learn? Why do we need to know that? Assume nothing, question everything except yourself.

Don't question yourself. Okay, let's wind it back a bit. How did I get here on a train that ran on time? I work in consulting and as a consultant, I'm always walking into the new. New projects, new clients, new teams, new proposals, new roles over and over again every week.

And I got sick of lying awake at 3AM, staring at the ceiling, listening to my partner and Alfie snore. And running through my mind was everything I hadn't figured out yet. A project at work, something going on in life, something that could go wrong. And yes, I am a deep or over thinker. And I got fed up with myself and I decided to do something about it. I took the tools that we and I use every day at work and turned them on myself.

I used them to get comfortable with the unknowns and I'm gonna share them with you today. Six things that you can do to feel more comfortable with the unknown. These are laid out in a linear order but as we know in design, things are rarely... There's a beginning, middle and end. They move all around. So I'm not suggesting that you would tick all of these off.

Sometimes you might have already done part of this, sometimes you need to do it all, sometimes you switch around the order. Maybe one of them will make you feel a bit more uncomfortable when you're feeling that overwhelm of the new, the great unknown. But everyone is different and there's no one size fits all. The first thing to do is frame the problem.

Whether this is a personal situation or something at work, if we don't understand and identify the problem, we can't then design or identify the right solution. And there's a great quote that's attributed to Albert Einstein and there's this debate about whether he actually said it or not, but he says, or he is said to have said, if I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend fifty five minutes understanding the problem and then five minutes determining the solution.

So if you do nothing else, spend your time framing the problem. And here's some ways to do that. So by framing the problem, of course, again I mean challenge the problem. Don't accept what you're told or what you think the problem is. Even if it seems obvious, challenge and test your thinking. And there's lots of different ways to do this and I've just cobbled together, I'm a bit of a bowerbird or a magpie.

I pick and choose what I like from different methodologies and I've got two options here. If you're someone who likes to sort of deluge all the content and write things out, this is for you. This is one that I trend towards. It's the who, what, why, when, where and how. Who's experiencing this? Me, users, somebody else.

What's the real impact? Why does it matter? Where and when does it show up? How do we know this? This is a critical one. What's the data? What's the information? Where am I getting the signals from? And I write out all of these questions and the critical thing is you don't have to solve them all at once.

We'll be getting to how we move into prioritizing and moving forward. The other way to problem frame is one of your good old canvases and I am not picking one out because there's so many different ones based on your context and your need. I like these if I need to see a bit more visual, see all the information in one place.

A problem framing canvas, it has been renamed as an opportunity canvas because some people think that problem is a negative word and in this world we have to be positive. But sometimes it's a problem, so I just call it a problem. So you have all the information in one place. The context, the problem, the people impacted, the workarounds and the risks all in one place.

So jump on your favorite search tool, try around, play around with them, pick one that works for you. So you've mapped out your problems, you've got all your questions. We're gonna identify and prioritize the gaps and this is an image we saw a little bit earlier. You're gonna name your unknowns. So make a list of facts you know about the problem and its causes for sure.

For sure means you've got data, metrics, measures that tell you that that is problem and the cause. And if you don't know it, then you need to go away and get data that tells you that this is actually a problem. People are doing this, I don't know this, whatever the data you need to validate that. And then I like to give them a name.

I don't know this, I don't know who this is, I don't know how to do this, whatever it may be. By naming the unknowns, the tensions and the fears, you open up the space to engage with them. So we're identifying the gaps, giving them a name, then we're gonna prioritize them. Lots of different ways to do this again.

I love an x y matrix as my colleagues here will know. When you have a lot of gaps, a lot of unknowns, it can feel overwhelming and you can find yourself going off on random paths trying to solve everything all at once all the time. And I'm sorry to tell you, we'll never know everything, at least not all at once.

So this is my favorite prioritization matrix for problems. So on your vertical top to bottom matrix axis, we've got impact, clarity or comfort. What's the impact of this unknown? Will it give you clarity? Will it give you comfort? So at the bottom is low, at the top is high. And then along the horizontal, running along the bottom is the importance or urgency of closing that gap.

So again, low on the left and high on the right. So you take all of your unknowns and you plot them on this matrix and no two problems or unknowns can live in the same space and what you get is your prioritization of what you're gonna focus on first. So if it is high high, as I like to say, high impact clarity or comfort and high importance or urgency, that's where you're gonna focus your attention.

Complexity of complexity of unknowns, complexity of what you need to do, it kills clarity. So this for me, it gives me clarity, it gives me priority of where I'm gonna focus my attention. So high high, find out first. Prioritize doing that, understanding those unknowns, closing those gaps first. Then high low, so high impact, clarity, comfort and lower urgency importance, I would find out next.

And then things that are lower on the impact, clarity and comfort scale, but maybe higher importance, urgency, I might find out later. Now those two can interchange depending on what they are. This is not an exact science. If it's low low, I might find out when you would need to. I would deprioritize that. So this is a way that I just give myself a starting point, some clarity. Tip number three is to embrace I don't know yet. Don't be afraid to say I don't know yet.

Now as humans and professionals, we can sometimes feel like we have to know everything and we don't want to admit our knowledge gaps. And I'm here to tell you that this is not you, it's your brain. A man called Roger Sperry ran an experiment in the 50s called the split brain experiment and don't worry, brains were split by Sperry. He ran an experiment on people who had their brain, the left and the right hand side of their brain divided to treat epilepsy and seizures.

And he found a way to deliver an action or a task to the left or the doing side of the brain, and then he asked the person why they did that. So he told them, stand up, pick up this, do this. And then he asked them, why did you do that? So the thinking side of the brain.

And he found that they would rather make up a reason for doing it than to say, I don't know. So saying I don't know, we are wired to avoid saying that. So it's not you, it's your brain, but embrace saying I don't know yet. We all have our areas of expertise and then we have our areas we don't know so much about.

For example, everything I do at work is focused on helping customers to identify the right problems to solve and then aligning them to the right technology with design in the middle. While I know a fair bit about this, I am still always learning every single day. And then on the other hand, we have the great humble humble...

Humblizer, I don't know if that's a word. I'm making it up. Humblizer, which is parenthood. It's the ultimate humbling experience. When I became a parent, this is a true story. I walked out of the hospital with my daughter in a carrier with my partner and I got to the car park and I realized I have no idea what the hell I am doing.

And I thought, who in the right mind is letting me walk out with this baby? And I did consider going back in and saying, please take this child. I don't know what to do. And I realized I had to change my mindset and go back to being a student of parenting. And I took the mindset of always be learning because if anyone is a parent or you have a puppy or anything, the minute you think you've got it nailed, they change and they do something different. And this picture here is my daughter who's six now, a parent of her own as we can see.

I still have no idea what I'm doing, but I have learned to be more comfortable with that now and I think of I'm always learning, always be learning that growth mindset. But there are some brain friendly alternatives to I don't know that I want you to start trying out. So instead of saying I don't know, I'll find out.

I'll look into it. I'll circle back. That's an interesting question. Let's find out. Okay, here's what I know and here's what I don't know. Tip number four is, this is a common designer refrain, stay away from solution mode. Don't fence yourself in too early by focusing on a solution too early. If you can, keep it vague, maybe capture, write it all down because you don't know what you don't know at this point.

Solution mode is a trap. If you focus on a solution, whether it's an answer to your problem, tech stack, it's an app, website feature function, too soon in the great unknown, you stop trying to understand the problem and you start trying to prove your solution right. Or as we know, you're introducing bias, confirmation bias which is well talked about, I'm not gonna delve into it today.

But we are all wired to find the evidence to support us and agree with us and start to skip and ignore the evidence. So stay away from solution mode too early. The next tip is to share it. Two heads are better than one, six heads are better than two. The more diverse group that you share the problem with, the better.

So this includes having all your homework ready and going to them, so you've talked to your users, customers, competitors, other industries, other solutions. Then you wanna go to your carefully selected group of reviewers and share. Who you wanna pick is somebody who will listen actively, not listen to respond, who'll be curious, they'll wanna understand what you're saying, they'll challenge you, they'll ask you the tough questions and critically, they will call you on your BS.

Now the next tip is to test critical in UX design but also when we're in the great unknown. So run tests on what you've learned about the problem and this is a bit different but find ways to prove yourself wrong. And now I know I said to trust yourself and I said that our brains would rather make up an answer than say I don't know. So I want you to trust yourself enough to ask the questions and test yourself enough to confirm the answer.

So still trust yourself but maybe challenge yourself as well. So don't be afraid of being wrong, embrace being wrong, seek being wrong. Failing early is an asset. As we know, failing a prototype, a piece of paper, don't fail on the full solution. Failing early is an asset, not a liability. So there's that old saying, two wrongs don't make a right.

I think they do because if you're getting proved right, you may have designed the test wrong, you may have asked the wrong questions. If you get told you're wrong, you prove yourself wrong, then you're heading in the right direction. Direction. If no one... Because if you get told no, at that point in time, you get pointed in the right direction.

I just repeated myself. Let's jump forward. So some ways to prove yourself wrong. Ask yourself what would change my mind? And if you say nothing, there's bias because there's always new information that would change your mind. Increased scope, increased time, more, you know, a different technology, a new tool. So challenge yourself, how would I change my mind?

What would change my mind? Who would change my mind? This is one of my favorite activities and those who've worked with me may have seen me do this but maybe not call it out. It's the devil's advocate exercise. And this is something you can do for yourself or if you're working in a team, assign somebody the role of devil's advocate and what they want they're going to do is poke holes in everything, look for the flaws, the missing logic, the missing data.

And then you get to have that debate or conversation with them and it very quickly unravels if you have any gaps. So the devil's advocate exercise. Then design a test that could kill your favorite idea, feature or function. So really design to stress test your favorite thing.

In writing, they say kill your darlings in design, kill your favorite feature or challenge your favorite feature at the very least. And the final way to prove yourself wrong is to run a pre mortem activity which is you go, okay, we failed. Let's work back and figure out why. So did we focus on something too early? Did we talk to the wrong people?

Did we design it the wrong way? This is an activity where you find the weak points, the fail points and your biases. And a bonus tip is to make it fun and or funny. Celebrate the wins along the way and this is if it's a personal or a team activity. So I like to do things, have little ceremonies or traditions like coffee time and this is whether you're virtual or in person, coffee time, elevensies, a weekly team, you know, lunch or activity like going for a walk. Back in COVID days, we would jump on a Teams call and go for a walk and sort of chat to each other. We still do this sometimes today.

Something that I like to do is have a... I don't know if anybody appreciates this but I do, is to have a quote board which could be we've had it physically in office or a digital one And write funny things that you've said or done. Surprisingly, I'm often featured highly on these sorts of artifacts.

And I like to use these quotes or funny things that have happened at a wrap like activity. I call it gig trivia or project trivia, where we remember the highs and the lows of a project or an engagement over a year or a period of time. So 10 points, who can remember how many pies Saquib had when we went to Roma for the Great Start Discovery engagement?

So only Saquib, and I know the answer, but it was three. Or who slept with a butter knife under their pillow when we went to a slightly dodgy town in rural Queensland because we were worried about it being a quite dodgy hotel? Who slept with a wine bottle next to their bed for the same reason? These types of activities.

And celebrate the wins, big or small. So on a project of course, closing it out, it may be we got through our backlog, it may be that we had just a great interview. As a parent, it was like, I changed a nappy without getting pooing myself, yay. The other thing to do is, I know this is boring, but please, in the discovery phase is to document in whatever way, shape or form makes sense for you.

So this is if it's personal, if it's professional. Write down your thoughts, your actions, your concerns, your problems, your activities. Write it down at the time, a voice note, AI chat, interpretive dance. You won't remember with accuracy the next day, the next week, the next month. The context will change things, the things that you learn will change. So capture it somewhere along the way.

First of all, for accuracy but also it's great to reflect on your journey and go, I started here and I've been here along, know, and this is what I've learned and done. So going back over these, we've got six sort of seven tips. I've got a bonus tip in there. Frame the problem, challenge it, identify and prioritize the unknowns, the gaps.

What do you need to know first? Get comfortable with saying I don't know yet or the brain friendly alternatives. Let's find out, I'll look into it. Stay away from solution mode, it's a trap. Share with somebody who will challenge you, call you on your BS, test and find ways to prove yourself run. Wrong, run, wrong, make it fun and document.

So where are we today? I started here at 3AM wide awake, running through every unknown, every problem, everything that could go wrong, and I still have lots of unknowns in work and life, lots of uncertainty as we all do. But now I've got some tools that can help me to sleep a bit better, and hopefully so do you.

So don't trust the process, trust yourself. Thank you.