Thinking in Triplicate

Using stories to help visualize the relationship between design and business in order to make more intentional, ethical choices.

Originally posted on Medium. This is the tweeted digest version with some additional edits.

For all the efforts of smart and well-meaning professionals, the interfaces between humans and the economic entities we’ve created seem not to be so much on the side of the humans and trending worse.

This is the central problem of digital interactive systems design.

The tendency for designers to consider system design only from the point of the user—and to emphasize empathy as the key—has contributed to this chasm between the stated aims and the outcomes of human-centered design. 

Design is only as “human-centered” as the business model allows, and designers have been treating business models as givens.

To the the extent that a business takes place in software, designing the software is designing the business.

Unless designers consider and influences the whole system, they risk contributing to a beautiful experience that exploits people, or to a beautiful experience that fails.

We need to move from user-centered design, to value-oriented design. This means thinking about designing the exchange of value between an organization and its customers in a real-world context. (May Alan Cooper forgive me for conflating user and customer for the sake of a model.)

The tension between design and business turns on the type of data used to make decisions and express value. Value to humans/users is qualitative. Value to business is quantitative.

In order to make holistic decisions, we need a representation that makes that translation.

Services that offer a sleight-of-hand conversion of messy human experience to tidy numbers turn a tidy profit. They make out like bandits—even when the numbers are meaningless—because managers demand measurements.

Humans run on stories. Narrative is how we organize and coordinate our frankly disordered experience of life. As much as we want to think we are analytic and "data-driven", we all make choices based on habits and stories, *then* figure out how to explain those choices.

Kurt Vonnegut had an idea about stories that is exceedingly useful to both business and design.

He graphed stories along a timeline showing the good fortune and misfortune of the protagonist. For example, Cinderella went from downtrodden to happily ever after:

(Vonnegut found that many stories fit a small handful of basic graphs.)

You can also graph the prince's story AND show the prince and Cinderella in the same view. Sadness at midnight. Happiness after shoe fits. 

Designers are familiar with story graphs like Vonnegut's as "Customer Journey Maps" or similar, but usually only one perspective at a time.

The customer journey map represents a story—a series of interactions between a person and whatever a company offers. (Each interaction is called a "touchpoint", which is a little gross. So, I’ve replaced touchpoints with “boop.” Suggest you do same.)

But it only shows one side.

Businesses have storylines too. The successful ones tend to resemble one another.

For example, here is Paul Graham’s well-known-in-Silicon Valley start-up graph. This diagram is popular because it tells a clear, aspirational story.

Cinderella for early stage companies.

But what happens if you zoom out and extend the business story timeline? 

Even for the luckiest companies, that high growth "happily ever after" tends towards maturity and decline.

As industries and businesses mature, and prospects for continued growth fade, companies look for new ideas that will plump their value without cannibalizing their core business.

They acquire bright young things, or start internal “innovation labs”, or turn to "design thinking" (the fairy godmother of continuing relevance).

So, designers use customer journey maps—line graphs representing value to the user. And businesses use line graphs representing the value of the business. 

Even though people and businesses are obviously interdependent, we've been missing a simple combined visualization.

Huh.

In order to visualize the exchange of value, we could just plot both the customer and business story on one graph.

At every point of interaction, it's easy to see who is benefitting and how much, in a rough, for-the-sake-of-discussion way. 

This is the view we've been missing:

(If the user and customer are different, just add another line.)

Everything I’m talking about here is an over-simplification. But the only way we can work together across disciplines to solve hard problems is by creating a lingua franca of conceptual simplicity.

Complex representations, intentional or not, can hide a lot of dirty dealing.

A significant amount of business is based on identifying a resource (petroleum reserves, idle automobiles, human attention) extracting value from it, and often depleting it.

If business success means harm to the overall system, every individual contributing to that success is doing harm. Systems don't have simple stories, but you can plot the health.

How often do designers stand back and ask whether they are creating a real harm—a problem or injury not reflected in the balance sheet—at the same they are solving a business problem, or "delighting" an individual customer?

Not often enough. 

Because it's not "part of the job."

Of course, we are talking about wicked problems with no definitive solution and many trade-offs, but we have to stop burying our heads in the details of our discipline-specific documentation. 

We can't work as though "user empathy" and "shareholder value" are different isolated planets.

Try this with your own business or product or service. 

Draw one line for customer well-being.  One for business success. One for the surrounding environment (industry/society/planet/whatever)

See how well they align at each point. Discuss different scenarios and timescales.

Graphing multiple perspectives against one another doesn't take special skills, or tools, or software. You can use it to visualize historic correlations or discuss hypothetical scenarios. 

You should make it part of your basic practice.

The only way to design ethically is to design so that business success, customer wellbeing, and environmental health are in alignment, or at least not in opposition. 

This requires that all of us keep the big picture in mind at all times.

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Addendum: A previous attempt from the business end

The point of design as we are talking about it is to make businesses more successful, so getting better design probably requires redefining success.

The triple bottom line was coined in 1994 by John Elkington as a way to improve outcomes by changing how we measure them. The bottom line is a measurement of profit and loss. A company can become very profitable while passing along hidden costs and causing a lot of harm. Elkington wanted to change this by raising the profile of those unaccounted for costs by lining up profit, people, and planet on the same balance sheet.

While this idea is appealing in theory, it is impossible in practice.

One problem with the triple bottom line is that the three separate accounts cannot easily be added up. It is difficult to measure the planet and people accounts in the same terms as profits — that is, in terms of cash. The full cost of an oil-tanker spillage, for example, is probably immeasurable in monetary terms, as is the cost of displacing whole communities to clear forests, or the cost of depriving children of their freedom to learn in order to make them work at a young age.

—“Triple Bottom Line” The Economist November 17, 2009

While his work did contribute to a wide-reaching dialog on sustainability, Elkington has waved a white flag. Approaching its 25th anniversary, just days ago, he wrote a piece in the Harvard Business Review recommending a recall, as though his thought product were a faulty seatbelt.

Together with its subsequent variants, the TBL concept has been captured and diluted by accountants and reporting consultants. Thousands of TBL reports are now produced annually, though it is far from clear that the resulting data are being aggregated and analyzed in ways that genuinely help decision-takers and policy-makers to track, understand, and manage the systemic effects of human activity.

—“25 Years Ago I Coined the Phrase ‘Triple Bottom Line.’ Here’s Why It’s Time to Rethink It”. HBR. June 25, 2018

Conceptually, the Triple Bottom Line is a compelling idea. In practice, business proceeds as usual. Sustainability, as with diversity, is a critical practice stretched thin and used like a dime-store shade to soften and obscure the harsh glare of naked capitalism. And we all know what private equity firms do to dime stores.