 I very much enjoyed the last few days with you. Listening to that talk gave me some feelings. And I wrote some notes, you know, that are different than I think my originally planned beginning to this talk. Hello. To say that, you know, I'm so I'm feeling just a little bit of overwhelm because the things I'd like to tell you about are they're big in scope and deep in process. And for me, so kind of profoundly important that I feel it's kind of something to be able to introduce them to you. And so I'm going to use just two or three stories, a little introduction at the beginning and then just a couple of stories to try to illustrate some principles and give you a feel for some of the methods. But they're important to me because I believe that any of us who want our work to somehow make a step towards a more equitable and sustainable future for us all, that there's real power in these methods. So participatory. I did a little homework because I know there's been participatory design since the 60s, starting in Scandinavia. What do we mean by that in the world of UX? So what are people talking about when they say participatory design? This is just one article I pulled. There's a lot of them. But here's a quote from that, viewing participants as subject matter experts, involving them in the process of co-creation. We can start to see their needs differently and understand how our solutions can fit into the bigger context of their lives. So it's interesting, their inputs to our process to produce our product. And this is fairly typical. You get methods like a love letter, a breakup letter to the product or the company, lots of making activities, prototyping, role playing, these kinds of things. So there's a whole body of methods that sometimes it gets called co-design, sometimes participatory design. It usually comes in the form of an afternoon or a day workshop at a couple of points in the process. Well, those methods are helpful for some things. I'm glad that we're doing some of this. It is helpful for really listening. There's something that Jared Spool is saying about exposure time and surface area of the organization and how that helps a team deliver products that people like and care about. But it isn't real participation, I'm sorry. You know, the goal of the work, the definition of good, who the work benefits, who it leaves out, the process of creation, the choice of who to listen to, who not to listen to, what people's stories mean. The pool of ideas and concepts, all of those are still on the hand, they're still central in the hands of the sponsoring organizations, sponsoring companies, the team doing the design. Well, since about 2009, I and my colleague, we said, like, you know, can we learn how to start with social questions rather than business or product or technology questions. What tools do we need in our hand? Because design process by itself feels like a kind of a dull knife when you start to look at real social complexity. And this says three quick stories. I couldn't fit three in, there's two stories. And just to illustrate some of the principles that we've come to trust. So the first story is the scale and scope is a group of people in a room for a day. We'll get bigger in scope with the next story. And the setting is a nonprofit in the United States who advocates and educates for, well, people to take better care of animals and hurt them less. And in particular, a division that works with urban wildlife, so deer and coyotes and raccoons in cities. Our initial conversation with them and went something like this. They said, they operate kind of like an ad agency. They put out these campaigns of education and please don't kind of stuff. And they said, you know, we've been doing some metrics and we realize our campaigns aren't working, behavior isn't changing, the numbers aren't going down. And one of our questions was, well, how long since you talked to somebody that's mean to animals? I'm like, oh yeah, you know, you could tell the attitude was like, well, they're bad people. There was a real judgment in their response. We don't talk to them. Okay, let's do this. We arranged for four people to come to the day. One who had a career of being mean to animals in the horse racing industry and since has kind of reformed as an advocate in the other direction. One who overlaps, who collects wild animals in her backyard, which is also not helpful. A city official who gets the call. There's trouble in this neighborhood with coyotes. And someone who takes care of animals who've been on the receiving end of some of these treatments. I'm going to go pretty fast through it just to give you a feel for what it was like to do this kind of work. It's a method called collective story harvest. But first, before the storytellers came, so who's in the room is a vertical and horizontal diversity from this organization. So levels of power and different places along their creative process and their production and measuring process, yeah? And we just say, okay, here's who you're gonna meet. What are your assumptions on sticky notes? What are their motivations? What are their drivers? What pleases them? What are they afraid of? What displaces them? What are the influences? The force is pushing on them. What's going on inside? So they just made, they captured their assumptions. Then we gave them a job. It's a real challenge in a situation like this to get people to move their center of attention outside their judgments and just hear, just listen. So these listening lenses give everybody a job to do. Listen for the key moments in the story, the decision, the point where they could make a decision one way or the other. Listen for anything they say about their inner experience. Listen for who else is there and what the relationship is and what communications are relevant to their story. So here we are listening to the story, busy doing your job, no time for judgment, you gotta capture, yeah? Works great. After the stories, there's some nuance to how this goes. I'm going quickly. But after the stories, we updated our learning. We've made our learning explicit. Which of our assumptions turned out not to be so? What new things did we learn? Where do we want to update the way we described what's going on? So now we have this picture of the group together has made their learning explicit. And then we synthesized the stories into these journey maps where the events are across the top, relationships and communication, inner life, kind of this emotional arc. And you can see that they notice things like it's behind the words there, it goes, a shamed of true nature. So as part of this story, one of the storytellers had talked about when he was 12 years old and he's walking in the fields with his uncle and his cousins. And I don't remember what kind of animal it was. I'll say it was a turkey. And they said, there's a turkey. Shoot it. And the 12 year old shot the turkey and immediately felt regret. Immediately felt bad about that. Our friends at this agency had a moment over that. They go, when he was feeling bad, what was our message to him? Our message to him was shame on you. Our message to him was don't do that. We, no wonder, no wonder behavior is not changing. So by the end of this session, they had captured there on the left, this is the, these are the messages we've been sending. We've been persuading, we've been convincing, we've been trying to educate. We've been treating them as a target audience, a hunting metaphor, by the way. But then they generated some new words based on this sense of real connection to these people they just met and liked. Equip, connect, provide, journey, partner, create for, help, inspire, invite, open, care, force, support, ease. They had a transformed design brief. There's some excitement in the room. There's a sense like, oh, we've hit something that matters. Was this participatory? Well, kind of, it was, I would say it was an opening of the door for a group of people in a process that was absolutely not. It was a closed process. No window or door open to the outside world to real life outside their office. And so as a result, they not only have this new, this fresh and design brief, but they have the question, how must our process change so we don't fall into the same pattern again? So this illustrates some principles. These are some things that we use in our office to think about this kind of thing. Take time to convene across differences. Help people suspend presuppositions and judgments. Start by listening. Every time, first step, listen. Attend the conditions we're gardening here. Not make, not being carpenters of solutions. And an explicit goal of the activities of the designing of these sessions is to increase relatedness. Another story. So now the scale is a whole institution, a university. And this, I don't know, it's kind of early, but it's at least a year and I hope it goes out further. And I'll say that such a private university in the deep south of the United States. With the pre-Civil War, its founders were Confederates, making an institution in defense of the values of slavery. Explicitly, it's in the Wikipedia story for this university. And now students and faculty and administration are asking, what's a university of the south in the 21st century? Who do we need to become? We're not equipped, we're administrators and professors. We're not equipped for that kind of, we have no creative process to live into that question. So we've just started to engage with them and they decided that a good practice run would be the easier but still very difficult thing of taking on the dysfunctional social life on campus, which emphasizes heavy drinking. So can we shift that pattern? Is there a question? A couple of, I don't know, terms or principles. We find it very useful. Power always comes up in these things. The Board of Regents, old gentleman, white gentleman. It's useful to say, executive authority, people who have money, who can make decision making, who can set policy, process authority, people who can help us move this thing along. The authority of lived experience, people who live the current situation or the ones that are gonna be living the future situation. They know what it's like to live this situation out. If we think of those as peers in the creative process, three peer authorities, now our conversation changes. Another principle I've already mentioned, think of ourselves as gardeners, not carpentries. This is not a process of deciding what campus life should be like and then executing it, implementing it as though it were a building we could construct. Instead, it's something that has grown out of the current conditions. It's a pattern of behavior and relationship and belief. What, under what conditions, and by the way, there's nuggets of better, already present. Almost always what needs to happen is already happening. It just needs to be fed and grown and garden. Lastly, I'll say that we're starting to work with a notation, we call it a participation strategy. So if we're thinking, taking seriously participatory, well what's our strategy for engaging all the voices, for leveling power, for nurturing the conditions? So these are kind of the big movements and then there's some other ways you can draw bubbles inside these things. So let's talk about the listen part. So E, executive authority, said okay, go. People, we grant people time away from their other duties. We give you space, we give you equipment. We'll pay some people. P, process authority, that's us. And then that's students and faculty and administration and staff. So we did a lot of phone interviews. We had a lot of lunches and dinners. There's about a month's worth of effort in that box. And that helped us design the next thing, which was a big gathering, deliberately convening representative diversity of the campus. And the goal is, there was just a lot of cynicism. This can never change, this can't change. And I don't trust those people. Administration's gonna be there. Let me tell you what they did last time, right? So there's just a lot of that coming into the room. So I'm gonna just quickly show you some of the activities that we did. I don't know if it will make sense as a connected story. I hope it gives you a feel for what happened in these two days. One thing is that people walk into something like that with sort of the ghost of ritual complaint. The stories that we repeat over and over again to each other and to ourselves until we believe them. And those ghosts are present. They come in with everybody. So we did this thing that's called liquid courage. It's mostly people walking around, these people are sitting, but it's walking around completing sentences of complaint. If only they would, they make me. If they would blank, then I could blank. So here's deans, students, new faculty, old faculty, people of color, LGBT, all these kinds of people are in the room complaining. How leveling is that as a student to discover that the faculty member has complaints just like you do. The dean feels powerless for change. So the ghosts are banished. And we're more like one group now. Then we have a session that's about what's going on. Anything as complex as a social situation, more than one truth is legitimate, right? Depending on where you stand, how you look at it. So many people are right, even though they say something different. So let's put these points of view together and make a picture on the wall of what's going on. They never had this before, a map from many points of view of what's going on. Oh, now we're a little more together. What does a good culture feel like? Let's go back in our memory. Get kind of a vivid image of a time when I was part of a thriving group. It was great to be there. I loved the people in the relationship. I look forward to being part of it. Good things came out of it. What are those qualities? Let's start to maybe feel some recognition of what could be. Now something called World Café around a question of what's possible. So this mixes up people. We'll have 20 minutes of conversation, mix up the tables, have the same conversation again with new people. That's sort of, can you read the question? You can't really. But what declaration of possibility can you make that has the power to transform and inspire you? Now here's a table. The chief of police is there, faculty, students, and a dean. And like students thought, if we try to erect a temporary shelter from the sun to just sit out in our chairs and read together or have a picnic, the police will make us take it down. The police goes, why would I do that? So they're just right there talking about these possibilities. And we're just starting to get the conditions for co-creation. 20 minutes of what if we were 10 times bolder? Generating ideas, what if I had no additional authority or resources but I was just bolder? What could I do? So how comes 30 ideas? 10 of them bubble to the top as crowd favorites. And then an open space that took a good part of the second day. Open space starts with a blank agenda, which is populated then by asking people, what's a topic that you're passionate enough about, you believe in enough that you're willing to host a conversation for whoever comes about that topic and generate a document that suggests what would it take for this conversation to continue after the workshop? So there were quite a number of those. And one of the outcomes of that is like, well, what's worth trying now? So this is just starting to get to action items. The main goal of this remember was to increase relatedness and belief that change is possible. That was the job of these two days. But that belief tied to some possible next steps is helps people not be so cynical. It's something to tie their hopes to and something to engage in, a place for the passion to go. One of the last things we did is we, in the beginning we had this imaginary axis on the floor and we said, okay, here change is absolutely possible. Down there, there's no way it'll change. Stand where you think you want on that axis so people stand scattered along. And I have agency to affect change on this campus. Yes, no, stand where you want. This is people crowding up against the yes wall at the end of the second day. A real weak sort of this kind of physically manifest hope, not hope, like actionable hope, not optimism or pessimism, but hope. So that's another story. It illustrates some of the principles that it offers are that the people who live it now are the people who will live the future. Let's not have them just be inputs to some expert's creative process. Let's have them be the team of the creative process. Let's equip this culture to create for itself. Convene diversity and power and level their voices. They're all humans. Relational outcomes before practical outcomes. Increase relatedness and agency. Skilling, one thing I was thinking during the talk about emotions is that this, it's in a day or two, we can boost people's emotional skilling. It's not that hard. It may be hard to put into practice, but scaling the sense of confidence and confidence that I can create together and that I may not even have to like you in order, or I may not have to like you in order to create with you. Can we get past the idea that we have to all be at peace before we can create? This is a community of people that is not completely yet at peace, but they started to believe they could create together. Garden the conditions for experimentation. Let go of control. This is one of the hardest parts. 10 years, I still have trouble with this. Let go of control. Trust that good things will grow. Be a carpenter, yes, when something is truly ready to be built, not gardeners exclusively. I have no idea where I am for time, but I'm gonna say this, this is something's going on. We talked a little bit about this in the workshop yesterday. There are multiple communities of practice in multiple sectors, working either at the kind of systemic approach level, working at the group and community level, working kind of at the interpersonal and personal level. This stuff is a little scary. You're gonna meet conflict. You're gonna meet strong emotion. Who do we need to become in order to stand in that and nurture conditions for creation? It's all kind of starting to come together. It's a very exciting time. And so here are a few resources, and I hope these slides will get into your hands. And I wanna offer one other point. It feels, I think I'm starting to feel it's important to say whenever I'm in a room like this, I don't know you, forgive me if this doesn't need to be said. But I'd say that if nothing else, if none of these things that I've said relate directly to your work, there is an aspect of taking participatory seriously that matters to us all. I think that if we want to create a future where everyone belongs, we want a sustainable and equitable future, and we have this participatory idea, that means it's not only up to the experts, we have to include all of the voices in the work, which means in our organizations and in our teams. It's a very interesting Google search. Google Decolonizing Design. It's a friend in Carnegie Mellon that just did his PhD dissertation, Decolonizing Design. You'll get good hits. Here's a little list from Ann Ditmeyer. There's something going on in the tech industry as well. I imagine you're aware of it. Being a little less monocolor, monoculture, mono voice in our work of creation. So also another reason that it's exciting because this conversation is coming to the foreground. So I feel honored to be working in this age. Well, I'm gonna stop there. This is my contact information. I welcome your emails or your tweets. Think about coming to our frontier retreat that this feels like it puts you on an edge of your profession or your personal life. That's all I got. Thank you, folks. Thank you.