Deux Process

True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

– James Clear

We can talk for days about our user-centered approach to design but our lifetimes will be spent learning. By framing our process around our learning system we keep ourselves authentically agile, emphasizing flexibility while providing a repeatable framework to fit with your process, meetings, and style of collaboration.

Our process, inspired by John Boyd’s OODAloop, guides our design methods as much as our delivered artifacts. It encourages adaptation and opens the door for us to augment teams at any stage of a project.

As the project evolves, so do we.

Boyd provides cited references and compelling thought regarding uncertainty and ambiguity. Not just as errors in human understanding or logic, but built into the framework of the universe.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems

Any logical model of reality is incomplete and must be continuously refined in the face of new Observations.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

As our Observations become more precise around a particular domain, we’re likely to experience more uncertainty about another.

2nd Law of Thermodynamics

Just as a closed system in nature will have increasing entropy, or disorder, so too will a person (or organization) which does not communicate with the outside world.

We embrace this ambiguity as part of our process. It signals our opportunity to create a new shared reality, with us as a collaborator.

OBSERVATION

Intent: The collection of data to discover concepts.

Concepts are formed by data and vary depending on our eyes, ears, and experience. Separating data signals from noise can be difficult. As such, Observation works best with contributions from different disciplines. We all have a background, bring it to the table. As we move forward, these concepts will shape every decision.

Which is why they must be destroyed.

ORIENTATION

Intent: Focus attention on what was observed.

Through analysis, concepts are deduced and differentiated into their particulars (Destroyed) and the resulting particulars contain more meaning (a story!) than their previous data. Our willingness to continue unstructuring our beliefs from these particulars encourages them to be built from the ground up, generating something different than what previously existed.

Lastly, the synthesis of these particulars helps form perspective. By entertaining new mental models we explore new realities while refining and validating against the goal.

We are always Orienting.

DECIDE (HYPOTHESIS)

Intent: Determine the best course for our current situation.

We will never have complete and perfect information, so we proceed with our best-educated guess. We are comfortable in ambiguity and understand that not every design we make is in service to the answer, sometimes they just help frame the question.

We validate our new concepts against the goal, allowing ourselves to both shape and be shaped by a changing environment with experts adding precision and subtlety.

ACT (TEST)

Intent: Test our concepts in the real world.

By crafting concepts into concrete examples we continuously experiment to determine if our mental models are correct.

As a result of the actions we now have new data to repeat the process. Either creating new concepts or refining our existing ones by identifying those particulars which seem to hold together, repeating the cycle, but not throwing away our concept in its entirety.