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Design For Ease of Use with Lean CX – Leadership Card 17

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How Would You Like To Play Video Games For A Living?

No matter how old you are – teen, millennial, Gen Y, X or Baby Boomer, I can pretty much guarantee there was a time in your life when you played some sort of a video game.  Maybe it was on your mobile phone just the other day, maybe it was on one of the original consoles like Atari in the 1980s, maybe it was more sophisticated like the PlayStation or XBox, or maybe it was just plain old solitaire on Windows.  The point is, it was fun, and you could easily get lost in the moment (which turned into moment-s) while playing it.

That’s the thing about games.  Because of their very nature they naturally engineer the state of “flow” in people participating in it – that state where time flies, you get into a rhythm, and you’re so engaged you forget to eat.

And with the state of flow – it can actually be engineered into your work to make it more game-like in its systems, through the process, the feedback, and the way the work is performed.

It’s Not Quite Playing Candy Crush All Day

Now this doesn’t mean we’re literally playing Candy Crush all day and getting paid for it – when I say more game-like I’m talking about the way the work is structured to engineer the state of flow, and help the work get done with more engagement from your team.

So we’re looking at the mechanisms behind games, not games themselves, and how they are addictive because they create this state in people.

Flow Model – The First Tip – Make it Repeatable 

The first part of the Flow Model is creating work for your team that is neither too easy, nor too hard.  This means getting right in there and creating the rules of the game – a repeatable process that can be done the same way every time (or used as a guideline for work that is wildly different, complex or creative).

Because you know what?  Most leaders never clearly articulate the rules of the game – the outcomes, the path to get there, and regular check ins to see if we’re on that path.  Can you imagine playing a game – whether it’s football outside or a video game inside – and not knowing the rules to the game?  It wouldn’t last very long, and that is exactly what is happening with your teams.

When creating that work process, it’s also really important to look at the ways we can make it easier to do – to improve the “Ease of Use” of that process.  By improving the ease of use we are making it easier for our people to fall into a natural rhythm and state of flow, and not be interrupted by making mistakes, having to check how to do something, having to wait for someone else, or multitasking between too many things.

That’s what we mean in this first step by “performing a task, that is neither too easy nor too hard”.

Most leaders never get to this step in their leadership.  

Putting out fires unfortunately becomes a routine part of their day.  They don’t understand that you have to engineer the work – design the work – and design it specifically for ease of use.

Now look at it the other way.  Your best staff – the ones you love and the ones who “naturally” do a good job.  There’s nothing natural about it at all – in order to get good at something, any star performer has simply figured out, most likely through trial and error, the best way that flows naturally for them to do something.  They’ve experienced the errors, so they know how to avoid them.  They know the sticking points, so they know how to approach them.   To learn something – anything – humans have to create and strengthen neural pathways in our brains by doing something over and over.

What I’m asking you to do is to do better for your team.  Help them design their work and the process.  Make the objective clear and make the path clear, and help make it easy to do before they have to go through all that figuring out themselves.

In doing so, I absolutely guarantee you will see some incredible results.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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