In an article co-authored with Paul Kahn, we explain it this:

We propose the term “alignment diagrams” to describe the class of maps and diagrams that visualize touchpoints in a business process. Such diagrams are implicitly part of the current design practice. Thus our definition of alignment diagrams is less a proposition for a new visual technique than recognition of how various techniques can be seen in a new and constructive way. Alignment diagrams are constructed to reveal touchpoints and thereby contribute to the design and business process…It is the system of visual alignment that distinguishes this type of diagram.

Specific techniques for research and diagramming are important, of course, but it’s really the principles of alignment diagrams that are essential. Once you grasp these, you’ll find there range of potential ways to go about diagraming, including mental models, customer journey maps, service blueprints and more. You may even introduce variations on these standard forms or come up with your own.

Below is a list of core principles are at the heart of the alignment technique.

Alignment diagrams focus on human behavior as part of a larger ecosystem. They are NOT about product research (e.g., not about mapping out the workflow with a specific software program). As much possible, look at what your customers do in their normal lives or normal work environments.

Your customers “hire” your products or services to get a job done. An alignment diagram should focus on these jobs in the context in which they happen. Specifically, use customers’ goals and desired outcomes as a centripetal force for telling the alignment story. Show their pain points and barriers to overcome as well to enhance the narrative.

Paint a holistic picture with the diagram and then, together with your team, try to solve problems for customers. This will lead to opportunities for innovation and growth.

Alignment diagrams describe multiple facets of information on the customer and on the business sides of the equation. This is what the “alignment” part of the technique is really all about.

There are some common types of information to include on the customer side: actions, thoughts, feelings, goals, pain points and moments of truth are some of the leading things to include. There may be others depending on your situation.

On the business side, common elements include processes, actions and artifacts, as well as departments or roles involved. Channels of communication are typically relevant as well. In this respect, alignment diagrams help diagnose and plan cross-channel experiences.

Alignment diagrams expose touchpoints between the customer and business. The multiple layers of information shown in an alignment diagram (see Priniplce of Multiplicity) must come together to show where customers have contact with a product, service or brand in some way.

After determining and aligning the multiple facets of information, analyze the touchpoints. Start with simple SWOT analysis: how well does your business serve customers in each phase and for each touchpoint? Or give yourself simple school grades to see where you’re good and where you’re poor.

Beyond that, use the alignment diagram to prototype the customer experience. Walk through the touchpoints in order and examine the real-world artifacts customers would encounter. In this way you can use the alignment diagram to gain empathy for customers and put yourself in their shoes.

Alignment diagram show a composite view of behavior and processes in a graphical overview. It is the act of visualizing the alignment of various types of information and the touchpoints that makes value creation on both sides evident. A 10-page report with the same information won’t have the same effect. Stakeholders need to be able to take in the entirety of the interaction described in the diagram at once.

A single visualization also provides a compact and focused artifact to bring into a workshop. The diagram should be engaging, and a visual representation of customer and business activity helps.

Alignment diagrams should need little or no explanation. Anyone should be able to walk up to an alignment diagram and orient themselves quickly.

Note that visualization, while helpful, does not guarantee the simplicity needed for self evidence. You will have to work hard to reduce the information to only the salient points.

Alignment diagrams tell a narrative. If your user research data is rich, it will be challenging to tell a concise story. You’ll be tempted to include everything you found. Resist this urge and stick to the main plot. Self evidence is more important than an overload of details.

Alignment diagrams seek to address real-world problems and therefore must be relevant to a given business or organization. As a creator of an alignment diagram, this means you must thoroughly investigate and understand the goals, challenges and future plans your business partners have. The resulting diagram should fit seamlessly into their thinking.

In particular, strive to shed light on problems that are not transparent or difficult to see. For instance, a business may be looking to strategically expand into new markets. Let’s say a B2B provider wants to start selling directly to B2C markets, something it previously hasn’t done. An alignment diagram can help document the types of interactions the business would have with this new segment, and it would highlight the additional capabilities they would need to develop.

Alignment diagrams are firmly grounded in first-hand investigation and evidence. They are not made up or brainstormed in isolation.

Even if a company already knows a lot about its customer behavior, primary research must be part of your alignment diagram effort. Almost with certainty, you will find things previously unknown. More importantly, you will validate, deepen and strengthen the information included in the diagram with first-hand research.

If you want to learn more, I’ll be giving a full-day workshop on alignment diagrams on March 15, 2012 in London. This is part of UX Fest, a 4-day series of workshops run by William Hudson and myself. The workshops offered are:

• Tuesday 13 March, Agile User Experience & UCD (William Hudson)
• Wednesday 14 March, Agile Requirements (William Hudson)
• Thursday 15 March, Alignment Diagrams (James Kalbach)
• Friday 16 March, Faceted Navigation (James Kalbach)

#1. …On Communicating Strategy for Design

19 June 2011

I’m really happy this came at the top of the list because it was by far the hardest and longest one to write. Lot’s research and re-reading went into this it. But it was fun to do, and it’s proven to be very helpful in my day job, too.

Here are the elements I found to be most significant in communicating a design strategy:

• An explicit design strategy statement of 35 words or less. This should encapsulate the objectives, as well as scope and advantage to the degree possible.
• An activity system map to show which unique set of activities you’ll undertake and their relationship with one another. This is a more detailed explanation of scope.
• A strategy canvas (or two) to show design’s advantage and unique value–both to the organization and to customers.

The subjective response to this post was good too. Here’s what one commenter had to say:

“This is an outstanding article, James. As a design strategist (or someone who does design strategy as a part of a much larger set of tasks) I took keen interest in all the information you have curated here. I cannot remember the last time I spent an hour digesting something on the Web. Really good and important read. I have sent it to my circle of smart friends. Thanks for putting this together.” (Steven Keith)

Thanks, Steven! Sometimes hard work pays off…

#2. Business Model Canvas: A Type Of Alignment Diagram

11 July 2011

The genesis of this article came from a simple realization that Alexander Osterwalder conceives of the Business Model Canvas in a similar way to how I view alignment diagrams.

To review, alignment diagrams are a class of documents that visually align aspects of customers’ interactions with a product or service. They have two halves: one part shows key elements of the customer experience; the other half illustrates business activities and how they fit into customer activity.

#3. QuestionStorming – Framing The Problem

2 November 2011

Unlike #1 in the list, I fired this post off fairly quickly. It’s still quite valuable though.

I came across this technique in The Innovator’ DNA, which I was reading just at the same time we were planning an innovation workshop at USEEDS° for a client. The timing was perfect. In order to prepare myself for using the technique, I did a little research on it and was able to share what I found in a blog post.

I’m actually surprised this was only #3: judging from visibility this post got on Twitter, it felt like this would be the winner. I’m still seeing people mention this post on Twitter…

#4. Fighting The “Air Sandwich”: Aligning For Success

18 Sept 2011

I was really happy to have come across the notion of an “air sandwich” in Nilofer Merchant’s book The New How. She clearly explained and articulated what I’d observed in the companies I’ve worked for. She writes:

An Air Sandwich is, in effect, a strategy that has a clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle–no meaty key decisions that connect the two layers, no rich chewy center filling to align the new direction with the new actions within the company.

In the post, I don’t think I highlighted well enough how alignment diagrams can be used to address air sandwiches. It’s kinda hidden at the bottom of the text. Maybe I’ll circle back on that in another post.

#5. The Myth of Fixed-Width Layouts–Revisited

3 October 2011

This post shot up very quickly, probably because Jan Jursa (@IATV) picked it up on Twitter.

Fixed-width layouts have been a pet peeve of mine for years–ever since I wrote one of my first published pieces: “The Myth of 800×600.” Over a decade ago, working on a project for Audi, I came to the firm belief that designing a web page for a single size is a flawed practice. The web is a digital medium, and pages should be fluid and flexible. Back then–in 2001–we even built in a type of low-level responsive web design into the the Audi website. We weren’t targeting mobile devices at the time (heck, we were still looking at WAP back then), but the website did end up with 3 different optimized sizes–small, medium and large.

Anyway, I’m glad to response web design finally taking off and will be a supporter of that movement moving forward.

Honorable mention: Faceted Navigation: Grouping – An UnTapped Potential?

6 Dec 2010

OK, you noticed–this post wasn’t  from 2011. But it was close. And it also got a lot views, so I decided to include it in this recap anyway. It was also one of my favorite posts, so it gets an honorable mention.

The thing I find interesting about grouping is that there are no commercial examples that I know of it, although the Flamenco faceted search UI makes use of it. I suspect that’s because there’s little or no real business value in it. In fact, it may add complexity that could actually hurt the overall user experience of a faceted navigation system. But that’s precisely the challenge that’s fascinating to me. I’d like to see a commercial use of grouping that brings value to users and to the business.

Here’s a quote from the post:

With grouping–as with the scatter/gather interface–users can see a presentation of results in a more structured way. The theory is, structuring a results list by clustering items around a topic better reveals “aboutness” of subsets of items, and this in turn potentially increases the chance of relevance. This isn’t only true in academic settings: studies show that grouping results can be of significant benefit in broader contexts on the web.

Read the whole post for more. Or come to my workshop on Faceted Navigation on March 16 in London. I’ll be talking about grouping and many other techniques in faceted navigation.

Happy new year!

While these calculations may be performance intensive, indication of magnitude provides valuable navigational cues to users. Seemingly trivial, this tiny bit of information can affect a user’s decision to select a filter or not.

Indication of magnitude can be classed into two primary types:

• Absolute magnitude shows the exact number of items. The most common approach indicates magnitude with a number in parantheses, usually after the filter label but sometime also before it.
• Relative magnitude shows the general size of the set in relation to other filter values. This is usually done with bars of some kind, either horizontal or vertical.

A hybrid of absolute and relative is also possible, as seen in the Relation Browser, an academic project for faceted filtering at the University of North Carolina (Image 1):

Image 1: The Relation Browser from UNC shows both absolute and relative magnitude (click to enlarge)

This example shows faceted filters for a collection of science and engineering data. The absolute number appears to the left of the value label. The relative magnitude appears as a blue, horizontal bar.

Notice that to save space, the designers put the value label over the bar. This avoids a real estate problem for showing longer filter labels: had the labels appeared to the left of the bars, for instance, some would most likely have to be truncated.

But wait, there’s more…

The Relation Browser take the display of magnitude one step further: rolling over an available filter forecasts the size of the resulting set of items by overlaying the new magnitude on top of the existing bars.

In the next screenshot (Image 2), the mouse is hovered over the value “Graduate” in the facet “Education level,”  (as indicated by the red outline). The blue bars now show the set of items you’d get after selecting that value. The white bars indicate the original magnitude (as seen in blue above) for all of the other filters.

Image 2: The Relation Browser forecasts magnitude by overlaying blue bars (target set size) on white bars (current magnitude).

This interaction is dynamic and instant, so you get a feel for the relationship of existing magnitude and new magnitude quickly. In the above screen shot, you’d know that by clicking on “Education level: Graduate” you will not get any documents in PDF, text or PowerPoint formats. This might affect your decision to select that filter at all, thus potentially saving you a step.

The display of magnitude is admittedly  a very detailed aspect of faceted navigation. But the example of the Relation Browser goes to show there is room for exploration and innovation in faceted navigation. How, for instance, might this be integrated into ecommerce without overwhelming users and in a way that is immediately understandable? What might be the benefit of this approach in a business context?

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Upcoming Workshop: Faceted Navigation (part of UX Fest, London, 2012)

If you’d like to learn more about faceted navigation, visit my day-long workshop on faceted navigation in March 2012 in London. We’ll cover faceted navigation from end to end. Below links to details about the event and about UX Fest, the series of four workshops William Hudson and I are running together:

• Tuesday 13 March, Agile User Experience & UCD (William Hudson)
• Wednesday 14 March, Agile Requirements (William Hudson)
• Thursday 15 March, Alignment Diagrams (James Kalbach)
• Friday 16 March, Faceted Navigation (James Kalbach)

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He writes:

Marketers need to drop the funnel metaphor to describe consumer touch points and instead study the evolving and increasingly digital consumer decision journey (CDJ). The CDJ illustrates how consumers add and subtract brands from a group under consideration during an extended evaluation phase. And purchase is no longer the end of the relationship. Now consumers often enter into an ongoing relationship with the brand during which they enjoy, advocate for and bond with it.

That feels very intuitive–even obvious–to anyone who has been working in design in the online space. But it’s important that managers and marketers are looking at the entire customer experience. If using a CDJ diagram helps, then that’s a good thing.

Decision making is a key dimension to look at in a company’s relationship with customers, for sure. Still, I’d not classify the CDJ technique as outlined by Edelman as an alignment diagram. This is primarily because it only captures one dimension of the customer experience. There’s also no mapping back to internal process within the business, and so no real alignment.

The article shows in a case study how one company used a CDJ map to instill change in the organization:

As a result of this reconceived CDJ, Global Light rethought its go-to-market approach, expanded the role of the corporate digital marketing team, and changed the nature of its customer relationships.

This is an important, non-trivial outcome of customer journey mapping in general. It builds agreement and a fosters a culture of customer-centricity internally. These effects are sometimes overlooked in such efforts, with project sponsors looking for an immediate, monetary return. It’s hard, however–if not impossible–to put a value on shared vision and culture of service in a company. A recent study on innovation by Booz & Co. shows that organizational culture is the single most-important factor the predicts how successfully a company innovates. They found that:

Spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.

I’ve had success with customer journey mapping and similar techniques in building a common vision of the ideal experience. I encourage you to try experience mapping out. It may just transfer your view of the customer from the inside out to the outside in.

For more, see my list of resources for customer journey mapping on the web.

Discovering problems actually requires just as much creativity as discovering solutions. There are many ways to look at any problem, and realizing a problem is often the first step toward a creative solution. To paraphrase John Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, a properly defined problem is partially solved. (p. 128)

The start of innovation, then, shouldn’t begin with the search of the perfect solution, rather with the search for the right problem.

With this in mind, I was happy to come across an innovation technique called QuestionStorming in the recent book The Innovator’s DNA.

QuestionStorming can be traced back before that book. Jon Roland wrote about what he calls “Questorming” back in 1985. His method is available online. He writes:

Its aim is not so much to get a group to come up with “solutions” to a “problem” as to come up with well-stated and well-selected questions or problem formulations. In one sense it addresses the process leading up to what is done in more conventional brainstorming: formulating the problem to be solved by the group.

This directly recalls Berkun. More importantly, QuestionStorming offers a concrete approach to getting to the right problem.

The technique is fairly simple and can be described in 5 steps:

1. Have a group of people start asking questions and write them down one-by-one. It’s important to not start a new question until the previous one has been recorded.
2. As in brainstorming, refrain from judging, censoring, or discussing the questions as you collect them. The goal is to go for volume.
3. The authors of The Innovator’s DNA suggest a goal of 50 questions. After that mark is reached, you can end the QuestionStorming.
4. Group the questions by type. Common types are

• What is? – These questions focus on facts and as-is situation
• What caused? – These questions get at the root of a problem
• Why? Why Not? – This type reflects the rationale behind a given problem space.
• What if? – These are the questions that point to a different future and lead to real innovation.

5. Prioritize the questions and pick the most relevant ones to discuss and develop further.

The above quote is something I wrote back in March of 2001. At the time, the standard resolution to design to was 800×600, but things were changing to 1024×768. There were debates at the time as to whether web pages can be optimized for larger screens. My article, entitled “The Myth of 800×600,” essentially attacked fixed-width screen design in general. (Perhaps a better title might have been “The Myth of Fixed-Width Design.”)

I concluded that article with a prediction:

“With an increase of alternative browsing devises on the horizon, such as WebTV, public access kiosks, video gaming systems, e-Books, small handheld devices, and other nonstandard applications, the continuum of viewable browsing sizes will only expand. Never before has the demand for flexibility been greater.”

A decade later that contention seems to more true than it was back then.

At the time I was working with Razorfish on the relaunch of the Audi.com and Audi.de websites. I summarized a case study of that project in an article on Boxes and Arrows. (See: “Challenging the Status Quo: Audi Redesigned,” originally given as a presentation at the IA Summit 2002 in Baltimore.).

One of the themes covered in the case study is an innovative approach to screen resolution. We called it “jumping boxes” at the time, referring to a layout that had three different states: small, medium and large. This was achieved by making components “jump” down on the page as the resolution got smaller (and vice-versa).

I wrote in the case study summary:

“Razorfish, Germany wanted to address the fact that users surf with different browser window sizes. We believed developing pages for one fixed size is fundamentally inappropriate for web design and ignores the basic flexibility of the medium. … [Therefore], the Audi sites have ‘smart’ pages that detect browser size and serve up the right layout automatically. Entire content areas of a page appear in different locations depending on the user’s resolution. These content boxes appear to ‘jump’ around in the layout, hence the phrase ‘jumping boxes.’”

In the end, the jumping boxes approach didn’t bring much to the site or to our client. It was more a philosophy of web design than anything practical. And the website has since been relaunched several times without the flexible layout.

These days folks are talking about responsive web design, spearheaded by Ethan Marcotte in articles and books on the subject. He writes in A List Apart:

Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web design, but it also requires a different way of thinking. Rather than quarantining our content into disparate, device-specific experiences, we can use media queries to progressively enhance our work within different viewing contexts. That’s not to say there isn’t a business case for separate sites geared toward specific devices; for example, if the user goals for your mobile site are more limited in scope than its desktop equivalent, then serving different content to each might be the best approach.

But that kind of design thinking doesn’t need to be our default. Now more than ever, we’re designing work meant to be viewed along a gradient of different experiences. Responsive web design offers us a way forward, finally allowing us to “design for the ebb and flow of things.” 

The layout for the Boston Globe website is a good example of responsive web design. Below are three screenshots from the site at different sizes:

Figure 1: BostonGlobe.com at its maximum width of about 1280 pixels (click to enlarge)

Figure 2: BostonGlobe.com at about 800 pixels wide

Figure 3: BostonGlobe.com at about 220 pixels wide

These screenshots are of the same page, taken only minutes apart. There is no horizontal scrollbar needed at any size. And the layout works at all of these resolutions.

This is far more sophisticated than what we were attempting in 2001 with the Audi website. We didn’t even come close. But we were falling the same aesthetic–one that breaks away from the what I call “the four corners syndrome.” Typically, web designers determine a fixed a size and begin filling in the corners with stuff. This is reminiscent of print design, really.

Now, with a veritable continuum of sizes to accommodate, picking just one doesn’t go very far. Responsive web design seeks to address that. It’s quite possible–from a design perspective and from an implementation perspective–to create a single website that scales as needed and takes advantage of a truly flexible medium to work on nearly any browser size. I, for one, welcome the further development and adoption of responsive web design. At a minimum, we should strive to have a single size be our default starting point for web design.

The metaphor I use is that of a “cliff”: stakeholders throw vague ideas over “a cliff.” They quickly plummet downward for individual contributors to execute. And no one seems to notice the gaping hole in the middle, between the top and the bottom. Mapping, modelling, coordinating, testing hypotheses, iterating, revising, and above all co-creating seem to get left out.

Happily, Nilofer Merchant in her book The New How (O’Reilly, 2009) has articulated this phenomenon much better than I have. She too has observed this disconnect between the top and bottom layers of an organization. It’s what she calls an “air sandwich.” Nilofer writes:

An Air Sandwich is, in effect, a strategy that has a clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle–no meaty key decisions that connect the two layers, no rich chewy center filling to align the new direction with the new actions within the company.

Also see Merchant’s promo video on Amazon.com for a brief explanation with cartoon representation of the air sandwich.

The metaphor is reminiscent of the “Where’s The Beef” campaign Wendy’s hamburg chain restaurants launched decades ago. In our case, the top bun would be the high-level strategy; the bottom bun is execution and implementation. And there’s nothing in between–no beef.

I was reminded of the “air sandwich” again when reading an article by Alexander Osterwalder (of business model canvas fame) and Yves Pigneur (see: “An e-Business Model Ontology for Modelling e-Business“). They discuss three levels of business structure: The planning or strategy level, the architectural or business model level, and the implementation or process level.

Here’s the diagram from the article illustrating these levels:

Figure 1: Levels of an organization (Osterwalder and Pigneur)

Notice that middle level. That’s the one that gets left out. That’s where the air sandwich comes from: a lack of focus on the architectural level. This layer is like an equation or a series of IF-THEN statements. It’s the governing logic of how the business is to function and what employees are to do. Without this algorithm in place, folks are left to improvise or make assumptions. Osterwalder and Pigneur argue that an explicit business model provides a framework for architecting and managing the business logic.

Regardless of what you call it–a “cliff,” an “air sandwich,” or the “architectural level”–the pattern is the same: senior management complains that their brilliant ideas don’t get implemented properly: “If we could only get execution right, we’d be better off.” Lower-level managers and individual contributors, in turn, groan about how stakeholders don’t “get it.” They don’t buy into those “brilliant ideas,” and they don’t believe in the direction set from above.

What’s the answer? Should we expect execs to roll up their sleeves and detail everything out? Not exactly–that would quickly become micro-management. Still, instead of crapping bricks of strategic poo from their ivory-lined corner offices on the heads of the mere mortals who implement the stuff, execs can make sure their vision and plans are broken down and architected for execution. In other words, they need to make sure the middle layer is aligned upward and downward and that there is no “air sandwich.”

For instance, execs can engage the bottom more frequently and actively to gather input into what will actually work. Often it’s people closest to the customer or the production line or a service partner that will know where the showstoppers may lie. Instead of creating a strategy in behind closed doors and then telling the rest of the company what their future is, execs should co-create the strategy with a variety of sources of input from all levels.

But from the bottom up there are things that can be done too. In particular, applying design thinking to the architectural level can provide a different picture of a given situation. Instead of griping about a lack of vision or direction, use your skills to draw a picture of the architectural layer. Literally.

You may have already heard me beating the drum about “alignment diagrams,” for instance. This class of document provides a structured overview to some of the middle layers of a business. More importantly, they bring a strong customer perspective into the discussion and align this with business activity.

In the end, the fighting the “air sandwich” needs to be done from all directions–from the top and from the bottom.

Some may say, “We don’t have time to plan every detail” or “We need to be first-to-market on this one” and “Let’s just start executing without all the planning.” But combating the air sandwich makes execution more efficient in the long run. Simply put, it makes economic sense to spend time getting the business logic right before going off to execute a plan. “If you get the thinking right, the doing is much easier,” to quote Ms Merchant again.

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See my upcoming workshops on Alignment Diagrams:

1. Thursday 22 Sept 2011, Prague, CZ - Part of Euro IA 2011
2. Thursday 3 Nov 2011, London, UK – Part of UX Fest London

Also see some articles and presentations on alignment diagrams:

• Presentation at the Euro IA Conference 2010, Paris
• “Locating Value with Alignment Diagrams,” co-authored with Paul Kahn, Parsonas Journal of Information Mapping, April 2011.
• “Alignment Diagrams,” Boxes and Arrows, September 2011.

For the November this year, we have added two brand new, thought-provoking workshops: on on agile requirements (William Hudson) and one on alignment diagrams (James Kalbach).

Here’s the full program with links to William’s site:

• Tuesday 1 November, Agile User Experience & UCD (William Hudson)
• Wednesday 2 November, Agile Requirements (William Hudson)
• Thursday 3 November, Alignment Diagrams (James Kalbach)
• Friday 4 November, Faceted Search & Beyond (James Kalbach)

Online registration for UX Fest is now open. Be sure to take advantage of the 4-for-the-price-of-3 special.

All courses are from 9:30-5:00 at Wallacespace, St Pancras, London WC1H 9PN in central London. (NOTE: this is not the Covent Garden location for Wallacespace). Lunch and refreshments will be served.

TESTIMONIALS

Here’s what former participants said about our workshops:

About William’s courses:

• “Excellent, well paced”
• “Fully met my needs on how to use UX techniques in Agile development”
• “Instructor was very, very good at presenting and very knowledgeable”

About James’ courses:

• “Highly valuable and relevant strategies … in a clear, friendly and engaging manner”
• “Lively, engaging, coherent style”
• “Practical and clear”
• “James demonstrates excitement for his profession and, with this, opens new perspectives for work in web design.”
• “The content was well prepared and very practical through the numerous examples.”

To sharpen my skills I decided to deconstruct the Xiameter business model and compare its parent, Dow Corning–just for fun. (You have the right to now say, “Get a life, Kalbach”). My starting point was an article outlining the structure of Xiameter: “Dow Corning’s Big Pricing Gamble“ by Loren Gary. I combed the text for the 9 elements of the BMC, jotted them down on paper, and then entered them into the canvas.

The image below (Figure 1) shows my analysis using the iPad app for the BMC. The GREEN notes represent Dow Corning’s core business. The ORANGE notes show the Xiameter model. Interestingly, Xiameter seems to have had an effect back on the core business model, according to the article. These aspects are shown in BLUE notes.

Figure 1: Comparison of Dow Corning’s core business to Xiameter using the Business Model Canvas (Click to enlarge)

The new Xiameter channel is a textbook example of disruptive innovation. Clayton Christensen illustrates the basic dynamics of distruption in a now well-know diagram:

Figure 2: Clayton Christensens illustration of disruption

Dow Corning recognized that it was overshooting its market. Overshooting is one of the first signs of a market ready for disruption. Scott Anthony et al write about overshooting in The Innovator’s Guide to Growth:

At the heart of the disruptive innovation model is the concept of overshooting, that is, providing too much performance for a given group of customers. Remember, the model holds that companies innovate faster than people’s lives can change to take advantage of the advances those companies provide. As companies innovate, products or services that were previously not good enough become perfectly adequate; ultimately, they become too good for a given group of customers. (p. 65)

(See my full review of The Innovator’s Guide to Growth in a previous post).

As the Xiameter case study article shows, Dow Corning seems to have recognized overshooting:

In the early 1990s, however, Dow Corning noticed an emerging trend toward commoditization in some of its markets. This meant that as specific products matured, the priorities of clientele within them shifted from wanting help with innovation to wanting to keep costs low. …

This change in what some customers valued—and the consequent decline in profit margins within those market segments—led Dow Corning to conclude that the basis of competition had shifted in parts of the industry. Facing the possibility that such a shift might spread, the company realized it required a more needs-based approach to customer segmentation. Its existing business model, which emphasized selling technical assistance and product testing on top of its core products, ignored price-conscious customers. To meet their needs—and to keep them from migrating to other, less-expensive providers—Dow Corning would have to devise a radically lower cost structure that would allow it to profit solely from selling products.

Overshooting is a key sign of a market ready for disruption. But don’t confuse breakthrough innovation with disruption. A breakthrough is the next, biggest, better product or service in an existing market. It’s the fifth blade on a razor or the Airbus 380. Or, see Kohler’s numi toilets–another example of a breakthrough product design, with a heated seat, feet warming, music and a remote control. But by definition these aren’t disruptive.

Disruptive innovations are more convenient, cheaper and easier to use, generally targeting previously underserved market segments. Think: Flip video camera, eBay or Zopa (a peer-to-peer lending service), as well as Skype and Ryan Air as disruptions. Xiameter is also a disruptive innovation.

The amazing part of Xiameter, however, is that Dow Corning distrupted itself. The fear of self cannibalization is extremely difficult to overcome in most companies, particular those as large and traditional as Dow. And that fear is precisely what causes the innovator’s dilemma. Dow overcame this fear and didn’t let entrants take that piece of their pie, as the chart above (Figure 2) show what usually happens.

My big take-away from this exercise is in the power of visualizing and diagramming all of these elements. Go read the article article that I reversed engineered (Here’s the link again–opens in new window); then come back here and compare what you read to the diagram.

Which explains the big picture better? Don’t get me wrong: the author of the article writes well, and it’s a clear story he tells. But you don’t get nearly the same sense of interlocking dependencies and overall logic you get from the text as you do from the canvas.

More importantly, the BMC let’s you design your business. You can quickly “sketch” multiple directions or variations. If they don’t work out, crumple it up and go back to the drawing board. That’s the power of it: iterative prototyping. With the BMC, you can apply design thinking to the innovation of a business model. It’s a far better better way than trying to detail a model out in text-based report or description.

Visualizing abstract business concepts really helps solve problems. I’ve been beating that drum for the last year or so, ever since I gave a presentation on “Alignment Diagrams” at the Euro IA conference last year. (See also the article Paul Kahn and I co-authored on alignment diagrams: “Locating Value with Alignment Diagrams“). Alignment diagrams are a class of document that includes such things as customer journey maps, service blueprints and mental model diagrams.

In a previous post, I suggest that the BMC is a type of alignment diagram. The elements on the right side represent customer-facing aspects. Alexander Osterwalder calls this the “front stage.” The fields on the left represent business-related aspects, or the “back stage.” In the middle is the “value proposition.” It’s this type of alignment between the back stage and front stage that’s often missing in business logic. While no silver bullet, the BMC and alignment diagrams can help bring clarity.

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NOTE: I’m giving two workshops this year on alignment diagrams:
1. Alignment Diagrams, Euro IA, 22 Sept 2011, Prague (1/2 day workshop)
2. Alignment Diagrams, part of UX Fest, 3 Nov, London (Full-day workshop)

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As a result, many companies lack coherence. Part of the problem is that there are too many pieces to puzzle. Globalization, digitization, automatization, outsourcing, crowd sourcing: navigating the possibilities business have at their disposal these days is a wicked problem.

We then see these companies pass this complexity on to consumers. Customers get bounced from service provider to service provider or from department to department. No one takes control or, worse, they blame each other.

Designers try to reduce this complexity for users of the products and services they create. We’re naturally good at empathizing with customers, understanding their motiviations and needs, and translating this into a concept for an offering. One important tool designers rely on frequently are diagrams: flowcharts, concept maps, interaction models and the like. Often these are for design purposes, but used to describe business contexts, they can take on a new role.

While no silver bullet, diagrams can help provide insight into complex situations. Visualizing all of the components of a process or system provides both a compactness of information and an immediacy of understanding. Maps help us see relationships and connect the dots. It’s this big picture that is often missing in business thinking.

Enterprise Business Motivation Model (EBMM) is a techique to identify and visualize the disparate elements of a business. It’s a big picture view of an organization. It includes a variety of elements, and mapping out in more details is surely a task in and of itself.

Here a picture of the highest-level of the EBMM. (Click for full view–opens in new window)

(Unfortunately, there is no identification of Design as a core business function)

Based on my presentation at the Euro IA conference in Paris in 2010, Paul Kahn and I wrote about alignment diagrams in a longer article (See”Locating Value with Alignment Diagrams“). The EBMM is NOT an alignment diagram by our definition of the phrase because it doesn’t account for any customer behavior. However, elements from the EBMM could be used to describe the business portion of an alignment diagram. For instance, if your alignment diagram has horizontal “swimlanes” of information that are visually aligned in the map, aspects like “Business Unit,” “Business Process,” “Data Object,” and “Initiatives” could be separate rows.

The interesting part of this to me is that I believe people in design disciplines have the necessary skills to do this kind of work–to map out businesses and interactions. We’re good at investigating and uncovering complex problems that may be otherwise not “visible” and making these tangible. I’d like to see more of this kind of work and thinking come from the design community. We can use our design thinking skills to help solve business problems.

As Luke Wroblewski’s commented on his blog years ago:

The same communication skills that help designers create effective visual and interaction designs for products can also play a significant role elsewhere in the product development process especially during early strategic work. …

… Especially early on in the product development process, design artifacts are able to create buy-in for a product vision, provide market context, or illuminate data, processes, goals, and the impact of decisions.

…designers have the skills needed to communicate and persuade but few of them utilize these skills for business visualization. Especially early on in the product development process, design artifacts are able to create buy-in for a product vision, provide market context, or illuminate data, processes, goals, and the impact of decisions.

I won’t be talking about EBMMs in my upcoming workshop at the Euro IA Conference in Prague on alignment diagrams, but I will be discussing some of the points I just mentioned in more detail. We’ll also look at some of the mechanics of creating alignment diagrams. Registration for the workshop is still open and there are spots left.

BTW, the early bird price for the conference itself has been extended until Sept 4. Sign up! Luke Wroblewski is our keynote speaker–you won’t want to miss that!

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[1] IBM, “Capitalizing on Complexity,” (2010). [http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/ceo/ceostudy2010/]

[2] Booz & Co, “Executives Say They’re Pulled in Too Many Directions and That Their Company’s Capabilities Don’t Support Their Strategy,” (Feb 2011). [http://www.booz.com/global/home/press/article/49007867]