Ogilvy UK head of strategy, advertising, Matt Waksman, illustrates and interprets the role of the strategist within advertising and wider society

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If you’re trying to think and act more creatively and more critically, focus on asking better, more interesting questions of the briefs you’re tasked with answering. What we teach children can and should be applied to our own professional lives, too. A focus on problems and solutions first, promotes consistent, ‘safe’ answers, but won’t move the work on. Spending time on asking and answering better questions will help refine the understanding of a problem and will create the conditions for new, interesting and challenging solutions.

But she did explain how researching and designing for the majority or “average user” actually end up ignoring, othering, and harming the people our designs are meant to serve. Indi shared how she finds patterns in people’s behaviors, thoughts, and needs—and how she uses that data to create thinking styles that inform more inclusive design decisions. Indi talked about… Why researchers should look for patterns, not anecdotes, to understand real user needs. What are thinking styles and how to uncover and use them. Why your “average” user often doesn’t exist in the real world, and how we can do better.

Method:Three participatory workshops were held with the independent Welsh residential decarbonisation advisory group(‘the Advisory Group’)to (1)maprelationships betweenactors, behavioursand influences onbehaviourwithin thehome retrofitsystem,(2)provide training in the Behaviour Change Wheel framework(3)use these to developpolicy recommendationsfor interventions. Recommendations were analysed usingthe COM-B (capability, opportunity, motivation) model of behaviourtoassesswhether they addressed these factors. Results:Twobehavioural systems mapswere produced,representing privately rented and owner-occupied housing tenures. The main causal pathways and feedback loops in each map are described.

The issue is: We try to solve every single box in the problem tree. If people don’t know about something, then we solve it by raising awareness. If people don’t care about something, then we solve it by getting them to care more. If people are doing illegal behaviors because of a lack of enforcement, then we solve it by increasing enforcement. We go through the whole set of problem tree causes in this manner, writing objectives with a one-to-one match per problem. Not only does this result in a long list of objectives, which will quickly overwhelm us, it also traps us into solving behavioral problems using logic-based approaches.

That’s why we’ve developed an evidence-based approach to identifying and prioritising the most suitable behaviour(s) to address a problem: The Impact-Likelihood Matrix (ILM), developed by our very own Sarah Kneebone. By undertaking a rigorous investigation of the literature and audience research, our technique ensures that the behaviour(s) you choose to target for your intervention or policy will have the highest likelihood of driving the change you are seeking.

In their maturity, the fields of experience strategy and behavior change design are moving past the casual flirtations of two complementary knowledge domains into a full fledged partnership: when we marry the design of behavioral interventions and the design of experiences, there’s a special power in combining the myriad frameworks from both domains. This becomes especially effective when the goal is not just to identify pain points in an existing experience journey or illustrate an ideal future one — but to make actionable recommendations that will help clients make the leap from actual to ideal.

Developed by the Right Question Institute, the Question Formulation Technique, or QFT, is a structured method for generating and improving questions. It distills sophisticated forms of divergent, convergent, and metacognitive thinking into a deceptively simple, accessible, and reproducible technique. The QFT builds the skill of asking questions, an essential — yet often overlooked — lifelong learning skill that allows people to think critically, feel greater power and self-efficacy, and become more confident and ready to participate in civic life.

Context analysis helps you to understand the elements of an environment and a group of potential users so that you can design a better technology project. It should involve key stakeholders, including implementing partners, donors, local and national authorities, and community members. We suggest five key lines of inquiry that context analyses should consider: People: Levels of education and literacy, information habits and needs, access to disposable income for equipment, electrical power to charge devices, and airtime and data to run them, and network access; Community: How membership of specific groups may affect access to technology and communications habits. For example, a nomadic clan may have attributable characteristics shared by its members, and variations in levels of access and freedom within the clan differentiated by gender and age. Market environment: An understanding of the key players, legal and regulatory issues, the mobile market, including both cost and distribution of agent networks, and the infrastructure, including commercial mobile infrastructure such as the availability of short-codes and APIs are all critical to making good design decisions. Political environment: understanding governance and control of, and access to, communications infrastructure by government and other actors Implementing organization: Many interventions have failed because staff were not able to maintain technology, because power or access to internet were not strong enough, because staff capacity was low or went away, or because the intervention was not supported by a broader culture of innovation and adaptive learning.

original “jobs to be done“ article from 2008

So how is it done? We’ve found that all jobs have the same eight steps. To use job mapping, we look for opportunities to help customers at every step:

There are a few enormous benefits to using challenge maps. First, challenge maps help teams surface the key decision points that will have the greatest potential impact, both for users and the business. Challenge maps also help teams get aligned and on the same page about the most impactful next step. Finally, and maybe most importantly, challenge maps help teams see where their thinking has been too limited, inspire fresh thinking, and unlock innovation.

The Paradox Process is a model for brand development that when applied works for many brands facing complex challenges. Its primary purpose is to get insight into consumer pain points or contradictions that need solving, and it works by using contrary perspectives to arrive at new conclusions.

How and when to give different types of feedback on creative designs

SRI offers an interesting model for segmenting your audience based on their attitudes and values.

Higher Education Center for Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drugs