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Shift to holistic
Did you catch one of my favorite words coming from Fed chairman Ben Bernanke this week?
Here's the quote, from the transcript:
We must have a strategy that regulates the financial system as a whole, in a holistic way, not just its individual components.
Ahh, the holistic, strategic approach - something I've found useful in 12 years of customer experience consulting - but which I don't think I've ever heard advocated at the highest levels of our financial system.
Holistic. It's about time we gave credit to this method, now that we've been severely burned by the narrow-minded, blinkered, short-term-profit-at-all-costs mindset foisted on us by specialist "experts" who assured us that there was nothing to worry about, that our inability to understand complex financial instruments was due to our sadly unendowed cranial capacity - and not at all because the opaque, the over-complex, and the over-specialized thing tends to lose sight of, and all grip on, the world.
The holistic - taking the big picture into account - indeed making the big picture, and the long term, our only frame to evaluate the final goodness of what we do... it's about time we gave it credit.
If you're interested, "holistic" and "holy" come from the same root. The idea offered by the word is bigger than any one discipline or tradition.
This shift to the holistic affects us - you, reading this - starting right now - even down to the day-to-day reality of our jobs.
Speaking to a recruiter friend of mine recently, I mentioned that job titles in the "experience" field have always been hard to understand. What's the difference between all of these?
• user experience designer
• user experience analyst
• interaction designer
• user interaction designer
• visual designer
• information architect
• usability specialist
I told my friend that I doubted if "gurus" (let alone the hiring managers at companies) could easily describe the distinctions.
"It doesn't matter much right now," she said. "In a recession, companies are looking for generalists" - that is, people who can do all sorts of things to improve the customer experience.
An evolutionary biologist could probably give us a good case for why this happens: when an ecosystem is under pressure, agility and flexibility become more valuable - those who evolve fastest, or perhaps those who didn't over-specialize, tend to survive.
This moment, as tough as it is, presents a genuine opportunity for the holistic-minded, the generalists, the generally smart and curious (you know who you are!) to come out from hiding and WORK YOUR MAGIC. You're not just a senior user interaction designer; no, more importantly, you're someone who cares about the customer experience - if I may say, the holistic experience - which will determine the life or death of the company, durnit, and you're going to roll up your sleeves to give the company the best chance possible to survive and maybe even grow in this environment. Shout that to anyone who doubts what this mindset can do.
Take off the blinders. Shake free from the job title. Open your mind to learn from other parts of the universe. Listen better - to whatever, whoever may teach.
And if you want to be among kindred spirits who are committed to this holistic way of understanding experience, come to Gel.
See you there.
Great post - one of the major challenges is that just about every company is not organized to approach their business holistically. All the silos and cross-matrixed org charts really hold companies back from looking at things from a holistic vantage point. Hopefully, that is what customer experience professionals will strive for.
It's always good to broaden your approach, no matter what discipline. But in your post you're still speaking to a discipline. Recruiters when they say they want generalists, are now asking for someone who can do UI, Design, Project Management and Coding. These companies that are asking for generalists in this range clearly don't understand quality.
37signals readers had a couple dozen comments on those job titles:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1631-speaking-to-a-recruiter-friend-of-mine-recently?21#comments