Scoping is the indispensable first stage of design, involving open-ended and non-judgmental collaboration with stakeholders and experts in other disciplines, to explore what are sometimes called ‘fuzzy front ends’, ‘problem spaces’ or ‘wicked problems’. Scoping is collaborative, participatory, and user-centred.

In these respects, scoping is similar to the crafts of co-creation and co-design (not surprising since they all share the same progenitors of participatory and user-centred design crafts). The techniques of co-creation and co-design include brainstorming, appreciative dialogue, generative tools, and the sharing of ideas and methods with the aim of releasing a person’s—every person’s—unacknowledged innate creativity. For some advocates of co-creation and co-design, these are sexy new crafts, part of an ideology of openness, collaboration and participation in design—a celebration of democratic values. But these crafts are not new: they were being advocated at the end of the nineteenth century by Arthur D Little, adapted by George Prince and Bill Gordon as synectics, and advocated by E De Bono, A Koestler, and H Read, among others throughout the 1960s and ’70s.

Ironically, the current advocates for these ideas describe them in such vague and abstract terms that they invite scepticism, all the more so as some of them are information designers (or ‘sensemakers’ to use their term). When questioned recently about this irony, they reacted with hostility in much the same way as members of a cult react, claiming esoteric knowledge that the rest of us can only acquire by joining them, thus compounding the irony: we strongly believe in making sense and sharing with everybody, but not when it comes to making sense or sharing. A kinder interpretation might be that this vagueness is a deliberate strategy for maintaining a non-judgemental ethos.

For the wider community who are interested in these rediscovered and reinvented crafts, here are some of the questions you might like to ask a practitioner before handing over your money:

• What are the antecedents of the methodology?
• How rigorously is it defined?
• What is the evidence in terms of before and after results, outcomes, and unexpected consequences?
• Is it replicable in a variety of contexts?
• Where does the money trail go: who pays, who gets paid, who benefits financially from the outcome, who gets the ROI?
• Who gains and who loses power and control?
• Where does it sit in a mature communication design practice?
• Is it a sustainable practice?

The last of these questions is particularly pertinent in our time, since a great deal of design is still directed at finding new ways for us to increase our consumption—much of which ends up as landfill.

My advice is: if you cannot get satisfactory answers to at least some of these questions, then like many before them offering unsustainable and evidence-free design practices, these advocates might just be contributing to the co-creation of our collective rubbish.

On the other hand, co-creation may be the answer we have all been waiting for…

Sometimes, though, we are asked just to test something independently to find out whether it is working or not, and this has proved profitable and worthwhile for decision makers. So we are now offering testing as a stand-alone service, using our network of Fellows across the world. It’s like a health check; indeed, we call it diagnostic testing. We test your documents or internet content to find out if people can find the information they are looking for and whether or not they can use it once they find it.

Diagnostic testing is an effective and valuable method of finding out if your new design will work, your old design needs changing, or your existing design needs some refinement.

Our independent evidence-based reports tell you what is working and what is not, and compare the results against agreed performance requirements and targets. When we write our reports we draw on thousands of similar results from testing we have undertaken for over 200 organisations.

It’s not very expensive, we can usually run the testing and report back to you within three weeks, and you will probably find the results useful and surprising.

If you are interested, email me here or ring me on +61(0)412356795.

After 16 years of hard work by many dedicated writers of consumer medicines information (CMI) in pharmaceutical companies in Australia, their collective achievement can be seen in a single world-class collection published by the TGA.

The story of CMI in Australia began in the early 1990s with major changes in government policy on medicines. In 1992, with funding from the Commonwealth Government, we undertook research into consumer medicine information. This led in 1994 to the publication of the first edition of Writing about medicines for people(WAMFP).

WAMFP quickly became the defacto standard among CMI writers and has remained so through three editions, with each edition adding more information and examples based on the best practices of CMI writers, and the cumulative experience from CMI testing and research. This book has been applied to some degree in all these CMI. But nothing happens in a vacuum.

The real achievement here is that of the dedicated CMI writers, and the supportive industry and government environment that was created in order to nurture and support those writers. Juliet Seifert, mentioned in my previous blog, was one of the chief architects of that environment. And it was not easy.

Not everyone thought that giving people easily usable and detailed information about their medicines was a good idea. Some questioned whether or not people needed that information, that it might interfere with them complying with their doctor’s instructions. Some questioned whether or not people were entitled to this information as a right. Some suggested that it was all too hard, would cost too much time and money without any obvious benefit. Despite the many, often powerful nay-sayers, other voices such as Juliet’s were there to vigorously protect and defend people’s right to easily usable medicines information.

The credit for this massive and impressive work goes to Juliet Seifert, the many people who worked with her in supporting this work, and of course, the CMI writers.

TGA has published the CMI alongside the drugs’ Product Information (PI)—a formal technical document containing the detailed clinical and pharmecological data submitted by companies to TGA for approval to sell the products in Australia.

The TGA collection of CMI is the single most impressive and comprehensive collection of well written medicines information for consumers that has ever been published and made available in the public domain.

There are some faults and weaknesses in this collection, not least of which is the clunky 1980s word processor layout of the documents—something we were forced to use in WAMFP because of the technical limitations on production of CMI in pharmacies—a limitation that persists to this day with few major improvements on the horizon. Some of the writing could also be improved. But many of these CMI are well written and properly tested as part of the Consistency Working Groups that were set up by the pharmaceutical industry. These groups each took a therapeutic class—hypertensives, antibiotics, etc.—and collectively wrote and tested a core CMI. Once finalised, each company marketing products in that class took the core CMI and adapted it to their own product. It is this type of collaboration that characterises the approach that has infused this area under the guidance of people like Juliet Seifert.

I commend the collection to you.

Juliet’s contribution to ASMI over that period has been enormous, and as many of the distinguished speakers on the evening said in celebration of her achievements, her positive contributions to the development of health policy in Australia extended far beyond her specific role as an advocate for ASMI. Indeed, it would be true to say that Juliet has been an advocate for all interested in better health: consumers, professions, research, industry, and government.

I have had the great pleasure of participating in a number of health policy initiatives in which Juliet successfully achieved a remarkably collaborative approach among all the participants in the interests of the common good. I could say a great deal more, but others, far more qualified than I, have spoken on this subject and will undoubtedly do so in the future.

But I couldn’t let the moment pass without celebrating Juliet’s contribution to CRI. Since the mid-1990s to 2008, Juliet was a Member of our Board of Governors and a Member of the Board’s Executive Committee. In that capacity, Juliet guided our research and advisory agenda and acted as a wonderfully astute friend and mentor to CRI. Like all our Board Members, Juliet did this work in a voluntary capacity for the common good. We thank her greatly.

In a future blog I will mention some of the remarkable evidence of Juliet’s contribution.

After the 1993 Federal Election in Australia, I wrote a ‘provocation’ to my research colleagues. You can read it here. The only thing that has changed since then is that it probably doesn’t seem quite so provocative, and the many faults in using focus groups are more widely recognised. But will anyone do anything?

This is not an acceptable excuse. The politics is always there, a natural part of any project. If you don’t take the political aspect of the work into account in a sophisticated way, and they overwhelm you,  you have not managed the project professionally.

But how much effort is involved in professionally managing the politics? Over a number of years, as part of our continuing research into design methods, we routinely track the amount of effort that goes into each stage of a successful information design project.

Obviously, there is a lot of variability across projects but the diagram below gives a rough guide.

If you believe successful information design is all about writing text in plain English and getting the graphics right, you might find it surprising that only 4% of project effort goes into developing a first prototype. But wait a minute…the percentages above add up to only 50% of the effort. What takes up the other 50%?

That’s where the politics comes in. 50% of the effort in any successful information design project goes into managing the stakeholders, that is, all those who are interested in the outcome: keeping them informed of progress in ways that are suitable for them, firefighting when things go wrong, and getting agreement from all concerned.

Above all,  the greatest risk of failure in an information design project comes from mismanaging the politics. Yet it is as if a conspiracy of silence prevails over the subject. You will not find in textbooks on information design any teaching on the political skills needed, nor is it part of the curriculum on most courses. This has to change.

As part of that change, we teach all about it on our postgraduate courses in Information Design, we are beginning to publish Guidelines for our Members on how to manage the politics of information design projects, and will be giving presentations on the subject at conferences, starting at the Information Architecture Conference in Sydney on October  8 and 9 this year.  Join us there.

Our experience and research suggest that many approaches wonâ??t work, particularly those based on academic communication research. The reasons for this are complex, involving outmoded ways of thinking and a lack of appropriate skills. But the resultant breakdowns in communication are obvious: information is ignored, cannot be found, or is not understood.

As the old saying goes, a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and in risk management, communication is often the weakest link. Unfortunately, you wonâ??t know that it hasnâ??t worked till itâ??s too late. And it probably will not work unless the communication is developed to the highest standards using the most advanced thinking.

The challenge facing many organisations is that they do not know what a high standard of communication is, and they do not know how to measure their own communication efforts to make sure it achieves a high standard. This is not just a challenge in risk management; it permeates many aspects of organisational policy and practice.

Fortunately, it doesnâ??t have to be that way. The methods for getting communication right are now understood, though not yet widely available. Our job is to make those methods available to our Members.

In fact, over the last few years we have helped over 200 of our Members investigate, develop, and implement risk management and communication policies and practices that really work.

Join us, and find out how.

It’s not often I feel grateful to politicians, but today I make an exception.

My gratitude may come as a surprise to most readers of this blog. And if your’e Australian, you might be doubly surprised because our current Prime Minister is controversially spending nearly $40 million dollars of our money on a public information campaign to persuade us that he is acting in our interest—raising taxes to make Australia a better place.

You might also be surprised that my gratitude is related to a public information campaign. After all, we at CRI have been highly critical of such activity in the past; if you look through many of our publications you will find a sustained attack on this type of information and communication activity. From that point of view, the current campaign is no different to most other such campaigns, with the usual litany of false assumptions, poor research methods, inane execution, and dubious outcomes. Indeed looking at this particular campaign fills me with a sense of great weariness at the thought of the many layers of poor thinking and execution that one would have to strip away before one might get to a position in which one could do something useful.

The irony is that to do something useful in this area—to explain the new tax reforms and their impact and to have these explanations widely available—would cost a tiny fraction of what the government is currently spending. My back-of-the-envelope calculation gives a figure of 5% of the current budget, about $190,000. BTW, this includes the costs of research.

So, why am I grateful to the Prime Minister? Clearly, not for spending my money wisely. I will explain.

Most days I avoid reading newspapers. It’s depressing and not very rewarding: a bland mixture of disaster, death, and nitpicking commentary. But every now and then the desire to be in touch, the habit of reading the paper with a cup of coffee in hand, comes upon me. Sadly, the habit is accompanied by guilt: if I avoid reading something I know I should read but know I won’t enjoy, I feel guilty, torn between duty and dislike.

So imagine my delight this morning when I came across one full newspaper page that I knew I wouldn’t have to read, one I could bypass yet still do my duty. That full page was so clearly a government public information campaign advertisement, I knew at first glance that I could skip it. No obligation, no duty and no guilt.

So, thank you Mister Prime Minister. You made my day!

No tax law, however well drafted by parliamentary draftsmen, escapes the parliamentary process of amendment, with all the resultant legal and administrative complexity. This is the reality of most laws passed through a bicameral party-based system. One could argue that this is democracy at work, with all its attendant checks and balances. But checks and balances mean complexity in law and administration.

Much has been said, in the current debate and in the lead-up to the Henry review of taxation, about simplification of the system. In the face of the obvious and avoidable reasons for complexity this is worrying, as if attempts to simplify the law will necessarily lead to a simpler system. The complexity is there to stay in one form or another.

Thus the primary question should be: Who should manage the complexity? In the case of our current taxation system, the Australia Taxation Office (ATO) has outsourced the complexity: an army of accountants, book-keepers, tax consultants, the poor—who cannot afford these services—and a few DIY enthusiasts now manage the complexity and administration of the country’s tax system.

The ATO has always outsourced complexity, but since the introduction of what is euphemistically called ‘self assessment’ in the late 1980s, this outsourcing of complexity has become a positive policy. The Tax Pack was one of the earliest high profile public manifestations of ‘self assessment’, BAS statements are a more recent high profile example. The consequence of these and many other less obvious examples have progressively externalised the complexity of the system.

Some work could be done to simplify such things as the Tax Pack and BAS, but only at the margins. It is the fact of these instruments that constitutes the complexity; real reform can only occur by removing them. In other words, the complexity needs to be managed by the ATO on behalf of the taxpayers.

For this to happen, the ATO would have to be a much larger organisation, properly resourced to manage that complexity on our behalf. This would not only make life easier for taxpayers, it makes economic sense: the findings from our research suggest that for every extra dollar spent on the ATO, there could be a hundredfold reduction in external costs in running the system. This would free up a great deal of unproductive private sector tax consultants, accountants and book-keepers, giving them the time to do more productive work.

Will this happen? I don’t think so. Just prepare, as a taxpayer, to manage a new type of complexity.

Undoubtedly, I upset a few people at both by suggesting that some of the projects reported were not of an adequate standard. In the case of the Information Architects I was critical of the stakeholder management processes used in a large website project. In the case of the Plain English conference, I had already lobbed a few grenades before the conference began, arguing that Plain English is an inappropriate basis from which to develop an adequate standard for public communication. Three days of careful listening to presentations substantially confirmed my views, though I now have a better insight into some of the possible reasons for the inadequate standards.

Shooting the messenger is one of the ways in which people deal with adverse criticism, and there were plenty of shots directed personally at me and, more generally, at the vague body of naysayers like me. But I’m an old warrior with thick armor, no stranger to controversy, and I like a good fight. So I didn’t roll over, nor did I retreat into my bunker to lick my wounds. I stand by the criticisms I made, and if need be, I will make them again.

For those of you who are still reading this, let me explain why these criticisms should be taken seriously by Information Architects and Plain English practitioners and advocates.

I’m a communication researcher. It’s my job to investigate routine communication practices such as Information Architecture and Plain English and to create new practices such as diagnostic testing; it’s my job to test them out in the field, find out what works and what fails, and based on my findings, promote the best practices and discourage poor practices. Above all, I offer evidence that can be publicly scrutinised and evaluated by my peers. Most of what I do is in the public domain and is reported on our Institute’s website or in peer reviewed publications.

I am not setting myself up as an authority beyond question, an unchallengeable arbiter of what should or should not be done. Far from it: I make the criteria I use and the evidence they are based on as public and as accessible as I can, and welcome open discussion.

I could, of course, do this work quietly in the back room, but that is not my personal style, nor is it consistent with my job description which is to promote good practices and a general improvement in the quality of communication between large organisations and people. And it is worth pausing for a moment to ask why I regard this work as important. The answer is simple. If we do not communicate at the highest standard, some people die or suffer injury, and many people are unable to exercise their rights.

For example, if people cannot appropriately use their medicines because they cannot read a medicine label or leaflet, they can kill themselves. If an electricity linesman cannot follow procedures for inspecting faults on lines because the written procedures for doing so are difficult to use, the unrepaired faults can lead to fires and many people being killed or injured. If refugees cannot make sense of the regulations applied by governments to establish their status, they will be distressed by a process that is supposed to help them.

A high standard of communication can significantly contribute to avoiding death, injury and hardship.

It is also nice to know that high standards of communication lead to more efficient and profitable organisations; but that is the bonus, the icing on the cake. The bottom line is that a poor standard of public communication is unacceptable for safety and social reasons.

There would be some excuse for poor communication if the know-how for creating a high standard was unavailable, but that is not the case. For some time now, tested methods have been available in the public domain. So when I see work that claims to be ‘professional’ yet falls short of acceptable standards, I voice my concerns.

I could go into a great deal of detail, but two points will suffice. First, professional information designers have known for years that the political management of projects—that is, ensuring that all stakeholders are actively involved—takes up about 50% of the effort in public communication projects; poor stakeholder management is the greatest risk to success of such projects. So hearing the ‘professionals’ at the conferences talking about their recent discovery of political factors, and their accounts of fumbling through the process, caused me great concern. Second, there is an old saying that to a hammer everything looks like a nail. To information architects, it seems, the solution to public communication problems lies in building a website; to Plain English advocates the solution lies in rewriting documents according to their rules. Such rapid moves into the solution to communication problems shows a sad lack of awareness of contemporary design problem-solving methods used in communication and information design.

I suspect that by making these remarks I shall get fewer invitations to speak at conferences, but that does not matter. What matters is that people continue to be needlessly harmed and disadvantaged, and that must be addressed, regardless of who says it.