‘Orchestrating Experiences’ is a book chock full of practical advice on how to help complex organisations deliver valuable experiences to their customers. Each chapter culminates in a detailed, easy-to-follow workshop guide and the concepts themselves are clearly explained - often through the application of apt and illuminating musical metaphors!
Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity, Chris Risdon & Patrick Quattlebaum (2018)
The first thing I’d like to point to as great about this book is that it is job title/design field agnostic; no space at all is given over to an attempt to define the relative merits and territories of UX, CX, service design or design thinking. Instead, the focus of this book is solely on the practicalities of 'how to put human-centredness into action' in complex environments to forge ‘solutions that work as a system’. The authors label this collaborative process ‘orchestration’, and its practitioners (from whatever background they hail) ‘orchestrators’, as success depends on 'everyone knowing their part'. The central question the book poses is then how 'different practitioners with different skills can own their part of the puzzle while harmonising with other customer interactions outside of their responsibility?'
The first section is made up of four chapters that each cover a basic concept we need to establish 'a common language' for collaboration. Here, musical metaphors help to bring clarity: Channels, as the medium of interaction with users, need to be ‘in tune’ with one another to avoid creating ‘dissonance’ when customers move from one to another. Touchpoints, on the other hand, are the ‘actual notes’ that customers hear when they interact with your organisation. Mapping ecosystems is defined as a way to 'understand the colliding worlds of customer and organisation' and lastly journey maps act as 'hubs of empathy' that help stakeholders identify with users.
Part II is a crucial section of the book, featuring three chapters that focus in detail on how orchestrators can guide others through these processes. Chapter 5, on mapping experiences, emphasises the value of involving a range of stakeholders from different teams in this work, to help build 'cross-functional rapport', develop empathy and gather revealing insights. Chapter 6 focuses on experience principles, which are how we can go from individual insights to produce 'a set of guidelines that an organisation commits to and follows from strategy through delivery to produce mutually beneficial and differentiated customer experiences'. Here the musical analogies shift genre, to jazz; good experience principles we are told should provide some structure, the way a time signature does, to encourage 'supportive harmony' between band members, while at the same time ensuring each member still 'has room to improvise'.
Like every chapter of the book, this one finishes with a detailed workshop guide on how to collaboratively refine experience principles, involving stakeholders to increase the chance these principles will actually be adopted. Chapter 7 is about ‘identifying opportunities’, which are defined as sets of circumstances ripe for positive change’, the ‘what’ we need to change rather than the ‘how’ (the solution). Crucially once more we get valuable guidance on how to run a workshop to identify and prioritise opportunities collaboratively and then socialise them within the organisation.
The third and final section of the book covers ‘vision and action’. Chapter 8 is on generating and evaluating ideas, while Chapter 9 focuses on ‘crafting a tangible vision’: This can happen via an approach like ‘stories from the future’, which helps foster alignment through the co-creation of stories in the form of storyboards, posters or videos, or through service blueprinting, to map effective end-to-end experience architecture. Chapter 10 is called ‘Designing the Moment’ and covers the prototyping of key interactions in user journeys. The final chapter of the book, ‘Taking up the baton’, summarises many of the methods and mindsets outlined in the rest of the volume, and re-emphasises the key roll of the ‘orchestrator’ in facilitating a collaborative, inclusive approach and providing projects aimed to delivering improved customer experiences their very best chances of success.
Comments