Five Sketches™

People have a preferred conative style. Their conative style is how they prefer to approach a problem.

Actually, people can easily adopt a different conative style, for a while. Most people in the workplace have done this. However, when the pressure is on, people retreat to their preferred conative style. There’s nothing wrong with this, except in these two cases:

1.  Teamwork can be a challenge. Imagine:

• The team is under pressure.
• Team members have different conative styles, so they unintentionally work at cross-purposes.
• The team members with the strongest personalities have disproportionate influence.
• The contributions of quieter voices get missed.

2.  Design work can be a challenge:

• Design is more likely to succeed when many ideas are generated up front, and analysis is delayed until after all ideas are generated.
• Idea generation is an ideation conative style, but analysis is a judgement conative style.
• Ideation and judgement are opposite conative styles.

Design is stressful for people who haven’t had previous success with ideation. Since, under pressure, people resort to their preferred conative style, Five Sketches™ has specific things to encourage non-designers to engage in generative activity (to generate ideas without analysing them). Developers are great at analysis, logic, reason, examination, and judgement, so during Five Sketches training, I present a model of the conative styles that appeals to their judgement: I plot the styles, I provide data from of previous projects (as social proof), and I provide a timeline that shows ideation is a temporary activity. During the ideation stage, there are specific actions and reminders to keep people on the ideation side until it’s time for everyone to move to the judgement side of the ideation-judgement axis. Over the space of several hours, this is what happens:

Experience shows that it works. After a brief foray outside their comfort zones, developers and other non-designers get to return to their preferred conative styles. The benefits: design outcomes are better; stakeholders are included and heard; requirements are met; and the development schedule is the same or shorter.