Indexing the Future
Mindful leaders design work experiences — especially collaborative ones that build new organizational competencies — to improve data-driven decision making.
Note: use of the terms “data” and “information” are used interchangeably to represent the same concept.
My grandma didn’t have the best memory. Towards the end of her life, I would visit her every week or two and help her with things on her to do list: drive to a doctor’s office, fix a lightbulb, or decode some confusing healthcare bill. What she lacked in memory, she made up for in workarounds. To keep organized, she used a series of index cards with various levels of priority to track the various tasks she needed to complete. For the most important items, she’d safety pin a ruled card to the inside of her purse with a bright red scrap of fabric — a flag of sorts. For the three daughters she had the most contact with, she’d keep individual cards for each kid with various subjects she intended to broach in the next conversation. It wouldn’t be unusual for her to give me a gift grab bag which often included a pack of loose index cards bound together with a pink rubber band.
Aside from my fond familial memories, index cards are pretty banal in today’s office supply marketplace. My grade school librarian taught me how to use them as a disposable research tool: one idea or citation per card so that you can shuffle a string ideas around for a book report or research paper. In forensic class, I used index cards for speeches and debates. In my early twenties, I learned about David Allen, most known for his “Getting Things Done” culture, who utilized the index as a leading organization tool and methodology. A recent Atlantic Monthly article supporting the power of the index card came as a pleasant surprise to me, being that they are a tool I still use on a regular basis. Carl Linnaeus, father of biological taxonomy, invented this “tool for categorizing anything” by leveraging “little paper slips of a standard size” to record data. “Like his taxonomical system, paper slips were both an idea and a method, designed to bring order to the chaos of the world.”
I’ve been using index cards my whole life as portable units to capture ideas and make complex information more modular amidst uncertainty and disorder. My practice certainly began before cult of the Post-It in the rapidly popularizing field of design thinking. It’s my belief that simple forms (and places, as highlighted in a recent post) help make the intangible more tangible. Information, our most valuable resource, is often invisible and we only succeed in promoting the value of information when we create visual repositories — or units — for this information. What works better than a sturdy card, measuring three by five inches, as a everyday way to surface information to make it more accessible within a collaborative environment. When I use index cards to extract and collect data, the information becomes more usable and therefore more often utilized opposed to data buried in a white paper or, perhaps worse, trapped inside one’s head.
Of course, index cards are not the only kind of modular container that helps data become more actionable — parsed, higher quality, accessible, and fundamentally more legible. Consider another kind of container that helps the intangible (quite literally) tangible: DNA. As Dr. Mukherjee’s describes this in The Gene: “It is the idea of what it does. Images crystallize ideas — and the image of a double-helical molecule that carried the instructions to build, run, repair, and reproduce humans crystallized the optimism and wonder of the 1950s.” Human form and function is complex — at our core, kind of dataset drives our operation. DNA is the modular dataset that carries our human information and through the course of history, as the visual form of “what” this essential information looked like, the more we started to understand the “how” behind its function. The information annotations on 48 chromosomal index cards is the instruction manual of our bodies. As for an examples of coded instructions from the digital realm, the most basic behavior of information transfer — movement of data from point a to point b — is referred to as packet switching. Packet switching, to me, is an adorable sentiment that conjures a visual of a tight stack of index cards in a snug envelope careening through a sparkling space. Oftentimes, a little visual to establish common understanding is all it takes to make the invisible easier to comprehend.
Giving information a visual form helps give it a structure and therefore makes it more manageable. This is especially relevant in the collaborative environments I lead where I am expected to draw out strategic priorities and help cultivate new competencies based on very diverse needs…and no playbook. A good example of this is in my previous work with The Work Department, a social innovation firm that I founded in 2008 and led until 2017. As part of my hometown Detroit’s UNESCO designation, we were challenged to create a participatory system to develop a set of core values that would underpin larger municipal economic development initiatives. In response to this challenge, we designed a seven-month collaborative process to synthesize the diverse perspectives of over 500 stakeholders across 15 Co-Labs (collaborative labs i.e. workshops) where people ultimately exchanged thousands of different kinds of data. If we had not developed a strategy for ways to contain and structure this data, this process could have ultimately yielded an enormous pile of unstructured data that served no one well. Instead, my team and I invented a smart collection format — a variety of structured (and fun!) formats that resulted in more organized stacks of parsed out information — which doubled as an exciting and human-centered relationship building process. In our operation, we successfully distilled three, community-led core values to drive inclusive growth in the City of Detroit: Diverse Experiences, Collaborative Relationships, and Accessible Opportunities. Throughout this I imagined that we were playing out, in an analog fashion, the core behaviors of natural language processing and potential for equitable algorithms for more automated and collaborative decision-making processes in the future.
Being mindful about how we design the work experience — especially collaborative ones that build new organizational competencies — is essential to making data serves us better as we make decisions. My work at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which I’ve described in previous posts, is helping to lead diverse groups within both internal and external ecosystems, the objective being to uncover common ground and shape the future of the larger NCI data ecosystem. Our process draws from the three core components of collaboration as outlined by Dr. Deborah Mashek, expert in the science of relationships, in this succinct piece from Psychology Today on what I’m calling a kind of collaboration continuum. Again and again, I return to her framework feedback loop: networking to coordination to cooperation.
Networking
When working with an interdisciplinary team, my primary goal at the start of the relationship forming stage is gaining awareness through an intake and listening process. Dr. Mashek outlines the first step of collaboration as Networking. At The Work Department, we called it Discovery. IBM calls it Observe. Johns Hopkins Sibley Hospital Innovation Hub calls it Listen. Regardless of the terms, it is participatory strategic process that puts the voices of the people who will be core to leading implementation of the organizational changes at the center. It’s about improving relationships and building trust. It begins, literally, by putting our (index) cards on the table. With my interdisciplinary colleagues at NCI, we spent the first two months of our time together surfacing hundreds of our diverse questions, vision fragments, and hypothesis through small internal innovation lab pop-ups. Our use of the index card in these scenarios to capture data urges a kind of more focused self-editing, a feature that is hard to come by in most democratic environments. The limited space one has on an index card to write out thoughts forces a sense of clarity and thoughtfulness. Choose words wisely, for there is but a small window to say your piece.
Coordination
Our second phase is what Dr. Mashek describes as Coordination. This is the period of pattern recognition, resource inventory, and acquisition of additional resources under a shared agenda. In this process, because I encouraged everyone to put all of their cards (or information) on the table, I sort and rearrange the units of information to draw out stacks of high level themes while simultaneously breaking content down even further to understand the core elements on hand. By doing this, we get a better sense of the resources we have, determine what’s missing, and who we might invite to fill in the gaps. In order to generate a new “big picture,” I’ve found that it’s best to first break a team’s diverse intellectual assets down into their smallest parts, like pieces to a puzzle, then reassemble them into a new whole. This is similar to how databases are designed for artificial intelligence platforms so that algorithms can “understand even the most complicated data by breaking it down into constituent parts.” The beauty of the index card as a container is that it’s modular and somewhat interoperable–the processing work can be done collaboratively and/or alone in reflection. Sometimes, I tack index cards up on a wall, move them around, tear them down, put them in my bag, and carry them over to the next cubicle with new colleagues for continued discussion. It’s easy to prioritize the data within your big stack of cards, edit, trash, and add new as needed. As I outlined in my previous post about space, at NCI portability is a necessity as we don’t have an Innovation Lab… yet.
Cooperation
Cooperation is the point when a team can effectively and efficiently establish a dynamic process that brings a shared goal or outcome to life under an assembled vision. This requires making a commitment to a certain hierarchy of the index cards. I’ve found this step to be the most difficult for groups. It’s where the rubber hits the road. It’s where we combine concepts and move forward. We stop noodling around for a while. In order to achieve tangible results, a group must discard certain activities, introduce new ones, and find a way to bring this all to life in a customer-focused set of prioritized actions that deemphasizes our personal relationship to the information and pivot’s value towards new ways this information can benefit others. When we try to do things — when we make things — the index cards become the cues to action. As noted in Psychology Today, this is the part where things get real: “Cooperation requires a substantial time commitment, a higher level of trust, and significant sharing of turf. Our two departments would be cooperating if they decided to co-host a seminar (on collaboration, perhaps?), worked together to identify the guest speaker, and each pitched in funds to cover the speaker’s fee.” In The Gene, Dr. Mukherjee uses an analogy to describe this as well: “… a boat is not made of planks but of the relationship between planks…only a particular configuration of planks held together in particular relationship (and order) makes a boat…”
My team at NCI is currently in the Cooperation phase of the ongoing collaboration continuum. We will go back to networking as we’re bringing in new perspectives to fill in gaps, ensuring we understand how to deliver a return on investment when it comes to big data. We’ll add new index cards to our stack and perhaps rearrange themes further. Because the government’s job is to serve the people, we’re listening to a lot stakeholders, representing diverse interests across the public and private sector. Because the government has the power to convene, we’ll also host a series of collaborative labs or workshops over the next six months, ranging from 10 to 100 people. We will write a set of foundational, community-led policy recommendations to ensure our role in the future of data design is a solid and supporting one. Throughout this inclusive process, we strengthen a collaborative vision and build an innovation ecosystem: stronger communities and partnerships, smarter systems, more usable tools, and more seamless interfaces that work together, better.
In the spirit of working with my team and encouraging them to put their cards on the table, here are some of my cards that I choose, in the style of my grandma, to highlight with a red flag. I believe that in order to promote not only modern technology, but a modern culture of work, we’re going to need more collaborative space to bring interdisciplinary teams together to work more openly on the problems we clearly cannot solve when we remain true to our silos. Solutions to our most vexing problems also rely outside the government. Empowering citizens to innovate around the data of the future, in the form of innovation prizes, funds, or investments, will reduce barriers to making more meaningful breakthroughs. As we grow new forms of collaborative leadership in more inclusive spaces and financing mechanisms, we’ll be able to develop a culture of innovators who work together to generate smarter policy (and perhaps legislation) by design. Collaboration is hard and meaningful work, it takes time. I second Dr. Mukherjee’s use of Wallace Stevens’ (half poet, half insurance executive) quote in The Gene: “The imperfect is our paradise” — my passion is to lead our imperfectly human collaborations forward and help scale our nascent innovations with sustained impact and efficiencies. We have plentiful opportunities on the horizon, let’s keep working.
