B2B Prototyping part 8: How to build a prototyping culture in your team

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

Hello!

This is the final edition in our series on how to build a prototyping culture in your B2B content teams. We’ll be taking the rest of August off to plan our next series, and I’d love to know what you’d like us to cover. Here’s a couple of suggestions, but feel free to suggest your own:

We’re picking up a lot of really fascinating new work at Storythings right now, and we’re about to launch a new ‘content as a service’ product to make it easy for you to bring the right expertise and support into your content teams. If you’d like to know more, hit the button or hit reply and we can get a call in the diary.

To recap - this is where we are in the series right now:

- Create space in busy schedules to build and test prototypes
- Collaborate with internal and external partners on prototypes 
- Test these ideas with your internal and external audiences 
- Create metrics to measure attention and engagement
- Scale ideas from prototypes into full projects
- Know when to stop or kill and idea, even if you love it
- Demonstrate how prototyping saves your company money and time
- Build a sustainable workflow and culture for prototyping in your team (that’s this post!)

THE PROBLEM

Back in episode two of this series, we looked at one of the challenges of starting a prototyping culture - how to work with the existing rhythms of your organisation, not against them. There’s a similar challenge once you’ve succeeded in starting prototyping, and want to grow this into a sustainable practise in your organisation.

The problem is really not about prototyping, but about the most valuable thing it can contribute to your team’s culture - it will change your attitude to failure. In most organisations, particularly large organisations, the saying goes that every success has many parents, but every failure is an orphan. Nobody gets promoted for doing stuff that doesn’t work, and this means that people hide their failures away, and boost only the successes.

This is exactly the wrong way round - we only learn through trying something new, failing and then trying again. But very few organisations have cultures where sharing what you’ve learnt from a failure is seen as a positive thing. So the challenge with building a sustainable prototyping culture is not just about making more prototypes, but changing your culture to one where trying new stuff and learning from failures is rewarded, not hidden away.

THE INSIGHT

If you want to shift the culture of your team to make it more amenable to prototyping, then you have to start by unpacking what your current attitudes are to sharing, learning and failure. Is your organisation heavily siloed, with a lot of autonomy in each department, but no real collaboration or sharing between siloes? Is it driven by top down strategies and targets, where everyone is measured by external KPIs? What is most rewarded in your organisation, and how is this articulated around the organisation? Especially if you’re a manager or leader, you might be surprised that the culture you thought you were nurturing in your org is very different from the lived experience across your teams.

THE ACTION

Changing the culture of a team to reward prototyping requires becoming a bit of an anthropologist. You need to spend some time working out how your team currently works, and the forces that shape your existing culture, before you can change it. Here’s a couple of simple questions you can use to do this, with links to practical resources for each:

1. What kind of organisation are you anyway?

Ash Mann has worked on digital transformation projects with arts and culture orgs around the world for decades, and he’s currently writing up a really interesting series on what he’s learnt about successful digital transformation. He’s recently shared a short list of ‘organisational archetypes’ which are applicable not only to the cultural sector. The first two - The Siloed Giant and The Directionless Builder - feel very familiar:

https://www.ashmann.co/tools/beyond-the-promise-organisational-archetypes/

2. How open is our culture to sharing what we learn from failure?

Giles Turnbull is one of the best writers about using comms to create more open and iterative cultures, influenced by his ground-breaking work at the Government Digital Service. This great post looks at the tensions you create when you ask previously guarded cultures to open up:

“On one hand, we’re telling teams and organisations to undertake ways of working that we know will result in (small, fixable) failures. And on the other hand, we’re encouraging everyone involved to share those failures, ideally in public - an act that few individuals or institutions feel comfortable with. In fact, most actively push back against it. I’ve seen that happen, a few times.”

His post has four great examples of what you can do to help your teams get over the tension and nervousness inherent in any culture change. They’re not easy, but his focus on teams, people and context is really, really important. Failures are not really orphans - they are an valuable part of every team, so you need to contextualise them in that way:

https://gilest.org/notes/open-test-learn.html

3 - What kind of organisation do we want to become?

This is the ‘north star’ question at the heart of any culture change. If you want to make change happen, you need to create a compelling vision of what you will look like after the change. Embracing prototyping will mean your culture will become more iterative, more focused on your audiences’ needs, and more open to sharing between teams in your org. This is sometimes called a test and learn culture, and our friends at Public Digital have recently published a fantastic short book on what it means to have a test and learn culture. Their description of how a good test and learn organisation works feels very familiar to everything I’ve been saying in this series about prototypes:

“When an organisation is able to test and learn, it has a much better chance of designing and delivering products and services that truly meet the needs of its users.

It’s especially useful when you are delivering in a context where there is complexity and risk.

At its simplest, taking a test and learn approach involves articulating assumptions and hypotheses about what you think will work, and then testing them with real users in the smallest, fastest and cheapest way possible, in order to learn if those assumptions and hypotheses are correct.:

So - if you’ve enjoyed this series, and want to dive deeper, you can download Public Digital’s book on Test and Learn here, or email them for a printed copy:

So - that’s my series on prototyping all wrapped up! It’s the longest series I’ve done on Attention Matters so far, and I’m not sure that such a long series always works. It’ll be great as an archived series, but I think it might be harder to follow a long series as a subscriber. But hey - it was a prototype! And therefore, I’d love to know what you think. If you’ve found this series useful, been sent here by a link from a friend or colleague, or especially if you’ve found it frustrating, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Hit the button below or hit reply to this email:

I’m going to take a short break for the rest of summer now, and Attention Matters will be back in September with a new series. I want to mix up the format a bit, so will be working with the Storythings team on some new ideas. If you’d like to get involved, please get in touch!

In the meantime, thanks for joining me on this series, and have a great rest of your summer!

Matt