Just back from User Experience Week 2006 - which is a great intersection of practioners/industry experts from both profit/non-profit worlds of user experience/interaction designers/product managers/information architects....anyone involved in excperience design. more on conference to come as I get time.

Attended a great session by Chris Conley of Gravity Tank, ITT Professor about how we have really lost teh ability to work together creatively and collaboratively with organizations. I'm curious to hear your thoughts?

His Premise: The way teams work has a huge impact on their ability to create successful new products and services. And while there are well-known business processes for many of a company's core activities like product development or supply chain management, there is not a well-articulated model for working on initiatives aimed at innovation.

He talked at length about a Peter Drucker quote" Profit is only a measure of marketing and innovation." Marketing is about seeing the opportunity. Innovation is about designing it and meeting that opportunity. When the two come together you get products such as iPod. He argued that while our organizations are filled with great talent that could address this innovation, how we organize talent and its interaction does not bode well for innovative products, and that currently much innovation is achieved through informal channels. Our work is hampered because of EEEMP...email, email, email, meetings and presentations.

Have you found this to be the case?

Collaboration
This all struck a cord with me because there is so much discussion about collaboration and innovation and how we foster that as an organization and how do we foster that within our customers. I'll be honest - I am still feeling my arms around our process in my role as product manager and most days would probably be lost without my informal channel. But I want to strive and believe in so much more. I love the team environment and the picture that Chris spoke of - this ensemble cast, this creative and somewhat chaotic process - so excited me because you never know where innovation will come from. I know that this part of the goal of imiscommunity.com - fostering collaboration...which is great, but I don't want to forget that collaboration isn't just about answering a question in a forum or documenting processes - its about coming out with something better than you went in..its about innovation- and i am not saying that we have, just that i don't want to lose sight of that ever...

Innovations....resonation and telling a story
While Chris' exact vision might not always work for what we do....there are a couple of key thoughts that I want to reaffirm/incorporate into my everyday approach:

• You have to tell a story. Every great product has a story to tell - remember that it is always a pitch, am always telling the story, that stories resonates with people - and that story can present itself though interfaces
• Stop giving power point presentations that are feature - make the pitch, bring the emotion back
• work lo-fidelity to high-fidelity
• Review and critique work everyday and create an environement that appreciates and understands what critique is and isn't and that is comes from a base of respect
• keep pushing

Anyway, it was a great conference and I hope to post more sessions and thoughts from it over the next couple of days.I have included the slides from this presentation for those interested.