In-the-moment design

Transcript of this video:

I’m going to share a story, I’ve told a few times before, So forgive me if you’ve heard it already. A few years ago on a wet winter’s night, I was cycling home from the cinema here where I live in Cambridge, when two drunks stumbled into the street in front of me, and I had to kind of swerve around them, dinging my bell.

And as I passed them, they started hurling abuse at me. They clearly didn’t like the sound of my bell, and one of them started chasing after me. So I carried on cycling until I came to a traffic light at red. Where 95% of my brain knew the smart thing to do would be to look very carefully out for traffic, but keep going.

But sadly on that night, the 5% of my brain that had other plans intervened, either wanting to comply strictly with the letter of the law on the red light, or perhaps a tiny bit of it wanting to have it out with this drunk, and to justify, and defend my actions in ringing my bell at him.

So suddenly I found myself standing astride a bike on a bleak winter’s night, facing a much larger and much angrier man. Whose face was now very up-close to mine, and hurling abuse at me.

Now what happened was in that moment, what I found myself saying to him was two words, said in something like this tone, I’m sorry. And there was a pause, And then he stuck his hand out,

And then he said, I’m sorry, which I wasn’t totally expecting, but I shook his proferred hand and said, yeah, it’s Friday night, we should be enjoying ourselves.

And he said, yeah mate, you carry on ringing your bell, as I cycled away to safety, realizing that that was one of those moments, that occasionally happens in your life, when things could have turned out, very differently.

And a little bit later, I thought, I wonder if our lives are made up entirely of these moments, but we just don’t realize it, because they’re not as dramatic.

That moment by moment, we’re making small decisions, that are subtly influencing what happens next in our life. I mean, in that case, whether I got punched or not in other times subtler than that.

And I was thinking of that experience today, when I read some articles by Elizabeth Stokoe, who’s a professor of conversation analysis. She studies conversations, recorded conversations in minute detail, paying a lot of attention to things like pauses, and uhms, and ers, and the exact way things are phrased, and intoned.

And that might be anything from, you know, at one end of the spectrum conversations in a call centre, between the call centre operator, and a customer on the phone, to, at the other end of the spectrum, conversations between a first responder, and a person in distress, who may be thinking of taking their own life.

And she looks at these in great detail, and illustrates the myriad ways, in which a standard script or procedure, is shifted and changed and influenced by the way that it is delivered by the person.

And she used this phrase in the middle of this article, and she calls it, “In-the-moment design.” These people are doing, in-the-moment design, when they adapt the script or procedure. And I thought, oh, that’s an interesting way… that’s another way of talking about, what I sometimes talk about, improvisation, that moment by moment, we’re shaping what happens in our lives, by the detail of how we perform something.

And in my line of work, there’s often a lot of worrying about “What model are you following?” “What process are you using?” Or, you know, my favorite, “What’s your theory of change?” So we have these important sounding conversations about these processes and theories, but I think it risks us missing that the much more important part of it probably is not the theoretical model, but the minutiae, the craft, if you like, with which we’re doing it.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash