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Sample Chapter: Design for Learning

This is a sample chapter from Jenae Cohn and Michael Greer’s book Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning. 2023, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1

Learning Is an Experience

A group of fifteen people log on to a video conference call together. They are gathered to attend a change management training session, all logging in from different locations. Their faces float in their individual squares, arranged in a neat grid. One minute before the session begins, the grid of faces shifts to the side of the screen and is displaced by a screen-shared “welcome” slide. The facilitator for the session announces that the conversation will begin shortly.

But what’s called a “conversation” is not really a conversation. The facilitator talks for an hour as she progresses through a slideshow. The participants in their separate squares simply listen. Maybe some of them take notes. Others tune out.

Live online learning experiences like this are common, but they can often feel uninspired and, frankly, boring.

You could probably make your own list of online learning experiences gone wrong. The slide deck with tiny type that was almost unreadable. The endless blocks of dense informational text that had to be navigated in a pop-up window that looked like it was designed in the 1990s. A “next” button that can only be double-clicked for some reason. A workshop lacking clear organization and degenerating into chaos. Videos that lack captions. Seminars running over time—by an hour or more. The examples go on and on. But learning designers can do better than all of this.

Doing better means understanding that learning experiences can’t just be facilitated; they must be designed in ways that are attentive to an online user experience. Many online classes are designed simply to mimic the experience of in-person learning, largely because facilitators and instructors haven’t been given sufficient training or support in the theory and methods of online learning. Sadly, this lack of training and support has caused many learners and instructors alike to blame the online environment itself.

But it’s not the fact of being online that’s to blame for a crummy learning experience. It’s a lack of attention to what people’s experiences are like when they are online. It’s a gap between an understanding of user experience design and actual learning design.

Designing for learning means designing an environment where users have clear choices. It means creating a space where learners can find what they need in the way that they need it and feel supported all along the way.

Design for Possibility

Learning is often associated with a stodgy, formal environment, like a schoolroom with desks bolted to the chairs. That’s because learning, historically, is a lot about control: pour some ideas into learners’ minds, and they’ll come away with new knowledge. Paolo Freire famously critiqued this model, referring to it as the “banking model” of education, which assumes that learners are only there as vessels to receive and file away information (like depositing money in a bank).

But in the last two to three decades, nearly ubiquitous access to the internet and mobile devices has provided platforms that give learners a lot more agency and control in where, when, how, and why they might engage with a learning experience. And while the technology itself hasn’t disrupted “the banking model” of education, it certainly makes the deficits of the banking model all the more visible. You can try to force leaners online to watch a bunch of videos with no engagement or follow-up. Or you can attempt to keep learners still and silent while staring into a web camera. But you’re definitely not going to succeed. After all, it’s all too easy to get distracted and find new and interesting things to do online. Online, learners are no longer at the mercy of what a teacher tells them to do; instead, they get to navigate through their own experiences because the technology does not keep them confined to one place at a time. If you really want someone to learn something online, it’s important to keep them engaged and give them a reason why they should be there learning in the first place.

In today’s world, successful online learning experiences put learners in the driver’s seat. For example, Codecademy, an online learning platform founded in 2011, offers a large and growing catalog of courses in web design, machine learning, data science, and related subjects in coding languages and computer science. As of 2023, over 100,000 paid subscribers have used Codecademy to learn how to write code (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1
The Codecademy course enables users to see the how, what, and why of an activity all at once by showing three key pieces of information for a user learning HTML for the first time: a description and purpose for the activity, the terminal for writing the code, and the rendering of what the HTML code produces for the Web.

A typical lesson on Codecademy starts with a short introductory text explaining a concept or idea; in this case, how an HTML form works. Learners read through the explanation followed by step-by-step instructions describing the process to build a form. At each step, learners can click “Stuck? Get a hint.” A concept review provides a sample “cheat sheet” that can be used to review the main concepts in the lesson, and learners can also check the community forms to see what questions other learners asked about the lesson. In the center window, learners can run and troubleshoot their code in real time, and on the right, they can view the visual output produced by the code (a mockup for a fictional business called Dave’s Burgers).

Codecademy is one of many examples of digital learning platforms that have transformed the experience of learning in the past twenty years; others include LinkedIn Learning (formerly known as Lynda.com) created in 2002, Khan Academy in 2008, and Coursera in 2012. While these platforms have not replaced a lot of traditional learning experiences, they are designed in ways that give learners the agency to stop, start, pause, apply, and re-try new concepts without the time constraints of a formal learning experience.

A Brief History of Online Learning

The seeds of online learning experiences were planted by the internet in the 1980s. Concurrently (in 1984), Malcolm Knowles, an adult learning theorist, created a theory of “andragogy” or “adult learning” that posited four key principles as critical to helping adults learn new ideas: having a strong self-concept, having a reservoir of prior learning experiences to draw upon, having a readiness to learn, and having an orientation to what it means to learn. These four principles, he argued, needed to be applied to the growing world of online training experiences, including the integration of a clear stated purpose for the learning experience, a task-oriented way of organizing content, the inclusion of varied learning activities, and room for learner agency and direction. These kinds of principles set the stage for the continued growth of online learning in the 1990s.

By the 1990s, online courses began to emerge, mostly centered on college campuses, often in states with large rural populations, like Utah, where students would have to travel long distances to attend class in a brick-and-mortar classroom space. Online classes grew steadily throughout the early 2000s and by 2011 about one-third of U.S. college students were taking at least one course fully online.

The flexibility and ease of accessing online learning experiences has continued to be facilitated by the growth in consumer technologies that make information even more portable and convenient to access. In 2007, Apple introduced the first iPhone and launched what has become a thriving ecosystem of digital learning. This growth in consumer technology has made the prevalence of learning experiences online all the greater; learners have to learn how to use their iPhones in order to continue buying and engaging with iPhones. As such, programs such as the Google Analytics Academy, the Meta Community Manager certification, Hubspot Academy, and the Salesforce Trailhead program are all growing and thriving consumer technology education programs, in large part because they count on a growing consumer base remaining interested in becoming better users and learners on the tools of a persistently growing consumer technology ecosystem. Smartphones are now used by many more learners than laptops or other large screens. Even with this unprecedented growth in access to online learning experiences, the need for theories like Freire’s and Knowles’ persisted; increased access did not necessarily mean an increased understanding of how to develop an experience that would really, truly be meaningful to learners.

The need for an immediately accessible learning experience became even clearer at the peak of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. This catastrophic event forced many people into online learning because of “lockdowns” that prevented people from gathering in brick-and-mortar spaces. From early 2020 through the end of 2021, learning experiences across industries were rapidly spun into remote experiences. It’s worth noting that the customer education industry, with companies such as Salesforce and Hubspot Academy leading the way, were leaders in developing online learning experiences prior to the pandemic. However, outside of the customer education industry, remote learning experiences were often considered “inferior” to an on-site class experience. But the experiences of emergency remote learning opened many trainers’ and teachers’ eyes to new possibilities for learning and gave a wider range of individuals more ubiquitous engagement with other learners.

The rapid rise of “emergency remote teaching” has been an earthquake in the lives of instructors and course designers, and the aftershocks continue today. There’s no unwinding the clock on the experiences that lots of students and professionals alike had with learning online, and the key for learning designers now is to consider how, with deliberate time and planning, the tools for online learning can be designed to be even more attentive to users’ needs. It’s easy to anticipate that online learning will continue to grow because of the following criteria:

• Accessibility: People no longer need to travel to brick-and-mortar campuses or offices and can access learning from home or wherever they have access to a smartphone and a good internet. Plus, disabled learners have access to tools like closed captions and screen readers, which can ensure their access to the materials they need.
• Social mobility: Many people have either been priced out of continued learning opportunities, such as enrolling in higher education courses, or have not found traditional continued learning opportunities to meet their needs as full-time workers or caregivers. There is a growing need for people to learn outside of formal, inflexible, and expensive channels.
• Career growth: Learners today are often driven by a desire to change or advance in their careers. Technology drives many of these learners, who discover that they need specialized training to move up the career ladder.

This brief snapshot of the landscape of learning begins to explain why there is so much in motion now. Today’s learners are seeking ways to learn at their own pace and on their own schedules. They want to learn in their own ways, gravitating toward interactive experiences to test and practice their learning, rather than learning primarily from textbooks or a long lecture.

Learning designers and others who create learning experiences face both huge opportunities and big challenges.

Why Learners Today Are a Different Kind of User

Learning experience design reflects a growing body of work that combines user-experience design (UX) with learning science. A learner is a special kind of user, with their own needs and values. If you want to check an account balance using your mobile banking app, you can log in, look up the balance, and you’re done (if the app is working properly). If you want to learn how to design a website using semantic HTML, you need much more information. You need to learn how to learn.

Online learning platforms are complex information systems. Designing these systems draws upon several fields, including:

• Information design (or information architecture): A process for designing how users move through complex systems. Information design makes information both findable and understandable.
• Instructional design: A process for designing and developing learning experiences.
• Learning science: Theories and practices developed from neuroscience, psychology, and education research to inform how people learn.
• Visual design and UI: An understanding of how the visual layers of an online experience look and behave.
• User research: Research to learn about learners’ needs and behaviors.
• Content strategy: A process for imagining and planning the content across the product or experience.

Language from these fields informs the planning, sketching, prototyping, and production of digital learning experiences.

A Model of Learning Experience Design

Learners are not sponges who absorb information through osmosis. But many learning platforms are unconsciously based on a model that defines learning as information transfer. Even formal courses often present learning as expertise being delivered directly from instructor to student. Current work in learning science and related fields suggests, however, that learning is an active process. Learners do not absorb knowledge; they actively create new knowledge.

That’s why you need to design the learning experience with a specific learning experience design model in mind. The learning experience design model begins by centering on the learner. The learner’s interactions with the instructor, course website or platform, learning activities, and other course materials to support the learners’ practices combine to form the essential learning experience, as shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2
This user-centered learning experience design model demonstrates how the learner’s behavior, motivation, and engagements with the course need to impact the course design just as much as the course design needs to impact and engage the learner.

This focus on the learner and their behavior in the experience design model happens not just through direct instructor-to-student feedback, but also through an automated framework. For example, in Duolingo, every time a user completes a lesson on the app, they receive automated acknowledgement of their progress and a score sheet detailing their performance, including the areas where they excelled and struggled. The next time the user logs in, they receive a customized set of lessons that are aligned with their progress report. So, if the user succeeds in lessons on using, say, modifiers in Spanish, they see lessons about modifiers less frequently. And if the user struggled with conjugating verbs in prior lessons, they see more lessons on verb conjugation, which will reinforce the user’s need for practice in this area.

In the case of the automated language learning app, the user is getting real-time and automatic adjustments (feedback) based on their performance in the activities. This process is often referred to as an individualized learning experience. This kind of automation is not possible in all learning contexts, but this model of design centers the user in their experience and offers them materials that are aligned with their needs, at least as far as the robot understands them. In Chapter 11, “Reviewing Your Learning Experience,” we’ll explore the benefits and limitations of using robots or other forms of artificial intelligence for feedback.

We’ve found that many instructors tend to overemphasize the content of their courses, seeking that one perfect reading or that one perfect example that will enable them to get their point across to learners. In contrast, the experience design model encourages designers to focus on what the learners are doing—or how they are using the content and why.

This doesn’t mean that content for learning can’t be designed in an interactive way. But interaction is not the same thing as learning.

Peloton’s instructional exercise content library is a perfect example. Peloton bike users get access to a novel range of exercise videos that they can play whenever they’d like, and they are incentivized to interact with those videos through several features. Exercisers can track their progress, earn badges for completing a certain number of workouts, and compete with other Peloton users on a live leaderboard to gamify their experience.

Where Peloton excels is by building a powerful community. Peloton users can identify “friends” to add to their accounts so that they can invite others to join rides with them and build accountability networks. This community helps users build strong motivation to take more classes and be in a community together. Most Peloton users don’t expect to become professional athletes by purchasing access to the Peloton app or buying a Peloton bike. They want to build a habit by investing in a commitment, not developing mastery.

When users ride on a Peloton bike, they are not receiving feedback about how effective their form is on the bike. Rather, they are receiving instructions and incentives to keep them exercising. There are videos to help them set up the bike and strive for better form, but short of remaining uninjured, they may never really know for certain if they’re riding the Peloton bike like a professional athlete. And that’s OK! That’s likely not their goal. But it’s worth understanding and appreciating the difference. Building a habit and a motivation to learn are part of a learning experience. But without getting direct feedback on how to improve, learning isn’t possible.

Interaction design and learning design are not the same thing.

If your end goal is to design training or a course that users will be incentivized to complete, then a gamified video playlist, like the Peloton app, may very well do the trick. However, if the end goal of your training or your course is for a learner to be able to apply that knowledge to a variety of flexible situations and gain new knowledge that you can assess for authentic learning, then your learning design is going to require some well-designed interventions.

A starting point for that intervention is remembering that you’re designing for users who have specific needs. Knowing what those needs are and how you can optimize your design to meet those needs is the goal.

It’s Not All About You

When you’ve given a presentation in front of a room, have you ever heard the advice to imagine that your audience is naked? It’s a piece of advice that’s meant to calm you down and make you laugh, but it’s also advice that’s communicating something important about presenting information: the more pressure you take off yourself to perform, the better.

Imagining your audience naked is about remembering that a presentation is not just about you. It’s just as much about how you feel about the audience you’re with as it is about how you’re feeling in your own skin. And while imagining the audience naked is not advice that works for everyone, it remains popular and well-known precisely because it communicates something learning designers need to remember when leading or designing a learning experience: it’s not all about you.

When you’re leading and designing something, you’re going to have an impact. But also remember how you’ve felt as a learner in a training or a class. You might have some vague memories of how the teacher or facilitator looked and acted. But what you probably remember most is how you felt taking that training or being in their class. Now that you’re in the position of facilitating or designing a learning experience online, it’s tempting to get hung up on how learners might perceive you or the content you’ve created. And while appearances do matter, they only really matter in one way: how those appearances impact how your learners will get what they need from the learning experience.

Seeing Learners in 3D

The idea that you are not your learners has an important corollary: You need to design for real people—people who are not you.

Part of designing in 3D is recognizing the reality that learners are more diverse than you might think. You are probably already working with learners who have disabilities, for example. In fact, you can assume that about one-fifth of your audience is using some form of assistive technology to access and engage your content, from captions to screen readers. You are also probably working with learners who speak more than one language, and who may never have experienced learning in a way that’s ever explicitly been designed for them.

Chances are, you are also designing for learners who are stressed and have other demands on what researchers call cognitive load. Designing with the goal of reducing cognitive load will make learning experiences easier for learners to process, absorb, and maintain their engagement.

Online learning requires an engagement of both mind and body. Designing for real people requires learning designers to understand and empathize with people who experience learning differently than they do across many dimensions.

Learning doesn’t just happen to people. It’s a designed experience that has defined goals and outcomes. If achieved, those goals and outcomes should evoke positive feelings for the learners. Defining how the goals and outcomes of the experience align with who the learners are is an important starting point for any learning experience design project.

The Learning Design Process

Learning design is an iterative rather than a linear process. There are starting places for the learning designer, but those starting places may need to be returned to repeatedly to ensure that the vision for the learning experience is clear and that the needs of the learners are met. A learning designer may need to circle back, repeat steps, and return to earlier parts of the process multiple times (see Figure 1.3).

The steps of the learning design process are as follows:

• Learn more about who the learners are.
• Identify the main problem to solve for the learners.
• Define an endpoint: a vision for the learners at the end of the experience.
• Create a list of learning goals.
• Build a learning map around your list of learning goals.

Figure 1.3
The learning design process illustrates the iterative nature of designing a learning experience, all while keeping learners’ needs at the center of the design thinking process.

As a content designer you should assume that online learners will not follow the path you have laid out. Therefore, you must make it possible for them to determine their own ways through the content. The best way to understand how your learners will navigate your material is to build feedback loops and spaces for reflection and evaluation into your course or learning experience. (See Chapter 10, “Giving Your Learners Feedback.”)

This learning design model is the foundation for launching an online course experience that keeps learner-centered needs in mind all the way through.

Takeaways

• Build a full experience, not just content. A meaningful learning experience is developed based not just about what people are learning, but how they are learning.
• Design with the possibilities of engaging online in mind. Don’t try to resist the multiple ways that learners can engage online. Lean into the options and design for experiences that can be accessed in multiple ways.
• Design with purpose. Know why your learners are engaging with your learning experience and remain aligned with that purpose as you begin your design process.
• Keep diverse learner needs in mind. Embrace the fact that learners will have different needs for your courses and anticipate what those needs are as you move forward.
• Learning design is an iterative process. There are steps you can follow from start-to-finish when engaging with the learning design process, but bear in mind that you may need to revisit and re-engage with those steps as you develop your learning experience.

back to Design for Learning

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Sample Chapter: From Solo to Scaled

This is a sample chapter from Natalie Marie Dunbar’s book From Solo to Scaled Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. 2022, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1: The Content Strategy Blueprint

I’m fascinated by buildings: single family structures, high-rise dwellings, and especially office towers. As such, I’ve always had a healthy curiosity about the construction process. For example, Figure 1.1 shows a Habitat for Humanity building that I worked on. From the initial breaking of ground to the completion of a building’s façade, I find comfort in both the art and order of construction—how foundations support columns, columns support beams, and beams support floors. When the building plans are followed as written, every element comes together perfectly to create a strong structure that is capable of withstanding natural elements like wind and earthquakes.

Figure  1.1

I worked as a volunteer on this building with my UX team.

In my career as a content strategist, I’ve heard colleagues speak about “standing up a team,” or “standing up a practice.” There was familiarity in the concept of building a figurative structure that had a specific function or purpose. And, of course, that familiarity stemmed from my fascination with buildings, so the construction metaphor made sense to me.

That metaphor also reminded me of one of my favorite books, Why Buildings Stand Up, by Mario Salvadori. Before writing and content strategy became my full-time job, I worked in various roles in residential and commercial real estate. All of those roles exposed me to various phases of building construction and tenant improvements, and reading Salvadori’s book helped me understand construction and architecture in an engaging way.

The familiarity I felt when hearing the phrase “stand up a practice” in the digital experience world often stopped short of the idea of the building metaphor. For example, practices were “stood up” with no attention to order. Foundations were poured before soil tests were completed, often resulting in skipping the addition of the footings that might be needed to support the foundation, or in the case of the practice, doing the work to ensure that the practice followed the necessary processes to create digital experiences that met the needs of users as well as the goal of the client or business. And inevitably, the structure—or the practice—began to crumble.

And sometimes those practices failed completely.

From the Ground Up

Having had the opportunity to build an agency-based content strategy practice from the ground up, and later expanding and maintaining an existing practice within a mid-to-large-sized organization, I began to see that failures often happened because steps crucial to supporting the structure had been skipped. Or perhaps the structure had been compromised because the framework used to build it—if one was used at all—couldn’t withstand the constant stress of tension and compression.

When I started to think about what caused these seemingly strong practices to crumble—I returned to the building and construction metaphor to look for possible answers. That’s because it’s sometimes easier to, er, construct a mental model that’s more tangible than the nebulousness nature of digital information spaces.

If the building metaphor still feels a bit weird to you, then try this: think of the last time someone asked what you did for a living. If you’re a UX practitioner, or if you collaborate with members of a UX team, you’ve likely experienced the feeling of the listener’s eyes glazing over as you tried to explain the concept of user experience—or as I once saw it described, “making websites and apps stink less.” Then think of what might happen if you described the user experience using a more relatable metaphor, such as one of the following:

• The internet is a space.
• A website or mobile app is a destination within that space (and in the case of websites, a space complete with its own address).
• The work you do helps people avoid getting lost in that space.

In keeping with this theme, now imagine that the opportunity that’s immediately in front of you—that of building a UX-focused content strategy practice—is a pristine plot of land. Provided you have a solid plan and the right materials and tools, this untilled soil is ready for you to break ground and to stand up a healthy content strategy practice.

So this figurative plot of land you’ve been given needs someone—you—to till the soil and prepare the space for a structure to be built. And the creation of the plans for that structure, as well as sourcing the building materials and the tools you’ll need to build it, has also fallen to you.

Lucky for you, this book is your blueprint.

Nuts and Bolts: Tension and Compression

In construction, tension happens when building materials are pulled or stretched. In the process of standing up (or building) a content strategy practice, tension can happen when you are asked to take on tasks that pull you away from the core functions of the practice.

Compression happens when building materials are pushed against or squeezed. As you’re building your practice, compression may present itself as pushback from departments outside of your immediate cross-functional team. You’ll find more details on how the concepts of tension and compression can impact your practice in Chapter 3, “Building Materials.”

Department, Team, Practice: What’s in a Name?

So, why the focus on building a practice? Why not focus on creating a new (or expanding an existing) content strategy department, or focus on hiring a team of content strategists? First, the focus on buildings and structures is intentional. That’s because I’ve learned that for the work of content strategy to succeed as the function that happens within the structure you are building, it must begin with a sense of permanency—a firm foundation. Ask any content strategist how many times they’ve been asked “when the content strategy was going to be done,” and how many times they had to explain in response that “the content strategy is never done”—that content has a lifecycle, from content creation to archival; that there will most assuredly be legacy content that will need to be maintained in some shape or
form; and that the creation of new content (or the addition of newly curated content) starts the cycle all over again.

Content departments and content strategy teams often sit in a variety of places within an organization or agency, including marketing or some variation of digital or user experience. There are also content strategy teams embedded in different organizational functions, such as customer care; or teams that support a specific product or feature, such as video content; or those that are aligned with a single line of business within an organization, such as in a healthcare organization where practices support individual and family products, healthcare plans offered by businesses, or Medicare and Medicaid plans. These teams tend to be highly specialized, and they focus on creating strategic approaches to content geared to a particular business need. But no matter where that team sits within an organization—and even if content strategy as a function is distributed throughout the organization—establishing a structure where content strategists can practice their trade goes a long way toward supporting the strength and longevity of the work of content strategy, or the core of the practice.

Also, departments and teams can be absorbed or completely dismantled. I’ve seen this happen where content strategists were reassigned to other types of content work, or worse, laid off or let go. I’m not saying that building a content strategy practice will safeguard you against those outcomes. But I am saying that building a practice with the support and buy-in of cross-functional teammates, product owners, and stakeholders might make the complete dismantling of the practice a less desirable option, especially after so many people have invested their time and resources into co-creating it with you, and especially because they have undoubtedly reaped the benefits of the practice as a result.

Beyond Copywriting: Meeting the Unmet Need

Imagine this scenario: You’re the solo “content person” in your department or agency. You write copy for digital experiences, have a good understanding of UX principles, and you likely know a little bit about search engine optimization, or SEO.

You’ve heard of content strategy, but there’s so much to learn. Then a client asks (and therefore makes the case) for the establishment of a content strategy practice, saying, “We hear that content strategy can help us create content that is performance-driven, useful, and reusable. Do you have anyone on your team who can do that for us?”

If you can relate to (or are currently experiencing) the previous scenario—or if you’re a digital creative director, a content manager, or a user experience lead, and you’ve found yourself in a similar situation, take a deep breath, grab your favorite beverage, and settle into your favorite reading spot. There is ground to break and some structures to build. But first, you’ll need to create and review the specs for getting it done.

Power Tools: Resources on the How of Content Strategy

Since you’re reading a book about building a content strategy practice, it’s a safe bet that you’ve either done your research on, or know a thing or two about, what content strategy is, and you have a good idea of how it’s done.

If, however, you’re building a practice while simultaneously learning how to do content strategy, don’t fret! Here’s a short list of books to get you started:

• The Web Content Strategist’s Bible by Richard Sheffield
• Content Strategy for the Web (2nd edition) by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach
• The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
• Content Strategy at Work by Margot Bloomstein
• The Content Strategy Toolkit by Meghan Casey
• Writing Is Designing by Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle
• Content Design by Sarah Richards
• Managing Enterprise Content by Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper
• Content Everywhere by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

The first five books will dive into the “what and how” of content strategy. The next two track the evolution of content design from content strategy, and the last two take a deep dive into “back-
end” content strategy—structuring content intelligently to make it future-ready and device agnostic. You’ll learn more about front-end and back-end content strategy approaches in Chapter 4, “Expansion: Building Up or Building Out.”

Blueprint Components

The second entry in Merriam Webster’s online definition of a blueprint reads, “ . . . something resembling a blueprint (as in serving as a model or providing guidance) especially: a detailed plan or program of action.” It’s that last part—a detailed plan or program of action—that parallels the concept of a blueprint as a tool for providing guidance as you consider the components necessary to build a content strategy practice.

There are five components to the practice building process that I’ve come to call the Content Strategy Practice Blueprint:

1. Making the business case
2. Building strong relationships with cross-functional teams
3. Creating frameworks and curating tools to build with
4. Rightsizing the practice to meet client or project demand
5. Establishing meaningful success measures

In this chapter, you’ll learn how each blueprint component will help you build a practice that’s both sustainable and scalable. In subsequent chapters, you’ll learn about the people, procedures, and processes that support these components.

One last thing: Before you break ground, let’s get aligned on the kind of content strategy practice that you’re constructing. While this blueprint could apply to building a variety of practice types, our focus here is specifically about establishing user experience-focused content strategy practices—a practice that has the mission of creating and supporting a brand or organization’s digital experiences and information spaces across digital channels, including websites and mobile apps, and that might extend to include AI, blockchain, and beyond.

Although the work of the practice may well include conducting content inventories and auditing content in social media spaces and on third-party websites, this book is not about content marketing strategy, which focuses on placing branded content (or content created in-house by a brand or organization) on third-party sites, social media, and similar channels.

Making the Business Case

In the building and construction trade, the circumstances that lead to breaking ground on a new building site are many, such as inheriting a new plot of land, or the need for more space, which necessitates acquiring adjacent plots to accommodate growth.

And so it is with building a content strategy practice.

Like a homeowner seeking a real-estate loan to make improvements that add value to a home, you’ll want to show how building a content strategy practice adds value to your agency or organization. That’s why the first component of the practice blueprint is making the business case. As well, every component that follows helps you implement this first step correctly and establish footing that is critical to creating a firm foundation for your practice as you build.

Conversely, there are other times when the business case is made for you. For example, there are creative leaders who realize that a client project—say, a website design—requires more than just a reskin and copy refresh. They know that something more deliberate and permanent is needed to support the sheer amount and types of content necessary to meet the needs of users and achieve the goals of the business, so they search for a content professional who can bring a critical skillset to complement an existing UX team.

Other times, there is a fierce advocate for content strategy of the user experience kind, who is willing to sponsor the establishment (or growth) of a practice that is distinct from marketing content operations a practice that is focused on things like content structure, content hierarchy and the flow of information from one part of the experience to the next, and how things like navigational labels and visual cues help users find what they need and successfully complete tasks. That advocate may have hired a content strategist or two, or elevated an existing, seasoned, UX-leaning digital content pro to transition from content creation to content planning and other strategic functions to begin building out a practice.

Then there are situations where someone within an organization recognizes that adding content strategy to their user experience capabilities provides value to the business, where content is created and maintained as an asset. In this case, once a decision has been made to establish a team or practice, a UX or CX (customer experience) lead, manager, or director is tasked with staffing a content strategy team, and the people who comprise the team may eventually choose to formalize the practice.

No matter which of these scenarios you identify with, take the time to execute on the following steps to establish your footing and make the case for building your practice.

• Know what you want to build before you break ground. This book is about building a structure, or a practice, in order to house a function, which is known as content strategy. While it’s true that there are overlaps between a team and a practice—and maybe you could argue that you can’t build a practice without a team—you can, in fact, start a practice team of one and expand (or scale) that practice as the demand for content strategy increases.
• Identify the value proposition that you’ll share with business stakeholders. This step involves communicating the value that the practice brings to your agency or organization, whether it is an expansion of agency capabilities and services you offer to your clients, or, for a midsized or enterprise practice, demonstrating how the practice can foster alignment around the strategic use of content to meet business goals and user needs.
• Find relevant case studies—or create one from a past client or project. Take this step to show how the establishment of a practice dedicated to delivering sustainable content strategies can make the difference for your clients—internal or external—by introducing repeatable processes for ensuring that content is useful and usable and supports the digital experiences created by your UX team.

So, whether you’re lucky enough to have advocates clamoring for the creation of a content strategy practice that will create, curate and manage content as a vital asset to your agency or organization, or the business case is made for you, taking the time to walk through these three preliminary steps will help you avoid the risk of establishing your practice on an unstable foundation.

Notes from the Field: Making the Case for Content Strategy

Barnali Banerji, Design and Research Manager, McAfee

When Barnali Banerji inherited a legacy team of UX writers (later called content designers) at McAfee, she knew there was a need to introduce content strategy into the mix. “The strategy part was essential because we have very complex apps and complex products that interconnect over different operating systems and different form factors. You need a content strategist who is able to see how to present content in an organized way—how to make content reusable, how to repurpose it, and how to establish consistency.”

In order to differentiate between the types of content roles and the value each one could add, Banerji sought to better understand the role of the content designers on her team. “There was a lot of overlap with product design. So you start to ask, where does product design start? Where does it end? Where does content design start? And what is content design supposed to do?”

“I’ve done a lot of work on mental modeling and top task analysis, and how that reflects the information architecture of a product.” The content designers were adept at storytelling as it related to products and services, but Banerji’s team needed expertise in both areas—content design and content strategy.”

Banerji now has a mix of content disciplines on her team. “In my opinion, content strategy is very different from content design. When you look at strategy, you’re actually talking about how might we present this offering, and how might we scale it? How might we measure that we’re doing the right thing?”

Making the business case for (and showing the value of) content strategy at McAfee was easy to demonstrate for Banerji. “From the front-end perspective, because we have such complex apps, and because there are so many features on those apps which don’t make sense to the user, that’s where content strategy shows up.”

The first content strategist to join Banerji’s team helped to improve the information architecture. They showed how to organize information, and how to surface that information on the front end. The second strategist she hired helped to build a reusable and scalable content management system for their products.

Banerji has plans to add a third strategist to the team as well.

All of the content strategists are loosely embedded in product teams because Banerji wants them to have time for (and control over) being part of content governance discussions and driving more content-related initiatives at the broader level of the organization. “In order to do their best work, content strategists need to have a really good understanding of the business context and the larger product vision.”

Building Strong Relationships with Cross-Functional Teams

While the crafting of content may be a solo endeavor or one that’s relegated to a team of writers, the effort it takes to bring that content to a screen or similar modality doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are many hands that your content must pass through before it becomes part of your digital experience, and the people (and disciplines) that those hands are attached to should be involved in the formation of your practice before you break ground. At the very least, these cross-functional disciplines should include the following:

• Visual designers
• User experience/human-centered designers
• User researchers
• Information architects
• Developers/engineers
• Product owners/managers
• Project managers

Introducing the concept of the practice and articulating its benefits, especially to the people you collaborate with the most, is a crucial step toward establishing practice longevity. At the early stages, you’ll want to focus your efforts on understanding the functions or disciplines that are a part of your team; on helping every member of the team understand how content strategy will impact their work; and ultimately on helping everyone individually and collectively see the value that a strategic approach to content brings to your combined efforts.

You’ll also want to consult with your colleagues as you begin the work of constructing a process framework. Involving them at this stage not only gets buy-in, but it also creates a sense of co-ownership in the practice. Chapter 2, “Structural Alignment,” takes a closer look at how a content strategy practice can benefit each of the disciplines listed previously and provide you with some conversation starters on specific ways the practice can add value. You’ll also learn what a process framework is and how to create one in Chapter 3.

Creating Frameworks and Curating Tools to Build With

To ensure stability and longevity, every structure, no matter how big or small requires a solid framework to help it stand. From the foundation to the footings, to the columns and beams and walls, every element that comprises a building’s framework, along with the tools used to construct it, contributes to the strength of the structure, allowing it to withstand forces that would otherwise cause it to fail.

It’s the same with the practice you’re building. Creating a process framework—testing it and improving upon it—will help your practice stand strong. More than just a building metaphor, you will learn to create a repeatable framework that considers all the trades (cross-functional disciplines), tools, and elements that contribute to and are impacted by the work of your practice. You’ll “soil test” your framework—meaning that you’ll test the environment you’re building in to ensure that you can create a firm foundation for your practice—with a variety of agency clients or in-house projects to show where you might need to add additional footings to further support the foundation of your practice, all with the goal of avoiding structural failure.

The following elements are critical to this blueprint component:

• The involvement of and collaboration with cross-functional teammates to establish alignment with the goals of the content strategy practice.
• The creation of an end-to-end process framework to identify responsibilities, dependencies, and critical handoffs in the development of a website or similar digital experience.
• The evaluation of a variety of tools to use within your practice at the project or client level to help you find what works best for your agency or organization.

Rightsizing the Practice to Meet Client or Project Demand

After you’ve successfully made the business case for the establishment of your agency or organization’s content strategy practice, your next step is to rightsize the practice to fit demand. Rightsizing can sometimes have negative connotations, such as when an organization has to reduce its workforce to adjust to a downturn in business or market conditions. But in keeping with the building and construction theme, rightsizing in this instance refers to “creating a structure that’s optimized for the size of the agency or organization—and for the number of clients or projects—where the practice is being built.”

Even if there aren’t any immediate projects on your radar, think bigger and consider the potential for future expansion of the structure you’re currently building. This blueprint component requires you to think beyond the current project plans that are right in front of you and to consider how intentionally planning for future expansion can help you sustain practice growth. But how can you do that if the demand for the practice isn’t there yet?

You create it. You use what you have in front of you to show how you’ll grow the practice when the demand comes. Here’s another way to approach it: most content strategy projects begin with a qualitative audit of the current state of the content and with a future state goal (usually informed by product requirements) in mind. If you are adhering to best practices, that future state goal usually includes plans to fill gaps in the content that might occur as a business or brand changes and grows.

You may not currently know what those changes will entail, but it’s reasonable to assume that changes in your business goals will be constant. So you create a core content strategy that considers the content components you’ll need to meet the current requirements, and one that also identifies content elements that may be needed in the future to support growth and change. And you’ll also consider how that content can be structured for reuse across digital platforms.

Additionally, you should consider the people, processes, and tools needed, not only to maintain the core strategy, but also to accommodate change, including the estimated number and types of roles you’ll need to fill, along with the workflows and governance needed to make key content decisions that will undoubtedly impact growth. Since you’re likely already familiar with these processes from the how of content strategy, you can take a similar approach to rightsizing your practice.

If you are a sole practitioner at an agency or looking to rightsize your content operations into a more strategic position by expanding your practice to accommodate growing demand, consider adopting these approaches:

• Are there current clients or projects you’re involved with that will allow you to demonstrate the benefits of taking a more strategic approach to content? If so, you can turn these projects into test cases by identifying a few quick wins that won’t compromise the timeline as you demonstrate how the practice can scale to take on more work:
  • Take a proactive look at the organization’s content through the lens of a sample inventory and audit (sometimes called a spot audit) and measure that content against attributes that map to future state goals.
  • Conduct a comparative analysis among similar brands or industry peers to identify potential content gaps that you can strategically turn into future content opportunities.
• If there aren’t any immediate client opportunities for you to work with, find out what’s on tap with potential clients. Determine if there is a chance for you to position content strategy as a value-add and to show how the practice can grow to accommodate more work:
  • If your agency is pitching its services on a rebranding project, ask to review the creative brief with an eye toward understanding why and how the potential client is planning to rebrand. Then do a quick spot audit of content on their website or app to see if current content offerings map to their future state, post-rebrand goals.
  • Determine if there are clients in need of an updated style guide or voice and tone guidelines. These are content deliverables that sometimes get overlooked and a demand that your practice can easily fulfill.

If you’re a solo practitioner or the lone “content person” in a medium-sized organization, or if you’re part of a small content team that wants to begin building a foundation for establishing a practice, the previous approaches can still work for you with a slight change of perspective:

• First, you’ll be looking at the content as an insider. Hopefully, that means you have access to things like product backlogs and roadmaps to identify upcoming initiatives. You can take a proactive look at the types of content that may be needed to support those initiatives, and you can strategically turn the results of that review into content opportunities to demonstrate value.
• Second, familiarity with your organization’s content likely means you know a thing or two about the editorial process. Conducting a few informal interviews with content creators, editors, SMEs (subject matter experts), and others involved with this process may reveal gaps or missed steps in that process that you can use to identify opportunities to improve the editorial process within the practice structure.
• In many organizations, there’s no single source of truth for information on who those content creators, editors, SMEs, and others are. As a result, when the time comes for a site refresh or redesign, or migration to a new content management platform, the content team is left scrambling to figure out who owns what. This situation presents another great opportunity for you to demonstrate how the practice can meet another demand by creating a sample content matrix to show how a tool like this can save time and resources.

Establishing Shared and Meaningful Success Measures

There are several ways to measure the success of a singular content strategy, whether for an agency client or an in-house project. And there are just as many ways to determine whether the content created and curated based on that strategy is delivering against established metrics. Whether you use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), or some other metric du jour, your choices for measuring content effectiveness are many. There are also many ways for you to measure the success of the practice. Working with your client, content lead, or in-house digital experience team, along with product owners or managers and business stakeholders, can help you establish measures that are meaningful to the success of the practice and the overall success of your digital experience team.

Measuring effectiveness at both the project and practice level should:

• Be collaborative, involving colleagues and partners from multiple disciplines. If at an agency, this collaborative approach can (and should) be introduced to your client(s), and the results should be shared with those on your team who are responsible for delivering success for your client. Or your team can offer to lead a workshop to help clients establish this collaborative approach.
• Be documented, with the understanding that as business goals, user needs, and technologies change, so too will the things that you or your clients measure and how you measure them. You’ll want to create a living document or repository of documents to track and update success measures as the practice matures.
• Be shared, not just as a finished artifact that gets circulated among teammates, or delivered to a client, and then shelved or archived never to again see the light of day, but to ensure buy-in and support from other departmental partners, as well as leadership for agency clients and in-house teams alike.

Ultimately, while there is no one single best measure of success for the practice, the measures you choose to gauge practice success depend largely on a few factors:

• Agency-based or in-house practice: Measures that matter to an agency practice may not apply (or may be unimportant) to an in-house practice within an organization. By the same token, the measures you ultimately decide upon to test the overall success of your practice will determine what measures make sense for your situation.
• Overarching client or organizational goals: While you can count the construction of your practice as a measure of success, your work doesn’t end when the practice has been built. After the practice is standing and operational, project or client work will likely begin to increase in frequency and intensity as the word gets out that the practice is up and running. That means the success of the practice will be measured by meeting the goals that have been set by your client or dictated by the requirements of the project you’re working on.
• Quantifiable business goals: These goals track the success of your practice for things that can be counted, usually as an answer to the question “How many?” as in “How many clients have we successfully provided content strategy services to?” or “Of the five most important content strategy initiatives we’ve identified, how many projects have we successfully completed?” Keep in mind that an increase in the number of clients or projects is only a single factor among many to consider as you create and track success measures. You’ll also want to look at whether projects were completed on time and to the satisfaction of the client contract or product brief.
• Baseline number of clients or projects handled by the practice: You may be tempted to assume that this number will always be zero, but if you’ve applied content strategy how-to to even a portion of a client or in-house project, those efforts count toward the establishment of growth measures, and will show where you are currently as you map out where you want to go in the practice’s future state.

Renovations While Occupied

Chances are, if you work in content at an existing agency or organization, you’re likely working on building a practice while simultaneously taking on your first content strategy project. While
that might sound a bit like living in a house while an addition is being built, a.k.a. renovating while occupied, the truth is that in most cases, you simply can’t avoid it. And that’s OK. It’s how you learn to build resiliency—and the strength and tenacity you create while doing so is how you’ll eventually succeed.

This book is going to guide you as you build the structure where content strategy can happen—a solid container where the work can be done with minimal disruption. You’ll learn the best ways to augment that structure so that the practice can function under different loads, whether at an agency with several clients, or within a medium organization or large enterprise.

You’re also building a practice that invites stakeholders and teammates to co-work with you, both as trusted advisors and SMEs, and when it’s time to hand off to another discipline in the product development process.

Establishing structure or building a practice gets buy-in at the earliest stages. If you decide to scale from a practice of one to a practice of many, you’ll find that having that buy-in from stakeholders and teammates will make it easier to garner support from leadership as the practice grows.

Notes from the Field: Tips for Building a Content Team

Andy Welfle, co-author, Writing Is Designing, Head of Content Design, Adobe

Andy Welfle knows a thing or two about building a UX content strategy practice from the ground up, having grown a team at Adobe from a solo operation to a team of ten, all without the benefit of a blueprint or guide. “I probably could have ramped up a lot faster if I had a book that talked about some of the common scenarios and things to look for.”

Welfle had given little thought to organizational structure before joining Adobe. “I wasn’t prepared for the open-endedness and ambiguity of everything.” He soon figured out that work structure matters. “Who you report to and who your boss reports to sets you up for success—or failure.”

Among the many books that have been written about organizational structure, Welfle wished there was one for content teams—especially teams that sit within a larger design org—and one that addresses typical organization structures and their strengths and weaknesses. “I was really lucky that I had a boss who let me figure things out and empowered me to say no to certain things.”

Welfle was the lone content strategist among some 200 designers and 30 researchers. So knowing when to say no—and that it was OK to do so—was of particular importance to his personal well-being. Trying to be everything to everyone simply wasn’t sustainable. “I definitely burnt myself out.”

His boss suggested finding a product team to embed in and told Welfle that he wasn’t expected to help everyone. “But I would get Slack messages from everyone looking for help. And I didn’t want to say no. I wanted to show my value far and wide.”

Getting product stakeholders to understand what he did and how his work added value took some work. “I tried, through a lot of trial and error, to get them to understand what I did and show my value as a content strategist. Some of it was hands-on explaining ‘I’m going to help you through some of these content problems.’ And some of it was just presenting a slide deck.”

The need for establishing boundaries—and defining what kind of services were provided within those boundaries—became clear as the team grew. “Pretty early on we started doing office hours. It was really useful, not in solving actual problems, but for understanding the bigger problem space, to see trends and problems across products, and for building relationships. If I gave the perception of being accessible, people were a lot friendlier and willing to talk about that stuff. It worked out really well for me.”

Welfle has spoken about his practice-building experience at conferences and meetups and has developed a list of six tips for growing a content team (see Figure 1.2). They’re complementary to the practice blueprint outlined in this chapter, and they’ll be useful to you as you’re making the business case for building your content strategy practice.

Figure 1.2

Andy Welfle’s six tips for growing a content team are a useful addition to your toolbox and will be quite valuable as you are making the business case for building your content strategy practice.

Notes from the Job Site: A Practice in Need of a Plan

I’ve been herding digital content for nearly two decades, and even now, I’m still surprised at how many content strategists I’ve spoken with who can relate to starting out as the lone “content person” at some time in their career, evolving from solo web copywriters to growing or being a part of a team of content strategists.

Still, as this book started to come together, I wondered if my experience was more of an edge case. I mean, I knew how to make sense of smaller companies and agencies that lacked the resources to invest in building a content strategy practice. I could see how some didn’t understand how establishing such a practice would level up their content creation and curation game—or that of their clients—while enhancing their organizations’ user experience offerings.

And even though more and more books about the importance of the work and how to do it were being published with increasing frequency (in answer to an increasing industry demand), when it came time to stand up a practice—a figurative structure where the work gets done—there weren’t many resources.

For example, when I first joined the agency where I stood up my first practice, I had to learn the hard way how to introduce the work to the staff UX lead. In my desire to do a good job, I inadvertently stepped on toes, and had to figure out, through trials and many, many errors, how to introduce content strategy—and by extension, the content strategy practice we’d eventually build together—to my cross- functional teammates.

I also had to learn how to articulate the value of the practice with everyone from designers to developers, to project managers and product owners, in a way that broke down potential barriers and built strong partnerships that helped the practice grow and thrive as an integral part of the agency’s user experience capabilities.

But just because I was eventually able to get most of my colleagues on board, the work of building the practice was far from done. Like a builder with approved plans, I still had to figure out what materials I’d need to complete the practice-building process. I needed the frameworks and tools to create a firm foundation for building the practice, as well as success measures that I could point to as indicators of bringing value to the agency and its clients.

It wasn’t until I moved to a larger organization with a similar practice- building goal that I began to document what worked (and what didn’t) and to figure out if it could be scaled to fit a larger organization.

This book is the blueprint I wish I had access to years ago.

Persistent Principles to Remember Along the Journey

Wherever you are in your practice-building journey, you’ll find it helpful to remember these principles along the way:

• You will always be called on to educate (or re-educate) clients, stakeholders, and team members about the value that the practice brings to your digital experience capabilities.
• You should always keep goals and success measures in mind as the scope of your projects—and the potential impact of the practice—evolves and changes.
• You’ll find peace in knowing that you are not alone. There is a vibrant community of authors and experienced practitioners who have years of experience and lots and lots of stories to share.

The Punch List

There’s a lot of information here for you to process, and there’s even more actionable information to follow. For now, grasping these takeaways will prepare you for expanding your practice-building knowledge and skills, and set you up for success as you make your way through subsequent chapters:

• There are only five components to the Content Strategy Practice Blueprint. All five steps are integral to building a practice that can withstand stressors like tension and compression from outside of your practice structure. The order of the components (and the steps and guidelines within them) are important, too, but the main takeaway here is, even if you have to change the order of things, don’t skip a component.
• The work of content strategy isn’t “one and done,” nor is the construction of the practice where that work happens. Just as a newly constructed building needs maintenance and repair to prevent structure failure, your practice will need similar attention to prevent its failure, too. Collaborating with cross-functional teammates, product owners and managers, and stakeholders to get buy-in and gain alignment will help you build resiliency and resistance to structure failure.
• Remember the persistent principles: Always educate, always highlight the practice goals, and always, always remember you are not alone. Your practice will always be stress tested, because things will get tough, no matter how hard you work to maintain your practice structure.

As an author and fellow practitioner, I’ve got you. And as a member of a generous community of passionate content strategy practitioners, we’ve got you. And you—yes you in the hard hat holding the blueprint and wondering what to do next—you’ve got this, too. Now let’s learn the tools and tactics you’re going to need to lay a strong foundation for your practice.

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Sample Chapter: The Leader’s Journey

This is a sample chapter from Donna Lichaw’s book The Leader’s Journey: Transforming Your Leadership to Achieve the Extraordinary. 2023, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1

Your Core Identity Narrative

A superhero’s identity is signified by their costume or a nickname. But it is much more than that. It’s the story of who they are. For example, Superman’s costume that is made of alien material, featuring a large “S,” tells us about who he is (a superhuman alien) and what he can do (fly). Captain America’s red, white, and blue star-spangled uniform and shield tell us about his beliefs and mission—he stands for freedom and shields the oppressed. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on the other hand, doesn’t wear a costume at all. Her name clearly signifies what she does: she slays vampires. A superhero’s identity encapsulates her story of who she is, where she is going (mission), and how she will get there (superpowers).

But superheroes are often wrong about their identity early on in their journey. As such, they are not super yet. For example, before Harry Potter found out that he was a wizard destined to save the world, he was an orphan who lived under the stairs at his aunt and uncle’s house. He was an outcast in his family with the uncanny ability to wreak havoc with his mysterious, as-yet unidentified powers. It’s only when he found out his true identity that he could learn magic and then lead himself, lead others, and save the world.

When you find out who you are and how to leverage that, your story really gets going. I learned this the hard way.
When I left that leadership retreat in Napa that day I could not stop thinking about that executive’s question. How can I be a hero? I wish I could say that my mission was clear, superpowers activated, and I confidently set out on my quest to find out how leaders could be heroes, transforming my business and myself, as a result. I transformed from someone who developed products to someone who developed people. I found my cape. I helped others find their capes. We all lived happily ever after. The end.

But leadership journeys are rarely that straightforward.

I eventually did those things. But first, I flew home feeling like a failure and spiraled into a debilitating depression. The worse I felt, the harder it was to muscle through some of the biggest projects of my career. I’m embarrassed to admit that I did not show up as my best self as I delivered keynote addresses and consulted with teams and companies that I was sure I was letting down. I wanted to put the brakes on my software development work and focus on my new obsession. But I refused to give in to my whims. I had a very good reason for doing that—I knew that deep down, I was a quitter. When I found success, I quit and moved onto something new. I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

As I would eventually learn, this story wasn’t totally true. But it felt true. As such, it had a strong power over me. Psychologists call this kind of story an identity narrative—the story of who you are. I didn’t realize this at the time, but this story was also my cape—only at this point in my journey, it was choking me rather than helping me fly.

We all have stories that guide us. They move us forward. And they hold us back. It is only when you see them for what they are that you can embrace the ones that move you forward and transform the ones that hold you back.
To understand how to do this, you have to know what you’re looking for. To know what you’re looking for, you have to understand how stories work.

The Architecture of Experience

People have told stories since they began to communicate. The earliest evidence of storytelling, dates back 36,000 years. It’s believed that stories evolved as a way for people to teach one another so that they could influence behavior and ultimately stay alive.

For example, let’s say that your clan lives not far from a river, and little Lucy wants to go down to the river alone to play. You might tell Lucy, “I told you before, don’t go down to the river alone. It’s dangerous.” She might listen to you, or she might not. If you have ever dealt with a toddler or worked with an adult who behaves like a toddler, you know that they don’t often want to listen. Our hardwired need for autonomy starts at a very young age.

Instead, you could tell Lucy a story: “Lucy, once upon time, little Timmy went down to the river alone. He slipped in the mud along the bank, fell into a deep pool of water, and died a painful death while being chewed on by a crocodile. We could hear him screaming from the terrible pain he suffered as he was being torn apart. By the time we ran down to the river to help, it was too late. All we found was one of his shoes. So, whenever you go to the river, always take someone with you.” That story is much more likely to stick with Lucy and to have your desired outcome.

At their best, your stories move you forward. They motivate, inspire, and move you to action. They keep you smart and safe. They keep you alive.

At their best, these stories also hold you back. They keep you safe from doing stupid things— like changing your business focus just when things are getting good.

Stories elicit feelings and feelings guide behavior.

But stories aren’t just for telling. To process your story and then take action, Lucy needs to glean meaning from your story. Stories are how you comprehend what has happened, is happening, and will happen in the future if you take action. If things work out, you get to be the hero. Otherwise, you die.

Stories are the currency of understanding.

But it would be inefficient if you had to constantly hear people telling you stories in order to stay alive. Over time, the stories that you hear become a part of how you operate—you integrate them into your values, beliefs, sense of self, and projections onto the past, future, and even other people. They become so much a part of you that you don’t realize they’re there. Thinking in stories is like breathing or walking—you do it without noticing it. It’s just how you operate.

Stories are an evolutionary feature. They’re a huge part of how humans got this far.
But stories are also a bug—a defect, a glitch. When they go wrong, they go terribly wrong. To see what to do about it, I want to introduce you to Oscar.

Oscar was once a patient working with psychologist, Stephen Madigan, a pioneer in the field of narrative therapy. When Oscar first met Madigan, he was isolated, depressed, and suicidal. The previous year, he had been hit by a truck while crossing the street and immediately fell into a coma. He awoke after three months and endured a long, arduous recovery. He survived, surprising everyone including his doctors. But he was debilitated by severe anxiety and no longer wanted to live. At the time that Oscar sought treatment with Madigan, he believed that he was a “good for nothing,” a “useless human being.” While this story wasn’t true, Oscar believed it to be true. It was powerful enough to compel him to want to end his life.

Stories started to be used as a serious therapeutic tool many decades ago. Typically, when you go into a clinical setting with a problem, you are diagnosed by a professional and receive a prescription. You are depressed. Do this. You are ascribed a story and prescribed an ending. The results of a traditional, diagnostic approach are hit or miss, however. After all, we humans don’t always love being told what to do.

Starting in the 1980s, narrative psychologists and therapists like Madigan started to have a different idea. What if you let people take ownership of their stories rather than have doctors ascribe and prescribe a story to them? Might they have enough agency that they could then author their own way forward? The answer that Madigan found with Oscar was yes.

When you restructure your narrative, you can change your behavior and change yourself.

Rearchitecting Your Narrative

When Madigan and Oscar unpacked his story, they saw that they didn’t have a lot of data at its foundation. He felt unwell, he had a difficult recovery, he was convinced that his partner would abandon him, his friends would find him out, and he did not want to live. This all amounted to one epic story with a lot of missing pieces.
To fill in the missing pieces, Oscar and Madigan enlisted friends and family to write a brief letter expressing how they remembered him, how they currently felt about him, and how they imagined their relationship in the future. The letters poured in.

What Oscar thought was true was anything but true. He wasn’t useless and unloved. He was missed and much-loved. These stories created a much more cohesive, truthful story. It didn’t happen overnight. It took time, mindfulness, and having new experiences with his friends and family that could overwrite the former story. Over time Oscar transformed from an anxious, depressed “good for nothing” to a calm, confident friend and partner to many people. In transforming his story, he transformed himself. Oscar learned how to be the hero of his story.

When I first learned about Oscar and narrative therapy, I decided to take a closer look at my own story that was holding me back. This story was true, as far as I could tell. I was there! I lived it. I was living it. Could I really rewrite it?

Yes and no.

Although talking with people who shape your narrative and hearing their stories firsthand is the most effective way to reshape your story (more on that in Chapter 4, “Your 360 Story”), it’s not always possible. My story started when I was eight years old. If I could have, I would have gone back to the source. But my mom passed away when I was 13 years old. This story was all I had.

So, I did the next best thing. I unpacked this story like a screenwriter would. I broke my story into little pieces to see if I was missing anything. And then I put it back together and made it more complete.

My story started one day when I wanted to learn how to play piano and begged my mom for lessons. But lessons were expensive. Pianos were even more expensive. And I had a tendency to pick up new hobbies and drop them. The answer was emphatically “No.” I begged and begged, and the answer eventually became, “But you always start things and then you stop them. Lessons are expensive. Pianos are expensive. No.”

I eventually got those piano lessons, and I loved them. Convinced that I would stick with this hobby, my parents saved up enough money to buy me a piano. Two years later, I got bored, asked to quit, and got a big “I told you so” from my mom. I cost my family a lot of money. My parents were upset. And I felt ashamed. I regretted not listening to my mom. She was right all along.

I carried this story—and this shame—with me like a suit of armor for the next 30 years. “Don’t quit,” I told myself whenever I got excited about something new. And quit, I would.

While this story had always felt cohesive to me, it was missing some key components.

Understanding Narrative Architecture

At its core, every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And every story has a protagonist. That’s the hero—sometimes a group of heroes.

Every hero wants to accomplish something—they are either intrinsically motivated, or they find out that they are called to do something. This is what is called a call to adventure or a call to action. For example, Batman doesn’t fight villains for fun. He is called to do so after his parents are mugged and killed when he is a child. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is called to action by an ancient Watcher’s Council.

Along their journey, every hero faces conflict—both inner and outer.

And, in the end, they resolve their conflict and meet their goals. If they don’t, it’s a cliffhanger or a tragedy.

But for a story to be great, goals are not enough. A hero must have a reason for wanting to meet their goals. A so that… or why. These reasons often come down to basic human needs like food, shelter, love, connection, certainty, knowledge, mastery, autonomy, being understood, or being of service to name a few. (For a comprehensive list of human needs, download a free Needs Decoder Ring from my Story Driven Leadership Toolkit.

For example, Batman defeats villains to uphold justice. He could do it to seek vengeance (this is the case early on), but he would be a very different hero (an anti-hero) with a very different story. He could do it for no reason, but that would be boring. Heroes need a bigger purpose in life so that we can believe, relate, and connect to them.
While stories can get much more complex than this, this core architecture is what storytellers use to write stories. It’s also what your brain uses to understand and experience stories.

When I broke apart my story like a storyteller, I realized that it was missing a key component: a proper ending. A so that…

In my story, my hero knew what she wanted, but she didn’t understand deep down why she wanted it. I wanted to play piano. I played piano. Boring story. Boring ending. I wanted to play guitar. I played guitar. Same. “But why?” When I really thought about it, I wanted to express myself.

Simple reason. Totally different story.

As I got clear on the real ending of this story, I realized that I had actually accomplished what I had set out to do that day when I was eight years old. I just couldn’t see it because I had the ending all wrong. I figured out how to express myself. I had an amazing time doing it. After learning to play many, many instruments that I liked, but didn’t love, I eventually learned to play guitar. I found my thing. I spent the next few decades playing in rock bands. I met my best friends, met my mentors, kicked off my career in tech, and eventually met my wife through playing music.

Looking at my story with a proper ending, I could for the first time in my life that this wasn’t the story of a quitter. This was the story of someone who did not give up.

When I applied this story to my leadership journey, I realized that my story was much the same. What I always thought of as a series of failures, was in reality a decades-long career at the forefront of the tech industry. I wasn’t a quitter. I was an expert and a leader in my field. When I saw an opportunity, I pounced. I had grit—something a lot of leaders strive for. Not giving up until I found what I was looking for was a part of my process and my journey. I just couldn’t see it before.

As I saw all of this, my anxiety started to lift, and I began to feel like a human again. Where I used to feel ashamed, I now wished my mom could see how my story had turned out—how I had turned out. She would have been so proud. I was proud. I am proud.

Once I could see my story—and therefore see myself—I quit developing software and started developing leaders. I found my courage. I found my cape. And the world is a better place for it. And because this is a business leadership book, I should also mention that my business is much more successful because of it (more on that in Parts III and IV, “Mission” and “Impact”). It wouldn’t be easy—still isn’t. But that’s all part of the leader’s journey.

I would have a lot of work to do to fully believe this new story and put my old one to rest. But it piqued my curiosity enough to see if I could apply what I learned toward helping leaders unlock their own stories. Because I am someone who does not give up, the answer is a resounding yes. Throughout this book, I will show you exactly how to do that.

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Frequently Asked Questions

These common questions and their short answers are taken from Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s book Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

1. What do you mean by “content everywhere”?
   The way I talk about it, “content everywhere” doesn’t mean splattering your message in every corner of the Web. It’s about investing in content that’s flexible enough to go wherever you need it: multiple websites, apps, channels, and other experiences. Why? Because devices of all shapes, sizes, and capabilities are flooding the market, and users expect to get your content on all of them, which you can read about in Chapter 1.Right now, most organizations can barely keep up with their large, unwieldy desktop websites, much less multiple different sets of content for all these different experiences. Content everywhere is all about learning how to prepare one set of content to go wherever it’s needed—now and in the future.
2. What do you mean by structured content, and why is it so important?
   Today, most digital content is unstructured: just words poured onto a page. To signify where one part ends and another begins, writers use formatting, like upping a font size to be a headline or putting an author’s name in italics. This works fine if your content is only going to be used on a single page and viewed on a desktop monitor, but that’s about it.Structured content, on the other hand, is created in smaller modules, which can be stored and used in lots more ways. For example, you could display a headline and a copy teaser in one place, and have a user click to read the rest—something you can’t do if the story is all one blob. You can give the same content different presentation rules when it’s displayed on mobile, such as resizing headlines or changing which content is prioritized or emphasized—automatically. In this way, adding structure actually makes content more flexible, because it allows you to do more with it. You can learn about this in Chapter 5.
3. But don’t I need different, simpler content for mobile?
   If your content is needlessly complicated and full of fluff, then yes: Your content should be simplified for mobile—and for everywhere else, too. After all, a user with a desktop computer doesn’t want to wade through filler either. But should your mobile users be offered “lite” versions of your content rather than the real deal? No.While you might know what people do most often on their mobile devices, you can’t know what they’re intending to do on any specific visit. After all, people apply to college and buy cars on their phones every day—and will only do more on mobile as devices get more powerful and cheaper. Finally, I’ve seen firsthand how hard it can be for organizations to manage content on just one website. How much harder will it be when you’re juggling updates and versions for multiple discrete experiences? There’s no way you’ll have the time, resources, and skills to keep up. One set of content that’s clear, meaningful, and well structured is a more sustainable solution. You can read more about making this work in Chapters 9 and 10.
4. Who should be doing this work?
   In the past, content modeling work was often just called data modeling, so it was done by database developers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it has its problems. Because content can be much more ambiguous and conceptual than other sorts of data, it needs attention a developer alone is unlikely to give it. If you want content to communicate a message, tell a story, or do something specific for your organization or your users, then you need someone who understands what the content means and how it means it there when you’re making content modeling decisions.Oftentimes, the ideal person to play this role is a content strategist, editor, information architect, or user experience designer. The good news is, it’s not either-or. Content modeling and structuring can and should be collaborative—something that’s more effective when people from multiple perspectives are involved. In Chapters 3 and 4 of this book, I aim to show those who may not have been in those conversations in the past how to get started.
5. I’m a content person. Do I really need to understand the technical parts?
   If you typically work in a creative, editorial, marketing, or branding role, then dealing with modular content, metadata, logic, and relationships might feel foreign. How does this relate to communicating a message or telling a story? Do you need to know how to build databases and APIs?No, probably not. But here’s the thing: If you’re the one who understands the content best, and who knows what readers and users want from it, then you’re exactly the right person to be thinking about how it should be structured, stored, and transported—so you can keep its meaning and purpose intact. While this doesn’t mean you need to become an XML expert, it does mean you should get more comfortable with the ideas presented in Chapters 6 and 7, and be able to discuss needs, options, and priorities with those who will implement technical solutions.
6. Is this just about mobile?
   Yes and no. Getting content ready for mobile is a big challenge, and spawning all sorts of debate: Do we give mobile users just a portion of our content, allowing them to “snack”? Do we go responsive? Build an app? What does mobile mean, anyway: Is a tablet a mobile device, or something else? As these questions are raised, it becomes more and more clear that what we need is content that can go onto all the devices that exist now—and those that will exist in the future.Smartphones may be disrupting our assumptions today, but they’re just the beginning. TVs, household appliances, cars, and more are becoming Internet-enabled. Plus, there are content-shifting services like Instapaper and content-plucking sites like Pinterest to contend with, as I explore in Chapter 11. It would be easy to get overwhelmed, but the good news is this: The work you do now, to structure content for reuse and get it ready for mobile, is going to also make that content more prepared for wherever the future takes it.

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Frequently Asked Questions

These common questions and their short answers are taken from Katie Swindler’s book Life and Death Design: What Life-Saving Technology Can Teach Everyday UX Designers. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

1. What do you mean by “life and death design”? Is this book about death?
   Not really. This is a book about high-stakes designs with life-and- death consequences and all the ways your designs can help people in moments of extreme stress or crisis. It’s a book about designs that save lives. In particular, Chapter 8, “Hero by Design,” explores ways to help bring out the best in your users, helping them step up and save the day.
2. Will I be able to use what’s in this book if I design “boring” stuff?
   As long as you design something meant to solve a problem for a user, the information in this book will apply to your work. Problems cause stress. Whether someone is under a small or a large amount of stress, the same neurochemicals are released and the same fight- flight-or freeze instincts drive behaviors. Because of this, lessons learned by designers creating products for extreme environments, like emergency rooms or war zones, can be applied to all sorts of products that help stressed-out users across just about any industry imaginable. In Chapter 1, “A Designer’s Guide to the Human Stress Response,” you’ll get an overview of the five phases of the stress response and the design considerations unique to each phase. You’ll also get a plain language overview of the neuroscience that drives these phases.
3. Does this book cover techniques to address harmful biases?
   Absolutely. When humans are stressed, they instinctively fall back on intuition-based decision-making, which has a lot of benefits, but can also open the door for harmful biases to creep in. So Chapter 3, “Intuitive Assessment,” explores the science of intuition in detail, including how it’s formed, when it is most beneficial (and when it’s most harmful), and how it can be harnessed through good design. It also looks closely at the role that bias plays in intuitive decision-making. Then Chapter 5, “Reasoned Reaction,” explores specific design techniques to help users control bias, even under extremely stressful situations when their instincts might otherwise lead them astray.
4. I design for a population with people who are chronically stressed. Does this book help me address the unique needs of my users?
   The techniques for creating calming designs covered in Chapter 6, “Recovery,” will be of particular interest for those people designing for users who are chronically stressed. If you are designing for populations with high levels of PTSD, you may also want to review Chapter 2, “The Startle Reflex,” to learn ways to avoid triggering a startle reflex, as people with PTSD tend to have a particular sensitivity to startling stimuli. Chapter 7, which covers “Alarms and Alerts,” might also be useful to those designers creating products used in high-stress environments because the chapter discusses techniques to communicate important information appropriately to your users without overwhelming or further stressing them.

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