Wolfgang MAEHR

Dear Appendix,

As I am leaving (Singapore, not the team), many have expressed apprehension about the future of Appendix. These concerns are understandable, and I want to address them through this open letter.

TL;DR: I believe Appendix is in the strongest position it has ever been. I believe that our formal and informal leadership is capable, committed and genuinely caring for the growth and Spirit of our members to grow the team, to grow Beach Ultimate. And, with the last co-founder stepping further out, a space opens for you all to step in and move the team forward the way you deem best. Growth requires change and the goal has always been to teach confidence, commitment, intention and awareness to let everyone shape their own and our growth. Thus, if you care about this team, there is no better time than the present to get involved and help shape the team in its many facets.

I also wish to express my deepest gratitude for all the efforts contributed by everybody, as it has given me so much meaning, growth and joy over all these years.

This said, I’d like to share what I have learned to hold dear about Appendix over the years; what has given me meaning and energy for the team, in the hope that it provides you some clarity, meaning and hopefully energy as well.

Running a team takes energy and—as many—I have had times of feeling drained and frustrated over the years since our inception in 2012. Luckily, different things and people have reminded me at crucial times of the meaning and scale of impact that Appendix has had on SO many people over the years.

1. Duality is our unique selling point and strength Yes, focussing only on beginners or only on a competitive team is much easier, but we wouldn’t be where we are and who we are. We would not exist without being open to beginners, late starters, visitors and other “misfits”. We chose the name “Appendix” as it has represented this aspect of “where the funny stuff goes”. And, specifically, we’re the only open club in Singapore, which provides us with access to new and also experienced players unlike anybody else. Without having a competitive aspect in the team, our players would not grow and a lot of our experienced players would not be around for the others to learn from. As I shared before, I believe we have three main audiences, and each contribute a key aspect to our club to make it work: Newbies, growth players and veterans. Saturdays are great to have people to train together (or alongside each other) while other sessions can be more targeted to the specific audiences.

2. Our core mission is fostering holistic growth With our dual focus and diversity of members, growth must be holistic, not single-dimensional. Diversity is a strength when built on top of shared values, like our Ethos. Diversity means more ways to solve problems and more ways to succeed (or fail). Which is why, for a diverse team, it is important to focus on helping people grow holistically rather than optimising performance. While optimisation can yield short-term gains, its fragility often results in long-term struggle. Helping players grow in areas they are not good at (i.e. not just making a receiver a better receiver) brings more flexibility and resilience. The same applies to game sense and problem-solving on the field: Prescriptive drills lead to prescriptive practice, leads to prescriptive gameplay. Letting players figure out the right solution encourages thinking and game-awareness in the long term. This doesn’t mean we should neglect our fundamentals, but my goal had always been to grow thinking players, thinking team members, thinking humans. Yes, this applies to the higher levels too; this team should give us the opportunity and help us become better teammates and leaders, better humans and not just athletes.

3. Growing together is easier, better and more rewarding We play a team sport for a reason, and I believe team sports teach us skills that are tough to learn in individual sports. Our teammates help us become better and pick us up when we are down, but they also challenge us and make mistakes (as we do). One does not come without the other, and embracing and appreciating that will make us better teammates, leads to more growth and will ultimately bring more satisfaction irrespective of glory. To grow together, we have to work together, be vulnerable together, suffer together and celebrate together as that builds trust; trust that gives us confidence and allows us to challenge each other and lift each other. This only comes if we roll up our sleeves ourselves and see the others with their sleeves rolled up. And, if we do not see others with sleeves rolled up, then let’s understand why, challenge and help with empathy: Trust there is a good reason. And if not, don’t be shy to challenge and make fair but tough calls. Culture self selects, and allowing slackers undermines the shared trust and efforts; yet being overly harsh impedes confidence and growth. It’s a tricky balance that we’ll get wrong often enough and the only thing that saves us is being genuine, humble, emphatic, vulnerable and trusting.

4. Commit to the infinite game of direction and momentum Growth takes time and commitment. Growth also requires change, and with change always comes risk of failure. With failure comes disappointment and, hopefully, learning. Focussing on process goals helps us to work diligently on progress and to recognise when we have grown. Combined with awareness, it also allows us to flex and react to changed circumstances and keep our motivation and optimism despite setbacks and changes. Momentum towards the roughly right direction beats insistence on the perfectly planned path.

5. Appreciation unlocks potential and opportunity Optimism is a crucial resource to help our motivation: Focus on the opportunities allows us to give things a go, rather than letting counterarguments prevent us from even trying. Appreciation helps us find the optimism and the opportunities, as it allows us to reframe situations and change perspectives. Specially in adverse and challenging situations, appreciation lets us tale a step back or see things how others see them, disassociate and objectively find the positive side. It allows us to embrace adversity, adjust our plans, commit and build upon reality rather than fighting it.

Finally, trust yourself and each other and engage to work towards the shared goal. The best way to predict the future is to create it, or at least attempt to do so. In these twelve years, I’ve failed more than succeeded, and we are here due to the failures as much as due to the successes. So change what you think needs changing, update the Ethos if you believe it needs updating, take a different approach where you think things are broken.

Appendix is your team to shape, not to consume. Grow the team, and you will grow.

So long, and thanks for all the discs. 🥏🌈🐰

#Appendix, #Ultimate, #team

As digital design is moving into more complex domains, our tools have been stuck and limited by our past. As a domain, we have moved from digital products to services and multi-channel experiences. In parallel, our practice has expanded from UI/visual design and human factors to interaction design, to service and experience design and the power of our conceptual tools has improved too, from mockups to UI flow diagrams (wireframes), to journey and ecosystem maps and service blueprints. Our key tool is often post-it’s and sharpies on large canvases and whiteboards as they facilitate collaboration and extremely malleable. Beyond that, however, our tools have hardly improved. Instead of Fireworks, Photoshop et al., it is now Sketch, Figma, Overflow, Mural and et al., which all utterly fail to capture journeys meaningfully.

These tools all try to flatten multi-dimensional spaces onto a 2D surface because that’s the best we know how “to design”. And while this approach means less tool to learn, it also results in most of the drawbacks of paper without the advantages: The tools are shallow, as they all produce lines on a canvas. Any process or journey mapped becomes a landscape of boxes without any inherent logic. Tools like OmniGraffle and LucidChart handle diagrams and graph layout better, and BPM tools like IBM’s BlueWorks allow to quickly model processes. But no tool provides the ability to describe a journey as simply as textografo but with depth and thus the ability to change perspective.

And while drawing digitally allows for easy duplication, undo, templates and remote collaboration, it also limits users in terms of screen space, especially when abstraction is handled as zooming rather than summarizing. For example, taking a full end-to-end product/service user journey, we can identify a number of phases that can be broken into smaller steps, which may break into specific actions. With pen and paper, we would draw this through a set of diagrams that cut at the right level of granularity: high, medium and detail level. With our digital tools, we can either replicate the same or allow for zooming. What no tool provides, is an ability to automatically collapse, aggregate and drill-down based on inherent logic.

The key to user experience is the flow of a journey: A flow from screen to screen, from touch-point to touch-point or from process to process. In more complex ecosystems, these flows are intertwined and interdependent, best described through a graph. Ideally, we would like to have one large interconnected model, that allows moving through levels of abstraction rather than levels of zoom. Even more, if these journeys are modelled through structured and semantic objects, it would allow us to filter our view dynamically (e.g. critical path, processing time, swim lane, failures, etc.) and—more importantly—turn our perspective. For example, a base view may be the logical flow through the journey, while another view could show RASCI definitions, while even other views may be based on timelines, checklists, list of pain-points, etc.

Architects and industrial designers use their CAD programs exactly for that: To help them view their artefacts through various dimensions. To do something that is incredibly painstaking or impossible on pen and paper. For digital design we should have come to the point, where such a tool makes sense to exist. A generic tool that allows multiple users to come together remotely to document an as-is process with pain points, or create a to-be process, add comments. A generic tool, where time is not spent on laying out work visually but to describe connections between actors, actions, objects, systems, processes, failures, comments, metrics, etc. A generic tool that allows simple sharing of a journey, where one can drill down to understand more or dynamically toggle to show comments, or elapsed time, or mapping onto a timeline, or a specific actor’s actions and quality criteria.

Such a tool would be a truly computer-aided design tool for the experience designer. Our work has moved from UI layouts to multi-dimensional journeys. Our tools must catch up.

Note: This is a first post on modelling complex operations. My next post will elaborate on modelling processes and the various dimensions to look at operations.

#Design, #Tools, #ToolsForDesign, #Modelling, #Graph