The Assembly 2024—Chaos and Control: Through the Looking Glass of an Ever-Changing World

Our second annual Assembly event brought leaders from UX, Design, Marketing, Technology, CX, Business Intelligence, and Brand & Creative to Palm Springs, CA, to explore the dichotomy between Chaos and Control. Together, we uncovered opportunities to successfully adapt to new environments and navigate the unpredictable with a sense of wonder.

Key Takeaways

As priorities, technologies, and markets continue to shift, we’re forced to navigate chaos daily. A key takeaway from the event was to resist the immediate urge to fight chaos. Instead, find ways to use control and structure to help normalize chaotic situations. Other takeaways included:

1. Improvise in the Moment to Succeed During Chaos: Within organizations, individuals and teams aren’t always going to agree on the right path forward. Ultimately, someone in the group is going to be responsible for the outcome of the initiatives. Fostering an environment of psychological safety allows for improvisational skills and disagreement in moments where the path forward is not clear. Being able to draw on the resources around you and the information you have enables creativity, innovation, and progress.
2. Limitations Will Free You: Although control sounds like the exact opposite of chaos, exercising control and setting up boundaries can allow chaos to run free. Providing guardrails for teams can help them focus and inspire them to be resourceful for more creative solutions. Without some constraints—around inputs, outputs, process, etc.—teams might have a hard time not getting lost in the chaos. Additionally, these guardrails can make change and transformation more manageable and less intimidating. It’s hard to push boundaries if they don’t exist.
3. Humans Are the Answer: It’s easy to get distracted by all the talk of artificial intelligence, but understanding the needs, concerns, and goals of humans can be a guiding light as teams and companies navigate change and chaos. By assembling a team of “T-Shape” individuals with broad experience and deep expertise, organizations can alleviate the pressure stemming from the rapid pace of AI. A human-centered approach will help employees make better decisions and clients feel more confident and less overwhelmed.

Sessions

Delve into this year’s sessions to discover how transcending traditional boundaries can transform challenges into extraordinary narratives and experiences.

Calamity and Humanity: Finding the Thread That Connects Us All

In our opening keynote, Ryan Schulz, Executive Director, stresses the importance of creating connections between calamity and humanity, chaos and real human connection. He argues that finding connections that break through the chaos requires us to take some risks and engage with the digital world in a more human way than ever before. Talking about his history with improv theater, he draws the thread between improvising and the evolving nature of improving. That is, making the most of the tools around us to do something new and novel.

What can we learn from Improvisation?

• To be a great improviser, you need to understand the rules.
• Good improvisation allows us to find new territory quickly.
• Improvising can lead to incredible connection with your audience/team.
• It makes us better communicators.
• It creates the opportunity for psychological safety, and that can lead to better relationships.
• Improvisation can reinforce and build community within your teams and organizations because it has more to do with listening and observing than creating.

Resilience: How to Respond to (Not Control) Chaos

Are you a chaos Muppet or an order Muppet? Kalev Peekna, Managing Director and Head of Practice, discusses the importance of chaos. He stresses that it’s less about the need to control chaos—or resolve it—and more about how to move forward through it. He highlights three important areas perfect for a little chaos:

• Diversity: Diversify your strategies. Think about how your strategies will respond in various ways to chaos. Seek diversity in skills, not just backgrounds—finding individuals with T-shaped expertise.
• Improv: Improv classes set up psychological safety, which helps teams believe that it’s okay to take risks and express ideas. With it, teams find good chaos. Without it, teams can operate erratically.
• Heuristics: We can learn something from practical experience, by trial and error. Even when changes come, human behavior doesn’t change that fast—it evolves. Focus on the adaptable, agile humans to navigate the chaos.

Creativity and Constraints: How the Natural Tension Between Chaos and Control Fuels Creativity

Jessica DeJong, Managing Director of Design, discusses the tension between chaos and control. She argues that some of the best breakthroughs occur when designers are forced to innovate around constraints. It’s about finding the right balance. Too many constraints make it difficult to be serendipitous; but too few, and you find a lack of focus to make progress. She suggests maximizing on the following three pillars to fuel creativity.

• Inputs: Anything that constrains what gets put into solving a problem. This could be time, money, people, and resources—noting that there is a point of diminishing returns.
• Process: Anything that constrains how something gets done. This could include tools, technology, or methodology.
• Outputs: Anything that constrains what the final solution looks like. This puts limits on how people access it, branding limitations, video lengths, or design elements, for example.

AI and the Workforce: The Teams and Talent Most Likely to Win

As privacy restrictions reduce the ability to track people across devices, websites and applications, companies are faced with a lack of access to understanding their customer needs. Referencing David Epstein’s Range, Ben Magnuson, Director of Data Strategy, advocates for broadening your range of experiences to effectively solve problems, stay close to your customer, and be prepared for business transformation.

• Bridge gaps beyond your area of expertise to make connections and break specialization silos.
• Use analogical thinking to break outside of your inside view and expand your range when problem solving.
• Create multidisciplinary teams to help to bring in new perspectives.

Empathy as an Antidote: Creating Comfort in the Face of Unwelcome Levels of Turmoil

Kat Kollett, Senior Director of Strategy, discusses the plague of information overload. With the amount of information available growing exponentially, everyone is feeling the strain of information overload—especially customers and employees. Kat argues we can offer support around scope, opacity, urgency, and even emotional load by being more empathetic.

• Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the feelings of another.
• We can help alleviate overwhelm with good customer experience, employee enablement, and employee support—reflecting client and employee needs and continually adapting to address their concerns.
• Leaning into the “intelligence” of AI can help alleviate some of the overwhelm. But we must still create space for curiosity and care—the work that only humans can do.
• Chaos is a catalyst. It points us to the best opportunities to make a difference for others, and it can be the inspiration for innovation. Whether chaos is big or small, this is the joy available in it.

Walking the Technology Tightrope: The Line Between Trends and Tradition

Jennifer Lill, Lead Technology Strategist, explores the difference between trends and technology. Trends are dictated by market pull—such as customer expectations around product capabilities—while technologies represent a market push that creates emerging tools. This push and pull between the market and customer expectations can create chaos for companies as they attempt to respond to these needs.

To navigate this tightrope between trends and technology, Jennifer recommends that organizations:

• Utilize technology trends as a tool in your toolbox rather than a divining rod for the future.
• Define and prioritize insights to assess trend readiness.
• Gather multiple perspectives.
• Create actionable roadmaps.
• Stay curious and include your customers in your discussions.

Navigating the Chaos of Change with Design Strategy

Zach Schloss, Director of UX Strategy, outlines the humanist tools and design thinking approaches that can be used to cultivate an environment of trust and transparency, helping you to embrace ambiguity. By consistently and intentionally applying these repeatable practices, teams and organizations will be better equipped to navigate change and drive outcomes.

• User research helps to illuminate human needs and pain points and drive inspiration.
• Triangulated data ensures we’re solving the right problem and reveals business insights.
• Co-creation facilitates organic idea generation and drives alignment across teams.
• Experiments test ideas, generate data and increase confidence in our outputs.

Place Your Bets: The Possibilities and Probabilities of a Lower-Resolution Future

Kevin Leahy, Senior Director of Content & Brand Strategy, addresses the information overload that has accelerated since the rise in made-for-advertising websites—and the brand safety concerns caused by this ad wastage. To cut through the noise, many brands are adopting an overreliance on data—but in the quest to stand out, it’s easy to mistake a higher-resolution view for a more actionable one.

Metrics for low-resolution success:

• Fame-driving campaigns have strong correlations to other business metrics like driving sales and reducing price sensitivity.
• Broaden your reach to include everyone in your market.
• ROI isn’t the end-all be-all. Treat a small portion of your business activity as a bet to invest in fame and reach.
• As third-party cookies get phased out, reconnect with your audiences, and be more intentional with your data.

Explore the key themes and topics explored during the 2024 Assembly by visiting the official event page below.