Last week was all about:
Sensemaking
I’m helping a couple of clients make sense of who they are, what they do, and what their differentiators are. One is for a content strategy and IA project. The other is for a content design one.
OMG, it’s hard.
No snark to either client here — it’s always this hard. But different clients struggle in different ways. If they have a clear set of products/services, they might struggle with defining the mission and purpose. Or if they’re clear on the mission, they may find it impossible to work out what makes them different.
The sensemaking tools I’m using are:
- Card sorting: creating a set of cards to represent different chunks of information and then working through sorting them into all sorts of different combinations and categories to explore ways to organise the content.
- Domain/ecosystem mapping: creating a diagram to visualise all the different concepts I learnt about in discovery, group them, name them, and map the connections between them. This works really well for my brain, but I can see that some clients look at an artefact like this and die inside.
- Anatomy of brand messaging: this is somethingthat I drew up for a client a few years ago to try and make a really tangible set of guidelines for what elements a positioning statement, mission, values, etc should contain by reducing it to a list of core questions. I’m not 100% happy with it yet, but will make it into a new toolkit when I am.
Voice and tone
I’ve also been working on some brand voice guidelines. I haven’t got to do this for ages, and I love it. This has involved a lot of sensemaking (including card sorting, too). One thing I noticed is that I think deepening my content design practice over the last few years has made me better at brand voice. I feel like I’ve been able to articulate how to achieve the personality and tones with a lot more clarity and specificity. I want to go back and update all my writing on brand voice now.
A nice email
I got a really lovely email from someone I mentored a few years ago — my first official mentee. They’d been reflecting on how much they’d gotten out of the experience, which made me feel pretty great. (FYI, I have capacity for a couple of new coaching/mentoring clients from October onwards…)
New books
I picked up some new books:
- Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman (particularly excited for this one and its focus on imperfection)
- Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford
I also redownloaded the apps my local library offers for ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines and marvelled at all the amazing stuff on offer. Librarys are so great.
