I gave a short talk about web governance at iQ Content’s “lunchtime learning” session on 25 November in Dublin. Here’s a video of my presentation. Big thanks to Randall Snare for inviting me.

I’ve written an article for FUMSI magazine called “Seven things I’ve learnt about organizing a conference”, based on my experiences organizing Content Strategy Forum 2011:

The internet and the social web are revolutionising the events industry. It’s now possible to organise a conference for a relatively small group of people who are passionate about a topic, even if they’re scattered around the world. You don’t need a large advertising budget, the support of mainstream media, or an office full of staff – you just need a compelling story, a committed team, great speakers, a community that’s engaged with you via social media, some logistical savvy and a large dollop of courage.

Thanks to Martin Belam for encouraging me to write it.

If web and user experience agencies want to embrace content strategy, they need to change the way they sell their services, switching from a contractor model to a consulting model. Which means throwing away some unethical working practices. Let’s talk about scoping, selling, and project management.

Three ways to scope a project

Back in October 2010, Stacey King Gordon posted Content strategy and the project pricing dilemma to the content strategy Google group. She posed an insightful question which started a great discussion. Here’s an extract:

…[an agency I collaborate with] work hard to price the end-to-end design project based on assumptions — the client’s, theirs, and mine as the content strategist. However, as I dig in and do my work — content analysis, stakeholder interviews, brand research — the scope of the project inevitably grows. It’s very difficult to be accurate in what the final site will entail until the content strategy work has been done.

It’s worth reading the whole thread. I found this response from Karen McGrane particularly illuminating:

This is a common problem when you try to scope development—both copywriting and technology—without a clear understanding of what will be required. There are really only three options:

1. Only work with clients that will accept a 2-phased project (strategy/design + development)
2. Only deliver work within the bounds of the initial contract
3. Change order, change order, change order

We treat web design like accountancy

Karen’s three-way choice about how to scope projects provides a neat way to explain the changes I’ve noticed in the way UX-like services—web and interaction design, software development, content development, etc.—are bought and sold.

Option 1 implies a consultancy relationship: the client thinks that they need expert help to work out where they are, and where they need to go, before they can start implementation. This is strategy.

Options 2 and 3 are more like a vendor, solution provider, or contractor relationship: the client knows what they want, and they’re shopping around for someone who has the right experience and can agree on terms. This type of relationship is familiar and comfortable for organizations: it’s similar to the relationship they might have with standardized professional services firms like accountants, or software vendors, or even cleaning contractors. This is tactics.

Until recently, most organizations have managed to buy these types of services using options 2 and 3. Need a website redesign? Write a request for proposal (RFP) and send it to some agencies to get quotes. Agencies like selling in this way too. Why is that?

Fixed specs are attractive

Let’s start with the buyer. She works in an organizational silo: maybe it’s marketing, IT, product management, or corporate communications. Although she has organizational goals in mind when she decides to start a web initiative, she’s more focused on her silo’s goals. All of her budget comes from the silo, and her performance is measured based on that silo’s metrics, not on the higher-level goals of the business. From the client’s point of view, it’s much easier to buy a fixed-price, nailed-down contract.

Even if she has some doubts about what should be in the spec, it’s easier to get her manager to fund a clearly-articulated, conservative scope than an open-ended strategic exploration whose results are unknown, and which could easily open a can of worms. For example, it might suggest that the organization needs to change the way it operates in some way. My goodness, we might need to talk to the other departments! Our client wants a quiet life, and that’s scary stuff right there.

We could be forgiven for thinking, “those wretched clients! Why are they so short-sighted?” But that’s only half the story. Web professionals are scared of strategy, and we use the distraction sell to keep projects within our comfort zones. We’re comfortable using option 2, and option 3 is even better, because it allows us to blame those pesky clients for all the faulty assumptions in the original contract. There’s nothing the lizard brain likes better than setting ourselves up for failure.

But fixed specs are dangerous

So what’s wrong with fixed specs? Let’s start with economics. Do you ever see web designers complaining on twitter about crappy RFPs, and how difficult it is to compete on price with the 3000 other web design shops who claim to be able to do great work for peanuts? Have you ever come across a client who decided to outsource their work to a contractor thousands of miles away in a low-cost location? Or have you ever heard copywriters complaining that companies just don’t appreciate the true value of content?

If the spec really is nailed down, if the strategy work’s been done—that is, if the client truly knows what they need—the actual implementation work is less valuable, more price-sensitive, and will eventually become commoditized. Someone else will do it for less, and probably to a good-enough standard. (Jared Spool calls this distinction hands vs. brains.) That’s great if you’re creating a factory-style contracting business in a low cost economy, but if you live in London or San Francisco, eventually you’ll have problems funding your latte and iPad habit.

Many web projects are sold in a murky bait-and-switch fashion, where the agency agrees to an unrealistic fixed spec written by the client, and then hopes that once the problems become obvious, the client will prefer to pay their way out of the mess rather than starting over with a new agency. You’ll recognize this practice from the technology industry, who call it lock-in. (They used to say that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. That isn’t true any more.)

I see the move towards content strategy as part of a slow recognition that this type of sales and project management has mostly been disastrous. Objectives aren’t met, nobody plans for content governance, and projects focus on short-term pizazz instead of achieving business objectives in a sustainable way.

Client: “We want content strategy, but we need to know what it looks like first”

Let’s return to Stacey’s question. We’re competing for a client project, and we want to include a content strategy piece, because we know it’s the right thing to do for the success of the project—and it will also differentiate our proposal. But we’re worried that the client won’t buy a two-phase project, because they want to compare our proposal with all the others. And the RFP has a set budget and timeline.

The tempting option (which Stacey explains in the thread) is to add a line item for “content strategy”, make some assumptions about the outcome of that process, and then bake those assumptions into a single-phase proposal that includes implementation (and presumably a commitment to a fixed delivery date.)

Here’s the problem: if these assumptions are correct, the client isn’t ready for content strategy. They’re not ready to acknowledge a problem that’s bigger than a silo or a delivery channel, or to ask consultants to help them with strategy. It’s much easier to say, “we need technical help with development, design, and web writing” than to say “we need strategic advice, web therapy, and inter-department facilitation.” Crucially, the person buying probably isn’t ready to become an agent of change in their organization. Change hurts, and actively advocating for it scares the hell out of people.

No content strategy? That’s a show-stopper

When a client asks an agency to build a website, and admits to not having a content strategy, that’s a show-stopper. You can’t just graft strategy onto the project and cross your fingers.

Just because a client says they want content strategy, it doesn’t mean that they understand what that actually entails, or that they’re ready to start changing the organization. The best we can do is to explain the problem as clearly as we can, talk about the pain and suffering that will continue to occur if it isn’t addressed, and politely decline work when clients don’t appreciate the value of a strategic approach. They’ll be back, in time.

Good news for content strategy advocates

This is great news for those of us who are tying to raise our game, to leave our comfort zones, and to get our practice to a place where it sustainably serves both business objectives and user needs. (Note: if you’re already there, congrats! Many of us aren’t.)

The sales methods and working practices of many existing agencies (and internal teams too) are threatened by the growing realization among clients that their web initiatives aren’t effective. And the two-stage scoping model is key to understanding this shift. Can traditional agencies hack it?

The skills that a web professional needs are changing: it’s less about design chops, technical prowess, web writing skills–all essential of course, but also widely and cheaply available. The skills that set true web professionals apart are interpersonal skills like facilitation, counseling, advocacy, diplomacy, pragmatism, and patience. And the courage to be an agent of change.

In practice it will take a long time for client-side advocates to lead their organizations into the change management programs they actually need to start to get a hold of their content and web problems. But it’s starting to happen. And those of us who work as consultants should take an active role in the process, by refusing to participate in unethical selling practices.

Good news for web professionals: we’ve hit the big time. There’s nobody worth listening to who still thinks that the rise of the internet is a passing fad, that the web is just another channel, or that its influence on our companies, governments, and social lives isn’t revolutionary.

But our organizations are still set up like none of that has happened. Pre-web processes, job descriptions, culture, attitudes—corporate denial. It’s 1994 all over again.

The impending crisis

Here’s the problem. The disconnection between the way organizations operate and the web’s revolutionary changes is getting so big that it’s causing a crisis. Most organizations still don’t have the basics of web strategy, governance, execution, and measurement covered. Ten years ago that was a competitive disadvantage. Today it’s a set of chronic risks: strategic, financial, regulatory, and legal.

Which is where you come in.

Web governance is nobody’s job, so make it yours

Today, web professionals face a stark choice.

We can keep our heads down while watching this slow-motion train crash from the comfort of our official job descriptions, perhaps taking some perverse pleasure in the fact that we told people this would happen, and they ignored us. This is the way to make ourselves replaceable, outsource-able, fireable—not to mention depressed. The best possible outcome is that someone else decides to take the lead, but a long, painful decline is more likely. This route doesn’t require any courage, but it’s reckless all the same. As Christine Pierpoint puts it, “be careful of what you wish for”.

The alternative is to acknowledge that establishing web governance is nobody’s job, and instead of whining about it, make it our own. That means stepping outside of our comfort zones and job descriptions, speaking up against the status quo, and leading. Scary stuff.

What Seth Godin taught me about web governance

If that makes you think it might be time to leave the web profession and transition to something safer, stay with me for a moment. This problem isn’t exclusive to our profession.

In his masterpiece Linchpin, Seth Godin describes the effect of the end of the industrial era on our organizations:

We have gone from two teams (management and labour) to a third team, the linchpins.

Godin’s linchpin is an indispensable person: an artist, someone who exerts emotional labour to overcome the resistance, who challenges the status quo, who pursues human connection, who makes change by leading and shipping.

We’re living through a period of massive cultural change, and the rise of the web is at the center of it. Organizations need linchpins in order to survive, because they need to change how they operate to fit the realities of the changing world. And when it comes to the web, most organizations have been trying to ignore change for so long that they’re suffering from a serious case of denial.

So if you’re convinced by Godin–and you should be, he makes a strong case–it’s not just web people who face a stark choice. Every professional in the Western world is in a similar situation: if you don’t lead your organization by becoming an agent of change, you’ll become a replaceable cog.

How to talk so management will listen

So what does being a linchpin have to do with web governance, and how can we apply it in practice? Stop whining and start leading.

We’ve all done it: whining about how difficult it is to do our jobs, how nobody appreciates us, how colleagues don’t understand what we do, how our jobs are made impossible by organizational culture. It’s almost standard practice for web professionals. The problem is, whining is the perfect way to get management to write off our concerns as the obsessive-compulsive ranting of geeks with poor interpersonal skills and no understanding of business objectives. We can do better.

When we whine and complain, we’re effectively asking others to give us permission to make the changes we need to do our jobs properly. That permission will never come.

The only way out is to stop waiting for permission, and to start leading. This isn’t technically complex, but it takes courage: the willingness to leave our comfort zones, face our own fear of confronting the status quo, and overcome our resistance to shipping. It also takes a lot of messy interpersonal work: advocacy, facilitation, diplomacy, pragmatism, and patience. This is what Godin calls “emotional labour”. Like it or not, these are the key skills of the modern web professional.

If we want to talk so management will listen, we need to sell to their pain. What risks is the organization taking by ignoring web governance problems? What opportunities is it missing? How could overcoming the challenges we’re facing as web professionals improve the organization’s future prospects, or its competitiveness?

Get out of your comfort zone: ship web governance

This is a time of huge opportunity for web professionals. But if you want to embrace it, you need to leave your comfort zone and start shipping. Become a linchpin, an agent of change, and a web governance advocate. Your organization needs you.

Note: For a longer take on web governance, check out my recent article in A List Apart.

I’ve written an article for A List Apart magazine called “Web Governance: Becoming an Agent of Change”:

The web’s hit the big time in a way few of us imagined possible. So as people who make websites, you’d think we’d be celebrating our repeated successes in designing amazing user experiences, as the organizations we work for become increasingly successful. But many of us have noticed a problem in our work: the user experiences we deliver don’t meet our expectations. Here’s the problem: organizations are the context for our work, and when it comes to the web, organizations are broken.

It’s two weeks since the end of Confab: the Content Strategy Conference, hosted in Minneapolis by the delightful Brain Traffic, but I’m still reeling. It was that good. If you haven’t read some of the 5 billion live-blog posts, recaps, and session notes, you’ll want to do that now. And if you didn’t hear that we toured Fire Station 11 during a tornado warning on Tuesday evening, well, I have evidence.

So what’s the big deal, you ask? Surely the cake-related sugar high has worn off?

First, there’s something magical about seeing so many twitter avatars transformed into real live human beings, all at once. Sure, CS Forum 10 in Paris had some of that, but this was more than twice the size. Second, Confab was the best organized conference I’ve ever attended, thanks to the amazing work of Erik Westra, Clinton Forry, Lauren Cramer, Sean Tubridy, and Kristina Halvorson—who forced the others to take the stage for applause during her keynote. The millions of humorous, practical, cake-and-bourbon-related, or just plain thoughtful touches made us feel welcome and cared for in way I’ve never experienced before. But wait, there’s more.

From push-back to collaborative problem-solving

What actually blew me away was the attendees. Hundreds of people from a huge range of backgrounds—writing, editing, web development, design, technology, marketing, sales—all there either to find out what the content strategy conversation is about, or to learn from others about how to start making change in their organizations. If you’ve read the write-ups, you’ll see a “this isn’t rocket-science” theme: the speakers weren’t revealing new and revolutionary techniques, magic technologies, or simple 7-step programs to content nirvana. As James Callan put it:

Here’s something that surprised me: I was inspired by all of the presenters, but I was not awed by them. (Not all of them all the time, anyway.) I came away from several sessions realizing that I know stuff like that, and I could probably work on doing a better job of sharing that knowledge. (Could? Should.)

This is the first content strategy conference I’ve attended where the attendees didn’t push back against the speakers—they didn’t need to be convinced that our organizations’ content problems are strategic, or that the only way to fix them is to become agents of change. Instead of saying, “no, this couldn’t work for me”, or “I need a rock-solid case study to guarantee my business case”, people were digging into the messy reality of ways they could advocate for content strategy, collaborate with their colleagues, and start to turn the oil tanker around.

My other favorite write-up was Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s “On Confab, Conflict, and Collaboration”:

…But elbows are a short-term game plan. Once you’ve established a bit of voice, it’s time for ears to take over – time to start listening to and collaborating with those people we fought so hard to let us in in the first place.

Once we’ve convinced our stakeholders that a lack of content strategy is a problem, that content is a critical business asset, that we can’t go on like this without taking crazy risks—they’ll ask us what to do about it. And suddenly we’re in the change management business. In their presentations, both Ian Alexander and Karen McGrane called out change management as the real meat of content strategy.

It’s difficult, messy work, and it goes against both our society’s cultural norms and our personal habits as nerds—but ain’t nobody going to make those changes if we don’t. Confab showed me that we have a community of people who are spending their time sharing and learning from each other about how to change their organizations so that they can start to get hold of the overwhelming problems associated with content strategy, web strategy, and web governance.

That’s amazing. What I learned at Confab is that all of us can and should do more to broaden the conversation, involve more people, start to get this change train moving. Brain Traffic and others have led the way: now it’s your turn. Start a meetup, host a work lunch, write a blog post, submit a talk to a conference.

Wrapping up Confab in London

If you can get to London on Tuesday 7 June, a few of us are putting on a special event to do just that, and I’d love it if you could join us. It’s called “Wrapping up Confab, unwrapping CS Forum”:

In a series of lightning-style talks of 5 minutes each (with plenty of pauses for drinks), eight speakers (including two international guests) will fill you in on what they learned at Confab, the groundbreaking U.S. content strategy conference, earlier this month—followed by a sneak peek of what’s to come this September at CS Forum 11 in London.

Hosted in the stunning Mermaid Centre, join us to learn, talk, socialise, discuss, network, pow-wow, postulate and surmise. And did we mention it’s free?

Tickets are free but limited, so get yours while they’re still available.

Come to Content Strategy Forum London

And consider coming to Content Strategy Forum London, 5-7 September. We’re featuring 39 speakers from 11 countries including Norway, Australia, Finland, South Africa, Ireland and the UK, and our headliners are the incomparable Gerry McGovern and Karen McGrane. Attendees have registered from across Europe, and as far away as the USA, Canada, South Africa, and Australia.

Early bird pricing ends on 3 June, which is just over a week away, so register now to get the best rates. See you there!

I was invited to speak about content strategy at the Association of Publishing Agencies “Digital Breakfast” event, held at Channel 4 television in London on 5 April. The APA is a professional association for the customer publishing industry. Here’s a video of my talk, “What Web Content Strategy Means for Publishers”.

What Web Content Strategy Means for Publishers from Jonathan Kahn on Vimeo.

I’ve written a guest post on the Confab blog:

The same problem keeps cropping up in web, marketing, and communications teams. You’re working on a project. Maybe it’s a time-limited campaign, a section of a website, or a specific delivery channel like email or social media. You know the project is unlikely to achieve its objectives because of problems with strategy, governance, execution, or measurement. But that higher-level stuff is outside your official scope. What can you do about it?

The call for speakers for the Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London is now open. You should submit a talk.

After the resounding success of CS Forum 2010 in Paris, we’re bringing this year’s conference to London, with a bigger venue, 3 days of presentations (single-track, multi-track, and workshop days), and three awesome parties. Together London (my company) is organizing this year, joined by the super-talented Randall Snare and Destry Wion.

Why you should submit

We’re trying to make the conference as inclusive as possible. Help us to achieve that by submitting a talk or a workshop, and encouraging your friends and colleagues to do the same. Even if you’ve never presented before, give it a shot: there are many 20-minute slots in break-out rooms, and we’ve laid out topics to help you decide what to talk about. As Erin Kissane tweeted, how can you resist?

The call closes on 4 March, so start thinking now! I can’t wait to welcome you to London in September.

Here’s a video of my 5-minute lightning UX presentation on why content strategy is a big deal for user experience professionals.

Transcript

The video is captioned, and here’s the transcript:

My name’s Jonathan Kahn. I’d like to talk about why content strategy is a big deal for user experience professionals.

So content strategy, you’ve heard about it, right? Everyone’s talking about it, have you got a content strategy? So, why is it so hot? It’s been around for as long as the web’s been around, it’s not really anything new, it’s part of user experience. Why the big deal? So I think the reason it’s such a big deal is we’ve been talking for a long time about stuff like information architecture, usability, UX, research, all this different stuff. They’re disciplines that people have grown and talked about for ages.

If you think about content and content strategy, it hasn’t really happened. We’ve only just recently been starting to talk about it, to write books about it, to have conferences about it. So I think we’ve been ignoring content and all of its complexities and hoping that it will go away, and that’s kinda caused a bit of a crisis.

So I think content strategy is the moment when you realise that you need to do some more thinking. If you think about all the complexities associated with planning and creating and governing and editing content, they raise all these questions that most organisations aren’t really very well placed to answer.

So think about the organisation you’re working with as a UX professional. They need to cover 4 components in order to really have a content strategy and be able to deal with content properly. And two of them concern content itself, which are substance, which is things like a messaging architecture, what are our key messages, and style guides, and structure which talks about the way that people navigate that stuff, classifications, you know, classic IA stuff. And then people components which include workflow, in real life which human beings are going to do what when, with all the content, and governance, which talks about decision-making processes, how do we set policies, how do we have ownership, standards, that type of thing. And the problem that we have as people who come from the IA background, speaking for myself, is that we’ve really focused on the structure piece only, and ignored all the other ones, which makes a lot of what we do kind of like a fantasy that may never actually get implemented.

So I think content strategy is an appropriate context to discuss some deeper business issues that are broader than any particular product or project that you’re working on right now, it’s an appropriate place to talk about bigger stuff. It doesn’t necessarily have all the answers, you can’t kinda go to the book and say right, content strategy, what’s the answer to this problem. But it think it has some really good questions, and that’s how we should think of it, it’s a way in, some things it’s OK to ask that come raise some bigger stuff. I think as UX designers, we are helping our organisations move through a time of great change, right, you know, the web revolution like the industrial revolution. And we’re all trying to help our clients or organisations deal with some big scary words, like these. Product strategy, corporate governance, metrics, or ethics. And I think content touches all of these things, so we can talk about these things in the context of content. So just to take ethics for an example.

What type of persuasion techniques are we using as an organisation, you know, are we straightforward with people, are we upfront, are we transparent, or do we use unethical marketing tricks for example, like Harry’s documented, and I know he’s going to talk more about that later, the dark patterns like this. Everyone in this room would like our organisations to not do any of this stuff, and I think content strategy is a great way to talk about why we need to have an ethical stance, and what bad things will happen if we do unethical things.

So if you think about your design context you might think of an oil tanker heading the wrong way, as if the web never happened. And in that context how on earth can we change some of the things I’ve been talking about, like how the organisation deals with content. I think the answer is, we have to become content strategy advocates, that’s what I’m asking you to do today, become an advocate. Which means you’re the person who’s bringing up these issues, and saying this is a problem, we need to deal with this problem. So the way to do that is to become, sorry, to thrash early. If you can get everyone in the room as early as possible and bring this up, on whatever level you can, and say, this is a problem, are we dealing with this, if not let’s create a plan to deal with it. I think that’s the way to start to turn that oil tanker around, because it can be done, it just takes a long time. So if you’d to learn more about content strategy I have a shameless plug for you this evening, which is I’m helping to organise a conference here in London in September about content strategy, keynoted by Gerry McGovern and Karen McGrane, which will be really good so I hope to see you there. And that’s why I think content strategy is a big deal for UX professionals. Thank you.