Same old problems, different conditions

I'm excited to get back to conference speaking after a break last year. I'm working on a new talk and workshop outline and I'm in the research phase - reading articles, listening to podcasts and watching other talks. All of these insights have been going around my head as I've been trying to build out my narrative.

It was only after I revisited a talk I delivered almost 10 years ago where I touched on themes of research democratisation, creating a customer centric culture, silos of insight and connecting the dots, I was struck by a realisation:

As researchers and UX professionals, we’re STILL struggling with the same problems.

None of this is new. What has changed is the environment. The conditions we're working in have changed. In particular the market has changed and so we find ourselves with more organisational constraints. So how do we respond to this? What's the solution?

I think it comes back to my article on 'Getting Started with Research Ops'. In this post, I talk about how we need to start with the pillars on the left (Environment, Scope, People and Organisational Context) to inform what we do as these pillars are all about how the research gets done. At the end I talk about how we need to continuously evolve our practice. As these are the pillars on the left - that have changed the most, we need to go back and revisit our Team Strategy and evolve our practice.

This is a good starting point but as to how we do this, that's what I'm thinking about! I'm hoping to be able to share some early thoughts on this soon.