Enterprise UX — Birds of a Feather Flock Together

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” ~Henry Ford

These are some reflections back on my professional experience attempting to bring a positive social influence to an enterprise organization. When working at a company and trying to solve an issue, bringing people together from different disciplines, various cross-functional teams usually leads to more innovative solutions when those individuals can safely contribute their perspectives.

A metaphor I’ve used several times to describe a model for harmonization with the flexibility to be nimble, is birds in a flying V formation. Scientists continue to study exactly how birds can achieve this synchronized rhythm. Just as the birds will fly in a V formation, they stay as a harmonized unit adjusting their course of direction as needed. Likewise, as designs evolve and human expectations evolve, we must be able to adapt to changing business needs but remain as a collective unit. In a 2014 US TODAY article “Why birds fly in a V-formation”, Kenny Breuer, a professor of engineering and ecology at Brown University is quoted “Once again remind us that animals are much more complicated … than we often give them credit for. They’re reacting in very sophisticated ways to maintain these V formations.”

When new concepts and trends emerge, we can turn to embrace those, but we would turn while maintaining our V formation. Within the same US TODAY article, Steven Portugal, of the Britain’s Royal Veterinary College, states “It’s amazing how quickly they can respond to any changes (by) the bird in front.” Creating technology is a sophisticated process, however just as birds can maintain these V formations while being dynamic to respond to changes. One would think humans can achieve this as well. I believe people can, if they put forth the effort.

As I’ve mentioned in other articles focused on Agile, this nimble philosophy is complimentary to the agile & scrum methodology. From a business efficiency perspective, this encourages individuals to work together, across teams when trying to problem solve. Furthermore, an indirect goal is to reduce redundancy especially if more than one team within the same company is trying to address very similar tasks. The birds in the flying V formation can minimize energy use, by catching the uplifting eddies of the bird ahead of them.

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