We need to start interacting like our customers want to interact

With all the talk about Conway's Law and #teamtopologies, we seem to forget that Conway's Law is the opposite of a much more obvious phenomenon. Conway says that groups of people will make things that resemble their own social patterns. More obvious is that our social patterns are determined by the spaces we interact within and the things we use to interact. Our products not only reflect our interaction but determine how our customers interact. This means that if we want to make products that our customers want, we need to know how our customers want to interact using our products. Then we need to start interacting in the same way ourselves.

Human social patterns are influenced by spaces and objects

This is the really obvious phenomenon. Humans can only interact with one another in ways afforded by the spaces we inhabit. If you live in a cave, you interact with your cave-mates. We make friends with those in the same classroom at school. A room set up with rows of seats affords a different kind of social interaction to a room with a circle of chairs. Tools made agriculture and villages possible. The wheel and printing press transformed who could interact with whom. Factories made the nuclear family. And so on.

It's not just at such a large scale that the same applies. Every object in a social moment influences the way we interact with each other. Each word you are reading right now is causing some kind of social impulse in you. You might be drawn to me, repulsed or moved to respond to me or comment to everyone. People by products to be liked and so on.

Spaces and objects are influenced by human social patterns

Conway's law refers to the same effect in reverse. It says:

[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

If two groups of people who largely stick to themselves build a thing, then that thing will consist of two entities that largely cohere internally but not with each other. Architecting teams and how they interact is architecting your product. This has been proven over and again and is the basis for the awesome book Team Topologies which provides useful insights and approaches for achieving it.

It's homomorphism all the way down

With this homomorphism (tendency to be of a similar shape) working bidirectionally between people and things, it must flow along value chains:

people -> things -> people -> things -> people -> things -> people

A social ethnography approach to customer empathy

This means that if the people at the extreme left want to make things for end-users at the extreme right, they need to figure out how how those end users want to interact with each other and start interacting the same way ourselves.

Empathising with our customers isn't enough. We need to be participant observers and step into their shoes, see through their eyes, relate like them, live like them like method actors or social ethnographers but in our teams and organisations in each moment.

Changing the World starts with changing ourselves –?especially in tech

For those of us in tech, this presents a particular challenge to be conscious of how we influence the way people interact in the World. Tech is having a profound influence on the World. If we bicker and blame, even right in the bowels of tech, we will be creating a World where people bicker and blame. If we want a World where people get on together, even when it's hard, then we better find ways to get on together, even when it's hard, ourselves.

And why wouldn't we cos we'd get more done and have more fun that way, anyway.