David Connis: Systems Thinking for Content Designers – Episode 196

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A crucial skill for any content practitioner is the ability to sort out complex work environments and thrive within them.

David Connis shows how a systems thinking mindset can help you cope with the upheaval of AI, the messy realities of content work, and other complex design challenges.

He teaches a course on systems thinking for content designers but shows how any content or design practitioner can benefit from a systematic approach to their work.

We talked about:

• his role as as a lead content designer on the design systems team at OutSystems
• how he discovered his innate focus on systems thinking in a Netflix documentary about chefs
• how a brief stint as a UX developer and his holistic approach to design work revealed the benefits of systems thinking
• the role of systems thinking in his growth and development as a content leader
• his observation that “work is weird”
• his approach to remote working and management
• the crucial role of facilitation in remote work
• how his personal growth and professional growth intersect
• the importance of being intentional in your approach to work and leadership
• his observation that “everything you do influences everything you do”
• how he links words and concepts and objects in his work and how they help digital products tell their story to the user
• his advice to systems thinking course at the UX Content Collective

Dave’s bio

During a brief stint as a junior UX developer, Dave found that he loved the UX part more than the development part, so he took a job as a technical writer. From there, he discovered content design. Now, he’s a Lead Content Designer at OutSystems.

Connect with Dave online

• LinkedIn
• Instagram

Systems thinking resources

• Systems Thinking for UX Content workshop at UX Content Collective
• Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows
• Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, Sheryl Cababa (interview)
• Systems Thinking for a Better World, Peter Senge

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 196. As everyone tries to cope with onslaught of AI and as content practitioners try to develop the right combination of strategy, design, and people skills, Dave Connis says we can all benefit from a systems thinking mindset. Whether you’re connecting the words and concepts and objects in digital products or connecting the people who are building the product experience, a holistic view of your work can help everyone involved understand the ecosystem you share.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Yeah. Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 196 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really delighted today to welcome to the show, Dave Connis. Dave is lead content designer at OutSystems. I believe you’re based in Portugal, but you’re in the US, right, Dave?

Dave:
Yes, that is accurate. Yep.

Larry:
Tell folks a little bit more about…

Dave:
There is an office in Boston, so it’s kind of US-ey, but it’s mainly Portugal.

Larry:
Nice. And as a lead content designer there, you do… Well, tell me a little bit about your role there, what kind of stuff you’re working on and…

Dave:
Yeah, so I am on the design system team. So we’re working on all sorts of patterns and lots of systems thinking, lots of components, design tokens. We’re in the middle of redoing design tokens right now. I’m doing a lot of content pattern things, lots of content strategy, working with a bunch of cross-functional teams to get stuff done that is reusable and scalable and all the nice other cool, buzzy words that we like to talk about all the time. So it’s always something different, always something new, and it’s always a big challenge, so it’s good time.

Larry:
Well, that’s interesting. So I’m really curious now because I’ve worked on a few design systems and talked to a lot of people who do that. Well, just for folks who don’t know, OutSystems does kind of like low-code development stuff, right, for-

Dave:
Yeah. Yep. It’s a low-code app platform that you can basically just create your own app. It’s typically used in specific industries, so like HR apps, banking apps is some of our bigger sectors. And you just bring your own data, so BYOD. And you’ll hook it up to OutSystems, configure a bunch of stuff, and then build an app. It sounds really easy, but it’s, of course, not. So.

Dave:
It’s a 20-year company, so it’s been around for a hot minute, and that also provides a lot of challenges from a content perspective. I mean, even from a design perspective and from all the perspectives, technical, design, because it’s just there’s a lot of legacy stuff. So you’ve got all the technical constraints that you have to deal with when you’re dealing with legacy stuff.

Larry:
Yeah. Well, I know a big part of your job, like you mentioned, you’re working on the design system, but I know you have a general interest in systems stuff in general and systems thinking. Did that grow out of your work in design systems or is that just sort of a hard-wiring that you’re gifted with?

Dave:
Oh, that is, I’m pretty sure, a hard-wiring and I just didn’t know. When you start off in all of this, you don’t know that design systems are a thing. So when I first started in tech, I was thinking that way and I just didn’t have the language for it. So I just remember always trying to push like, “Hey, how do we do this component in the same way over and over again? Is there a way that we can do this consistently?” I was always just trying to ask those questions even when I was just an individual contributor on a team. And it wasn’t until, really, OutSystems that my manager, Sandra, was like, “Hey, I actually think that this is a thing for you and maybe you should do that.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, okay, let’s try it.” And I’ve been in love ever since. So it’s where my brain is. I was actually watching Chef’s Table. Have you seen Chef’s Table on that-

Larry:
I don’t know that show. Yeah.

Dave:
It just interviews different chefs and what they’re about and some stories that they have and just how they approach food. And there’s this guy, I forget his name, I think it’s Dan-something, but he was talking about the ecology of food and how he was like, you got to do the farm. And when you’re in a farm, you have to have goats or you have to have cows, but the cows need good grass, so in order to have good grass, you have to have good chickens. And then, in order to do good chickens, you have to have… And he just launched into this three-minute ecology of a farm and how that affected the restaurant. And the whole time, I’m sitting there just thinking, “This is systems thinking for chefs. This is so cool.” So I think my brain is hardwired because I notice it in Netflix documentary series about chefs.

Larry:
Interesting. Well, that’s sort of the good chefs. I don’t want to do some overwrought analogy to a kitchen and a design system, but the way you just described that, so is that sort of the foundation, I guess, of systems thinking? At least one of the ways I think about it is that ecological awareness of the environment you’re in. But also, for you, it sounds like there was also a professional development part of this of you realizing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you stitched that together? I’m assuming this took a couple of years from that realization that like, “Hey, I like doing this,” your boss saying that, and all of a sudden, here you are.

Dave:
Yep. I think I always had this feeling like if you just dive deeper and ask a question of why is this the way that it is, I think you eventually have to reckon with the relationships of things and the causality of things. And the further you go into the rabbit hole, the more you have questions about, because you can’t just look at a single thing, you have to look at the whole thing. And I think I naturally do that for better or for worse.

Dave:
I mentioned earlier, it took me a while to get the language of it. I remember, I worked at a place called Contrast Security for a while. And it was kind of like a watershed moment where I worked with this lady who was very systems-minded. And I learned a lot from her in the short time that I was there about just what are systems for at a tech company? How do you make them? How you enforce them? How do you point to them?

Dave:
And then, I think from there, I also just had this realization of like, oh, all of this stuff we see on a screen, it isn’t just magically appearing and doing stuff. Like when you press a button, it’s not like there’s just a magic fairy somewhere that is doing something. That button is happening to something.

Dave:
And then, I had a tiny bit of experience as a developer, as a UX developer. So I had this idea of data schemas in my head, and they finally kind of mashed together to form this idea that there’s a system happening. And once I understood that, I started looking for ways and vocabularies to explain it, and some of them were my own. And then, I started finding information architecture and for a hot minute content strategy and content modeling and all these other ways that people were trying to think about it and talk around it.

Dave:
Because the system as a whole, I think getting that correct and getting that down has been a time-tested problem. It’s just always a thing because companies, they innately have a system and they innately grow, and they innately grow beyond ways that you can control. So people are always trying to get it under control. So there’s been… What? … 75 years, 80 years of just new and fancy ways to try and put words to words and titles and job descriptions and all these different ways to try and do the same thing, and that’s just tell a unified story in a product.

Larry:
Interesting. Yeah, the way you just said that whole thing. Well, one thing I want to call out from that is you’re talking about your holistic approach to it, and then you mentioned this smorgasbord of practices of like IA, content strategy, content modeling, but which isn’t really a smorgasbord. To me, those are inextricably linked. How do you identify now? Do you go by, you call the content designer? That’s your official job title, is that how you identify or?

Dave:
It is at OutSystems. I don’t know. I think that’s the thing, I just don’t know anymore. What I know is that there’s a way that I see the world and there’s a way that I approach the product. And whatever that is, I think is the way that a lot of people should try. Even if it’s not their main jam, their main squeeze. I think getting some sort of perspective on it is key to just being a human-

Larry:
Yeah, exactly.

Dave:
… and being a good designer and just being a good person, being a good collaborator. It’s even just beyond, I think just making products. I think it’s soft skills too. It’s the whole, again, back to the system, it informs everything.

Larry:
Right. And people are an integral part of that. That’s a theme that comes up over and over again in the show. Yeah. And we talked earlier about the culmination of that instead of assuming some kind of leadership role, because in a leadership role now, but you weren’t always, but even before then, tell me a little bit about how the leadership part of your personal and professional growth happened and how that might relate to systems thinking.

Dave:
So when I started at OutSystems, there was a team of, let’s see, I want to say five other content designers, maybe six. And we were all on a content design team, so we were acting as a consultant model. When I started, we switched pretty fast to being embedded into teams.

Dave:
But at the time, I was on a one-on-one with my manager, and I was talking about something, an issue that I was having, I’m trying to remember what it was, kind of managing up. And he said, “Well, you’re the most senior person on there, so I think you just kind of have to take it and go tell people what you need and what you want.” And in that moment, I was like, “Oh, yeah, I guess that’s true. I am the most senior person on here.” And at that point, I realized, oh, it’s not that I’m just here and offering my skills as a – whatever I am – content, word person, friend, but I also have this other stuff that I can offer.

Dave:
So from that moment on, I think I tried to lean into that development side of myself because I hadn’t realized that at all that I could do anything other than that other than just the word side. And OutSystems is really good at giving you the chance to do stuff. So if you say, I want to study quantum physics and enact that in the product, they’ll be like, “All right, weird, but let’s figure out how to do this.” So I think I’ve had a lot of support from OutSystems to kind of figure out what that looks like for me and also have chances to give that.

Dave:
So it’s been very intentional and it’s taken time, so it didn’t just randomly happen. And I think I’m constantly trying to figure out what are the parts of me that are not just random work parts, but are just parts of me that I have to offer that maybe are just different in other people, and trying to think of that across the board as well. There’s a guy who I worked with for a year or so, and I didn’t know tons about him, but I took on a new project, knew nothing about it, and he was kind of my buddy and he was such a good teacher, he was so calm, he was so patient.

Dave:
At the end of this whole thing, it was about a month long thing, and I was like, “Dude, you’re a great teacher. That is an asset to OutSystems, and I don’t think I would’ve known that if I hadn’t have done this with you. So how do we call that out in you, this random soft skill that is just you? It’s not people, it’s just you. So how do we call that out and bring that out of you so that we can all enjoy this and you can feel like you’re offering something that’s unique to you?” I think that’s a huge thing that I would love to see leaders do more is just pay attention to the people around them.

Larry:
That sounds like a core leadership competency that, I mean, everybody drawing out the best, they are figuring out the best in people and then drawing it out and encouraging it, developing it and growing from there.

Larry:
And again, back to the systems thinking around that, because as you were talking just now, I couldn’t help but think about, it’s kind of like it’s your role in that system, that individual, that kind of teasing out those things that you’re good at, identifying the things that are good in the people around you.

Dave:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Larry:
As you were talking, I was picturing this kind of little rippling out network kind of thing. Is that-

Dave:
Yeah. Yes. Yep. And I think that’s what people do in companies, right? You are a part of a culture, you are a part of people’s days. And people are coming to work with this whole other life that is not work. And I think it’s really easy to just see people as work people, and I think you have to kind of work against that, but also work with that. It’s really weird. It’s complicated. Work is weird.

Larry:
That’s right. Yeah, you think about a few hundred years and none of us had jobs remotely-

Dave:
Right.

Larry:
… anything like this. A miracle we’re getting anything done at all.

Dave:
And then, you add the remote layer and you just get this whole other thing going on, yeah, it makes soft skills that much harder.

Larry:
That’s a really interesting point. And we’ve all had that applied in to a ridiculous extent in the pandemic. And subsequently, it seems like even though the big return to office push, there’s still a huge amount of virtual employment out there. How does that… Because you’re pretty remote. I mean, you’re not in Boston you’re out down in Georgia and there’s a lot of colleagues in Portugal. What are some of the keys to doing systems work in a virtual distributed collaborative environment like that?

Dave:
A whiteboard. So a digital whiteboard. So either Miro trying to get some FigJam going on, and basically, just good questions and preparation. I try not to show up to a meeting empty-handed. I try to start without a blank page. I feel like specifically with remote, starting with a blank page, it’s just incredibly difficult, so I try to have some sort of thing that we can go off, even if I know it’s completely wrong. Sometimes that’s even more helpful is to have something that’s completely wrong because people are engaging it more. I think just having preparation and having thoughts and having a good way to get people going because I think the cold start, you don’t have the energy of being together, so the cold start feels a lot more stark.

Dave:
So I think facilitation is massive for remote work. You have to be a good facilitator in order to get work done, and you have to be a good summarizer and a good active listener because you have the one call and then you have to make sure that you have your answers in the call. I guess you could say the same thing about meetings, but you could just swing by somebody’s desk. And I guess you could say the same thing about Slack, but you have to get habits of efficiency.

Dave:
And the danger with that is you start to lose out on the people aspect because then everything’s about efficiency. So you have to have this balance of facilitation as efficiency and facilitation as just relationship. And it’s really difficult to know when to do what, especially with meeting tiredness, because if you have 80 meetings and you’re just like, “Well, I don’t even feel like talking now.”

Larry:
I won’t name names, but I worked at a place where I would go eight hours back to back to back to back in meetings, and that was hard to reflect in that environment for sure.

Larry:
But as you talk about facilitation and leadership and how you pull that together, even though you were called to the systems thinking part of it, the way you described facilitation sounded like that was just like it came naturally to you as well, even more naturally to you. But have you thought about like in both of those instances, have you teased out like, not like a three-point plan, but like concepts or ideas that have helped people? Have you ever helped people, I guess, become better facilitator, better leader, better systems’ thinker?

Dave:
I’ve done the systems thinking side and the facilitation side. I think I’m still putting my finger on what matters and how to do that. I think I want to be a better facilitator and see the need for that. And I’ve actually thought about a lot this year and next year, that’s what I want to learn, how to facilitate and just questions.

Dave:
I think a lot of what I have now is it was a group of guys that just got together and did kind of like a counseling one-on-one course together. And we all learned about, basically, facilitation and active listening and all of these things like listening to people’s words, paying attention to what they called emotional buzzwords, and then asking questions of digging into things.

Dave:
I think that has impacted a lot of how I approach both work and relationship because it gives me a framework to go off of of like, okay, this person just said that this “couldn’t happen.” Couldn’t is a really intense emotional word. Outside of like, “Yeah, we might not be able to do that,” couldn’t seems very strong. So what can I tease out of this couldn’t? Where are they coming from? What’s the question behind the question? What’s the idea behind the idea? What do you actually want to say?

Dave:
And giving space for that to happen has been in my personal life for a good 10, wow, maybe 14 years now. So that’s just a skill that I have practiced because I have other guys that I am practicing it with because I still meet with two of them. Two of them are my best friends now, and we still do that to each other all the time. So yeah, in a work world, I’m not entirely sure.

Larry:
Yeah, but that’s a really interesting intersection of personal growth and professional growth-

Dave:
Yeah, absolutely.

Larry:
… the capabilities you’re developing there. And that’s sort of like you talked when we were talking before the podcast about just personal growth as a thing, and I was like, “How am I even going to work that in a professional podcast?” And there it is. It makes perfect sense.

Dave:
There it is. It’s a whole system. I have been thinking about this. Everything you do influences everything you do. Again, if you pull back to the system level, why? Well, because you’re a whole being and you’re bringing that being to work, and then that person who is at work is also learning things that is then going back into normal life, and everything is talking to each other.

Dave:
And even if you’re intentional about looking at what those things are, then you can actually be intentional about naming them and saying like, Oh, this little bit that I have experienced in work is also something that I can bring to my life and practice, this little bit in my life is actually something I can also bring to work and practice.” And you just continue. If you’re actually paying attention and naming those things and writing them out or whatever you need to do, you start to be able to get better at those things and develop those things.

Dave:
I’m kind of a gym nerd too, so there’s this big saying that you don’t know if you’re progressing if you don’t track it. So I’m not saying you have to track everything and become a data guy or girl, but you have to be able to see it. And the paying attention and the being curious about it is one of the bigger things that I think is a lot of people just say, “Well, that’s my work, that’s my life, and maybe there’s things,” but I don’t know.

Larry:
Yeah, no, you’re reminding me that the gym metrics that you have about measuring your progress, you can do analogous things at work. You also reminded me, I read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, like 20 years ago. And one of the things he talked about in there is the myth of work-life balance. And one of his points is it all has to get done. So there’s something analogous in the personal and professional growth kind of overlapping.

Larry:
But yeah, I want to circle back, something you just said, this might seem like a tangent, but I think it might be related. We talked way before, months ago, you had made this observation of how concepts and digital objects are related and connected. I can’t remember the context of that conversation, but that just kind of came back. And like I said, this might be a stretch.

Dave:
Yes. I mean, it’s connected in the sense that everything’s a system and everything relates to each other. So yeah, this is coming out of a lot of the thinking that I’ve done to try and figure out how do words and concepts and objects from the digital standpoint work together? Because there’s been a lot of talk. So you have your UX idea where it’s about… Or even if you go back for that object-oriented programming where you have these objects, these things that you are interacting with within the digital system, but then you have the words that are representing those things.

Dave:
But words aren’t just representing the objects, they’re representing other things too. What is the other things? Well, we have to have a system for how we deal with concepts because a concept can be represented by anything. So all of that came out of this workshop I developed in collaboration with UX content collective called Systems Thinking for Content Designers.

Dave:
So the idea is that in your products you have words that are representing a concept, but those words also might represent a digital object, and they can be the same thing. So like think of a bird. So there’s an Audubon app, which is like a bird tracking app. In that app, the whole thing would be about bird sighting, so you could say, “Well, you have three bird seen today.” Bird seen, the scene is likely some sort of action, you would say you saw a bird at a sighting.

Dave:
But that bird word is representing the concept of a thing with wings that flies in the real world, it’s like a literal thing. But in the case of this app, it’s representing a digital object that can be seen that has some code somewhere that is saying if seen, if added, increase the number of times seen. That time seen has to live somewhere within an app, and it’s likely this bird object. So in this case, the word bird is representing the concept, the thing that flies and the object, the digital data thing that is collecting all of these attributes that we would associate it with in an app somewhere. And those things are all working together to do something and that relationship is pretty tricky because it can get broken really easy in any direction.

Larry:
And that’s making me think of the role of word nerds in digital design. As a content designer, do you feel like you bring, I don’t want to diss any engineers or product people, but do you feel like we bring a little more to that game of labeling and figuring out concepts?

Dave:
I think so because we’re already thinking about it. That’s kind of where we’re already hanging out is with the word stuff. So I think it’s not that big of a stretch for us to say, “Oh, the words are doing stuff.” And we say it’s not just a few words when everybody says, “Hey, we just have a few words to edit.”

Dave:
So I think our brains are already there and we’re already attuned to what does it look like to have a clear story, product story, we’re already trying to do that. So the concepts and the digital objects, all of that stuff I think is, while I do believe that everybody should be thinking this way, I think that content designers have the skills and the upper hand here to fall into this and to do this well, because I think we’re already there, we just need the language for it.

Larry:
No, I’ve met some other… Well, they all come from content backgrounds, but I’ve met other digital designers who are good at that as well. Hey, Dave, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up close to time, but before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation or that you just want to make sure we share before we wrap up?

Dave:
Yeah. Check out Systems Thinking for Content Designers, the workshop. There’s also, I think as AI takes the world by storm, relationships and facilitation and structure and unified ecosystems, those are all, I believe, very unique to human endeavor. I think as the world goes on, we’re going to need more people who can hold all of those things together and to lead the charge in unifying systems and bringing people together that way.

Dave:
So I would say if for the next year you’re looking to learn some sort of competency, dig into systems thinking, it can be any flavor, it can be any person, it can be any book. There’s a lot of resources out there. And as content people, we have lots of different, go back to the beginning of the episode, we talked about information architecture, content modeling, they’re all different perspectives trying to get to the same thing, and that’s just a unified ecosystem. So dig into it. We need more people who are thinking on this unified scale, this big system, and I think it will serve you in the long run so much that-

Larry:
Nice. So I’ll send you a note after this conversation and ask for some resources, and I’ll dig up some myself because I’d love to include some resources about systems thinking for folks. Oh, and one very last thing, Dave, if folks want to connect or follow you online, what’s the best place to find you?

Dave:
Yep, I’m on LinkedIn. I think I am Dave Connis. I might be David Connis. Sorry, not content reuse. I’m one of the two. So find me there. And then, if you want non-work Dave, then you can go follow me on Instagram, I am DConnis there because inconsistency-

Larry:
Excellent.

Dave:
Embrace it. Embrace it.

Larry:
Honoring our humanity at every turn. Expression.

Dave:
That’s right.

Larry:
Well, thanks so much, Dave. Really enjoyable conversation.

Dave:
Yeah, thank you.