After many years of being Epic-curious, I finally was able to catch the EPIC conference when its orbit transited through Europe this year, via Amsterdam, for Epic2022. As I’ve written elsewhere, there was much to love about it. Not least the people. But the talks were good, too. My favourite was the closing keynote, by Melissa Gregg, senior principal engineer in user experience driving carbon reduction and green software strategy at Intel. Her work is new to me, but she’s a well known scholar in organisational culture, who transitioned into industry. (Her book Counterproductive: Time management in the knowledge economy looks interesting.)
I found her talk surprising, inspirational, and unsettling.
Style
Her style is surprising. It’s pretty normal for people at conferences to be “on” – not in a bad way, but focussed on blowing their own horn, onstage, offstage, and anywhere anyone will listen. Melissa Gregg presents differently – humble, softspoken, and intense. What she says carries, although it’s said quietly.
Substance
I often find organisational theory kind of dry. But it came alive in this talk, as the underpinning for the narrative arc of how her organisation was persuaded to engage more fully and deeply with carbon-aware computing.
The organisational story she told was about the difference between adaptive networks and hierarchical networks, and how both are important in the journey of every idea in an organisation, including the initiatives she wanted to dedicate herself – and her organisation – to support.
What I found inspirational about this was not just the cause she was encouraging through various stages of organisational evolution – though that’s clearly inspirational. I liked the way she named something about patterns of informal and formal adoption that I’ve seen in organisations, and my work in therm, but haven’t thought of in that way. There’s always an ebb and flow between getting agreement about directions and methods and follow through for work, and actually doing the work. The first one is always harder, I think partly because what actually happens is often implicit. Gregg talked a fair about about the emotional labour involved in creating and managing change – which is a new framing for me but it certainly resonates.
Now I have a new way of thinking I can use to try to understand and shape what’s going on, organisationally. UXR practitioners need to be particularly skilled at this, especially if they are not ski-ing in someone else’s tracks.
Unsettling
We are faced with multiple urgencies and uncertainties, as individuals, as societies, and as a species. The talk’s opening challenge faced off with this unsettling reality, from the get-go.
What is the role of ethnography in the face of extinction?
Melissa Gregg, opening challenge of the closing Keynote, Epic Conference 2022
She unfolded this question into further questions:
- what do we need to do
- what do we need to know
- how do we need to be.
I don’t think she answered it for us. But asking us all to ask the right questions is a start. Like many others, I am trying to work this out – once again – for myself. And for you. And for us.
Insight analysis 