The regular topic on my mind these last two weeks is how some details ammount for nothing towards a certain goal. And it’s not about the size of those details.
Most little things lost, broken, or forgotten can be fixed or replaced. We can find alternatives to most of the little problems and obstacles that come our way. And yet those are the things that stress me sometimes.
And yet, in any profession that deals with Communication we know how much details matter. Fixing misstypes in websites, blog posts, consistency, good photos, building a coherent design and branding, all those are part of our routines.
I have been my own kind of perfectionist since ever, and I now make an effort to switch from focusing on the details that display high quality to the rough brush strokes that help me just “get there”.
That switch happens incrementaly. First figure out the rough brush strokes to get to the goal.
Once there, we figure it out. After all, I am Portuguese and we are known for the creative problem solving. It’s said that, during the Discoveries, other european ships would hire portuguese sailors for their ability to improvise and pull a MacGyver.
Quick hack for Stakeholder mapping
I’ve had a hard time finding a way to use Obsidian, a note taking app. It’s not the most user friendly software but it is extensible and flexible to fit almost any workflow.
And I use it to map networks of stakeholders like in the example below. Each node is a note with extra information and the graph can include topics of interest for each person. It can be useful to visualize where we need to build bridges and find topics that we may be missing.
Your tool for this week
Keeping with the theme of using things from other areas to help Communication Professionals, a useful resource for UX Research.
https://www.notion.so/UX-Research-Templates-079c8453fb0d40039b7b7597dccb340f
Odette Jansen built a set of Notion templates that will also be useful if you work in Public Relations, Marketing, or other fields.
