Design principles
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The design of organisations and products
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In Don Norman’s terms[1] design is comprised of affordances, signifiers, mapping and feedback, a taxonomy of which the design of legal products seems utterly ignorant.
- Know your purpose
- Assume there will be accidents: The role of the risk manager is to know where the risks are concentrated, not to be satisfied there are no risks. If your RAG status has been uniformly green at every opco for the last ten years you should get your coat. Because either there is no risk, so what are you even doing chairing an opco, or you are flat-out delusional, so someone else is needed.
- Design for average people: be realistic about your people’s capability: they will be, on average, average.
- Iterate
- Open source: don’t seek rent; especially not on utility material. Legal boilerplate is not special sauce.
- Amplify signal, minimise noise
- Know your client ↔ Be personal
- Have excellent data
- Automation eliminates value but not risk
- Solve simple problems. Like Blind spot assistance. Leave the hard stuff to the experts.
Antifragile
- Be sceptical of models ↔ Don’t tick boxes ↔ watch out for proxies. Don't confuse simplistic models with simplicity.
- Decomplicate ↔ reduce complexity: do few things well, rather than everything fairly.
- Be antifragile