Desire Lines

Two or three mornings a week I get coffee at my friend Andy’s coffee shop. 

The coffee is extremely good (if you’re ever in my town, just ask and I’ll point you).

Andy isn’t just an exceptional roaster and café owner; he’s a designer. 

We spend a bit of time talking about design concepts. Last week he was telling me all about “Desire Lines”. 

If you don’t know what a Desire Line is (I’ll admit, I didn’t know that term, but I’m probably late to the party), a Desire Line is the term for the unplanned trail that gets created by foot traffic, outside of the designed walking path.

You’ve definitely seen one. They look like this:

Humans be humaning. Even when local council or the school planners want everyone to move in a certain direction and mark it out in concrete certainty, humans will take the path that makes most sense to them.

The people impacted by your platform implementation will have desire lines too. They don’t look like eroded footpaths, they look like local spreadsheets. Files stored on a desktop or C drive called something like “Elaines_working_numbers.xlsx” or “my_accounting_real_v2.xlsx” that make a mockery of the platform you’re calling ‘The Single Source of Truth’.

And just like the paths across your local playground, they aren’t sinister. They represent a very human desire for flexibility, ownership, and comfort. Because years of exposure to Excel has meant that everyone can have that experience of feeling in control of their data.

But we need people to use our shared tool. It’s not just that the concrete footpath cost council a whole lot of money (insert CRM, ERP implementation and license costs here), it's that we know as an organisation we do better with shared, accurate data, and Elaine’s Working Numbers might hold something that the rest of us need to make better decisions.

So, what do we do? Do we put up walls to ensure no one walks on the grass? Do we ban the spreadsheet or shut down the shared drive?

Instead, bring Elaine into the conversation. What does her spreadsheet do, that our CRM doesn’t? What can we learn from the dusty path snaking across our playground?  

Here’s where the smart designers do something different. They watch the people move before they lay the concrete. When the smart implementation teams ask for people to share the spreadsheets they are using currently, they don’t just get them to share the files. They get Elaine to walk them through it. 

---

Some extra things to ponder...

This is quite old but still useful – Mav3rik wrote a great article around how to approach solution workshops. If you are about to start an implementation project and want to know what to expect from your SI Partner, or you are a new consultant, this is definitely worth a read. 

Also, just because it’s hilarious – Salesforce have pivoted on their naming of their AI interface again, following President Trump’s desire lines. Get ready for SIForce. This is the third name change in 6 months. At some point, there needs to be a bit of a concrete path.