David Connis
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:
https://youtu.be/XAgcKmOOZ3I
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,
