Episode 53: Are Halland - Understanding and using the core model

Kristina Halvorson:
This is the content strategy podcast and I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson. On each and every episode I interview someone I admire who’s doing meaningful work in content strategy and all its adjacent disciplines. If you care about making content more useful, usable and inclusive for all, welcome in, you have found your people.

Hello. Hello. Welcome back, once again it's me, Kristina, here to talk to you about some content strategy stuff, which is, I know why you've joined me today. I hope all is well with you and yours. Now, before I get to a very amazing guest, I am going to just tell you right now that I have practiced pronouncing this name for about half an hour and I'm going to mispronounce it, but he is worthy of the perfect pronunciation, so I'm going to go for it, today's guest is Are Halland. He is the inventor of the Core Model, which I cannot wait to talk to you about.

He has 25 years of experience with strategy, communication, and product development. He has worked both as a consultant and in-house with business strategy, innovation processes, user research, UX design, content strategy, and information architecture. From 2006 to 2019, he worked for the Norwegian digital agency, Netlife Design, implementing the Core Model as a cornerstone methodology. He now works as an independent coach, speaker, facilitator, and consultant, helping people take advantage of the simple power of the Core Model. His forthcoming book about the Core Model is entitled Core Content: A Common Sense Approach to Digital Strategy and Design. Are, welcome.

Are Halland:
Thank you.

Kristina Halvorson:
Now please pronounce your name correctly.

Are Halland:
The entire name?

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, say your whole name. Go ahead.

Are Halland:
I'm not expecting anyone outside of Norway to pronounce my entire name, but it's Are Gjertin Urkegjerde Halland, but for short, Are Halland.

Kristina Halvorson:
Are Halland. That's right. All right, well, now I feel a little bit better. I know every time I talk to you I'm like, "Are, guess what? I lived in Norway, let me tell you all about my time in Norway," and you're always very, very patient with me. So tell me where you are calling us from today.

Are Halland:
Yeah, I live in Oslo, but originally I come from the West Coast. If you have The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I guess it's Slartibartfast, the planet designer, he once won an award for the Norwegian fjords. The one that got him the award is the fjord where I'm from, that's the most beautiful place on earth.

Kristina Halvorson:
The most beautiful place on earth, I have a feeling that other Norwegians from other fjords would like to fight you over that.

Are Halland:
Yeah, I'm ready for a fight anytime.

Kristina Halvorson:
I lived in Norway when I was a teenager for three years when my dad was over there doing military duty, and then I've been able to return a couple of times during my content strategy career, including visiting Netlife twice and speaking at WebDog there, which unfortunately I don't think exists anymore, but I too have seen the fjords and they are sight to behold, and I'm sure yours is the most beautiful. But enough about Norway, we can talk about Norway all you want if you want to, but I am really, really, really excited to have you here today because we are going to talk all about the Core Model.

And I should say for starters that we had you come to Confab, The Content Strategy Conference, last year and your workshop on the Core Model was one of the highest ranked out of all the workshops, so we are thrilled to have you presenting it again at Confab this spring, April 30th through May 3rd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Find out more at confabevents.com. But the Core Model has been talked about in the content strategy community for such a very long time as an easy, effective, incredibly impactful way to get one's head around content that exists, content with purpose, it's relation to larger digital strategy overall. 

Oh, I almost forgot to ask you the most important question. Can you please tell me about your journey to content strategy? I always start with that, but I got too excited talking about the fjords.

Are Halland:
So how long do you have? Let's start in 1993, I read this left wing magazine article about the internet and I realized this is my mission in life, digital, and I thought this is about information. So I studied media and communication, and I worked as a web journalist, and then I read The Polar Bear book, and became an information architect. And I was doing information architecture, with tens of thousands of pages, portals, and lots and lots of navigation. I made the deepest levels hierarchies and the grandest information architecture ever, but I didn't think about the content. So it was, I think, in 2006 that I had been working as an IA for 10 years, with these huge complex portals and projects. People couldn't cooperate. And even though sites won prizes, it didn't work.

But I had this actually an epiphany, I have to call it that, in 2006 with a napkin at this children's playground, lots of noise and cacophonic, and I had this napkin and I just wanted to iterate on a website I was working on and just jot down one page, and I focused on the content and then it came to me that this is all it's about, it's the content, stupid. And if you start with the content, the answer to the user task that reaches the business goal, then you can create inward parts to that content, and you have to have forward paths from the content because it's not the end station of the internet. I presented it at the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas in 2007. And then it has surfaced later, I think it was in 2015. My colleague in Netlife presented it at Confab actually. So then it, I think, took off in the content strategy environment.

And things have happened since 2006, you got social media, you got content strategy, content design, all of these new areas, and now we're into product management. But what I find today is that the Core Model is actually more relevant than ever because it's still all about content. And the six elements of the Core Model, the atoms of digital strategy and user experience and marketing and conversion and content design. The beauty about this it is that it's so simple that anyone can understand it and then anyone can gather around and understand cross competency, cross silo, cross levels in the organization, and anyone can use this simple tool to create a common understanding of what it is we are trying to make, and what is needed to actually bring it about, and then people can understand that content is a job, because they get their hands on it, and that you also need to follow up and create the content and also maintain it.

So it's a way of getting the organization to understand the point of content and how it works. You have to stop me.

Kristina Halvorson:
Well, here's the amazing thing though, what you were talking about really is having a simple framework to achieve alignment, which is I think in so many ways the missing link for organizations, especially large organizations who are dealing with so many silos, how do we get people on the same page about what's important, why it's important, and what it's going to take to get us there. Walk me through the Core Model. It's a magical mystical tool and I'd love your help in understanding its different components.

Are Halland:
It's a simple canvas, six elements. So it's a top row and a main floor. So in the top you start with the target group or actually you are going to empathize with one single user, so empathy is the starting point for this exercise. So starting with a single user, you can connect other methods to this as well. So if you have personas, that's a great starting point. But you start with the user and then you have the user tasks, which is what do people come to do, what are the questions they want answered. And this links to the top task methodology of course, and we can also connect it to jobs to be done. And other-

Kristina Halvorson:
I'll just jump in and say the top tasks methodology that you're referring to is from Gerry McGovern. And it's, I think, also one of the cornerstones about how content strategy can rule the world. Okay, continue.

Are Halland:
And so you have the user and the user tasks, and then it come to the business objectives because it's user needs and it's strategy to, it is very much about aligning these two spheres. So then you talk about not the overall wishy-washy abstract strategy, but you're talking about the micro strategy for this page or whatever content you're working on, what are the key results that we are going to produce? We want more sales, more leads, we want fewer calls to customer service, and really pinpoint those so we know if we are doing this the right way can we measure if it works or not? So that's the framework in the top row. And then in the main floor you have a mini customer journey through a contact point or a core. So you have the inward paths, which is how will people find this content.

And then you start up with some scenarios to understand where the user are. And then you work with things like search engine, search words, you work with inbound type strategy, even information architecture, whatever it takes to get people to the content. That's the inward paths. And then we just skip the entire solution, the core content. That's very important. Never talk about solutions until you have the entire framework in place, because the next you look at then is the forward parts, and that's what is going to happen next, what's the next part of the customer journey. Then you look at the strategy and you see what are the targets, the objectives, and what does that mean in terms of calls to action, and so on and so forth. And there's also an element of behavior psychology in there or how you can nudge the different kind of behaviors and so on.

So that's the kind of framework around, and we haven't talked about solution yet, and now we are ready, now we have the framework. Now we can talk about how do we solve user task and reach the business goals in the simplest and most effective and optimal way, and really appealing to common sense, people in the room, everyone has common sense. So you can have lawyers, you can have developers, you can have subject matter experts, you can have chief executives, you can have customer service, and they're working in core pairs, that's an important part of the workshop methodology. And then they work to how simple can we put this so that we do the most important. So it's a prioritization tool.

You sketch out the content and then you have to fit it within the size of a mobile screen. And the last thing is the action card. You have to fill in the action cards for, okay, what has to happen in order for this solution to become reality. Then you have to pair write  this content. We need to organize to have revisions and what does it take to get this piece of content out into the real world and make it work the way it should.

Kristina Halvorson:
A huge reason that you developed Core Model in the first place, as we said, was to get alignment and to get people to focus on what's important prior to jumping to solutions, and I think what we've all seen over and over again is in the room where we're trying to take several steps back and talk about research or inputs or mistakes that have been made in the past and focusing in on what matters and what's going to balance user needs and business goals, but that people are so used to their jobs are measured on productivity, their jobs are measured on the things that they did, not the things that they thought about.

So talk to me then about how when people are really pushing back to say, "Oh no, but we have to do the thing, we already have a solution, or we've already talked through this, and we need to move forward with the game plan because leadership wants to know what's being done," what kind of tools do you use to slow those conversations down or help people realize and recognize if we keep just plowing ahead, we're going to get the same results or no results at all?

Are Halland:
I think it's about diverting the attention. And so it's taking these steps, small steps one at a time and building up and understanding, and a context before you come to the solution, that makes people think entirely different. And this core workshop, it's really, really fast-paced. You get, okay, describe user, you have two minutes, so you can talk about these things for hours and days and weeks and months and nothing happens. But if people start working and being concrete, then that's something entirely different. You add a piece of yourself into this solution when you start using common sense, and then when you come to the solution at the end, you have actually built up an understanding that makes silos disappear somehow when it works, so diversions.

Kristina Halvorson:
And you touched on this, but it's really interesting to me that you do have people work in pairs. Talk to me about the strength in that approach versus just everybody sitting on their own and filling out post-it notes to put on the wall or writing their own understanding then everybody going around to the room to read it. Why pairs?

Are Halland:
I've had my share of post-it notes and I think there's a post-it note fatigue out there as well, but working in core pairs and pairing up people across competence, across silo, across level, that's the most important part of a core workshop. And if when you have two people, you get fewer communication lines, less talk and more action, and give them short timeframes so they have to jump in, have to start working, and then they will. Then you can have a momentum through the entire workshop and step by step then build better understanding. And in the end you come up with something better and more prioritized than what you would've gotten if you just sent memos and mails forth and back and have all these meetings where you talk past each other.

Kristina Halvorson:
Let me ask you another question. In workshops when we're talking about user needs or what users want to do or what we think users will do, something that I see over and over again when I'm facilitating these workshops is people making just assumptions, and the assumptions are often very self-serving like, "Oh, I think this user is going to arrive at the website to find out about pricing for our bundled packages of software," when in fact the user has come to the website to get an answer to a question because they can't figure out how to use the one product. Once you start talking about user needs and expectations, and people start jumping in with self-serving assumptions, how do you reframe the conversation? Do you ask for research to be brought in upfront as the researcher in the room? How do you keep the conversation focused on what's actually happening versus just what people wish were happening?

Are Halland:
It very much depends on the audience. Sometimes when you are closer to the users, then it can work. You might use an empathy map as well if that's what it takes. But having quantitative research as a starting point, and top tasks, that's the best way because it's so undisputable when you can show the hard facts that, okay, 80% come to do this thing, then that's a given. But the best thing about user research, user needs is to have the people in the workshop having taken part in the user research.

So if you can involve people in user research, that's great, but there's another king's way to digital maturity and that's user testing, having people gather in a room and have to empathize with a user and the painful parts of a user experience. Then you have to discuss the user experience and not your silo. So doing a user test before a core workshop to prime people into understanding and emphasizing. So it's qualitative insight, people have to feel it in their stomach, and then it's as massive quantitative insight as you can, and that's top task methodology. So user testing and top task methodology are two activities that work really well together before the core workshop.

Kristina Halvorson:
What are some other pitfalls that you see to have to navigate or to avoid when you sit everyone down to talk about strategy and alignment? What are some of the things that facilitators need to watch out for?

Are Halland:
So you should do your homework before the core workshop. So you have to know the user needs and you also have to know the strategy. And my impression of most strategies is they're very lofty and not really applicable to what you're doing.

Kristina Halvorson:
Okay, I'm going to interrupt because this is my favorite conversation, one of them. Because 90% of what I see people saying are strategies are not strategy. What makes a good strategy? What do you have to have before you walk into that room?

Are Halland:
What you want is measurable objectives that you can apply directly to see if this content performs or does not. So number of calls to customer service, that's a classic, how many leads do you generate. But you have to have that connection to the overall strategy somehow and down to the actual piece of content you are working with. And if you read a strategy, you make the hypothesis of the goals, and actually, often I do what I call a priority workshop before the core workshop, which is getting alignment on the strategy and the user needs, so we have people in the room who are close to the users and who have decision making power in the room, and then you can use that to zoom in on which cores to work with, what goals, objectives, and user tasks, and so on.

But in the core workshop you should have a hypothesis, or ideally you should have these are the objectives, we want fewer calls to customer service, we want this and we want that. And then people maybe they can add to it and discuss it and even concretize it even more. But the objectives should be planned ahead of the workshop.

Kristina Halvorson:
Tell me about a time where you began the workshop and you thought you had everything all lined up and you thought everybody was appropriately paired, and things completely went off the rails, what happened?

Are Halland:
Obviously if you are in an organization where the organization doesn't know why it exists, then you'll have huge problems in the business objectives. And like you said, if people totally have no contact with user or no understanding or no appreciation of end users, then that's a problem. So in the top floor you can run into problems if you haven't done your preparation.

Another one could be that you have these core pairs working in the bubbles all day and then they walk out of workshops still in each their bubble, so they haven't aligned in total, so it's very important to allow time to share and then in the end, everyone gets to present their core Model. But then the last presentation, the focus has to be on the action cards so that people doesn't fall in love with their own solution. That's also a pitfall. So it has to be focused on what is the next step in order to have this solution become reality.

Kristina Halvorson:
Here's my last question for you. A lot of what we're talking about, especially if we're talking about in the context of the website or website strategy, if a content strategist comes and says, "I would like to move down this path of running one of these core model workshops, I think that it could really help our organization gain alignment and traction over why the website exists in the first place, and what the content is supposed to do, and how we can move forward creating purposeful content, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera," and the manager or the vice president or somebody that you're talking to says, "Oh, well, we've got Bill over in digital transformation, he's really the person that should run a workshop like that, or, well, we have been running website workshops, and the designers or the product managers have been running them, we don't need the content person to be leading the charge." What is your answer to that?

Are Halland:
I'm not sure the content person has to be in charge. You have to cooperate. If there's a user experience, designer running, it or if it's a product manager, or digital transformation something, I think this is not only a content strategy, a content design tool, it's a tool for digital transformation, it's for understanding about user needs and strategy and cross-channel customer journeys, and understanding this is understanding that content is the integral part of user experience and business, and all the other things.

So I think content strategists, content designers have to cooperate and maybe give up some control, or at least this method it's possible to cooperate... User experience designers use it. And lots of product teams, product managers, at least in Norway, have started using it to facilitate communication between teams. So it's not just a design content strategy tool, but at its core, at its essence, everything I think is about content design. So if we can use this tool to make all the other competencies understand this, then that would be great, wouldn't it?

Kristina Halvorson:
I agree. If there is a tool that helps everybody in an organization suddenly think, ah, it is the content, stupid, then we would be so much farther down the path as content strategists and frankly I think our industry as a whole, but that's just me, and I'm a little bit biased towards all things content. All right, we are out of time. Thank you so very much for joining me today, and I know that our listeners thank you. Besides Confab in May this year, where else can we find you online?

Are Halland:
My book is right around the corner now, planning to publish in March. But you can go to the coremodel.com. There youi can download templates and read about the core model, and pre-order the book. And then of course come to Confab, and the core workshop, and buy the book, and eat cakes, and everything that's fun in Minnesota.

Kristina Halvorson:
In Minnesota, exactly. All right. Thanks again, Are.

Are Halland:
Thank you.

Kristina Halvorson:
Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.