Supervillain strategies for persuasive design

In an old post I just happened across, Scott Berkun writes about a user experience challenge he was involved with at Adaptive Path’s MX conference. His team’s goal was to plan the future of design at a fictional corporation.

Pretty dry so far, but check out step 2 in his approach. I have to try this in our next account planning meeting… what would Blofeld do?

The center of our work was to pitch a plan to the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). The team I facilitated did 3 things:

1. Dissect the brief. We made a list of assets and liabilities from the brief, including questions we wanted answered that the brief did not tell us. (e.g. who made the personas? Were they BS or was there any data? etc.)
2. Tactics inventory from dangerous powerful people. We made a list of possible models to list, but settled on four: P.T. Barnum & ShamWow!, Genghis Khan, Machiavelli, and 007. For each we made a list of tactics or techniques they would use and put them up on the wall.
3. Divide and conquer. We split up the work into three piles: Work before the pitch, the pitch, and work after the pitch. And then split into three teams that came up with a plan for each one.

References

No holds barred tactics for UX in organizations