We're spending more and more of our time helping organizations make the transition from designing single interactions and artifacts to structuring and designing service systems that deliver across channels and touchpoints. It's both a new and old way of thinking that presents enormous opportunity and complexity for business. In short, it's a great time to be a designer. It's also a frustrating time to be a designer. 

Persuading, cajoling, and pushing clients to think about big picture, long-term considerations takes time, effort and rhetorical skill. Especially when it comes to asking successful and traditional organizations to think differently.

Cindy Chastain, a creative director at R/GA and a prior MX speaker, nicely frames the way she thinks we need to work to deliver experiences on multiple channels in her recent talk at the MIMA Summit.

For me, there are a couple of well made points: 

• Journeys drive strategy; personas aren't enough
• “Mono-messages” are no longer useful in ecosystems; marketing and UX have to co-exist
• We need to start making the great (although idealistic) models of iterative design and development across teams and projects more of a reality

If you read one thing today other than this, make it Cindy's presentation. I'll definitely be sharing it with clients.