Ask Like a Designer launched with an article about how six designers — Builder, Scout, Tinker, Facilitator, Traveler, and Pro — help you get better results with design-driven innovation. This article takes a close look at Scout.

Scout’s favorite question: “What do I know?” While Builder wants to know just enough to act, Scout wants to be sure it really knows what it thinks it knows. Scout scans the territory around the problem to find the limits of its understanding of what’s happening, and why. Scout will dig deep and wide to find data supporting, and sometimes data refuting, ideas, concepts, stories, and assertions. Scout will work to identify and label assumptions, fictional knowledge, and unexplored territory that might yield valuable knowledge — or distract from it.

Scout’s searching, scanning and gathering is directed by these questions:

• What do I know?
• What’s the evidence for what I know?
• What else do I need to know?
• How should I gather data?
• How might I organize what I know?
• How might I eliminate blind spots?
• What assumptions am I making?

Internalizing Scout nurtures and provokes our hunger to know. Scout also keeps that hunger from turning against us by looking for weak evidence, knowledge gaps, assumptions, and areas where we don’t know what we don’t know.

What do I know?

Scout’s first move is to look over Builder’s shoulder [link to builder article] and take in the problem we are trying to solve. Scout then gathers everything we know about the people, history, context, systems, ideas, and related problems. Scout gathers what we know, but its real gift is establishing the boundary on what we know and, in doing so, creating a known territory. Once we know what we understand about our problem, we have territory to explore and expand.

What’s the evidence for what I know?

You might have a vast known territory. But how much of it do you trust? Before venturing outside the known territory, Scout is going to look beneath the surface at the foundations of what we think we know. Scout helps us pause and check the evidence for what we think we know before we rely on it. The known territory will be the basis for countless decisions and ideas that build on each other. Scout makes sure we’re deciding and creating with the strength of the evidence in mind. When Scout finds the evidence lacking, we move that data out of the known territory.

What else do I need to know?

Scout is a little twitchy. It isn’t that Scout always wants to know more. Scout always wants to be sure there isn’t something critical we should know and don’t. Scout will look at all the data, stories, ideas, context, and history inside the known territory for clues about undiscovered lands. Scout is looking for additional things to discover that will help us understand, create and decide. Scout asks, “If we know X, will it help us [understand, create, decide] Y?” If the answer is yes, Scout adds that to exploration territory. Scout also includes anything bumped out of known territory for lack of evidence in exploration territory.

How should I gather data?

We won’t find multitools and NASA-engineered parkas in Scout’s exploration gear. Scout moves into exploration territory with a backpack full of research methods. Scout wants the numbers, observations, stories, and experiments that will expand, contract or convert exploration territory. Scout will choose a variety of research methods to reveal both the stories and numbers that turn exploration territory into known territory. Scout will also note where research exposes new known territory, things we didn’t know we knew, or new exploration territory.

On Scout’s missions into exploration territory, it operates with ambitious efficiency. It seeks to maximize data quality and amount and minimize time spent, effort expended, and resources depleted. Scout won’t climb a mountain when a hilltop will do.

How might I organize what I know?

Between missions, Scout organizes the known. Gathering the data is not enough. We must organize it so that we can see and create meaning in relation to the problem we are trying to solve. Scout might visualize the data, organize images by category, or code transcripts for behaviors.

In making the data useful for others, Scout looks for areas where its interpretations or biases might influence data interpretations and representations. Questioning how well we are making meaning from the data and connecting it to the problem we are trying to solve is one of Scout’s greatest contributions.

How might I eliminate blind spots?

If we know we have a blind spot, is it still a blind spot? Short answer: yes. For example, we might know that university transfer-student experience is an important part of understanding the student loneliness problem on campus. We haven’t gathered data on transfer students yet, but we know we need to. We have a blind spot in the known territory.

Blind spots in exploration territory are tricky. To search for them, Scout uses perspective hopping. Scout considers the people connected to the problem and the known territory then asks, “What would this person want to know? How might they gather data? How might they organize it?” Both kinds of blind spots are an inherent characteristic of the terrain Scout searches for data.

What assumptions am I making?

Here there be monsters. Scout’s terrain shows up with blind spots. We show up with assumptions and are happy to create more. Humans have benefitted from being able to make assumptions about the world. We just get ourselves in trouble when we mistake an assumption about how the world works for data about how the world is working. Assumptions cloak parts of the known territory and expansion territory, by letting us think we know something we don’t know.

Scout works to prevent us from sneaking assumptions into the territory. Scout reviews our research methods and actions. Scout checks how we’re organizing data. At every step, Scout asks why we made those choices to ensure our reasoning is based more on what we know to be true than what whispers surface from our brain’s leviathans.

Scout’s voice leads us through gathering data about our problem and protects us from dangers inherent in its knowledge territories and in our own humanness. Practice asking Scout’s questions as you gather data about a problem or challenge.