Notes from Leading Design 2016
I’m attending the first Leading Design event in London, hosted by Clearleft. I spoke first about Design vs. The World (PDF) and I’ll be adding notes to this post as the event goes on. Please forgive typos – I’ll come back and clean up when I can.
Farrah Bostic, CX is the CEO’s Job
She romped through the history of business schools in the U.S. and noted that it was Selfridge who coined the irritating term “the customer is always right” (1909). She critiqued Taylorism (1911), and the management centric philosophy he had “Managers are inherently smarter than workers”. She also disputed the Ford quote about “if I asked people what they wanted. He didn’t invent the assembly line but did employee it successfully at scale.
Ford did actually say “If there is any one secret to success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as your own.”
She emphasized how Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction is central to startup culture today:” we must harness change otherwise it will drown you”
Next she referenced Drucker who posed in 1954: “The purpose of a business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – basic functions: marketing and innovation.. all the rest are costs.”
Today it’s common for people to confuse principles with processes – for example you don’t “do lean” you “think Lean”.
Another customer value model is the Toyota production principles:
precisely specify value
identify the value stream for each product
make value flow without interruption
let customer pull value from producer
and pursue perfection
A disturbing (or exciting) fact is that Fortune 500 companies last shorter than ever. And yet CEOs get paid more than ever (and tenure is shorter, 6 years on average). Worker income stays the same.
Many famed books that claim theories to explain why some businesses last don’t hold up over time. She suggested we “Read books and then wait 5 years and see how well the theories hold up” – Good To Great is a good book, but many of the highlighted companies have not lasted.
A common mistake CEOs make is to spend more time talking to their best customers rather than their next customers. The American TV show Undercover boss is predicated on an essential truth: often the CEO has no idea what is going on in the company.
“FOMO leads to dalliances not marriages”
“Malcolm Gladwell effect: CEOs go to a party and hear about a book and get FOMO so they fall for the latest trends and are prone to hiring consultants who sell the latest trends and buzzwords (offered my Eric Reis)
“The data will tell us what to do” is a myth –as if a magic voice can speak to you off camera with the secret truth.
Recommendations:
Uncover your riskiest assumption
Get to know your next customer
Commit to change (air cover and ground cover)
Make ruthless sacrifices (jettison old business and people who don’t fit the new vision)
Gail Swanson, How to present to decision makers
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them” – George Orwell
We tend to believe “If we have the best rationale for why we made a design decision that will make it easy for decision makers” – but this doesn’t work very well
Design is change – FUD fear uncertainty and doubt. Designers enjoy it, it is our business but we have trouble empathizing with people who don’t.
Human Centered Change is a good way to think of what we do and Behavioral science can help us. But one presentation is never enough to create influence– it’s a series of points of communication in sequence that creates influence
Your Role
Rebel – I made something and the world should change
Organizer
Helper – facilitate discussion
Advocate – create a belief and partnership
When most designers show their work in presentations they are asking “Is this good” – this is non productive. You are asking someone to check your homework and give you a grade. It’s best to skip this and focus instead on “Is it right for you? For this situation/scenario?”. You are a professional and should stand behind your work.
How to you build an effective presentation:
Who is in the room?
What is their POV?
What background do they come from?
Are the business focused? Service? In-house?
What are their pressures?
What forces are acting upon them?
How are they rewarded?
A good framing question is to think about: We can get A to do B if they believe __________________ .
A narrative endows information with meaning. Giving data points doesn’t help decision making – it leaves interpretation to them. Part of our job is to provide the story and framework for interpreting data.
Lead a conversation about risk. “What is the risk if we are wrong?” – often it’s something that can be anticipated and made less scary.
The work to create the design is as valuable as the design itself. It helps to answer questions, test and validate assumptions.
Tactical language (vebal judo book)
Build common ground
Strip phrases: “I appreciate that… but” “I understand that concern but we can address it if we…”
Paraphrase – people rarely say what they mean. Ask clarifying questions.
What is the experience of you? Are you protecting yourself by being an expert? Are you pompous? Or are you connecting with them and do they see you as an ally?
Sarah B. Nelson, A Place of Our Own: Making Networks Where Design Thrives
“Why is it that some projects succeed and some fail, even when it’s the same group of people” – question she’s obsessed about . She learned a great deal by trial and error and making mistakes, as we all usually do.
IBM where she works is huge. But it’s easier to scale down than to scale up, and her lessons should be easy to apply. IBM 350k employees. Founded in 1905. Definitely Big and Old. She works on thinking about what makes great creative environments.
She asked people in design studios why they were great places to work and these were some of their answers:
You can work alone or together
Ideas and knowledge are shared
My imagination is nurtured
Everyone is pushing each other to be best selves
I can draw on the walls
People can collaborate regardless of their role
She asked the audience about the size of the teams and explained there are very different challenges at different sizes.
Team of 5 (Magic Number)
small team
information flows freely
you know what each other does and is working on
Team of 11 (size of family unit – enough people to spread work, but few enough to have deep relationships) subgroups
light processes
someone dedicated to process
still visible knowledge
Team of 20
emerging specializiation
Team of 35
systems starts to break down
suddenly everyone can’t be involved in all decisions
Team of 70
people who like small environments slip away
system breakdown
Team of 150
Dunbar number
GoreTex organizes company in business units of 150 people – buildings and parking lots only hold 150 people. When the parking lot gets full, they build another building. Merit based flat system.
The basic needs of creative environments are the same regardless of the size.
What to do?
Establish standards and tools
Provide paths, shortcuts and guides
Empower designers and leaders
Enabling conditions
Social environment – strong relationships, sense of belonging, diversity, empowered ownership, dependability
Physical environment – Flexibility, support visual thinking, enabling technology, abundant materials
Emotional environment – Stability and Safety, growth mindset, how safe is it to fail in public, is critique useful or ego driven, respect (attrition is caused here)
Intellectual environment – stretch goals, new ideas invited, cross-pollination, knowledge sharing
People + Practices + Places = Outcomes (ibm.com/design)
What can you do?
Establish standards and tools
Provide paths, shortcuts and guides
Empower designers and leaders
Andrea Mignolo, New on the Job: Your First 90 Days in a Design Leadership Role
As a design leader you are responsible for being a design ambasaor and to build design into the DNA of the company. She examined different leaders from Game of Thrones and asked the audience if we thought they were good or bad managers (Jon Snow / Jofree).
Authentic leadership – built on ethical foundations. Takes a lifetime of practice (principles aren’t necessarily easy to practice)
For four years she lead a 40 person guild in World of Warcraft. The other leaders had different styles and they wondered if love or fear were been ways to lead. And they experimented to see which work best – they found they call all work if the match your style.
Good design & good leadership share many traits. They are both: thoughtful , serve people, appropriate, empathy, intentional, vision, collaborate
“Designers can not design a solution to a disagreement” – Montiero
Harley Earl was a designer at GM –”My primary purpose for twenty eight year has been to length and lower…” His north star, or guiding idea, was to make GM cars more natural and oblong in shape.
What is your vision for design, what do you believe, what is your north star?
What is your company’s north star?
What different is it from yours?
How can you minimize the delta?
What did you learn in your interview?
When starting a new thing 30/60/90 days are arbitrary units of time for thinking about transitions to new things. Instead she offered a more useful one: 10/10/40/30.
The First 10/10/40/30 – Is the pregame. You are trying to gain clarity and information. Take your north star and apply it.
But apply it to the context of the “layer cake” of your world:
Board of directors
executive team
company
design team
colleagues
departments
public
parent
During pregame, connect early and socially with as many people as you can. Do sleuthing about your predecessors and what history there is that defines perception of your role
10/10/40/30 – Critical 10
Rigorous planning is the best prep for improvisation, Expect the plan not to work as planned, but to have developed it will help you deal will all of the situations you couldn’t have possibly planned for.
Think about how you want to be perceived and invest in it. She chose Optimisit, Open, Awesomely competent. Think about your origin story, which you will be asked about often. It helps shape how you are percieved. Good origin stories: why you do what you do, other organizations you worked in, and why you are excited for your new role.
Boatload of meetings. Take notes and have beginners mind. Write down jargon and abbreviations (and ask for clarification later). Look for allies – people who care about design. They may not use design language but there are giveaways. Dev who spends extra hour on details. Marketing who emphasized brand.
Talk to people in different departments to ask: how they see design, how design can help them.
10/10/40/30 – Making Moves
Formula for Trust: (Credibility + reliability + intimacy) / self-orientation
Earl’s design studio at GM. When he joined the company his department was called the beauty parlor and his team the pretty boys. As their reputation improved people wanted to visit the studio – it was a cool place to be. It made design visible (externalized) and helped establish credibility.
Foundations
Pre game
Critical 10
Making moves
To infinity and beyond
As a leader, it’s Education, inspiration and facilitation core skills.
Buy in
Credibility
Trust
Communication
Ah-ha moments (and ha ha moments)
Julia Whitney, Culture, culture, culture: tales from BBC UX&D
She shared a story of Rupert, an engineer, discovered a problem with a mixing board used for live production in the BBC. It was a difficult scramble but he dropped everything else to fix the problem and solved it before any listener noticed.
Later, In an offhand meeting, she mentioned an idea for consolidating how their clunky wifi worked. A few weeks later a set of wireframes came back with an overdesigned and misunderstood set of requirements. This reflected something about BBC engineering culture – they had the habit of dropping everything, respond to a crisis, and fix the problem quickly, but without clarifying or communicating well.
“[Culture is a] shared set of unconscious assumptions as it solves their problems ” – Edgar Shein
One way to better understand a culture is to ask: what counts as heroic behavior in this culture? That’s what helps explain Rupert’s behavior.
What levers does a leader have to influence culture? She offered two kinds.
Structural methods
Embedding mechanism (leadership behaviors)
BBC (where she used to work) is structured in genre silos (news, sports, etc.) UX was organized in the same way. Design became increasingly divorced from development. Churn escalated. When she took over the leadership of the group, she admits she brought her own cultural assumptions. Eventually they arrived at a functioning model called federated ? )
In 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, it’s explained that there are five layers that contributed to teams that function well:
Trust – I can give my true opinion with repercussions
Conflict –
Commitment –
Accountability –
Results –
Regarding conflict – she realized we were being way too nice to each other and were unwilling to disagree. This kept information off the table and kept commitment from being heartfelt. Our decisions were too wishy-washy. “Fuckmuttering: is the complaining you do outside of a meeting to vent your true feelings”
The invented the term Productive Ideological Conflict – useful conflict that is explored until a resolution is reached.
Conflict mining: agreeing to dig in to conflicts rather than avoid them.
Motto “We will not prioritize relief over resolution”
Shein also suggested that unless leaders can acknowledge their own vulnerabilities transformational learning can not take place.
Q: “What changes in your behavior does the culture you are trying to build require from you?”
