Andy Polaine

Joel Bailey – The Role of AI in Social Media Management

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is Joel Bailey, product and service director at Arwen.ai, a four-year-old marketing technology startup that uses AI to help brands to manage and moderate their social media comments at scale.

Joel brings 25 years of experience working in service design roles, leading change and building new stuff for a diverse range of organisations. We talked about his journey into Service Design, Service Design and AI, navigating AI and social media, the future of design and much more.

Note: Given the fast pace of developments in AI, I should point out that we recorded this in June 2025. I had a big backlog…

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Service Design and AI
04:50 The Journey to Service Design
10:00 Understanding Service as an Outcome
15:08 The Role of AI in Social Media Management
20:11 Challenges of Moderation on Social Media
25:32 The Evolution of Business Models
26:36 The Role of AI in Startups
29:13 Navigating AI and Content Moderation
30:20 Understanding AI Bias and Ethics
31:43 Engaging with AI in Social Media
35:11 The Future of Design and AI
40:21 Creativity in a Fast-Paced Environment
44:56 The Importance of Service in Design

Show Links

Arwen: https://arwen.ai
Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelbaileyuk/

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

Andy Polaine (00:09) Hello, welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of zoom, from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organizations, society and the world. My name is Andy Polaine, I’m a design leadership coach, service designer, educator and writer. My guest today is Joel Bailey, product and service director at Arwen.ai, a four-year-old marketing technology startup that uses AI to help brands to manage and moderate their social media comments at scale.

Joel brings 25 years of experience working in service design roles, leading change and building new stuff for a diverse range of organizations. He says if you slice him down the middle, he’s 30% total service nerd, 30% AI and design fanatic and 30% family man.

Joel, welcome to Power of 10.

So that 30%, that’s like a sort of slice of Brighton Rock, is it? There’s different sort of…

Joel Bailey (00:57) Good to be here.

Yeah, do you know what? That is exactly the image. Although I think my family would have something to say about only getting 30%. But it depends. Maybe that’s time-based. Obviously not love.

Andy Polaine (01:13) Okay, very well done. look, tell us, I’ve talked a little bit in the intro about your background, we actually don’t know how we know each other, but we’ve been in each other’s orbit certainly from the service design world. Tell me a bit about that journey to where you are now.

Joel Bailey (01:32) Yeah,

I was trying to remember exactly how we connected. I think it’s one of those ambient relationships that just came out of the ether, right? As you say, in similar orbits. I think it is around service design. So I was very lucky, I think, to stumble across service design very early on in my career. And I’m not a trained designer. I have an arts background. ⁓ I didn’t do any sort of

qualifications or certificates in design. But I’ve always had a creative lean. And I think when I started working and I was working in organizations where I was basically being asked to solve problems, which is what lot of people get asked to do. If you’re not doing admin, you’re solving problems. And I was pretty frustrated with the tool set that was available, which was very kind of expert led, best practice, best best practice that. And I think it was…

in one of those roles that someone said to me, what you’re going towards is like service design. Because I come from a digital background and I remember, I called myself an information architect at one point. I used to work across A2 size bits of paper mapping out websites and things, right? And then I started looking at user sensitive design. If anyone remembers the Rosenfeld book with the polar bear on the front, the information architecture, but legendary stuff.

Andy Polaine (02:57) I was about say publisher.

Joel Bailey (02:59) All right, exactly. So now we’re feeling old, right? So these books were quite seminal to me, and it was very much making it up as I went along. And then I got to work in, I went to work as a contractor consulting in government in the UK, and I started doing what is now known as user-centered design. But back then, we were just winging it. It was like the logic of the project I was doing, which is working on one of the big government super sites, as they were called.

This one was businesslink.gov.uk for anyone who cares. It’s basically a website by the government to businesses. And I learned that the best way to create the outcomes you wanted was by asking users what they needed. And the worst people to ask about what a small business owner needed was a civil servant at that point, because they were like, well, they need to out Form 20348. And it’s like, well, do they really, you know, they might have to by law, but that’s certainly not what they want to do. So that’s when I first got into user-centered design.

And then we fast forward, I guess, a few years and somewhere along that road, someone said service design. I remember going to the Wikipedia page and it was like two lines, know? it was like, service design is applying user-centered design to a wider scope of organizational activities, all different channels, multiple touch points. I was like, okay, that’s kind of what I’m doing. Because we had telephone lines we were dealing with, we were dealing with email, we were dealing with webpages, PDFs, all that sort of stuff. So it was like, okay, so this is a good space to be in.

And I guess the rest is sort of history in that I got very invested in it. I really got excited about service design. I’m really excited about two things, the design approach, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, which I still use, and service and what services, which I’m, as I said, a bit of a nerd about service and what it is and how it works in my spare time.

And now, if I come all the way to now, all these things kind of come together in this very unexpected way. So, you know, I’m running a business, I mean, but they call it product, but it’s a service business. It’s got a big digital product in the middle that uses AI to detect and remove toxic commentary from social media. But it also uses the same technology to, you know, have conversations with social media users on behalf of brands. So there is service happening there.

We as an organization are providing a service to our clients and we have to design it continually because our users have very high standards. Anyway, that’s very short, a long answer to your question, but that’s kind how I found my way. And along the way I’ve had quite formal service design jobs. worked at LiveWork for a while and everyone who knows service design knows LiveWork. So was very grateful to be to work with Labyrinth and Ben and the others over there. ⁓ And I’ve led service design.

in large organizations and small, but now I’m not really doing service design as a job for the first time. I am applying it in a startup, which is so different.

Andy Polaine (05:57) Yeah, well let’s come to why it’s different actually in a second. mean, it’s interesting for me, you know, talked about the information architecture thing. I find sort of people go one way the other and sort of encounter services. One is they’re working into interaction design and UX and they’re like, there’s sort of more than this. There’s a larger ecosystem or I want to be more involved. If only they had come to me earlier.

in that process and I can input it in the strategic part. And so they kind of do that zoom level out. I mean, this is why the show is named after that Eames powers of 10 film of the different levels of zoom. Or they go the other way, which is, I’m sort of systems thinker. I’m a kind of ecosystem thing. And I think the IA thing is, well, it’s actually a good mix of the two, but there’s definitely that kind of overview of how does all this kind of hang together and what is the kind of.

the view of this and you sort of gone that way. So I can kind of see where it meets in the middle.

Joel Bailey (06:49) Yeah,

there was a third option, was, I’ll just stay in the website UX space with my headphones on, looking at screens. There were a few people that did that and I did think about that at one point. But I’m just too curious and I think ask too many questions. And then once you start asking about the call center, like what happens when people can’t do this thing on the website? Then you end up going to the call center and talking to the manager and asking them questions. It’s just very organic. But that systems theory there.

It’s fascinating to me and I’m not a systems theorist. I’m a systems thinker in the very basic sense and I’ve read enough to be dangerous probably. it’s increasingly, you spend longer and longer in organizations of any size. You have to understand systems theory and you have to understand that you can’t change one thing without some ramification elsewhere. So I’m very sympathetic to the systems world. It’s complicated.

hard to deliver.

Andy Polaine (07:49) It’s complex, isn’t it? It’s interrelated. We just said the thing about you know, you’re working there and they call it a product, but I call it a service. you know, my endless rant that everyone’s bored off by now is that, you know, everything’s a service and certainly anything that’s digital is. mean, I always say if you’ve ever used turned on Slack and the, ⁓ you know, the service is not working or it’s, you just get a load of placeholder boxes, how you know.

You are using an avatar to a service and anything else same goes for your banking and almost everything that is digital.

Joel Bailey (08:26) Yeah, and the way to frame it in my mind, I remember doing presentations of FS, Financial Services audience, and it was all about, we trying to create better mortgages or better homeowners, right? What are we trying to do here? And in our organization, the product, sorry, the service we’re after really is we want to move our clients from one place to another, from a less good place to a better place. And the better place is

They’re just more engaged with their community, right? That’s what R1 is all about. Our mission is to make your social media more social. So that is all about more engagement. The product, one of our products, is a tool that auto-moderates all the horrible stuff, the spam, the racism, of which unfortunately there is still a bit too much of it on social media.

So for me, it helps to think about service as an outcome. And it’s about movement from A to B for anyone ⁓ in life. And I take it very seriously, whether it’s service leadership and how I’m trying to work with others to get them from A to B in their lives and careers, even with my family, right? It’s like, what can I do to serve this person to move them forward? With our clients at Arwin, it is very important.

to not think that we’re a rubbish removal business, because we could do. But that really limits your opportunity for that relationship with that client. When you say, yeah, we do rubbish removal over here, but actually our service is about getting you to better engagement, whether it’s on your ads or on your organic. As a service for me, it’s such a useful framework for that.

Andy Polaine (10:00) Yeah, think, know, nine is it’s a broadening of view of the ecosystem because it includes more than just the product. Which also obviously every time you kind of broaden the lens, I mean, there’s a danger you lose yourself, but there’s also this idea of, there’s a different way of, we could come at this from a different angle as well. And that’s often where some of the innovation lies.

Joel Bailey (10:19) Yeah, you know, as service designers, we’ve all been invited to do innovation as much as just improvement, but you can’t innovate, you’re right, without a bigger ambition and service.

Andy Polaine (10:31) But I mean, but conversely, can’t, know, services I had got, I think it’s probably for the reputation of some of the agencies that certainly are the big consultancies that I might have worked for, of delivering sort of concepts and, you know, and journey maps and blueprints. And then the clients run out of money, go, here you go, good luck with that. And obviously, you know, the real thing, reason why our book is called From Insight to Implementation is because

You know, how things are implemented makes such a massive difference. I mean, you’ve talked about businesses filling in a form or something. You hear this stuff about you. Whenever I explain what I do to people and that’s a whole thing in itself or what service design is, I, you know, I then immediately get this barrage of, you the other day I was trying to do X, Y and Z and this, and it’s, it’s tiny things. It’s always the gaps and the transitions where things go wrong.

and screw people up. And you mentioned that sort of flow chart of, know, person does this and then they go to that. the arrow, innocent arrow or the hairline between those two boxes on the flow chart contains a whole lot of horrors when it goes wrong.

Joel Bailey (11:41) Yeah, and think you and I, we both had a very similar visual metaphor for this, I think yours is crossing the chasm or something like that. Yeah, the crevasse. Now I had a blog post a few years ago about crossing the chasm, I think I called it, which is that that line between two boxes on a process map actually goes across cultural boundaries or organizational boundaries or team boundaries or geographical boundaries. And in that, all sorts of things get lost, know, lots of tacit knowledge.

Andy Polaine (11:48) Yeah, the Cravat.

Joel Bailey (12:09) And that’s what service designers do is they’re trying to stand in the user’s point of view and say, how am I being carried from A to B? It looks so simple here from a business analysis point of view, but the reality is I’m suddenly being handed to someone or another part of the organization who doesn’t care about me as much as that first bit. Like sales, they really cared about me. Onboarding, they didn’t care about me so much because I’m now just a product to be processed through onboarding. Anyone who bought a new utility. Yeah, yeah, you’re done. We’ve won you.

And we’ll come on and talk about startup and how it’s different, but ideas implementation is obviously massively ⁓ shrunk down in my world. We can have an idea and implement it in hours, which for much of my career was just not possible because the raw material of my work was other people. So I’d have to work with other people to develop conceptual ideas.

and then they’d have to work with other people on committees to make change happen within the organization to make that concept a reality. We obviously don’t have that. We are 15 people and we work very quickly to take an idea into reality, however quick as we want to or not.

Andy Polaine (13:19) I, like you, probably have had large enterprises say, treat us like a startup. We want to be like a startup. Well, so what does that mean? And a startup, one of the things is it’s not like, we’re really innovative. And so that’s kind of what they’re hoping. But one of the things of that is a startup has often key people are wearing many hats, right? Or at least a couple. You have such a small

group of people, the communication lines are very, short. Literally, I’m the person next to me or whatever, even if they’re remote now, there’s only a handful of people and those people are empowered to make decisions, right? Because it’s probably their thing anyway. And so when you say enterprise client, you want to be treated like a startup, are you happy to get rid of most of your decision making and governance process that gets in, well, not governance, but kind of ⁓ gatekeeping process that gets in the way of that.

Can we just have direct lines to someone who can make a decision? And, you know, can we try stuff out and be risky? And they’re like, yeah. So we’d like to be a startup, but you know, not those things. Yeah. And so then they always fail. So I really like to kind of come back in a minute. I’d really like to talk about the design and AI thing, but just go back and tell us a little bit more about what Arwin does. Because I think it’s really interesting. I want to ask a few questions around that.

Joel Bailey (14:42) Yeah, so I mean a lot of people just kind of sigh a little bit when they hear the words AI at the moment and we are in that high cycle dip, right? And I get that. First thing I’d like to say is that Arwin, we have been AI from start four years ago. So we’re pre-chat GPT. So it makes us really old, makes us wise like Gandalf, right? We’re pre-chat GPT. We’ve been doing this for quite a long time in AI terms, not obviously.

mean, AI is 30, 40 years old, right? But anyway, what we do as Arwen is probably easiest from the origin story from where it began. So the euros which are being played now, if we go back four years ago, we remember the racism that was thrown at the players who missed the penalties. It was kind of that point that Matt and David, CEO, CTO got together and said, we’ve got to solve this thing. We can solve this thing. Let’s solve this thing.

I came on board a bit later. And ⁓ what we built is a platform that pulls in data models and algorithms from all sorts of different providers. And then we plug this thing called Arwin into your social media profiles in an authorized way. We’re authorized by the different networks.

And then Arwin scans every single comment that you get on social media. And if it finds something that breaks your rules, and we set those with each client, so everybody wants to get rid of spams, or porn bots, and crypto bots, and all the fraudulent stuff, which can just grow.

Andy Polaine (16:14) 90 % of the internet

Joel Bailey (16:16) My name is certainly is then. The

networks obviously have it worse than others. And obviously if you’re a brand and you’re trying to connect with your audience, either on paid or organic, that stuff really gets in the way. It’s a pollutant, pure and simple. So we remove that and we do it by studying both the content and we have probably the world’s largest database of spam items in the world. And we do fuzzy matching. So we don’t do like exact keyword. We don’t use keywords at all actually.

We do fuzzy matching. Basically, Arwen’s saying, how close is this to every other spam item I’ve ever seen? It looks at the comment and it looks at the profile. So it can look at the profile’s avatar. It can look at the different characteristics of the profile to determine and score how likely that is to be a spammer’s profile. And then it looks at the content itself and makes a decision. It does all of that in under a second. And then it hides it if it goes over a certain threshold. So it’s…

That’s the simplest way of describing it. Now we do that for spam and that’s like our biggest seller because everybody wants to get rid of it. But then we also do it for unwanted content. So that is what we call in the UK lawful but awful. Okay, so the networks are pretty good at getting rid of illegal content and that stuff is really the unpleasant.

Andy Polaine (17:32) Because they have to.

Joel Bailey (17:33) Yeah, because they have to in different regions in different ways. And that’s a colossal job and they do a very good job of it because we don’t see things like child abuse on social media. So they are doing a very good job. The awful but lawful bit, because it’s bit loose and fast in ⁓ legal frameworks globally, even our online safety bill in the UK is a little bit fuzzy about how to deal with that. That’s where we step in. So a brand basically says, so we are a, we’ve got a number of Formula One teams who have very premium sponsors.

very large audiences, increasingly a female audience that they want to engage with because they’ve watched maybe Drive to Survive, the Netflix program, they’ve really engaged in this sport in a new way. And we’ve worked out through our analysis that these female fans are a small, they’re about 25 % of Formula One fans. They contribute about 80 % of the vibes to the community. They’re really positive. So, and yet they get all the toxicity. So then we start helping them to hide misogyny.

sexism, sexual aggression, all of which occurs in sporting environments, unfortunately. Gaming environments, we work in a bit as well. So it’s all about, and I go back to my earlier point about we are trying to improve engagement. The first step to improve engagement is to put some rules in place. We use the analogy of a bar, right? You walk into a bar and there people smashing bottles in the corner, shouting abuse, racist abuse, or ⁓ trying it on in really offensive ways with women, whatever it is.

We come in, I often think of that film Roadhouse, coming like Patrick Swayze, the old Roadhouse, we come in like Patrick Swayze, and we just tidy things up. Some people do get blocked from the community. We automatically identify those people. But everyone else just finds that you can’t say these things anymore. We help our clients write a clear policy, put it on the door. And then within three months, they have got at least on average 21%, 22 % increase in engagement.

and the number of toxic comments has gone down by around 70%.

Andy Polaine (19:33) Just because it’s just not a horrible place to hang out.

Joel Bailey (19:36) horrible place and no one wants to be you know there’s a real sheep mentality.

Andy Polaine (19:40) It’s the whole Nazi bar thing, right?

Joel Bailey (19:42) Yeah,

exactly. So you denormalize it. We talk about denormalizing toxicity, which is why we invest in speed. Let me give you an example about we don’t got a lot of behavioral analysis on this. So the behaviors of ⁓ a hater, a troll, and the behaviors of the sheep that follow them are quite obvious when you look at the data patterns. Someone will, so let’s say client post comment, post a beautiful picture of a football ball being kicked into a goal by a female football player.

someone comes in and comments and says, get back in the kitchen. We’ve seen all these, so I’m not describing anything. These aren’t my words, let’s be clear. So that someone posts that as a comment, as soon as that is seen by other people, it creates permission for other people to do it. So they come in and start saying, yeah, yeah, you shouldn’t be doing that. All of that. Because we get rid of that first comment and we hide it in seconds, often under a second,

Andy Polaine (20:29) I’m going to some football.

Joel Bailey (20:38) then it doesn’t create that wave of permission and we shorten the life of a potential toxic event considerably as a result.

Andy Polaine (20:46) I’ve got a question for you, which I would imagine like everyone else is thinking. Yeah. Obviously, you know, you do this for brands, right? Because whatever Mercedes, AMG, Formula One team don’t want to have that stuff next to their brand. And in fact, that’s one of the most sort of best ways to kind of pressure brands to shift the way they think about certain issues is to highlight that. Why don’t the social media platforms do this themselves? Why is…

X and everyone else Y or know, Substack for that matter, talking of the Nazi Bar thing. Why aren’t they doing it? Why? I mean, they haven’t hired you yet or is it problematic at the scale they’re at?

Joel Bailey (21:30) Well, they’re partly at scale. So it’s important to think about pre-publication moderation and post-publication moderation. Again, I would say they do an excellent job of pre-publication moderation on illegal content. Very good at finding illegal content and stopping it from getting out. That in itself is a colossal data management job, huge amounts of data processing going on.

Awful but lawful stuff that I’m talking about. There’s a few reasons why it gets really hard for them to do. First of all, they aren’t legally obliged to do it. Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act, which some people will be familiar with in the US where they’re all based, basically says they’re not an editor. They don’t have to edit. They’re not responsible for what their users put online. And there are all sorts of challenges going on on both ends of the spectrum to that. Some states in the US are saying,

You can never moderate anything pre-publication. It’s against the First Amendment or right to free speech. Others are saying you have to to protect children. So this is playing out and has been since we started the business. that legally, if they start pre-publication moderation of the comments that I’m describing, then they are basically saying, well, we are an editor. And then they’re leaving themselves open, I think, to a challenge of like, well, if you’re going to do it for that thing, you’ve got to do it for these other things that I care about.

And then we get into the really hard bit, which is one person’s really toxic comment is not another person’s really toxic comment, unfortunately. Now, some are. I mean, I think I’m not going to do them on your lovely show because it wouldn’t be right. But there are some comments that I see that no one in the world would go, that’s great. Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that. But unfortunately, you get into gray areas, which is why we don’t set any standards on our clients. We work with them to work out what is your graphic equalizer to profanity to insult.

And it’s different for every client because they’re different brands and they have different communities and they engage. So sport is going to be very different from children’s entertainment, obviously, different demographic. And you can’t expect one network to do all of that on behalf of everybody globally. It’s it’s nigh on impossible. And I put it, I posted about this the other day, actually. So I think, I think there is, there are a number of factors that prevent them from doing it. I also think that.

If you do go into the pre-publication moderation world, you really take on a responsibility. Clearly, as a network, you’re making your money out of attention, the eyeballs that see the ad. If you’re having to put a human set of eyeballs on every bit of content, every comment before, the business model just won’t stack up. You’ll be spending so much to check everything that you won’t be making enough out of the ad eyeballs. Human eyeballs, one side, human eyeballs on the other side, they’re both costing the same.

So I am very sympathetic to the networks because I think the other thing I would, I’m going to go one step further and say, we do expect social media to be a utopia when the rest of the world isn’t. Okay. Now I know we can look at the algorithms around ranking, although Metra has done some great changes that our clients benefit from, that positive interactions get higher, ranked higher than negative interaction. So they are working. But I think we’ve all seen that the drama.

is what the ranking algorithms go for. And drama is often where toxicity lives. So people are pushed into places where there is toxicity. we can’t, know, a lot of our clients, if you go to a store or an event or you hang out with the CEO, they probably all got security at the front door. They’ve got security in a drive that drives them around. If they fly or do something,

They have extra levels of insurance and care and protection on themselves and their buildings. ⁓ And really, that’s no different on social media. ⁓ So I think we’ve just got to be careful about the networks. They’ve got to make the human race just much nicer to each other. It’s really hard.

Andy Polaine (25:32) Yeah, I think it probably says the thing you’re talking about eyeballs says something more, I think around, I would suggest broken, certainly, or toxic or difficult business models. Right. You know, that’s the problem as you know, the cardinal sin of the internet is that it lacked micro payments and that created advertising or ad tech. Right. So then everything kind of follows on from there.

I’d like to move on a little bit. You talked before about something I want to circle back to. You said, know, obviously when I was doing other stuff, it involved a kind of group of people and the pathway from idea to trying something out was much longer, know, weeks, months. in some cases, lots of expense to an infrastructure. And now you are saying, you know, that’s much, shorter now. We can come up with an idea and try it out very, very quickly.

How much is kind of that because of the AI aspect of it or how much is it, know, what role is technology playing in there and how much is it to do with your culture as a startup?

Joel Bailey (26:36) Well, I mean, definitely the culture of startup helps. It’s all experiment, right? The whole business is an experiment live in the world. But if I look at any department, I say department, we don’t really talk about departments, but like we have, you we’ve got engineering and product, we’ve got marketing, sales, it’s all ongoing experiments. And the first thing you learn

when you’re working in a startup is that most of the books are wrong or they were right for a certain context, but they’re wrong for your context. And so you quickly realized that you needed it. The most important thing you need is an experimental framework. So I’m working with Tushar, who works in our marketing team on a range of marketing experiments, which is where I guess the AI also comes in, not our own AIs, but other AIs out in the world that we’re working with. So we’re working with a couple of different AI

products that allow us to not just to take our kind of experimental DNA of a startup, bring AI into that, and it then accelerates the experiment itself. So things like research, secondary research, primary research, less so, but people keep trying to tell me that avatars are going to do primary research. I don’t think trust is there yet for qualitative research, but hey, but quantitative research, it’s amazing.

I can get an AI to go and find out lots of facts for me very quickly and compile them. You’ve obviously got to look out for hallucination, but the thing you’ve got to remember in a startup and in any business is all you need is a hunch. It’s a Rory Sutherland thing here. He says, we’re not doing quantitative research for like Elsevia or some university or something. We don’t have to be 100 % right. We just have to be right enough or righter than the next person. And one of the things that

that I was blessed with as a service designer in previous roles was lots of good data, like qualitative data and quantitative data. I could go out and speak to customers. I could go out and do research projects that last weeks. We probably can’t do that so much anymore. I things have changed budget-wise. But that was a real luxury. In a startup, you’re very data poor, very time poor. ⁓ So the experimental framework plus AI allows you to overcome the time piece, but also bring in the data.

And you just accept the fact that you might get errors in the data because you’ve just got to be faster at getting to the hunch and then sitting down and going, it’s good enough, we’re going to push the green button and we’re going commit to this as an approach.

Andy Polaine (29:08) You’re not generating content, is where, you know, that can be…

Joel Bailey (29:13) Quite

well. We have a second prod. We’ll talk about that separately.

Andy Polaine (29:18) Well, putting content out in the world, that’s where it’s pretty problematic, particularly with AI as you know, you’ve seen this kind of weird thing going on where companies would fire an employee, a customer service employee if they said that kind of thing in a chat thing, but obviously they just kind of plug a chat bot in and let it go crazy and with some crazy results too and not great results for them.

But you with the moderation thing, can also, you know, this is a very well known thing that part of the problem that happens with moderation is if for example, a person of color is talking about experience of racism that they’ve had, gets flagged up because they’re using the words that the racists are using and it gets flagged up as content. And so those marginalized voices get further marginalized. How do you deal with that aspect? Because there is a, you know, it’s still quite, it’s very, very complex, obviously. I think there’s a lot of the…

there’s just a black boxy, we don’t really know what’s going on. Even the people have kind of put it together, you know, once it’s got up and running. But how do you balance that?

Joel Bailey (30:20) You’re absolutely right. You know, this is one of the risks of AI’s who’s built it how they built it on what data has it been trained etc I mean we just distinguish between LLMs which will come on to And how they work and how they’ve been trained versus the various models that we’ve been using Pre-charge GPT and continue to use really effectively They have all been built and trained by experts in this field, right? So they are detection algorithms and they are benchmarked for bias and error rates

So around, you know, white supremacism, bigotry, racism, all these things. Okay. And I could go into quite a lot of detail about why we’re confident in how they make decisions. So, so clearly that’s something to keep an eye on. It’s, think when you get into the LLMs bit where it feels like a bit more of a black box, I can tell you how the other ones work and I can tell you how they were trained and how they were built.

Andy Polaine (31:12) So

there is some rickets behind that.

Joel Bailey (31:14) Providence and rigor. LLM is, it feels like, you know, they’ve just created something and it’s just gone, it’s just gone out to the world and hoovered everything up and it’s coming out with something quite useful, but is it entirely true and right? So we do use large language models and we do use generative AI. So I’ve talked about the moderate product. We have an engaged product. So like I said earlier, our service mission is to make our clients more social, make their social media more social.

So once you’ve got rid of all the bad stuff and that bar is now great and everyone’s hanging out, having a great time, now you want to talk more to your community. It’s safe, it’s lovely, it’s got all the people in there that you want in there. The most surprising thing to me about social media, so $270 billion got spent on social media last year, sort of globally. Someone came up with that number. It’s really big. And it roughly sounds about right when I hear about some of the social media advertising budgets.

You put that content out there, that content on social media will be responded to. You will get comments. Clearly, I’ve talked about the negative ones, the toxic ones. Negative is different. Toxicity, we get rid of it. But you’re going to get negative comments, you’re going to get questions, you’re going to feedback, people going, yay, I love this. The amount of brands that do nothing with those comments just astounds me. You spend all this money advertising essentially is trying to get someone’s attention. You’ve got their attention, they’re asking you.

something, they don’t do anything. It’s like the orphan child. Everyone’s all about, create more blog posts, create more blog posts. So we use large language models to help down at comment level. So if someone’s looked at your ad and says, great, where can I buy this watch? You can’t scale a team where you can, it’ll cost you a lot of money to answer every comment on every social media channel in real time. You’ve got to do it within an hour and to get into that buyer moment.

⁓ Arwen can do that. Now to go to your point about the fears that we all have about hallucinations and stuff like that. So the latest technology that we’re using, which is called retrieval augmented generation, lovely phrase, rag retrieval augmented generation basically says you’re a large language model. You’ve learned off all this stuff, some of it good, some of it bad. But I have a load of content here that I know is good. Yeah. It’s the company policy. It’s the brand voice.

It’s the rules and regulations. It’s the opening times of all the stores. They’re facts. And I want you to refer to those things when you’re making a consideration generating a response. So what Arwin does is it goes to the large language model and says, person, the large language model goes, this person’s asking a question about a watch. ⁓ And then the rag element looks at the rules and says, they’re looking at this watch. It’s this ad for.

this watch, yes, you can buy it here, here’s the URL and it connects them through. Okay. So what we’re trying to do with RAG and it’s a meta originated technology because they’re obviously fighting this kind of, all this crap firing across the internet from AI is like, we’ve got to put rules around it. You’ve to put control around it. And for us, it’s so important because if Engage is going to be having conversations with people online and delivering service, let’s be honest, that’s what it’s going to be doing.

then it has to be accurate or the lawyers will never sign it off because we’ve all heard about, I don’t know what brand it was, a car brand in the US selling a car for a dollar because the chat bot, they managed to get it to do that. No legal team is now going to sign off a chat bot AI. We’re not even rolling it out as fully automated. We’re like, it’s semi-autonomous. It’s a co-pilot. So our AI reads the question, reads the comment, whatever.

and then generates three alternatives and then the manager can go in and just choose which one they want to use. Okay, but the key thing is this rag technology allows you to put guardrails in so that the AI doesn’t just freak out and promise people like a new car.

Andy Polaine (35:11) So talking of co-pilots, I’m not going to talk about Microsoft co-pilot. As we are speaking, and this will probably come out in a couple of months, so as we’re speaking, Figma have just shown all their new stuff. There’s a lot of AI tools in there for design. ⁓ I had a dream, a frequent sort of daydream as a kid that I had a robot me, duplicate me that went into school and did lessons and all the boring stuff. I stayed at home reading comics and eating sweets. ⁓

The question is, it’s a part of me when it looks at some of that stuff that it can kind of very quickly generate. there was some stuff I saw the clip where it’s where you’ve got a whole, instead of having some lorem ipsum text, it just sort of generates a load of actual sort of placeholder text and all that stuff. And obviously it’s going to do a lot and sort of make prototypes really quickly, ⁓ go from some idea to prototype. And part of me is like, you know, that’s amazing. That takes a lot of drudgery away. And then the other part of me is, yeah, but.

Design isn’t just design, as in the end artifact. Designing is a process of thinking whilst you’re designing and actually that process of prototyping of, you know, even sketching on paper actually, there’s a talking to Eva Lottelam in some comments of a thing she did the other day, which is teaching people to sketch wireframes again in paper. There’s a lot of thinking that goes on in the designing.

And I really kind of worry about that. I worry less about the AI taking people’s jobs. So there’s clearly a lot of, there will be a lot of sort of low end product managers who go, oh, this is great. I don’t need designers anymore. I can just kind of write in a prompt and, and it will send some stuff to engineering, which is how they treat design anyway. Rather than I want to have this kind of trio and have this kind of good conversation and understand so that the good ones do that. So I can see the kind of.

the advantages of that, but I do worry about that side of it. What’s your view on it? Talking about that sort of going from idea to prototype very quick.

Joel Bailey (37:03) Well, we’ve both worked in consulting design, well, businesses and agencies. And I think we’ve all seen over the years that what is pushed out as original work is often just a repeat of like, you want a website? Well, we did that with one, we’ll kind of use a version of that. So I think for me, comes down to like, what is the job of inventing a wheel of actual invention?

is going to have to remain a part of the designer’s core skill set. I think there’s lots of reinvention of wheels going on out there and being sold as, well, you want a website, it’s 100,000 pounds. But we’ve done 14 of them. We’re just going to repackage this one. There’s a lot of that going on. And I think, to be honest, look at it, it’s same people sitting down. A website is now, I’m using that as an example, but you could take anything.

is a very well thought out, very well understood artifact object. clearly you want to make it right for that brand. But for me, we’re talking a sort of co-pilot logic here, which is get me to a good decent first draft so it’s all structured and labeled right. And there’s no like stupid mistakes where the site map just doesn’t connect and has broken ends to it. And then let me go in and add in how this is going to work for this brand and this particular use case. I just think that

Design has been doing a lot of recreating of things and treating that as creativity when not necessarily the case, when some of these things are already well-invented, well-understood, and it hasn’t really done us any favors. Equally though, the best briefs are the ones where, right, we’re struggling in this market, everybody’s things look like this, everybody’s things look like this. We need something that’s different.

Right. And again, it comes back to your point about just the client. I used to say, they say we want innovation. I’d say, okay, do you actually mean you want to invent something new or improve the thing you’ve got? Because if it’s improving the thing you’ve got, I do think AI has a role to play there. As I said about testing things, researching things, understanding things, coming up with options, potentially then designing that and the evolution of that thing. But if you want something brand new, like very inventive, I totally agree.

I wouldn’t say never because I just don’t know how this is going to change. But I’m with the lady who said, and it was a lady, think he said, I want AI to be doing the dishes and washing up so I can do the art, not the AI doing the art. So I have to do the washing up, right? I’m very much in that zone, but I do think we can’t help. But some of the drudge work, not the drudge work, because some people love doing boxes and AI and IA, sorry, and information architectures.

But let’s be honest, when I did information architectures, I always forgot about little bits. I have to go back and do them later. The joy of an artificial intelligence is it generally is complete, right? It doesn’t finish the job till it’s finished. So you’d expect me to be a bit pro at it, and I am quite pro at it. I think that designers have peddled a lot of design that isn’t really creative work. It is just taking something else and putting a slightly different skin on it, on patterns that are very well understood.

which is maybe a spicy take, but that’s the one I’m giving it.

Andy Polaine (40:21) So my response to that would be though, I think that is a systems effect of the environments they’re working in. In that the agile digital product kind of thing has been very, very, it’s been great for so many things, right? It’s really improved the ability of teams to get past all that sort of ⁓ waterfall stuff and big brands, enterprise brands that actually, most of my banks having had really, really awful.

kind of apps and stuff now have kind of reasonably decent ones and things like that. I, you know, that’s definitely because of that. On the flip side is I tweeted or I didn’t tweet because I don’t tweet anymore, but I tweeted the other day and I put it on LinkedIn, which is a sort of AI is kind of the wind tunnel of creativity, right? But you know, there’s some very famous silhouettes of cars out there, you know, small cars, sedans, know, SUVs and…

In the silhouette, they all look the same and that’s because they’ve all been designed in a wind tunnel. And at some point everyone optimizes for pretty much the same stuff and everything starts to look the same. In my experience, whenever I’ve been using a chat GPT or whatever it is, it gravitates towards that sort of mediocre middle and chat GPT therefore sounds always like kind of a management consultant because it’s like very average stuff spoken with amazing confidence.

And what I’m saying about design is I think in an environment where that was a sort of lean and agile thing where speed and velocity without much thought is always held up as the most important thing because it comes from that startup world. in other areas, it doesn’t make so much sense. When everyone is working very, very fast or under pressure to work very, very fast, they’ll lean into what the tools do well. And so they’ll use…

that particular what used to be, know, rave posters all look the same because they all had the same flash shot filter or, ⁓ you know, in the rise of flash and all the vector stuff. It’s all vector stuff because that’s what the tools did well. They all leave their signature. And now, you know, with Figma, you can always tell, you know, this has just been a kind of design pattern that’s been pulled down. And in some cases, obviously, the design system, which the designers are just kind of pulling on. there’s not really that, as you’re saying, there’s not really that much original work being done.

kind of feel like that is that’s not because designers come forward, it’s because they’re under pressure to operate really quickly. I worry that the sort of AI kind of say the AI Figma stuff just kind of perpetuates that and just makes it even worse.

Joel Bailey (42:46) I it will. I think it will. I think there’s two pressures here. One is like a sort of general capitalist, neoliberal pressure. You know, make it as lean as possible and scrub everything out. But there’s also a pressure the other way, which is people like familiarity, right? And do I want the copy explaining something to me about what I should do as a small business to be written by a copywriter? Or do I… It’s just instructional in that sense. It could be written… As long as it’s written in plain English for…

Andy Polaine (42:51) Yeah

Joel Bailey (43:15) the average age of 10, which is the average reading age for the most of the UK. And most corporates don’t do that. And I was surprised when working on copy stuff that people still write copy for people who are like, you know, reading age of like 15, 16, like the economist, you know, and people don’t, right? So you can tell an AI that I want you to write this for the reading age of average UK reader or whatever country you’re in. And it will do that. And it will do that repeatedly. And

Sometimes you don’t want creativity in there. You just want, and I’m talking about service stuff here. mean, marketing is different. Marketing, you’re trying to capture attention. You’ve to have something creative in there. I think creatives are reasonably safe in some of that stuff. I saw the Toys R Us little video that someone’s put out that saw a creative. I think there’s a way to go with capturing attention and delighting the soul of another human via AI. I think there’s a way to go. But a lot of the stuff we’re talking about is

Um, it’s, it’s, it’s just a lot of work that I used to do as service designer is like, well, we just got to get into the terms and conditions and we’ve got to get into the instructions on this page. And do we have to have those there? And if we are, can we make them really much simpler, please? And, I’d have to work with copyrights to do all that. And I’m not having a go at copyrights here, but I think everybody wants to bring creativity to a project that often doesn’t need it. Um, but we, we, we need creativity in the right place, right? I’m not denying that because your point about everything.

All those rayflies were the same until they weren’t because somebody said, hold on, I’m going to do something different. And I don’t think there’ll be any different here. AI already is making everything very generic. And so then something else will have to change. And it will always be a creative decision to make that change.

Andy Polaine (44:56) There

is a lot of very generic, mean, lot of the, I don’t know, I had like three or four websites open for different stuff the other day. And I looked at them and I was like, wow, these, they’re all using the same typeface. They all use the same hierarchy, you know, as it was all. It wasn’t bad. I wrote this essay a little in my newsletter, the last newsletter it was called, it was called On Mediocrity. And you know, it was like, well, it’s just H &M t-shirts, you know, everything’s like H &M and it’s kind of fine.

Joel Bailey (45:07) It wasn’t bad. ⁓

Andy Polaine (45:24) but it’s not very exciting either.

Joel Bailey (45:26) No, and I think that’s it, right? And a lot of organizations settle for it’s fine. And lot of managers will and workers will settle for it’s fine because it makes their life easier. If you can do eight hours work in one hour. mean, you know, people do gravitate towards that sort of, you know, decision making. I think that’s why AI is so disruptive inside organizations because you want the quality there and who determines what quality looks like when everybody has access to something.

like this. think AI within the organization and having proper guardrails on that so that people are creating good quality right for this brand, right for this organization, whether it’s internal comms or external customer comms, whether it’s in a service that’s outward facing or inward facing. there’s so many, you know, it takes me back to almost like the early days of the dot com, right? It’s like, this is all new. Where do we start? What’s important? And the perennials are still the same. Like if you’re trying to capture my attention,

You’ve got to be interesting and I’ve got to love something about this. But if you’re just trying to tell me to do something, just give me the facts for you. But in fact, get out of the way. And the promise of AI obviously is to get totally beyond the interface, right? Is that I’m just like, hey, ⁓ AI thingamajig, I need a holiday next year. You kind of know what my family likes. Come back some options. know, like we talk about body doubles. I’d like to send a version of myself off into the world.

as a gopher and it will come back and say, well, I found three holidays and they’re in this sort of price range. That’s very attractive. The question we might come onto is that what does that mean for a designer? Because in a way, I’d like to be a designer. could go off and do secondary research for the day as a body double, come back, tell me what you’ve learned. But I still want to be the person who synthesizes it and goes, oh.

Andy Polaine (47:15) That’s the thing. I think there’s a thing I read the other day, is, you know, what AI doesn’t have is sort of common sense discernment and taste. know, I think one of the things that does, and it’s interesting actually, because I looked up the etymology of intelligence today, because I was to make a snarky comment on LinkedIn. But it was, and it’s that, right? It’s pretty much that. And so, you know, artificial intelligence is such a sort of misnomer. I think one of the things that

what you just described does then highlight is the, differentiates really good ideas from the kind of craft dazzle, right? And I think that that sort of evens that out. We are actually coming up for time. So there is one final question, the one small thing question, is what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world?

Joel Bailey (48:08) Okay, you talk about a thing. I’m going to go right back to the beginning of the conversation because it’s a bit of an attitude really. ⁓ I think it’s an attitude to serve that I’ve designed into all sorts of organizations or tried to, and I’ve certainly tried to do it in ours, which is service and service to others, whether it’s people that you work with, or whether it’s a customer that’s giving you some money for some exchange of value. But for me,

It’s a real anchoring concept. ⁓ I’ve been a service designer, I know service designers, but I don’t think most people really think about service as a concept and what they’re trying to do. But for me, it lifts my entire life, which is why it’s connected with religion. And I’m not religious, but I can see why that connects. So for me, if you’re doing any sort of design, you’re thinking about a service, don’t just think about the service as the noun, right? Think about the verb, the doing of it.

And what is the, what are you trying to move forward here? Is it, it’s not necessarily you’re trying to create a widget or a product or anything like that. It’s like, what is the outcome you want to achieve? Now that’s a bit abstract. It’s not a thing, but it is very meaningful to me that I am trying to serve the world in a better way. And therefore that anchors me down to what does this person need to move forward? I don’t know. I need to find out.

but it’s helped me through my design career. And it just so happens to be helpful because the majority of businesses in Western countries where I tend to work are service industry organizations. And I’ll be honest, they don’t really understand what that means, right? They have forgotten because of their scale that their service organizations and helping them to remind, and everyone knows, like I used to start my workshops and you probably do something similar by saying, right, I just want to go around the room. Just tell me the best services.

Andy Polaine (50:02) Yeah, service.

Joel Bailey (50:03) Or tell me the worst. Yeah, tell me the worst. And everyone knows it. Everyone’s like, my God, and they’ll never forget the worst one. They’ll never forget the best one. But then they go back into the service organization, so they forget it. So I think just rekindling that little flame, and I have it on every aspect of my life. I try to. There’ll be people listening to this going, John, he doesn’t do that for me at all. But I am trying. And I just think it really helps to create an integrity to the design process, to whatever you’re trying to do.

So that’s the one small thing I’d ask everybody to take into account. I think it can change the world, right? I think service is a, I actually heard Keir Starmer talking about it in his speech, a return to service. King Charles did it in his speech, all about service. No one’s really getting it. So I think it’s a communications issue. I got it. So I’m the one person going, yeah, I get it. Because I think it’s really profound.

Andy Polaine (50:53) That’s

very fine answer. Thank you very much. Where can people find you online? Arwin is arwin.ai.

Joel Bailey (51:00) Arwin.ai is where you’ll find our service and what we do. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m probably mostly there these days because we’re a B2B software as a service business. That’s where we live. I used to have blogs and things. I am on X, I am on Instagram, I am on all these places because it’s my business to know how they work. But LinkedIn, otherwise arwin.ai or joel at arwin.ai.

Andy Polaine (51:22) Thank you very much. Thank you for being my guest on Power of

Joel Bailey (51:25) much. It’s been a pleasure.

Andy Polaine (51:27) You’ve been watching and listening to Power of Ten. You can find more about the show at polaine.com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice, online courses, sign up for my very irregular newsletter, Doctor’s Note. If you have any thoughts, put them in the comments or get in touch. I’m on LinkedIn, my website, you’ll find it everywhere. You Google, all the links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening and watching and I’ll see you next time.

The AI sparkle is the new Intel Inside

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0200

The ✨ emoji that has come to signify “AI lives here” is the new Intel Inside sticker.

Nobody cares about your “AI Inside”. But they do care about menu and UI selections being replaced with a prompt box, and price increases when they don’t want AI features they can’t turn off.

Just make your stuff work better. That’s your USP. You don’t have to keep screaming, “Look Ma, we’ve got AI, too!”

Alan Colville - Embracing Conflict

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0200

In this episode I spoke with design leader Alan Colville, exploring the nuances of design leadership, the importance of embracing conflict, and the dynamics of communication in both public and private sectors. We discussed personal journeys, the pace of change in organisations, the significance of vulnerability in professional relationships, and how small changes in how we communicate can lead to significant positive outcomes.

Show Links

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

Andy Polaine (00:09.902) Hello and welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in our organization, society and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I am a design leadership coach, designer, educator and writer. My guest today is Alan Colville, a design leader helping government, public and private sectors think differently to find human centered and design led ways to thrive.

He’s been an independent consultant since 2006 and is currently helping the UK Met Office design their data services. I met Alan recently at the Service Design Global Conference in Helsinki where he gave an excellent talk about embracing conflict which really resonated with a lot of the conference guys. Alan, welcome to Power of 10. Thank you, Andy.

Yeah, it’s a privilege to be here.

So I want to talk about the talk because it really did resonate with a lot of people. It’s been one of the ones that many people have listed and said it was one of my favorite ones. But before that, just tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to where you are now.

Okay, so I’m going to pick out just some, I think, transformational moments because I’ve been doing this for quite some time. I’m a designer by qualification. My degree is in graphic design, actually. And I started working mostly in print, loving the smell of paper and the process of printing and really enjoying that. But of course, the internet started to happen, didn’t it? And I realized fairly quickly I was being asked to design things that I didn’t fully understand.

Alan Coleville (01:37.118) interaction around. in 1999, I went and did a Masters in, I guess, Interactive Media was the title of it at the time, but it had a lot of human computer interaction. And I think that was the point I can clearly remember becoming user centred. And it being the thing that I carry through and the red thread, essentially throughout the rest of my career and what I do mostly today as well.

From there, there wasn’t anybody in Ireland where I’m from doing, I guess, usability, information architecture. So I harassed a company in the UK to give me a job and they did. They’re CX Partners who are still based in Bristol. And that was a huge change for me because I began to see the possibilities and work with other disciplines and see

the work getting carried through. And from there, working in an agency, of course, around 2001, we had the dot com boom and things started to change and all agencies then started to let people go. And I moved from there and took up a position in a cable company in-house, was, you know, some people consider it to be an unusual move.

understood that maybe I’d continue agency side. But I think the four years I spent in that company were transformational. I had a role as a commercial manager, but I was a commercial manager with a superpower because I saw things from a user-centered point of view in 2002, 2003 when not everybody did. And it gave me a way of really developing products that had impact actually.

And then within the organization was identified and rose very quickly as somebody that could do something and deliver things in a way that worked. From there, was, I guess the next most important piece was I was headhunted to go to BT. So the British Telecom, because they were designing a TV service. So their first foray into TV. So I was heading up the customer experience team there.

Alan Coleville (04:02.03) And I think about a year and a half into that, I was pretty much burning out. know, dumb roles risen really quickly, but felt it wasn’t quite working for me. In a huge organization trying to be user centered, it was really hard. It was like trying to steer a tanker. So I decided to leave and was offered a gardening leave.

in case I went to a competitor, which I took and my wife took us. Let’s go traveling for a while. So the three of us, my wife and my 18 month old went traveling for a year. I think that was really transformational for me because I think I hadn’t the balance right in work and life. I hadn’t really seen my 18 month old. But that allowed me then to kind of crave that flexibility. since then, that’s 2006, I’ve been an independent consultant.

working for myself in, you know, mostly in private sector, I would say. But actually in the past seven years, and this is another transformational piece, wanting to work for organisations with stakeholders and with purpose more so, and less for shareholders. But I remember coming into government and public sector and being really surprised by design. It didn’t look, sound, feel, work as I…

It was, and I think actually that was the point where it started to surface how disagreement was entirely different, how harmony was valued over constructive disagreement. And so that was probably the biggest challenge I had. In addition to the pace, the pace was very different to private sector or, know, for agencies where you’re working on pitches.

And it’s really high-paced, high-measured. Yeah, and that kind of takes me to today where I’m working still for a government organization using user-centered design to help them understand users better and deliver better services.

Andy Polaine (06:16.642) And out of that, kind of the pace difference, mean, slower in public services or you said different.

That’s slower. I definitely think slower. So you have to adapt to that. Inside work and outside of work, I’m quite energetic. And I think I had to think about, what do you do with that slower pace? What are the things that you can focus on in addition, because you’re moving slower? And that’s where I started to think about the more human qualities actually, that you can spend a little bit of time because I guess in the higher pace, you’re focused very much on the practice.

the primary and secondary, the competencies and stuff, but less time to engage because actually it became, if you’re moving slower, keeping people engaged, keeping them moving with you when you’re traveling at a slower pace. And sometimes it can be glacial and just managing yourself to accept that’s okay. And sometimes actually in that context, trying to rush is really detrimental because the culture and people are not ready.

how they currently do things. But yet you need to move fast because organizations need to change. And if they take too long, then there’s a risk and a threat there, isn’t there?

There is, I mean, there’s that perpetual change thing that happens as well, which I think if, you know, I’m not a fan of speed particularly. I think that whole kind of obsession with velocity has been problematic, you know, because it’s been inherited from mostly from Silicon Valley startups, right? And they’re where velocity is important. But for a lot of large companies, I think often getting it right is an organization’s getting it right.

Andy Polaine (08:01.806) is more important than speed at all costs at least. But there is obviously the flip side of that, which is that sort of glacial pace. And there’s a thing that happens where, you know, we’ve spent two years doing this transformation and then, you know, new CEO or new somebody comes in and goes, oh, well, I’m going to do, not doing any of stuff that that last guy did. We’ll do some other stuff. And it is often, that’s quite gendered often, it is often a guy saying that about the previous guy’s stuff.

and you know, I knew a company in Australia, a telco, I won’t name which, which of the two it is, but they went through this whole process. it took them like six months to do their budgeting process for the year. Right. So they were in the middle of the year, just got it all kind of sorted. And then, the CEO brought McKinsey in McKinsey did their restructure, which meant firing a lot of people basically.

and McKinsey forced them to do the budgeting process all over again. So literally, they were like 10 months into the year and they still hadn’t fixed their budget for the year. And it’s impossible to really work amongst in those kinds of conditions. And so that stuff happens a lot. There’s definitely a cycle. So your talk, let’s talk about your talk. Well, we talked earlier and we ended up doing that thing where we ended up talking for ages before the show.

So now we have to repeat some of it, but there was, we talked about your talk about conflict, but we were talking about a thing that I talked about actually, which was how much your family circumstances, how you grew up, certainly family, school, culture you grew up in, they shape a lot, an awful lot about how you deal with conflict. And you started your talk with a personal story. Do you want to?

Yeah. So I think I’ve had to, in my simple brain, put together how to have better conversations because I didn’t have role models, for example. So my mom and dad, you know, I told this story, valued harmony in the house. They took pride, bless them, like, love my mom and dad to bits. They took pride in

Alan Coleville (10:17.334) never arguing in front of us. And I remember, you know, having relationships then as you grow up, and having disagreements and just not having the tools just having to, you know, I’d shy away from it, I would avoid it at all costs, which isn’t healthy. And it doesn’t progress things. So I think almost the talk was me recognizing that

you have to have better conversations, which involves having constructive conflict and piecing together. How would I bring myself to a point where I could broach subjects where I would lean into it? Luckily, as a designer, you’re kind of taught that, right? It’s part of your degree. know, critique is really important. You always have thought that you take it and you build on it. So I think that was really useful for me, but it still didn’t give me the day-to-day nuance, I guess, of…

dealing with disagreement with colleagues, for example, or even with partners as you grow up. yeah, I think that’s where the talk kind of stemmed from my own inner work, as you called out in your talk, which I absolutely love. But it’s funny, isn’t it, as designers, we start with, OK, so I’m going to look at this thing and I’ll understand it, but I’ll look at how it affects other people. But the more I went through it, the more I realized it was my inner work. It’s actually

me and what I bring to the table because that all comes into play when you disagree with someone. It’s not just about the topic of disagreeing around, it’s how you disagree and your approach to it. And that’s where I realised, you know, as a designer, maybe I’ve not set the conditions for that to happen well, because I haven’t considered even the words that I use, the tone, the approach, the question you asked, that opening question to

open up a discussion and create space. And then, you know, that really hard bit actually, which is being prepared to change your mind. I think almost as a designer, we’re taught that, and particularly service designers actually were often looked to as people who have answers to lots of different things. But being able to say and going into a disagreement and hedge your claims, don’t start by trying to prove yourself right. So

Alan Coleville (12:43.148) Yeah, that’s quite a shift. That’s a reframe of how you approach disagreement, isn’t it?

It is indeed, yeah. There’s something that’s just become apparent to me that is now really obvious now I can think of it. You said something back before about sort of taking something, looking at how something’s made and there’s a classic thing. I mean, you it as a graphic designer or as a media designer. I studied film, video and interactive media and photography. But there’s a classic thing that say, know, industrial designers, product designers do, which is, you know, the professor comes in with a vacuum cleaner.

like a Dyson and says, okay, take this apart and understand how it’s made. And you take that thing apart and you have the students take it apart and have a look at it and they go, oh, this bit’s injection molded and this bit has been designed in this way because for efficiencies or whatever. And here’s where they save some money. And you really do that. You really can deconstruct it and understand all the parts of it and understand and try and do the reverse engineering of thinking, how did that become that way?

Why is it done in this way and so forth? And what were the decisions made? And I try and get my students to do that with services, which is a bit more difficult because they’re intangible quite often. But it just struck me, the thing that seems like really obvious now that I think of it is doing the same with interpersonal interactions and doing the same. So obviously what my wife is a psychologist does all the time, but really intentionally doing it in the work environment and saying, okay, there’s a conflict going on here.

And instead of like, oh, conflict, we don’t want any of that. doing, we can talk about the generational thing later on actually, but doing that thing of like, no, I don’t want that. That’s, you know, that’s triggering me. That’s traumatizing me. Um, but actually looking at it and going, well, let’s have a look at what’s going on here. Let’s pull it apart. Let’s look at it as we would any other designed and or designable object. Um, and understand it. I think it’s a, maybe a useful way for us to get our heads around the idea that it’s not.

Andy Polaine (14:45.57) awful thing to do but it’s actually a very design-ly thing to do.

Yeah. And I think so if you said that and applied that it’s in organizations, that’s not how they run. you know, organizations are, you know, there’s lots of research to say that organizations are not doing their best thinking because they truly don’t know how to handle conflict. And I gave some some statistics around even at an exec level in Europe and the US that execs shy away from avoid because, you know, they might fear.

of getting embroiled in conflicts that they don’t know to manage because they don’t feel equipped or maybe even they think that they would lose. So even at that level, and then you think about employees as well, you have to think then about, okay, so what’s my part to play in this? How might we have better conversations? Understanding that the norm is probably to avoid them. So then the only way you can lean into that is you as a designer.

what you bring to the table and how you might encourage better to start to a tone and model that rather than thinking, I’m going to change the organization to having constructive conflict. That’s not the starting point, if that makes sense.

Yeah, mean, I agree. The more and more I kind of think about impact on the whole conference we were at, the theme was impact. The more I think that the greatest impact we have is, obviously, really like the stone in a pond and the ripples is those really close to us. And that ripple effect, I think we underestimate actually of what a difference that can make. And even if it’s not in the organization you’re currently in or for the next few years, often, you you will be the role model for someone else.

Andy Polaine (16:35.744) And when they are in, end up in that position, they end up affecting quite a few people, you know, anyone who’s reporting to them if they’re in a leadership role. and so that could be, that can have a massive impact. really can have a ripple effect. And when I talk to people in coaching, you really hear it’s one or two people in their lives have made a massive difference. It’s quite often, for a lot of people, it’s a teacher of some kind, either at school or university who, saw something in them and kind of gave them permission to step into their own power in that respect.

or showed them that design was a thing. But quite often it’s just one person who really, could be someone they worked with, be a boss who just really unlocked something or just gave them a role model for something. But that goes both ways, obviously, Mike. So people have kind of terrible role model of someone, I say terrible role model, they have a role model of someone acting in ways that are very destructive, but that also often gets them promoted and then that becomes a thing too.

And I that quelling of conflict can often be a very sort of dictatorial approach in management.

Yeah. And I think the challenge is really, isn’t it, our psychological drive to not have interpersonal discomfort or to rush over conflict. these habitual things we do when we’re faced with it. It’s kind of… You talked when we spoke before this about reprogramming. think the element of reprogramming here that you’ve got to do, starting with yourself.

And how do we as designers not jump to a solution? I think we’re better at that. We try to surface assumptions which should create disagreement that would allow us to get to better, forming better outcomes that we can work to. But we are human and we do want to be proven right. We want to be seen as. So like that reframing and reprogramming is really interesting. But from going through this process, and I’ve been kind of applying this for some years now.

Alan Coleville (18:39.022) It is hard, but it’s simple as well. Because these are the things you can do. Just last week, I was using some of these techniques, just simple framing statements to just try and have better conversations where there wasn’t good conversations. And it’s amazing once you have some courage, show a little vulnerability, how others react. And the room changes as well, doesn’t it? Because you find, oh,

I’m not the only one because of course you’re the only one. there’s something else feeling, you’re feeling it’s not being said, know, others feel it too. So, you know, it can be really positive to be the one that kind of just says, hang on, you know, there might be a better way here. And then others go, yeah, I was thinking that too. And it’s like, it just changes everything. Or even you say something that people disagree with and you don’t get resolution. And it isn’t solved.

you’ve had a disagreement and that might be the first time you’ve had a real disagreement in a team. So the next time you have it, maybe you’re better placed or you just, you just shifted the dial a little bit or lent it a little bit more. So it’s a better place to have it next time. just saying those things and getting them out there, even if it doesn’t get to the outcome that you’ve maybe you’d hoped for is still better. Cause I, you know, I’ve presented this talk before going to Helsinki.

I think.

Alan Coleville (20:06.35) And someone in the audience said, it sounds like an awful lot of work. Yeah, it does sound like a lot of work, but think about the lack of motivation. Think about the negative energy. Think about the dissatisfaction. Think about the team and how it can deliver impact when you don’t surface those things and you just leave them there and you carry them and they just remain. Yeah, I think that’s worse. But

Yeah.

Alan Coleville (20:34.646) Again, in organizations, we like to quantify and measure things. That’s really hard to measure that we should create some sort of playbook for designing with conflict because it actually, the return on investment is this. We’re far away from that. But I think on an emotional energy level, I think it makes more sense to surface those things than it does to actually leave things.

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think it’s also, I mean, you could quantify some of that stuff. one of the things that happens in consulting and, know, this isn’t unique to Accenture. It’s unique, you know, it happens in loads and loads of large organizations, large enterprises. Um, but what I found, I was really surprised by the amount of, uh, alignment meetings. I was like, what, what, we need an alignment meeting on this. Initially I was like, what the hell’s an alignment meeting? And what it is is.

a group of people dancing around each other, circling around each other. It’s a bit like when dogs meet each other and they are, and you get that initial moment of like, are we going to fight or are we going to play? And we’re not quite sure. And so there’s this kind of circling around each other and everyone is talking around the project. And usually there’s a lot of jargon in there because jargon is a great way to cover up all sorts of insecurities and questions that nobody really knows the answer to and everything. And then eventually,

what happens by some kind of osmosis, greater, or, you know, it’s like a kind of a systems effect where the group of people align and at least they think they do and now this is our purpose and direction and so forth. Quite often that is an illusion anyway. But there’s a, there’s, you know, a deck has been created. That’s usually one of the aligning things, but you know, it can be like three or four meetings with quite a lot of people who have paid quite a lot of money to get there. And

If people had the confidence to say, I’m sorry, what are we doing here? I don’t really understand what we’re doing. When you say we need a vision strategy roadmap, what is that? I don’t really know what that is. And there we would get very much, much quicker to some kind of result. I think one of the design superpowers, which we forget all the time is to make abstract things like that tangible. It’s to draw a diagram or to draw whatever it is.

Andy Polaine (22:56.13) you know, is it a concept or an idea and to actually sketch it is a very, powerful thing because then you, get out of the fact that telepathy doesn’t exist and everyone’s kind of pretending to know what the other thinks and you actually have a concrete thing that you can disagree over too, but you’ve at least you’re both know you’re looking at the same thing and you’re disagreeing over it rather than thinking you’re aligned and you’re not. mean, how often does that happen where you get this moment where everyone thought we’re there on the same page and then.

as soon as something gets made manifest in the project. I said, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not what I was thinking of at all. And trying to get there quicker is really important.

Yeah, think I remember from the conference somebody talked instead of alignment to talk about cohesion. And I thought that was really interesting because it says an awful lot more, doesn’t it? But what would you need for cohesion would be different to what you would need for alignment, for example. So in putting the talk together, one of the things that I tried to stay away from was a tool case, you know.

I’m so tempted to ask you, what are three things you need to do?

Because actually, think it’s more fundamental than that. It’s more foundational. It’s more words, you know, being so powerful. And the framing statements you could use to elicit some of those assumptions that you feel are in the room. You know that they’re in the room. You know there’s beliefs, particularly at the beginning of a project or even some way through. You know what you can feel when there’s beliefs that are not coming out. Maybe a sketch or a visual thing as designers, but sometimes just a reframe, just a question.

Alan Coleville (24:35.16) can be enough to start a conversation that might result in, does it look like this? And I think the interesting bit is, like, how would you flip that to make that more open for input from people who maybe don’t want to pick up a pen and do a sketch? For example, know, great with solutions architects, for instance, they’re happy to do a process flow. I do, I use an exercise which I’ve been using for many, years, and it’s just a…

It’s a stick figure exercise and I’ve used it with X, I’ve used it in ballrooms, I’ve used it everywhere and it’s beautifully simple in that everybody can do a stick figure. So I guess it’s thinking about if you are going to use a tool, how do you leave it as open as possible to input? A really good, I don’t know, even the simplest, like let’s start with outcomes as a question is really good at reframing. But that six figure one is like really useful because it’s got only six boxes.

So it forces out a priority. You ask people to start thinking about a user going through it. So it then starts to build empathy for users. And you ask them, know, the sixth box needs to be the outcome that they want. So even in that, and I’ve had people sketch out stick figures with ties and high heels and all sorts of stuff, I’ve never seen, even when I’ve used it, I’ve never seen, know, initially people go, well, I can’t sketch.

you, but it’s fine. know, everybody can do a stick figure. But I guess, you know, that’s the lowest fidelity, but that’s as much as you’d need sometimes to surface disagreement, isn’t it? But other times it’s like it’s complex than that. So you need to put something together that really brings out some of some of the complexity in that. And that might be a diagram or a tool. But I yeah, I tried to in the talk of us all the time resisting my

urge as a designer to whip out a tool and say you could because it didn’t fit. was like, because I knew it wasn’t about our practices. I knew that it’s about our human qualities. So that’s very much about our language and our attitude and our mindset, which is, guess, where the the core of the talk came from was that and you the idea that it’s embraced the conflict and I had those stickers that people keep asking me for from it because

Alan Coleville (26:57.992) I do think it’s a mindset shift that you can do at any time and you could start tomorrow and just try.

Yeah, think we talked about this a little bit before in our previous chat that there is also this, well, there’s cultural differences and there’s also generational differences. I so I’m British and I had lived a long time in Australia. I live in Germany now and I teach in Switzerland. I’ve taught in Australia as well. I certainly noticed differences when I first went to Australia about …

critique culture, for example, and I don’t know if it’s unique to the UK, it may be true of the USA. It’s pretty hardcore in the UK when you’re in university and you go through a design crit, there’s no holds barred. In Australia, I really found there was a tendency to avoid that conflict or to avoid being the one who put yourself out there a little bit and say, you know, well, I really think this didn’t really work so well because there’s a whole cultural thing about what they call not being up yourself.

And so that ended up in crit sessions, people going, yeah, I like it. I don’t like it. But why? I just think it’s great. But why is it great or why is it not? And getting that out of people. You’re Irish, so you were talking about, and now you live in the UK. What have been your sort of cultural experiences around the differences in the way people approach conflict or avoid it?

interesting isn’t it? I love this.

Andy Polaine (28:23.63) We’re going to make loads of generalisations now, right?

tons of gender violations. So I think you can jump to, and I think this was the third section of my talk was talking about supporting others. And a lot of that is about maybe some of the beliefs that you’re bringing into a disagreement around your cultural background or somebody else’s actually. But we often do forget about the thing that trumps that, is our family experience. But let’s start with cultural background for a second then. So

I’m Irish, which I think gets me a long way into disagreement. Something about the accent, for example, which people like. Once you’re understood, that is. I do remember coming here when I moved here first and meeting somebody that I’d been working with for about three months and they were in a different office in a different city. And when I met them in person, they were like, you know, love your accent, but didn’t understand the words you were saying. So, you know, that that can be an issue.

I think that’s something that I bring to the table when I’m disagreeing with someone and that comes into play. And sometimes that can be beneficial because maybe I’ll, you know, the accent gets me some of the way. But I think in the UK, people are not as willing to disagree. I think it’s more healthy in Ireland because we’re very self-deprecating as a nation. it’s, yeah. So

And then, you know, I’ve got a brother who does initially and his Italian wife, you know, healthy disagreement is such a part. And it’s so interesting. I was with him a little time ago and to see when he interacts with us, you know, it’s, he’s not as, as, yeah, I guess he’s Irish, but when he’s interacting with Italians, it’s like a different person.

Alan Coleville (30:25.14) because of course he’s been living in 20 years, so he’s taken on and it’s like much closer proximity to people. know, like, these are really careful not to kind of stereotype here, but you know, it is a lot of like, it’s not just verbal, it’s, it’s… And you don’t know, I don’t understand the language, are they upset? No, they’re not. It’s just that’s how they express themselves. But you know, so I think there is a cultural thing for sure that…

Fog-gesticulation going on.

Alan Coleville (30:54.124) you know, is good to consider. But also don’t just consider who’s in front of you and their cultural backgrounds. Actually consider your own and start there. And then there are benefits that you can just think about, right? You know, how can I kind of better not utilize because if I hate to think that you’re thinking about this as some sort of persuasion, that’s not what it’s about, actually. It’s just about because the most important thing is when you’re working in a team, when you’re working in organization, regardless of cultural background or

family experience, you just want everybody’s opinion. You just want people to be heard what you don’t want. Either from a senior stakeholder who maybe has an idea that you’ve not managed to get out or from a team member, you just want to get those ideas out. That’s the most important thing, regardless of background or family experience. But what it does really help is to think about cultural background, maybe. But if you can get underneath it a little bit and think about somebody’s family experience.

And I explained a couple of techniques to do that, asking simple questions in your team. Because we know that when people share a little bit about their family experience, they’re more likely to share in other areas. Because that’s all you’re trying to do actually, is to set up a space where people can feel, they can share, and you can get everybody’s opinions. Because we know best opinions don’t always come from designers. They come from every place, and you have to hear them. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s funny when you think about the of the methods used in workshops, they’re often used to deliberately flatten out the hierarchy in the room or to get different kinds of voices. And if you think of that round robin exercise, people don’t know it’s an ideation exercise where someone ideates something. And then the next you pass your papers like the consequences game, you you pass it around to the next person and they are called upon to critique that idea. And I’ve had it once in

In Japan, fact, where, know, hierarchy is very strong in business culture, where the person was sitting next to the CEO and had they had not been given the instruction of run now, you have to kind of critique this piece of work. They probably wouldn’t have done it. Um, but it was, you know, it’s very healthy. It’s really useful to do that. I find the culture of things always fascinating. And obviously, you know, know thyself is really the rule here of, what do I bring? And it’s so tempting.

Andy Polaine (33:11.758) you know, certainly when you’re younger, I think to assume that your, your cultural norms are, are the norms. I have a really funny little example of this. Actually, there was a TV show in the UK and it all about generational cooking and recipes and how people cook like their parents and grandparents did. And it was a woman who was saying, you know, I always cut the cooking ham or something like that. So I always cut the of corners off of the ham or the kind of, and I said, well, why’d you do that?

just the way I cook a ham. And then asked her mother and her mother said, why? My mother used to do it, so that’s why I always do it. And they asked the grandmother and the grandmother said, well, you know, it never used to fit in my tin. And so they’re taking on this thing. I am someone, actually, I am someone who likes, I like vinegar on my bacon. And I thought it was a thing that everyone did. It just turned out my dad did that. I suspect his dad did that too.

But those kinds of examples are really, you hear it over and over again. When people actually start to excavate their own cultural norms and then lot often those things get embedded in methods as well. you know, having done lots of workshops and stuff in other parts of Asia, for example, it becomes very, very clear of how North American, a lot of design and European, a lot of design.

methods are offered, sort of workshops and facilitations and things, and they don’t necessarily translate into other cultures. But that said, I think you can lean into your own culture. When you said about the Irish thing, I’ve definitely had a, there’s definitely an excuse when I’m in Germany or in Switzerland to say, you know, it may be because I’m British, but can I ask this really stupid question? It’s not really a stupid question to see that. Can I ask the question elephant in the room? Which I think you can make use of. And I’ve also had a,

I think it’s a nervous tick of mine probably to sort of be a little bit joking and kind of dad-jokey in interactions with sort of senior people. But I found it very useful because I found a few times I slipped into that kind of court jester role and the court jester was there to tell the king the truth that everyone else would get their head cut off off for saying. it’s been super useful sometimes because I felt I could then…

Andy Polaine (35:30.646) I had the license, think, that gave me some confidence, but a license to say the thing that everyone else was thinking in the room, but didn’t dare say. And say it in a way, which maybe is a very British thing to have this, it could be interpreted one way or the other to say it in a way that, you know, it could be interpreted as a joke if it, know, if it landed badly, but it could also be taken seriously and start a conversation. And I think there’s a, there’s an awful lot of service you can do.

where you understand, you know, what role can I play in this social dynamic? What am I good at doing? You sometimes it’s bringing people back down to earth. Sometimes it’s bringing clarity. Sometimes it’s bringing some humor. Sometimes it’s bringing the kind of personal in. Everyone has their different skill, I think, but I do think everyone has a skill.

I completely agree. So it’s interesting, Andy, because one of the doubts I had before giving this talk was I knew it was an Irish person working in the UK and this was a global conference. So was like, well, any of this land actually, you know, are any of these things universal? And I think I asked that question in the very beginning, you know, has anybody had issues or concerns at work they’re afraid to raise and the whole put up their hand. So I was like, that made me instantly happy.

All right.

Alan Coleville (36:45.26) and sat because I wasn’t sure that I thought maybe it was culturally specific actually. So I didn’t see how it would land, but it seemed to have definitely hit a note didn’t it? The talk itself was very well attended and I’ve been in it data to be honest since. So there’s something there and there’s something for us as service designers, there’s something about how we better have better conversations.

There’s definitely a feeling, think, because I’ve looked back to some of the things that people have been probing me about. And it’s like it is looking for better ways to deal with, but it’s not about, you know, have you a tool that’s more about how would you broach, how would you ask, how would you… So it’s simpler, isn’t it, but really important.

Yeah, this comes up all the time in coaching actually and there’s often a, I think I talked about it in my talk, there’s often a moment where someone’s having a problem like that, they’re having an issue with someone they work with and it’s often a peer as much as a boss or someone working for them. And they really wound up about it. eventually, and I hear, listen, they rant about that for about 10 minutes or something. said, well, what is it that you really want to say to this person?

And I get the version of it with lots of swearing. And then we kind of go, well, but my answer is really, or my question is really, then why don’t you say that? And what would it look like if you had to say that? And then they make the non-swearing version of it. But it amazes me how scary that is for people to then go off and say it. But invariably, when they’ve had the courage to then say it, and it’s helped them to rehearse it, I think, in the coaching. You know, including what’s the worst that could happen if you say this and what might happen otherwise.

And then they have it and often it’s not only resolves some of the conflict, it can quite often really be a very, it’s like the first argument in the relationship, right? It actually then bonds them much better with the person that they’ve previously been in conflict with. Have you had that experience or similar? Yeah.

Alan Coleville (38:54.136) That’s exactly it. that’s, if people understood that, we’re willing to take that risk. You know, and I think, you not just because people do ask me a lot about, okay, so, but hierarchy, you know, surely that’s, you know, the biggest problem. But often our disagreements can, you know, are with peers or with people in different teams, not always with disagreement with management or an exec.

And that’s rare actually, because that’s more about the strategy going in the right direction, which isn’t actually about agreement, that’s a direction. So I’ve absolutely had that and I’m having that all the time. And I’ve yet to have, and this is me being really honest, to raise something that didn’t feel right or that was maybe worrying about or demotivated me or made me feel anxious and not had the other person step into a space.

that made us better connected afterwards, even if we didn’t get to some perfect resolution. The trust that was built with just raising that and being humble and vulnerable and exposing yourself and just saying, I’m feeling this. creates that space that is, yeah, so it’s worth doing. It really is worth doing. But you need to

approach that with a mindset that is, if you’re looking, and this is the kind of checklist, if you’re looking to proved right, then that’s probably not going to go well. But if you’re looking to truly make a better connection or work better, and if it’s in the interest of work, and if you’re prepared to be wrong, then it changes things entirely. Because tonally, obviously, it changes things. Words, language, framing, everything becomes different.

But you have to be willing to change your mind. I think that’s probably the key thing, isn’t it? It doesn’t work if you’re not willing to change your mind. And are we really willing to change our minds? Because you’re not always right. So are you willing to be proved?

Andy Polaine (41:08.854) I mean, obviously, you know, I’m always right, but everyone else. I think there’s a funny paradox at the heart of this. I said this lots of times that I think the biggest lie is this idea of it’s not personal, it’s just business. We have this idea of professionalism being sort of non-emotional, right? Don’t bring us, why it’s so gendered as well, you know, don’t bring those kinds of emotions in there. This is being professional.

You know, we are sensible when we’re professional, we wear suits and all of that stuff. But actually when you hear, I hear you talking about that, what you’re really hearing is in fact the sensible, mature thing to do is to have a conversation about this and have the conflict, not act out the conflict, but actually have discussed the conflict. That’s that sort of meta communication thing. And that is much more sensible and mature. And those who don’t, who kind of use

The idea of, I’m just being professional and sweep the emotions under the carpet end up actually being the opposite, right? Where you end up being terribly unprofessional, or at least by not being human, not being personal, you end up creating this really, really toxic environment that has negative professional results, is what I’m saying, or effects. So it’s this kind of weird paradox there that the very thing, maybe it’s just human nature, but the very thing we’re trying to avoid is the thing that’s causing us the problem.

It’s interesting though, isn’t it? So some years ago, decided my LinkedIn profile should have elements of me outside of work on that. And I think that started to happen. This is well documented over COVID, for example, where we started to see into and understand and get a glimpse of. And I think that is a good thing, actually. But the thing for me is, because I always have in my head

those times where you had a really good working relationship, where disagreement was healthy, where ideas just bounced, where roles disappeared. really didn’t matter how hierarchy was lost because it’s in the interest of getting to the best. It was open, it was free. So always have that in my head as that only happened because people opened up.

Alan Coleville (43:34.902) It only happens actually, I think, when the emotional part is there and understood. yeah, and you know, there are constraints, you know, but there’s an understanding, you have this promise that you’ve made to each other, that there’s trust. And when you raise something and disagree that it’s for good reason. And then, you know, the creativity and the innovation just flows from that. So you’ve kind of…

took apart that professional piece, put it to one side, and you’re only dealing with the emotional piece, actually, and that’s when it works best. But you’re right, you know, I’ve expressed this before and I really like it, but that’s a flip, isn’t it? In, you know, putting emotion into your professional work and what you do and being vulnerable and being willing to say I was wrong. All those things that me as a consultant, maybe…

Maybe I was less comfortable to do that 10 years ago, maybe when I’m younger as well. maybe I didn’t have the gravitas perhaps to say, well, no, I didn’t get that right. I think it should be like this. As a young designer, I probably wouldn’t have had the courage or the confidence to do that. But I do think it’s, yeah, that’s a change that I’m putting into play now and have been for some years.

The benefits are so much better. The connections you make with people are so much deeper. The impact that you can do is far greater.

You said before there are constraints and boundaries to this. think there is definitely a, I have seen people sort of weaponize that in the other direction where they come in and it’s all about them and it’s all about their, how they’re, you know, and if they’re having a bad day, there’s someone in particular I’m thinking of and she used to come in and was, you know, made a big thing about how hungover she was and then sort of it would sit down and be like,

Andy Polaine (45:27.374) You know, and it was like it flooded this room with this vibe of like, you know, it’s not my day today. And then of course it just became awful for everyone. And there was no, there were no boundaries there. And I’ve also seen that thing, you know, like I said, I’m married to psychologists and psychotherapists and the language of therapy, and I don’t want to minimize anyone’s actual trauma or experiences, bad, toxic,

workplaces because there’s lots of them. I’m not saying this at all. I’m going to preface this, the language of, you know, even things that saying that triggered me or I’m traumatized or I feel unsafe. I really want people to be able to say that they feel unsafe and all of those things, but I have seen it then used cynically, I would say, you know, to say, than I’m feeling discomfort here and we can explore that. So I feel unsafe and just shuts the whole thing down.

And it’s particularly used as a way of kind of bullying upwards. And I understand all the reasons why sometimes you need to kind of fight upwards and use what you can because there’s a power differential there. But I’ve definitely seen it then go so far the other way that it makes it very, very difficult for people to interact with each other because it’s conflict aversion so strong there. You can’t even begin to have a conversation about the fact that you might be having a conflict, let alone actually go any further than that.

It’s yeah, so I’ve presented in the talk Patrick Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team. do think it’s the simplest if you were to apply some framework to it because you know, when he talks about, okay, so in what you’re describing there, Andy, is it an attention to results? So is that person focused on individual pursuits and not collective success, for example? So I think with Patrick Lencioni’s framework, you can start to go, but what is this?

break it down, is it that there isn’t trust here, so people are afraid to disagree? Is it that, you know, there’s a lack of commitment because we don’t have clear direction and there’s a lack of bias, so we just can’t make decisions that stick? Or is it about accountability? Because when I gave this talk, people say, well, one of the things that we disagree on most is people’s roles. And we know there’s much more disciplines that we’re working within teams. So, but I think you can unpack it.

Alan Coleville (47:55.234) Probably the scenario you’re describing, it’s hard even to get to that discussion point. But I do think thinking about where might the problem be and then having the conversation and even showing, you know, I’ve used Patrick Lencioni’s model and showed it to people where there was disagreement. So where are we having this? What’s the disagreement about? there’s a little bit over here. There’s a little bit over here, but it always comes down to the same thing. There’s probably a lack of trust and there’s probably a fear of conflict.

the roles, responsibilities, the attention to results and stuff is all stuff you can sort out and should sort out and that’s really valuable because actually if they’re not there, that will cause disagreement. But it usually comes down to the human qualities and the foundational competencies that mean you’re not having good disagreement.

Yeah, it definitely can help to have a third thing you can point to, I think, rather than, you know, that’s just your opinion and stuff. But I think it’s also what I’m also hearing there is how important it is to have some of these conversations up front and to talk about, certainly when you’re forming a project team or any of that stuff, to talk not just about, you know, here’s what the project’s about and everything, but how do we feel about this agreement? How do we go about resolving that? Are there any particular structures? What are our boundaries?

But also the personal stuff of this stuff’s really important to me and this stuff is stuff I need your support on. And I’ve seen teams where that’s worked well and people have policed each other and someone said, it’s okay, you know, I’ll stay late to finish this. And the rest of the team said, no, you need to go because we know that on Tuesday nights is yoga or whatever it is. And that’s really important to you. And when it works well, like that stuff is really, really super important to have upfront. it can help.

Again, it’s that sort of meta communication idea that we’re going to do some work around how we communicate before we are full of all the adrenaline and fear and hormones there that are going to make us then explode. So that when we get to that point, it’s like having a good fire extinguisher. When we get to that point, we know what to do.

Alan Coleville (50:02.35) So I agree, but I’ve seen this go wrong actually a few times. where you, for example, you take it in because you’ve got different organizations starting off on something really big and you start to build that understanding. Maybe you’re starting to get people to think about objectively different strengths and weaknesses. But I think it’s the things that you can sow into the routines that are

Okay

Alan Coleville (50:31.776) almost more important. the reminders of, I’ve used examples of a simple question at the end of a retro, for example, to say, is there anything here that you’re afraid to say? I think if we can start to let into routines, it becomes, because a great start is good, don’t get me wrong. But then it can just be focused on the work as you say in the milestones and it goes into the cadence. And then we’ve lost it somehow.

So I think if you can build it into your routines and it’s totally possible to do that. There’s a lovely, from facilitation at a glance, that really amazing book. There’s a beautiful survey that you can run. It’s only 10 questions that you can run with your team to just assess how are we handling disagreement? And I love that because it’s really old, it’s beautifully simple, and you could do it at any time just to see, is there anything below the surface here that’s not being dealt with? there anybody that’s afraid to say?

So I do think, yes, a good start to surface some of those things can be hard because you might not know some of those things. You might not have that relationship yet, right? You might not have built some trust. So then periodically coming back to that I think is really healthy as well.

So this has been fascinating. We’re coming up to time. Unfortunately, we could talk about this for ages. We should have recorded the pre-conversation we had where we talked about a load too. As you know, the show is called Power of 10. It’s named after the powers of 10 film by Ray and Charles Eames, all about the relative size of things in the universe. And so the one small question is, or the one of the final question is, what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world?

That’s a really hard question, Andy. I love that you are. There was so much, I was racking my brains over the weekend thinking and there’s so much that I could have talked about. But I think for me, I need to bring it back to the talk. I need to bring it back to the idea that, you know, we’re not doing our best thinking. So taking that first step, there’s probably something if you’re in a team and you’re doing work today.

Alan Coleville (52:39.982) There’s probably something that you’re not saying. There’s probably some, whether it’s big like an elephant in the room that people are not talking about, or whether it’s small, something, maybe an interpersonal thing with a team member that is demotivating you, you’re finding it hard. So I think the small thing is just saying it.

and

how it lands and then seeing the ripples as maybe somebody else does the same. So for me, the smallest thing that could have the biggest impact is just to start to have those disagreements, to say that thing, to, you know, and to not think of that as a negative because sometimes we give ourselves a hard time and say, I can’t say that because of this. Don’t think it through so much actually in some regards. Just think of it as, you know, this is a step forward. It’ll help others.

And just remember that you’re probably not the only one thinking it. So it’s good to say it. So the smallest thing would be just to say that thing that’s worrying you, that concern that’s there, that issue that’s there, that interpersonal thing, person in the team that you’re going, I’m not quite sure. I think we could and just go for it. I think that’s the small thing.

That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. What I’m also hearing there is the thing around people reflecting from what is it that I’m actually feeling here too, I think, because I think there’s often the surface thing and then what’s actually going on there. And I think that can help ask those questions or have that conversation without the immediate kind of emotional conflict that sometimes will come with it. So where can people find you online?

Alan Coleville (54:14.638) So, yeah, it’s a complicated question these days with some of the changes in social networks. LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to find me online, to the point that I like to people to know a little bit more about me beyond the professional. My Instagram is actually someplace because I’m a visual person. So that’s the other place I direct people to at the moment. But if you want to contact me, LinkedIn is best.

Thank you so much. I’ll put all the links in the show notes and I’ll put a link to those couple of books you mentioned too. Thank you so much for being my guest on Power of 10. You’ve been watching and listening to Power of 10. You can find more about the show on Pelain.com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice, online courses, as well as sign up for my irregular newsletter, Doctor’s Note. If you have any thoughts.

It’s Andy, thank you very much.

Andy Polaine (55:02.754) Put them in the comments below or get in touch. You’ll find me as at andypolaine on Bluesky. You’ll find me at Andy Polaine or apolaine on LinkedIn or my website. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening and watching and I’ll see you next time.

The Importance of Project Closure

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Most of the time leadership’s ambitions are greater than their willingness to resource them.

If your teams are just jumping directly from one project to the next, you may be sowing the seeds of burnout because how you end projects makes a big difference to the quality of future ones.

Project closures—or sunsets—are just as important as the kick-off.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

Most of the time leadership’s ambitions are greater than their willingness to resource them. If your teams are just jumping directly from one project to the next, you may be sowing the seeds of burnout because how you end projects makes a big difference to the quality of future ones.

And this week I want to talk about project sunsets. When I say project, mean, in whatever way you break down your work into a unit of work.

Projects are hypotheses

Every project is a hypothesis. Now you probably know it from OKRs for the actual work of we believe that by doing this thing we’re going to shift this metric and we’ll know if we’ve done it by this time.

But the resourcing of a project is also a hypothesis. Someone, somewhere, maybe you, says, well, I think it’s going to take this amount of people this much time to do this chunk of work.

And obviously it’s based on your experience, but it’s also a guess, right? That’s what a hypothesis is, an informed guess.

What I’ve seen happen often is designers move from finishing a project up with a hectic end on a Friday to starting the new one on Monday morning and they’ve already been in meetings that week previously prepping for it. This gives no time for reflection and importantly it creates no feedback loop to whoever set up the project or sold the work and resourced it in the first place.

So often leadership get the impression that everything’s fine. We asked for this piece of work to be done, we gave these resources and the work got done. What they don’t see is people working at evenings and weekends and people burning out and really stressed, because that doesn’t get fed back up to them and that’s really important. You would likely not skip a project kickoff.

So make this project sunset a part of the way you work. It doesn’t take that long. You can do it in two or three hours and maybe a little bit of extra time to do a case study.

The value of case studies

And I’d really recommend creating a little two page or two slide case study. You may not be in agency land and so you might not think about it for pitching, but those things are really, really useful if you are,

they’re your credentials. But even if you’re working internally, it makes the case for impact and ROI in the future because you sat down and thought about it and very fresh in your mind of all the things you did and the impact you might have had.

So you get used to this idea of articulating the value of your work. They also have another benefit which is really useful for onboarding new people. Invariably new people ask two questions. What does good look like here? Show me some of your work. Show me the projects you’ve done and how you go about them. And when they’re working on something, have we done this before? so I’m not reinventing the wheel.

Closure

Sunsets give people some emotional closure. You get to thank people and show gratitude. It also gives people a chance to say, can we not do this again? Because that was an absolute nightmare. And feed that back. it gives them a moment to have their say.

And that feedback and reflection practice is just like any other reflective practice that you think about what went well, what you would change, what you would improve and learn and that’s how you raise the bar of quality.

Outro

I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below.

If you have any of your own tips or even templates, post a comment below. I’d love to hear them. Thanks very much. I will see you again soon.

Leadership Renewal Retreat 2026

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0200

If you’re struggling with January blues and already feeling busy, Marzia Aricò and I have the antidote for you:

A Leadership Renewal retreat in Bergamo, Italy, 9th-12th April, 2026.

We both coach and both experience coachees feeling overworked, depleted from holding space for others, and often a loneliness of being the only design person at their level.

So we decided to create Leadership Renewal retreat. A small, intimate retreat for senior design leaders at the beautiful and peaceful Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design campus in Bergamo, nestled in the Astino valley.

Take a few days away from busy calendars, calls and kanbans. Time out from performance mode. Away from having to be “on”.

We planned this as a kind of Italian family gathering. Together, we will cook, eat, walk, think, talk, and sit with what leadership really looks like at this point in our careers.

We’re not here to solve all your problems, but to enable you to reconnect with energy, clarity, and direction.

We hope you will join us. We’re keeping it as a small group, so reserve your place as soon as possible here: https://leadership-renewal.me/

We’re so looking forward to welcoming you.

Chui Chui Tan - Cross-Cultural Insights

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is Dr. Chui Chui Tan who specialises in culturalisation strategies tailored for international growth. She leverages cultural insights to craft winning global business strategies and has partnered with industry giants, Fortune 500 companies and household names, guiding them to navigate international markets successfully.

Chui Chui’s expertise lies in simplifying complex cultural landscapes into actionable strategies that drive success for businesses worldwide.

She is also the author of a new book, Research for Global Growth: Strategies And Guidance For Cross-Cultural Insights.

Show Links

Chui Chui

Website: https://beyo.global
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuichuitan/
Book: https://beyo.global/books

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello and welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organization, society, and the world. My name’s Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, designer, educator, and writer. My guest today is Dr. Chui Chui Tan. She specializes in culturalization strategies tailored for international growth.

She leverages cultural insights to craft winning global business strategies and has partnered with industry giants, fortune 500 companies and household names, guiding them to navigate international markets successfully. Tree tree’s expertise lies in simplifying complex cultural landscapes into actionable strategies that drive success for businesses worldwide.

She is also the author of a new book where she’s gathered a lot of her knowledge together. It’s called Research for Global Growth Strategies and Guidance Across Cultural Insights. Chui Chi, welcome to Power of Ten.

[00:01:01] Chui Chui Tan: Thank you Andy. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:03] Andy Polaine: So I gave you your sort of, you know, your official bio.

Can you tell me a little bit about your journey here? I think I read in, in the book that you’ve been in 46 countries around the world. Yeah. Doing, doing, uh, I don’t know how much of that is living or traveling and how much is work. Quite a lot of it’s for work. But, uh, tell me how you got into the, the work you’re doing and what you’re doing now.

[00:01:22] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah. Um, so I, my background is, I, I suppose I should actually mention about my background because I think it plays certain elements into what I’m doing now. So I’m a Malaysian Chinese, um, so my grandparents actually from China, so by Malaysians I’m very relate to this country. Um, so we follow the Chinese, uh, culture.

Um. Because that is our traditions and we celebrate the, the, the same um, um, celebrations as in China, but in Malaysia it is kind of like, I dunno, um, your audiences and yourself know about this, but it’s actually Malaysians, it’s very. A melting pot. Really. Yeah. But is, um, it’s kind of have a lot of ethnicities, um, like Malay, Chinese and Indians and many other ethnicities as well.

So I kind of grew up in very much on the cultural, how to say, like very much blended into different culture and very familiar to me. Without me knowing that. So my background, my undergraduate and my master is completely different’s in mechanical engineering and then, uh, music technology master. And um, by, I end up doing human and computer interactions as my PhD.

And that led led me to, um, user experience, well we call it human computer interactions and then usability and then UX and then cx. You know, like I went through the whole evolutions of our industry really. Um. Can I accidentally mention about my Asian at this point? Yeah. But um, so yeah, I think, uh, my background is customer experience, but where I start off with the globalizations and culturalization is more when I started, um, working with, at the time Merit International, I was work with them as their external global consultant.

Really helping them to understand their. Travelers and, and from different cultures how they book hotels and then meets from end-to-end journey and digital experience and also in hotel. And that kind of start to bring me into, oh, there’s actually the world out there and what is different. And then I think because it’s quite, um.

My roots, where kind of see different culture is very common to me. So I start to kind of work on that a lot more. And then I start working for myself for the last seven or eight years. And I focus very much on culturalization, I call it culturalization, uh, mainly to help businesses to understand or simplify complex cultural landscape and into actionable strategies that actually can drive them successful globally.

So it could be from, um, launching a new market, like we are going in into a new market of this is the first time we’re going into a new market. What should we do, what we, what we should be paying attention to or helping businesses to take their existing market to another level. So at this moment as well, I also advise a lot of C levels and senior management to help them to kind of uncover how their global opportunities would be, and also if they have.

Let’s say they have two markets in two markets and they have very different function products, functions, and services. How to bring them together into one as they start to grow globally. So you can have too many different variations, um, to maintains and, and, and governs. Um, so how to bring that together so that you can cater for similarities as well as differences, um, easily, um, most cost efficient and productive as well.

[00:04:54] Andy Polaine: So maybe you can kind of pull apart. Now unpack this, this difference. ‘cause you talk about the difference between localization and, and culturalization. Uh, and I think you sort of mentioned a lot of clients they say, oh yeah, we we’re sort of already done some localization, which mainly is we’ve translated some of our staff into another language.

But you’ve made the distinction here. Can you talk a bit more about what’s the difference between culturalization and localization?

[00:05:20] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah. So first of all, culturalization, I don’t think you can find in any additional risk yet. But it’s kind of self-explanatory for me. Um, I think when I’ve mentioned that people actually understand what that means, um, in, in the higher level.

But for me, I start off actually talking about localization with businesses, but I start to see actually the understanding there’s a lot of misunderstanding and we are not talking about the same thing when we talk about localizations or culturalization. So a lot of times, localizations. Means to a lot of businesses or, or senior management is, yeah, like you say, changing the language, changing the currency and ing, you know, like adapt design elements to a very, the bare minimum.

And that is enough to do that. But of course we all know that actually. There are more than that to make a local experience better for the local audiences. Um, there are more things to kind of consider your services and so on. So localization is very much, um, more like one off actions. So you do it once you change the language or you change the currency and then that is it.

You know, like you doesn’t feel like you need to do more than that, whereas actually. Um, culturalization for me is more long term. Like you, you have to be continuously doing improving because you can be possibly know all the insights about local culture and local market, and then you do all the changes at once, and then that is it.

You, your knowledge about them is going to build up. Um, progressively throughout, uh, the time and also their behaviors and things might change. Their context in the countries might change because they have a better politicians and things change economically become better. Yeah. They have exposed to more, um, different technologies and so on.

So the local people’s behavior and mindset and things like that will start changing as well. So culturalization is about that, about kind of understanding the full picture. And the holistic view I call it. And then you keep continuing, um, improving. And it touch on not just language, not just product, not just, um, design, um, or marketing, but it’s actually touch on every single elements of your business and everyone have to work together, um, so that it actually more align.

So that’s why I tend to use the word culturalization.

[00:07:45] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Can you gimme an example? I mean, it’s probably easiest, I think, to sort of hear from examples. I, I’m, I’m interested of, you know, what happens if they don’t do this? What happens when they get it wrong? And I dunno if you’ve got any examples of that you probably might not want to name names.

[00:07:59] Chui Chui Tan: Um, just different layers of getting it wrong. Right? The first layer I think I mentioned in my book as well, um, uh, research for Culture, um, global growth is I actually have, uh, uh, three layers. Um. I call it to three levels of culturalization. So getting it wrong could be the first layer where you actually create something that actually offensive.

To the culture or to the religions of the countries. Um, also on uh, or, so that is kind of like the basic thing. You don’t want to offend anyone because you want to build the respect you, um, you want to kind of do that. Some of examples I mentioned in the book, some didn’t, but, uh, one of the example was that geopolitical mistakes, a lot of company.

Did, um, in terms of putting Tibet, um, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and all those into as a country, and so there’s a backlash or they have to apologize to the Chinese government. So that’s geopolitical mistake. Um, and then you have others, like you, there’s a campaigns in, um, um, by a Canadian supermarket, like huge Canadian supermarket.

They kind of have this, um, festival for the Sikh. Um, but they actually promoting, um, I can’t remember which town made like as a, as a, as the one of the promotions of the food, but actually it’s against their religions to actually consume that kind of meat. During their festival and things like that. So this I to think of getting it wrong or make the mistake, and then the rest could be other elements where you kind of, um, provide, for example, this again, a simple example, provide the wrong payment methods that they actually be more relevant with.

Like, for example, in, um, Kenya. M PSA is very common. If you don’t use that, um, and you say credit cards in a lot of countries, then they’re actually not going to be relevant and you create barrier for them to actually pay. So there are different type of layers. Some is more than the others. Some is kind of like you will actually become a barrier for them to use them.

Some is actually, um, some. Of those mistakes, just creating something that actually would not allow you to kind of, um, provide another layer of growth, for example, um, not providing the experience that they, they kind of, um, look forward to

[00:10:18] Andy Polaine: this experience and enhancement is the, sort of, is the third layer you said?

Yeah. Are they, do you see those as kind of built on each other that you can’t. Do you like? You have to kind of earn the respect or, or earn the right to sort of be even interacting or be in a marketplace by those other layers before you can kind of get to the enhancement. The enhancement layer. Yeah.

[00:10:38] Chui Chui Tan: So the book, I have three layers.

So one layer is about the respect and the second layer is about the basic customer experience where you kind of provide. The right addressed format or name, formatting first name, last name first, and all those things. And then the last one was the, the biggest one, but actually the most important one, the enhancement.

Um, it doesn’t have to be like one layer to the others, but the respect one, I would imagine it has to be. Yeah, you have to get it right first. Um, otherwise, like you move into a new neighborhood and you didn’t have that respect, it’s hard for you to do anything else to kind of gain that trust and so on.

[00:11:16] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:11:16] Chui Chui Tan: But the rest, it’s actually, um, it could be done. Um, concurrently or actually, um, progressively as well.

[00:11:23] Andy Polaine: Yeah, it’s very subtle. A lot of this too, I mean, you know, we are talking an example here where I think probably in our heads, well in, in my head, you know, there’s an example of say a kind of a western, you know, or American company moving into somewhere like China.

But I know in Australia, for example, where there’s. And so I’m British, but I lived in Australia for, I’m also a Australian now, I lived in Australia for a long time and it probably took me about two years I think, of being there before I really clicked. I thought, oh actually this is a different culture because you know, they’re speaking English, they’ve got the queen’s head on their, their money at the same time.

There’s a lot of kind of American influences there as well, and it sort of feels like, oh, I know this and I watch lots and lots of companies. So come into Australia, do that classic thing of, oh, we are gonna show them how these Aussies, how to do this, you know, from Europe or America. And then sort of leave two years later scratching their heads and one was Starbucks.

So Australia has a very, very. Strong, thriving coffee culture there. I mean, very kind of, you know, baristas, kind of carefully measuring everything and, and that, you know, people are very particular about the coffee and it’s, it’s very good. And Starbucks came and set up in the middle of kind of the, uh, you know, CBD Bigs of Glass thing and just kind of vowed they, they, they moved, I can’t remember how long it lasted, but it just couldn’t kind of.

Get the idea that, you know, that’s not what coffee meant to Australians. And this was, it was always interesting for me, the moment it happened for me, where I had that kind of switch was someone saying to me, oh, you know, we were standing by around a barbecue. I remember this. They said, I’m really looking forward to Christmas and the summer holidays.

And I was like, oh my God, you’ve had a very different childhood to me. You know? And there’s this sort of moment of realizing everything was, in fact very different and different values and all of those things, but kind of very subtle shifts. You mentioned, um, you know, ordering things in to match those markets or to kind of, you know, uh, get the, make sure you’re not offending to gain respect and all the rest of them.

Um, and actually one of the examples you gave was around Pixar and I found that I, you know, ‘cause there’s a lot of work obviously to do that. Do you wanna talk about the Pixar example? ‘cause I, I think it Sure. It’s a really nice example of exactly what you’re talking about.

[00:13:32] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah. I think it’s a nice example and quite easily related to it.

Right. Um, so yeah, Pixar is very much, they actually have a, I think I’m watching a documentary about them. I saw they have a localizations, um, team as well to look into all these elements. So the examples I was given giving in my book and some of my talks is, um, inside out. I think they have inside out too now.

But the inside out oneand that we are talking about, so Riley, the little girl. Um, so there are scenes that I, um, you can see that her dad is trying to fit her broco. And this is, most of us actually see this scene. So a lot of them actually, um. Riley was being fed by the dad, um, broccoli, and she has this disgust, um, feeling like, ew, I don’t want to eat that.

But actually, um, in Japan, they actually see a very, very different view, um, because they found out that broccoli actually, like by the. Kids in Japan, for some reason they loved it. So that doesn’t, that doesn’t really much to that kind of perceptions of kids. Doesn’t like broco. So they did some research into it and they realized that actually, um, kids in Japan didn’t like, um, green pepper.

So they changed that scene and they are quite, um, I think it’s, there are 26 shoots that they actually changed just for that, um, that scene, um, to change that. And then not just that they have, I think there’s another scene quite, um, commonly known is the dad Rileys, that actually was watching ice hockey, um, in one of the daydreams.

But actually in a lot of other markets we see. Soccer or football, whatever, whichever we call. So, um, Pixar is very, very good in kind of finding out different things. Sometime it’s just about, you know, like experience relevancy, but sometime it’s more about the language to make it easier, like conversion.

Sometime it’s about the respect. Again, some words you actually shouldn’t be mentioned in that country because of the religions. Um, reason. So they remove that. Or the sign you can see at the background that we might not even pay attention to. They will change that as well, um, to assign or symbol that actually relate to them.

Yeah, Pixar is very good examples of, you know, even small things actually create emotions, attachment, um, to the products or the, the things that you create that is very important as well.

[00:15:50] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

So, you know, in, in something like a film like that, obviously it, it creates a lot more work for ’em ‘cause they have to kinda re-render the shots and things.

But on the other hand it’s, it’s a kind of one thing, once they’ve finished it, it sort of goes out there in the world and it. You know, it has different formats, but it doesn’t really change for other companies, um, where they’re, you know, it’s, they’re involved in, uh, providing services and there’s many, many more kind of touch points.

It’s more complex. Um, you talked before about sort of finding this, is there a kind of sweet spot between how much you. You can do before it becomes unmanageable. Mm. And, and, you know, by what criteria do you decide okay, that’s, that’s just enough? Or, um, is it just a kind of budget thing? Or is it, is there somewhere where it’s, um, ‘cause I can imagine, so I guess where I’m going with this is I can imagine if you make it too complex, you can run the risk of missing something.

Mm. Right. The more complex it becomes, the more chance of making mistakes in some respects. You know, so is there a kind of bell curve there? And there’s a sweet spot in the, in the middle.

[00:16:48] Chui Chui Tan: Mm-hmm. Um, very good questions. And so. Always have to start from somewhere, right? Like I think, um, I was talking to a CPO of a company and then she said like, this is very overwhelming.

Like, where do I even start? Right? Um, a c, C, right? That’s CPO and, and so on. So I kind of like step back and say, say okay. To me it’s quite systematic and know how, how to do it, when to stop and, and so on. Um, but I can imagine that it’s actually one. Hearing all the things I say, you should consider this and that.

It could sounds, sounds like, oh yeah. It’s quite, um, quite scary. And so I think. One thing that, um, one misperception I want to clear out for now, um, to start with is a lot of people have these misperceptions that they only needs to think about culturalization when they are ready to go to a new market. So they say, okay, don’t talk to me first.

Like, I will let me sort out my UK market first, for example, and then, um, I will get in touch again once I ready for the new market. It’s actually quite risky to do that because, you know, ultimately your. Your service, it has to grow somewhere because if you’re only one market, you are actually go going to be quite restricted in terms of your growth and like it or not even you’re not in other markets.

You have users from other markets using your products in this country or, yeah. Yeah. You not even like organically grow up, um, into other markets. So it’s very important for CEO and to start with all the, um, any startup to, to have this mindset of global mindset so that you can set up your product and business proposition from the very beginning that is easily adaptable in the future for other markets, so that you don’t have to rebuild everything, so you don’t have to rethink your value propositions because it’s so hard to convert into other.

Culture or add value. So it’s very important to have that. And if you have that mindset to kind of help you on your. Very early strategy and also throughout the process that you make decisions with your team. It’s good to have all this mindset, global mindset to start with. So once you’re ready to go, it’s actually easy.

You don’t have to kind of go back game.

[00:19:01] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So you get sort of culturalization debt otherwise where you kind of have prepared the ground. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:07] Chui Chui Tan: So there’s one example. One, one project, a startup, actually they did in the right way, where I work with the, the. Their health related startup, and they know that because the investors are from other countries, they say.

You start off in the uk, but eventually we want you to go to other places. So, because it is medical related, we did some research in the uk, but all the outputs, very, very NHS focused, right? NHS way of like doing this, um, you know, like. Pregnancy. You have, I think 16 weeks before you start going checking and you, you call it, um, yeah, you have a very different way of managing the whole pregnancy, for example.

But once you move to other country, it’s very different. So if they set their value pro position and also their content in a certain way, then it’s actually really hard in the future to do that. So, yeah, you need to think about it from the very beginning. So you build a system in the right way rather than.

Really hard to kind of convert in the future. So yeah, that is a very starting point.

[00:20:11] Andy Polaine: I was just wondering, you know, out of all the things, ‘cause you talk in quite a lot of detail about how to set up the research and how to work with local people. You have that sort of glocal. Thing going on, which is sort of the space you operate in of that sort of global, local and the partnerships.

There’s a lot in there and it’s very, very useful, very, very tactical for people. I can’t wait to share it with my students. I have a lot of international students, actually mostly international students and some kinda really interested, and they often want to do something around their own communities, around their kind of own ethnic or country communities.

Um, and I think it would be really, really useful. Obviously incredibly useful for companies. You know, there’s been this whole conversation in design recent about, you know, the death of UX research. Mm-hmm. And, you know, everything is, you know, research is being in, in the product world, research just sort of being pushed under products and all the rest of it.

But there’s clearly a case for two things here. One is I think you really lay out the case for why actually having specialists who know what they’re doing is really important and not just, you know, anyone can do research. Everyone should kind of do a little bit, I think, but not everyone can do research at the level of kind of cultural nuance there.

Can you talk a little bit about the difference between someone like you doing this and you know, a product owner or someone saying, well, you know, I, I, I can do some of that, or, you know, we could just a couple of people.

[00:21:28] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah. I think it’s two layers, right? Like the thing you mentioned earlier, like, we see so many out there, like people saying researcher.

Should be the one doing research because other people can do it, but it’s not to the extent. So that is the standard research we are talking about. But when you add to the cultural. Elements, there’s another layer, which is even more complicated. Even the normal researcher might actually

[00:21:53] Andy Polaine: struggle with it.

[00:21:53] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah. The researcher that actually doing the normal research might not even consider because it’s a second layer of complexity that you have, so yes. It comes with experience, but also the mindset as well, um, in terms of how you see things slightly differently and know what to look into. So it’s from my experience or from the very beginning when I do international research and I kind of.

I’m a researcher. I’m a good researcher, but then there’s some elements that I didn’t know already if I compare it now that I know. Okay. If you go to, for example, Japan, what are the things that you, I already know some of the behaviors and the culture elements that I know for this company, because it’s talking about working.

Um, tools like, uh, work, work management tools, and there are elements that I can bring in already hierarchical and things like that. But when I work with, for example, Spotify on in the same market, I know actually it’s a, it’s a different one from Asana when I work on work management tool, that the things that, the cultural insights and nuances that is important for.

Asana might not be for Spotify anymore and vice versa and so on. So it’s kind of, and then knowing those kind of cultural nuances that might impact the people’s behavior for this company. Before you go into research, it’s very useful because then you actually have a better idea where you want to dig deeper into it, how, what kind of questions you might want to kind of put it into the discussion guide and prop more into as well.

Yeah. Because it’s relevant to that market, uh, knowing that the mobile data is very expensive from that market, how is it going to influence, you know, things like that. So, very beginning when I do my re um, internet research, I didn’t know that. I just like going in and trying to hear any differences and new.

Um, nuances that I can pick up so that we can say, okay, this is very different. So that comes with experience in terms of picking out what to do. But then, like my book was doing, my book, this book is, there’s big part of, it’s very tactical, like you say, it’s practical in the thing. So even. I, I wanted to write another book, more strategic, but I kind of like, maybe I find a balance onto that a sec.

But this tactical bits, like, like I, I got, uh, put in a book like from the project management side, like to choose who you should kind of pick to work with to start with and also, um, when you kind of plan for your timeline and timing. You have time differences. Not just that, but you have different culture and festivals.

You have things that they are, they care about Ramadan. That is happening, then you need to know what to do and what not to do, and organize your, your researching differently. And then to the point of how you brief your moderators, your teams and, and then how you brief interpreters and, um, translators because they’re important.

So there are a lot small elements within all this, um, is very important. Yeah.

[00:24:55] Andy Polaine: There’s a thing that strikes me this, and it’s sort of unsurprising in, in many respects, you know, there’s a lot of relationship to accessibility. The of the, you know, it’s very different for someone who’s a sighted person to.

Design something for someone visually impaired and kind of read all the literature and sort of try and do that versus having someone who’s visually impaired actually be on that team and kind of tell them about the sort of reality of it. You know? ‘cause there’s similar kind of, I think, cultural relationship.

There’s a thing that struck me though in that example where, you know, an oxo, I dunno if you know, the, the people who make kind of kitchen Yeah. Um, utensils. Yeah. Sort of famously there’s that idea of if you make it good for those people. You actually make it good for everyone else. Can you think of any examples where you’ve, there’s been like an adjustment or an insight that from, ‘cause often we’re sort of talking about a company and like I said, it’s often a US or sort of European company moving into another culture where there has been an insight in that, uh, ization moment where they’ve gone, actually, you know what, that should flow the other way.

What the changes we’ve made here for this particular culture or this market would actually be really beneficial if we kind of pushed it back to the, the original market and it goes the other way.

[00:26:02] Chui Chui Tan: Mm. So that is kind of like the thing about identify, not just differences, but similarities. Right. Because that is quite similar.

Yeah. Like you, you go to other markets you say, oh, that is very different. And then can that apply to any other markets as well? So that actually grow that, so for example, with Spotify in the western markets, we have the individual plans and, and family plans and so on. So you have monthly payment, but in, in country, like we, we identify like for example, um.

Indonesia, for example, like, or actually Philippines to start with. People actually care about paying things as, think I mentioned in my book. Like people like to pay things in a small sachet. Garlic, you buy too clothes. S culture. Yeah, sachet mentality. Um, because they don’t want to waste it from, you know, from the history.

They don’t, they so care about. Just taking what they want or buying what they want or need. Um, so that mentality is still here, even though the wealth is actually better, um, in a lot of, um, yeah. Areas, but because it’s what they family. So this actually, this, um, this behavior or mentality move into. Digital as well when they think about paying music.

But I’m not going to listen to music in two days in this week or three days next week because I’m busy. So, but I’m paying for the whole month and I’m wasting, and I’m not taking the best value out that. So they have this mentality. So one of the things that came out after that is how do we actually have this?

Propositions that help them to, to overcome this Sasha mentality. So they came up with a mini plan. Mini plan is where you can play per day or per week. And you say, oh, next week I’m gonna listen to music a lot. I’m going to pay with that first. And then so they can pick and choose, don’t feel like they wasted.

And then we realized actually there are a lot, other markets actually have similar mentality mindset, but also because the way that they being paid monthly, uh. Their salary is not being paid monthly. It’s biweekly or daily. Yeah. So this kind, this kind of proposition or plan is actually useful for them as well.

So we start to kind of, Spotify started to kind of, um, look into which market is actually better, so kind of spread out to other markets as well. So this is kind of examples. You look in one and actually there’s a similarities that you can actually can spread out to other markets as well. It might not be all markets, but there are certain markets that you can look into.

[00:28:28] Andy Polaine: No, but I can imagine, I mean, the thing that comes to mind for me, you know, here is the idea of, of teenagers on a kind of prepay plan. Mm-hmm. Who’s maybe got kind of pocket money in part that pocket money is to be spent on those kinds of things, rather than the parents just kind of paying the subscription or whatever and, and that they might want to kind of eke it out in a different way.

I can see that.

[00:28:45] Chui Chui Tan: But of course it’s like they probably, there’s options. Um, there’s a possibility to do that. But as a business, you probably need to see how much conversion would be like, you might capture the market share like this little, but then it’s actually not worthwhile because there’s complications on logistic and also licensing and things like that.

So it’s always balance between the culture and also the business.

[00:29:06] Andy Polaine: So this brings me on to the next thing actually, because you know, yes there is a lot of tactical stuff in the book, but there’s also. This whole kind of aspect of, um, strategic research versus tactical research and how to. How to sort of take one brief that’s very tactical and and be more strategic.

And I thought it was a very kind of valuable thing actually. ‘cause I think a lot of, well, I hear quite a lot of stories of people feeling like they’re a bit boxed in by the brief as a research and they really wanna do more strategic stuff, but can’t, you know, they’re not getting the brief. Mm. Yeah.

What’s your approach to, to sort of pushing upstream a little bit more?

[00:29:41] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah. So yeah, I always say that it’s as, it’s good to do tactical, but at the same time, if you, if you want to being seen more valuable to your stakeholders or to the business, it’s actually good to have input into the strategic insights.

Um, so examples that I, I actually gave in the book as well is. That, you know, for example, if you’re asked or tasked to do a, um, tactical risk usability test, go and test this pricing is, is working for this market or this payment is good. Um, you could do that, but at the same time you could also. I want to see like sneak in is the right word, but

[00:30:18] Andy Polaine: I think it’s fair enough

[00:30:19] Chui Chui Tan: you can put in some, include some, some strategic information so that you can get a more tax strategic insight for the um, company.

So for example, talking about pricing and also um, like how they go about paying so you can actually. Understanding how people in that culture view value, um, their willingness, willingness to pay what actually, um, increase their willingness to pay. So for example, in India, there’s this culture of I need to share with other people.

So anything I paid that I can be shared with other people, like paying for video streaming is actually more willingness than music because. Video, your whole family can see it. You don’t feel like, yeah, you’re being selfish. Yeah. You pay for it. Everyone can, but music is personal. Should I pay it because, um, it’s only me going to, um, use it and, uh, enjoy the, the benefits of it.

So there’s all this value. Uh, how this perceive value is very strategic because it’s not just about, um, information is inform your pricing strategy, but also inform your, your other propositions that you can put it in on how to make things more appealing to them to want to be able to pay off, uh, can justify to pay.

So you in, you can include all those questions and to understand the reason behind of their decisions of those pricing. Decisions that they made and start gathering that. Um, every single tactical research you did, you gather some strategy insights. As you grow them, you actually can start to see bigger pictures in that instance and these other things that might open up to the businesses say, oh, we did never heard about that.

Maybe we should do more research in that area so that we can do that. So yeah, that is kind of a trick. Really to, to do more than you ask to show yourself.

[00:32:13] Andy Polaine: I really like to, I mean, I think sneaking it in is, is fine to say, ‘cause you know, I like the idea that you’re not asking for permission here really, and that you’re speaking to someone for, I don’t know, for an hour or whatever.

Anyway, you might as well kind of ask ’em some of that stuff. But also this idea that you dunno what you don’t know, right? So if you’re just asking some stuff, you, and it’s very narrow. You, you never have that experience of finding out stuff you didn’t know. And by including some of that strategic stuff, I guess you can go back and go, well here’s the answer to the questions you asked me to kind of find out, but actually I’ve, here’s some other stuff which suggests maybe we were asking the wrong questions or there’s something else out there that we didn’t even kind of consider.

Yeah. Um, and that’s very powerful and I think that’s really powerful.

[00:32:51] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah. And also you, you. You don’t have to rely on that specific user testing sessions to gather this. Yeah, you can do some desk research if you are actually interested in services. I think very interesting and about pricing. Maybe I can do a bit of desk research myself to find out is there any more questions that I, or angle that I haven’t thought of that I should bring it in to help you to guide that as well as a starting point of conversations.

[00:33:17] Andy Polaine: Yeah, when I hear all of this, and I know this is, this is a problem for my students. I’ve seen it, you know, firsthand in projects I’ve worked on. Uh, it seems to be sort of massive problem. Now. A lot of research teams, they’ll use some kind of platform. A lot of them use Notion as the storehouse with their stuff, and part of the problem with something like Notion is.

It’s USP is the kind of lack of friction to make a page and make a sub page and sub sub page. It’s really easy, but that’s also, its Achilles heel, right? ‘cause everyone can just chuck stuff in there. How much time do you spend on. I dunno if this is really research ops, but you know, how much time do you spend on the kind of curation and making sure that, you know, the data is Yeah.

Is curated and whether it’s kind of tagged or placed or kind of stored in a way that people can access it and, and that it makes sense and so forth. ‘cause a thing I hear quite often is teams do a whole bunch of research. And then it sort of gets forgotten about and the company just carry on doing whatever they’re doing anyway.

And then you get caught in that catch 22 because of, well, there’s not really much value in the research and it, it’s partly ‘cause they didn’t bother to kind of connect that up. You know, they, they’re faced with a load of data, but they don’t really know how to do the, both the synthesis and analysis and analysis and synthesis part.

As well as the communication part of it for it to be useful at the other end. Mm-hmm. They sort of get a bit disconnected.

[00:34:32] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah. I think there are two parts in your question, isn’t it? One is presenting it and then because when you’re creating an output, you can straightaway create something that is actually.

Usable right away and then easily to, to be stored. And then the second part is like how do you, where or how do you store it? So the first part is very important. Like in my book, I didn’t talk about like how to present in the nice way and like graphics and things like that because that is quite standard, um, like storytelling.

But the other parts that is really important when it comes into reporting culturalization related information is too. To be able to kinda link the output that you get from your participants, make it relatable to your, uh, stakeholders so they are more able to kind of receive it. So you, um, the example is like, for example, you spend 10 hours, 20 hours in doing research and looking into all data, everything.

And then the stakeholders is only have an hour for them to understand and receive it and to kind of feel what you feel about the, the, the locals and everything. So you have to empathize them. Just to know where they’re coming from and the decisions they need to make and and so on. So you use Metaphor for example, that there are a few tricks that I use, you use Metaphor that they can relate to.

You use things that they’re familiar with, like in this market you do this, but in the other market they actually doing this because you know, like kind of relate them and then you can, depending on the stakeholders and how much they want, the detail is because it. Every single individuals actually want different thing.

I work with a chief growth officer that will want every single stories of each participants as well as the high level stories. So they want the details and big, but then some of them just want to know the main story, just tell main story and what to do. So you need to pick and choose which one, and similarities and differences as well.

So you can have a big report, you can a summary, you can have highlights and things like that. You want to be able to store it easily. The second bit of a storing is very, depending on the company I work with, they might have their own way of doing it. So I probably wouldn’t be as much, uh, influence in terms of how they do that.

But if I get to kind of get into the smaller company, like talking about how they should do that, um, a lot of times I kind of make sure that they. Have a easier way to kind of put in similarities and differences. And also as the new markets that they do non-research in, there’s a easier way for them to add it in so that you make the insights become a clearer puzzles if you like.

[00:37:10] Andy Polaine: Yeah,

[00:37:10] Chui Chui Tan: so think about it like you have insights from research A, you put it in a few puzzles, and then you have research B, you have more, so you kinda add the whole picture bigger and bigger. So find a way to do that as well.

[00:37:22] Andy Polaine: Yeah. You talk about a whole range of methods actually in the book and you know, there’s some qualitative and quantitative, you know, there is that, that big picture sometimes, like what’s the top five or what’s the one number or, or that kind of stuff can be often the case.

I, my experience being, the thing I always say is that I think that stories are what convince people. Right. And can they stick with people? And you talked about metaphors, and I love metaphors, and those are the things that people carry with them and they’re really compelling. But the, the numbers or the sort of facts and figures give people to permission to believe in the story.

But if you just have the numbers on their own, you’re kind of missing a whole lot. And if you just have the story on their own, you’re also missing. Has that been your experience or is, is your experience different?

[00:38:01] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah, um, it’s very much so. I think if you do qualitative research, then story is very good because you have all the.

Photos and things like that to accompany it so people can see, oh, this is their environment. Rather than, like you say over Christmas, like if you take a photo of Christmas, it’s like snow and everything. And then you say Christmas in Australia is like barbecue and things like that. So it’s, you can actually see and feel it.

Um, so. Qualitative, sorry, is very important. Sometimes, um, people tend, uh, some clients or some researcher tends to want to say, two out of six participants say that, or four out of five.

[00:38:39] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:38:40] Chui Chui Tan: That sometime is not strong enough. Sometimes it’s good indication, but it’s not strong enough to say the figure. So unless you have statistic that you can pull in from.

Internal statistic or data that you have. You work with the companies data scientists to say, can we pull informations about this and that? And then say, actually this is aligned with our, our data internally as well as your stories. Then that will be. Very powerful. Or sometimes you say, actually it’s not aligned, but why?

Then the why is really interesting and you say, ah, maybe because when they’re doing that, we collecting data, we call it in a different way. There’s other way or the other way around, so, so that kind of data is really, really useful. If you only do quantitative, then you have a lot of data, you have a lot of numbering and so on.

But there again, you lack of this. Story, it’s very hard to create a story with just quantitative. Yeah. So a lot of times, um, actually when we see quantitative is useful is when it pair up with qualitative. Yeah. Do one. The order could be different from where you are at that stage and how much you know, and also the scope of the research.

Sometime you do quant first and then you do qual. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Makes more sense.

[00:39:55] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Relying on quant data on its own seems like a great way to completely miss cultural context. Yeah. Because you’re not getting that, uh, human part.

[00:40:04] Chui Chui Tan: You can explain why.

[00:40:06] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Apart from, apart from hiring you of course and buying your book, what, what are the kind of first steps if you are, I know with you UX search or if you’re kind of in the C-suite of a, of a company, what would be the sort of the first small step they could do in this direction?

[00:40:20] Chui Chui Tan: Um, I always say that when I go into a new company, like, oh, where do we even start thing, which I want to come back, uh, about the CPO that mentioned overwhelming very quickly later on. Um, but if you are kind of very beginning of that, um, you can say, okay, we have limited budget. Like we can just go out and do big research and so on.

Yeah. Actually relevant to dissipate or, um, conversations is like you can actually start small. Right. First of all, it is actually very important if you haven’t done so in your organization, is to sit down and bring in all the knowledge you have about. A market first, um, saying, okay, we have a bit of data.

Let’s say you’re already in that market but it’s not doing very well, and so on and go through all the data informations you might be able to collect. Is there any other way you can think about how you analyze data? Because sometimes data is that you can find a different way to analyze them so that it’s actually become more useful for you.

Um, all the insights and everything. In my book, I have a, uh, four buckets, um, exercise that I mentioned. Mm. That is very useful to bring all the knowledge together, all the assumptions people have, especially C-level say, yeah, I think they work like this and we should just do decisions like that. And, and a lot of them are very subjective view or stereotype or certain thing.

So bring all of them together. Go through that exercise. Four buckets is non facts, strong hypothesis, weak hypothesis, and then unknowns. Put them in the right buckets, but make sure that the facts are in facts. So, questions about the sources. Um, the. Um, validity. Mm-hmm. Like how long ago that this insights was provided, because things might change.

And so to make sure that anything in effect you can actually take actions, that that’s why you have to make sure they are really, really sure. If you’re not sure, put them in a strong hypothesis because then you’ll kind of find certain way to say how else we can validate or invalidate that. Yeah. And so on.

Yeah. Start from there. And then you have informations about do we even need to do research or what type of research, how big the research should be. If we call it all this and we do one off research, could we answer a lot of these questions already? Can we do that stretch a bit? Budget to do that? Yeah. So it’s kind of like finding the balance, um, of all of them and see where that actually comes in.

It doesn’t have to be like. Big, um, overwhelming. It could start somewhere. And if, let’s say you say, oh, we have very small teams, and oh, this insight is enough for us to mix. A roadmap for now, and that is fine. And then you probably see some growth, leave it and then see some growth. And then you might want to focus on other markets in the meantime and then come back to this again.

It’s fine, um, to do that. It’s a progressive journey so you don’t have to make sure that you do everything right, um, in one goal.

[00:43:10] Andy Polaine: So how did you, uh, respond to the CPO who said this is all too overwhelming?

[00:43:15] Chui Chui Tan: It’s so interesting. Actually, I have one hour session with her. After that, and we go back to the questions like there were in a few countries already and just like, how do you even start choosing which country to go into and to focus next?

Just like, uh, don’t know, like maybe we just guess and because this language is easier for us to get into and just like, okay, there’s another exercise I normally do with client to choose. This is not in the book actually. Um, which market is actually, uh, for you to go into? Either to launch or to focus on, uh, to put more money to focus on.

So it’s essentially, it’s looking into potentials and opportunities versus, um, efforts and frictions. Um, and then within that there are a few elements that you need to look into, um, to make sure that it’s correct. So yeah, I mentioned about that. And then we kind of go back step for backwards as well. And because the questions that she asked, um, during the sessions was.

We have all this data, we want the market or do the marketing, how do we do the marketing? I just like, well step back. Why do you want to do the marketing? What insights and things like that. So a lot of companies very focused on a specific question, what should we do now? Like, do, should we just do marketing very well?

Should we just change the products? And, but there are a lot of things you need to step up back and ask the right question and to do that.

[00:44:34] Andy Polaine: Yeah, yeah, you can kind of see the pressure for kind of speed and, uh, let’s just do a thing. What’s the simple thing we need to do? And, and then we’ll just market it and that, and that’s it.

Yeah, hey look, I could talk to you for ages about this ‘cause I find it really fascinating and, you know, people and cultures always very fascinating too. But we are coming up for time. The show is called Power of 10 ‘cause it’s based on this Eames film called Powers of 10. It’s about the size of relative size of things in the universe and you know, people can Google it and find it’s, it’s really fascinating.

But it’s really about this idea of operating at different zoom levels. And I think one of the things you’ve been talking about is, you know, there are cultural things and they are sort of evidenced in very detailed ways. You know, and I think it’s always interesting in a mostly globalized world where you go somewhere else, especially in Europe, I goes to another European country and it’s kind of like the same as every other European country except for small things like, you know, the post boxes or the shape of milk bottles and, and those kinds of things.

And cultural norms, of course. So the, the very final question is, uh, what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world?

[00:45:39] Chui Chui Tan: Um, I think for me it’s this notion I haven’t really, I have this, this thinking, but I haven’t actually expanded myself to see what does that actually mean, because that might be a second book that I want to write about.

Cultural elements, um, not just on business, but also politics and, you know, culture in sense. But I think it’s the notions of we are all human, right? Um, we are on the same species and it feels like we are very, very, very different. Which is true. We are different in certain ways. One country. Share the same things for the other, but not the other thing, the other culture elements.

So there are differences for sure, but we are all the same human species. The reason we are different is because. Hundred thousand, hundred thousand years ago. Like we kind of ancestor kind of evolved very differently in different environment. So that changed their, our gene, their skin color, their, where everything that we have, um, and the language.

And then, I don’t know, when the whole border things start off, um, and people start to become, oh, you are there. I’m here. And you know. The human evolutions, I guess, and it’s, it’s all start from the same thing, but it’s just evolved slightly differently. Just like a family member, you go to a different culture to grow up different way.

Then your cousin might be slightly different from you, but they’re also the same family. You see what I mean? So I’m kind of like, especially in this world that so many discriminations or you know, the culture people, I’m just thinking about actually we are, we are different, but we actually also the same, the reason we are different is because if evolutions, um.

Slightly differently. I think it’s kind of like, I think the small thing that you’re talking about is, is actually quite big in the notions of we’re at the same, but you see what I mean? It’s really hard to, um, describe that at the moment. Yeah. But I just, it’s, it’s the, it’s the whole thing of we kind of need to be just emphasize why people are different and see, be open about it rather than criticize each other for the differences that we have.

Yeah.

[00:47:45] Andy Polaine: It’s like when astronauts talk about the overview effect, you know, when you, they see the world, you know, from space and it’s, you can’t see any borders, right? Yes. And all you just see is this fragile thing protected by this fragile layer of atmosphere that keeps us all alive.

[00:47:59] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah, exactly. And it changes and we breathe.

It’s the same airways. We drink the same water, sea, sea water. You know, it’s, it’s the same. It’s just, um. Yeah. If we have all those in that perceptions, we cannot accept, everyone will. There’s no right or wrong way to do things Everyone’s, it’s everyone’s way to do things, so be more acceptable. Uh, open to learn about that.

[00:48:23] Andy Polaine: That is a very big, small thing.

[00:48:24] Chui Chui Tan: I know. I’m sorry. Um, so where can

[00:48:25] Andy Polaine: people find you online and where can people find your book as well?

[00:48:28] Chui Chui Tan: I’m most active in on LinkedIn, so, um, can find me on my name and connect if you like, or get in touch. Um, I, my website is beo.global. BEYO do global. Um, I have some content and also all the works I have done, um, in the past that, um, because every end of each year I reach.

A summary round up for everyth, things that I have done for that year. So I didn’t do it first year, and then I started doing that for the rest of the year. So I have probably have five, six of them there. So it’s very details of every work that I have done. Um, and then my book, I have this book here, um, it’s on, you can find on Amazon.

Um, on your, uh, your area or country or regions or Apple books, if you don’t really want to buy it from Amazon,

[00:49:17] Andy Polaine: I’ll put all the links in the show notes for people to find you. Thank you. Are you active on any other socials anywhere or is it linked in this person? No, I’m just

[00:49:23] Chui Chui Tan: LinkedIn for now. I, I’m on Twitter, but I don’t tweet.

Um, where else, I dunno. I’m, I’m, I’m kind of in between social and also. Yeah. Private. Yeah. One is enough for me.

[00:49:34] Andy Polaine: It’s probably, uh, it’s probably wise.

[00:49:36] Chui Chui Tan: Yeah.

[00:49:37] Andy Polaine: Thank you so much for being, uh, my guest on Power of 10.

[00:49:40] Chui Chui Tan: No, thank you so much for having me.

[00:49:41] Andy Polaine: You’ve been watching and listening to Power of Ten. You can find more about the show on polaine.com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice, online courses, as well as sign up for my irregular newsletter Doctor’s Note, and I’ll put all the links.

In the notes too. If you have any thoughts, then please put them in the comments or get in touch. You’ll find me as andypolaine on Bluesky. You’ll find me on LinkedIn or my website. Thanks for listening and watching, and I’ll see you next time.

Carissa Carter – Assembling Tomorrow

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is Carissa Carter, a designer, geoscientist, and the academic director at the Stanford d.school. She is the author of The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data, and the co-author of Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future. Carissa teaches design courses on emerging technologies, climate change, and data visualization. Her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain has earned multiple design awards.

Show Links

Carissa

Assembling Tomorrow book site: https://dschool.stanford.edu/book-collections/assembling-tomorrow
Carissa Carter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carissalcarter/
Scott Doorley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdoorley/
Armando Veve online: https://levineleavitt.com/artist/armando-veve/

Andy

Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Design Leadership Coaching: https://polaine.com/coaching
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky: https://andypolaine.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello and welcome to Power Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of Zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organizations, society, and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, designer, educator, and writer. My guest today is Carissa Carter, a designer, geoscientist, and the Academic Director at the Stanford dSchool.

She’s the author of The Secret Language of Maps, how to Tell Visual Stories with Data and Co-Author of Assembling Tomorrow, A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future. Carissa teaches design courses on emerging technology, climate change and data visualization, a work on designing with machine learning, and blockchain has earned multiple design awards.

Carissa, welcome to Power of Ten.

[00:00:51] Carissa Carter: It’s great to be here Andy. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:53] Andy Polaine: So, I’ll just give it a bit of your background, but how does, what is your pathway to the Dsco?

[00:00:58] Carissa Carter: It sounds kinda drastic to think that I, I had a first career as a geoscientist before making my way to design. It felt really natural in practice.

I was working as a scientist. I have always loved geology. That’s what I studied and did my first degrees in and. I really do, um, enjoy understanding the processes that shape our planet. I’ve also always had a thread of how do we build, how do we make, what is art? How do we present information? I never really knew how to pull those things together when I was younger, and honestly, I didn’t know that design really was a discipline.

Until I was, until I was maybe in my mid twenties. Right. Um, it just, it just wasn’t on my radar. So I made my way. Into the design field and one thing led to another because I really do believe everything’s interconnected. Yeah. And you know, there’s the, there’s the path. We all are many things.

[00:02:02] Andy Polaine: So when was the moment where you did realize the design was a discipline?

[00:02:06] Carissa Carter: I think I, I remember exactly where I was sitting. Uh, it was in a cubicle. I worked at the US Geological Survey at the time, and. I had an excellent mentor, Dave Rubin, and we were looking, we were making models of ripples. So in sand, you know, little ripples moves the sand, grains move in the direction of the flow and the sand grains bounce.

And they, they, they’re the, the way that they are preserved in the rock record can show you a lot of complex things about, about how the water flows, how the wind flows, et cetera. And we’re making these models and. It was in that cube that I had to do a lot of, not just understanding the science, but a lot of presenting information and making it accessible to a wide range of audiences and thinking about, well, why does this even matter?

You know, this is like this tiny slice of truth, but like, what about the big picture? Where does that go? And it was a combination of that and like, what? Was accessible on the web at the time, and like really great encouragement from him. He was a builder, a tinkerer on his own. He did his own inventions. He invented a self-locking bike, and I just like all those things came together, right, the right people, the right circumstances, the right things.

I was realizing about myself, and then I found out that there’s. Design was something you could study. There are people that, that look at how we make things and it, and it came together for me in that cubicle.

[00:03:47] Andy Polaine: Yeah. It’s design’s perennial problem that, uh, it is ubiquitous and that people just feel like stuff pops into the world, um, or don’t even feel that.

And it just seems to happen and it’s everywhere. And I think it’s, that’s why it gets ignored, quiet on. We’ll, we’ll come back to that right at the end.

[00:04:02] Carissa Carter: I mean, it’s wild to me. I mean, still today, I’m, I’m blown away that everything is designed. Yeah. Whether or not intentionally or not, like absolutely everything was a design decision.

[00:04:12] Andy Polaine: When I was teaching in Australia. I had a, a, a parent come up to me actually about, uh, on graduation day. You know, I’m very proud that their daughter had just graduated and, and sort of quietly came up to me and said, but, but what does a designer do? You know? And I said, well, you know, everything that you are wearing, the car that you came here in the, the, you know, books, you read, the magazines, you uh, you read whatever you in your kitchen, you go and use.

Everything has been designed by someone, you know, and it’s, um, it sort of blows people’s mind a little bit. Exactly. So, um, we talked a little bit, um, about this before. You know, the, the show is called Power of 10, um, because it’s named after the Eames film, powers of 10. It’s all about the relative size of things in the universe and how it’s all connected.

And so for me, this idea of kind of thinking in layers and these different layers of zoom. You know, my main thing that I teach these days is service design, and that’s what people know me for though. I’ve got a background in, in earlier stuff, in digital and stuff and UX and all those things before they record those things.

But it’s the easiest way to try and explain to people those different layers, although it’s sort of artificial in the sense of, you know, where you actually decide to draw a layer. It’s a really kind of fundamental thread that flows throughout the book. So. Can you tell me, ‘cause you, you’ve got the onion diagram before maybe we get to the onion diagram.

Can you tell me what the sort of impetus for the book is? I always feel most people write a book either, you know, you think, well, there’s a, there’s a missing thing out there in the world, but it’s often to scratch your own itch a little bit too. So what was the impetus of the book? And in fact, we should probably name your, your co.

Collaborators as well with, um,

[00:05:53] Carissa Carter: yeah, so, so the book is Assembling Tomorrow and my co-authors Scott Doley, who’s the creative director at the D School, we had an incredible illustrator arm, Armando, ve and the book is really, you know, inspired by the fact that Scott and I are both educators in the field of making things and teaching other people how to make things.

But even to us right now is a very overwhelming moment in the world. Our climate is in dire straits. Our emerging technologies like AI feel like there is a new algorithm released every day, and these algorithms can learn on their own and it can really feel like the world is happening to us. But at the same time, we know that we all have a lot of agency, right?

And. We can teach that and we know that there are ways to center ourselves and really build a future that we wanna have. So we wrote the book to call attention to the urgency of the unsettling this, of this moment. Right. And to pave a path forward that anybody can take.

[00:07:03] Andy Polaine: Yeah. And you kind of talk about where you talk about the layers of design and ecosystems and flows in particular.

And earlier on you, you use the onion. As an example. Mm-hmm. Or you kind of cut through it. Can you explain that? I, maybe I’d put some video of it up or an image of it up, uh, on the video. But for those listening, uh, what would we be looking at?

[00:07:24] Carissa Carter: Well, by the onion, um, we mean the layers of design that we like to talk about.

And, and one way to think about it is to take any sort of object. And I have this, you know, iPhone here that I’m holding up as an object. Okay? This is when somebody says, well, what is design? Okay. This is a product. This phone is a product that was designed, somebody decided on the radius of the corners, the material that it’s made of, how it feels in my hand.

I can open it up and there’s a ton of, of digital products on here too. All those apps are digital, is both physical and digital. Product design here. Each one of these products enables any number of experiences to happen. So here we are on a new layer. We went from product to experience. We can have a video call with somebody on the other side of the world, right?

That experience was designed. Each one of those products and experiences is embedded in any number of systems. Okay? New layer of that onion. As a Stanford employee, I’m a cog in that system, and this phone has the security software that they require on it. I’m on an at t phone plan, which is a system that decides where I get service.

Around this country and this world. If I want a new app, I get one from the app store. Another system that was designed right? So product experiences and systems are all layers, but every single one of those. Products if by going down into the onion now, you know, is enabled by any number of technologies, both digital and physical technologies.

Yeah. Um, and then each one of those technologies is powered by data. So for example, if you were going to to, to text me and you’re texting to Carissa, my name’s not always in the western cannon of names. It will auto correct a carrot or carcass, right? And, and then like, there’s just a very interesting things happening there.

Like one, somebody designed the data set of what names get auto corrected or not, right? And so that was a design decision. And then two, like how that algorithm works. Like you, you text me a few times and you’ve corrected it and it no longer, um, prompts you. The next time, you know, to change my name. So right now we have data, technology, product experience, systems, and E.

Every one of those things has implications, large and small, near term and long term. And this is what we mean by the onion, right? Because there are apps on this phone that have allowed people to band together and change governments in their city, in their countries to, to really powerful effect. And those same, those same technologies have enabled things like intense school bullying.

[00:10:19] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:10:20] Carissa Carter: Right. There’s positives and negatives to everything, and you can always, with. Absolutely. You could do this with anything around you. You could trace it down from the data that was used to make it or power it all the way up to the systems that govern it and the implications that it has.

[00:10:37] Andy Polaine: There’s an interesting thing that I think that happens when, I mean, John Qui took talks about it in a book at this about the semantic zoom.

If you take a, particularly if you take a physical product and you kind of zoom in and you end up down in the kinda material level of it. Um, and actually the iPhone’s a good example because of the rare earth, uh, uh, metals in there, right?

Mm-hmm.

Where, but then you zoom out again, you go, okay, this thing exists in an ecosystem of my, sort of my Apple ecosystem, for example.

And that exists in the kind of marketplace that exists in the world. And as we’re kinda seeing at the moment that, uh, the, the company Apple is kind of rubbing up against the, the legal frameworks of, of the EU and the, those kinds of things. And you kinda kinda zoom right out and you get geopolitics again, which of course, you know.

Materials that are coming from problematic countries. Yeah. You know, that, that all kind of bounce together so it kind of wraps around the other side again.

[00:11:28] Carissa Carter: Absolutely. Right. And it’s really interesting questions for our own value systems and what are our ethics and what are our boundaries, our constraints.

[00:11:36] Andy Polaine: So you divide the book into intangibles and actionables. Um, and so I am interested in the. The book is very, very beautiful, by the way. Thank you. When we spoke before, I made a note about the kind of information architecture of the book. ‘cause one of the problems with this, as I’m sure you know, that it’s the kind of peral service design problem is when everything’s connected to everything else.

Where do you start and how do you tell something, the story of this stuff? In a medium that is sequential, really. So how did you go about that and why did you make that division?

[00:12:07] Carissa Carter: Yeah, so the, the, the front half of the book, the intangibles are about these forces that are making the world feel somewhat unsettled.

Right now, in the back half are the actionables, which is what can we do about it and what can we do about it from a very personal agency perspective. And then interspersed throughout the entire book are these short, speculative fiction stories that paint pictures of moments in the future, not super far in the future, maybe.

You know, 2050 ish years out that really allow us to try on some of the phenomena that we’re talking about at that moment in the nonfiction. So we, we very much believe in fiction as a way of testing. How we’re gonna show up in the future and do we like what we look like in it. It’s a great prototyping tool and it also allows people to consume content differently.

I think people are reading very differently than they ever used to. Hmm. And hooking people through story is often a very engaging way to get them involved in the topics that we’re, that we’re dealing with.

[00:13:16] Andy Polaine: I was interested that you call them histories of the future in the book, and they are mm-hmm.

Quite compelling. There’s some. I was quite surprised and amazed that you used Apple and Amazon, not the company, but Amazon Forest example in there. Only ‘cause I, I was thinking, oh, well they actually used Apple’s name in this. Why? You know, obviously, uh, speculative design is a thing and uh, often used to kind of critique, uh, the future of, you know, where things are going.

I’m interested why you chose to use stories, um, rather than. Designing artifacts or things and, and using those things as the examples.

[00:13:50] Carissa Carter: Well, stories are one way that we can make sense of information. They’re really memorable, right? Like the, the human mind is wired to create story. We are, you know, there’s a whole section in the book on make believe.

Yeah. Um, we are, we are wired to find patterns, um, and to see faces like this is how our brains are set up. And so by using story. It, it, it creates a narrative, you know, you can fill in the details, like if I just talked about an object that might exist in the future. Okay. But like, put that object in context and have somebody using it and have people fighting over it, and then, you know, reacting to it and you pull in the emotions and it really brings in the whole human experience when you’re, when you use a story.

[00:14:34] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. I, there’s a quote you have in there, I think, which is actually something I’ve always said, or I was interested to find the quote around. No one was ever persuaded by the numbers or something. I was that I think that’s in there. Or maybe I read it today by, from somewhere else.

[00:14:50] Carissa Carter: I’m not exactly sure which one you’re referring to and nobody’s ever, there’s just, this could be in there.

This

[00:14:55] Andy Polaine: idea that, you know, we, we tend to talk about num, well, we. Businesses and leadership often talk about kind of numbers as these very concrete things, but obviously any projections in the future are just, just as made up as a, as a speculative fiction. Right. But it’s actually, I’ve always found that the, the numbers give people permission to believe in the story.

Uh, but it’s actually the stories you say it’s the memorable thing that people kind of take with them.

[00:15:19] Carissa Carter: I mean, and, and, and when you talk about numbers too, right? You’re, you’re talking about what you’ve chosen to measure Yeah. And what you’ve chosen to have value and. There that can be really problematic on its own.

Right. Because we tend to think that the things that we measure are the things that matter most. And the minute you decide like, oh, this is our metric.

[00:15:38] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:15:39] Carissa Carter: Right. You’re locked into that.

[00:15:40] Andy Polaine: Yeah, absolutely. And I, you’ve, you’ve got quite a lot, I mean, you’ve got a lot about this, but you also, I think you talk about the kind of crime figures somewhere as well, crime prediction as a sort of problematic thing because, uh mm-hmm.

Because it’s, it’s based actually on arrest data rather than, um. You know, actual crimes. ‘cause if I speed somewhere or break the law and nobody catches me, then it, it never appears in the data. Yeah.

[00:16:07] Carissa Carter: Right. And so then where, where are we looking? Who are we arresting? It’s a self, you know, it’s a self building phenomenon.

Yeah.

[00:16:15] Andy Polaine: We are obviously in the midst, well, perhaps we’re not in the midst. Maybe we’re coming over the, the peak of an AI hype cycle at the moment as we speak. It features a lot in the book. I would say you are fairly balanced actually, or kind of neutral I’d say about AI in the book that you’re not particularly, I don’t think you do this with any of it actually in the book where you, it’s not particularly that you’re screaming, this is kind of terrible, terrible thing, nor are you kind of saying it’s fantastic either.

There’s this sort of caution throughout the book. You have a whole thing around the kind of relationships with AI in the book. Do we want to talk about that a little bit?

[00:16:52] Carissa Carter: Yeah, I mean, well, you know, just to unpack that lead up there, what was fascinating is we really wrote this book. The main bulk of the writing was between.

You know, 20, 21, 22, little bit 23, right? So this AI wave that you’re talking about us today, right? Like it, it hadn’t happened yet. And what was happening as we were writing right, is like. One thing after another, like just started to come true. Right? So like we have, we have double the amount of stories that we threw out because things were just happening so fast.

Mm-hmm. That, that acceleration was really, really felt as we were, as we were writing this in, in particularly with ai. Right. Especially with generative ais. You know, advancements in the last 18 months, and we really did try to toggle between the dystopian, utopian, uh, versions of what might happen because, you know, we don’t believe that either is going to be the case, right?

There’s, there is no perfect utopia. There’s a, there’s a f there’s a figure in the book that. You know, really says like, even Utopias have a sewage system, which I just love. Right? Because it is a, a beautiful Armando drawing of what a sewage system for a utopia looks like in there. You should check that out.

Um. But the reality, right, is like, it’s not all going to be doom and gloom either. And we have to be able to, to work and acknowledge the things that are going wrong as we are pushing forward to try to do the right thing. And I think that’s a lot of what is, is troublesome about tech and AI development right now, is that we are really in love with the possibilities of what might be that we forget to look.

What could go wrong along the way.

[00:18:44] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:18:44] Carissa Carter: And this culture of shepherding our mistakes into the future doesn’t really exist yet. And it, it’s wonderful that we love to build, I, you know, we love, we teach people how to build. Right. And I don’t, I don’t want that to go away, but I also want us to take, you know.

Coming back to that onion, like how do we take a whole holistic view of the effects of what we’re building along, along this journey?

[00:19:11] Andy Polaine: Talking about mistakes you have in one of the histories of the future, this idea of the World Creation Council, the UN World Creation Council. Can you explain what that would be and what its job is?

It’s a very, very, it’s very, very sad and touching story actually in the book. I dunno how much you want to tell the whole story. Yeah,

[00:19:27] Carissa Carter: no, that, that comes in, um. A story called Hello Mamas. Hmm. And in this story, you, if I can distill it really quickly, there’s a son who loses his mother. And this is taking place in the future.

Um, we don’t exactly know how she’s, she’s passed away, but he, the son comes to realize that it is, he’s the seventh great grandson of somebody who invented the separate condenser part of the steam engine. Right. So like really help the industrial revolution happen.

[00:20:07] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:20:09] Carissa Carter: And you know, if you think about it, they, the things that we built during that industrial revolution have had outsize impact on the pollution that we have in our world today.

Right? Like the smoke that was put into the sky, like, like what if we had done it differently way back then? And so then that like begs the question of like, how do we allow ourselves to continue and like get all that incredible progress, but also like take back, could we ever take back things that we did that, that were troublesome?

And so the, the idea of the World Creation Council that comes up within that story is that maybe there is a place you and like right where you could come to them and say, Hey, I made a mistake. With what I built, it’s had, it’s had problems, can you help me pull it from the world? Right? And how that would happen, like, you know, would take some sort of like systemic technological.

Big breakthroughs to happen, but like what if that was possible? And so in this story, the main character Dunn is trying to, to pull his seventh great-grandfather’s separate condenser from existence. Then I won’t give away exactly what happens, but

[00:21:22] Andy Polaine: yeah, so the council’s job is to. Sort of kick into gear and I, I, I would be, I would’ve to spoil it in order to say actually how that happens, but what happens at the end.

But to really try and remove, you know, this problematic technology from existence, but you have a whole thing about the sort. The creator does not suffer any. Harm from this. This is like a, a global or un decision to say, you know, we recognize that people, we don’t want to stymie people making things, but we also need to have a mechanism to do a, a kind of take back.

Yeah.

[00:21:55] Carissa Carter: Right? Yeah. Like, so, like a, there’s gotta be a balance between really, you know. Encouraging people to want to innovate, but also sometimes we don’t know the negative effects when we launch something and it can really, it can get beyond us. I mean, there’s been so many examples of, of this in the world.

Like from everything from, from social media, right? Like in the beginning it’s to say hi to your friends. And now it can be really emotionally, you know, societally. Troubling. We’re addicted. We’re, you know, yeah. There’s that type of example all the way down to like the coffee pods that now contribute so much waste or toothbrushes, right?

Like there’s like projects, physic products, physical and digital. How do we allow people to keep that experimentation? But then is there a way to come together and say like, okay, we gotta pull this from our society,

[00:22:48] Andy Polaine: but isn’t there a kind of, you know, all things in moderation problem there that, that, you know, almost anything in the world has, you know, including humans, has a positive side and a kind of negative effect, particularly once it has gone beyond a certain scale.

Uh, and that the kind of fundamental issue underneath this is our obsession with using growth as the measure of success. And that if you actually move away from that, then that kind of ameliorates a kind of lot of the problem rather than the objects themselves.

[00:23:18] Carissa Carter: Yeah. I mean, I do think we’re obsessed with speed and efficiency.

Yeah. As a society, right. Make everything faster, get that done more quickly, and that has become a new metric. Is it the only one? I’m not sure. I mean, like I, I am thinking about the, the Montreal protocol and our ability to come together to remove CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons mm-hmm. From the atmosphere. Right.

And like their, their existence was to help, you know, aid in refrigeration more than anything else. Right. And so if you are from, if you, if you grew up, were, were around in the, in the nineties, you know, like you remember that campaign. Yeah. To get the whole of the outta the ozone layer. Right. That was like a global way that we actually banded together.

I think it was to this date, still the only time that, that we’ve had global consensus on anything.

[00:24:12] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Especially to do with the environment.

[00:24:14] Carissa Carter: With the environment. Right. And like, was that, what was that one about? Speed and efficiency. I mean, I do, I, I’m with you on speed and efficiency, but it does feel like we have the ability to value other things too.

We’ve seen it, we’ve seen evidence of it as a society.

[00:24:29] Andy Polaine: Well, it’s kind of, I mean, it’s kind of a growth thing, right? In the sense that this is the most efficient meaning, uh, in this case, probably cheapest way of cooling. Mm-hmm. And so therefore, that’s, that’s the thing we’re gonna use. And obviously then it, as it scales, it becomes a, a massive problem.

And, but partly it’s also about. This idea of not thinking in terms of ecosystems, not, there’s, there’s a guy called Joe McLoud, who, who, who writes and talks all about the ends and endings, you know, of the onboarding process. He’s, you know, we talk about the iPhone again, you, you, a whole onboarding process is beautiful, but the offboarding process is really rubbish, right?

Mm-hmm. And so we don’t really think, or, or, uh, and manufacturers don’t take into account very often the end of life cycle of things as a thing they should be designing. And here’s a whole kind of framework for this, and so, so part of it’s that as well, right? Which is if you are focused on growth as the metric and you know it’s mostly money, right?

It’s mostly sort of growth of the business, then the kind of rubbish end of it, the disposal end of it. Well, that’s not a growth thing, right? Really, unless. People go properly circular, so therefore you kind of end up with, um, that’s the bit that gets ignored ‘cause no one’s measuring that as a metric of success.

Whereas instead, if you said, well, how much, if the measure of success of a company was not how much it had grown, but how much it had reduced its waste or its, you know, output in, in some way. I mean, these are the kind of degrowth arguments, right? Then that measurement and the way we kind of think about success would radically change the behavior.

I mean, I guess your book is kind of full of little things like this of like how do you change behavior through, through changing what we measure and what we think about and focus on, right?

[00:26:08] Carissa Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that entirely. I think if you look at. Productivity, you know, and then coming back to technology and AI too, right?

If you look at like data of, uh, from at least the United States, US Department of Labor, if you look at their data, American productivity really has stayed fairly flat since about 2007, eight ish maybe. Goes up slightly.

[00:26:35] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:37] Carissa Carter: And in a parallel timeframe, you see our micro-processor speed, like continue to increase exponentially.

So we’re making faster and faster computing devices, but we’re not getting more productive. And if you think about like what else is happening around that time, like that’s really about the same time that you start to see the iPhone, right? And you start to share video, you know, use video as a medium of, of sharing information more and more.

And so then this, this, this beg of the question of like to what end? Like. Do you feel like you have more space in your day to do things now, or do you feel more harried and frazzled than ever? Mm-hmm. Yeah, and, and I’m not sure how many of us think that we are actually, you know, that this technology has freed us up to be more.

You know, productive elsewhere.

[00:27:37] Andy Polaine: No, I mean, that’s the whole kind of the, I can’t remember who originally wrote this about sort of ai, you know, so I, my dream was always that kind of AI was gonna do the drudge work and I was gonna, it was gonna free me up to kind of make music and, and I love that. And images.

I love that. And it’s the kind of where the opposite is true. Mm-hmm. That we’d just become slaves to it. I always, the example I have quite often, I’ve got a robot vacuum cleaner. And it’s got a water tank and a fresh water tank and a dirty water tank. And I regularly get these poorly worded notifications on my phone, uh, which are like empty the water tank, ASAP and oh my God.

Okay. And I feel like I’ve just become this kind of, this slave to my, my robot vacuum cleaner. That kind of demands to be emptied and to be filled and to be, you know, you need to do this bit of maintenance, the brush knee replacing. Oh god. Okay. And part of it’s actually just the tone of voice is really off.

But part of it is like, you know, as we all know, the little red dots and the notification or, you know, you see people’s emails and they, they haven’t turned off that badge. Mm-hmm. And so it’s got sort of, you know, 50,000 unread emails and we’ve become these kind of real slaves that those devices.

[00:28:45] Carissa Carter: Is it a hard, is it a, is it a, um, a smart vacuum cleaner?

Like is it, is it connected? It

[00:28:53] Andy Polaine: is to the

[00:28:53] Carissa Carter: cloud in some way.

[00:28:54] Andy Polaine: It, it, it is supposedly it’s not sharing my data. Mm-hmm. But it could well be sharing the, the math of my house. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, you know

[00:29:02] Carissa Carter: where I was going with that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is another fascinating thing. Like we, we are like, it brings me into the topic of privacy, right.

And what is still sacred. Right. Because like, let’s just say hypothetically that, that, that is sharing your data in under the. Assumption that by knowing the footprint of your home, right, and knowing the type of cleaning products you need, it could reorder its special soap at the right frequency, and you wouldn’t have to do it right, like all under the guise of making your life easier.

But is it okay that that company knows exactly where your furniture is?

[00:29:46] Andy Polaine: No, it’s not. The good thing is the robot sometimes gets lost and I have to rebuild the map again. So, uh, I don’t think it’s that smart just yet. But it could be. You have you, so you have a whole, you have a whole section about data actually in the book.

Mm-hmm. Uh, maybe you could kind of talk about that a little actually, given the, the topic.

[00:30:02] Carissa Carter: Yeah. I mean, data’s, everything is data, right? And in this, in, I think we’re in this data grab phase of society right now too, because. Every technology needs data to power itself. Yet the thing that we’re gonna see more and more, and we already see it, right, is that where data pools lies power.

Hmm. And so right now, like as organizations collect more and more user data, data on the world, who has the ability to store that data, even if we don’t know what we’re going to use it for yet, that will have value.

[00:30:37] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:30:37] Carissa Carter: Right. We are all familiar with the, the phenomenon that totally exists right now where your, your data is sold.

To third party organizations, sometimes, many times without your consent, at least in the United States, better, better in Europe, um, and elsewhere in the world. Right. But yeah. Should you own it right? Should you own it yourself as an individual? I think most of us might feel that way. At least I do.

[00:31:03] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

Yeah. But

[00:31:04] Carissa Carter: how, how this is gonna play out, I think we’ll have profound implications for decisions that are made. Who gets to, who gets to decide what to do with all of that data?

[00:31:13] Andy Polaine: I mean, you, you talk about it a bit in the book, but there’s that, I think a lot of people underestimate just how much, you know, everyone goes, well, you know, my mom will kind of go, well, you know, who cares that I’ve been to kind of the, the supermarket, uh, today in Iran?

I don’t care. But I think people underestimate how much there are different sets of data can be pulled together to know an awful lot about Someone. I remember at a company I worked at, there was a data analyst and said, well, you know, I’d look at, you might have anonymized purchase records. You might only see the last.

Two digits or you know, some tiny bit of metadata around the actual kind of purchase of this thing. But, you know, in the shopping center, when you’ve logged onto their wifi to also kind of, because you want free wifi, where while you’re in the, uh, shopping mall, all of that has tracked you. And if we pull those two, two together, I know exactly who’s bought what when, because I can just kind of pull all this data, uh, points together.

And I think people kind of do. Not really understand how much, uh, can be found out about you in that way. And, you know, the privacy is one of those things that sort of gone through cycles, over history. Right. And early, a few hundred years ago, you had, people had no sense of a kind of right of privacy.

‘cause they lived very close to each certain in cities, lived very close to each other, often the large extended families in a small house. Uh, and then kind of prophecy became a thing. And then, um. Uh, as a sort of concept and, and it’s sort of going away again, I’m sure, you know, there’s, there’s quite a lot of apathy amongst kind of gen Zs about that.

Like, it’s just, you know, that, that ship us out.

[00:32:41] Carissa Carter: I think the thing that worries me right now is that that data that we, maybe, that apathy exists, right? And people are giving away that location, their, their purchase history. Mm-hmm. That data’s then like repackaged and given to you, right? And it sways your next decision based on the media that’s presented back to you.

Mm. Based on the directions that you’re given to get from here to there based on so many different factors, right? Because an organization wants you to engage in their products and. It starts to get to a moment where I worry that my thoughts and behaviors aren’t my own anymore

[00:33:26] Andy Polaine: are that you’re being nudged sort of unconsciously.

[00:33:29] Carissa Carter: That I am being manipulated.

[00:33:31] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:33:32] Carissa Carter: And right now it, I think all of our behaviors are being manipulated. I mean, this is the polarization of the internet. I just, you know, one video. Makes you, you watch this one video and it says, oh, you might also like, right? Like that is a well-documented phenomenon in things like YouTube that they’ve worked really hard to combat, right?

But we know that, that our behaviors can be nudge. But is there a moment when. My thoughts aren’t even my own thoughts, like, and I’m getting a little bit philosophical here, but I do worry that our technologies are morphing our own psyches in ways that we may not yet totally understand or appreciate.

[00:34:13] Andy Polaine: I think, you know, I had Oliver Stein on who, uh, makes the app IA writer and they have a sort of quite a stance on the ai and in his one is, why should I read something that you haven’t bothered to write?

And one of the things they kind of put in, built into the latest version was this authorship mode. So that if you do paste some content in, uh, you can label it as ai. Mm-hmm. And it kind of pasts it in as kind of, sort of grayed out slightly so that as you start to. Rewrite it, you know, in a, in a sense it’s kinda like a game, like how can I kind of turn all that gray back to black again with my own words?

But there is this really compelling problem with that, where you read it and you go, wow, I can’t really think of a better way to put that. And so I might as well leave it how it is. I mean, you’re at D School, I have students too, and, uh, this is, this is definitely an issue, uh, um, where I think, um,

[00:35:02] Carissa Carter: this was.

You know, we, we have a graduate program where you read essays for everybody that’s coming into Stanford. And I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of people are talking, you know, around the globe as to, you know, people that have this year used AI to write essays. And I think one thing that, while I didn’t see any like blatant people pasting in the chat, GPT says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, in their own personal essay.

Yeah. There was a phenomenon I noticed this year that was different, which is that I felt like there was a lot of pandering. I. And you know, like in a way that it seemed like maybe the entire text of, of the program website had been plugged in. Right. And then repackaged in a way to be like, let me tell you how wonderful your program is.

And like, I, it just felt like, oh, there’s something going on with that phenomenon.

[00:36:00] Andy Polaine: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There there’s definitely kind of little signatures that you start to read. Mm-hmm. I mean, I find it fascinating that you can tell. You can kind of tell the difference between a mid journey image and a Dali image, right?

Mm-hmm. And I’m kind of fascinated that in a pretty short amount of time you can kind of spot the tells, you know, of those things. And I, I kind of feel there is a bit of that, but you know, there’s also makes me then start to wonder how much I. Then, but I know exactly what you mean by the pandering thing.

It is like, it’s like kind of SEO, right? It’s like someone’s pulled in all the keywords and then you kind of read it back and again was kind of saying all the right things, but it’s a bit soulless. There’s a kind of uncanny valley aspect to those texts I think that, um, that show up.

[00:36:42] Carissa Carter: And, and, and then let me just give you the flip too, right.

The amount of ways that I’m a, um, you know, like welcomed into, I just came back from vacation, right? And I used Suno to make a song for my out of office message, right? And it was so fun to do that. I could never have just composed a song in 15 minutes. But here, all of a sudden, like that, AI has helped me.

Do something fun and creative that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. In no way does that make me a songwriter or a musician. Mm-hmm. Which is just like, let’s park that as a, as a thing. But like it, it’s. Allow me to participate in ways that I wouldn’t before. And like, I think that’s incredible, right?

Because a lot of times some of these, some of these fields are really inaccessible to people that wouldn’t have access otherwise.

[00:37:36] Andy Polaine: Yeah. I’m totally split on that. I have to admit the same because I, I, I remember the rise of blogging

mm-hmm.

And the blogging platforms and it. I had a blog before, you know, when I actually had, so just individually upload the HTML files and to, and sort of add it to my website, um, in like 1996 or something, when things like Blogger and, and WordPress and a couple of other earlier tools came out, it democratized publishing stuff onto the web, right?

Mm-hmm. And so you suddenly got, because you didn’t, you know, instead of having. Blogs that were mostly tech based, from tech people. Mm-hmm. You suddenly got, you know, the whole growth of diverse voices across the, the web and you know, so in that sense it was kind of amazing. Of course, we’ve sort of seen the, we’re seeing the opposite happen now of all these kind of ward gardens, which sort of reduced them down and created these echo chambers.

But, well, I guess it goes back to my point before sort of anything that we put out in the world has a, has its positive side, but, but also kind of in excess, uh, has its negative side. In the end of the book, you have a call to action and you talk about design for healing, and you have sort of some principles in there.

Could you tell us a little bit about what those are?

[00:38:45] Carissa Carter: Yeah. Uh, the headline is that anything that you put into the world, whether that be a thing, a system, a routine, absolutely everything is going to either break or break something else. And. Instead of just trying to mitigate breakage all the time, how do we design for healing and healing the mistakes in the, in the effects of what we put into the world?

So how do you continue to shepherd what we make into the future instead of putting out there and just. And, and saying it’s one and done. And so our call to action is to really understand that that’s going to happen and that that should be a piece of your design work. Is the full, bringing it fully into the future as well.

[00:39:35] Andy Polaine: Yeah. I think one of the things to learn from those histories of the future stories, it’s often we tend to sort of start from the beginning and kind of then create a thing and then, and that’s it. But actually starting from the end is a, is a better place to start sometimes rather than the beginning.

[00:39:48] Carissa Carter: I love that.

[00:39:49] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So, uh, we’re coming up to time. As you know, the show is named after the, the Eames film. We talked about at the beginning what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world.

[00:40:03] Carissa Carter: I thought a lot about this. I’m gonna say sunscreen.

[00:40:07] Andy Polaine: Oh,

okay.

[00:40:09] Carissa Carter: There are so many things I could, there are so many things I could say to answer this question, and I’m saying sunscreen because it has. I’ve been in the back of my mind for years. There’s so many assumptions. One about how we protect ourselves from the sun’s radiation.

[00:40:30] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:40:30] Carissa Carter: One that it like has to be topical and how it works and it’s more and more becoming.

Important as our climate shifts in those UV rays are hitting us more and more throughout the day, and our rates of skin cancer are increasing rapidly. And you haven’t really seen too much technological innovation within it. Okay. If we could protect our skin, our bodies, in different ways, and this doesn’t need to be like a screen, like it could be other ways that we shield ourselves, it could, you know, be in within our behaviors.

I just, I think that, I think that we could see in incredible shifts.

[00:41:10] Andy Polaine: Very good. As a Boardman, I can tell you I wear a hat and stay in the shade as much as possible. As a board Englishman, I should probably say, say that,

[00:41:18] Carissa Carter: and if anybody’s listening that wants to work on this, could you please make a sunscreen that we can drink?

Because I have always wondered why, why can’t it be something that we like? Secrete, right? Like in your po like drink in the sweats. Oh, I see that you

[00:41:32] Andy Polaine: sort of sweat out and then Yeah.

[00:41:34] Carissa Carter: Like versus, versus put on on the outside. So.

[00:41:38] Andy Polaine: All right. That’s a good idea. But don’t drink sunscreen right now? No. Where can people find you and, and Scott?

Indeed. Online and Armando.

[00:41:48] Carissa Carter: Yeah. Well, both of us work as a Stanford D school, which, um. Has all of the, the D school tags around the internet. Um, you can find both of us on, on LinkedIn as well. Um, Carissa Carter. He’s Scott Doley, and you can find, uh, the book anywhere books are sold.

[00:42:05] Andy Polaine: Correct? I’ll put all the links in the show notes.

[00:42:07] Carissa Carter: Thank you.

[00:42:08] Andy Polaine: Thank you so much for being my guest on Power of 10.

[00:42:11] Carissa Carter: Thanks for having me, Andy. It was great to chat with you this morning.

[00:42:13] Andy Polaine: You’ve been watching and listening to Power of 10. You can find more about the show on paule.com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice on my courses, as well as sign up for my irregular news letter Doctor’s Note, if you have any thoughts, please put them in the comments or get in touch. You’ll find me as @andypolaine on Blueskyl, on LinkedIn, on my website, and all the links are in the show notes too. Thanks for watching and listening. I’ll see you next time.

For Work Conflicts, Try Couples Therapy

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0200

Stressed interpersonal dynamics at work are really common. It forms a large chunk of my design leadership coaching conversations. How might we tackle these better by borrowing from couples therapy?

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Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Stressed interpersonal dynamics at work are really common. It forms a large chunk of my design leadership coaching conversations. How might we tackle these better?

One of the things I notice is how often the idea of being professional means people don’t have the conversations on the emotional level that is actually where the conflict is. They’ll instead dress it up in terms of process or what’s the right thing to be doing on the project when it’s more often to do with feelings of not being seen, being treated unfairly or unjustly.

Borrowing from therapy

[00:00:29] Andy Polaine: Given how much the conflicts are actually relational, one of the ways you can tackle this is to borrow from relationship therapy techniques. Whether that’s for couples or family dynamics. A fundamental concept of EFT emotionally focused therapy is the dynamic of the pursuer withdrawal cycle.

So typically in couples, there’s one person who’s the pursuer who wants more closeness, more intimacy and so forth, and for the other one that feels too much and they withdraw. And the dynamic is the, the more the person withdraws, the more the pursuer pursues and it just makes it worse and worse and worse.

Part of the process in couple therapy is either with the therapist or then eventually to learn without the therapist to recognize that they’re in their cycle and see it as this thing that we want to try and step out of and break the cycle.

An approach you might take at work is asking something like, “how can we do this better next time we have this situation?” And the important part of this is we. Rather than blaming any one person for being wrong, and you always do this or you should stop doing that, you externalize the dynamic you collectively have and you turn it into a problem for you to collectively tackle.

So now you’re in it together rather than in opposition to each other.

Outro

I encourage you to try this out. If you’ve used this approach in work or in personal life, how has it worked for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

If you’d like to check out my design leadership coaching practice, it is at https://polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put the link below.

I hope that’s useful for you, and I’ll see you next time.

Direction vs Micromanagemnt

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0200

What is the right balance between direction and micromanagement?

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Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: What is the right balance between direction and micromanagement?

Perfectionism

[00:00:03] Andy Polaine: One of my early learnings in a leadership role was even though I had hired a super talented group of people, I noticed that the work wasn’t quite as good as it could be. I just felt like I’ll just let them do their stuff.

But actually it became clear that when I did give them direction, the quality of the work went up, because everyone can get too close to their work and they can do with some direction and coaching. That’s why people like me exists. Why coaches in all sorts of walks of life exist.

I think the temptation for a lot of design leaders is frankly the desire to get back on the tools and actually make something. I think the other thing is that it’s hard sometimes to see work done worse than you would’ve done it.

The trick is to assess when it matters. Sometimes it really does. Sometimes there’s work that you do not want to let out. It’s not ready to go out there into the world because it’s gonna cause problems later on or harm or anything like that.

Sometimes things don’t matter quite as much, or you can let them take longer.

If you try and be a perfectionist with everything, and let’s face it, a lot of us designers can be that way, you’ll end up micromanaging. It’s basically directing someone’s hands to do the stuff.

Learned Helplessness

[00:01:07] Andy Polaine: The paradox here is that the team end up in a state of learned helplessness and the work gets worse. Your team use you as a crutch. They can’t do anything or they dare not to do anything, or they end up in a state of apathy without you directing them. So it’s really much better to build up a robust critique and feedback culture, and that’s one of the ways you really raise the quality.

The advantage that design leaders have is they have some positive or negative role modeling because you’re mostly in middle management. There’s usually very few in the C-suite and so you usually have a boss who is managing you, and that person may be micromanaging you and you can reflect on what that feels like and one of the things is that sense of not being trusted and the loss of agency.

I know that sounds really obvious, but I hear this all the time in coaching that a coachee is complaining about being micromanaged and at the same time is accidentally doing that to their team.

Outro

[00:01:59] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own tips around how you avoid micromanaging or how you give your team agency and trust and let them grow, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much, and I’ll see you again next time.

Francesca Cortesi - Passionate Product Leader

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 09:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is Francesca Cortesi, a passionate product leader with over a decade of experience in scaling digital products that users love and that drive sustainable growth. She has worked with Europe’s fastest-growing companies, from startups to IPOs, delivering tangible results. Her most recent role was as Chief Product Officer at Sweden’s leading property platform, Hemnet, and has just started her own consultancy.

Show Links

The LinkedIn post where we met.
Francesca’s Website: https://www.francescacortesi.com
Francesa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesca-cortesi/
Design Leadership Coaching: https://www.polaine.com/coaching
Online Course: https://courses.polaine.com
Andy’s website - https://www.polaine.com
Subscribe to Power of Ten podcast - https://pln.me/p10
Subscribe to Andy’s newsletter Doctor’s Note - https://pln.me/nws
Andy’s YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine
Andy’s online courses - https://courses.polaine.com
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Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello, welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of Zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organisations, society, and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, designer, educator, and writer. My guest today is Francesca Cortesi, a passionate product leader with over a decade of experience in scaling digital products that users love and that drive sustainable growth.

Has worked with Europe’s fastest growing companies, from startups to IPOs, delivering tangible results. Her most recent role was as Chief product officer at Sweden’s leading property platform, Hemnet, and just started her own consultancy. Francesca, welcome to Power of 10.

[00:00:47] Francesca Cortesi: Hello, and thank you for having me.

[00:00:49] Andy Polaine: It’s a pleasure. Now, we met over a sort of comment exchange or or post you wrote on LinkedIn, and I comment, we’re gonna get to it in a minute. Um, I would like to just hear a little bit more about how you gotta, where you’re now, what’s been your journey.

[00:01:01] Francesca Cortesi: I’m gonna give you the elevator pitch of my past 15 years maybe.

Uh, that’s when pretty much I started in a product. It’s, that’s when I moved to Sweden. I’m originally from Italy and in my. Previous life as I call it. Uh, I was not working digital at all. I was working in the fashion world in Milan. And maybe, you know, if you watch the Devil’s Worst Prada or this kind of things, uh, you know, that that is not digital.

It’s like you want to be there, you want to be at the show, you want to touch the things, you wanna see the catwalks. Uh, that’s what I was doing, uh, in my twenties. Uh, until I decided to, uh, move to Stockholm, Sweden. Uh, and there basically I accidentally start working with digital and as accidentally I stumbled into product.

Uh, my background, uh, it’s in philosophy, but what I was doing, uh, actually is doing, you can call it project management because all those shows and fashion shows and stuff mm-hmm. Um, it’s basically a project. You have like a deadline, you have a time, you have people, you have to invite all the things. Uh, and I started to do that in Sweden, just digitally.

And then I realized that I wanted a little bit more, uh, I wanted to, uh, understand why we were doing things. And that’s when I, uh, stumbled into product. And back then, uh, this is when you understand, and I’m really old. Back then, uh, there was nothing, I mean, there was not such a thing of, oh, you’d be a product manager.

I mean, there was not. That. Kind of wording for it. Uh, a lot of, um, concept that we use today that, uh, will be like, uh, product led growth, uh, growth hacking, uh mm-hmm. Product management or all these kind of things. I mean, we were doing them, uh, but we weren’t calling them like that. Uh, so I started, uh, I was working in a game, uh, company and a community, and I started to be responsible for engagement and retention.

So what you were called. Product led growth today. Uh, I did that. Um. And then, uh, worked for an e-commerce, uh, where I was their second product manager. Uh, and I built up, uh, together with my colleagues, the old product function. Uh, I did my own thing for a while, uh, creating my own little startup. Uh, that did not work.

Uh, so I learned a lot what it means to have product market fit and how you should think about that. Uh, and then I ended up. Uh, as you said at Hamnet, uh, which is, um, Sweden’s biggest property portal or where you go to buy and sell properties. It’s also one of the most apps, uh, the most used apps, uh, in the country.

Um, and, uh, I’ve been there for six years. Uh, going through their, uh, building up their product development there as well, IPOing the company until I realized that, uh, we were really good for each other for a long time. Maybe that was like the end of a really nice story. Uh, and I, uh, starting now, uh, my own, uh, my own gig, uh, with the idea of helping companies in, uh, growth stages because that’s, uh, that’s what I’m good at.

[00:04:07] Andy Polaine: Great. Alright, we’ll get to that in a minute. So we met, as it were, you wrote a post on LinkedIn and it was about this idea that PMs are not just there for to, you know, you said, we initially said, do you believe that a PM’s job is to protect the team and then help them focus on execution and the product management should own the what and why.

And, you know, being the expert around the customer and the business and leaving the how to the team. And you said, you know, I used to think that way, but I realized it kind of blocked innovation and you kind of had a shift for that. And um, maybe you could tell say a bit more about it and then I’ll talk about what my response was and how we then kind of met.

[00:04:40] Francesca Cortesi: Yeah, we go to the juy stuff here. Yeah. Yeah. But uh, as I said, I mean, I had the realization, uh, kind of, um. In the past months in my career, uh, like understanding, I mean, what, what’s my role, what I want, and where should we go, which made me reflect a lot. And from those reflection, uh, I said like when I started there was not really boundaries for product managers, uh, or product management in general.

But I would say that even today, the discipline, it’s a bit misunderstood. And, uh, I believe, uh, personal belief, uh, is that, um, you don’t have an output at the end of the day of your work. You don’t have a design, you don’t have a prototype, you don’t have a line of code. So it becomes this like rule that is a bit fluffy and it’s not well defined.

Uh, and it, it creates some frictions, right? So when I thought about, when I stepped into product management like 13, 14 years ago. Basically what people told me, it was this one-liner you have to own, uh, the why, uh, and then the, the what and the how will be to the team. So that’s your job. That’s the expectation of you.

That’s what you have to do. Uh, and that’s. What I try to do, basically like being the person that we’re collecting all the inputs and try to navigate it and then translate it to the team. That will come in only in the very last step. And this is still, I mean, it’s a little bit connected to the CEO of the product narrative.

It’s about, you know, being this person that is. In charge and is the one that is supposed to aggregate information, collect information, process information, and then come with an answer to a team. Uh, that’s something that I was fed. Uh, and that’s something that I still see around a lot. Uh, but when thinking about it.

When working. I mean, that’s not reality. I mean, that’s not reality for me because that, what that did is that I brought in a lot of competence really late. Like my designer, uh, lead or designer counterpart that could really work with, um, how user interaction, usability, how do that going into the user journey or even the tech feasibility that will become already in.

I mean, they will come in when we add already the solution kind of decided, you know, we were going for something. But I realized that they had a lot of great inputs in the earlier phases when we were shaping which kind of answer we should take. Right? So that’s the old shift. I mean, don’t be the one that tries to collect everything, but bring people along with you as early as possible.

There is also a threshold in this because while I was, uh, testing in my career, this you cannot bring everyone along. At the same time because otherwise you will be extremely slow. And, uh, in Sweden especially, there is this culture of which is good for many, many ways, but a culture of include including a lot of people, uh, and everyone has to have a saying, uh, which is really good in theory, but slows you down a lot.

So when, uh, time to market, of time to values of the essence you have. To find something in between which I found basically, uh, yeah, finding one representative from product one, from engineering, one from design, what many people call the product trio, uh, to work together. And also, uh, make it really clear that you, you are in it together.

You might have your own competence. You, there’s like the designer that should have the last word on usability, but I mean, you, the three of you should be. One unit. Right. Uh, so that’s like, that was my post was all about. And there were a lot of discussions about it.

[00:08:35] Andy Polaine: There were a lot of discussions about it.

And my response was, was probably like kind of, you know, 500 word emoji shrug, you know, of like how I, on a second. Hasn’t that always been the case? And so I was kinda surprised to read it, right? ‘cause from, from someone who’s been been design and digital for a very long time, I’ve kind, well this is.

Obviously this is kind of how, how you should work, but obviously as a, as a coach, I have, and I’m coaching design leaders, I’m usually. I have a very biased sample. ‘cause often people come to coaching ‘cause they’re having a problem with the, um, some other stakeholders. And one of those is commonly, um, the product leadership.

It’s not always, I mean, have a lot of coachee who have really good relationships with their product leadership too. And one of the things that goes on with the way you describe that kind of form thing of like, I’m responsible for owning the why and the what. It obviously, it kind of completely robs the agency from everyone else who’s further downstream.

Which is one of the kind of things I think I’ve seen go on. And you know, you’ve seen it also. Play out in all the layoffs where a lot of, uh, senior designers have been fired and it’s just kind of left a, a bunch of kind of junior. I’m gonna be rude again to those people. But, so, Figma jock is people who are executors of those things, doing delivery work, and then, you know, the, the, they don’t really have any input into the how, if anyone can hear a kind of squeaking, it’s my dog dreaming.

And so, you know what that’s turned out? I mean, the worst case scenario is kind of feature factory, right? Where people are just literally, it’s like they’re kind of just designing widgets coming down the, um, the assembly line and, and there’s, there’s not much. Thought behind it. Uh, they’re just being told what to do and it can become very frustrating, but it’s very frustrating, obviously, if you’re more senior, because you’ve been used to, you know, contributing to being part of the research, contributing to kind of the the why.

Discovering the why, uh, of it, as well as, you know, thinking about the what and all those things. So that was my sort of long response and we had kind of exchange about it. But one of the things that came up in the comments a lot was, was people, and there was often PMs saying, yes, but then who owns this?

How do things get done if nobody owns this? And if no one’s, you know, keeping track of it. What, what other things did you see in there? Because I’ve got some thoughts about that, but I, I want to say here.

[00:10:39] Francesca Cortesi: Yeah, I mean, I think like what you’re describing, I mean, in a way, the people that have been working this way have the same reaction that you have as like Yeah, obviously.

Yeah. Uh, because if you’ve been working in that way, then you see the impact that it makes. Yeah. I mean, when we say, I say a lot, uh, product development is a team sport and not only in the team, I mean, you have. A broader team, like including stakeholders, sales, marketing. I mean, if you have, you don’t have distribution from the beginning, then you have an amazing product that is not gonna go anywhere.

So, I mean, there is a lot of this, uh, but I think that product management is still such a young discipline, uh, and also. I mean, one core fact, uh, to this is that product managers do the really different jobs depending on the companies where they are. So there is no common view, yeah. Of what product management is or what product management does.

Uh, there is a lot of context that needs to be applied, and in that contents comes expectations. So I believe that, uh, you come to the product management line of work if you are like a certain type of person. I mean, you want to make an impact. Uh, you are really driven, and I mean, you want to excel the expectation and it isn’t yourself, right?

So if the expectation is not calibrated. Then that’s what becomes like maybe the company, I mean, different perspective. The one that you were describing, that designer that get, uh, get handled only the very last piece of designing the last thing might feel that he or she is in a feature factory. Yeah.

While I, as a PM in that company that I feel like I’m going and talking and putting together, I feel really empowered. So it becomes like this shift of different perspectives. Uh, and I think there is also like the narrative that you were pointing at, oh, if I don’t have one person accountable, nothing will get done.

But is it really,

[00:12:45] Andy Polaine: not really right, because people have been making stuff for ages and stuff gets done. Right.

[00:12:49] Francesca Cortesi: Also, my experience is that if, let’s say that you and I work in the same team. Yeah. Uh, and I mean, we work together as a team. Yeah. Uh, we still divide. Tasks you’ll still have maybe like, oh, you and they go and do some usability test or whatever might be feasible in exactly that moment.

Right? Oh, we have to un we need to understand if this, uh, users will use this product, uh, or this kind of things. You will be the person to go to. Yeah. Like you are responsible for that part. While if I will be talking with, uh, I dunno, our. Pricing function or business development to understand how to put, you know, what, what should be the pricing of this product or which kind of, uh, what is our ICP or whatever.

I mean, I will be the go-to person for those questions. Yeah. So even if like there is a team, you could still appoint responsibilities. So that, I mean that narrative, I’m, I don’t really get it to be honest.

[00:13:49] Andy Polaine: I mean, there’s a lot wrapped up in there. I think one of the things that’s different, and it, the two sort of ways of thinking that you’re looking at is, is the shift from, you know, ownership.

Is it, you know, you talked about empowerment, but often empowerment can mean taking power off of other people. Mm-hmm. And it’s very kind of focused around that one person and, and it’s a bit colonial actually, in the sense of, well, I’m just gonna kind of take this and do this. I’m gonna do that and I’m gonna do that without much sort of regard for whoever else was already there doing that stuff in the past.

You know, and this always happens with disciplines, you know, I mean, design is, is just as bad at this. I think there’s the difference between that and this idea of ownership versus governance and you know, in governance you have that sense of here’s how we deal with making decisions, here’s how we go about it.

Here’s who’s maybe ultimately responsible for making the call on stuff. Or here’s the forums within which we discuss these things, here’s how we discuss those things. And it feels to me that’s a very different kind of thing. And she’s sort of more mature thing than just this idea of, you know, I own this.

I dunno if you’ve got any. Thoughts on that?

[00:14:47] Francesca Cortesi: Yeah, I think it’s like, also this is really contextual to the different companies, right? Mm-hmm. And I mean, how big the companies are, uh, in governance and, um, decision. I mean, in governance there’s a lot of, uh, decision making, for example. Yeah. How do we take decision?

And I mean, if we disagree, who will be the last. To make the call. Uh, I see this from two perspectives. Uh, one, it gives like, it’s more of a psychological, maybe philosophical one. I mean, it gives you this perception that if things do not go right, there’s gonna be one person. But I mean, in reality, you don’t get there often.

It’s more like you prepare from the beginning to the worst case and maybe you optimize for the worst case when the worst case doesn’t. I mean, it can happen, but that’s not what happens normally. Uh, the other part I think it’s also connected to ego, you know, is like I am a back to the CEO of the product or whatever.

Like, oh, I am the la the one having the last word. I am the one like putting down the feet. People should come to me because I know better. Uh, and there is a lot of, I mean, I’ve seen this in product management, obviously. I’ve seen it like. Beyond product management in companies. Uh, and this is a little bit of like Yeah.

The factory kind of mindset. Mm-hmm. There is like, there are steps and there are linear, and this should go in a certain way. And I mean, there’s people like kind of like approving things. Mm-hmm. Product development and digital development is not, if there’s something I’ve learned, it’s not linear. No. I mean, you, you don’t go linear, uh, never.

I’ve never seen that happening and like trying to fit that in, in linear process or linear governance because someone is used to that and has some ego attached to it. I think it’s the wrong angle to things.

[00:16:45] Andy Polaine: Yeah. And I, I, I gave a talk. I know you’ve just come back from product at heart up in Hamburg. Yep.

Uh, with our friends and, um, I gave a talk a little while ago about the language is about mind, your product language actually, and it’s like, for me, the thing that drives me nuts, and it’s partly ‘cause of the service design thing around that language of, of even just calling it product, right? My brother is an industrial designer, or by trade, you know, originally by training and all those.

People who consider themselves actual product designers, um, but also this, you know, this idea of, of shipping stuff or delivering, you don’t, right? You don’t, you don’t ship. No one ships code anymore. No one even sent, you know, not really. Nobody really sends stuff out on CDs anymore, uh, and all of that stuff.

But it’s very industrial language and I think it does make you set up a mental model that it’s a linear process and it does set up that thing that’s like a factory and, and in classically in the factory, it’s very class. It’s classically in the factory you have the blue collar workers who, who, you know, supposedly unskilled labor, right?

And just do what they’re told and do, do the same repetitive task over and over again, you know, and the white collar labor sitting in the glass box, looking down at the factory, kind of in the office. Who are the brains? I think there’s still that kinda hangover of that, and I think it’s really important to become, to be very, very conscious of those dynamics and the sort of, I guess what I’m saying is actually the kinda history of companies and organizations and how they.

How they operate. And yet we’ve had this very, very dominant narrative of, from Silicon Valley, mostly around product and about tech. And as you said, a lot of that stuff has come and ways of working and thinking have come from startups and scaling up. It’s very different to be in a, an existing enterprise or you know, in a government service or doing those things and, and trying to sort of operate that way often it doesn’t really kind of work.

Yeah. How big was Hemnet?

[00:18:27] Francesca Cortesi: Yeah, Hamnet, when I started Hamnet, uh, was 60 people. And then when I left a month, uh, a couple of months ago, it was like 180.

[00:18:36] Andy Polaine: Okay. Alright. So it’s not, but it wasn’t like several thousand. Yeah. Okay. And

[00:18:39] Francesca Cortesi: I also, full disclaimer, I have never worked for such big enterprises so far by choice.

Uh, mm-hmm. But I’ve been coaching, uh, people that work, um, with enterprises, like thousands of people. Uh, and I think you are completely right. Uh, there is this, um, idea. I mean, one, one, when the company gets bigger, obviously governance gets bigger. Hmm. Because that, that’s like, that’s just how life works. Uh, I mean, you cannot, you cannot go and talk with your colleagues.

I mean, you need to have an overall structure about it. Uh, but then it could become that slippery slope that this overall structure is like. We are the thinkers and they are the makers. And if you put on top of that, that maybe some people working in the company have been working that way for many years.

And I’ve seen that specific ways of thinking and working, like going well. Mm-hmm. Uh, like that shift in mindset is not trivial. And, uh, especially also become, it depends a little bit on your, uh, personal background. I, uh, told about my background didn’t come from digital at the beginning, and I mean, you have to adjust quite a while to understand how it is to do digital.

How would it is to do, in my case, uh, project management in digital, but digital sales from analog sales is different. Digital marketing from analog marketing is different. You, you talk about your brother, you know, like developing a physical product, it’s another story than developing a digital product. So it’s like, it’s a lot about, um, ideas and preconceptions and maybe unlearning what’s served as well, uh, that get and.

Kind of having the humility of understanding like what is our role in all of this, uh, that comes into play and it’s. It’s hard for every single person. I mean, it’s hard.

[00:20:40] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that is different really with, I mean, I would say services, I would say almost all of the digital products are actually services.

Um, ‘cause they have multiple kind of touchpoint and they have an ecosystem. But one, the difference between those things that they’re never finished right either. And I think with a, with a physical product. Once it really has come off the assembly line or has been created, it, it, it, obviously, it ages and things, but it doesn’t change.

It, doesn’t it? You, you buy a thing or you market a thing and sell it and then that thing doesn’t change and there’s not really an ongoing relationship unless it’s to sell that person more or something goes wrong. Um, whereas software and services, they’re just constantly in flux all the time. There’s no real sort of end point of it either.

I think that’s probably one of the bigger difficulties to get your head around if you, if you had that sort of industrial mindset in the past.

[00:21:26] Francesca Cortesi: Exactly. And I mean if you couple that with one of the, I mean for me at least, it’s one of the most recurring questions is like deadlines one, is this done? Mm.

You know, one is like, that is the same mindset. I mean, obviously you need to be able to grasp and have an idea, but that cannot be the first thing you do. Yeah. Because you have no idea of the. You haven’t test with user. You have no idea on the complexity of the code. You have no idea when you start, you know, the architecture and these kind of things are maybe the less visible.

Yet the one that impact, that creates the most friction, because that’s another mindset, you know, to build a cup or whatever you’re building. Yeah, yeah. Uh, it’s like, okay, I know exactly what I have to do, and it’s kind of the same thing all over. That’s not the same with software.

[00:22:15] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Particularly in a new area.

I does try an opinion on you.

[00:22:19] Francesca Cortesi: Yeah.

[00:22:19] Andy Polaine: And I, I’m not sure, I mean, you know, it might be unpopular, but, um, I think there’s a, a relative amount of truth behind it. But, um. One bit of it, uh, could also be a bit offensive. And it’s this, you know, I, I think, you know, there’s been a boom and, and products has had this kinda massive boom in the last mission in the last 10 years.

It became, you know, the, often the highest paid role in, in the organization. I mean, obviously that attracts a lot of people and my experience has been, you know, that certainly what, a bit like in the.com boom, actually in the sort of late nineties, early two thousands, you end up getting quite a lot of sort of low grade people coming in, certainly on the sort of bottom third or even half of a discipline, uh, because of that.

‘cause it’s, you know, it’s a gold rush and that starts to degrade the practice. Right. And you were sort of talking about this, it’s a, it’s a new practice, so there’s not that much, you know, there is obviously, you know, leading lights out there talking about how to do it well. And there’s obviously a lot of people doing it well, but there’s also a whole kind, a bunch of people just going, well, you know, I, nothing, I could just Reba myself.

One of the things about this, and this may be the offensive thing, is if you know, you make a thing, so if you’re a coder and you’re kind of, and you’re writing code or if you are a, a designer and you are, you’re making design artifacts. You can kind of tell whether someone, there’s, there’s a sort of an artifact there that is the signal of whether this person’s any good or not.

Mm-hmm. You’ve got a thing to look at that you can say, well, this, this, this design’s awful. You know, you can point to the typography and the hierarchy or whatever, and the code could be sort of messy and hacky and so forth. I wonder whether with product management, whether there’s a thing there where, because you don’t have that.

Whether it’s sort of easy for that bottom third that I was talking about to sort of get away with it and could have not be shown up as not being very good, or whether that is offensive and unfair to product management.

[00:24:02] Francesca Cortesi: I think, uh, I mean, first I love the provocative question and uh, I agree. Uh, there is a lot of.

Mediocracy, mediocrity. What you say? Mediocrity. Yeah. Uh, in, um, I’ve seen a lot. I mean, I’m famous for taking forever to recruit, uh, because I’ve seen, I mean, I really have to go through many people. To understand, okay, what are do they actually do? This is partially because the role of product is different, different companies.

So maybe what I might need is not what you’re used to despite you have that, uh, that title, but there’s also a lot of rebranding. Exactly. As you were, were saying. Uh, I would say that there is a way of like seeing, uh, if you are a good product manager and that way is that the product that you help shipping.

Uh, create, uh, business impact, uh, because it’s not only, I mean, unless you are a charity or an organization that doesn’t have to make money, uh, then your job is actually to create business impact. Are you able to solve a problem and are, uh, your clients or users, uh, willing to pay for it? Uh, and do you impact the top line or bottom line, or do you make it some kind of.

You know, difference, uh, in the company ecosystem, uh, that is the, the way of measuring a product manager. Uh, and the problem, uh, many times, uh, is that if we think about those product manager that are there again to, you know, okay, my job is to, uh, make a backlog, one to 10, and then we ship this, and then when it’s shipped, it’s done.

Then you obviously can hide. I mean, if you come back to me handy and say, okay, but this Francesca, this thing, I mean we put uh, x many engineerings hours and we spend this amount of time and it’s out. But I mean, we’re not making any penny if something we’re losing because we invest all that money and we are not seeing any result.

And I say, yeah, well my job was to ship it and I shipped it. You know, you are bad because you pick the wrong idea. Then I mean, there is basically your hide. Uh, but I mean, if you, if you do real product management, according to me, uh, you have to take responsibility for the impact you need. You, you really have to, that’s your way of like measuring the same way that, you know, uh, a designer will be measured like, oh, how is this, uh, usable in our app?

Or like, uh, engineer will be measured, or is this making, you know, our code? Fasters lower is like connecting with the architecture and et cetera in all needs to go together. Uh, but definitely there’s way, especially in as company grow. And as company maybe see the role of product in different ways.

There’s definitely a way of hiding.

[00:27:04] Andy Polaine: Yeah. I wonder if there’s an inherent tension there. Actually, going back to what we were talking about at the beginning, where if you know, if the thing that you are measured on, the criteria by which you say you know you are a good product leader and versus a not very good one is the impact on the business.

And yet we’re also saying, but it’s a collaborative, you know, process, right? Where everyone is involved in that. So actually. You know, it’s everyone who has been responsible for the impact on the business for sure, and the tension there being as a product leader in order for me to kind of prove my case for myself.

I have to kind of basically state the claim that it was me who had that impact on the business and not the kind of collaborative group. And I wonder if that is part of that tension that we’re talking about, where you’re talking about sort of the ego thing where the sort of systemically it’s kinda set up for that dynamic to happen.

[00:27:51] Francesca Cortesi: I think it’s like a lot of this boils down to mindset. Mm-hmm. I mean, when you realize, and I came to that realization myself, I will not be able to have that impact by myself. So I cannot claim that I made the impact by myself because if I, yes, there is like two scenarios, or two parallel word, right? One word where I do it by myself.

So I go and talk to sales, and talk to marketing, and talk to finance and shape an idea and then task someone to talk to users in the best of case. And then they come back with some result, and then I make a choice, and then we build it. Right then I take a lot of burden on my shoulders. Mm. Because I feel that I have to do it, and I kind of like take in people on and off during this process.

So they feel that they pitch in, but they never have enough skin in the game. Because again, they can say, oh, I deliver those user user interview, or I deliver this design, I deliver this, uh, idea. But. This doesn’t make a product successful. Yeah. Uh, and at the end of the day, that also happens like in different phases.

Like in my realization, first I was too close, you know? First it was myself, then I was close to my team, and that is like cutting off, almost like taking in only on demand, uh, distribution. And marketing. Yeah, and I mean that didn’t work either because we had this product, we were super proud. We put like hours and sweat and tears and blood and everything.

We want to make it work, but no attachment from sales. How did you think that went? Yeah, yeah. Right. So I mean, it is like you cannot, your role. I always say, I mean, I don’t like the CEO of the product kind of thing. I like to think that my role is facilitating. And then my role facilitating in product can be on different levels.

It can be like, if you are A CPO, then your role is like to align everyone on a product strategy, meaning making this really, really hard thing of choosing one bet instead of the other. Or like one thing is instead of the other, because you’re always constantly gonna go back and be opportunistic. Mm-hmm.

How do you balance long-term with like more opportunistic thing? So that’s your job and your job like as you go down until the PM is like, make sure that when you have a problem space to work, you bring in everybody and it’s everybody that succeeds or everybody that fails. And obviously everyone has a different.

Role depending on the, on the specific moment in time when you shape the product. But I mean, you cannot claim that you’re by yourself and you can show the impact and that impact would’ve not been creating without you being good at facilitating. So in that way, you really need, you see the difference. If you’ve been in those teams, you really see the difference of like the product person can make in that perspective.

But I mean, you’re not. You cannot do it by yourself. And again, it’s like a lot of mindset. If you think like, oh, my worth is man, I value and the value is created by me, then you are like. Slippery slope.

[00:31:01] Andy Polaine: Yeah. It’s a very difficult thing, isn’t it, to know when you hire someones, how collaborative they have been in their past place.

‘cause you know, you can speak to people, but it depends on the reasons why someone has left. Uh, it’s also equally hard and the other way around when you are interviewing or when you, you know, you’re being the, the candidate and you want to know how collaborative is this culture. ‘cause it’s very difficult.

You, you often don’t know that until you really get there. I think it’s one of the kind of toughest things. It’s kind of very hidden. So what you just told me actually was sort of the answer to the next question that was gonna ask. ‘cause you said before, well that’s a product management or product leadership, according to me, and you just sort of gave your, your outline of it.

You are just starting or you’ve started your own advisory consultancy. So what are you aiming to help clients with and what experience will be drawing upon to help them?

[00:31:47] Francesca Cortesi: Yeah. Uh, that’s like my, um, exciting thing that I’m doing, uh, that I’m doing this year. Uh, and you probably, uh, realize that I’m really passionate about, uh, collaboration and how we can do, and how we can work together to, uh, make an impact.

And I’ve been noticing that product in this lately, as you were describing, became really an hot discipline, but also became a little bit, um. Empty in the inside. Uh, I have like, which creates a lot of frustration. Uh, you have like business people who think that, uh, product people only think about users and not how we make money.

And then you have like, uh, engineers and designer who thinks that product only, you know, are, uh, want to decide a bunch of things. So you’re like, and you are like those individuals that in product that try to do their best. Uh, and they’re like. Many times burned out and in between and don’t really know where to bang their head.

Uh, so I, um, with my consultancy, I really want to go in and help, uh, and try to, uh, to lead, uh, or help these teams and individual, uh, to, uh, create better product, but also feel more fulfilled themselves. I specialized in, uh, scale-ups. Uh, so that’s what I’m, uh, I’m good at. That’s where my experience comes from.

So post-market fit, when there is an all new set of things, that’s when collaboration becomes important. That’s when like how we take decisions and when distribution that all users and business comes together. Uh, that’s that. My, uh, space where, where I’m really good at and that’s what I’m wanna, uh, help companies either like coming in, uh, fractionally, uh, and helping them for period, or for some days, a weeks.

Or, uh, another thing that I’m really passionate is we always say that is lonely at the top. Which it is. Yeah, it is. I mean, let’s be honest. But I also think in my years as at the top myself, I was like, does it have to be that way? Uh, I think we can, uh, kind of like it. Brush, uh, ourselves, like a bit of ego out, uh, our CPOs and think we don’t have to have it all figured out and we can use some people to bounce ideas and people who have been there.

So that’s my other thing, like coaching, uh, product leaders and product teams, uh, to accelerate their time to value and really make it normal. You don’t have to have it all figured out. Nobody has. Uh, and if you put that expectation on yourself, you’re not gonna end well. I was really close myself, like to put it all together, it doesn’t work.

[00:34:36] Andy Polaine: Yeah, there’s a bit of a culture I noticed, you know, also at conference and stuff, a scene of amongst kind of product leadership of, you know, busyness of kind of crushing it and smashing it and we do everything, you know, and all of that sort of stuff. There’s a sort of pride in that, but I can imagine there’s quite a lot of burnout in that too.

[00:34:51] Francesca Cortesi: Guilty. Like, you know what you are by design at the, especially like in this scale up and growth phases. Mm-hmm. By design, like really. At the interception of so many things, uh, you have like strategy that is like five years, and then you have at some point I had like investors or like quarterly report, and then you have teams, and the teams grows.

Then you need to understand what it is, you know, that is the fire that like a PM tells you in a one-on-one or what is the. Structural problem that you have to address, and then you have your own ego, and then you have like the expectation that others or especially yourself put on you recipe for disaster.

[00:35:39] Andy Polaine: Yeah, I’ve often, uh, said with design, I think there is a, a mix of, uh, humility and ego that you have to have, right? You have to have enough ego to be someone who says, well, I think things could be like this, and I’m gonna make a thing and put it in the world, and, you know, fight for those things and support them and say, you know, this should be the thing we should do.

At the same time, obviously having the humility to work with other people and, and, and be wrong, you know, and I don’t think you ever kind of perfectly get the balance right. It’s that kind of balancing on a. On a chair or something where you’re always kind of wiggling around a little bit and go from one side to the other and sometimes, you know, sometimes you fall off.

[00:36:15] Francesca Cortesi: Yeah. And also I think it’s like we all are, uh, personally inclined on one side or the other. Mm-hmm. Uh, but what can be, I think, uh, really important is to have someone to. You know, to bounce ideas with that can show you like that, then call you on that side, oh, now you’re tipping too much on this side, but now you’re tipping too much on the other side.

Have you considered this? Uh, and it’s a all other thing is, is a person that I’ve been in that seat because it can kind of understand what you’re, uh, going through.

[00:36:46] Andy Polaine: Yeah. But my coaching’s really similar as well. You know, I have the, the loneliness thing is a really real thing. I mean, it’s, it’s. I dunno if it’s as, you know, the same, you know, one of the things that happens when designers become into leadership role is all their peers or other people who have got much more of a shared business background than they have, um, often, I dunno if this is true, maybe for product people too, but it’s definitely, um, loneliness, but it’s also a bit of a self-imposed loneliness because people.

You know, for all obvious reasons, but the culture of work isn’t usually a place where you can go, sorry, I don’t really understand what we’re doing here. Or, I’m, I’m really feeling a bit lost at the moment. ‘cause you’re supposed to be at the top and, and know all the answers. But I mean, all of those people are often like that.

I think it’s really, uh, important then. To have that space where you can kind of give people that. And then the other thing is, you know, I think it’s, it’s important to create that safe space, but also to be slightly annoying, right? And to kind of ask people, the, the pointy questions go well, you know, who cares about that?

And, and for them to have the moment of really thinking that through, uh, in a way that, you know, they maybe don’t give time for in their, in their day daily work, you know, where they’re supposed to all have the answers off the cuff. And, and often I think, wow, some really big decisions just got made. It’s just completely sort of in the spur of the moment then, and everyone just nodded and kind of went on.

But, uh, rather than taking the time to kind of work them through and think, think them through.

[00:38:06] Francesca Cortesi: But that happens quite a lot because when you’re in the midst of things

[00:38:10] Andy Polaine: Yeah,

[00:38:11] Francesca Cortesi: at certain point people, I mean, you’re so, there are so many things and you work towards something that, I mean, you get frustrated and you just want to move on.

And some things are exactly as you said, decide quite quickly. Uh, yeah, like, you know, while other, it takes forever, but I mean, the impact of the two is many time unbalanced, and that’s when it requires someone, I mean, external or like with the fresh eyes on the question. Uh, that can be really beneficial. I mean, I’m guilty of that myself.

I, we spend so much time, like upstream sometimes, uh, and made like a super quick decision downstream that, I mean, the two things. Just looking at it in a more, uh, detached way. You, I would’ve done completely the opposite.

[00:38:59] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So the person they can do that with is you?

[00:39:01] Francesca Cortesi: Yeah. Or you, or depending, like, uh, yeah, but I think it’s like the idea of, uh, yeah.

If you like, are looking for how can we, uh, in our team elevate. Generally like our ways of working, uh, I could be a person to talk with, or even if you’re looking for a product bouncing board as I call it, uh, that could be also a product to talk to.

[00:39:26] Andy Polaine: Yeah, and I think, you know, with the scale up thing, there are kind of inflection points aren’t there as, as.

You get to certain sizes and things change and the the social dynamic changes as well. Obviously, um, you start to, at some point you kind think you knew, so I found you get to around 80 people and you start not to know everyone in the company mm-hmm. Anymore and that kind of changes everything again.

‘cause you’re just some annoying stakeholder on the other end of an email rather. Or Slack rather than, you know, a person I know and all of those things. Exactly. Yeah. And that’s what I

[00:39:54] Francesca Cortesi: find, find, uh, fascinating because scaling is like, as product doesn’t have an end. It doesn’t have a ceiling. It’s just that you have to handle like all the different scale phases in different ways.

[00:40:07] Andy Polaine: I wish it did though. I, I think the, the conversation about how big is big enough doesn’t happen enough actually, you know, particularly in the kind of state of the planet today as well. Yes. Of, you know, what size are, are we comfortable with getting to rather than just this sort of endless growth thing.

Uh, we’re coming up to time. The show is named after this Ray Charles Eames film called Powers of 10, and it’s all about the relative size of things in the universe. People should go and Google it. It’s, uh, it’s very interesting. And so I have one small question at the end, which is called one small thing, which is what, one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world.

[00:40:44] Francesca Cortesi: You call it small thing. But I mean, I think this is an extremely difficult question. Uh, I had to think really hard about it. Uh, and that’s one thing that, uh, two things actually that pop to my head. Uh, but the one I will, uh, bring up is, uh, I think we could redesign the always on culture. Mm-hmm. Uh, and I mean, it might be a little bit, uh, philosophical, but I mean there is this, uh, if we like scope it to the workspace, uh, there’s so much email, slack and now with ai, like a lot of, like bombarding and uh, a lot of things which create a lot of pressure and expectation of like being always like.

On top of things, especially if you work with people that are all over the globe that, I mean, you’re, you’re never done. And that’s not healthy because that’s not where you create your head space and where you can do your best work. So one thing that, I mean, just generally speaking, I mean just like fantasizing, uh, it could be good for example, uh, to what, what will happen if in Slack we are defaulted by offline.

Instead of having to opt in as like, I agree, you know, offline or like not available, whatever that is. Uh, or like another thing could be, do notification need to be in like instantaneous? What if like, I could decide, okay, now it’s my focus time. I get no notifications. Like I don’t have to, what I do is like I close down everything, but I still have this idea things are happening.

Right. It’s

[00:42:19] Andy Polaine: piling up in the background. Yeah, but I mean,

[00:42:21] Francesca Cortesi: what if like there will come in batches. For example. I mean, I think it, I mean having those kind of, um, it’s a new approach. Uh, if I stretch it, I mean I could even have it with products like, you know this, why do we have to ping people all the time?

Wouldn’t be like nice if they would come to our product because it’s so valuable for them that we don’t have to nudge them all the time. Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. But I mean this idea of like rethinking the always on will be my,

[00:42:51] Andy Polaine: yeah. I, it’s funny ‘cause there’s also an old thing thing. Uh, you know, I I, when people used to get actual mail post, you know, people would often have their sort of correspondence tray and they would kind of batch it and then they would kind of go, okay, I, I’d sit down and one of the things was I knew someone who said, I, I asked, I answered my correspondence.

She said, um, she was my babysitter as a kid. She was already quite old. Then I answer my correspondence strictly, you know, chronologically, you know, whoever mm-hmm. Comes, comes in. I answer that one next and go through that way. And she would sort of batch it out. And people used to do that. And I think, you know, in the early days of email, certainly in in Europe and in America, it’s slightly different ‘cause of the way phone calls work.

But in Europe where you were paying always for the amount of time you were, you were online. You used to write your emails, go online, send them all, and then go offline again in the days of dial up. And you didn’t have that, uh, always on culture either. And I know there’s a few email kind of programs that started to do that.

Again, it’s funny to see that stuff come

[00:43:46] Francesca Cortesi: back around. Yeah. In circle. And I think it’s like this always on all, I mean obviously like the problem for mental health, but it also like. We’re not putting the time on the most important things because there’s so much to be handled all the time that, again, we’re not making the, the right impact.

[00:44:06] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So can we,

[00:44:07] Francesca Cortesi: I mean, can we do something about it?

[00:44:09] Andy Polaine: Yeah. There’s not much differentiation. Sometimes I, I call that sort of busy work thing, the junk food of work, right? Where it’s like you’re sort of snacking on all this stuff, but it’s not. None of it’s really nutritious. Yeah. You know, it’s not like a you, we need this junk food, you know, the, the slow food, you know, the Italian slow food movement.

[00:44:25] Francesca Cortesi: Exactly.

[00:44:27] Andy Polaine: Uh, with work. Um, where can people find you online?

[00:44:30] Francesca Cortesi: Uh, they can find me on LinkedIn. That will be like the easiest, uh, way of finding me. It’s Francesca Cortes. Or my website, uh, which is my name, francesca cortes.com.

[00:44:41] Andy Polaine: Wonderful. You say your name so much better than I just mangled it at the beginning.

Francesca, thank you so much for being on Power of 10.

[00:44:48] Francesca Cortesi: Thank you, Andy, for having me.

[00:44:49] Andy Polaine: You’ve been watching and listening to Power of 10. You can find more about the show on polaine.com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice online courses, as well as sign up for my very irregular newsletter, Doctor’s Note, if you’ve got any thoughts, put them in the comments or get in touch. You’ll find me as andypolaine on Bluesky, you’ll find me on LinkedIn and on my website. I’m no longer on Twitter anymore. I deleted my account the other day, but it’d been frozen for a very long time, but I finally decided to just get rid of it.

All the links will be in the show notes. Thanks for listening and watching, and I’ll see you now. Time.

Service Design 2nd Edition

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 09:00:00 +0200

The big news that I am late blogging about is that Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie and I have completed the second edition of our book Service Design: From Insight to Implementation!

It comes out officially on October 21st, but you can pre-order now to get a 15% discount. If you already bought the first edition from Rosenfeld Media, you should receive and e-mail from them for a discount off the second edition.

Should you bother to buy the second edition?

Obviously, we think so!

It’s a very odd experience to write a second edition, akin to re-touching a spot on the wall and then deciding you need to blend it in, then paint the whole wall, then, while you are at it, re-paint the room.

Lavrans started us off with the challenge to cut material out that felt outdated or general design methods that had become so commonplace we felt it made more sense to reference other books.

The biggest advantage of looking back over the past 10-15 years is that the discipline has grown enormously and we now have a whole load of case studies to draw upon. We’ve updated almost all the case studies in the book and revisited the one in Chapter 1 about the insurance company Gjensidige, for which Lavrans met up with the now ex-CEO and CMO to talk about what was successful in the intervening years.

We also have a bunch of new sidebars from guests who really add to the knowledge shared in the book. And, of course, we recognise the rise of product-led organisations. Product, as we know it now, was really only emerging back in the first edition days. (Yes, I know, everybody has re-written their resumés to say they were doing product in the 90s. They weren’t. I was there.)

We updated all of the chapters in one way or another and moved some material around. The more method heavy chapters around blueprinting and the service value proposition have been updated, as has measuring services.

There is a new chapter on organisational change, one of the real missing pieces from the first edition. And we’ve updated the final chapter on future challenges (as well as taking a look back on what predictions or wishes turned out to be accurate or utopian).

All in all, it’s definitely a new book, but we tried to keep as much of the original flavour and, dare I say, wisdom, while we were updating it. We’re all very pleased with how it has turned out.

If you do buy it and read it, please let us know what you think. And we’ll love you even more if you would write an Amazon review. As you know, we are all slaves to the algorithm these days and it really helps.

Emotions At Work

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0200

Would you prefer to quit rather than have a difficult conflict conversation with someone at work? In this coaching reflection video, I want to talk again about being emotional at work and why it’s important to acknowledge them.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Would you prefer to quit rather than have a difficult conflict conversation with someone at work? In this coaching reflection video, I want to talk again about being emotional at work. It’s often seen as a negative thing. You are so emotional or you had an emotional outburst. We never obviously talk about an “outburst of rationality”.

Emotions at work

[00:00:19] And yet work, especially leadership, is really all about relationships and not the worky work part of the work. The famous psychotherapist and couples counselor, Esther Perel talks about how there’s this kind of pandemic of people breaking up and getting divorced because they’re unable to talk about sex in their relationships.

[00:00:37] And I think there’s a parallel to this in terms of talking about emotions at work. I think it brings up all the same kind of sense of vulnerability, fear, and anxiety. I hear it quite often in coaching sessions. That someone is having a real clash with someone, it makes them so miserable and yet the fear of actually having the conversation with them on a heart to heart level is too great. And they would prefer to quit and look for another job.

What do you really want to say?

[00:01:00] So what I do in coaching sessions is I ask people, what is it that you really want to say? And it’s not usually about the work. It’s not usually about process stuff or whatever it is. It’s generally a much more human thing. That you are being left out, you’re feeling excluded, not heard, not seen, or all those kinds of things.

[00:01:18] So I asked them to come up with the, the sweary version of it. Like, what would you really want to say with the filter off, and you come up with all of that and you, oh, this, that, and you are like this. And then we work through and come up with the non sweary version and the kind of I version rather than new version. By which I mean, “When this happens, I feel these things” and it’s not, “You are doing this and you are doing that”. So it’s, I feel excluded. Not that you are excluding me and so on. And as we then work through that, we come up with a version that is vulnerable. It still tackles the emotions and it is honest, but it’s also something that’s not gonna create a huge fight.

Try it!

[00:01:54] I really recommend you try this. If you’re thinking of quitting, you have little to lose anyway. I know in some situations you may have something to lose, you might fear you’re gonna lose the promotion. You might fear that you’re gonna received some retribution, but I really recommend you give it a go because generally people respond well to someone being vulnerable. I’ve seen it completely unlock a conflict and I’ve seen it help people really connect on a human level at work and, and that’s either peers or it’s even someone and their boss.

Outro

[00:02:21] I hope that’s useful for you. Let me know how that any of that goes in the comments, or if you want to talk more about it, that’s one of the things I do in my coaching practice, which you’ll find at polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put the link below.

[00:02:33] Thanks very much. I’ll see you again soon.

Politics Is Not A Dirty Word In Leadership

Sun, 18 May 2025 09:00:00 +0200

Have you ever said, I just want to do the design work and have its value recognized without all the politics? Maybe you’re looking at it from the wrong end.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

Have you ever said, I just want to do the design work and have its value recognized without all the politics? Maybe you’re looking at it from the wrong end.

My name’s Andy Polaine, and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

And in this video I want to talk about the idea of politics being a dirty word. Now obviously with everything going on in the world at the moment, politics does not have a very good name.

Politics

But when you really think about what politics is, it’s really about aligning people and getting support for a common cause or change.

So if you’re trying to make the case of resources, some of that is going to be about connecting to what senior leadership care about. That’s going to be making sure that you’re not just talking about design and design for its own sake, but actually connecting it to something that is serving the organization.

Some of politics is about making allies and that’s about being useful for others, so in what way can you take something off their plate? And in what way is design, again, serving the organization [00:01:00] rather than this common refrain of why doesn’t the organization value us more and recognize our impact?

Politics is literally about governance. It’s about how do we go about making decisions? Who’s involved in making those decisions? What do we do when we can’t come to an agreement?

Diplomacy

But it’s also about diplomacy. Diplomacy is kind of another word for relationships, too. And diplomacy is going to be around the language you use. It’s going to be how you go about relating to people. It’s going to be around how far do you push and push back, and how far do you set boundaries.

All of those things are necessary to operate as a leader or a design leader within an organization. It doesn’t need to be a dirty word. It is just some of the stuff you actually need to do.

Outro

I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own stories or tips, please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much, and I’ll see you again soon.

Meltem Naz Kaso – UX Career Coach

Thu, 15 May 2025 09:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is my friend Meltem Naz Kaso, a Barcelona-based UX Career Coach with a background in UX Research. Her last full-time position was at Glovo, where she served as a UX Research Manager and Staff UX Researcher.

She works with Senior UX professionals to unblock their careers by boosting their leadership and communication skills.

You can listen to it below, watch it on YouTube or subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Show Links

Mel

Career With Mel: https://careerwithmel.com
Mel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meltemnaz/
Leadership Atelier, BCN: https://leadershipateliers.com/facilitators/meltem-naz-kaso-coskun
World Usability Congress: https://worldusabilitycongress.com/agenda-2025/

Andy

Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Design Leadership Coaching: https://polaine.com/coaching
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/andypolaine.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

2025-04-08 PoT Meltem Naz Kaso

Andy Polaine (he/him): [00:00:00] Hello, welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organizations, society, and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, service designer, educator, and writer. My guest today is my friend Meltem Naz Caso, a Barcelona based UX career coach with a background in UX research. Her last full-time position was Glovo, where she served as a UX research manager and staff UX researcher. She works with senior UX professionals to unlock their careers by boosting their leadership and communication skills.

Mel, welcome to Power of Ten.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Thank you. That was so impressive. I really want your accent one day.

Andy Polaine (he/him): You’ve got a good accent too. So all those, all those other people can be listening and dreaming of our accents. So tell us a bit bit more about who you are and what’s your journey, you know, from, from there, wherever there was, uh, to here. Because you have been in Barcelona for a while, but you’re not originally from there either right.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): That’s right. That’s right. So I [00:01:00] called Barcelona home and I’m extremely excited about it because I run a fully remote business. I feel that it’s important to be able to locate ourselves now. So I’ve been here about a decade. My two kids. Uh, all were born and, and they’re raised here. Before I was in the Netherlands, um, you know, doing my grad school and before that I was in, technically in 12 other countries.

So I’ve been everywhere pretty much. Uh, I was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and before starting UX career coaching, I’ve done, as you just said in the intro, a lot of UX work, particularly in the field of research. And before that I had, um, different careers. I’ve done investigative journalism, I’ve done research in academic and NGO settings in policy, uh, and and and whatnot.

So I had, uh, pretty much different things happening for me.

Andy Polaine (he/him): what was your trigger to start coaching? How did that get started for you?

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Right. Um, I’m curious about your journey [00:02:00] too, Andy, because we have some parallels in there. It happened very organically. It wasn’t that I woke up one day and said I’m gonna become a coach, or, I wasn’t aware that this was gonna be a thing for me when I was still, um, studying, but it just happened so that when I went down the managerial track, I begin to work through people as well as with people as you know, and I realize that.

There was a special sort of satisfaction when you succeed through people, but then, you know, um, when you work in an organization, you need to marry the needs of your direct reports with the needs of an organization. In ideal setups, it works and sometimes there is big clashes. But then I realized with further reflection that the thing that I really liked about management or working with people, helping them reach their goals, that was the coaching part.

When I got to ask them open questions, when I really understood their pain points, when I really, um, helped them. And I get unstuck basically. So that was the part, coaching [00:03:00] part was something I did when I was still working full time. I also did coaching on the side for many years before fully transitioning to running my business.

So it was sort of this whole thing where I was doing multiple things at once and that includes also training and and teaching at a university and whatnot. And eventually, about a year ago actually, I said, okay, let me give it a try. Let me make this my full-time effort to do coaching.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah, you just posted your anniversary, right?

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Yes, exactly. Last.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. No, it was one of the like, uh, last days of March. Uh, so it’s been just a little over a year. Crazy.

Andy Polaine (he/him): well done. Congratulations.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Thank.

Andy Polaine (he/him): How much is your, mean, I’m guessing the answer is probably a lot, but I’m interested in how, in fact your, um, background as UX researcher has influenced the way you coach.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Wow. Um, I wanna, I don’t know if I can help modify the question somehow. I know you’re the host, but I wanna say,

Andy Polaine (he/him): you can.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): because [00:04:00] there is no way to answer that without also saying how being a journalist influenced my UX research. It’s like. You know, everything just going on and influencing each other. Um, so with journalism, I’ve learned in my research that storytelling did matter because you can run, um, the most rigorous UX research project in the world, but if you’re not telling the story the right way for the, uh, stakeholders to care about it for, um.

Users to understand the right way, your questions and that sort of thing. It was just not gonna work out. So my storytelling, communication skills gathered through journalism helped me run and communicate research, I believe, and the best way. And speed also influenced from journalism. One thing I had learned that, you know.

You needed to balance rigor with speed. I like to think of it as quality at velocity. You know, you cannot, um, come up with a best story, uh, whether it’s a research report [00:05:00] or when you’re publishing for a newspaper in 10 weeks. Right? Like, maybe it’s gonna be a lot better than what you’ll deliver in a day, but we don’t have that much time.

It has to be new to be news, right? So, I. You know, um, apply that for my research as well. I don’t like to call it quick and dirty because it has the rigor. It’s just that it’s not the most rigorous, like academic research. So fast forward, all those things influenced my coaching too, because I like to be present for my coaches.

I believe that if they need me, part of it is emotional, part of it is for the work, for their deadlines. I cannot just come back in three weeks and say, you know, I have the best. Response to what you’re asking because the need was then, not now. So speed is a big part of that. Uh, communication is a big part of this.

I guess those two things are, are, are quite relevant for me.

Andy Polaine (he/him): I, I am interested that you didn’t say about asking questions actually, because both in journalism and the research, how you frame the questions makes obviously a huge difference, right?

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Very true. [00:06:00] Very true. And and that’s absolutely right. My thinking of that was, that goes under communication. How can you communicate without asking questions? Someone implicitly or explicitly should be asking questions, reframing, setting the context. It’s absolutely, it’s an obvious one, an important one.

But I do believe that asking questions isn’t always enough. Like I went back to this best, uh, research example. No, you can ask those questions, but the way you deliver the results and the one that people consume, uh, if, if that doesn’t work out, if it’s a boring one, an appealing one, irrelevant one doesn’t create the impact, it still doesn’t work.

So I take it on the communication umbrella.

Andy Polaine (he/him): I mean, I, I often think that the getting the question right is. it’s the hardest bit. There’s a book called Designing Design by Kenya Hara, and, um, he’s, I dunno if he still is, he’s the, um, creative director of Muji, or he was,

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Okay.

Andy Polaine (he/him): talks about this and it’s called Designing Design because his whole thing was, he, he has a few different examples of coming up with [00:07:00] trying to sort of write, find the right question for a design brief or a design project or whatever. It, you know, is the hard bit once you get it really well. So there was a project where they did, where they got different architects to, to redesign pasta forms each architect took their sort of classic forms, um, and sort of translated them to the pasta. But it turned out. Well, it turned out that the, the, the classic shape of like penne and stuff that had been developed by Italians, um, over the years was still the best one for kind of carrying the sauce.

But he had this kind of whole thing in the book. You just keep seeing, once you get an interesting question, everything else sort of flows much more easily from it. Um, and I, I kind of think that’s sometimes true of coaching of, of, you know, people come in and that I, so I, you know, I want this, this, and this, so I’m having this problem with that. And there’s often that moment of like, Hmm, but is that really the question here? You know? So I’m interested for you,

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Hmm,

Andy Polaine (he/him): have, you know, you focus on [00:08:00] UXers and UX has been through a particularly difficult period. I mean, lots of us have in the

Meltem (UX Career Coach): course.

Andy Polaine (he/him): of couple of years or so what have been, what have you been seeing coming up in your coaching and the kinds of issues that people have been dealing with?

Are there any patterns there?

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Yeah, there is. And, and thank you for that. Um, questioning example too. I’ll go ahead and say something a little provocative and hopefully that’s gonna make a more interesting podcast episodes for us. I do believe the value of open non-bias . Non-judgmental questions. Indeed. Important ones to ask ourselves before we coach, because as a coach yourself is your most important tool.

You need to be self-aware and you need to ask those questions to, to yourself as well as your, your clients, your, your coachees, right? But there’s a point to be made also to balance between the, the questioning part, um, as well as. You know, um, having more direct statements because one thing that I hear from my coaches over and over, and the reason why the ones that stick with me go ahead and [00:09:00] continue working with me and love the impact that they get is because it’s not this philosophical.

Um, engagement with open questions, one after the other. We need to e eventually narrow it down. We need to make final statements and we need to figure out what it is that we’re gonna experiment with. So questions tremendously important. I agree, but it also does not end with questioning. So for me, what success looks like is not that someone leaves like, oh, I got amazing questions.

Let me think about them. Of course, that’s part of it, but we need to also narrow down. The scope, see what we can commit to, to experiment with any given month or, and so on and, and take action. It’s all about taking action. Um, so that’s one part of it. And, and what you’re saying about what your X-rays are going through, that’s absolutely right.

And that’s why actually to be so transparent, I took a bet and, um, left my full-time job and wanted to be a UX courier coach because one thing we’ve all learned. Um, I’m curious. What you think is that no matter how, um, you get a [00:10:00] promotion, you are an over performer. You’re very loyal to your organization.

You might be laid off from one day to the next, due to reorgs, due to, uh, whatever that might be taking place, uh, in your, in your department or in your organization at large. So one thing I’m seeing from people is that it’s not, um, like a formula that you apply for your success. And as long as you get a green light from your organization, you’re good to go.

So people are realizing. Well, I’m employed full-time. I’m having a, you know, great salary. Uh, I love my colleagues, but I need to be networking. I need to be building my brand outside of my organization. I need to be more active. I think people are realizing that, um, people meaning UX rays, that they are, UX curvier is the most important product that they’re working on, so they need to design their UX careers.

It’s not just something that is hanging in there. Um, that’s an important one that we’ve, I think all learned.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah, it is. There’s a, there’s a, um, screenwriter called John August. He wrote, [00:11:00] um, big Fish and uh. Charlie’s Angels and quite a lot of, uh, of other stuff. and he, he talks often. He’s got really good podcasts called script notes, and he talks often, you know, um, write in and they’re saying, you know, as a young screenwriter, what can I do and so forth and how can I break in, you know, get my break and things. And one of the things he said was to network when you are junior is because at some point. you know, I have now friends and colleagues who are kind of, you know, heads of CEOs and, you know, or kind of heads of design, you know, senior people, right? But there are people I’ve known since, well, you know, 25, 30 years.

And I think, um, it’s really important to do that because your peers, you know, the, the temptations always want to net to network to the senior people, which I think is also important. Um, but I think as you are building up your career. It’s really important to sort of stay in touch and network with your peers.

‘cause at some point they’re gonna be someone who might be hiring you or, uh, or any of that kinda stuff. that is really important. Yeah. [00:12:00] The, the career thing’s interesting. I mean, I, I put a comment on one of your posts the other day that I’ve had probably about, I sort of consider, I have about, I’ve had about three different careers.

I’ve had a sort of career. As some kind of digital interactive thing guy, you know, that’s changed over the years. 30 years ago in, you know, UX interaction design, um, you know, any of those things, they didn’t really have names. info information architecture, a little bit, maybe it was probably the first one to emerge as a clear discipline, but prior to that it was all like HCD and things like that.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Okay.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Uh, yeah, and then I moved into sort of service design stuff in the early two thousands, but I’ve always also had a sort of academic life and been teaching more or less depending on sort of what’s going on now the coaching. So, um, sort of four careers if you like. Um, and I think it’s important for people right to remember, particularly when they’re in their, I dunno what the average age is of your coach is, [00:13:00] but particularly in their sort of twenties and thirties to remember. There’s quite a lot of life left to go, right.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Absolutely. Absolutely. No, you, you said it out actually, but one thing that I appreciate from what you said is that you still. Teach and, and you have a diverse background as well as current experience, and I think that’s important for a coach because what I also insist on doing is I make sure I write at UX Collective.

I make sure that I teach and train and do group events because I need to be, I. In touch with the realities of the people. And I need to, um, you know, it’s, it’s not gonna sound, uh, very humble, but I am gonna say that from a place of humility, but also boldness that I think to be a good coach, you need to be that, you know, person that asks open question, but in a way, also an opinion leader.

And you cannot do that if you’re only practicing coaching. So for me. All those other things you’re mentioning, like teaching, what does it take to teach? You need to continue to learn, you need to be, um, giving workshops, master classes, writing articles. You even wrote a [00:14:00] wonderful book. Like all those things are so important to, I believe, establish yourself as a co a coach that stays relevant and I do my best in, in doing those things as well because like, it’s so important as you, as you just described.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Talking of that, um, you’ve got a, uh, session at one of the leadership atelier. So I’m doing the one in Lisbon, um, for the Hatch Conference guys. And you are doing the one in Barcelona. So my one’s in. Yeah, my one is, um, in Lisbon, in, in a few weeks time. Actually, not, not long, in a couple of weeks time in, uh, in April.

When is your one in Barcelona?

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Fifth and 6th of May. I know it by heart because the sixth is my daughter’s birthday,

Andy Polaine (he/him): Uh, yeah, it’s

Meltem (UX Career Coach): sixth.

Andy Polaine (he/him): mine actually. Yeah. Um. So what will you be doing in that? Can you, can you share anything It might know, depending on the timing It is. I hope that this gets out before then, but, um, might have already have. What did you do? Yeah, exactly.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): [00:15:00] Somehow. Um, so I will be giving a masterclass for two groups of, of, um, cohorts let’s say, and it’s gonna be an hour and a half, uh, to help people, um, do their best in communicating designs value to non-design stakeholders. Because no matter. The, the sector in which you work, the kind of organization where you, um, collaborate.

Um, people keep on coming with this, you know, I’m a UX or I’m a designer and I find it very hard to communicate the, the value of my team’s work, whether if you’re a senior IC or, or a manager or a director. For, for those that are not UX extras, like they don’t understand. It just feels like an add on irrelevant thing.

Like why is this guy wasting our time? So, um, it’s gonna be an interactive session where we’re gonna establish, you know, everything that is worth knowing. Uh, very pragmatic, very actionable about communication styles and what it is that, um, business leaders, product leaders, care about. Uh, when we [00:16:00] build, um, material to, to sell, to be profitable and all that, like different languages.

Different priorities and whatnot. And then we’re gonna deep dive into the kind of ways we can still root for, for UX and like be flexible, um, but also adjust our communication style to make sure that it, um, works out well with a CEO or, or a product reader or business leader or what have you. So it’s gonna be a session where it is gonna be a lot of, uh, engagement across participants and, uh, yeah, hopefully it’s gonna be both relevant and exciting.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Nice. Good. Um, I’m sure it’ll be fantastic. You sound, it’s

Meltem (UX Career Coach): I am

Andy Polaine (he/him): very clear.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): I got even so excited to be honest, because I’ve spoken with you as you know, and like two of my colleagues that I really, really trust at Miro and, um, you know, a a, a freelancer that also publishes books and they were like, oh my God’s super relevant. I know, have thought about it. That was like, that’s great.

And I just checked out the list of participants and they’re coming from Middle [00:17:00] East, they’re coming from all across Europe and, and the US. And so I’m like, whoa, like this is gonna be a historic moment, not because I believe the value of the material. Of course, that’s beautiful. But I really appreciate that.

It’s gonna be very international because design is very cultural as well. Um, and also people are gonna bring diverse set of experiences as they engage in, in pair. So I’m quite excited. Yeah.

Andy Polaine (he/him): It’s one of the things I really like about my coaching actually, is I coachee from all over the world, from all different, you know, from startups to scale up to kinda large enterprises, to agencies and, and you know, owners of agencies, small agencies and things like that. And I think it’s been a bit, and it’s a sort of cliche to say it’s a privilege, but it really has been, I find it a real privilege to. See a much experience, a much broader set of people’s experiences, uh, than I have myself and especially as like, you know, middle-aged white guy, right? So, uh, I’m as, as kind of in the middle of that privilege as you can get, but it’s, it’s, um, I. [00:18:00] I know, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. but yeah, no, it’s, it has been really good.

That’s also, you know, goes for sort of race and gender and, uh, sexualities too. You know, it’s been, there is a real kind of range there um, it’s it because the sort of coaching so intimate, I dunno if you find this, I feel like this sort get in someone’s life and I really, you know, you know, and I feel. Yeah. And I feel, you know, I feel kind of, yeah, it’s privileged. I feel, um, very lucky to be that, that those people and honored really, that those people kind of let me in like that. Um, I dunno if it’s the same for you.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): It, it is, it cannot be. Uh, it cannot resonate more with me, honestly, because, um, my take is that, and I say to everyone, like, I’m not a lives coach. You know, I’m not like a relationship coach. It is very specific to your UX career. It’s very specific to the impact you wanna create at work. You wanna get a promotion, you wanna have more influence in your organization.

You wanna be [00:19:00] hired in a better organization with whatever principles. So. We are very action oriented. It’s not just like, um, philosophical or cheesy materials. Not to disrespect that kind of coaching. Maybe it’s appealing to others, but I’m very clear like, Hey, I’m a coach, but before a coach, I’m a uxr. I actually.

You know, I’m gonna talk about tangible things that will resonate, uh, with you as gonna impact. But that being said, one thing I also tell everyone is like, when it boils down to talking about your family dynamics, of course we’re gonna talk about it because there’s no way for you to concentrate at work and be successful by our definition if you’re doing the heavy lifting constantly with your partner.

So your work, uh, life, you know, emotional life, your, your private life is, uh, you know, under a bigger umbrella. Of your yourself and you know, without considering that we cannot think of your career. You know, so everything emotional, everything personal do come in. So there is some sessions that people cry or we laugh a lot.

And

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah. Yeah.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): so those are indeed [00:20:00] part of what we do. And I feel, I. Extremely, um, like gratified because part of what I did for my undergrad studies was clinical psychology. Obviously, I’m interested in understanding people through the lenses of, you know, cultural anthropology. Even revolutionary biology was part of what I did, which I love and, and psychology, but I.

Uh, entertained the idea of being a therapist. Um, but then I realized that I actually love to offer a little bit of empowerment to high functioning successful people that wanna get even more impactful. That, to me, delivers a lot more value than maybe treating someone with a very serious mental illness, and that is an absolutely rewarding line of work.

I don’t disrespect at all, but I feel like in what we do, Andy, we can help people, uh, to feel better. Create more impact at work, um, and also be part of their personal lives in a way that is very action driven, and I really appreciate that.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah, no, I mean similar thing for me, right? So I, I [00:21:00] always say I’m kind of opinionated as a coach. ‘cause I think, you know, the whole point of coming to someone who’s had the, who’s

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Yeah.

Andy Polaine (he/him): path or that you’ve been through, is that’s, that’s the reason for coming to it, rather than just a sort of general career or life coach that’s just gonna say, you know, what would having that do for you?

And, you know, those open questions are useful sometimes, but I usually switch, I’m usually sort of saying, okay. Uh, here’s my opinion now, but you know, you take it or leave it, and I don’t wanna sort of set myself up as a guru, but I kind of think there’s, what’s the point of coming to me if, if, you know, if I don’t give that?

Well, yeah.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Like, no disrespect to HR professionals or, you know, I know that there’s amazing certification programs for for coaching, but I also do feel like, hey, if I have, for instance, right now, 17 clients, all the async exercises I provide, or the questions I ask them and what we are doing with them, they’re all very different from each other.

There is not like this HR worksheet sort of template that everybody. Yes. Because this is like companies, uh, training or anything like that, and the way that I attain these [00:22:00] individuals is because of the experience. So, and, and, and having my sense of, you know, what success looks like together with, with each person is, is that co-creation.

Andy Polaine (he/him): yeah. It’s funny you said I’m not a relationship coach ‘cause I kind of feel like I am more and more and more, I mean, I was aware of this some time ago, but it just becomes ever more clear to me that

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Hmm.

Andy Polaine (he/him): none of my coaching, none of my job as a design director. Uh, very little of it was actually di directing designers and, you know, in a, any, any creative sense, just all the time and so much of the coaching is, oh, I’m having this really difficult problem with this stakeholder or with someone else, or this colleague.

And, and you know, that’s the stuff that really fills people’s heads really kind of, you know, sets them off on a kind of spin, you know? And. Quite often people will prefer to leave a job than have, uh, a difficult or conflict conversation with a

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Absolutely with their broth especially, or, or with, [00:23:00] but I will add one more thing. I don’t disagree with you. Anything around like emotional, um, awareness. Uh, relationship management. Those are key because I always tell it to people, hard skills are amazing. You can either learn them, claim to have them. I don’t necessarily think your hard skills alone will make, uh, a major difference, especially in the era of ai.

So the, the relationship management will, however, I think there is a difference between someone that calls themselves a life coach, that sort of relationship. Um, term that applies so broadly and abstractly without any context. So I really appreciate that we can offer, you know, um. How to build influence, how to gain more power in a way that you can be more impactful in your organizations.

How to be more, um, smart about your relationship management at work. But within ux, where we understand UX, um, processes, how product teams work and, and what it really takes [00:24:00] to, you know, empower ics if you’re a manager, if you’re an ic, how to then go ahead and, and defend the value of your work and that sort of thing.

So I think it’s the application of that. Relationship bit within a particular field makes it all very, very, um, relevant in my opinion.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah. But even the storytelling stuff, the, the things where I keep coming back to the relationship stuff is, ‘cause I think I’ve, I’ve learned more from, you know, books about relationships, uh, listen to podcasts about that stuff. Um, even things like dating for networking, right? And stuff like that. I’ve learned more about that from that world, from the world of really understanding interpersonal relationships than I ever have from reading any kind of management books or, you know, how to build high performing teams and all that kind of stuff. Because actually even something like the storytelling thing, if you’ve ever had that thing in a, in your personal relationship of like, you know, I’ve got this need here. There’s this thing that bothers me and every time I talk about it, my partner somehow just doesn’t get it. And you just seem, we seem to be kind of talking across purposes and all of that stuff is exactly the same. Uh, [00:25:00] why is this not landing with that person, with that stakeholder? It’s exactly the same as, you know, how is it that we can misunderstand each other so much and yet we know each other so well at the same time? And all of those kind of dynamics about what people, where people go when they get stressed. So my thing I’ve just talked about over and over and over is that this idea that world of work is just really filled with fear and anxiety, right?

Everyone seems to be operating from a position of fear and anxiety and it, Yeah. And it sort of explains so much behavior and it’s kinda much more like a, an empathetic view really. ‘cause once you get the fact that this person isn’t being and annoying because that’s what they wanna be, it out a place of fear and anxiety. I think it kind of can really help reframe the way you kind of then approach that person. That’s, that’s why I think the relationship stuff is so important.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): I mean, what I do hear you say, and I definitely agree with you, is sometimes we, um, narrow down our focus on the work itself [00:26:00] that we’re talking about. We’re talking about retention, acquisition, user flow, these pain points. But it’s important when you collaborate to remember that you’re collaborating with a human being that was once as a, you know, child had their challenges with their parents, and if they have a conflict at work with their, you know, at home with their wife or.

Their kids or whatever. All those things are part of the equation. So building a relationship that extends beyond the superficial challenges that are being paid, uh, you know, faced in any given project, that’s key. But I also wouldn’t create a, um, you know, duality between reading about relationships and personal stuff versus business MBA books because I learned also a great deal from those books.

And I think for UXers especially. Gaining the trust of their stakeholders, of, of their, um, you know, um, collaborators. They need to be able to showcase that they understand the language of business they need to showcase, uh, their competencies. So to be able to contact switch from [00:27:00] one to another will be an important one.

So I wouldn’t zero in on, in, in one way or another. I think we can gather something more holistic.

Andy Polaine (he/him): No, I, I think you’re absolutely right. I, I guess my view is that the language of business is not really the language of business. when we say that, what, you know, what is it that we actually mean? And I think what we mean is I. stakeholders we are presenting to care about different things than we care about. And it’s not really about kind of business. ‘cause business is this like hand wavy term, right? It doesn’t

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Of course.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Um, and you know, but, but it’s, what we’re really saying is that you’re having that kind of stranger and a strange land moment where you’re going somewhere and you are presenting to people.

You’re talking to people who, who daily speak a different language to you. would argue that a lot of the language of business, um. Is masking right for, um, it lacks honesty. A lot’s particularly jargon and the kinds of things you may ever listen to, like a quarterly earnings call. And the CEO just kind of spout like nonsense. and [00:28:00] it’s, you know, we are, we are having, it’s, uh, it’s been a challenging quarter because of kind of, you know, market headwinds. It’s like, what, what are you saying? We didn’t earn as much money as we expected to. Um, but there’s a real lack of, uh, emotional honesty in the language of business. And I think one of the clashes between. culture in general and, and sort of business culture is, is the kind of, I think design generally is, is closer to being, closer to you sort of to that kinda emotional language and more so maybe emotionally honest around, uh, in their interactions and interested in that area and interested in that language.

And when we’re doing research in people, in people into people, we wanting to understand people’s lives and things. and yet there’s this kind of distancing, which I blame the fear and anxiety thing, you know, and this idea of being professional, where you kind of move away from that into this kind of language of business. But underneath that is, underneath that armor is all the kind of human stuff. And you know, CEOs and senior stakeholders, they make [00:29:00] decisions not on hard facts and numbers. Many of those things are hand wavy anyway, like a spreadsheet is way more vague. Like a

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Oh yeah.

Andy Polaine (he/him): is maybe more vague than a prototype that you put in front of people.

Right. much more hand with, yeah,

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Dataset, you can take a bunch of different decisions and just them, but I think, and I think a healthy, um, divergence, let’s say with, with review in mind, even if we have a lot of points in, in common, is that if UXers, and this is my view, and if anyone watches this podcast and wants to challenge that or give examples or otherwise, I think it’ll be interesting to hear.

Um, to be able to gain influence.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yes.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): don’t think that, um, you know, providing opposing, um, approaches to towards our non ux, non-design stakeholders will help. We need to first mirror them, use the same language to be able to communicate, uh, directly and indirectly. That I hear you. I understand you. I’m like you, I’m one of you.[00:30:00]

If you wanna even pull them into that. Space beyond the armors where we can talk in a more human way. Because I think it’s one thing where we reject that language. It’s another thing where we say, look, we understand that language. We, I we under, we identify why there’s a need for it and we are articulate.

We can speak that language, but at the same time, there’s more than that and we can also

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): you see that. I think. So it’s gonna be important to, instead of like creating oppositions, I’m not saying that’s what you say.

Andy Polaine (he/him): I

Meltem (UX Career Coach): I’m saying that, um, it’s gonna be an important, that like UX series also begin to see themselves as business people in two ways.

First, um, serving within their organizations, but also the business of running their own business,

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah. Yeah, no, I

Meltem (UX Career Coach): their career.

Andy Polaine (he/him): agree. I mean, I think the, certainly the shift kind of to leadership in the kind of conversation designers tend to talk design to other designers, you know, and one of the shifts as you move into a sort of management leadership role is you actually have to talk about design less.

I. You know, in the same way that accountants, well, I guess they talk about [00:31:00] accountancy, but they will kind of talk about what matters to the business and that sort of shift of how does the design serve the business rather than how can the business recognize design as being this kind of fantastic thing is really important. So we’re coming up to time. We could talk for ages. Um, I have one final question for all my guests. Uh, the podcast is named after the film Powers of 10, uh, by Ray and Charles Eames, and it’s all about diff the relative size of things in the universe, and it’s, it’s, go watch. It’s really great. So my question is, what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized impact on the world?

Meltem (UX Career Coach): It was a big one and, and, um, I’m glad I, I got to think about it just a little bit. I think, um, it’s time that we redefine, um, what we understand from success. That’s a small thing because we’re not gonna change how the business world works, how products are being made, but it’s how you reframe [00:32:00] success, uh, to make it work in your own terms today.

For many people it tends to be about your title. It tends to be about where you work, the, the name of the organization, your, your income, but these don’t necessarily correspond with your degree of fulfillment. You might have the most sexy title, earn great deal, uh, work for a really fancy organization, but you might be depressed.

I actually have clients working at Meta, Google, all those places, pretty senior roles, wonderful salaries, and yet they have autoimmune diseases and, and, and, you know, they are being triggered more and more due to whatever it is that they, they feel. And, and there’s that lack of fulfillment. I’m not gonna go ahead and in the remaining minutes, blame your organizations, not.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Like that, but it’s about really be honest yourself and asking, okay, well, what is success? You live only once you deserve to be fulfilled, but the only way to make that happen is if you can be honest about what success looks like. You know, rather than just adopting [00:33:00] external formulas.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah, it’s funny, the, the, the, um, that’s a very good answer. The, the question that, well, an issue that comes, coaches come in a lot, is around confidence. I think, know, that’s probably for you too, right? And I.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Yeah,

Andy Polaine (he/him): I, I always feel that confidence comes from, you know, the, the closer you are to being true, true to yourself, the more you have confidence.

‘cause you have nothing to be sort of found out about. Nothing to be, you know, you’re not hiding

Meltem (UX Career Coach): I.

Andy Polaine (he/him): You know, and, and, uh, they, it’s actually about being comfortable with yourself more than any kind of thing that you somehow exude, you know, or, or put on.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): I, I couldn’t agree more. And it just sounds like from the way that you described it, the opposite of confidence is actually like defensiveness maybe. Like you need to be there just like defending yourself, um, or feel bad about yourself. And you know, those like imposter syndrome is part

Andy Polaine (he/him): to be someone else, right. Or

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Yeah.

Andy Polaine (he/him): you know? Yeah. Yeah. Mel, where can people find you [00:34:00] online?

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Uh, that’s a very fun question. I don’t know when you’re gonna publish this, but, careerwithmel.com is a website that we are building right now. It’s not ready yet, but it’s gonna be already very soon. But until then, where I’m most active is LinkedIn. So they can search me on LinkedIn. I’m sure you’re gonna drop the link.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah, I’ll, okay. And, uh, your, your substack, would that be going away or, um,

Meltem (UX Career Coach): No, it’s gonna stay. I love to use that, um, space. But of course, let’s see what future brings. If people find me on LinkedIn, um, I have it on my profile, my substack newsletter link, and I’ll make sure to add that to my website as well. It’s gonna be a simple, easy one with some videos and hopefully fun views from Barcelona.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah. And then people will find your writing and talks, uh, all over the place, actually. So if you, if you Google Mel, then you’ll find them there.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): It sounds like you Googled me.

Andy Polaine (he/him): I also got some special links from you. Oh. I have Googled you. Of course, of

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Oh, good. I Googled you [00:35:00] too.

Andy Polaine (he/him): It’s, it’s a research. It’s research journalistic research.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Of course, I Google people all the time and I’ve even like, uh, used ChatGPT.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah, ChatGPT, I tried it on myself the other day, um, and it, it

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Yes.

Andy Polaine (he/him): it wrong. So, you know,

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Oh really?

Andy Polaine (he/him): Yeah, it got, got the title of my book wrong, so, um,

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Oh, sorry for that.

Andy Polaine (he/him): I’d written something else, so, which I hadn’t

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Oh, no. You had a fight.

Andy Polaine (he/him): I used to just, it’s just not very good. Uh, I’m, you know, I’m an ai, a bit of an AI skeptic, so there we go.

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Okay.

Andy Polaine (he/him): an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for being my

Meltem (UX Career Coach): Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me and having this conversation.

Andy Polaine (he/him): Thank you.

You’ve been watching and listening to Power of 10. You can find more about the show on p lane.com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice online courses, as well as sign up for my very irregular newsletter. Doctor’s Note you have any thoughts, uh, put them in the comments below or get in touch.

You’ll find me at [00:36:00] apolaine@pkm.social, on Mastodon. On LinkedIn or on my website. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening and watching, and I’ll see you next time.

Lisa D. Dance - Unpaid Customer Labour

Thu, 01 May 2025 09:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is Lisa D. Dance, an experienced UX Researcher whose 10+ years of work has spans UX Research & Strategy to Interactive Prototyping & Usability Testing.

She has created award-winning work for enterprise organizations and also helped small to mid-sized businesses improve their websites and apps so they do not frustrate or harm customers.

Lisa is a contributor to CMSWire and a frequent public speaker on topics related to User Experience, Customer Experiences, Ethical Research & Design, and Technology’s Impact on People.

You can listen to it below, watch it on YouTube or subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Show Links

Lisa

Lisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ldance/
ServiceEase: https://serviceease.net
Today Is the Perfect Day book site: https://todayistheperfectday.com
ewsletter: Tell a Friend tinyurl.com/TellaFriendTuesdaySignUp

Andy

Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Design Leadership Coaching: https://polaine.com/coaching
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/andypolaine.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello. Welcome to Power 10, a show about design operating at many levels of zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organizations, society, and the world. My name is Andy Pauline. I’m a design leadership coach designer. Educator and writer. My guest today is Lisa D Dance, an experienced UX researcher whose 10 plus years of work has spanned UX research and strategy to interactive prototyping and usability testing.

She has created award-winning work for enterprise organizations and also helps small to mid-size businesses improve their websites and apps, so they do not frustrate or harm customers. She’s a contributor to CMS Wire and frequent public speaker on topics related to user experience, customer experiences, ethical research and design and technologies impact on people, which also have written a book called Today is the Perfect Day to Improve Customer experience.

Lisa, welcome to Power of 10.

[00:01:03] Lisa Dance: Thank you, Andy.

[00:01:03] Andy Polaine: Oh, I think I found you via Indie Young, actually, who mentioned you, uh, on the podcast I did with her. Um, so tell us a little bit, uh, about yourself and your journey to where you are now.

[00:01:13] Lisa Dance: Certainly. So, uh, you gave me such a great intro. But, um, my path to user experience started when I was nine years old and I told my mom I wouldn’t shop at a particular store anymore because of how they treated their customers.

And so ever since that time, I was always studying. Um, now that I know. Uh, customer interactions, but I was studying what was going on and I was trying to strategize ways to improve it for both the customer and for the business, because even at nine, I knew both of them needed to get what they, uh. What they wanted to achieve.

Um, and so, um, I was always just studying that. And, um, when I graduated from college, like user experience wasn’t a thing, or at least it wasn’t any a thing that I knew about. And, um, I. So I went out in the world, you know, um, at first I was supposed to be a lawyer. I went to law school orientation, uh, for a week and said, I do not wanna be a lawyer.

And so I’m out here in the world now trying to figure out, okay, so what career I’m going to, you know, I. What’s my career gonna be like? And so I did struggle with that a bit, but I started getting in roles where I was sort of managing like programs. So I mortgaged like a customer retention program for a mortgage company.

Mm-hmm. And I worked in like HR on the side of like administering. Pension benefits, but in those roles, I was always trying to advocate for the customer, but also finding ways that would, that would be, that would be a, a, a benefit to the business, right. And then parts of those roles also then brought in some, a technology piece to it.

And so I was still kind of in this path of trying to, you know, prove things for both businesses and customers. Uh, but. On my second layoff, I, I said, I wanna do something in that area, you know, and I thought it was customer experience at the time, but, um, in researching about customer experiences and trying to get more education, I found user experience research and design.

And that was like, I took a course and it was like, ding, ding, ding. I’m home. Right? ‘cause not only was I able to do what I had was doing when I was nine, which was like sort of identifying these problems, but also like strategizing how to. You know, resolve them. Right? And so that was kinda like a full circle moment, uh, for me with that.

And so that’s sort of like my path.

[00:03:43] Andy Polaine: So you found your, you found your people and your in that world. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It helps quite a lot of people actually. I’ve, I’ve noticed, you know, and I mean, people know me for service design though. I’ve got a sort of background in, uh, interaction design and, and digital from, from before they had names.

Um. And, you know, there’s often that thing where people say, and then I discovered this thing and just the light bulbs went off and, and here I, I realized there’s this, the way I think around about the world, other people do, and there’s a whole methodology about it and there’s stuff I can learn about it.

Um, and, and it’s a, it’s always a nice moment when people have that, and particularly if they’ve turned it into their. Career. Um, there’s a very cute picture of you in the introduction actually of, of you when you’re nine years old in, in the book, right? Yes. Looking, not unhappy with customer service, but, but that is the, uh, the, the introduction to the book.

So, um, tell me, tell us a little about the book and, and, you know, I always think people write a book because there’s a, a niche they want to scratch, uh, of their own, um, as well as maybe seeing there’s nothing out there like this. So, uh, why the book in the first place? I.

[00:04:49] Lisa Dance: Well, certainly it, uh, I guess about six or seven years ago I started seeing that, in my opinion, customer experiences were just getting, uh, increasingly worse, right?

Mm-hmm. And how I showed up in my life was that I would have my to-do list of things that I needed to accomplish, but. All of a sudden it would be like I couldn’t get things off my list no matter how hard I tried. And it was always something related to my interaction with like a company or some other organization, and I couldn’t get the issue resolved, at least not quickly.

Right. It was either, you know, like there’s some information that’s wrong, I need to get a question answered. Um, there’s, you know, something hasn’t been delivered. This website’s not working. It was always. Something. Right? And it was, it’s getting to be really frustrating, especially when they started to overlap.

So it wasn’t just like one issue on the list. You know, you’d have two or three. And so imagine how frustrated it is when you’re just trying to move on with your life and you can’t. And so as I started talking to first like family and friends and they started, they were having their own stories as well, and I’m like, it’s something here to this, you know?

And the stories started getting increasingly worse and I felt like out in the marketplace, maybe people were talking, okay, people would complain about a, you know, a particular, you know, issue or story they had, but like, is there this underlying pattern of what’s going on with this? And, um. And as I, I started collecting more stories and I said, I started seeing, okay, there is a pattern and it’s, and it’s a bit nuanced and it’s related to technology too, or at least the piece that I wanted to sort of hone in on, you know, with my user experience, um, background.

Um, I. And it was that piece of like that sometimes technology is really wonderful and great, but sometime it actually just exacerbates problems, you know, of trying to get things resolved. And so that’s sort of like the itch that I wanted to scratch is to like really hone in on that because I also truly believe that.

I don’t think that a lot of leaders in organizations understand how bad their worst customer experience is. Like that it is so bad that they would not want their names associated with it. And I don’t think that they, you know, they get that, that, um, that site into that, you know, to really understand like, we have to make better decisions.

[00:07:24] Andy Polaine: Yeah, there’s an old, um, video, a guy called Dave McQuillen is giving a presentation. He used to around customer experience for Credit Suisse and uh, there’s a bit anywhere. He talks about the fact he had five PhDs in the room and he handed them their credit card application form. So can fill this in and none of them could do it.

And you know, because obviously they get it just given to them automatically, right. For about being employees at the place and, and it was kind of one of those, those mismatches between, um, you know, what people think, you know, the organization is actually doing and, and what the actual experience of it is.

Right. So the structure of the book is kind of, um, well it’s kind of case study after case study of. Like, just really, really face palming, um, customer exper, bad customer experiences mostly. Um, would you say there is a kind of, uh, any sort of patterns to the structure or, or kind of, uh, flow through it that you started to put together as you, as you did the book?

[00:08:25] Lisa Dance: Well, certainly, so one big piece of the book is that the stories are illustrated. So I got this wonderful illustrator, Antonio Meza, and so he was able to illustrate this, you know, ridiculous story that took me maybe six pages to write into like a one page illustration so you could, one, understand the customer’s context, what happened, the emotions that were, that were going on with it, and the, and sort of the start to see the impact as well as the, um.

What resolution or if there was a resolution, right? So I’m introducing the, uh, what happened in an illustrated story. Then I’m breaking down, um, within, uh, the book, uh, talking about unpaid customer labor and actually talking about what characteristics and organizations, uh. Force customers to pay unpaid customer labor.

So unpaid customer labor’s that, uh, amount unwilling amount of time, money and stress that you have to put in to try to get, you know, the pro product that you purchased or, uh, get it delivered or get a issued resolved around it. Right? And so I’m outlining like. What characteristics of organizations require you to put in unpaid customer labor?

Um, so like, examples of that are organizations that have limited customer ser service hours, right? They’re selling to you 24 hours a day, but then you can’t talk to them, but at really narrow times to get, uh. A really serious issue, invol, um, resolved. So I’m outlining those types of issues for each story, but then I’m also, um, having a breakdown of the cost, both for the, both for the customer and for the, um.

The company. And I think that’s a really important piece because often the reframe is when you talk about customer, um, experience issues, people will say, well, you know, they’re making a business decision to, uh, protect shareholder value and reduce costs. And what I really believe is. That I don’t think that, uh, some of these companies are actually counting all the cost of bad customer experiences.

And if they really counted all of those costs, they might, would make different decisions, uh, within that. And so that, I wanted to break that down, um, as well, because, you know, in some of these situations where, um. The story is in the book where a customer talked with six employees. Well, how much lost productivity is that?

You know? Yeah. And then, um, there are other issues, you know, uh, around customer rage and anger that you know. Make it, um, so that far as employees that this makes their job satisfaction much less and there’s a lot of turnover within front facing, um, companies. So then are you adding up all the cost of having to so much turnover and having to try to.

You know, increased, um, satisfaction to the employees that are there. Like there’s a cascading cost to this that I just don’t feel like that all organizations are calculating around. Uh, customer experience being, uh, bad.

[00:11:40] Andy Polaine: Yeah, there’s a very big number. I’m looking at it now. I’m trying to work out is, is this trillions then that we’re talking here, that you have in the revenue loss under the counting of the costs?

Uh,

[00:11:51] Lisa Dance: um, trillions? Yes.

[00:11:53] Andy Polaine: Yeah, it’s like 887 trillion. I mean, it’s a lot. It goes on into the billions right, of a revenue loss. Where did that number come from?

[00:12:04] Lisa Dance: That came from this, this great survey called What? Survey and study called, uh, the National Customer Rage, uh, survey and actually has its origins from a study done by the White House in 1976.

Wow. And so the White House did this study in 1976 on customer complaints and then, uh, as company, uh, in 2003, uh. We, uh, started the survey and, you know, used, um, some of the questions. And so since then they’ve done, um, 10 iterations of it and in my book, and that number is from the 2023, uh, version of it. So they can say, when they say that customer experiences, um.

Problems are at an all time high and that they more than doubled in 1976. You know, they have that, you know, they have the data.

[00:12:59] Andy Polaine: I love, well, I love, and I don’t love that there’s a customer rage index, uh, survey.

[00:13:05] Lisa Dance: Yeah. It’s not just complaints,

[00:13:07] Andy Polaine: but rage. I think a lot of people kind of, uh, can relate to that.

[00:13:11] Lisa Dance: Yes. And it’s, um. It’s awful for the customers involved. It’s awful for the employees that are experiencing it. And oftentimes the employees who are expen experiencing it have absolutely nothing to do with the decisions that the customer is angry about. But they are the ones that get, um, uh, unfortunately the, the, um, the rage and the anger.

[00:13:37] Andy Polaine: Tell us about Peggy. You have this figure, you have this figure, Peggy, in your, in your book.

[00:13:44] Lisa Dance: Yes. Um, so Peggy is this bright light within organizations that like if a customer is trying to get a problem resolved, if you are lucky enough to stumble on and. Talk to Peggy. She’s that one or two, uh, one or two in, uh, employees who either have been there that long, that they just have all of the, you know, the in institutional knowledge, they know all the, the mergers, the, uh, system changes, all the different policies and able to actually help you, right?

That you’re not talking to someone who don’t, who doesn’t even. A lot of times you talk to employees and they might not even recognize that it is an issue. You have to like prove to them that it’s an issue. Peggy actually understands that and, and knows how to solve it, right? Um, and so Peggy can be that.

You know that one long-term employee, but also Peggy sometimes is a newer employee, but just have taken so much initiative beyond the training and the process and procedures to really understand, uh, what problems are and to collect knowledge and re and have relationships throughout the company to actually be able to solve customers problems.

So if you are lucky enough to get a. You are very lucky ‘cause your, you know, your problem’s going to be solved, but a lot of times there isn’t a Peggy and you are struggling with employees who. Who can’t explain, uh, what the problem is. They can’t explain what caused it. Uh, they don’t know how to solve it.

And it’s like I was mentioning before, sometimes you have to convince them that there is actually a problem, right? Yeah. Because they’ll say things like, well, my system says. But your system is not the golden rule to everything. Yeah. Your system gets, gets is no is made by people and that people, you know, don’t always get it right.

[00:15:46] Andy Polaine: There’s a thing I do in, um, you know, when I’m teaching service design or teaching that, that kind of journey flow thing and saying, you know, there’s, there’s often a flow chart and it’s kinda boxes and arrows, right? And it says something like, you know, um, Jeff uh, pays his bill. Arrow, uh, membership details are updated.

And I’m like, yeah, but what happens when Jeff pays his bill and his membership details and what happens when the arrow breaks? ‘cause the arrow on those diagrams is very innocuous, you know, but there’s this assumption that this whole kind of infrastructure is actually working to enable that. And then Jeff rings up and.

You know, and says, uh, to, I dunno, the sports club and says, um, you know, but I paid my bill. And they say, yeah, but we haven’t seen it. And so it’s gone outta my bank account. You know, we, it’s not updated in our system. And then all of a sudden you have this thing, I call it the sort of, we, we, you talk about gaps, actually we talk about in a minute, but the, this sort of experience crevasse, it’s like it’s quite narrow and you, you could jump over it to a customer and frequently do, but once you’ve fallen down into it, you’re in this kind of deep, uh.

Asse that no one can, you know, no one can even hear you. Right. Uh, at end you’re sort of shouting up, saying, help, help, help on hard. And that’s when you

[00:16:59] Lisa Dance: start the unpaid customer labor of your time, money climbing back, stress, trying to crawl, and then you, you scrape your, your know, your knuckles and you fall down and you try, you know?

Yeah. So, absolutely. So we, we,

[00:17:12] Andy Polaine: we kind of laugh about this stuff, talking about it, and you know, like you probably, when I tell people what I do and it takes a little while to explain the service design thing, they go, oh, oh, the other day, you know, I was trying to get my broadband installed or whatever it is, you know, and I, I get like loads and loads and loads of these stories, which, you know, you’ve collected many of, I think it was Lou down, said in a, um.

Lou down wrote a book, um, called Good Services, and they said, you know, if these things were physical products, they, they would be recalled, right? Because they’re, uh, and in some cases they, you know, are actually dangerous, um, as digital services, but often just as, um, you know, just deeply frustrating. Um, but for some reason, um, services do not get.

The same kind of scrutiny as as physical things. Um, why do you think, so, you know, you are in, in the book you’ve gone through and you’ve kinda analyzed a lot of these things. Um, why do you think this is happening so often? Um, maybe more often than having, you know, if, if a company brought out a. Uh, a car or something.

It occasionally happens and the might like to test the thing, right? The gas pedal is not working properly. Then all of a sudden it’s kind of big panic. Why, why is this not happening in, in these kind of service customer experiences?

[00:18:27] Lisa Dance: Well, I, I think, you know, sometimes it’s about that they have just haven’t done any research or they haven’t done enough research on what the customer.

Wants and needs and their context. Right? And so they’re just not even designing anything that meets that need. Right. Uh, a lot of times I think people assume that they know, okay, well I pay my payment. So yeah. I. I, you know, I know I, I can design this, right? Um, versus say you’re trying to, you know, uh, create a physical product like a television, well, you don’t, you don’t know how all of those things have to go together, right?

Um, so I think that that is that as well. Um, but I think that there’s also been some philosophies about, uh, product design that have, um. Not, not always been the best, um, like, um, the, uh, minimum, you know, valuable product. Viable product. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Because you know, on the bad side of that, you know, you’re just experimenting with, uh.

With customers, uh, you know, on something that can be really, you know, really quite flawed, you know, and so then they put that out there and it’s always a backlog, which they never get to, right. Um, because the priority, at least in a lot of companies, they’re being incentivized to create more features instead of actually resolving the backlog and actually making, uh, um, their core product.

Like a really good experience. Um, they’re looking to say, oh, we have a new feature and let’s bring in, um, you know, sell that and bring in new revenue that away. Yes. I think that those are some of the, the reasons. Yeah.

[00:20:19] Andy Polaine: I hear this quite often, um, from design folks actually, where they say, oh, you know, they keep saying, yeah, we’ll fix it in the next release, but they never do.

You know, my, my sort of mental metaphor of this is, um, it’s like people kind of, uh. Racing along on a speedboat and things fall overboard. And they say, well, we’ll go back and get that later on. And then when they look back and go, someone says, well, you said we’ll go back and get that. And they look back and it’s so far away, they go, oh, you know, we can’t, we don’t have time to turn around and go get back, get that now.

And, and so it just speeds on and there’s this, this kind of litter of broken stuff, uh, floating around behind.

[00:20:58] Lisa Dance: Right. Yeah. It’s a ocean of it at this point. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:21:02] Andy Polaine: Yeah. And there’s a, actually, to extend this metaphor slightly, I, um, when I moved, I, I lived in Australia, um, twice. And when I’ve, I’ve moved with a container, you know, across the, the ocean and they, you know, you have to have it insured.

Uh, when I was, I. He said, yeah, well, you know, obviously in case it goes overboard. And I, and I said, really? And he said, yeah, no, it’s about what kind of 400 containers go overboard? It might be more actually every year. And I thought, really? He said, yeah. And then they sit in the shipping lane and because the, it, it kinda gets an air pocket in one corner, so it’s like an iceberg, right?

You just have this little corner of, its sticking out the water, but the rest of the container is underwater, you know, with all my furniture in it. Um. And it just reminds me of that. ‘cause those things then come and really scupper people’s customer journeys. Look at that, that my metaphor completely worked.

Yeah,

[00:21:49] Lisa Dance: absolutely.

[00:21:50] Andy Polaine: Um, there’s another kind of time cost though, or time theft. Um, you know, we, you talked about this, so that sort of unpaid, um, labor. Is, um, there, well actually maybe those two are different concepts really, but the unpaid labor of just making it difficult for customers or, or not making it easy.

And maybe it’s, um, it depends. Some, some organizations it definitely feels like you’ve made this difficult, like it is, you know, there’s no phone number for Facebook, right. Anywhere. Um, other organizations I think just accidentally. Have that problem. And so there’s this sort of invisible labor, uh, of those things, of that unpaid labor.

And it’s often falls on other members of the family too. You’ve got, uh, an example of, uh, I think, uh, someone’s grandson or something like that, helping them, um, fit in something. So there’s, there’s that, that goes on. There’s also a whole thing. You know, build as convenience around self service. Right. Uh, of self check in.

Um, and, uh, whether that’s at a kiosk at the airport, or whether that’s doing that on your phone or, um, you know, my mom, my mom’s 84 now, so there’s a lot of stuff there where she’s like, oh, I suppose it’s all on the phone, isn’t it now? But I’d really much prefer to have something printed out and all of that stuff.

I’m going to a concert on Friday. I’m gonna see Adele actually. And, um. Wow, there’s no way of actually having a printed ticket, right? You app, it has to be on a smartphone. So there’s all those kinds of things. Um, but even, you know, I don’t, I don’t eat at McDonald’s, but, you know, go to McDonald’s and, and there’s, you know, clearing your tray, you know, or, or punching in the order these days.

I think that, I dunno when that came in, uh, like I said, don’t release at McDonald’s, but I’ve seen people, then they go in as a screen, you put in your order and basically the staff are just there to kind of. You can see how they’d be replaced by a robot. ‘cause they’re just there to kind of deliver the order on the thing and, and that’s it.

Um, there’s an awful lot of unpaid labor that’s crept into services. Some of it’s useful, but a lot of it is more, more like, um, this is a way of us to present, uh, uh, a service. Convenience, but in fact, you’re working for the company. Have you come across that quite a lot in your, in your travels?

[00:24:03] Lisa Dance: Yeah, absolutely.

‘cause thinking about, um, self-service, yeah. When it’s, when it works, it’s wonderful and it’s convenient. But if it doesn’t work, like especially think we’re thinking about like online things, there isn’t an employee there if there’s an issue to resolve it. Right. And so then not only like I’m stuck in this, now I have to go and go through their, you know, customer, um.

Customer service or customer support, um, whatever mechanisms they have to try to get someone to resolve it. So a lot of times I feel like, you know, companies have championed these digital transformations and, um, self-service and, and things like that. They’re really giving you the work. Right. Yeah. Um, and saying, you know, hell, this is more convenient.

And sometimes it is, but a lot of times it’s not convenient because it’s very difficult. And if it’s not designed well, you can’t get past it. Right? Yeah. And so you are. You are trying to do the work, you can’t do the work, then you’re doing more work to let them know you can’t do the work, and then you still have to pay your money for it.

And, and it’s just a vicious cycle. You know what I mean? So yeah, it, that is that dark side, I would say of, uh. Digital transformations and self service that nobody sort of talks about, you know? Yeah. It’s in the store or in McDonald’s if you hit the button and something doesn’t work, and then you can call somebody over and potentially they can resolve it.

But then, like, it’s a story in my book where I had a, went to a self-service, uh, um, kiosk, and as I was put in, I had put in, just put in my payment and the, uh. The screen said order terminated. Well, that didn’t sound right and um, and so I looked at the, um, they have a board up there, which your, which your orders are coming in and it wasn’t on there.

I told the employee, they looked them on the board, didn’t see it, so they, what they didn’t know how to do anything with the computer part of it, the kiosk. So they ring, rung up my order again, and then two weeks later I get. Duplicate charges. And so then I have to go back and do my unpaid customer labor to get my money back with it.

So, um, so all that to say is that like sometimes in person, they, there’s a person there who can resolve the issue in a self-service environment, sometimes they still can, and definitely online, most of them, there is not an employee there to, uh, resolve the issue right in that moment.

[00:26:55] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Well, and soon it’s replaced by an AI chat bot who, um, just invents stuff anyway.

[00:27:02] Lisa Dance: Right. That’s very ineffective. And, uh. It’s interesting you brought that up, is that, uh, the White House last week and, um, announced an initiative called Time Is Money. That’s talking exactly about the things that I was talking about in my book about these companies and the everyday hassles that they are, uh, false upon.

Um. Customers, um, and taking their time and money. And they were, they’re announcing this government wide, um, effort, uh, through different agencies to crack down on that. And one of the things that they were talking about was, um, AI chat bots that actually don’t, uh, can’t actually resolve an issue. Right?

Yeah. Um, and how, um, they were through different agencies, they were going crack, they were, um, going to have. Rules and regulations to try to crack down on that for companies. Uh, um, so I think they mentioned in the initiative, like, especially like for banks, that banks can’t, you know, like have this AI chat bot and that doesn’t actually resolve, help resolve your issue.

Yeah. So yeah,

[00:28:15] Andy Polaine: talk to the bot. The organization isn’t listening. It, it’s a very asymmetric relationship. Right. Too. I think that’s, that’s one of the things we talked about in our book actually on service design where, you know, uh, if I. If I don’t have a ticket on a train, you know, I, I can get fined on the spot and the, and the, the ticket inspector’s going to take my credit card and, and make me buy the ticket plus the fine and all that immediately.

Uh, whereas if the train is canceled or, um, delayed and I can claim my money back, it can take months sometimes for that to happen. And it does feel like. Well, it’s, it’s a bit like in the uk I dunno if you know, but there, there was this thing called the hostile environment, kind of, um, foreign policy for, for, um, asylum seekers in particular.

Um, which was just to make it really difficult, right? It difficult and expensive to apply for asylum and get citizenship and all the rest, or residency and all the rest of it. Um, you know, and. If you’ve ever tried to get citizenship in, in another place in the world, you’ll find out how hostile that is or not.

And you, you realize, okay, this is actually set up for just to put so many hurdles in the way that people will give up, um, rather than, um, rather than actually kind of chase it up, you know? And, and it’s, it’s often known until they, they write to the newspaper. It becomes a kind of meme online, and then all of a sudden, you know, the, it becomes a PR disaster.

But that stuff for that stuff to kick in. But it is a, I think for a, from a. So my, my theory about this is that I think humans, you know, humans anthropomorphize everything, right? We, we talk about our cars and our animals as if they’re humans. And I think we do this with companies or organizations too. And so we relate to them as if we were, it was just another human being and they just, but they obviously don’t act like that.

They act in this completely different and unreasonable way. And I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s so jarring all the time, uh, to have that experience.

[00:30:08] Lisa Dance: Well, definitely. And then in the US there’s. Like a doctrine. Something that, you know, a corporation actually, you know, ha it is like, it’s like the status of a person, but they don’t have the consequences of a person.

Right. And so, you know, very nice put So, uh, you know, and, and you are, um, in these circumstances, you know, you have all of the, you know, the, the, the pain and the suffering of this. And I talk about in my book that, you know, people who have the least resources, this. Is, you know, even worse for them because if your money is held in limbo and you don’t have any money, then you, you know, you are, that’s the money that you want to use to, to feed yourself or to pay your rent or take care of your children.

And then you are in such a deficit in a vulnerable position when you get in. Uh. A situation like that where your money’s held in limbo and you don’t, and then oftentimes it’s, you know, you know, some people, they don’t have the time, they don’t have a, you know, a nice office job where they can stay on the phone and um, and call for hours and wait on hold and to try to get something resolved.

And so sometimes they just have to give up, but they really can’t even afford to give up either. And so that’s the really, um. That’s, that’s the part in a lot of this that bothers me the most mm-hmm. Is that, uh, you are really doing harm to people like above and beyond what they lost far as in the money and the transaction, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, a cascading cost of it. And it’s interesting that you were mentioning about the media because one of the stories in the book. Is about my three over three year struggle to get unemployment, uh, benefits, um, that were from the pandemic. And, um, I. I wrote the story in the book. Um, all the other stories are private.

Um, you know, were private companies, but I also wanted to put far as, um, example of government as well, because there’s expectation around, um, customer service and, and customer experience for, uh, government as well. And actually. The only reason I actually finally got my money after over three years is because I contacted a reporter, and a reporter did a, contacted the, um, the Virginia Employment Commission, and then suddenly they were calling me to see if they had the right address.

And in two days of them calling, I had my money that I had been waiting three years, uh, to get That’s

yeah.

[00:32:57] Lisa Dance: Yes. And so that’s oftentimes is what’s happening as well. And so that circles back to, I wanted to say for two points. One is that in that situation with the unemployment, the part that bothered me and worried me the whole time is that I knew that there were people.

There were hundreds of thousands of people who were in the same situation.

Mm.

[00:33:20] Lisa Dance: As me, uh, with the Virginia Unemployment Commission and the, the, I definitely know that there were people who were in much more precarious situations than I. And if you don’t have a job and then you’re getting your unemployment and you still have to eat and live there and, and take care of your kids, what do you do?

And so that’s just like bothered me to accord, uh, with that. Then also it circles back to like if companies are waiting until the media contacts them to, you know, do the right thing, and that’s the only way that you can get them to do the right thing. Um, you know, that’s a, um, you know, that’s a cost to that too, because then you’re having to make sure you are, um.

Monitoring, you know, all kinds of platforms and things like that for your, for you know, reputation, right? Yeah, yeah. And now with online platforms. You know, there are just numerous ways of people to like event their, um, uh, displeasure or just share their story of how something has gone wrong. And I think of an example is that Vanguard just got a new CEO and there was an article about a month or so, um, in the Wall Street Journal, um, talking about that longtime customers were.

Imploring the new, new CEO to improve, uh, is that customer service, right? And like, you know, is that really what you want? Is that like you get a story in the Wall Street Journal that your, you know, your customer experiences are? That bad. And some people in, in the, in one of the articles I read, they said, well, maybe one of their strategists, it’s that they wanna get rid of sort of these customers because they don’t, I.

They don’t make, they don’t make them as much money and they wanted to put them in this sort of, I think like personal advising service or something like that. But I’m thinking to myself, well, how many people are you losing when you’ve gotten, you have a story in the Wall Street Journal about how bad your customer experience

Yeah.

Are,

[00:35:34] Lisa Dance: you know, so. That’s like, I think people need to think through, like, there are lots of other cascading cost of consequences.

[00:35:43] Andy Polaine: Well, that’s an invisible one as well. ‘cause you don’t know, you don’t know how many customers you, you, you didn’t get because they didn’t even start the process. Right. My favorite story, uh, of this is there was a, a story that hit the papers in, in Australia, um, it’s quite a few years ago now, where a guy, um, went into the.

Optus, uh, store Optus is like the second largest telco in, in Australia. Uh, and chained himself to the reception desk. Um, because he had spent so many hours trying to get the ownership of his iPad’s business account number or, you know, data account changed. Uh, and in the end, you know, this, they had to call the police and stuff and, you know, it was, it was resolved kinda peacefully, but, and it’s a kind of funny story and obviously.

You’re in a shop, shop for the smartphones, right? So of course what happens is pictures that everywhere, uh, and it hit the, hit the media. Um, and it, so it sounds funny on the one hand, but you also have to kinda think that guy who’s a small business owner is so frustrated that he’s gone into, he’s bought a length of chain and gone into a shop and chained himself to it and risked being arrested because of his frustration.

And it always, always kind of show that story quite often because. You know, the initial thing is, haha, that’s really funny. And then actually, when you think about it, it’s actually not, it’s not funny at all. It’s really tragic.

[00:37:01] Lisa Dance: Very tragic. And, and, and, and disturbing. And to think about how the, the mental frustrations that he has had to go through to get him to that point.

Exactly. You know, and they don’t e and even though he got the issue resolved, like, you know, having to go to that extreme of a, uh, step. That stress sort of still kinda, you still have a flashback of this really negative emotion. Yeah. ‘cause as I was, uh, collecting these stories, uh, you know, like one person’s like, you know, they had to take a, a moment because.

Talking about it was very stressful. Yeah. And I put like a caution, you know, in my, on my, uh, table of contents, like if you feel stressed about this and it’s like tricking you on some situation that you have, then, you know, take a moment and, and, and de stress from that. Because what I’ve found is I’ve talked, when I talk to people and mention about my book.

Everybody has one, two, or nine stories. And, and the story, the companies have a, they still have a. A lingering really negative, um, uh, feelings about it, you know what I mean? So it’s, it doesn’t just sort of dissipate just ‘cause you’ve gotten it resolved, not when they, these issues have gone to the extent that, like the ones examples in the book or, or this gentleman, you know.

[00:38:29] Andy Polaine: No, it can leave definitely a real trace. It can leave kind of fear as well of doing things and all sorts, I think too.

[00:38:35] Lisa Dance: Yeah. Well, you know what I, I also mentioned in the book, it’s like customers, when you run into an. Issue. You get that familiar sense of dread of is this going to be something that actually I can resolve really quickly, you know?

Or is this gonna be, am I gonna go into, you know, this abyss and you know, I. Who knows when it’s going to get resolved. And so you do feel that because you, you’ve gotten it enough that that’s what the experience of things are now. So

[00:39:07] Andy Polaine: occasionally get the opposite. Where, where they go, they result, you ring up and thinking with that dread and say, okay, I’ve sorted out for you.

Is there anything else I can do? And you’re like, oh. Oh, I was expecting that’s be so much harder than it was. Um, no, that’s it. Thanks. It’s too, right,

[00:39:22] Lisa Dance: Peggy?

[00:39:24] Andy Polaine: Yeah. You’ve got, I’ve got a Peggy. Um, listen, we are coming up to time. Um, it’s been great chatting to you. The, the show is named after this, um, Ray Charles EAMS film.

It’s all about kind of the size of relative powers of 10 all throughout the relative size of things in the universe. Um, so the final question is always what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world.

[00:39:46] Lisa Dance: I, I think that when you’re designing a particle service technology, it’s taking that step to really think through what could go wrong and actually resolving it early on, or actually putting in a step if something goes wrong, where, where’s that, uh, really quick and, and easy way to get it resolved.

I think, uh, people. Designed for the happy path as as if everything’s happy and nothing ever will go wrong. But if you actually just took a little bit of time to think about how something may go wrong. You can avoid just so much, uh, pain on the backside. So that would be it. Okay.

[00:40:30] Andy Polaine: Very good. For me, I think, and it adds to this if I may, which is, you know, empowering those frontline staff, I think quite often they are treated as kind of very in mean menial roles and not very trusted.

And, and if they’re able to, they’re given the power to, to credit some, a certain amount back. Without question or without having to go to a supervisor. Sometimes I kind of think, you know, why are you even having to ask someone about that? The time it takes you to do that, it’s gonna cost you more, or the organization more than just saying, yeah, okay, we’ll refund that.

So, uh, where can people find you online?

[00:41:02] Lisa Dance: Certainly. So you can, uh, find me, uh, on LinkedIn. Uh. Lisa D Dance or you can, uh, find me on my website, which is serviceease.net. Um, and if you wanna sign up, I have a newsletter, it’s called Tell A Friend, um, you can sign up for that on my website as well. And that comes out monthly.

[00:41:24] Andy Polaine: Correct. And the, the book is, todayistheperfectday.com?

[00:41:27] Lisa Dance: Yes. And that’s the website for the book.

[00:41:29] Andy Polaine: Definitely. Cool. I’ll, I’ll put all the links in the show notes. Lisa, thank you so much for being my guest on Power of 10.

[00:41:36] Lisa Dance: Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it so much.

[00:41:38] Andy Polaine: You’ve been watching and listening to Power of 10.

You can find more about the show on pauline.com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice on my courses, as well as sign up for my my regular newsletter. Doctor’s Note, if you have any thoughts, please put them in the comments or get in touch. You can share your horrific customer experience, uh, there too.

Uh, you’ll find me as apolaine on PKM social on Mastodon. Uh, you’ll find me on LinkedIn or my website. All the links are in the show notes too. Thanks for listening and watching, and I’ll see you next time.

The Materials of Service Design

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0200

My guests in this episode are Johan Blomkvist and Stefan Holmlid who, along with Simon Clatworthy, wrote the book The Materials of Service Design, which discusses materials (broadly framed) as a means to explore what service design is and could be.

You can listen to it below or on YouTube or subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts.

Audio

Show Links

Guests

The Materials of Service Design: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/the-materials-of-service-design-9781802203295.html
Stefan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-holmlid-b402683/
Stefan on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefan-Holmlid
Johan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blomkvist/
Johan on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johan-Blomkvist

Andy

Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Design Leadership Coaching: https://polaine.com/coaching
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/andypolaine.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello and welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organization, society, and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m design leadership coach, service design, and innovation consultant. Educator and writer. My guests today are Johan Blomkvist, Assistant Professor in Design IDA in Linköping University in Sweden.

I’m pretty sure I pronounced that wrong. And Stefan Holmlid, Professor in Design IDA. Also at the same university in Sweden, and together with Simon Clatworthy, who’s not with us today. He’s the professor in design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway. They are the authors of the new book called The Materials of Service Design.

Johan and Stefan, welcome to the show.

[00:00:55] Johan Blomkvist: Thank you.

[00:00:56] Stefan Holmlid: Thank you.

[00:00:56] Andy Polaine: So the book is called The Materials of Service Design, and it is a sort of recognition, I guess, of in other, traditionally in design you have things like materials, libraries, and you have you know or pattern libraries. You have things that you, you can kind of recognize the different types of design.

Why did you feel the need to write the book?

[00:01:17] Johan Blomkvist: Mm,

I. We felt like it was time, maybe even a, a bit over time to write. Yeah. This kind of book, since the material that I. We, well me and Stefan think a lot about and work a little bit with and service design practitioners work with daily is not very well understood, I think or explored.

and we have been thinking about this and struggling with the issue of what. The service design material actually is for a long time and before this book, I think a lot of what we know about the material comes from other disciplines such as service marketing or service management, for instance.

And. I, it has been useful for us to think about how to understand the service from that perspective. What it means to co-create value, or what it means to work with resource integration and things like that, and what that means for design. But it’s time, I think, for the sign. To explore the material and think about what the material actually is and what it consists of.

And in the process of writing this book, I think we discovered that it’s much more complex, it’s much more rich in terms of different. Types of materials, different perspectives on the material than we anticipated. So, yeah. I think it was overdue for, for this book.

[00:03:08] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Yeah. You know, service design is one of those things that is.

One of the things I say traditionally, I, I we’ve out and written about it too, is, you know, we often talk about it being intangible, right? That the, the experience of a service or the, the value of a service is about the interaction between people. and so I. I’m interested in your, you know, in your use of the word materials, EE even, so, you know, when you were doing this, you have kind of, you started to make a kind of taxonomy.

You started to make a, some kind of categorization of different types of things and it sort of forms a section of the book. And maybe you could talk about that a little bit actually of, of what those sections are, but also was that immediately obvious? Of how to categorize this. ‘cause I have, I would imagine that was a thing.

You must have thought and discussed a lot.

[00:03:55] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. I mean, let, let me first say something about material and the intangible, tangible thing, and I’ll mm-hmm. I’ll pass on to you on to talk about this, all the nerdiness of categorizing and thinking about how do they actually fit together all of these different ways of thinking about materials here.

So one thing that we were. That we wanted to do was both to talk about service as a material, but also about the materials that service designers use in their practice. and as you said, there’s a lot of thinking that, and that these, this service design thing is, it’s about intangibles, about the material.

And that’s of course not untrue. but everything also needs to be in the world. Which means that it also becomes material, even though maybe not in the sense that it becomes a physical thing that we can grasp with our fingers necessarily. I. Everything actually exists in the world, which makes it material in some sense.

So that was something that kind of also developed during our writing and talking about these materials of service design that, well, they, all of them are both intangible, untangible. It’s, it’s not that they are either or they’re both at the same time. And that’s also something that maybe is very prevalent in service design while it’s less prevalent, maybe in in other disciplines of design, but that also caused a lot of.

Discussions, let’s call it let’s call it that. Right. thinking in when we were writing, because we were also, we also agreed when we started to writing the book that we don’t have to agree about everything.

[00:05:55] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:05:55] Stefan Holmlid: We just have to agree that this is an important book to write and we may come with very different perspectives and ideas on what this can be, should be, have been.

and that’s what we wanna do. We want to make that book happen. And then we had all those materials and the categorizing work that needed to be done suddenly.

[00:06:17] Andy Polaine: So I put, I’ve put on screen here briefly ‘cause I highlighted the content before. So, Johan, you were gonna talk about how those discussions resolve into and when you say discussions, are we talking like there was like strong debate around this and, and arguments in a, in a good sense, robust editorial debate or, or was it that we’re just trying to get our heads around this.

[00:06:41] Johan Blomkvist: No, I mean for the categorization, I think we just agreed, like Stefan said, that we won’t be able to agree fully on any categorization and, um. so I, I’m not exactly, you know, that the strong words came in other situations but the categorization was interesting. So it’s the third part of the book book where we sort of take all the material contributions from other authors.

So there were a lot of people that contributed to the book and, um. They, their chapters should have formed this material library that we are starting, um with this book. And we felt like we can’t just, you know, include the material library and not say something about what the materials have in common or.

You know, ways in which you can structure them or analyze them. So we decided to do some attempts at categorizing the materials and, um. We, I think we quite quickly realized that we couldn’t agree and that meant that we, we tried, and I don’t know really why we decided to do that, but we actually included in the book our our failed attempts at categorizing the materials not failed necessarily because each categorization.

Says something about the materials. So we have a viewpoint from, um from the service marketing field, for instance. Yeah. So how could you categorize the materials from that point of view? how can you categorize the materials from a more design practice point of view? So that’s another like how the materials relate to each other.

As part of the sign, that’s another categorization that we Yeah. that we attempted to do. and the one we sort of end up with, which is not to say that, you know, everyone agrees that that’s the best one or anything like that. I think it’s, it, it’s main benefit is that it’s very, uh. Like small and easy to understand and grasp so that that sort of divides the material into traditional materials.

So some materials are more traditional in some sense. and of course there’s a lot of. debate about whether or not material can be considered traditional and what that means to be traditional. But we say that a traditional material is one that you can work on alone and you don’t need to include others in giving form and shaping this material.

Then we consider it more of a traditional material.

[00:09:30] Andy Polaine: Can you give me some examples of that?

[00:09:31] Johan Blomkvist: yes I can. so we have touchpoints, for instance in the way that we describe touchpoints in the book or the chapter on the Yeah, the material description of touchpoint, for instance.

[00:09:47] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. So just to, um. To add something there is also that the, the thing with the, with the categorization we ended up with, which is these three end points on spectrum in some sense is that they also work generatively.

So the first categorization we did with that, or the one that, that related to service. The traditional service fields, we felt that the, the materials got locked in and it didn’t really give the possibility to think outside and beyond what is already there. So one thing that this final categorization we did.

made, what it made possible was to actually work generatively with figuring out what could be a new material that we should work with and how can we think about something that we’re working on as a material. Okay. And how can we develop a material into, so a traditional material like them touch points?

Yeah. if we want to make it more like a co-design material, what then do we need to do?

[00:10:59] Andy Polaine: Okay. So right now I would be, if I was listening to this. Audience, I would be thinking, well, that’s all very well, all sounding kind of abstract to me, so, so let’s get kind of nuts and bolts a around it. ‘cause because you use the word materials, right?

There’s the, there’s definitely an expectation I think, that you can then describe these things. They have certain qualities, you know, they have certain affordances and so forth. So let’s start with the, maybe the, the, the touchpoint ones. and for those of people they might, they assume there’s quite a lot of service design people listening, but describe to people who may not understand even that word what you consider a touch point.

As a, as actual materials. Yes.

[00:11:39] Johan Blomkvist: So the thing is, this chapter was written by one of the contributors of the book, so. I would prefer if the author of that chapter could also explain the material. so that’s another thing that we noticed during the, the writing this book that a lot of people that contributed to the book, they’re really passionate about their material and they want, they know a lot about the material.

They work with the material, they can explain the material, and they, they have a firm grasp of what they mean. By, you know, touchpoint for instance, or clay or behavior or any other material that you can find. There’s a lot of materials in the book and. So I don’t want to to sort of intrude on, on their area, their explanation of touchpoint.

so yeah, I, I would rather that we sort of collect these materials and make them available to people so that everyone can can see them and judge for themselves if they think it’s a material that they work with, then they understand why it’s a material, for instance. Yeah. And how it’s, um.

worked into a more finished form as part of Okay. The design process. So,

[00:13:00] Andy Polaine: Well, I, I, I’ll give my, my version then in that case. Yeah. So for me, I always talk about touchpoint as something that you can. See s sense, basically see, smell, touch and interact with, and or interact with, right? So, so it’s usually a thing that actually has some kind of tangibility in the world in that way.

You know, it, what, what might I hold in my hand? Who, what, what or who might I interact with? You know? So it could be another person. and often, you know, and traditionally in sort of service blueprints and stuff, you have this idea of the line of visibility. And I’ve always kind of hated that. ‘cause I thought, well, you know, if you ever sat next to someone in a restaurant smoking a cigar, you’ll know it’s not just visibility that, you know, makes a difference, right?

Or you’ve got the, the table and the other toilets and all those things. So, you know, there’s quite a lot of other stuff in there. But in general, the, it’s the, the moments of interaction. tho those would, or the, the things you’re interact with, interacting with or sensing at any, any one point that I would consider a material, the obvious materials of touch points, but there are some other things like policy and time.

I mean, policy is obviously a thing. It gets written down, but that’s, it’s the enactment of policy, which is a sort of systems effect thing. And systems are another thing that would seem to be you know, other important materials. Time in particular is one of those things that, you know, we often talk about services unfold over time.

They’re different in that way from physical products because they sort of don’t exist outside of unfolding over time, I would argue. how did you deal with, with time? There’s a, there’s a section on time, timing, and time in. Yes.

[00:14:39] Stefan Holmlid: And I mean in that sense time, of course there are a lot of different ways of thinking about time, right?

And, and people in service design probably has their own way of working with time. but one of the things that we can. We can see, and that is also in this description of time as a materialist, that there are two different ways of thinking to, you know, very general ways of thinking about time. And then, which means that we approach time in different ways.

It’s the chronological way of thinking about time that time passes. It’s something we can measure. things happen at a certain point in time, et cetera. Right?

[00:15:13] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:15:13] Stefan Holmlid: on that chronology. And then it’s the the other way of thinking about time is usually called kairos. Or a tic time as I’m writing in the in the book which much more has to do with the experience of time of, um you know, something happening at an appropriate time rather than at a specific not 1501, but rather at the time when it’s needed, right?

[00:15:43] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:15:44] Stefan Holmlid: and those two different ways of thinking about time we can see in the way that service designers work and, but maybe they’re not necessarily so good at understanding and dealing with those two different ways. So thinking about time. So if we’re taking on a chronological way of thinking about time.

we actually need to be really good at working with, for example, if we try to prototype waiting time, you usually don’t make a prototype where you wait a week, which would be, it would be in, in real life, right? Maybe waiting for Yeah, yeah. To get a response from a doctors or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So then working with time in that way, you have to, as a material, you have to actually think really, really hard.

What is then the experience of waiting for a week and how can I simulate that in a prototype? which then introduces the chaotic way of thinking about time immediately. So this mix and understanding this mix and how they co-exist and how we can work and shape these materials, I mean, that’s really, really important to, to see that.

[00:17:05] Andy Polaine: yeah, I once did a actually a talk that you probably saw about service design and talking about time. ‘cause it’s such a, the perception of time is such a kind of relative thing, right? And so, as is quite well known, when they started putting dot matrix displays on bus stops and in train stations, you know where it says, you know, the next train is in one minute.

There’s some research across London underground of like how long a London Underground Minute is, and it’s, it’s not actually a minute, but with it. But it’s this idea that if you know how long you have to wait, then waiting for that amount of time, even if it’s a bit longer, doesn’t, it’s kind of okay.

What’s really, really irritating is, is the not knowing is the kind of death row aspect of, of kind of waiting for a bus or a train and you not knowing, because what you’re really calculating is, should I just walk? Now, or walk to the next one or get a taxi or whatever versus you know, waiting for this extra minute or two minutes.

And there was also some research on how much people, what their sort of hourly rate what they considered their hourly rate would be for waiting. I I, I think when I read it, it was like $50 an hour or something. But there’s this thing where it’s to do with quality too. So if you go into McDonald’s and you have to wait for ages, well, the, the trade off that you’ve made, which is, you know.

Crappy food, but you want it quickly his fails, right? Because you’re getting crappy food and it takes ages to come. And whereas if you go into kind of like a Italian, especially like a slow food restaurant and you order a risotto and the risotto comes within sort of five minutes, well, you know, they’ve just microwaved, right?

So there’s all these kind of trailers or sometimes you want to wait longer. ‘cause that part of it is, is part of the joy of the experience is to wait. And I find kind of times that are really interesting. Thing to play with and to explore. Yeah. yeah, and it, it gets lost a lot in that sort of very process oriented way of thinking about services, I think.

[00:18:57] Stefan Holmlid: Definitely. And, and I mean time also when we, when we work with time as a material, it also gives us possibilities to work with pacing, with rhythm, other things that has to do with our experience of things that happens. In time, right? Yeah. The process view is all about things that are happening and not so much, and not actually anything about time, just sequence.

so when we introduce time, both aspects of time, then we get this possibility to think about rhythm and pacing and just a, a public transport example again. Then in Stockholm, they experimented with. You know, as always, in larger cities there is this there buses are not always on time, uh mm-hmm given the time schedule that they have.

So they try out a, um instead of them having, when it. When the clog is kind of easing up, instead of them having four buses at the same bus stop that were, you know, at actually at different points in time, they started having this, the correct pace of the buses. So they were not allowed to drive.

You know, and, and queue up. They were only allowed to keep the same distance in time between each other. Okay. So people knew that bus 40 will be here every 15 minutes?

[00:20:29] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:20:29] Stefan Holmlid: That has nothing to do with, with the schedule or anything. Right. But with pace and rhythm.

[00:20:33] Andy Polaine: Right. Okay. Nice. Nice. Okay, so they’re just all sort of going around the circuit and keeping and keeping the same distance from each other.

[00:20:39] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah.

[00:20:41] Andy Polaine: So time, you know, you can kind of. I see how time gets lost, particularly in a, I mean, I, I would argue that part of the, one of the things that say digital product design in particular has kind of brought to the world is and, and it is actually, it’s inherited it from the kind of startup sort of Silicon Valley thing, which is that, you know, everything has to be as, we have to move as an organization, as fast as possible.

You know, speed defacto equals good. and I think it then. It doesn’t really get kind of considered that much. And then there’s, there’s, you know, there’s expectations which I think are important part of time. Those examples I gave before about some McDonald’s versus kind of slow food restaurant.

One of those things of kind expectations versus I. You know, what’s the reality of it? so those are kind of abstract, but as you start to think about them, you can start to break them down and start to kind of think about how you might consider them. Was this the sort of idea or the intent of the book that you were, you know, as you start to pull these things apart and examine them perhaps more closely than they have been before, that you would then start to actually see things you hadn’t considered to be materials, to be things you can actually.

Play with, experiment, with design with

[00:21:53] Johan Blomkvist: Yeah, to some extent. I mean, it’s been a very involved process with all the materials. So we started actually with pitches material pitches, and we asked people to pitch, you know, the most important or one of the most important materials in a short format for first.

and we wrote a few ourselves as well. And then we had a symposium and that symposium included a lot of discussion about materiality and materials, and we give some feedback to all the material authors. And after that we started the process of reviewing the suggestions for materials.

So, and one of the things that we. Definitely wanted people to think about and make sure that they could describe about their material was, you know, what is the role of this material in design? How is it shaped into more finished form? What does that process look like? I. To, you know, give people a sense of what, what they consider the MA material to be and, and that process of, of using the material as part of design.

So, yeah, and I mean, like I said, we’ve discovered a lot of materials, but also aspects, elements of the materials that we hadn’t previously thought about. So from that point of view, it’s been a really interesting journey.

[00:23:21] Andy Polaine: Were there any surprises of things that people pitched and came up with, but things that you hadn’t yourself thought of as a material of service design?

[00:23:29] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah, I, I, I mean, one of the authors suggested conversations.

[00:23:33] Andy Polaine: Hmm.

[00:23:34] Stefan Holmlid: As material.

[00:23:35] Andy Polaine: Hmm. Yeah, I saw that.

[00:23:36] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. I hadn’t been thinking about conversations as a material to form. but you know, when, when talking about it, it becomes really obvious that yeah, this is one of those super important materials in service designing that is.

And probably in many different, not necessarily only in service designing, but uh

[00:24:00] Andy Polaine: definitely in service designing in

[00:24:01] Stefan Holmlid: general.

[00:24:01] Andy Polaine: That was Jonathan. Is it Yan? It is probably Yan. Is it Ron? YY yeah. Yeah, yeah. and Johan, you, you did behaviors I. Yes. you talked about, tell, tell us about behaviors as a, as a material.

[00:24:14] Johan Blomkvist: well as you know, behaviors are difficult to design directly, so it’s interesting, I think, from this feedback point of view. so feedback is a theme of of ours in the book. I guess. we talk a lot about feedback and how feedback, what it looks like. Um. We know some from behavioral psychology about what it means to design for behaviors, what we can do to influence behaviors, the tools that we have available to us.

We have choice architecture as one of the things that we can play around with as designers and both use and misuse, right? Yeah. It’s a difficult material to pinpoint. And I think the format, like it, it’s almost worth writing a whole book. I think about that specifically. And of course there has been books written about behavioral design.

So it’s a big topic and I, I chose to write. About some aspects of behavior and I try to focus as much as possible on, you know, what has been done to influence behaviors or to, to get specific behaviors to appear or in, be able to influence in, in a in a, in a positive way, how people behave in different situations, I guess.

[00:25:46] Andy Polaine: Yeah. It, it’s kind of pretty contentious this though, as well as a, as an idea, right? Because of obviously, you know. Part of it is, first of all, there’s a, I think there’s a school of thought which says you, well, you can’t design behaviors, you know, people just, people do what they do. which is obviously not true because we, we know there’s all sorts of things that nudge our behavior either intentionally or unintentionally.

But then the, you know, the other aspect is who, you know, who’s to say. What the better behavior is. And I think this is a trap that certainly a lot of my students fall into. I think there, and it’s, it’s very kind of good-willed based. I want people to be, be engaging in the political process more. I people should be more sustainable in their behavior.

And there’s a lot of people should be X, Y, and Z, but there’s, there are, who is the kind of arbiter of that? Did you manage to kind of navigate that at all when you were looking into this?

[00:26:38] Johan Blomkvist: I think I stayed clear of it as much as I could actually, so I took the, the easy way out there. No. Yeah. But I think one of the things that is very important in, in, in relation to that is, is this idea of feedback actually that, you know.

Knowing the material and knowing how the material feeds back or how the material reacts to whatever you’re doing, and the time spans of that. I mean, that’s the whole thing that we could open up even more, I think in the book that like understanding your material, regardless if you’re a carpenter or if you’re, you know.

If you’re a someone who paints or, yeah, play the piano or whatever it is, like, there’s always an understanding of what you’re creating and how that feeds back and you’re, you’re training yourself in being able to predict, I. The change that you are inflicting or imposing or you know, that comes with whatever you’re doing.

[00:27:38] Andy Polaine: Yeah,

[00:27:38] Johan Blomkvist: and I think that’s like part of what we also try to do with the book and in relation to behaviors, but also in relation to a lot of other materials. I mean, some people say that you can’t design service and I, I guess some of us say that you can’t. Some, some of the author might say that. So this idea of feedback, like that’s, that’s one way to understand the materials and think about, you know, when does material feedback, like when do you get, talk back from the material and in terms of behavior, it could be months or years after you do something that you actually see a change in behavior or.

You know, if it’s about clicking the right thing on a website, if you want to force people to do something, for instance, you can see it immediately. Because you can just measure that, okay, these are, that many people actually now click this way. So, and yeah, figuring out how those things, like the things that you do, how that relates to how people behave and things like that, that’s really difficult.

And I don’t think you can read about that. It’s something you have to test and try and, and learn about. Uh. about this and I, I, I mean, when writing the book and thinking about feedback and thinking about service, it was really interesting to think about how the materials influence each other. Like how conversations and influence behavior or how behavior influences thinking.

Yeah, thinking is another material that we have in the book. but also understand these feedback loops and how they can sort of. interact with each other, but also to be, to be able to figure out like, what can you, can I do for this service? Like, how can I, how can I understand the current behavior in this service and what does that mean for the feedback that I’m going to get?

Like, is there a threat of layoffs in this service that I’m entering into and I’m trying to change? Um. Like how, how can I approach this material? And that you have to be, you have to develop sensibilities for, for different types of situations. And I mean, understanding humans and understanding how they might be how they might respond to your actions as a, as a designer.

I think that’s really, really interesting.

[00:29:49] Andy Polaine: And non-humans, right? I know there’s a section on data and there you get the sort of, ethics gets touched on. I can’t remember if there is a section on, on ai. Is there. As a, as a sort of, as a material?

[00:30:01] Stefan Holmlid: Not directly.

[00:30:02] Andy Polaine: Would, would you have, if you were to, you write it now?

‘cause when, when did it come out? It’s, it’s been out for how long now? Roughly? The book Since

[00:30:09] Stefan Holmlid: December last year. Since

[00:30:10] Andy Polaine: December. Right, right. And so obviously the, the writing time and, and it takes a while for, from the final manuscript. Mm. But

[00:30:17] Stefan Holmlid: AI has

[00:30:17] Andy Polaine: been

[00:30:18] Stefan Holmlid: around since 59, you know, so it

[00:30:19] Andy Polaine: has been, been around for a long time.

Was that a conscious decision not to include that or did no one pitch that idea? Or was it you know, no, it wasn’t pitched. I say it now because there’s obviously been a talking of conversations. There’s obviously been, I. Quite a few cases of, of particularly chatbots. Right. Just kind of, they just get kind of launched into a, a, a customer service offering.

Right. And, and cause, cause kind of havoc in some respects, or at least, you know, if not havoc, then things go wrong. But actually in some cases real, actual problems.

[00:30:48] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. So, so I think, I mean, one, one way of thinking about it is with the one of those frameworks we, we have in the book with.

Traditionally designed materials, catalyst materials, and, and co-design material materials, right? So when we think about AI as being part of a finalist service, in what, in what ways can we form what it does in that service? And is it then a traditional design material or is it a co-design material? And how, if we view it as a co-design material in that situation because I mean, in my view the final design of a service is always done in the situation.

so we prepare stuff that will be used for that final touch of design in the end. Right?

[00:31:36] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So if

[00:31:37] Stefan Holmlid: you then view AI as part of that, as a co-design material, then what do we need to do? Or if you view it as a catalyst material as something that will in the organization help the people who tries to understand what they’re doing helps them drive change or, or become better in service delivery, not delivering lousy food you know, with a waiting time of an hour.

Um. So I think this, this little framework we have is, is really, really important when we think about what it means when we say that something could be a material of service design, because we have to make a bit of a, a, you know, a bit of analytic thinking on if I view this as a traditional design material.

Let’s say ai. Yeah, and it, it’s actually something that I believe I can form. And then my actions as a designer, as a, as a person who tries to form that will be of a certain kind. But if I view it as a co-design material, then my ways of working with it will be totally different.

[00:32:46] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:32:47] Stefan Holmlid: And that goes to all those materials, right?

So like behavior is it something we try to design directly and form very, very much

[00:32:54] Andy Polaine: and sort of shape inness of an authorial way? You mean exactly? Yeah.

[00:32:58] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. Or is it the catalyst material behavior is something that we need to understand and we can view it as a, as a material that will help us do other things.

[00:33:07] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So, you know, it’s one thing to, to put a book like this together. you know, and you’ve got all this collections and there’s a lot of thought and thinking around service design and what do you hope people will. Will do with the, with what you’ve come up with here, how, and maybe apply it to their work.

[00:33:24] Johan Blomkvist: Yeah. This is this is a tricky one actually. I, you’d think that we had a better idea about how people will use it, but the, the we talked about this, I mean, before we started writing the book, I guess, or when we just got started with it, that we wanted to write. We’ve been thinking about this for a long time and we wanted to, to write a book about this because it’s really interesting to us.

And I think that we said, or one thing that we said at least that stuck with me was that, you know, we’re, we’re service design nerds. Let’s write a book for service design nerds who might also find this interesting. and I think that is what we did. but I. Of course you don’t have to know a lot about service design, I think to read the book and, you know, have it mean something for you.

I think definitely it can help you expand your idea about design, what design can be, and what you can work with and for in design. I think it can be really valuable for teachers of design since they might be able to think about using, for instance, the categorization that we have suggested what kinds of designing they need to teach and think about in their curricula and things like that when they develop.

Um. Things like that. Yeah. So yeah, I, I, yeah, I think there, there, there are many recipients potential recipients at least of, of the book or, yeah.

[00:35:15] Andy Polaine: Yeah. No, that’s definitely, I can imagine. I mean, it’s stimulated some, some thinking for me for teaching. Sure.

[00:35:21] Stefan Holmlid: I mean, it also gives an individual designer the possibility to think about what kind of designer am I, what kinds of.

What kinds of materials am I confident working with? How do I want to develop? maybe also seeing new ways of thinking about materials that you have been working with for a long time.

[00:35:43] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:35:44] Stefan Holmlid: and, and so it, it also, and also for companies, right? What kind of a company are we, are we a company that are working with co-design?

Mainly? Then how do we talk about these traditional design materials and how do we make sure that we. In cases when we need that have the capacity and competence to, to work with that.

[00:36:05] Andy Polaine: Yeah,

[00:36:06] Stefan Holmlid: I talked about that before, right? It’s generative in that sense. Yeah. It gives the possibility to think about where am I, where do I wanna go?

what kind of design practitioner am I, what kind of design practices do we, do we make possible?

[00:36:19] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:36:19] Johan Blomkvist: When we talk about the book with. Practitioners or when I talk about the book with practitioners, a lot of times they, they have suggestions for materials that they’re like passionate about, that they want, oh, you should have this material in the book.

It’s so important. And they also recognize some materials, and some materials are like provocative to some of them. So I think, I think there’s emotional elements of why it might be, uh. Fun or interesting to read the book?

[00:36:47] Andy Polaine: I, I seem to remember, I can’t remember now ‘cause it was a while since I read it, but there was a, the aim to sort of create some kind of repository of these things.

Is that still a plan or not?

[00:36:58] Stefan Holmlid: Yes. So we, the symposia thing, it started out as a way of thinking about whether we could create a, a materials library for Yeah. with this materials or service design, kinda framing. so we’re we’re running that. it’s still in uh. You know, under construction, kind of, of Okay.

Label. but there is a, a website where we will be collecting suggestions for new materials and also then having a, a process where there will be a feedback loops for, for people that are suggesting materials to develop them and to publish them. And so they will be available for everyone in, in the end.

[00:37:45] Andy Polaine: Okay. Alright, I will I’ll get to that in a second of where people can find you online. but before that, ‘cause we’re coming out to time, as you know, the, the show is named after the Ray and Charles Eames film Powers of 10, and it’s about the relative size of things in the universe and different levels of Zoom.

And it’s always been the way I’ve found it easiest to explain thinking about services actually. So the one final question is what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world?

[00:38:15] Johan Blomkvist: So my sort of focus and what’s it called when you can’t let go of one thing, you know like mono.

Passion. Passion, okay. Yeah. Passion. I, I was going to say mono. I’m a monomaniac when it comes to prototyping and, uh. Representing your thinking. So externalizing going from something that’s in your head to putting it out in the world somehow. And I think designers in general maybe are good at that, but I think in service design it’s been a little bit overlooked and I think we should teach and practice a lot more.

The process of materializing service, different ways of doing that, different ways of making it accessible to yourself and to others for co-design processes or for traditional design processes. Then if we want to make that distinction again and I think that would have a huge impact if we could develop the practice of externalizing service to make it easier to work with these materials.

Yeah. That’s such a great answer. I love it.

[00:39:28] Andy Polaine: Stefan.

[00:39:29] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah, that’s always hard to follow up a great answer. Right? But no pressure. I’ll try. yeah. You want will, you will just give me help tomorrow. Right. But no, but one, one thing I, I’ve been working with the meeting between design and the. And the public sector for a very, very, very long time now since 2003, somewhere.

And I think one thing that is often overlooked in, when, when working with that meeting with between design and public sector is how zooming out is done.

[00:40:09] Andy Polaine: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:10] Stefan Holmlid: So zooming out from the specific you know, meeting with a, with a doctors or whatever the zooming out is usually done through through the service.

And you think that it’s a service, but it’s actually not. Right. It’s actually the materialization of the societal contract. Mm-hmm. Or the right. You have, um. And that of course looks different in different you know, in different political systems, et cetera. But it’s still the fact that if it’s public sector, it’s not a service.

So I usually say that public precedes service in public service, right? Yeah. and that’s something. So swimming out to the service world is kind of, maybe not the thing we should do, but zooming out into the public world is probably the more. From my point of view, at least the one that is overlooked.

[00:41:08] Andy Polaine: Good. Thank you very much. Another great answer. So I made a little URL for the book on with my, because of the, the actual publishers one’s very long. so if you go to PLN me, that’s kind of pal me slash materials, dash of dash sd, you’ll find a link to the publisher’s website for the book. where can people find you both online?

I’ll put ’em in the show notes. So,

[00:41:33] Stefan Holmlid: I’m mainly, I’m, I’m so old, so I’m mainly on LinkedIn and of course on the university and on Scholar, right? That’s my slow social media kind of place.

[00:41:45] Andy Polaine: Okay.

[00:41:46] Stefan Holmlid: I can be found on, on that bird platform. I never do anything there anymore, but that’s another question.

[00:41:54] Andy Polaine: Yes. Are you on Mastodon?

[00:41:56] Stefan Holmlid: No.

[00:41:57] Andy Polaine: Oh, I thought you were okay.

[00:41:58] Stefan Holmlid: Get on there. Prob, I probably have an account, right? But I’m not on. Okay. Alright.

[00:42:04] Johan Blomkvist: how about you, Johan? Yeah, very similar for me. ResearchGate also, if you’re a researcher, that’s where you can find the things that I do. I think I update most manually update my publications and stuff like that on on ResearchGate.

But o otherwise it’s LinkedIn or scholar, I guess. Yeah, or the university website. Yeah.

[00:42:26] Andy Polaine: Okay. I’ll put all the links in the show notes. thank you so much for both being my guests on Power of Ten. Thank you.

[00:42:33] Stefan Holmlid: Thank you.

[00:42:34] Andy Polaine: You have been watching and listening to Power of Ten, you can find more about the show on pal.com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice online courses, sign up for my irregular use newsletter Doctor’s Note, and more thoughts and stuff around service design to if you have any thoughts, then you can put them in the comments below on YouTube or get in touch.

You’ll find me as @apolaine on pkm.Social on Mastodon. You’ll find me on LinkedIn and obviously my website and all those links will be in the show notes. Two. Thanks for listening and and watching, and I’ll see you next time.

Resolve Opinion Clashes With Questions

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0200

How do move forward when you get into clashes and power struggles?

We often get into situations when we feel unheard or want to assert our opinion, especially when managing sideways to peers or upwards to folks more senior. This can lead to a kind of power struggle head on clash of opinion against opinion. The counter intuitive approach to moving past this is not to tell, but to ask questions.

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Transcript

Intro

How do you move forward when you get into clashes and power struggles with colleagues and stakeholders? This week I want to talk again about the power of asking questions.

Dealing with opinion clash

We often get into situations when we feel unheard or want to assert our opinion, especially when managing sideways to peers or upwards to some folks more senior than us.

And this can lead to a kind of power struggle that ends up being just a head-on clash of opinion against opinion. The sometimes counterintuitive approach to moving past this is not to tell more, or to emphasize more or to try and get your opinion across more, but to ask questions.

On what basis are we building this?

Some favorite ones are very simple.

One is on what basis are we deciding to build this? So when you’ve got someone who’s saying, we are going to build this feature or they’ve just decided this is the next thing to be creating. If you ask them on what basis are we deciding to build this? They should have some kind of data, ideally from some research, and they should be able to tell you.

Now if they can’t tell you and they just go, well, it’s just my opinion. Well then you’re in an opinion against opinion thing. ‘cause you might say, well, in my opinion we shouldn’t. But then you can point that out. Then you can say, well it seems to me that we are in just having opinion against opinion. How can we find some more data to move us forward? There you might suggest doing some kind of experiments, doing some more research and so on.

Or maybe that person doesn’t know. That’s the beauty of asking questions. because you put the responsibility back on them to make the case rather than you having to make the case of why they’re wrong. So they will either know and they’ll tell you or they won’t know and they may have an aha moment where they’re like, oh, actually yeah, no, we should get some more data around that and understand that better.

Intent

Another useful question is what’s the intent behind this? Whether that’s a feature or a policy or a process, because people get dogmatic about, oh, that’s just the next one off the backlog, or, well, that’s just policy and so we have to do it.

But when you ask what’s the intention behind it, it’s the why behind the why classically, and it helps broaden out the problem space and you might have a different way of approaching it. It also gets you out of that problem where people are very focused on pushing a metric that has become a target, if you know Goodhart’s Law. For example, we need to go from being a two star app to a five star app in the app store. But why? Why? No, we just want to do that. But actually, if you read all the comments, it tells you exactly what you need to do.

Governance

Another good question, particularly if you are collaborating with peers, is how do we make decisions? It’s a funny question because it seems like, well, we just decide on stuff. But actually, if you don’t have a formal process or a formal kind of governance around this, then it just becomes whoever’s loudest or has the most influence in the room, and it’s not really actually an intentional and informed decision making. Lisa Welchman wrote a really good book called Managing Chaos about this.

So for example, you might say, well, when we are just opinion against opinion and we recognize that, what do we do? Go and get some more data and so on. It could be that someone says, well, when we don’t really know one way or the other, and it’s not tragic, which the decision is, it kind of doesn’t really matter who decides.

Or it may be that someone says, yeah, when we’re not sure and we’re sort of deadlocked, I’ll make the captain’s call because I’m the the boss. None of those is inherently wrong. But the point is that you want to be agreed and aligned on that upfront.

The questions become part of the process

You may find, as you use those questions often that you’re repeating yourself a bit too much, and so you can soften this a little bit by saying, look, I know I’m always the one asking this, but, what’s our intent behind this?

Sometimes what happens when you drip, drip away with that same question is people start to internalize it and so they, they do it in advance. For example, they might say, and because Andy always asks this, here’s the intent behind this thing, and that’s great now you’re in a very different kind of conversation and relationship with those people than you were before when it’s just one of you trying to persuade the other one that you are right and they’re wrong.

Outro

I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own tips, please post the comment below. I love to hear them.

Thanks very much, and I’ll see you again

Stop Asking For Permission To Do Your Job

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0200

Sometimes doing your job means actually doing your job.

Yet one of the habits we find hard to shake in a leadership role is seeking permission for doing what we think should be done. That’s the topic of this week’s coaching reflection.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

Sometimes doing your job means actually doing your job.

My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

Not asking permission

And this week, I want to talk about this idea of not asking permission.

So we go through the first half of our careers and often really the first half of our lives, with other people telling us what to do. From kindergarten all the way through to graduation, whether it’s your parents or teachers. Everyone’s giving you a structure and saying, okay, this is what you have to do.

And then you have this moment of graduation where you’re suddenly faced with the rest of your life. And it’s a little bit scary and oh my God, what am I going to do? Then we find our way and then we enter the workforce and we start that ladder all over again and there’s something that someone once said to me ages ago, that’s really stuck with me, which is the hard thing about growing up is realizing that adults don’t have all the answers.

And there’s a similar thing that happens when you move into leadership, which is part of your job is to make stuff up. Part of your job is to decide, this is what I think should be done. This is what I think we should do. And this is how we’re going to go about doing it.

Part of it is that we’ve gone through that whole part of our career always deferring to someone else. And it feels deeply strange to be the one who says, okay, we’re going to do this and we’re just going to do it.

So one thing to remember is you may be the most senior design person in your organization. There’s no one else really to check in with to see whether this is the right thing to be doing or not from a design perspective. So, if you say what I think we need to do this. I think we need to travel here, or I think we need to have this event or I think we need to implement this kind of structure in the way we work. Just go ahead and do it.

You don’t need someone who probably knows less about design than you do to tell you that that’s okay and to give you permission.

Dealing with blocking stakeholders

If you have a stakeholder who does have some kind of blocking power, one of the ways you can deal with that is just to say, I’m going to do this thing. I’m going to have this meeting going to have this workshop, going to deliver this piece of work, or this is going to go live. And give them a deadline for feedback or response. If you say, I’m going to do this. If you see any problems with this, please let me know by Friday. What you do is exactly what they do to you, which is to give you a deadline that they want you to respond by. And if they don’t, well, then it’s their fault, assuming they actually got the message. And you just go ahead and do the thing. And quite often that really gets around a lot of the gatekeeping.

It is actually your job

Now there is a caveat around this, which is sometimes you do actually have to have sign off from someone to release resources. And that can be problematic, but you will find quite often you can just carry on doing stuff and it’s your job to do it. Those people may be looking to you to actually just step up and do that stuff.

One of the things that comes up in coaching quite often is people saying, oh yeah, one of the bits of feedback I got is that I’m not being proactive enough. And this is exactly what they mean. If you’re the most senior design person and you’re working with senior leadership and they’ve asked for certain outcomes, it’s your job to come up with the way you’re going to achieve those outcomes. Then, if you keep saying, is this right? Is this the right way to do this? You’re actually not doing your job. Your job is to be the one who says this, I think, is the right way to do this. And to go ahead and do it.

Now, it’s not that you just mow down everyone else. You might want to get feedback. You might want to get input from different people. But someone has to go, we’re going to do this and just get on with it.

And with that, you have to get over the insecurity that well, it’s just my opinion. I’m just making this up. Because everyone’s just making it up. And that’s the thing about growing up, which is realizing you don’t have all the answers, but you do it anyway.

Outro

I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put the link below.

If you’ve got your own tips or thoughts about this topic, please comment below. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts.

Thanks very much. And I’ll see you next time.

Your Time is a Non Renewable Resource

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0200

This week’s Coaching Reflections video is all about valuing your time.

Your time is the fossil fuels of your life. You don’t know how much is left and it’s never coming back. So it’s really important to think about who deserves this most precious, non-renewable resource.

This small reframe can shift your relationship to unreasonable asks at work, how you approach interviews, avoid burnout, and shape what you want to do with your career and in life.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Your time is your most precious resource. So who deserves it?

My name is Andy Polaine, and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

Your time is a non-renewable resource

[00:00:12] Andy Polaine: And this week, I want to return to this topic of your time and the value of it. Because it comes up all the time in coaching sessions. I’ve done other videos about defending your time and boundaries. But I really want to restate this point.

If you’re working for an organization, most of the time, your job, ultimately, is to help them make money. Now money is a renewable resource. They’re always going to be able to get more of it, but your time is not. So any of those moments when you feel like, oh, I should probably work weekends and evenings, because I have to, because the work just has to get done, it is really important to remember what you’re actually giving up at that point. This non-renewable resource.

Now, I’m not saying you should never do that. There are obviously times when you might have to, or might want to do, but if you’re constantly in that crisis state, well, then it’s no longer a crisis. It’s just the norm.

So quite often this happens because a company’s leadership’s ambitions are greater than their willingness to resource them. And that’s why it’s so important to learn, to say no.

Our lives are just blips in history

[00:01:19] Andy Polaine: Thinking of your life in this way can be a little bit humbling. One of the things that’s part of an activity I get coachees to do is to go out into nature somewhere— forest, ocean, cliffs, or look up into the night sky at the stars— something to remind you that these things have been around for billions of years and will carry on being around for billions of years whilst your life is just a tiny little blip.

The point is that it’s not really to make you feel small. It’s to remind you of the preciousness of your time. So, I know it’s really difficult at the moment for a lot of people and when you’re applying for jobs and you get ghosted and all of that stuff is going on, which incidentally is terribly bad behavior from those companies and those recruiters. It’s also important to try and flip that script around a little bit and think, well, okay, this isn’t just about me and am I good enough for this organization?

Whether that is, you’ve got a job and it’s like, oh, am I hitting my performance targets and the hoops I’ve been told I should be jumping through. But certainly when you’re interviewing for a job, it’s a two way street. You’re interviewing that organization to see whether they deserve your most precious, non-renewable resource.

Although, that’s just a small reframe. It can really make a difference to the way you approach those interviews. And indeed move on from the ones who are taking ages to get back to you or ghosting you, or just being difficult. Your time is worth more.

Outro

[00:02:38] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s helpful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, you’ll find it at polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own thoughts about this, please post a comment below. I’m always really interested to hear how other people reframe or think about things, particularly regarding how you think about the usage of your time.

Thanks very much. And I’ll see you again soon.

AI is a double polluter

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0200

I’ve come to think of AI as a double polluter. Not only are the energy and water costs enormous for most of the unnecessary use cases, but the output goes on to pollute the cultural commons. One there and ingested into training models, it’s impossible to remove.

There are useful uses for AI, but writing an e-mail or a blog post for you is not one. Nor is making an image or video when there are so many out there already created by humans.

It’s the equivalent of being thirsty, but instead of turning on the tap, you get in a massive fossil fuelled SUV, drive 400m up the road, buy some bottled water, drink it and throw the plastic bottles down the storm drain.

And then complain that there are microplastics in your body and energy prices are expensive.

Photo by Catherine Sheila on Pexels

Asking For What You Want

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0200

When we using indirect, hedging language and people please, we can actually end up being selfish by accident, because we’re asking them to do the emotional lifting to decipher our request.

The topic of this week’s Coaching Reflections video is learning to ask for what you want in direct language without being rude. It is definitely something you can practice and it also builds your confidence.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Why is asking for what you want so difficult and why might something that feels like where people pleasing actually turn out to be selfish?

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week. And this week, I want to talk about this idea of people pleasing and using hedging language.

Hedging Language

[00:00:19] Andy Polaine: By hedging language. I mean the language we use to soften a request or something we want to say. So instead of saying, I would like X. You’re saying do you think it would be okay if I could just have X for a little bit of time?

Maybe you seen examples in your family or your social or work life as you’ve been growing up that are abrasive and you have a bit of a reaction to that and think I don’t want to be like that.

People Pleasing

[00:00:39] Andy Polaine: This can very quickly turn into a people pleasing complex. Where all you’re doing all the time is wanting to make sure that people like you.

And that can mean you’re inadvertently reinforcing the wrong behavior. So you’ve asked for something, maybe at work you’ve asked for something to be done in a certain way, but you’ve asked it in language that makes it sound like it’s optional and so the person has decided to do something else.

But the paradox is if you don’t actually ask for what you want and just hint at it. You’re actually making the other person do a lot of the emotional lifting to decipher what you’re asking for and try and read your mind.

They’re having to think, "Okay he, or she has said that thing, but what is it they really want? I think they maybe want this." And then of course they might get it wrong. And then you’re annoyed and then it’s their fault.

So that’s how that actually turns out to be selfish by accident.

Know Your Filler Words

[00:01:23] Andy Polaine: So, what can you do? Well, I want to emphasize to start with it, that this doesn’t mean being blunt or gruff or being rude. It just means being more direct and honest. And that’s using clearer language sometimes and avoiding your filler phrases and words. For example, a lot of mine are things like right, you know, like.

Some of those are going to creep into your natural language.

Practice asking for what you want

[00:01:43] Andy Polaine: You can practice asking for what you want with people you trust. So that might be your partner. That might be some other relatives or friends. And you can name it to yourself when you catch yourself doing it, or you can even name it to them. So when you catch yourself saying things like, "Well, you know, I’ll have whatever you’re having or so I’m thinking maybe what would be good would be…"

You can stop and say, "Hang on. I’m trying to get better at asking for what I want. Here’s what I want."

So when you do this among people you trust and more likely in your personal life, you break the pattern and the habit. You show a vulnerability to that person and you invite them to help you grow. And then you get to try it again.

So now the emotional lifting you’re asking that person to do is very direct. You’re saying help me get better at this, rather than please decode this for me whilst I just sit back.

So you can try out in a low stakes environment to start with asking for what you want to eat or drink or saying something that you don’t want or don’t like.

In work context, eventually, it could be asking for a raise or a promotion, or it could be giving direction at work where you really need to be clear about the fact this isn’t an optional thing. This is a thing that has to be done.

Treat it as a form of curious inquiry and just play with it. It’s just like any other creative process. You explore the affordances of the different kinds of materials, the different phrases and words you might use. You reflect on how that feels and then you practice and you iterate it and play with it.

And I think you will find as you start to practice it more, you start to gain confidence in it and you start to feel more confident in yourself and present more confidently.

Outro

[00:03:10] Andy Polaine: Hope that’s useful for you.

If you’d like to check out my coaching practice it is at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below.

If you’ve got any of your own tips, particularly asking for what you want, please post them below. I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much. And I’ll see you again soon.

The Four Seasons of Design

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0200

It’s important to build in a cadence of difference paces in your day, week, project and year. Without it, you risk burning out.

I like to think of this as the four seasons of design (and life). In this video, while walking through my own metaphor, I talk about what that looks like and how you might apply it to your work and life.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hi, so I thought I would do a slightly different Coaching Reflections this morning and take you on my morning walk with Charlie, who’s there, um, because I’m walking around here orchards and and fields and it reminded me of something I’ve talked about before which is this idea of the four seasons of design but I think it’s true of of life and work in general.

The Four Seasons of Design

[00:00:26] Andy Polaine: There was a book by John Seymour called The Guide to Self Sufficiency that my parents had when I was growing up and it had all these different pictures of the garden at different times of the year and it’s a something that really stuck with me as an idea. You know in springtime you prepare the ground, you sow seeds and plants and then it comes to summer and they grow, they grow like crazy if you have a good summer and sometimes get a bit out of control.

Uh, you don’t do much cutting back, you’re just sort of letting it go. And that’s kind of what our default state is with work, which is just growth all the time as fast as possible. A bit like bamboo growing everywhere. Uh, but come to autumn, and these trees for example have been all trimmed back a couple of months ago ready for winter. They’ll probably have another trim in early spring ready for the growth in spring. They’ve all dropped their leaves and that means they draw their energies down into their roots ready for winter. And I think it’s a really important time. In the garden in autumn you tend to everything, you cut stuff back, you repair fences, you check everything’s okay and maybe make some changes.

And then in winter you, you stop, like you’re forced to stop. And, rather than seeing that as a, the brakes, putting the brakes on, and in the northern hemisphere this idea of, um, kind of three months of purgatory and dark night, that in fact it can be quite nice. It can be a quite nice introspective time where you recharge and think about what you want to do, what you want to do with your life, what you want to do with work.

And on a kind of daily, or weekly, or project, or certainly yearly basis, you can think of that cadence too. Where what you’re doing is making sure that you take time to go for a walk, take time to go and have a coffee without checking Slack. Certainly if you’re in a leadership role, nobody’s going to do that for you.

You really have to defend that time, those time and boundaries. And for your team, you can enable that, you can enable a culture that that’s okay. That staring out the window is an okay thing to do. Because reflection time and time to think and the lack of it is something that coaches often complain about to me and it’s one of the things we spend time on early on.

And so, you know, whether it’s in a, in a week where you say, okay, on Fridays, we’re going to have a slightly slower pace. or, uh, in the month or the year, try and think about that cadence so that you’re not just flat out growing all the time. Because the goal of life is not productivity. I hate to break it to you productivity fiends out there.

The goal of life is sustainable growth. And if you don’t, if these trees don’t drop their leaves and recharge over winter, And they will eventually die. They’ll weaken and die because they don’t have that recharge time. And that’s of course what burnout is when it comes to our relationship to work.

Outro

[00:03:35] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s a useful thought for you.

Go out, take some time to recharge, enjoy the winter. Here where my metaphor completely breaks down in the southern hemispheres where you’re about to have your summer holidays after Christmas and New Year, well enjoy that. It’s a different kind of recharge. Should give you a hint that you should do this more often than just winter.

And um, I will put a link to the presentation that I did ages ago about this in the notes. And if you’re interested in my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching. Thanks. I’ll see you again soon.

Marzia Aricò – Design Leadership Maverick

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is Marzia Aricò, an independent consultant for organisations seeking to integrate design strategically, and works as a design leadership coach for individuals aiming to advance in their design careers.

Marzia has been immersed in the world of design leadership for more than 15 years. She holds a PhD on the topic from the Copenhagen Business School and has led design driven transformation programs with many major organizations. She also writes a regular newsletter called Design Mavericks and has a video series called Design Voices Elevated.

You can view it below or on YouTube or subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts or listen on the player below.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Audio

Show Links

Marzia

Marzia’s personal site: https://marzia.studio
Marzia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marziaarico/
Design Mavericks: https://designmavericks.substack.com
Design Voices Elevated podcast: https://designmavericks.substack.com/podcast
Design Voices Elevated on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@marziastudio
Design Leadership Chronicles book: https://www.bispublishers.com/design-leadership-chronicles.html

Andy

Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Design Leadership Coaching: https://polaine.com/coaching
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/andypolaine.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine

Timestamps

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:48 Marzia’s Background
00:06:14 Service Design and Organisational Change
00:14:03 Fear Anxiety
00:15:19 Design Leadership Chronicles
00:18:22 Coaching and therapy
00:21:53 Design Voices Elevated
00:26:57 Self Love Intentionality
00:35:37 Rethinking your future
00:42:25 One Small Thing
00:45:07 Outro

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors. AI is dumb, but also Marzia enthusiastically talked over each other a lot in this episode!

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of Zoom, from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organization, society, and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, educator, and writer. My guest today is Marzia Arrcò, an independent consultant for organizations seeking to integrate design strategically, and works as a design leadership coach for individuals aiming to advance in their design careers.

Marzia, welcome to Power of Ten

[00:00:46] Marzia Aricò: thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Marzia’s Background

[00:00:48] Andy Polaine: So Dr. Aricò, we can, we can call each other doctor. Tell me a little bit about your journey.

[00:00:54] Marzia Aricò: Okay. Brief intro is that I started from industrial design. Actually, my father was an architect. So I was thinking to become an architect. But then I realized I used to love going, you know, working with him as a young child. But then I realized that I was way more comfortable with a scale of design of objects.

Architecture was too large of a scale for me. And then I studied industrial design and started actually designing things, real products.

[00:01:21] Andy Polaine: Hmm.

[00:01:22] Marzia Aricò: And that didn’t last long. You know, I found myself in, uh, one year at the Salon del Mobile in Milan, and I’m Italian.

[00:01:29] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:01:30] Marzia Aricò: And, you know, I was surrounded by people that were, you know, conversing for hours about the perfect curve of a chair that probably a hundred people in the world would be able to afford. And I realized that that was not a good way of using my skills. So I have relocated to London, and I got into the world of design management, innovation management. So I really started thinking about design as a way to explore. Uh, support transformation really, mainly around innovation.

[00:02:00] Andy Polaine: Yeah,

[00:02:01] Marzia Aricò: And that brought me to my PhD in organizational studies because I very quickly realized that, you know, with a, with a wave of design thinking and service design, I really felt at one point like a corporate entertainer, you know,

you, you, you

are

in an organization. entertaining and innovation department that has some leftover budget, you know, they love working with you because you bring some new ideas and post its, but then there is no real impact. I mean, at least with the chair, there was the chair at the end of the project, you know, is that with this, there was really nothing. Um, so for me it was even worse. So I thought, okay, I thought there must be a better way to do this. And so I decided to go to a design, to a business school to really understand the way organizations work and how could we embed design in a way that could be a service of organizational goals and business goals. And so that was quite an enlightening, um, yeah, experience. And it brought a lot of that knowledge into LiveWork. I used to be design director of LiveWork in, actually in Brighton. I’m in London. So I translated, a lot of that academic thinking into practice and translated into models that could help organizations really apply design to their transformation efforts. So usually, I used to come in, and At moments where, you know, an organization was going through a digital, uh, transformation or some agile transformation sort of, consumer obsession, right? So those things, they are quite grand, they have big words that no one understands and they’re usually tech led.

[00:03:36] Andy Polaine: Yeah,

[00:03:37] Marzia Aricò: And so I used to bring a design approach, a more realistic approach to the

story.

[00:03:44] Andy Polaine: and I’ve

completely forgot about the live work connection actually and and the whole service

[00:03:49] Marzia Aricò: yeah I’ve been there for 10 years.

[00:03:52] Andy Polaine: I haven’t I haven’t actually read it yet, but your latest newsletter. You, you talk about, you’ve got this, uh, competency model, right, for service designers.

Just so I can kind of age you , um, when did you, when did the, I was gonna say date you, when were you doing the, the PhD?

[00:04:08] Marzia Aricò: Finished

in 2018,

[00:04:12] Andy Polaine: Okay. All right.

[00:04:13] Marzia Aricò: so I started four years earlier.

[00:04:14] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So, you know, earlier than many in the whole designers need to learn about business and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:24] Marzia Aricò: I did this as a, as a

practice led PhD, like an industrial PhD, so I wasn’t really a PhD. in academia instead of academia doing only that but I was working and live work at the same time and for me it was the best setup because I could immediately, you know, observe reality in my projects with my clients, translate that into the world of academia and vice versa, so it was a really good setup for me. I was not there to, you know, resolve a gap in the literature, you

know, I was

there to, to, to, to find the space to really scientifically look at the issue.

[00:04:57] Andy Polaine: And it was about design. Organizations or the, the,

[00:05:01] Marzia Aricò: about the adoption of service design in

organizational context.

Uh, and it took me about two years actually to find a business school that would Allow me to do

that because

you know, yeah, because I have a design

background.

So every single business school I approach were like, you know, you are a designer.

You should go to a design school to do a PhD and I had plenty of design

schools that wanted to do this with me. Right. But I was like, you know, I understand the design part. What I don’t understand is your part. Like I need your help to understand your bit. And it just, the answer was no. I mean, usually they used to tell me, yeah, go, go do an MBA. And then come back and I’m like, I’m not going to spend like a 200k to do an MBA, two years and then come back to do four years PhD, forget it. And then eventually I found this illuminated professor at Copenhagen Business School who was really believing in the power of Stephan Misk, in the power of, you know, bringing

design and business

together.

And he was running an experiment, bringing really students from the design school and the business school, to, to really explore alternative ways of imagining really organizations and the future.

that was the perfect place for me to do that. But it really took me a while to find that

island

of joy.

Service Design and Organisational Change

[00:06:14] Andy Polaine: That just goes to show you kind of the divisions there, doesn’t it? The kind of siloing that goes all the way through. I mean, I certainly found that in academia too, I think it was Yuval Noah Harari that was talking this. said isn’t it ridiculous that the school of economics is in a different building to the school of biology or the climate change department or any of these things, you know, and humanities.

So, in this, we’ve often talked, um, by I say, we, as a collective service design kind of community about really when service design is successful in an organization , there’s been a sort of injection of it, you know, so they might hire consultants or be building up that department in house.

The whole organization really switches to that mindset and it’s, it becomes a sort of normed way of working rather than this kind of innovation jazz hands thing that I mean, I had someone say to me, a client, uh, sometime ago, Oh yeah, we did, we did service design last year

[00:07:08] Marzia Aricò: It didn’t work. It didn’t work.

[00:07:10] Andy Polaine: design last year, didn’t we?

So now we’re, you know, whatever they were doing, the next thing. So what did you discover in your PhD around that? And what’s the secret to it getting absorbed and transforming an organization? And, you know, what barriers are there?

[00:07:25] Marzia Aricò: Look, I think with everything, the key is understanding the context.

So when service design comes in, it usually, it rarely enters as service design. It enters as service of something. And usually that something is customer centricity, or the customer voice, or, you know, very, very, very often it’s customer experience. So when that happens You bring inside an organization a fundamentally different logic to what exists there, right? And so what I started looking at is what are the logics that operate in an organizational context that determine the way people think and behave, right? And there are not infinite number of logics. Um, there are probably six or seven. So I, I used, you know, an example of a telco organization and there was this market. traditional technical logic dominant there, which tells you, you know, it’s all about, you know, profit. It’s all about technology as driver of innovation. It’s all about specialism, right?

And then there was a second logic that was quite, you know, relevant and present, but smaller than the first one. And there was a digital one. So they went through a digital transformation years before. So the digital logic is somewhat similar to the traditional one, but brings some aspects forward in terms of speed.

For example, speed becomes a very big thing, right? And the approach to innovation becomes agile and

[00:08:49] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:08:50] Marzia Aricò: And then, and then, and then you get customer centricity is a logic on his own. And you can actually see people carrying these different logics. Like you see which groups of people actually portraying, believing, you know, carrying

those sets of values and beliefs.

And it’s not that one thing is wrong and the other is right. You know, like those organizations have been operating like this for centuries and very, very successfully. So, you know, you come in with a completely different set of, uh, of, uh, of, uh, ideas and, and you’re trying to basically, um, tell them that what you bring is better than what they have, which rarely works, right?

So, so the idea that I try to introduce is, is combining, combining logic. So, so first of all, can you really break down the existing logic and understand what are the key elements that make the logic? What are the words that people use? What, what do they believe in, in terms of, you know, the very purpose of this organization and now, and now, and now that purpose comes to life, right? In terms of ways of working. And then understanding what, what, what are areas where you can really collaborate, where, where there is somewhat similarities, there is an opening where you can actually work together. And what are areas where, where you count, where fundamentally there is, there is such a clash that you will have to basically either push for one or the other.

But, and then if that is the, the, the, the option that you go for, how are you going to do that? Right? Because you’re not going to be able to tackle everything at once. So what is your best bet? Where do you start? How strategically can you do that? And, and so that was a big part of my research. Defining what these logics were and the composing elements and how to recognize them and how to work with those.

[00:10:39] Andy Polaine: So this all makes a lot of sense as you’re describing this. And yeah, I think there’s often that thing between, I like that you called it logics there’s because there’s this idea of a worldview that makes sense to people as an internal worldview of kind of how they think about things.

Often though a tension or, uh, outright kind of clash between the stated principles of the organization and the logic of the organization. And, you know, the one, the one that’s top of mind for me right now is Google’s emissions through their AI ambitions are now 50 percent higher than they were because of the data centers. And so, you know, there’s one of those things where there’s a classic, you know, here’s what our mission statement, here’s what our ambitions are, here’s what we’re saying. And yet, there’s this other thing that’s driving them that’s actually with the sort of actual logic on the ground or the kind of the tacit, sometimes it’s not even explicit, right?

The tacit, this is the way we do things around here. How have you sort of found the

[00:11:37] Marzia Aricò: first thing I

[00:11:38] Andy Polaine: that or exposing it even maybe? Yeah.

[00:11:40] Marzia Aricò: exposing it, I think, is that it’s a better question solving it is a much harder answer, but exposing it, I think, is the first step. And usually the way I’ve started my research in every single one of the organizations I looked at, and I looked at about 10, 11 organizations, is what are you here to do as an organization? So what’s your purpose, right? And in what way people answer to that? And then you will discover that there is not one logic of the organization. There is a logic of a group of people that has critical mass. And then there is another group of people who actually explains the purpose of the organization in a wildly different way. And you will find pockets, right, of people doing that. You will probably find two or three. And those really are the first representation of conflicting logics. And what literature tells you, because obviously I base this on theory,

institutional logics theory, um, What literature tells you is that if the conflict arises at the level of purpose of the organization, that is not, it is not possible to resolve it.

So one will have to prevail over the other, basically. Uh, I tend to agree with that in a sense although my view of the world is a bit more nuanced than that, I have not seen anything else in practice happening.

[00:13:02] Andy Polaine: And so in those situations, so in that, in that sense, there’s like a dominant group and I guess it’s a top down thing. It’s, it’s rare. I tried to think of an example, well, is it rare for the critical mass to come from the bottom of the pyramid, if you like?

[00:13:19] Marzia Aricò: Only from the bottom of the pyramid? I don’t think so.

I don’t think

that can

happen.

I think you need, you need a bit of

both, right?

So critical mass exists when it, it, you know, it, it is, um, complemented by, you know, different levels of seniority

and different,

But to be honest, if you look at examples where organizations really managed at one point to radically pivot from one thing to another.

It happened through a massive round of layoffs, basically. If you look at the moment in which, you know, IBM at one point decided to reintroduce design and this renaissance of design in IBM happened because there was a new leader who decided to just cut a whole, you know, layer of people like in droves and then replace them with people with a completely different mindset, right?

And you create, you artificially create a new critical mass.

Fear & Anxiety

[00:14:03] Andy Polaine: Yeah. I guess really like, you know, amputation and kind of, amputation and an implant isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. I always come back to this over and over again. I think, I don’t know if it is for you and it’d be interesting to hear your view on this that comes up in coaching all the time is the level of fear and anxiety kind of in the world of work in general.

And, you know, obviously there’s in coaching, you hear it from coachees, but also how much is, you know, all the way through the organization, whether you’re a junior and that sort of in some respects more understandable cause you don’t have any power and you might get fired through, but right the way, all the way up to the top.

There was a stat I think that came out the other day, which I don’t know how to really kind of interpret this stat, but something like 60 percent of CEOs feel they have imposter syndrome, you know and so, you know, all the way through it was certainly kind of middle to senior leadership, junior, executive leadership.

There’s a lot of fear and anxiety that seems to really be pervasive and shape the kind of behavior and culture of the organization. There’s a lot of kind of hidden tensions and that there. Did you, did you find in your, either in your PhD or in your coaching that that is the case? Yeah.

[00:15:16] Marzia Aricò: fear. Like the book, I’m going to publish a book.

Design Leadership Chronicles

[00:15:19] Marzia Aricò: I’m going to publish that. That is, that is the currency. I’m going to publish a book in November. It was going to be called eventually Design Leadership Chronicles. But actually the original title of the book was Fear of Design. And, uh, and then I change it because people said it’s a negative thing, but actually so true, like, you know, and and fear is what is what moves things inside organizations.

And that is the reason why large, especially large organizations are not for everyone for a very specific, you know, subset of individuals that can actually handle that and are okay to deal with that. So yes, it emerges very often in all sorts of different places. Um, In my coaching for sure, and these days more about probably in the coaching about all the rounds of

layoffs that

have happened, is my job secure? But also in terms of imposter syndrome, am I good

enough?

And in the book, I have, um, basically portraying nine stories of design leaders from all over the world. So these are leaders that work for very large organizations in various sectors, from healthcare to banking, and it’s a graphic novel.

So I’m, I’m telling

each

individual

stories in, in, in, in a graphic novel format, right? And that, that is one of the things that I really wanted to highlight, like the human side of it. The human, the toll, if you like, of covering positions of that kind for, for a long period of time, trying to drive that level of change

in a place that really rejects you, right?

Rejects you and, and your, and your ideas and your way of seeing the world. And, and, and in many of these, I, I’m thinking of a specific chapter where there is this woman in a corner thinking, I’m not good enough, I’m not good enough, I’m not good enough. And how do you get out of the mantra that you’re not good enough to actually, you know, drive your team to start

growing change,

right?

It’s a very hard thing to do. But a lot of these people have managed, managed. I think it’s a very human thing. To feel, you know, I think it would be weird not to feel, you know, on the other side, it would be weird to feel that you’ve got it all, you know, it all, and then, you know, you’re, you’re up for the challenge because some of the, some of the, you know, challenges that these organizations face are really complex, you know, redesigning healthcare for the entire population of Brazil,

like there are lives at stake.

There are not just in terms of patients, but also actually the employees, uh, you know, jobs and. And you’re really rethinking the way a certain organization goes about delivering some crucial services for people. So it would be weird I think and not necessarily right to actually go in it saying yeah, I’ve got it all.

I’m good You know, I know what i’m doing. So I think there is a level of actually, sanity for like, uh, it’s a healthy way of questioning yourself. The problem becomes when that paralyzes you,

right?

Paralyzes your, your actions and your choices. And that’s what I tend to explore with the people

[00:18:20] Andy Polaine: In your, in your coaching. Yeah.

Coaching and therapy

[00:18:22] Marzia Aricò: Yeah. And a lot of the times then you discover that actually the source of the problem is not really their role. It’s really coming from the parents, right?

[00:18:29] Andy Polaine: yeah, So I usually,

[00:18:31] Marzia Aricò: I,

I am at a point, no,

but I’m at a point where I refuse to coach people that do not have a psychotherapist.

Like if you are doing, so if you are doing a parallel kind of experience, introspective experience about who you are, where you’re coming from, what are your triggers, usually my role as a coach is way easier and become way more effective.

[00:18:52] Andy Polaine: I do explore this too in my coaching. My wife’s a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and I sort of draw a lot from that work, and it’s something I’ve done for a very long time too, about 25 years. I have two opening questions in my coaching actually, is my secrets.

One is, you know, what did you want to be as a teenager? Because I’m always interested to know, some people are like, Oh, I’ve known I wanted to do something creative since I was six. And other people were like, Oh, I wanted to be a, you know, a fireman or thought I was going to be a doctor, you know, and their parents wanted them to be a doctor.

And then, you know, there’s always this interesting moment of when did you discover that design was a thing? And this was a thing that you could do. For your case, your father’s an architect. My dad was a designer, my brother’s a designer. And so that was kind of always there. Um, I actually wanted to be a filmmaker though.

I wanted to be a film director.

[00:19:38] Marzia Aricò: Oh,

[00:19:39] Andy Polaine: Um, and so it’s always interesting because I often think there’s a, there’s always that slight echo of that initial ambition that sort of pervades people’s lives, it does for me. But there’s the other bit which gives you a chance to talk about people’s parents and upbringing, because your parents, in, in leadership, your parents are the first people you encounter as leaders, right?

They’re your role, role models, the people who are in charge of what’s going on around here. Right? And, and it really is fascinating how often that comes up and, you know, when I hear that and then when I hear then people’s kind of issues, particularly when they’re dealing with senior stakeholders and managers, it’s, it’s really common.

And it’s funny cause I have some coaches like, well, I’ve, I’m thinking of doing some therapy at the same time, but does it, is it going to kind of clash? And I’m like, no, no, no, no, please do it. You know, please do, both. Yeah. Because I also want to have the time, cause I’m not, I’m not a therapist, although I’ve got a lot of kind of experience in it, but I, but I also have times when I, you know, want to say to someone, Hey, you know, I think this is something that would be really useful for you to work on in therapy because there’s some stuff that I can’t, um,

don’t feel responsible enough yet to bring up in a, in a session, particularly in an online thing, you know.

[00:20:48] Marzia Aricò: But also on the other way around, like the other way around, if they are aware of specific triggers or trauma or, you know, sources of certain, you know, behaviors, then it’s way easier to recognize

that and,

and, and, and embrace it in

your strategy

and you’re thinking about your career and choices and you become way more

intentional if you God, I wish so many more people did it though, as well, because it’s,

[00:21:10] Andy Polaine: you know, one of the things there was a thing I read, uh, then if you read Stowe Boyd, he does has this work futures newsletter there was an HBR article. I went to have a look for it just now, but I didn’t want to get distracted.

It was kind of, we did a study to, you know, examine whether the way managers react to employees talking about their emotions makes a difference. And we discovered that it does. And I’m like, really, no shit, and so much of that stuff, it’s this, we’ve got this data and part of me is like, great, well now you’ve got some data about the bleeding obvious, right? But another part of me is always astonished at how this idea of professionalism means you, you know, you just suppress your emotions at work and yet you see the toxic outcomes of doing that, right? All the

[00:21:53] Marzia Aricò: time

Design Voices Elevated

[00:21:53] Marzia Aricò: But that is

the reason, that is the reason why I started my, uh, video

series, Design

Voices Elevated, because, you know, I’ve been in my entire career, I’ve been working as a consultant with very large organizations were dominated by a very specific group of individuals, usually typically men, typically white, typically in

[00:22:15] Andy Polaine: People look like me. It’s, it’s

[00:22:17] Marzia Aricò: Well, I mean, a bit less creative, I’d say, so.

[00:22:20] Andy Polaine: Me in a suit,

[00:22:21] Marzia Aricò: and also whearing a suit or not. But usually with that, um, kind of approach to leadership where, you know, your, your emotions and your, your vulnerability should be hidden.

Right.

And, and the, the loudest voice is the most important voice. Right. And so at one point, I mean, for me, I had a really a breaking point where it was like, I really don’t want to, I do not want to do this anymore.

Like I do not want to enable any more of these people to make more money or expand their markets or, you know, whatever the thing is that we’re doing. But I also, I felt the need to hear other narratives, you know, other narratives of people that are leading in organizations, they are making change happen, but they’re doing it in just different

[00:23:04] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:23:05] Marzia Aricò: And so that’s why I started looking at women, people of color, non binary, like people that might have just a different way of looking at what success looks like, what leadership

looks like,

what management looks like,

[00:23:20] Andy Polaine: It’s a great series. So you’ve got all of these, you’ve got all of these people I’m really interested to know whether there is … there’s a couple of things actually. As you say, the dominant culture is, like I said, people look like me, cis, white, middle aged men, who maybe don’t even think about the fact that there’s a whole structural bias in that direction, right, in the worst case.

So it’s not always easy for those people that you’re interviewing in Design Voices Elevated to even get into leadership positions in the first place.

and it’s also not easy, as you talked about, you know, in an organization that might have a different set of logics to operate, to bring a new one in, right.

And to operate in a different one. So are there any clear sort of themes and topics that you’ve learned through those or common themes and topics that you’ve learned through those videos.

[00:24:04] Marzia Aricò: Yes,

I think so. Actually, it’s the first time that I’m reflecting. On it like that, because I’ve been running

you know, and then stopping it to actually reflect the holistic. about what, what is happening this first 10 episodes? It’s a very good question. Um, you know, in the first season, I’ve interviewed people who were diverse in lots of different ways, like, uh, diverse in terms of social economic background.

For example, I interviewed, uh, Bethany Jarroussié, who comes from a very large family, 10 kids. None of them went to school. She, she, she did not go to school. She did not graduate. She was homeschooled and she did not go to university. And so for her, that, uh, was a big stigma, you know, like it was really difficult to get into a corporation and just say yeah, I don’t have a degree and I’ve been homeschooled for my entire life and I was actually a part of a family that was moving every year, you know, and there were others that were just racially different, like black women. I just actually interviewed for season two, the first black man. And, um, or, uh, you know, in terms of also kind of ethnicity, all sorts, gender, but also sexual orientation. And, and for all of them, it’s, it’s been very difficult to find their space in a, in an environment, in a system that was just simply not designed for them. Where they were the exception, and themselves being themselves because when you tell people you know you should show up as your

[00:25:29] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Your authentic self. Yeah.

[00:25:31] Marzia Aricò: yeah it’s very easy if you fit the parameters of what people like or or consider acceptable or consider you know legitimate but if you don’t it’s really hard to just show up as yourself and then people go like wait a

[00:25:44] Andy Polaine: Well, it’s dangerous. I mean, it’s no good it’s

[00:25:46] Marzia Aricò: dangerous you

[00:25:47] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:25:48] Marzia Aricò: And so I think there are a couple of things.

What, what the first one is like an incredible self love, like these people are, are self aware, they love themselves as

individuals and not in a way that they think that they’re better than others, but they just like who they are. And so, and so in a sense, they are confident enough to actually bring out that. piece of themselves in an environment that might not necessarily like it because they’re not going to change their idea about themselves because that dude thinks differently. And And these are people that have been also very reflected because they are not privileged in the sense that options are given to them.

But there are people that have to scrap every single next opportunity, right? They’re just, you know, digging for the next thing, uh, and really working hard to make it happen. They’ve been incredibly intentional in their progression in their, uh, career in the, in the choices that are

[00:26:45] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:26:45] Marzia Aricò: uh, way more than a lot of other people that I spoke with, you know, when in very fancy universities and, and their father, you know, called

[00:26:55] Marzia Aricò: their mates and

[00:26:56] Andy Polaine: It was all easy. for them, you know?

Self Love & Intentionality

[00:26:57] Marzia Aricò: Um, so that’s the second thing. So the first is, um, yeah, self love and the second is intentionality. And let me think if there is anything else. Oh yeah, the third is probably an incredible amount of passion. Like, these are all people that are really passionate about the subject matter that they are in, but also like the people they do it with, right?

They’re all people,

people, you know, there are people that really care about the people and, and whatever they do, they try to do it with a team of, uh, individuals that, share a sense of, uh, the same beliefs and values, if you like.

In a lot of these conversations, they always refer to their team or the group that they were, they did the thing with

[00:27:44] Andy Polaine: yeah. And is that sort of intentional also in terms of they’ve built their tribe around them really, they’ve deliberately found those people and, if they’re in leadership roles and hired those people or has it just been a sort of gravitational pull to the people who have followed them?

[00:27:58] Marzia Aricò: pull. I think it’s a gravitational pull and, and, and these are generally people that can find the best in

others, you know,

so they don’t necessarily need to build their own team of like minded

people.

They’re actually able to jump into a situation where a team is broken and people treat each other with no respect or, you know, and then work with that material of design, if you like. to make something wonderful out of it, right? Because these are people that profoundly believe in, in, uh, that there is good in everyone, you know? And so I can certainly work with you, even if other people think that you are not good enough, or if you are, uh, Yeah, not considered, you know, you don’t have good relationships with others or So in a lot of the cases that I heard, it’s not necessarily I mean, in some cases they build their

own teams, but in a lot of others they just go in and just work with the people that they had in a way that was unprecedented. Because, you know, when When you are used to, like a lot of the people, probably you have the same, like a lot of the people that I coach have no one example of a good leader or manager in their

career.

They’ve always been widely, you know, treated really badly, you know, they’re just very bad examples of people that are massive egos, uh, you know. And so when that’s the only example you have, then it’s the only thing you think to do,

you know, but

when something new happens to you, when someone comes with a completely new perspective on what leadership is, that someone that gives you agency, that, you know, empowers you, if you like, although it’s a word that I really don’t like, because when you talk about empowerment means like, you know, the power is somewhere and then you

[00:29:36] Andy Polaine: Yeah. It’s, it’s a little bit colonial, in itself, Yeah.

[00:29:39] Marzia Aricò: it’s, yes, but okay, it’s a word that, you know, people understand.

So, then, you know, things change. People change. People start seeing their environment and their relationship with others in a slightly different way. And it takes time, but it is possible. So a lot of these stories are stories of that

[00:29:55] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Pull those threads together, you were talking, we were talking about that thing of people feeling like they’re not good enough and, and all of that sort of feeling, because that’s, you know, messaging you get a lot as well. I mean, that’s what a, a management structure and all those bloody performance reviews and all that kind of stuff that in corporations are really set up to constantly remind you that you could be doing more, you know,

you

should

be doing more, you know, even if you’re burning out.

So it’s not, it’s never enough, right? Even if you hit.

Even

if you’re a manager, you’re someone in sales and you’re, you know, you’re hitting all your targets,

[00:30:27] Marzia Aricò: your

target. it’s like, well, that’s well done, here’s your new target, you know, and you don’t get to just sit back and relax. And so there’s this constant undermining of yourself. I want to come back to a question about this, but if you’re saying that, you know, these people that you have been interviewing in the elevated series, that they are, have got this kind of amount of self love. And it’s contagious, right? So then when they have that, then other people get permission to have that and it will shift them out of a operating out of a kind of position of fear, which is usually pretty toxic for everyone to, to a different one of, of confidence and that idea of there’s good in people.

[00:31:03] Andy Polaine: My question for you though, there is what’s really a question for them as well, which is. You know, a lot of those people who are, um, in some kind of minority, you said it’s difficult for them to kind of rise up in a structure that doesn’t really encourage it. It’s not just doesn’t encourage it, often actively suppresses it, right?

So, if you’re a woman of color or a non binary person you’re constantly getting the messaging that you’re, you’re different. You’re not right. You’re not one of us, all of that sort of stuff. How have those people found their kind of self love and confidence in the, in the face of that,

[00:31:40] Marzia Aricò: That’s a very good question. I’m not sure. This is something that I should ask. Actually. Yeah.

[00:31:46] Andy Polaine: cause, cause it, because there’s that sort of classic,

the way I’m sort of getting

to with that as I guess there’s a, there’s that classic.

[00:31:52] Marzia Aricò: Yeah.

[00:31:54] Andy Polaine: False DEI thing where, where kind of people will say, well they should speak up and it’s like, no, but you don’t understand the power differential there.

But these are people who have spoken up, have stepped forward in the face of often, you know, the possibility of losing their job and, and all of these things. Um,

[00:32:11] Marzia Aricò: and I’m

I don’t know. I can guess. I guess, um, you know, one thing that I find that’s, uh, in common to all of them is they’re incredibly reflective people. Like, they really cruelly know themselves, you

know, in the good and bad ways. Their experience is also varied. Like these are rarely people that have stayed in one place for like 10, 15 or 20

years. These are people that have seen multiple realities of different sizes, shapes, right? Small businesses, they were founders, they were then, you know, in a large corporate and moved to another one. So there are people that are exposed to a variety of humanity. And I’m hoping and guessing that in that, you know, changing movement, um, Yes, you will find people that consider you wrong and will not miss any opportunity to make the clear but you will also find people that don’t and that encourage you and One of the questions that I usually ask is Like something in your career that changed everything for

you

and usually it’s what their reference is, a

[00:33:14] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:33:15] Marzia Aricò: that opened up something for them in terms of self realization, in terms of change of perspective, in terms of, you know, very often it’s about, you know, how Someone that helped them realize how to, uh, operate from a position of strength rather than one of

weakness, right?

Because what we usually do is, you know, we think about in all of the different ways in which we are weak in a certain position and use that as a starting point while flipping the perspective on what are actually my strengths within this environment and how can I leverage that. That’s a very different starting point in your connection with others even.

[00:33:51] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

I think it’s the first time sometimes people have been seen, you know, properly seen as a, as the person they really are by someone. It’s incredibly valuable that I think, you know,

[00:34:00] Marzia Aricò: Yeah,

it’s really

powerful.

And it’s rarely a manager, or a leader, or a sort. It’s just another It could be a peer, it could be anyone.

[00:34:07] Andy Polaine: yeah, I mean, I definitely heard some, you know, when we were talking about some people’s stories of childhood some of the stuff I’ve heard is a teacher, you know, teachers who had a moment, but sometimes it’s that sometimes it’s a relative, you know, Sometimes it is a manager.

I’ve heard, you know, my coaching occasionally, um, and that, that person’s then followed that manager to different companies, right? They’re, they’re loyal to that person. Um, and then they get to a point where they realize that they also then want to sort of move, move away from that because they start to feel a bit dependent.

But I think sometimes it really is just a person said, Oh, you know, You’re really good at this, or you should try this, or, you know, and they, they’re seen, and they have that moment of being seen as the person they are, and it gives them such confidence. In the face of, I guess, the organizational structure that’s very common to, to suppress all of that, whether it’s the sort of feelings and emotions, or whether it’s this is your role, stay in your box and all of that, or even not having that kind of conversation, right?

Not even, you know,

Having a culture where, you know, like that HBR article where talking to people about how they feel, um, and surprise, surprise, the human beings. I felt like that whole article could have been, we did a bunch of studies to find out that humans aren’t robots, you know, um, you know it really makes a difference in opening that space.

There’s so much we could talk about we’re coming pretty close to time. You’ve talked about this idea of alternative futures and using design to sort of reinvent the future of the organization. Um, tell me a little bit about that before we to wrap up.

Yeah.

Rethinking your future

[00:35:37] Marzia Aricò: Yeah. I think it’s one of the best things that design can bring in an organizational context. Um, this ability to really rethink what your future could look like. And it’s so so relevant right now. All sorts of different changes the organizations have to deal with, right? And, and usually the response is very reactive.

The structure is rarely set up to be able to see the change coming and ride the wave rather than succumb under it, you know? And so a lot of the kind of work that I’ve been doing, but also the research that I’ve led, is really to try and understand in what way, uh, designers and design can do that. And in the book specifically, I have a whole section around it with three stories. And one of these stories is, um, uh, the story of a woman that I absolutely love and respect, Harriet Buckleham. She’s, uh, actually British, but, uh, She used to live in Australia and now she’s in Singapore. She’s um, director of design at DBS, the bank now. Uh, but before that she was working for an insurance and a lot of the work that she has done is to really think about, you know, in a world where, that eventually is an uninsurable world, right? Where, you know, heat waves are hitting on a weekly basis and, you know, you have hailstorms and all of that and, you know, insuring your houses is just not as simple as it was, you know, a couple of decades ago. What is your role as an insurance? You know, what is that? Are you going to insure? Like, what is your business model even, you know? And I love the ability of designers to actually ask these dumb questions. The people go like, oh. Like who are you even? Like why are you, you know? Like, uh, you know, it’s like almost just stopping the wheel.

Like people are in this tunnel vision. Deliver, deliver, deliver, deliver, deliver. And then she just, she put a, you know, piece of wood in the wheel, stop the wheel and go like, hold on a minute. Like, and, and I find that incredibly powerful, just the ability to actually ask the question. But then what she did was to really work with she, um, scenario planning, and she did a course at Oxford. Say business school with some professors that really help her think how scenario planning could really, uh, work in a context. And she basically materialized. You know, she told me one thing that really stick with me. She said strategists tell to make, while designers make to tell, right?

And so what she did, she really crafted this plausible futures in a way that people could interact with it. And she had four plausible alternative futures that could actually become reality. And she made all of the artifacts and she had actors, you know, acting, the, the role is a small business owner. She had the kind of food the people eat and the kinda smells the people would have, right? And she allowed stakeholders to really immerse themselves into the world and the problems related to the world and the opportunities related to the world to then engage them into conversation. Okay. In a world of this kind, what is our role as an organization. And then you start really, because you bring people outside of the daily, but you project them in something that is so, you know, they feel so further away, then they, you start unlocking the creative powers that individuals didn’t even know to have and, and start connecting dots in ways that are just unprecedented. And so from that piece of work, a completely a new strategy for an organization emerged. I find that incredibly

powerful, this ability of allowing people to imagine, but also, and more importantly, to connect that to what does that mean for our today, right? So what does it mean for what am I going to do tomorrow morning? Because, you know, it’s all very beautiful to just, you know, as an artist, bring people out there and experience something new, but then the connecting the dots into your role tomorrow morning, um, That’s as important as the other bit. And I think designers more and more, the role of designers, strategic designers should actually be that,

you know,

should really help organizations and people in organizations ambition, the future that they want to be in.

[00:39:45] Andy Polaine: you know, you forget that you’re, cause you take it for granted. I think that you can do things like draw or, or, or, or kind of manifest things that your superpower is you can make an abstract idea tangible in some way. And I’ve just, I teach on a Master’s, I co lead a Master’s of Service Design in Switzerland and we’re talking about sort of prototyping stuff and this idea, you know, that there’s obviously down one end there’s all the stuff you might do and you do your research and you do your kind of concepts and all that stuff, but it stays very where we are now, but obviously prototyping the future and things like design fictions and critical design are really powerful because of that thing that you do. You take people off the treadmill really. Uh, and then just kind of looking down at the ground and running and running and running and, uh, and you have to, you ask the question of not just why is it like that, you know, and what might that be?

But the ability to make that tangible the way you just described it is incredibly powerful because as you say, you know, once people then Once people see it, they can go, Oh, right. Now I see that, that changes the

[00:40:43] Marzia Aricò: you cannot unsee

[00:40:45] Andy Polaine: you can’t unsee it. Yeah, it’s Yeah. Yeah. That’s very true. How powerful is that indeed?

[00:40:49] Marzia Aricò: Yeah. You know, within that, I’m, I’m really a big fan of, for designers to understand business, to

understand organizations. A lot of the stuff that I have been writing the last year is all about that, like explaining to a design audience how organizations work, how are policies set, how are people measure stuff, what is a business model?

You know, all the basics, but that is not true. then comply and become part of the machine. That is knowledge to use to do stuff like this, you know, to allow imagining alternative futures with a language and a connection to the reality of today, uh, that is relevant, right? So it’s a way to be relevant rather than a way to become like them, you

know, and I don’t want to do it.

I don’t want to do

[00:41:37] Andy Polaine: Us and them. Yeah.

[00:41:38] Marzia Aricò: but you know.

[00:41:39] Andy Polaine: But I think, I noticed that people talk about engineering, but we talk about design and somehow designs become this kind of noun. And, and we don’t talk about designing.

And I think there is that part where I just need a bit more research and research can be a fantastic procrastination tool as well. Right. I just, I just need a bit more. Um, because it’s almost so that they can then color by numbers.

And I think, you know, there’s that leap. The designing bit is imagining what a future, whether it’s sort of an object or a website or whatever, uh, or a whole, you know, social scenario, imagining what that might be like. And our job is to make stuff up. Our job is to imagine something new and then make it tangible. And that’s the designing bit that I feel has got somehow lost in, uh, in the last few years.

[00:42:25] Marzia Aricò: I agree.

One Small Thing

[00:42:25] Andy Polaine: So we’re coming to the end. As you know, the show is named after the Powers of 10 film by Ray and Charles Eames about the relative size of things in the universe. What one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world?

[00:42:41] Marzia Aricò: Okay, I have something in mind, which is not really small,

but I’m going to use

that one anyway. Which is education of small children.

Um,

I’m thinking like zero three even. You know, that is like the period of our lives where. Our infrastructure is set, you know. And kids are usually treated as, um, almost like an empty box to fill

in with things, while by themselves they have so much creative power to unleash, if you would just let them do that. So, I think, you know, I’ve been thinking about it a lot because I have a six year old and I’m now pregnant with my second child and, and I really, I’m really struggling with, to deal with the

educational system as

we know it. And I’m in a, you know, country like the Netherlands that is very progressive in the sense, but, but, but still like I find like gender definition or, or what plays or, you know, uh, constructs that are just not empowering or providing agency to kids to really express their full potential. And so I think that is something to really think about. And I think it would really benefit our society at large. I think we would really benefit from a bit more of nurturing creativity since very early stage and trying to maintain that

throughout

our

lives. As the father of a daughter is in a Steiner school, I can only agree that’s a very good answer. Thank you so much. So where can people find you online? You’ve got all of the stuff going on. I’ll put some Oh yeah, so

my blog, my blog designmavericks. substack. com and there I write every week, but I also publish my video series and there, there will be info about my book as well. So I guess that’s the best place

[00:44:35] Andy Polaine: All right. I shall put all the links in the show notes. You are at marzia. studio is your, is your sort of personal marzia.studio is

[00:44:41] Marzia Aricò: my

website. Yes.

I’m also on LinkedIn most of the time,

More than happy to have conversations there with

[00:44:47] Andy Polaine: Great. All right. I’ll put the words there and people can find you there. I really appreciate all the work you’re doing, your writing and the videos, you know, the, the elevated series is, is really excellent. I think it’s really important too.

Thank you so much for being my guest on Power of 10.

[00:45:02] Marzia Aricò: Thank you for inviting me. I had a great time.

[00:45:05] Andy Polaine: you. Bye.

Outro

[00:45:07] Andy Polaine: You’ve been watching and listening to Power of 10. You can find more about the show on polaine.Com, where you can check out my leadership coaching practice, online courses, as well as sign up for my very irregular, more irregular than Marzia’s newsletter, Doctor’s Note. If you have any thoughts, please put them in the comments or get in touch.

You’ll find me as apolaine on PKM. social on Mastodon. You’ll also find me on LinkedIn on my website, all the links are also in the show notes. Thanks for listening and watching, and I’ll see you next time.

Design as wise guide versus hero

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Are you the hero or the wise guide in the story of your work and leadership?

This week I’m teaching a masterclass on storytelling, pitching and getting buy-in for the Service Design Network Academy and we’re exploring classic story structures and also think about what journey our org or client is on.

Here are some thoughts about design taking a role as wise guide rather than being the hero of the story (even though our egos might like the idea of that).

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Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Are you the hero or the wise guide in the story of your work and leadership?

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

What story are you in?

[00:00:11] Andy Polaine: This week, I’m teaching a masterclass on storytelling pitching and getting buy-in for the Service Design Network Academy. And we’re exploring classic story structures and also thinking about what journey our organization or client is on. So sometimes that’s defeating the monster. If you’re in retail, that’s obviously Amazon for you at the moment. Sometimes it’s rebirth. I think this is what telcos and banks and even TV is going through at the moment. Or maybe this also has apprentice, which seems to be the story of AI right now.

The Hero’s Journey

[00:00:40] Andy Polaine: Joseph Campbell’s classic hero’s journey always comes up and in that structure, the hero goes on this journey, moving from a known to an unknown land. In work, you see that whether it’s a project doing something new or a huge transformation, you see the same structure going on and the same kind of trials and tribulations.

The Wise Guide

[00:00:57] Andy Polaine: And in these there’s always a sidekick. A mentor or a guide of some kind. In Star Wars, classically it’s Obi Wan Kenobi for Luke. In Shrek is Donkey. In finding Nemo is Dory and you see it all the time.

And often that person gives the hero a map of some kind, gives them some direction, tells them where to go. They often show or demonstrate a new way of being as well, rather than just telling. And sometimes in the case of Donkey in Shrek, they have no filter or fear of the heroes complexes. Donkey, tells Shrek exactly what he needs to hear. Donkey just speaks truth to power.

Design as the Guide, not the Hero

[00:01:34] Andy Polaine: This role, I think is leadership. It’s leadership from the side or leadership from behind. And it’s a supporting role. It’s not the hero role. And given where design is at the moment, I actually think design sits better here.

We have the skills for it. We have the sense of reading people and understanding people. Not everyone has those skills, not even the hero of the story, which is why they need that guide. I think this is something that is really suited to what we do. We often do give the map, literally, the journey map, the blueprint of here’s where the organization is struggling. Often it is our job to speak truth to power. It might not work out quite so well if you do exactly like Donkey in Shrek and do it without filter, but one of the things about Donkey played by Eddie Murphy is he is very funny and there’s a lot of true words said in jest.

We also have the skills to show rather than tell. And this is the thing that design people bring to the leadership table. And we often forget about it, I think, because it seems self evident to us and for everyone else being able to make a diagram or sketch something or make a demo or prototype something, it’s kind of like magic to them. It’s The Force.

I don’t think we need to apologize about taking that wise guide role. That’s a version of servant leadership that I can get behind rather than the kind of martyrdom I talked about in another video.

Outro

[00:02:47] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you would like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching. And I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own stories or examples, please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much. And I’ll see you again soon.

The Ripple Effect of Your Impact

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0200

How do you think about your impact as a leader? Is it the bottom line of the business? The culture? Or is it on the people around you more individually? In this Coaching Reflections video, I talk about impact on a personal level.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: How do you think about your impact as a leader? Is it the bottom line of the business? The culture? Or is it on the people around you more individually?

My name’s Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

And this week I want to talk about impact on a personal level.

The Ripple Effect

[00:00:20] Andy Polaine: We tend to focus on the big things when we think about impact, we think about business, industry, environment, social impact and all those things are important, don’t get me wrong. I think those are the things that we should be caring about.

But you may find, and I have definitely found in my career, the impact is greater closer to you. And it’s very much like throwing a stone in the pond. The ripples are strongest nearest to you, but they travel wide and they can have a great effect.

Just today I had a message from a student who I taught 20 years ago. She said, I was thinking about my own leadership journey. And there was a thing you said to me in one of the first weeks of the semester, which was "the jobs you say no too often define your career more than the ones who say yes to."

And she said it was something she had really carried with her and had been somewhat of a north star for her and shaped her career choices.

I was blown away that she got in touch with me about this. I was so happy to hear from her. I kid you not. I was in tears today when I was reading it. And it made me really realize, wow, that one thing I said that one time and this has had a real impact on this person’s career. And I think it’s really important to remember this as leaders as just human beings and the people we work with.

It’s certainly a thing I think about a lot as a teacher. You can have an effect on one or two or three people around you that you work with. Those people have an effect on three people around them that they work with. And that ripple effect is really exponential. And before, you know, it, you realize you’ve actually had a much, much greater impact on people, whether that’s the industry or just a group of people that have crossed paths with you over the course of your career, than you might think.

And as a leader, you might find you have a larger group of people over whom you have some kind of influence. And it really makes a difference.

And so while on a big universe level our significance is tiny. Your significance to those immediately around you can be huge and I think it’s worth remembering that.

Outro

[00:02:15] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put the link below.

If you’ve got any of your own experiences or stories about that, please post a comment below, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much and I’ll see you again soon.

It's all about the people

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0200

What is the real work at work?

I have very few coaching sessions about the actual design work. It’s all about people.

In this week’s coaching reflections video I invite you to consider that all that people and relationship stuff that seems to “get in the way” of you doing your work is actually the work, especially as you move into management and leadership. Considering it this way can help alleviate the sense of frustration and, instead, replace it with curiosity.

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Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Companies, aren’t really real. They’re really just an idea and they may have a legal entity, but actually what they really are is a collection of people just doing their jobs.

My name is Andy Polaine. And every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up. And this week, I want to talk about this people aspect of the job.

Companies are ephemeral

[00:00:21] Andy Polaine: I said, companies are collections of people and really, they are quite ephemeral. For example, Toys R Us at one point controlled a quarter of the world’s toy sales. But they lasted 60 years, they went into administration with billions of dollars of debt.

So really people come together just for a short amount of time. And this thing that we think is this large entity with solidity, in fact, isn’t. And it’s the same with projects and any kind of work initiatives you have. Really, most of the work that you’re doing is not the actual work– the design work or producing things.

The work is the people

[00:00:55] Andy Polaine: Yes, of course. There’s that stuff and we make stuff. But certainly in the leadership role and management roles 90-95% of the work is the people stuff. And if you feel like you’re having this frustration, well, why don’t they just let me get on and do design properly or whatever flavor of design you are doing. You’re kind of missing the point.

It is a bit like a firefighter complaining that they are getting burned, and smell of smoke. And why do people keep lighting fires all the time? I wish they wouldn’t. Where actually, that’s your job. And really getting your head around how people tick, how you tick and what pushes your buttons and understanding the relationships and in another video, I’ve talked about this idea of fear and anxiety being everywhere. That is really the work that you have to do.

I’ve found the reframe around that of understanding it that way that, "Oh, this is actually my work and not the thing that’s the impediment to my work" is very, very useful and takes away some of the frustration. And instead gives you a much more of a human curiosity lens to the process.

Whether it’s about relationships, whether it’s about how you think, whether it’s about how you communicate or whether it’s, how you understand yourself.

Outro

[00:02:03] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching. And I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own thoughts, please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much. And I’ll see you again soon.

Saying No

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0200

If you’re a people pleaser or self-identified high achiever, how good are you at saying no? This is something that comes up all the time in my design leadership coaching practice and is the topic of this week’s coaching reflection.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Introduction

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Are you a people pleaser? Self identified high achiever? How good are you at saying no?

My name’s Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week. And this week, I wanted to talk about a reframe of saying no.

Trouble saying no

I just came back from this Service Design Global Conference in Helsinki, which was wonderful. And I gave a talk around leadership and this idea of it’s not business, it’s personal because it’s always personal. There’s a lot of things I said, but one of the things that happened was a lot of people came up to me afterwards and said yes, but you know, one of the problems I really have saying no.

The no reframe

[00:00:36] Andy Polaine: And I want to give you a reframe around saying no. When someone comes to you, they’ve got something on their plate that they want to get off of their plate. They’re trying to get this thing done, and they want someone else to do it, or they need someone else to do it. At that moment in time, it is still their problem. As soon as you say, yes, I’ll do that. Then it becomes your problem.

If you know that you’re not going to be able to do it in time, or it’s going to be a struggle, or it’s going to be a stress. It’s much better to let someone down upfront and say no to them early while they still have time to do something about it. And secondly, while it’s still their problem. As soon as you take it on, if you let them down at the last minute and say, oh, sorry, I didn’t manage to do it. Well, now that problem is yours. And now you’re the one that looks flaky and it reflects badly on you.

If you say no upfront, and that person has left it too late because they haven’t planned properly or there aren’t enough resources, well, then that’s their problem. And that’s really, really important because it’s usually someone more senior or senior leadership saying on a Friday, this thing has to be done by Monday. To which the reasonable answer is, well, your lack of planning is not my emergency. Because the expectation then is that you’re going to be working your evenings and weekends to get it done.

Completing the feedback loop

[00:01:46] Andy Polaine: Saying no is a really important part of the feedback loop, that their ambitions are greater than their willingness to resource them. Or their need to have something done urgently is down to their lack of planning.

Now there are going to be moments where, of course you have crunch times and occasionally we will have to work weekends or you do something on the evening. But what I’m talking about is when that becomes the norm. And what you’ll end up doing then is you’re now working for free, for starters, you’re taking time away from your loved ones, but also, if you get it done, you’re actually reinforcing the poor behavior. Because then what happens is whoever gave you that task with an unreasonable deadline, sees that it worked. And probably thinks well next time you can do that quicker.

Saying no is being helpful

[00:02:24] Andy Polaine: So the reframe is saying no is actually helping people. You’re helping the organization get a more realistic idea of what they’re able to achieve instead of everyone running flat out and burning themselves out. And it’s obviously more useful for you because you’re not having that experience. And you’re not reinforcing bad behavior. There’s a lot I learned from training a dog.

Outro

[00:02:45] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own tips about how you go about saying no and what’s worked for you. I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much. I’ll see you again soon.

Julian Simpson - the life of a screenwriter and director

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is Julian Simpson, a London-based writer and director who has worked in film, TV and audio for the past 25 years. He made his directorial debut annoyingly young in his mid-20s with The Criminal and more recently worked on Spooks, New Tricks, Doctor Who and more.

He created the Lovecraft Investigations, the Aldrich Kemp audio series and the Pleasant Green Universe. He runs a writer-led company called Storypunk and writes an excellent newsletter about the screenwriting life called, Development Hell.

As it happens, Julian and I went to school together and rediscovered each other’s work recently due to the magic of the interwebs.

You can view it below or on YouTube or subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts or listen on the player below.

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Audio

Show Links

Julian

Development Hell: https://developmenthell.substack.com
Julian on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0801065/
Pleasant Green: https://www.pleasantgreen.co.uk
The Lovecraft Investigations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06spb8w
Cartoon Gravity https://www.cartoongravity.com
The Virtual Production of The Mandalorian Season One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk

Andy

Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Design Leadership Coaching: https://polaine.com/coaching
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/andypolaine.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine

Timestamps

00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:20 - Julian’s journey to here
00:06:59 - Disruption
00:08:34 - Making the film many times over
00:16:18 - Actors and trust
00:22:38 - The rise of development desks
00:28:57 - Changes in the age of digital shooting
00:32:32 - Writing slowly
00:36:04 - Outlines, PKMs, and just writing
00:50:28 - AI and writing
00:53:51 - One small thing
00:56:33 - Outro

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello, welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of zoom, from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organizations, society, and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, service design and innovation consultant, educator, and writer. My guest today is Julian Simpson, a London based writer and director who has worked in film, TV, and audio for the past 25 years.

He made his directorial debut annoyingly young in his mid twenties with The Criminal, and more recently worked on Spooks, New Tricks, Doctor Who, and more. He created the Lovecraft Investigations, the Aldrich Kemp audio series, and the Pleasant Green Universe. He runs a writer led company called StoryPunk, and writes an excellent newsletter about the screenwriting life called Development Hell.

And as it happens, Julian and I went to school together and rediscovered each other’s work recently due to the magic of the interwebs. Julian, welcome to Power of 10.

[00:00:56] Julian Simpson: Thank you. Nice to be here.

[00:00:59] Andy Polaine: So I’ve wanted to have someone from film on here for a while, because as I told you this, you know, I studied film, video, photography, and this newfangled thing called digital interactive multimedia in the very early nineties.

And I didn’t go on to be a film director is what I planned but you did and, and

[00:01:17] Julian Simpson: to Christopher Nolan, who was at college with

[00:01:19] Andy Polaine: Yes, that’s right. So he was in the other film course about two years ahead of me and, you know, where is he now? How, what happened to him? So I, I listened to an interview with Christopher Nolan and I had this sort of parallel universe that sort of, you know, sliding doors moment, like, yeah.

That could have been me but, you know, having moved into interactive media and then digital broadly and design and so forth and then sort of in service design and everything I do now, you know, that, that sort of film production model and that kind of way of thinking about. A very large group of people actually, sort of an interdisciplinary group of people coming together to collaborate on something and, and the kind of process that film has had, has behind it, which is relatively mature now, I’d say very mature now, certainly compared to sort of, you know, anything digital, has always fascinated me and it’s stuck with me as, as a way of thinking about groups of people working together.

So I’d kind of be really interested to, to chat to you about that, but I guess, first of all, I’m interested to know your pathway to where you are now.

[00:02:20] Julian Simpson: It’s kind of weird and atypical probably. I don’t actually know what typical looks like. I left school didn’t go to university, got a crappy job in advertising that actually, to be fair at the time, wasn’t a crappy job. It just feels like a crappy job now. And then decided that I did want to go into film, which I kind of always wanted to do, but didn’t know how to. Still didn’t know how to, but figured I could write a short film and make that, and that couldn’t be too difficult. So I wrote something. And then put notices up at your film school, actually for crew ended up getting a bunch of students in to crew this movie that was shooting that we shot in the flat that I was living in did enroll at university to get the grant money and the loan money to make the short film, but didn’t actually turn up. and ended up having, so our sound guy on that was a student at your place called Asif Kapadia, who went on to make a movie called the warrior and then more recently made the documentary Senna and Amy and a couple of others. So he’s like an Oscar winning documentary maker now, but he was just the sound guy on our short film. And very good at it. Did that, that didn’t go anywhere at all. Decided to write a feature film which took about four or five years to get together. Mostly through ignorance and stubbornness and not really understanding that these things aren’t meant to happen. Made that, thought that was the ticket to everything. Turned out not to be. Had another film set up. Um. And kind of all ready to go with Hugh Jackman just before the first X Men came out. And we couldn’t get the finance because no sales company in the world would believe me when I said that Hugh Jackman was going to be a big deal.

[00:04:18] Andy Polaine: yeah, well, you know, what happened to him?

[00:04:20] Julian Simpson: exactly, exactly gone the way of Nolan and that was a weird one because that was going to be Hugh Jackman and Courtney Love, which was going to be quite an odd combo.

So that movie fell apart. I went and worked, well, I did nothing for a while, went and worked in television kind of worked my way up through television and then moved into audio as well. And now I kind of where I am now.

Right, right. So what you just described, there’s another podcast I listened to called Script Notes. I don’t know if you do with John August and, Craig Mazin. It’s really brilliant. It’s, it’s kind of, like you could skip film school and just listen to the whole archive of that, I feel, one of the things that you just described there is how incredibly precarious the whole kind of filmmaking process seems to be.

[00:05:01] Andy Polaine: It seems to be, you know, for anything to even start to get made, it seems to be to the stars, really, I’m literally the stars, right? Really have to align. Otherwise it just falls apart. Is actually I presume is where Development Hell comes from.

[00:05:17] Julian Simpson: I mean, there’s

[00:05:18] Andy Polaine: people what development is actually, cause they,

[00:05:20] Julian Simpson: well, development is, I mean, I don’t know if I know what development is, and I’m not entirely sure that anyone knows what it is. It’s the bit that happens between having an idea and making something, and it seems to be designed it. How I’ve often described it is that you’re in a boat, and you’re setting off from a dock, which is you having an idea, and you’re sailing to a destination. And it’s a straight line, and it’s not that, it needn’t be that difficult except that in the way there is a whirlpool, which is development, and if you get sucked into it, you will just go, be in there forever, and you will never get out. So there are people who, there are brilliant development people around whose job it is to take your idea, help it get better, grow it, make it into something, and send it on its way into production, but there are equally an awful lot of people who whether they intended to do this or not not have become perpetual development people so they don’t know how to get something moving on.

They just know how to keep it going around and around and around and kind of killing it with improvements. and you see that a lot. You, you end up, so development hell is exactly that. You’ve got an idea. You’ve, someone said we should develop this. They’ve paid you some money and now. They are never going to be satisfied with it. It is always going to need another iteration before anyone else ever sees it. And you are literally just in hell, kind of rolling this rock up the hill to mix mythical metaphors.

[00:06:59] Andy Polaine: And so, you know, is this, this has been around for quite a long time, that, that kind of process. You know, is it useful or is it, is it ripe for disruption as the you know, our Silicon Valley friends might say,

[00:07:13] Julian Simpson: It’s ripe for disruption. I mean, it’s a tricky one because our Silicon Valley friends have in fact tried to disrupt it. Netflix came in. Amazon came in and their initial thing seemed to be to not do development. And that can go one of two ways. Sometimes you can end up with a show like Going Back, something like The Wire, or The Sopranos, or Breaking Bad, a show that is so authored and kind of idiosyncratic to its creator that no amount of outside voices are going to improve it anyway, so you just want to get it out there, and With all of its kind of rough edges still intact because it’s worth something, it’s valuable in its own right. But most of the time what happens is that you end up putting any old crap on the air because there were some famous people attached to it and you don’t have a development team so you’re like, Oh well if this actor and this director and this writer are attached to it, I’m sure it’s fine. And you put it on the air and we’ve seen a lot of it. Especially movies on the streamers, where they all feel like terrible vanity projects because there wasn’t the development process because there wasn’t anyone going, wait a second, this doesn’t make sense.

[00:08:34] Andy Polaine: So one of the things that, you know, is different between our, our two worlds now is you know, this idea of kind of first copy costs, I guess which is. I realized this far too late in my career, you know, I used to sort of make bespoke digital things and try and send it to someone for as much as I possibly could.

And obviously the way to make loads of money is to make something that can be, you know, repeated and duplicated and, and take a little bit of a lot of things. But I think there’s a thing there that, you know, one of the shifts towards as a software development and all the rest of it kind of ended up all being online.

And I’m of a, I’m of an age where I remember actually making software that, you know, got burnt onto a CD and then pressed in the, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands. And if you screwed it up, then you, you screwed up hundreds of thousands of times. But now, of course, you know, they’re all shifted and so software gets released, you know, Amazon famously started releasing, you know, new updates every few minutes and now it’s like every few seconds.

I mean, it boggles the mind. So the real idea is, you know, we’re going to get that stuff out there and we’ll find out if we’ve got, you know, if we’ve made mistakes, we’ll fix it afterwards. And I guess there’s a certain amount of that in film. But one of the things that’s always fascinating me about film and particularly screenwriting actually, is that screenplays are sort of a, an unusual writing medium in the sense that they’re not really meant to be read by the end audience, right?

There are kind of.

[00:09:49] Julian Simpson: No, they’re like an architectural blueprint,

[00:09:51] Andy Polaine: Right, right. Yeah.

[00:09:53] Julian Simpson: It’s the blueprint for the building. It’s not the building itself.

[00:09:56] Andy Polaine: Sort of makes the film though, as best they can in different formats. So you, you will have, you’ve got your, I guess your treatment and outline. You’ve got your screenplay, multiple drafts of, and then you’ve got you know, people storyboarding.

Then you’ve got, and then finally. You’ve got shooting it, which, which is, you know, incredibly, incredibly expensive. And now you’ve got post production, which is also now incredibly, incredibly expensive. I don’t know if they’re kind of, if those two have switched, switched that post production is more expensive than the actual shoot these

[00:10:24] Julian Simpson: it depends. Weirdly enough, I was talking to a virtual production company about an hour ago in Helsinki. And they were talking about, they’ve got a big LED volume, like the kind of things they shoot Star Wars and Star Wars TV shows and stuff on. So it’s an Unreal Engine feeding a 180 degree LED screen.

[00:10:44] Andy Polaine: Yeah, we should probably just kind of describe what that is like for people. Cause in case they, they don’t know they are, they are, it’s a, it’s a studio soundstage, but it is just got screens like wraparound screens

[00:10:57] Julian Simpson: So yeah, so instead

[00:10:58] Andy Polaine: and you can put anything

[00:10:59] Julian Simpson: green behind it, where you’d ordinarily key in a scene or whatever, you know, spaceship or whatever, you have an LED panel that goes all the way around, it’s huge, that shows you, as an actor, as a director, it shows you where you are. It’s the, it is the background, backdrop of the scene, but it also responds to the camera.

So if the camera sees you, Changes aperture and changes its focal length, then the background will blur accordingly. So it feels like you’re in a real place. It doesn’t always work. And I think it’s overused and kind of lazily used sometimes. But the point was that these guys in Helsinki, they run this thing and there’s like eight of them and they all know how all of it works and they run it and they do a really great job.

They do games, they do movies, they do all of this stuff. You move that setup to L. A. And suddenly they’re like a hundred people there who all need to be paid. And the Finnish guys were basically going, it’s just, you know, it’s a classic kind of Hollywood problem. If there’s just, they’ve employed, everybody paid everyone far too much money and are now going, Oh, wow, virtual production’s expensive, isn’t it? And it’s like, well, you guys make everything expensive.

[00:12:08] Andy Polaine: It’s, it’s actually, if people Google Mandalorian and cause that’s the way where I saw it first, I think yeah,

[00:12:15] Julian Simpson: is the kind of famous one.

you’ll

[00:12:17] Andy Polaine: find it

[00:12:17] Julian Simpson: it’s used more and more and more now, and we’re talking about doing a movie with those guys and just doing, there’s bits, you know, you can do, it’s much easier to do a car chase, for example, if you’re, if you’re shooting it from inside the car, then your background being on an LED screen is a lot cheaper than having it there for real, and also, and safer, obviously,

But also probably not noticeably an effect.

[00:12:44] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:12:45] Julian Simpson: if you get it right

[00:12:46] Andy Polaine: The camera, it moves. That’s the other thing is it kind of like a parallax thing. The camera moves, or the background moves with the

[00:12:52] Julian Simpson: with the camera

[00:12:53] Andy Polaine: head has got a kind of movement track on it. It’s very cool. I mean, it is an amazing thing to,

[00:12:57] Julian Simpson: it’s an amazing thing, but it’s overused and so, you know, it, it becomes something there was an Amazon show called Citadel, which was I think the most expensive television show ever made largely because they made it decided they didn’t like it and then made it again. from scratch. And they shot the entire thing on one of these stages, even where they didn’t need to. So you kind of end up with scenes in an office where you’re like, why does this office look weird? And it’s just because it’s on a screen, but it didn’t need to be.

[00:13:27] Andy Polaine: Okay. So where I was getting to with this though,

[00:13:31] Julian Simpson: Sorry, I’m diverting you

[00:13:33] Andy Polaine: no, and that’s fine. It’s great. But then you’ve got the edit, right? And then the movie is sort of made all over again in the edit. And but I guess you’ve been through all stages of, of this. I’m assuming it’s like everything else, what are, what would you say is the secret of maintaining some kind of integrity of the thing from start to finish?

Because that must be a sort of really, I mean, I think Craig Mazin just said, listen, you have to write the best script you possibly can. Which is also, I mean, apart from your time, it’s cheap in terms of the production. Right.

[00:14:02] Julian Simpson: It is the cheapest

bit. Kubrick always talked about this as one man plus typewriter is the place where you want to be making mistakes because it’s the cheapest part. I think it’s interesting that Craig Mazin says that. All writers go write the best

[00:14:17] Andy Polaine: Writing’s the most important stuff. Yeah.

[00:14:19] Julian Simpson: Writing is the most important thing.

You should talk to the makeup people, they have a different view. But I think it’s about intention. I think that I always liken this to architecture, even though I know absolutely nothing about architecture, but it strikes me that there’s a blueprint, and then you kind of build a model, and then you build the, start to build the real thing, but then you have to paint it and finish it and do all of this other stuff. And, I’m assuming that what you’re trying to do throughout that process is maintain the intention of this is a family home, this is an office for a tech company, you know there is a building in Vienna that I was told about recently when I was over there, there was a barracks where the entire process fell down, because at no point from blueprint to finishing the building did anyone spot they’d forgotten toilets.

[00:15:15] Andy Polaine: No.

[00:15:17] Julian Simpson: Apparently, so this is like way back. This is like 100 years ago or something. But yeah. But so I think it’s about maintaining the intention. So the thing that keeps you honest is what’s the film about? And I don’t know how that translates to design in an obvious way. But this right? The best script you can is great.

But if you hand that great script to a terrible director, They’re going to screw it up. Bad actors are going to screw it up. Bad lighting is going to screw it up. Loads of things can screw it up. It is true that it’s difficult to make a good film out of a bad script, but it is not true that it’s difficult to make a bad film out of a good script.

[00:16:00] Andy Polaine: Yeah. There’s lots of opportunities to screw it up.

[00:16:03] Julian Simpson: Oh, loads. So many. I I’ve seen what bad editing can do to great acting only takes getting the scissors in and the wrong place to turn a very, a performance that was great on the day into someone looking like an idiot in front of the camera.

[00:16:18] Andy Polaine: So talking of which, there’s a lot of trust, right? I mean, actors often talk about trust and trusting the director.

[00:16:25] Julian Simpson: They don’t have any choice to be fair. I mean, they have

[00:16:28] Andy Polaine: you know, that’s true. What do they mean by, I mean, I’ve got an idea of what I think they mean by that, but what do they mean by that?

[00:16:35] Julian Simpson: they do mean, I mean, I think that when you hear the, the, that line in interviews, it’s tempting to think that they mean in the moment on the day, they kind of don’t, they mean that they’re going to be there, or it’s, I think what they mean is they’re going to be there. They’re going to do however many takes of a scene and some of those takes will be good in their opinion.

Some will be bad in their opinion. And they are trusting the director to know the difference between the two things. They are trusting the director to agree with them about the difference between the two things, which is not always what’s going to happen, but they are trusting the director that in the finished product, which they have no influence over beyond. standing on the set. You go through the edit, you go through the music, you go through the grade, you go through sound mixing and all of that stuff. They come out the other end, they’re trusting that you will have protected their performance and not let them look stupid. And they’re also, there is an element of trust on the day in terms of what you’re asking them to do. They have to trust. You know, you go, there’s going to be a dinosaur there. So you’ve got a, you know, and it’s going to be this big. And it’s like, so they’re trusting you to, to, deliver on what you’re promising and to, and to take care of their performance. Most interesting example of this, which no one ever spots, but I find it really interesting.

And it was apparent most recently in Masters of the Air, the HBO, I think it’s HBO, the world war two flying show you have scenes on runways. In that show and in the background of the run on the runway, there are World War Two planes with their propellers spinning up taxiing around, you know, big flying fortresses now. Obviously on the day you can’t have that because you’re recording dialogue. So those planes are probably their propellers aren’t moving or they’re being towed quietly or whatever’s happening, but they’re not loud.

[00:18:39] Andy Polaine: Hmm.

[00:18:40] Julian Simpson: And so As the director, you’re saying to the actors, you have to pitch way up because on the day when this is out there, there’ll be a gigantic plane making a load of noise behind you. You would have to shout over it. Even though that noise isn’t there now, we still need you to shout over it. It’s very difficult for actors to shout. Louder than they need to to project if they’re in a group and one person isn’t if one

person doesn’t do it. Everyone feel self conscious and brings himself down and, the trust.

So there are scenes in I’m not going to name actors names, but there are scenes in Masters of the Air where there’s one actor who isn’t pitching up and three actors who are and because that one actor wasn’t pitching up, they’ve had to mix the background lower so that he doesn’t look weird and he happens to be the lead. So the other three now look like shouty idiots because they’re shouting over no background. So that’s the trust. It’s about going. I’m trusting you to not let that happen.

[00:19:58] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I guess there’s also the, the sort of emotional, I mean, there’s a, there’s that scene at the beginning of Apocalypse Now with Marty Sheen, where he kind of punches the mirror and stuff and you know,

[00:20:11] Julian Simpson: It’s having a breakdown.

[00:20:12] Andy Polaine: and yeah, yeah, yeah, he’s actually having in real life, but it, you know, of, of the director just kind of letting that go and letting an actor really kind of go deep, I suppose is perhaps a way to say it and, and know that that is not going to.

Are you taking advantage of as well?

[00:20:29] Julian Simpson: I don’t, I’m not sure that that he wasn’t taken advantage of,

and I haven’t seen Hearts of Darkness for a

[00:20:36] Andy Polaine: no, I know if you

[00:20:37] Julian Simpson: sure that he knew they were filming, or was, you know, he seemed quite drunk,

[00:20:42] Andy Polaine: well, I think it was one of those things where nobody said cut. Right. And, and, and so, you know, it wasn’t very clear.

[00:20:49] Julian Simpson: but it was the 70s, different rules.

[00:20:50] Andy Polaine: yeah, it was a bunch of different rules. So we talked also about it. So you asked before you said this thing, I don’t know how that kind of parallels to design. And

I think one of the things that happens a lot on, on design projects and particularly kind of digital things, but also big service design things and stuff is lots and lots of what’s known as alignment meetings, lots and lots of people having meetings where you’d have far fewer of them.

If, if enough senior people just went, sorry, I don’t know. I don’t really understand what we’re doing here. What, what are we doing here? What, what are you talking about? And, but nobody does that. And so everyone circles around like, You know, like dogs that are kind of deciding whether they’re going to fight or play

and, and then they sort of align and they go, okay, right.

This is what it’s about. And I think that’s, that’s one thing. So a lot of that is, you know, there’s a lot of corporate jargon about how strategic vision statement and all of that stuff. And everyone’s like, you know what that means? You know, what do they mean? But there’s also another thing I think in particular in the startup world where we, we think this is, we think this is a thing, we think this is an idea that has some kind of product market fit, but it’s not.

But we’re not really sure when you see it quite often, they’ll launch something, they’ll launch a, you know, an MVP, minimum viable product, they’ll launch a kind of first version of something in that very sort of lean and agile way, just to get something out there. And then they realize, oh, they’re kind of searching for it.

And, you know, I coach people in those environments and you see it quite often where. A platform or a digital product is trying to kind of find its, its niche, trying to find what its purpose, right? And the way they do it is to really just put something out there in the world that doesn’t really happen.

Or at least the thing that’s put out in the world, presumably is the screenplay, right?

[00:22:28] Julian Simpson: well

[00:22:29] Andy Polaine: or

is there, is there a sort of a stage in between, between that where more stuff happens? And people go, Oh, you know, actually, this isn’t going to work.

[00:22:38] Julian Simpson: so, no, well, the development process is a bit like that. Increasingly we’re being asked to produce decks for movies.

Which would be, I’m assuming, similar to design.

[00:22:51] Andy Polaine: horrendous. That sounds good. It’s like a massive shame

[00:22:54] Julian Simpson: Well, it’s got worse. So I directors have always had to do what they call a director’s vision, which is a completely meaningless document that’s given to people who might be greenlighting the movie so that they can pretend to understand what’s going on. Exactly what you’re talking about.

And that’s kind of now morphed, used to write basically an essay about, you know, your thoughts on the movie and how you were going to shoot it. So it was absolutely nonsense, but everyone felt better for having read it. Or not even for having read it for having, for knowing that it existed. Now they’re going, can we get a visual, like a deck of basically shots from other movies that will give us an idea of what your movie is going to look like. And again, it’s nonsense. But I recently. Was told that the deck on a movie that we’re putting together wasn’t considered kind of up to snuff by some of the people that had been looking at it.

[00:23:51] Julian Simpson: So I was like, okay, well, show me, show me the decks that they like. And I got sent some and it’s interesting now because the deck that we’d created was, was an accompaniment to the screenplay. Here’s the script. Here’s visual reference stuff make you feel like a sort of some swatches that will make you feel, you know, designing and they and, and the decks that I was being told were the, were the kind of the, the, the benchmark for this now I was like, Oh, these aren’t accompaniments to the script. These are instead of the script.

[00:24:28] Andy Polaine: Right.

[00:24:29] Julian Simpson: These decks now have a few paragraphs on each page, or a few lines on each page, telling them a story, so they don’t have to read the script anymore.

[00:24:37] Andy Polaine: No. Okay.

[00:24:38] Julian Simpson: They get a picture book, telling them what the story of the movie is, with some pictures of some actors, and that’s how they’ll be making their decisions. And, that’s it. I understand that these people think they’re busy. They’re not, but I understand that they think they are. And I understand that this seems like a good idea, but what’s going to happen is that you get further down the line, you end up in the edit. You end up in the expensive bits. We’re shooting, we’re editing, we’re in post production. And because those people have a say in the finished product, but never read the script, you are going to start hearing, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.

Right.

And it’s like, well, no, because you looked at a picture book and made a decision.

[00:25:30] Andy Polaine: Is there a shift in the type of people who are, I guess you’re talking about the people who greenlighting a movie is basically saying yes to the budget, right? So are these the are these, is there a shift in those kinds of people? I mean, you talked about the kind of Silicon Valley folks moving in.

But is it just, I’m too busy to read this or, presumably because good writing is part of the thing, right? That if someone is looking for, can this person tell a story and are they painting a picture in, in words in the descriptions and then they, are they, you know, is the dialogue good?

[00:26:01] Julian Simpson: I think that there’s so you’ve got several stratus of folk in the film industry and the tech people have moved in, but they’ve kind of moved in at the top.

So they’re mostly not involved with what we’re talking about earlier with development, for example. So the development people have basically been the development people, whoever owns the studio, the development people, the development people, and they tend to be, in my experience, the Hollywood guys are really good, right?

They, they get all the references. They read stuff very quickly. Their notes are astute. They tend to be and this is not necessarily a popular thing to say amongst writers, but I think they tend to be the smartest people in the room. Often the development people. The problem they have is that they answer to people who may not be the smartest people in the room. So the development person has gone. I’ve taken your script. I’ve got some notes with we’re all working together in the same direction and we think we’ve made it better. And this is great. And then their boss goes, Oh, by the way, now I need it to be a comedy with a talking dog in it. And they have to give that note back, so they seem like idiots. But actually it’s somewhere above them is an idiot. And at the moment it’s, we’ve gone away from comedies with talking dogs and we’re into, well, we had the tech guys came in, Netflix and Amazon came in and they were going Netflix specifically. We’re going to disrupt

that whole thing was we’re going to change how things are done.

We’re fast. We, you know, move fast and break things where the guys from Silicon Valley who are going to transform the movie industry.

[00:27:39] Andy Polaine: got all the data too, right?

[00:27:40] Julian Simpson: Yeah, and specifically the television industry, we’ve got the data, we know, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah,

[00:27:47] Julian Simpson: good shows, because they didn’t really get too involved with development and stuff, they did make some good stuff.

And then they and then they slowly turned into movie studios because they started to, go, well, hold on. We need a movie star in this and we need an established writer or an established director, and they basically became all of the, all of the obstacles to getting a TV show or film made that previously previously existed, began to exist at Netflix and, um, and got to the point now where they’re going, what if we had adverts and what if we didn’t release stuff in box sets, but what if we released shows weekly with commercials in them? And it’s like, well, congratulations. You just invented network television. I thought you would, I thought you’re trying to do something different. But the other thing that they do, which I might be to do with your thing about kind of putting stuff out there and then seeing how it works. They spent a lot more money than it needed to. On a lot of things that throwing money at things was their solution to a lot of problems.

[00:28:57] Andy Polaine: It might change. I mean, now that now that money is no longer free, you know I think that’s probably one of the things that’s going on.

One of the things that’s also interesting, I think is a reverse of this. I’ve always, you know, there’s this whole idea of lean, right. And this idea that you can put the minimum, just enough in there you know, out there, invest just enough to get something out there to test it. And obviously film, particularly in the shooting moment, film is kind of incredibly, fatty. It’s not lean at all. You know, it’s, it’s, you, you shoot an enormous amount at great expense with a lot of people over the course of, you know, days and weeks.

And most of it never ends up in the, in the final edit. So you have, you know, I don’t know what the shooting ratios used to be when people were shooting on, on film film. What, 10, 10 to one, 15 to one, something like that.

[00:29:43] Julian Simpson: mean, depends on who the director was. There’s a great story I heard from a guy who was a driver who had driven Hitchcock on one of his last films. It was shooting over here, I think, at Pinewood and they wrapped on a Friday. And he had to drive Hitchcock to the edit after wrap. And it says Friday night and he said to him, Mr.

Hitchcock, when will the edit be finished? And Hitchcock went, said Monday. And the reason he said Monday is because he basically went, we take the clapboards off, take the markers off the strip of film, stick them together. We’re done. I don’t shoot anything I don’t want. So, we select the best takes, but there’s no shot, there was very few shots in a Hitchcock movie that you don’t, that weren’t seen.

[00:30:37] Andy Polaine: Yeah. I’ve heard a similar thing about Clint Eastwood actually, as well, that,

[00:30:40] Julian Simpson: Flint does the

[00:30:41] Andy Polaine: has said that,

[00:30:41] Julian Simpson: yeah, and John Huston used

[00:30:42] Andy Polaine: I’m an actor, actor sort of went. So, you know, maybe do a second take and it was just like, why would you want to waste everyone’s time? No. Okay. All right. There’s some trust there. So, but now, you know, and particularly, you know, with digital everywhere, digital cameras everywhere, it’s, it’s enormous, right?

You were talking about Fincher, you know, you were talking about,

[00:31:01] Julian Simpson: Fincher’s on, I mean, 100 to 1 or something, is his shooting

ratio, he’s often doing 100 takes?

I think

[00:31:07] Andy Polaine: so that is, so that’s takes or multiple cameras though, right? Two. So that’s amounts of things that got shot compared to the, the, the ratio I’m saying. So a hundred to one is like, we shot a hundred minutes of something for one minute or something that ended up

[00:31:21] Julian Simpson: Yes. Yes. And that just requires, I mean, it’s interesting. I did hear on Finch’s films that he uses the delete button on the camera.

[00:31:37] Andy Polaine: Oh, yeah.

[00:31:38] Julian Simpson: So he does go over and over again. He’ll do a hundred takes, but he doesn’t keep a hundred takes. If it’s bad, he just deletes it.

[00:31:46] Andy Polaine: That’s, that’s like a bunch of teenagers taking a selfie these days, isn’t it? Of like that kind of thing that shifted of people take a photo and then immediately look at, look at it and then

[00:31:56] Julian Simpson: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:57] Andy Polaine: can take another one. Yeah. But

[00:31:59] Julian Simpson: he does that, it feels It feels quite final. It feels quite extreme, but actually his editor probably doesn’t want to go through a hundred takes. In the, it’s like, that’s a time consuming and expensive process. If you know this take is bad, don’t bother anyone with it.

Get rid of it. I quite like that actually. There’s always a, there’s an insurance thing. There’s always a kind of insecurity of going, but what if there was some nugget in there that are, that I’ve missed. And I think that there isn’t just get, just chuck it, get rid of it and work with what you’ve got. It’s fine.

[00:32:32] Andy Polaine: yeah. Yeah, I would like to turn to writing actually, because in your newsletter in development hell you’ve written a couple of things recently but one was about writing slowly and the other one was about sort of notes and outlines and The writing slowly thing, well actually talking of a thing that I think everyone can relate to that will be listening to this, you talk about the shared fiction of deadlines, and I’m, I’m going to quote a bit, I’m going to sanitize the F word into something

[00:32:56] Julian Simpson: Okay,

[00:32:57] Andy Polaine: And we say, you know, we need to get the draft to Bob before he goes on holiday. Screw Bob. Bob’s not sitting on a beach reading my script. And more to the point, if that week Bob is spending in Maui is time I could use to make the script better than double screw Bob and his pina colada. I very, very much enjoyed that particular section of

[00:33:16] Julian Simpson: I mean, I kind of assume it’s weird, isn’t it? I assumed everyone else’s deadlines were real.

[00:33:21] Andy Polaine: No, no. I’ve, I’ve always, not always, but I’ve realized at some point that this is just made up cascade of kind of deadlines.

[00:33:30] Julian Simpson: I mean, I think there are, you know, in film, if you’re shooting and I’ve had, I found this equally frustrating when I’ve been directing television shows and Writers who may or may have the same attitude as me about deadlines, generally, they’ll go, you know, you go, I, but I, but we’re shooting this tomorrow. So if you’re going to change it, it needs to be changed today. And then they don’t because they never hit deadlines. And you’re like, this is, this was a hard deadline. This wasn’t a fictional deadline. We’re literally standing on set with some actors. But those are the only deadlines in film, I think, that mean anything.

Everything else is a shared fiction. It’s, it’s probably done with the best of intentions oftentimes. But it very often is, you know, this guy’s going on holiday. Can we get him the script before he goes? And it’s like, So

[00:34:21] Andy Polaine: not, it’s not going to read it on holiday. No, I’ve heard all sorts of versions of that. And I think there’s also that cascading thing of someone, big boss says, you know, I want to see this by the end of April and someone else, the next person goes, okay, so we need this by mid April. And the next person goes, right, we

[00:34:35] Julian Simpson: check it.

before he

[00:34:36] Andy Polaine: know? Yeah. Yeah. And then all of a sudden said, no, we’ve got only two weeks to do this. Are you sure big boss wants us to rush this in two weeks? Yeah.

[00:34:45] Julian Simpson: so I have a, a show with a streamer at the moment and we have quite a few gatekeepers in between me and the kind of final decision guy and they’re all good gatekeepers, but they all, he’s like, so when can I see a draft? And you’re like, I don’t know, like four weeks or whatever it is. And then as soon as he’s off the call, other people are like, I need to see it before he sees it. And you’re like, okay, so guys, you need to tell him it’s going to be six weeks. Because what I’m not doing is doing the work in half the time so that three people can look at it before he sees it. He’s going to get it later because I’m going to take the same amount of time over the work, and then you guys will want to see it before he does. So you’re eating into his time, not my time.

[00:35:32] Andy Polaine: How does that work?

[00:35:34] Julian Simpson: It has mixed Next results. I mean, the thing is that ultimately, the thing I actually really like about the US versus the UK is that if you within reason, if you go, this is how long this work is going to take. And the reason it’s going to take that long is because I’m going to do the best job I can with it. Americans go with it. We get it fine. English people go. No, I need it. We still need it on Tuesday.

[00:35:59] Andy Polaine: Oh, really?

[00:36:00] Julian Simpson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not all of them. I mean, I just, you know,

[00:36:04] Andy Polaine: Yeah, no, no, no, it’s all right. You know can write off my home country and you’re one that you currently still live in. Britain’s broken for a reason, you know, yeah, no, I know the notes and outlines thing was interesting because as you know, I think, you know, I’m, I’m part of this sort of, you know, the PKM, the sort of obsidian cult of people who kind of

[00:36:22] Julian Simpson: I did not know,

this

[00:36:23] Andy Polaine: digital, gardens thing.

Now I’m not, I’m not particularly as a personal knowledge management person. I do use it cause I like to just have everything kind of one, one space. I don’t do a massive amount of kind of interlinking of all my notes and stuff. And one of my previous guests, Jorge Arango, has written a whole book on this.

But I was interested because you, you describe, well, maybe you can talk about that particular thing about sort of describing you sort of following the process and then ditching it and kind of doing it differently.

[00:36:51] Julian Simpson: well, the PKM process.

[00:36:54] Andy Polaine: you were following the kind of notes and outlines and doing all of that stuff. And then, and then you sort of ended up in this space where you’re like, Oh, hang on I’m just going to kind of write it all over again.

[00:37:04] Julian Simpson: Oh, I think, yeah, I think I love the idea of planning and it never quite works out for me. And I always find that the process, the development process, I guess. But the process of television and film always requires a plan. They, they’re like, you’ve told them the idea, and then they’re like, great. Can you now write that out in one page so that we can read it? And show it to other people and then that they like that. So they’re like, great. Now, can you write out in 10 pages, just expand and expand, expand until the point that we get to a screenplay. And I find that that process kills the creativity for me. Because if I’m, if I’ve figured everything out before we start the screenplay, I think the screenplay for me is a, is a process of kind of exploration of an idea and of characters.

And if there’s something to explore because we’ve mapped it all, then I don’t, I don’t, personally, I don’t really have very much interest in doing it. And weirdly, it doesn’t make it easier.

[00:38:10] Andy Polaine: Does it just become typing? I mean, I, I

[00:38:12] Julian Simpson: becomes typing, but it becomes trying to fit… because the menu is not the food, it’s it’s, I’m trying to find, it works on paper, but when we start putting people in this scene and get them to talk to each other, they don’t seem to want to do the thing we were hoping they were going to do. And I can force them to do it, but it’ll feel forced.

[00:38:35] Andy Polaine: So you just touched on that thing that lots of writers talk about, and I, I kind of know from a, a different, a different thing, actually from my, from my D&D and from other things that I’ve written other, which is this idea that I heard Ian McEwan talking about this actually, as well, that. You have an idea for a scene and you obviously know the characters that are going to be in that scene and you know whatever the tension or opposition there usually is in a scene to set it up and give it its fuel.

But when you start writing the characters, these fictional people inside your head seem to have a life of their own. Is this a thing that is true

[00:39:08] Julian Simpson: It is, but I think it’s I love talking about it in those terms, but it’s kind of nonsense and it’s sort of pretentious actually happens, I think, is that you get into a sort of flow. Where you’ve had the thousand foot view on it and you’ve gone. This is what the scene is about. This is where it starts. This is where it ends. Like you say, these are the conflicts. These are the tensions between these characters. And now I’m going to put them in this prison cell or in this police station or up this mountain and I need them to get from A to B to C through this scene and you start it and authors and writers will always go and then the characters kind of take over.

What actually happens is you just get into the weeds of it and you have a better idea. A little thought in the back of your head’s like, what if they hit, what if he hit her? What if this person jumped off this cliff? What if this person turned out to not, not be who they thought, who we thought they were?

You just have better ideas. And it’s the ideas that you get from being at kind of eye level with the thing versus having the kind of, you know, the drone view of it, which you had when you were outlining or planning or even just thinking about it. And I was doing it this morning, I was writing, writing some stuff and I planned it out quite meticulously.

It’s a redraft. I’ve even told this story a number of times before. And yet, and I knew exactly where this scene ended. And yet, that one line of dialogue occurred to me that changed something, and then another thing happened, and then suddenly there was a different character at the end of the scene, and I was like, this is how it should be. But I couldn’t have known that before it happened, but I don’t think it’s mystical. I just think it’s that your brain is going into a different gear and is pulling. I’m going to use the PKM analogy a little bit, but it’s pulling all of the stuff, you know, in,

[00:41:03] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:41:04] Julian Simpson: you know, it’s going what is in the hovering around in the back of our minds that we can suddenly find a link to and drag it into this scene what suddenly what connection, what synaptic connection have we just made?

[00:41:18] Andy Polaine: So this is the thing, and it goes back to that kind of process or the planning thing you’re talking about before that I think is really that kind of reflective practice as Donald Schön described it where I think got lost. Like in the design world, there’s been this whole thing about design thinking and, you know, this kind of separate bit of design.

And it sort of got morphed into this idea that we can do some design thinking up front and then we just go on and kind of do the production as if there’s no thinking happening while you’re actually doing the doing. And I think one of the things, one of the things I really like about writing is there’s no second draft without the first draft.

You really kind of have to just go through that process and let yourself write some junk and then, and then kind of go back and, and also that kind of classic thing was by the time you got to the end of it, you, you actually know what you’re writing, you know, what it is you’re writing about. And then you sort of go back and fix

[00:42:07] Julian Simpson: But isn’t this a bit like design in terms of like, I’ve always imagined that if you’re talking about industrial design, if you’re talking about factories, that there must be a point at which thinking stops because you need the widget to get designed to go through the production line in a particular way.

[00:42:24] Andy Polaine: There is, and I think it’s perhaps one of the differences between sort of craft, if I sort of take like, I’ve got a little kind of handmade cup, you know, espresso cup here. And there’s that thing where you’re, you’re making a thing with your hands and you’re getting that

[00:42:35] Julian Simpson: So that’s what I was going to say. The kind of the artisanal, the kind of craft thing, which is kind of how I think of what I do is exactly that. It’s like we can draw a table. And we can, but then we get the wood and we start to do whatever you do, if you’re making a table with wood and, and it’s going to direct us in a, in, in perhaps a different way, or, or you’re going to make a mistake and have to course correct in a different way.

[00:43:01] Andy Polaine: Yeah, no, I think there is definitely a you know, there’s, there’s quite a lot of parallels there in, in design and certainly in, in digital, because one of the things you you’re doing is you make a thing, you might even test it with real people, but certainly you make a thing and you’re looking at it as you’re designing and going, Oh, actually, maybe not like that.

And there’s a thing I call sort of designing yourself into a corner where you have this utopian, well, it’s actually more of a sort of platonic ideal of something. You know, this form of something in your head, and as soon as you make it manifest as a tangible thing, whether that’s in words or a sketch or something, you’re like, Oh, and now I see that that’s never going to work at all, right?

I’m going to have to do that differently. But because your brain leaves out all these kind of essential bits.

[00:43:41] Julian Simpson: and

also because nothing’s ever as good as the original idea.

[00:43:45] Andy Polaine: no, no, exactly. No, I, I used to love doing art at school actually. And I used to love the kind of preliminary sketches or the bit of painting where I’d done the sort of background

[00:43:54] Julian Simpson: Yeah,

[00:43:54] Andy Polaine: or wash.

And then I’d sketched out what the painting was going to be, the outlines out of it. And then I hated the rest because it only got worse after that, right up until that point, it had all this potential for being this amazing thing. And then I gradually just made it worse and worse and worse. The

[00:44:09] Julian Simpson: And I think that’s what hap, I think that’s what we’re talking, that’s the process of filmmaking in a lot of ways. So, there’s this thing of, of people saying the script is written three times. It’s written in the screenplay, it’s written in the shoot, and it’s written in the edit.

I don’t think that’s true, because the script in, certainly in an ideal world, the shoot and the edit aren’t starting from a blank page. So it’s not there, it’s, it’s, and it’s not even a rewriting process, it’s a process of evolution. And you stand on set. With your script and your actors and they say the lines and you suddenly go, Oh, I need that line of dialogue because You’re doing it with a look. I don’t, I don’t need that anymore. So you can start to kind of scrub that out and then you get into the edit and you’re like, actually, you know what, they don’t even need the look because we can cut to that and then cut back to them and we can cut that look out completely.

And, and it’s a process of refinement. And I don’t necessarily think it gets worse. I definitely think the writing process is kind of what you’re talking about with painting, wherein you kind of go, I’ve got a great idea for a film, and by the time you’ve written Fade Out, you’re like, I hope people will still work with me after they’ve read this. Because that does get worse and worse and worse. You just kind of go, I’ve got this great idea, and you walk around with it for a while, and it’s like, this is still brilliant. I’m working on one at the moment, and I made the mistake of pitching this, brilliant idea to a movie star’s company and they then went to the movie star and the movie star loved it and they came back and went we’d love you to write this that he’s really really excited about it and i was like cool i’m super excited about it too. Sat down, went right, what actually is it though? I was like, Oh, it’s one line, isn’t it? It’s not an actual story. It’s not a thing. And they’re like, they’re constantly going like, how’s it going? How’s it going? He’s very excited to read it. I’m like, what to tell you?

[00:46:06] Andy Polaine: I hope, I hope they never watch or listen to this podcast now. So, you know, we, there’s so much we could talk about cause you’ve got this whole audio thing that you do. So I’m, I’m interested by the, the the turned to audio actually for you. You know, is it simply that it’s easier to get audio stuff made?

It’s cheaper, presumably to, to make an

[00:46:27] Julian Simpson: actually, it’s a lot. I don’t actually, I don’t have a terribly difficult time getting stuff off the ground at BBC audio anymore. Because I’ve won a couple of awards and they generally like me as long as I don’t try and do more than one thing a year. They pretty much let me but getting other audio stuff off the ground, it’s very, very hard.

It’s as hard to get finances, anything else, even though it’s a smaller amount of money, it’s like a short film. It doesn’t get, there’s no returns on it really. So it’s hard to kind of get going. What I like about it. Is that audio, the way we do it at least, is entirely artisanal, if that’s, if I’m saying that right when I write, so take for example Aldrich Kemp, which third season of Aldrich Kemp, I’m writing at the moment I’m on the third episode of five only the producer has read the first two episodes, Radio 4 will never read the script.

They never even get sent it. So, there’s, it’s a complete collaboration amongst equals who know each other to get this thing right. I can cast whoever I want, as long as we can afford them, whoever I like to do what, and I can write whatever I like. We then go on we don’t go into a studio ever on these things.

We record on location. So we then go to some kind of interesting place that will sound like where it’s meant to be. With a bunch of actors who everyone gets on with each other. We, you know, bring sandwiches is not an expensive production and we’ll record and you can record five episodes in five days.

It’s really not a particularly long process. The guy who recorded it is also the guy who edits it. And the guy who does all the post production and sound mixing and stuff. So he’s there all the way through and he understands exactly what we’re going through at any given point. And then I get it bounced back to me over and over and over again and he and I get on zooms and we talk stuff through or I go to his place and we talk stuff through and figure it out and figure out the music and all of that stuff and the end result of what we do gets broadcast on Radio 4 without any interference whatsoever.

[00:48:48] Andy Polaine: That’s amazing.

[00:48:49] Julian Simpson: So it’s a beautifully kind of craft process that hasn’t got any of the guardrails or interference that you get from movies and television.

[00:49:02] Andy Polaine: And why is that? Is it sheerly, is it just because of the amount of money that is not involved or is it, is

[00:49:08] Julian Simpson: I actually think it’s

[00:49:09] Andy Polaine: you know,

[00:49:10] Julian Simpson: I think it is because I think

it would be different like

[00:49:13] Andy Polaine: radio.

[00:49:13] Julian Simpson: we’ve sold, I’ve sold something recently to Audible that we’d already made. And I really like the guys at Audible, but I get the impression if I was to go to them and go, I’ve got an idea, it would be more like a TV or film process. I think it’s the BBC. I think it’s how they’ve always done it. And there’s, there’s one pitfall to the entire process, which is you get to do exactly what you want to do and no one will stop you. There’s lawyers,

there’s a legal process

[00:49:49] Andy Polaine: But you can, you can, you can drive it off a cliff

[00:49:53] Julian Simpson: I can drive it off the cliff and they’ll never hire me again.

[00:49:56] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Okay. Well, you know,

[00:49:58] Julian Simpson: But that’s quite, that, that is the risk I’m happy to take, you know, because then it’s your mistake. Because other people in film and television, other people drive it off the cliff and you get the blame.

So there’s other people, you know, these days we’re, we’re in, there’s a lot of talk about is AI going to kill, can it film a TV and all the rest of it. And there have been several attempts to get a chat GPT at Al to kind of write a screenplay. Okay. And it’s. They’re not

[00:50:29] Julian Simpson: I’m pretty sure it already has and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some of those movies, but

[00:50:33] Andy Polaine: Yeah, well, I mean this is the thing though, right, you know What will it do it will kind of probably head towards kind of mediocre middle of a sort of average screenplay based on thousands of other examples of movies, but that kind of sounds like the Marvel universe to me anyway, right?

[00:50:52] Julian Simpson: I wouldn’t, I would never in a million years besmirch Marvel, but it’s yeah, I think that if, if, if the criticism of AI writing screenplays is it’ll turn out a bunch of mediocre rubbish that’s based on a whole bunch of other things, then there’s definitely a huge market for it.

[00:51:09] Andy Polaine: we’re already there.

[00:51:11] Julian Simpson: it’ll be enormously successful. It’s, I use it. I mean, I, I think someone much smarter than me said earlier, early in the development of this stuff. And it’s, you know, the development’s obviously very, very fast that before you get replaced by AI, you’ll be replaced by someone who can use AI.

And so I use it for research. I use it for, you know, knocking things around and I find it helpful.

It’s not that it can’t write a screenplay. It can certainly understand one. I fed it a screenplay because I was looking for a one page pitch for something I’d already written and I hate writing pitches after I’ve written the thing. And I fed it a screenplay thinking it won’t know what the hell it’s looking at.

And it was like, boom, there’s the one page. I was like, Oh, that’s pretty good. You’ve missed a couple of points, but I can tidy that up in five minutes. That’s good to go. But I think that it’s like, it can paint pictures like with Dali and Mid Journey. You can do, you can do paintings and I’m sure it can do design and it can do a lot of things. I don’t. doesn’t have a sense of self. It doesn’t have a sense of an, a kind of an authorial voice. It can copy one. It’s not genuine.

Yeah, it’s an, it’s an uncanny valley thing.

[00:52:24] Andy Polaine: Yeah, yeah.

[00:52:26] Julian Simpson: through history, the people that we’ve, the artists that we’ve admired, whether they be novelists or screenwriters and directors or actors or painters, they’ve all had their own kind of unique experience and point of view. I think there may well be significant AIs that have a body of, that will have a body of work that is interesting. But I don’t think that AI as a kind of melange can do that. The bigger question for the human race at the moment, I’m writing a film about AI, so I’m thinking about this quite a lot is why we are asking AI to do things that we like doing. First is getting it to do things that we don’t want to do. Why is it bothering to learn how to paint a picture if it can’t do my tax returns?

[00:53:20] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, it’s well, it’s to make kind of a bunch of people very wealthy. No, I think there’s There’s a you know, very good questions around that It does seem kind of rather strange that we end up humans end up doing the drudge work and AI is doing all the stuff that was supposed to the artistic creative stuff

[00:53:38] Julian Simpson: I thought

[00:53:38] Andy Polaine: to free us to free our time up

[00:53:40] Julian Simpson: I was promised was, you know, a universal basic income. No one needs to work and you can spend your entire time painting and reading books. And it turns out that actually AI can do that, but we’ve got to carry on working.

[00:53:51] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Hey, so look, we’ve come up to time, the the show is named after this film by Ray and Charles Eames called Powers of Ten which is about the relative size of things in the universe. And I’m springing this on you, I’ve realized cause there’s one, one question at the end which is what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world.

[00:54:16] Julian Simpson: don’t know about an outsized effect. But in my daily life, the thing that most grinds my gears, I don’t know if this is true where you are are black bin bags.

Okay. Perfect.

I’ll tell you why.

I can’t fathom, I can’t fathom why the bin bag that is the right size to fit in our kitchen bin is not sufficiently strong to hold the contents of said bin.

[00:54:48] Andy Polaine: Okay.

[00:54:51] Julian Simpson: can’t figure out why everyone’s getting away with making crappy bin bags. So that’s, I bet it’s not going to change the world. I appreciate that.

[00:54:58] Andy Polaine: It would change my,

I’ve, I’ve spilled, I’ve spilled my, the contents of my bin enough over the over the years.

[00:55:05] Julian Simpson: someone to come up with something. Yeah, would be good.

[00:55:08] Andy Polaine: Well, that’ll do.

[00:55:10] Julian Simpson: Oh, I tell you what I think I’ve just bought Hasselblad, digital Hasselblad, the new

[00:55:14] Andy Polaine: Oh, yeah.

[00:55:15] Julian Simpson: And this is sort of shocking, actually, it’s The thing that I didn’t think I cared about turned out to be one of the things that I really like about it, which is that instead of using these, which I’m showing

[00:55:30] Andy Polaine: Yeah, the SD cards. Yeah.

[00:55:31] Julian Simpson: SD cards, it’s got internal SSD.

It’s got an internal solid state drive of one terabyte.

[00:55:37] Andy Polaine: All right.

[00:55:38] Julian Simpson: And I don’t know why every camera doesn’t have that.

[00:55:42] Andy Polaine: That’s a very good question. All right We will leave others to give us the answer to that one. Where can people find you online?

[00:55:48] Julian Simpson: They’re used for defining on social media, but I think life’s too short. So, I am Development Hell at Substack, and CartoonGravity, all one word, dot com, is my kind of scrapbook thinking space, you know, nonsense area.

That’s pretty much it

[00:56:07] Andy Polaine: i’ll put some links to the Lovecraft Investigations, Pleasant Green your imdb profile where you’ve got a very sort of Javier Bardem photo. Yeah picture on there. Yeah

[00:56:18] Julian Simpson: Ah, yeah, I think that might be the one picture i’ve ever used for anything when people go. Do you have a picture? I’m like, oh, yeah, there it is

[00:56:25] Andy Polaine: Here’s one for me 30 years ago

[00:56:26] Julian Simpson: Exactly.

[00:56:29] Andy Polaine: Julian, thank you so much for being my guest on Power of 10

[00:56:31] Julian Simpson: Thank you very much

[00:56:33] Andy Polaine: You have been watching and listening to Power of 10. You can find more about the show on polaine. com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice, online courses, and sign up for my newsletter, which is very irregular called Doctor’s Note.

If you’ve got any thoughts, put them in the comments or get in touch. You can find me as at a polaine on PKM dot social on mastodon. You’ll find me on LinkedIn and on my website as well. All the links will be in the show notes. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

How our parental relationships play out at work

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0200

In this week’s coaching reflections video I take a look at how our parental relationships and childhood experiences play out at work.

For more of these, check out my YouTube channel.

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Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: How does the environment you grew up in influenced the way you show up at work?

My name is Andy Polaine, and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

And in this one, I want to get a bit more personal and talk about your childhood.

Parents

[00:00:17] Andy Polaine: You know, our parents are the first people we encounter who are in charge around here. And so they’re the first role models we have some kind of leadership. Not only that you’re also dependent on them for survival as a child, so you quickly learn to shape your needs to theirs. Those patterns often surface later in life in all relationships, including work. And we have this idea that work is not personal, it’s just business, which I think is the biggest lie in work.

But of course, wherever you go, there you are. So you take your baggage with you, including the way you relate to people and the way you relate to people in authority. Work also has this hierarchy and structure and we displace our complexes on top of them. So a complex is really sort of bundle of some unconscious emotional responses to things. And so if you find yourself having an overreaction to something where something really gets under your skin and you go home or that night, you keep thinking about it’s looping around your head. Or someone just really pushes your buttons and winds you up. There’s going to be a complex underneath there that’s being triggered in some way. And it’s really important to look into that stuff, particularly if you’re in a leadership role, because if you’re responsible for 20, 30 other people and you have a bad day, those 20 or 30 people also have a bad day as well.

The stepmother moment

[00:01:32] Andy Polaine: I’ve got a good example of this and my coachee gave me permission to share this. She had been working for a company and the new CEO who she then ended up working with .By and large, they had a decent working relationship, but occasionally it would really clash and she felt like her boss would micromanage her or jump in or not see the good work she was doing and things like this. And we talked about it came up quite often and it came up in a very strong, emotional response for her. And at some point we were talking about when she had felt like this in the past, and then the tears came and there was this moment, she realized it was her stepmother, who she now has a good relationship with, but back then when she was a teenager, her stepmother did the classic thing of wanting to know where she was all the time and querying her about the clothes she was wearing and all of that stuff.

You can see that even though these are completely unrelated. What it was doing was producing that emotional response. And what happens in those moments, you are back as a child, you’re a teenager or your young child, having that emotional response that back then you did not have the ego and the emotional resilience to deal with. Whereas now, of course, you’re an adult. 30, 40, 50 something. And you’re in a very different position, but you get emotionally dumped back to that point and that’s why it gets under your skin and pushes your buttons.

Journal it

[00:02:45] Andy Polaine: So I’m not doing therapy in my coaching, and I’m very careful to maintain that boundary that if something really is problematic, I’ll suggest someone does do therapy. I think that’s the thing that everyone should do. I’ve done it for the last 27 years and I’m married to a therapist too. But it’s very important to spend some time reflecting on that.

A very simple thing you can do is do a little bit of journaling. I don’t mean writing pages and pages and pages. You can do that if you want. But sometimes if you’ve had a moment like that, where someone’s really wound you up or pushed your buttons, just write down a little bullet points. What was the context? What was the person, what was going on there and how are you feeling about it? And if you regularly do it, you’ll often see there’s a pattern that starts to emerge around that, that you can then explore further, either in coaching or in therapy.

Companies are not families

[00:03:30] Andy Polaine: And finally it’s really important to remember a company is just an idea. It’s a legal entity. It’s not a person. It’s an abstraction. It’s a collection of people doing their jobs. And it’s certainly not a family.

We are asked to be really loyal to companies. And sometimes, particularly in creative agencies, we talk about it being a family. But actually that loyalty goes one way. If you’ve been recently laid off, you’ll know. One of the things is you don’t really fire people from the family. And so you might want to have a familial structure, but remember that’s a very loaded term to be using because it sets up a mental model in people in the way that they relate. It isn’t actually reflected in the reality of the situation.

Outro

[00:04:09] Andy Polaine: I hope that that’s useful for you.

If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below. And if you’ve got any of your own tips or thoughts about this or experiences, please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much. And I’ll see you again soon.

Using a Personal Kanban to combat to-do list overwhelm

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +0200

If you’ve ever had that feeling of being overwhelmed and scattered because your to-do list is never-ending and you never seem to get anything properly finished, a personal kanban might work wonders. I switched to working this way years ago and find it excellent to help me focus my easily distracted brain.

In this week’s coaching reflections video, I take you through a very simple set-up. For more of these, check out my YouTube channel.

Here is the Defensive Calendering video that I talk about in this video, too.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: When I ask my design leadership coaches, how and where they keep track of all the things they have to do, their answer is often a digital to-do list, a physical notebook, sticky notes on the desk, email, calendars, and of course the attention black hole that is Slack. There is a better way and that a personal Kanban.

My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos of reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week. And I’m back after a few weeks of holiday and this week, I wanted to talk about avoiding that overwhelmed, scattered feeling and how to use a very simple, personal Kanban.

Personal Kanban Intro

[00:00:36] Andy Polaine: Now the idea behind the Kanban, most of you have probably used it in work, is you have several columns and they have different states and you move things that you’re working on through those columns.

Getting into the habit

[00:00:47] Andy Polaine: So, what you’re seeing here is a very, very simple Kanban. I’ve got this running in Obsidian. You can do it in Trello, you can do it obviously on a whiteboard with Post-It notes, but you can’t sync that, so I prefer to do it on a digital tool.

Bandwitdh

[00:01:01] Andy Polaine: There are a few basic principles to the idea of this. One is about bandwidth.

So the idea is the up here in this doing area. This is what you’re actually doing in any one day or any one time. And the key thing about this is this idea that you can only get a certain amount of stuff done in a day.

Now there’s a little bit of getting to know this and I found that it takes about three to four weeks to get into the habit of this. Generally, I think you get one big thing done in the day, plus a couple of smaller tasks and maybe something kind of very tiny. You know, like a phone call or replying to an email. You’ll end up doing other stuff during the day anyway. So, don’t be too draconian about this. Over the years I’ve tried different things. I had a look at Getting Things Done and all this. I find those too complicated and you end up messing around with the productivity system and this isn’t really about productivity. This is about focus and about sanity.

I’ve got project X I’ve put up here, because getting the granularity of this right is also quite important. Project X might be something I’m just working on every day or every week for a few weeks. So that’s going to take up a bunch of my time.

Include personal tasks

[00:02:10] Andy Polaine: But the crucial thing about this is I’ve got things like call the dentist and buy a milk on here, because those also take up my time. And if you don’t have any of your personal stuff in the personal Kanban, you’ll end up thinking you’ve got more time than you have, and then there’s no play in the system. So you might think, oh, I’m going to do all these things today and then someone says, oh, you know, I don’t forget to pick up our daughter from kindergarten and you’re like, oh, I forgot about that and that’s going to take an hour out of my day and so now I’m not going to get those things to do.

In general, the stress and that sense of overwhelm is coming from people overestimating the stuff they can get done in a day. And when you overestimate that, you say yes to too many things and you take on too many things and don’t say no often enough. And that means you let people down and then you get caught in that stress cycle again.

Stop stressing your brain

[00:03:00] Andy Polaine: So that’s one thing which is this idea about bandwidth. The other thing is the supposed neuroscience behind this is that having something on a to do list that’s ever-growing tickles your brain in a negative way. That your brain is constantly thinking I haven’t done that thing. Haven’t done that thing. And you’re turning over often the, to do list in your mind. Writing it down helps having a mental one is awful because you’ve really constantly doing that. Your brain is constantly being stressed by these incomplete tasks.

Adding an item

[00:03:25] Andy Polaine: So the idea behind this, someone says, I need you to give me that report about Andy. I added in here on my to do list. All right. And I give it a date and here I’ve got this set up to trigger a little date thing. Most things like Trello and stuff allow you to set a due date. And then I put it in there and then for my brain, it’s like, okay, that’s taken care of, I know this is coming up and I will get to this and I can get back to what I was doing.

I really recommend have a look at the other videos about defending your time and with email because I recommend you don’t get disturbed all the time. You know, just turn Slack off, turn your email off.

The backlog

[00:04:02] Andy Polaine: So then we have a to-do list.

This is your backlog, right? This is where this comes from, the Kanban obviously. And you need to get into two other habits.

Always start with the kanban

[00:04:09] Andy Polaine: One is that when you sit down to do anything. I’m detective you’ve been away from the desk and come back or in the morning, what you do is you go to this straightaway. You have a look at this doing section straight away. And you think about, okay, this is what I’m going to do now. And you’re only working on anything in here.

The waiting column

[00:04:24] Andy Polaine: If you have something like I’ve got this marketing copy for project Y launch here, right? And I’ve sent this off and I’m waiting for some feedback on that. You have a waiting column. So I might do a thing. I might write my newsletter, which is overdue– my newsletter is always overdue– and I’m waiting for something to happen, waiting for some approvals or something like that and I put it in waiting.

So that’s the discipline is always sit down, always look at what you’re doing first, and that keeps you focused.

Don’t start anything until a doing slot is free

[00:04:52] Andy Polaine: The second thing is you can’t do anything else, you don’t add anything else to this list until you’ve made a space. Think of it like a kind of parking lot. There’s only four spaces in there. And you can’t move something else in there until you’ve moved something out. So that could go into one or two places I’ve written my newsletter. In which case it will go into done.

Enjoy the done moment

[00:05:11] Andy Polaine: Or I put something into waiting. So if I put that into done. There we are - done. Now that little bit where you move something into done is really important. That gives you that little dopamine hit to your brain. It’s a really nice feeling and gradually that column will fill up . And if you remember the old days of peoples of writing a novel. I have a pile of blank paper on one side of the typewriter and then the manuscript grows on the other side. It’s really important to that sense of, actually, I’ve actually got quite a lot done this week, Rather than this sense of, oh, I’ve still got all this stuff to do. It’s a, it’s a subtle shift, but it’s really good for your sanity and your mind and your focus.

So now I’ve made a space, then I decided or something else to go in there. Now some of these things are date sensitive. Like reply to the CEO with thoughts on strategy. So I’m going to put that in there and then I’m going to sit down and do that. And then once I’ve done it, then it goes into done.

And that’s it.

Extra optional columns

[00:06:02] Andy Polaine: I have two more columns in my own personal kanban. One is this thing called an idea backlog, because I write and I make videos like this. I sometimes put stuff in there. It’s a bit of a shoe box for me. If I have an idea, I just put it there. I actually rarely use it because I have more ideas than I get around to doing. The second one is because I have a podcast, I have a podcast guest list on there and that’s just because it was easier to have it in there. I don’t really use it in the Kanban as much apart from maybe as a recording, that podcast goes into doing. But it’s just there as one extra.

Keep it simple

[00:06:33] Andy Polaine: My suggestion is you keep this very, very simple. This is why I hate productivity systems, because I feel the focus of those is this idea of, I’m going to become a ninja of productivity. I don’t think life is about productivity. I don’t think you should be just churning through as much stuff as you possibly can. I think life’s about creating stuff and having focus to do so. And I’m someone who’s quite easily distracted. I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD. It wouldn’t surprise me if I did. I have lots of coachees who have it and this has worked pretty well for them. And it certainly takes a lot of the stress out of that feeling of everything you have to do.

So give it a try. It’s a very simple structure. You can do it in whatever tool you, you feel alike, just don’t fiddle around with it for ages. Just think about this idea of a, got a fixed amount of bandwidth. I put my stuff into the to do backlog. I moved something into doing once I’ve done that thing, I move it out to somewhere else. And I can’t start doing anything else until I move something out of the doing.

Outro

[00:07:31] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the links below. If you’ve got any of your own tips about how you give yourself some focus and how you manage your to-do list please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much and I will see you again soon.

Holding your boss accountable for their promises

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Many of my coachees are presented with promises from their bosses in the guise of “this is a great opportunity for you” that never materialise. How might you set up some criteria for these so that you’re not sitting there a year later still hoping it is going to happen?

In this week’s Coaching Reflection I want talk about holding yourself and others accountable for those promises.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

Many of my coachees are presented with promises from their bosses in the guise of "this is a great opportunity for you" that never materialize. How might you set up some criteria for these so you’re not sitting there a year later, still hoping it’s going to happen?

My name is Andy Polaine. And every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that came up in the week. And this week, I want to talk about holding yourself and others accountable for those promises.

OKR-ish format

The way to think about this there’s some kind of loose version of OKRs. They’re not really OKRs. But the idea is you don’t fall for the old line of, yeah. Sorry. It didn’t happen this year, but next year, it’ll definitely happen we promise. This happens with projects. This happens with promotions, titles, salary increases and all of those things.

This is something you can also use when you’re interviewing for a job when you are being told, there’s all sorts of potential for growth in this role. Just be a little bit skeptical and think, okay. Fine, but what does that look like?

Start at the end

So my favorite thing is always to start at the end. If it had happened, what does it look like? What does good look like? Imagine you, you’re now running that team or you’ve got that title or we’ve got that new position or whatever it is. What does it look like?

Now it’s not going to happen all at once. So what would be the signs that you, what you want is happening? It’s in progress in some way.

This is so you don’t get stuck in some kind of almost there purgatory. What would be your timeline in three months? What would you see in six months? Or at the end of the year and you’re reflecting back, what would you expect to have happened?

Example

Let’s take the example of growing a team. If you think, well, by three months I would hope to have this person in place. And by six months I’d hope to have these other two people in place. And by the end of the year, when I looked back and I’ve got this team of X number of people, of this kind of constellation. If none of that is happening or there’s no job ads out there and budget approval, well, then you know that it’s not really happening. It’s just empty promises.

The Clark Rule

There’s a book by Dan Ward called Fire F.I.R.E. It stands for fast, inexpensive, restrained and elegant. And he talks about this thing called the Clark Rule that NASA adopted. And it’s named after a satellite project called Clark. And it’s this: Cancel any project when its cost growth exceeds 15%.

Now the book is all about projects that go over time and over budget often ask for more time and more budget. And in general, that leads to them just becoming so bloated that they fail anyway. They just fail after more resources have been spent on them. So having this rule up front to say, okay, when the cost growth exceeds 15%, we can the project, no questions asked. It’s still harsh when the project is canned, but but it’s not a surprise to anyone because there’s always going to have been some lead up to that. And this is what I’m saying about your projects.

Having those metrics and conditions, very tangible and upfront helps, you know, when you reach them or when you haven’t. And then you can be ready to walk away because that is the agency you always have in a job or in a position or a project or a title. You can always say, I’m not doing this anymore.

So you can use this for interviewing for a new role. You can use this for any new position or responsibilities you might be given in your current role. You can use it when you’re thinking about, oh, a lot of other things in life, actually.

Outro

I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching and you’ll also find more of these videos on YouTube. I’ll put the links below.

If you’ve got any of your own examples of how you’ve gone about things like this, please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them. I’d like to collect examples.

Thanks very much. And I’ll see you again soon.

How to deal with jargon

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0200

This week’s coaching reflection is all about dealing with jargon and that feeling of having no idea what people are talking about in meeting (spoiler: nobody else knows either). There’s a simple trick you can use that everyone will thank you for.

You’ll find more of these on my YouTube channel.

Check out my coaching practice here.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

“I think we need to double click on this and develop a strategic vision roadmap and finalized DNA scenarios of resource deployment for experimentation.”

What?

If you’ve ever experienced someone say this kind of thing at work and wonder what the hell they’re talking about. There’s a simple trick you can use that everyone will thank you for.

My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos are reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week. And this week, I want to talk about combating jargon.

Jargon

Now I once worked for a large consultancy and I’ve also worked in academia. Both places are very full of jargon. So much so that I started collecting them over the years. I occasionally include them in my newsletter. I call it The Big Book of Guff and I have some corkers in there.

One of the common confessions of my coachees is they hear certain phrases, which it seems like everyone else on the call or the Slack channel understands, but they’re not really sure what it really means.

There’s things like a strategic roadmap. It’s often something with strategic something in front of it. And what you’ll find is people are often talking about this stuff and everyone else on the call goes, yeah, I think we should have one of those too. And does that thing where they are not really actually contributing anything new, they’re just agreeing with the person who went before and adding a little bit to it.

If you don’t understand, ask

When you really have no clue about what’s going on or you’re really not sure, and even better if you suspect the other person saying that stuff is also not sure, you can remember a thing that your parents might have told you at school. If you don’t understand something, ask because you can be sure that others don’t understand either and they’re too scared to ask.

A simple trick for cutting through jargon

My trick for cutting through or clarifying that kind of jargon is to ask something like, "You know, I’ve heard that phrase used by lots of different people in different ways. What do you mean by it? Just so that we’re aligned."

And you can ask them to make that tangible or give you an example. And you will probably find that people either don’t know and they’re just saying things like strategic vision without really knowing what they mean by it. Or they will know, and you’ll get your answer.

Either way, instead of looking stupid, everyone else is actually really thankful because I can guarantee you there’ll be other people thinking, I don’t know what we’re talking about either.

Do everyone a favour

I’ve had several times when coachees have said on a call, there’s been a back channel of direct messages on Slack or Teams with people asking, "Does anyone know, really know what we’re talking about?"

The world of work would be a much, much better place if more people had the courage to say, "I’m sorry, I don’t really understand what we’re discussing here."

It’s an opportunity to align

if you do discover that no one really knows what that term means or at the very least everyone’s got different opinions about that. Then that’s a really good place to be at, because then you can work through it and develop a shared understanding of the terms and what you mean, and specifically what’s the artifact or what’s the outcome that we’re after here and everyone’s on the same page.

Otherwise you can spend hours and hours in alignment meetings, circling around, trying to discover what the other person thinks and is that the same as what I think when actually you can just ask.

That’s what it means to do adulting in the workplace.

Outro

I hope that’s useful for you. You’ll find more of these on my YouTube channel and if you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the links below. If you’ve got in your own tips about how you go about cutting through jargon. Please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much. And I’ll see you again soon.

The Work Never Speaks for Itself

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0200

“I hate politics, the work should speak for itself.”

It’s a designer’s affliction. But the work never speaks for itself.

In this week’s coaching reflections I talk about the need to shape the narrative of your work, otherwise someone else will do it for you. Usually badly.

For more of these, take a look at the Design Leadership playlist on YouTube

Check out my coaching practice here.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: I hate politics. The work should speak for itself. I’ve heard it so many times in coaching.

My name is Andy Polaine, and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

The work never speaks for itself

[00:00:13] Andy Polaine: And this week, I want to talk about like taking control of the narrative of your work. So when I hear people say, well, I just want the work to speak for itself. I think it goes back to an early part in people’s design careers, where you’re used to making an artifact, and then you present that artifact and go ta-da! Here it is. And the work should speak for itself.

But of course it doesn’t, you’re always presenting it. You’re always talking about it. The work can’t speak for itself. It’s just an artifact. Actually it’s not quite true. The work will always have some kind of messaging. The Marshall McLuhan idea of the medium is the message. It does make a difference. And so depending on the format you present your work in. The classic one is presenting something that’s kind of obviously rough sketches or pen and paper or wire frames, right, versus some really polished work will make a difference to how people receive that work.

The trouble is with trying to let the work speak for itself is it’s highly susceptible to interpretation. Now, if you think well the work can speak for itself, I challenge you to go to an art gallery and have a look. There’s often a block of text by the piece of work explaining why it’s significant and the history of it and the context of it. There are whole books on just single paintings, like Picasso’s Guernica or Leonardo’s The Mona Lisa.

Give your boss the mythology

[00:01:26] Andy Polaine: And certain mythologies and stories and narratives build up around those pieces of work too. One of the things I often hear is something like my boss is unable to tell the right story about design. The answer to that is to help her. How can you help her tell the story of the work and the narrative that is going to be the one you want to be told? You can’t just expect a person who isn’t really involved in design or doesn’t have that background, or isn’t really, that’s not their job to just get it.

It’s up to you to help that person do it.

So you want to think about, or what was the context and intent when someone is looking at this piece of work? Where do they place it? So they’re not just making assumptions or jumping to conclusions or making suggestions that are irrelevant.

Why is this piece of work important to the organization? Get the story of that really crystal clear. And what impact is it going to have? All of that is going to make the person who’s presenting it for you be able to present it better. If they can present it better, it’s going to reflect much better on the work you’re trying to achieve in your design capability.

Use video

[00:02:25] Andy Polaine: One really good thing is to make a video. That can be a screen cast. It can be a presentation like this. Do it using something like Loom. Or you can just do a full case study of the work, but you know, the deck is not the presentation. You’ve got something that can stand alone. And then you’ve got something that you’d actually present to, and it’s important to separate those two.

The nice thing about video is it doesn’t get messed up by someone presenting it wrong and that’s what can happen with a deck. Many of us have had that experience of someone presenting someone else’s deck and they go through and they’re clicking they’re "I’m not really sure what this slide is about" and they skip over it and they don’t have the proper narrative or sequencing. They don’t know what they should be concentrating on and what bits are less important.

When you craft a video and partly because you’re having to do a video, you get to plan it and you get to edit it. And then you can put together this really nice compact thing and videos are really transportable. You know, people can drop it into decks. It can sit somewhere on a on a website or internally or externally facing.

And if it’s any good people will use it over and over again. They’ll drop it into their own presentations. It will become a thing of its own.

Help me to help you

[00:03:26] Andy Polaine: If politics and self promotion, they make you feel a bit queasy then think of it instead as helping others to help you. And you’re helping them tell the story you want to be told.

Storytelling course

[00:03:35] Andy Polaine: Now this isn’t meant to be a promotion, but I haven’t on my course about that. I’ll put a link in the show notes and I’ll be running a masterclass about this for the service design network, which I’ll post about soon.

Outro

[00:03:45] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching. And I’ll put the link below.

If you’ve got any of your own tips about how you’ve successfully crafted the narrative about work and help others present your design work and capability and their organization, post a comment below. I really love to collect these and hear other people’s stories.

Thanks very much.

And I’ll see you again soon.

Navigating Difficult Work Relationships

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Work is most often stressful not because of the amount of work part, but because of the interpersonal relationships. The idea of being “professional” is often code for “suppress your emotions,” but of course they come out whether we like it or not, because humans are not robots.

In this week’s coaching reflection, I talk about navigating difficult relationships, the positive and negatives of fight, flight, freeze and fawn physiological responses, as well as a couple of tips on how to reset relationships that have gone awry.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

## Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: The workplace is often stressful, not just because of the amount of work, but most often because of the interpersonal relationships. How can you navigate these difficult conversations and people?

My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week. And in this week, I want to explore how we can approach difficult relationships, conversations, tension and boundaries.

Also want to have a look at how those four physiological responses of fight, flight, freeze and fawn play out in the workplace. And lastly how you might think about resetting relationships.

Caveats

[00:00:37] Andy Polaine: And upfront, I really want to set a few caveats, given that I’m talking about things like boundaries and bullying. I’m a cis white male, middle aged, middle class. And I know that that comes with an awful lot of privilege. So it’s pretty easy for me to speak up. And as a side note, in terms of allyship, if you look like me, It costs you very little, if anything, to speak up for other people who might not have the benefits of that privilege. And so the less, it costs you, the more you should speak up.

When we’re talking about real bullying and abuse, that’s a whole another video. I did a podcast with Sarah Wachter-Boettcher talking about gaslighting and she’s got very good podcast called Per My Last Email. When it comes to that, that’s something you shouldn’t put up with or grit your teeth and bear it. That’s something where you need to speak to someone you can trust. There are a lot of resources out there to help you, including a therapist or counselor and something you really need to document.

Remember, HR is there to protect the company, not usually you. And even if they do take something on, you have a real difficulty with someone who is really toxic. They’re going to need plenty of evidence from you and others to do anything about it. So that’s why documentation is so important.

Types of acting out behaviours

[00:01:45] Andy Polaine: What I’m really talking about in this video is about someone kind of showing, acting out behavior. Ignoring boundaries or transgressing boundaries. That can get close to bullying. That can be someone being aggressive. That can be someone speaking in ways that are inappropriate or even demeaning. But it can also just be someone you’re finding it difficult to work with. It’s not really connecting or you keep misunderstanding each other, or there’s a little clique that’s forming or power structures are forming where there’s an us and them thing going on and you’re having difficulty working together or you’ve got communication issues.

Your physical response

[00:02:16] Andy Polaine: I say quite often that the biggest lie work is this idea that is not personal it’s just business. We can think that we can leave our emotional baggage at the door, but we don’t really.

The thing to remember around the fear and anxiety around work in those relationships is your body and your stone age brain can’t really differentiate between that and genuine physical danger.

So you have all the same stress response. You have all that cortisol kicking in all the other hormones kicking in, even though actually you’re not physically in danger. And if you are physically in danger, then really that get out of that danger. That is something you need to do something about.

Fight, Flight, Freeze & Fawn

[00:02:48] Andy Polaine: People will know fight or flight and some people, know freeze. The other one is fawn. Those are the kind of four common physiological responses to feeling in danger. And those are there for a reason. They’re there to protect you and they have a healthy and unhealthy version.

Fight

[00:03:02] Andy Polaine: So the fight response, that could be around setting boundaries and saying, Hey, no that’s enough. You don’t talk to me like that, or simply robust argument and critique that can be also be very, very healthy. But it can flip into aggressive argument and that can be someone else’s repsonse. It could be your response to someone.

Flight

[00:03:19] Andy Polaine: The positive version of flight is I’m going to disengage with this person. I can see this is maybe going to go into an argument that’s not going to be helpful. I’m going to disengage. That’s going to give me some time to think about it. And give that person some time to think about it, or I’m just going to avoid that person, which starts to move into an avoidant negative behavior, where you’re actually sort of having to work around someone. I’m going to talk about that a little bit later, cause it can be a strategy.

Freeze

[00:03:44] Andy Polaine: The positive version of freeze is similar in that you can slow down and appraise. The negative versions where you feel totally frozen, you feel unable to do anything and you feel helpless. And that happens quite often and you’ll feel it you’ll feel that kind of pit of the stomach moment you won’t know what to do and it can be really traumatizing.

It can show up when being asked the question in a meeting with some important people there, but it can also show up when someone is showing that aggressive response or transgressing a boundary.

Fawn

[00:04:12] Andy Polaine: And the fawn response… we probably most often see it with a dog. You know, when dogs are playing each other and one of them rolls over on its back. The positive version can be you’re pacifying someone, and that can be taking the temperature down of a conversation.

The negative version of that is where you become so people pleasing that you end up forgetting yourself. And last week I made a video about servant leadership and how that can lead into burnout martyrdom. And you don’t want that either.

Questions to consider

[00:04:36] Andy Polaine: So the first thing is tune into your body. What’s going on there? How are you responding? Because it’ll make a difference to how you respond. More importantly your body is telling you what is going on inside you.

Some questions to consider are is this a person who holds any structural power over you? So is this someone who is responsible for your promotion? Someone who can block a promotion. Is there someone who could be an enabler in a positive way that you actually need?

So, if you’re having a problem with someone who’s kind of not very important to you. Well, one of the ways around that person is just to avoid them. And when I say avoid them, I don’t mean avoidant behavior where you’re not being yourself, where you’re having to tie yourself in knots just to get your work done. What I’m saying is, is this is a person you’re basically not going to give the time of day too, because it doesn’t really matter.

Is it taking an emotional toll on you that you can just avoid and you don’t really need to deal with that person anymore? Or is this something where this is someone who’s present in your work all the time, and it really is taking an emotional toll on you, and then you need to deal with it in some way.

Fear and anxiety

[00:05:38] Andy Polaine: One of the things I’ve talked about before is this idea that fear and anxiety is really prevalent in the world of work. I talked about it when engaging with stakeholders. I’ve talked about it quite often when people are seemingly being difficult, it’s actually coming from a place of fear and anxiety and the very counter-intuitive thing here is, once you frame it that way and look at that person that way, it actually makes you more empathetic about them.

The other counter-intuitive part of that is it’s probably a moment where you least feel like being empathetic to someone because we equate empathy with sympathy. You think, well, that person’s being really difficult I don’t want this to be sympathetic to them. But in fact, sometimes, if you can bring it onto that human level again, you can actually really reset the relationship.

Resetting the conversation

[00:06:22] Andy Polaine: So here’s some thoughts about resetting.

First of all, text is a terrible medium for this. WhatsApp or Slack in particular because Slack can often end up being a public spat and it can get a bit performative and people will start protecting themselves by leaving a trail of the conversation.

A conversation is much better for that kind of reset. So it could be a video call where you’re having a face-to-face conversation with someone. It’s even better if you can actually meet that person in person. And even better if you can go for a walk with that person. There’s something about going for a walk, which is somewhat meditative, it’s kind of social. It’s also side by side, so you can often have a difficult conversation with someone, because you’re walking along beside them and you’re not having that kind of face to face moment.

It’s important to set aside some time to talk about this and do the meta communication. By which I mean, don’t add it to another meeting. Don’t have a whole meeting and say, oh, by the way, have you got five minutes? I just want to talk to you about X.

It’s really important to set aside a specific time to talk about the specific thing and not let it get dragged off into another conversation. And by meta communication, what I’m saying is to talk about how you are feeling and the interactions you’ve had in a more objective way, rather than act out in the moment.

So instead of responding really angrily about something, because it’s pushed your buttons, what I’m saying is in that situation where we had this going, I felt really angry in that time. And that’s a more neutral way of talking about your emotions rather than just letting them out. The benefit that has also is it sort of plugs into this idea of being professional at work. Professional is often shorthand for suppressing your emotions. But actually they’re really important at work and I think really particularly important in the kind of work that design folks do.

What do you really want to say?

[00:08:03] Andy Polaine: A question I often ask coachees is what is it you really want to say? And I get them to say it to me. And they’ll say something like, well, when you do this, it makes my life really difficult because of X or I feel like I’ve been left out of that conversation and it makes me worried about what’s going on or I feel my point of view is not important and I feel unseen.

And the response to that question is really well, why not just say that?

Vulnerability

[00:08:25] Andy Polaine: Now I go back to that caveat at the beginning, obviously, to speak to someone like that involves a certain amount of vulnerability. Vulnerability does beget vulnerability most of the time, but if there’s a power differential there, then obviously you really want to think about whether you feel comfortable or safe enough to do that. Where I’m talking about doing that is where you’re really interacting with peers. So you might have, classically in product, the product leadership yourself and engineering, and there’s some stress going on there, but it can happen all sorts of different levels.

You obviously need to have more sense of safety and confidence, if you’re going to have that kind of conversation with someone who is a higher level or holds some kind of power over you, but it’s not impossible. It does depend on the person though.

You can always quit

One last thing to remember, and this is coming a little bit from a position of privilege, is that you can always leave. That’s the one piece of power you maintain is that you can always quit. Now I know that for some people, that financial situations means that makes it really difficult. And maybe you really can’t and depending on what country you’re in, it might be connected to healthcare coverage and all sorts of really important things. But it is always an option and it is always important to remember that you have that option.

[00:09:37] Andy Polaine: It’s also horrible though, to feel like you might have to quit because someone else has bullied you out. And going back to that point in the beginning. Yeah, document it. You can make it an HR issue. But sometimes it’s not actually worth the mental health impact that that’s going to have on you. And sometimes it’s better to leave rather than grit your teeth and try and get that person out, particularly if it seems like the company or HR is not actually doing anything about that person. I would suggest that the damage to your mental health and your confidence long-term, is worse than whatever dip you might go through by having to switch jobs.

I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below.

This is a pretty loaded topic, and I know people have lots of different opinions and experiences about this and I would really love to hear from you, so please post a comment below.

Thanks very much and I’ll see you again soon.

Servant Leadership or Burnout Martydom?

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0200

The idea of “servant leadership” is quite popular, but in my design leadership coaching I often see this ending up as martyrdom and burnout.

In this week’s design leadership coaching reflections I offer a different metaphor, ending with fill your cup first rather than leaders eating last.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Intro

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: The idea of servant leadership is quite popular, but it can often lead to a kind of toxic martyrdom and burnout. How can you avoid this?

My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

The downsides of servant leadership

[00:00:16] Andy Polaine: And this week, I want to talk about the downsides of servant leadership and offer a different metaphor instead. Now, originally comes from Robert K Greenleaf who wrote a book called "The Servant as Leader".

I think a lot of people probably know it from Simon Sinek’s "Leaders Eat Last" book. And I’ve always had a bit of a problem with it because the way I’ve seen it present in coaching. I’ve often seen that become a kind of martyred in leadership, taking all the blows and being a punchbag for both the stakeholders above and then from the team below.

I don’t know if this is particular to design leaders, because they spend a lot of their early career building up their empathy skills and then are applying it in that position. I think it could also be to do with where design sits in the organization. I have executive design leaders, but a lot of them are that junior executive VP level design leaders. And there’s usually some people more senior to them and then they’re also running a capability beneath them. I think it quite often happens at a slightly more junior leadership level, like a design lead or a team lead or something like that as well.

In my coaching. It also has a bit more of a bias towards female coachees. And by that, I mean, people socialized from birth or as children as female, because as Emily Nagoski says, women are socialized as givers.

What I do see in my coaching is people who have been that punchbag for awhile, they’re just burning out they’re stretched very thin, because they’re trying to take all of this stress from above and absorb it. And they’re also usually getting some kind of stress from their team below and they’re trying to absorb that and that’s just very, very hard to take.

I think there’s an ability you can develop over time where it’s not that you don’t care. It just doesn’t get absorbed into as much.

A different metaphor

[00:01:52] Andy Polaine: I prefer a different metaphor for this, which is a compressor or noise gate or some kind of stabilizer. So for those of you not familiar with audio processing there’s a thing called a compressor, I’ve got one down here, and what it does is it takes the high level audio and it compresses that down. And it takes the quiet sections and it brings them up a bit. And so you get a much more even audio. You’ll hear it on people’s podcasts all the time, and you’ll be hearing it on this.

There’s another thing called a noise gate and we use it in audio processing, I use it my podcast too, so that when I’m really quiet and there’s silence, then there might be some very quiet background noise, the noise gate just cuts the audio. So only lets through a certain amount of noise above a certain threshold. When I’m speaking and I’m going to quiet, it goes to zero again.

If you think about this in terms of what’s your role as a middle leader in the organization, you’ll often get stakeholders who get kind of jittery and our link to another video where I talk about that and skydiving.

And what happens there as they start to get jittery, they’re going to start talking to you and micro-managing, and they may even start to talk to the team directly. And often that can be really problematic, because the team are trying to get on with their work. And they’ve got someone who’s very senior to them who’s making them nervous.

But it also happens from the other way as well. So the team can often complain about what’s going on - a difficult stakeholder, difficult project owner or manager and if you let all of those comments through, if you always pass them on, what happens, you get this really high frequency interaction and they can build on each other and end up in this kind of feedback loop and that can really start to become problematic.

The job of that middle leadership is not to be a punching bag from each side and just try and suck it up and hold it in, but actually to stabilize things in the middle and, and to do that, you need to have some kind of discernment of whether this complaint or this issue, the team having warrants being passed upwards. And it might be slightly modified in the way you say it. You know, the team might be swearing about someone, but you probably going to pass it on in a slightly gentler way, but you still need to be authentic and clear about what the problem is.

And the same in the other direction, if you’ve got senior stakeholder who is constantly complaining about the team, or has issues, or is worried and all those things. You have to decide which one of those things are really genuine that you need to bring to the team because they need to do something about, which ones you’re just going to leave the other side of the noise gate.

Fill your cup first

[00:04:13] Andy Polaine: So what inspired this video actually, apart from my coachees was a video from John Amaechi, who’s got really great content on LinkedIn, and he talked about this idea of filling your cup first. So rather than leaders eat last. Fill your cup first. If you are burnt out, you’re not going to help anyone, right.

Eventually you’ll end up taking time off or leaving. Then the team lose their leadership and they won’t have set up their own boundaries because you were acting as their shield already. And so all of a sudden they’re really exposed. So just as you might put on your own oxygen mask before you help others. Fill your cup first.

I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own tips about how you go about managing that tension between those two sides please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them.

Thanks very much and I’ll see you again soon.

Hansi Singh - AI-accelerated environmental forecasts

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0200

My guest today comes from a very different field to design. Dr Hansi Singh is a former Professor of physical climate science, University of Victoria. A US Department of Energy Office of Science fellow and awardee. Specialist in Earth system modeling and high performance computing. Working group co-chair of the Community Earth System Model, funded by NSF.

And she uses all those amazing skills as CEO of Planette, a company specialising in AI-accelerated environmental forecasts to help inform decision making.

You can view it below or on YouTube or subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts or listen on the player below.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Audio

Show Links

Hansi

Planette: https://www.planette.ai/forecasts
Hansi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansi-singh-phd/

Andy

Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/andypolaine.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine

Timestamps

00:00 Intro
01:16 Hansi’s Background
05:04 Crochet
08:19 Planette
25:36 How climate scientists run models
33:26 One small thing question
37:20 Outro

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello, and welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of Zoom, from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organizations, society, and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, service design consultant, educator, and author. Sometimes I like to change things up a little, and my guest today comes from a very different field to design.

Dr. Hansi Singh is professor of physical climate science at the University of Victoria, a U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science fellow and awardee. Specialist in earth system modeling and high performance computing, working group co chair of the Community Earth System Model funded by the NSF. And she also uses all those amazing skills as CEO of Planet, a company specializing in AI accelerated environmental forecasts to help inform decision making.

Hansi, welcome to Power of Ten.

[00:00:51] Hansi Singh: Thank you so much for having me, Andy. Super exciting to be here.

[00:00:54] Andy Polaine: So you’re unusual as you, as you know, the show is mostly around design. Although I do talk about kind of design operating at different levels of zoom and thinking about that systems thinking and how small things make a big difference.

Before we get onto Planette can you just tell us a little bit about your background and maybe the sort of pivot? I don’t know if it’s a full pivot or that kind of your current role, how you’re getting into that.

[00:01:16] Hansi Singh: Yeah. Yeah. I have a very sort of non linear life trajectory in many ways. So. Yeah, it’s super strange.

I did my undergrad in physics. And then after that, I actually spent some time as a modern dancer. So was a modern dancer. And then from there, yeah had a child and then was like, Oh, I love the topology of knitting. I’m going to like make crazy things with it. And so I spent some time as a knitting or craft at that time it wasn’t even called influencer, but I realized now that’s sort of what it was. You know, so doing that, I kind of created a very successful small business with that.

And then I was like, Oh, math is so fun. I’m going to go to grad school. And so then suddenly I ended up in grad school in math. And from there I transitioned into climate because it was such a cool use of math. And then from there, you know, yeah, did all of these other sorts of things. you know, things that you, you list there. So became worked at the Department of Energy for a while. They actually are the ones that sponsored my, my graduate program. I was a DOE CSGF fellow, which is basically computational science. And so, yeah, so they sort of really try to, I’m steep you in national lab research culture so that you know, you’re coming in with this very specific science subject matter expertise, but you know a lot about high performance computing.

So there’s all the computing stuff coming in as well. And then from there, yeah, transitioned into being a prof and actually you listed that I’m currently a prof. I actually just resigned.

[00:03:02] Andy Polaine: Oh, okay. Well, congratulations. Commiserations. Not sure how that works.

[00:03:06] Hansi Singh: Yeah, no, it was, it was a good kind of resign because this is, you know, really wanted to devote myself full time to what we do at Planette.

[00:03:16] Andy Polaine: There’s a little step there where you said on modern dance and topology of knitting. And then I went to grad school and did all this computer, the hardcore kind of maths and computer stuff. Presumably you were also already good at that. And it wasn’t just like, you know, waltzed in.

[00:03:30] Hansi Singh: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, my undergrad was in physics for sure. So, you know, did the math and everything, right? But I think at some point kind of thinking through what it meant to be sort of a professional artist. It was, I don’t know, at that time and probably even now, not necessarily what I wanted.

So I think that’s where that transition came in. And I think also at that same time I was, I was still doing other things that were keeping me close to, you know, physics and science. So I did a lot of like tutoring. And so it wasn’t as though I just had this, you know, 10 year break and hadn’t done any math and then suddenly went back to it.

So, but . I guess there’s kind of two themes there, right? I mean, one of them is just like that kind of underlying theme of, of just science and technology and computing. But I think there’s also this idea of what can you make out of that when you can be creative with it?

[00:04:34] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Okay.

[00:04:35] Hansi Singh: Right. So like that, the creativity is like the part that’s. I don’t know, adds some spark to that and makes it exciting and where you’re sort of thinking about possibilities. And, you know, I definitely spent a lot of time getting that subject matter expertise, but now I feel like I’m in full creative mode, which is really fun.

[00:04:54] Andy Polaine: All right. Well, that’s good. That’s very good. We’ll get on to it in a second. I cannot let the topology of knitting go though, so I, what

[00:05:00] Hansi Singh: Okay, we’re going to talk about the topology.

[00:05:01] Andy Polaine: Yeah, just tell me, just tell me briefly what that is, yeah.

[00:05:04] Hansi Singh: Yeah, so, so basically at that time I think it was like 2007, 2006, there was kind of a lot of online chatter about this, there was this one mathematician over at Cornell. Her name was Diana Taimiņa I hope I said her last name right, but basically she was doing like kind of teaching students about higher order topology using crochet. So essentially, you can create these sort of really cool. I guess, what is the word for hyperbolic surfaces using crochet and you see them a lot in the natural world.

Like imagine anything that’s like super crenulated that is actually a hyperbolic surface. And so she was doing that and, you know, the big place that you see those crenulations is often in coral reefs, right?

[00:05:58] Andy Polaine: Is she the woman behind that?

[00:05:59] Hansi Singh: Yes.

[00:06:01] Andy Polaine: I know what you’re about to say. Go on.

[00:06:02] Hansi Singh: Yeah. So then that like really just kind of got me thinking because these people are doing crochet in the context of these like beautiful coral reefs.

And so then, you know, there’s these big displays going up in, you know, You know, various institutions. I think Cornell probably had one at that time, but I, I don’t know. They were, they were going up all over, all over the world. You know, which was basically a bunch of crochet folks making these hyperbolic surfaces and, you know, they have these beautiful kind of coral reef shapes and they then, you know, are putting them in these kind of displays.

It’s like you know an art setting that they’re, they’re doing almost like a diorama, but it’s like giant. And so I was just like, well, but they’re doing crochet. Can I do the same thing with knitting? What can I do with knitting? Yes. So beautiful.

Yeah. What can I do with knitting? And so it was sort of from there that I was

there is so much beautiful underwater imagery. And so, why just knit a sweater? Why not knit like an octopus or a nudibranch or, I don’t know a squid, right? Why keep yourself to sort of the usual types of things that people like to make?

Yeah, those are so beautiful.

[00:07:17] Andy Polaine: Yeah, I’ve seen that exhibition in the flesh, actually. It was in Germany and, went, went to see it is, it is amazing. Yeah. It’s beautiful. And it’s just this beautiful community thing because all these people kind of send stuff in as well.

[00:07:29] Hansi Singh: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So you know, I started to make, like, it actually first started with an octopus, started making an octopus and, you know, posted it. I think I posted it on Flickr and then I actually posted the octopus itself on Etsy. And then I suddenly got all these like questions of like, Hey you know, I’d love to make this for myself. Like, can you share the pattern? And yeah, that was like, Oh, well we can sell patterns. Right. And yeah, so that’s where this whole thing, I had this little brand called Hansi Garumi.

And, you know, basically just created all sorts of crazy patterns for various stuffies. And so, yeah, did that for a few years and wrote a book. And then from there, I was suddenly like grad school. I don’t know where that came from. So…

[00:08:19] Andy Polaine: Amazing. Well, that’s quite a pivot. So so well, so tell us tell us about Planette then what what was the… you know, there’s been obviously weather and climate forecasts for a long time. So you know, what were you seeing where you were thinking, well, I should tell us about what Planette does actually, I gave the sort of one liner, but you should maybe tell us a little bit more about it.

[00:08:40] Hansi Singh: Yeah. So as you know, we have reached some really, I think important planetary milestones. milestones, maybe not good milestones.

So for example, we are now at the point where we are 1. 5 degrees Celsius warmer than we were in 1850. And so, you know, that might not seem like much, but I think when you put it in the perspective of the fact that during the last glacial maximum, when there were ice sheets covering huge parts of North America and Europe and Eurasia in general, at that time, the earth was only about three and a half degrees cooler than it is today.

So thinking about that, and then thinking that now we’ve, we’re at 1. 5 degrees warmer, that is huge. And I know that that is also, you know, like we have the IPCC and you know, in Paris with the COP agreement, we were like, yeah, we’re shooting for 1. 5, but. 1. 5 is still a very different world, right? And yes, we’re shooting for 1. 5 because we know that it’s much worse further, right? And so, yeah, I think that that is where Planet comes in, because we recognize that because the world is very different than it was you know just over the last century that is going to require adaptation. And so here you get into this kind of big issue, right?

Where we as a species are trying to figure out, first of all, we have to decrease emissions, but at the same time, this world that we have, this 1. 5 degree world is something that we are stuck with. Right. Like we can’t change this 1. 5 degree world within my lifetime, your lifetime, even, you know, our grandkids lifetime.

And that’s just because carbon cycles are really slow. Even if we find ways to, you know, kind of speed them up where, you know, I mean, sure, there’s a lot of like kind of ideas of how we can better pull carbon back into the ground, but honestly, we haven’t even figured out how to stop emitting.

So this is the world we’re stuck with and it might get worse and so adaptation is a huge and important area where we need to put in resources and this is where Planette comes in. So, today If I want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow or in the next few days, I look at a weather forecast, right?

If I want to like get really depressed and hear about how bad things are going to be in 2050, right? Yeah. Yeah. If I want to cry, if I want to go catatonic in my bedroom then I will go read the IPCC report or some other kind of climate timescale Projection. And those are like, you know, 30 years into the future and beyond.

And so what that means is that I have a few days versus 30 years. What about the in between time where people actually need information? And this is an area where there’s like, very little information currently available for the public, for businesses to be able to adjust to make decisions. And yet as climate change is increasing, volatility is increasing, you know, extreme weather event magnitude.

This is information that people really need. You need this in between timescale information. And so this is what we do at Planette.

[00:11:59] Andy Polaine: So why has it been, why is it missing? So now I get, cause I was going to ask you this question, but you, you talk about on, on the website, you talk about the data and the, and the forecast being actionable, and I guess this is kind of what you’re saying in the, you know, if I, if I really want, you know, if I want to know the weather now, I look out the window, if I want to know the weather in a few days, you look at where the forecast and for some things I can know I, I need, you know, to put stuff under cover or whatever it is, right. And down the other end, it’s kind of, well, you know, in 10 years time, don’t know, right. Our business might not even be around. So you know, the actionable window is this sort of near, near to midterm, I guess, you know, of ducks in a row.

I’m sort of nonplussed that that doesn’t exist already. So, so first of all, why, why is there this gap?

[00:12:47] Hansi Singh: Yeah. So a few things, first of all, it’s been, some of it is science and technology, right? So in order to do forecasting at these timescales, you can’t use a weather model, right? You have to use a large scale global climate model and that’s because predictability over these longer time horizons completely depends on the state of the ocean.

So you have to be able to predict the state of the ocean. And then that state of the ocean sort of you know, creates what we call teleconnections to land. And then that is what we then experience as a particular climate state for that particular month or that particular family of weather events that could occur based on that ocean state.

So, so you need to run these different models the technology for being able to do this and the science, even it’s only been around for approximately the last 10 years or so, and this is because you have to take these big models, and these are very similar to the models that like the IPCC uses. And so, you know, all of the major climate modeling centers in the world use, and then you have to initialize them very particularly with the state of the ocean, but it’s not straightforward how that initialization happens.

So, you know, for these last 10 years, 10 or 15 years, scientists incrementally have been figuring all of that out. And now this kind of shorter term forecasting is more or less like, you know, production ready, but it’s mostly stuck within research and academia. Right. So what? Okay. Exactly. So part of this issue too, that we get to is tech transfer.

So if you’re at an engineering school anywhere, like literally the first thing, like people are constantly thinking about tech transfer. They’re like, patent transfer, commercialize, patent transfer, commercialize. And that is just, you know, like bread and butter for what any engineering school around the world does.

But for climate science, people have like conventionally thought, yeah, this is just something that we study for fun. And now suddenly it’s being thrust into this area where the planet, every single human on this planet is our stakeholder, and yet the way that that discipline has been functioning has not caught up, in my opinion, to, you know, the magnitude of global need for this information.

[00:15:06] Andy Polaine: We, when you talked before you know, before this recording talked about the side of the, kind of the storytelling, if you like, of that data too, and I’m interested kind of about how you go about this. Because one of the things that’s been, I think, an Achilles heel of scientists is they tend to think, well, if people just knew the data, then they’d change their behavior. So we just need to tell them more data and they still don’t get it. Let’s tell them some more data. And of course, what happens is people get in that sort of helplessness mode. And then it’s like, oh, it’s just all too much. It doesn’t really matter. I’m just going to carry on how things are. Someone else will sort this out.

I’m interested kind of how you go from that, what I imagine is a lot of very heavy number crunching and actually kind of tell the story of that because step changes in public awareness have been, you know, Al Gore David Attenborough of a polar bear on a shard of ice, a seahorse with its tail wrapped around a plastic earbud. Those are those kinds of things that really stick with people and then make them actually, well, if they make them act, they certainly stir some kind of action. So I’m interested how you take this thing, which I imagine is very heavily computational and turn it into something that your, your clients, your customers, your businesses and other organizations can look at and make sense of without being, well, without being people like you.

[00:16:19] Hansi Singh: Yes. So that is kind of a huge area of figuring out how to take this kind of, you know, midterm climate information, right? So midterm forecasting. So somewhere between what’s going to happen next month versus all the way to what’s going to happen, say, five years into the future. That is the window that we occupy. And it’s a little bit beyond what people conventionally call S2S sub seasonal to seasonal forecasting. Usually S2S is up to a year or maybe two. I think NOAA defines it as two. But yeah, we can go even further just because there is predictability in the system and for some people that’s useful to know.

But. So in terms of thinking about how to make the data actually useful. So from a business perspective if I just give a random business that data, like they won’t know what to do with it. And so what people have to do, what we have to do is figure out a way to translate that information into what does that mean for that particular business?

And so in the process of that translation, right you know, there are so many possibilities. So first of all, there is some certain classes of businesses, for example, that are very data savvy. They can just take the data and they can write the story themselves. So for example, one example of that is insurance companies.

They have amazing ways in which they model risk. And so our data is kind of one of the factors that they might use to say, you know, model risk for underwriting for next year, for example.

So that is relatively straightforward, but for some other verticals, right? It is like so much more complicated in terms of they might not be data savvy, and you know, they might have sort of very specific things that they want to look at. And so some of it might be, you know, like us actually having to provide some sort of a dashboard where we input some of their information, take our forecast, say of extreme weather or of, you know, various other weather average environmental variables, and then use that to pull out the intelligence and then have that visible on the dashboard. So that’s one of those areas we’re still kind of working on figuring out what the scalable kind of solution is there for, for different areas. So like, for example, think about energy, right?

So in this new world, we’re going to have like so much renewable energy, which is wonderful and great, but renewable energy, it’s not the same as having your coal fired plant that can just be burning all the time. Right. It’s intermittent.

[00:19:00] Andy Polaine: It’s peaky. Yeah. And it’s weather dependent, right? Yeah.

[00:19:02] Hansi Singh: Totally. Totally. It’s totally weather dependent. And so because it’s weather dependent, right, what that means too is that sometimes when you have high demand events, you have low production. So like imagine, for example you have a heat wave. And at the same time, most heat waves are accompanied by something called a thermal high. And so because of that, you have like this high pressure that’s kind of sitting there. Usually with high pressures, like you don’t have much wind, right? So suddenly all your wind turbines are off. And the temperatures say if they’re really high, even the solar panels, their production will be down. And so you could have a case where you’re not actually meeting demand.

[00:19:45] Andy Polaine: Right, because everyone’s aircon is on. Yes. Which is the, yeah, okay. Yeah.

[00:19:49] Hansi Singh: Exactly. Exactly. You’re not meeting demand. And literally there’s places, right, where people are alive because of the air conditioning. Like think about Phoenix in the summer.

You know, just kind of thinking about that, I’m like, I’m not sure if that place is really habitable without air conditioning. I mean, maybe it is. I, I, I don’t know. So essentially the information that we can provide is this kind of longer timescale information so people can actually be prepared for events like that.

So, for example, we can forecast, Hey, you know, it’s going to be low production, but high demand this particular month. And so, you know, y’all should make sure that you have other energy sources on the grid or that you are prepared to purchase energy from neighboring electricity grids.

[00:20:41] Andy Polaine: Right. Okay. And so for real estate, this is also, so I’ve got a little story here for you actually, which you might enjoy.

There is a a place, I think it’s called Yulara. It’s near Uluru, which is, is known as Ayer’s Rock, but Uluru is the, this big rock in the center of Australia. That everyone knows as a sort of tourist place to go to is that famous kind of red kind of plateau. And when they were doing the surveying for Yulara, which is a kind of village, it’s been a few kilometers away where there were the sort of tourists and there’s this kind of like, well, there’s a campsite, but there’s two other hotels there.

And the indigenous Australians said, well, you know, don’t build a hotel there because it’s a watering hole and the surveyors were like, well, there hasn’t been water here for a hundred years and they were like, and sure enough, of course, you know in indigenous knowledge, the kind of cycles of seasons are things like, you know, there’s this one thing that lasts for a month and it comes every 10 years.

And and sure enough, you know, when it, there was a downpour the, the luxury hotel started to flood because, you know, that’s what happens at the watering hole. So I guess, I’m guessing with real estate, I know in Miami, there’s a massive kind of issue about this, right? In the States, I imagine there’s other places where rising sea levels and all the rest of it. But how else does real estate get involved in your world?

[00:22:03] Hansi Singh: Yeah. So, you know, you were kind of talking about how to translate that data, right? So for energy, you would translate it in terms of energy production and demand and helping people figure out like, you know, how to plan for those Times where load was unequal, right?

For real estate. So, you know, it could be something like this year is going to be a really, you know, bad hurricane year. And so for that year, make sure that you are taking the proper precautions in terms of your real estate in terms of say insurance coverage, or in terms of various types of retrofitting, like this might be the time to do that retrofit. The other interesting thing about real estate, I have to say, Andy, is like, I don’t know if those markets have caught up to reality.

I was about to suggest that. Yeah.

Yeah.

[00:22:52] Andy Polaine: I don’t think they have. No. No. There was a, there was a really good, I think it was like an NPR thing where some guy was was thinking about moving to Miami and, and he was then asking realtors, you know, so, you know I, I noticed, you know, is there any, you know, what are you doing about kind of flooding here? You know, how’s this condo kind of built for that? And, but you know, it’s fine. Everything’s fine. And he, you know, this person obviously knew that it absolutely wasn’t. And I imagine it, that’s, that’s tomorrow’s problem, right? Which is the fundamental issue.

[00:23:25] Hansi Singh: I think that is the fundamental issue, and I think some of it too is because, for example as scientists, how do we tell those stories, right? There’s the issue of stories, but I think there’s also the issue of how humans function, right? And so all of those things, I think they kind of are at odds with each other. So, you know, the storytelling is particularly about the fact that this land is subsiding, literally the land is subsiding while at the same time sea levels are rising, while at the same time you have changes in weather patterns.

So for example, like the Atlantic this year, it’s an El Nino year. Usually you expect El Nino years to be, you know, pretty low on the hurricane totem pole in the Atlantic, but guess what? They’re not going to be this year because the Atlantic is also really warm, right? And so, you know, all of these different factors that come into play. How do you communicate that to people? And how do you even communicate that to the market? I think the market does not know because people don’t know. But it’s hard to say that they don’t know because honestly, like who doesn’t know unless you were living in a hole, but I, I, yeah, this is, this is hard. Real estate is one of those areas where I don’t view that as being one of our first markets because that’s an area where people are, yeah, I don’t know.

[00:24:51] Andy Polaine: People. People are people. People are people. You said the markets thing. You hear that on the news, the markets reacted in this way to something. And of course, you know, it’s people.

And we tend to think, I think, because those people are dealing with numbers and sometimes very large numbers, that somehow it’s kind of all very, very logical, but it’s it’s terribly instinctual, all of that. And as we know, you know, you get kind of you know, runs on things and you get all sorts of bubbles and, and all the rest of it.

Yep. I wanted to switch, you, you talk about this the work you’re doing or the, the sort of what you’re creating is powered by AI. And of course, right now is a little bit of like, oh God, you know, well, everything, my shoes are powered by AI. This feels like an area where it’s like legitimate. So can you tell me a little bit about what role that plays and how that’s meant you can do things that you couldn’t do before?

[00:25:36] Hansi Singh: Yeah. So in this case Let me tell you about how climate scientists run large models. So our very large models are run on high performance computing systems using thousands of processors running at once. And sometimes individual experiments can take months to run. And if you might wonder, well, what does she mean by a global climate model?

It is literally a couple of million lines of code that is often in Fortran and usually pieces of it are in Fortran 77. Right? Because there’s a lot of legacy code in there. And so, you know, you can kind of think of it as a, a sort of layered ball that people have just been like building on top of, right?

And so, yeah, there’s Fortran 77 deep in there. And then all of these other layers, you know, Fortran 95, right? Oh, so, so modern. And, and so, yeah, so these are the kinds of things that we run. In order to, you know, produce say climate projections for the IPCC. But as I said, this is also what we have to run in order to produce these types of short or midterm projections, which is what we do at Planette. So one month to five years. And, and so in order to do that in a way that is efficient, operationalizable, and actually useful to humans rather than just being like, Oh, look at this cool thing that this model did. We actually have to use the AI in there.

So the AI, we use it to speed up, right? So we can actually use it to like for example do something called boosting. So what we do, right, is that we can run our Earth system model, and then we can create a whole bunch more ensemble realizations of that model using an AI emulator. So that’s kind of, yeah.

[00:27:38] Andy Polaine: So that’s, so that’s sort of variations on the, on the theme. Okay. And I guess people who have been using kind of image generators will, will know that kind of idea of like, you start with one and then you can kind of do variations on it, right?

[00:27:50] Hansi Singh: Yeah, exactly. But they’re like physics based variations. Cause the emulator that we use is based on a, what we call the hybrid AI model.

So meaning that there’s physics in there. Okay. But it’s AI, so it’s really fast and efficient.

[00:28:03] Andy Polaine: Yeah, so you’re not having to recalculate recrunch everything from scratch each time.

[00:28:08] Hansi Singh: Yes, exactly. And, and so, yeah, so that’s part of the acceleration. But the other thing too that AI actually allows, and you might have been hearing all of this stuff about how AI can do weather better than a weather model.

Partly that’s like, I mean, a lot of these AI models, they’re just quote unquote, dumb models, right? Because it’s just taking all of the statistics and just crunching it. And then kind of producing an emulator that can emulate the weather. Like that’s, that’s, that’s pretty much what these things are.

The next level up is when the model actually has some physics in it, but it still has the statistics that AI specializes in. And so from there, then, you know, you can calculate things that potentially are outside of the models training data. That’s kind of one of the challenges here as well, when it comes to, you know, say a weather model. If the weather model has only seen a particular type of weather, right from the past, then as our climate changes, yeah, yeah. I get it. Yeah, is it able to actually do that? And this is an issue both with numerical models as well as real life models as you know, or or AI models sorry. Because of the fact that, you know, everyone is kind of working with the same training data in terms of AI or with the same physics, right? And so, And not only that, but interestingly, like, technically, a numerical weather model should be good for any type of weather, but practically, all of these models are tuned, they are tuned to a particular climate state.

And so, you know, this is one of those things where this hurricane Otis intensified really rapidly over 24 hours. How come our models didn’t capture it? First of all, they only ran 10 ensemble members, right? That’s usually how people do these types of simulations. And then on top of that even if you were using an AI model, if the AI had not seen enough examples of rapid intensification and the factors that cause it, then it’s not going to produce an ensemble member that has rapid intensification. So I think we’re getting into all sorts of interesting things where you have AI, it’s powerful, but it’s powerful in the context of training data. How do you get it to behave outside of that training data envelope and the way that you do that is through putting some physics into there as well?

[00:30:33] Andy Polaine: A couple of last questions. One is what are your hopes for Planette? Obviously you hope it’s going to be successful, but what do you hope it’s impact will be?

[00:30:40] Hansi Singh: Yeah. So we’re a mission driven company and yet we just raised a bunch of money from venture capital. So we just raised 2. 4 million.

[00:30:51] Andy Polaine: Congratulations.

[00:30:52] Hansi Singh: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And so what that means, right, is that people are betting on us as a high growth company, high growth, scalable company, which is great because one thing that’s going to Good about that model is that it assumes that everyone wants your, whatever you’re offering, right?

In this case, our data or the intelligence that comes from that data. So that’s great. So what that means is that, you know, we are shooting for high reach, but the impact part is that look not everybody can pay. So there are a lot of people that can pay. Insurance companies can pay you know, the military can pay I’m trying to think like…

[00:31:35] Andy Polaine: There’s a lot of businesses or sectors where I guess it’s highly lucrative for them to understand what you offer.

[00:31:42] Hansi Singh: Absolutely. Yes. This kind of midterm prediction. Absolutely. So those folks can pay, but then for example, thinking about impact, what about say disaster preparation in the developing world, right? There are so many places where, for example, if you knew that next month or in three months, there was going to be the possibility of really extreme precipitation there are measures that you can take to save lives.

Usually with extreme precipitation, what kills people is actually not the flooding itself, but it’s actually the fact that the sewage gets into the drinking water and then people die from cholera, right? So if you can get that clean water there. You know, well in advance of when these events happen, rather than having to figure out how to get it there really fast once people are already drinking contaminated water, you can save so many lives, right?

So even just thinking about those kinds of impacts, there are so many use cases like this where, by being able to deploy this data really widely, we can really make a difference in the world. And I mean, one thing that I often think about is when you think about the developing world, they’re not the ones that caused the climate change and caused the sewers are flooding all the time kind of situations, right?

And yet they’re the ones that are going to, In general, be the most afflicted. And so by being able to provide this information, we are trying to do sort of the right thing in terms of allowing folks to be prepared in however way possible. I mean, when we think adaptation in our world, think about adaptation in the developing world, that’s even harder because you don’t even have the money to do it.

[00:33:26] Andy Polaine: So there is one final question. Maybe, maybe you’ve already answered it. Ray and Charles Eames, they made a film called Power of 10.

[00:33:32] Hansi Singh: My favorite.

[00:33:34] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:33:35] Hansi Singh: Classic. I remember watching that at the San Francisco Exploratorium when I was four.

[00:33:40] Andy Polaine: There you go. So my story is my dad had the flip book of it that I used to flip through as a child. And it really kind of that, that levels of zoom thing. That’s what, you know, why I talk about it because I, I’m always very fascinated by how one small thing can kind of ripple up and have a massive effect. And the sort of systems thinking thing of also how the larger system, if there’s a slight shift in it, how it ripples all the way down. I used to find it very, very difficult to find examples of this until COVID happened and then everyone’s like, Oh, yeah. Okay. And I’ll get how that works now.

So it’s a very useful way of explaining my particular sort of area of design of service design, where we kind of look at that relationship between those two things and some of what you’re talking about just now about getting clean drinking water to to areas that will be hit by a disaster. I know all the sort of systems thinkers and services and people, they’re kind of radars we’ll be going want to get involved in that.

So the, the final question is what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world?

[00:34:37] Hansi Singh: That’s a hard question. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could bring it back to climate adaptation, because to be honest, that is one area where I think there is not enough emphasis put in, and yet it’s going to be such a huge part of how we stay civilized as we move into this warmer, wetter, more volatile world, right, that we’ve created.

That is like sort of one of my hopes that as we think about, okay, okay, we have to decrease emissions. We have to decrease emissions. How do we do that? How do we actually make this possible? Given the fact that there are so many countries that still need to develop and industrialize and lift its, you know, citizens out of poverty. And I think the other side of that, of course, is that this world is different, right?

This is a different world than the one that our parents grew up in. I often think about this in the context of how kids experience summers. Think about this whole idea of, Oh yeah, in the summer you just go to camp and you hang out for several months and you, you know, you swim in the lake and kids this last summer, they didn’t get to do any of that because either it was smoky or something was burning or it was just too hot.

It is a different world. And so this whole idea of this large scale transformation that has to happen with adaptation, adapting to this new world, that to me is such a crucial piece of I think how we have to think about the climate story.

[00:36:17] Andy Polaine: Yeah. It’s interesting as a species, you know, obviously our success has been that we’re incredibly adaptable. Yeah. But as sort of individuals, we’re kind of really rubbish at thinking about it sometimes.

[00:36:29] Hansi Singh: Yeah, that is so interesting, actually, because you’re right, like, we are adaptable. We have brains. I mean, to some extent, that’s almost one of those areas where you’re like, you wish you weren’t quite so adaptable. Because I think that’s where you get into the frog in the frying pan analogy, where everyone is just like, Oh, yeah, it’s all fine. Sure. This is the new world. I think that if we were a little bit more like, hey, we need to change things. I, I think that, yeah, I, I don’t like the direction this is going.

[00:36:59] Andy Polaine: People can find you on, at planet with an extra E or double T E dot AI. Where else can people find you linkedIn and things.

[00:37:08] Hansi Singh: Yeah. So I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on Twitter. Usual places.

[00:37:13] Andy Polaine: It’s been fascinating. Thank you so much for being my guest on Power of Ten.

[00:37:17] Hansi Singh: Thank you, Andy. It’s really great to be here.

[00:37:20] Andy Polaine: Thank you. You have been listening to and watching a Power of Ten. You can find more about the show on polaine.comwhere you can also check out my leadership coaching practice, online courses, and sign up for my unfortunately very irregular newsletter, a Doctor’s Note.

If you have any thoughts, put them in the comments or get in touch, you will find me as apolaine, A P O L A I N E on pkm.social on Mastodon. You’ll find me on LinkedIn. And of course, you’ll find me on my website. All the links will be in the show notes, including those from Hansi.

Thanks for listening and see you next time.

Developing presence and confidence in leadership

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0200

What do David Byrne, David Bowie and Beyoncé, all have in common? They’ve all used a persona to help them step into the energy of performing and give them confidence.

In this week’s design leadership coaching reflections I talk about presence and stepping into the leadership role without becoming self-inflated and arrogant.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Introduction

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: What do David Byrne, David Bowie and Beyoncé, all have in common? They’ve all used a persona to help them step into the energy of performing and give them confidence.

My name is Andy Polaine. And every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week. And this week, I want to talk about presence and stepping into the leadership role without becoming self-inflated and arrogant.

Presence

[00:00:24] Andy Polaine: So presence is one of those things that sometimes talked about as executive presence, which I find a little bit, 🤮. I really think it’s not about pretending to be entirely someone you are not, and this is a common misconception, I think. And it can lead you to become sort of overinflated and full of hubris and become very fake, like Steve Ballmer’s famous "developers, developers, developers" monkeying about onstage. And ironically, when you do that, you actually get more imposter syndrome because you’re scared you’re going to be found out if you’re trying to be something that you’re completely not and holding that tension can often lead to leaders acting out in awful ways where they become very demanding or arrogant or aggressive.

And that’s not what I’m talking about.

On Stage

[00:01:05] Andy Polaine: So, what I’m talking about is that it’s, it’s kind of a gig you’re sort of on stage. This is important because when you’re in that role and either you’re in a leadership role or giving a speech, you are teaching, that’s one of the things I’ve really learned from teaching quite a lot and also from facilitation of workshops, people are expecting you to take on that role. And that’s what I mean by holding the projection and when you constantly undermine that, If you’ve ever seen a teacher who has been very nervous and then the class runs amok or if you ever seen someone who’s facilitating a workshop and they just can’t control the room and manage the room. You’ll see that going on. And actually people really appreciate the fact that you do take on that role.

Personas - David Byrne

[00:01:43] Andy Polaine: So David Byrne is an example I often use because in the Stop Making Sense tour he famously had this really big suit. It was kind of normal business suit, but it was made huge because a friend of his said to him, "Oh it’s like Kabuki theater, Japanese Kabuki theater. They have this big sort of boxy silhouettes of costumes. When you’re on stage, everything needs to be bigger." And he’s famously also neurodivergent and you can see that it gives him this way to sort of unmask himself when he’s onstage. And if you look online, you’ll find videos of him practicing in the suit and finding funny ways he can move about in it.

Personas - David Bowie

[00:02:16] Andy Polaine: When David Bowie died, there were loads of documentaries about him, and there was a bit in it where he was talking about Ziggy Stardust, his famous persona. And one of the things you could really see that he was sort of struggling to perform actually. He’d often said he likes making music, but he didn’t really like performing and being on stage. And you can see there’s a sort of lack of confidence in him and an awkwardness. And then when he developed the alter ego of Ziggy Stardust, you can see when he’s on stage, he’s just completely different. He’s got a whole load of confidence and difference about him. And he talks about this and how it enabled him to be something he’s not, enabled him to get onto stage.

Personas - Beyoncé

And Beyoncé’s alter ego is called Sasha fierce and she said, " It’s the fun, more sensual, more aggressive, more outspoken and more glamorous side that comes out when I’m working and when I’m on stage."

[00:03:02] Andy Polaine: Tina Turner is another one famously introverted, very quiet and shy, but onstage is obviously Tina Turner, as we all might think of her.

Wear a costume

[00:03:09] Andy Polaine: My own little version of this was a very gaudy, bright shirt from Desigual that I used to wear when I was giving keynotes on stage, I was always used to wear it when I was doing facilitation. Unfortunately, the shirt has now worn out. That’s why I’m talking about it in the past tense, but I will try and usually feel like I’m dressing up in some way to be in that role. I used to call it my "look at me!" shirt because it would draw people’s attention to it. It never failed to get some tweets and it was for me, a kind of costume that I was putting on. And I knew, okay, I will put on my costume and I’m going on stage and this is a kind of performance. Obviously I’m just giving a keynote or facilitating, but it put me in a slightly different frame of mind.

I know people who wear a special pair of shoes or even underwear to give them that confidence that this is a slightly different persona they’re taking on. If you’ve ever worn fancy dress, if the men amongst you’ve ever worn black tie and done the James Bond move in front of the mirror, you might’ve experienced how it can give you more confidence in social interactions.

But it is a costume and it’s important that you learn that you put it on and you take it off again. It’s a magnified version of you, but it’s still part of you. It helps give yourself permission to be a, maybe a bigger or more charismatic version of you, but after a while, you can switch it on and off without the props.

Don’t lose yourself

[00:04:23] Andy Polaine: It’s important you don’t lose yourself in it and think you are that person. The quote from Beyonce, wasn’t, I’m a completely different person. It was, this is a side of myself, when I’m on stage and there’s a different side of myself when I’m not on stage.

My suggestion for you is to try it out. If you feel like you lack a little bit of confidence or you don’t feel like you have presence when you’re talking to some people where you need to have that. Try it out. Try just wearing something a little bit different.

If you’re working from home, or especially if you’re working from home, and you have an important presentation. If you have a standing desk, try standing up to present your whole body is very different. I’m sitting right now, but, and I’m a bit like this. And when I stand up, it’s a very different posture. You’ve got more oxygen coming to your lungs, more blood flow and so forth. But more to the point it signals to your body. Oh, I’m on stage and I’m performing at the moment. So just try it out, experiment, see what works for you.

Outro

[00:05:16] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful. If you would like to check out my coaching practice it’s at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below. If you have got any tips about how you give yourself a confidence and presence boost, please post a comment below. I would love to hear them.

Thanks very much and I will see you again soon.

How To Use An Experience Portfolio To Plan Your Career

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Roles and titles are abstractions from the actual day-to-day work activities you do, but it’s easy to get caught in the trap of climbing a title ladder rather than exploring a portfolio of experiences.

In this week’s design leadership coaching reflections (which is actually last week’s posted late 🤦🏼‍♂️) I talk about the idea of an “experience portfolio” rather than just your design work portfolio. It’s also a great qualifying tool when it comes to saying yes or no to the many opportunities and asks of you.

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Transcript

Introduction

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Roles and titles are abstractions from the actual day-to-day work activities you do. But it’s easy to get caught in the trap of climbing a title ladder rather than exploring a portfolio of experiences.

My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week. And this week, I want to talk about your own career path, since it’s a thing that comes up a lot in coaching.

Title vs Activities

[00:00:24] Andy Polaine: You might yearn for the title of Chief Design Officer, for example, but it’s important to think about what that means as a daily activity. There’s not going to be much actual designing involved, for example, it’s mostly going to be about interacting with your peers in the C- Suite. And the enabling work for design to thrive in the organization, by helping the organization thrive. And that probably means a lot of meetings and calls every day. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s all about being clear about whether those are things that energize you or de-energize you.

Consider an Experience Portfolio

[00:00:55] Andy Polaine: Another way to think about your career growth beyond roles, levels and titles is to consider an experience portfolio approach.

So as a designer, and certainly when you’re more junior, you’ll be used to having done work over the years. And then you put that together in a portfolio that you show someone and say, look, this is all my design work. And this is how I think about designing. And as you get into management leadership roles that happens far less.

But even as a more junior designer, let alone being more senior, it’s useful to think about what kinds of things are missing from your portfolio of experiences? Not just the actual work.

So that could be what context or manner of work do you want to experience that you have not yet. That could be something around tools and technology. It could be around management and leadership. It could be about business knowledge and value proposition development, strategy, product leadership. It could be something around culture and quality or process or storytelling. Or it might be around the size of the company or the industry. Quite a lot of my coachees have maybe worked for startups and want to work for somewhere more established or vice versa where they’ve been working say in a large enterprise and then actually much prefer to work somewhere smaller or a startup.

Using the Gaps to Qualify Opportunities

[00:02:03] Andy Polaine: For other people, it might be, "I’ve been working in healthcare for ages and I’d like to move into FinTech, or I want to move into social impact work" and things like that.

Once you have an idea of the gaps in your experience portfolio that you want to fill, you can use those as qualification criteria for opportunities that come up where you are now. You’re always going to have more demands on your time and attention than you have time for. So this helps you to consider what you say yes or no to. There’s lots of people who will say, "Oh, you should do this thing it’d be really great for your career." And actually what they really want is "I’ve got this thing on my plate and I’d like to shovel it off onto your plate. And I’m going to tell you, it’s a real opportunity for you so that you take the bait."

So does this opportunity that is being presented to you, take your step closer to one of those experiences you want? So, for example, if you’d like to be managing people, and you haven’t really done much of that yet and you get the opportunity to mentor one or two designers in your team.

Or maybe it’s the chance to lead a project really much more on your own than you have done in the past. Those are all good experiences for moving upwards. It might be an opportunity to think about the whole career matrix or the structure of a team, if you’re a little bit more senior already, and that might be something you haven’t done yet already.

Or are you being asked to do something that you’ve done a million times before? And you could literally do this standing on your head. So you might want to say no to that because there’s not much growth in it for you.

So this way you can think about your career pathway. And it’s somewhere between something that’s very, very planned—and actually my experience has been when coaching people that nobody’s careers are really that planned. And when you listen to people, maybe well-known people talking about their experience and their career pathway, it sounds like it’s all been terribly cleverly planned and actually it’s much, much more random and generally people are often just going, "There’s an opportunity that came up and I went for it." So this idea of an experience portfolio gives you something between something that’s very rigidly planned, which is unrealistic, and something’s just kind of completely chaotic and you’re just a pinball being batted around whatever offers are there. It gives you a plan, but it’s loosely held.

Outro

[00:04:05] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you would like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own ideas and suggestions, or would like to share your own experiences of your career pathway, please post a comment below.

For everything else, such as my newsletter and my podcast you can go to polaine.com and you’ll find it all there.

Thanks very much and I will see you again soon.

How rules set you free to give great feedback

Fri, 31 May 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Rather than being constraints how can rules set you and your teams free? How can this help you give great feedback and raise the quality of design work from your team?

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon that the common themes and questions that came up in the week.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

Introduction

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Rather than being constraints. How can rules set you and your teams free to create great work?

My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that came up this week. And this week I want to talk about critique, culture and quality of work and how to raise it and how to set it up.

The Magic Circle

[00:00:22] Andy Polaine: But I’m going to go all the way back to 1938.

There’s a man called Johan Huizinga. He wrote a book called Homo Ludens and it was all about exploring games and play. And in it he came up with this concept of the magic circle as he was researching games. And the magic circle, you will know as something like a boxing ring or the lines on a football field, or the board on a board game. And in the magic circle different rules apply. So in a boxing ring you can punch someone, but you can’t punch them beneath the belt. On a football pitch, by which I don’t mean American rugby, I mean soccer, you have to kick the ball unless you’re the goalie and then you can pick it up with your hands. And if it goes out of that white line, then you start again and so forth.

And this is a really important concept because what happens actually is that those rules allow a different kind of behavior when you’re in the magic circle to the behavior than when you’re outside. And when it comes to critique culture, for example, and crit sessions, if you actually just have a very open structure and you say, okay, everyone bring their work and we’re going to talk about it. No one really knows what the rules are in that situation. So what they will do is, they will default to the normal social rules of the place, either the explicit ones or the tacit ones. So that might mean they defer to someone who’s more senior. That might mean that they’re polite with each other and don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings about their work.

All of those things can be really problematic because what happens is everything sort of merges into like a mediocre middle and that’s not what you want for the work.

Most people have some idea of these rules from brainstorming where you’ll say, build on each other’s ideas, don’t crush an emergent idea or yes and instead of no, but. Those are all rules that are guiding default behavior.

Feedback Structures - Rose, Thorn, Bud

There were a couple that I quite like. One is called rose, thorn, bud. That’s where a person will show their work and they’ll ask for feedback and while they’re receiving the feedback they stay silent. That’s a really important part. And they are also quite specific about what they want feedback on.

[00:02:18] Andy Polaine: And then rose thorn bud typically it was done with post-it notes. Obviously it’s going to be done probably these days with digital post-it notes. Roses are the things that are working well, thorns are the things that are not working so well. And buds are things that have potential for development. And what happens is once the person is presenting people, write those things down, or it’s done asynchronously, and they post them up around the work.

Feedback Structures - Stars & Wishes

[00:02:41] Andy Polaine: I have another one, which everybody, like you actually comes from my nerdy, Dungeons & Dragons world in tabletop role-playing games there’s a thing called stars and wishes as a way of giving feedback at the end. And stars are the things that you really liked and wishes of things that you wish had happened or wish had been there. I really like this one and I use it a lot with workshops when I do training to give each other feedback and also to give me feedback because they’re both actually positive things. So a star sounds positive and a wish sounds positive too, but the wish is actually critique sort of disguised. People are just more comfortable about giving that kind of feedback. So that works really, really well.

Don’t bring finished work

[00:03:18] Andy Polaine: Another rule you might have—and this is a thing I’m hearing quite often from design leaders—which is they’re saying in my teams, keep bringing polished work to crit sessions or feedback sessions, review sessions, whatever you call those. And I don’t know what they’ve done in between. I haven’t seen their working. Where are the other sketches where all the other ideas.

So a couple of rules you could have is bring all the other ideas along. Show us how you got to where you got to. Or you might just simply have a rule of please do not bring any polished, finished work. And I think we mostly all know, when you present someone with polished, final work, or at least final looking work, people are very hesitant to give feedback or critique because they think, well, this person’s done all that hard work I don’t really want to burst their bubble.

So one way of dealing with this is to have a rule where you say only bring draft work to a review or a crit session, because we want to be free to give feedback and critique.

No conversation without an artefact

[00:04:15] Andy Polaine: And another rule, and this might be for one-on-ones as well as in group crit and feedback sessions, is to always have an artifact. It is very, very easy to end up having a talk fest around an idea or a thing of what it might be and you can get really bogged down in debates and arguments around methods and all of those kinds of things without having an artifact. And actually having a thing, whatever it is, it could be a sketch it could be a piece of work that is closer to a finished stage or finished draft. It could be something else you’ve seen that is a piece of inspiration. Whatever it is in those conversations it is really useful to have some kind of artifact. This is also true for when you’re having conversations with other stakeholders.

Because when you have an artifact, the dynamic changes from being an oppositional one with "here’s my opinion and well I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong" to you’re looking at a third thing. When it’s actually in a physical space, you literally turning to the side and looking at a third thing. On Zoom or whatever you’re still looking at a third thing, but you might be looking at it on another monitor on another window. The point about this is that metaphorically you’re still sort of side by side, looking at a third thing and having a conversation about whether it works or not.

Ask about intent

[00:05:27] Andy Polaine: One of the things that’s essential to do as a manager is to ask really good questions. The very first one being, what was your intent with this? What are you trying to achieve? And what are you struggling with? Now, ideally this then becomes the norm for everyone to say my intent with this was X, Y, and Z. And the bit I want feedback on is this.

If you just offer up a piece of work for just general feedback. People are just going to come up with stuff. I don’t really like the color. They might talk about something that’s actually irrelevant to what you’re trying to find out. And so being specific about asking for the feedback that you want, helps people actually give better feedback.

So again, you set the rules up there and then you get a really good outcome as a result. Then people can give you feedback about what you’ve asked and also by talking about intent it allows the person giving the feedback to say, "Well given your intent, I’m not really getting that from this, that’s not really coming across to me."

And then it’s an I statement from that person. So it’s not, "This isn’t working, this work is rubbish." You’re saying, given your intent, it’s not really working for me and then you can have a conversation about that.

The danger of politeness

[00:06:27] Andy Polaine: When you take away that oppositional structure, you also don’t get caught in the politeness trap. I’m a bit wary about saying this… I think politeness can be really deadly for quality work.

So, not being polite does not mean being rude or blunt or any of those things, and there’s a lot of close to abusive behavior that is dressed up in people just saying, "Well, I’m just calling it how I see it. I’m just saying what I think." And that’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is if you’re holding back on saying what would be useful for that person and be useful feedback for them because you’re feeling too polite and you don’t want to hurt their feelings in any way. Then actually you’re not doing that person a favor. In fact, in the worst case, you’re setting them up for failure later on. Either with this particular piece of work or later on in their career, because they’re not getting the feedback that’s going to help them grow.

I know there’s the book Radical Candor. I kind of liked the idea of it. I don’t like how it’s often ended up being enacted, because there’s such a fine line between being candid and being rude and abusive. I think you really have to be careful. But just think about am I holding back for the right reasons here?

This clarity about the rules and the structure can also really help the different thinking styles, meet each other, which is what I talked about last week. So if you’re an extroverted person, it can help give you some structure and if you’re an introverted person, the structure helps you formulate your thoughts and gives you time to do so.

Outro

I hope that’s helpful. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching. You’ll also find my blog there, you’ll find the other coaching reflections which you will also find on YouTube. You can also find links to my courses and I’ll put all those links below.

If you’ve got any of your own ideas and suggestions or you disagree, I’m open to robust critique. So please fire away in the comments.

Thank you very much. I will see you again soon.

Understanding Your Thinking & Communication Style

Fri, 24 May 2024 16:00:00 +0200

A classic human bias is to assume everybody else thinks the way we do, but of course they do not. Understanding your thinking style and how you manage that when interacting with others is an essential, but often overlooked skill.

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon that the common themes and questions that came up in the week. And this week I want to talk about two thinking and communication types.

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Transcript

Introduction

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: A classic human bias is to assume that everybody else thinks the way that we do, but of course they don’t. And understanding your thinking style and how you manage that when interacting with others is an essential, skill in leadership and also in life.

My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up. And this week, I’d like to talk about two thinking and communication types.

Thinking Types

[00:00:27] Andy Polaine: Now the idea of thinking types and personality types comes from, C.G. Jung. He’s the one who came up with this idea of introvert and extrovert, thinking feeling, sensation and intuition. There’s a lot more in that, and it goes quite deep, but really I want to talk about two things that come up in coaching all the time.

Introverted Thinkers

One is introverts or introverted thinkers, I would say more. These are people who typically report when they are in a meeting and someone asks them question and going to be expecting facts and figures or some kind of response off the cuff. They really struggle with it. And it’s because what they want to do is they want to sit and process and think about the stuff before they do it. Typically what happens with those people— and a thing that shakes their confidence— is they get asked the question. They get anxious about the fact that they’re being asked that question and don’t immediately have the answer. And because that anxiety is rising in them, it kind of really freezes their brain and they have the sort of rabbit caught in the headlights moment. And therefore they can’t think. In some cases they literally just stop or they just get very flustered.

There is a kind of surprisingly simple solution to this, which is just to say, "That’s a good question. I’d like to look into that. I’ll have a think about it." And then "I’ll get it back to you" and give a specific time. So it might be, I’ll get back to you in about 10 minutes about that. Or I’ll get back to you in a couple of hours or by the end of the day, or maybe you need more time and it’s tomorrow. But actually just saying, " I need to have a think about that and I’d like to get back to you" is fine.

One of my earliest coachees had this very particular thing. And he was someone who is a smart guy, really great. Just had that thing where sometimes I just need, it could just be a couple of minutes, I just need to go away and think if someone comes up to my desk and says, what do you think about this? I just can’t immediately respond like that. I like to go and think about it. And I like to put my thoughts in order, and then come back with a considered response.

And this person who was doing a very large pitch for a large public service client in Australia. To a very senior public servant. And they had been pitching to this woman for about two hours and at the end of it, the client said, "Well, thank you very much for everything you’ve shown me today. I’d like to take the time to really look through it in detail and I’ll get back to you by the end of the week."

And for him, it was a really great role modeling moment because here was someone very, very senior who was saying, I’m going to take the time to think about this, rather than just coming off with an opinion off the cuff.

And so I asked him, "Well, how did you feel about that? How did you feel that she said she was going to take this time?"

And he said, "Well, it was great. Normally someone just has some immediate feedback and it feels like they haven’t really taken it in. Whereas I actually felt that it was valuable that she was going to take the time to look through all that stuff before that work into."

So quite often the fear that is going on about saying, "Well, I’d like have to think about that. And I’ll get back to you." Is feeling embarrassed that you don’t immediately have the answer, but actually what the other person experiences is, "Oh, this person is taking my question seriously and is taking the time to think about it."

Extroverted Thinkers

[00:03:29] Andy Polaine: Extroverted thinkers, and I’m someone like this, we really need to speak things out loud in order to think them through. So that’s actually kind of what’s going on with these videos too, but often I’m talking to my wife or talking to colleagues. I will try out ideas on people out loud to really understand what do I really think, about this? And while I do sit down and I write, often in the initial stages of trying to sort of turn something over in my mind, I very much need to have someone else that I can talk those things through with.

So we’re often very happy to talk off the cuff. Ask me a question and I’ve probably got an opinion about it and I’m quite happy to say it.

The downside of that is often we talk too much and we can get a little lost in side avenues. So sometimes there’ll be this process of, well, let me tell you about this thing and oh, there’s this really interesting thing and I’m going to tell you about this other really interesting thing. And before you know, it, you’ve kind of lost people in your conversation. Because you haven’t actually done the thinking upfront. You’re doing the thinking whilst you’re speaking.

Some people you’re talking to might worry that you’re being a bit vague or you’re changing your mind, or you seem unsure about stuff. Because again, you are talking it out. If you’re more senior, there’s also a danger— and this happened to a coachee recently— where the people who are junior to that person, reporting to that person, their team just went off and executed a thing that he had just come out with as a thought. And was really expecting to have some people come back at him and say what’s your feedback on this? Let’s pull this idea apart and make it better. And that didn’t happen. He just kind of voiced an idea about something and then two weeks later they had done it and it was really surprised by it.

Knowing your type and those you interact with

[00:05:05] Andy Polaine: And so one of the things you have to kind of be aware of is what kind of person are you and who are you interacting with? People who are very process oriented and want everything very, very clear you can often send them into a bit of a panic if you’re an extroverted thinker and you’re just kind of reeling off thoughts and they don’t seem very well formed.

However, just as the introverted thinker can signal, "hey, I want to go away and have a think about this" the extroverted thinker you can also say, " I’m just thinking this out loud at the moment. I don’t really have this fully formed, so don’t get into panic about this or don’t go off and execute this. I’d really want some feedback on this. What do you think?" That can really help take the pressure out of that way.

And conversely, if you’re someone who likes things more ordered and you are reporting to that, say a boss and quite often startup founders tend to be extrovert thinkers. They’re very good at selling their ideas to people. That’s how they got their funding.

Often, if you’re on the other end of someone like that, it can all seem a little bit vague and a hand wavey and actually you need to sort of pin them down a little bit or go back to them or present some feedback to them in the moment. And not get too panicked and reactionary to that person, because that can cause you an awful lot of stress, which doesn’t actually have to be there because that’s the person just kind of reading some stuff off of their head.

Outro

[00:06:22] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching. And I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own ideas or suggestions or your own experiences of this please post a comment below. As an extroverted thinker, I like these videos to be a conversation too.

Thanks very much and I’ll see you again soon.

Presenting your portfolio and yourself for interviews

Fri, 10 May 2024 09:00:00 +0200

When people will present their portfolios of work, they often forget the most important thing, which is the storytelling about themselves.

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

Video loads from YouTube on play — Google's privacy policy applies.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: When people will present their portfolios of work, they often forget the most important thing, which is the storytelling about themselves.

My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that came up during the week.

And this week is about presenting yourself and your portfolio. This is coming up a lot right now because of all the layoffs and some of my coaches have also been affected. And so they’re preparing all their portfolios and presentations for interviews.

Structure the work presentation

[00:00:27] Andy Polaine: There are really two parts to this. There’s literally the case studies and the work you’re showing and your portfolio, but then there’s the storytelling of you. And it’s very important that the former supports the latter.

Try coming up with a structure that you repeat when you’re presenting your projects. That way, when you presented one to your audience and then present subsequent ones, they’re not having to relearn and understand how you’re thinking about these.

I find a useful structure is something along the lines of what was the ask or the problem? Did you reframe the ask and find the problem behind the problem? That can be an important moment to show either creativity or leadership or just really the way you think. How did you approach it and what did you do? This is literally here’s the work we did and what the outputs were, if any.

Now I say, if any, because if you’re in a more IC or player coach role, you’ll have created some work and you’re going to want to show off that work by which, I mean, whatever digital assets or final artifacts you’ve made.

But you might also want to be showing off some other things you’ve done, particularly if you’re in a leadership role. So maybe it was something around like a career matrix, or some kind of roadmap or some kind of strategy document. And that’s going to be your output, the artifacts of those. Some of those, you may not even be allowed to show.

The next thing that is important though, is the outcomes and impact. So those artifacts, those are the outputs, but those are not the outcomes or the impact. The easiest way to think about impact is to answer the, so what question. So we did this work. Here’s all the outputs that we did. So what, what happened, who cares about that? You should be able to answer that question. Because that’ll be the thing that ladders up onto the impact you had on your organisation. Those could be things that were internal, like a better collaboration between the teams, faster responses to changes or doing new versions of things or whatever that is.

And then we should ideally be measureable in some way. You could have in uptick good customer metrics, whatever they should be, those are probably growth or sales or retention or faster onboarding, whatever that is. And a reduction in some other metric such as support requests or failed deliveries or whatever the things are going to be for your organisation that they’re trying to improve or get rid of.

Now, those don’t always have to be numerically measurable. They could be some things that are qualitative. For example, if you do spot surveys around the morale of your team or employee experience, those might show an uptick in positive sentiments and things like that.

The story of you

[00:02:56] Andy Polaine: When you think about the case study, think about what you want to say about yourself with that case study. So yes, you want to show the work and everything you’ve done and were doing. But the whole point of a website or a presentation is tell people how great you are. It’s not just, you know, here’s all the work we did and it should speak for itself.

If you’re creating a presentation, consider what you really want to say in the whole presentation. I really like a three-act structure. Here is this one thing about me and some introduction around who I am and so forth and what makes me tick. Here’s the middle bit where I really talk about the work and that’s going to be your case studies in there.

Why are you leaving your previous job?

[00:03:32] Andy Polaine: And here’s the third bit, which is about where I want to go and how I want to grow. You should be able to answer the question of why you’re leaving your old place. Now, if you’ve been made redundant in some respects that makes it easier because you had no choice. And right now, everyone understands that that’s a kind of social contagion going on in business and so nobody’s probably going to think about it too hard.

But quite often, you’re really saying I’ve got to this point and I didn’t really see a growth pathway for me of where I currently am at. And here’s where I want to be going next. And obviously what you’re really saying here is here’s where I want to be going next and your place is where I see that could happen. And here’s where I suggest asking some questions around that because you’re interviewing the company that you’re applying for just as much as they’re interviewing you. If you think about your time as this non-renewable resource, which I’ve talked about before. Then is this place deserving of this most precious resource of yours?

Three act structure

[00:04:28] Andy Polaine: So when you come to that three-act structure, what’s the main story of those acts? For example, it could be how you responded to leadership requests and interacted with the C-suite. It could be how you took leadership on a project and say, ran a small team, if you’re looking to run a slightly bigger team now. It could be how you collaborated across functions in the organisation.

[00:04:47] Andy Polaine: If you think of each case study, it’s kind of multifaceted. I’m a D&D nerd and so I have these kinds of multi-sided die here. And I often think about them in this way, and this is the one case study, but you can present a different face of that case study depending on what it is you want to show and depending on what it is you want to say about yourself.

So you might be showing how brilliant the design work was or how you responded to the research insights and met customer needs, or how you solved a technical or even an organizational problem. It might be something about how you’ve come up with an entirely new offer and how successful that was or how you validated and tested something.

Each of these will say a different thing about you. And you might want to present a different facet depending on who you’re presenting to and what role you’re going for, even within the same series of interviews for the same company.

Sometimes you might be interviewed by the design team and often that’s around some interview three or four, and they may be interested to know what went on in the design process and for you to show your working and how you thought about that, because they want to see how you tick as a designer. But you don’t really need to explain the whole design process to them and what it is you can assume that as designers, they understand the terms and the things that you’re talking about. Leadership folks may be more interested to know how you impacted the business positively. Product leaders might indeed be more interested to know how you collaborated with product folks.

One thing per slide

[00:06:09] Andy Polaine: For each slide consider the one thing you want to say with that slide, maybe then one or two other points if you have time. Or maybe it’s a slightly more complex slide. If you find that one slide is saying a very similar thing as another slide or directly repeating it. Consider dropping one of them, or maybe combining the two, if there’s aspects that you really want to talk about. It is very, very easy to end up repeating the same point over and over and over.

Conversely ensure you’re giving enough context to the case study. It’s really common for people to dive into showing the work and leave their audience really confused because they lack the context.

You were there. You know, this context inside out, but your audience may not even understand what the organization you previously worked for does and certainly what the project was all about.

So you need to make sure that you give them that with the structure I talked about at the beginning, otherwise you’re diving into a kind of, oh, we did this and we did that and then we did this. And they’re thinking, I don’t really know how this relates to anything.

I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put a link below. If you don’t want to do a whole set of coaching sessions, I’m very happy to do one-offs or a couple of sessions to look through a portfolio or give some feedback about how you’re presenting yourself.

[00:07:24] Andy Polaine: If you’ve got any of your own ideas and suggestions, or if you disagree, please post a comment below. Thanks very much. And I’ll see you again soon.

Why does quitting your job make it more enjoyable?

Fri, 03 May 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Why do people have the best days of their jobs when they’ve just quit? And what can it tell us about how we relate to work?

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Why do people have the best days of their jobs when they’ve just quit? And what can it tell us about how we relate to work?

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

And I’ve had quite a few coachees over the years, actually, but also recently who have either quit a difficult work situation, one they’ve been unhappy with or they’ve been part of the recent layoffs and there’s a kind of common theme that I’ve seen or a reaction that’s happened, which many of them, all of them actually report the feeling of a weight being lifted. And they often say, " My last couple of weeks have been the best time I’ve had in the place I’m working at since maybe the beginning of it."

And I think it’s kind of really interesting what’s going on there that people actually have quit and then having a good time at a place they had previously been really struggling in.

I think some of it’s just stress. I think it’s the lifting of the stress. And I know this is " I no longer have to kind of care about this" and so that stress goes away. Some of it, I think is maybe seeing a way out, light at the end of the tunnel, having been trapped in some kind of state of learned helplessness. But I think a more significant thing is they no longer have the fear of being fired.

Now. Even if you’re financially stable and have some kind of runway, there’s always this background fear that I might get fired for saying this for speaking up for going to the CEO directly, instead of going through this other senior stakeholder who has told me everything has to go through them or any of those things. And obviously in the U S I’m aware of that the health care reality that pretty much, if you don’t have a job, you don’t have any healthcare. And it’s quite different in Europe.

That said the fear of being fired is such a strong enabler, powerful enabler of some really toxic behavior from leadership. That I think is really important to remember you always have the choice to leave.

There’s a certain amount of privilege I want to recognize in that statement because, obviously, for some people leaving really is a massive existential crisis. That said you still have the choice.

What a lot of coachees report is now I’m speaking my mind. I’m saying all the things I held back on. Often to stakeholders that they’ve struggled with in the past. And I don’t mean being belligerent and just burning bridges and giving people the middle finger.

I don’t think it was ever a good idea to leave a place in that kind of toxic way, even if it hasn’t been great. I think it’s useful certainly in public to leave with some kind of grace. You don’t have to thank them and tell them that it’s the best place you’ve ever worked at, but there’ll be one or two people you will miss and who you’ve enjoyed and you want to thank.

If a place is really genuinely toxic, I think it behooves us all to tell our network maybe more privately, "Hey, you know, this is not a place I’d recommend working at." And if there’s something that is really bullying and harassing, then there’s a time there to support people talking about this in public.

But in general, though, I think the more important thing is to recognize that the external reality of the place that you are working at hasn’t changed. It’s still the same place. It’s still got all of its dysfunction and everything else. The thing that’s changed that makes you now enjoy it is you’d be released yourself from that fear.

What has changed is that you have reframed your relationship to it. And that in turn changes the way you relate to others and the work. And, in turn, that’s going to change the way they relate to you. Essentially it’s a very Stoic philosophy approach, where instead of wasting a lot of energy in things you can’t control you focus instead on the things that you can influence, which is mostly yourself and the way you relate to things.

At the end of the coaching sessions, I will ask coachees for feedback. And one coachee gave me this lovely piece of feedback, which was "One thing I’ve really taken from the coaching is not to take work so seriously."

And by that it wasn’t about being unprofessional or not trying to do your best work. It was more about this idea that some of the things that seem like they’re desperately important and this deadline has to be hit by this time and so forth and all of that stress that you let kind of permeate your whole life. It’s about letting go of that and not letting that happen and having a slightly more observational and detached approach to the way you think, at least about the stress of your work, and a bit more of a kind of realistic recalibration of your relationship to your work. That stress permeating your whole life is easier than ever in remote and hybrid work environments where you, you don’t even get the mental buffer of a commute.

So what can we learn from this?

Well, really, I think we can learn what that feeling feels like. And if you’ve had it and you’ve had that moment of release and you suddenly feel happy and more confident in the way you’re relating to people at work and the work itself, you kind of want to focus on that and almost bottle it so that the next time, wherever else you’re working, you come back and you can remember that feeling and what was going on in you that gave you that confidence and that sense of freedom of fear.

I hope that’s useful. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put a link below. If you’ve got any of your own ideas or suggestions, or if you disagree, please post a comment below. I like these videos to be conversation and not just monologues.

Thanks very much. I will see you again soon.

Management & Leadership as Slow-Motion facilitation

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Instead of thinking you have to become a business suit as a design leader, what if you think about management and leadership as slow-motion facilitation, using the skills you already have a designer?

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. In these videos, I reflect upon common themes and questions that came up.

This week, I present some thoughts on providing structure, cadence and reading the room in the way you might facilitate a workshop. You can use this same approach over days, weeks, months and years and lean upon your existing skills and experience.

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Transcript

Introduction

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: What if you thought about leadership differently, instead of it being about standing at the front and telling everyone to follow your direction. You think about it instead of slow motion facilitation. My name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.

Slow-motion faclitation

[00:00:19] Andy Polaine: And this week, I want to talk about this idea that as you move into leadership and people management, yes, it does require learning some new vocabulary and understanding the business. But it doesn’t mean jettisoning your existing identity as a designer. If you do that what’s the point of you? You’re just another MBA. And instead I’m suggesting you bring your unique background and experience and tools and tricks to play.

A lot of business folks learning about leadership have to relearn a lot of the emotional intelligence that they’ve spent years leaving at the door. And I think designers generally already have a lot of this EQ.

When I was at Fjord, I had this real unlock moment where I realised that teams who were sometimes a bit gaseous, they were floating all over the place and really struggling. Typically in that sort of analysis and synthesis stage, or sometimes in ideation stage. They sometimes needed some structure to give them form. I would maybe go in and I on a big flip chart, I’d say, okay, here’s a kind of template for you to use for whatever the synthesis. And an hour later, I go in there and they’d say, "Oh, you know, that doesn’t really work for us, Andy, so we’ve changed this bit and that bit." And that was the whole point, right? My point wasn’t here is my way of doing things and it’s correct. But actually to give them a frame and boundaries so that this gaseous form is contained. And then they soon bounce up against it and bang their elbows against it and realise "Oh, no. Okay. No, this is what we want." And so by giving them some structure, you actually help them find their own structure.

And then sometimes it’s the other way around sometimes teams get very dogmatic about method and process and things like that and their ideation in particular can stall or they just want just one more bit of research as if the researcher is going to tell them how to design exactly everything. And it becomes a designing by numbers exercise. And actually at some point they have to start making stuff up and they have to think a bit more broadly. So in those cases, I’ll try and get them to do something to shake it up. I’d say, look, when I come in tomorrow morning, I want to see a hundred sketches or something like this. So that they come out of that dogmatic fixed structure.

And a real unlock for me was realising that this was like slow motion facilitation. I’m used to facilitating lots of workshops. And when you do this, and I’m not going to go through the whole of what I’m putting on screen here, but you’re doing a lot of reading the room.

So you’re thinking about who’s invited and included, who’s excluded. And what are the power structures at play? Things that sort of tools, methods, spaces.

Sometimes you’re thinking about the cadence and the intent and what are the methods and whether it’s a divergent or convergent process what I was talking about with that gaseous versus fixed solid structure just now.

If you think about when you run or facilitate a workshop, you are up front and you are directing the action, if you like, or the interaction between the people and where you’re going. But you’re not entirely telling them what to do. You’re not telling them what to come up with. You’re leading them through the process. Your expertise is actually in the process rather than necessarily the subject matter often in a workshop.

But what you’re also looking for, certainly in a face-to-face workshop is, "Oh, look, there’s a table of five there and one person’s checked out and they’re just on their phone the whole time what’s happened there?" Or you give a direction, say, we’re going to do this activity now, you know, here’s the template and you say, okay, right, go. And everyone looks at each other and says "What are we supposed to be doing? I don’t really understand what we’re doing." And so they’ve, they’ve lost that moment of purpose. They’ve lost the moment of what they’re supposed to be doing and direction. You’ll often find there is one person who is causing a lot of noise and very negative in the space. You’ll often find that the energy is really flat and my technique always is to get people, to start making things. And when people start making things, their energy sort of goes up again, usually.

And what I found was— and like I said, this was a really massive unlock for me in a leadership role— you can do this over the course of days, weeks, months, and years. You can look at what’s the shape of the kind of energy of the team, as you’re looking over this over the month or year or a project. You can look at have we sort of lost our sense of purpose. I need to bring people back and we have a reflection on where we’re going. Are there people who are disengaged? Are there side conversations going on that actually need to be brought into the middle and so on and so forth. And really what you’re doing is you’re reading the room.

There’s a very good book by my friend, Daniel Stillman called Good Talk and in it he has this OS canvas about designing conversations and some of which I put in that kind of big list of words.

So the nice thing about this is these are tools that a lot of designers already have. You already have that experience and understanding and reading the room in a workshop and facilitating people.

And so one of the things you’re doing, as you’re moving into leadership and people management, is you just use those same tools, you’re just doing it over a longer time span.

I hope that’s useful. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below.

If you’ve got any of your own ideas and suggestions or you disagree, please post a comment below. I like these videos to be a conversation and not just a monologue.

Thanks very much. I’ll see you again soon.

Starting at the End + Avoiding Pointless Meetings

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. In these videos, I reflect upon common themes and questions that came up.

This week, getting started by starting at the end and avoiding pointless meetings.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello, my name is Andy Polaine and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon that the common themes and questions that came up in the week. And this week starting at the end and meetings.

Starting at the end

[00:00:14] Andy Polaine: A journalist friend mine once gave me the best writing tip ever and that was to take the last paragraph you’ve written, cut it and paste it at the top of your writing, because at that point in time, you actually know what you’re talking about and what you want to say. Now often when you have some kind of end goal or ask of you such as, build up a design team or greater cross-functional collaboration, where to start can be daunting because the possibilities are infinite almost. Where do I get started? I could do this. I could do that. And it’s very, very hard to get started and you get blocked. Last week I mentioned inverting the question and asking why is this not happening already? As a way to reveal the tangible things that are getting in the way.

So you might go, well, it’s not happening because we’re siloed. We’ve got these wrong cadences we’re aligned and all of those things. But another classic coaching approach, which is similar is to start at the end.

So imagine you have achieved the goal and the outcome already. You have your team and they’re collaborating across the business. So, first of all, what does that look like? And this is also the classic, "What does good look like?" question. If you’re struggling to imagine that then you might need to go back and question that goal in the first place, because if you can’t really think, what difference would it make? That may be a problem with the way you’ve got it initially framed.

I once got asked if I could train 3000 people in design thinking at a bank and it was always my favorite question to ask a potential client about this and say, "Okay, well, imagine I’ve done this. How do you think people are going to be working differently? What do you think the effect of that will be?" And they couldn’t answer it because they hadn’t really thought about why they would really want this and what the difference a bit at the end, they’re just going to new design thinking’s the thing and so we should get everyone doing that.

If you do have an answer though, then you can work backwards. So if you would think about, well, we would be able to work faster or we’d make fewer mistakes or we’d have a much more harmonious working environment. Then you can kind of think backwards from that. So what would have, have to have happened last in that process, say, for the collaboration. Would it be alignment amongst department leaders, or maybe that’s the first thing? Would it be some operational things like we’ve got the tools and we’ve got processes in place, or maybe it’s things like places and rituals and, and cadence of connections and communications that we’re not scattered across a whole bunch of different tools and platforms and things, but we have a kind of really clear, aligned way of working together.

Whatever your answers are, you can then ask what would have, have to have happened for that to be in place. So what would have to have happen to say for the tools and processes to be in place? You can go back and say, well, we would have had to have gone through a process of deciding and talking to each other about what we think the best tools would be for us to be using for this. Deciding and agreeing upon the communication channels, where should we talk about this thing? Where should we talk about this kind of thing? And so on.

And then what happens? You just keep stepping back and you go, well, what would have to happen for those things to be in place? And that way you get back to where you are. But now, you know, the first steps. If you know, the five why’s technique of, you know, asking why something’s gone wrong or asking in user research, when people say, oh, I want this thing. And, well, why do you want this? And so on you keep laddering it. It’s kind of like a reverse version of that, except you’re starting at the end but you go the what. So what would have to have happened? Then what would have to have happened for that? And then you’ve got a nice kind of chain of events at least to aim for. As you go through each one of those things.

And the very best thing about it is you have your first couple of steps. Once you get going, then you will actually start to know what you’re talking about. You can’t do like you can with writing and cut the last thing and put it in the end. But at least you can kind of think about it mentally like that.

Meetings

[00:04:06] Andy Polaine: I want to talk about everyone’s favorite thing meetings or their mostly their calls now, not even coming together. I want heard someone at a conference say, make every meeting a workshop. I think it was Johanna Kollmann. If she’s watching this video, let me know. But it really stuck with me because I have run a lot of workshops and, and there’s kind of a thinking about workshops and an intention to them, partly because of the cost, partly getting all those people together and if you’re the facilitator then you really have to think about it a lot.

When you become a leader, one of the things that happens, you just get more and more meetings. You’ve got all your one-to-one. You’ve got some kind of design leadership meeting, you’ve got some on a product leadership meeting, got some global leadership meeting, whatever it is, senior leadership meeting. You end up with all these regular things and if you’re across two or three projects, you might be having stand ups all the time. And all of a sudden your calendar is completely blocked out. So there’s a few things to do to really have a qualification criteria. So ask in advance if the, the meeting partner has anything, if you’ve got a regular one, so you might have one to ones, for example, And say listen, you know, we’ll leave that in here, but a couple of days beforehand, "do you have anything to talk about?"

It’s okay to say no. Default to no meeting. But it’s in there if you need to have it. And if "No, I don’t really have anything to discuss." That’s fine. Then don’t have the meeting. And then you’re going to clear that time out. One of the things that happens with meetings and particularly regular ones, is that everyone thinks "Ooh this meeting is coming up and I need to come up with some stuff to fill the time. I better have something to say."

And then a load of people have a meeting together. And if you do one of those, you can get those meetings salary calculator things, they cost anything between 1,000, 2,000 up to $10,000 per hour of meeting, if you’ve got a lot of people there, I mean, it’s an extraordinary waste of resources. So default to no meeting and then only put it back in, I mean the most radical way to do it, which is what Salesforce did recently, is just get rid of them all. So take out all recurring meetings and then you only start to put back in meetings if you need them.

But if you’re going to have meetings where someone’s added it to your calendar or someone is asking you to come to a meeting, ask them some questions.

Is there an agenda? Is this some kind of intent to this meeting? Why is it happening? What do you want to do here? And a real red flag is if you’ve got a really long agenda. It’s much better to have two or three things that you’re going to do and you get deep into them, or even just one thing. Rather than 10 you’ll ever get through.

And if you ever seen a meeting agenda that’s got 10 items there’s no way you’re going to get through them. There really isn’t. And sometimes with recurring meetings, people just sort of copy and paste the agenda each time. And so you end up in this ridiculous situation of keep going over stuff that you don’t really need to go over.

So that’s the first thing, is there an agenda? If there isn’t my suggestion would be just decline the meeting or tell the person to give you the agenda and if they can’t, then don’t turn up. Because really what they’re doing is they’re saying "I would like to waste an hour of your time, I’m not really sure what about."

So the second thing around the intention is, is this an alignment meeting? Is this an agreement meeting? Is it generative? We’re coming up with some ideas. Is it that we have to make a decision upon something or we just need to discuss stuff. But what are the intended outcomes? What would we like? So agreement, decision and so forth.

Are there any intended outputs? There probably aren’t, unlike a workshop, but there might be, there might be a thing that you have signed off on or agreed to. And then there’s the personal bit. Why am I here? In what way am I contributing value? And is there information I need to be here for that I can’t get another way? The classic, it could have been an email. And if you can’t really answer yes to either or both of those, probably not worth you being there. There’s a lot of FOMO in meetings. And the truth is you’re not as important as you think you are, you might not want to miss out what happens if there’s a an important decision that I haven’t been part of. Yeah. That may be true, but also what happens if you’re not getting any work done because you’re in meetings all week? This is this busy work is the junk food of work.

So, go through those and feel free to turn down meetings if people can’t give you those things. And in return, if you are setting a meeting, if you’re asking a bunch of people to come together, then please try and have those clear to people so that then they can decide. Really what you’re doing there is just giving people criteria and information by which to decide.

I leave you with two books. One is Meeting Design by Kevin Hoffman. It’s a Rosenfeld book. And then there’s another one called Magical Meetings by Douglas Ferguson and John Fitch from Voltage Control. Both of those useful books to give you some ideas of structure and ways of thinking about those things. And you might think, well, you know, I don’t need a book about meetings. I can guarantee you, if you’ve ever sat in a boring one, you will really wish the other person had read a book about meetings. We have them all the time, it’s a large part of your work so make them valuable.

That’s it for me. I hope that’s useful for you. If you would like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own ideas and suggestions or you disagree. Please put those in the comments below as well.

Thanks very much. I will see you again soon.

Scaling Yourself + Two Tricks for Clarity & Stakeholder Management

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these short videos, I reflect on common themes and questions that come up. Last week. I talked a bit about meta communication. This week, I want to talk about a question that’s come up fairly often.

If you are interested in my design leadership coaching please get in touch via the contact page.

You’ll find more reflections here and on my YouTube channel, as well as my podcast and newsletter.

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How can you scale yourself?

It’s often been a question of leadership of the design leader, which is how can you scale yourself? Now there’s a kind of problem inherent in this already with this idea of, you know, people are human beings and they’re not just kind of a thing to scale. But I think the ask behind the ask of this is how can you not be the bottleneck and the only arbiter of quality and a process and of sign-off and things that this. Because as design teams do scale. You know, you cannot be the only one who kind of gives the thumbs up, like the Roman emperor.

And I think one way of approaching this is to be explicit about your kind of internal algorithm or heuristics. Rather than trying to get people to reverse engineer your thinking. And by this, I mean, you often see junior designers they have conversations and they’ll say something like, oh no, don’t do that cause Andy likes this. And when I’ve ever heard that, it’s horrified me because obviously I’m not the one to be pleasing here. Ultimately, either the stakeholder or certainly the end customers are the people you want to be pleasing. And so I think what’s going on there though, is this idea of like, we don’t know how something makes its way through to the next stage.

And so we’re trying to kind of I work there, the mystery box inside that design leaders head. So one of the ways of scaling yourself is to really actually take what probably has become quite intuitive. Now. Over many, many years of practice, which is you will have a whole, lots of internal pattern library of things that, you know, work avenues to to close off because you know, they are unlikely to work or you’ve been there before and, and avenues to pursue. And in that sense, you have like a set of qualification criteria for projects as they go through. Some of them will be about quality, right?

About what’s an acceptable or desired level of quality. What does good look like? You know, and if your response is well, you know, I know it when I see it. That’s problematic because that doesn’t really scale, right? You need to be able to make that explicit and externalise it. And that’s going to be through a bunch of examples of finding stuff that’s going to be through showing the things you’ve already made as a, as a team and having that library. Things that you bring in and you have a kind of session, you know, once a week, once a month, where you are looking at other people’s work externally and talking about it, critiquing it in, why is this good?

What is good about it? What is good to look like? It’s useful to have other people’s work from externally to do this cause then the sort of politeness goes away of not wanting to offend each other in a kind of internal crit session. Other things might be around the different stages of work.

So when have we been, when have we done enough research and need to move on and actually get to that bit where we start ideating and coming up with things. When is something ready to go to a stakeholder or a client? And when is it not? And rather than you being the one, just saying, well, I don’t think that’s ready yet. What do we all agree is a kind of acceptable level of quality of work. What does it look like?

So what you’re really trying to do is it’s like the director’s commentary— if you remember those from DVDs— of your own process and make that much more external. I think this sounds very obvious when I kind of say it like this. What I do notice though, is it’s not sort of obvious at the time for a lot of design leaders.

A lot of the time there is an internal thing. It’s it’s maybe been the sort of secret sauce, if you like, maybe been what’s led you to the position of getting into a senior role or a leadership role. But actually it’s really kind of important to get that stuff out of your head. The added benefit of this is the more you do that. The more, you’re able to explain your decision making to other stakeholders.

Although there, the shift is going to be talking less about sort of design and design process. More about impact and how it’s going to help the business.

Two Tricks

So I have two tricks for you. And these are two things that I, I use over and over and over again. And one of them is a question. And one of them is a kind of. A mental trick.

So What, Who Cares?

The first one is when you’re trying to think about why design matters, whatever it is you’re trying to do. All right. So whatever you’re with, you’re trying to change your process, trying to increase collaboration, trying to get designed involved in conversations earlier on in the process. If you’re trying to get resources for more designers or whatever it is it’s very tempting, I think, as designers, because we spend a lot of our time talking design to other designers. It’s very tempting for design leaders to do that again to stakeholders. And basically say we need more design because design is good. And therefore we need more of it.

And you end up in this kind of circular argument and it’s not very convincing.

One of the, kind of shocking truths, as you get higher up is you realize that a lot of stakeholders and senior stakeholders, the C-suite, they kind of really don’t care about design. Why should they really, why is it any different from any other function in the business that is this kind of special thing? What they do care about is going to be some metrics there’s going to be whatever, you know, it’s usually around kind of growth of some kind it’s usually around efficiencies. It’s usually about whatever priorities they’ve said. Whatever it is you’re trying to do with the question you can ask, the sort of magic question is very, very blunt. And it’s this: “So what, who cares?”

So if you’re saying, well, you know, we need to do more research at the beginning of projects. “So what, who cares?” And your answer to that might be why, you know, because we want to be more accurate about designing for people’s unmet needs.

Okay. “So what, who cares?”

Well, that’s going to be because we want to make sure we are putting one, our resources in, in a direction have confidence of where we’re going. You know, well “So what, who cares?” And you can just keep laddering up. Eventually you’ll get to something along the lines of, because we want to avoid wasting resources or we want to avoid risk. Or we want to avoid redoing things.

And most of those things you’ll find the right level or depending on the stakeholder you’re talking to, you’ll find something that actually connects to something they care about. They can kind of follow the chain back and you’re still saying what, you know, we want to do more designed research in this case, because I know as a designer, that’s a good thing and it’s going to help our process. But no one’s gonna really care about that.

What they care about is the, is the impact at the other end. And “So what, who cares?” really is a very useful question. I use it all the time for a whole bunch of other stuff, too. It just gives you clarity. And it gets you out of this sense of your internal bubble. And it makes you think about, “Yeah, actually, why is this important?”

Invert the question

The second trick is inversion. So I think a lot of the time in organisations where we think about doing stuff doing more, so, you know, how can we increase our innovate innovation? How can we become more collaborative? What should we do to improve the quality of our work? What should we do to grow and all those things. And it’s very additive, right?

We don’t really kind of take anything away. Or consider taking anything away. And if you’re focused on the doing thing and doing more, you can often add to the chaos you can often make things worse. Because the, the possibilities of what you might do, a kind of infinite, right. Whereas, if you invert the question and just ask, “Well, why isn’t this happening already?” Or “Why are we not spontaneously, more innovative or more collaborative?” And you ask that of people like everyone knows the answers.

They won’t just go “Well, I dunno”. They will absolutely say, “Well it’s because our teams are siloed, it’s because we spend too much time in meetings, it’s because we don’t have the right tools or the way we communicate is broken” and so on and so forth.

All of those things are really tangible. And the nice thing about things that are really tangible is all of those things are redesignable. So inverting that question gets you past the assumptions as well. Often leadership will say something like, “We need to freshen our UX or UI.” That was that actually a thing that came up in a coaching session this week. And what does that mean? There’s the, “So what, who cares?” Why does that matter? You get through the, ask behind the ask, and then if you ask, “Why isn’t that happening already? What, what went wrong? Why, why don’t we have a, kind of a fresh, whatever that means, UX and UI?” Then you’ll get the tangible reasons why that didn’t happen. So those two things, those two little tricks. I use over and over again.

And I think they’re very, very useful to bring clarity to something that’s often laced with a lot of kind of jargon and vagueness.

Indi Young — Mental Models and Thinking Styles

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is Indi Young, a solution strategist who uses purpose-focused qualitative data science. She created her method over a 30-year span, and teaches that method in courses, coaching, workshops, books, talks, and through working with teams on research studies.

People are complex and nuanced and their mental models and thinking styles are not fixed personas or personalities. They changed based on context and it is essential that organisations listen to and consider different ways of thinking and addressing user needs.

Indi was a joy to speak with and this is a long episode, but she articulates her thinking and insights so well I could not bear to edit out more.

You can view it below or on YouTube or subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts or listen on the player below.

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Show Links

Indi

Website: https://indiyoung.com/
Indi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/
Indi on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/indiyoung.bsky.social
Indi’s Newsletter: https://indiyoung.substack.com
Indi on Medium: https://indiyoung.medium.com
Time to Listen - https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-listen/
Practical Empathy - https://indiyoung.com/books-practical-empathy/
Mental Models: https://indiyoung.com/books-mental-models/

Andy

Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Design Leadership Coaching: https://polaine.com/coaching
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/andypolaine.bsky.social YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine

Mentions

Lisa Dance’s Today is the Perfect Day to Improve Customer Experiences: https://serviceease.net/book

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello, welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of Zoom. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, service design and innovation consultant, educator, and writer. My guest today, who I’ve been wanting to get on for ages, actually we’ve been talking about it for a very long time, is Indi Young, who I think may not need an introduction, but I’m going to do it anyway.

She is a market strategist who uses purpose focused qualitative data science. She created a method over a 30 year span and teaches that method In courses, coaching, workshops, books, talks, and through working with teams on research, research studies, she was one of the founders of adaptive path. And we had Peter Merholz on recently, and pioneered opportunity maps, mental model diagrams of people’s approach to purpose aligned with the support a solution provides or doesn’t. I think probably mental models might be the thing that people know you most for. But you’ve written several books: time to Listen, the latest one, Practical Empathy, and Mental Models. And there’s another one on the way. If I keep going, half the podcast will be gone.

So let me instead welcome you, Indi, to Power of 10.

[00:01:11] Indi Young: Indi, thank you.

[00:01:14] Andy Polaine: So, I always like to know a little bit about people’s pathway from, from, from there to here. So, you know, how did you end up doing what you’re doing? And, you know, you’ve had this 30 year span.

[00:01:25] Indi Young: Oh God. Yeah. But yeah, um, 30 years ago I was a software engineer. And I think that was at the point in time where software was starting to expand and they weren’t making it only to encode a process for an engineer or a scientist or something or some math.

And before that point, all then the software engineer had to do was go understand the process and understand the, the edge cases to the process and then encode all of that. And I got asked to, um, do a, an upgrade for the call center for the visa. Um, when you lose a car back then it was travelers checks and the call center had people in there speaking like 14 different languages, uh, all at the same time it was global and the management was just going to rip all their computers away and give them windowed computers with mice.

And I’m all like, um, you probably don’t want to do that.

Let me go do some research. So that was kind of. The beginning of my… my core, which is to, um, get let’s not accuse management. Let’s get anyone who’s working in terms of the strategy around digital products, but also services tied to those, um, to stop thinking only in terms of themselves. There are other people who have to use this software.

Um, who have to use the, uh, the, the, the processes that you’re setting up through that software and it doesn’t match them. And that’s the big thing that I’m about. Hey, you’re only writing some process for a one way of doing things. You often, especially with IA now we’re like, um, sorry, AI. I’m betraying my background.

Um, we’re, we’re trying to like optimize to one way. And then we’ll just, you know, invest in making that one way. And it makes most people struggle. I’ve never met a piece of software that I really thought matched my thinking style in that context. And there are millions of us out there.

[00:03:51] Andy Polaine: Yeah. I’m really interested. So this was quite a long time ago, given the, you know, shift from, I guess, some kind of DOS based thing to a windowed computer that you were just talking about. And you said, you know, let’s go and do some research. Um, how did you know what you were doing and what to do back then?

[00:04:12] Indi Young: Uh, UX didn’t exist, UX research didn’t exist.

Yeah. I knew in my heart that I needed to represent. Those people working there and I needed to understand their approach to it. I think at that, at that point, my working my way through it. I had no tools. I wasn’t aware of like, um, anthropology or the ethnography. I wasn’t aware of any of those other parallel fields that have now sort of we’ve we’ve pulled some ideas from them.

All I had was a state machine, which is a way of sort of mimicking what a computer might do with a process, but I wanted to mimic what reps might do given certain customers. And that was all I had. And so that’s, that’s, uh, it was kind of the beginning of, Hey, we need to represent these other people there’s a variety out there of thinking. Let’s, let’s, support it.

And that is, that’s been my philosophy. I’m all about support. Let’s support the variety of approaches and thinking styles out there. And at the time I just, I was just trying things. The, that particular project, uh, the state machine that I made and the things that fell out of it actually, I ended up creating the data schema. There was a whole team of people doing the data, but I’m, I created a data schema for what we might need. I messed around with the architecture of the, the whole software suite. Um, and that whole approach ended up holding the whole team together. Everybody on the team, they’re all like, Oh my God. Okay. Yeah. Now I see how this is going to go together. Thank you. You solved it. Or at least you’ve given me like a little glimpse into a direction where I can see. And that, I felt like that was very powerful because I’m representing people.

[00:06:24] Andy Polaine: You said that sort of helped the team. You sort of brought the team together, it helped the team.

You know, there is a whole feeling out there. I don’t think it’s actually completely true, but I think I understand that lots of people have been laid off and they’re feeling it, but there is, there has been quite a lot about, you know, UX, UX, in fact, but certainly UX research is dead and it’s kind of gone somewhere else.

And even down to kind of, it’s not necessary. So in what way did this help the team? What, what did they not know? Um, what were they struggling with because what I’m hearing isn’t that they didn’t say what we need is some research. That was you who was saying this, right? Um, so how did it sort of, when you brought that to them, did it then help them?

Cause I think it’s kind of useful to hear the origin story of that.

[00:07:05] Indi Young: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in this case, it was a bunch of different contractors that were hired by Visa. One contractor to do the software architecture, another contractor to do the data. I was sort of the contractor to do the front end, you know, the lipstick on the pig sort of thing.

And they were without leadership. There was somebody who was supposed to be the leader. As many leaders are not a lot of people got along with them. Um, and so there was like it, so there were that it solved that it was like, "Oh, here’s, here’s somebody who actually went and did work, did some understanding and has something that we trust."

[00:07:53] Indi Young: That now me looking at this other contractor over there, who’s like thinking in a different language than me, not literally, but, you know, figuratively, um, how, how do I communicate with them? Now we had this thing and it was from somebody that we, that had done some work. And at that point in time, we didn’t have the get it done yesterday kind of speed thing.

This was, that was not a part of the picture. So having done the work was an okay thing. You didn’t have to like persuade people to, to take time. I think the other thing is that being able to see how it would function for people in the end gave them a way to look, uh, to sort of like see what should be behind it to make it function in the end.

Does that make sense?

[00:08:50] Andy Polaine: Yeah, it does. You said a thing just now, you know, it helped them to trust. And I’m, I’m really interested in this, uh, you know, especially back then, but, cause this is the sort of number one problem, but it’s certainly a big problem for UXers in general, but, or, you know, design in general, actually, but certainly, uh, researchers because there is a, a tendency to, you know, we know our customers, I know our customers, I know what they want, or, you know, I’m Steve Jobs and I kind of have got this brilliant idea and I don’t really need the research. I’m sure you’ve heard every single kind of variant of this. So getting people to kind of trust the, trust the research, what have you found that is successful there?

[00:09:28] Indi Young: There are some ingredients that go into it. Uh, one of the ingredients is… and they vary from organization to organization, and really when I say organization is usually an individual or a pair of individuals within an organization who have done the work to get in a position where they might have budget, they are maybe in the position where they have a connection to somebody in the, at the executive level or the VP level, they might be in one of those VP, uh, positions themselves. They might’ve made a relationship with somebody up a couple of levels, but what happens to that person or a couple of people is that they have in mind this idea that, If this org is going to be sustainable. And so I think I’d step back and say, this doesn’t work for orgs that don’t care about being sustainable.

If you’re…

[00:10:26] Andy Polaine: By sustainable, you mean longevity?

[00:10:28] Indi Young: Around for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Having employees for a long time. Um, yeah, if you’re like a startup and you just want to get bought by some big tech company, this doesn’t apply to you. Um, you have to be the kind of person that’s, um, I’m interested in not only like the technical, the typical innovation, the idea of like having a competitive edge, but also having some sort of an idea of including more people or supporting more people. This idea that, uh, it’s been a struggle with the people who are working in accessibility. I think we’re finally starting to see some progress there. Fable has been doing some great, um, webinars with some amazing guests that talk about their accessibility process within their org.

And I think what’s happening with the idea of getting people to trust research or to be interested in research is that whole idea of like, oh, there is more out there. By reducing what we make to one optimal, when I realize the kind of harm it’s doing to people out there, and it is a harm that does not help our organization.

There is harm that people, organizations do that help the organization. Um, let’s think of, you know, your telecom or whoever allows you to stream, uh, movies, they, they do things intentionally to keep you on a higher price or to delay service or whatever, you know,

[00:12:26] Andy Polaine: All the scummy things.

[00:12:27] Indi Young: Yeah. Yeah. All the intentional harms, all the dark patterns they’re called.

Um, So those are intentional harms, but if they’re, they find out that they’re doing harms that are hurting their org.

[00:12:40] Andy Polaine: Oh, okay. Right.

[00:12:41] Indi Young: Hurting their org. They’re unintentional. Yeah. And they’re hurting the org. And that’s where, where we have some, ability to get interest. I think like a large SAAS kind of company always was thinking, okay, here’s one solution. Everybody’s going to use it. And then an org buys it and forces all their employees to use it and the employees don’t use it or they use it wrong and they don’t get out of it what was promised to them and so they go back to the big organization that sold them this big software and they’re like, hey this is not working

[00:13:24] Andy Polaine: I’m giggling because I’ve, I’ve said this exact thing so many times, I’ve had this, here’s Damien Newman’s kind of squiggle diagram and kind of flipped it around as a sort of design process. He said, you know, you think it’s this way, it’s all kind of neat and planned out and, and you know, and you, someone, and you know, I used to work for Fjord who are owned by Accenture uh, you know, technology consulting company, someone has sold you a kind of multi million dollar SAP system and then you’re going to come back as it hits the kind of messiness of humans. You’re going to come back in, you know, a few years time and go, Hey, you know, Why do, why do people hate this or hate us or whatever it is, you know, we spent a fortune on this? And instead of starting with the messiness.

[00:14:05] Indi Young: Right. Yeah.

[00:14:07] Andy Polaine: I’m interested, you also kind of, you, you, I’m kind of reading it off here. You talk about the work you do is purpose focused, qualitative data science. And in your tag there, you’ve got, you know, data science that listens. Has it been helpful to phrase it in that way, to talk about it as data science than, UX research, you know, sort of, you know, hugging customers and, you know, and that’s just your opinion and all that stuff.

[00:14:33] Indi Young: Exactly. Right. I think the other thing is that , I don’t do UX research.

[00:14:38] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:14:39] Indi Young: UX research has become known as, and it’s odd, because user experience means like the whole experience, but UX research has sort of become, oh, we’re just like doing A B tests or doing usability or, you know, that kind of stuff.

[00:14:56] Andy Polaine: Just the sort of end bit of it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Once you already know what it is you’re making and it’s just about kind of. Working out which right, which bit is right.

[00:15:05] Indi Young: Right. And maybe you’re making some prototypes and throwing those out there. It’s all in the solution land. I call it the solution space.

[00:15:12] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:15:12] Indi Young: Right. It’s all about ideas and solutions and figuring out how those solutions rub up against real people.

[00:15:19] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:15:19] Indi Young: I don’t do that at all.

[00:15:21] Andy Polaine: Yeah. You’re all about the problem space, aren’t you?

[00:15:23] Indi Young: Yeah. Well, yeah. Although I’m starting to call it in one of my diagrams, I started putting this, this little space in between and I called it the strategy space. And I hit the strategy space actually speaks a little bit more strongly to people. Nathan Shedroff just, um, published a book in December called A Whole New Strategy um, and he’s, and his opening is like, "Oh my gosh, companies don’t do strategy. They just like, you know, stick a finger in the air."

They’re like, “Oh, I think this is, you know, the direction we’re going to go.” And strategy is based on a bunch of things, but one of the very first things with the biggest chapter is the qualitative data. Is understanding your market. So, um, trying to understand, A market, a market segment, get market insights, all of those kinds of words, I think are describing what I do, what I’m trying to do. I do have a, a purpose of , and, a mission is to get organizations to realize the variety in their market and start supporting it.

[00:16:34] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:16:35] Indi Young: Uh, so that’s, those are kind of the, that’s the difference. I’ve never done UX research. The way it’s defined now. Um, yeah, it’s always been more of the strategic level. Like let’s do some gap analysis between what, how we support people, Richard Dalton calls it capabilities, uh, the capabilities and org has, how do we support people? What are the gaps? And then I ask questions like, well, what are the gaps between different thinking styles? And those capabilities and how do we measure those and track how we’re changing them over time?

It also helps, uh, in terms of being able to prioritize, cause there’s so much you can do. And sometimes we get sort of stuck going, well, let’s just, you know, follow this direction. Cause that’s the direction we’ve been following. And it’s hard to. To not only see a new path that like goes off piste, into a direction that’s really interesting, especially for a certain thinking style that you’re interested in having that maybe you’re harming, and that’s detrimental to your organization or… the traditional way is like, we’re only going to follow the path where it’s the market segment that has the most money, is the most, you know, the, the most profit for us, but there’s other reasons to do it. And so I’m trying to bring those other reasons in there. It’s been, you know, so many studies like, Oh yeah, your brand can get damaged.

[00:18:04] Andy Polaine: Can you, can you give us some examples? Cause I think, I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of what you mean, but I think it’s kind of useful to, to hear sort of concrete examples of what that, what kinds of things you’re talking about.

[00:18:16] Indi Young: Right, right. So, um, Hmm, which example shall we follow?

[00:18:21] Andy Polaine: Uh, you don’t necessarily have to mention brands, but you know,

[00:18:25] Indi Young: Well, I just did a post about something I heard a Netflix product person say, so Netflix is the streaming company. Um, they do, they develop a lot of their own content and then they also stream other movies and then they just turned off this DVD, uh, spin off that they had where, which is how it started actually.

[00:18:52] Andy Polaine: Oh really have they stopped doing that now. They were sending out a DVD and, and.

[00:18:56] Indi Young: Yeah. So you can’t, you can’t just go order a movie that you wanted. This is actually, I remember seeing.

[00:19:02] Andy Polaine: I didn’t even know that still, I didn’t even know that still, they were still doing it.

[00:19:06] Indi Young: They were still doing it. Yeah. They spun it off as another company. So you saw the writing on the wall 10 years ago.

So, so I heard this, uh, Netflix product person say, uh, and the Netflix product person was very and like trying to charge up the audience to start thinking like product managers and the, and he says something very biased and he didn’t realize it. And so I wrote a post about it and the biased thing that he said was, well, we have this $7 a month subscription that has ads, ads are coming, ads are going to come no matter what.

And so we decided to make it a subscription for only $7 a month so that people love it. They love it. You know, all these ads are great. I, I love the ads that I’ve been seeing on Instagram. I’ve bought so many things like this little, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so as we’re coming, and so we did it this way, and I was just like, my jaw was on the floor.

I’m like, okay, this guy has no clue how biased that statement is. And how is it biased? It’s biased in a couple of ways, two ways. One is that he is thinking only from a point of view of someone who has never had to struggle for money. Okay. Um, if you have done research, I have listened to people who have struggled with money there are different thinking styles within certain contexts. And so when I talk about thinking styles, it’s not a personality. It is your approach, your cognitive approach to a thing that you’re trying to get done. A purpose. I call it, you can call it a goal. You can call it a job, whatever you want to call it.

Um, the thing about the, the reason I use that word purpose, cause it sounds all fluffy. And so maybe I shouldn’t use it, but, um, I’m flexible. I can adopt whatever language an org likes to use. A driver was something somebody was using just the other day. The idea is that it’s. Super big. It could be a purpose that you don’t ever want to finish or it could be something that you want to get done in five minutes.

[00:21:20] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:21] Indi Young: Right. Yeah. So, um, and, and it could be something negative and there’s a lot that that’s maybe what we should be talking about is all the negatives that I’m trying to get at. So what happened here is that he’s looking at it just from the point of view of someone who’s had a lot of money, hasn’t had to struggle and doesn’t realize that there is thinking styles within this purpose of deciding whether to buy a streaming service. There’s a thinking style of like control the luxuries.

[00:21:54] Andy Polaine: Yeah

[00:21:55] Indi Young: Where, you know, and even it’s, it extends beyond luxuries, like I’m going to control my water bill, my electricity bill, I’m going to turn off the heat because it can’t afford the gas. So it’s not just luxuries that, uh, it’s involved in, but this thinking style with regard to deciding whether to buy like a streaming it’s around luxury. And if you’re going to serve ads to people who are in that mindset, they’re going to be harmed.

[00:22:26] Andy Polaine: Yeah, because they’re constantly being sold, sold stuff or advertised stuff that they are unable to buy or don’t want to buy.

[00:22:35] Indi Young: Yes, that’s one another could be that maybe they know someone who went through bankruptcy or maybe they themselves went through bankruptcy and there’s a lot of shame around it.

[00:22:44] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:22:44] Indi Young: When you find yourself in that position, you realize maybe you had some habits that you, that were out of control. That’s also, you know, shame, shame is a harm. And so every time they see an ad, they’re going to feel shame. Is that what you want to do to your customers? No. The second reason why it’s biased is that… so what I did in my post is I like, okay, let’s have a control the luxuries option where you, you can get it for $7, but you don’t have ads, but maybe a few other things are, um, restricted. Like maybe you can choose four days a week that you can watch it or something like that. I’m just making things up.

[00:23:28] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:29] Indi Young: Yeah. Um, But you don’t have the ads, but you’re still at $7 a month and you don’t get that harm that’s happening to you. And so the second bias is, well, Hey, by offering that Netflix doesn’t really have to do anything, spend any money, invest, they just have to offer that and maybe have some sort of, you know, code for which days that particular account is allowed to see the streaming, but is that not the right kind of growth, right? That’s the question. I mean, it is growth. And I think what’s happening within organizations all over the place is that they’re defining the right kind of growth versus the wrong kind of growth. There’s something that just happened with Lululemon. I don’t know if I’m saying that brand right, but it’s like a fitness clothing.

[00:24:24] Andy Polaine: Yeah. I, Lululemon. I know from all the yoga and yeah, fitness.

[00:24:28] Indi Young: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Apparently, recently, they’re all like, okay, no, no, no, we’re not going to be like this. We um, you know, we’re going to cater to people who are overweight or we’re going to cater to people only exercise once a month or, you know, people who have brown skin or, you know, whatever it is, they’re just like, Nope, we’ve got our market. It’s fit people and we’re gonna do it this way. And they’re like, just like pulling back into the dark ages.

[00:24:57] Andy Polaine: Wow.

That’s, I’m amazed. I’m, I’m amazed that they should do that. And, and is that a, is that a sort of classic sort of rationalization thing where, where, you know, supporting these. I mean, it’s what you’re saying before there’s the center of our market, which is the most lucrative and the return on investment isn’t worth it for those other things, right?

[00:25:15] Indi Young: Yeah. Yeah.

That’s, that’s the classic thing that we’re all, I think, trying to fight against. But the, the thing is, is that it’s, it’s raw bias.

[00:25:27] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:25:27] Indi Young: It’s like, we don’t want to support those people. We don’t want their money. Even though we don’t have to do anything, invest anything to get it.

[00:25:38] Andy Polaine: Yeah. It’s funny, isn’t it?

There’s, you know, there’s been this whole, I’ll try not to kind of be hugely into the politics of it, but as you know, being in America, there’s been this whole kind of anti DEI thing going on. And you know, putting it that way, phrasing it that way, someone else, this isn’t my word, someone else was pointed this out the other day, I think it was Kara Swisher or something, you know, um, was saying, you know, when you say anti DEI, it sounds like, you know, I’m just anti this thing, but actually if you’re going to break it down and go, so what you’re saying, you’re anti diversity, you’re anti inclusion, you know, it’s kind of like an anti equity, you’re, it’s, and the way you just said it, it’s like, so what you’re saying is we don’t want those people, you know, we don’t want to serve those people, we don’t want your money, you know, It sounds much more, I mean, it’s the reality of what it is, but I think it’s, you know, it’s a much more stark way of putting it.

Yeah. I’ll be, I’ll be really interested to see.

[00:26:29] Indi Young: Or we’ll serve them, but we’re going to harm them.

[00:26:32] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Well, that’s even, yeah, that’s even worse. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:34] Indi Young: We’ll harm them in order to serve them. Yeah.

[00:26:38] Andy Polaine: So I wanted to ask you something because you, you were, we should get onto Time To Listen.

[00:26:41] Indi Young: Okay.

[00:26:42] Andy Polaine: Um, but your, your first book was Mental Models and with this, this way of, you know, so, uh, some mental models were, were a thing already.

I mean, I, they were, they are still a thing, what I’m saying and what I mean is there was a. Yeah. Um, they had all been already been kind of research into, there’s different versions of it like the mental models, how people understand things that they don’t understand is maybe one way of putting it. So, you know, I think one of the very first bits of research in the um, that I ever saw about it from the, I think mid eighties about thermostats, you know, I can’t remember who the authors were now, but people understanding, you know, how do your thermostats work, is it a switch that goes on and off at a temperature or is it a valve that it sort of opens more or less depending on the, and people had these, I think the, the original research was about sort of folk taxonomies or, or, um, or explanations for how things work like that work. Is that what you, that’s where I very first heard the term.

[00:27:40] Indi Young: What I wanted to do was make a mental model for a team about a population, about a segment of a market. So that’s all I’m doing. My mental models look like a city skyline. They look like a whole bunch of towers.

Yeah.

[00:27:57] Andy Polaine: And really importantly, I guess it’s probably saying this is a bit that, you know, I really love from a service design perspective is you, you have these, well, you have a few things. You have these kind of some of what we’re talking about, the, what are the purposes that you use going to a movie actually? I remember. And there’s lots of different reasons for going to a movie, right? Most people go and see a film, as you point out, it’s now I want to go and hang out with some friends. I’m going on a date. I want to, you know,

[00:28:23] Indi Young: One of them was like, I had to escape work. It’s like the only place I can turn off my pager. Oh, whoops. Another word.

[00:28:31] Andy Polaine: They were like mobile phones that you couldn’t talk back on. And then, um, uh, but the, the other crucial bit is sort of underneath you had, you had, so that you had those different sort of, uh, sort of tower blocks of, of depending on kind of those different purposes and things.

And then, but underneath you had sort of where the organization is where they’re supported, uh, in those different stages. And it, it sort of very nicely made a kind of, well, here’s, here’s a massive need or set of purposes here. And there’s a gap there, right? There’s no, there’s no one supporting it. So, you know, opportunity. I know I’m skipping through and I feel terrible because I don’t think I’m doing any of these justice, but my, my, my real question is, you then wrote Practical Empathy and then Time To Listen and I’m interested in the kind of through line of that, because what I’ve experienced most often with, I mean, myself, but other authors is I wrote this book and then I started, you know, people started working with people about it and talking to people about it. And then I got all these questions or I saw people didn’t understand bit this bit and had these problems. So I then wrote this next book, you know, and so I’m interested in that kind of through line for you of like, what’s been the development.

And I guess that might get you to the one you’re writing now.

[00:29:38] Indi Young: Right about three months after mental model diagram, uh, Mental Models came out the book. I realized I was using the word task in that book to represent cognition and that was just wrong. And it was confusing the hell out of people. So, um, so that was one thing that I had to change.

And the other thing was that I was, um, so. It is evolved, but it’s still the same thing. In the very beginning what I was trying to do was make it more like a functional map, um, functional, uh, gosh, I can’t even, it was some document that we would do in terms of software to describe what the software ought to be able to do.

And I was trying to make it like that. So I was shortening things a lot. People would be saying things and I would shorten them. Um, basically just as a explanation of what these are is that people would tell me what went through their mind as they were doing that thing, like going to a movie, all those other times they went to the movie, what went through their mind and the different reasons.

And, uh, I would pick out of there, the interior cognition and the interior cognition. I would then just sort of shorten into a summary and stick it, um, in my head. using affinity of focus of mental attention in that’s how it like emerged as these towers. The towers literally grow, um, kind of like seeds and yeah.

And so, um, I also realized, and this was feedback from a lot of people. It’s like, we need to have more in there that can’t be that short. It’s hard to suss out what those things mean, even though we label the tower and then we label the block that the tower. Um, but as you start labeling higher, those labels get shorter because they’re trying to represent more.

So those labels, those little summaries in the windows, in the towers had to be longer. So that was another thing that I changed. Um, and I started learning how to listen better. As well in the very beginning, as I was listening, I would be taking the transcript, so that’s wrong because, yeah, I had all these tricks and tips for taking a transcript while you’re listening to someone, but it meant that still, there was a chunk, maybe 20 percent of my cognition was going into getting that thing through to my fingertips and the keyboard, um, getting their words into the keyboard.

And, um, And you don’t want to use your cognition to do that. So another thing I changed was like, let’s just make sure these are being recorded. If it’s a situation you can’t record, then afterwards you spend 20 minutes writing down summaries of the concepts, the interior cognition concepts, um, of which there are three types.

But, um, I also realized, uh, right in the beginning, I knew that I was not after people’s needs. Like, I’m not going to walk up to them and say, what do you need? Um, instead I’m going to say, what went through your mind as you did that thing? Cause you already are a human. You’re already doing it. Um, email was not something brand new that like was something people never did before, because before email within an organization, we wrote memos and put them in little boxes in the central room.

[00:33:16] Andy Polaine: So this is turning into like, Oh, the thing, do you remember those?

[00:33:20] Indi Young: The festival of the old!, Anyway, so email was letter writing email was so many other forms of communication that people already did. There’s nothing new under the sun. What we are doing is enabling things that humans do. And so what I wanted to do was understand the interior cognition of it.

So learning how to listen and understand the layers. Of what’s coming out being able to teach people how to do that more clearly so in the latest book I have this analogy of a sort of a jaw breaker or a jaw gobstopper I don’t know it’s called a lot of different things.

[00:34:03] Andy Polaine: We call them I think I called gobstoppers you call them a jaw stopper, jawbreaker.

[00:34:08] Indi Young: Yeah. They’re called something.

[00:34:09] Andy Polaine: I’ll find the picture.

[00:34:10] Indi Young: Yeah. Yeah. They’re called something else. Um, in Latin America and they’re slightly different, but what it is, it’s a candy. It’s round. It’s spherical. And often it’ll take a very long time for someone, yes, there’s the book for someone to like suck the candy all the way through and it has layers and the layers are often different colors or different flavors or something. So that explains the jawbreaker. And in time to listen, I help people understand what someone is speaking about as a jawbreaker at the outer layer, uh, we have the description layer.

That’s kind of like that, that outer layer that explains how a process works or gives you seen like sets the scene for what was happening, what the context was about whatever topic this is, or maybe it has some statements of fact, and that’s not what I’m after. That’s going to happen in a listening session, but that’s not the good stuff.

Then we’ve got something I call the expression layer, which is where the opinions and the preferences are and opinions and preferences or perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes are what market research has always been about. I don’t believe those go deep enough. Those are based on past interior cognition, and I want to know what the interior cognition was back then when you formed that opinion.

And oh my gosh, this is so helpful to ask your manager about their preferences and opinions this way. You will suddenly see them as a person. Um, then there’s another layer that I call almost cognition, which is where we’re talking about sort of generalized interior. Thinking so maybe like every time I go to the airport, I get coffee there because I don’t want to have to, you know, sit in traffic and then have cold coffee when I get on the plane or blah, right, whatever that’s a generalized every time I go implied emotional reactions.

Uh, a lot of cultures don’t like to speak out loud about their emotional reactions. So they kind of hide them behind a word fence or implied fence Uh, but the central core is this interior cognition that i’m after that’s the inner thinking a person’s emotional reactions and a person’s guiding principles and the guiding principle is a personal rule It’s not a value because a personal rule can be set up because of some sort of belief or something that happened to you in the past and so you’ve set up a rule.

This is what happens when you have been discriminated against. If you have been discriminated against in the past, you get, you build this little personal rule about how to deal with it in the future. In the future, you’re in a situation you’re being discriminated against.

You have the emotions, you have the emotion, the, uh, inner thinking, and you pull out this rule and this is how you deal with it, right? So that’s what I mean. And I think one of the most important things is to, in a listening session, which was always way back in the first book, Mental Models, it was a non directed interview. There is no list of questions. We’re just going to ask you this one germinal question, which is what went through your mind as you were doing that thing that you do, so that maybe we can help with it and level help, help you level up, give you access to more, um, but I’m not going to ask you about this tool we’re not talking about the tool at all. I’m not even necessarily going to talk about the org. It’s all about your thinking is you did this thing. Now, one of the things that happens at this point when I’m teaching it is that people will start to think that the jawbreaker represents a whole person and it only represents so that we’re like, "Oh yeah, we’re sussing out like the inner thinking of that person. And, you know, we’re getting past that person’s preferences." No, it’s only about a topic. So during a listening session, there’s going to be a lot of these jawbreakers on the table. Person’s going to bring up a lot of topics about the purpose that they were doing that we’re talking about. And each one of those topics is going to have these layers.

And your job as a listener is to try to help them tell you what their interior cognition was. If they don’t go and do it right off the bat, um, you have to set a safe space, um, and not judge and all these other various things that I talk about in the latest book. Um, so yeah, it’s, um, It’s kind of been a continuum, being able to not only improve it myself, but to improve the way that I explain it so that other people can do it as well.

So what we’ve got on the screen here is like a person talking about a bunch of different topics that the whole purpose was decide whether to go to a restaurant six months after the pandemic, the COVID pandemic started. And so there’s a topic about pre screening a restaurant. There’s a topic about just doing grocery shopping or having groceries delivered.

There’s all sorts of topics that come up, each of which is its own jawbreaker, each of which we might return to, or that person might return to um, if, uh, my only job is to understand whether we got to that. interior cognition at the core of each jawbreaker. And if there’s a jawbreaker that they mentioned, but we didn’t get there, I might say, after, you know, they’ve explained a bunch of jawbreakers, I may say, well, earlier you said in this topic, and then we’ll get back to that and see if there’s something at the center.

[00:40:01] Andy Polaine: You’ve talked about it a little bit in kind of thinking styles. My, uh, my ex colleague and friend, Martha Cotton talks about it in mindsets, but there’s just this, this idea of, of different ways of doing things or thinking about things based on context, but there’s kind of a lot of stuff around values in there too, you know, and I guess one of the ones that I often will ask people about or suggest is tell me about what you ate over the last week what context were you in, um, and, you know, cause often you say, you say people, you know, so tell me about your dietary habits and it’s well, you know, everything organic and I really try and, you know, I don’t eat much sugar and, and all the rest of it.

And quite apart from that whole interviewer pleasing thing going on where you want to kind of present yourself as, as this amazing person. You know, it’s all contextual. I mean, we’ve done it with mobility, all sorts of other things as well, where people are saying, well, yeah, no, actually, when I think back through it and do the sort of, or keep a diary, but certainly even just thinking back through it, it’s, oh, yeah, no, I, I grabbed a muesli bar or a chocolate bar or something, kind of more unhealthy on, on the, on the way home or to work, you know, when people used to commute, um, because I didn’t have any time or I skipped breakfast that day or, um, but you know, when my friends came around, we sat down and we spent three hours preparing a meal and together and all that sort of stuff.

And so you get all this kind of this shift in terms of depending on this context, I value certain different things. You sort of talked about, we talked about this idea of, you know, drop the demographics. And I was thinking all the way back to you talking about sort of market, market strategy and kind of where you’re going to go, because obviously a really common thing is we’ve got lots of market research. Why do we need to do this? Um, and it’s less so now, I think I, to be kind to kind of market research people, but I think, you know, there is a, a tendency to look at the demographics as in age, location, wealth perhaps, and, um, you know, and gender and loads and loads of businesses still operate in, in that way.

So how do you sort of, how do you tackle that?

[00:42:05] Indi Young: That’s a pretty, yeah, that’s a pretty easy one because, um, all you have to do is say, okay, so if you’re saying, you know, that all Spanish speakers are, um, probably worried about money. Okay. That’s wrong. Yeah. Right. And I can prove it. Yeah. All suburban housewives, um, have kids. That’s wrong. I can prove it. Um, and then we come back to that. That, you know, the center where, Oh, well, it’s only right to support the most common and you’re making a biased decision to not support what you think are outliers. Um, so back to the beginning there, that’s, um, It’s interesting that you brought up, what did you eat because I did a study for a fast food restaurant, uh, who wanted to improve. I mean, the whole goal was to figure out better ways of doing, um, ordering for drive thrus. Okay. But what we studied was the interior cognition. Of people deciding what to get to eat for lunch and framing it. Framing is I teach a whole course on framing, um, because it’s hard, uh, but framing it to get patterns and framing it to get patterns that are useful for that particular organizational goal of improving ordering, uh, for drive thrus.

It takes a lot of thought. And so what we did was we saw not only this city skyline mental model diagram of what goes through people’s minds as they got lunch, but we also saw the thinking styles and the thinking styles were not, uh, they’re contextual. So your thinking style one day might change the next day, or it might even change when you get to the place where you had decided to go using one thinking style and see that it’s so crowded that there’s no way possible that you can do it. Um, and that’s when you reach for the muesli bar, right?

[00:44:21] Andy Polaine: Or a packet of chips or whatever.

[00:44:23] Indi Young: Yeah, yeah, or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Um, so you can flip thinking styles quite frequently. I’m in the. Just about finished with a comic series of a person demonstrating that flip. Same person, same context, but different things causing the flip, uh, between thinking styles.

So the idea though, is it like, um, for deciding what to get to lunch. I think, uh, one of the thinking styles was, you know, try to stay on the straight and narrow, whatever my straight and narrow was, right. Our straight and narrows might be different. Um, but I’m trying to stay on it and make my decisions by eliminating things from menus or eliminating locations to go based on what’s available there that doesn’t fit within my straight and narrow.

[00:45:16] Andy Polaine: So that could be, you know, keeping to a budget. It could be health thing. It could be being vegan or whatever it is that’s for you.

[00:45:22] Indi Young: Counting calories. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All that thing. Um, whereas another one, you’ll probably relate to this as like, I don’t want to eat the same thing twice. Right.

[00:45:35] Andy Polaine: I’m the opposite.

[00:45:36] Indi Young: Don’t eat the same thing twice. Yeah. Yeah. So, you’re at work, you’re going to go out to lunch with your buddies, you know, two, three buddies. Um, and they all want to go get a burrito and you’re like, no way, dude, I had a burrito last night. Mm mm. And you will leave that group in that thinking style and go get your own food somewhere.

[00:45:56] Andy Polaine: Even though that was your thinking style the day before.

[00:46:00] Indi Young: No, the day before it was, I mean, I got a burrito because the day before I had a grilled cheese sandwich.

[00:46:05] Andy Polaine: Right. Okay.

[00:46:06] Indi Young: Yeah. It’s not about the burrito.

[00:46:07] Andy Polaine: So it’s always, always, it’s always kind of contextually relative to the thing before. It’s kind of moving along.

[00:46:12] Indi Young: Yeah, exactly. It just can’t be the same.

[00:46:14] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:46:15] Indi Young: So it, so what’s interesting is that when you get, the mental model diagram and these thinking styles and then you come back to try to solve this. How do we help people order God? Wow. Already you’ve probably thought of two ideas, how to serve or support the people who don’t want to repeat the same thing two days in a row, or, you know, even the same week, because you can track what they’ve ordered at your organization if you’re doing it through some sort of an app.

[00:46:45] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So, you know, when you explain it like that, so eloquently and, um, you know, ev you know, you can really relate to it. And I think, you know, when, when you talk about this stuff, people are, oh yeah, yeah, I completely get it. I’m like that all the time. People do it. Money is another one. And people do it a lot with a very varied relationship to my, always, always interested in that kind of perception of value, of like, I’m not gonna buy that. You know? And you go, well, that’s you that’s only the cup of a cup of coffee. You know, particularly with like buying an app or something from the app store that was a waste of money. It’s like, yeah, but it costs less than. One of the five coffees you drink every day. It’s really interesting.

[00:47:20] Indi Young: I, I, I just have to inject here that I don’t drink coffee, so I find it hilarious when people use that as the monetary.

[00:47:27] Andy Polaine: I don’t drink tea. I’m English, but I don’t drink tea. So, yeah. I only started drinking coffee when I was in my thirties.

[00:47:32] Indi Young: I actually have no idea what a cup of coffee costs.

[00:47:35] Andy Polaine: Oh, yeah. Too much is the answer. Um, so no, it’s probably not enough is actually the answer. So I think people really kind of get to understand this stuff and, and, you know, immediately get it right. Um, why do we get it so wrong? Why has it been sort of got so wrong in, in businesses or over and over and over again?

I mean, I’m always fascinated by this thing of like, this seems really obvious. I mean, there’s a, there’s a thing in service design. We talked about it in our book, there’s a guy called Daniele Catalanotto who’s just kind of has these little service design principles books. And one of the things, his principles was, you know, don’t treat your customers in, in a different way that you’d treat a friend.

Um, and it’s a very simple kind of principle, but all the time we have these very kind of asynchronous and unfriendly, unkind relationships with companies. Why, why does this all go wrong? Why don’t, why, why are we so sort of, I’m saying we to, you know, why are we as, you know, organizations so terrible at doing this?

[00:48:34] Indi Young: Yeah. Uh, first of all, I want to mention Lisa Dance just published a book called Today Is The Perfect Day. Uh, that’s all about all these things that companies are making us do. And she has this idea of unpaid labor, uh, highlighted in that book. So in the beginning we said like, there’s either intentional or unintentional harms.

And so let’s just answer it for unintentional harms. I mean, I can’t answer that question, but I can only see it through, you know, my little hole, it’s a big giant question. Um, there’s a lot of answers to it. The little, the little piece of it that I see is that we’re a little like in our org, in our team, the, my position in my team, um, my relationship to the people above me, is broken these days because we can be laid off tomorrow.

Often we don’t even build relationships because layoffs happen so quickly. We are not functioning as teams. We are being told we are a team, but we’re not functioning as teams. We’re not making the effort to make relationships. I think there’s a lot of reasons. Yeah, there’s layoffs. Uh, there’s also when you know, so and so who had dark skin tried to make a change and then she got ostracized and she complained to HR and they did nothing and she ended up kicked out. Okay, I’m not going to rock the boat.

[00:50:06] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:50:06] Indi Young: Right. There’s the, I’m not going to rock the boat or maybe I’ll rock the boat for myself, but not for everybody around me. I’m not going to make this huge deal. I’m just going to make it right for me and I’ll be quiet about it. Or I’m going to try to make it a huge deal. There’s a lot of us who are, I’m going to make it a huge deal for everyone so I can try to make a difference in my tiny little way. And if we all try to make a difference in our tiny little way, then maybe we will make a change.

But I think that there’s a lot of stuckness within our orgs. Like what I said in the beginning is like, they’re just going to fall back to the way we always did things. I’m not going to go off piste in that direction because of, you know, it doesn’t adhere to the way that we’ve traditionally spoken about business.

It doesn’t adhere to the idea that, Oh, that’s a, a market where we can get a lot of profit. It does represent this DEI, it does represent sustainability. It does represent being able to uh, be on a team where we function as a team, where we have each other’s back, where we can make ideas together, where we have, where our managers have our back to make ideas together, where the, where our managers actually make ideas that are great.

Um, it’s broken. So that’s the little piece of it that I see.

[00:51:27] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Dehumanized. Yeah. And actually, I, you know, I kind of often said, you know, the role of what we’re trying to do is to re humanise, de humanized products- and services, right? I mean, I think it sort of leeches out.

So what are you working on at the moment? What is the, the next one?

[00:51:45] Indi Young: So I’m not working on that book yet. Um, the next book is Thinking Styles. I’m working, I’ve got a course that I’m, I’ve got a course right now, but, um, I have upgraded, been upgrading my courses, um, so that they are accessible and so that they are. In sort of they work in people’s lives a little bit better.

What I do is the recordings. There’s a whole set of recordings for a course, like the Listening Deeply courses, 11 hours of recordings. Um, and you’ve, you’re going to do it over six months and figure it out. Right. And there’s, Um, all the exercises and I did this for the two courses around emergent data synthesis, which is my way of seeing the patterns, letting those patterns grow, not putting my codes on it because my codes are my codes and my orgs codes.

That’s not what people are saying. So it’s emergent data synthesis. So those three courses are out. The next course is the Thinking Styles course and then the course after that I’m going to upgrade is the Framing Your Study course. So that’s what I’m working on right now. Although at the very moment, what I’m working on is trying to get more positioning case studies, elevator pitches. How do we talk about this out there for the whole community? Um, so, and, and kind of like, what, what can you do with this kind of data? So that’s what I’m working on right now.

[00:53:17] Andy Polaine: The stuff I asked you before, like make the arguments for this and how do you persuade people to do that? Yeah. You probably hear this all the time. I absolutely do. Whenever I give workshops and stuff. Oh yeah. Yeah. How do I convince my boss?

[00:53:30] Indi Young: Yeah. So I’m, I’m working on that. Um, and, uh, the Thinking Styles, I think is going to be really fabulous because it is one of the things is that people, when they’re, doing those mental model diagrams, um, it is a lot of mental work.

In fact, when I do it with teams, each team member only works on it for 10 hours a week. Uh, because it is a heavy lift. And if you do more than that, you end up burning yourself out and then you don’t wanna do it again. And I don’t want that to happen. I’m also working with somebody exploring what the current types of AI models can recognize. I don’t think it can do, um the affinity technique of focus of mental attention, but maybe in 20 years it can, I want to be the person to help train it. So I’ve got that in the works and so that might make some of that lift heavier, but with Thinking Styles, the lift is a little bit less. It’s a very specific way of working with a team and representing the people that you did listening sessions with, you can get it done I would guarantee after you do your listening sessions, I would guarantee you’d get it done in six days. Um, if you’ve got the right data, if you framed it, right. If patterns show up. Every time I do it, it works because I know how to frame this thing. There’s definitely the chance that it won’t work if it wasn’t framed, right.

[00:55:07] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So I, we, we could, we could talk for hours, but we have hit an hour already. There is one final question always, uh, which is what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have a, an outsized effect on the world?

[00:55:24] Indi Young: I think the one small thing that I’d like to mention is our, pride in our curiosity about data,. When we react to it, when we see a piece of data, we will ask these really stupid demographic questions.

It’s everywhere. We’re swimming in it. It shows up in academic papers. It shows up in journalism. It shows up in our own work. I mean, we’re literally swimming in it in the entire world. It’s like, Oh, you know, 57 percent of respondents were in favor of X but the others were, you know, like all split all over the place. And so you’ll go like, Oh, that 57%, how many of them were women?

[00:56:11] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:56:11] Indi Young: Right. That will be your proud curiosity. Well, I want to know how I was like, that’s a ridiculous shit question. First of all, First of all, it’s often in getting asked in a binary sense and binary does not apply. And second of all, like what, what, what are you going to get out of that? It means nothing. It’s like saying, Oh, all Spanish speakers have trouble with money.

[00:56:38] Andy Polaine: Um, yeah, it doesn’t make any sense.

[00:56:41] Indi Young: It makes no sense. So that’s my one little thing.

[00:56:43] Andy Polaine: Okay.

[00:56:44] Indi Young: Stop, stop that. Don’t be proud of that kind of curiosity, ask different questions like about the thinking styles.

[00:56:52] Andy Polaine: Where can people find you online? I’ve put IndiYoung. com there, you are, you are there.

[00:56:56] Indi Young: Yep. I’m on LinkedIn and I’m also on Blue Sky and Twitter slash X but I think in LinkedIn, that’s where I focus. So I do my most responding to people there. And that’s Indi Young at LinkedIn.

[00:57:13] Andy Polaine: I’ll put the, I’ll put the links in the, in the show notes.

[00:57:16] Indi Young: Yeah. I also, uh, you can, I’m on Medium and I have a newsletter on Substack. Um, I had to switch to Substack because they shut down Tiny Letter and, um, Substack has its issues, but I’m not spending any money through them at all. So I’m like, okay, maybe, I don’t know.

[00:57:36] Andy Polaine: Well, I’ll put the links to that in, in the show notes too. Indi, thank you so much for being my guest on Power of Ten.

[00:57:43] Indi Young: Thank you, Andy. .

[00:57:45] Andy Polaine: You have been watching and listening to Power of Ten. You can find more about the show on polaine. com, where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice, online courses, sign up for my very irregular newsletter, Doctor’s Note. If you’ve got any thoughts, uh, comments, disagreements, whatever, put them in the comments below if you’re watching on YouTube or, or get in touch. You’ll find me on as @apolaine on pkm.social on Mastodon. You’ll find me on LinkedIn or my website. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

Managing Up and Meta-Communication

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0200

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I spend my days coaching design leaders, helping them improve themselves and their organisations. Since so many common themes and interesting questions come up, I’ve decided to start a regular series of video reflections.

This one is about managing upwards through questions, meta-communication — the communication around the work vs the work itself — and the importance of showing your working.

Plus a bonus clip of me tandem skydiving.

Thanks to Daniele Catalanotto for the inspiration!

Transcript

N.B. This is generated by Descript. There are likely some errors:

Coaching Reflections April 4th 2024

Hello, my friend and co-leader at the Hochschule Lucerne where I teach service design Daniele Catalanotto and I have been doing these roundups of our coaching sessions with our students. And then I thought, well, this is a good idea to do with my design leadership coaching too.

So one of the questions that comes up all the time as a topic is how do I manage up. You know, you can’t really change an organization from below very easily, but one thing you can do is ask pointy questions. So a thing that always comes up is this idea of, you know, speed and this has to be done.

And, you know, we need to go faster. We need to grow more. We need to all those kinds of things. And this causes people in all sorts of stress. Uh, it means that if you’re a manager of designers, you’re kind of putting your design team under stress. And it’s always good to question that original premise.

Why do we need to go fast? What for what reason are we were going fast? What’s the speed for now? If you’re in a startup, there’s usually a good reason we’re going to run out of money and we need to launch and so forth. In larger organisations, this is not necessarily true or more established organisations.

Speed is not always the right thing. Now I’m not saying you should become this kind of really slow creaky enterprise. And I don’t know what the kind of agile and lean people will be rolling their eyes here. But actually, you know, At a certain scale. Think of Facebook, right? Getting it wrong has massive consequences.

If you’re a very established brand already. It’s better to launch something, not as a kind of MVP that’s a little bit half-assed and people think, God, you know, What the hell is going on here. But actually, you know, launched something that is really thought through. You don’t really see car companies like Mercedes launching a car that’s really poorly designed and a little bit half-baked and with the idea that we’re going to fix it later. And yet of course, in digital, we do this, this happens all the time, except stuff doesn’t get fixed. So ask the question. Why are we going fast? And that forces two things for, for the person you’re asking. They’ll either give you a good reason. In which case you now have your reason? Or they won’t have the answer.

And they’re forced to think about that themselves. And that’s the really useful thing about using questions as a way of managing up. So other things are, do we have any validation for this thing we’re building? Do we know why are we building this thing? And people might have an answer, but if the answer is well, I th I know in my customers and we think it’s a good idea. That’s not a very good answer.

And that gives you something to actually have a kind of conversation about. So you kind of force that person who’s just often cascading the stress and the deadline downwards, to do some thinking themselves. And deadlines are another one. Is this a real deadline? Or is this a fake deadline? Most deadlines. are not as urgent as they are given to be. There’s a really great piece. Uh, by someone I went to school with actually seemed to be on my podcast uh, a screenwriter called Julian Simpson, and he has a newsletter called Development

Hell. One of them’s about writing slow and there’s a whole bit in it. There’s a bit of swearing in it. So I’m not going to say it because YouTube is going to ding me for the swearing, because the whole thing in there around. Um, this idea of, you know, he got like three emails saying urgent, we need urgent script changes on this before this guy, Bob goes on holiday. And he’s like. I’m not, why would, Bob’s not going to be reading my script. Whilst these on holiday. And even if he is, I could be using that time whilst he’s on holidays to improve the script. So, you know, screw Bob. I’ll put a link in the notes about this.

Another thing has come up as a topic is more than one design leader has said, you know, I’m not really sure whether my design team. What their skills are, how they’re ideated, because we’ve got really established design system. And a lot of what they’re creating and a lot of what they bring to presentations is finished, polished work. And it’s kind of to based and built upon that design system. So you know the question is, would they be able to do that on their own or are they just kind of able to push the parts around of an existing design system that someone has worked upon? I suspect there might be a bit of a generational thing here. Um, but we were talking around the value of of ideating and sketching.

You know, I have this conversation with my students all the time. Um, but it also kind of bleeds into a professional life. If, you know, there are times when it is definitely worth not going through the kind of process of doing a mock up and then showing people and having the conversation where they don’t really get that

it’s a mock-up and you might as well just build the real thing or build a clickable prototype to show them. There’s definitely value in that. At some times. But if they’re, if it’s just that’s the first leap, I that’s, it can be really problematic because as your teachers will have said to you show your working. Um, where are the ideations, where are the kind of multiple ideas that you had as the way of tackling this problem? You know, where are the sketches that you might have had? And I, I kind of feel like sketching stuff has become a bit of a lost art of kind of multiple variants of things and different ways of approaching stuff. And I’ve also, this has come up in the last couple of weeks. The lost art of presenting. If not wireframes then certainly kind of sketchy versions of something.

Balsamiq mock-ups the wire framing tools did exist and there’s also a bunch of Figma templates first. I kind of look like in a Sharpie sketching lines. For showing this stuff, there is a real power in communicating, Hey, this is not a finished thing. These are some ideas that we’re, we’re thinking of. There is room for maneuver and, um, change here. Or here is the progression of how we were thinking about this.

Certainly when you’re presenting to design leaders, I think that you always have that problem with stakeholders, other stakeholders that may not be able to make that mental leap from, you know, they don’t know what they’re looking at. Why is this black and white? Our brand isn’t black and white. I don’t know.

These are sketches. There’s a wire frames. Um, But there is a real power in also presenting something that is obviously not finished as a way to stimulate discussion because you then get much better feedback. You. And this I thought was a known thing that the reason why you do that is because you’re communicating this isn’t a finished thing that gave me honest feedback. Whereas when I… I’ve presented you a polished thing. Um, we’re going to, people are going to feel more, um, worried about giving you direct feedback. Cause I think we’ll look at all the work you’ve put into this. It is really, really important.

Do not skip that ideation stage. I feel like research gets done. The insights and analysis and synthesis should be done, rather than just the research sitting in a Notion database somewhere that no one could have really knows what to do with, and there should be then some responses to that and multiple responses to that.

And that should be a divergent process. And I, I kind of. I feel there’s a habit now of just skipping to the end. Most of it, I think is driven by that pressure to be, to work fast. But what happens when you work fast is you lean into what the software can or the tools can do easily and that can also be your design system or kind of existing templates and patterns. And so there’s this kind of homogenisation that comes in where everything starts to look the same. And it’s all, it’s all a pretty boring. Now, your job as designers is to make stuff up, right?

Your job as designers is to invent stuff. So I really would like to see that happening more. And at the very least you can’t have a decent conversation as a design leader, you can’t have a decent conversation and critique session, if all of you are just kind of turning up with really polished work and everyone’s are kind of very precious about it and no one wants to offend anyone. Um, I don’t think anyone should be unpleasant, deliberately or bullying. But a kind of, there’s a kind of politeness. I don’t mean disrespect, but I mean, there’s a kind of politeness that can really kill creative processes because you’re not being candid and you really need to be.

And then the last thing came up actually from Daniele Catalanotto I will put a link to his presentation. He did a little presentation to my students. And this is the thing that comes up all the time in design leadership coaching, and it’s metacommunication so it’s, it’s the talking about the work rather than the work itself.

He started the presentation saying, you know, when, when he started, he thought, you know, the work was like 90% of the thing and the 10% of the kind of politics and the communication stuff to stakeholders. You know, was only a kind of tiny part. And wasn’t really that important, and that’s what the kind of suits and the business people did. And, um, then he kind of realised he wasn’t really getting anywhere.

He wasn’t really getting much progress. People were switching off when he was presenting stuff and he realised that actually he went the other way. He sort of did like 10% of the work and the 90% meta-communication, but then kind of came back and found a balance of half and half. You know, the meta-communication and the further, you would go up, um, in leadership the more important that is, which is how do you communicate about the work? How do you understand where people are at, how do you basically make friends with people, make friends and influence people right within your organisation? That stuff is vitally important and it feels a bit counter-intuitive because it feels like what I’m not talking about design anymore. And you still need to speak design to designers and your design teams. But, the value of going around and speaking to people, understanding what they have on their plate how might you be able to help them take something off of their plate? And help them in some way and be a really good stakeholder partner.

All of that stuff really gives you a massive amount of influence and goodwill, that then you can use when you’re trying to get change done and sometimes it’s that fixing a very small thing or doing something that’s kind of been a constant irritant to people, and no, one’s really done anything about a new approach it differently and you fix that or you improve that thing. Sometimes it’s just about actually understanding that people are human and the someone who is, uh, appears to be being you know, difficult or, you know, uh, controlling is probably full of fear and anxiety and when you see it that way, you think, what are they afraid and anxious of and how might I mitigate that in some way? How am I kind of help them some way? And that may mean communicating way more about the work you’re doing. The meta communication around the work, than you think is necessary, because it’s self evident to you how great that your work is and all the reasons why you’d want to do design stuff. But actually it’s not self-evident to those people.

And when people are afraid and anxious, they will grip tighter. My favourite metaphor for this is actually a video of me tandem skydiving, and there’s a lot of communication there around on the ground first of like, this is how you can do it.

There’s like a dry rehearsal of what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of I imagine it is actually real safety checks, but not just safety theatre, but there’s quite a lot of sort of tugging on carabiners and stuff to check, you know, are you, are you properly connected? And I’m, I’m pretty sure quite a lot of that was for my benefit too, because when you actually shuffled towards the edge of the plane and I’m sitting on this guy’s lap hanging out over the top of the plane, it’s very very scary and the first moment of the jump, your brain just goes right. What’s going on panic stations and actually if I really, really panic and I grabbed the guy’s arms because I’m afraid we’re going to plummet to our deaths. Well, then we plummet to our deaths because he can’t pull the chute.

And so there’s a lot of stuff there about kind of calming me. And I realized afterwards, looking back at the video, you know, this was this guy’s, this is this guy’s office. Right? I was probably his 10th jump of the day or something. He does it every day for him, it’s just like, well this how this works. I know how this works. For almost all of the people he jumps with, it’s their first time, like it was with me. And, and so you have to do a lot of over communication in order to calm people’s nerves, even though, you know, “Oh this is fine. This is a process we’ll, we’ll survive it and it comes through the other side” So meta-communication. It’s super important rather than just being reactive.

I hope that’s useful. If you’re interested in my design leadership coaching, you can click in the show notes down here or I’ll put some doobly thing on the screen. if you would like to get in touch or you’re interested, or you’ve got some thoughts of your own, then please leave it on in the comments. Otherwise I will see you next time.

Bye.

Are you my 100th coachee?

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0200

Although I have been mentoring designers of all levels for years as part of my work, I am formally in the fifth year of my design leadership coaching practice. I noticed I am coming up to my 100th coachee and, while I don’t know yet who that will be, I thought I would share some quick reflections on the 99:

Coachee profiles

I coached slightly more women than men as well as people identifying as non-binary.
Coachees are from all around the world and a diverse range of backgrounds and ethnicities.
The ages of my coachees ranged from 23 to 59.
Around 75% of my coachees pay out of their own pocket versus employer paid.

Common themes

Creating time and space in calendars as well as mental space.
Stakeholder management and partnership.
Dealing with feelings of overwhelm and imposter syndrome.
The shift in identity from maker to manager/leader, what I call The Leadership Dip.
Struggling with the unquestioned need for speed within organisations.
Becoming more discerning about what you spend your time on.
How to link the needs of design to the needs of business stakeholders.
Loneliness in the leadership role.
Lack of confidence in speaking off the cuff, in meetings and calls.
Building up a palette of story components and structures.
Finding the shape of you and developing a personal manifesto.
Understanding leadership as enablement through slow-motion faciltiation.
The importance of your inner work. You can’t lead others if you can’t lead yourself.

Thank you to all my coachees who have trusted me in their process thus far. It really is a privilege to be invited into someone’s inner life in this way and I’m looking forward to the next 100.

If you would like to be one of them, find out more here or get in touch

Photo by Javier Graterol on Unsplash

Oliver Reichenstein - Keeping it real when writing with AI

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0200

While every app rushes to add an AI assistant, iA Writer’s Oliver Reichenstein asks, “Why should I bother reading what you haven’t written?”

Here he talks tells about the deep thinking behind the latest version 7 of IA Writer and the new feature that dims the text you paste from AI tools, keeping track of what is yours and what isn’t.

Watch on YouTube:

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Or listen below:

Show Links

Oliver

iA - https://ia.net
iA Writer - https://ia.net/writer
iA Presenter - https://ia.net/presenter
Writing with AI - https://ia.net/topics/writing-with-ai
Oliver on Mastodon - @reichenstein@mastodon.net
iA on Mastodon - @ia@mastodon.net

Andy

Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/andypolaine.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

Andy Polaine (00:00:03): Welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of Zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organization, society, and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, service design, innovation, consultant, educator and writer. My apologies for the late start. We had both some tech problems and also the city have decided to cut down a tree just outside my window, so I’ll be hitting mute judiciously throughout the interview to try and hope that you’re not going to hear that there. It’s so while every app is rushing to add an AI assistant and add ai, this and everything will help you write on LinkedIn. You can go online and start to write a post and AI is like, would you like to meet Ed? Write your thought leadership for you. My guest today, Oliver Reichenstein says, why should I bother reading what you haven’t written? Oliver is the founder of information Architects at the company behind the very popular markdown based writing app, IA writer, and more recently, IA presenter is here to talk about keeping it real when writing with AI and why and how they built in this authorship mode into IA writer Oliver, welcome to Power of Ten.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:01:20): Great to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Andy Polaine (00:01:22): So it’s been an age since we actually kind of chatted person to person. I can’t remember. We met many years ago at a conference and hung out. Our two families hung out together and obviously I’ve seen IA writer evolve over the years. One of the first apps that I used on the mobile space actually I think is probably where I first started using it as the iPhone came out and plain text was a thing and markdown was a thing before you could kind of really do anything more interesting. So first of all, before we get into the latest bit, how has it evolved over the years for you and how many years has it been?

Oliver Reichenstein (00:02:02): It’s been 13 years now. The idea is very, very old. I used to earn my money as a teacher of Microsoft products, Microsoft Office, and in particular Microsoft Word where my job was to teach people how to use Word in particular to write scientific papers for university or for high level schools. And I used to teach at Art School Basel, and I noticed there that the art school pupils had a similar problem as I had where instead of writing, they were just choosing fonts and colors and line heights. And by the time they were done with the right layout that the lesson was over. And of course that was bothering me as a teacher, but I noticed that I had a similar pattern every time I open Word, I first have to make sure that everything is correct before I get started. And so at the time I started using a typewriter myself to see how that compares to work and I found that I write much better with the typewriter even though it’s very bothersome when you make a mistake and all that, but I found the way it slows you down, the fact that it hurts when you type that you think twice before just typing anything you can correct it later actually led to a much better writing just simply because I was thinking before moving my fingers.

(00:03:33): And so that idea was born in the nineties, somewhere mid nineties, but I always carried it with me and by the end of the zero years or the naughties maybe, I think they’re called in English, not quite sure

Andy Polaine (00:03:50): They do we say the naughties?

Oliver Reichenstein (00:03:51): Yeah, it sounds nasty, but

Andy Polaine (00:03:53): Well, it’s the English dub.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:03:57): Yeah. By the end of around 6 0 7, we started to make concepts of an electronic device that we wanted to build in China by ourselves. It was half serious to serious, but I started to work with a Finn designer that used to work for nasa, did toilets, they dump toilets for spaceships because Americans didn’t like making toilets. It’s dirty. So they got the finish guy that had no experience with anything space, but yeah, he’s a funny guy. He lived in Japan and we worked together on a concept for an electronic device, an actual device where he could only write, and then the iPad came out and things went happened very quickly. We were lucky to get one of those iPads early on because we were working for and decide, and the moment where Steve Jobs presented the iPad, we were on the job, so we were prepared with the design conditions of the iPad. At first, we printed out paper iPads and moved little boxes and pieces of paper on top of it. And then I think in May we got the first iPad at the office. We had a little, hes start because I think it came out, I don’t remember exactly when it came out, but we were really, the timing was perfect for our app. And yeah, we had a couple of good ideas from the very start. I think we came out with focus mode, the idea of focusing on one sentence at the time. Like a

Andy Polaine (00:05:42): Typewriter, right?

Oliver Reichenstein (00:05:43): Like a typewriter, exactly. It was very really a translation of the typewriter, what we’ve done. But we also said it’s silly to just force people to write on a typewriter where you can’t edit because that wouldn’t be medium appropriate. It’s a basic design principle that we follow and everything we look at what we do now mean in the physical world and how does it translate, how can we improve? It? Had reading time and we spent a lot of time on the typography of it as we always do, and we started thinking about something called reading typography where we discerned the writing from the reading typography. I think it’s a new thing on computers because before we didn’t have much choice on the typewriter, what organic typography use, and we found that actually Monospace had a lot of benefits. I’m not going to get into each and every point there, but that’s where we started.

(00:06:41): And the vision was always the same to create a writing app that is made for writing because word is not like that word is the default writing app, but it’s more like of a layout thing, but you can do this and that and versioning and all kinds of stuff. It has a visual basic editor in there. I know each and every corner of the nineties word application because I taught that and I know each and every bug from the nineties, the latest versions may be fantastic, but from what I hear, there’s still the same box around. You can’t get out of lists, especially if you have a nested list. Once you’re on a nested list, you can get out. All these things still

Andy Polaine (00:07:22): Present. It’s hugely buggy. I mean, I rant about Microsoft on a regular basis. I mean mostly about their irritating account authentication. But yeah, no, I mean having been working in a consultant, well, there’s two use cases that still just irritate me enormously. One is having worked, having written a book, there comes a point where because copy editors want track changes, which we’re going to get to, then you’re stuck. Then however you’ve been writing, and I write in Mark down and I have done for many, many years as pretty much as soon as the spec came out, then you have to go into Word or you can kind of do it in Google too. But it’s horrible. It’s horrific, and I hate it. When I wrote my PhD, I avoid using, I used another app called Elle back then. I couldn’t face doing a long form. It’s really bad for long form writing where it just starts chugging really well. It feels like I always feel like it. I’m using an emulator, which I kind of suspect I am. And the other thing is then in consulting obviously is the world of PowerPoint and talk about the number one place where you can faff about and lose enormous amounts of time on formatting. That’s the place. Now you guys, before we get back into IA writer, we probably just talk about IA presenter a little bit. So tell us about IA presenter.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:08:53): So yeah, I haven’t worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers or wherever you’ve been,

Andy Polaine (00:09:00): Well, it was Fjord, right? Fjord

Oliver Reichenstein (00:09:02): Right of used to be a design agency, but Accenture,

Andy Polaine (00:09:06): That’s such a burn, but yeah, okay. Yes.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:09:07): Yeah, sorry. I don’t know about the insider jokes in those

Andy Polaine (00:09:14): Consultancies,

Oliver Reichenstein (00:09:16): But yeah, as a design agency also you live in PowerPoint. I used to work, which is not that far away from the really bad evil consultancies, but

Andy Polaine (00:09:31): Purely FA nice guy. But yes,

Oliver Reichenstein (00:09:33): Very nice. No, they’re very nice. Yeah, they just belong to McKinsey or what was that

Andy Polaine (00:09:39): Again? They belong to Accenture, which I probably would. Yeah, I have to stop. Not the worst, I would say. I think McKinsey probably pretty high up there. So anyway, so I

Oliver Reichenstein (00:09:52): Have to start with the ego jokes, but yeah, so what is it about You live also in PowerPoint and especially if you work for a bigger consultancy, you just make one PowerPoint after the other. And that’s pretty much what I did at the, I just lived in PowerPoint, felt like very basic camping actually. And then there was a phase where every web designer had to be at the design conference and I followed the try. And so I was giving one presentation after the other until there was a point where I asked myself, do I really need to use PowerPoint here as well? Do I really need to have a presentation? And I started experimenting with presentations without PowerPoint and I liked that a lot. And I remembered on weddings or Christmases, when your talented uncle stands up and hits the glass and then starts talking, people paid a lot of attention.

(00:10:55): Everybody was happy and looking forward to these. And most of these conferences, I’m sorry, but most people don’t really enjoy these presentations. They don’t. They’re just boring and they have the memes and they have the videos and so on, but there are very few people that really care about what they say. And yeah, I kind of ended my whole career at conferences because family was starting to complain. You fly to Australia, you fly here, you fly there. Well actually you have two kids at home starting to say no and staying with the family. But I ended that career more or less by sticking to non PowerPoint presentations and just talking. Even though I was talking about design, I always have this tendency to philosophize about design, which is the reason why I accepted these conferences because that gave me the opportunity to talk about Hayek and Plato and Aristotle, which clients at the time were not.

(00:12:02): So, but yeah, that was pretty much it. And I’ve been mostly working on the application for the last 10 years except for some select clients that I still work with and I didn’t need much PowerPoint anymore. And then one of our employees started working on a markdown version of PowerPoint quite some time ago. And developer very, very talented, extremely talented, extremely efficient, interesting personality. And I was very skeptical. I was like, first of all, I don’t like presentations and then just making PowerPoint in markdowns kind of pointless and I hate that. I hate presentation apps viciously. And then his presentation app wasn’t big commercial success. And he said, yeah, but I built it. I have all this stuff and maybe I think what is needed is some design. And he felt like making it look nice. And I don’t take that personally.

Andy Polaine (00:13:18): Oh, could you add, can you put some nice design sprinkle on top of my code? Is that you’re

Oliver Reichenstein (00:13:24): The bit, like I said, he’s a really cool guy. He totally understands what we are actually doing, but I think he might have, no, I’m being unfair. He knows what we’re doing and he knows that it would have probably gone a bit further, but we planned three months to see what can happen if we add some design. And then these three months turn into three years because design is not on top, it starts on the bottom. So we started asking what is really a presentation? How should it be done? We started researching, we went to ro, I don’t know how to say in English, that’s just something I always read in English. Cicero, I

Andy Polaine (00:14:07): Think Cicero, I say Cicero,

Oliver Reichenstein (00:14:09): Cicero, maybe even native speakers. Don’t know how to say Cicero because they always read it. And anyway, so Cicero and all the traditional rhetoric theory, and we found some very nice, very useful tips like the canon of rhetorics where you start with the idea and then you work on the structure and then you elaborate your speech and then you add detail, you try to remember it. And in the end, Axio is not unimportant that you actually, you do a good speech. This is something you need to train and you need to focus. And all of this is completely left out in PowerPoint. You just focus on moving boxes around all the time. And so study getting excited about it and getting so excited that we worked on this for three years until we had the structure where we say, okay, so our presentation, you start with the idea.

(00:15:13): If you have nothing to say, maybe you shouldn’t do anything. You start with the idea, you write your speech, then you add visuals where it makes sense, not because you have a slide where you need to have something and your speech will not be something that everybody needs to see that you put on every slide. So you don’t forget when you present, but it’s something that only you see. So it’s split between what you say and what you show is a fundamental part of it. And the fundamental part of it is also that you don’t use stock imagery and stuff. So we actually, we have some secret functionality that we don’t show. So we have Unsplash actually built into present, but we never unlocked it because we feel like it would be detrimental to the idea. So we have a sort of, I would say a Protestant, a Protestant tendency in our company where we don’t do things that would be possible.

(00:16:15): We also have hidden in the code, we have graphics, how do you say, charts and graphics and so on that you could write, but we haven’t unlocked it because it’s not good enough. We have back links in IA writer, but we haven’t unlocked it because it’s as good as everything else and we want to unlock it when it’s better. So we’ve had that for nine months now in writer. We’ve had backlinks, but we don’t download because it’s messy, it’s nasty and it’s as good as other apps, but we feel like it’s below the level of what we have in I writer. So that Protestant thing of we keep it back, we could do it, but we don’t because not to make other people suffer like the Protestants, that’s the Protestants idea. You always have to suffer a little bit, otherwise you don’t go to heaven. That’s not the idea. But we kind of sometimes a bit frost frosty with these new features, but I think it’s good. So to make sure that we keep the original vision. And that brings you back to ia, right? The vision is always that to make a tool where that is made for writing and that means that where you enjoy writing as well. And I noticed lately that means where you enjoy thinking, which is almost a paradox because thinking is very painful. Yeah,

Andy Polaine (00:17:41): I want to get onto that. I’m going to get onto this. Just one sec. I’ve got a question here from Nicole. Hi Nicole. And she asked whether it uses reveal js under the hood I present

Oliver Reichenstein (00:17:52): When it comes to technical matters. I’m very, I think yes, you’re not, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, I think I heard reveal before. I leave that to the developers and I’m 99% sure, but sometimes I say things technically and they tell me no, but I’m pretty sure it’s revealed 99%.

Andy Polaine (00:18:12): Alright. Alright. So yeah, just to finish off that, I think one of the things that used to try, and I guess when I learned this, but it’s the idea that the deck is not the presentation. I think this is a thing in consulting that gets conflated all the time and for a lot of people when they’re presenting, and it’s partly because you start with the deck and usually in consulting you don’t start with an empty deck. You go, here’s all this kind of other stuff that we really have and you make a Franken deck out of all those different decks and then you’re kind of stuck with all that. So let’s move on to IA writer. So I want to touch on the kind thinking thing actually the, there’s a designer called John who’s one of tomato. He’s been a very long experienced designer and he often said to me he missed the times when Photoshop was, well, machines were slower and you’d apply a blur filter in Photoshop and go off and make a cup of coffee whilst it was doing it chugging away the kind of blue baring because it gave me time to think about what I wanted to do next.

(00:19:30): And so there is this though, there is this connection between writing and thinking. One of the things I learned as a writer was keep the structural stuff of, and that’s also formatting, but also keep the structural stuff like the outline and what you’re planning to do and editing separate from the actual act of writing the generative thing. Because when you combine those together, and this is always my message to my students, writing their thesis is often the first big bit of writing they’ve done. If you do the editing and writing at the same time, you get caught in that thing where you spend two hours writing the first sentence. And I used to write a column for Design magazine and have to knock out a thousand words every month. And I always knew the first two or three paragraphs they were just, I had to let myself write junk.

(00:20:19): I knew I’d go back because halfway through or towards the end I would realize, oh yeah, now I know what I’m talking about. And actually a journalist friend of me said, gave me a tip once. So take the last paragraph you wrote and cut it and paste it at the beginning and because at that point actually what you’re going to write about and that’s the introduction. So I think there is a kind of parallel there between this idea of thinking and writing. And I know there will be a bunch of people who are watching this who are from the PKM person knowledge management community who use obsidian. And for me I use both. And the way I think about it is I use obsidian for notetaking and for thinking and the outlining and I use IA writer to do the writing. If I want to do some writing, I’ll use that.

(00:21:04): And that’s for me the kind of combination of those two. One of the things that does also start to happen though is you, as I was saying before, you sort of write to think, right? So yes, you’ll think about what you want to write, there’s a load of stuff that happens as you’re writing where you start to realize and then, oh, this is what I actually mean and so forth. Which kind of brings us to the whole AI assistant thing, which is obviously part of the way you can use that is just to do the writing for you. And I’m pretty sure I read a thesis the other day that was mostly chat GPT, hard to say or you can kind of use it differently. So let’s go there because as you’ve built this into IA writer, God, the AI and IA thing is really annoying, isn’t it? You must be so annoying about that. You’ve kind of thought about this beyond just, oh, we’re going to add this feature or going to add this stuff. So maybe we can talk about you and what you’ve been thinking about in terms of writing with AI and Well, you wrote several pieces actually about what is it good for and when is it useful and when is it not?

Oliver Reichenstein (00:22:19): I mean this whole notion that writing is thinking this is just not my thought at all. This is wildly and widely shared in writing guides. Yeah, William Sin said it just exactly like that writing is thinking, but I’ve read that in various versions. I really love to read books about writing and they’re written under the condition that they have to show that they know what they’re talking about. And that pressure often leads to good examples. I think some of the best writing from Stephen King is about writing, actually not even, it’s even called like that. The book.

Andy Polaine (00:23:11): Sorry, go on. It’s great. It’s great. I’m about to That’s great. I was just say his thing was that writing is an act of telepathy, right? That’s my favorite line from That’s

Oliver Reichenstein (00:23:21): Great too. That’s true. But there are also various versions of this formulation. Writing is time traveling and so on. But yeah, when ti came out a year ago, I was taken by surprise how well it simulates human language at this point. And the big shock for me was not so much that statistical approach actually works and simulates human thought to the point where you often are not sure is it even understanding what it does because it can’t without the body I’m philosophically convinced you can’t understand. But it was shocking how well it can simulate thinking. And there were two big shocks. I tried it with some philosophical literature. We both studied philosophy. That’s also something that our, your breeders maybe your views maybe know. But it’s a funny coincidence that we also found out only a bit later when we talked back in the day.

(00:24:34): Now what was shocking is how well it understands complex philosophical texts. So when you read the critique of the pure reason in German, even now after almost 40 years, for me it’s really difficult. I need to fully focus and I’m trained in the matter, but I have to fully focus and I can consume maybe a page per hour or so when it gets the company. But with chat GPT, I can ask it what does that mean? How does that relate to transcendental perception or whatever? And it gives me pretty good answers. And of course you’re suspicious and often it hallucinates, but very often it’s spot on and it can help you. So if you use it as a dialogue partner to read complex texts, but just as you deal with a human dialogue partner, you’re not like, oh yeah, I’m not that much, must be it.

(00:25:35): But as a dialogue partner where you discuss with the person I used to, my best friend at university Miana was my dialogue partner back in the day and we used to read Ecker and all these impossible. We used to read Hago like the worst stuff. And it was fun in dialogue and I can use it like that. As you know, there are few people, like my wife doesn’t want to talk to me about philosophy. She’s majorly annoyed by that waste of time. And other friends, I don’t know, the few people really have the desire and have the background, the education and the will to discuss philosophy for many hours. Chachi PT does that. So that was a nice surprise. I have someone I can talk about the metaphysics, which is something I’ve been studying for two years now. Again with great passion. And I love this book now after many, many years where I used to hate it and with Chachi I can do this.

(00:26:40): That was a positive surprise. The negative surprise was that the bullshit you get from cha is very similar to the bullshit you get from corporations and from marketing talk and from management. Consultancies is almost indiscernible and I realized that we are all less original than we think we are because when we use language, we often use cliches and things we heard somewhere and we forgot that we heard it and we repeat this and we think we came up with it ourselves. We also work a lot of Jet GPT language works like that. However, there’s one major difference if you are really serious about communicating with other people, what you want to do is you want to transfer the impression you have inside yourself, find an expression that matches that impression as much as possible so that other people on the other side can pick up that expression and make an impression and incorporate it actually into an impression inside themselves.

(00:27:59): I think this is what’s really happening when we communicate, we have something inside something more or less vague, we call it feeling, and we try to find a shape for it, which usually is a form of language, can be visual, can be verbal, can be music, can be, when we say language, we often just think about verbal language. But this is what happens when we speak and we mean what we say. We try to find a shape for what we sense for what we feel, for what we think by whatever want to say and put that into a shape so other people can have the same impression. And actually dealing with chat pt, I started thinking about this in a very, very intense way together with chat pt. I think my first longer conversation was with it was if it can understand and at first it said it can and I almost convinced it that it can’t understand because it doesn’t have a body.

(00:28:58): And I tremendously enjoyed that conversation, which was slightly annoying because I didn’t expect that to happen. But it made me think because I thought that this is very, very helpful in many ways for writing. It’s helpful for preparation, it’s helpful for testing what you want to say. And then for me as a non-native speaker, it’s often very, very difficult to write English and not make mistakes that I just can’t see. I can’t spot them. Commas missing something is misspelled and then people read this and I feel like people, I’m very stupid but I just can’t see it and Jack CT can always spot these mistakes. So there are many things, but it’s really great. But all the downsides were very obvious to me from the very start. It’s in fact most people are going to use it like business consultants and just splattered the bullshit all over the place.

(00:29:54): And you said you just read the paper that was very likely written with J gt, we develop a sense for it, we develop a sense for the visual ai. When I see this lollipop stuff, I’m not impressed at all anymore and we start seeing it with language too, but it’s much, much harder because our senses for language are not as sharpened as our senses are for visual products. Where now most people I think that have a little bit of training in visual perception will see 99% of AI produced imagery and will be able to recognize that. Yeah,

Andy Polaine (00:30:36): That kind of, I talked about it when we were talking earlier, excuse me, where there’s the people know the uncanny value, this idea that A 3D rendering or it comes from robotics actually, but something that’s either the closer it gets to being human, it goes through that value of the more it’s a little bit off and a bit creepy and uncanny actually something that’s more abstract like an emoji or whatever or feels more we are more empathetic to than again, it has to be really super exactly human for us to go back through that valley. And I’m sort of getting that quite a lot with AI imagery but also with chat GPT, I’m kind of reading stuff and I think at least, so this is the challenge and we will get to authorship mode is I think I’m reading it and I think I’m thinking there’s a shift in tone here and it kind of feels like this has not been written by the same person and my suspicion is chat GPT. And obviously when I then put in a prompt around the kind of subject matter that I’m reading and I get kind of the same text back and like, oh, okay, yeah, I’m sort 90% sure. I do worry that I’m probably missing quite a lot else. So you’ve built this idea of you’ve built this functionality into IA writer seven called authorship. So tell us a bit about how that works and the kind of thinking behind it. I’m going to put the video up on screen whilst you were talking about it too.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:32:06): Yeah, so there’s this initial perception of how well it can imitate us and what it could lead to in a positive, in a negative way. It strengthened more and more the idea that it’s good to use JG PT as a dialogue partner when you don’t have a human being you can talk to about things and not everybody has an editor to work on their texts and not everybody has 20 philosophy friends. They can talk about the critique of the pure reason if they want to read it outside of university. I think it’s a very positive use case, but the ability to pretend that you think, to pretend that you’ve written, to pretend that you understand it’s huge, and this will be the standard use case. A lot of voices started popping up about, yeah, we need to have some sort of water marking some fantasies that there will be AI to recognize ai.

(00:33:10): It’s such a ridiculous idea technically. I mean you don’t need to think very hard to know this is just an arms race that will never be won by anyone. We thought that this sounds awfully familiar, this problem about originality and is it really you and so on. And it led back to a long, long internal discussion we had about copywriting copyright, right? Yeah, it’s a huge complex, delicate, difficult, dangerous topic to talk about because you’re in proximity to big corporations that use copyright and patent laws, which just exercise power, but it’s also very, very real, especially if you’re a graphic designer or indie developer and you see your stuff being used by these bigger corporations often that then claim copyright over it. It’s a huge problem and it’s practically impossible to solve because whenever you say something, you call someone else, you sound like a whiny little

Andy Polaine (00:34:22): Animal. Oh, you were on YouTube, can’t say that, but there we go, done

Oliver Reichenstein (00:34:25): It now. Whiny little animal of the can kind and there’s just no way to deal with this just from this perspective and we usually just avoid it. But as a designer you also know that sometimes you’ve stolen stuff and sometimes that you’ve done things that you shouldn’t have done. And I’ve done things I shouldn’t have done plenty in my life as a designer and as a human being and I’ve stolen designs that shouldn’t have and I vividly remember these, especially one case where I really shouldn’t have done two cases actually, but I really shouldn’t have done it and I still feel very bad about it, extremely bad to a point where the two people that I’ve stolen from, they probably like, yeah, it’s a long time ago and you corrected it and it’s fine. One time I’ve been called out about this and I corrected it right away and it was so embarrassing because I knew I stole content from another website and the guy came to me, he’s like, you’re a young man and you may not be fully aware of that, but this is not good.

(00:35:43): And I apologized and took it down and the other cases where I stole a design and I really ripped it off one-to-one because it was so great. It must have been like 2006 or something. I’m not going to say exactly, but it was terrible. It was just absolutely horrific and that stayed with me. I was like, yeah, the person you steal from kind of knows, kind of knows. It’s not like a headache where only the person that has the headache knows, the person knows as well, but you really know and you know shouldn’t do it. So we were like, you know what, this is the right approach for copyright. It’s about author, it’s not just about the person you steal from. It’s a bad thing and the person will get offended because you steal their time because to design or to write something to find shape takes so much time, it takes no time to copy stuff, especially in the digital reel.

(00:36:40): And so we were like, this is somewhat connected. What if the right approach for AI also is not about policing and patrolling and trying to catch people that are using AI like you were kind of aiming at before. It’s about them and maybe if they’re not just complete assholes, they feel worse, they feel even worse. It’s, it’s a very embarrassing thing to steal from other people and being called and called out and so on, but it’s not about being called out. You feel bad to begin with if you’re an honest designer, if you’re an honest person when you bullshit people. And we do that inadvertently sometimes, but when you say what you don’t understand, when you say what you don’t mean, if there’s any humanity left in you, you feel really bad about it. And I thought maybe this is the right angle that we do not try to create something that scans for chat CPT typical expressions because we have, they

Andy Polaine (00:37:47): Don’t work very well anyway.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:37:48): It wouldn’t work really well. No,

Andy Polaine (00:37:50): I’ve tried them and everything I put through it went a hundred percent human. I was like, I’ve just taken this generated from chat GBT and it doesn’t work.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:37:58): You could go down this path, but whenever you do something like that, there’s always a countermeasure as well. But it’s ethically the wrong approach. Ethically the right approach is saying you have to decide for yourself and you can use Chachi PT for spelling for grammar. Here we go again. There you go. For spelling, for spelling for grammar. I think editing’s fine Journalists have editors and they change a lot of text. I think it’s fine. You don’t need to have the academic levels of scrutiny where you’re not allowed to actually just transcribe a thought, but in the end it’s up to you and as an author and so we want you to build something like that. And we said the main problem we have currently is that if you are an honest person, but you use Jack CPT to write in the most honest way, you don’t want to pretend to say what you don’t understand or express what you don’t mean. You don’t have a possibility to discern what you got from Jack CPT and what you did to yourself. And then we have a technical problem. How the hell do you do this in markdown? And now we have a solution where people are like, yes. Some people say like it’s just marking off. It’s no big deal. It is super, super hard to do. We didn’t want to You didn’t want that signal. I’m speaking too long. No, no,

Andy Polaine (00:39:27): No. It was your video and I forgot to turn the audio off. I know. Yeah, it was this.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:39:34): There you go. It was super hard to do and now it’s kind of obvious. So then the circle closed where we were like, holy shit, now we have that copyright problem again. People are going to copy it. And our friends that obviously and our friends at Obsidian, they’ve been just ripping off our design up and down just to the pixel, how to reconstruct I writer and Electron. We like the team at Obsidian and obsidian great software does fantastic impossible things. My favorite function is how you can lay out stuff like an illustrator and stuff. This is all good, but ripping off our design, it piss me the fuck off because it’s not cool. It’s cool if you do it for yourself, but it’s not cool if you put entire leverage out there how to. It’s really not cool. To

Andy Polaine (00:40:27): Be fair to the obsidian team though, it’s not them, right? It is the plugin and kind of theme. Oh

Oliver Reichenstein (00:40:33): Yeah, I’ve talked to ano about this. When you started logging someone for being so innovative to invent syntax highlight, I was like, dude, this is not innovative. It’s just another rip off. And he was like, yeah, I’m sorry. It’s true. He knows the feeling because he’s also a developer and he gets ripped off all the time. But it’s also not an attitude honestly to say, well, it’s not our fault. We want to be flexible. Actually, I think, and I have to talk to them again about this, I meant to do that. I think they should tell their developers, Hey, please don’t make clones of other indie apps. If you make a clone of word you can punch up like this. But clones of other indie apps and because we don’t punch punch down or on the same level, but obsidian with being a free app has a pretty big audience at this point. I don’t think it’s punching down anymore when I say that, yes, have policy for what’s cool to clone and whatnot. If it’s pixel perfect colonial, it’s just not cool. It’s not cool and we haven’t said anything about it until the show, but I think it’s just fucking uncool this stuff. And it’s also back clone novel because what we do can’t, it’s not a native app and the degree we go to without typography is insane, but I’m not going to get

Andy Polaine (00:41:58): Into details. Well, I was just going to say I counter, I think there’s may be a fair counter argument to this. I’d be interested to see what your response is because I have seen people say, well, I like this bit, but I don’t like all the rest and I don’t want to be. Because I think it’s probably fair to say, and I think you were kind of one of the early, you said it at the beginning, but also sort of one of the early voices of the idea of opinionated app design where IA writer has, there’s opinion in there. There’s a lot of detailed thought and design philosophy that goes into it and it’s not going to be for everyone. And right down to whether you show the markdown and whether you don’t and all that kind of stuff, these are decisions I know you’ve thought long and hard about. I don’t think they’re, they’re not just random, but I was thinking of the German word IC and I can’t think what the English word of that is.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:42:53): I think random,

Andy Polaine (00:42:56): But at the same time people might go, well, I really kind of like the focus mode, but I don’t really want all the rest or the other stuff. The way you handle the kind of markup is not for me or whatever. Do you think that it’s fair then or would your answer be, well yeah, sure, do it for yourself, then write a little CSS snippet for yourself to enable that. But is your point really it’s not that. It’s actually the whole constellation of trying to customize and use a whole bunch of plugins and CSS to try and completely clone the exact look and feel within an

Oliver Reichenstein (00:43:32): I have absolutely no problem whatsoever. You can clone anything you want for yourself if you do it for yourself privately. I do that all the time. You learn a lot. It’s great. And maybe this particular person’s like, oh, the bold needs to be gray. We have, like you say, we have a good reason why we don’t do that and we just say no, we thought about this love and heart typography kind of something. Yeah, we’re very opinionated in a way, but we also know what the hell we’re doing there. And so yeah, if that is so important for you, you can replicate that in whatever app you want. That’s fine. If you do things for yourself, it’s totally fine. What I think is absolutely horrendous is to make full packages that allow you everyone to clone our apps functionally design wise down to the pixel, which actually is not possible anyway, down to the pixel in another free app.

(00:44:39): This is totally onco. And people thinking like, oh yeah, it’ll be free advertisement for you or something, fuck off. No, we don’t need free advertisement, we’re doing fine. That’s not the point. It’s about stealing someone’s design and make it available for everyone. It’s called counterfeiting and if you want to, it’s illegal, but that’s not the point. It piss us off because it’s our work and you’re not supposed to distribute it freely to everyone. Now if you’re not happy with a certain way that we design our app and you want pretty much everything that we have except for some asterisk risks that want to be great, well yeah, do what you can and build, rebuild the app in Xco if you want a native feeling. No, I’m not going to provoke people now with this. No, no, it’s fine. It’s fine. The problem we have is, and we didn’t realize that for a long time because like I said, usually we stay silent, don’t say anything. And actually these plugins are, they’re not even that popular and they’re being left there and they decay and it’s not a big commercial problem for us, it’s, it just pisses me off because the attitude is the wrong one. This is not something you can just take and distribute freely to other people. It’s not yours point.

Andy Polaine (00:46:09): You have bigger problems in the app store though with things like AI writer and things, using your logo and everything and just kind of switching the letters around.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:46:17): It’s not a commercial. We’ve solved 3 million apps in 13 years. You have 500,000 users. Everyone has paid our app. I don’t know. I don’t know. We have made some experiments with a free tier on Android. It was an absolute disaster. It attracts completely the wrong people for the type of app we have. Anyway, the last word on opinionated, I hate that word. I

Andy Polaine (00:46:42): Thought it might.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:46:43): And the problem is I’m not a native speaker, so I don’t have so many context for the word opinionated. The only time where I hear opinionated, it’s negative and I know it’s been used.

Andy Polaine (00:46:55): No, you just used quite a lot. Yeah, yeah,

Oliver Reichenstein (00:46:58): Yeah. People have been trying to use this in a positive way, but every time people say opinionated, I’m like, no, it’s not opinionated.

Andy Polaine (00:47:04): No, I think

Oliver Reichenstein (00:47:05): I have opinions, but we don’t do that because we think our way is the only right way and you have to follow because

Andy Polaine (00:47:15): We know. Yeah, but that’s the idea. I mean when people talk about an opinionated app, what they’re saying is, this is my opinion. I mean, is it log sec? I think it’s that one, which it takes that view as well, which is this is the approach I’m going to take to this. I have opinions about the style or the mental model or the UX or whatever it is about this, and I’m going to apply those to the thing I’m making, which is fair enough, I’m making a thing. And you have to have an opinion. The worst way is down the other end I think where you get the design by committee. A lot of enterprise software is like this and a lot of open source stuff is like this actually where it’s kind opinion less and it’s generally really watered down or incoherent and inconsistent because of this, I think. So from my view, I think you have to have an opinion about we’re going to choose this because an opinion helps you make a choice. It’s a filter. Say we’re going to do this instead of this because our underlying philosophy is based around that. So that’s what I mean by that. But I know .

(00:48:29): I want to get back to this idea of interoperability because partly it’s in my head because I’ve been listening to and reading Cory Dr Hours, the internet con and the heart of it is this idea of interoperability or avoiding it. And that’s what big tech has done is obviously is tried to see it going on with the Confederated thing at the moment, tried to avoid interoperability in order to create this huge ward gardens and monopolies. And so one of the things briefly, I guess one of the things that authorship mode does in IA writer is when you are pasting stuff in, it will keep a reference of what you’ve pasted and who the author is of that stuff. Which for me is great because one of the things that happens I find when I’m working with other people is we lose track of who wrote what.

(00:49:24): And as you mentioned in the article, track changes in Word or using, I know there’s a school of working or writing which uses Git for writing. It’s pretty horrendous really in the end as a kind of user experience. And so you’ve come up with this approach to do this, and in it you sort of grade out stuff that gradually you, as you rewrite the AI written stuff or the other author’s written stuff, it kind of turns black. And so you get the sense of how much is yours and how much is written by someone or something else. But you’ve also released this on GitHub as markdown annotations. So given the conversation around features and not being ripped off and so forth, why release this as a on open source as a spec?

Oliver Reichenstein (00:50:22): So this was a heated debate. This was a heated debate because we also run a business. We do, and the first thing that happens when we do something new is we get ripped off regularly. And I know how whiny and how little animals this sounds, but it just, it’s a reality. It’s unbelievable. And you don’t know. You have no idea how much that happens because we never say anything, but we see all this mostly because people report that when we came out with ia, right? We had different males every day of people pointing to this and then other, and you develop a thick skin, but it’s also annoying. And then from a business perspective now, it would’ve been much clever to just keep this for some time until someone copies it or copies something similar and then it’s not interoperable anymore. But the reason why we like markdown most of all is because of its interoperability.

(00:51:24): It’s fantastic. I copy paste stuff all the time, and this is something that a lot of people don’t understand about markdown, like, oh, can you have an export here, an export there? But actually it’s about copy and pasting stuff I copy and paste it from, I write to WordPress chat GPT and back, and it always works. Also chat GT uses smart dams. Fantastic, right? It’s really cool. There’s interoperability for that. So we were like, okay, so there’s the interoperability aspect where we can’t just ignore this and rather than people doing something similar, but then it’s not compatible anymore, we should actually publish it. And then there’s the other aspect where we say, well, author ship’s up to you. You need to decide. So we said, so why don’t we formulate it like that? Well, it’s not something clear cut like the legal texts. And like I said, it’s not about legality.

(00:52:16): When we talk about copyright, it’s about morality and it’s not clear cop, you can do this, but not that. And the other thing, because design doesn’t work like that design, when you copy design it and the copy person kind of knows it as well. So we said, well, let’s do it like that. You can use the functionality just as it is. Well, if you can help us developing it. And we got a lot of really great feedback on that as well. And we will develop it based on that feedback, which is fantastic. We didn’t expect that because usually when do so something open source, you don’t get much feedback. People just use it and that’s it. We seen that with the phones, right? Anyway, I’m not one, I don’t want to complain too much. What we want is people to use this and do their own thing with that. And if they do their own thing, it’s fantastic and it’s completely up to them. And that doesn’t mean you can’t abuse it and just say, well, you serve it up to me so I can cheat. That’s really not the idea. They have to get into the reality of the creative business where you need to find a way with yourself to come to peace with how much you copy and how much you don’t. And then you need to live with it. That’s our take. And we’re not going to call out people.

(00:53:38): I’m not saying categorically not calling out people because if you go too far, you go too far. But we reserve the freedom to say something if it’s just ridiculous. But very likely we’re not going to say anything, even though we don’t agree. It’s up to you. The thing though is if you are not sure, you can always talk to us. And that’s also a reality that few people grab that when they do something and they’re not sure, will this piss off the other person? They talk to you, and I always appreciate that,

Andy Polaine (00:54:16): But I think to end up, but I’m really pleased you to have released it because I find the interoperability part is the critical bit of plain text, the markdown, the whole fact that can plaint text is very robust. There was a little conversation about it on Mastodon. You can have several apps open at the same time accessing the same plain text file. And even when they’re, most of the time they don’t clash with each other, obviously just move from one side to the next for whatever you’re doing.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:54:50): However, it’s not very realistic that this is going to be a standard or something even. Well, I

Andy Polaine (00:54:59): Hope I really

Oliver Reichenstein (00:55:00): That a lot of people are going to use it. I’m not very hopeful on

Andy Polaine (00:55:03): That. You’re not. I am, I am. No, it’s

Oliver Reichenstein (00:55:05): More,

Andy Polaine (00:55:07): Well, because the perennial pain for anyone who’s writing and having to collaboratively write and like I said, and you’ve got an editor and stuff, is at some point having to go back into Word or Google for track changes. I know this critic markup, I’ve had a go. Maybe if I was a proofread a bit like the way proof readers know all those little symbols, they used to kind write on a manuscript by hand. You kind of remember all the markup. I just found it too much for me to remember at the time. And I really liked this as an approach. So I hope it does because I really want the sort of collaborative markdown writing tool that doesn’t involve some kind of weird gymnastics game between putting stuff up onto Google and then exporting again. And I’ve tried it. None of it ever works. Even there’s a sort of ether pad kind of plugin for obsidian that sort of attempts that, but it doesn’t really work. So that’s the holy grail for me. And so I hope that it does become a standard. Hey, we’re coming up for time. Where can people find you online? Are you basically on IA net? Is that where they find you? Yeah,

Oliver Reichenstein (00:56:21): I moved away completely from Twitter. We have some bad conscience tweets here and there sometimes because we think, yeah, few good people that are still left on Twitter and there are some good people still left. This is by the way what we did. But we will move completely over to saying subscribe to a newsletter or come to Mastodon where I am right now. I think I feel very comfortable on Mastodon. We are at some instance on Mastodon and at Mastodon, what I used to do on Twitter. Now we do there. It’s great. The audience is perfect for in the developers and for people that think alike. Still. One more last word about this, about whether it becomes a standard or not. I’ve been dragged into that word being forced to use word again and again myself. I’m not naive. I know what the standard defines.

(00:57:24): It’s the most used apps, Google Docs afterward. But I think it’s really important that we do what we say and that we act accordingly. And so putting this out there, of course there’s a little hope that more people will pick this up and we would be able to use authorship in different places, but mostly we have to offer the possibility to do that. And we have to stay true to what we say about authorship and copyright and allow people to make their own decisions in that way. And if we said, no, this is our standard. You can only use it here. It may be profitable short term, but it won’t be very useful. What we did instead is we tried as much as possible to look at this back and forth. If you copy a text in that is different, you can say, where does it come from? And we spend a lot of time on that as well. But if other people use it and evolve it and find another shape of it, maybe even a better one where we would be tempted to copy and improve it, because that’s what creativity is. You copy and improve to the point where you don’t necessarily recognize the original at one side, then that would be really, really cool.

Andy Polaine (00:58:42): But it would be nice, I mean, I think one of the gifts to the world of John Gruber was to kind of not try to own the markdown spec, especially as there’s been other variants of it and there’s all sorts of different kind of flavors of it now. And he’s resisted a lot of pressure to change his original spec. This is the spec if you’re going to go off and do something else and go off and do something else. But I think he’s changed one thing I think, I can’t remember which one it was. I dunno if it was images or footnotes. I don’t think footnotes are in the original spec and it’s become this great thing that’s everywhere, even in chat, GPT. So the show Power of 10, it’s named after the Ray and Charles Eames film about power. It’s called Power of 10 Powers of 10, sorry, that’s what it’s called. And it’s about the relative size of things in the universe. And I’ve always really liked it for that kind. Different levels of mental zoom and the repeated patterns at different phases. So on that front, the final questions always what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world.

Oliver Reichenstein (00:59:59): Wow. It’s not, I never watched your show, which I should then I would’ve known this. One thing that I think, I don’t think it’s a little thing, but one thing I noticed is the trash can. We separate the trash. We have organic trash and plastic bottles and cardboard, and we have a big box now of different trash elements and we do our best to separate that. And yet for some reason, whenever I look at my trash can, I feel like what bunch of evil people are we? Every time I look at my trash can, I’m like, yeah, you’re not trying as hard as you can because there’s still too much stuff in there. It still fills up too quickly. And I wonder, I don’t know how, I don’t have a solution, but I wonder if someone could have a look at this and find a way to redesign the trash can in a clever way, that it helps us to not fill it up so quickly with all kinds of crap. My brain starts working already on it about labels. I think about small, making it smaller or whatever, but making a smaller opening. I’m not sure, but I think this would change a lot.

Andy Polaine (01:01:18): Okay, well, I’m

Oliver Reichenstein (01:01:20): Looking away way too much stuff.

Andy Polaine (01:01:21): I’m looking forward to the IA trash can. You’ve got these beautiful notebooks you just made. We didn’t even talk about those. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one of those too. Oliver, thank you so much for being my guest on Power of Ten.

Oliver Reichenstein (01:01:35): Thank you as well. It was a pleasure

Andy Polaine (01:01:37): You have been listening to and watching Power of Ten. You can find more about the show polaine.com, P-O-L-A-I-N e.com, where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice online courses, as well as sign up for my pretty irregular newsletter doctor’s note, although I will be doing an end of year one. If you have any thoughts, you can put ’em in the comments below. If you’re on YouTube, you can find me at apolaine, A-P-O-L-A-I-N-E, and on pkm.social on Mastodon. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening and watching and I’ll see you next time.

Jaimes Nel - Do design frameworks lead to boring products and services?

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Has the product and design obsession with frameworks and process led to everyone working on autopilot, churning out a bland monoculture of design? When are they useful and when do they simply become a crutch? Have we hit “peak framework”?

My guest is Jaimes Nel, founder of Path, a consultancy that helps organisations play the long game through design-led strategy. Jaimes was Head of Insight for pioneering service design agency Livework in the early years of service design practice. He’s worked on service transformation for brands such as the NHS, BBC, Aviva, Johnson&Johnson, Ebay, GOV.UK / HMRC and led a transformation design team at Westpac in Australia, delivering their digital mortgage service.

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Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

Andy Polaine (00:02): Hello. How has the product design obsession with frameworks and process led to everyone working on autopilot, churning out bland monoculture of design? When are they useful and when do they simply become a crutch? Have we hit peak framework?

Welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organizations, society and the world. My name’s Andy Polaine. I’m a design leadership coach, service design and innovation consultant, educator and writer.

My guest is Jaimes Nel, founder of Path, a consultancy that helps transformation organizations play the long game through design edge strategy. James was head of insight for pioneering service design agency live work in the early years of service design practice, which is where we met. He worked on service transformation for brands such as the N-H-S-B-B-C, Aviva Johnson and Johnson, eBay gov uk. Hm RC, that’s the customs people and revenue tax office, right? And LED transformation design team at Westpac in Australia where he joins us now delivering their digital mortgage services. James, welcome to Pav 10.

Jaimes Nel (01:11): Hi Andy. Thank you.

Andy Polaine (01:13): So first of all, tell us, I’ve got a little bit of a bio there, but tell us a little bit about your background and work before we get onto the framework question.

Jaimes Nel (01:23): So I’m what I guess I call a design-led strategist. My background is in research, I’m a sociologist, that’s what I studied, and I got involved in early days of service design from the research side. And over time my practice grew to incorporate more strategy. So as I added more design in, I guess I’ve become more what I would call a strategist or describe myself as a strategist. And I describe what I do as design led strategy rather than necessarily design strategy because it incorporates a lot of different elements of a strategic practice, but always bringing some of the elements of design that I think are a powerful ways of working and thinking that you don’t necessarily get with a very kind of analytic approach.

Andy Polaine (02:22): And so when you say it’s design led, what is particularly designerly about, I guess about it when you say those things add a different edge to a normal strategy practice?

Jaimes Nel (02:36): Yeah, I mean it’s interesting. We’re probably getting quite quickly into what we’ve been talking about speaking about today because I think what design adds is the ability to make leaps, to synthesize things and make jumps that don’t necessarily follow a linear path, that don’t necessarily go A to B or one plus two equals three. Design is quite powerful at allowing you to bring things together and find patterns or synthesize things in a way which can be quite unique or different. And also to work quite quickly at synthesizing patterns, I think design’s got something to offer massively in terms of bringing things together in a slightly different way around a problem that you don’t necessarily get when you’re following something in a purely analytic framework.

Andy Polaine (03:38): We are indeed getting close to what we’re going to talk about. I guess there’s one of these things, there’s a phrase, I think I’ve heard it from Steven Johnson, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it from, I think it might have come from somewhere else of the idea of an intermediate impossible or impossible intermediate outcome or what it’s, but this idea of when thinking through say something like a strategy or thinking through how you might tackle a problem or the beginnings of a solution, there’s a bit in the middle that you are not really very sure about. We don’t even know if it’s going to work. But the idea of this intermediate impossible is that we assume, let’s assume that’s going to work. Let’s assume we can solve that and then jump ahead and also work on the thinking after that and then move back. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about with that non-linear path as well?

Jaimes Nel (04:24): Yeah, I think we’ve developed a kind of comfort with that level of ambiguity in design and caveat all of this. There’s crossover everywhere everything we’re talking about. And so when I talk about the role or the extra thing that design adds, it’s a little bit of freedom to play with these boots kind of strict boundaries that I think unlocks a whole lot of possibilities that you lose when you’re trying to follow very, very strictly from one step to the other. And in a way I, I guess the risk that we’re kind of talking about here by becoming very, very process focused, design tends to mitigate that what can be its superpower.

Andy Polaine (05:18): Yeah. And so what are you seeing going on? I think this conversation about frameworks started in the comments about something like that I think. And talking about frameworks, I was complaining, I think about this idea that I see frameworks as they’re very useful. I mean I teach them, so I’m an educator and I train people in service design and other things and obviously and teach at university. And so I’m teaching frameworks. I’m well aware that I do that and particularly around research, I talk about it and synthesis, they’re very useful, but we may need to go as they say in sound of music back to the very beginning of what we mean by a framework actually. And before we get onto the sort of crutch aspect of it, but the thing I was complaining about in the comments was this idea that I think I see everyone from students, the people working commercially, professionally, sometimes use frameworks without the depth or critical thought behind those frameworks I guess. And they can become a crutch. And I think when we work at speed, which is obviously there’s this kind of massive pressure, always we end up just skimming those things and using those things without much thought. Let’s go back to the beginning. You also wrote a piece about this, but I want to just define our terms. What is the framework in your book?

Jaimes Nel (06:51): I was thinking about it a little bit actually. Actually I’m quite glad that I came up with a bit of a categorization for this because when I thought this through, it helped me a lot with some of, I have some of that same kind of discomfort with I guess throwing the baby out with the bathwater I’ve worked with frameworks for, and they’ve almost been the core elements of a strategic output for a long time. A lot of the time when you work in strategy, what you’re doing is breaking down ideas and recompiling them in a different way. The outputs are sort of irrelevant. It starts with the core of the idea and how that’s shift something.

(07:35): So I’ve always thought of frameworks as the engine of my practice, but then over the last few years I’ve been getting more uncomfortable because I’ve been seeing frameworks become more and more driving what people are doing and almost driving a kind of completionist type attitude to things. And I think it’s taken a lot of the focus of the work. So what I’ve been trying to do with teams that I’ve been working with is to say, we need to bring the focus away from the structure of the information that you’re working with and actually look at the work. What’s the quality of the work? How fit for purpose is it? What is it doing in the job that we’re trying to accomplish? So what I’ve been thinking about is actually the framework is different to a topology or taxonomy. And I think a lot of what, when we are saying framework, a lot of what we’re actually talking about is kind of a process or a taxonomy, a kind of a structure for information, but not the information itself.

(08:45): So if you go to, I’m going to pick on jobs to be done. If you look at jobs to be done a milkshake, the framework would be commute, slow, cold, a certain viscosity. So it’s slow to drink, that’s the actual content of the framework that tells you something about the thing, but the structure of how you write an empty templated jobs to be done, that’s not a framework necessarily in this model. That’s just a taxonomy. And so I started to think there’s a distinction there with an epistemology, how you do something, a process, and in ontology what is the actual thing that you’re designing? And that distinction helps me massively because I start to think, well actually I’m really focused in thinking about the meaning side of it. And that’s useful to have a structure and useful to have a model that describes things, but it’s not necessarily the same thing as you should fill out this canvas and then you’re going to get to a quality outcome. There’s a subtle distinction between them that I think is really helpful.

Andy Polaine (10:06): And so obviously everyone loves a canvas it seems, or at least us people who write things like a canvas. And as you know, so the way I think about frameworks, the primary two that come to mind for me in service design are things like Job down is obviously one, but things like I journey maps and blueprints, also framework keep trying to emphasize to my students that they’re a framework for synthesis, right? They’re not really a kind of thing that you are just filling in and it’s done. And I kind of hate hearing, I know there’s a reason for it, but I hate hearing, my boss has asked me to design, or the client has asked us to design three journey maps or five, six journey maps, whatever. And that’s often procurement driven too, but with this idea of there’s just a bunch of these things you can design as artifacts and that’s the kind of end result. And obviously those things are a means to an end anyway. And I think that’s probably another thing to remember about frameworks is that there’re a means to an end, but they’re a way of taking a lot of messy stuff, say multiple peoples, the research of multiple people’s journeys through something and simplifying it and synthesizing it into some kind of structure that aligns and matches up.

(11:24): I mean, I dunno if you agree with that, with those as frameworks or if are they just simply artifacts of methods? Yeah,

Jaimes Nel (11:32): Interesting. I mean I think in this kind of process template topology versus framework kind of distinction that I’m using the journey map on its own, it is just a grid and that’s a template. And so then got to be careful with the dangers of that, which is drives a sort of completion is so everybody that’s done this kind of work will be familiar. Well, there’s blank spaces there. Well okay, we need to come up with something maybe not. And so you get more focused on filling out every cell in the canvas then you do in actually thinking about what the content is and is it the right thing for the problem.

(12:18): So the framework would be, well, the actual content of a particular problems journey that it’s useful. This is incredibly useful. The other bit where I think thinking this through a framework is really useful is when, and again this is kind of framework as embodied knowledge is when it’s an accelerator to understanding a new space. So you come to a problem, whatever it might be, and you download a previous kind of piece of work or theory or literature that has already thought through the problem and created a structured framework around the knowledge in that space or that if you haven’t ever dealt with that space before, that’s a massive accelerator to understanding a new space. And it might also be things that other people are building off that same theoretical knowledge. And so you’re able to kind of collaborate with people better around that space, but that’s the knowledge, not the kind of boxes in which we put the knowledge.

(13:24): And so I think when you make this distinction, I’ve almost been in my notes, I’ve been writing process and template and framework almost interchangeably because I think what we’re talking about, a lot of it is if you follow this set formula, you’re going to get to a quality outcome. And that’s sort of, I guess the heart of my problem with this whole space is that we’ve removed ourselves a little bit from examining the work and thinking critically about the work and trying to think about what is needed, what is actually the next thing that you need to do to improve the output of whatever it is that you’re trying to do.

Andy Polaine (14:04): Yeah, I mean I’ve always felt and said that it’s the conversations in front of a journey map or a B, you said it in this article actually you said this thing about it’s a useful way to audio thinking. And I think that one of the things that happens before I keep coming back to that sort of synthesis analysis synthesis stage because probably sort of the really messy stage, there’s kind of ideation end of things too, I think, and what should we be doing? We’ve got a million ideas where they often come in and I guess that also comes in at the strategic level too, where you are thinking things through and a framework helps give you some order through which you are thinking. And arguably that’s what the business model Canvas does. It’s also just a grid, but it does a thing where it forces you to think it’s not sort of good housekeeping forces you to think around all the facets of a particular area in a way that your habit might not get you to and it can help you.

(15:08): Any of many of those product frameworks are a way to look at that. Some of them kind of take a zoom level up, like safe scaled, agile framework for enterprise, which yeah, I could just leave that there. But there’s a thing with those. There are not only beloved of product here, the beloved of management consultants for whom I’ve worked, I’ve seen so many frameworks on slides, which seem to consist of a lot of boxes surrounded by some other boxes and arrows from each box pointing through every other box. And I kind of think, okay, in what way does that help? What’s that communicating to me? And you’re just telling me stuff’s complicated and everything’s related to everything else. And so there’s a point where the framework seems to become detached from the actual work itself and it sort of seems to become a thing that helps us to vaguely talk about stuff where actually the work on the ground really departs from what that framework is supposed to be doing. Have you seen that going? I see that going on all the time.

Jaimes Nel (16:15): Look, the distinction that I make around that is probably actually it’s useful to have a good and a bad understanding of just quality or not quality. And that’s really, I guess what I’m trying to build. We’re in this idea of judgment or evaluation, is actually looking at the work and going, where does it need to go next? It’s largely a matter of going, is it good enough for the purpose that we need and that’s the driver. So rather than the category itself being good or bad in itself, it’s the same thing with process. You run a process. It doesn’t mean the output is good, right? You still have to operate it well to get a good quality outcome and you can look at it and go, did we get a good quality outcome? No, throw it out, start again. Or whatever the case might be. I was looking at some of Lauren Tan’s PhD work earlier because just thinking about that idea of process, not process, and I remember she wrote this PhD on dots oh seven, so this is dating me quite a bit, but talking about ideas, and I hadn’t clocked this kind of reference as much, but kiss, dos, work on, we rely and have come to rely too much on process.

(17:46): And again, we can talk about is this a framework or a taxonomy or what is it? But he’s talking about the objects of the work, the context of the work and actors involved in the work rather than necessarily just the process. And so maybe it’s a rebalancing of these kind of priorities and thinking about, well actually if we’ve lost a little bit of the focus on the work because we’ve been concentrating on removing ourselves as designers from the work and almost kind of anonymizing the design, anybody can do it. It’s a capability that anybody can learn that’s all kind of really noble, but it loses something around how you actually do work. Work happens, a particular piece of work happens by somebody, whether it’s a designer or not is kind of irrelevant, but the outcome of the work has a certain quality and I think it’s sad in a way to lose the expertise of saying somebody that has put a lot of time and effort into growing a practice around achieving quality outcomes is anonymous or decent. It’s not the right terms to talk about decentering or not, but incorporated in the work or the thinking.

Andy Polaine (19:15): Yeah, I mean I have done my bit of teaching training design teams and it’s been often under the guise of, or not non-designers under the guise of design thinking, which I’ve always slightly felt uncomfortable about, felt a bit queasy about. But one of the things I’ve noticed, and again I noticed it with students too partly because at that stage of their careers that they sort of dunno any better in some respects too and they’re just learning those things. But I’d certainly say it with professionals and I guess the thing about design thinking is you can skim the surface. I noticed in coaching too, there’s lots of coaching frameworks and things like that and whenever I’ve experienced them as a coachee, I’ve always felt like you can ski, you can go through the steps but not actually do the work and not really get into the depth.

(20:03): So personally the way I coach is it follows much more of a style that’s similar to psychoanalyst style where there are some tools and activities but there to get us somewhere rather than to fill the fill in the boxes or check the boxes. One of the things that comes up quite often is this idea of how do you know when the framework or the method or the process, and I use those as one bucket more or less to mean a thing I’m borrowing from someone else or that someone else has done and I’m applying to my work roughly to say someone else has done this, someone else has come up with this framework, this method, this methodology, this is a process and we are going to use it for our work. And I feel like there’s always this question is it’s not working for some reason if we’re not getting the results we’re after. And how do you develop the critical thinking or the ability to say, you know what, this is the wrong method or the wrong framework to be using for this problem at hand versus we are doing it wrong.

Jaimes Nel (21:14): I mean it’s interesting. I almost think it doesn’t come up in my practice that the problem doesn’t come up in my practice because always treating the framework as the output, not the input. So you’re always working on it and so you might borrow a piece from something or piece from something else, but your focus is continuously on the outcome. And so it’s like this piece of the puzzle comes from here and it’s working and that piece isn’t working, so let’s get rid of it and we’ll bring in something else from somewhere else. And that might be completely new, it might be from another piece of work or understanding, but the critical thing is always the question, is it working? And I dunno, I feel like maybe it’s a glib answer because it seems to kind of skirt the question, but actually I think it’s quite critical to this idea of, well actually that is your role as the developer of this piece of work is to be critically assessing it.

(22:32): I’ve been thinking, I use software metaphors quite a lot in my thinking. I’ve been thinking about what a stack might look like where you’ve got a library that you’re using for a particular piece of the puzzle and then another thing that you’re using for something else and you’re kind of trying to, I guess to have a little bit of material honesty about how those pieces all fit together. And then also knowing that as you’re building that stack up, you’re kind of relying on relying on things and being clear about where they do and don’t work. It sort of gets to another one of the tricky bits when you do this and maybe go back to the scaled agile example without trying to open without

Andy Polaine (23:20): Banking it out too much,

Jaimes Nel (23:21): Without opening a

Andy Polaine (23:23): Box of I don’t think anyone

Jaimes Nel (23:24): Box of frogs. What that’s trying to do is, and other framings trying to do that same thing is they’re trying to add kind of collaboration around a common reference points and that’s incredibly valuable, particularly at scale. So you need to be able to work on multiple pieces of the same problem when you’re working at multiple teams. And so there is a call therefore, well let’s build some standardization around a particular piece. The tricky bit comes when you are then kind of reliant on a piece of framework that’s not working but is a part of the collaborative engineering. So how do you be critical about the framings that you’re using and how you’re using them and how do you build in a bit of interoperability without holding things, holding things back? You still need to have a bleeding edge. And so maybe there’s this kind of idea of a framework stack and some teams are running the bleeding edge and other people are running the stable one. And depending on your ability to navigate the kind of edge cases that might come up from using the framework that you’re using, you select the stack that you can operate.

Andy Polaine (24:49): Connor just made this comment about there’s a delicate line between using a framework to help build understanding and around a focus area and overly abstracting it, the information that’s actually important. And I kind of feel like there is a relationship here obviously between what we’re just saying at the strategic level of things, as you zoom out, you start to look at organizational frameworks and look at this. So we’ve got this framework, so this is how we’re going to then structure teams and who’s going to be in these teams and then who is going to be managing those teams? And they were kind of power structures that start to creep in with those frameworks. And again, I feel like those things start to get abstracted from the real work on the ground, how those teams actually work versus the idealized model of it. And I guess the more strategic you go, the more that’s happening too where you’re getting that kind abstraction of this seems like nice idea but in practice it doesn’t work. Is that a problem in the strategic end of things? Partly maybe. I’m wondering if there’s something to do with the feedback loop is longer too of knowing by which, I mean here’s our thought about here’s a hypothesis about something and then we’re going to try and do it and then we get some data in return once we do it strategic work, there’s a longer kind of feedback loop there.

Jaimes Nel (26:20): I think sometimes with the strategic work actually, I mean there’s an output of that strategic work and an impact in a broader ecosystem that is on a slower cycle, but a lot of the time you get feedback really, really quickly in terms of the cognition of the idea that you’re working with. So is it resonating with the team around you? And I think if you shift your idea of strategy from an idea of this is purely an idea based thing about something in the future and this kind of romantic idea of strategy too. Well actually strategy is the work on the ground to get people to understand what you’re even saying or shift the context in which they’re trying to think about something. You actually, I dunno, you have a strategic focus which is about preparing the ground a lot of the time more than necessarily, and there might be more of a meso strategic kind of ground that really covers in the far off strategy world a lot of the time are actually freer, the stakes aren’t the same.

(27:30): And then in the more near term where you’re trying to translate that abstraction into something that teams can actually work with the practicalities of making it understandable, incredibly critical. So a lot of the time what I am trying to do and the framework is it’s an ontological exercise of trying to reframe the way that people are thinking about something. A lot of the time what I’m trying to do is isolate the bit of the framework that needs to change and leave the rest unchanged if possible so that you’re reducing the burden of new understanding and thinking that other people have to do. Just make that really practical. It might be thinking through a new kind of type of way of working for a business unit and just trying to figure out what’s the one bit that actually shifts the dialing what they’re able to do and particularly in the near term that then opens up their ability to actually consume higher orders of abstraction. So use the rest of their structure, don’t change the whole structure, change one piece of it which opens up a new way of thinking or looking or a new kind of practice. You relying on that practice, that next step to be the unlocker for the subsequent steps. So rather than trying to reframe everything in one go, which I think when you’re starting out in strategic work, that’s what the design,

Andy Polaine (29:09): The temptation is

Jaimes Nel (29:10): You

Andy Polaine (29:11): Trying to do that everything’s a nail and you’ve got the strategy hammer

Jaimes Nel (29:14): A hundred percent and you’ve solved the whole world and everything. But I think over time you start to try to actually do less and just figure out how you can plug everything in without that shifting that much because you’re just trying to unlock, unlock the possibilities of the next step. If you don’t get that first step, the whole future thing is kind of pointless anyway.

Andy Polaine (29:41): I definitely to see that it’s the achilles heel of service design is that wanting to kind save the world and see everything’s connected to everything else. So we have to change the entire system and for those you people who know systems thinking Don Donella Meadows had this list of the, I think it’s 14 levers of where to intervene in a system and increasing order of effectiveness but also difficulty in the bottom line is that change the system and I notice it with students all the time, sorry, I feel like I’m picking on my students today. Their projects are make the world use less plastic and things like that and it’s so massive. I think once you get maybe a bit older and more experienced and jaded, you’re like, I just want to make this tiny bit of the service a bit less rubbish and that would be a win. I want to talk,

Jaimes Nel (30:35): I mean I’ll pick on that a little bit because I think sometimes the piece that you’re looking for is the lever point, so it’s not necessarily just a tiny piece, it’s that one little bit of unlock that allows momentum or flow or whatever it is. So yeah, not to get trapped in the, I just want to make the change I can make actually sometimes the one small bit is the bit that’s actually the critical elements of a larger change.

Andy Polaine (31:05): I mean I think from a stakeholder management point of view and from design leadership, it’s a really crucial thing that particularly if you’re coming into something completely new, it’s clearly needs change, but everyone’s a little bit stuck on how to do it. I think often changing one or two things that are quite small, but constant irritants like things that people have been irritated about for ages and approaching and they’ve been locked up in some way or some of the reasons why they don’t change is because the existing framework actually doesn’t consider them a priority or important. Sometimes it’s one of those gap things where two different departments usually feel like the other is responsible for it and so there’s a little gap in the middle where no one really takes care of it. I see that all the time. I think that’s a particular kind of lens of service design to look at those sort of cross channel things and see the moments where a customer moves from either one step to the next or between channels. There’s always these little kind of cracks I call ’em sort of crevasses, right? This little crack. It doesn’t seem like much to the organization from the outside, but if you fall down as a customer, it’s a nightmare. And those kinds of things

Jaimes Nel (32:13): Always the handover.

Andy Polaine (32:15): Yeah, it’s always the hand transitions. I mean transitions I think are always the biggest problem in whatever direction. And in fact partly it’s because I think the things themselves get taken care of. This sort of that exercise that you do in design school sometimes, which is to draw the negative space that the spaces between letters or spaces between objects in order to trick your brain into seeing them differently. That’s actually quite a good metaphor for a framework. And looking at those gaps in between is often really important. Which maybe brings me onto this idea of the autopilot thing because I think one of the things that design has become very, I think design has become a bit process obsessed or had become become process obsessed and now it’s made its way into product design and design systems too. Obviously another way of operating a little bit on autopilot.

(33:15): I think they’re obviously incredibly useful. I understand the reason for them particular scale and they create great consistency and speed things up an awful lot. Do you feel like there is a kind of aspect though there where you mentioned this kind of monoculture idea that, and I slightly clicked bait in the title of this said it leads to boring products and services. I posted a thing on Mastodon a little while ago where I had all the, I dunno, I had a bunch of different apps and they were all some kind of social media thing, whether they were sort a Twitter based thing or a mastodon based thing and they all just looked the same. They all have that same kind of four or five things along the bottom, perhaps a kind of ribbon up the side of I’m looking at one right now which has got the same kind of structure. Do you think that that kind of increased process focus on design means that it actually creates kind of things that are pretty bland and boring that everything starts to look the same? That’s such a leading question. It’s a terrible research question. Do you think I’m right about this thing?

Jaimes Nel (34:21): It’s what everybody wants to hear us. So I think these things are cyclical and so if you think about it as increasing layers and then black boxes and then those are recombined in different ways to get new things, you are always going to reach points of peak something and then they get recombined in a different way. There’s a new thing that gets unlocked. So I dunno that I necessarily, maybe it’s an inflection point. I feel like we’re at an inflection point for design where if you look back 10, 20 years, there wasn’t good design in every app that you used to. I mean there weren’t apps for

Andy Polaine (35:14): Instance. No, there weren’t apps in my day.

Jaimes Nel (35:17): There weren’t apps in the way that you think of apps now, but there was software and there were services and the bar was pretty low. And that bar has risen and it’s become I guess hygiene to have relatively good design in packaging or software design or whatever it is. And so that’s resulted in a kind of plateau and that’s kind of where my thinking is with that. And so part of this kind of okay process has got us this far, it’s helped us to push the boundaries of what we’re doing wider and more people are consuming good design than maybe in the past. And actually the volume of things that we’re consuming has also gone up, but we maybe need something different for the next step. There’s something else that’s needed. We always have conscious kind of breaks in order to have and have we got boring things? Yeah, I feel pretty bored with a lot of what we deal with. I think we sort of run the end of clean simple convenience. These kind of ideas have maybe reached not necessarily like a limit because I think there’s a lot in those ideas and they’re not necessarily easy to achieve, but you can look at almost any category and you’ll find two or three that are fairly similar. I did an exercise recently doing a scan for financial services clients.

(37:08): You are always looking for something interesting. And then it was quite interesting looking for the not so interesting things and actually looking at some of the copycat things in secondary markets was really interesting. They were all the same message over and over again. And it was like, is this somebody that’s cleaning up in this context across the whole world by copying and pasting across different markets? Or is it just that these ideas have become so formulaic that if you want to be successful you have a simple easy marketing message. And I guess the interesting thing, if you then think about, well what do you do with that that I don’t necessarily have an answer for? So I think that’s where we need to now start thinking about, well if we start reintroducing that kind of idea of good and what is the kind of quality output and go beyond simple and convenience as the only markers of that, how do we start thinking about distinction again, maybe that allows a little bit more friction possibility for distinctiveness in again. And I guess if I’m right and we are right and we’re at this kind of inflection point, maybe our clients need to start looking for that as well because they also going to have to look different to the next thing for it to be a competitive advantage, it’s not an advantage anymore.

Andy Polaine (38:43): And so that’s the thing with process, I guess that’s the kind of culturally strategy for breakfast thing, but it’s this idea that process is kind of easy to copy and everyone seems to be doing it too, but it’s the execution on it that makes the big difference. And you see that all the time with copycat things. Jason, Jason, hi said, it feels that safe is a great example of something seductive to people that frameworks can be seductive to people for providing a fo simplicity on a complex world. And it kind of feels like that’s really where we are with a lot of those things. There’s this constant desire to try and linearize and make something complex into something that’s complicated as in a complicated thing, we can kind of take it apart and into its component parts, work on each bit and put it back together again with obviously complexity.

(39:39): Everything is connected to everything else. And if you pull it apart within then you kind of just break the whole ecosystem, which I think has been service designs kind of mantra for forever, which is to think of the ecosystem. I think businesses really struggle with that because stuck in an industrial mindset of the way they organize and Nicole just said, hi Nicole, this thing about if they’re useless, they describe how people actually work, but they can often be prescriptive and taken as rules rather than the kind of inspiration. And it seems to me that the real struggle with I guess sustainability and climate change is the biggest one where everything really is connected to everything else, which is for businesses to spend the time, I would suggest on considering the complexity of the problem. And I think frameworks can be very, very useful. They help you explore a complex problem from different ways.

(40:37): They help you force your brains to look in different directions and consider different aspects of things that you might inhabit and in speed not always do, but it does feel also that there’s a, I’m thinking of the canvas of some kind. There needs to be the box there that’s like, what’s the maddest version of this? Or what’s the thing that kind of completely blows this up or turns us upside down? It thing that Mark Curtis is one of the co-founders of Fjord often used to say is that, oh, you know what this project needs is a moment of madness where we really kind just get out of that sort of process and that routine. But I think that takes time. I think that takes an investment in time to want to do that. I don’t think it’s a thing that you can kind of do quickly because you necessarily make the work you’re doing really messy. Again, you sort of force yourself back into that messy middle I think when you do that or do you disagree or have a different view?

Jaimes Nel (41:41): No, I mean I guess where an example of where they are comfortable, and I can say again, I’m completely uncomfortable with dismissing them because they’re such a kind of intrinsic part of the way we work, but how we work with them is critical. So if you are insisting that you do this as an exercise at the end of every workshop that you flip it, I worked with somebody years ago who was had this great make the evil version of it, it just as a way of reframing it or what’s the dark version or it is a lovely mental flip, but it doesn’t work if you do it every single time. And so I think how do we keep things alive means that we’ve got to fight against things being stayed. And if your framework is contributing to, again, it’s focusing on the work, if the output that you’re getting is feeling dull and boring, maybe you need to inject something else into it. But you’ve got to be looking at the work to understand whether that’s the case or not. So it’s the kind of uncritical use of frameworks that’s more problematic. I dunno if that means that it’s the frameworks problem with the operator’s problem, but we have a responsibility to make our processes work for us rather work for them.

Andy Polaine (43:09): I mean it’s always the operators, it’s always a problem between chair and keyboard. There’s always the human aspect of it. I think that where it goes wrong, and I kind of feel like that comes back to this idea of, so I’m going to make a yoga reference here. My wife and I have done ayenga yoga for a long time. She’s a teacher as well actually. And Ayenga yoga uses props and the idea being that it’s better to use a block or a chair or something to maintain the integrity of the kind of alignment rather than bend yourself out of shape. But there’s also this idea that when the teacher calls a certain pose, everyone grabs their props automatically. And often a good teacher will go just get rid of the props for a second and see what it feels like without them. Because you used a prop as a beginning, that’s fine, but after you’ve been practicing for five or 10 years, why are you still reaching for that without thought?

(44:04): And it feels to me like that’s a kind very, really good sort of analogy for this idea of reaching for the prop and not really thinking and not really reflecting on what is this achieving for us. And if there’s a sort of thing I guess to come out of this conversation is this idea of really pleading, I guess I keep going back to this idea of speed and time for some time and some part in the process actually for reflection and thinking and critical kind of thought rather than, well that seems good enough, bang it out and we’ll fix it later. Which is I guess digital main a kid’s heels that you can just release something and then fix it up later if it didn’t turn out very well. And I think with say other products and services and I’m interested in maybe the government work you’ve done, you kind of can’t do that, right? Certainly with the physical products you actually have to do a lot more testing, but you also have to do a lot more critical thinking about what’s happening. It might kill someone. Is this true in the government work you’ve done too?

Jaimes Nel (45:09): I’m just trying to think if that’s necessarily,

Andy Polaine (45:12): Is that true? I dunno if it’s true.

Jaimes Nel (45:15): Well, I mean it depends on what it is, right? So yeah, that does have that safety. I’m not sure I can, it maps directly because usually the work that I’ve done has been perhaps a little bit upstream of an actual medical outcome and that will need to be there. But actually you’ve kind of focused on figuring out the work. And so the feedback loop is more about trying to figure out what’s working then necessarily what’s the kind of implemented outcome at a medical level. The service level tends to have slightly different, slightly different parameters than the medical,

Andy Polaine (46:03): I guess I’m thinking people go back and listen to the podcast I did with Kate Taring actually about, we’ve talked about policy quite a lot and policy as an act of design and this idea of actually really thinking through what’s the intent here, what might be, because policy is also framework. If you hear about policy frameworks all the time, this is an intent of what we’re trying to achieve here and then how it actually pans out on the ground and spending the time to really rigorously critically reflect and analyze that because the debt scandal in Australia is a really good example of how something like that can go wrong. People can Google that. We don’t have time, but it’s where this idea of a kind idea up here gets just pushed through almost like a Play-Doh, one of those forms that you push play-dough through all the spaghetti comes out and then it all goes wrong.

Jaimes Nel (47:03): What it does make me think of is regulatory frameworks and how they are quite often described, designers get kind of hands off about it or scared about it or it’s this compliance thing that needs to go, that’s a step down the line, then we’ve got to kind of pass. But actually a lot of the time that framework has a spirit and it’s actually quite close to what we’re trying to do. A lot of the time. It’s trying to protect consumers or protect people that are using it. And so it has an outcome in mind, but then it tries to wrap it in a particular kind of framework and people then start adhering to the framework where actually if you step back from that and say, well what’s the intent of this and what are you trying to actually accomplish with this? A lot of the time you can actually go quite, can marry the best outcome for the person who’s impacted to the spirit of the law. And that’s something to kind of always Hal to that spirit versus the letter. And maybe that’s the same thing for frameworks. It’s like, well what’s the spirit of this framework and how do I consume that and interpret in my own practice rather than just follow the letter of it?

Andy Polaine (48:21): I remember working on, I think I mentioned this in the Kate Haring podcast actually, there was a project I worked on for a large government organization, public organization, government organization in Australia. And there was this thing that kept coming up where in workshops, and we can’t do that because policy and eventually we got the policy person in and every time that came up they went, no, it’s really not policy. And people kept saying, that’s the law. And I said, no, there’s the law. Here’s our policy as a response to that law and then here’s how this gets interpreted by us all the time as kind of the dogma and there’s these different levels and it gets narrower and narrower more fixed to further down you go. And as you’re saying, if you actually take the effort and time to step up a level, you actually get much more wiggle room in terms of the things you can explore.

Jaimes Nel (49:08): Absolutely. If designers aren’t reading the regulations themselves, they’re missing a trick. I keep detailed notes about all the regulated frameworks because usually there’s the legal teams and the compliance teams and they’re kind of quite first in the letter of it, but there’s a lot of other people that are, it’s almost hearsay

Andy Polaine (49:33): Around it is.

Jaimes Nel (49:34): And you can kind of go quite quickly through that.

Andy Polaine (49:37): Actually, one of the things that we found when we were doing the research on this was the end users of this service, I can’t say who it was, but the end users of this service, the way that people knew, oh, this is what you can and can’t do was because of a Facebook group and it was, it’s kind of a language problem and a design problem in that the policy documents so sort of arcane and opaque in the language that they were written in that it was sort of reinterpreted and the simplified version was the thing that was circulating on Facebook and a lot of it was wrong. A lot of it really was hearsay and then it just sort becomes the norm,

Jaimes Nel (50:15): The classic of post-it notes in the call center. That’s the kind of actual source of truth, not the

Andy Polaine (50:21): Exactly policy. So look, we’re coming up for time, the talking of time. What are your hopes for path?

Jaimes Nel (50:33): We’ve got quite a lot going on trying to two years old studio, largely largely me as a practitioner and intentionally keeping it small and working with networks of people, but trying to work at finding what the right kind of fit is and in the context of I guess a market that has shifted a lot from kind of buying projects from agencies to building a lot inhouse and so experimenting a lot to try to find the right way of working with that market. And then it’s interesting talking about frameworks because building a lot and trying to embed some stuff into some tools. And so FRA has come up as a key part of that as almost the intellectual bedrock of whatever it is that you’re trying to build. So I’m trying to build a lot a practice and then working with some really interesting clients to implement some of these things at scale, which is this really great testing bit. So the way I look at it is, I guess product market fits not a bad kind of idea for the way the practice is evolving, working, trying to find the right fit for it, a vehicle that helps keep trying to grow things and do things a little bit differently all the time and keep on the edge of evolving things, which is where I’m kind of happy about practice when I’m going to doing something new or different or kind of evolving something.

Andy Polaine (52:25): Yeah, yeah. And clients mostly in Australia or all over the world?

Jaimes Nel (52:31): Mostly in Australia. A little bit of a mix, but yeah, a lot of large financial services companies is probably the mainstay of it, which if Australia, that’s,

Andy Polaine (52:47): It’s quite a lot of them,

Jaimes Nel (52:49): The bulk of the market here, but also big problems around scale. And so that’s the elements of my practice that I think is the most interesting and challenging is how do you take these kind of practices and then grow them out across large teams, large volumes or quantity of work. And a lot of my practices at that kind of thinking about a portfolio of work in how it orate together, not necessarily just individual pieces.

Andy Polaine (53:22): So the show is named after Ray Charles Eames film Powers of 10, which was about the relative size of things in the universe, which is for me the most useful metaphor for service design or the idea of moving to different levels of zoom and the similarities actually and echoes there. And so the very last question is always one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world.

Jaimes Nel (53:57): Maybe this is a glib answer, but it’s something I’ve just been thinking about a lot. I’m really interested in, I dunno if this is a small thing, maybe this isn’t a small thing at all, but how batteries battery flow and how there’s this kind of behavioral piece around batteries that as we get more used to batteries, we are kind of embedding them in everything and they all become interconnected with each other. And so this is things like getting the grid connected up with your car so that you’re charging at the right times. And I got obsessed a little while ago about this players all the way down to charging headphones off your phone or all this kind of stuff. So I like it as a problem because it’s such a kind of clear behavior and technology and system kind of example. So it feels like there’s something kind of interesting in this thinking about the power grid as something that you carry with you that’s a really nice, interconnected, small thing that goes to a bigger thing.

Andy Polaine (55:06): Yeah, charging and charges. They’re kind of interesting space at the moment. I mean obviously in automotive world there’s a big thing going on there. It seems lightly that Tesla is going to be a charger company, perhaps more so than it is a car company. I was interested to see, thank you so much for being my guest on Power of 10. Where can people find you? Where’s the best place? Is it path or is it

Jaimes Nel (55:33): The best places? My website, paths ventures.io. I use it quite extensively and there’s a bit of framework tools, stuff that I’ll be releasing soon. There’s quite a bit of stuff there that’s nearly ready to be shared.

Andy Polaine (55:55): And on social media, LinkedIn is the main

Jaimes Nel (55:59): Place. Yeah, these days I’m kind of checked out of almost everything,

Andy Polaine (56:06): Checked out everything else. Okay. Alright. Well thank you so much for being my guest on Ton.

Jaimes Nel (56:12): Lovely, Andy, thanks for the chat. It’s been really good.

Andy Polaine (56:15): So if you’ve been watching and listening to Power of Ten, if you would like to find anything more, you can find, wait, search my name, Andy Polaine, really everywhere. You’ll find me on Mastodon. I’ve kind of pretty much given up on Twitter. You’ll find all the show links at polaine.com, where you can find more episodes. You can check out my leadership coaching practice on my courses, sign up for my very irregular newsletter. I need to try and make it become more regular, but called Doctor’s Note. If you’re looking at this on YouTube, there’s a whole bunch of more stuff that I’m going to be doing on YouTube. So give it a thumbs up or subscribe if you’ve got any thoughts. I put them in the comments. I know for many people this live stream was very early in the morning and for the Americans you’ll all be asleep. So if you got any thoughts about it, then pop a comment in and I can respond. That’s the nice thing about YouTube versus the podcast. This will also appear on the podcast feed. All the links will be in the show notes down there. Thanks for listening and watching and I’ll see you next time.