It's a wrap! Thanks for an amazing IBM Design Leadership Summit

We just wrapped our IBM Design Leadership Summit 2022. A three day virtual gathering of about 300 design leaders and emerging design leaders from around the globe getting together to sharpen the focus on our strategic intent, level up our practices, and hone our design leadership skills and pipeline. I'd like to thank all who helped make our IBM Design Leadership Summit everything I'd hoped it would be, and much more!

Day 1

Katrina Alcorn, our GM of Design, kicked off the event with an inspiring keynote detailing the organization’s strategic intend of driving pervasive excellence in design through a maniacal focus on customer insights, cross-discipline teaming, and intentional continuous learning. These are the core themes of the next chapter of IBM Design that we’re writing this year. Forrester analyst Andrew Hogan gave an insightful outside in perspective that brought additional clarity and perspective. Design leaders Krystal Webber, Kim Bartkowski, and Jennifer Price introduced some powerful business mindset focused design practices. Scott Robinson facilitated a “let’s get to know each other” virtual session breaking the audience into groups of six given that some of our leaders are new and others don’t work regularly with one another given the size of the company and it’s global footprint. He then led a workshop getting the audience to identify the most personally actionable ideas of the day that they plan to incorporate into their daily practice after the Summit.

Day 2

Ashna Ram introduced the Value Tree, a powerful IBM Garage methodology used in our IBM Consulting practice that we’re now going to incorporate into other parts of the company. Todd Simmons told us about an exciting new IBM Blue Studio that designs how IBM shows up in the world. We then had some exciting lightening talks with Hal Wuertz and Adam Cutler on designing for AI, Kim Bartkowski on intelligent workflows, Armon Burton and Alexander Graves on designing the early hire experience for Black designers, Lucy Baunay and Stephanie Cree on designing for sustainability, and Sarah Brooks on designing alternative futures. We then held drill down breakout groups with our design leaders choosing which topics they wanted to explore in greater detail. We closed the day with a reflection panel of emerging design leaders from all around the world hosted by Apurva Dabhade featured panelists Andrea B., Marion Bruells, Kareem Collie, and Michael Tam.

Day 3

Lauren Swanson and I described my Design Executive Team's work and updates to our Design Principal program. We were joined by Erin Buonomo, Kimberly Cassidy, Seth Johnson, and Kevin Paolozzi discussing our managerial and technical design career paths. We then had a panel of exemplary experienced design leaders Dawn Ahukanna, Ruchi Batra, Herman Colquhoun Jr., Adrian Jones, and Sophia Levens hosted by Renee Albert. We had the attendees provide commitments to incorporate the various key practices that we discussed during the whole Summit into the work of business unit teams with a workshop led by Kim Bartkowski. Katrina Alcorn and I wrapped up the entire Summit with our reflections and thanks.

Co-chairs & Summit Team

I'd like to express my deep appreciation and thanks to my amazing Co-Chairs, Kim Bartkowski, Sadek Bazaraa, Olivia Davis, Ryan Mellody, Oduor, Erick (Eno), Scott Robinson, and Dan Silveira and Summit Team of Renee Albert (who also served as MC), David Vox Avila, Gord Davison, and producer Lauren Swanson. This team was an absolute delight to work with in planning the Summit and the delivery of it. The co-chairs did structured interviews with a sample of our design leaders and that listening combined with my strategic imperatives informed the themes for the Summit. We collaborated with our Design Executive Team to select some of the speakers for particular topics, the co-chairs and my report Summit Team together designed the flow and format of the Summit, and the entire team shared various responsibilities in the delivery of the event. The latter included designing the branding (Ryan), creating the internal website (Dan), building the Mural boards (Gord and Eno), operating the video conference platform and controlling the virtual stage (Gord), sharing the interstitial charts (Eno), crafting and posting comms and links (Scott and Ryan), recording and editing videos of the sessions (David), serving as the awesome and personable MC through the entire event (Renee), and helping me daily with the big picture issues and sweating the smallest yet incredibly important details, overall producing of the Summit (Lauren).

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Lastly, I’d like to thank the amazing design leadership community we have at IBM for your enthusiastic engagement, insightful questions and comments, and for having identified actions you’ll all take to incorporate what you’ve learned into your daily practice individually and as a group.

Let’s make a dent in the universe of IBM this year inspired by our Design Leadership Summit 2022!

Design vs Pseudo-Design

I was asked to do a talk to a large group of design researchers before the holidays regarding my thoughts on the optimal practice of design and design research. I thought I’d share and expand on my notes for that talk in this blogpost.

Design without Design Research is Pseudo-Design

I coined the phrase “Innovation Theater” some time ago to describe doing design thinking with only the workshopping—standing around with Sharpies® and Post-it Notes® reflecting and not first observing (doing design research) and then also not making (designing and developing). I regularly tell people if that’s what they’re going to do then to not do it because it won’t be effective, will waste time and money, and will just give design thinking a bad name.

Doing design without design research is similarly ineffective, wasting time and money, and will give design a bad name. Pseudo-science and pseudo-medicine are terms that describe practices that are not based on rigorous observation and research evidence. I’d like to suggest that we call design that’s done without design research pseudo-design. Any mature Enterprise Design Thinking focused design practice needs to make design research the foundation of their work. Without design research, the team is flying blind. They’re making things up. They’re guessing. And what they design won’t be successful, at least not reliably so. Do we need innovation and creativity in design? Absolutely. However, that creative effort should be focused on and grounded in a deep understanding of the user that will eventually use that design. To be clear, I’m talking here about the design of products, systems, and services that people will use and design that is intentionally created for people. I consider design outside of these parameters more like art. Art is incredibly important but is not what I’m talking about here

Experienced design researchers need to be specifying what design research needs to be carried out, whether or not the design researchers carry it out themselves or with help from others on the team. Just like you wouldn’t start your day without brushing your teeth, it should be considered basic hygiene to do design research before starting your design and using design research throughout to further hone that design with user input.

I did research some years ago (published in SigCHI and Communications of the ACM) looking at the use of various design practices at more than 100 companies. The findings showed that while executives at those companies assumed that their designers were using the practices that they thought were best, most design practitioners weren’t using the best methods. In fact, the practitioners could identify the most effective methods like contextual inquiry and hands-on user evaluation but they mostly did so-called discount methods like simple surveys and heuristic evaluation. I made the case then and I am again now that we as professional designers and design leaders need to be responsible to our profession and to those who pay our salaries in doing design using the most effective methods which always need to start and end with design research. I’d go as far as to suggest that we adopt an oath much like the Hippocratic Oat of “do no harm” that physicians regularly take which for design might be “do no design without design research”.

As an example, the car I drive just had it’s entire user interface redesigned and I’m convinced that it was pseudo-design because it can’t have been based on user input given the nature of the changes. While there are lots of visually appealing features and some actual improvements, the majority of the release convinces me that either no design research was done or that the design research team had no or little influence on the design. Key frequently used car actions are now several taps away and a customization option doesn’t include any actions critical to driving a car. Just like pseudo-science and pseudo-medicine can be dangerous, so can pseudo-design and especially on a car and other important systems. And, most enterprise design involves the design of important systems.

So, if we’ve established that design research is absolutely required to do good and responsible design then what advice do I have with regard to doing it optimally. Let me share a few thoughts that I have on that.

Hire Design Researchers

In the early years of design, like 10 to 15 years go, it was a practice by many companies that a single designer in a company, or for larger companies a single designer on a project, was all that was needed and those designers would need to do the design research, the user experience design, and even the visual design themselves. I would ask audience members at workshops I ran at the major design conferences during that time with a show of hands how many were the only designer at their company. The majority of attendees would put up their hands. I made the point then how bizarre that was given that the companies that those attendees worked for likely had more than one developer or engineer so design was simply not seen as being as important as the other disciplines. We all needed more designers and design specializations too.

We’ve come a long way in recognizing the need to staff projects with designers much like we do the other disciplines. IBM’s design reboot nine years ago is often credited with leading this trend by specifying that a designer to developer ratio of 1 to 8-12 should be the target and then hiring more than 3,000 designers to staff projects with that ratio. Our rationale for the ratio was that if there were too few designers on a project, the developers would out of necessity do the design themselves with less than optimal outcomes.

The question then arises, how many design researchers do we need? The rationale that I just mentioned applies here too. If we don’t have sufficient design researchers on a project, designers will be flying blind and will need to just make things up. They’ll have to guess. They will also be giving designs to developers without the basic hygiene of user input and evaluation. I suggest that a ratio of design researcher to designer should be in the range of 1 to 5-8 based on industry data.

While visual designers, user experience designers, and industrial designers are able to be recruited from design schools and design programs in universities and even bootcamps, it’s often not as straightforward recruiting design researchers. Very few design schools and design programs in universities teach design research as a discipline. Most are back in the old model of simply ensuring that user experience designers just need a few design research skills. And often, students who aspire to be user experience or visual designers don’t have the attributes to be great design researchers. Where can we then recruit design researchers from? In my experience, people who have education in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and cognitive science tend to have the personal attributes necessary for design research and even have the foundations of many of the design research methods. However, they will still need to learn the full range of actual methods of design research typically on the job. Incidentally, there is a similar problem in recruiting content designers which is also a discipline that isn’t taught in most design schools and design programs. Journalism students tend to have the requisite attributes and many of the skills needed for content design.

Once you have the requisite design researchers, what are some of the other best practices that should be adopted? Let’s explore a few.

Working with customers

It feels like stating the obvious but in order for design researchers to do their jobs, they have to have access to customers so they can work with the users working in those customer organizations. And not just any customers, customers who are representative of the market the product or service is targeting. It’s also a best practice to recruit long-time customers and more recent ones as well as users who may be early adopters and others we are more resistant to change. Some call the former types of users, extreme users. It is also a good practice to do some work with what might be considered future users and customers who don’t currently use your product or service. Satisfying them is an excellent way of ensuring growth in marketshare of your product or service. We recommend that any project should have a carefully selected set of what we call sponsor users with the criteria above and to have only a handful so that we can go deep into their experience. However, we also need to guard against being too myopic in designing for a small group of sponsor users so it is advised to also include a fresh set of sponsor users to provide feedback on the evolving design. It’s important to point out that the best work with customers and users is truly collaborative characterized by co-creation.

Understand various lived experiences of users

Much of the design research that is done focuses on the lived experience of one type of user, typically an able-bodied, white, straight, North American man. But, that’s not typically representative of the actual current or targeted future users of the product or service. Design researchers therefore must ensure that they are including people who are more representative of various lived experiences.

Work as a team

Design researchers themselves should work together with other design researchers, especially in large companies, to plan a coverage strategy for their work. It’s often the case that different products from a company are used by the same types of users so it makes sense to not duplicate design research effort but instead plan which design researchers will explore which unique aspects of the user experience they have in common and what work should be done together. It’s also a good practice to have exploratory design research like ethnographic observation and structured interviews conducted independent of particular products or product release schedules in contrast to user evaluation of product prototypes which need to be done just in time for particular releases.

Design research should also be a team sport involving non-researcher members of the team. Having team members personally experience customer insights first hand is a powerful way of getting buy-in and empathy for the customer experience for all team members. It’s also often a good way to leverage additional help in carrying out the research. One of the most effective pieces of design research that I led with a team a few years ago involved having a researcher and a product manager doing observational work and structured interviews with users and stakeholders. The design researcher focused on the user experience while the product manager leaned in on the business value in the information they were collecting. Another similar experience included a visual designer who also sketched what the user was describing and then immediately sought feedback on the sketch to determine whether the user’s intent was accurately understood.

Be maniacally curious

Design researchers and the designers accompanying them should be maniacally curious. In order to truly understand a user and their environment, you need to adopt an almost childlike curiosity and see every situation from a beginner’s perspective. Make sure to not annoy the user but ask a lot of “whys” and “tell me more” type questions. Make sure to open the aperture of the problem space you’re exploring in addition to the primary areas of focus. And, explore what sorts of things delight the users you’re working with and also for enterprise applications learn about what you could do with your design to make the user more successful in their job, more satisfied while they’re at work, and ideally more efficient so they can finish up their work more quickly at the end of the day.

Be innovative

As design researchers, you have a large toolkit of methods to choose from and you should be innovative in your selection of the right methods and tools for the specific situations but also in modifying them for your particular needs. Keep your focus on what you want to learn and use the tools and methods that will best achieve that learning objective. Just like medicine needs epidemiologic and diagnostic methods to track big picture trends and individual problems so too does design research.

Use Qual & Quant

In my experience, individual design researchers major on either qualitative or quantitative methods. I think all design researchers should have mastery of both types of methods. And, importantly, design researchers shouldn’t shy away from the methods and tools that require statistics. In fact, I think we should be using data science methods more in design research like causal modeling to bring clarity to the relationships of measurements to one another in the entire system and to determine the statistical and substantive significance of our findings.

Look beyond users and use

Design researchers should be working with current users but they should also be working with future users and include important stakeholders in their work. The latter is especially important in enterprise products and services. We’ve had success in the past with including a user and the decision-maker at their company together in a user evaluation session with users giving feedback on their use of the product design and the decision-maker providing an evaluation of their intention to purchase. It’s also important to realize that the entire what we call universal experiences a customer or user has from first impressions in an ad or on a website of a product all the way to upgrading the product should be considered to be within the purview of the design researcher. When thinking about looking beyond users and use, it’s also a good practice to consider one other critically important stakeholder, the earth. In order to design products and services that are more sustainable, design researchers need to factor the earth and its environment as a key stakeholder in their work.

Understand competitors

It’s also critically important for researchers to understand gaps between our product or service and that of the key competitors from actual users. Make sure to do head-to-head hands-on user evaluation sessions to glean insights into the areas that your product or service is better and areas that are opportunities for your product or service to further improve. Consider recruiting users of your competitors’ products and services for your user evaluation studies of your product or service as well. If you can satisfy them with your design, you’ll be in great shape to gain marketshare. If your product or service doesn’t have an obvious competitor, understand how users current do what your product or service is planning to improve. We had a product idea in the past that involved incorporating the capabilities of several existing products from different companies into a single new product that we were considering designing and developing. However, the user research showed that users were perfectly happy and in fact preferred their current use of the combination of products to our idea of a new integrated one. Your product or service always as a competitor, the way people do things today. I’m reminded of the design inspired CEO of Intuit, Scott Cook, who challenged his design team to make the company’s first product, Quicken, better than a person using a pen and the check-writing process.

Make to learn

It’s tempting to always try to do incredibly thorough and comprehensive pieces of exploratory research. However, that can take a long time and lead to analysis paralysis. It’s often better to be more lean and time-limited in your research work and then to quickly get into making to learn which means gathering feedback on very early ideally paper and pencil or foam core prototypes that can be easily modified and thrown away.

Understand the future

It’s not enough to understand what users need today, we also need to give the design team insight into alternative futures by using Strategic Foresight methods. There are many different methods and models but they all essentially involve scanning for strong or weak signals of change and using these to create alternative future narratives to inform potential alternative designs of your product or service.

Share Research

Especially in larger companies with more design researchers, it’s important to share research work and even more importantly research insights. And, design researchers should first seek to understand what other researchers have done before doing their work and then afterwards to share what they’ve done with the other researchers as well.

Design Researchers as Designers

After any piece of design research has been completed, the communication of the work and the key insights from it needs to be designed. Yes, design researchers in this way need to be designers. Design researchers have users: the rest of the design, product management, and development team. Those colleagues are busy and they don’t know what you know nor do they have the skills that you have. So, don’t assume they have a lot of time to consume the output of your design research or the knowledge or skills to understand it the way you do. Spend time identifying the most important, relevant, and insightful findings and then design the communication of them in the most consumable way.

Optimize

Design research is probably the most process and tools dependent design specialization. As such, it has the greatest opportunity to be optimized and streamlined with the aid of DesignOps and ResearchOps specialists and a streamlined toolchain that is tailored for the kind of company and the types of users that it serves.

Implement

The best design research in the world is entirely useless if it doesn’t inform design and be implemented in the target product or system. Product management needs to incorporate design research into plans and ensure that key insights inform the product or service strategy, design, and implementation. All the design research and design effort will be wasted if that work doesn’t get implemented into the product or service.

Executive alignment

Design research work, the incorporation of it into design, and the design’s implementation in the product need to be made transparent to executive management. Like the study I mentioned earlier, executive management assumes that the right work is being done by all the professionals on the team. Their role is also to adjust priorities, balance staffing, and modify schedules. They can’t do their jobs properly governing the organization without visibility to the key customer insights gleaned from design research and the degree to which those insights have informed the design and in turn the implementation in the product or service. We should as design researchers, designers, and design leaders provide them that visibility.

It’s important to note that senior executive managers often haven’t had any design or design management education. Incidentally, the graduates of the EMBA program that I’m an Industry Professor in do have this knowledge but most don’t. As a result, design researchers have to use their design skills to make customer insights able to be understood by senior executive management. This can take the form of scorecards using a format that senior executives would find familiar, like quadrant charts. Keep the focus on showing results that are actionable for senior executives. Some years ago, I was responsible for the design of IBM’s application development products. In that role, I worked with my design researchers to identify the top 10 user problems for the entire suite of products. I simply showed a brief description of the problem and included a brief video showing users experiencing the problem. I also invited the senior executives to try that aspect of the product suite themselves. That led to executives on the team being assigned the job of getting the problem fixed by a particular date and every subsequent status meeting included reports on the status of fixing those problems. I gave the senior executives the information that they could do their jobs with in driving solutions to the problems. Partnering with senior executives especially on topics having to do with design which they often know little about is crucially important.

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Now, you may be thinking that I’m being too extreme. That I’m making too big a deal about the importance of design research. I actually think it’s the role of design researchers to not only do the work to improve design but to also use their tools to provide evidence of that improvement. I did a piece work some years ago with a Masters student at a business school in the UK. I collected data on all aspects of the design process. It was IBM’s User-Centered Design process at the time. The data included the number of customers recruited, the number of hours of user input and evaluation sessions, the number of designers on the team, the number of iterations of the design, and other variables like this all regressed in a hierarchical regression model using product revenue and customer satisfaction as the dependent variables. The model was able to calculate what percentage of the variance in the dependent measures of revenue and customer satisfaction the various predictor variables accounted for. The results showed that the amount and effectiveness of design research had the greatest impact on revenue and customer satisfaction. I believe we need design research organizations to do this type of higher level design research on design research itself to assess its efficacy and even the efficacy of various design research methods. In fact, there is no other discipline better equipped to do this work.

In sum, I truly believe that you can have the absolutely best visual, user experience, content, and industrial designers and the very best developers and engineers but you still won’t be successful, or at not least consistently, if you don’t have great design researchers and a practice of incorporating their customer insights and user feedback into the product or service. In fact, the number one reason for 90 percent of startups failing is a lack of appropriate design research. Essentially, they’re doing pseudo-design. And just like pseudo-science and pseudo-medicine, they’ll occasionally be successful purely by chance. Most companies can’t afford to have those kinds of odds so they should do design research and in turn do real design.

Why I'm Staying at IBM

People typically only reflect on their time at a company and write about their experiences at the time that they announce that they’re leaving. That’s fine but I’d also like to continue a trend started by my wonderful friend and colleague Farzaneh Ghods of reflecting and writing about experiences with a company when you’ve decided to stay. Here’s my reflection on my time at IBM and why I’ve stayed and am staying.

The Path to IBM

Let’s start at the beginning. I never planned to work at IBM or get into design or the field of technology. I wanted to be a singer and musician when I was in high school. I studied classical music at the Royal Conservatory of Music, sang with the Bach Elgar Choir, played the lead in several musicals including Jesus in Gospel, and played in a number of rock and folk bands including working for several years as a professional musician in a house band playing every Saturday night. My high school music teacher advised me against taking music in university because he said most people with degrees in music end up teaching music and then they spend their life listening to bad music. So I took psychology as an undergraduate and in graduate school transitioned to clinical psychology and cognitive science. I was a student therapist at a correctional institute, a researcher at a psychiatric hospital, and ran a cognitive science research lab at the university. I also developed and taught several courses including research methods and statistics and also supervised undergraduate thesis students.

During my PhD program, all of my experiments investigating affective and cognitive processing of information were run on a computer as were the experiments in the research lab I ran. An interesting thing happened when I advertised to the university campus for a research assistant to help run the experiments. Even though there were many applicants, all were male students. I thought that was strange given that the student body was largely made up of women. Being a researcher, I wanted to find out why. It turned out that it was the fact that the job required working with a computer. This was in the late 1980s and it’s not like there weren’t any computers. It appeared that there may be a gender difference in feeling comfortable using computers. I created the Computer Anxiety Scale (CAS), a standardized survey instrument that several hundred male and female students then completed. The results confirmed that college women were significantly more anxious in using computers than their male counterparts. Then I investigated why that was the case and looked at computer use in elementary school and a content analysis of computer advertising both of which revealed sources of the gender difference. Boys would physically push girls away so that they could maneuver themselves into position to use classroom computers and the computer advertising had almost exclusively male actors and used male pronouns. So then I thought, how can I improve this situation.

That’s what inspired me to get into design. I immersed myself in the study and practice of design. I analyzed the design of software at the time and noticed that it wasn’t very intuitive or usable and it actually was a pretty negative experience. That is, quite literally negative because much of what you did on the user interface would generate an unpleasant sound and an error message saying that you did something wrong and often nothing about how you could fix it. In fact, there was very little in the way of positive experiences in working with most software. So, I designed two different user interfaces, one with the usual elements characteristic of typical software at the time, and one that was more intuitive and usable that gave positive feedback and no negative feedback. I then tested the two user interfaces with computer anxious women (who scored high on my CAS questionnaire) and non-computer anxious women (who scored low on my questionnaire). I measured self-report, galvanic skin response, and heart rate. The results were outstanding. My new design led to results that made the computer anxious women indistinguishable in terms of self-report, galvanic skin response, and heart rate from the non-computer anxious women. The non-computer anxious women preferred it too.

I presented the results of all of that work at a scientific conference shortly after that and not only did it generate a buzz in the scientific community, I was also interviewed by the press. Several people at IBM learned of my work through those press interviews and gave me a call asking, “have you ever considered working for IBM?” I answered honestly saying that I hadn’t ever considered working for IBM, I was planning to be a clinician, and an academic. However, I mentioned that I had read a book about the founders of IBM which impressed me with their vision, innovation, and mostly their values. That led to an interview in a facility that was far more impressive than my lab at the university in terms of the design of the space and the equipment. And when we talked salary, I said to myself that I would give it a go for a year.

The Early Years

It turns out that I was hired by the Vice President of Research and Development, Bill McClean, to amp up design practices at the Canadian development Lab because the global company was planning to break up and the Lab I was hired into would have to survive and hopefully thrive on its own. As an independent software company, it would have to dramatically improve the design of its products. That VP of R&D didn’t tell anyone else though about the reason he hired me. I therefore spent some time doing things the way they were done for the first couple of years. That included practices like human factors engineering, usability testing, and generally learning what was wrong with a product too late in the cycle to do anything about it.

The User-Centered Design Years

When things finally got serious about starting to change the design practices in the early 1990s, the Director of the Lab, John Schwartz, asked me to develop a new approach to designing products and lead a few others to come up with a new product development process. I was given six designers, a budget, and six months to come up with the new design and research approach. I read the existing literature and came across a book by Don Norman on User-Centered Systems Design. I loved it. It was exactly what I needed so I made that the foundation of our approach. My team and I also combed the literature and met with other leading companies in the industry to share best practices. I also wanted to ensure that our practices would be business focused so I added methods like competitive evaluation and measurements like intent to purchase. We took this so seriously that we would recruit the decision maker as well as the user and have them answer as one in our evaluation sessions. We needed to do that because with enterprise software, purchase decisions aren’t made by the user themselves. We would also recruit users of our competitors’ products in order to try to design our products to satisfy them. I called the new approach to design IBM User-Centered Design (IBM UCD). After developing it, we tested it with a handful of product teams.

Even though I still had a couple of months to go in my allotted six month project, the interim results were so positive that the head of IBM’s global software group, Steve Mills, asked to have me fly to Armonk, New York to present my new approach to the A-Team, his senior executives and himself. That meeting went really well and led to the inclusion of my IBM UCD in the company’s integrated development process.

After our Software Group adopted IBM UCD for a couple of years, IBM’s CEO Lou Gerstner, also became a fan. In fact, he asked, “what do teams do without IBM UCD, do the engineers just make up what the product should be and how it should be designed?” The answer was sadly, “yes”. That led to IBM UCD being adopted as the approach to design for all business units of the company. In 1995 IBM UCD went company-wide.

To activate the entire company with our new approach, I traveled the globe to do presentations to our labs, ran what we would now call bootcamps, three days in duration for product teams and one day for executives. I also had monthly conference calls with the company’s designers and separate calls with the managers and we also held a yearly conference.

We had significant success with IBM UCD in that it helped the IBM Thinkpad go from eighth in customer satisfaction to first. We also used IBM UCD to design the software and systems for the Olympics and several of IBM’s software products.

To inspire more adoption by additional business units in 1997, I came up IBM UCD Lite, which added a set of tools to make the carrying out of the work more efficient and effective. The tools included a database application which provided designers the ability to select from 10,000 users who were prescreened and willing to be in user research studies, a tool for understanding, visualizing, and analyzing user tasks, a tool for conducting complex surveys for our designers to use and another with preset questions to choose from for non-designers to use, a tool for users to let us know about positive or negative experiences that they had in real time which would also with their permission send us two minutes of screen activity immediately prior to the event, tools for logging events tagged to video recordings of user studies, and even tools for making designs accessible including showing how designs would appear to users with different types of color blindness.

I had a direct team of about thirty designers and developers that were almost entirely funded from each of the business units of the company whom I would reach out to annually at Fall Plan time to show the value my team provided to them the previous year and to specify based on their number of designers and the use that was made of the tools the portion of my budget they would have to contribute. It was at times nerve racking running what in essence was an internal startup and having to make the case for funding based on the value we provided and yet having thirty employees and their families dependent on my success at tin-cupping around the company. I was so pleased that business units were sufficiently satisfied by my team’s work that my budget would increase typically about ten percent each year.

I authored a book together with a couple of my colleagues to share everything we’d developed entitled “User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach”. I also served as the special issue editor of an entire issue of the IBM Systems Journal describing our work and I also put together a special double-issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. I ran workshops teaching IBM UCD at each of the major industry design conferences as well for several years.

During this period I reported to IBM Vice President and IBM Fellow Tony Temple. I led the process and approach teams should use, IBM UCD, and the rest of Tony’s organization focused on innovative user interface technologies. We also had an internal Ease of Use Consultancy team which I was on which met for a week at an IBM lab somewhere in the world and we would review product designs from that lab and provide recommendations and guidance for how the designs could be improved. We also briefly toyed with an approach that was called User Engineering but it wasn’t as effective as IBM UCD was.

The Early IBM Design Years

Prior to this, I used the term IBM User Experience Design for our organization but in 2008 I introduced the term “IBM Design” and didn’t preface design with anything else. We also did work to specify sub-disciplines like visual design, interaction design, user research, and a total user experience leader. We updated our website with the new name and created the IBM Design social media handles we still use today.

During this period I reported to IBM Vice President and IBM Fellow Rod Smith who had responsibility for incubating, developing, and introducing entirely new technologies and product types into the company. One of those technologies was Artificial Intelligence or AI. IBM’s research division had built an AI system designed to beat humans in the TV game show called Jeopardy. And IBM Watson did just that in 2011. Rod asked me to head up design and research for a new product version of IBM Watson. I was asked how many designers and researchers I would need and I said six to begin with. I was told to go find the best six in the company.

In addition to continuing to lead the company’s 230 strong community of designers and design managers, I also led the product design work on IBM Watson. We had a startup mentality. The executive team decided to focus the first product on healthcare in general and on Oncology in particular. What did we do first? User Research of course. A couple of researchers and I visited cancer clinics doing ethnographic observation and structured interviews. We reflected on what we had learned and on how AI could help the staff and the Oncologists in diagnosing and treating their patients. We then designed paper and pencil prototypes of possible solutions and carried out user studies to gather feedback on those prototypes. We then built higher fidelity prototypes and those generated huge interest because they were the first examples of using AI in these ways. Those prototypes were shared with the entire senior executive team of the company, with IBM’s investors, and with the press. The designs were implemented in the first versions of the product and early results showed that cancer patients could get treatment weeks and months sooner when Oncologists used the product. It was one of the most gratifying projects to work on given our purpose of saving lives.

The Phil Gilbert Years

In 2012, IBM announced a new CEO in the person of Ginni Rometty. I was in a meeting with Ginni on her second day on the job. She started off her talk by saying that the client experience would be the most important strategic area of focus during her leadership. I was delighted. And I knew that the group of design managers that I led across the company should provide some input to her to realize her vision. We pulled together the best practices that we saw inside the company which had Phil’s organization’s Design Thinking in the top spot. Design Thinking is built on the User-Centered Design practices we knew and loved but it also added incredibly powerful collaborative mapping and ideating methods. We also determined that we would have to hire a lot more designers and researchers given her focus. I put a presentation together recommending the practices and staffing and together with fellow executive Sal Vella presented it on a conference call to Robert LeBlanc, our Senior Vice President. He asked me to gather some more data on the current population. I collected that information—most importantly that we had 230 designers and researchers with most of them assigned to more than one product and on average three products. I thought it was so important to get this information to Robert that I flew to New York on my own dime to share it with him in person. He was shocked at how few designers and researchers we had and even more so the fact that they were typically working on more than one product. Given the recommendation from our previous presentation coupled with these cold hard facts about our design and research population, he immediately contacted Ginni. Robert also had conversations in parallel with Phil and then more between Robert, Phil, and Ginni. After that, Ginni had a call with Phil and asked him whether he could achieve what he accomplished with his company and the business unit he was hired into with design thinking and to do it for all of IBM. Phil answered “I don’t know but I’m willing to try”. Phil was then asked to take on the role of General Manager of Design for IBM. In one of the first conversations I had with Phil, he said that he wanted me to work 100 percent on the design transformation of the company and that I shouldn’t have product design responsibility. I then reluctantly gave up my design leadership role on IBM Watson and didn’t have much to do with the project anymore after that.

I outline in detail what we did during the Phil Gilbert years in my blogpost “A Personal Tribute and Thanks to Phil Gilbert”.

The Katrina Alcorn Years Months

When Phil announced that he was stepping down as GM of Design, he also announced his successor. It was Katrina Alcorn. Phil couldn’t have chosen a more perfect successor. And that’s so Phil.

Of course, Katrina’s era of IBM Design is only a few months old at this point but it’s been absolutely awesome working with her. Phil was a startup guy who was audacious enough to make the case for and build out a 3,000 designer community, our Enterprise Design Thinking transformation, and our almost 100 design studios around the world. Phil laid the foundation. Katrina is a designer. And she takes a designer’s approach, which is perfectly in line with my approach to things. We think alike.

Katrina has worked very closely with a hand full of colleagues and me on the Next Chapter of IBM Design. I’ve helped her run roundtable workshops with small groups of our design leaders, conduct surveys of not only our 3,000 person design organization but also of design adjacent disciplines like product management, development, partners, and sales. She’s written several blogposts as we constructed the elements of the Next Chapter to gather input and additional ideas. To optimize the listening, she published the blogposts out in the open internally and externally in our IBM Design Medium publication and held Ask Me Anything sessions (AMAs) inside the company.

What I’m doing now

My current responsibilities include heading up the Design Executive Team (DET) which is made up of the most senior managerial design executives from each business unit of the company. I established the DET as a body of leaders to govern and lead the company’s 3,000 designers. I’m perhaps connected more with all of the company than any other design executive so I notice when we need to explore an opportunity or address a problem. DET members also propose these themselves. I then form workgroups to address the opportunities/challenges by asking each of the DET members to assign members of their business unit design organizations to the workgroups. The teams I lead like the DET are ones where we truly work as One IBM. Another such team is the Design Leadership Board (DLB) which reviews and appoints our Design Principals, Distinguished Designers, and IBM Fellows, the highest technical positions in IBM’s design career framework. A related role involves being responsible for the design profession and our design career framework. I gladly took on these roles and now work with amazing team member Lauren Swanson on those programs. At the beginning of this year, Phil asked me to take on some additional responsibilities including design culture across the company including our focus on racial equity, our external social media presence, and our external engagement. I absolutely love those additional areas of responsibility and thank Phil for them. I also now get to work with the awesome Renee Albert on these additional responsibilities. That work has resulted in programs like our Design Mavens Power Hour video and podcast series which has been internal to the company thus far but will soon be available externally as well and our collaboration with the America by Design TV show with whom we’ve produced six episodes of Season 1 and we’re working on Season 2 as I write this.

What I love about IBM?

Like many successful and highly visible design executives, I’ve been approached by headhunters and company executives trying to recruit me for Vice President or General Manager positions at other large and well-known companies. While the offers are tempting and flattering, I’m not, nor have I ever been, much into titles and prestige nor am I looking for additional challenges. IBM continues to be a big enough challenge. I’m a servant leader that just wants to get things done in collaboration with colleagues and my mission of making IBM insanely successful with design hasn’t been accomplished yet. So, I’ll be staying.

I also just love the opportunities that IBM has and continues to provide me, the values and culture the company espouses and encourages, and what the company does for the world. These include the following.

• I’ve been given free range and empowered to come up with entirely new programs and to work on projects of my own choosing. These include:

  • Developing IBM UCD for the company and having the freedom to found an internal startup to enable it with outreach, education, and innovative tools.

  • Having had the opportunity to lead design globally for IBM’s object oriented computer-aided software engineering initiative called AD/Cycle.

  • Representing IBM on various standards bodies and having the opportunity to co-write several design standards including the International Standards Organization (ISO) Human Centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems 13407.

  • Overseeing the development and evolution of IBM’s first executive dashboard to track key design and quality related metrics.

  • Building a design team and leading design for the brand new technology of AI with the IBM Watson product and working with the most senior executives of the company, the company’s leading investors, and the press.

  • Leading the design and development of IBM’s first design system and toolkit, IBM One UI. It had a set of design patterns, a design language, and implemented in an open source toolkit that was the most accessible and global at the time. This work was the predecessor of IBM’s current Carbon design system.

  • Designing and then executing on approaches to organizational transformation of each of the business units of IBM (product, consulting, and sales) and with numerous other enterprise and startup companies and organizations.

  • Working with every part of IBM, traveling around the world several times to IBM locations and working with local teams, and working with hundreds of IBM clients and prospective clients often with their c-suite or other senior executives.

  • Reaching out to the heads of the World Design Organization and Design for America and together forming and leading the Covid 19 Design Challenge.

  • Creating the IBM Global Academic Programs for Design and working with the top design schools, universities, and HBCUs around the world.

  • Founding the Future of Design Education initiative with Don Norman and co-leading it with him and Meredith Davis and forming a volunteer team of IBM designers to help with the initiative.

  • Being invited to give keynotes at conferences, being asked to be on industry panels, serving as a judge for design competitions and hackathons, and being asked to be a mentor to so many people.

  • The support I’ve had in advocating for plant-based whole food vegan options in the cafeteria at the Canadian Lab where I’m based and for agreeing to provide vegan options at our major global events including the client executive workshops that I’ve led over the years.

  • Having been able to pursue my first passions in music, clinical psychology, and academia while at IBM. I’ve formed bands and sang in choirs at IBM, converted my inside IBM mentoring into a highly popular Life Habits Mentoring podcast hosted on all the major platforms for more than ten years with more than 100 episodes, and having been recruited to serve as an Industry Professor at the Degroote Schools of Business and Medicine at McMaster University after a press interview where I was quoted as saying that our IBM bootcamp program was the “missing semester” of university. I’ve been teaching that missing semester ever since.

• It was the values and beliefs of the IBM founders in that book I read those many years ago that initially inspired me to join IBM and in my experience they continue to inspire and support me in my work. Beliefs like respect for the individual, a culture of innovation, a service mindset, a supportive management culture, trust and responsibility, fairness, and being a good corporate citizen.

  • I’ve always had managers who respected and supported me, who allowed me to pursue my interests and to use and hone my skills, who considered me an equal in collaborating with me, and who supported a healthy work-life balance.

  • The type of person IBM hires has always impressed me including the people I’ve hired. A focus on skills and talent but also on collaboration, communication, and caring. I can honestly say that I thoroughly enjoy my daily interactions with my staff, my colleagues, my bosses, and our clients. You spend a lot of hours at work and why not spend them with people you enjoy spending time with. I’ve also been impressed by the diversity of my colleagues whether gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, race, ethnicity, and the fact that I work with people from all around the world.

  • I started my career in Canada and even though I’ve had a global role since 1995, I love that I still have responsibility for the IBM Canada design studios and get to work with Gord Davison and the Canadian managers and designers. They also give me the opportunity to stay grounded and to try new things and prototype ideas in one region of the world before introducing them worldwide.

  • IBM has a set of business conduct guidelines that every employee has to study and certify every year. And those guidelines evolve with the times. Those guidelines and seeing evidence on a regular basis that they’re being followed is so heartening. It makes me proud to call myself an IBMer.

  • IBM has been on the forefront of diversity and inclusion for many years. The company hired its first Black employees in 1911 and its Equal Opportunity Policy came out 11 years before the US Civil Rights Act. IBM hired its first employee with a disability 59 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act. The company hired its first woman vice president in 1942, the first woman to be appointed to such a position in any company in the USA. And the list goes on. No company is perfect and nor of course is IBM but IBM’s values, beliefs, and culture keep us maniacally focused on trying to be better all the time.

  • When George Floyd was murdered last year, Phil Gilbert, my boss and General Manager of Design, arranged a town hall on the topic of race which subsequently launched a major initiative called Racial Equity in Design that has led to significantly greater hiring of Black designers, the creation of a field guide for managers and leaders, the co-hosting of a history of Black design conference, the teaching of a class on decolonized design, communicating the work and inspiring young Black students to get into design and founding an Empower Award to organizations doing exemplary work in the area of diversity and design on the America by Design TV show, and much more. This work was led by my friend and colleague, Nigel Prentice, his second in command Jessica Tremblay, and an awesome team of Black designers which Nigel calls first pillar and a team of non-Black designers, like me, who Nigel calls second pillar. You need both pillars to be the foundation for effecting real change. What’s most heartening is that I’m seeing real change happening in the company and beyond due to this amazing work.

  • A 110 year old company has to keep focused on ensuring that it is a company for existing employees but also for younger new hires as well. I was fortunate to become involved with an initiative that’s now called Innovation Corps which was designed to help re-design the company for and with the help of the next generation of employees. I’m responsible for the Canadian arm of this initiative and love working with my partner who represents that next generation, Farzaneh Ghods. We’ve workshopped, run surveys, and formed a team of next generation employees and together made a real difference in the way the company operates.

• I continue to be impressed by how important IBM is to the world, how it continues to invent and innovate, and what it stand for.

  • Most of the world’s business is done on IBM systems, with 87% of all credit card transactions being handled for example. I believe our purpose with IBM Design is to make people’s work life more enjoyable and productive given how much of our lives we spend at work and so that those workers could finish their day a little earlier and with greater satisfaction.

  • IBM organized the High-Performance Computing Consortium to put the fastest computers in the world at the disposal of scientists working on Covid 19.

  • Concerned about the use of facial recognition software by law enforcement, IBM abandoned its work on the technology.

  • Its Tech for Good programs are addressing everything from climate change to food safety to disrupting human trafficking.

  • IBM has been granted the most patents of any other company in the world for 29 years running. Inventions that you may not know came from IBM include the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code, the Automated Teller Machine (ATM), Lasik laser eye surgery and five IBMers have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

  • I think it’s impressive too that IBM has a decades old policy of not making political donations.

  • I’ve been so pleased with IBM’s response to the pandemic with 95 percent of the company’s employees able to work from home within a week or two and the level of empathy and caring exhibited by leaders as we progress through this lengthy period of disruption.

I could go on but I won’t largely because I have more experiences to have and more chapters to write as I continue my journey with IBM. I’ve always been proud to say that I’m an IBMer and I look forward to many more years of saying that.

A Personal Tribute to Phil Gilbert

My boss for the past eight years, Phil Gilbert, announced recently that he’s stepping down as General Manager of Design at IBM. That position has now be filled by Katrina Alcorn, the former head of design at Autodesk. I’ve read her book Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink which I thought was powerful, insightful, and moving and I’ve been impressed with her early days of being at the helm of IBM Design.

I’d like to reflect in this post on Phil Gilbert, the leader, the transformation of IBM that he led, our journey together, and the lessons I learned from him. I’ve so appreciated Phil’s support of what I’ve been able to do over the past eight years, the guidance he’s provided, and the freedom he afforded me in doing what I thought was the right thing to do.

Phil Gilbert in front of the IBM Design sign in the IBM Austin Studio.

Phil joins IBM

Phil is a serial entrepreneur and IBM bought the company he led, Lombardi Software, in 2010. His company had no new technology per se that IBM didn’t already have. His company had just done a great job of designing an exemplary user experience for their products. And they did that by using a version of design thinking that Phil innovated. Phil was asked to lead the IBM business unit that his company had been acquired into. He got to work to introduce design thinking and to simplify the portfolio of 44 products. Within a year, Phil had introduced his version of design thinking and reduced the products from 44 to 4 while also increasing revenue.

IBM gets a new CEO

In 2012, IBM announced a new CEO in the person of Ginni Rometty. I was in a meeting with Ginni on her second day on the job. She started off her talk by saying that the client experience would be the most important strategic area of focus during her leadership. I was delighted. And I knew that the group of design managers that I led across the company should provide some input to her to realize her vision. We pulled together the best practices that we saw inside the company which had Phil’s organization’s design thinking in the top spot. We also determined that we would have to hire a lot more designers and researchers given her focus. I put a presentation together recommending the practices and staffing and together with fellow executive Sal Vella presented it on a conference call to Robert LeBlanc, our Senior Vice President. He asked me to gather some more data on the current population. I collected that information—230 designers and researchers with most of them assigned to more than one product and on average three products. I thought it was so important to get this information to Robert that I flew on my own dime to New York to share it with him in person. He was shocked at how few designers and researchers we had and even more so the fact that they were typically working on more than one product. Given the recommendation from our previous presentation coupled with these cold hard facts about our population, he immediately contacted Ginni. Robert also had conversations in parallel with Phil and then more between Robert, Phil, and Ginni. Ginni then had a call with Phil and asked him whether he could achieve what he accomplished with his business unit for all of IBM. Phil answered “I don’t know but I’m willing to try”. Phil was then asked to take on the role of General Manager of Design for IBM.

Developing the Framework

Phil, together with my long-time colleague Charlie Hill (now an IBM Fellow), announced our new IBM Design initiative at a meeting of all the software technical leaders at the end of 2012. Phil also pulled a small group of us, some existing design leaders at IBM like Charlie and me and members of the team that he brought with him from Lombardy and his first IBM business unit. Joining Phil, Charlie, and me were Adam Cutler, Fahad Osmani, Pierre Henri Clouin, and Melissa Sader.

Adam Cutler, Phil Gilbert, Fahad Osmani, Charlie Hill, Karel Vredenburg, Melissa Sader, and Pierre-Henri Clouin.

This small team developed the approach we would take and the framework we would use. We purposely referred to it as a framework because it was multi-faceted due to the bold and ambitious remit we received from CEO Ginni Rometti to “create a global, 
sustainable culture 
of design and 
design thinking at IBM.” The initial framework focussed on the people, places, and practices required to achieve that bold vision. We hired a massive number of staff which took our number designers and researchers from the original 230 to now over 3,000. We built design studios and now have close to a hundred. And the foundation of our practices was what started out as IBM Design Thinking and eventually renamed to Enterprise Design Thinking when we started helping other companies adopt it.

The Transformation

Product Labs: In one of the first meetings I had with Phil he said “you know this company well and many people know you so would you like to communicate and share our new IBM Design framework in person to each of the product development labs around the world?” I said “absolutely” and put an overview deck together and started to rack up frequent flyer miles as I traveled the world visiting the labs and presenting my New Era in IBM Design message at all employee town halls and having meetings with location executives and design teams. People still mention to me that they remember hearing me speak at their location and being inspired by our new direction and being committed to our program. Our core team, now including Doug Powell, continued its focus on hiring designers and researchers for product teams, onboarding them in a three month long bootcamp we now call Patterns, activating existing product teams in the practice of Enterprise Design Thinking in week-long bootcamps, building out studios around the world, and supporting the early teams onboarded to use our new framework.

Design Services: After my first year of evangelizing our new design program to the product development labs around the world, Phil and I had another conversation, actually during my first performance review with him. After we quickly dispensed with the performance evaluation part of the meeting, I said, “do you think our services teams should be using our framework too with their work with clients?” Phil answered and asked me another question, “yes they should and do you want to do it?” I said “absolutely”. Phil’s trust in me taking on the transformation of our entire design services organization single-handedly empowered me to quickly write an email with my proposal to the executive responsible for IBM’s Global Business Services iX organization, Paul Papas. I got an answer back almost immediately saying simply, “YES, how soon can you get to New York?”. After that meeting, I worked closely with Matt Candy who headed up the design services iX organization across Europe for Paul at that time and who shared my vision of infusing design thinking into the practices of his teams. I spent the next year developing a services version of Enterprise Design Thinking and again flying around the world starting for the first few months in Europe with Matt’s teams activating our services designers. I taught a four-day bootcamp for services designers and a one day activation for the people charged with selling design services engagements, the associate partners, partners, and other executives. I also used an apprentice approach having two or three apprentices joining me in order to learn how to do what I did for themselves. Phil commented, “but, Karel, that approach won’t scale”. So I pivoted to teaching train-the-trainer classes so as to expedite and widen the reach of our program. Those leaders continued to activate the rest of the staff and new hires in our services organization.

Clients and Sales Teams: After I activated the GBS iX teams and enabled them to train themselves, the next conversation with Phil went something like this, “Phil, our Enterprise Design Thinking approaches are clearly powerful for our design services teams, I think they’ll also be powerful in sales situations with clients”. Having been a serial entrepreneur and still thinking like one, Phil has always had a maniacal focus on clients. In fact, I’ve seen him in situations with clients were I could see that he’s a natural salesman while appearing to not be one overtly. Phil again supported my desire to pursue the use of EDT for sales. I had already run some client workshops during my time working with GBS iX including ones with my colleagues Rich Berkman and Doug Powell. I continued to hone these workshops and worked with hundreds of clients using them often with their most senior executives, c-suites, and even boards of directors. The success of these sessions and the value they provided to both the clients and to our sales teams led me to start developing an EDT for Sales approach. I initially worked with our technology services organization and had them hire dedicated design staff whom I activated in the use EDT for Sales on sales pursuits. After that, Phil helped me staffed up an absolutely stellar A-team in our Design Program Office to work with me to further hone our EDT for Sales approach and to pilot test it with four of our top sales teams. The approach yielded impressive results so the subsequent year Phil supported me in building out the team even further and also added a co-leader, Nigel Prentice, to work with me in activating each of our top account teams globally. That work was also successful and, in part, inspired our current go to market approach called Experiential Selling.

Academic Programs: As we were wrapping up that work with the sales teams, Phil said, “you’ve been teaching at and working with universities all these years, please schedule a meeting with the two of us to take me through all of that”. I had been an industry professor for about five years at that point having been recruited for the part-time position after being vocal in the press about the gaps in education of the staff we were hiring and why we needed to develop our own three month bootcamp. I told Phil about my having co-developed with Michael Hartmann new curricula for an EMBA program with a business school, an emerging health leaders program with a medical school, and a pan-university innovation by design program for students of any faculty. I also told him about being a judge in design competitions, doing guest lectures and keynotes at universities, and other interactions I’d had with universities. After the presentation, Phil said that he’d like me to develop a new global academic program that would involve working with the top design schools and universities around the world and with the historically black colleges and universities in the US.

I loved the challenge and immediately turned to the university rankings to select the top schools, then selected with Phil the senior design leaders and executives from IBM to serve as academic focals for each school, developed a menu of ways we could collaborate with the schools, and met with design school presidents and university deans together with the assigned academic focals to work out our mutual collaboration plans. Most of those have turned into long-terms relationships with our focals being sought out to teach courses, give guest lectures, conduct workshops, host panel discussions, provide and coach capstone projects, etc. Just to give a few examples of those collaborations, IBM academic focal Adam Cutler is now a SCAD Fellow at the Savanna College of Art and Design, focal Charlie Hill worked with Harvard Business School leading to their writing of a Harvard Business School Case on our IBM design program, focal Hal Wuertz co-developed and is teaching in a new Masters of Arts in Design Engineering program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Brown University, we held an IBM Day at the ArtCenter School of Design (see pic below), we worked with MIT Solve on a design challenge to tackle job insecurity among vulnerable populations with Phil serving as a judge and me helping to facilitate the use of Enterprise Design Thinking by the startups. I’ve also personally taught our Enterprise Design Thinking framework to students at Stanford’s d.school, University of Pennsylvania’s Integrated Product Development program, and worked with Don Norman at the University of California San Diego on his cross-disciplinary Design.a.thons. Over a weekend when I was at the University of California at San Diego, Don and I also got talking about our mutual desire to improve design education and that led to the Future of Design Education initiative. There again, an early call with Phil, Don, Don’s colleague at UCSD Michael Meyer, and I helped launch the initiative with Phil giving it his blessing and providing me budget for IBM to become the industry sponsor.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted to bring together designers to do what we could to make a difference. I partnered with the World Design Organization, Design for America, and our IBM Design community to put together the COVID-19 Design Challenge. In addition to about 100 IBM designers, we also had about 150 students, deans, faculty, and professional designers from various industries who all together did user research, workshopped, and developed solutions to seven major challenges with teams from around the world. It was an amazing experience for everyone involved, had an impact, and we also created a website with the results of the work and also a Medium article describing the entire project.

Phil giving a keynote at ArtCenter School of Design

One IBM: While the global academic programs work is still ongoing last year, Phil asked me to take on some additional roles. He asked me to chair the Design Leadership Board which involves governing our senior design technical community and reviewing and appointing our Design Principals and Distinguished Designers, the highest technical positions in IBM’s design career framework. A related role involved being responsible for the design profession and our design career framework. I gladly took on these roles and now work with team member Lauren Swanson on those programs. I also suggested to Phil that we should have a Design Executive Team of the most senior design executive leaders in each of the company’s business units to govern the overall design community. Phil agreed and I set up that team as well. At the beginning of this year, Phil asked me to take on some additional responsibilities including design culture across the company including our focus on racial equity, our external social media presence, and our external engagement. I absolutely love those additional areas of responsibility and thank Phil for them. I also now get to work with Renee Albert on these additional responsibilities. That work has resulted in programs like our Design Mavens Power Hour video and podcast series which has been internal to the company thus far but will soon be available externally as well and our collaboration with the America by Design TV show with whom we’ve produced six episodes of Season 1 and we’re working on Season 2 as I write this.

Lessons Learned

I’ve lived a lot of years and have shared what I’ve learned in this blog, in articles, in my book, and on my podcast. However, I’m always motivated to learn more and while Phil was my manager, he was also an informal mentor whether he knew it or not. I’d like to capture here the lessons I learned from spending eight years working with and for him.

1. Audacity—Phil thinks big and sees the entire company as the entity to be designed. He makes bold proposals, is extremely effective at selling them, and then delivers on those proposals confidently and effectively exceeding expectations.

2. Strong Views Loosely Held—When someone first meets Phil, they’re often struck by how strongly he expressed his views but when you get to know him better you realize that he believes in taking a position, arguing it strongly, but then be willing to change his views if someone else comes up with an even stronger argument counter to that view. He actually uses the phrase “strong views loosely held” himself when describing his style.

3. Understand Strengths—Phil has a real talent for getting to know someone, understanding their strengths, and then aligning their work assignments with those those strengths. He did that with me all the years we worked together and it felt so empowering.

4. Pick Your Battles—There were numerous times when I was working on an issue or other members of the team were and Phil would question whether it was worth it to address that issue. Some battles aren’t worth fighting. They also can divert attention and resources from the issues that are worth addressing.

5. Take the Long View—Further to the last point, the lens that Phil uses to determine whether an issue is worth addressing is whether it is key to achieving the long-term goals.

6. Take a Sales Perspective—Many situations we find ourselves in require convincing people to do something and keeping an eye on what you’d like to achieve in your communication is key. A salesperson does that and Phil showed me in many instances while in meetings with clients or colleagues how that seller’s mindset is crucial to those situations. The best salespeople don’t make it obvious that they’re selling. They understand the other person deeply and then using that knowledge customize their pitch accordingly. Phil is a master at this.

7. Be Authentic—Some leaders put up a facade but Phil doesn’t. He’s open and honest plus shares emotions that he’s experiencing. Phil’s personal reaction to George Floyd’s murder, his immediate hosting of a companywide town hall with the design community, and his launching of our Racial Equity in Design initiative is a case in point. Phil focuses on doing what’s right authentically.

8. Don’t be Afraid to Use the Word “Love”—Related to the notion of being authentic, how many times do you ever hear a senior executive say to their team, “I love you”. Well, Phil does. And he means it. His expressions of his emotions like this make him even a better leader that people truly connect with.

9. The Power of Storytelling—Phil is a master storyteller. He regularly uses stories to provide context for what he’s talking about and it has the effect of not only engaging whom he’s speaking with but it also deepens their understanding.

10. Take Stock & Pivot—Many people talk about the need to sense and respond but Phil lives it. Likely from his days as a serial entrepreneur, Phil constantly checks to see how things are going and takes action accordingly. As an example, in most of our eight years transforming IBM, Phil held quarterly offsite meetings with his direct report team. I called those pivot meetings although he couldn’t call them that. We would take stock of how our various programs were going and he would take action amping up programs that were going well, cancelling programs that weren’t, and launching new programs if that was required. This was all done very quickly.

I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Phil for his leadership in transforming IBM but also for his collaboration with and support of me and the various programs I was able to launch and lead. I also appreciate what I’ve learned from working with Phil these past eight years. It has made me a better leader and person.

Innovation Theater vs. Design Thinking Mastery

I’ve been teaching and using Enterprise Design Thinking for eight years now. I activated each of the business units of IBM and many clients and numerous other organizations. I’ve also observed the way that many organizations use design thinking that I didn’t teach or lead. And I’ve learned a few things that I’d like to share.

Innovation Theater Defined

Many people do design thinking wrong and few do it optimally. I characterize the major way people do design thinking wrong by saying that they’re simply doing “innovation theater”. I was doing a guest lecture on Enterprise Design: An Intrapreneurial Perspective at the Stanford d.school last week and used this phrase and Bill Burnett who runs the program said, “ah, innovation theater, I like that and am going to use that”. The way the phrase has resonated so well with experts in design thinking like Bill inspired me to devote this blogpost to it as a cautionary tale for non-experts and to provide them with some guidance for how to avoid perpetuating the bad practice of innovation theater.

The phrase perfectly captures the essence of only appearing to be innovative by standing around with stickies and a sharpie at a whiteboard wall, if you’re in-person, or the digital equivalent, if you’re remote and digital. People doing innovation theater simply use the activities and mapping techniques of design thinking and nothing more. They think design thinking equates to doing a workshop and nothing else.

What’s Wrong with Innovation Theater?

You may ask, so what’s wrong with Innovation Theater? If your goal is to simply look innovative and cool, there’s nothing wrong with Innovation Theater. However, if you want to actually be innovative using Enterprise Design Thinking then you’re doing it wrong. In brief, you’re only doing the "reflect” element of the three element observe-reflect-make loop of Enterprise Design Thinking. Unless you’re going to do it right, don’t call it design thinking because your failed project will give design thinking done right a bad name.

Let’s look at what is typically missing when people do Innovation Theater.

Observe: Innovation Theater typically eliminates the “Observe part of the loop which means you’re not understanding the users you wish to serve. You’re essentially “flying blind” and simply making up out of thin air your understanding of users with no real data. Your project therefore lacks the very foundation that all projects should have, a deep knowledge of and empathy for the user.

Make: When you’re only using the workshopping and mapping methods that are mostly represented by the term “reflect”, you’re also eliminating the crucial element of making, the essential intended result of the effort. You have to make a version of what you’re ideating in order to again observe user feedback on it.

The Principles and Keys: Practitioners doing Innovation Theater also don’t adhere to the Enterprise Design Thinking principles including “a focus on user outcomes”, “restless reinvention”, and “diverse and empowered teams” nor the keys including Hills, Playbacks, and Sponsor Users. They typically don’t involve users at all, don’t iterate, and don’t have true diversity reflecting the diversity of the users they’re wanting to serve and the team isn’t empowered to implement the ideas generated in the session. They also don’t craft Hills articulating the who-is-going-to-be-able-to-do-what-with-what-wow-experience to guide the next stages of the project. They don’t do Playbacks of the evolving user experience to all key stakeholders nor have a handful of Sponsor Users who are representative of their target market to work with for two to three hours per week.

Design Thinking Mastery

So how do you do Enterprise Design Thinking optimally? Well, you need to adopt a Designer’s Mindset and disabuse yourself of the notion that design thinking is a workshop or just just a set of methods and tools to use indiscriminately.

Observe: You need to gain a deep understanding of the users you intend to serve. You can do that by carrying out the type of user research that’s required for what you need to learn. That can take the form of ethnographic observation especially if it is important to understand the environment your users are in, how they interact with one another, and without any undue influence, interference, or potential bias from you. If you require deeper insight into the what your users are thinking and feeling, you may want to use structured interviews. My favorite interview questions include “what keeps you up at night about your job?” to get at deep worries that users have that you should consider addressing. When a design team of mine a few years ago was working on a health application, they asked Oncologists that question and they got answers like “I worry that my diagnosis is wrong or that I haven’t read the latest literature about my patient’s condition”. The application we were working on was able to provide information to address these sorts of concerns. Another favorite question is “what gets you up in the morning about what you do?” which gets at what they really value. Those same Oncologists answered this question by saying “the time I get to spend with my patients” which made the design team realize that we needed to make sure that the technology we were working on wouldn’t get in the way of the physician-patient interaction. Of course, you could use a combination of these two methods or hundreds of other methods. To know what to do, you should call on a trained Design Researcher (also referred to as a User Researcher).

Reflect: You need to consider the tools of design thinking, like Empathy Maps, Stakeholder Maps, As-is Scenario maps, Prioritization Grids, Storyboards, and To-be Scenarios, like the tools of a carpenter uses. They don’t indiscriminately use a hammer simply because it’s the first tool in their toolbox even when they’re dealing with a screw. And they don’t use the first Allen wrench that they see when it may be the wrong size for the job. No. They suit the tool to the task or objective at hand. You need to do the same. For example, if you’re working in a domain where the user and the people they interact with are equally important to understand for the problem you’re solving, consider different approaches to capturing the input. You could use one Empathy map with different colored stickies, one color for each person you’re interviewing. Alternatively, you could create a separate Empathy Map for each person and to be even more comprehensive, link those individual Empathy Maps together into a Stakeholder Map capturing the relationships between the people involved. You can do the same to capture the experiences of people who interact with one another over time using an As-is Scenario Map. You can again use different colors of stickies for the different people or better yet if they play particular roles, you can use what are called “swim-lanes” for each role and then draw lines indicating when the different roles interact with one another. Also, if you’re using an As-is Scenario Map to capture the day-in-the-life of the person you’re observing or interviewing and their experiences involve working with data throughout and that’s important to what you’ll be building, then include the data they’re working with as a swim-lane as well. Make sure too that you have team members work individually especially during ideation and voting so that you truly get the representation of the room and counteract any groupthink or uneven influence of particular members of the team when you have the team verbalize rather than individually write their ideas. My technique is to use the phrase that it’s “quiet time” now and that I should “only hear the synapses of each person’s brain firing away with creativity”. Become a master carpenter by using your design thinking tools to suit the objective of the project you’re working on.

Make: You’re not done until you’ve made the thing you’ve been working on. And what you make again needs to suit the purpose. The various purposes include thinking through your ideas visually and experientially, communicating your ideas to others, getting feedback from potential users, working out technical feasibility, getting buy-in from stakeholders or investors, etc. Again, don’t mindlessly go about making, intentionally make to suit the objectives you have. For example, you could use a Storyboard to think through your ideas visually and experientially as well as a very early way of communicating your ideas to others. You could draw a paper prototype of an app and use it for a user evaluation or if you’re designing the new flow of patients through a clinic, arrange the layout of the chairs, tables, and mocked up new designed artifacts out of boxes or styrofoam for users to literally walk through. You may want to built a coded prototype to test technical feasibility if, for example, you need to determine whether the machine-learning or AI technology you’re using or the data corpus you have access to is sufficiently capable of doing what you intend for it to do. You may want to build a visualization of your ideas focusing on its value to users in order to show stakeholders or potential investors. A polished video is often a great way to do this.

Principles and Keys: Make sure to maniacally focus on user outcomes. Revisit regularly throughout the project, especially as you’re heavily into implementation, whether you’re still delivering on user outcomes or whether the constraints imposed by technical limitations are compromising the user outcome experience excellence. Challenge yourself and your colleagues too whether your team is diverse enough and whether your team reflects the diversity of the users you’re intending to serve. Project leadership should also continue to challenge themselves as to whether they’re empowering the team sufficiently for them to deliver on the user outcomes. Another question to regularly ask yourself and your team is whether you’re iterating enough. Did you settle on one idea too early when you should have explored a couple of other ideas. Are you learning from your user evaluation sessions that you should more significantly pivot your design and iterate on it? Have you written Hills in the form of who will be able to do what with what wow experience and if you have, are you regularly checking to ensure that you’re still aligned with those Hills? Are you doing Playbacks showing the evolving user experience to all of the key stakeholders and if you are doing that, are the playbacks truly telling the story as a first person experience or are you devolving into statements like “and then the user would tap here”? Take the point of view of the user by using a think-aloud approach and saying things like “oh, I see that I change my setting by pressing this button, let me press that now”, etc. Lastly, make sure that you’re getting a ton of user input and feedback from Sponsor Users, a few real people who are representative of your target audience. Work with them intensely and often.

Designing for the Future

Another way you can optimize your practice is to not only design for the here and now but also for the future. If you only focus on designing for the here and now, your product, system, or solution will be out of date by the time you deliver it. You also have to prevent your design from causing unintended consequences.

Strategic Foresight: There is a whole set of tools, methods, and practices called strategic foresight and also often referred to using other names like speculative futures. These are powerful ways of ensuring your designs will be appropriate for today but also for the future, or in fact, alternative futures. The field of strategic foresight is vast and beyond what I can cover in this blogpost but suffice it to say that you should explore this exciting area to further fill your Enterprise Design Thinking toolkit to be able to focus on trends that are relevant in your domain and ways of analyzing them to ensure your designs will be future-proof.

Pre-Mortem: While the field of strategic foresight is vast, there is one future looking tool that I would suggest should be in every designer’s toolbox specifically to prevent unintended consequences of design. It’s called the Pre-Mortem. The idea is rather than doing a post-mortem after a project has failed, you do it before and then get the insights to prevent the failure. It’s really simple. When the team has worked an idea, you get them to imagine that it’s a year from now and you’ve implemented your idea exactly as you’re now planning it, but it turns out that it is a complete and utter failure. You then ask “what went wrong”, not what could go wrong but rather imagining the actual failure and asking “what went wrong”. After you get those insights, you get the team to ideate on mitigations that would have prevented the failure which you then build into your now more future-proof design. People are fond of the phrase “fail fast and often”. I suggest that people use Pre-Mortems to imagine failing fast and often so that they can prevent some of those failures. I firmly believe that many of the unintended consequences that we’ve seen with a number of startups, scaleups, and now enterprises could have been avoided had the teams gone through this simple exercise. And, you shouldn’t only do it once, do it periodically to stay ahead of potential problems. One of the benefits of this tool is that you often see the design project for more than the thing you’re designing and instead realize that you need to be designing a system that has many users, stakeholders, and often some bad actors.

Designing in the Large

You should also use the masterful power of Enterprise Design Thinking when you don’t just open the aperture at the end of a Pre-Mortem but also in tackling big, even societal, challenges. I led a Design Challenge, together with the World Design Organization, Design for America, and IBM Design, just after the beginning of the pandemic last year for designers to have a positive impact in addressing seven major challenges of the pandemic. Many of the designers were surprised that they could apply Enterprise Design Thinking to tackle even huge challenges like this and in a period of only three weeks (check out the article for more details and the website for the results of the challenge). I led another Enterprise Design Thinking session recently with MIT Solve on the Rethinking Pathways to Employment Grand Challenge for people who are job insecure. This session involved having the winning teams of the challenge co-creating a customized version of their proposed solutions (cycling through the loop again) together with job seekers, potential employers, and case workers for particular workforce boards in specific regions of the US.

I believe we can and should be designing and co-creating with affected communities solutions to address the biggest challenges of society using the Enterprise Design Thinking framework.

So, if you’re doing innovation theater today, please consider the ideas above to develop your mastery to realize the true power of Enterprise Design Thinking. If you’d like to learn more about Enterprise Design Thinking and take some free (during the pandemic) self-paced learning, head to our website.

Video Calls: Amping up How You Show up

Working from home for many of us for the past six months has meant being on video calls all day. And, the way things are looking now with the second wave of the pandemic, we’ll still be on video calls for the foreseeable future. After the first week or two of being on video calls and wearing t-shirts, using the camera on my MacBook Pro, and using my AirPods for audio, I decided to amp up how I showed up. I’d like to share with you what I did largely because so many of you reached out to me after my various remote keynotes and other appearances asking how I show up looking and sounding so good.

Appearance and Room Setup

The top left picture illustrates how I now show up wearing what I normally wear and I’m most comfortable wearing when I’m actually physically in the studio, a button down shirt. Like many people, I also haven’t had a haircut for half a year so I pull the extra hair back in a ponytail.

I also just arranged the room, which is actually a bedroom, in such a way that I have a solid wall behind me. That way I don’t have to worry about what else is showing in the room or anyone else moving around in the room. There are too many embarrassing videos of happenings behind someone when the whole room is showing behind them that you don’t want to be one of those people.

Camera and Microphone

I still had a Logitech C920 that was actually not being used and was being stored in my son’s desk drawer. So I started using that and just recently upgraded to a Logitech BRIO model (see the bottom left of the picture above). However, you can certainly just get the C920 model for a great picture. I control the settings of the camera with an app called Manual Camera which is available in the Mac Appstore. Most of the time I just use the regular lights in the room but this app allows me to control the brightness so that I can get the look I want. In fact, the wall behind me is dark blue but I use the app’s brightness setting to make my background black.

I’ve done a podcast for over ten years called Life Habits (available anywhere podcasts are found as well as on this website). Early on, I bought a Audio-Technica AT2020 USB microphone which I decided to start using for my video calls (see the bottom right of the picture above). It’s cardioid condenser USB microphone that sounds great and plugs directly into the computer’s USB port or with a simple adaptor. It’s also a directional microphone which is great because I can also then use the audio on my Thunderbolt display and not have to wear earphones. I also bought a boom microphone stand for it so that I can easily reach my keyboard while on a video call. I think you should look and feel as natural on a video call as you do when meeting face-to-face. Wearing big over the ear headphones (often referred to as “cans”) takes away from the natural look and also makes you feel more distant from those on the call. Wearing AirPods is better than the cans but they have the disadvantage of having to be charged making a day of video calls a challenge unless you only use one and charge the other or use two sets with one always charging. That becomes a hassle. I also have a pop filter (also shown in the picture above) and while I use it for my podcast recordings, I don’t use it for my video calls largely because it gets in the way and really isn’t needed for video calls.

I should pause here to say that doing what I’ve just described thus far is sufficient to amp up how you show up on your video calls. I’ve recently amped up further largely because I’m being asked to do many more keynotes at conferences all around the world that are virtual and I’d like to perfect even further my setup for those.

Lights and Green Screen

I can control the settings on the Manual Camera app that I mentioned above pretty well. However, when I need a stronger light source, want to have multiple directions of light, and be able to adjust intensity and the warmth of the light, I now use two Neewer LED Video Lights (see top middle of the picture above). These come with a remote so they’re easy to turn on and off as well as to adjust. I initially used these on every video call when I first got them as a present from my kids and kids in law. However, I noticed that I was getting headaches so I now only use them when I’m doing a particularly important keynote, presentation, panel discussion, etc.

Most video call software platforms now provide the ability to put a background picture behind you on calls which is great to deal with the situation I discussed above of controlling what’s shown behind you. However, the problem with that option is that parts of your body or even your whole body can disappear into the background picture which is disconcerting, distracting, and often humorous. The way to use background images so that you stay as solid as you are in real life in front of a background image is by using a green screen. I bought the Emart green screen (see top right in the picture above). It’s collapsible and retractable meaning that I can raise it up and lower it back into is case that sits on the floor easily between video calls.

Zoom has been the leader in the field of video conferencing and first introduced most of the advanced features. Zoom has the background image feature and also provides a setting for you to indicate when you’re using a green screen which then let’s them use the chroma key technology to automatically eliminate your background and replace it seamlessly with the background image. However, WebEx which the company I work for uses, only recently introduce the background image feature but hasn’t yet included a green screen setting and in fact, they’ve recently prevented third party companies that provide that feature as a pre-process from operating with WebEx. I’m hoping that this means they’re about to offer the feature themselves. However, right now you can’t use background images with a green screen when you’re using WebEx. And, that’s one of the reasons why I needed a green screen that was flexible enough to get out of the way. This isn’t the only reason I wanted a flexible one, I also often still prefer my physical black background. And yet, other times I need to use a green screen when, for example, a conference wants presenters to use a particular background or when I want to include my own branding.

Internet and Bandwidth

You could do everything that I’ve described above and still not optimally show up on video calls. Why? Because your internet access and bandwidth may be suboptimal. Make sure that your computer can effectively reach the internet in your home by positioning it so that I can reach a strong WiFi signal or use an ethernet wired connection. It you have sufficient internet in your home but it doesn’t reach where you want to do your video calls from, you may need to look into a mesh home network system which can distribute your WiFi signal more evenly throughout your home. I use a three unit Orbi system from Netgear.

You may though have the WiFi signal appropriately distributed throughout your home but not have sufficient bandwidth coming into your home. With more members of a family working from home and being educated from home normally sufficient bandwidth can be strained resulting in the need to buy a higher bandwidth package.

Some Final Thoughts

Some may say, what does all this matter. I suggest that it matters a lot. How you show up leaves an impression on the people you’re on a video call with but also even more importantly, determines how well you’re able to contribute to whatever you’re doing on the video call. If you’re not able to be heard due to your setup or make your point effectively because people can’t see your facial expressions, or your connection drops completely, that impacts whatever you’re doing online. People generally care about what they look like, act like, talk like, and show up in person so why wouldn’t that be important on video calls. I submit that it’s even more important.

Let me also just provide a few other ways to optimize how you show up.

• Put the video call window that shows the people you’re speaking with as close as possible to the video camera you’re using. You want to simulate actually speaking to the other person so you want to look at them. It’s really disconcerting, for example, when someone is speaking to you but looking totally in another direction at the camera on another computer. Try to simulate how you would look if you were there in person.

• Turn your camera on as much as you can other than at the odd times that there’s some reason not to due to something happening in the house or you just got back from a run. We should be sensitive to there being times when someone isn’t camera ready but I suggest for your own purposes to minimize those times if you at all can. Think about it. You’re eliminating the richest channel of communication, the visual, when not using your camera.

• Most video call platforms have an option to let the software adjust your microphone volume. Use that! Again, it’s disconcerting when others on the call can’t hear you or equally disconcerting if your volume is up too high and you’re blasting louder that others on the call. Also, if you’re going to use a headset, make sure that the microphone in particular sounds good. There are people on calls that I’m on who are using such crappy headphone microphones that people have a hard time understanding what they’re saying.

• When you’re on calls with a number of others, whenever possible, try to use the gallery view so that you can simulate being in a meeting with each of your colleagues or classmates.

Lastly, let me address the question of cost and personal circumstances. I know that some of you won’t be able to buy any of the things I’ve mentioned here. You might have lost your job due to the pandemic or just aren’t in a financial position to afford any of this. If that is you, I still think that you can use the general advice I’ve given here which can apply to almost any situation. I know that others of you may have personal circumstances preventing you from having a dedicated room to use for video calls necessitating using headphones for example.

The rest of you may be able to afford some or all of the things I’ve mentioned here. As I pointed out above, I’d recommend the products on the bottom row of the picture above for most of you and the lights and green screen only for those of you who have a professional need to amp things up even further.

For those interested in getting some or all of this gear, let me give you some idea of what these things cost. The Logitech C920 webcam that I initially used costs about $100 (I’ll give all prices in US funds from Amazon), the updated Logitech BRIO model costs around $260, the Manual Camera app costs $10 in the Apple App Store, the Audio-Technica AT2020 microphone costs about $160, the stand costs about $20, the Neewer light kit costs about $160, and the Emart green screen costs about $190. The basics that I’ve recommended above will together then cost less than $300 and the full kit will cost about $800.

Finally, I believe that effective communication is incredibly important and that communication that has to be done digitally is even more important. I hope that sharing my experiences and advice on this topic will be of help to you in making your digital communication on video calls more effective.

Rethinking Design Education

We’ve been working for some time to organize a Future of Design Education project. I’m delighted that we’re now launching and looking for many people to join us. Read our description below and then please register your interest in contributing if you have the background and time to participate. Also, feel free to nominate others that you think would provide a significant contribution.

The Challenge

The requirements of the 21st century are quite different than those of earlier years. New needs continually arise, along with new tools, technologies, and materials. Designers are starting to address some of the major societal issues facing the planet. Does design education prepare them to work with and lead the multidisciplinary teams required to work on these complex sociotechnical systems?

The Origins

We are embarking on a serious effort to rethink design education for the 21st century. We started with the multiple thoughtful articles in two special issues of the journal She Ji on design education (download from our website). This inspired us to assemble a team of senior designers from academia and business to serve as a steering committee to start a large effort to rethink design education.

The Working Group

Other disciplines that have restructured their curricula have required a Working Group of over a hundred people working for a year or more: this will certainly be true for the complex set of specialties called design.

To be successful, we must accommodate all beliefs and perspectives. Yes, we do need senior, well-established designers, but we also need those who challenge the existing ways. Some will wish to expand and extend traditional design education. Some might wish to revolutionize it. We believe that we can do both -- not by compromises that weaken all positions, but by providing alternative paths. 

The world is changing rapidly, with new views on the role of design in the world as well as a growing realization that the existing model of design practice had its historical origins in the industrialized nations of the world as a service to industry. Today’s designers have moved far beyond these historical origins. One result is greater awareness of the deterioration of the economies, environment, and culture in what has been called the “colonization of the world.” Our initial committee was too small to address these important issues: The larger composition of the Working Group will allow a major rethinking of design education.

This effort will fail without the effort being open and public, which is why we are reaching out to you. We need your participation to propose yourself as well as others for the Working Group so that we will have a rich diversity in age, gender, race, areas of interest, socioeconomic status, and political views. Nominate people who are interested in the important, but long and difficult task of changing design education. We also encourage self-nominations -- so yes, nominate yourself if you have the background, interest, and time to participate.

Help Us by Nominating Yourself or Others

To learn more about this project and the different levels of involvement, to volunteer yourself and to propose other candidates, visit our website. https://www.FutureOfDesignEducation.org/.

Steering Committee: https://www.futureofdesigneducation.org/steeringcommittee.

Let's Design a New World

I think we’d all agree that the world we’ve been living in the last few years is far from optimal. In fact, we’re getting a taste of what the world might be like if we don’t make some drastic changes and make them soon. I believe that designers and design thinkers can not only help but can lead some of the change that’s required.

The Power of Design

I made the case in the Design for America keynote I gave last August and I elaborated on it in a blog post here that designers should mobilize to tackle the big bold problems of the world and do that with a bold, global, and personal perspective.

Design Challenge Wave 1

A few short months after that, the world was hit by the global COVID19 pandemic. And in collaboration with Srini Srinivasan, the president of the World Design Organization (WDO) and Rebecca Breuer, the executive director of Design for America (DFA), we brought 255 designers together from the WDO, DFA, and IBM Design communities from 33 countries and across 17 timezones to address several urgent and potential impactful challenges. The results of that work are now available on our COVID19DesignChallenge.org website including projects addressing awareness and communication, essential workers, vulnerable communities, remote learning, and healthy habits. Everyone involved in that project did awesome work and it’s made a real difference in dealing with the most urgent issues. I did a webinar interview about the project that’s now available online and I also just wrote a Medium story that goes into the details of the project as well.

Additional Challenges

Of course, there’s much left to be done in addressing the world’s biggest challenges. I believe we need to have designers use the power of design to address topics like climate change. My colleagues Adam Cutler and Susanne Jones and I presented at the Security and Sustainability Forum webinar on the topics of “Using Design Thinking to Address Global Changes, Effectively Use AI, and Collaborate on Decarbonization”. We made the point that design thinking and AI, when used correctly, can help address many challenges and, importantly, including key aspects of climate change. Similarly, while we’re in the midst of this global pandemic, I’ve also been thinking about the root causes of pandemics and how can we use design thinking to effectively start now to prevent the next pandemic. And of course, we may still experience the next pandemic and we need to use some of the work from our COVID19 Design Challenge and more to prepare for that eventuality as well. And of course, I think most of us know that we’re not going back to the old normal but rather we’re going to be entering the new normal. We’ll also need to carefully design that. And, lastly, we need to take this opportunity to do as the title of this post suggests, design a new world. Let’s design a new world without racism, inequity, and divisiveness.

Design Challenge Wave 2

I’m indebted to the WDO’s Srini Srinivasan and DFA’s Rebecca Breuer for our incredible co-leading of the COVID19 Design Challenge and to all the talented, committed, and passionate designers who worked on it. That was Design Challenge Wave 1 and i hope that we’ll again together launch Wave 2 soon in order to address the additional challenges I mentioned in this post.

I say it’s time to design a new world. Let’s do this!

Fostering an Awesome Design Studio Culture

I’ve seen hundreds of design studios and innovation spaces within companies, incubators, and at universities in my travels. Some are staggeringly beautiful spaces but lacking in character and an inspiring, collaborative, engaging, and quite frankly fun culture. The bricks and mortar as well as whiteboard walls, open collaboration spaces, moveable furniture, etc. are important but they’re not as important as the culture of the place. And, that’s the focus of this post.

In addition to my global design role at IBM, focussed at present on our Global Academic Programs, I also have the honor of serving as the head of IBM Studios Canada with seven locations across the country. I’m really pleased with and proud of how the culture in our spaces has evolved over the past few years and I’d like to share some of the ingredients that I think really made and continue to make the difference. Each of our spaces is unique and, in turn, develops its own culture but these are some of the things we’ve found are helpful in fostering an awesome design studio culture in any space and I thought you may want to consider some or all of these if you haven’t already for your studio.

Some Simple Rules:

1. Hire the right people - Include members of your studio in the interview process and look for skills but also look for fit to the studio. Strive for diversity in all relevant forms: gender, age, race, life experience, etc.

2. Balance project and studio focus - A tension typically exists between focusing on the project work needing to be done and participating in studio activities. For a healthy studio culture, the leadership team needs to communicate to studio members that both are important. There may be times when the project work takes precedence but those times should be rare.

3. Encourage but don’t manage - A great culture cannot be mandated nor implemented by management. Leadership needs to encourage, support, and give license for studio members to propose and lead studio activities that they’d like to have.

4. Balance work with fun - While the work being done in the studio is important, it’s equally important for studio members to get to know each other better as people and to just relax and have a good time together.

5. Foster professional growth - The experiences members have in a studio should enhance their growth as professionals whether that is further honing their skills, gaining additional knowledge, working on different teams, or having career advancement.

Examples of Activities:

• New employee experience - The first day on the job should be special. We try to ensure that the computer and other equipment the studio member will require is all ready for them, that the manager walks them through the studio to meet everyone individually, that studio leadership provides a personalized overview of the company and how the studio fits into the company, and the new studio member is asked to prepare an interesting and fun presentation at the next all studio meeting introducing themselves and talking about where they were born and grew up, what schools they went to, where they’ve worked, what their favorite things to do are outside of work, and some other fun things about themselves.

• Personalizing the space - Some studios use a ‘hoteling’ model where employees are assigned desks for the day, others provide desks and personal workspaces on a more permanent basis. In our experience, the latter is far more helpful in fostering an awesome studio culture. People appreciate some predicability and stability in where they sit and they also love to personalize their space with plants, stickers, pictures, etc. Studios using the hoteling model, on the other hand, often feel stark and impersonal.

• Show and Tell sessions - It’s good for studio members to share what they’re working on with other studio members. While some studios use formal critique sessions, I’ve noticed that simply giving designers the opportunity to informally share their work and ask for input if they want works much better. There’s less pressure and it ensures that everyone in the studio knows what others are working on and what challenges they’re having.

• Workshopping enhancements - Designers in most studios I’ve visited use design thinking workshopping in their product or service design work. However, they don’t think to use those powerful methods to ensure that the studio space they’re working in is designed intentionally to suit their needs. We’ve found that workshopping studio enhancements not only ensures an optimal user focused space design, it also builds studio culture, belongingness, and pride knowing that the designers designed their own space.

• Skill building opportunities - A studio shouldn’t just be a physical space to work. It should also explicitly foster skill building. We’ve found it helpful to either bring in an expert on a subject or more often in fact to share expertise that a member of the studio has with others in the studio.

• Opportunities for career growth - In addition to acquiring new skills, studios also need to encourage and support career growth in the practice of those skills. This can be accomplished by encouraging staff to help with client workshops, run volunteer initiatives like STEM for Girls, STEAM for Kids, Bring your Kids to Work, onboarding and mentoring of new employees, coaching student capstone projects at universities, serving as a judge for university design competitions, moving from one team in the studio to another, and of course, being promoted to a higher level position.

• Designing for social good - Skill development and career progression are important but so is giving permission and encouraging studio members to pursue designing for social good initiatives. Recent examples in our studios have included redesigning the recycling system used in our buildings to make it more effective and comprehensive and designing a design thinking education curriculum for elementary schools.

• Birthday and vacation sharing - A studio has to have a lot of just having fun together. One great activity that several of our studios do is to celebrate all the birthdays for that month together including birthday hats, cake, and singing. After the birthday celebrations we transition to having studio members share pics and stories from any recent vacations or trips. These activities are hugely popular with the whole studio turning out for the event.

• Snacks, lunches, & social outings - Keeping with the having fun theme, our locations now provide free snacks all day long. Groups of colleagues regularly go and have lunches together at nearby restaurants, particularly at your downtown studios. We also occasionally get together for meals with the whole studio team and for various outings to places like the movies, axe throwing, tree climbing, hiking. escape rooms, etc.

• Celebrating significant holiday events - It’s great to celebrate significant holiday events with the whole studio, like halloween and the holiday season. The studio members decorate the whole place including themselves. Being talented designers, the halloween face painting and costumes are always out of this world amazing. One of our studios dressed up and played the roles of a murder mystery one year.

• Multi-studio summit get togethers - My favorite time of the year is the IBM Canada Design Summit which brings together all seven locations together for two days. We’ve now held this Summit for the past four years and it’s the highlight of the year for us. We have keynote talks, one of which I give, guest speakers, a client panel, demos, skill building sessions, fun activities including a design focussed jeopardy game, and workshopping key challenges. This year we included students and faculty from local design schools and universities for the second day and together workshopped improving design education and industry-academia collaboration.

We spend a lot of our lives at work and I think its crucially important to make that time as enjoyable, productive, rewarding, stimulating, and fun as possible. We don’t profess to have all the answers but I hope our experience will provide you some ideas that you may not have tried in making your studio more awesome.

I’d like to thank the leaders and the entire staff for having done everything that I’ve shared in this post. You are, in fact, awesome!

Being Bold, Global, and Personal

I presented the closing keynote at the Design for America (DFA) Summit 2019 just outside Chicago. I celebrated the great work done by the DFA over their now 10 year history. I then talked about the need for interconnectedness between business, design, and society and the fostering of interconnected communities. After sharing the experience of our team’s design transformation of IBM, the hiring of a huge design team, the building of studios all around the world, the ways we’ve fostered connectedness within and between studios and with clients, and now connecting externally to various educational institutions, I talked about the challenges we all should address focussed on being bold, global, and personal.

There’s been a trend for universities to focus on “designing for the social good” and the DFA does an excellent job of that at more than 40 campuses across the US. The capstone classes I teach and the college campus workshops I facilitate have included “designing for the social good” as well. I think we should continue to do projects like that but I’d like to challenge us all to be more bold in the topics we take on.

There are three areas of focus that require particular bold attention in my view: 1) climate change, 2) social media and 3) divisive societies.

Climate Change

The image above is of the Athabasca Glacier that I visited some ten years ago. It had such a profound impact on me. The site has markers indicating where the glacier was every few years and the accelerating receding of the glacier is shockingly evident. Climate change for many people is quite theoretical but it’s disturbingly real for anyone visiting this site. The projects we’ve applied design and design thinking to on the topic of climate change have been important but, I believe, not bold enough. And why are they not bold enough? Because we don’t have time as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out. We need to be more bold at the global level of organizations and governments but also at the personal level.

Tesla

We need to workshop and champion crazy bold ideas like Elon Musk’s of building an all electric car. It isn’t bold to do that in itself. He could have built an entry-level super ugly car that only environmentalists would buy. Instead, he first built a desirable electric sports car and a luxury car which were highly desirable for their looks and performance. And, they were also environmental. Tesla was bold in its design and its engineering but also in its attention to the need to build out an entire system of Superchargers, mobile service technicians, and over-the-air software updates. After creating an incredible demand for these highly desirable well-designed and amazingly well-engineered cars, Tesla delivered a reasonably affordable sedan that it’s having to build new massive giga-factories for in order to keep up with demand. Tesla’s also developing solar technology for homes but in the future also for cars so that they possibly will be able to be run entirely on solar energy. And of course, while making a huge dent in climate change, Tesla is also developing autonomous self-driving technology to eliminate the need for human drivers and, in turn, to drastically reduce the death toll from human drivers.

What’s the lesson in what Musk and Tesla have done and are doing? Their startup wasn’t simply trying to develop another Instagram in order to be bought by the major players or a tiny solution to climate change, Elon Musk and Tesla addressed the hugely bold challenge of how might we accelerate sustainable energy and autonomy. They’ve been addressing that challenge and inspiring others to do the same. And, importantly, they didn’t just address the global problem boldly, they also empathized with people and designed their vehicles and the surrounding technical ecosystem in such a way that people desired the cars for their looks and drivability and, oh, in turn are making a huge positive impact on reducing climate change. Bold, global, and personal.

Beyond Meat

While transportation is a major contributor to climate change, so is animal agriculture. And what did startup Beyond Meat do to address the challenge? Did they produce an ugly meat alternative that tasted strange but that some people might buy simply because they wanted to reduce their impact on the environment? No. They used the best science available to understand what made meat taste and look like meat and they then found plant-based ingredients to create a product that tasted and looked like meat but didn’t require environmentally damaging animal agriculture. And they placed their products in the meat section of grocery stores to make it easy for consumers to switch and they created huge demand every time their product was introduced to yet another fast food chain. They’ve also broadened their products so that they have alternatives for most animal-based meats and they’ve made it easy for all places that serve animal-based meat today to also sell their plant-based meat. Much like Elon’s objective for autonomy in additional to sustainable energy, Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown had the additional objective of eliminating animal suffering and death. The formula of addressing a bold challenge globally but also with a focus on the personal made the difference.

These are but two examples both of which are salient to me with regard to taking effective action. We need many, many more.

Social Media

Another area requiring bold ideas and action involves social media. Things started off innocently enough with social networks connecting people and enabling them to share posts and pictures with each other. Early on there was even an explicit intention to not monetize with advertising. But that all changed.

The Problem

And when it did all change, the largely positive impact became much less so and we started seeing worrying implications of designing these services to increase engagement and time spent on the site in order to increase advertising revenue, the optimization of newsfeed algorithms for showing similar content, and the ability for advertisers to micro-target messages. While these developments were good for business, they weren’t necessarily for users or society as a whole. Users became addicted to their newsfeeds, constantly checking them every few minutes. Advertisers loved the platforms to influence people to buy their products but so did anyone wanting to influence the perceptions, beliefs, and actions of people. The very same micro-targeting that advertisers loved was now being used to purposely spread misinformation and that misinformation was shared disproportionately compared with veridical information. Could this have been avoided? Well, yes, had these companies used strategic foresight methods and/or an exercise that we often use called a pre-mortem. After a team has done their user research, ideated solutions, and chosen a particular solution as the preferred, the team is asked to imagine that they’ve now implemented that solution and it’s a year in the future and the project completed failed. The team is then asked to consider what may have gone wrong and then to come up with mitigations to prevent those negative outcomes. These companies and all of silicon valley seemed to be consumed by youthful optimism without critically evaluating what could go wrong and when things did go wrong, as they still are regularly, blind optimism still appears to be their single-minded strategy.

The use of social media platforms to spread disunity, to tailor different messages to specific groups, and to provide direct access to subgroups with no filtering, vetting, or review has had disastrous effects on the social fabric of societies around the globe.

Some Positive Examples

Tristan Harris recognized some of these dangers of social media early and has been a champion for raising awareness of them. He argues that social media is essentially an attention economy which can be best characterized as “the race to the bottom of the brainstem”. He is credited with starting the Time Well Spent movement and the Center for Humane Technology focusing on the problem of “human downgrading”. Tristan, together with Aza Raskin, developed terminology for people to relate to including phrases like the downgrading of humans, downgrading of humanity, downgrading of our relationships, downgrading of our attention, downgrading of democracy, and downgrading of our sense of decency.

Tristan’s work mostly focusses on characterizing the problem but he has also inspired some changes like Apple’s attempt to reduce social media addiction by introducing Screen Time for all its platforms which provides information to users about their social media use and allows users to set limits on their use. They also introduced Do Not Disturb While Driving which prevents the use of the phone while driving.

To start to address the influence of social media on elections, several companies have admirably banned political advertising including Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitch, and TikTok. Twitter’s CEO argues that “political message reach should be earned, not bought”.

Big Challenges Remain

Notably absent are the advertising powerhouses Facebook and Google. They haven’t addressed the problem of human downgrading or specifically their negative impact on elections and democracy. And remember, these are the companies who have all our data, who know us best, and who have advertising platforms capable of micro-targeting based on those data. Facebook in particular argues that this is a free speech issue and argues against fact checking ads saying that cable networks and national broadcasters play them. However, what’s worse in my view is that Facebook allows any information correct or incorrect to be targeted to specific groups with micro-targeting which nobody else can see. They’re hugely different in that regard.

While there are some companies dealing with these issue in a bold progressive way, others seem to be guided more by revenue than what would be best for their users, democracy, and society in general. The backlash has led to a healthy crop of alternatives to Facebook and Google services. Some will argue that these startups couldn’t possibly succeed but look back at what Tesla and Beyond Meat have done in the climate change space and the changes now being made in the incumbent competitors. Most of the big automakers are now developing electric cars and the biggest animal-based meat companies are now buying up plant-based meat companies and offering an increasing supply of plant-based products. I believe that the social media space is ripe for disruption too.

Divisive Societies

Societies in the past were never completely homogeneous but societies today appear to be more heterogeneous than ever before largely due in my view to the topics discussed above. Interestingly, societies aren’t so much heterogeneous but bifurcated along several lines, conservative vs. liberal, young vs. old, white vs. black, one religion vs. another religion, immigrant vs. non-immigrant, rural vs. city, rich vs. poor, women vs. men, educated vs. uneducated, etc. And topics like climate change cut across these divisions and social media both fans the flames of these heated divisions and also ensures that no real debate happens across them. Entrenched views become even more entrenched. The lines between in-groups and out-groups are even more solidly drawn. As a result, we don’t see collaboration, compromise, or quite frankly working for the common good. This is the case in many countries around the world.

A Call for Action

I’d like to issue a call to designers and multidisciplinary design thinking teams to take on one or more of these bold challenges. You have the knowledge and skills necessary for deeply understanding the issues, the various players involved and their stakeholders, to ideate solutions focusing on the global and personal levels, and to prototype and evaluate the various solutions. There is significant interest in each of these topics, so much so that there are regular protests about them. While its good to draw attention to the topics, these protests don’t typically come up with well thought out, researched, and designed solutions. We need to do that.

I think it would be great if some top teams in university capstone courses took on one or more of these challenges and that DFA studios on various campuses did too and that startups also consider these bold challenges. I’m also thinking of organizing a Design Olympics type event of sorts with the best designers and thinkers in the world getting together to tackle some of these biggest challenges in the world in a bold, global, and personal way. Let’s join together to use the power of design and design thinking to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems.

Design Thinking vs. User-Centered Design

I’ve been having discussions at universities on this topic the last number of months and prior to that with many companies prompted by my evangelism of Design Thinking while having written a book some years ago on User-Centered Design. I regularly get asked how they are related.

In practice many people use the terms Design Thinking and User-Centered Design interchangeably but those who know the history of the field not only know that there is a difference, they often see Design Thinking as an inferior new framework that lacks the rigor and depth of User-Centered Design.

I don’t see them as competing. I see them as integrally linked, when practiced properly. Our Enterprise Design Thinking by IBM framework has integrated the methods of User-Centered Design directly into it.

Each framework historically has built upon its predecessor and incorporated key methods in it while typically broadening its scope. Human Factors and Usability methods were incorporated into User-Centered Design and User-Centered Design methods were in turn incorporated into Design Thinking.

Let’s look at an example. User-Centered Design includes user research methods such as structured interviews and ethnographic observation leading to a task analysis which typically was shared with others in a written report. Design Thinking, when practiced properly, also uses the same user research methods but further improves on User-Centered Design by not only focusing on tasks or what the user does, it opens the aperture on the user to also capture what the user thinks, says, and feels and it does it using an empathy map and a scenario map, ways of synthesizing and communicating that are collaborative, efficient, and much more actionable.

As I’ve mentioned here previously and in many talks, Design Thinking is being criticized entirely deservedly because many practitioners simply are using it incorrectly. Most are practicing what I call innovation theater, using stickies and sharpies on whiteboard walls, essentially using the mapping and collaboration methods without the User-Centered Design methods. That shouldn’t lead people to abandon Design Thinking in favor of User-Centered Design, it should lead to the doubling down on making sure to use a version of Design Thinking, like Enterprise Design Thinking by IBM, which has the methods of User-Centered Design incorporated directly in it.

Its worth mentioning that others argue for designers simply ideation solutions. Enterprise Design Thinking by IBM includes ideation but within the context of the user research and having understood and worked with the community of users. So designers and other disciplines do ideation, in fact, that’s a critically important element of the overall approach.

I’d like to suggest that we dispense with the academic arguments about Design Thinking and User-Centered Design as well as attempts to introduce new terminology and instead just ensure we carry out the user research and evaluation methods we all know from User-Centered Design and glean the benefits of the whole person view and the highly efficient collaboration and ideation mapping methods of Design Thinking.

I invite you to check out our website to learn more about Enterprise Design Thinking.

Designing Your Career for the Future

I was asked to give the 2019 Interdisciplinary Lecture at York University and there was so much interest in the talk at the event and afterward on social media that I thought I’d capture the highlights here as well. The talk was on designing your career for the future. I start by describing the early influences and academic experiences in my life and career and then summarize my 21 recommendations.

Early Influences

I believe that everything you do in life contributes to who you become as a person and to what you pursue in your career. I therefore think it’s important to reflect on the early life as well as early career influences. My family moved from The Netherlands to Canada when I was eight years old and that experience had a profound impact on me in deeply appreciating immigrants and those whose native language isn’t English as well as anyone who’s different from rest. I also held numerous physical labor jobs during high school and undergraduate university, everything from bailing hay on farms to being a janitor in a hospital. Those experiences made me appreciate and value people who do those jobs and it also inspired me to pursue additional education. I still go out of my way to thank the janitor who collects my garbage at work every day.

Academic Experiences

Studying, singing, and playing music were my passions during high school and music was also my part-time job during that period playing in a house band every Saturday night. Music gave me confidence in front of audiences, something I to this day appreciate. I decided to not make music my career though thanks to an insightful teacher but I instead pivoted to my other passion, helping people. I therefore initially focused on clinical psychology including doing clinical practica at psychiatric hospitals and corrections institutes and also on cognitive science in general. It was my PhD research into cognitive, affective, and physiological processing of information that led to my final pivot to design. All the research I conducted was done using computers and I relied on research assistants supported by my Medical Research Council Fellowship to run those studies.

Interestingly, a job ad at the university resulted in only male students applying for the position even though the university population was heavily female. I decided to investigate and carried out six studies into things like gender bias in computer advertising, early childhood experiences with computers, and ultimately the impact of computer user interface design on levelling the gender playing field. I next pivoted to the field that was then called human-computer interaction design and in turn created optimal design patterns for positive engagement as measured by self-report, behavior, and psychophysiology. I presented the results of this work at an academic conference which led to media interviews and a call from IBM asking whether I had ever considered working for the company. My answer was “no, but I recently read a great book about the founders of IBM who impressed me, so I’ll give it a go”. I accepted the job and said that I would give it a year which has now extented to more than three decades. Even though I’ve been with the same company all those years, I’ve taken on new and tough design leadership challenges every year or two which have given me a wide set of interesting and insightful experiences especially over the past six years in order to continuously learn and develop in my career.

Experience & Skill Confluence

All of these experiences have led me to value diversity in all forms including gender, race, age, ethnicity, SES, life experience, the crafting of experiences from every pixel on a screen to entire stage performances, a focus on improving the human and animal condition by empathizing with the individual and improving upon current conditions, and the incredible power of research methods and big data with a focus on user research, psychometrics, and data science. And I now enjoy sharing my experiences on this blog and through my mentoring, teaching, on my podcast. It’s also important to note that careers are often not a direct path but rather a circuitous one with each turn or pivot contributing more skills and insight to the base and resulting in building deep and broad expertise.

Recommendations

I’d suggest you similarly look at your past to acknowledge positive influences that you should amplify in your career and look to experience more influences moving forward.

Here then are my twenty-one recommendations for designing your career for the future.

1. Focus on your passions and aptitude to decide on a career or career change - not necessarily what your parents or friends advise. Many people come up to me to say that they completed their first or second degree only to find out that they don’t have a true interest in the subject they’ve been studying when it comes to actually practicing it in the real world. Others realize that after many years of working in a field that it isn’t for them. It’s common for them to say that they went into that field due to strong influence from parents or friends. Take the advice from parents and friends but make sure to also consider what you’re truly passionate about and also what you have a particular aptitude for in order to choose a major and a career.

2. Practice foresight to imagine what that career might look like in 10 years or so. We’re living in a time of rapid change so make sure to apply the future proof test to any candidate careers you’re considering. For each potential career, think about how that career could be impacted given current trends in technologies like AI and societal trends.

3. Talk to someone who is in that career to ensure you understand what it’ll be like. Taking a subject at university isn’t the same as practicing it in the real world. You may enjoy studying a subject but not at all enjoy a job in that field. So, I advise seeking out someone who is a field you’re considering and asking them to have a coffee with you to ask about what it’s like to work in that field. You may want to go further and ask to what’s called “shadow” that person or others to see first-hand what the job is like. This will prevent the experience I mentioned in #1 above of people having completed a degree or two before they decide when they go to work in a field that they don’t in fact like it.

4. Authentically listen, and listen more than you talk. This is a good advice in general but also the way you should approach #3 above. Try not to simply find evidence to support your own views but truly and authentically listen and learn without you talking the majority of the time. Any talking you should do should be questions to better understand the role you’re considering.

5. Take courses in adjacent disciplines - business, design, engineering, etc. Most university programs are myopically focused on a particular discipline which is great in order to develop deep knowledge and expertise in that field. However, success in the workplace often requires awareness of and experience in adjacent disciplines so take courses to learn about adjacent disciplines. Of course, you can also take those courses in adjacent disciplines once you’ve started working too.

6. Attend multidisciplinary workshops and hackathons - it’s a team sport. Some disciplines taught at universities are very restrictive when it comes to students taking courses outside of the discipline often due to accreditation requirements. If that’s the case in your discipline or even if it isn’t but you want more ways to broaden your knowledge and experience while you’re still at university, take advantage of multidisciplinary workshops and hackathons that may be offered at your school. They’re a great way to get to know others outside your field and to learn something about their fields and how your discipline relates to theirs. This applies equally if you’re already in the working world.

7. Seek out mentors to gain insight and leverage experience. This applies to those of you at university and also those who are already working. Mentors are incredibly important all through your career. I regularly come across people who are trying to figure everything out themselves but much of what they need to learn is only available or most readily available directly from people who have that knowledge and experience. So reach out to someone to be a mentor, even a temporary one for a single session. Most candidate mentors feel honored to be asked and are willing to help you.

8. Get the experience yourself through internships and/or first jobs. Another way to make sure a discipline is right for you and to gain experience is to take advantage of internships and/or co-op jobs. They’re a great way to get insight into what it’ll be like to work in your discipline and to also get work experience which is also helpful for your resume and if relevant portfolio. You can explore similar experiences if you’re already working but want to change jobs or careers.

9. Consider intrapreneurship inside a company. When I ask for a show of hands of who is interested in starting their own company and being an entrepreneur, a good majority of hands go up at most student events. I agree with Venture Capitalist Joe Kraus of Google Ventures who says, “Want to be a founder, get a job”. Getting experience in an established company is great knowledge to acquire if you want to start your own business and for an increasing number of people, being an intrapreneur inside a company is also a desirable career and for some, in fact the best of both worlds.

10. Be a T-shaped person with deep skills in one area but also learn other skills like design thinking. A T-shaped person has deep discipline skills (the vertical stroke of the T) as well as cross-discipline skills (the horizontal stroke of the T). Career success is often more linked to what are often referred to as “soft skills” (the horizontal stroke) than your knowledge and skill in your primary discipline (the vertical stroke). Soft skills include things like written and verbal communication skills, interpersonal skills, and the like and those are important. There’s another set of skills that I include in the mandatory set of horizontal stroke skills and that’s design thinking. The proper use of an enhanced form of design thinking like Enterprise Design Thinking by IBM in many work settings leads to effective problem solving and co-creation.

11. Use design thinking to design your life and career. Many people restrict their use of design thinking to work contexts. I advocate using the principles and techniques of design thinking to design your life and career as well. I have a podcast episode on this topic.

12. Understand the business you’re going into or are in - the flow of money. Many people in my experience work in companies or organizations doing their specific job but don’t take an interest in or truly understand the business of that company or organization. In order to design your career for the future, I suggest you follow the flow of money in your company or organization and make sure your role and how you progress your career is aligned to that flow.

13. Don’t only be about money - do something for your soul. Having just talked about money, also don’t only be about money in your career and life. Focus on the business but also focus on something for your soul whether at work or outside of work. Some people can find a career that brings in the money they want and need while also being their primary passion in life. For many others, their primary passions aren’t fully served by a career and it then makes sense to pursue those passions outside of work. Either way, it’s important to stay balanced in life.

14. Make a change every few years whether between organizations or within. It’s good to stay fresh and continue life long learning. That often is best achieved by making a change every few years whether moving between organizations or making a change within the same organization. Many people believe you can only achieve such a change by changing companies or organizations but I’ve seen in others and in myself the power of making a change within a company or organization as well.

15. Develop your eminence and digital brand. Many people believe that they can advance their career by simply putting their head down and working hard. For most careers, that isn’t an effective strategy. For most careers it’s important to develop your eminence and digital brand. You should be sharing your knowledge and becoming known in your field to others, connecting with others in the field, and making sure that when someone does a digital search for your name online that the results reflect who you are and what you’re known for.

16. Write an aspirational resume/portfolio and then make it a reality. One of the Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people is “Begin with the end in mind”. A way of operationalizing that habit for your career is to create what I call an aspirational resume/portfolio. Include in it what you’ve actually done but also include what you’d like it to look like in a few years with the experiences and accomplishments that you’d like to have had. I suggest making the aspirational parts of the resume/portfolio in another color or font and then focus your energies on making those aspirations a reality. If you’re in a discipline for which portfolios are used, make sure you base yours on storytelling rather than simply a collection of artifacts.

17. Try to improve every place you work. Employees who take an interest in and work to improve the place they’re working at often enjoy their jobs more and are appreciated more by fellow employees and management. Others who only complain and don’t suggest changes or better yet help to improve the workplace are often disliked by other employees and management. Yet others just do their jobs. I would advise you try to be like the first sets of employees I described and work to improve every place you’re at. Make sure though that you don’t go overboard and either neglect your primary job or get too absorbed in making improvements unless that becomes your job.

18. Develop an in person and digital network of professional contacts. Career progression and career changes are facilitated by many of the things I’ve been advocating here but you also need to make sure while doing those things to develop and maintain a network of professional contacts both in person and digital. Those contacts can serve as mentors and references when you need those. Some people believe that such a network of contacts will just happen on its own naturally. It may for some but others need to actively and intentionally foster, develop, and maintain such a network of contacts.

19. Keep up with the news and developments in your field - stay current and be a life-long learner. Whatever field you’re in, you should keep up with the general news of the world as well as the specific developments in your field. Both are important. You need to stay current in general as well as in your field. You can do both of these by doing such things as subscribing to news sites, news feeds, podcasts, online and in person conferences, courses, journals, blogs, etc.. Some believe that you go to school to learn and then you go to work to do what you learned. That’s no longer the case. You have to be a life-long learner.

20. Be resilient. Stay focused. Strive for mastery. Change is now constant. Become comfortable with change and some uncertainty. Anticipate change when possible and be resilient through the periods of change you didn’t anticipate. Stay focused on your aspirational goals and make realistic changes to them when situations change. Stay grounded in your fundamental beliefs and values. And strive for mastery by practicing your discipline or craft intentionally for many, many hours. Research has shown that it generally takes about 10,000 hours of focused and intentional practice to truly achieve mastery.

21. Do career workouts regularly. I introduced the concept of career workouts in my mentoring and then here on this blog, on my podcast, and in my talks. The feedback I’ve received on the approach has been really positive and it appears to be effective for many people. So, I suggest you read the post or listen to the podcast episode to get the details of the approach.

I regularly recommend that people group things into lists of three or at most ten so I haven’t followed my own advice here in coming up with twenty-one recommendations. But then, it’s unrealistic and probably unwise to restrict fairly comprehensive career advice to only a few recommendations. I’d like to thank the design, business, and engineering faculty at York University for having invited me to give the 2019 Interdisciplinary Lecture which inspired me to think about and develop the advice provided here.

Beyond Stickies, Sharpies, & Innovation Theater

I've now spent several years activating major business units of IBM, major corporations worldwide, start-ups and scale-ups, and university students with what we at IBM call Enterprise Design Thinking. When we started about five years ago, most organizations hadn't heard of design thinking so they understood and internalized our carefully crafted version of the generic design thinking along with the other critically important ingredients of a design transformation. Over the course of that time, many organizations learned about some form of design thinking from a variety of other sources. Some have done well at that but I'm learning that many are now finding it lacking. 

In fact, when some now find out about the details of our approach, they regret ever calling what they've been doing as design thinking. The brand of design thinking has been tarnished by the these bad experiences with it. Many of these organizations simply get people into a cool looking space with whiteboard walls, write things with sharpies on stickies, and put them on the whiteboard walls. They think by simply doing this, they're been creative, innovative, and modern. I say that they're simply performing what I call innovation theater. They're using what they're calling design thinking but its mostly all show and doesn't lead to substantive outcomes.

Add to that the click-bait headlines and titles of talks bashing design thinking. A perfect example is a talk titled "Design Thinking is Bullshit" and an article titled "Design thinking is extremely dangerous" by Natasha Jen of Pentagram. I believe she lacks an understanding of design thinking, how it should actually be used, and believes that it simply involves other disciplines appropriating design from designers and that everyone should just hire designers like her who can intuit great designs. She conflates design thinking with design.  

From all of that you may come to the conclusion that design thinking is ineffectual. Well, it isn't, when done correctly with the right ingredients. IBM's approach, which we call Enterprise Design Thinking, was evaluated by Forrester Research regarding it's economic impact. They found that clients shipped products twice as fast and experienced a 300 percent return on the investment with our approach. And, when asked who they associate with design thinking, a majority of enterprises identified IBM. So, it's working.  

So, why do I say that we should go beyond stickies, sharpies, and innovation theater? In order to glean the considerable true benefits of Enterprise Design Thinking. Let's review what I believe are the important insights, necessary conditions, and essentially seven essential habits for effectively using Enterprise Design Thinking. 

1. Empathize with users and carry out user research with them. Many begin their design thinking activities with building an empathy map. This is a powerful tool but not if the information posted on it is made up! I often see people happily writing stickies with their sharpies and posting what a user does, thinks, says, and feels but entirely off to the top of their heads about an imagined user. Some even later use the information in their misguided empathy maps to create a persona complete with stock photos of models and descriptions based on the information in the empathy map. Doing this is dangerous. The human brain is wired to quickly and thoroughly process faces and human stories. If the information is made up then the empathy maps and personas are worse than useless, they're illusory and will misguide the entire project. What should you do instead? You should do user research which can take the form of such techniques as structured interviews, ethnographic observations, and analysis of digital journeys. These techniques needn't be time consuming or laborious. They can even take the form of doing the interview with a user, for example, while team members capture information directly on the empathy map.     
2. Get the right skills and drive multidisciplinary collaboration. I subscribe to the perspective, which I've shared previous on this site, of the T-shaped person. I see design thinking as a set of skills and habits that all disciplines should have (the horizontal stroke of the T) in addition the their specific discipline (the vertical stroke of the T). Contrary to Natasha Jen's assertion that design thinking involves the appropriation of design by other disciplines, I see the need for all disciplines to have design thinking skills but of course, teams also need to have the requisite design disciplines on them as well (user research, visual design, user experience design, and front-end development). If a single discipline decides to use design thinking without each of the other disciplines including importantly the design disciplines, then they're again not practicing effective design thinking. And, simply having the requisite disciplines onboard at the beginning of the project possibly only during some design thinking workshopping, that too is insufficient. All disciplines need to collaborate regularly and intensely in order to see the benefits of design thinking. Does everyone on a team need to be working together all the time? No. They clearly have individual work to do but they should be collaborating several times a day. And, they should be colocated in order to foster that level of collaboration.  
3. Use design thinking but for more than workshopping. This is probably the worst transgression. Way too many people think that design thinking equates to workshopping. Those who do are practicing innovation theater and not true design thinking. Design thinking should be adopted as a way of thinking, a way of perceiving the world, a way of understanding, reflecting, and making. Design thinking should influence how someone on the team speaks to a user, how they think about the problem they're trying to solve. the approach they take to arriving at alternative creative solutions. Much of this can be done without stickies, sharpies, and a white board. Does that mean we shouldn't use stickies, sharpies, and workshops? Yes, if that's the only thing you're going to be doing with design thinking. However, they're powerful tools to use if you're using design thinking in everything you do. 
4. Create Minimal Delightful Experiences. I hear many people, especially in start-ups but not exclusively, champion the Agile deliverable of the Minimal Viable Product or MVP. What this often involves is developing a subset of the capabilities of a product in order to get feedback on it. That often translates into providing the raw support for a subset of tasks to be carried out but it doesn't include the experience design. We liken this to a pizza company trying a new product by providing someone with a small part of the product like the crust. Instead, in order to truly evaluate the new product, the pizza company should in fact provide a thin slide of the pizza with the toppings and crust, in other words a taste of the entire experience. We at IBM call that the Minimal Delightful Experience. When making prototypes in design thinking, make MVPs with a minimal delightful experience. 
5. You don't have to fail fast and often. Everyone seems to have adopted this phrase. I think it's important to reinforce that we should learn from failure and to iterate quickly. However, too many people are so in love with this phrase that they don't think, or do any design thinking, before they simply take their first idea, build it in code to get feedback on it. When it then fails, they just say, "well, we did what we needed to do, to fail fast". If instead they would have started to do some design thinking focusing on the definition and validation of their "how might we statement" for the product, then did some quick user research, they'd have prevented some of the failure and then they could do some more design thinking and built a low fidelity paper prototype and get feedback on it. Failures of design when it's on paper are way less expensive than in code. Some teams also know they simply want to ship their idea in code and may do a little bit of design thinking, putting some stickies on walls but they're doing innovation theater. About 90 percent of startups fail and the number one reason why they fail is what's called market-product fit which I simplify by saying that they were building something that nobody wanted. Design thinking when done right will reduce that high failure rate because it will ensure that the problem is an important one to users and that the failures will be on paper and not with shipped code. Interestingly, the second reason startups fail is not having the right skills on the project, something I've discussed in item #2 above. 
6. Embrace technology but focus on the user experience. A lot of projects start by wanting to use some shiny new technology. That's fine as long as the project uses design thinking effectively to determine whether the problem to be solved for the human beings involved can be solved by the technology and that the experience that users will have with it will be amazing. Technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality all can lead to amazing user experiences when design thinking done right is used in the design of the system, even in the determination of whether the technology is appropriate for the situation. 
7. It's a team sport, deploy it pervasively within an intentional organization-wide system. The previous six points and more need to be part of a pervasive and intentional organization-wide system in order to truly ensure the optimal use of design thinking. The system we built at IBM is an example of the necessary conditions for the proper use of design thinking. We wouldn't have been successful had we only gave out stickies, sharpies, and said to go do design thinking. 

So, do you have to get rid of your stickies and sharpies. Yes, you should if all you're doing is innovation theater. However, they're powerful, simple, and extremely portable tools to use if you're aligned with the seven items I've outlined above. Check out our Enterprise Design Thinking system for more information.

Can Design Thinking Help Sellers?

It's now clear that design thinking, when done right, can be hugely helpful for designing products and services. That's how it's mostly used by organizations. That's also how we activated our company with IBM's enhanced version which we call IBM Design Thinking. I traveled the world introducing our approach to all of our product labs and I subsequently introduced a modified version to our consulting and technology services organizations. After my initial work with a business unit, we had dedicated staff activate teams within each of those organizations through bootcamps and set up a leadership team. All of those organizations are now effectively using IBM Design Thinking. 

We've had great success using IBM Design Thinking in workshops with clients, particularly by our consulting and technology services organizations. However, we hadn't focussed directly on the sellers themselves. My focus for the last while with my team has been expressly in this space, the use of our version of design thinking to transform the way sellers think, perceive, and work. Based on my experience working with many organizations across many industries, sellers typically think about what they want to sell and how they can get the customer to want to buy it. They perceive reactions from their customer through the lens of the degrees of likelihood of them buying what they're selling, and the focus of all of their work is typically on, in fact, "selling". Of course, not all sellers think, perceive, and work like this but a significant proportion do. Customers react to sellers like these with suspicion, caution, and often with their guard up. They will typically try to minimize the time they have to spend with the seller. Of course, this minimizes the chances the seller has to actually sell anything. 

A design thinking approach to selling pivots the seller to focus on the customer. Rather than thinking about what they can sell the customer, they instead start with understanding the customer, the context of the situation they're in, what problems they have, and what opportunities may exist to improve their situation. They now no longer perceive progress with a customer solely through the lens of likelihood to purchase but also on how well a solution may solve their problems. Their focus now isn't on just selling but also on co-creating a solution with the customer that will satisfy their needs. We've tailored our IBM Design Thinking framework methods for this domain and have been seeing very promising business results where we've used this new approach. Customers also love the approach and want to spend more time on this because they're not being sold to, but rather are involved in co-creating solutions together to the problems they have. 

So, can design thinking help sellers? Yes! Here's another instance where the change in thinking, perceiving, and focussing that design thinking, especially our IBM Design Thinking version, fosters can transform ways of working and materially advance results on a team, in this case a sales team.   

Hippocratic Oath for Design Thinkers

It's so heartening and gratifying to see how popular design thinking has become and how widely it's been adopted. With that popularity also comes those who simply learn a subset of methods in order to hang out their shingle as a "design thinker". Some will argue that doing some design thinking is better than doing nothing. I disagree. I think you need to do it right in order to glean the benefits of it. I think you can do more harm if you don't do it right. In fact, I think we should adopt the physicians' Hippocratic Oath to "do no harm". 

I've had a chance to observe design thinking being described, taught, and practiced at numerous institutions and organizations worldwide and have concluded that there are three major ways that I think some practitioners fail to do design thinking properly which, in turn, can have a negative impact.

1. No User Research. A common practice is to start doing design thinking by using an Empathy Map exercise. However, if the team hasn't done any user research in order to understand the user, the value of the exercise is questionable because participants will simply be "making it up". And if the results are summarized in a persona the negative impact is further amplified. The team may think that they've accomplished something by empathizing with their users but they've done something worse, they've created a made up summary of a user that doesn't have any basis in fact. Human beings are wired to recognize people and internalize key attributes of the people they meet. If the team created a made up person with made up attributes, they're going to recognize and internalize that incorrect information. To mitigate against this, the team should first carry out user research using methods like ethnographic observation and structured interviews and then create the Empathy Map based on the information collected. If that isn't possible before doing an Empathy Map exercise, the team should arrange to have representative users or even someone who knows them really well be interviewed during the exercise. It's also a good practice to have the team members mark each sticky note that they're not certain about with a question mark during the exercise which can then be followed up with some user research to explore or validate those areas of interest. You want to have confidence in the information captured in the Empathy Map in order to glean insights from it for your project. At IBM, we have a User Research practice that provides the foundation for our IBM Design Thinking framework.        
2. No Organizational Alignment. One of the tangible benefits of design thinking is the collaboration across diverse participants, diverging and converging, and creating a shared understanding of, alignment on, and commitment to the desired outcomes. Often key disciplines, organizations, and decision-makers are not included in the design thinking exercises. Those important voices therefore aren't heard and those people are excluded from the collaboration. All key disciplines, organizations, and decision-makers need to be included in the collaboration in order to achieve organizational alignment. Even if all the key players are included, teams sometimes don't diverge and converse properly. They will sometimes have the facilitator solicit input which then gets written on sticky notes. Other times, a senior participant will ask a junior member of the team to write their input on the sticky notes. Both of these approaches lack true divergence and convergence. The most effective way of ensuring input from all disciplines, organizations, and decision-makers present is to have them all quietly and individually capture their input on sticky notes (divergence) and then come together to share and decide on which of the collective input to pursue further (convergence). Lastly, organizational alignment requires that the team have a clear shared understanding of what was decided and a way to track the achievement of it. At IBM, we have teams develop what we call Hills, which are statements that say who will be able to do what with what wow experience. These Hills statements, a maximum of three per project, provide incredibly clear organizational alignment. Hills also provide the alignment function in Playbacks, which are meetings with all key stakeholders during which the evolving user experience is reviewed. Hills help to determine whether the objectives have been met. Organizational alignment is critical to the success of design thinking.
3. No Pervasive Use. The third and final major way that practitioners fail to use design thinking properly is when they fail to understand that it is a way of thinking that should be used throughout a project by all members of the team. Many people equate design thinking with simply doing a workshop. Some see it as a shiny new method that is in vogue at present and makes the team look modern. I contend that simply doing a design thinking workshop without follow through and use of the methods pervasively can do serious harm. An expectation is set after doing a workshop that if nothing happens and nothing changes then it is worse than not having held the workshop at all. If it isn't used pervasively, it can also lead to a conclusion by participants in a workshop that it doesn't really work. Design thinking, and IBM Design Thinking in particular, is amazingly powerful if it is practiced pervasively end-to-end on a project and by all key team members. Check out the IBM Design Thinking Framework for more information on the attributes and elements that are key to achieving optimal pervasive use. 

I've introduced IBM Design Thinking to hundreds of companies, practiced our version of design thinking on hundreds of projects, with thousands of people, and I've taught design thinking to hundreds of practitioners. I believe that the framework is amazingly powerful when used properly. As I've pointed out above, it can also be used incorrectly. I therefore believe that all design thinkers should take the Hippocratic Oath to "do no harm."

Infusing Design into Pan-University Programs

I believe strongly that education should provide a solid foundation for the skills, knowledge, ways of thinking, and fostering of a curiosity required to progress advancement in society. I also believe that design and design thinking are critical ingredients of education at all levels.   

This commitment to education led me to start working with a variety of education institutions, design schools, business schools, medical schools, and whole universities. I've delivered guest lectures, given invited keynote presentations, served as a judge in case competitions, worked with my IBM design teams to provide collaborative real world capstone projects for design classes, and participated on a variety of university and government education boards and committees. I've worked with education institutions worldwide and have recently been working more closely with Canadian universities including University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, Carlton University, York University, OCAD University, University of Windsor, and McMaster University. 

I most enjoy helping to develop and then co-teach entirely new programs and courses. I've done this mostly thus far with McMaster University as well as with it's DeGroote School of Business, it's DeGroote Health Leadership Academy, and it's Directors College. I do this teaching as a personal passion on Saturdays as my Design Director role at IBM more than fills up my weeks and involves significant travel. In this role as Industry Professor, I've collaborated closely with Michael Hartmann, the Associate Dean of the School of Business, Del Harnish, the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, and the insightful and forward thinking Dean of the Business School, Leonard Waverman. I've helped infuse design and design thinking into a new Executive Digital MBA program, a Health Leadership Program, a Directors College Program, and most recently a brand new Innovation by Design pan-university course. I absolutely loved working with the students especially given their diversity. While further improvements can and will be made in these programs, I think we're really onto something here. 

As I've mentioned previously, I'm a strong proponent of fostering a T-shaped person, someone who has deep skills in one or two disciplines (the vertical stroke on the T) as well as has broad skills that all disciplines should have (the horizontal stroke of the T). I believe that design thinking (and in fact IBM Design Thinking in particular) is in that latter category of cross-discipline skills. And I don't mean exclusively the mechanical learning of specific methods but rather the new perspective on problems and opportunities to improve a situation, the approach used to conceptualize and evaluate future directions, and the practices to make it real. 

Feedback from students and faculty on the keynotes as well as on the programs and courses has been extremely positive (e.g., "this is absolutely the best course I've ever taken!"). So what's so special about the new perspective and skills provided by the innovation by design approach? And, how is it that it's relevant to such a wide range of disciplines? Well, let me give you some examples of experiences that the students had. Business students are typically deep in analytical thinking but while analytical thinking is very useful for many things, they need design and design thinking skills to know how to come up with something innovative. Of course, they need to have analytical thinking and design thinking skills and they learned how to know which to use in what situation. Medical students, and health sciences students more generally, learned how to take a patient-centered perspective in everything they do, for example, how they arrange the patient flow through a medical office, clinic, or lab setting using service design or even to include the conceptualization of various methods of automating and digitizing the experience. Engineering students learned how to not focus immediately on the solution but rather to understand the problem or opportunity for improvement better first, and to explore and evaluate with users alternative solutions. Students from other undergraduate and graduate faculties had similar transformative experiences. Executive students learned how to ready their companies for the future, how to foster innovation, and what organizational models they should be considering. Directors College students learned how to evaluate the innovation readiness of companies and how to help guide companies to optimize for innovation by design. All disciplines learned from each other and realized that future innovation requires truly diverse multidisciplinary collaboration.

Does including these approaches in the curricula guarantee that students will be more innovative? Well, no, but it does give students a perspective that is human centered and focussed on the opportunities to be innovative and provides the approaches that will increase the likelihood of an innovative solution. I believe that something is only truly innovative when the user who is using it thinks that it is innovative.  

There's an appetite for this change in education at all levels: executive education, health education, and in fact pan-university education. I believe that traditional approaches to university education need to be disrupted and incorporating innovation by design approaches is a first step in doing this. There is a lot of attention in education circles of late on what are called the STEM disciplines. That is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Others have argued for the inclusion of the Arts, which makes the acronym STEAM. I believe that if we really want to prepare students for the future, we should be focusing on STEAMED. The additional two letters represent Education and Design. Given what I've written above, you probably see the wisdom in the addition of the D but might be wondering about the E for Education. The contributions to the various university programs summarized above haven't been solely focussed on content. They also focus on the way the students are taught. The focus has very, very little lecture style learning but rather has mostly experiential learning. Students learn much more effectively and retain more of their learning in an experiential learning environment. In fact, I believe that university education programs should actually be designed using design methods to intentionally create the right learning environment for the students.  

Check out our IBM Design site for more information about our overall program and our version of design thinking. You can also check out the Emerging Health Leaders program, the EMBA program, and the Directors College program. Details of the next pan-university Innovation by Design course should be available shortly. 

I'll discuss in a future post how I believe design schools, business schools, universities, enterprises, and entrepreneurs should be working more closely together in a new innovation by design ecosystem.      

IBM Design Thinking Badges

Many of you may have seen notifications on various social media sites, most notably LinkedIn, that someone has been awarded an IBM Design Thinking badge. Some of you have asked me what these badges are all about. Well, let me tell you.

These badges are part of IBM's overall design transformation model and focus on the calibration, assessment, and professional development of IBM employees. The IBM Design Thinking badges in particular focus on skill and experience acquisition and mastery of our IBM Design Thinking framework.

I first discovered the need for calibrating, assessing, and specifying the IBM Design Thinking professional development of staff when I was activating our global business services organizations. We'd started our design transformation of IBM in our product organizations but when I was dealing with staff in our services organization who would be using the framework in their direct work with clients I decided that I needed to ensure that staff had the requisite knowledge, skill, and experience. I decided to implement a program that required the people whom I was teaching IBM Design Thinking to carry out at least two internal workshops/projects and to have themselves recorded on video presenting, facilitating, and workshopping particular portions of our framework. I then reviewed those videos to determine whether the candidate was ready to be allowed to work with clients using IBM Design Thinking. That worked well for a while but of course wasn't scalable with only me doing it and using such a laborious process. 

As with most things I do in our IBM Design program, after I've explored it and shown it to work, it is taken over by our amazingly capable IBM Design Core Team to flesh out, harden, and scale. Our team worked tirelessly on developing the rubric, the badging levels, and the companywide program for managing and sustaining the program. 

There are four levels of badges: practitioner, collaborator, coach, and leader. Employees make their way through the badges from practitioner to leader with coaches in their region mentoring them so that they acquire and hone the skills and also gain the requisite experience practicing the skills. It's important to note that these badges aren't exclusively for designers, far from it. We believe strongly that everyone should know and practice IBM Design Thinking regardless of their discipline or role in the company. The challenge is to ensure that the right level of skill and experience is acquired at the right pace while assessing and tracking progress effectively and efficiently companywide. That's what the IBM Design Thinking badging system provides.

As I've mentioned many times before here, design thinking is necessary but not sufficient to transform a company. Many people think that it is. Design thinking, or more accurately IBM Design Thinking, is core to IBM's design transformation but there are many other elements that are critically important to our design transformation program. This badging system is but a small example of an additional element. I'll cover some of the other elements in a future blog post.    

A New Interaction Paradigm

We've seen a number of paradigm shifts in interaction with technology over the decades. The first interaction paradigm that I experienced with computers was one that involved using a keypunch machine to create punch cards that you fed into a hopper for the computer to read and the output was a printout from the printer. Next was a keyboard and cathode ray tube (CRT) followed by a personal computer. Next was a mobile phone using T9 texting followed by the amazing multitouch iPhone.

We're now witnessing another phenomenally important paradigm shift in interaction: the use of voice as input and audio as output. I remember using voice in the past as an input mechanism. In fact, I wrote much of my book, User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach, using voice dictation with IBM's ViaVoice. That generation of voice interface was limited to dictation and voice commands to control a computer interface. The former was quite popular especially with specialized applications like medicine. However, the voice commands never caught on. The technology wasn't ready for prime time, but it is now. Today's voice interfaces don't require a computer and they're free-form. Amazon Echo is an instance of an ambient voice interface, being able to speak to it anywhere in a room, while the Apple AirPods are a personal instance that makes Apple's Siri accessible with the simple double-tab of the AirPods. Because it's personal, Apple's AirPods essentially act like an augmentation of the human brain. Issue a question or a command, like you would to your brain, and your trusty AirPods deliver the answer or action directly to you or for you personally without anyone else knowing. 

So, what are the implications for this new interaction method for designers. Well, it means that the traditional mainstays of design, like typography, iconography, and color, are no longer the only types of skills that are relevant. And, voice, earconography, and tembre are now important. Is the voice whimsical, authoritative, or neutral? Is the earconography recognizable, meaningful, pleasant? Is the tempre that of a woman's voice, a man's voice, or mechanical voice? These are entirely new challenges for designers to understand, master, and apply.

Given that the interaction is now more natural and human, expectations are also higher, expecting human-like interactions. How intelligent the content of the interaction is turns out now to be crucially important too. I'll deal with that and the broader topic of artificial intelligence or what IBM more all encompassingly calls "cognitive computing" in a future post. Its worth noting that much content delivery is now also consumed via audio. The popularity of podcasts and audiobooks is evidence of that trend.    

The point I'd like to leave designers with here is that future "user interfaces" may not at all be what you've been considering UIs thus far and the skills you'll need in this new world will also be different from the ones you've developed to date. Of course, not all interfaces will be voice and audio based but increasingly more and more will be, similar to the transition from full desktop user interfaces to increasingly mobile ones. The future will likely see certain interactions being delivered by voice, others by a mobile device, and yet others still using a computer. It's an exciting time to be a designer, as long as you add voice and audio interface design to the skills you're going to focus on in your Career Workouts (see my last post for more information on this). 

Career Workouts

I'm often asked for career advice by family and friends, by my staff and the couple of dozen or so people I mentor at work, as well as by people who listen to my podcast. I have episodes in my podcast series that address particular topics but I'd like to reflect in this post on the way I think you should frame your thinking and approach to your career. In doing so I'd like to again use an analogy, this time to physical exercise.

I'm sure that you regularly workout at a gym either daily or at least a few times a week to build your cardiovascular capacity, your muscular strength, and to look good. If you don't, you at least know that you should. Do you take the same approach to your career? Do you have regularly scheduled times daily or at least a few times a week for a workout that focuses on your career, developing your skills, broadening your experience, and looking good to your current and future employers? Likely not and you're likely also not aware of the fact that you should either. That's what we'll discuss here.

I too often have a conversation with people looking for a promotion mid-career who have only done their jobs most of their lives. They haven't honed their skills, developed their experience, and haven't established their career eminence in their chosen discipline or field. If you're in that situation, the approach I'm proposing is still relevant to you but its preferable to start this early in your career.

These are my specific suggestions.

1. Schedule Career Workouts. You should even start these before you begin your career while you're still in college or university and you then need to keep these up for the rest of your professional life. So, what's a career workout? Just like a physical workout at the gym, it involves making a commitment to do it, to put time on your calendar (I'd suggest at least once per week for an hour at a minimum), and then plan what you'll cover during those sessions. I often say that it's the one time during the week that you should be selfish and take the time to work on yourself. An early session can be devoted to developing a plan, determining your career goals, identifying what skills you need to develop or further hone, considering what types of career experiences you'd like to have, and what level of career eminence you'd like to strive to achieve. Subsequent workouts can be devoted to exercising and further developing desired skills and experience. You might take an online course, read a book, or just practice further developing a skill. The workouts could also include working on your career eminence. That will depend on your particular discipline or field but often includes becoming known inside your company and in the field outside your company by blogging, vlogging, submitting articles to journals, presenting at industry or professional conferences, submitting patent disclosures, entering your work in competitions, etc. The career workouts are the time for you to work on you and your career. They can also be used in order to keep a career journal. 
2. Keep a Career Journal. You can use a physical one but I prefer a digital journal. Just like many people do at the gym, organize your Career Workouts work using a journal. It's a place for you to keep everything having to do with your career. This could include the plans you make for your Career Workouts, the notes you take about what skills or experience you need to develop, the place where you record compliments that someone gives you and also the place where you keep copies of particularly noteworthy work you've done, and it should include a living resume and, if relevant to your field, a living portfolio, to capture your career progress, accomplishments, and eminence.
3. Get Career Checkups. While you track the minutia of your workouts at the gym using a journal, you likely also regularly, often yearly, take stock by having a checkup with your doctor, checking your weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and blood work. You should similarly schedule career checkups with your manager and/or your mentor. Its a time for you to organize what you've put in your journal for the period prior to the checkup, and then have someone other than you review the progress you've made in terms of accomplishments, skills you've developed, experiences you've had, and eminence you've achieved. Much like doctor's visits, you can also schedule career checkups more frequently if you need to or more infrequently too if that makes sense given where you are in your career. Don't delay them too long though because you really do need to have someone else provide you feedback on how you're progressing and to give advice on filling gaps you may have in your accomplishments, skills, experience, or eminence.

To reiterate, everyone either does and at least knows they should exercise regularly. In contrast, few people realize that a similar approach needs to be taken regarding your career. I've therefore made the case for the importance of regular career workouts, journaling, and checkups. I'd like to suggest that if you do adopt these, you'll have a healthier and more fulfilling career.     

Workshopping for the Big Leagues

In a previous post I made the case for seeing design thinking, and IBM Design Thinking, as more than the running of workshops. This time I'd like to address another misconception people have about workshopping itself. Many people believe that you just need to have sharpies and sticky notes and you're good to go. Anyone can do it and there's not much to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Effective workshop facilitation is hard and there's more to it than most people think. And, to make the point, I'll use a sports analogy. 

Most people don't approach a sport with the assumption that you just need a ball and depending on the sport a bat, a glove, maybe some pads and you're set to go. Most people realize that there's much more to it than that. You not only need to have the requisite equipment, you also have to spend hours and hours learning and practicing the skills and getting experience in practices and in actual games to get good. They also realize that there are specialized skills for certain positions on the team. Whether professionals or amateurs, most people take their sport seriously and often spend a lifetime to master it.    

I'm concerned that many people simply participate in a design thinking workshop, get some post-it notes, some Sharpies, a few charts and think they're all set to go. I believe the field would benefit from taking a more rigorous approach, more like that used in sport. And, the approach taken in the big leagues. 

I've led hundreds of IBM Design Thinking workshops all around the world with some of the largest companies and also some of the most promising startups too. I've also run numerous internal company workshops and trained hundreds of facilitators and co-facilitated workshops with many of them. I've also seen how design thinking workshopping is taught, how other organizations use it, and have incorporated workshopping in several university programs.

These then are what I consider to be the ways to unleash the power of design thinking workshopping for the big leagues. 

1. The venue is key. Big league teams care about all the details of the venues they play at and leagues ensure that facilities are optimal for game play. The same holds true for workshopping. You may think that any room will do. But you'd be wrong. I've been asked to run workshops in boardrooms with one very large table in them and virtually no room to move around the table. I've also been asked to do workshops in rooms that have cloth, brick, or cement walls and insufficient room to bring in whiteboards on wheels, or even the less than optimal flip chart easels. You should select a room that has tables and chairs on wheels and with sufficient wall and/or window space for the number of large post-it note board the you'll need. You should have sufficient room to keep all Post-it Note boards up at all times. Ensure the venue has the right equipment too. Make sure to use actual fine tipped Sharpie brand pens. Ballpoint pens won't do. You'll need the flip-chart sized Post-it Note brand pads and small, square, multi-colored Post-it Note brand pads that have the glue on the back top in the same position on each sheet. Don't use the accordion-style. Anything less than this will compromise your workshop. Using ballpoint pens will allow people to write too much and make what's written on the sticky notes unreadable from a distance which makes group collaboration difficult. Using sticky notes from other brands often leads to the sticky notes falling off onto the floor and using accordion-style ones which alternate glue on the top and then the bottom of the sheets makes them awkward to use and often leads to people sticking notes with the glue on the bottom leading to them not being visible or falling down. Much like sports teams have a maximum number of players so should your workshop. I think twelve to eighteen participants with two to three groups of six participants is optimal. I have run workshops with several hundred participants out of necessity and while they were workable and met the objectives, they weren't optimal. You should plan on having one facilitator for every six or so participants.  

2. Have a game plan. You may think that you can just launch into the workshop and figure out what you're going to focus on when you get into the room, it is a workshop after all. That's like saying to a big league team to just go for it. Of course, they don't. They carefully craft a game plan, discuss it among the leadership team, and then execute on it. The same goes for a workshop. You have to have full clarity on what problems you'll address, hone them in collaboration with the leaders, and then map a workshopping plan of methods to explore, progress, and address the problems identified. Make sure that your problem statements satisfy the Goldilocks rule, not too big, not to small, just right. Also ensure that the problem statements include who's life will be improved if the problem statement were to be addressed.  

3. Its a team sport. Just like any sport, workshopping needs the participation of the entire team. You need to ensure that you've got the right people in the room with the right skills, experience, and who will follow up on the work that will be progressed. In addition, if someone is on the field or in the workshop, they can't just decide that they'd like to sit on the sidelines and watch. Everyone has a position and role to play so everyone has to be all in. Just like a player on the field can't pull out a cellphone and start talking or texting during a game, the same holds for a workshop. Multitasking is fine in other environments but during a game or a workshop, every single person has to be fully engaged, focussed, and participating. 

4. Bring your A-Team. Coaches, quarterbacks, captains, and other leaders are critically important in sport. They are also to workshopping. Workshop facilitators need to be highly trained and also have significant depth of experience. As with a sports team, you can have assistant facilitators but you have to have one lead facilitator who ultimately calls the shots. In my experience, the lead facilitator should be a designer with significant experience not only in workshopping methods but also of one or more of the design disciplines. I teach all facilitators to learn the material extremely well, the flow, the charts, the exercises, so that virtually all of their attention can be focussed on the people in the room. I tell them to focus on how they'd like to have the hearts and minds in the room changed from the time they start the workshop to when they leave it. I also get them to focus on what they objectives of the workshop are and to relentlessly stay on track to achieve them. And, lastly, I get them to empathize at every moment of the workshop with the participants and not themselves. Just like it takes focussed practice in sports, it also takes many hours practice in workshopping to master these skills. 

5. Keep your eye on the ball. Everyone in sport has to stay focussed on the ball and the ultimate goal. Same goes for workshopping. Inexperienced facilitators will sometimes pursue topics that aren't central to the problems being worked and will waste precious time on them. An experienced facilitator will keep a board on the wall for "parking lot" items. These are for things that an important member of the team may have raised but aren't directly related to the objectives of the workshop so you can satisfy that person by acknowledging the importance of the topic by putting into the parking lot which can then be dealt with at the end of the workshop if you have time or can be dealt with following the workshop proper. Also, when you have sales people in a workshop, they often have a desire to demo, pitch, or just get into a selling mode. That's inappropriate for most workshops. Like the parking lot, the lead facilitator should handle this situation by directing the team to do any of these sorts of activities after the workshop. 

6. Use all of your playbook. Sports teams develop and practice a series of plays that the team's leadership can call up at will during the game depending on what's going on in the game. The same holds for workshopping. Many facilitators have learned a default set of workshopping methods and they run that play regardless of what's going on in the workshop. This is often the case if facilitators aren't designers. Designers typically have a deeper playbook of methods to draw on and also have more skill and experience at knowing how to apply particular methods optimally given the particular needs of the workshop. Assistant facilitators whom I've worked with as the lead facilitator are often surprised to see how I modify methods or use new to them methods given the particular needs of a workshop. 

7. Win the season and not just the game. Stretching the sports analogy a little more, teams don't just play one game and that's it, they have a whole season of games to play. Similarly for workshopping, a single workshop doesn't win the season. As I pointed out in a previous post, IBM Design Thinking is not workshopping, it is a framework for a entire project (or season). Please refer to my previous post "design thinking is not workshopping" to understand the ways in which workshopping fit into an end-to-end IBM Design Thinking project. 

Analogies are often helpful in visualizing something or getting a different perspective on something. I hope my use of a sports analogy helped bring some clarity, understanding, and actionable insight regarding design thinking or more specifically IBM Design Thinking workshopping.