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. 

Agile Needs Design Thinking

When Agile methods were first introduced, I thought they were going to be a significant improvement over waterfall methods for design. Developing smaller parts of an application to support a subset of user tasks and then testing them as soon as they were built rather than developing the entire application and only then testing it was a significant improvement. And, in many ways, Agile has been a significant improvement. However, in many other ways it has made things worse and the zealously articulated phrase "fail fast, fail often" sums up the major problems in my view. 

This phrase is usually meant to communicate that teams should start coding to build a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) quickly, release it, and if it fails, to learn from it, pivot and start over. This is the approach most startups use, in my experience, and the approach many enterprise teams are readily adopting too.

In contrast to this approach, if teams practice design thinking, or better yet, IBM Design Thinking, they will very quickly carry out some user research to identify a problem to address or an opportunity to pursue, or to validate that an initial idea the team came up with has merit. In doing that user research they will also be empathizing with the users to be served by the solution which can then be used to inform the early design visualizations. They will then prototype the idea rapidly using pencil and paper and gather some quick feedback on it. If any aspect of the conceptual design should be improved, they can even change that design while they're with the users giving the feedback. They can then take the information summarized in assets like Empathy Maps and Scenario Maps, to write the user stories which can then be developed using Agile methods but with a much higher sense of confidence. During Agile development, the detailed design for the user stories is crafted and coded and quick user feedback is gathered and incorporated in every Sprint. Additional elements of IBM Design Thinking like Hills and Playbacks will further increase the chances of success. 

This approach doesn't preclude the chance of failure but it minimizes it rather than glorifying it. It increases the likelihood of success by ensuring that the team has more information with which to design and develop. And if failure does happen, and its bound to some of the time, the team will have even more information that they can use to understand the failure and what to do next. It's important to point out that this approach requires more than engineers. It also requires designers with expertise in user research methods, visual, and interaction design.

Can Agile methods lead to building solutions more quickly? Yes, but without the information and methods that design thinking provides, many of the teams using Agile methods simply build badly designed solutions or even ill-advised solutions more quickly. Those kinds of failures can and should be avoided. The combination of Design Thinking and Agile methods together provide the approach that optimizes for designing and building the right solution rapidly and, in turn, minimizing the chance of failure.         

Designing with Peripheral Vision

It's useful periodically to review designs that fail in order to learn from them and then avoid those failures in future designs. These seven anti-patterns all suffer from not taking context into account, or stated another way, their designers failed to design with peripheral vision.

I was working with faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) a few weeks go and during a break we visited RISD's Nature Lab. It's director, Neil Overstrom, spoke about the need for art and design students to be aware of details in their environment, in the periphery, which is why his Nature Lab includes many natural artifacts for students to study. I've been talking about designing the "total user experience" since the mid-90s, wrote about it in my 2001 book, and its central to our IBM Design Thinking framework but I thought Neil's concept of being aware of what is in the periphery through peripheral vision was a good way to frame the challenges of commercial design practice when context isn't taken into account at all or not enough. Hence the title of this post.

Here are seven anti-pattern themes with examples for each from my own experience.  

1. Cool technology and visuals but failure to design the end-to-end user experience.
   I was excited to try out e-registering and using a digital key when I stayed at a hotel a few weeks ago. I was really impressed with the capability of the technology. I was even impressed by the rather visually engaging iPhone app (it also had an Apple Watch app but that didn't work at all). The app allows you to avoid having to register at the front desk when you get to the hotel. So, you walk right past and go to the hotel room that you selected using the app. It's rather cumbersome to navigate through the app to get to the digital key but once you get there, it's pretty slick that you can open your hotel room door by simply pressing the button on your iPhone (see top right image above). The cumbersome navigation to get to the key becomes quite annoying subsequent times that you go to unlock your door. In fact, it's way easier and faster to simply use the usual card key. However, the shock came when I noticed that I didn't have a receipt under my door on the last day of my stay. I looked all through the app to see where the option to get to the digital receipt was. I ended up going to the front desk only to be told that the e-registration still requires you to checkout by going to the front desk. I travel a lot and I haven't checked out at the front desk for years. And, checking out is the part of the total hotel user experience that is in most need of being fast and automated! So, the lesson here is that the cool technology and nice visuals on the app got me to try the new capability but the fact that the designers only used their foveal vision and didn't see the checkout process in their periphery make the entire experience a failure. This may have been their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version and they may well have the intention of eventually designing the entire user experience but I won't ever experience that because their initial design so failed to address the full user experience that I won't try this technology again. Or, at least not from that particular hotel chain. An initial bad end-to-end experience sours the user sufficiently that they won't come back.
    
2. Failure to design for the full audioscape. Designers are now also asked to design audio related systems.. I experienced the public address system in one airport recently where the emergency message was completely indecipherable due to poor quality speakers and was being drowned out by the flight announcements which used high quality speakers. I'm confident that the designers of the two separate systems never actually spoke to one another or tested their systems in actual use. By contrast, a week later I was at another airport where every announcement was crystal clear and understandable. This may actually be a failure to design with peripheral hearing (if there is such a thing). 
    
3. Failure to design the software and hardware experience. I use e-tickets on my Apple Watch and find it really convenient especially after gate scanners were modified to allow the watch on a user's wrist to fit under them so that the QR code could be scanned (see top left image above). However, a common problem I experience is that I ensure that the Apple Wallet app is running with the ticket QR code showing but just as I get to the scanner, the Watch display turns off and of course my other hand is holding a passport or something else preventing me from easily tapping on the watch face to turn on the screen again. When the QR code is displayed, the Apple Watch display should not turn off until you turn it off. Similar to the problem described in number 1 above, a problem like the display turning off is enough of a bad experience to turn users off of the technology altogether.  
    
4. Making major gratuitous changes to an app's design. I wrote a blog post here some time ago "Fine Tuning the Design Throttle" which made the case for designing several releases out and then staging in bite sized pieces the changes so as not to cause users too much of a challenge adjusting to the new designs. I think that advice is still relevant and some recent app design changes didn't heed that advice. A good example is the iOS Camera app which changed the positions on the screen, from the top to the bottom, of the most frequently used actions. These changes don't take into account the fact that users have developed motor memory for those actions. Similarly, the iOS Mail app changed the arrows for moving from one email to the next from up and down arrows to left and right ones. In my experience, that conflicts with the mental model I'd developed from the previous design and in dealing with email clients of all sorts for decades. And the direction of the arrows seems to be the opposite of what they should be with the action to move ahead in your email now being the left arrow key, something that seems to me to be counter intuitive. These kinds of fundamental changes to the design of a heavily used app for what appear to be purely random or in fact gratuitous reasons leaves me thinking that the designers completely ignored the context of regular use and arrogantly went ahead anyway with changes that serve to annoy users. If that happens to users too often, they're apt to stop using apps from that vendor.  
    
5. Failing to take mobility into account when designing wearables. If there were one category of product that really needs to be designed with peripheral vision to take the context of use in mind, it's wearables. Users are on the go when using wearables so the interaction with them has to be even simpler with less reliance on physical interaction with the device. I found it interesting therefore to discover that even though I could text message using Siri on my iPhone entirely while staying in auditory mode, the Apple Watch required me to get out of auditory mode and actually tap a small touch target to send the Siri dictated texts. If there were ever a device that required hands (and fingers) free interaction, it's the Apple Watch! 
    
6. Apps that don't take the other apps screen real estate into account. Apps should appropriately adjust themselves given what else is using screen real estate. When I'm using Google Maps on my iPhone or using the phone app, the top bar on the iPhone is taken up by those running apps. However, other apps don't take that possibility into account in their design. Again, motor memory to logout of a financial app, for example, by hitting the bottom most option in a left nav, leads to unintended actions when the bottom most selection is no longer logout. Or, in a social media app I use, the upper most options aren't visible when persistent apps like Google Maps or the phone app are are in use.   
    
7. Physical designs which don't take the context of use in mind. I love all of my Apple products and devices. I love how sleek, sculpted, and beautiful the peripherals that I use in the office with my Thunderbolt display are (see bottom image above). However, while the new Apple wireless keyboard and trackpad can be used while being charged with a cable, the mouse cannot. I'm not in my office very often due to travel so the batteries on my mouse and keyboard last a long time. However, the other day, I got a notification that the rechargeable batteries on my Apple mouse were getting low. I unfortunately didn't have a charging cable with me as I only charge my Apple Watch and iPhone overnight at home. A little after that initial warning the mouse died and I couldn't do my work. I then asked around the studio to see if anyone had a cable I could borrow. I found one but then discovered that the cable only fits into the bottom of the mouse, making the device useless while it is being charged. The other peripherals can be used while being charged and it's not as if the human race hasn't figured out how to attach a cable to a mouse and allow the mouse to be used while the cable is attached. All these devices for decades have had cables coming out of the top end of the mouse. Again, the context of use was either not understood (which in this case is unimaginable), not taken into account, or intentionally ignored. Any one of these reasons is totally unacceptable. I brooded about this as I sat there waiting for my mouse to charge. Another example of this problem is Google Glass, an amazing technology that didn't sufficiently take the surrounding social environment into account. Had the product been introduced without the offending camera, it could well have been hugely successful.   

Context in the environment, context on the screen, and motor memory are so important in designing for mobile and for people on the move. I'm seeing a trend toward foveal and in fact even myopic design that is focused on the technology and great visual design. Designers need to use their peripheral vision too and be aware of and design for the entire user experience for the environmental and screen context especially for users on the move. Even though the concept of "designing the total user experience" has been around for decades, it appears, sadly, that using peripheral vision to be aware of and then design the total user experience has still eluded many designers. Let's redouble our efforts to truly design the end-to-end experience. For additional information, check out IBM Design Thinking and also our new IBM Design Research information. Let's design with our full field of vision to craft innovative solutions for the entire user experience.   

Design Thinking is not Workshopping

I wrote previously here about the 7 myths that I believe many people hold about design transformation that limit their effectiveness. Those myths are still pervasive but I'm coming across another more recently that is worth addressing: workshopping.

Many people seem to be of the view that simply doing workshops with sticky notes is sufficient. In fact, they're of the view that design thinking is workshopping. As with the other myths I discussed, workshopping should be practiced but it's insufficient by itself. I think this perception is getting traction because many people's introduction to design thinking, including IBM Design Thinking that I introduce to companies, is via a workshop. In fact, workshopping has become synonymous with design thinking. 

Of course, workshopping is core to design thinking, and to IBM Design Thinking, because it has powerful methods like empathy mapping, stakeholder mapping, as-is scenario mapping, ideation, prioritization, storyboarding, and more. When these methods are put in the hands of experienced facilitators working with diverse groups of participants, amazing results can be achieved largely due to the simplicity of the tasks and the selfless radical collaboration that proper workshopping fosters. Several C suite executives have pointed out to me that the simple act of writing something on a sticky note and putting it on the board anonymizes the idea as it becomes the group's idea. Workshopping, when done right, removes ego and ownership while also levelling the playing field ensuring that everyone can and does participate. All of this leads to far superior group collaboration than, for example, a team sitting around a table in discussion, an approach where contribution of ideas is mediated by status, introversion-extroversion, gender, age, and other factors that unnecessarily bias or constrain the free expression of ideas. 

If workshopping is so powerful, you may ask, why am I saying that it is insufficient. Let me illustrate by using what we call "The Loop" within the IBM Design Thinking framework (have a look at the full description of IBM Design Thinking to see how the loop fits with the rest of our framework).

   The loop illustrates the iterative nature of good design practices. After the team has identified the problem space that is of interest to them, they need to observe the people whose lives they're going to be focussing on improving with the project so that they can empathize with them in order to understand them deeply. This observation can take the form of such methods as ethnographic observation and/or structured interviews. Once sufficient initial understanding has been gleaned, workshopping methods can be used to allow the team to reflect on what they've learned and to help synthesize that information in a form to progress the project so that they can make their first prototype. This prototype is usually of low fidelity and typically made of paper, in the case of software, or foam core, in the case of devices or hardware. The prototype is then shown to representative users so that the team can again observe the experience users have with it. That leads to more reflection, which again can be done using group workshopping methods. As the loop illustrates, this cycle continues throughout the project until the final deliverable is produced and released. And, of course, then the loop starts again. 

To reiterate, workshopping with sticky notes is central to design thinking and IBM Design Thinking but is insufficient and needs to be augmented by observation methods and making methods as illustrated in the IBM Design Thinking Loop.      

Design Thinking: What's it good for?

I use design thinking, in fact IBM's version called IBM Design Thinking, in my work everyday on a very wide range of problem spaces and with a wide variety of organizations. I'm therefore often surprised by the limited view people have of the applicability of design thinking. Many people believe that it is only relevant to the user interface or the "look and feel" of an app or application. Nothing could be further from the truth. These people are essentially conflating and thereby confusing design and design thinking. I explained the difference between the two in my previous post.

In that post, I pointed out that design thinking, or more specially IBM's version called IBM Design Thinking, should be learned and practiced by all disciplines represented by the horizontal generalist stroke of their T skill set. So following on from that, if design thinking isn't limited to the user interface and the "look and feel", and should be practiced by all disciplines, you might ask, what is it good for and what kind of problem or opportunity spaces is it relevant to?

Well, I'm finding in my work that the framework is applicable to virtually everything I've applied it to and I haven't found a situation yet where it wasn't relevant. Let me summarize briefly several examples that illustrate the wide range of applicability. 

• Healthcare providers have developed new approaches for making patient care more effective, convenient, and at lower cost including processes, apps, and systems.
• Financial institutions have focussed on making their client experience more engaging, seamless, and automated focussing on procedures, policies, apps, websites, and call centers. 
• Transportation companies have developed innovative ways to make their client experience efficient and their application development operations more agile through apps, technologies, and simplified processes.
• Insurance companies have examined and redesigned the various touch points their agents have with clients and the technologies that mediate those touch points.
• Telecom companies have improved the B2C and B2B client experience to competitively differentiate their offerings and to speed up delivering new capabilities to clients. 
• Retailers have refocussed their companies on their customers and their employees and the various ways they can make the experience of both more enjoyable, efficient, and cost effective.
• A collection of high tech companies looking to attract the best talent to a particular city used the approach to better understand the variety of types of candidates they should targeting and how best to communicate to them.
• Universities have used the approach to design the direction for their curriculum, how they should collaborate with one another and with industry, as well as the methods they should use to communicate what they offer. 

In many of these cases the initial experience of IBM Design Thinking was through a one to two day workshop I ran with them. A typical experience often starts with some level of scepticism, largely due to misperceptions about the approach that I referred to earlier. However, once everyone gets into the workshop proper, they quickly see the power in the approach and the applicability of it to their organization and problem/opportunity space. C level executives often comment that they think the approach is powerful because it focusses everyone on the human beings they are trying to improve the lives of and also because the methods drive a level of collaboration that takes the ego out of the equation, gives everyone an equal voice, and leads to more diverse and often more innovative ideas. 

Many companies quickly realize that there is much more to the approach than simply using it within workshops and they ask us to help them launch a design transformation of their company like we've done at IBM. They realize that IBM Design Thinking is the foundation and is necessary but that it isn't sufficient to transform the way a company works. I'll get into great detail on that topic in a future post.

When a company has gone through a design transformation, all parts of the organization start to use design thinking as a matter of course. They start to think and act differently. That is the case for IBM. Here are several of the ways different parts of IBM have used the approach.

• Product development: We use IBM Design Thinking in the development of our products whether its an entire ecosystem for developers to create apps and applications like Bluemix or a Cognitive solution to help Oncologists treat cancer patients with IBM Watson. The designers, offering managers, and engineers together use the design thinking to conceptualize, iterate on, and develop the product. 
• Services: We have a business services and a technology services organization and both now use IBM Design Thinking. We use the approach when our services involve designing and developing a solution (website, apps, call center, etc.) for a financial institution, for example, and also when our services involve designing an entire IT infrastructure solution for a transportation company, for example, for whom we run their entire IT systems. 
• Sales and Marketing: Our sales organization and our marketing and communication functions uses IBM Design Thinking to better empathize with clients and potential clients to better understand them, their current experiences, and challenges in order to more effectively determine a solution to their challenges, as well as to develop marketing (websites, advertising, etc.) that communicates to a broader audience what we have to offer to address challenges companies are having.      
• Human Resources: Our HR organization has used IBM Design Thinking to reimagine our employee evaluation system so that it actually has built into it key aspects of our framework (collaboration, iteration, feedback) and they're also using the approach to improve our recruiting and on boarding methods, applications, and processes. 
• Finance: Our financial analysts have used our framework to determine how to better serve their internal clients, managers and employees, by simplifying processes, approvals, and reporting. 
• IT Systems: Our CIO's office as well as individual country IT organizations have used IBM Design Thinking to dramatically improve the user experience with the internal apps and applications our employees use. For example, we have a new app and web application for finding any employee in the company, any information about them, and the ability to connect with them directly. Another example is the internal Mac@IBM App Store which dramatically simplifies setting up, installing new apps, and requisite updates for employee computers.   

It's important to point out that incorporating design thinking into a project or using it to transform an entire company involves a journey and isn't accomplished overnight. It should also be noted that the approach has limited effectiveness if the scope of project is too narrowly defined, if it isn't applied at the beginning of the project, and if the requisite skills and staffing aren't made available to the project. There are initial conditions that need to be met in order to effectively apply the approach. However, I hope that the examples I've given here of the various types of companies, the types of problem spaces, and the types of areas within companies have provided you some idea as to the wide applicability of design thinking in general and IBM Design Thinking in particular.   

Design vs Design Thinking Explained

Sara Diamond and I recently wrote an article entitled "There's no innovation agenda without design thinking" which generated significant interest and discussion. One of the commenters wrote, in part, "...functional and aesthetic design is important but the technological innovation and the ability to implement the ideas are even more so. The kind of design the writers are speaking of acts as a discriminator if there are competing products but without the existence of a new product, does not come into play." 

This comment confuses design with design thinking. This is a common confusion and one that those who coined the later phrase are painfully aware of. The best way to explain the two terms is by reference to skills and practices as illustrated by the concept of the T-shaped person. I've discussed this here in a previous post. The vertical stroke of the T refers to deep specialized skills whereas the horizontal stroke refers to the generalist cross-discipline skills. 

Design Thinking skills and practices, as illustrated above, should be thought of as being appropriate to all disciplines including design. Design itself is a craft of deep specialized skills comprised of visual design, interaction or user experience design, user research, and front-end development. Each of these design specialties needs to know and practice their own specialized craft (the vertical stroke of the T) while also knowing and practicing design thinking (the horizontal stroke of the T). 

Of course, many other disciplines are needed on the team, business and engineering for example, and each of these needs to contribute their specialized discipline specific skills while all needing the generalist design thinking skills. The IBM version of design thinking, which we call IBM Design Thinking, has further enhanced the set of cross-discipline skills and practices to optimize for cross-team collaboration, alignment, and transparency. 

It is the practice of design thinking by a team that leads to the opportunity for innovation and each discipline's unique contribution, including design, that fleshes it out and realizes the potential. 

Let's use an example to illustrate. Let's imagine a startup wanting to create a new product in the increasingly important health space. In my experience, startups often approach this by simply having smart engineers sitting around in a cool looking incubator space working all hours staring at their MacBooks trying to dream up some innovation, building it (and perhaps also having a designer to "make it pretty"), and then pivoting when it doesn't work.

The design thinking approach would start off by having user researchers understand the people the startup wants to improve the life of (i.e., patients, nurses, etc.) using various ethnographic observation and interview methods. Other disciplines on the team would help with this, gaining first hand knowledge of the domain and deeply empathizing with the people they intend to serve. The team comes back and uses methods like empathy mapping and as-is scenario mapping to capture what they learned, importantly reflecting on a 360 degree view of the people they intend to serve, what they do, say, think, and feel. The team members then individually, and afterwards as a group, determine which aspects of the current experience are the most problematic and opportune to significantly improve. Based on this knowledge, the team collectively articulates their intended objective using what we at IBM call Hills, statements that communicate who is going to be able to do what with the new solution with what "wow" outcome for them. Hills provide the clarity and focus for the team and are used throughout the project as well during what we call Playbacks when all stakeholders review the evolving client experience. The team then ideates on potential solutions, importantly getting input from all the team's individual specialized experience and skills. They decide which of the ideas they'd like to explore further and then create paper mockups of the most promising ideas on which they then get feedback from a few representative target users (which we call Sponsor Users). The team determines which ideas were best and iterates on them based on the feedback received. That cycle of iteration continues as the product is further fleshed out in higher fidelity prototypes and then production code. At all stages, team members are involved in and using design thinking while also contributing their own deep specialized knowledge and skills. Design is an important but only one of the important specialized skills on the team. It's important to point out that the above can be done extremely quickly and efficiently while at the same time increasing the likelihood of success. There is no prescribed order and teams have a wide selection of methods to use. Design thinking, as the name suggests, is at its essence a new way of thinking about a problem or opportunity space and how to address it collaboratively with a team of specialists. 

I truly believe that using design thinking, particularly IBM's version, with teams that have all the requisite talent and skills, including importantly design, will dramatically increase the likelihood of delivering highly successful and innovative outcomes.