A transcript of Episode 224 of UX Podcast. Jeanne Liedtka, author of multiple books around design thinking and organic growth, was visiting Stockholm and we had the opportunity to talk to her in person about design thinking and the business value of design.

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Ebuwa ‘Ria Evbuoma.

Transcript

Per Axbom
UX podcast is funded by James and myself together with any contributions we can get from you, our listeners. You can contribute any amount you like, whenever you like by visiting uxpodcast.com/support

Computer voice
UX podcast, Episode 224.

Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
And I’m James Royal-Lawson.

Per Axbom
And this is UX podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden, and you’re listening in from 190 countries, from Malta to 24 out of the 27 states in Brazil. Now you wrote that, and that’s quite something.

James Royal-Lawson
I was just fascinated by the fact that there were just so many listeners in Brazil and so diverse across Brazil, because it’s a big country. So, in case you’re wondering, the three Brazilian states that we don’t know if we do have listeners in, are the three smallest.

Per Axbom
And I’ve seen you’ve written here, Acre, Amapá and Roraima. I’m sorry, I have no idea if I pronounced that right.

James Royal-Lawson
I’m so glad you tried and not me.

Per Axbom
If you know anybody in those states, of course, let them know that they should listen to UX podcast.

James Royal-Lawson
Jeanne Liedtka, who joins us today is an American strategist and Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of the University of Virginia. She’s particularly known for her work on strategic thinking, design, thinking and organic growth. She has consulted on and written on topics surrounding strategic thinking for over 30 years, including the award-winning book, Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers.

Per Axbom
And Jeanne recently gave a talk here in Stockholm, organised by Daresay, on the business value of design, and we sat down with her after her talk, and we had a discussion about why design thinking matters, why it’s okay to not be perfect, the nuances of value creation and overcoming tension and fears in the organisation.

James Royal-Lawson
The business value of design. Now, first question is, “What created value before design?”

Jeanne Liedtka
That’s an interesting question.

James Royal-Lawson
Why didn’t we think of the business value of design? And that’s what we’re seeing now. It just struck me, where were we before?

Jeanne Liedtka
I think the term design is so ubiquitous. At some level, you can be a business and not have design. I mean, you may have designed rather haphazardly and you may not have designed in a very customer-centric way. But if you’ve produced a product or service, there has been some level of design involved.

I think what we’re talking about, particularly when we begin to talk about design thinking, is a particular methodological approach to thinking about things that we perhaps weren’t as fully aware of, or something like customer-centricity. We were fully aware of it. We just didn’t have very sophisticated tools to do it with. And so I think in part, it’s bringing a much more conscious and methodologically complex view to what all organisations, what all of us as human beings are, which is we are designers.

James Royal-Lawson
Creative and designers – it’s always been there. Yes, it’s the age of consciousness we’re entering.

Jeanne Liedtka
I think it is. And again, I think we could, you know. With most things design-related in the US, there are things we alternately praise and fault Apple for. Because I think they were what brought in the US, consciousness to this idea that there was competitive advantage attached to being very conscious about the design that you gave your customer.

They also gave us this notion that design meant a sleek piece of hardware, which I think we’ve been fighting against ever since. But it did raise the consciousness of it and the recognition that it wasn’t as they would call design, you know, the last way station that made something pretty on its way to the customer. But that in fact, it kind of was an integral aspect of any product or service.

Per Axbom
Nice. I like that because that dovetails nicely with when you’re thinking about how mature you are, unconsciously incompetent, or consciously incompetent. Yeah. And that’s those steps. So what phase are we at now? We’re sort of like, consciously incompetent because not everyone gets it, apparently.

Jeanne Liedtka
Yes, yes. And also, I mean, psychologically, as human beings. We are so unconscious, for the most part. I mean, a lot of the power of design is to make us realise that the rest of the world doesn’t want exactly what we want. And particularly in areas like healthcare, where you’ve had the design of delivery systems, pretty much dominated by a small set of experts, who are the caregivers.

There’s just huge opportunity for improvements in the experience by doing nothing more than recognising the basic notion that other people have needs and wants that are different than ours, and perhaps we should listen to them.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. And that is, like one of the really core, important parts about design thinking that we’re talking about – getting to the, like, deep core of people’s needs.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s a good point. In our industry, there’s always so much talk about definitions. Yeah. So what’s, what’s your definition of design thinking?

Jeanne Liedtka
So my definition of design thinking is pretty straightforward. It’s that it is a problem-solving approach which has some unique characteristics relative to the typical problem solving approaches that we’ve had in business and I, I try and avoid this idea of design thinking as a religion, that it is something that that basically supplants everything else we ever do and have done and that every project should be a design thinking project in an organisation.

In fact, design thinking is just one methodology among many. And for most of the activities of most organisations, the methodologies we’ve already got actually work quite well. But design thinking is optimised for a set of conditions that our other decision-making approaches generally have not been optimised for, and that is particularly around uncertainty and diversity of stakeholders and a changing environment.

Just a set of conditions, that analytical methodologies – that are basically based on extrapolating from the past into the future – are particularly bad at. And so design for this one category of problems – human-centred, fairly uncertain, we don’t feel comfortable extrapolating the past. Design thinking is almost unique in the management tool kit.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And then I guess the traditional management tool kit is going to be built with tools that were used for production in in more factory-like environments, I guess.

Jeanne Liedtka
Yes. It’s also mostly been a set of tools for testing. Yeah. So if you look at a lot of our economic tools, they start with an idea. And then you can get fairly sophisticated about different approaches to testing it. But we have very few tools that are around creating ideas. And that’s one of the exciting things about design thinking to me, it is a tool kit, not only for testing, and I do think it has some very unique properties even in relation to testing. But it is almost completely unique in that it’s given us a set of deeper tools that allow us to generate ideas and yet still be data-driven.

And I think that’s what appeals to me as a business person about design thinking. We have this notion that creativity and innovation are just ideas (that) come to people in the shower, right? That that there is no way to help people get better at it. And that, you know, some of us are born with it, and the rest of us just have to wait for the people who are born with it to come up with the idea so we can go test them. But I think what design thinking allows us to do, is say, we can create ideas with data rooted in the customers needs.

And so I think that piece of it, for those of us who grew up in a quantitative world, who believe in data, who liked data, and who think that if you don’t have data, people just designed for themselves, the fact that we still get to be data-driven, but with a very different kind of deeper, more ethnographic data than we’ve traditionally had to work with as business people – I think it’s it’s very exciting.

Per Axbom
So I love that you’re saying this because we’re not talking about qualitative data. What I know that people struggle with in the industry is actually getting the time to do exactly what you were saying. Is it then not design thinking if you’re not doing the real work of going out there? Doing observational studies, understanding the people you’re designing for? Is it then not design thinking?

Jeanne Liedtka
It wouldn’t be design thinking under my definition of it. For me, a full design thinking process has three components. The first is an exploration of existing customer needs. Now, interestingly, that doesn’t always have to be face-to-face ethnographic interviewing.

For instance, one of our most interesting stories of a healthcare organisation, they basically created the customer journey out of data that they had in their records because it was happening in the emergency room with people who are psychologically distressed, that you couldn’t interview. And yet, they were basically using data to understand the context of the problem and the needs of the people involved. Right. They were then generating ideas.

And one of my firm beliefs is that it’s essential to do design thinking that you generate multiple ideas. As business people, we think it looks so much more efficient, to just take the first idea we fall in love with and stop there. So you have to impress upon people, we are creating a portfolio of ideas, not a single idea, then, we are moving that portfolio into testing.

And the people who get to make the decisions are the customers that we’re serving. And so for me, if you skip the front end, the exploration of the existing context, or, if you move one idea into it, or, if you don’t go to customers with prototypes or testing, then it doesn’t get to be called design thinking.

Per Axbom
Because the next question then to follow, of course, always is, how do you know when you’re done? How do I know when I know enough to go on? Yeah.

Jeanne Liedtka
And of course, you’re never done. Yeah. There’s always more to know. This is, again, a lot of things I think that frustrate people about design thinking are in fact, just things that frustrate us in organisations whenever we do research, right? And this question of, “when am I done?” I always loved the Frank Gehry discussion of that a lot of my initial inspiration for design thinking came from studying architects like Frank Gehry and trying to understand their process.

Because when I started on this about 20 years ago, I had never heard of design thinking. I mean IDEO was around, but they weren’t being discussed in the US. So for me, design was a metaphor, not a tool kit. And it was a metaphor that I largely understood through the work and the writings of architects, and Frank Gehry basically said, you know, at some point, someone takes away your pencil, you’re out of money, you’re out of time, you call it quits, you’re not satisfied, it could always be better, and you move on.

Now, in my old life, as a strategy consultant, it was exactly the same way, you can always justify getting more data. And one of the advantages of design thinking is it says, “stop looking for the perfect data to prove what you think is true. Take it raw, and bring it to the real people you’re trying to serve, and they’ll give you data.” And I think that action-orientation, that design-doing, as much as design thinking is, really critical, that it’s okay to move on when it’s not perfect. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
You know, I think you’ve mentioned how you can’t use past data to create a future. And I really like the way we talk about the UX. If you take on board all the constraints of today, you constrain yourself into ways you can’t create a future that’s any different, really, from what you’ve already got.

Jeanne Liedtka
Exactly. Most of us can. Anyhow, this is a conversation I have with designers a lot. Designers thrive on constraints. Designers will say, “if you give me a problem without constraints, I mean, I can’t work with it. I mean, the more constraints, the better the because they’ll stimulate my creativity.” That is absolutely not true for about 99% of the world’s population.

Constraints don’t stimulate our creativity. They shut us down, right? We see constraints as red lights that say, “Oh, well, that’s not good work. Just go back to the way that you’ve always been doing it.” Right? So particularly people who grew up in large organisations and of course, I have spent the majority of my career with what I call the dinosaurs, right?Organisations, those are the people who hire consultants and those are the people who send their people to be educated at MBA programmes, right?

Organisations that know they have to change, but that are large and resistant to change and bureaucratic and hierarchical and all of the things we know are anathema to innovation. And, in those organisations, people are tremendously afraid of making mistakes, and it is probably one of the dominant cultural aspects of these organisations and again, that isn’t entirely the organization’s fault.

It is kind of a deeply rooted human quality that most of us are. We don’t view life as a journey of learning as, Carol Dweck describes the growth mindset. We view life is a test and we’re trying not to look stupid, right? And within that context, if you don’t lift constraints, you won’t get much creative thinking.

And if you don’t give people a lot of structure, I think another critique of design thinking from designers is that you’re, taking all the magic out of design. I mean, you have these steps. I mean, I have a ridiculous 15-step model. And the reason I have it is 10 years of teaching managers to do this stuff. I kept adding steps, because if you left them on their own, they went off course or they gave up or they sub-optimised or they did something that interfered with their ability to have a positive outcome.

But that structure is really critical. One of the the leads of Design at Intuit once said to me, “it’s like playing jazz. We are all about improvisation, but you can’t improvise until you’ve learned your chords. So the structured process is where people learn their chords. And once they’ve learned those chords, they’re on their own, they can improvise, they can pick whatever piece of the process works for them, they can move at whatever pace they want, however they want. ” But while you’re teaching people their chords, I think that structure equals safety. And safety is critical.

James Royal-Lawson
This is something I think a lot of us will struggle with all the time where, you know you want to flip from being innovative with innovation, and when you’re actually just improving. Many of us work on projects where we we need to improve ‘this thing’. We don’t have the moment, the opportunity, the mandate maybe even to be completely innovative, that that maybe comes at another point. So, they overlap and they intertwine. So when do we switch track? And how do we switch track?

Jeanne Liedtka
You know, I have a very simple answer to that. I think most of the ways in which we parse innovation are not helpful. I mean, it may be true, there’s disruptive innovation, there’s technology innovation, there’s science, human centred innovation.

But basically, all innovation, I believe, is about improving the value creation that you have for people. Now, sometimes you can improve that value creation dramatically, you know, you can invent Penicillin. And other times you can produce it more marginally. But innovation, it really doesn’t matter what you call it. Most of the time, the level of radicalness of your ability to innovate is a function of where you sit in an organisation.

If I’m face to face with the customer behind a desk, I have very powerful local intelligence but probably very localised decision making authority as well. At a senior level, I can be a strategist, I can do disruption, I can invest in research and development. You know, as a research scientist, I can do blue sky research and all of that. It doesn’t really help to to talk about disruptive innovation to the person who’s on the front line. It’s kind of a (thing), it’s like the old Covey thing.

You know, I mean, I still think you can go back to Stephen Covey for so many basic truths about life. And he talks about our sphere of influence and our sphere of control. Yeah, in management in general, we spend way too much time haranguing people about things that are not even in their sphere of influence, much less their sphere of control. And we divert their attention from focusing on areas where they could make a difference. And so for me, innovation is not about novelty.

It’s not about disruption. It’s about creating better value for the people we serve, whether it’s the person right in front of us, or whether it’s an entire industry, depending upon the nature, and that’s the heart of it. Sometimes you also can’t tell how radical, value creation is. One of my favourite examples here is wheels on luggage.

Now, I mean, most of our audience is probably too young to remember when we were actually stupid enough to haul suitcases around that had no wheels on them, right? In retrospect, it seems so obvious. And I mean, wheels have been around for how many millennia, sacks have been around forever, you wouldn’t think there’d be a whole lot of value creation in combining those two.

But imagine, given the amount of time we spend furiously running through airports these days, what life would be like without those wheels on our luggage? And so I think it’s easy to denigrate something by calling it, “oh, that’s just incremental.” But the reality of it, is for the person you are serving, it matters and it may well be significant, even if it’s not significant to the tune of millions of dollars and an organisation-wide influence.

Per Axbom
Yeah. And I love this because at the same time, I love what you were saying before today about design thinking being inclusive by itself, because you bring in people from all over the organisation so even the receptionist is a person you went bring into the process, preferably.

And thinking about that, I can’t verify this, our listeners will have to verify this. But I heard the story behind that wheels on luggage is that a stewardess came up with that idea. So that is, actually the people with the greatest need when you listen to them, that’s when the ideas come.

Jeanne Liedtka
And I think it’s part of our it’s hierarchy and elitism and who we privilege to have ideas that we listen to. And the reality of it is because everyone brings something different from their perspective, often people with what we would call the beginner’s mind, right, bring a lot of value, and one of my favourite stories comes from the US Department of Defense.

So this is you know, big deal, very serious kind of people. Group of people using design thinking, wanting to have an idea generation session, they send out the email to everyone in the department. And when the session starts, the administrative assistant in the department walks in sits down because she was on the email. And as the person was facilitating the session describes it. He said, “I pause for a moment and wonder if I should tell her that she didn’t really need to come.” And then he thought, “oh, I think that would be rude.” So they went on with the session.

As part of this session, a lot of design thinking is trying to move anonymity into the process. So you’re writing up post-it notes, you’re putting things up. So ideas aren’t owned by particular people, especially in a hierarchy where we’ve got military involved like the Department of Defense, you won’t get anything from lower level people unless you give them anonymity. Anyhow, at the end of the session, they picked one idea to move into the next stage of development.

And as they were leaving this session, the facilitator said to the admin, “so what did you think of the session? “And she said, “well, I thought it was great, and I thought it was particularly cool that y’all pick my idea.” Again, that is a true story and an amazing story, right, because she wasn’t even supposed to be there because she wouldn’t know she couldn’t contribute, right?

And so I think, the more inclusive we can be within a structure that doesn’t kind of collapse, with all of the diversity that we’ve introduced, it’s just very powerful. And so for me, the conversation design thinking creates is actually its most significant part. It’s a conversation that allows us to tap into the best of our diversity, while still focusing on the person that we’re trying to serve. And I think that’s something that we desperately need in today’s world.

How do we step away from the ideologies that drive us these days where we can’t even communicate with each other across our differences? And step back and say, “yes!” All right. On one level, you may say Black Lives Matter and I may say Everybody’s Lives Matter, but can’t we both agree that there’s something terribly dysfunctional that’s happening in traffic stops in the US with young black men? And can’t we just try and figure out how we would improve that process? Regardless of which ideology we ascribe to? That, to me is the ultimate power and design thinking.

James Royal-Lawson
Wow, yeah. So through increasing the sphere of influence of people closer to the person we’re trying to serve. with whatever we’re doing, it’s that that gives us design thinking. That’s what allows design thinking to grow in organisations.

Jeanne Liedtka
Well, you know, better choices come from better information. And local intelligence is probably the most valuable kind of information in a world of change. In a world that static, perhaps you can afford to process everything up the ladder and to have some senior leader looking at reports and based on that, making decisions.

But in a fast changing world, the data about what’s really happening is happening at the front lines of the organisations. If there is no way to pull that data into your decision -making process, you’re going to waste money, you’re going to miss opportunities, I mean, you’re going to do a whole lot of things that we don’t want to do in business, because of the loss of that local intelligence.

James Royal-Lawson
If no one talked to the stewardess, then it would have taken a lot longer to realise that wheels are needed on the suitcases.

Per Axbom
But this is also a core part of where it can go wrong because (of the) value creation you talked about, but its value creation, of course, for the user, or the person out there that you’re designing for. But of course, there’s also value creation, that you were talking about today, value reation for the business. And sometimes those two are in conflict.

Jeanne Liedtka
You know, they’re often in conflict. I mean, the fastest way to make money is to raise your price, but there’s very few customers who get enthusiastic about that, right? So the tension between business success and customer satisfaction has always been there. It’s like the tension between long-term and short-term. You can never really resolve it, you manage it on a day-to-day basis.

One of the things that I personally believe in design thinking is critical – and this is not universally the way everyone does it – but I ask people to completely hold at bay the question of organisational needs. And we factor that in and treat it as a constraint during idea testing, right? Otherwise, basically, people create out of the existing capability base.

I mean, when you say let’s you know, what’s the most effective form of innovation for an organisation? Well, it’s to sell more of what we’re already selling to somebody new, probably right. It’s not to innovate, because actually creating new stuff is expensive and risky. So we have to lower the cost of creating new stuff if we want people to do anything more explicit than just churn out the stuff that they’ve got. But how do you reduce that risk? The more thoroughly you know the customer and the more you engage them in the process, the lower the risk and the less trade off.

So again, there’s always going to be organisations that want to maximise profit in the short term, which means they’re not going to really focus on investing, in developing that next level of thinking about the customers future needs. They’re going to make today as profitable as possible. But I think for organisations to take a more strategic focus, who in the long term want to be profitable, the surest route to profitability is to deeply understand your customer and to deliver better value to them than the people that you compete against.

And so, holding your own needs at bay, while you really focus on, “if anything were possible, what would we create for them?” And then you use some of your creativity in service, not to the idea, but in service of how you execute the idea. How do we find partners, if we don’t have that capability? It opens up whole new vistas. And again, I think another focus of today’s world is we’re not trying to do it all.

As an organisation, the old days of vertical integration where a given organisation did everything, are gone. It’s increasingly about collaboration. It’s about partnerships. And that collaboration, though, has to be in service to value creation for customers. Otherwise, how do we know who to partner with? And around what, right? Once we understand the customer needs and we can analyse the gap in our own capability set, then we know what the qualities are that we need to look for in a partner.

Per Axbom
For me, that’s perfect. That’s a great ending. Thank you for sitting down with us, Jeanne.

Jeanne Liedtka
Oh, you’re welcome, it has been my pleasure.

James Royal-Lawson
I don’t know if I count as a listener of the show. I do listen.

Per Axbom
Well, you did listen to this.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I do sometimes listen. But I look to the story of the suitcase and the and the wheels. And it was actually the roller board, as it’s called, and invented in 1987 by Robert Plath, who was an airline Boeing 737 pilot who liked creating things.

But I think we saw the idea of it comes from the hostesses, and I think he sold it to his crew and different crews. So it became a sight, that you would see, these airline hostess and crews whizzing through airports with really nifty bags. So what you saw and then what recognised was these people and then you wanted for themselves.

But the story is excellent, and it’s a really good example. It was, as far as I’ve read, that this was an example that well, the first person to put wheels on suitcases, that idea didn’t really go down too well at all. And he was quoted as saying, the problem he had in in pitching it was that the people he was pitching to were predominantly men. And they regarded it as not macho not being able to carry your own case. So it was a shot at a sign of visual strength that you could march to an airport with these, you know, suitcases on your arm. So they dismissed it.

Per Axbom
That makes me think, how many excellent good ideas have been blocked by men thinking that everyone is like them?

James Royal-Lawson
I suspect quite a lot, but it ties in perfectly with Jeanne’s point that you know, by being inclusive, by including the right people in your forums for innovation or decision making, you make better decisions. And, you know, the the pilot who invented the wheeled box, he saw a problem. He just basically went to his workshop, knocked up some wheels for a suitcase that worked better than previous ideas.

And rather than kind of try and pitch it straight off, he started supplying these to the people around him. The problem showed that he got data and learned that it worked. Then he went on to pitch it and made it, and by that point, it was more communicable. It was more an idea that we could communicate easier to other groups.

Per Axbom
Yeah, and the demand was obvious now, and there was a business case because people obviously wanted this. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So, now it’s definitely a good example of a story, I think.

Per Axbom
It really speaks also to the power of influence. I mean, who, who could have invented that? Who would people have listened to? But as you said, actually, he did make people listen to by showing it being in use. And that’s how it became interesting to others.

James Royal-Lawson
Gather data.

Per Axbom
Yes, I like the points that Jeanne made about data-driven. Because when you hear data-driven sometimes these days you think, oh, no one with those people who obviously want to like look into analytics engines, count the numbers and look at profits. But she actually does talk about the ethnographic data, the data about human beings, and that is being data-driven and I love, love, love how she brings that qualitative data into it and also something that a lot of people seem to be missing.

I mean, I mentioned at the beginning about this conscious incompetency, I think it’s very, very common that people are aware of what design thinking is and how it should be done. But a lot of the people practising it, do not have the mandate, they do not have the influence to do it all the way, so a lot of that specific research around human beings and their needs and behaviours is not always done the way that people want to do it; which means that there’s a risk here of actually making…a part of the risk is that if we do it wrong, people won’t to listen to people who want to do design thinking because it didn’t work the last time. And the fact that we could actually be endangering the results by not doing the right research, the right amount of research.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s interesting, because actually in in her talk, she brought up the point of statistical significance and and doing it right. And she said, it doesn’t matter. She says, because we’re using the data to inspire innovation.

Per Axbom
Oh, that’s nice. Nice.

James Royal-Lawson
But it’s interesting how, how what you’re saying now is quite true, that you can do, we can do research badly. But, the argument here is that you’ve got to frame it right and say, “well, no, this is just inspiration.” It isn’t necessarily fact all the time.

Per Axbom
Yeah, because she also says you she had a line, make it raw, and give it to the people you want to serve. And they will give you more data. So it’s really, it’s about getting more data all the time. But that also means that you actually need to have access to the people that you want to try out your solution, before you launch it. Because there’s also a danger here – if you don’t give it to the people beforehand, and you just throw it out there and test it, you have to be looking for the stuff that could also negatively impact people. Yeah. And also you need to be sure about what you’re looking at.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, you got to be careful, I think if you’re using it for inspiration, then you perhaps have already decided in what way you want to inspire. So you frame the results in order to achieve that inspiration. So I agree with you, it can be risky.

Per Axbom
Yeah. But then she has another point to counter that, kind of. In the end, we talked about organisational constraints. And so you can actually, in your work, say that the organisational constraints are not there. We don’t take them into consideration until we actually start solving. But to look at the problem and understand the possibilities, we need to look away from the organisational constraints. And I think that’s really hard. I have a hard time with that in workshops, and what I try to communicate with my clients is that they have a hard time not thinking about the constraints all the time.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I know in the talk itself, Jeanne went into a bit more detail of her definition of design thinking. She said it was, design thinking was problem-solving around three core beliefs. One of them was empathy, human needs. Another was innovation, so exploring new possibilities. And the third belief was around iteration, that the first solution is just a stepping stone to a better one. And that then dovetails into constraints and building constraints. You would say, “well, look, we don’t we don’t have any constraints,” at first. And then you kind of maybe apply some of the constraints.

Without the constraints, this is where we want it, this is what we’d like to have, this is what we think would be the best or a great solution for a problem that our users face. Yeah, what constraints? Can we start to apply and see where, how far we can get with that? What was our first stepping stone? What? What did the constraints allow us to do? At first, but still, you’ve allowed yourself to open up and be creative.

Per Axbom
Yeah. That is interesting. I love also how she points out then that as a designer, or whoever you are in the organisation, your sphere of influence may not be that big. But that does not mean that you aren’t working with value creation. You just have to assess what is a reasonable amount of value creation that I have that power to produce? So she’s actually acknowledging that not everyone can invent and be innovative in the sense that, maybe we read about all the time, but you are always producing value by creating value for the people you’re building for.

James Royal-Lawson
And that’s, this is lovely because you’ve got, what you’ve got is you’ve got a double-fronted attack that what Jeanne’s doing is saying, yet in your world, you can innovate, you can innovate something and make incremental improvements and deliver value from wherever you are in the organisation. As long as you understood where you are, where your influence goes? Then, at the other end of it, she’s talking, she’s teaching, she’s spreading knowledge about how managers should push decision making as low as possible in their organisations, crushing it close to the source, build capability, locally.

So she’s yeah, she’s encouraging you at the bottom to kind of like – I don’t want to say bottom – so you can be encouraging more sets of people to make the best of the world they are in; at the same time trying to expand the world and the managers, the higher-up levels to go downwards. So the idea being eventually, we’ll all meet in the middle and we’ll live in the design thinking world. I guess.

Per Axbom
Well, that’s beautiful.

Per Axbom
I thought was really interesting how you had to correct yourself now, because we always think about higher level and bottom level. And she was using the word, localised influence. Yes. as she was talking about it.

James Royal-Lawson
You’re, right, I did fall into the weeds. I mean, there’s so much language. It’s decades of business, you know, business or management tool kits and things and all the the language and the things I’ve been taught around these kind of things, has a certain way of framing things and you have a certain way of perceiving organisations. And design thinking has to break that down in order to be its most successful.

Per Axbom
Exactly. So when thinking about what to listen to, next, I noticed you had something in our notes and it was funny because she used in the interview, the phrase “design doing”, as well. Yeah, design thinking and design doing. And I we actually have an episode I think that is called design doing.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, with Don Norman, that we recorded a little while ago now, but it was a two-part interview with Don, that we called “design-doing”. Yeah, well, he talks a fair bit about well, it’s one thing design thinking but let’s get … can we just get on with actually doing rather than just thinking? That’s a very good point.

Per Axbom
And that goes to Jeanne’s point that you don’t always have to feel like you’re ready, but put it out there. That’s what she says, make it raw. Put it out there, get the feedback and then you get the data. So it’s by doing that you’re then thinking, so you get out there, you have to go. They have to dovetail with each other. Really? Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Though always be improving. Anyway, so that was Episode 125 and 126 without recommending or listening for you to get into now. And if you’d like to contribute to funding UX podcast, then please visit uxpodcast.com/support. Remember to keep moving. See you on the other side.

Per Axbom
What did Winnie the Pooh say to his agent?

James Royal-Lawson
I don’t know, Per, what did Winnie the Pooh say to his agent?

Per Axbom
Show me the honey!

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Jeanne Liedtka. Recorded in October 2019 and published as Episode 224 of UX Podcast. 

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Ebuwa ‘Ria Evbuoma.