A transcript of S02E16 (326) of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Nathan Shedroff to discuss how we as designers can be, and are, strategic. Context is everything, and through situational and operational awareness, we can bridge the gap between design and business.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Cristian Pavel.
Transcript
Computer voice
Season two, Episode 16.
[Music]
Nathan Shedroff
And I remember asking like, why? Why do you need a sketching class? And this one woman? So succinctly put it like when we’re in team meetings and talking about things, they’re sketching things out, and then they hold it up and say: “You mean like this? ” And everyone’s like, “Yeah, yeah, that that. Yeah!” And they’re driving the conversation then.
Per Axbom
Hello, everybody, welcome to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts, Per Axbom, and James Royal-Lawson. Balancing business, technology, people and society, with listeners all over the world, from Latvia to Hungary.
James Royal-Lawson
Nathan Shedroff is a seasoned professional strategist and serial entrepreneur, as well as a pioneer in the fields of experience design, interaction design, and information design. Currently, he’s creating new tools and models for new ventures. And we caught up with him when he was teaching a workshop about strategic impact.
Per Axbom
So we picked Nathan’s mind about what makes a good strategy and ended up talking about how leadership works, the importance of sustainability, as well as the significant impact and value of design.
James Royal-Lawson
This is actually the well, third time we’ve had Nathan on the show. But interestingly, this is the first time we’re talking more about what Nathan does. Previously, he’s been talking to us about sci-fi.
Per Axbom
Yeah, it’s always been together with Chris Noessel, before when we had him on the show.
Per Axbom
Today’s interview was recorded at UXLX, which is a conference that is held every May in Lisbon, Portugal, tickets are on sale now and sell out, every edition.
James Royal-Lawson
Nathan, you, like me and Per as well, we’ve been in the business for a while. Just a few years, to that point now where we probably don’t want to mention exactly how many years it’s been. But you know, all of us in our careers go on journeys. It’s an inevitable fact of life, isn’t it, of working life. And one of the journeys that you’re deep into now is the one regarding strategy. And what you’ve experienced and noticed with the where strategy in the realm of digital product, digital design works, or doesn’t work.
Nathan Shedroff
As the case often is, right?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Nathan Shedroff
I think in some ways, my journey has always been about strategy, just not using those words, and maybe not always knowing it. And that may not be different than most designers or other people who make things or interact with people to make things. Because those elements are always there. They’re acting on every decision. They’re acting, you know, the kernel of the frustration that it is the design condition, or how we interact with others. So I think it all goes back to strategy at some point. Regardless of what level you are, like, if it’s product strategy, fine, if it’s corporate strategy, that’s different, but it’s the same sort of experience. So I think it’s something that we all struggle with, and try to understand.
In the military, you have operational awareness and situational awareness. And that’s one of the ways to describe strategy. Everything about context, everything about markets, including customers, and competitors, etc. It’s all about situational awareness, what’s the situation we’re in so that we can understand how to act? And then operational awareness is all about, like, how do things work? How prepared are we? What do we need to be successful to operate? That’s everything about operational awareness and operational strategy. So the two are there all the time, at every level, in everything we do. And it’s just a matter of acknowledging the pieces so that you can do them more effectively.
James Royal-Lawson
And we, I guess, in our silo as it often is this, we get frustrated with the strategy, that you know, we know better! Why is that?
Nathan Shedroff
Well, with the caveat that we don’t always know better. Like sometimes we think we do, but that’s so different than everyone else, by the way in the room, right? Everyone thinks they know better, mostly. And especially some professions know, they know better whether or not they do. That’s very often the situation with MBAs, especially newly minted ones. I feel like I can be critical of MBAs because I have one I’ve earned one. But you know, that gives me the platform. And the justification to be critical of that area, but they’re taught that they are the masters of strategy and that they’ve been taught everything that’s important. And very clearly, they don’t know everything that’s important.
So part of this is just recognising that we’re all in the same boat, we all have not been given everything we need to be successful. And we’re learning that along the way. Designers have key parts of the puzzle that other people lack. And so that leads us, and because specifically, if we’re talking, the big kind of design that we talk these days, as opposed to the design, when I was brought up through design school, was a very different kind of design, like go out and redesign everything, the way you feel because the world will love it and then the world doesn’t, right?
Now we talk about design from a user, customer whatever centred approach, which is a very different way of seeing the world and acting on it. But because we’re so close to the customers, and very often, we’re the only ones that are, are the only ones that are recognised as being valuably close to the customers as opposed to salespeople or customer service people. We see firsthand what’s not working, who’s not being served well, what value is left on the table in a way that even our marketing peers don’t. And certainly, leadership doesn’t, because they’re not next to it, they don’t see it firsthand, usually, and most of our operational peers don’t. So we have a particular viewpoint that is definitely informed by direct experience and our techniques to get to that information. That makes it very clear when the strategy doesn’t appear to be working. So I think that gives us an extra anxiety or annoyance, because we are so very close to it.
Per Axbom
Is it also the case that were better suited at like communicating or visualising what’s going on?
Nathan Shedroff
I think in some ways, yes. I mean, individuals have, you know, their own distinct skills. So not everyone maybe is that great at visually communicating, or, like graphically communicating. But we are, you know, most design programmes, especially in interaction design, and product design and graphic design, we’re taught how to communicate visually. And that can be really powerful. It’s not the only thing that’s powerful. The power of a story is an in you know, is incredible sometimes. So you can tell a really important part of the story of what’s happening, or what could happen just verbally, but often, just the ability to sketch and form models and put things together or separate them and do it in different ways, changes the conversation, the first year of the MBA programme. You know, when we created this programme, we always thought that the designers were going to have like, be a little bit behind the eight ball, because they didn’t have accounting and economics and some of these other fields in their experience.
But we actually saw more so the problem where the non designers would come to my office and say, “How can I take sketching class on top of my load?” And I remember asking, like,”Why, why do you need discussion class?” And this one woman, so succinctly put it like: “When we’re in team meetings and talking about things, they’re sketching things out, and then they hold it up and say, You mean like this? And everyone’s like, yeah!” And they’re driving the conversation. “I can’t do that. I need to be able to do that.” And so it really flipped my expectations. But it also highlighted the reality of, these skills are super powerful. We don’t always know what to communicate in order to tell the whole story. But much, most of designers have a tremendous power and being able to visually communicate, if they just sort of come up to speed on the rest.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so the rest, there, you’ve got two halves of the same pie, I guess. You’ve got the designers that need to be more non designers or MBAs, and then the MBAs need to be more designers.
Nathan Shedroff
Yeah, it feels more like there’s multiple pies and you’re only in command of a half of one of them. Yeah, you’re essentially right.
James Royal-Lawson
So when we’ve got that frustration, and we’ve got that strategy, that plan that we’re not comfortable with, we’ve also started to gather insights that add fire to our already burning frustration. What’s our next step as designers?
Nathan Shedroff
I think that there’s no one right answer, of course. But I think that one thing that really helps is to expand your understanding of the context that you’re working within. So that’s on many levels, your team, your company or organisation, the context of your customers live within, not just in a functional product standpoint of you know, this is the task and these are the touch points, and therefore, how do those work, but really, in a societal context, and even outside of that. You know, climate change is probably the most important issue in all of our lives in every decision affecting every organisation. And it’s mostly not in the conversation in most of our day to day, right? So you can expand the context pretty wide. And this goes far beyond what designers are expected to do and what they’ve been educated or prepared to do.
But the reality of being a human and you know, the 2020s is that, we need to understand things we’ve never been asked to, because in a systemic world, and everything’s, you know, everything’s a system, there’s many systems, they’re all connected. And so it’s going to touch whatever we’re designing whatever the response to a challenge is, there’s all these things touching it that we have never been taught or given tools to deal with. And yet, they’re there. So I think as designers in order to earn the ability to have conversations that we think we should be having, or being invited to, or to earn the influence that we all think we deserve, because of what we do, the way to earn that is to learn and develop an understanding of all these other systems that are at work and how to deal with them. Because that’s the only way you can be satisfied and make change and have impact. And it’s also something that sets us apart from the rest of our peers.
Per Axbom
So are we the ones who take that flag and run with it? Are we the ones who should convince others of it? Or who takes the leadership position, here?
Nathan Shedroff
It’s a great question. I think that that can’t happen. It’s not an either or, because, you know, if no one else is picking up the flag, and you know, it needs to be picked up. And yeah, by all means, pick it up and run with it. But at the same time, if you know someone better, that should be leading the flag, and you can help them pick it up and run with it, that might get you all to a better spot faster anyway. I don’t think any one person has to be, no one can solve everything. And there’s clearly more challenges than we’re going to solve anytime soon. But it doesn’t have to be either or.
The other thing is you use the word leader, which I think is something that not everyone aspires to be. But everyone sort of deep down thinks that “I’m not a bad leader”. And one of the ways to become a better leader is to understand what leadership is, which is to have a really clear definition of leadership because it reduces down the essence of what does that role mean? What does that that mechanism, really. And so the definition that’s resonated the most with me, that I always go back to is a leader clearly communicates a vision that other people want to follow. And all the elements of leadership are right there. Clear communication. So everything that we were just talking about, you know, communicating visually or telling powerful stories. You don’t get to be a leader unless you can do some aspect of that. Clearly communicate a vision, what is it that you want everyone to be doing? Or where do you want us all to run to? If you can’t point to it, then don’t expect anyone to follow you. That other people want to follow is the rest of that definition.
So if you don’t have that understanding of people, society, the market, your organisation, whatever, if you don’t know what they would want to follow are what they would respond to doesn’t matter what their vision is. It doesn’t matter how clearly you want to communicate it like people aren’t interested. So if you can do those three elements, help create maybe collaboratively, that better vision, clearly communicate it to the people that you’re trying to lead or motivate and understand that it’s something that they actually will respond positively to, then you’re worth him carrying that flag. Or at least you’ve helped someone else carry that flag.
James Royal-Lawson
One thing I hear, though, is, I guess, in part timescale, but then, in part, crossing into someone else’s domain, and we’re talking about leadership here, we’re not talking about insights and things that we’ve noticed something maybe isn’t quite right, with strategy and so on, then that scale there. I mean, if it’s, if there’s a minor thing, maybe you don’t want to run too fast with the flag, otherwise, some of the things we’re gonna be chipping at for a long period of time. And I get the feeling that you’re gonna get quite a kickback from an organisation, if you become too strong of a leader, the wrong position in the organisation, with an insight that clashes with an established mindset, oh, geez, that’s not gonna work.
Nathan Shedroff
Yeah, it might not. And which means maybe you’re in the wrong organisation, right? Like, maybe that’s your decision to rather than, say, “My organisation is not ready for this, they’re gonna be threatened by it, so I won’t bring it up, I’ll just continue doing what I’m doing.” The other option is “No, this is important to me, and this needs to do, I’m gonna go find another group of people that want to do it.” Both are, there’s probably other choices in there, too. But the other thing about leadership is, and this definition being so clear, and generative, is that there’s nothing about authority in there. You don’t have to be at the top of an organisation to enact that, right? And so we have examples of people leading from the top, obviously, so maybe a Steve Jobs or Yan Carlson, or people leading from the bottom like, in the US, we have Norman Ray as an example of a union worker who’s on the lowest end, and yet was able to lead a company to change.
And then you have people in the middle and you even have people outside the organisation. So you can look at like Martin Luther King again, in the US, where he’s not in that organisation, yet, he’s able to clearly communicate a vision of that people want to follow and has assumed a leadership role, even though he’s not part of that immediate system. So we can lead from anywhere should we choose to, if we do this thing correctly, and we can always choose not to as well. It’s not something we’re up for.
James Royal-Lawson
And that kind of situation where you’re, you’re actually leading from outside, that becomes funny, I can mention that being an easier thing to point to, and say “Look, that’s a guiding light, that’s what we should be doing.” So you spark off a conversation or process in your organisation. Because of the external spark.
Nathan Shedroff
Right, exactly. Well, you know, there’s many examples to point to, but I’ll take one, and that is the sustainability initiative. There’s a whole world of, you know, sustainability consultants, and leaders and all sorts of stuff. But one of the things we have all done really poorly, is create that vision of a more sustainable world, that people will want to vote for, or run to, or contribute to. We’ve been really good at the dystopian visions of what we don’t want or what’s going to happen. But we’ve been really bad about exciting people, and encouraging them to go to that other better place. And until you do that, it’s not really going to happen.
There’s another quote by Harvey Milk, I’m from San Francisco. And Harvey Milk was a activist that ran for public office and became a board of supervisors. And he was sort of one of those unlikely leaders. Like never wanted to be in politics and didn’t see himself doing it, but saw what needed to be done. And he used to say, one of the elements of leadership was figuring out where the crowd is going, and then getting out in front of them. Which is kind of funny, but also speaks to some of what we do in design, which is figure out what the audience or the users need, and what they’re ready for, or what they might be excited about. And then go like lead them doing that, which is to say, lead our organisations to provide that.
Per Axbom
And that’s so important, isn’t it? Because it feels like often we are trying to invent where people should, rather than figuring out where do they actually want to go and how can they contribute in their own way?
Nathan Shedroff
Yeah, and again, there’s no one only right way to do this, right? So Steve Jobs, of course, was very famous about saying, “You can’t ask people for what they want”, because, you know, you’ll get, you would never get the Macintosh, you’d get a, you know, PC computer with a little more memory and a little bit more speed and whatnot, right. And so it’s a careful balance because, and also it’s not prescriptive for design, it’s not designers go out and, you know, figure out what the specs are supposed to be because people told them and then have to follow those specs. It’s much more generative. So no, people don’t know what’s possible, we can go out and really well document their needs, their desires, their aspirations, their associations, but they’re not going to be able to tell us what that new thing is or what it looks like, what how it works exactly, they’ll be able to give give us the conditions for its success. But it’s still, like there’s still a huge creative process and and set of things that need to be agreed upon and designed and then delivered in order to meet those needs.
So it’s a little bit of both, and different organisations might, you know, balanced that mix differently. This is also one of the issues with co-design, or participatory design where, you know, we acknowledged that design has had a history of you know, parachuting in and solving a problem and, you know, patting ourselves on the back and then leaving, and the problems not really solved, or isn’t solved for long. So we have something called participatory design, which is sit down and put users into the process and have them participate in it so that they have a connection to it. And then there’s issues with that as well. So you have a group of people that say that’s not right, why are you asking them to solve, to do your work for them, even if your work is to solve their problems, right? So there’s no one right way to do any of this. I think that, you know, as a designer, you have to balance all these factors to find what’s going to work most appropriately or more sensitively in any given situation.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, thank you very much for joining us today, it’s been lovely.
Nathan Shedroff
Sure. You’ve sort of opened so many cans of worms, there.
Per Axbom
So when I listened back to this interview, and towards the beginning, when Nathan was talking about operational awareness, and situational awareness, he had this sentence, where he said, “You need to understand the pieces, so you can do them more effectively”. And I took notice of how he used the word effectively, rather than efficiently. And there’s an important nuance there, of course, and that’s why I’m bringing it up now, in that we so often talk about things being more efficient, but it’s important to realise you’re not trying to do things faster, you’re not even trying to accomplish other stuff all the time. Sometimes you just want to do the same things, but have a bigger impact in what you are trying to accomplish, what you what you’re related to what your goals are.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and I think in the design world, we talk a lot about operations, design ops, that is a thing. There’s conferences and books, there’s stuff about it. Whereas when we look at situational awareness, that’s not as clearly labelled as a thing. We talked there about how designers do have enhanced situational awareness, but I think that gets confused a lot of the time with operational effectiveness or efficiency are what you say and or maybe it gets blended in with research, discovery, those aspects of the work we do. And that’s not really what Nathan and we were bringing up there in the chat.
Per Axbom
Because in those situations that you’re talking about, now, you’re not looking inwards, you’re not looking at where you are working, the people you are working with. I can think of a situation where you have a company of 10 people with certain types of competencies, certain type of education, you have another company with the exact same education experience, but the people are different. And with situational awareness, that means you need to understand where the people are coming from, the context of their lives, how you can talk to them as individuals as human beings. That is situational awareness that helps you accomplish goals related to your business as well. Because if you aren’t taking those things into account to two different companies with the same exact competencies can succeed or fail based on your understanding of how people relate to each other.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly, and well it doesn’t stop at the boundaries of the organisation.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
Nathan is talking about understanding of systems and domains outside your own. So then you need even more enhanced situational awareness, it has to go beyond your team or group, it has to go beyond the walls, the organisation has to go out there into society.
Per Axbom
Sort of that’s what I’m saying as well. Because you have to go outside into what are people’s home lives like? What are their home situations like? And what are people thinking about constantly? When Nathan said about climate change “It’s something that the the most important thing that is affecting us all right now, is climate change”. And at the same time, we’re not talking about it inside organisations, we don’t talk about it on on an everyday basis, usually, as part of our work, whereas we could.
James Royal-Lawson
Absolutely, I mean, of course, that’s into the understanding of yes, you might say it’s the biggest thing affecting us in the world right now. But how that manifests itself and how that is perceived on an individual level is not necessarily the case. I mean, it might be I need food, I need a job.
Per Axbom
Yeah, definetely.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we are pointing at our system thinking…
Per Axbom
But thinking about worries.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so what we’re doing there, you’re understanding maybe that an underlying problem is a bigger systemic one, but your situational awareness would allow you to understand that, how you can observe it manifesting itself in your team, your customers, your people around you.
Per Axbom
And the expectations of all of those parties in how should we, as a company be addressing this? Why aren’t we doing more? Perhaps people are thinking that, but since we’re not talking about it, we’re not addressing it. And it’s making them actually work more poorly, because it’s taking up so much of their mind.
James Royal-Lawson
I think clear leadership as well. Nathan said it’s very important, because it’s important. It’s one of those things that you kind of say, “clear leadership” I mean, why, ofcourse that’s going to be important, why would it not be! But you know, time and time again, see poor leadership. So, you know, when you witness poor leadership so often that, you know, it’s worth pointing out what good leadership or clear leadership is and why it’s important.
Per Axbom
Yeah, he had three parts, like you need the vision, you need communication, you needed to be able to communicate and articulate that vision. And that’s when we also talked about visualising as a tool, which was fantastic that he observed that as something that people were coming to him and asking him to teach them sketching and visualisation. And then also, but understanding what will people get behind. And that is part of the situational awareness, I think. So just understanding all of those things, and having the competence to execute on all those things as well.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s worth repeating the definition that Nathan generally uses, a leader clearly communicate a vision that others want to follow. And I think there it doesn’t, you don’t have to be the appointed leader. That’s one of the things if you want to lead, then you need to follow that bit of advice, wherever you’re there kind of official leader or not. That’s part of your strategic way of working would be to adopt that definition of leadership and plan out your actions to make it effective.
Per Axbom
And I also, again, appreciate so much about how he also acknowledges, you don’t have to be the leader, sometimes you have to realise that someone else is a better leader in this particular context. And then your work is actually elevating them to the leadership position.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, you become a more of a coaching role. Rather than leadership. You’re the scaffolding, the underpinning of their work and their progress towards your vision, shared vision.
Per Axbom
I think there’s this other quote I heard the other day, “The only way to change culture is to change leadership, or change leadership”. So in the sense that leadership has to change themselves, or you change the entire leadership and change them out. So it was really well articulated. It was something else he said, that really struck me and I took to heart and we’re so good at dystopian visions. We’re really good at those, but not the optimistic visions. Because I spent a lot of time thinking about things going wrong in digital now. That’s why it’s like a punch in the gut. But, just finding those positive perspectives, I mean, that’s a challenge. And that I think that is also part of leadership is what he was saying.
James Royal-Lawson
I think you’re right. I mean, we do get more, I think we get more cynical as we get older, I think. But you’re right. It’s not the pushing down, that helps us succeed. It’s the pulling up, isn’t it? It’s the lifting.
Per Axbom
And showing that vision, articulating the vision. Showing this is where we could go. Nevermind, that over there, I’ve talked enough about it. Let’s go over there where I can show you something else, a different way of doing things a different way of being, new goals. So I suppose for recommended listening, people will just need to listen back to it each time we’ve ever talked to Nathan before.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, that is a really good point to next step in this is to listen back to our chats with Nathan and Chris. They’re really interesting and thought provoking chats. And if you want to know exactly which ones they are, so you can dig them up in your podcaster of choice, then, well, two, three, no, hold on, episode 314. That was the most recent chat we had in September with Nathan and Chris Noessel. And then prior to that it’s available as episode 216. Originally, episode 25. So depending on where you are scrolling, you might find 25 easier to reach than 216. But that was one of our earliest interviews over, when we talked about sci fi interfaces with Nathan and Chris.
James Royal-Lawson
Ah, so much fun. And if you want James and Per, us, as part of your next conference, event, or in house training, we are offering workshops, talks and courses to inspire and help you grow as individuals, teams and organisations. Get in touch by emailing hej@uxpodcast.com. Remember to keep moving. What did you say?
James Royal-Lawson
Ignore me. I was just babbling. When you say growing, I was thinking about growing plants.
Per Axbom
You’re only thinking about your gardening right now.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it is that time of the year.
Per Axbom
But it was snowing today.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it did.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side!
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Per, my boss told me to stop acting like a flamingo.
Per Axbom
Your boss told you to stop acting like a flamingo?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah, I had to put my foot down.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Nathan Shedroff recorded in May 2024 and published as episode 326 (S02E16) of UX Podcast.