Crafting Change: Design Thinking and its role within the Intrapreneurial Landscape

“You can’t always succeed, but we keep trying and we keep showing the value or trying to show the value of what we do and why it’s going to be in the organisation’s best interest.”
Jane Curtain

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Themes & Trends in the Modern Workplace: How flexibility, hybrid work models and remote facilitation have changed & continue to change the way in which businesses and teams operate
• Breaking Down Design Thinking: Why organisations need to place greater value on inclusive & service design and how leaders can foster greater diversity and inclusivity in the process
• Mitigating Flight Risk: Staying ahead of employees seeking career change and knowing how to find, motivate and maintain loyal employees
• Importance of Employee Experience: The right tools, processes and technology that can optimise employee experience and improve retention and productivity
• Facilitation Engagement: Tips & tricks to improve involvement and contributions when running workshops and presentations and how to shift facilitation styles to meet modern expectations

Key links

UniSuper
Jakob Nielsen
Flight Risk
Dimension Data
Design Thinking
Service Design

About our guest
Jane Curtain is an enthusiastic and ever-evolving design thinker, having spent time as a strategic CX design consultant and an in-house service designer across a vast range of industry verticals for over 20 years. She first entered the industry as a Voice User Interface Designer in 2000. She’s particularly passionate about directing people’s attention to how we think about end users, how we include them in the design process, and how we provide fit for purpose, connected products and services.

Jane is very multifaceted in her approach to CX design, and her role usually requires her to be part researcher, part designer, part strategist, part trainer, part coach, part mentor and part change manager.

About our host
Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.

Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.

Transcript

Chris Hudson: 0:07

Hey, it’s me, your host, Chris Hudson again, and welcome to the Company Road Podcast. Before I introduce this week’s guest, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all of you for all the love and support I’ve had for the show. And as someone who was never really used to the centre of attention, nor craved it growing up, actually taken quite a bit of getting used to as I’ve never really imagined doing something like this when I was younger. So, we’re constantly reminded of the fact that if we’re not changing, then we’re standing still. So I wanted to hold up my end of the bargain and do something like that now. So I’m really glad that it’s, been well received. So thank you. Honestly, though, thank you for all the kind words and wishes. Our listener base is now rapidly growing and I’m delighted that we’ve now been able to attract listeners from four continents, which is simply amazing. So, if you can think of anyone else who’d benefit from the advice we’re giving to intrapreneurs like yourselves, I’d love it if you could also share the podcast link with them if you’re happy to. So in this week’s episode, I interviewed Jane Curtain someone I know and also loved working with recently, and Jane has worked as both a strategic CX design consultant and an in-house service designer across a vast range of industry verticals for over 20 years having first entered the industry as a Voice User Interface Designer in 2000. She’s particularly passionate about directing people’s attention to how we think about end users, how we include them in the design process, how we interact and communicate with them and how we provide fit for purpose, connected products and services that can be enjoyed by all. She’s an enthusiastic and ever evolving design thinker. Jane is very multifaceted in her approach to CX design, and her role usually requires her to be part researcher, part designer, part strategist, part trainer, part coach, part mentor, part change, manager, part everything, right? Her ultimate goal is to ensure that evolving needs are met and for the entire audience, not just part of the audience to be included and supported by the products or services we provide. So really looking forward to the episode. Let’s hear what she had to say. Jane. Hello and a sunny Australian welcome to this crazy little show where we hear about the ways in which people like yourself have been able to seismically shift their organisation’s, cultures, practices, perspectives, purposes, even. I’ve been really looking forward to this chat as you’re such an accomplished practitioner in human-centred design, but also brilliant teacher, empathic leader and forward-thinking culture maker. Maybe we could start with a bit of an energiser, as is customary in our field. This talk might be considered a bit of a performance, so I’d love to ask you, when was the last time that you felt like you had to perform at work and how did you prepare for it in any way?

Jane Curtain: 2:40

I think it was this morning actually, Chris. So I was facilitating a workshop on I’m putting together a digital roadmap for UniSuper, and I had a whole lot of stakeholders in the room, many of them virtual, of course, cross-functional team. They’re all putting together their own strategies for the next three years. And like many organisations, people have the absolute best of intentions. So they’re running a very fast race towards the finishing line, but they’re not necessarily aligning or communicating as effectively as they could be. So my job was to align everyone, bring them together. We need them for the digital strategy, we need the diversity of expertise and the diversity of thought. And I needed to convince them that this workshop was going to be a good thing. And so, yeah I think it was this morning, it went very well. But I had to go into it thinking, I need to make an impact. I need to leave a mark. I need to convince people that this is the right way to go about things.

Chris Hudson: 3:44

Yeah. Brilliant. And how do you get people g’ed, ready to go? Because I know I’ve run those workshops and there’s usually a few people in the room that are maybe, a little less willing, you could say. How do you get them going?

Jane: 3:55

Yeah, so I start with a set of principles that we all agree on. And so I come up with some in advance and then I allow people to add to them. And then I say, before we move any further, do we all agree to these principles? And they have things in it, like some of what we are going to do. Some of the activities may feel unfamiliar to you, but please trust the process. We will need to move through some of these activities faster than you may want to. There is a parking lot there for you to add some additional questions or concerns, and we’ll go through those at the end of the workshop or at the beginning of the next one. so I sort of make it very clear, this is what we’re going to do. This is the time we’ve got available, here’s why I’m going to be pushing us through some of the activities. Here’s why I might need to shut down some conversations. It’s not that I’m interested, not interested, it’s because in the interest of time we have to move on. So it’s just getting that agreement and you see them once, people wanna be heard, I think is the main thing. They wanna be heard. They want to make sure that their input is considered valuable. And of course they wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t valuable. And they need to have a means of getting their message across without feeling like it’s not wanted or it’s going to be perceived negatively or combative or whatever it might be.

Chris Hudson: 5:16

I mean, there’s, There’s a lot of good stuff in there and I remember it from our time working together. And I always since we’ve been, well, we’ve been working together, but also working in different roles now, I think back to that time and how you were able to almost make everyone just feel totally at ease and totally welcome and comfortable in the situation. And, some of those things will obviously help drive that… Is it characteristic of your approach to work more generally as well?

Jane: 5:41

Oh it, it’s hard to say, Chris. I absolutely love evangelising things that I believe in. But I also don’t wanna push my ideas onto people, so I want people to feel that they are completely free to give me their opinion. I’m not an expert in their area typically, so, I want them to be able to know that they know more than me about particular areas of expertise. I don’t know. I do love facilitating and I do love leading teams, so I think they’re passions of mine. But evangelising things that I truly believe in, whether that’s a methodology whether it’s a mindset, whether it’s, design thinking or something like that. That’s my comfort place. And it’s almost a performance. I mean, you know, you do, you do so much instruction and, facilitation yourself. It is a performance that you do need to prepare for but you’re always a little bit surprised as well. You never quite know what’s going to be said, and you have to have your toolkit at the ready to be able to bring out something that, you, you weren’t prepared to use that day, but suddenly you need to because that’s the direction it’s going in. I guess it keeps it interesting and I always get at the end of it, I’m always super energised and think, yeah, I’d like to do that again as quickly as possible.

Chris Hudson: 7:02

Is that because of the surprise? Part of playing the role of a facilitator is that you can guide the conversation obviously, but you never really know what you’re gonna get back Unless you are controlling it in a way too tightly. Obviously part of being a designer is to facilitate are you always aware of where you’re guiding conversation? How does that planning go? Is it something that you think up and then do, or do you think of it on the fly?

Jane: 7:24

Yeah, I think I’ve become more prepared than ever since we started working virtually, so I guess at the beginning of 2020. So I used to be a play by the seat of my pants person when it came to facilitation. Like I’d have an idea of what I was going to do and I’d bring with me under my arms some poster paper and a whole bunch of post-it notes and sharpies and I’d have a rough agenda in my mind, but not a huge amount of preparation. When we moved virtually and we were, we moved to digital tools like Miro. I felt that you couldn’t do that. You had to have things prepared in advance, and that kind of worked. But I’ve had many situations where I’ve prepared something in advance, and then the conversation has shifted and I thought, you know what? This next activity I had planned probably isn’t going to work. I’m gonna have to quickly come up with another activity and you usually can fairly quickly. But it’s being able to have those tools in your toolkit and being able to bring them out when it is necessary.

Chris Hudson: 8:31

That’s it. I mean, you can plan and plan, but actually you are, you’re faced with a different situation a lot of the time that environment. So outside of workshop environment, there are several dynamics at play and yeah, would love to just hear your perspective on the world of work today. What do you see as being some of the main themes popping out?

Jane: 8:48

Yeah, I think flexibility is one of the things that people now expect and value. I don’t know of too many workplaces that insist on everybody being in the office a hundred percent of the time. There are a lot of sort of hybrid situations. Some organisations like to have their team members in for a certain percentage of the time over the week. Others leave it up to the individual. I must admit I got to the point in my last position where, which, where it was very, very flexible and, there was no compulsion to come in at all that I just got very comfortable working from home, like extremely comfortable working from home, and I found it very productive. I thought being on video conference all day meant that I could still have that personal interaction. I felt I still knew my team members very, very well, and my colleagues very well, and I got very comfortable with that. In my current role I go into the office three days a week and at the start I thought this is gonna take some getting used to. Because I’m not used to sitting next to other people and having video conferences anymore. I’m not used to that noise around me or saying exactly what I think in an open office. So it did take some getting used to, but now that I’m used to it again, I enjoy it. So I enjoy the days where I can work from home and it’s deep work, but I also enjoy the days where I go into the office and interact with people and have those water cooler conversations. But talking to people, there’s just an expectation now that we work flexibly. And that flexibility is something that people not just crave but expect. So that, I think that’s the biggest change.

Chris Hudson: 10:42

Yeah, I’m wondering about that because it’s like we had to retrain, a lot of people had to retrain during those times and organisations shifted. We all shifted in the way that we, in the way that we work. We had what we thought were working preferences before. And that was all thrown out of the bus. Right. And then we had to reteach ourselves how to do it during lockdown when things were happening at home and make that work. And then we got used to that. And then going back was actually another change in itself. Talking about working flexibly, do you feel like people now more than ever, need to be, more prepared for working in different ways and actually be more, not terms of flexible working and working here or there, but actually flexible in their own approach to their own work?

Jane: 11:27

Yeah. I think that’s right. And I think also you can’t expect that someone’s going to be available when you walk past their desk or you know that, oh, look I’ll catch up with Chris in the morning because I need to ask him this question. You almost have to mentally train yourself to deliberately send a message to say, hey Chris, I need to ask you about this. Can we catch up in the morning about it? Or send an official invitation. It’s that preparedness that you need to have. I think having done some work with some organisations that perhaps struggle to get used to remote working early on I think one of the hardest things is onboarding new staff. New staff have a lot of questions, and it’s very easy to sit at your desk and say to the person next to you, oh, how do I blah, blah, blah, or where would I be able to find this, that, and the other? Whereas if you’re working from home and you’ve been onboarded from home, you have to deliberately reach out. And people are a bit hesitant to do that because that, they might feel it’s, they’re interrupting somebody or it’s a silly question or what have you. So I think that onboarding is the hardest thing. But yes, to answer your question, it’s a different approach. You have to really think about what you need and how you’re going to get it and make sort of more, formal requests for assistance or for information or whatever it might be. And even facilitating workshops like I’ve done two in the last three business days. The one I did last Thursday, I assumed everybody was going to be in the room. I was wrong. I would say half the people were remote and half the people were in the room. Now that type of hybrid setting is more difficult to facilitate than if everybody is remote or everybody is in the room because you’ve gotta make sure that all the voices are heard, whatever tools you are going to use you, you’ve gotta make the people in the room, for example, use a Miro board whereas we could have just been using a wall. That’s sort of more difficult, but you have to go into it with your eyes opened and that preparedness that this may happen. I have to involve everybody. I’ve gotta be a lot more organised, long gone are those days where you just walking in with your post-it notes and your sharpies.

Chris Hudson: 13:52

Yeah, you’re right. It does take that level of organisation and representation in the room is an interesting one, isn’t it? Because it feels like it can sway both ways. I remember, and it’s not so much the case now, but probably in the earlier days of teleconferencing and web conferencing, WebEx, various things. It just felt like whoever was not in the room was at a complete disadvantage. Right. You, you Couldn’t do anything. You had to overcompensate, even if you had somebody from your team in the room, you still felt like you couldn’t hear anything. You couldn’t contribute contribute meaningfully, and you were just inconveniencing anybody in the room by offering any suggestions. I had a client in Paris and we were in London, and we could sometimes get over, over to Paris, but we couldn’t always. And so there was often this really forced telephone exchange,

Jane: 14:39

Yeah.

Chris Hudson: 14:40

Where twenty five, thirty people were in a boardroom somewhere in Paris. And we are trying to, we’re trying to communicate. I think that kind of being aware of where people are, how they’re working, the situation, the context that they’re, that they’re in, as they join that environment is super critical, not only for facilitating workshops, but any kind of meeting.

Jane: 14:58

Yeah. And you, not so much these days cause I think our digital tools have improved, but I remember back when I was working at Telstra, we did a lot of video conferencing because we had colleagues all around the country. But if you would, if you just had one or two colleagues from Sydney as an example, and everybody else was in Melbourne, you’d often miss what the per one of the people in Sydney was trying to say because there would be that audio lag as well. So in the end, they would perhaps disengage and not bother to interrupt because they felt that they weren’t getting heard. And unless the facilitator was very aware of that and invited their voice in, I was talking about principles before. One of the principles that I always put in is if we’ve got people remote we must keep an eye on the hands up function, if it’s there, the chat box, if it’s there, and listen out for them if they need extra help, because the last thing we want is to disengage them. They’re invited because we need their voice and we need to be inclusive and to make them feel that they’re important participant in that workshop.

Chris Hudson: 16:07

We both work in the field of design and actually the extent to which you have to think through your day-to-day work interactions, even if you’re designing for end users or

Jane: 16:16

yeah.

Chris Hudson: 16:16

you’re having to do it more so for the people that you work with in the environment in which you work as well, I find, anyway. So employee experience is obviously becoming a big, it’s a much bigger theme these days, But actually how do you make the process and the, the feeling and the experience of working in a company that much better so that you can differentiate against other companies who are doing amazing things as well. What are you observing in that space? Is there anything that stands out as being, super relevant or particularly progressive? Anything there?

Jane: 16:46

I think over the years the view or the concept of employee experience has been elevated much more so than it used to be. And I think it’s a competitive world out there. It’s a competitive world in terms of employees or the right type of employees or employers with specific skills that you’re after. They have choice now and they will move quickly if they need to or if they’re unhappy or, if another organisation is offering a better deal or offering a better culture, a more comfortable culture, whatever it might be. I think it’s something that we really need to think about. And we’ve all worked for organisations where we are designing products and services for that organisation’s clients, and we are doing our very best, but the organisation that we’re with, their own products that their employees use are poor. You know, so you know, it’s a little bit, we put all our efforts into what we’re doing for our clients, but we are not putting the same amount of effort into what we’re doing for our employees. I think that is changing. It’s a slow change, but it is changing. Employees have higher expectations about the tools that they are given to use at work. If you’re thinking about digital tools, there’s never been a time where they weren’t as important as they are right now and will continue to be. So they have a high expectations about that. For those of us that enjoy service design and understand the front stage and the backstage, we know how important the employee experience is. We know that if we ensure that we optimise that employee experience and equip them with the tools and processes and technology that they need, they’re going to be able to provide a better experience for their customers et cetera. So it is critically important and I think organisations realise that and putting in more effort now than perhaps they used to.

Chris Hudson: 18:49

Yeah, I mean as an observation, just looking back a few generations and talking to people in my father’s, my parents’ generation really, where the world of work was, almost laid out in front of a lot of people from the moment they graduated or left school, they knew exactly where they were going or they took the first opportunity and then they worked for many years. my Dad worked for Shell for 40 years or so and was just moving from here to there to everywhere in a multinational company. And it’s just interesting to see that at the time. The best way to retain staff and to motivate staff and teams was really to give them another job opportunity and that would then lead them onto the next thing. But now with the, I suppose the availability of other options and the empowerment that people feel to be able to explore their own journeys and from a very young age, I’d say now as well, it feels like the possibility is just much greater. It feels in, in the information age, the fact that you can plug in, you can dial into the gig economy, you can just walk away and try a lot of things out without as much risk maybe or maybe the risk is still the same, I’m not sure. It definitely feels like the efforts for retaining team members have ramped up because of that. What do you think?

Jane: 20:04

Yeah. I completely agree. I don’t know what the statistic is, what the average time an employee stays with an organisation. I’m not sure what that is, but it’s certainly nowhere near 40 years.

Chris Hudson: 20:15

It was about two, but that was about 20 years ago.

Jane: 20:18

Yeah. I, yeah. It’s people do move around and they, they want to try different things. We’re talking about diversity of thought and we’re talking about how important it is to experience different things because we are the product of our past experiences. And the more we learn, the more we con contribute to our next opportunity. Young people have cottoned onto that and I think, that they want to explore different things and find the right thing. And they’re, a lot of them are quite ambitious, and so they want to move up the chain, but not necessarily in the one organisation. They wanna do it in multiple organisations and experience different parts. I even know in the design world, when you take on a grad, for example, that grad might be particularly interested in, say, I don’t know UI design but then when you give them the opportunity to work in something else, whether it be UX design or whatever it is, they might think, oh I’m now really interested and passionate about that. I didn’t know very much about. Now I do, and now I’m gonna pursue that. And I think it’s great. It just makes you a more complete designer because you’ve got the experience of different aspects and you can bring all those together and I think it just makes you more attractive. And I take my hat off to young people that do that. And also move around organisations and, expect different things or go overseas for a bit or whatever it might be. I think it’s great.

Chris Hudson: 21:43

I suppose the craving for skillset has changed. The appetite, and the rate at which people do learn and want to learn is obviously much faster than it was ever I think there’s an interesting implication in there as well, not only for us as entrepreneurs, but also for leaders of entrepreneurs in that, how do you motivate a team? How do you keep them excited, keep them engaged? You’ve managed teams with people that have got extremely ambitious goals. How do you cope with that kind of ongoing demand, I suppose?

Jane: 22:13

There’s no easy answer to it because every individual is different. And you’ll get one individual who is so promising, but doesn’t actually have the confidence in their own skills. They’re thirsty to learn and eager to learn. They hold themselves back because they don’t think they’re ready. Then you’ve got an overconfident individual who, I’ve experienced this on one project and therefore I’ve done that. I’ve ticked that box. I’m now ready for the next thing, or a promotion in that. You’ve got to try and convince them that experience isn’t just one project, it’s multiple projects or it’s multiple months doing something and you know, and convince them that even somebody who has 20 years experience learns something new, every single project that they do. And then you get somebody in between. So I don’t think there’s necessarily one approach for all. I’m all about individuals telling me what their goals are. So, you tell me what your goals are and my job as your lead is to help facilitate that for you. But sometimes you have to have those hard conversations too, which is, you are just not ready to be promoted or you are just not ready for this project that you really want to do. Perhaps there’s a shadowing experience, perhaps, there’s another one where you can build up your skills. There’s all sorts of ways you can handle it, but it’s delicate and you want people to be enthusiastic. You want people to want to grow and and you certainly don’t wanna curb their enthusiasm.

Chris Hudson: 23:49

Yeah, it’s really hard, isn’t it, because you’re often trying to help them. Improve their craft. But to them it might feel like they’re treading water and not going anywhere because it’s the same old or at least the perception of what it might be if you have to run this next project. It sounds a bit like that thing that they may not even have even worked on, but somebody else works on that they heard about. and, and you’re trying to almost pitch it to them as something that, that would be exciting and really worthwhile. So I think the promise and the outcome and the way that it’s framed is always really important. And I guess the feeling of choice is also part of The fact that it’s not just given to you from the, the clouds above where traditionally you’d have been told exactly what to do and when they needed it by. You’re trying to give the options to people within your team so that they feel like they’re self navigating a bit. Are you picking up on that too?

Jane: 24:42

Yeah, look, it’s a real juggle and I guess it depends on the situation that you are in work-wise. You often, a really interesting project will come up and everyone wants to do it, but. There’s a lot of BAU work that has to happen as well. And although that might seem mundane and boring and same, same, it’s important and it has to be done. So not everyone gets their wish and so it’s a, it’s a matter of sort of keeping track of who’s interested in what, when that comes up, if there’s availability, is it their turn the next time? What conversations can I have with. About the work that they’re currently doing and make them feel that too is really contributing to their growth. That work isn’t always about you having choice. But we can’t always give you exactly what you want, when you want it. Because, work’s work, lots of BAU stuff has to happen. And there may be an interesting project today that you don’t get, but the next one that comes up might be even more interesting and you’ll be the next cab off the rank for that one if you’re available. It really is a juggle and I guess you just can’t keep everybody happy all of the time, but you’ve gotta keep people motivated for the next thing and trusting you that you have their back and that you will try and get them on the most interesting project available to them when the time is right..

Chris Hudson: 26:13

Yeah. Yeah, I think, it sounds very fair and I know how difficult those conversations are, I think being in them myself. But there’s a concept of flight risk, which I think is an interesting one, and I’m not sure whether it’s valid still. Well, I was in a recent team meeting and most of the people in the team were through an engagement survey. They were asked whether they were happy to stay at the company and comfortable and confident in their happy in their current role, essentially. And I think an alarming percentage of the teams were deemed at flight risk basically because they said they’d be open to other opportunities. Do you think that’s just the way it is now? Or do you feel like some people are deep down, still very loyal?

Jane: 26:52

That’s a, it’s a really interesting question. I’ve been in a lot of conversations myself with senior management about, are there any flight risks and let’s identify people that we think might be flight risks and what we might be able to do to help alleviate whatever concerns we think they have. We are not mind readers, so I guess as a people lead, you need to be in a position where you team members trust you enough to tell you how they’re feeling so that you can identify if they might be a flight risk. So it might be, hey I’ve worked with this particular client for two years. I’m ready for a change. If I can’t get a change in the next six months, I’m gonna have to consider going elsewhere. Now, if they’ve had that conversation with you and they’ve given you enough lead time and it seems reasonable that it is time they come off that particular project or client, you can do something about it. But where it’s difficult is they haven’t. Said anything. And you’ve tried, because you’ve noticed that they’re perhaps not quite as engaged as they used to be. So you’ve tried to find out if there’s something going on or if there was a concern they want to ask and they don’t. And then suddenly they say I’m leaving. I’ve been offered this other job, and that’s where I’m going. And then when you deep dive into it, you find out that they weren’t happy with this and they weren’t happy with that. And you, you haven’t got that information. That’s when it’s tough. But I think identifying flight risk is good. I’ve never been in a position where everybody is a flight risk. Luckily, thankfully. But certainly there’s always one or two, or even three or four and, you can get in front of it if you’ve got enough information and it’s somebody that you really wanna keep.

Chris Hudson: 28:47

It’s always gonna be there, isn’t it? And you can handle it as best you can with the information that you have, but actually, like you say, an ultimatum one day or a sudden resignation because there’s a counter offer, and then you’re just straight into, negotiations around, what you could do to keep them. It limits your options, doesn’t it, when you’re just pulled into a room one day and suddenly somebody hands in their notice resident resignation notice.

Jane: 29:11

Yeah and ultimatums as you say I really struggle with ultimatums because I think that even if we came to the party and met their request or demand or whatever it is, how long does it last? I don’t think somebody who was engaged and happy with their current employment situation would make an ultimatum. I think they’d only make an ultimatum if they were already heading out the door.

Chris Hudson: 29:42

Yeah. So have Has that ever happened where somebody’s resigned, you’ve managed to win them back, and then they’ve walked at some point in the

Jane: 29:48

Yeah. Yes, I have, I’ve had situations where they’ve said that company X is offering them a lot more money. And so, we’ve looked at what we could do to see if we could match and and then given them a counter offer and they’ve stayed, but they typically don’t stay. For the, for two years. They might stay for six months, but I think if they’re looking they’re ready to move. Sometimes best thing to do is to let them go with your blessing. And if they’re great, maybe they’ll come back with some new knowledge or some extra skills or whatever it is. People are responsible for their own careers and if they believe that a move is something that their career needs, then I’m very supportive of that. As sad as I am to lose them, I’m supportive of them building their own career in the direction that they want to go. I think that’s a better way than, I didn’t know what the word is. Meeting an ultimatum.

Chris Hudson: 30:48

Yeah. Good. Well, yeah, we explored a few things there. I’d Bring the conversation back to you for now, if we can, Jane, and maybe with some of those themes in mind, actually, just think back to your own career. And some of the decisions that you had to make, you’ve been an entrepreneur, you’ve been incredibly successful in a lot of big companies. Telstra, you named one of them. I’d just love to hear about the things that you’ve experienced and I suppose the sliding doors, moments that characterised your career. If you could tell us a about a few of those.

Jane: 31:16

Okay. Yeah. I’ll give you a little potted history. So I never expected that I would get into design at all. I was thinking that I would pursue an academic career. So I was doing a PhD in linguistics and I also had an honours degree in psychology. And so I was trying to juggle which one I really wanted to pursue, whether it was linguistics or psychology. I was lecturing and tutoring in linguistics at Monash University and one day a headhunter knocked on my little office door and it was October, November and I was marking students’ work and it was a really busy time and this headhunter was all suited up, didn’t look like anybody on the university campus and said that he wanted to have a coffee with me. And I thought, I dunno who you are, like are you a prospective student for next year? Or, I don’t, I dunno what this is about and I’m so busy. But he was very persistent and he was looking for somebody with linguistics and psychology. So those two particular skill sets. And he represented a company called Dimension Data. And they were moving into enterprise speech recognition. So they were supplying big enterprise speech recognition, solutions for large Australian companies and they needed people to help them design those systems. And they thought that the skillset would be linguistics. So having an understanding of human language, but psychology, having an understanding of human behaviour was exactly what they needed. And as he spoke, it piqued my interest and I thought, tell me more. So we kept talking and as I said, he was very persistent. And then when he started talking salary, I was like, oh. Really? Yeah. Because as, you know, at that time I was on like a, scholarship and I was doing this session of lecturing and tutoring and you don’t earn much money in the academic world. And it was like, oh my goodness. So the conversation moved quite quickly and I ended up accepting a job with Dimension Data. So I came in as a voice user interface designer, and I was the only one. So I was the only one with that skillset. And so part of my role was to build up a team. So we had a number of very talented business analysts but we needed to build a team of voice user interface designers. And at the time there, there wasn’t really anything that you could follow, a craft that you could follow. So I started looking at what online designers were doing and I think I was particularly interested in Jakob Nielsen and looking at what he said about all of this. And so I adapted all that to voice user interface design and you know, built up a team and, built up a methodology with that. And as I moved on into that career, and I loved my time at Dimension Data. I worked there for 14 years in various roles, but I realised that no matter how good the solution was that we developed, It all fell apart if what went on behind the scenes wasn’t optimised. So for example, we could have designed the best user interface over the phone that was designed to go through to a contact centre agent and who would take up the rest of the inquiry. But if we didn’t have a screen pop with that agent that said, this person has already been ID’d and authenticated, the agent would ask for that information again. And so the user would think, well, why did I bother telling that system that was that robot talking to me? Why did I bother telling them that information when I’m gonna have to provide it again? And so that’s when I realised everything has to work both in the front end and the back end, and it has to be seamless and you have to have the technology in place. You’ve gotta have the processes in place, you’ve gotta train the people, all of that. And that’s when I realised this is Service Design so I then became very interested in Service Design, but also as I was designing these voice systems, we would record a professional voice, talents voice in a studio, and we would coach them for hours to make sure that they were asking questions in the right way that people could answer. And we designed the questions. We did so much testing with users, and I actually found, and this is way before Siri, and way before Alexa or any of those, I found that, hey, this is really good for vision impaired people. It’s so much easier to say what you want than to have to press those, touch those D T M F tones on your phone. It’s just so much easier. And sure enough, when we tested with people who were vision impaired, they really loved it. It was something that they were used to and it met their need. But surprisingly, it also tested really well with people who were hearing impaired. And the reason for that was these recorded voices were recorded in a professional studio and they were very, very clear. And we deliberate deliberately asked questions in a plain English kind of way. So rather than them speaking to a real person who, real people have good days and bad days, and sometimes their microphone is up on the top of their head, and sometimes they’ve got their hand over their mouth and they’re not speaking clearly, or sometimes they are speaking too fast, or sometimes they have an accent that somebody doesn’t understand. Hearing impaired people really liked this because it was clear and it was consistent and it was easy to use. So that got me interested in Inclusive Design as well. So that’s kind of how I, I started, and I guess it was a baptism of fire. It was a learning curve that was vertical because I was thrown in and, this is your job and this is what you do. And it was like, how do I do it? And nobody knew. So I had to craft the way. And I’m not saying I did it all on my own. As I said, we had a, wonderful team of super intelligent business. I did build up the voice user interface team, then became a consultant, and it was all around contact centres and so on. So, then I moved into I guess different areas of design. So it was no longer voice user interface design. It was all aspects of design. So yeah, I guess that’s a long-winded way of explaining how I got into it. But it taught me leadership, it taught me how to create things from scratch, how to research things. We were always given a lot of flexibility to do so much end user research. So that was good. So my passion for end user research, I guess started there. Yeah, so that’s I guess how it all started. For me,

Chris Hudson: 38:36

What a journey. That’s brilliant. The fact that you got the knock on the door, your curiosity led you from one thing to the other.

Jane: 38:42

Money, it was money Chris.

Chris Hudson: 38:44

Well, I was, I thought I’d call it curiosity.

Jane: 38:48

you’re being too kind. Well, there was curiosity there, I guess involved, but when he started talking dollars, it was like, Yeah. Tell me more. Yeah, but it was, it was kind of something to, in my two areas of academic interest combined, it was certainly something that I would never have thought of. I didn’t know even existed.

Chris Hudson: 39:08

desirability, feasibility, viability,

Jane: 39:10

Yeah. Yes.

Chris Hudson: 39:12

all all wrapped up. Yeah interesting that you started out in more of an academic setting. I know the realm of academia is a very different place to a lot of corporate and commercial settings. I wondered going through that journey and obviously up the ranks as you did and into design, doors were opening for you in different areas and that’s fantastic, what were some of the harder lessons that, that you needed to learn as you went through that journey?

Jane: 39:36

Oh, so many, so, so many. I think one of the hardest things for people that started off in academia is that the corporate world is fast moving and you can’t do endless research. You just can’t do it. you’ve gotta move quickly. You’ve gotta make fast decisions. You’ve gotta show value as quickly as possible. So you get very good at being very efficient very quickly, and, For whatever reason I was able to do that. But I have had some colleagues who have really struggled with that because it’s when, as they say, when I, if I was doing this piece of research at university, I would be, I’d get six months to do this and you’ve given me two weeks. I’m not going to be able to do justice to it. So I think that’s the hardest thing for academics to kind of overcome. But for whatever reason, maybe it’s just I’m not a good academic. I don’t know. I was over to overcome that pretty quickly. You know, there were times I love doing upfront research. I really love that. And I, do believe that many of our colleagues do that too quickly. They don’t spend enough time with that generative research upfront. I think people have misinterpreted, for example, usability testing where we know we can uncover usability problems with five or six users and they apply that to generative research. And I think that’s just wrong. There’s no way you can do justice with five or six participants if you are trying to explore something upfront. But at the same time nobody has the luxury to spend six months researching something like you would in, in academia. You’ve gotta uncover the problems quickly. You’ve got to highlight them. You’ve gotta draw out those actionable insights and you’ve gotta show value. It’s about showing value. Otherwise, our profession’s doomed.

Chris Hudson: 41:36

Yeah. Yeah. I mean you touched on an interesting point there, which is around being a subject matter of any kind, really within an enterprise setting organisation, corporate, anywhere you are usually in the minority and needing to prove that whatever you think is the right way to go, has to be done in a certain way and over a certain timeframe, and usually trying to convince people that don’t understand what you’re talking about, that this is a really great idea. So how did you go about that?

Jane: 42:02

Yeah it’s data and evidence for me. it’s about being able to show them the value of what we are doing from either past examples or they want to see organisations who have done this successfully and, and why they’ve succeeded. It’s just that data, it’s that evidence so that they know it’s worth doing. It’s always the struggle because it’s one of those things that, if people are cutting out the fat they’ll choose elements of design to cut out. And it’s our job to say no, no, no. That’s a false economy. If you do that, you risk having to go back to the drawing board. You’ll cost yourself even more money. Let’s just spend an extra couple of weeks doing this properly and you will get the benefits that you need.

Chris Hudson: 42:48

Evangelising, as you were saying at the start is really key there in flying the flag and telling people what’s what, even before it’s happened. You are campaigning for what might happen what might happen even though you haven’t done it yet. Did you ever feel like everything was just falling upon deaf ears? Nobody was listening or you felt like, you tried everything and you, you had nowhere to go. Was there anywhere any situations like that that you can remember?

Jane: 43:10

For sure and I think it often comes down to individuals rather than organisation. So there might be a key stakeholder who is representing the client, but is the decision maker for that client. And you can’t move past them because they’ve got their set idea. And it doesn’t matter what you say or what the research says. It’s their way or the highway and sometimes you just have to cut your losses or pick your battles and think, okay, well, this is really important to them for whatever reason. So let’s do the best job possible for them with these restrictions in place. And, get through it that way. I think every designer has had that experience at least once. And those of us have been around for years and years, have had it a few times. You can’t always succeed, but we try, we keep trying and we keep showing the value or trying to show the value of what we do and why it’s going to be in the organisation’s best interest. But there are times where people just, they really wanna pursue something, whether it’s the right thing or the wrong thing. And our job is, okay, if you are really passionate about that let’s do it that way. It may not be the best way, but let’s do it.

Chris Hudson: 44:33

Yeah. I mean, It takes a lot of perseverance and obviously courage to, to keep going in that situation. What was at the heart of your, your motivation in those situations? What, what kept you going?

Jane: 44:44

It’s knowing how hard to push and when to push, and whether you’re fighting a losing battle or not. And you don’t wanna lose the client either, so it might be that one individual who represents the client, but in that situation, you don’t want the relationship with the client to go sour either. So it’s probably better to, okay I think it should be done this way, but I hear you. You’d prefer it done that way. So let’s do it that way. And if you’ve kept the relationship healthy, then maybe they’ll come back to you and say let’s change it to what you said. You’re absolutely right. It didn’t work. It’s just about keeping that long-term relationship and the trust, trust is a big thing. And if we push too hard, you can lose the trust very quickly.’cause people will dig their heels in and they’ll think that we are just being combative without understanding why.

Chris Hudson: 45:43

Yeah, calls into question I suppose why a lot of leaders in that position have the trust to be able to command and rule in that sort of way. It’s been prevalent in business for so long now and predominantly driven by, quite alpha male behaviour that it’s just been passed on. It’s obviously changing a little bit now, but it still feels like there’s a long way to go.

Jane: 46:04

Yeah. I had a, a situation in a large corporate where the CEO wanted to do something and asked us to be involved, and we started off with the generative research and found that the thing that CEO wanted to do was completely opposite of what his customers wanted completely opposite, but there was just no changing his mind. There was no changing his mind. He wanted that thing no matter what. And we produced the research. We looked at other organisations who had tried what he wanted and it hadn’t been successful and that was not just locally, but international as well. But it just got to the point where he wanted this thing and well, isn’t it better that we deliver that thing for him as best we can, even though it’s probably not going to work long term? It kept him happy short term. And I think, he now knows that it wasn’t the right thing to do. But, he wanted it so much. It just wasn’t, it just wasn’t something that he was prepared to compromise on.

Chris Hudson: 47:18

Thinking about that, I suppose from his point of view now, and it presumably it’s much further into the future now. Uh, maybe it was a, maybe it was a recent example, I’m not sure.

Jane: 47:28

No

Chris Hudson: 47:28

no.

Jane: 47:28

No no

Chris Hudson: 47:29

yeah. For leaders like that what could we say to them, what could we give them in a way of advice right now to be aware of these dynamics, how would you position that to somebody in this day?

Jane: 47:41

Yeah I think everyone talks about data now, which is great. I love that. And I think a lot of what we do is another source of data, particularly when we’re doing generative research upfront to explore a problem that we want to solve. And data’s so powerful. So if we have rich data that suggests that you go in a particular question or direction, listen to it. Listen to it, because it’s the evidence that you need to make the wisest decisions you can at a point in time. And if you go against that data, the only person that has egg on your face, egg on their face is the person that goes against that data. You end up looking foolish. And we don’t want that for our clients, do we? I mean, we, we don’t want them to look foolish. So we just wanna say, just listen to the data. Your data is going to tell you everything you need to know. you know, if the research has been conducted properly.

Chris Hudson: 48:43

Yeah, I think a different dynamic maybe when you are in the position as we have been as a consultant and you are, you’re advising a client to working in-house within a company where everyone’s, in theory anyway, in the same direction. So common purpose. You’ve had the same chats from the CEO, you’ve had the same meetings, you’ve had the same social events, and yet you’re still coming up against this conflict. Have you noticed a big difference there?

Jane: 49:07

Yeah I go through patches. It’s like a rollercoaster where I think, oh, I’ve found the people who get it, like they really get it and I don’t have to push so hard and isn’t it great? And then we get the, to the top and everything’s going well. And then there comes up a commercial concern, we need to deliver this thing two weeks earlier or two months earlier, or we need to cut costs and. It’s not usually the engineering or software development team that they look at. It’s often the design team. It’s kind of, we need to cut costs, so you need to work out how to do this faster. Can’t you just leave out this piece, whether it be the usability testing or, or something. then you start to get a little bit disillusioned again. It’s like, why is it always our bit that has to get. So you just have these rollercoasters all the time. But I’m still here and I’m still smiling, so I really do, yeah, I really do believe that we are getting somewhere. I think that it’s slow. But it’s getting there. Big organisations now have Chief Design Officers, so there is somebody at the C-suite who is representing our craft and who is, telling people how important it is and how it is, it’s just as important as any other role in that C-suite. We’ve got leaders in organisations who have invested in design thinking and have put their whole team through design thinking, not to make them designers, but to make them aware of what we do and why we do it. So I think it definitely is changing for the better. You’ll still get one or two situations that feel like a bit of a struggle. As I say, it’s just, it’s all part of the fun, isn’t it? Like it, it wouldn’t be a good day without a little bit of a challenge.

Chris Hudson: 51:03

Yeah. I’m just gonna put you in a scenario now if possible, but imagining that you were an intrapreneur and you’d been working in one of these organisations and you’d tried everything, you decided you wanted to move on to a fresh opportunity or a fresh challenge, what was some of the markers of a progressive or, I guess, an opportunity rich organisation looked like versus another organisation that was perhaps, you know, a little bit, a little bit more on the toxic side. How would you, how would you describe both of those types of organisations? In this

Jane: 51:34

Yeah, I think you’d want to, identify whether there’s some open-mindedness there, how open they are and how willing they are to explore different ways of doing things. So how much they want to evolve. If you go to a job interview and somebody asks you a question and they’ve got a, like a very defined structure of how they want it answered, I think that’s indicative of them not being very open. To me that would be a marker to watch out for. And I think if they start to mention things like doing things really, really super fast, and although I completely understand that sometimes things do need to be done very, very fast and very, very efficiently, If they’re putting too much emphasis on that. I’d have a few red flags about that because I’d think, you know, are you telling me upfront that’s what you want to cut out? Or if they make a blanket statement oh, everyone was talking about design thinking 10 years ago and it didn’t go anywhere I’d have alarm bells. Or if they made some kind of blanket statement about human-centred design or listening to customers, or, customers don’t always know what they want. I’d have alarm bells then. But it’s hard like sometimes you just don’t know until you get in there and start working with them, how easy or difficult the conversation’s going to be.

Chris Hudson: 53:00

I think a lot of it also depends on your own preference for transparency or for ambition in the sense that you can influence the culture or if you’re quite happy just to be a subject matter expert with deep knowledge in one area without needing to change the four walls around you, then that, suits a different kind of personality. So, it depends a lot, I think, on knowing your own preferences for work and applying it to that situation to get a read on what’s feeling right or wrong, do you think?

Jane: 53:27

Yeah, you are right. You are right. I don’t think I’m that person though. I think I always try and rattle the cage a little bit.

Chris Hudson: 53:35

Yeah. I think you, you mentioned design thinking now, I just wanted, I know you are, you’re hot on this as well, but there, there are people obviously that are coming up against design thinking still as something that is, counterproductive. Was done before, is no longer relevant. What do you wanna say to some of those people?

Jane: 53:51

I’d love to explore why they think it’s no longer relevant to, to tell me more, because I’m curious as to why they would think that I, is it that they did a course and they’ve never had the opportunity to use it? Or is it that, their organisation put a lot of faith into it and then when I don’t know, agile or something came along, they left it to the side. They, they didn’t actually pursue using it. I’d like to sort of just deep dive into why they think that, and what they think might have replaced it. And it might be that they’re using a different term to describe design thinking anyway.

Chris Hudson: 54:30

Yeah, you’d be surprised. Through the teaching that RDU you probably had the same but so many students come onto the course thinking. I’m gonna learn about service design, I’m gonna learn about human-centred design or design thinking. They come along to the course and they think, ooh I actually knew quite a lot of this already because I’ve done bits and pieces here and there, and it’s a bit of research and it’s a bit of this, bit of that. It feels really intuitive for that reason.

Jane: 54:52

Yeah, exactly right. No, you’re right. Like people just have different definitions and even, you know, the, how do you define the difference between human-centred design and design thinking people use the same term to describe different things. Even in the design world, when you think of roles like how many advertisements do you see for, say A UX designer that’s requiring all these deep UI skills? There’s a lot of vernacular out there that is used differently by different people.

Chris Hudson: 55:20

Yeah, I think so. But it also makes us you know, as practitioners ourselves, maybe we’re a little bit biased, but it feels like we’re quite open to a lot of different perspectives and would welcome those perspectives on any projects or initiatives. So you want to make sure that it’s as independently facilitated as possible and that you are being quite impartial. And whilst you can influence that to some degree and steer it, you are still wanting to make sure that everyone’s involved in some way or another along the journey. So what would be some of your thoughts around, I guess fostering a sense of diversity within projects or within company culture, anything like that? What’s working well do you think?

Jane: 56:00

Ooh, I, I, I love diversity. So diversity of thought is just something that I truly believe in. So to me, a workshop’s not a workshop unless you’ve got a cross-functional team with different areas of expertise even like different cultural backgrounds it just, you just want the whole range because you want that diversity of thought so that you can be as inclusive as possible with your design, right? But also so that you can solve the problem knowing or perhaps, the technical challenges and the marketing challenges and the process challenges and all the other challenges that you might not have thought of if you had all like-minded people in a room. I always say design’s not a solo sport. It’s not something that we can do on our own. And so we have to do it with people, not just with the people that we are designing for, although that is incredibly important. But also all the people who are involved in some way in the organisation that contribute to it. I’d be so disappointed if we all thought one thing. We have to get those different opinions and we have to go through them and shake them all up and see what comes out.

Chris Hudson: 57:19

I think it’s, you know, we said this right at the start as well, it’s making people feel at ease with that process and with that system of thinking where they’ve just been pulled off their desk and their day job to come and join a workshop or whatever it is, it’s a different experience where they’re talking about, a business initiative or a product change that might need to happen or service design. And it’s uh, yeah, it’s a new way of ha handling a problem and, and is breaking outside of some of the usual parameters. Their work. So are, you’re thinking about how to make that make the conditions right, I suppose.

Jane: 57:52

Yeah. One of the things I notice, and I dunno whether you notice, I’m sure you do, is when you’re ideating. So if you are facilitating a workshop where there’s ideation, people really struggle to think blue sky. They come into it with all the constraints of why something won’t work rather than if you had that magic wand and you could wave it, what could we do? And that’s often the biggest constraint I see particularly with business people is it they just self-assess. I think it’s an adult thing that we just restrict ourselves and we start thinking of what’s not gonna work in the current situation. What have we tried in the past that didn’t work, and all the reasons why something is going to fail, rather than what can we do to make it succeed?

Chris Hudson: 58:43

I mean, it’s definitely not so much of a beginner’s mindset where when adults are concerned, because we leave all those things behind. We learn to critique and we learn to judge obviously, through these situations and associate with other situations that seem similar. So, yeah, I totally see that. I also see that the rush to the solution and, and the kind of lack of comfort about sitting in the problem space for a bit Seems to be a theme that creeps in. Because even rather than writing a problem statement, people are saying, we need to do this. It’s it’s just a bit of a leap. Bit of a leap, if you know the double diamond in the other steps of the You think, okay, we can do a few other things before we get to that. But it’s good to get some ideas out early. Do you find that as

Jane: 59:23

So true. Yeah. People are less comfortable with the first time than they are with the second, or they wanna just go to the end of the second with this is the solution.

Chris Hudson: 59:31

yeah, I think we’re almost, we’re almost outta time, but I just wanted to ask you one question mainly for the listeners around intrapreneurship and also how they could navigate the world of work in the way that you see it today. What would be some pieces of advice or a piece of advice that you’d like to share?

Jane: 59:47

First of all, keep your sense of humour. So I think that’s the first thing is work is work and although it is very important it’s not as important as your life. So, so keep your sense of humour. The second thing is be open-minded. Just appreciate that not everybody is going to think like you do. And as a designer we embrace that. So continue to embrace that. Don’t take things personally particularly if people are critiquing your design or your idea. we have to get very, thick skinned because everybody has different opinions and they’re going to critique your baby. They’re gonna tell you your baby’s ugly, and you might not be ready to hear that. So just don’t take those critiques personally. Keep learning, learn as much as you can and keep evolving. So stay in school. If a new method comes out, try and find out about it and learn as much as you can. It might replace something that you have been using. Just don’t get too wedded to, there’s only one way to do something and just realise that every conversation you have is successful in that you learn something a little bit. And I always say that about research as well. I’ve never interviewed someone where I haven’t learned something. You always learn something, so you never know enough. And the thing that you produce, the end product is only the start of the journey. It’s going to keep evolving and you’ve got to appreciate that and realise that there’s no such thing as the perfect design. It’s the start. And we, as audiences change and as technology changes and as people’s expectations change, we must evolve our designs with them as well. I dunno if that’s answered your question, Chris.

Chris Hudson: 1:01:44

Oh, I think you know that. It did.

Jane: 1:01:46

Okay.

Chris Hudson: 1:01:47

What a load of advice. I mean, that that just sums it up. I think, it’s been incredibly great that you’ve been able to join us for the chat today. And for those of you who haven’t listened to, well, haven’t listened to Jane speak before, but also haven’t worked with Jane in her team, you get a sense for how, how warm and how sharing you are really with all of these pieces of advice. So I’m just really grateful to you and for the fact that you’ve been able to encapsulate some of that, and obviously you’re happy to share it and impart some of the words of wisdom as well. So thank you so much

Jane: 1:02:17

Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me. And um, yes, it’s been a privilege.

Chris Hudson: 1:02:22

and if anyone would like to connect with you in one way or another, what would be the best way?

Jane: 1:02:26

I’m on LinkedIn so they can definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to share my phone number and my email as well. Yeah, that’d be great.

Chris Hudson: 1:02:35

No problem. All right, well thanks so much Jane. Really appreciate the chat and yeah, thanks again.

Jane: 1:02:40

Thank you, Chris. Talk soon. Bye for now. Bye.