Building better design: What Lego can teach us about design thinking & business transformation

“The more immovable that your solutions are, the greater the need to invest in that kind of thinking.”
Andrew Kendall

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Designing for impact: Strategies to more accurately understand customers needs and motivations in order to design products and services that go beyond immediate user needs to create tangible, transformative impact on people’s lives
• Long-term design considerations: Ensuring longevity and sustainability in design solutions by designing with future scalability and flexibility in mind
• Enabling creativity through safe spaces: How to tap into the full creative potential of your team and drive innovation forward by creating safe spaces in the workplace in which individuals feel comfortable and conventional thinking is challenged
• Impactful design through storytelling: The power of storytelling in influencing stakeholders and driving organisational change, particularly in fostering a human-centred approach to design
• Augmenting human creativity with AI: The secret to integrating AI as a complementary tool to harness its capabilities to enhance creativity while retaining the unique perspective and empathy inherent in human-centred design

Key links

Stanford d.school

Lego Serious Play course 

Victoria’s Department of Transport and Planning

Concorde

Lego Fender Guitar

About our guest

Andrew Kendall believes that solving problems creatively drives better outcomes. At age 15, he’d impressed the people at the Lego toy company so much they hired him. Andrew is now an experienced Strategic Thinker, Consultant and Facilitator specialising in the areas of Customer Experience and Service Design using collaborative, imaginative and creative ways to drive Customer centred design outcomes. Andrew is currently a Customer Lead at Victoria’s Department of Transport and Planning.

As a graduate of Stanford University’s d.school program, Andrew applies proven techniques and methods to build empathy, create customer insights and ideate these to create concepts and prototypes with stakeholders. Andrew’s key strength is knowing how to engage the right strategic partnerships and stimulate conversation at the Senior Leadership level.

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: Hello everyone and welcome to the Company Road podcast for this next episode. And in today’s podcast, we’re going to bring together a number of topics that are really close to my heart. One is around strategic and unexpected thinking. One is around inclusive or equitable design.

And the other one is probably around something a bit more fun, the endless joy or applications for serious play as it’s known to some or Lego to others, which is a matter that’s very close to Andrew’s heart. I know. So Andrew Kendall, a massive hot Summers welcome to you. And thank you for joining us on the Company Road podcast.

[00:00:35] Andrew Kendall: Hello, Chris. Great to be here.

[00:00:37] Chris Hudson: Yeah. And Andrew, you’re currently customer experience leader, Victoria’s Department of Transport and Planning here in Australia. You’ve been a part of some seismic changes that have been planned and implemented in the areas of architecture, engineering, infrastructure, transport, but the experience kind of more generally.

And you’re also graduate of Stanford’s infamous D school. So you’re no strangers to the world of human centred design. And I want to start with a really easy question just because I’ve always wanted to ask you this, we never got a chance to chat about it that much, but I’ve seen kids play with Lego. Seen them play with that for hours and days and months and years. And I’ve seen a few adults kind of take interest, right? And turn up at certain conferences and watch TV shows about it. And then there is over 18s kits that you can get. And people are sinking a few hundred or thousands of dollars into a kit that lets you build, a Fender guitar or a Game Boy or a Star Wars X Wing Starfighter, Captain America’s shield, whatever takes your fancy, but the big and the very serious question to start with is, is Lego designed for Adults or kids?

[00:01:32] Andrew Kendall: I think it’s designed for everybody, Chris. It really is and kids and adults often interact with Lego in a different way. And I think that’s fulfilling different needs based on kind of what you’re looking for. But I think with some of the kind of larger Lego sets that you’re that you referred to earlier, I think it’s kind of important.

So adults will often enjoy the kind of the puzzling aspect of it. And so really having a finished plan and something to aim for and the satisfaction, the joy that you get when the thing that you’ve set out to build is complete.

And you know that model might then go on a shelf or something like that in your home. And you can kind of think about the joy that you got completing that model. I think children is very different in terms of when they’re exploring using Lego in that really, they’re only limited by their imagination.

So anything is possible and there are no rules, right? So, you might have some rules of physics that keep things up. But then, you’re only limited by what you think it is. And certainly my three and a half year old tells me he’s playing with Lego already.

He’s matriculated from the larger Duplo bricks. And yeah, he’s very keen to tell me what this is and, there’s a big link between what is the mental picture of how he sees this Lego and perhaps what it actually is physically but what it means to him is something completely different and something that’s aligned with his thinking and then that’s actually the focus point you want to be on, not necessarily what you physically see that he’s built, which is amazing. But what’s going on in his head and trying to understand that because that’s how he sees what he’s created.

And that’s kind of the best representation of his imagination and what he’s producing. And I think that applies to just about every child when they’re exploring using Lego.

[00:03:04] Chris Hudson: That’s part of its ubiquitous nature really is that it enables any person to pick up some bricks and essentially try and conjure up something that’s in their head and shows that tangible thing, that thing that’s been made to somebody else. And for that to be then, relatable because somebody else can see what was in your head in theory.

Anyway, it’s a bit like drawing a picture.

[00:03:21] Andrew Kendall: There’s a kind of famous Lego model that’s a, it’s a model of a duck, but it contains about six bricks and 9000 different combinations around the way that you can put these together and what that means and what you can create and so while, you can say, well, actually in this formation, it’s a duck the other thousands of combinations could be anything that you want and it means something to the creator and perhaps in the interpretation that means something else to the observer of what’s been built. But it really, I think shows no limit to the imagination and the opportunity to bring that into business settings in exploration or discovery phases is really important to try and understand not necessarily what you physically see although there’s opportunities to ask questions about what’s. being built because it is that representation of that person’s thinking. But really, it’s about trying to unlock, what’s going on in somebody’s head in the way that they have manifested this in the creation that they’ve come up with.

[00:04:13] Chris Hudson: Give me an example too. If you have some around, I guess some of the more complex builds or obscure builds that you’ve seen either from other people or things that you’ve tried yourself to communicate some of these ideas.

[00:04:25] Andrew Kendall: Yeah, so it’s really interesting. For those fans of the Lego Serious Play course and if you haven’t joined up to that it’s very worthwhile to do that. And that really draws out a lot of the metaphorical use of Lego in the way that you can talk about things like organisational dynamics and, other aspects around how people kind of reflect their, perhaps their work environment and things like that, you’ll see people that build physical walls that to talk about things like blocks in communication between people, and it’ll be a big wall between perhaps someone and their boss or something else or a department.

And then use that to kind of explore actually what might be ways to remedy that. And what could be ways that you could build bridges literally to overcome some of those circumstances as well. So, very metaphorical in the way that Lego can be used in those settings but also how you let people express themselves and use that as a way to do storytelling as well.

[00:05:17] Chris Hudson: Yeah, brilliant. And I want to maybe take a step back and trace back to where it all began for you, because I think there’s an interesting story perhaps around when you first started out the age of 15. I believe it was when you were impressing the toy company that you had something about you to kind of pay attention.

This guy, Andrew, he knows a thing or two about how to build with Legos. what happened there and how did it influence your career after that?

[00:05:39] Andrew Kendall: So there was a few factors in it at play. And as you want to get more from Lego that support the kind of things that you’ve got in mind. So, if you have a view around something that you want to build, then if you know that there is a Lego part that will satisfy your creation, then you go in search of that, right? And so, so luckily for me I grew up in Sydney and Lego’s head office for Australia was in Sydney and they offered a what we call a spare parts service and that was where, if you’d lost a part or you do, something like that, they carried a range of different parts, and so, here was this 15 year old.

In fact, I think that the journey started a little bit early when I was about 13 and ended up at this place and knew kind of what I wanted to the point where, it kind of started that they said, well, actually, well, you know, I was like, no, no, no, that’s not it. And the guys are running around trying to find the wrong bits.

And eventually they were like, yeah, just come behind the counter. work out the bit that you need. And Lego being a Danish company also had lots of support from Denmark in Australia as well. And they had a model builder called Eric who was based in Sydney as well.

And he used to look after the big world shows that were on at big department stores in and around cities and it kind of got to a point where just getting access to the drawers of Lego parts in the spare parts department with, I’d kind of matriculated from that.

And there was at a point where they said, ah, you need to go down and see Eric. And so Eric was on a whole other level, right and he was this guy that looked after all these big models that were in these department stores and he had walls of Lego bricks, all with individual components, so that you could work out very quickly what you needed and then there would be a drawer full of the single part that you were after.

And so, as you became, more and more of an expert, this kind of opened up to you. But I got the feeling that this didn’t happen for just about it, just about anybody. And that then morphed to then doing work experience with Lego, doing all sorts of things, fixing models, changing models.

I remember they had a model of a Concorde that they had charged me with in changing the tail from Air France to a British Airways tail on the Concorde. So they could display this, right? So that meant taking off the other tail Lego models were glued as well. So there was some extra complexity about how far you could take this thing off to then rebuild another one, reflecting the delivery of the other airline.

And that was one of the summer jobs that I had when I was working with them to do that. So, yeah, it looked at really kind of in insightful, but then getting, and more and more into things. And then I think probably the last part of that story is that I’d always had a bit of an interest in transport.

So it’s kind of not surprising that I work in a lot of transport projects now, but I had a model of a bus that I built and then this was taken from photographs and the whole thing was designed on Lego graph paper, which was at a 1 to 1 scale. So you could actually plan out exactly what this thing was going to look like before you built it on.

And that’s how they used to design models. This is before computer aided design. And so, yeah, so it was really easy to kind of then work out what this needed to be and then how many bricks you needed to water to want to build this from scratch. But, this was a fairly large model that was about three foot long by about a foot wide.

So I’m not talking small scale stuff. This was fairly detailed models. And that’s now in a transport museum in Sydney. So, it’s nice to see these things get passed on as well to bring joy to other people once you finish with them as well.

So, there was a connection between Lego and transport quite early on.

[00:08:45] Chris Hudson: That’s amazing. I can’t believe we’ve not had this chat before, but it’s one of the amazing story.

[00:08:49] Andrew Kendall: There’s lots more to it, Chris, but we’ll keep it to the headlines.

[00:08:52] Chris Hudson: The other stories from behind the scenes, I mean, obviously, you’ve made this thing. I don’t know.

How much time did you spend building that by the way?

[00:08:59] Andrew Kendall: Hours. From planning through to execution, to hunting for parts and all that sort of stuff. You’re talking weeks of hours to pull these pulleys together. There was another model. It was about 1500 hours or something like that, and that was, look, this was an estimate from a 15 year old at the time.

The reality was it was probably way more, but there’s lots and lots of time that’s spent from conception right through to the kind of the build. And then when you deem it to be complete, so you’re always kind of looking at this thing or something happens to the thing that you’re modelling, right? So that when that changes, then you feel like you’ve got an opportunity to kind of update the model to reflect what’s happening with the thing in actual, in real life as well. While it was complete to a point, it’s kind of a bit of a living work in progress while ever that thing kind of existed in real life as well.

[00:09:42] Chris Hudson: I ask what kind of builder you are? I mean, are you the kind that would meticulously plan it all yourself and lock yourself away and do it? Or would you involve other people? Would there be a bit of iteration? I’m just trying to figure out whether this is just you in a room somewhere or if it’s kind of in consultation with a lot of other people.

[00:09:58] Andrew Kendall: Yeah, look, I think while a lot of it is kind of designing and executing at that point I had access to experts in this as well. Right. So, there was the opportunity to collaborate. There was the opportunity to sort of take designs and discuss the thing technically as well.

I mean, what’s the best way to build this, because this is what I’m looking to do. There’s a structural constraint here. So actually how would you deal with that and get inputs like that, which when you’re building Lego, if you’re at that level of conversation, it’s really quite interesting to work through what that might be and how you would go about that and perhaps some of the options that you’re using to enhance features, so not only would you build say a bus out of Lego, but you would also then want to say, well, actually, how could you show people features of this as well? So you build not just the bus, but you also build a roof that can come off.

So then you can see the detail of the interior and all of these things. And how do you design it so that you’ve got levels of functionality. So how do you design it? So if you turn the steering wheel in the cab, how does it turn the front wheels and all of these things end up being things that you build, but that require kind of, hours of thought and consultation and a bit of expertise to also get the best outcomes from that model so that, you know that when you do it, you have to get the gears the right way around so that when you turn the steering wheel, the wheels go in the right way, not the wrong way around how you do it.

So, all sorts of stuff but yeah from that perspective, there was consultation with Lego experts and negotiation with my parents around the hours that I could have being up and doing these kind of things as well, of course. But that was back then.

But, you know, and I kind of think about the kind of conversations that were going on at 13 or 15, but they were, quite mature conversations for what you wanted to do and in terms of getting the outcomes that you’re looking for as well.

[00:11:35] Chris Hudson: Brilliant I mean, did it help with your school career or anything else ? Did it help or was it just a total distraction?

[00:11:40] Andrew Kendall: It was quite interesting. I think it helps you, I think from a sort of a systems thinking perspective, it absolutely supports the way that you look at things when I was working as a business analyst.

And we were all about object oriented design and all of these kind of things that was looking at how things were modular and they fit together for me, a lot of that stuff came really naturally in the way that you looked at componentry and how they all needed to work together or how you would carve off a piece of it doesn’t matter whether it was software or hardware, but how you would kind of piece it together so that you could plug and play other bits and pieces as you went along to drive kind of design and efficiency of systems.

So for me, that was a pretty natural fit for the kind of work that I was doing anyway, which was nice. So, yeah that was quite good. And the funny part about it was and I was talking to a fellow who was also a facilitator in Lego serious play.

And the really interesting part about that is, that you actually started to see in Lego. And I know that sounds really weird, right? But you, what you would do is that your knowledge of the number of Lego pieces that kind of existed and the things that were put out there, you would do something like look at a building and you go, okay, if I was modelling that, that’d be like six studs across and that archway goes there and the door goes there and this is how it would be.

And yeah, it was a really, I don’t know whether it was a curse or a gift, but, that’s kind of how you started to look at the world or as if you were doing that, how you would go about doing that because you would start to see things in that way as well So yeah, that was kind of a interesting way to look at the world but I think I paid dividends later in my career.

So that was good anyway.

[00:13:06] Chris Hudson: I mean is that sort of something that you can move on from and forget or do you still see it? Is it everywhere? You can’t unsee it. I see the serial numbers on this archway, you know.

[00:13:15] Andrew Kendall: So if you’re not that much of a heavy user, I don’t know if that’s the right word, a word for it, a heavy user of Lego. It does kind of disappear after a while.

I’d forgotten that. That’s how I used to think. But it was quite a thing to kind of have almost the complete catalog of Lego parts in your mind in the way that you started to think but yeah, I am quite sure that there are people that do this for a living that they think that all the way, because that’s how you kind of need to problem solve when it comes to thinking about creating something.

So it doesn’t matter whether you’re building a bus or you’re building a dinosaur. If you need to get an outcome a then that’s the way you think. Because that piece that you’re thinking about could be the solution from getting from where you are to where you need to be.

And then all of those other things around the structural components and actually the physics kind of kick in around can you successfully hold that piece in place with the piece that you’re thinking about, will it work, and those kind of things help you kind of judge the way that things might be.

Or the way things need to change based on what you’re trying to do. And then that kind of forces a bit of a rethink. But yeah, there’s lots of different thinking that you do when you’re thinking in Lego, if you like to try and problem solve as well.

[00:14:19] Chris Hudson: My head’s spinning with lots of different thoughts around that. I think there’s so much in business today. And if you think about just coming back to the kit, just simple kit that you might buy for one of your kids, the rules, obviously you get a picture of what it’s going to be.

You get a very clear instruction manual, which Lego were pioneering a long time before Ikea came along and telling people how they would build these things. You open up the pack, you’ve got all the components, you can see all of the, all the different pieces, in the end, in the beginning, you have no idea how it’s going to fit together.

In the end, it’s obviously made this masterpiece and then you might forget about it after, but you almost take on that, a little bit of expertise every time you do it, which I think is the interesting part. And then if you’re, if you’ve got your own collection and like most people have got just trunks and trunks of miscellaneous pieces, just kind of bundled together, that’s definitely what we’ve got.

You kind of know what’s in your vocabulary, really, if you’re thinking, you know, it’s this analogy of it being a design language or a creator’s language, from that box, either what you’ve made before or what you can, what pieces you might reach for.

So there’s something interesting about that from the point of view of business really, and making the comparison to working with an organisation and knowing the rules and knowing the pieces and knowing the direction and all of those kind of strategic analogies that you can pull out and apply seem to be quite valid as lessons that you from an age of 13 or 15 were.

So it was kind of like a microcosm of your career to be, was already beginning back in the

early days,

I mean, what great work experience.

[00:15:45] Andrew Kendall: Totally right. You don’t think about that at the time, you know, but, you just know how you kind of think.

And so matching that with an outlet that kind of is supporting the way that you think I think is really important. And I mean, it’s kind of interesting. I mean, when you used to get Lego models, Lego would offer up the model that you bought. And then perhaps, there was two or three other combinations that they kind of said, well, you could do that with these blocks if you want to, you know, that wasn’t really on the instruction sheet. But you could do that. It’s a pity it kind of doesn’t translate. I mean, most adults, the closest you get is Ikea, another Nordic product that offers up instructions, right? But you end up with all sorts of weird combinations if you build that in another way other than it’s intended.

So, yes, I’m not quite sure it’s the same. but, yeah, it’s good. But look, I think the connections around how you think and how you kinda matriculate that to your work is really important. But for me, probably a really important connection between play and human-centred design was the work that I did in children’s hospitals.

And so for me while play was kind of really important the development of play programs in children’s hospital was really interesting. And I think that for me. involved in human centred design and understanding customers and all these sort of things requires an enormous amount of empathy.

And am absolutely 100 percent sure that my biggest empathy lesson came when you walk into a bay on a ward in a children’s hospital and have to very quickly kind of understand what’s going on and how that works as well and what’s appropriate, what’s not appropriate and really kind of understanding exactly what’s going on with maybe three or four families who all have children on award with various ailments.

And so, yeah, getting to do that at a number of children’s hospitals in Australia and in the UK was really powerful for me in kind of being a part of extending play into that on the wards and really kind of understanding what was going on there and then how you would go about designing a play program that would understand the needs of those children under those circumstances as well, but not just those children, but also the role that their siblings played and the role that those children played with each other.

So yeah, it was kind of interesting. You’d walk onto a ward and I think a lot of people kind of assumed that these kids would know each other for some reason, and I don’t know why you have four kids in beds on a ward, right? And they’re all kind of facing each other. And it actually required some facilitation through play often to get these kids interacting with each other.

And when you think about the minds of kids in hospital and hospital can be a pretty scary place, particularly when you don’t really know what’s going on and people are kind of doing a lot of stuff to you and so to be able to bring play into that space and facilitate play with kids that may have been in a room, but not too shy or not really wanting to interact with the others and do that with a couple of volunteers is really kind of make that place feel a lot less scary and a lot less and not as big either because if there’s unfamiliar faces this seems a lot bigger and a lot scarier.

And if you can kind of make those connections and really kind of understand what’s going on, then that, that makes those connections through play much stronger and lots of evidence as well to say that actually from a mindset perspective, if children through play can take their mind off the reason that they’re in hospital in the first place, that the number of requests they have for analgesics and pain relief is a lot less.

So it’s really kind of quite powerful to play into that space as well.

[00:18:57] Chris Hudson: Oh, definitely. Yeah it sounds incredible. The work you were doing there, it feels like there’s an aspect of that, that transcends any other, circumstantial whatever the situation is that the people are in there, you can, and I think the architects and engineers and even people that are making apps and websites these days, you’re thinking about the context in which people are going to be consuming, what’s going on in that environment, if it’s in the built environment or in a digital environment or anywhere, really, and to pick something like that, that in its universality is just able to be drawn upon.

It’s like a common language and you can introduce it as a method of comfort. That’s fantastic.

[00:19:33] Andrew Kendall: I guess I’m lucky in terms of bringing play to the business setting. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to lead a space that we had set up in Sydney Trains for transport for New South Wales.

And that place was called Customer Central. And we called it that for a reason that this was really around, focusing anyone who came into that space on the customer and trying to see things from their perspective, and it didn’t really matter whether you came into that place and you wanted to solve a problem that was something that was customers used directly or whether you were repairing a railway and then doing track maintenance and things like that, kind of helping people reframe the way they saw the problems that they were trying to solve from a customer’s perspective was really, it was really powerful.

So while this was a collaboration space and helping people from different perspectives sort of work together and do some accelerated work in the space through facilitation, creating that safe space where you could have those conversations, but also framing what you did from the customer, the person who was going to somehow be impacted by this.

This change that was being problem solved was something that was really powerful. And all sorts of guys, track maintainers, other guys that did work that you wouldn’t immediately associate with customer impact. All of a sudden started thinking this way and really starting to show empathy towards those customers around how they could do things like track possessions faster and think about it in a different way so that it meant that trains could run on those sections of track sooner so that those people catching those trains didn’t have to be on replacement services and things like that as long and some of those constraints would start to shape the way that these guys were actually looking at their work. And for me, that was, bringing that empathy and that lens into that work was something that was really important that I don’t think a lot of these guys had kind of thought about the impacts of their work to that kind of end consumer of the product around how they saw that the contribution of that work, to those people.

So, really interesting space and really glad I had an opportunity to bring that into the into the work environment and set that up.

[00:21:30] Chris Hudson: Yeah, there’s a massive difference. I just wanted to get your view on this. Because we’ve talked about it before in the past as well, but when you’re running research, obviously you can go about it a number of ways. And often I see it still happening. You see it still happening. It’s within organisations where the research is framed a certain way and the questions get asked and they’re almost a direct question to a customer or an end user of some sort.

And you get an answer back and you’re taking that face value, whereas what you’re describing, it feels like from the point of view of creating empathy, actually living and walking and breathing in customer shoes or end user shoes, within the context in which they’re accustomed to, there’s quite a big difference between one being just a survey of questions and people saying, yeah, I would like that. I don’t think that’s very good. This can be improved versus something that is actually telling you a bit more about the way in which people live their lives. So what’s been in your experience with that?

[00:22:21] Andrew Kendall: Yeah, look, I think that there’s a big difference between, sort of general sentiment about something about a topic and actually about use and engagement and I was working on a metro project and it was kind of interesting in that there was the stakeholder engagement work that the project needed to do, which is very much around telling and this is what the project’s doing and all this sort of stuff.

And it was quite interesting in the local communities that were hearing this information that they had heard that, but then very quickly those people kind of switched to, well, so, what’s in it for me? How am I going to use this thing once it’s built?

How do I get there? And it was kind of interesting that some of the conversations were about How this thing was going to be constructed. And at that point, there hadn’t really been kind of any kind of design conversations about how these people would use that, there was kind of assumptions made that you would drive, you would catch the bus or you do, one of these kind of things.

But there were big kind of design opportunities there that could have started the conversations yet, those kind of planned conversations were required to be delivered for all sorts of reasons. But, quite early on started to get those questions and things that are really good design and put into all actually. Well, how do you need to travel? How do you live your life? What’s appropriate for us to supply to you so that you will use this, and you know what? What don’t we want to do?

That means that you’ll stick in your car, or not engage with that metro project. And so it’s about really kind of, making sure that you’ve got those kind of design conversations happening early enough and being mindful of those things that can then happen in a way that you can do something about it.

If the project’s interested in doing that, but try and get better results or try and look at how all of those kind of opportunities and interactions kind of roll up to what your objectives are and what your outcomes are and so that you can create for use.

So always having that kind of use in mind around what you need to do. And so, I often get asked about, when should you do human centred design, when in the project lifestyle should you do that?

I mean, and the answer is always as early as possible. Right? So that you can have the maximum impact. But you kind of find that often the use of kind of human centred design around design often comes quite late in the game where it’s harder to change things.

And so, I think a projects really need to kind of look at, what they’re doing in their early strategy phases or in their procurement phases and really going out how have we really kind of engaged with the people who will be the users of these products in thinking about that and I know based on various projects that often requirements get baked into contractual documents that then exist and that’s really the point that if you do want to affect change for people who are using the products or services that you really need to have it before the contracts written and get it into the contract so that you can get that better outcome for people because it’s written into the contract.

And on a recent project that I’d been involved in we had got groups of users in the procurement phase to see proponents solutions to how they were gonna go and solve customer problems in the the products that they were providing.

And we did that in a way that was convolved with all of the procurement probity issues and all of these things and all the requirements you need to have around that but was a way that you could actually inject the voice of the customer into the procurement process before that contract was actually signed.

And what that meant is that as a result of doing that, that there were, features and functions of this product that were included in the contract that had that not happened wouldn’t have been the case, and it would have been a lot harder to get that project once it was in the delivery phase to do that, and often you may have had to wait for the delivery to occur under the terms of contract before then looking at a variation later to make those changes that actually were key to that, to particular users being able to do that in the first place.

So yeah, so lots of challenges there but being really mindful of how the users were going to to use the product and making sure that in the design of those products that every single feature and every single component of that product that’s being designed for users has a user story that sits behind that and I don’t mean this necessarily in the agile term, but I mean that in that as you’ve tested a product with customers that your really looking for the stories that those customers have told you through their lived experience around how that is something that is a feature that adds value to two particular users lives in the engagement with that product.

[00:26:34] Chris Hudson: I think the interesting part is around maybe the business casing aspects of that, because it’s fine to say, okay, when would we introduce those steps or processes? But somebody at some point had to convince somebody that was a good idea to involve that, it’s going to take extra time, resources, budget to do so what’s the framing of that that usually works in your view?

[00:26:52] Andrew Kendall: First of all, you have to define what you mean by customer or user in this space because you have to tell the story of the fact that not all customers are the same. And really that’s the study of people to say, well, actually, you’ve got groups of people who have got specific needs and that often it kind of feels sometimes like, when you’re dealing in technical terms that this kind of user is just one actor, who’s kind of defined off to the side and that’s the user that’s separated from maybe the super user or somebody else who might be using the system and that the customer is kind of represented by one actor and then that’s what you get. And often we were at pains to say, well, actually, we were designing for a whole bunch of different kind of users here and that they all have different needs.

And so ultimately the definition of that user is quite broad because in our study of those customers, we need to be mindful of the fact that we can’t just take single perspectives and that’s kind of it. So first of all, there’s a bit of storytelling that you need to have to go well which user are you talking about? Because I’m talking about a whole bunch of different ones that we need to make sure that we’re fit for purpose. But they’re also telling the story about benefits realisation as well. And so being able to show that your benefits are directly connected to use. And that by having an understanding of who those different users are and what those different needs are, that you can then connect that with the benefits of realisation to kind of say, well, actually not really going to get the benefits that you think you are.

If you’re excluding a whole bunch of users from even engaging with your product. And depending on what that is design, particularly around understanding lived experience of people with accessibility needs is fundamental. It’s something that’s very clear cut around making it easy for people with different needs to engage with your product.

And when you start chipping away to say, well, actually, now you’re excluding this group, and now you’re excluding this group, and now you’re excluding this group which you can realise your benefit starts to diminish unless you’re very clear about that.

And certainly, looking at kind of known heuristics around people who identify as having some form of accessibility needs. It’s generally around one in five, people. So if you don’t do that, you’ve automatically lost 20 percent of your customer base that you would have otherwise had you not made it easy for those people to engage with your product. That’s 20%, let alone those people who perhaps don’t identify as having accessibility and you still need to make that product but by making it easy to use your product and when we talk about ease, we talk about low physical effort and low cognitive effort.

So if you don’t have to think about it too hard, and it’s actually not physically hard to use, then you’re creating ease. And so being really mindful of what ease looks like and understanding what ease looks like for a whole broad range of customers is directly connected to that benefits realisation and so making it really clear about who you’re designing for and actually if you don’t design these features or you’re not mindful of this or you don’t choose to study what life might be like for those different groups of users who would engage with your product.

The automatically at risk. So, it’s calling those things out to start to quantify those things as well.

[00:29:50] Chris Hudson: Yeah, which in the history of infrastructure and transport is quite a new development, I’m sure, because the establishment, in the way that it was run for a long time was driven by the engineering side, probably rather than the experiential aspects, which everyone is a little bit more tuned into now, because we’re in a customer age and we’re in an information age and experience economy.

All of that feels like it’s quite a load to carry as a set of considerations, as a set of requirements that go into the broader context, but in infrastructure, I mean, you’re putting things down, you’re pouring concrete and you’re building things that could be around for a long time, hundreds of years potentially.

So you want to make sure that you get it right. Is there a degree of that in terms of futures and understanding where things might go that, that you also need?

[00:30:35] Andrew Kendall: Yeah, absolutely. I think, that it’s kind of interesting in obviously, understanding how things need to be for now but also really starting to understand, what some of those futures might be and I’ve spoken to lots of people that sort of work on futures and they describe that is, there’s not one future, but there’s possibilities that come from convergences of different things being brought together that then create what a possible future might be.

And so you can kind of build these out from scenario basis and say, well, actually if these things came together, what might that be and what might design look like for that versus others. And so it works on the basis that the change is a continuum.

And so, when you’re pouring concrete around these things being very mindful about what those kind of changes might be that would influence the design of some of the infrastructure around how you would make allowances for those things as well.

So, for example, you were looking at more sustainable travel modes. You would want to make sure that the provision that you made for active transport and for elements that you did or how you designed the way that your local bus or other services interacted with the train and what you made that transfer experience like working on the basis that again, it needed to come back to ease, low physical, like cognitive effort.

So really kind of looking at those things to say, well, actually, is this designing this in a way that’s going to continue to create ease under these future circumstances that might play out and what some of these convergences might be by looking at some of those things that could piece together around the design and just questioning those and working through some of those scenarios to sort of test the robustness of some of the design assumptions that have been made and how fit for purpose those design solutions might be for the future given scenarios that might play out as well and look, I’ve been on projects that have done that really well the projects that are/ we have made provision for many, many years before we had EV take up, for example. Had positioned car parks ready to take the infrastructure for EV charging stations and all those sort of things.

There was thought place. Well, actually, it’s not really an issue now, but in 10 years time, it might be. So how do we need to design for that? And kind of understanding

what those future needs of or the news needs of future customers might be in the way that we think about design as well.

[00:32:45] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s interesting. So there’s a load of contingency design out there in the world that is kind of ready to be used, but not yet being used.

Is that a fair thing to say, or is it just that it is being used somewhere, but not,

[00:32:55] Andrew Kendall: That’s right. And so I think that does exist. The challenge is always, it’s always about hedging your bets, right? So, you’re making assumptions that your thoughts and how you’re applying your thinking to these future things is going to remain constant, right?

And often it doesn’t, which is a bit of a challenge but trying to think about how you can help future you or future, someone who’s doing your job in a way that shows that you’ve thought about that earlier is really important.

So thinking about that, sort of back to our earlier conversation about Lego and modularity, maybe there’s a degree of that in design. And I know some really good infrastructure designers that think that way around how you do that future design and in the way that they think about the built environment and that they think about that kind of thing the same will actually if you needed to change this later, you just need to lift this thing out that we’ve designed for now and you can put in something that would support growth or in changing behaviour and things like that.

And so, it’s really kind of good to see that play out and it’s probably something we need to do more of in general design to think about the sustainability of the products and services that we’re creating.

[00:33:56] Chris Hudson: So it really is just a matter of changing air France to British airways from time.

[00:34:00] Andrew Kendall: I wish it was that easy just to do that, but yeah, I think that’s the thing here. It’s about actually, if you had to do those kind of things, how easy could you think about the componentry of what you were building how easy could you could future you thank past you for how you perhaps thought about something that made it easier to keep that design in the future.

[00:34:17] Chris Hudson: I often think that way about business in the work that I do, which is quite at the minute centred around org design and designing for culture and transformation really where there’s always a lofty goal and you’re trying to transition teams and quite complex systems and processes and everything that goes with it from one, one state to another.

I’m thinking about that now that you’ve said it, because if you’re designing for the rail, if you’re designing for any kind of significant infrastructure, you’re obviously thinking about this future, there’s four sides there all the time, because that’s really what you’re aiming for.

You’re almost going to be judged by the longevity to some extent, but in the world of business, it feels like if you can get to the target and you’ve hit that and your runway is okay. And, yeah. It feels like it’s just focused on that short term success.

There’s a longer term direction, but if we were designing businesses now that could be modularised in some way that were less contingent in systems and processes and people and everything else, that would be a magic answer.

[00:35:13] Andrew Kendall: Well, I think so. And I think it’s being mindful of future cost as well. So, that if you can do that, then what might be a little bit of extra investment now is going to be potentially a dramatic cost saving later. If you can do that because labor gets more expensive.

The cost of change gets more expensive as you go along. So, potentially unless you’re going to have a significant disruption, which case all of that goes out the window, but being mindful of how the business might evolve with some thought to that the future would make that easier and then hopefully thinking that way may be beneficial to that organisation in future around how that thinking has been anticipated for the future and how you’ve thought about your future in design.

[00:35:54] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I mean that it’s a sunk cost effectively, but you can call it an investment or anything, there’s lots of ways you could frame it. Have you seen that work really well in certain instances where that, that has been the business case and everyone has stood behind it because they see that as the preferred option rather than something that’s a bit more, lighter touch, but short termist?

[00:36:14] Andrew Kendall: I’ve seen in a number of cases, I guess, touching on some of those transport examples.

I’ve seen evidence of that where it’s clear and that kind of hedging your bets moment is kind of key to say, well, actually, if this is in terms of having a look at the likelihood of some of these things happening and so it always comes back, I think, looking at the risk of these things. I mean, risk is always based around likelihood and impact but if you can flip that around to say, well, what risk are we avoiding based on the likelihood and impact of a possible change and then asking yourself what could we do in design to avoid that? You know, really sort of comes to front of mind and can be used to assess those design decisions as well.

So, the more immovable that your solutions are probably the greater the need to invest in that kind of thinking.

[00:37:00] Chris Hudson: No, it’s good. I mean, the, a lot of listeners to the show classify themselves as an intrapreneur in some ways. So they’re kind of observing the working environment around them and doing their best to make positive impact in one way or another. And I think that ability, and maybe it’s curiosity, but it’s also a lack of fear and a bit of relentlessness. There’s a bit of grit to it as well, but you’re constantly trying to fight the cause a little bit. Is that something you can relate to as somebody who’s almost pointing things out.

It’s always a responsibility that you take forward. But is that a feeling that you share?

[00:37:30] Andrew Kendall: And yes, it is. A lot of colleagues that do do similar things to to what we do is really really kind of proving the value of the approaches that we take and very much human centred design approaches because you’re kind of moving people from thinking about the object to thinking about the user or the subject that the product that’s being built and flipping between the two to realise that there’s this symbiotic relationship between the user and the product that they’re using not just all about the product is a bit of a leap for some people and so it’s really important to get runs on the board.

It’s a lot easier to have a conversation once you’ve got an evidence base of where something’s been successful or case studies where by taking that approach, it’s made a difference in some of the work that you’ve done and in terms of those leaps of faith that you get in those opportunities to do that work and build those up, in terms of explaining to people kind of what you do and why you do it and why it’s important is always good to kind of back that up when you’ve got some examples of where you’ve made a difference before something that’s tangible, so again, on looking at one of the metro projects that we worked on, a key part of that was the standing up of an on demand bus service that service the metro stations and in that we’re able to have a true understanding of people’s habitual behaviour around taking their car is their kind of front of mind experience and to understand what you needed to change in people’s habits to shift onto something else that wasn’t something that they’d actually consciously not even thought of or ruled out or something that they had not even considered as an option.

To put a new option in their mind was a big thing. And so, in order to do that, you needed to come up with something that was compelling enough for people to change. And we were able to do that. We had a great group of people that were involved the design of this from who would be the operator to a group of service designers really looking at understanding needs of what this needed to be for people and what that needed to mean to them in order for them to use this, and we were really successful. And that came down to lots of things around trust in the service and the uniform that the driver was wearing and how they went about conducting the service and even down to parental trust in that this is something that their children could use and then they could get them off to school and then they could come back and use the service later, which was replacing the car trip to do the school drop off in the morning, where that meant that those families didn’t have to get in the car because now there was a, was another alternative for them to use.

And so when we looked at the stats around how this thing was performing and what was happening. We found that this thing had enormous take up, thousands of users within the first couple of months. And in this particular case, 4 percent of those users had either sold their second car or were no longer using a second car in that household, which was phenomenal.

So in terms of design connected to things like mobility choice that was really key. And it came down to things like those aspects or putting a call to action on the side, saying connecting you with the with the metro and all these things that gave purpose to all of those features that you had in there and why that design was really critical to thinking about the product that you were creating and who you were creating it for and then using those examples like that success to then justify other projects and getting people on board with this evidence base that then was quite irrefutable around what does this mean to how you shape things?

So, yeah, very important.

[00:40:54] Chris Hudson: Oh, very important work. Yeah. I mean that from a customer point of view, customer experience point of view, it feels like that’s our role really is it’s almost as engineers of people that can create the link between the context of the customer and the lives that they live and the products or service or the infrastructure or whatever it is that has a danger of being quite generically put together in one way or another.

It’ll kind of help everybody, but unless you can encourage them to make that leap to say, actually, I could too, I could do this and I could change my lifestyle and I could sell my second car. You’ve effectively helped them with those stepping stones, but without that, it may not have been conceived of in a way from a consumer’s view.

[00:41:30] Andrew Kendall: Yeah. And so I think with that kind of investment in understanding what this meant for those people and what it would take them to use something and really kind of under, all of that use. Right. So use is around design.

So how do I need to design this for you to use this? But really kind of understanding, what those motivators and those blockers are and what that change of behaviour is like to get people to then use something else to the solution that they’ve always gone to to solve their problem is incredibly powerful because now got a behaviour change to something else that is completely reliant on design to attract those people to do that. The minute that the design is not working for a cohort of people, the minute you’ve potentially lost those users from that service. And so, yeah, the way that we think about the design of new products and services in transport, but in other domains as well is super important around, really kind of understanding who you’re designing for and then and what that design needs to look like in order for those people to even consider using your products. So it’s critically important to have that understanding of those customers, of those users, of those people around what’s going on in their lives that will make them want to use

[00:42:44] Chris Hudson: Some great points and the stories in there and in case studies, from the humble beginnings of Lego and parts and all the things we were discussing at the beginning. Concord. I wish I could have seen that. I went on to Concord once. It was very impressive. Didn’t fly it.

I just got to stand on it for five minutes and then was asked to leave, but it was pretty cool. But yeah, it was just kind of. Yeah. It made me think maybe to draw some of these themes to a close. It just feels like there’s a degree of influence that we can have as leaders or as influences in some way within our organisation.

So what do you think are the most powerful or compelling tools that we have at our disposal to be able to either positively change or impact the business that we work in or the lives of the consumers that we’re serving in the end?

[00:43:24] Andrew Kendall: I think as you would hope that as humans, as people that by bringing the perspectives of others together and really kind of showing challenges that some people have with potentially using products and services that other people are responsible for really important.

So often, it’s about appealing to people’s sense of humanity really in relation to that. So I think being able to story-tell is really important and, often in these big projects that those customers, those users often don’t have much of a voice when it comes to design, that they might offer up some sentiment about the project generally, but about design in helping people have a voice in the way that something is going to be designed and have that recognised, I think is good.

And then our job as storytellers and whether that storytelling is using something like Lego to articulate that or a video of people showing how they interact today and what opportunities we have to make that better is really key to then build, really a sort of a coalition of people that are willing to get on board with the kind of things that we need to do and also sharing the success that we can have together once we’ve been able to, effectively have those people be able to use our product, doesn’t matter whether it’s a, an on demand bus or an app or something else that was perhaps out of the reach of people previously.

But to join in that success when those users say thank you, because they’ve been considered and for me our job to be able to bring those voices to projects and then have that reflect in design is an absolute critical part of what we do.

[00:45:04] Chris Hudson: Great answer as well. I think the design language, it’s almost the language of possibility that if you can make that more real and make it, understandable and transparent to a number of stakeholders within your business or teams within your business, then people can see where you’re going and what you’re trying to communicate more readily.

It feels like a lot of the language and the construct of business is situated in the heritage, it’s in the legacy and it’s in the construct of what the business has done or is known for already. So trying to push that out into more imaginative, speculative areas in a way that, it’s not too frightening, but it’s in a way that people can understand and does that feel right or wrong?

Can we interrogate it? Does it raise more questions? Can we answer those questions? It’s almost using it as a bit of a provocation in a low risk experimental way. then that can be incredibly powerful by the sounds of it. Do you agree?

[00:45:52] Andrew Kendall: Absolutely. And I think it’s really important that we’re cognisant of those kind of organisational biases around the way that things are always done and find ways to break those down and often there’s a higher degree of enablement you have to bring people to a place that they feel safe in having those conversations and creating those opportunities for where you can have a conversation about the art of the possible with those people, because I I guarantee you that solution designers, often these people may think about these things, but they often don’t have an outlet to explore that or or it goes against organisational norms.

So why would I even suggest that? And so being able to create being able to create a safe space, a place that potentially involves play as a way to unlock that creativity and that exploration facilitated by people who can bring a good understanding of the users and their needs and marrying the two together is a great way to give people permission to explore and create and perhaps look at solutions that haven’t been previously pursued in that organisation to then give both the users and the organisation an advantage.

[00:47:03] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Very important point again. I think there’s definitely something in there around the fact that, we’re being trained to give computers and bots and AI prompts and questions and we want a direct answer back and I think the art of learning, pedagogy just feels like you need to preserve that kind of skill of how to learn because otherwise we won’t know how to really, and if you can stretch your legs or creative minds in other ways, then that’s probably worth preserving in other areas. And you can use AI for it too, I’m sure. It’s like, make me a picture of this cityscape that’s going to look like this. And you could probably do what you were describing with a Lego now with generative AI as well.

But it just feels like we need to still be creators in some way.

[00:47:42] Andrew Kendall: Absolutely. And look, I think there is absolutely a role for A I in doing that, and, there’s been lots of conversations around AI in the role of synthesis as well and how, by engaging with AI that you can help in that creative process. And so, while the creation stays with the human, if you like the additional concepts and perhaps some of the left of field ideas to help with that creative process around angles that perhaps a single mind may not have thought of can be really useful within that creative process.

But again I don’t think it’s taking away from the, that the human element of creativity but then, using tools like AI to contribute to inputs in the formulation of that creativity to then bring other perspectives that may be useful and then can help drive a more inclusive outcome as well.

[00:48:33] Chris Hudson: Brilliant. All right. Well, thank you so much, Andrew. I think we’ll wrap there. But yeah, I really appreciate the conversation and the time that you’ve given up to tell us about all the things that you do in your work and the amazing story that is behind that tracing right back to your childhood.

So very much appreciated all of that. And thank you. And before we go, I often ask guests if there’s a way for people to get in touch with you, if they had a question or if something sparked a curiosity, would they be able to get in touch? So where would people find you?

[00:48:59] Andrew Kendall: So they can contact me via LinkedIn. Also they can contact me via my email address as well andrew.c.kendall@gmail.com

[00:49:04] Chris Hudson: All right. Well, thanks so much, Andrew. Really appreciate your time. And no doubt there’ll be some questions back from this one. So, so thank you again.

[00:49:13] Andrew Kendall: Fantastic, Chris. Great to talk to you as always.

[00:49:15] Chris Hudson: Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference.

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