 In this episode, you're going to learn how to radically increase your influence within the organization by connecting business to design. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, my name is Ryan Rumsey. This is the Service Design Show, Episode 119. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are they hidden and invisible things that make all the difference between success and failure, all to help you design and deliver great services that have a positive impact on people and business. The guest in this episode is Ryan Rumsey. He's the CEO of Second Wave Dive and the author of a book called Business Thinking for Designers. The topic we're going to explore today is the one where we're entering a new stage for design. We've managed to get a seat at the table and now people have expectations of what we can bring, the value we can bring, but often it's still a big struggle to actually deliver upon those expectations, especially when we have to connect our work to the language and thinking of organizations that aren't yet designed. So if you stick around till the end of the episode, you'll have a better understanding of how you can collaborate with your business partners and let go of the feeling that you have to convince them all the time, which will make your life more fun, your work easier and most importantly help you to deliver the impact you know you can. If you're interested in learning what's underneath the surface of service design, what are the ingredients for success and you haven't yet subscribed to this channel, make sure you do that because we bring a new video at least once a week that will help you to level up your service design skills. Now having said that, it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Ryan Rumsey. Welcome to the show Ryan. Hi Mark, pleasure to be here. Happy to have you on on this special day in many occasions. Yesterday was the inauguration, the previous episode was recorded just after the capital storm of the capital. So yeah, big moments are happening right now. Yeah, today is a much calmer day than we've had in a long time and I'm quite relieved for it. For the people who haven't googled your name yet, could you give a 30-second introduction and we'll dig into that later a lot more? Sure. My name is Ryan Rumsey. I am currently based in Austin, Texas. I have a background in design but also building design and product and strategy organizations. I've had the pleasure of working at companies like Apple and Electronic Arts and USAA, a large bank here in the US and I'm an author. I wrote a book last year with InVision called Business Thinking for Designers and so yeah, that's a little bit about me. I can highly recommend the book. I listened and read it this week actually to prepare for our chat and we were just preparing for it and my comment was there are so many things in there which I was already using but didn't have the proper name, didn't have a coherent story related to business thinking for designers as the book is called so I can highly recommend it for anybody who's listening if you want to know what to google. That's one of the big benefits. Thank you. I'm astonished that people have read it still. It's been almost a year and so thank you for reading. We're waiting for version two already. Maybe something is cooking. Yeah, that's a teaser because at the end of the audiobook there is already chapter one of the next book maybe. Anywho, I have a 60-second question rapid fire for you to get to know you a little bit better. So the whole point is to just answer these questions as quickly as you can. The first question is what's always in your fridge? Pickles. Alright, always pickles. Which book are you reading? I am right now reading Small is Beautiful. It's actually a 50-year-old book now by E.F. Schumacher all about economics being based around community rather than capitalism or corporations. Which superpower would you like to have? That's an easy one, flight. Again, so many people who want to fly, come on, especially now. What did you want to become when you were a kid? You know, I wanted to become a doctor. We could talk more about probably my most popular article on the internet is I rewrote or rewrote or captured my autobiography that I wrote when I was 14. And it is by far the most googled and hit article. And I think there's a lot of 14-year-olds writing an autobiography. So I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. Oh gosh, that's quite specific. Yeah. And the final question, although you're not specifically into service design, you're not out of service design either. So my question is what was the first time that you got introduced to service design? Gosh, I want to say probably around 2006, 2007. I have a lot of curiosity and I tend to dig into different things that aren't particularly, you know, domain specific. And so I recalled seeing some work, you know, back then everybody used to blog a lot and sort of share work in the open. And so I think it was around 2006, 2007 that I began to see a lot of the material. The topic we want to investigate and dig into the rabbit hole we're going to go down to is one that I think a lot of people struggle with. And that is how do you as a designer actually influence decision making? How do you get, how do you make change happen within organizations? Because we see a lot of designers struggle with moving from insights, research, artifacts, and actually translating that into business outcomes, right? And I think that's the topic you're just as excited about as I am. So that's what we're going to try to unravel and maybe give people some practical tips and yeah, yeah, things that they can actually do to be more impactful the next day. I'm quite interested like you wrote a book about business thinking for the designers. Can you take us back to what led you to write a book about this? And I'm curious, what was there a turning point in your career that you thought I need to understand this better? Well, there's a clear turning point. The turning point wasn't necessarily the same time that I was going thinking about a book. But the turning point I write about in the book, which was, I had an opportunity in 2011. So now 10 years ago to move from Apple, I had worked at Apple for about four years, where I was leading design for AppleCare. So not the glamorous side of Apple or the well known side of Apple, but designing essentially enterprise tools for AppleCare as an organization. So when you would call or message an AppleCare advisor, the tools that they use every day are the tools that I was working on in designing. But at Apple, we as designers were responsible for the product definition, which meant I had the authority, if you will, to say no to going live. So I could tell the engineering team that they did not develop the application to my standards or my specs or what matched up with my research that no, I'm going to hold back and say they couldn't go live. And so that was a very, I thought, normal way of working. And then I got an opportunity to go to Electronic Arts and build a design and actually program management organization from scratch inside a brand new customer experience organization from scratch. So it was like everything was built, the bigger organization I was in and then my organization. And what I found was that everything that worked at Apple, like of how we made decisions, none of that was working at Electronic Arts. The sort of way I describe it as Apple is they had a firm grasp on what they wanted to do. And then they would tell the employee, they would tell me or others say, Well, we don't know how to do it. That's why we've hired you. Go figure it out. And then I went over to a different environment, a different culture of sort of decision making. And it was kind of the opposite of that. It was more like, Well, we don't really know what we want, but this is how we work. And suddenly I'm going, Well, wait, that's, you know, how you work is not how we make great things. And it was just suddenly within, you know, a few weeks, 30 days, me going, I'm woefully unprepared for that challenge of, you know, trying now to convince other people that this is a proper way. And it was really it had a profound effect on me. I was really not in a well place. I was really upset, you know, how could people recognize this? So you go from an organization, which I would describe, and a lot of people probably would describe as being design led to an organization, which is not design led, it's probably engineering led or operations led, right? And then you have certain expectations about what's needed for you as a designer to actually be able to deliver value to the organization. And then there's friction, there's tension, like what, what did you notice? What actually started happening in that the period? So, you know, it's easy to talk about these things in hindsight, right? You know, you can kind of reflect and build. But fundamentally, at the time, I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I was broken in a way, like that they had. I wasn't up to the job. And so it was more this like, what am I doing wrong? What's wrong with me? And I had a wonderful mentor at the time. So the backstory of me joining Electronic Arts is actually my boss at Apple had been recruited by Electronic Arts. And there were a couple of us that moved over. And so one of my closest peers and mentors that I had worked with at Apple had already, you know, a long relationship with, came over to Electronic Arts as well. And I remember going on like daily walks, we had, you know, sort of a path around the building. And just talking, like not in a sense of like, here are the things that we have to do, but just like, something is wrong. I'm not doing it right. And so the feeling was more like, it must be me, you know, less than, oh, here's the structural thing that's going on. But was it a feeling like not being able to contribute to the organization or not being understood or? You know, I think it was not feeling understood by even some of the same people that I had worked with previously, because they were adapting to like culture that I couldn't see. But I think it was more a sense of like, there's a bigger picture here that I don't have access to, or I haven't spent enough time with. And there's also this pressure that now you're here. Now we expect things to be Apple-like. And it took me a little bit of time to realize like the things that we had made and developed at Apple were like, they were years long initiatives. Really, that sort of product is never solved. It's always unfinished kind of, you know, and here we're moving over to Electronic Arts. It was like, okay, now you're here. We need the things that you had made at Apple. It's been three months. They should be in place. But we don't want them to look or feel or be anything like the things you made at Apple. They should be totally different. So there was like this vague, like, where are we going? What's happening? And I felt really disoriented. And none of the sort of design tools and methodologies were helping me in this circumstance. I couldn't write a persona for a customer that was going to affix this, right? And I can imagine, like you said, there were expectations about what design should be adding and how it, yeah, what you should be delivering. And you had expectations and at some point, they don't line up and a lot of bad things can happen, right? Right, right. I think there was this, you know, and in hindsight, I think, and this kind of gets into why I wrote the book is there are things I wish I knew going into it that I don't think we often talk about. Before, yeah, before we, yeah, you know, and so it's like just going down that path of like, I just, I knew there was bigger picture there. But I didn't have access to the information. So that that got you to probably investigate and try to learn what's going on here. Why isn't this working? Why am I feeling miserable? Why am I frustrated? Why are all these other people stupid? Like, right, right. Yeah, right. Yeah. I think we we've all been in that situation where when you when you when you don't have the luxury to be in an organization that truly values design and that is design led and the design maturity is high, then you have a lot of work to do which isn't related to design. And that's the thing we don't get prepared to, right? And yeah, and in hindsight, now again, it's actually very related to design. Tell me, we just have to change, you know, what we what we consider design and human centered and all these things. Yeah. So where do we start? Because what maybe we need to frame? What is the thing that you didn't grasp at that moment? What? What was the mystery? Well, I think one of the biggest and this is I all credit to my mentor. His name is Jeff. We were out for a walk. And what he said was, at Apple, people valued you because you would come up with the right answer or the answer that then they thought was the right answer. But here you have to learn the art of letting other people have your way. When we're in different cultural environments, you might have to recognize that it's not about being right or the right thing to do. And it's more about allowing others to participate in that decision. And so one of the first things that he so he literally said this on a walk, learn the art of letting other people have your way. And suddenly it flipped a switch in my head. And I was like, hmm, you know, when we talk about customers and users and kind of human factors and all those things, our colleagues are humans too. Right? Do we actually know what's keeping them up at night? And so what one of the first things that I did was I sat in meetings and I sat in a room not as like that maybe an active participant where I needed to say what I wanted to say, but as a researcher, what are the dynamics happening here? When do decisions get made? How are they made? If we let somebody talk long enough, do they end up doing like a full circle? And so that was one of these first steps is like, okay, I'm just going to calm down. I'm not going to talk. I'm going to be an active listener and I am going to take notes by what I observe. Yeah, so you basically started to study the organization with your design, mindset, attitude, tool, skills. That's right. And what did you learn? Well, I mean, I began to learn that there were types of people who felt more comfortable with making decisions that were maybe considered more risky. There were types of people who were driven by some type of data informing them. And then there were lots of types, other types of people who were quite happy to just be told what to do. And we know about servant leadership and I was aware of that, but there's another concept called situational leadership. That is a super fascinating structure. I highly recommend going looking at it. And it's basically looking at some people want to be led, but others want to be directed. Others kind of want to be told what to do. And so those are the types of things is like looking at here, I'm part of a leadership team and looking at my peers and saying, ooh, this person, they just want their boss to tell them what to do and they'll go off and do it. But this other person here and maybe more me wants to be part of what gets decided. And so it was interesting to just sort of take notes. And suddenly we start to see some behavioral characteristics, some decision making characteristics. Now, if we pause for a second and say, come on, you are hired to do your job, you are hired as a designer, people knew what they were, hopefully knew what they were getting into. Why not stick to your craft? They didn't know. When we talk about people thinking or knowing, I think after a couple months, it was clear what they were expecting or what the expectations they were getting were different than the expectations I thought that they wanted. So when we talk about design at Apple, it has a very different perception and understanding than I think what a lot of people expect out of design. Was there ever a moment that you thought they have to change? Oh, sure. I'm not going to learn. I'm not getting an MBA. I'm not learning about business. I'm the designer. That's why you hired me. I think a lot of my initial reaction was that way. And so I carried that for a while. I'll be clear with that. And then so I was there for two years. We did a lot of good work, but it was very painful. I didn't necessarily feel good. And so I got another opportunity to go to another organization. And very quickly, I saw the same patterns. You've invited me here and now you just want to question. But one of the things that stuck out was interesting. I'm the only constant variable in these two situations. We're talking about electronic arts, wonderful company. There's so many great things about them. And then I got an opportunity to go work in an R&D facility working on systems biology for Nestle in Switzerland. And they went from, we've hired somebody who worked at Apple to like a week later, the same patterns of like, why are you doing this? No, no, no. That's not what we want to do. And me going like, whoa, hold on. Okay. Why is it the same thing? Why is there the same thing happening at a video game company that is a company that's working on systems biology? That's strange. And wait, I'm the only no, none of the same characters are here except me. Oh, wait, maybe, maybe I need to rethink how I'm approaching this. Yeah. And I guess that experience is really powerful. Like, if you're still, if you're in the same context all the time, it might be really easy to blame the context. But like you said, if you experience the same thing in multiple different environments, then it's probably, it has something to do with you. Yeah. And I think that is something in my work now, you know, when I speak to a lot of designers and people who've been around for a while, I work with a lot of sort of mid-career professionals. They suddenly, in having this conversation, if they've moved to a couple jobs, it's me saying, well, you're the constant variable. And that's this light switch in them that goes, oh, my gosh. And yes, that is what it is, right? And so if we paint the picture of what is possible for the people who are watching and listening right now, how would you describe the situation you're in right now? And how big is the contrast to what it used to be? So I think, right, design has matured as an industry by and large over the last 15 years. But I think there's a popular culture narrative of what it is as an industry and contextually that might not be the same in your environment. So I think when I work with people and I chat with people, you know, one of the first things I say is like, you are introducing a new culture into an existing culture. Things have happened before you were there. Maybe start by being a historian first. Has this initiative been tried before? How many times before? By whom are they still here? Is there still some type of emotional connection to what has been tried before? So that's one of the first pragmatic things is just as like, if you're new to an organization or even a situation is just to sort of say, like, can I just be a researcher? Can I just talk to everybody? See kind of what's happened. The same type of work that we do with say customer stuff or user stuff, service design stuff, what's what is the front and back of house of decision making, right? So that's usually where I say that's where we can start. And do you feel that the influence you have right now, like, what is the big game of getting good at this? Because we talked about it's like playing different games. And let's assume that you partially mastered this other game as well. What's possible? So I think fundamentally, let's start about the self. What you gain is a lot more confidence in the decisions you're making. Even if the answer isn't what you want it to be, you still have a lot more confidence that you did a good job in presenting your rationale, presenting your argument. And then yes, we don't win every single time. I think what you also get is trust in others, right? It's not a quant metric that you can gauge, but what are the things that you might sense and trust is, oh, my colleagues tend to be asking for more research or asking me to be involved earlier in a process. That's something new. That's a good feeling, right? So I think a lot of the things that we tend to gain out of this are, you know, all those things that they say like, oh, relationship skills, hard skills. But it's still, for me, comes back to the self, like that you just can sort of sit back and know that you've done a good job that you are worthy enough, try to remove some of that kind of imposter syndrome that I think a lot of people suffer for as they go through career transitions, right? And your life will be much more fun. Your work will be much more fun, less stressful, less frustration. I think you use the word convincing people, like getting out of that mentality that you have to convince people, seeing them as somebody you need to win over, rather than them being partners. Like that's a completely different dynamic. And I think that's what the future holds if you get this right. That's right. You know, there's a common phrase that I hear coming up a lot, still coming up a lot with designers, but also product managers, other functions as well, which is we need buy in. We need buy in. We need others to buy into this, right? We need headcount. We need this. If you stand back for a second pause, it's a very self centered way of approaching collaboration. And so one of the things that, you know, I work with people on is, what are you selling? And what are your colleagues buying? Can you be a little more intentional around that dynamic? That in turn will relieve some of your anxiety. That in turn will relieve some of your pain if you're just a little more pragmatic and intentional about, right? It's a different dynamic. Collaboration teamwork is not about I need to convince them. It's more about maybe relieving their pain that also relieves my pain, right? You know, four years ago, I created a course on selling services with confidence. And then one of the first things I try to point out in that course is that selling is not about convincing somebody is understanding that selling is about helping somebody achieve something they already want to do. And I think as well, once you get in that perspective that you have something to offer and your partners in the organization have a pain, like you need to make, you need to make that connection. And that's up to you. Like, and I think that's a skill that not a lot of designers are familiar with, interested in, don't know that they lack actually the skill to do. What is it? Mark? Partnership. Relationship. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one of the things that I've developed over time is, you know, when we talk about relation, build great relationships, right? Everybody kind of knows you have to do that. But that's kind of where it ends. Like, you're left to your own devices to sort of figure out what that is. But I tend to get really pragmatic. Like, how can you actually practice that? And so one of the methods that related to a canvas or service design type of tool is a canvas I've called the Good Partner Map. And it's really two different frameworks that I've combined. And the first framework comes from business models, business model, a magic triangle, which is essentially like, who are you providing value to? What do you provide of value? How do you provide that value? And then why is it valuable to them? So if you think about that, design is a discipline. I'm providing value to product management. Here are the skills and capabilities I provide. How do I provide them? It's through a Slack message or through a canvas or through research. Why is that valuable to the product management team is a question that I don't think we ask a lot. But then the second part here, which is critical, critical to change, is we're talking about behavior design. There are pragmatic ways to actually consider where you might make small changes to your approach. Can you give an example? Are you familiar with BJ Fogg's work or Atomic Habits? So what I have done is looked and studied his work and turned it into a simplified two by two grid, which is essentially saying in every behavior, there are three elements. Somebody needs to be motivated. They have to have the ability to do something. And they need some type of prompt or call to action to do something. So when it comes to partnerships, what I then work with people on is like, do you know if somebody has high motivation? Do you know if they have the ability to action what you've given them? Or do you need to provide some new call to action? Very pragmatic example for service design, service blueprints or journey maps. Most of my colleagues in my career are glad to receive those. Wonderful. Look at this. This is amazing information. I love these insights. And then they put them in a drawer. So the thing when it comes to behavior design is to understand that they're highly motivated but they have low ability to actually do anything with that map. Right. And so from behavior design, you say, how can we make journey mapping more actionable for our colleagues? It's not to maybe make a better artifact. It's maybe work that happens in the process of mapping or afterwards. Conversely, research. I don't know many companies who really want to spend money on research. So they have low motivation. So what you're not trying to do is give them something easier to do. You're trying to give them a new call to action as to why research is valuable. But then if you get very pragmatic and sort of intentional about that, you know that this is all design. And then how might you change a little bit of your model of what design as a discipline is providing as a partnership? There are so many good things in this. For one, is I think we need to get over the assumption that the people who we work with, and even if they hired us, actually know the value of what we bring. That's one. Right. And the other thing is when we start to see ourselves as service providers, which we are, you said it's a discipline, but we're actually providing a service to the organization, to clients, and then you have to understand how to position, explain the value of the service in a way that connects to other people. And then you have to use a different vocabulary probably than your design vocabulary. You have to use a vocabulary that's familiar to the person you're talking to. This is the great thing about sitting in a room and being a researcher. Write down words that you don't really know. Or write down words that you have questions. We talked about googling, right? Sit in a room, and when somebody says return on investment, spend a little time googling, not a specific, just what is return on investment? Are there things there, right? And then one of my favorite things to do is remix. So not create something new, take something that already exists, and just remix it a little. Do you have an example? Yeah. Sure, sure. Let's talk about remixing the phrase phase gate. So in traditional project management, you have phases that an engineering team or a project management team knows. Like so design, delivery, test, build, all these things. And they have what many organizations will call a phase gate. We're done with design. Now we move to the next phase. So when I worked at Electronic Arts the second time, I worked in IT. IT is full of preexisting culture. And so instead of saying you're doing it wrong, we should not be waterfall. We should be agile. What I had to say is like, how can I remix or really localize a lot of the words that are already being used? And I said, ah, phase gates. You know what's interesting? There's this other way of working called product management. It's not too far. It's like a cousin. And they also have phase gates. But those phase gates are more around conception, inception, introduction, maturity, decline, because when we talk about the difference of making like a tangible, hard physical item, you deliver it and you release it to the world and you never have to update it again. But when we talk about digital work, as soon as we release it to the world, we have to constantly be improving it. The work is never really done until we've determined that it's time to retire that. And so that's a way of remixing their language and just saying, we have the same word that you use. There's just a slightly different connotation in our approach. So I'm curious about remixing in regards to a topic or a challenge. I think every designer has experience in the past. And that is we already touched upon the return on investment. But what happens when you get the question of having to quantify the value of your work, the business value? Sure. And that's probably one of the most uncomfortable situations for a lot of designers because we focus on quality. We don't focus on quantifying stuff. What is your experience around that? Is it possible to cross that chasm? It is. It is. Fortunately. My first journey into this was accidental in 2009 when I worked at Apple. I was working side by side with MBAs. And my leadership just threw out like a curious question. Hmm. Our MBAs are using structures like balanced scorecards to kind of track how we're doing. It's a different way of looking at quality. Do you have anything like that? At this point, I started sweating going like, I've never, what? There's nothing like this. But it got me, they prompted me in a curious way. It's not like your performance review is not dependent on this. It was just like, hey, is there something you can sort out? So it just encouraged me to go start looking around. And about the same time, Livia Lobate and Austin Govella, some designers here in the U.S., were presenting at the IA Summit, the Information Architecture Summit 2009, I think they had what they called a UX health check, which is just placing some ratings in rubrics to kind of saying, here's what we think value is. And so I began mashing those things together. Could I take the structural framework of a balanced scorecard and just apply rubrics and ratings for what I thought was business performance or technical performance, what I thought was adoption as it related to the design lens. But it was really all about mapping. So when you talk about mapping value or how do you connect value, I think one of the biggest missing things in OKRs or measurements is, what do the objectives actually have to do with one another? So we think about metrics, metrics, metrics, what are the right metrics? But what does skilling up an employee have to do with customer satisfaction? What does increasing the velocity have to do with sales and performance? Well, guess what? There's another framework out there. It's the balanced scorecard approach. It's a methodology, not just a report. And so there's a lovely little tool out there called Strategy Maps. So it's in the book. We talk about it. But what it is really doing is connecting cause and effect. If we do this, then we expect that. If we get that, then we expect this. And it's the same thing with design now. We don't communicate effectively. What does accessibility have to do with usability? What does usability have to do with trust? What does trust then have to do with satisfaction? And so those are the types of things that we can begin to connect. And you can measure usability. You can measure in different ways, maybe not super quant, but trust, right? And if you begin to start measuring those, that's just an experiment you're going to continue to approve. Again, people start Googling Strategy Maps because I think that's a super powerful missing connection in the design space and also in the service design space, of course. And when I was going over this, a light bulb came up because I was using similar models to sort of try to quantify the value. And the challenge I see and what designers tend to get stuck when they get asked the ROI question is... People, a manager or CEO asks you, like, how did this impact our revenue? And you're like, revenue, we're working on a much lower scale, a much lower level. So the disconnect is so big. And what I think is needed and what you also advocate in the book is you just need to make, just in between quotes, you just need to make a statement which makes it believable or hypothesis that the thing that you're doing on this low level eventually will compound and contribute to revenue. That's right. One of the biggest switches that I made was the way I approached challenging a business assumption. I think in 2011, when I joined Electronic Arts and I joined companies, one of the biggest misconceptions I had, and this is no fault of any company, Apple is crazy metric driven. I worked in Applecare. We had the organization of Applecare as a cost center. I worked in Tim Cook as the chief financial officer organization. So you're talking about like, 13 key performance indicators and like 25 supporting performance indicators. Like we were working with standard deviations. So the assumption that I had when I went to another organization is that math was being used. So when we talk about return on investment, let's demystify that. ROI is just how much does it cost? When will I get it? How many people need to be involved? It's that. But one of the greatest ways that I have found to challenge a business assumption is to ask about the math. So often, right? We talk about Googling all the time. I certainly have done this over the years. Somebody will come to me and say, like, we need to improve retention. And I go and panic. You know, I did. We'd go and panic and Google, Google, Google. How do you calculate retention? How do I connect to retention? But I think one of the things that I've learned over the years is to, ah, treat it as a curiosity. Interesting. You know, I'd really like to improve retention. Can you tell me our current retention rate? Because if they don't have a current retention rate, they're not using math. And there's no way to actually calculate the value of a guess. It is all subjective. And my assumption was that surely the business partners, executives are using math to drive all their decisions, but oftentimes they're not. And so then, if we get really pragmatic, trying to then go and figure out the math is an interesting provocation of saying, like, how can I invite them to go experiment and start looking at math in this way? And then knowing what we might be exposing is like years of bad decision-making. Yeah. Again, what I like here is that we... I don't know if we're hiding or if we're naive or ignorant, but we're also not too much concerned about the value that we provide. Like, if you don't make any assumptions or you cannot hold accountable for the value that you didn't deliver if there isn't a benchmark. So we often, I think, do it to sort of protect ourselves of not having to get into that conversation. But I think that is working against us. And what we should do instead is when a client starts to approach you and hasn't raised the conversation about value, the business value that you are contributing, it should be you who pushes for that rather than saying, ah, nice. We don't have to think about numbers and RRI. You as a designer have to be critical and say, I want to be contributing to something that the company actually values and that the customer's value. Right, because what we find ourselves is if we're not curious and we don't ask about it, it can often be a setup six months later when whatever magical number didn't change that you weren't aware about, revenue didn't change, and then suddenly they may point to you and say, well, you didn't fix it. I'm no longer trusting you. And so by asking that up front, we can actually say, okay, let's talk about if math isn't present. That sounds like risky decision making. I am making you aware that this is a risk. If you want to move forward with that risk, that's okay by me. But I'm going to maybe provide you some insights around here's what will happen in six months. We still don't know math. We still don't know if there's some type of correlation between this work and what you're trying to get out of it. Yeah. And this is missing from the initial conversation with clients this, how should we call it? Business perspective, business mindset. So it's like, yeah, I think it's more like business situations, like business savvy, like just becoming, right? If we talk about value, are we talking about spreadsheet value or are we talking about like perceived value? What is that difference there? Of course, people can download the book, but if you had to give somebody a starting point to start to develop this new language, become more fluent, develop this vocabulary, what would be some good starting points? You know, I will say my book kind of is a gentle way to share some overview stuff, but if you are interested in the basics of strategy, how business people think about it, you can go pick up like the 10 fundamental essays of strategy that Harvard Business Review has put out. That's a good overview look and there may be some concepts in there, but YouTube is a wonderful place. If you then read that book and you see something like Michael Porter's Five Forces, not every company is using that or living by that, but if you just YouTube and go to video, there are literally hundreds of videos that just say, here's a four minute video on what five forces is. Here's a four minute video on the basics of generic strategy. There's three different generic strategies out there. I think that's a wonderful resource. It's HBR, I think it's 10 essays on strategy. It's a maroon book and it's just a general overview and what you'll find people like Clayton Christensen are in it. If you know Clayton Christensen, he is the parent of jobs to be done as a framework now, right? So there's all sorts of names that start to pop up. Yeah. And you need to, again, the book provides a very good introduction to what to start googling. And that's perfect. And I share a lot of footnotes too. It's awesome. Yeah, a lot of links, resources. At the start, you said something like, we're close or designers aren't that far away from actually getting good at this. What makes you so confident that we can do this? Well, I think as part of, you know, how we've been raised, if you will, how we've been instructed, how we've learned is I think we as designers are curious. We're comfortable with some ambiguity. We are comfortable with taking on risk. But also, I think many of us are driven to do it better, driven to have better things. And so we don't, you know, the traditional, say, design loop is like understand, reflect, and build, build or make. But when it comes to learning this, I'm going to talk about remix again, understand, reflect, and remix. Just gain a little comprehension on what your colleagues have already mastered or what they studied. You don't have to become masters yourself. You don't have to necessarily get an MBA. An MBA is good if you have the means and you have the access and the time. But if you just gain a little bit of comprehension on what they've learned, you're like halfway there. You're halfway there to just sort of say, ah, you keep using this word. I'm curious about this. This is what I understand that. Is that how you understand that? Right. And so it's just remixing what is already present. What would you, now in hindsight, I think we spend a time of 10 years, 10 plus years, something like that in this story. What is the thing that you wish you knew at the start? We'll go back to me. I think I wish I knew that I wasn't broken. It's been a very personal journey. And I've had to go through very weird situations. Like twice I've had a boss been fired within three or four months of me arriving at a company and left on my own. Those are the two things. Is that I'm not broken. I'm also not alone. You know, the first opportunity to really get exposure to that was a lovely little conference here called Design Leadership Camp run by the Bureau of Digital. And I went to the first one and it was the first time where it was designers who were now responsible for building organizations got together and we got to share like, oh wait, you have to deal with this too. You have to deal with this too. And so 10 years ago, I think you're not broken and you're not alone. Take pause, become a researcher, become a historian. You're going to be okay. It's going to work out. Nice. That's a positive footnote on this entire conversation is you can learn this, right? It's not a mystery. Not everybody who is in business has an MBA. It's not as scary as you think. And it's not even... We cannot ignore it. It's a must. Right. If we want to deliver on the promise we have as a community, we need to get this right. We need to get this right. And I think it's beyond just if we want to deliver. It's companies need us to deliver, but really communities need us to deliver. We have an opportunity here to help organizations pivot, I think, in a lot of ways that we as citizens, as society, have the means to do so. And what that means is maybe, maybe, understanding that there's a lot of humans involved in this process. And it's... We can't just hide into our own tools to get there to get there that really to have the societal effects that we want, to have the environmental effects we want. All these things that a lot of us want requires us to then go outside of our comfort zone. We should have started the conversation with this because this is at stake, right? It is. We want to create a better world. We want to create better organizations. And that's at stake. And that should be driving us to actually get good at this. Fundamentally. I fundamentally agree. How would we summarize this conversation? I think a lot of what we've been talking about is kind of this concept of leadership. Leadership is a craft. And with any craft, you need practice and you need some access to tools that perhaps you didn't even know were there. So in many ways, it's important for you to understand that you're not alone. There are methods and resources out there for you. And the craft of leadership is something that we should take just as deliberately and intentional as becoming a service designer or becoming a graphic designer. Well, we should see it as part of being a service designer. And the... Absolutely. We always talk about the holistic perspective and the holistic view. Let's add this to the holistic perspective on what service design is and what we do as a community. Yes. I agree. Ryan, thanks so much for shining a light on what's behind the curtain of successful design, design nurse. I think that's really the goal of the service design show to show what's behind the curtain, what's underneath the tip of the iceberg below the surface of what you don't see. And I think we definitely hit upon some really interesting things. So for the people who want to learn more, go get the book. It's totally free e-book, audio book. You can read it online. Awesome start. Thanks again, Ryan. Thanks so much for having me, Mark. I really enjoyed it. If you made it all the way here, leave a comment with the hashtag commitment and let us know what is the most valuable thing you get out of this chat. If you haven't done so already, make sure to subscribe to the channel because you've made it all the way till the end. So you're apparently enjoying these conversations. Thanks a lot for watching. I appreciate your time and hope to see you in the next video.