 My name is Kai Sing. By the way, before I start, I'm just curious if anybody agrees with me, I'm actually wondering if Ashley would consider doing a talk because I think I'll be interested to listen to her think about it. Okay, so this is the last one, right? I'm a little bit sad, but I'm really excited to be sharing my thoughts. Before you do that, maybe let's shift the room a little bit. Would you mind helping me with a little bit of a favor? Can you just maybe shift your posture and just sit up a little bit more? And maybe just take a deep breath, long deep breath in, and just breathe it out. And another one, could just turn to somebody just beside you, and just say, good job, you're almost there. Tell everybody, good job, good job. Okay, we can start. I'm hobbling a little bit because actually I twisted my ankle about 1-2 days ago, so if I'm hobbling, just bear with me, okay? So my talk is going to be about better design by looking outwards and learning from other disciplines outside of design. And actually the talk that I want to give now is quite interesting because I took a sabbatical, so a personal sabbatical, so I stopped my job of leading a design studio for five and a half years. I took a break for six months, and now I'm sort of out of that break, but that six months was wonderful. I highly recommended it to people because what happened for me was I lined up all of my days just chatting with different people that I didn't get to meet. And I learned so much about that. And this talk is really a summary of my learning from everyone and a reflection of that. And it starts off, I don't know whether you are having some overdose of Venn diagrams, but I'm going to add another one. Sorry, I should go. So, you've seen this, right? Familiar? Little bit familiar? Alright. And I think the interesting thing is when I talk to people, everybody had this mental model of how things should be done. There's business, technology, some call it users, some call it design. There is the design thinking we are doing it, which is viability, feasibility and desirability. So there's a lot of this. But I'm not going to talk about this. But the thing I hear from a lot of people is this. Kai Seng, I keep trying to convince my organisation or my team or my boss that the right thing to do is fill in the blank. More user research, ethnographic work, we need to iterate. Let's not take everything in. But they just won't listen. And repeatedly, that seems to be the story for everyone that I meet. Almost everybody I meet. And I don't know if that resonates with all of you. Does that resonate? You can snap or clap or whatever if you think that's just a photo band. If you can't snap, clap. And I think what we are really describing is this. Everybody is describing that there are three bubbles but the design one is the smallest one. It doesn't have that much influence really. Yes, snap, snap. Right, thank you. And the question they always ask is how do I grow this bubble? How do I grow design so that it can match either the business side of things or the technology side of things? And it got me into a spin because I don't know the answer. And so I started to ask design leaders what do they do? How do you grow this? And to be honest I didn't get a very satisfactory answer. And that's what I knew in that six months I had to go out of design and maybe somebody else has done this. And so I'm bringing in two other disciplines that do this well. But I'm going to just share one thing I learned about each one of them. So I'm just going to share two things, two concepts. The interesting thing is when you talk about people who are really frustrated the story of Cassandra comes to me. So for those of you who don't know in the great mythology Cassandra is actually a princess of Troy. And that's Cassandra. There's a more famous sister called Helen and what really happened in this famous story is the Trojan Horse. So the Greeks wanted to conquer Troy the city but it really couldn't get in. So what the day was, they sort of asked everybody to retreat. They built this really big statue of a horse and then they hid a few people inside. Some soldiers. Obviously the Trojans came out very happy. They ran off already. We're going to pull this in and celebrate. And then in the night the Greek soldiers came out open the doors and then Troy was gone. So how is this relevant to Cassandra? Cassandra actually saw the future and she saw this happening and she wanted to tell her father, the king and her brother but they didn't believe her. So the interesting thing is how did she see the future? Well actually she was in a relationship with a god called Apollo. I think back then Greek gods love to have relationships with humans. So he actually gave her the gift of foresight which we talked about in the previous presentation. So that's awesome superpower. 4D all the way in law 3. But the thing was she then said she sort of said you're not my type. I'm going to swipe left. And he was angry. So there's a criteria. Once a god gives you a power they cannot take it away. So what he did was he added an additional curse. And the curse was you can see the future but nobody will believe you. That is the curse. And that is a terrible curse. And that's why Troy fell. So there's a Cassandra complex in design. We've experienced frustration with people who do not believe the valid concerns we raise. We see it. We know it. You have to do the research. This is not the right way to do this. Why don't all of you believe me? You can sort of see the city burning behind her. In a way we are seeing our organisations burn. Wasting time. Wasting effort. You do multiple revisions and then you go back to the first revision at the start. Because that's what the boss says. So how do you prevent this? And what do we want to work with? Well, one thing is actually first you have to have valid concerns. And you have to, as designers maybe learn from Cassandra and actually see what's happening in the future. Ya? And so I went out. I'm not a cat but I looked out and we say, okay, design can't do this. Let me go out and take a look. So I was going with the question about how can we be more rigorous in forecasting into the future. And the three questions I came up with, how do you see what's coming? How far ahead can we see? And then how can we change the future if it's something that we realise is not good. It's going to burn our city down. So what I really was looking for was the theory and practice of looking to and thinking about the future. Especially long, medium term so that we can anticipate and prepare for the changes. That was really what I was looking for. It took me a while but I did find it. So there are people and conferences and huge groups of people practising this and it's called future thinking. It's a bit younger than design thinking and they're not as popular but they're up and coming. So future thinking is the first discipline that I saw of Encounter. Let's take a little look and do it and there's tons of stuff but I'll just pick one thing for today. What future thinking is not is predicting the future and you can see how very easy we go into that mode with Nokia and Forbes saying can anybody really catch the cellphone king? Or there's a certain prediction which is that it will keep coming on strong. So it's not really about predicting the future that you're seeing. It's also not thinking the future is what's happening now and you plus and minus 10%. There's a certain linear way we think about the future. It's going to be a bit more of what's happening now a bit less. It's not really like this. I'll go into so and this is a familiar diagram. It's not a Venn diagram but it's something that the previous speaker has already shared. There are probable futures. So in futures thinking, practitioners think about probable futures plausible ones. So I'm going to speak through because we already run this through. Possible ones and actually there's one more preposterous ones. These are where your black swans are if you read Nasim Talab. These are the ones that come behind you and blindside you. And what futures thinking practitioners do is they practice thinking about the preposterous ones and all the others. So I was like, wow! And they also add another one which is the preferable ones. Which are the ones we really want and then we solve. So get everybody along to that journey. So for example, Elon Musk let's all go to Mars. Or we'll sum the rich ones, I guess. Go to Mars. And so there are many futures not just one. You're not tied to one future. It's not a railroad track. There's many. And the interesting thing I think is futures thinkers prototype different futures to test their assumptions of what's happening now. So in a way that designers prototype interfaces colors, variations of blues and products and services futures thinkers prototype the future. Because if you think about your product and service in one linear form what if that future doesn't happen? Then your future or your product is going to be a bit off. Or it's not going to react so well to it. So maybe in terms of that designers can also think about the different futures and stress test our products and services and our new concepts and features so they can see whether it survives all the futures that we think about. That's one thing. And Jake, I think the Institute of Future was just here two weeks ago but I really love this quote it's better to be scared by a simulation than blindsided by reality especially startups, I think. So I'll start with one concept I learned in futures Whoa, that's a huge wolf. I was just looking back and I was like whoa, okay. And this is a story about Yellowstone Park in the US. Back in the 1950s Yellowstone and the park rangers had this thing about protecting the park visitors. So you would go to the park the visitors and then because they are part of the park you sometimes meet wolves and that's dangerous. So what they did was they set up agency to do predator control. So systematically in the 1940s and 50s they started to kill the wolves so that we don't get scared when we see one. And that was great and if you google this online you can actually see each year how many wolves were killed until they were none in the late 1950s. What they didn't anticipate in terms of the future was well because the wolves were gone they were more elk and bison because there's no more apex predator and they started multiplying. They multiplied so much that they had to kill them. Why? Because they were eating the vegetation even the small young shoots so much that they devastated the entire Yellowstone Park. So when they went there it looked like this it looked like this really sad it wasn't nice vegetation and things like that and so they started killing them by the hundreds and they couldn't kill enough. So while they could kill all the wolves they couldn't kill enough elk and they kept growing and growing and growing like wow okay. But then what happened next the beavers left because the beavers didn't have the vegetation to eat because the elk and the bison ate them all up the beavers left the rivers so they didn't build any more dams. So what happened? The rivers deepened widened and the rivers changed. So actually you can't really see unless it's on hindsight but killing wolves change the direction of rivers and that's what we call in ecology trophic cascades one thing leads to another to another to another until it's irreversible and now what they've done is oh let's put the wolves back so they have and they've successfully repopulated the wolves the elk have reduced numbers awesome the eagles have come and all these kind of things but they could not change the rivers back because the beavers wouldn't come back to the deeper river so some things can be reversed some things cannot and that's really important for us to think about in terms of impact as designers so this is called and this is the technique so for those of you who love techniques and tools this is called the futures wheel and what it does is you first put a trigger event in you map out what is the first order impact what will happen because of this thing so oh great let's put this button here and then let's see what is the impact on this and then you realise oh that impact also has impact and you do a second order impact and you think about what's the second stage that's going to happen and then you do a third and then you do a fourth and you go nth level so nth for those of you do programming it just means you just keep carrying on and it's really important I think for designers to think about nth order impact because if you don't you create problems like Mario said awesome right e-commerce well we're having transport problems because of it great right recommendation engines you create echo chambers and then you get Cambridge Analytica and then you get the destruction the democracy I'm not sure Amazon really thought about oh by doing this because you read this and you bought this I think you also like this can trickle down to the collapse of trust in a democratic system but that happens and we need to start thinking about this this one was an interesting one I saw on Twitter of a classroom management system so awesome you're not following instructions minus points great oh good teamwork right nice great day awesome and then oh you went to the restroom minus one point so what is the first order impact of this less people will go to the restroom I guess what's the second order impact people get bladder issues at five years old so it's really important we understand this and what really putting out into the world and this was the awesome one so one of the early Facebook designers talk about sometimes you don't know something's wrong until it's too late spoken by a Facebook designer right so the point is I don't think we are always doing bad stuff and we're not intentional right and I think we should definitely celebrate the benefits and the outcomes and the successes we are designed for we have given those that unbanked ways to do banking we have given people who are not able to have employment employment flexible employment right whether it's through food delivery or driving and that's awesome but we cannot continue to ignore the secondary and unintended impacts caused by our designs because somebody is paying for this and it's not you somebody else in the society is paying for this and there's no product owner for that so there's no product owner for climate change in the world so understand when the problems get pushed all the way up the ecosystem from interaction all the way to systems level all the way to ecosystems level there's no one owner and there's no when there's no product owner nobody solves that problem and we have to understand this wow very serious so there's some people who wrote about this already so my awesome book you can buy it on Amazon and get it shipped to you I guess consider the carbon footprint and there are these things so the artifact group also created these things you can download this online it's free it's called the taro cards of tech and it actually help you to explore the nth order impact of your work it's really beautiful and nice I'll give you an example of this so one of it called the radio star who or what disappears if your product is successful so if you get what you want or you get double or triple of what you want and you get a great bonus who loses their job because of your product and service what other product and services are replaced what industry will be affected and that's maybe something you don't have to own it but think about it maybe that's the first step just think about that and level impact so just to summarise this first part around futures thinking maybe be like Cassandra in that you can predict the future or forecast learn from futures thinking Google there's online courses think about it and just one technique to use think about the nth order impact ya okay I'm going to move on to the second one this is another story I've heard during my sabbatical I read and hear about success stories all the time when I try it myself it doesn't work as well you know ideal does it and it turns out fantastic but when I try it I get a okay we'll just do what we want like great great but don't do that anymore so why why is this happening and that's also something I was thinking about and I don't think design has a has a ready answer for this I think most of it is like you know increase your influence talk to your stakeholders convince your stakeholders but I did and this is what happens so what I realised was actually doing the design work doesn't mean it grows your circle and I think a lot of designers assume if you do great work you increase the circle sometimes it happens sometimes it doesn't and if there's such inconsistency maybe doing the work is not the factor maybe there's something else so what is the maybe so go back to the Cassandra complex so valid concerns you can get it great but let's tackle the frustration we experience that frustration so I went out okay, look again what can we do apart from just doing design well and hoping it convinces others how many of you I'm curious how many of you have got this question like okay so the three questions that I was asking myself was how do you get people to appreciate our work more how do we implement such change at scale and a lot of people ask me how do we shift the culture in my current organisation because it's not really working out I can sort of see the residents by the people sort of taking their phones up and so this is what I was really searching for is there a theory and practice of successful organisational change through structured ways of doing things that impact and shift and improve that attitudes, beliefs and values of employees well yes, somebody has been doing it for a long while have run conferences and have a lot of a lot of practitioners doing it so we don't really have to reinvent the wheel we can learn from them, right this is the field of organisational development so you want to learn about organisational change and you don't have to invent stuff you don't have to think of your own frameworks there are already tons of frameworks out there and they are researched and it's interesting so when I went to OD and looked at it it's amazing they also are in love with their tools and techniques and I see this common thing between OD practitioners designers even futures people they love their techniques and you yourself might be really interested and energised by learning something oh let's go for workshop let's sign up for this let's go and do this online course let's learn this new way of doing journey maps and you're constantly constantly constantly constantly looking for more tools like I have a friend bless him I love him he created this site called public design vault google it he's got 500 tools awesome and there are books like universal design which sort of collate like 100 techniques and tools but yeah that's a lot but there's something different about OD they do know about their use of tools and they want to have mastery in them but there's this other thing called the use of self what is this I was really curious and the use of self is essentially to become aware of and fully bring forth who you really are as an instrument to create impact so you are the tool and the method itself to carry this out and it's as strong and effective as any tool so if you think about it right if you're hiring a designer to do something you don't ask do you use Figma and yes okay great you ask who are you what are your design sensibilities and can you tell a story you really talk about the person and the craftsman rather than the tool they use you don't say oh you use a mouse oh great okay what type of mouse do you use no you don't you ask about the person and likewise they are very very particular about use of self so can you maybe stand your maybe can you bring your voice in the room when it's needed can you stand your ground like that no I'm just joking can you use humour to disarm and tell a difficult story through humour you know a tough situation can you be inviting and loving and inclusive when needed or can you be really strong and stable when all the chaos and there's headless chickens running around can you really really really ground yourself these are all different ways to use yourself and apparently they've done a lot of research and they have scoured a lot of books across multiple industries and they found that there's nine aspects to use of self okay this is not a Venn Diagram so the interesting thing was the person who did this was Mian and Mian literally wrote the textbook on OD so she's like one of the strongest practitioners in OD and this is her research so that's awesome and so I'm going to share very very quickly what are the nine things the first set of three cognition and how well you can think emotion and courage these are the three aspects of use of self that happens in the now so when you're in the meeting and somebody's upsetting you these are the three things you bring to help you so in cognition you look at strategic and how systematic you think whether you can frame and reframe things you know deep industry knowledge is useful obviously whether you can separate data from interpretation the he said she said and I think in emotion being empathetic and that's something I think we all have so I'm going to skip this do you have a positive regard for everybody else about seeing developers and product managers as one of us can you read reactions in the room are you comfortable with vulnerability and encourage you're really looking at can I do things myself am I a self starter do I have internal power you know can I be evocative can I be provocative when I need to and lastly can I dare to differentiate myself in the room my voice is different and others have been heard but mine is a different voice and I don't seem to dare to speak out so that's something you need in the near term there are three others that you need in the medium term for use of self and this is your character your skills and your values so a bit longer as you can see and they found great oldie practitioners with use of self are extremely trustworthy they have humility and we talked about that I think in the previous one desire to serve non-judgmental and are patient excuse wise you're generally a very good listener you can tolerate confusion and ambiguity short, sharp, sweet you can experiment and you've got inquiring mind I mean there's some of this which we already have in the room and values do you really value diversity and inclusion are you fair? are you always learning? do you collaborate? and do you have really true humanitarian values these are the three in the medium term that you want to develop for use of self and the last three for extremely long term use of self self work working on yourself improving yourself managing yourself and continuous growth so this is quite I'll just speed through this so it's investing in your own inner work being aware of yourself boundaries some people have extremely hard and tight boundaries some have very loose boundaries how do you manage them being authentic maybe showing your ugly side mindfulness was a very big thing and then working on your unresolved issues so these are your how do you call this when something happens somebody say something and you go into a rage the person is like what? it's just a small thing and you're so angry that is a signal that's an unresolved issue it could be things in your past father mother issue intentional everything you do has a reason and you want to have self-care and self-care doesn't mean you go for a movie you get a massage self-care really means taking care of yourself in the long term being in the right jobs working in the right people that fulfill your life and self-management getting high impact skills renewal non-reactive to challenges and then being able to separate your needs from others and the last one is like a catch all which is just keep working on all nine so here you have it these are the nine aspects that me and has researched on and let's put that front in centre so the question is wow that's a lot of work it's a lifetime and more of work so how do we know where to start so she also did some research she interviewed thousands of practitioners and she asked them what are your priorities so let's take a look at the priorities so we can also prioritise so how do you improve this the five top ones the biggest one that's top voted is really deepening your understanding of your own self and why you do things and why are you not doing things and why are you scared of these things anxious about these things why are you angry about these things why do they trigger me so because once you know that you can work on it second one is how do I impact others and how do others impact me but number one is by far quite far way voted three, four, five are quite bunched up so this is like working on unresolved issues groundedness so can I stay calm if the difficult situation is happening and then general emotional management and self management getting deep industry knowledge is not one of these five it's important but not one of the five so how do you do this so part of the survey they also ask what activities do you do to develop yourself in this top one is this reflective practice mindfulness retreats i'm not sure if that really really gonna impact but a lot of practitioners essentially voted this as the main one they'll do number two, keep on practicing having a coach and mentor is also extremely critical and then seeking feedback I think some of the speakers talked about this already the last one, awesome you already doing it yeah, so 10 conferences forum stand-up events but there's a caveat it's not just about attending it it's finding people like-minded people to connect with afterwards so if you haven't found a nice friend maybe after this I don't know if there are drinks but try to find somebody to connect with and continually practice and that's the main thing so that was OD and use of self Cassandra, don't be frustrated but learn from OD and be extremely intentional about use of self and start focusing and becoming aware of how are you in the room with your stakeholders or with your friends or with our collaborators so I'm gonna end with this and this is the story of a policeman who finds a drunken guy who is on his knees on the floor on the street and so the policeman was like, hey, what are you doing? and the guy said, oh, I'm looking for my wallet and keys and he's like, is it here under the light? I lost it somewhere else and he's like, why are you searching here? and he's like, that's where I can see stuff because I can't see it in the dark so how can I find it there and I think my message is don't let design be the lamppost if nothing's working for you or something's not working for you maybe don't search in the light search somewhere else and so today I've shared a little bit about OD use of self a little bit about futures thinking and thought of impact but you all have got different ways of doing this improve data, film school for some of you martial arts, cooking there's many, many other ways of what you can bring in and I think what I would like you to do is if you're having difficulties in design maybe look outwards and bring something back into design and enrich the design field and maybe you'll be surprised and somebody else can learn from that as well and that's all I have for you so, thank you if you've got things you want to think about and talk about feel free to sort of connect alright, thank you okay, thank you thanks for that interesting talk okay, now are you going to give one? right now, just kidding, no have you been practicing futures thinking? can you give an example? so, I have been reading out for about five years now have I? yes, can you give an example I can say no because it's a close-ended question okay, no, I can so, an example can we talk about it? okay, so we worked with the Ministry of Education in Singapore and we were thinking about the future of learning ten years time what's going to happen and so we had quite a lot of high level divisional directors and I think one thing that we questioned, so one of the things we thought of is well, most of education is now in schools what if we cannot reach the school then where does the education happen? now all the teachers go to school, the students go to school this is the basic assumption we have of the present way education works what if it cannot happen so we thought about like what if there was climate change and we had to take boats to school but if you think about it it's a bit silly to think about flooding and schools being inaccessible but if you look at Hong Kong now you can't actually go to schools and so sometimes rehearsing the future can give you ideas about how to prepare now so that's an example okay, thank you and has social media done more good or bad for modern day society do you think? wow I haven't done the futures for this I think it's good, it connects us but it's bad in other ways my slant is it's not that social media has done good or bad we have done it onto ourselves because we don't have the self-awareness of how to use social media so we are designers read things like the power of habit and get us to get into this infinite loop of scrolling but we are not self-aware to know that that's happening to us so I think it's not about social media it's about us so we need to level up our OS and one last question based on your presentation would that mean we design based on assumptions or not? we always base our design on assumptions almost everything in this world is assumptions that opens up another 2 hour thing so I don't want to do that but if you want to know why is it that way come and speak to me and why we are all living in assumptions and there is no fact or very little fact 1% of the world is fact but very little now we'd like to give you a token of appreciation