 In order to provide a great customer experience and let design deliver on its value in a systemic, structured and ongoing way, you need to rewire the newer pathways inside your organization. Say what? So now next to being a service design professional, you also need to become a brain surgeon? Let's find out. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, my name is Marc van Tijn and welcome back to the Service Design Show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are those hidden and invisible things that make all the difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Our guest in this episode is Perrin Rowland. Perrin is the chief experience design officer at Westpac, which is one of the largest banks in New Zealand. According to Perrin, there are some really interesting parallels that can be drawn between how our brains work and how the organizations work that we serve every day. We have certain beliefs, routines, behaviors and ways of doing things. All these things have been programmed into us by the things we experience in the outside world. Now, our organizations also have beliefs, routines, behaviors and the way they do things. Now, if you and I want to change our behavior, let's say we want to get rid of our deep fear for spiders. We need to change the associations that our brain makes when we see that spider. We need to rewire our neural pathways for that our brain associates a spider with something like curiosity rather than fear. If you hadn't figured it out already, rewiring the neural pathways and performing brain surgery inside your organization isn't an easy task or for the faint of heart. But when done right, the result can be transformational and will allow your organization to live on into the future. Okay, if all this sounds a bit conceptual, stick with us because I promise you, things will get much more practical as we go along. Because at the end of this conversation, you'll know exactly what the neural pathways are that you need to rewire in order for your organization to put customers at the heart of what they do rather than internal processes or shareholders value. How do you pull off this form of brain surgery without having any prior experience or the right tools? And what's the best place to start when you decide to embark on this ambitious journey? Okay, buckle up and get ready because this promises to be a hack of a ride. Welcome to the show, Baron. Hi, Mark. All the way from Auckland, New Zealand, right? Yes, you are in the home of Beach Haven where there ain't no beach and there ain't no Haven, but we love it anyway. That's such a good tagline. I need a similar one as well. It's early morning for you and it's late evening for me. I think we are really 12 hours apart or something like that. So if this interview sounds a bit cohesive, it's either you or me or it's both of us due to the recording time. So let's prepare the audience. Baron, could you give us a brief overview of what you do these days? What's your role? How did you get there? We'd like to know more. Sure. So I like to say that, so I moved to New Zealand. This is a long story, so everyone should just buckle up. When I moved to New Zealand in 2005, I came in as a bright-eyed UX designer, interaction designer, information designer. And I came to do some schooling and I thought I'd get a part-time job. And everyone's like, oh, you're a graphic designer. I'm like, oh, no, I can't make anything beautiful. I just make things make sense. And they're like, well, we don't need that. And I said, okay, that's fair. So I ended up working with a learning management system, helping them teach people to use the software. So it was an online learning system and they hired trainers to sit with academics and basically show them how to use the system. And I was like, you know, if you use someone like myself in a different capacity, we could actually make this self-serve and you don't need to hire trainers. And they were like, that's ridiculous. All software needs a human manual. And I'm like, thank you for your time. Anyway, 10 years later, finally, I end up at a UX conference and I'm like, where have you all been? I've been here forever. What is going on? And so then I ended up in the health field for ages, which was so much fun, figuring out ways to help doctors and nurses work smarter, not harder, making technology relate and information relatable, which is I think the core of what design does, right? We make things, we humanize things. We make things relatable. So fast forward via various career progressions. I found that my calling was much more service design and design leadership. And so now I'm really, really lucky to be the chief experience design officer for Westpac, New Zealand, which is one of the four main banks here in New Zealand. And I think of my job as humanizing commerce and providing the strategies, frameworks and patterns that allow designers to work with an enterprise design system to actually ensure that we can make sure that every single touch point that the bank has, our customers feel like they have a partner in the power of the bank behind them. So every moment our customers are interacting with us, the whole bank is working to help them get their job done. What do I do? You've got such a good pitch. Luckily, we're recording this. So you can just forward the podcast or the video to anyone who wants to know what you're up to. This is so good. I guess I like a new interface. Thanks for that intro. Yeah, but that's not enough because we have a lightning fire question around. I've got five questions for you to get to know you a bit better as a person next to the professional, having prepared you for what's coming. Just the first thing that comes to your mind and we won't go any deeper into them. Are you ready? All right. Okay, we're ready. If you could work from anywhere in the world, which place would you pick? Oh, I would be with my absolute best friend in Queens, New York sitting on her couch working from there. I'd have to put my family in the apartment above us so they don't feel left out, but that's where I would be. Queens, New York. Got it. Noted. This is also becoming a fan favorite question. What is your go-to karaoke song? All right. So I can tell you what my go-to karaoke songs aren't. So nothing by Mariah Carey because you're never going to hit those notes. Nothing by Celine Dion, again for the same reason. Tequila is a good one because all you have to do is go tequila. So yeah, I'll go with tequila. Note I carry a tune. So I like the spoken verse song. And also I can. Next time we meet, I'll set that as my ringtone for the times that people call each other, which they never do anymore. Thank you. Next question is what did you want to become when you were a kid? A roller skating waitress. Awesome. Yes. Is that still your ambition? Well, my parents call me Grace, not out of support, but in irony and mocking. So the idea of moving around on wheels is truly aspirational. And I've been a, I don't think anybody should be an adult without learning service to be quite serious. I found that I grew up, you know, waitressing and then I actually spent a really large amount of my time sheffing. So right after the towers fell in New York City, I kind of had a bit of a midlife crisis. A boyfriend broke up with me, you know, sad. And everything seemed to just and the dot com bubble was happening. And so I decided to move to Italy and become a chef. And I lived in Italy, mostly legally for about two years and worked, you know, in stages. So I would work for room and board and all these restaurants. And so learning, I thought that was some of the best UX training I ever had, because when you think about creating a mise en place, which is everything you need in order to create it, it's there's a lot of trope there that lines up to design and design thing and service design. But I also think just to be a better human, you should what it means to serve and how to treat people. I couldn't agree more. I think I did a recent webinar where somebody asked me, like, give what's your piece of advice for aspiring service designers. And I said, go get a job in a restaurant or a hotel or bar even. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay, question on before this is becoming an expanded, expanded lightning round. What is your hidden talent? Well, I busted it with with cooking. So there's that. Um, I am I give really, really great advice. I I'm like a hidden yenta. I can't take it. But I mean, who can take their own advice? But I am like, you want to know how to do something? I got you. That's awesome. All right. I'll add you to my notebook for questions about anything. You're like a walking G chat GPT. Okay, chat GPT but with less facts. More, more flavor. We've arrived at question number five, the last one, which is a tradition here. And that is, do you recall the first moment you heard about service design? You know, I remember the first time I learned about information architecture, that's burned into my brain. But I I don't I can't I can't even make up a good story about this. I feel like I feel like service design was the the maturity of my pathway. And so it wasn't a a moment but a emergence. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I can't even make up a good story. We'll edit one in post production. No worries. All right. Thanks, Baron. This was a really nice start to the interview. And you actually gave me a great leeway into the topic of today. You mentioned it was your pathway, sort of to find service design. And continuing on the topic of pathways, you suggested that we talk about building new or organizational neuro pathways. Like what? What is that? Hold on one second. So I there's this great book. We can't see it because I blurred it right there. Live wired live, live wired by David Eagleman. And it's the inside story of the ever changing brain. I have a lot of books. But and I've read all the ones that I buy, the Kindle ones, maybe not so much. But and what he talks about in this book is he really, he tackles neuro plasticity. And what he says is like plastics actually really hard. What we what we think about having to do is rewire the way that our circuits move throughout our brain so that we become like, you know, we're lifelong learners, we're constantly adapting and changing. And it there's, you know, there's a method and message in there about, you know, growth mindsets and keeping your brain going. Organizations have the same, same, I found an alignment to organizational design as well. And thinking about, you know, what what culture does is it's the sort of set pathways about how you do things. And then change is constantly about rewiring. And so when we think about, you know, visible and invisible experienced pathways that I think service design spends a lot of time thinking about, if you want an organization to serve customer need, and if you're working in an enterprise organization like I am, we have to rewire the organization quite deliberately in order to make that a systematized approach and a serviced approach. And so there's, there's lots of alignment that I think about when we think about rewiring and creating pathways that have to become habitual and patterned. And it's, and it's hard and stupid and requires a lot of resilience, which is I think, you know, like anytime you learn a new habit, like, you know, people tell me quitting smoking is hard and stupid and requires a lot of resilience. An organization, the way it acts is so you're saying it maybe resembles how the brain works, and we need to rewire it, the organization in order to serve our customers. Now, one could ask the question here. What do you mean, Baron, because they've been serving their customers for the day since they started. So why do we need to change the pathways? So enterprise organizations, which is organizations that have existed for a really long time, they've already scaled, they're really large, or maybe they're foundational institutions. So working for a bank, right, our bank is about 160 years old. I like to joke that banking is the world's second oldest profession. And it's, when you think about a bank, for hundreds and hundreds of years, they've been sort of focused on two things. One is return to shareholders. So what's the value that they create to shareholders? And then how do they maintain, so their shareholder license, and then how do they maintain their legislative license, their license to bank? I hear this all the time, oh, if we don't do this, we're going to lose our license. Or we have to do this because this is part of our license. Post COVID and maybe, and probably way before that with the rise of fintechs, that institution of the bank as a thing you go to as opposed to a thing that you do has started to require us to reexamine how these institutions work. And so I like in it to saying, look, to serve our shareholders, we've got really formed pathways to do the bank. We have an entire system and infrastructure that allows us to create value for our shareholders. We have an entire system and infrastructure that allows us to create value and pass our legislative requirements. But the idea of being a purpose led organization with a social license to bank, that's new. We don't have those pathways and infrastructure in play. And this is where I find that my designers and the design, human centered design approach becomes really important because we are being asked to humanize commerce and we have to build an entire infrastructure and pathway in order to serve. And I like in it to going, it's like we're digging another channel alongside, you know, the English channel that goes to France. And so we've got these high speed bulleted trains, you know, delivering value to shareholders and ensuring that we've got clients. And we're digging this thing out with teaspoons going, we're coming. We're like, traveling along and we're, you know, and, and there's opportunities. It's easy to kind of, and this is where I whenever I hear designers sort of bemoaning that they don't have a seat at the table or that nobody appreciates design. I'm thinking about like, actually, this is the opportunity, if you flip it around to start thinking about how do you create the systems and the conditions where, where design's value is extrinsic, obvious, and has the same dedication and resources and rigor as the other parts of your business. And, and it's simply because as businesses get older, they get in the habit of doing business with themselves and the value they attribute. So the business with ourselves is our legislative activity. And the, and the measurement of success is the value to shareholders. So what does it mean if we have to create value to customers, because they are questioning the institution we work in and are asking, what is your role in our lives? How do you make it better? Why does it become fair? And this is, these questions are really bubbling up right now in a post COVID world, as we reexamine a lot of the institutions that we've taken for granted over the years, because for two years, we had to rethink our relationship with the norm. What do you feel? So when you say, okay, we need to create these new pathways, we need to I think you call it the social license, we need to implement and create an infrastructure to deliver value to customers. And when I say that, it sounds so silly, like, how can a company exist without creating value for customers? But maybe that's, that's a different conversation. Let's go into, what do you feel is missing within the existing infrastructure? What are, yeah, what's missing? I think what's missing is a obvious and shared mental model. So when we go, when we see organizations that are riddled with silos, those silos become self-fulfilling. So their reward system, their value, their, their, their area of influence becomes quite explicit and boxed in. And, and I've noticed, and I don't know if it's, it's recent or what, or this is a general thing is that even if you give people a box, they create a smaller box inside of it, because they don't want to ping against the edges for fear of being punished or yelled at or, or told that they don't have, or God forbid told that they're not important and don't have value. And so we create even smaller cages that we think are, are better. And so there's, there's this idea of how does, how do things connect together? And how do people think both macro and micro? And that's like, that's the definition of systems thinking. And as we know, that's a learned skill. And it's not necessarily one that we kind of grow up with very quickly. Like I had to spend years actively thinking about systems reading. And I don't think I ever went to a class around systems thinking, except beyond, you know, what we do when we start to map. So I think systems thinking is a skill, our cultural predilection to not get in trouble or be told that we don't have value. And a lack of, of clear articulated services that help orient teams that help orient the entire value chain towards that moment. So we're seeing a lot of rise back again of value chains, where people are starting to articulate value as a, as a movement. What I'm noticing specifically that digital or digital first companies have is because they articulate that experience inside of a digital interface. It's a lot easier for that mental model or that shared model to be visible to everyone in the organization. And what agile does is they break all those things up in smaller boxes. And everybody works together towards that experience digitally. When you've got multi channels, all of a sudden people are running off the reservation and everybody, you know, you've got a real capacity to scatter the phrase I hear a lot as a spray and pray. Oh, well, they'll take care of it. We'll just hoist it over the wall to them. Or we see this, I mean, here's my, you know, power call out to all my sisters and brothers in the call centers, you know, that those are literally the drains for a lot of siloed organizations, like all, it's not even like the bottom of the cliff. It's like the drain at the bottom of the cliff where all the last bits of customer problems go in. And these, you know, these marginalized people from the organization are expected to solve all the customer problems. And this is why you see NPS completely tied to call systems. And we artificialize that with SLAs around call center times. But fundamentally, it's about we've left a lot of our least represented people, least informed, least decision making folks, you know, managing the sharp edge of our customer experience completely unconnected to the business that serves a lot to unpack. Maybe we can. I'm sure that in the years that you've been at the bank and the work experience that you've gained in the years prior, you've been involved in some initiatives where you've been actively building this infrastructure, building these new organizational newer pathways. Is there a project or a story or an example that comes to mind like how do you, what do you actually do? How do you do this? So I like the framework of people process tools. And you sort of tackle those towards, you have to, you have to organize those towards your intent. So the best piece of advice I ever heard, and I think it came from Jesse James Garrett, which is, how often do you have a meeting with the chief experience design officer? So how often do I sit down with my role itself and articulate what's my point of view? Where are we trying, where am I trying to take the organization? And how, and what are the conditions in the organization that will make that point of view, will that will make that successful? What levers can I pull? What options, what experiments do I need to run? What's my certainty in terms of direction? Which sounds really highfalutin to just kind of sitting by myself with a big white piece of paper and scribbling things out. So my point of view is I want a single branded consistent experience agnostic of product and channel. I've got eight major channels in our bank. Digital is one channel and then I've got seven human managed. So that's a lot to think about channel purpose and optimizing which channel customers go in and really thinking about how they all work because they all work independently of each other. So how do we create a single agnostic experience that can then be divided into the optimal channels so that we can meet customer need where it is? So the framework is really simple actually. You need to think about your customer needs and you need to break them down into your journey territories. And these aren't complicated. You can search a bank's journey. I think it's discover, apply, consider. It's a path to get a home loan and every organization can do this. I worked for one and it was how do I join? How do I use your services? How do I change them? How do I get help? And how do I influence? So everybody's got a set framework. And what you do is you collate all the customer needs into those territories because they group up naturally. This comes from data, it comes from research. It's pretty straightforward. Then you set your associative journey maps. Pretty simple. How does a customer solve that problem? Where are the channel touch points that those show into? But the magic is how do you connect that to your business architecture? Because the organization has its own pathway for how it solves customer need and it's not connected to the journey pathway that our customers do. And the big aha I had was we spent years and days and months and decades and souls to build these complicated journey maps. And they were beautiful, big. I remember meeting someone going, I have a nine foot journey map. But I'm like, yes, you do. We started comparing the sizes of our journey maps, which was the most proto masculine thing I've ever heard ever. But fundamentally, they didn't connect into the organization because the organization wasn't solving those needs, especially when you took two steps away from the customer. The customer completely disappeared. So how do you then line up your business architecture to those customer needs so that you can start understanding how does the entire organization operate to serve customers? Now, in other industries, you'll hear this as systemic failures. Oh, that was a systemic failure of the organization. That person got hurt, or that person didn't happen, or we see, you know, gross inequity happening over and over again. This is what they mean by systemic failure is what are all the processes in clay that have to work together in order for the business to operate. And what we don't see enough of is how those all those processes directly tie to customer. Once you get that going, you now have the ability for the organization to view customer need. This is and it sounds and I want to hear more about it, but this sounds like bridging the gap between sort of the front stage journey and what happens in the backstage of the organization and connecting the goals and the needs and the desires of your customers to actually how the business operates huge gap for like where most journey projects fail because they aren't able to bridge that to make that connection. If you look back at your journey into doing this, what were some of the, I don't know, pivotal moments like how did you make this work because a lot of people stumble and fall when trying to do this? So we have to go back to conditions, right? You have to look where the conditions of the organization even see a problem, right? So many, many years ago, not so many actually now, about three years ago, you'll note in Australia that a lot of banks are watching their CEOs and chairmans of the board be exited from businesses due to fraud and not knowing what's happening in their banks or in some cases, anti-money laundering, it's basically like not knowing what's actually happening in people's organizations. And so we had a similar situation and in order to meet the regulation, we had to start articulating and connecting our risk to our processes. And so what the organization created was a taxonomy that said here are all the capabilities that need to be true in the bank for us to deliver a service. And what we've done is created a layered system of increasing what we would call fidelity or detail where we break each of those levels down. And so what happens is, is we can now start to connect all of the micro tasks and activities into larger activities, into processes, into process groups, up into the capability. So all of a sudden, we got a source of truth about what the bank actually does and what it is supposed to do. When you've got really large organizations, the organization loses its power of gestalt. It starts to go, we are like where you are the sum of your parts, right? You're greater than the sum of your parts. A bicycle is greater than all of its parts. So it all works together. So really large organizations know exactly what they do in pockets, but nobody knows how it all ties together because they're just looking at return on investment or return on equity or what's our E employee NPS. But they don't understand how those mechanisms are all working together to serve customer. All of a sudden now, we have the layers in play that if we connect our front end and our back office end together to the actual infrastructure of the bank, in our case, we now have a line of sight from customer all the way down to micro processes. And now we're putting in the data in play so that we can actually say which part of the business is flaring up, which part is doing really well, and it allows us to focus with laser precision on what we need to improve. Yeah, so this is like you flipped the organizational model on its head where it's driven by the customer and the customer's journey and the rest of the organization is aligning around that and supporting that, correct? I mean, that's really because we've really taken a human centered approach to how do we, as an organization, serve me. So what is the customer need? What is the frontline person need? What is the person who supports the frontline person need? And so on down the line. And at every level, you're going, what's the technology and processes that enable that person to really understand the value that they send up the chain? I know for a fact that a lot of people who are listening, there's a lot of people who are listening to this conversation right now would dream of that situation. They are working their ass off, starting doing small initiatives, trying to get buy in, trying to get support, become the champions. But this doesn't sound like it was a bottom up approach. It sounds like this was a top down initiative to actually get this going. How did it work? Actually, it was both. So we had the pressure of regulation, so we had that regulatory license lever to pull and everyone was into that. However, because New Zealand is separate from our Australian overlords, we have, we've been working that process from a bottom up approach. And so what design does really, really, really well, and I think we forget that we do it really, really, really well, is that we're great at showing not telling. We're makers, right? We take ideas in the ether and we reify it. We show what it looks like in real life. So what we had to do was A, create the frameworks. So that was our, what we would call our visualized experience, right? We had to create here are the systems, here are the symptoms, here are the events. And then we had to connect it to patterns. So we were able to identify like, okay, we need everybody to record their work to this framework so that we can see where the work is. And now all of a sudden, we're able to show the business, hey, we're like, these are our set of prioritized initiatives. Here's all the work. We're not working on anything we've said is important. How are we going to do that? That the organization understands, right? So then once you have that, we start to go, okay, well, what is, what is good, like, what does good look like, right? So we spent the last year on a project called Visualizing Reality, where we have created a series of major service blueprints that does connect front and back, but they're all aligned to the exact same architecture. So now we can overlay them and show patterns that are emerging in the bank to say, all of these people are working on all of these things and they're completely unaware of each other. So we start to line people up and start to break down the silos. And we just keep projects like that over and over and over again. So we looked at what's a really good example. Oh, so we can't nail password reset for the love of God and the life behind us. Like every single time, we're like, hey, we reduced 10,000 calls in the call center and then we'd watch them creep up again, right? And we're like, why is this happening? And we had to keep going down into the pattern and the structure and the practices and the spaces and the interactions for that password reset and what are the behaviors around it and what are the values? And we finally figured out down at the values and mindsets area was that people were tweaking, people were convinced that because people could reset their passwords digitally, it was somehow unsafe. And so they started to put in blockers so that it would force people to actually call the call center because that was how they felt they could actually authenticate a real person. And so now instead of us talking about password reset, we're having a conversation with the organization about whose responsibility is it to validate identity? Is it the customer's responsibility to validate their identity with us? Or is it our responsibility to recognize our customers and serve them that way? And this is literally like making people's brains leak out of their ears. But that's fundamentally the question. I know it is. It must be a ton of work to map this whole ecosystem. It's taken us a year. Well, that's amazing. Like just a year. Yeah, I think that doesn't change, right? We think of the ecosystems as constantly shifting, right? Mergent patterns, convergent patterns. This is why having a taxonomy around your capability architecture is so important. So if you're wondering where to start, my advice is what are the capabilities that you provide to the organization and where do they go? Get really super clear on that. And then start going, what are all the capabilities that have to be true for us to serve a customer? And then what are all the enabling capabilities that have to be true for other people to serve you to serve your customer? So think about the value chain that it takes for you to put a product in market, right? You're going to have to come up with a strategy and then you think about how you design and develop it and then how are you going to optimize that across your channels? How are you going to market it? How are people going to apply for it? How are people going to use it? And how are you going to service it? And then everyone's really good at this. They're like, well, we need a technology department and the legal department and an HR department and all those are true, but they're not part of that core service. They're part of enabling those people to serve. So already now you've got two divisions. You've got what needs to be true to serve it and what needs to be true to enable it. Once you get that map running, that becomes a single source of truth because those capabilities don't change. So you can actually shift all the conditions around it because that always stays the same and that gives you a lot of scale and speed. Now, one of the things that I see happening a lot is visualizing is great, mapping is great, sort of creating overview and making sense of the chaos is great. And everybody nods their head and sort of applause you for doing that. But the moment that map or the journey or that visualization starts to imply that somebody needs to start doing something else or somebody might lose their job or move to a different team, like people start tearing down the walls and removing your journey maps. How did they, how did this work out on your end? Yeah, I actually had a post a different company, but after a restructure where actually a lot of, I lost my role, apparently a whole bunch of people in a peak of fury ripped the journey map down as a form of protest. I was like, yeah, sorry, I got distracted by that call. Could you, that story, could you ask it? Well, I can rephrase it quite simply. How do you go from overview to actually changing tangible things, people, processes? Absolutely. So the thing that's worked really well for us is what now that we have our frameworks in play, we sent a survey out to our frontline teams, specifically in our case, our bankers. And in that survey, we asked them like, what's working really well, it was a 10 minute survey with a series of questions. And we wanted to know what across the journey did, were they perceiving that worked well or didn't work well. And that had a huge response. And what we were able to now show is, as a really specific view, we had the frontline perception of the current experience, mapped to the journey territories. And because we have all the work in the organization mapped to that, we're able to say, okay, if this is the area that you're unhappy with, here's the 27 JIRA tickets that have self identified as working in that space. So we're able then to pull the front of the bank that serves customers and the part of the bank that builds those services that people have to sell. And we started a conversation going, all right, is this making any hey penny difference to this? Does this piece of work make any difference to that? Does this piece of work? And they're able to start understanding how it all pieces together to then discern if there's going to be any value for them, their shareholders and our social and our legal license. More importantly, we were able to understand, we were able to see the number of pieces of work, were they lined up to the areas where the bank itself felt it like it had the most problems, and unsurprisingly, we found that it didn't. So when you think about the forester framework for excellent customer experience, there's six areas, one area is design, another is customer understanding, another is measurement, and they've added one called prioritization. The challenge with the bank and the whole point of this experience infrastructure is how do we prioritize work with the same rigor and intent to customer as we do to shareholder and legal license facts. And so now this gives us a pathway with evidence to say, this is what's most important. We don't actually have priority on this, let's start building a program to it. And we break it down smaller and smaller pieces because we've got the layers of the taxonomy finite and articulated. Is this, have you seen that having this structure and this evidence is the thing that convinces senior leaders to actually make the investment? Yeah, so this is what's really, so this is, that's the bottom up approach. Top down what we had a legislative push. We finally had a moment where the shareholder value wasn't being perceived as well, and we had an entirely new leadership team come in and realize that our right to growth as an organization is based on how well we meet customer need. So magically, we now have an organization that wants to be purpose-led, that wants to invest in social license. Nobody knows how to do that because all they use is NPS is the only human value at that level. So what this infrastructure gives them is a series of measures and stories that can connect at any level of the, at any detail of level of the organization, what is actually happening to provide confidence and certainty that we're moving towards that ambition of serving our customers in a way that enables both their future and ours. So it sounds like you were almost in a perfect storm where there was so much pull and there was so much push to get this going. I'm curious, weren't you, weren't you, conditions? Yeah, well, they don't align in this way that often. Weren't you worried, yeah, well, I'm curious to hear about that. But first, weren't you worried that you would stumble and sort of fumble the ball now? Like, this is a golden ticket to start implementing this. Maybe a handful of people have this opportunity and where all these conditions align. I regularly have to lie on your tables and make carpet angels to convince myself that I'm not going to fuck the whole thing up. So, yeah. And then, and, you know, this is where, you know, you start, you know, embracing your authentic self and realize, actually, I am going to fuck the whole thing up daily, minute by minute, hour by hour, month by month, life by life. And, you know, this is where this is, and this is where you also realize, like, this is not, it's not about me and it never has been. So, you know, it's fundamentally about how, who are the people in your world that are creating this magic for you and with you? I mean, remember, design thinking is not only who you design for, but who you design with. And so, yeah, I'm constantly getting in the way of my team because, you know, I'm an overexcited puppy. I regularly have my exec team going, you don't make any sense to us. And, you know, that's a, that's a lesson. And, you know, constantly a thousand hours of conversations. And so, it's just, it's not about whether I make it successful or I don't make it successful. What it actually is, is having the genuine belief and the genuine energy to connect with people and make it part of a self-fulfilling movement of service. It's literally like being a waitress to go back to the beginning of this conversation. You know, we're going, hey, this is this great restaurant. I'm going to make sure that your experience with me is as awesome as it is. And so, even if I don't make sense and even if I throw up, you know, throw, literally throw up or throw a ball, you know, we still have the relationship and the, and the connection that says, yeah, I want to do this too. Let's, let's go. Um, I think, I think often that every, you know, what we do really well as design is collaborating co-create. And if we, if I keep that in the wheelhouse at the front at all times, then all the machinations and all of my like Mr. Burns plotting and, and all of the, all of the picture that we're trying to create gets a little bit more real every single day. Yeah. Uh, giving it your best shot. That's the best thing you can do. And, uh, yeah. Yeah. So, survived another day. Uh, let's see. Uh, yeah, I think that's, that's, that's the only attitude you can have. Yeah. I highly recommend, you know, mild, you know, medical, medical support. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, so, uh, looking back at your experience, uh, what were some of the, I don't know, uh, initiatives, actions, things you did or were part of that in hindsight had a disproportionate positive effect in actually making this a reality. It's all about trust. And, and it's actually about trust at single layer of that experience infrastructure. We have to create trust with our customers, bankers have to trust the bank that they're going to support them to build trust with their customers. Uh, people inside the bank have to build trust with their colleagues in order to drive those services up. Like it's all about trust. And so when I came into the organization, you know, a few, several, uh, several years ago, the condition, like the condition still baffle me. You know, we had no tools. They were the tools we had were independently purchased with credit cards, which was, um, a legislative taboo. And I had to fix that for the, for the official license. Um, you know, everyone was decentralized without a core model. Um, and everyone was running around going, what's service design? Why am I a service designer now? What do they do? Why am I here? Um, so from a people process tool standpoint, we were, we were below even, we were so far away. And, and I remember, um, wanting to talk to customers, um, in that first year and the, and, and having to convince the bank to trust us to talk to customers. And they're like, Oh no, you can't talk to customers. You, you don't know what you're talking about. You're not a banker. And I'm like, that's true. Not actually talking to them about their banking options. I want to talk to them about the relationship with the bank and how do they view your solution. No, no, no, we don't trust you to talk to customers. And it took me about a hundred hours of intense conversation with anyone who would talk to me, which, uh, wasn't many, um, to convince them to let us talk to customers. And so they finally gave us like six customers that they thought we would mess up the relationship with. They're like, eh, this relationship with these customers is so in the toilet, there's nothing you're going to do that's going to make it worse. And I'm like, thank you very much. We'll take it. So six customers after a hundred hours of negotiation. Um, and, and we did what design does really well. We, we asked really great questions. We wanted to understand their experience. We wanted to understand their experience with the bank. We wanted to understand what are the style of those services look like and how do they help. And we came back with, here's why the relationship with us is so crappy. It's because this, this, this, this, this and this. And if we fix these things, they're going to be thrilled. And I guarantee you, we've got more people like this. And by the way, that service you think is awesome that you're just about to invest like, you know, $20 million in, they're not super into it. Can we maybe rethink this for you? And that, what that allowed us, that built us trust because they had no idea that that was the reason that the relationship was swiftly. And so they started to, so they said, okay, well, those are the, like how you're talking to the customers we don't care about. Maybe we'll have some customers that we would like to have a better relationship with, but we're not going to really invest a lot of time into. So why don't you talk to them. And so we just started showing what would happen when you started talking to humans about the thing, as opposed to talking to humans about, you know, about the thing itself. And so four years later, we, I now have a customer care lab where we demonstrate care to customers in a transparent and safe space that allows people to be curious and to sit outside of any advice statement where we test policies, prototypes, service and offerings in as real a situation as we can artificially create. So we've got a little fake branch in our, in our area. And, and it's amazing still like engineers come into the lab and they look at this box that we have for our, our bankers and they go, where's the second screen. And you're like, there isn't one. They're like, no, no, everyone has two screens. That's how it works. And I said, I know, how does that work when we're building things that you have to drag and drop across applications when there's only one screen. And it's this big. And they're going, well, this is never going to work. I'm like, I know, what are we going to do? Like there's this situational reality that people completely forget about even when it's down to the screen. A really great example of this also working around creating empathy for each other, our customers and the people who serve them. We, we have a wonderful initiative where we are granting identity to custom to foster kids and prisoners through their bank accounts. And I'm really proud of this. I didn't even, it's not even my project. It's by this other one who is just magnificent, our extra care team. And prisoners come out of the prison system and they struggle to find a place to live and get a job because they don't have a bank account. And the reason they don't have banking out is they don't have any documentation that, that shows you exist. So we're now banking these people we're giving accounts to these people, which actually gives them identity. So when you look at foster kids, a lot of them are neurodiverse. They've been through the ringer. There's a lack of trust there. And so when they were building out how we were going to get them ready for bank accounts, we were thinking they'd come into the branches and then they'd go into these little taupe rooms with these desks and the single screen and they'd sit there for two hours while we lectured them about financial responsibility and get them through the space. I brought the lawyers and the team in and I shoved them all in this box and I said, you're not allowed out for two hours. They lasted 20 seconds. So like we have to go to them. We have to create a mobile service. I mean, that's, that's, that's what we get when we start to show and not tell what experiences are like. And is that sort of the summary to the answer or to the question, what had a disproportional effect showing them? Show and don't tell. We got there eventually. I think that's the thing that sort of resonates through the story that you build trust by showing people, I don't know if the evidence is the right word, but getting and letting them or making them part of the experience. So it's not about telling them what to do or making them feel unvalued or redesigning their job. It's going, here's the experience. How can we make this better? Finding ways to invite them into that experience. Heading sort of towards the wrap up of our conversation, I'm dying to know what's next. You've already had an amazing ride. What's next? We have to get the Death Star operational. So, you know, we've built all the stuff and now we are turning it on at scale. So we fundamentally have to change the way our customers perceive us and we have to create value more efficiently. And now we've got to do it across 5,000 people as opposed to the pockets of work that we're doing. But I'm excited for this next stage because this is where the rubber hits the road and the practice becomes embedded. That's exciting times. Stay tuned. We'll do a sequel, part two in six months or something like that. Or maybe I'll give you a bit more. If somebody made it all the way to this moment with us into the conversation, what's the one thing you hope that they will remember in a year time from our chat here? You can't build change on shifting sands. You have to get the bedrock, that core foundation of your organization, whatever it may be. And you have to look at square on the eye with clear eyes and an open heart. And on that note, I want to thank you, Perrin. This isn't a goodbye. This is more or less a see you soon, hopefully, to hear more how your journey is going. Thanks again for coming on early in the morning and sharing your story with us. I've really enjoyed it. Tenna took that. I'm so, it's been a really fast and lovely moment for me. So thank you. I hope that you enjoyed the conversation with Perrin just as much as I did. After the official recording ended, we kept on chatting for quite a while. If you could ask Perrin one question about the things we've just discussed, what would it be? Leave a comment down below and we'll try to answer all of your questions. If you've made it all the way here and enjoyed this conversation, please do me a quick favor. Click the like button on this video. This lets me know whether or not you're enjoying discussing topics like this and if we should address them more often. My name is Marc Fontaine and I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me. It's an absolute honor and pleasure. Please keep making a positive impact on the people around you and I look forward to seeing you on the next video. See you soon.