 This talk is going to be full of analogies. I hope you like emojis as the whole talk is full of them. Okay, so a bit about myself. I started off in hospitality school. I wanted to be a chef and then I found my way into experience designs. I've been doing it for about 12 years. I started off as a generalist designer, then I became a researcher shark and then now I'm trying this leadership thing called being an octopus. In my last role, I helped to set up the Singapore studio for foolproof, which is the experience design agency in UK. And I called it a dream setup because we had a very close team. There was high psychological safety and we were really crying a lot in front of each other at work, which is pretty cool, right? And then I joined the public service last June, so it's been about 17 months. So why am I doing this whole chronological thing? Well, I wanted to share that in my final year of university, I was suddenly very terrified of people in the outdoors, so I couldn't go to school and that's the thing called agoraphobia, which then went into social anxiety. And I share this thing because it started off a whole season of failure, of having to drop out of university, being a failure, and it carried on across into my experience design career. But I use that experience to try and explore what psychological safety can look like in large organizations like GovTech today. So that's a story of safety. So speaking of GovTech, I have been there and as the MC said, I came into drive design research as a practice. And in my first six months, it kind of looked like this, like five levels of inception inside the matrix. I was like, what's going on? Why are we doing things this way? Is it real? Are you real? And my world I think can be best described with a chicken, so bear with me. If you think about GovTech as the egg, so we help government with digital transformation. And then inside the egg, there's an egg yolk which is called government digital services, which is actually where I am. And I think some of the folks are here as well. We help to build the digital products and services that serve the rest of government, which is the chicken. Okay, so that's my world. And if you zoom inside the egg yolk, you'll see that we use the Spotify model. So there are four tribes and each tribe has different project squads or teams. And there's little me, which is the black door, jumping in into one of the tribes because my sponsor or champion is a tribe lead. And so if you look at the tribes, some of them have the word design in them. And then you think, oh, is that the UX team? Not really. We don't actually have a UX team, but we do have a lot of designers that are hired directly by the squads or teams. And so when I try to grow design research in GovTech, it's really looking at designers that are inside the egg yolk, inside the egg white, but also hired by the egg to serve the cosmos of the chicken, right? All the government agencies that are out there, sometimes we send designers in to support them. And so dealing with quite an uneven distribution of experience and expertise. Okay, so hopefully that's enough context for you. So let's talk about slowing down. What do I mean by slowing down and why do we need to slow down to scale design? Does it mean that we should have project delays? Should we be working more slowly? Scaling is often about speed, so we should be hiring more people, training more people. But the good thing about our industry today is it's so popular that we have a lot of mid-careers such as and then we have a lot of people trying to get into the industry. So junior folk needs time to grow. And at the same time, when I look at the work that we're doing in industry today, it's sort of like this. We're doing a lot of design. Is it necessarily impactful design? Is it necessarily work that helps our designers to grow? I don't know. It's a bit like baking bread in a factory. But what if we were to approach design like making sourdough bread? How many of you like sourdough? Yes, two hands up. And this is my friend Nadira who I think makes the best baguette in Singapore. So why do we like sourdough so much? It's tasty. It has nutrition compared to factory bread. It makes the people eating it happy. It helps the bakers to grow. And the nutrition from sourdough bread starts from this thing called motherdough where you take flour and water and you ferment it in a jar for about a week and then you can extend it and use it again and again pretty much forever to continue baking that sourdough. So I took this concept of motherdough and made my own design motherdough inside the egg yolk. That's a bit odd, but yes. So taking about 53 plus designers, a whole bunch of different experiments and then letting it ferment for about 17 months and counting. So you don't have to read the whole list. I will be talking through some of these experiments through three areas that I have been trying to slow design down in. So first area is time. So when I look at design, the possibilities are endless. And in order to be effective design, I think it depends on the designer's ability to expand and contract. And we do this all the time. We investigate and then we come back and we reflect our introspect. We're diverging and converging. We're looking at systems and people. We're looking at future state versus current state. Incidentally, diverge is the most dreaded word that my team likes to hear me say because they're like, oh, how can I solve this problem? What can I do? And I'm like, okay, why don't you just divert? I'll be here. But interfering with this ability to do effective design is this thing called the hustle. Hustle. This daily grind at work that always asks us to do things faster. Faster, faster, faster. So not only are we dealing with less time and hit space, but we have to do a lot of cognitive switching. Not only within the design discipline itself, but across. You have to switch domains. You have to switch between strategy and then stakeholders and operations. And then this other thing in our life that is really challenging called being an adult. It's just a lot of stuff going on in your head. So as one little black dot in the egg, I can't really change the hustle, but I can try to play with time to support different types of hustles. A generalist designer and a specialist designer use their time in kind of different ways, assuming that they actually take one hour in the middle of the day to go and have lunch. And so I'm looking at that, and how can I maximize my impact as the only research lead in about 53 plus and counting? So when I looked at the impact, it's really about broadening perspectives, broadening distinctions, and all the way to the end, which is to deepen your knowledge. So let's see how we can play with time. In terms of hours, one experiment is called kampung critique. It's just one and a half hours every Monday afternoon. We come together. It's a maximum of four people, and you can be from any tribe or even outside of the egg yolk from the egg white or even in the cosmos of the chicken. So you just come, bring your work, get fresh eyes, but also practice your critique muscles. And really, let's just help support each other a bit more, whether or not we work with each other or not. I run these open office hours called research clinics. It's a bit like seeing the doctor, so you can book my time for half an hour or two hours, and I can look at your work, and see, you know, oh, can you help me see my synthesis? Am I going on the right track? And then we shift a little bit into weeks. And this is a new experiment. It's called a roaming coach, which is four to eight weeks with one team on one study. It requires me to be a bit of like a navy seal because I'm dropping into this project. I have no idea what's going on. I need to quickly suss out the landscape. I need to quickly see out who the stakeholders are and see how I can help the designers, you know, learn something on one study in this constraint that is relevant to them. And then if we take that idea further into months, three and a half months, so from one study into three studies. And this is a non-negotiable amount. It's three studies so that you are not only being familiar with the process of usability testing, but then finally locking in that muscle memory in the third round. And then right at the far end is where I spend the most time with two teams. Really just giving them some hours every week and we can talk about work or we can talk about emotional problems because hey, designers are human too. You know, and we bring our personal issues into work and we bring our work home so I don't see why we really shouldn't talk about that in the workplace. And the only reason I've been able to do all this is because I'm not doing any delivery. I came in and I told my boss, you know, in order to do this, I think this is what the organization needs. Can you give me that air cover and can you give me that space to not be part of any project to do delivery so that we can serve a wider good? So find somebody at work if you want to try this to give you the air cover. If you can't step completely away from delivery, maybe you can experiment. Step away for one month and see what happens. Two months, three months. Nobody's going to die. Okay, and then a pro tip. Design rigor is really contextual to each team. We often think about, oh, let's have consistent standards across the organization. When your organization is distributed as fuck, it's not going to work. You really need to look at each team and say like, okay, this is the rigor, the minimum rigor for you. Maybe it's just having a research plan. Next team, you're a bit more developed. Let's look at how you can implement some design ops in your layers and so on. Okay, so that's time. And now let's look at the next area, which is teams and how we work together as people. I think this quote needs no introduction. Change moves at the speed of trust. But really, how does trust grow? Trust really grows at the speed of relationships, right? We work with people a lot of the time, and News Flash design is really mostly about people. Not so much about the interface or like, oh, I spent five hours making this button. Look how cool it is. It's about building that trust and that relationship so that we can make change. So how can we start to build relationships? A lot of times our relationships form when we join a new project. So at kickoff, hopefully you have a kickoff. You normally talk about hard stuff, right? Like the scope, the timeline, what are your roles, what are the stakeholders involved. But if you spend 30 to 60 minutes extra, just 30 to 60 minutes extra, you could talk about all the unspoken stuff. Like what are your strengths and weaknesses, your fears and concerns, what value can each of us bring into the project. What are the things that I want to try and learn on this project and can we support each other in doing that. So we put it all on a board and it's open and accessible anytime during the project. And then you can go back and see like, oh, actually we've managed to do most of these things, but actually Jonathan hasn't tried that tool yet, so maybe can we look at it in the next sprint. Hey, so now that you've formed those relationships, then we have to start looking at deepening them. And sometimes if your team grows very quickly, you could try this method. It's called a user manual which I found on Medium. Cassie Robinson's blog actually, and I adapted some of her questions. I tried to make it a bit more fun, so I had the, if I was an animal, I would be what, right? And then you can draw and play around with it. My spirit animal is obviously a sloth, sloth badge. Yeah. So if you're going to try this, don't just write it and stick it on Trello or put it in the shared drive. Really talk about it. Sit down, share something that you want to share, laugh and cry together, and actually just show that this is who we are as a team. No one is really weird or sticking out here and we can support each other as who we really are instead of trying to hide. Okay. And then so you've started forming the relationships that kick off, and then you've done some sort of integration work. But that's not going to be enough, is it? Muscles don't develop overnight by magic, if only. And gardens don't bloom by themselves. So you have to keep doing and practicing it. And one of the ways that I found to work quite well is my experiment called Emoji Reflections, which was every Friday in the studio we have just some team time, and it's like, okay, why don't you just pick one emoji to represent your week. So you stick it in Trello and then we'll talk about it. So we talk about it, talk about it, and then I think it was a couple of weeks later someone decided to just write a bit more. Right, right, right. I was like, oh, this is great. And I'm not doing anything. And then in a couple of months later, somebody said like, hey, why don't we try talking about our work highlights, our work lowlights, and then also do some team shoutouts. Okay, that's great. So people started, you know, trying and it started getting longer and longer. And then someone else said like, actually we shouldn't just only talk about our highlights because life is not ice cream and cherries, right? So we should talk about the shit that makes us sad too. And then seven months after the experiment started, two people cried for the first time while sharing their reflections. And I was like hugging them. I was like, thank you for sharing. But inside I was going, fuck yes! Yes! Because what is crying, it's a sign of some sort of psychological safety that we are starting to show up and see each other for who we are. And it's okay, there's nothing scary here and there's nothing to hide, right? So that's really building that habit, that psychological safety and growing those relationships. So the lesson here is a quite cliche but really start small and find the smallest possible unit that you can start with. It could be an emoji. In Melbourne when I gave this talk last week, someone said it was a rabbit. You know, they had an open space for, I think it was senior citizens and it really just took a rabbit to get things started. And then once you started just let it grow, give it time and space because different people take different times and you don't really want to rush this. It's not about efficiency. Alright, in the last area, it's really hard to talk about the work without talking about the person driving the work. And so in my last area I'm looking inwards and looking at tendencies. I'm not going to ask for show of hands but how many of you are aware what are your tendencies? What are the things that you keep doing over and over again, whether you realize it or not? What are the things that keep popping up in your performance appraisal or the feedback from your team or maybe just your mom nagging you? Yeah, tendencies. And the good thing about crashing in life and I have crashed a lot as you can see from the dark days and then burning out three times in my design career is that your self-awareness and your self-reflection gets a hell lot of practice. You really can't go through this thing without asking the question why? Why do I keep doing this? And why do I keep burning out? And what I have come to realize is that the strongest tendencies have the deepest roots and what was my deepest root? The story of failure. All the way back to when I was 21. And the great thing about deepest roots is that they also have multiple storylines like a Taiwanese soap opera. So the first one is that I was a failure so I'm going to keep pushing myself very hard. I'm going to push myself so hard and take on a lot of stuff to show that I'm capable, that no one will ever think that I'm a failure. So hence you burn out three times. Any of this familiar to some of you? It's hard, right? It's hard life. Second storyline. During the social anxiety I was very good at hiding. Hiding at home, hiding in toilet cubicles, hiding in plain sight. I would never be able to stand here or even just outside where the lunch crowd is. But over time I learned how to block people out so that I could actually go out and get a job and some money and come back and crash. What's really happening here is that over the years my habit of hiding has made me... How would I put it? I'm a lot more comfortable being under the radar at work and I don't really talk about my work in GovTech. Which is quite ironic because I'm standing here talking about the work but in the office I'm really very quiet and I don't really tell people very much what I'm doing and sometimes I think not even all the designers know what I'm doing. So that is the tendency versus the habit. And then the last one is because I had the story of failure I always felt like I don't deserve to ask for anything in life. I'll just take what I can get and bearing that shame of being the Asian family fuck up. College dropout in Singapore which in the early 2000s as you know is terrible. So when it came for the time for me to ask for a team to continue to extend the work that I've been doing alone I couldn't really do it. I spent three months crashing you can ask my team I was like working through a lot of my personal shit and really trying to process the fact that can I really ask for a team? Who am I to ask for a team? Yeah, so which brings me to this quote which I love what you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while. Are you aware about what you do every day that gradually builds up into a habit? Positive or negative? And I never really thought about my day until I read this article from Wait But Why where he talks about breaking your day out into 15 minute portions and so I took that and I made this. So this was when I was burning out two years ago it was the third burnout I think and I just put my day out visually and this was roughly what it looks like I wasn't doing a lot of sleep which is the green stuff I was working a lot dark red and then coming home and lying down in bed with my best friend called Netflix So dark red, bright red not really doing a lot of anything else and when this came out and I was looking at my life I was like holy shit I better do something about this because it's not healthy and it's not how I want to continue living So this is what it looks like now this was from August As you can see it's not perfect I don't think it will ever be perfect it shouldn't be I still spend my weekends with Netflix but I will try to balance it off with more of the things on the right the blue and the yellow things that are good for me like reading, reflecting, learning meditating and the yellow parts is hanging out with humans which you know if you think about my story my tendency is to just hide myself at home so I'm really trying to break that habit by just going out and hanging out with humans I mean I edit this column at the end which tracks my mood just as a traffic light system low, medium, high I haven't drawn the chart for that yet so we'll see So yeah, I mean when we work in design we look for patterns we look at patterns in our users' behaviors we look at stakeholder patterns so I would encourage you to turn this inwards to yourself look at the patterns of your life how are you spending your days what are you doing at work how are you helping yourself grow track time, do journaling or if you have some close friends at work ask if they can be your mirrors can you help me see the things that I can't see the things that I keep doing the things that I say that I really don't know that I'm doing a couple of years ago whenever I got pissed my whole body would go like and it's such a big physical movement now that I do it but actually I had no idea what was going on so luckily I had colleagues and friends at work that would tell me like, do you realize that's what your body is doing and everyone in the room can see it except you and then if you are doing some of the superhero thing at work like I used to do it's really tiring so maybe the question to ask is why why do you think you need to be the superhero and how can we work better with different people in order to achieve good design so yeah, so those are the three areas and what I have learned from growing the Fuku Studio app and the experience in my design mother dough for the last almost two years is that it's not enough that we only look at how we grow the doing of design building of impactful products, the disciplines, the outputs it's not enough that we also look at good design ops and good design leadership good projects that help our people to grow but we really need to start creating the conditions in the workplace that can allow people to show up for who they are to not hide to not do that second job that we actually all have when we don't feel safe in the organization and to have more self-awareness and self-care and talk about more about our emotions our biases in blind spots and how our body actually reacts to stress and how we take care of it because the world that we are going to be designing for is increasingly complex and it's going to be like you're going out into space wearing that helmet you have no idea what's going on more tech, more expectations, more emotion which translates back into the organization as more uncertainty and more risk right so more design comfort will be needed more emotional range because we work with people and we design for people and more alignment in the organization to say like this is how we are going to design up for success what's next okay so that's a snapshot of my design mother dough as one little black dot in the egg I did ask for a team in the end it took a while but I did ask for a team and the team that I proposed is a hybrid team called Odojo and it really is a continuation of what I've been doing practitioners go around coaching different teams but not doing the work and then another part of the team setting up the designers up for success right so we're really trying to grow that ability to expand and contract trying to shift the mindsets in doing design and then I think for us as a kind of new team to be more adaptable and flexible in the way that we support teams because every team is going to be different right and the rigor and the culture and the well-being is going to be contextual and there are two outcomes that I want to try and achieve the first one is MLM not multi-level marketing as you might know it but multi-level mastery where everyone can support each other and teach each other something a bit like the fungal network diagram here fungal networks live in the roots of trees and they extend forever and ever and they're just talking to each other and helping each other to grow and thrive right because the game that I want to play is the longest game of all which is industry with the designers leave GovTech they go out into other companies they help other designers to grow and the fungal network keeps increasing right second outcome is kind of from this quote from the philosopher Lao Tzu right as design leaders let's not be the leader that people fear or the leader that people revere but to be that kind of leader that people say actually we just did this thing by ourselves we didn't really need you we did it all by ourselves hashtag level up the kids make myself obsolete and I really want to make myself obsolete because I am not the hero of these stories the people building the products and the services are and if you think about it the work that I'm trying to do here is not very visible it's a bit like glue you know glue helps to hold things together but you don't really see the glue there how in the world am I going to try and measure glue I'm currently playing with a couple of things if you have any ideas please let me know so I'm trying things like confidence and getting people to reflect looking at how behaviors have changed time and clarity so confidence looks like this before coaching I send them a short survey and say like okay of all these things that you're going to be trying to learn in usability testing how confident are you in doing those things by yourself and then after coaching I send them the same survey and even though it's a self-assessed rating you can kind of see that okay it has shifted and the scores that they gave match my assessment of how they are actually doing the work and then I ask for reflections so through this I can see that okay besides the research craft itself they also gained more commercial awareness we're better able to talk to the stakeholders and the best thing for me is really like what the ex-delivery lead of this project said the designers in our tribe they now go to this designer for help before they come to you and I was like that's awesome it's really what I want to achieve this is a cert that I made it's called Chacha because it's really like just A4 paper very flimsy known nothing whatsoever and I made this to celebrate the completion of those who had gone through that three cycle you know triathlon coaching thing to celebrate it because it was tough but also to record their progression so that they can see like okay here's where you are at this point in time come back one year later and see how far you've grown you know this is how this is where you were at and here's where you are now but if you look at the cert there's actually two things that Immanuel was good at which is recruiting and research prep so already he can start to teach other people about it and you know if someone's going to come to me and say like how do you screen people on the phone I'm not going to answer the questions I'm going to send them to him and a final example is I just want to stress the importance of collecting reflections because not everything can be measured with numbers so here we have a reflection from a researcher who has not only gotten better at doing the research but also through our experience together and our time together learn how to guide a new researcher that is more junior than her and the best thing is that when I compare the reflections from the junior researcher that she has been guiding not only can you see how she has scaffolded in a way that really helps that person to not feel like overwhelmed but the fact that he can name what is actually going on is just brilliant because guiding someone and showing them like this is what we're going to do it just really warms my heart so we often think about scaling design like the rocket that is about speed, efficiency world domination but maybe we should think about scaling design like this giving time and space just enough for people to grow for things to mature aiming for the forest instead of the tree so these are my stories and they are for better or worse I have shaped how I have approached the scaling of design and whether you are just starting out or you are a leader I would like to leave you with three questions to think about the first one what are your stories where are they rooted and how have they affected the way you show up at work in designing for people what are some of the things that we can start to slow down or we can start to say no and finally how can we sow seeds for the future generation of design individually we are all little black dots in the system but collectively we can start to shift the way we work together and the way we support each other thank you so thank you, thank you Samantha and you know we'll just we have a few quick questions for you and you know I think a lot of people said that you know your talk really inspired them to kind of look at their own personal development and someone said you know I want to be part of your team so maybe you can also share a little bit on you know if people are interested in joining your team or GavTech as a whole where should they be looking I don't have a team yet but I would be happy to chat the team negotiation is currently in progress sure but come find me and you know your talk is about slowing down but how do you convince change you know when in environments where you know designers are built by the hour and you know everything is about you know faster, better you know break things and progress fast yeah I think as with any design product itself you know when we just start designing we go out and we understand context right so my first couple of months was really just going around talking to different people trying to understand what challenges they're faced with and then taking those constraints and seeing like okay how can I diverge and how can I play with different experiments that might not necessarily be traditional or kosher and just just whack just whack and try don't ask for permission and see what happens okay hope that helps yeah and you know you showed your experience of how you had a couple of burnouts in the past and one of the pretty upvoted questions was what made you actually bounce back when you had these episodes good support networks friends and colleagues who would not let me just slip yeah so being there for me reminding me that it's okay just take the time you need so I've been incredibly lucky that I've been in teams where you know that sort of thing can happen yeah perfect perfect thank you Samantha we'd just like to present you with a small token of appreciation thank you thank you okay alright do we take a picture yeah