 In this episode, you're going to learn how you can get design successfully into the boardroom. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Homaxi. Welcome to the Service Design Show, Episode 114. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about empowering you with the most effective skills and strategies so you can design services that win the hearts of people and business. And the guest in this episode is Homaxi Irani. As you'll hear throughout this conversation, Homaxi is somebody who has decades of experience with leading organizations and teams to embrace the design approach. I think this is going to be a really important conversation because sometimes as a service designer, you just feel that the organization is working against you rather than helping you to help them achieve results. Sometimes you just feel like you don't have the influence on decision-making you need to make the impact. Sometimes you just find it hard to navigate the swamp of middle management. If you recognize any of those things, well, then this episode is for you. Usually when we have conversations about these topics, the tips and advices tend to stay quite abstract and conceptual and are really hard to act upon the next day. Well, not in this episode. I promise you, when you listen to the episode till the end, you'll walk away with some very hands-on and practical advice that will help you to grow the design maturity in your organization and help you to increase your influence on decision-making and eventually be more impactful. The data tells me that 75% of you who are watching these videos are not yet subscribed to this channel. Well, if you want to stay up to date on the latest service design tips, tricks and techniques that help you to build services that win the hearts of people and business, make sure you click that subscribe button and that bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos come out. Well, now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Homaxi Irani. Welcome to the show, Homaxi. Hi Mark, thanks for having me. Awesome to have you on. We're going to discuss a really important topic and I think a topic that will be really relevant to a lot of viewers and listeners of the show. But before we dive into that, could you give a brief introduction to who you are? Right, so I'm Homaxi Irani. I was born in India but lived most of my life in Australia and the last few years I've actually been living and working in Hong Kong. I started out originally in mainstream advertising but then in the late nine, mid to late nineties, I kind of switched to this thing called the internet that everybody was exploring and then I've just been on this amazing journey ever since then around design and user-centered design, design thinking, experience design, all the manifestations that we have going on today. Yeah, I love it. Having a background in advertising, that will be a really interesting journey to explore further today. Let's do to get to get to know you a little bit better. Let's do a 60 second rapid fire question round. Just answer these questions as quickly as you can. Are you ready? Okay. Oh yeah. There we go. What's always in your fridge? Milk and lemon juice. Which books are you reading, if any, at this moment? I'm in between books. I've actually just finished reading a book called Battlescars by a friend of mine in Australia actually called Denaz Lenten and I've just literally just today I've started reading Religion for Atheists by Alain de Paton. We'll add the links to the show notes. Which superpower would you like to have? I think to be in more than one place at one time, definitely. Well, I think quantum physics allows us to do that. What did you want to become as a kid? I think I wanted to go follow my dad into advertising, to be honest. That was one part of me and the other part of me wanted to be a florist. Slightly different. And finally, what is your first memory of service design? This memory of service design probably goes way back to probably the mid sort of around 2004 or 2005, maybe more about 2006, but it was when I remember when I was starting to teach UX and we were diving deep into, you know, what our students would really want to know and understand about. And I remember as we put the course notes together, we started to kind of unpack what these things are and what is CX, what is service design, what is UX, how are they different? That's a long way back, at least from a service design perspective. So you've got some experience here. The topic that we're going to address in this episode is let's summarize it as how to bring design slash service design into the boardroom, right? That's what we want to explore today. And I get so many questions around this topic from often very passionate and engaged practitioners, but also feeling quite frustrated and demotivated as they fail to make the influence that they want to make, fail to get the respect that they feel that they deserve. So let's try today and find some answers to those questions and see how we can help these people because I think we're doing a good job. Now, when we talk about bringing design into the boardroom, what does that mean for you? So the shape of design at the moment is very much and it depends, it depends on the organization, it depends on the industry, but the meaning of bringing design into the boardroom for me is to basically get design embedded at an enterprise level into the thinking, the psyche of an organization, right? So it's really about embedding and scaling design thinking or design as a practice and a mindset rather than it design being at a project level. So often design is this very kind of siloed component way of thinking about, okay, how do we actually execute on something? How can we build a design solution for a specific problem? And bringing it into the boardroom, apart from all the obvious components of getting executive buy-in, for investment and resources, there's that aspect as well. But when we're talking about the service or the product, the experience that we can deliver to customers, it's really about thinking at a much more strategic holistic layer. And you can really only do that by embedding up at that level. Yeah. So if I generalize here, like moving from seeing design as a stage in a process into an approach, a mindset and attitude, like that's, I think, the major shift in a lot of situations, right? Yeah, it's shaping the strategy of where a company is heading. Where does it think its products and its services really make impact and meaning at that level? Yeah. Now, hopefully a lot of people who are listening will have a hunch why bringing design into the boardroom is important. But how would you phrase that? Why is it so important? So the first reason I would say is a very selfish reason, right? When I am a consumer, just like anybody else. And when I'm consuming products or services, you know, be they digital, be they physical, whichever they may be, the level of frustration that I feel sometimes, and I have to come clean, it's often rage. And I've actually had design rage far too often in the last two weeks. And I've been ranting to all of my colleagues about it, you know. But that is a level of frustration that our customers and our consumers shouldn't be feeling, right? They sort of, everybody's got their priorities of work and what they're trying to achieve and the tasks they're trying to do and, you know, the expectations that they have. And it just seems to me wrong, especially, I think the rage for me comes in using this word rage a lot. I think the rage for me comes in when as a designer and as somebody who knows and understands limitations, right? Because we live, when you work in corporate, when you work in enterprise, you do have these limitations around you. And when I look at them, sure, there's stuff about the product that I may not necessarily know or understand some of them. But for a lot of them, it feels very obvious that there has been absolutely no effort whatsoever in terms of, you know, thinking, is this the right solution? Is this the right need we're even fulfilling? Or obviously then at the execution, the tactical end in terms of how it's actually done. So that's very much at a selfish level, I guess. You know, at an enterprise level, I feel more in terms of talent at the moment. You know, if we think of our industry like anyone as there's supply and demand, the talent we have in our industry is awesome. You know, and yes, there are different countries around the world that are different stages of maturity of practice and the talent that's there. But by God, you know, the people coming into this industry at the moment, they've got amazing ideas. They've got ideas that can really help with the success of whatever business is trying to achieve and, you know, make it better for their customers. And it really pains me to see that talent go to waste. That's a shame. So I think, you know, companies could be doing tapping into that resource a lot better. And it feels like wasted talent. And like you said, you know, there are a lot of people listening now that are probably feeling that frustration, because they know and understand how they can actually help the organization at a more complex level than what they're probably allowed, you know, working on now. I think the people who we speak to and who we are addressing through the service design show also feel this driving force and feel like they're on a wave and often also feel quite lonely as they're wondering why isn't why aren't the people around me seeing the same. I'm curious. So if for us as customers, consumers, it will be better if design is more embedded in organizations, it would be better for the people working at those organizations. But where I still feel that there is something that is the driving force for corporates and enterprises, like it's doing good for your customers is important, but there's probably a different reason why it's good for them as well. Yeah. So ultimately, when organizations are not thinking with the design mindset, right, and they are driven by other agendas, and every every organization is different for some organizations, they might be at a phase where technology is driving what they're doing. And that's fair enough. You know, all of these have a context, they have a time, they have a place. It's sometimes about technology and that needs to be done. Building a more robust, safer, secure, stable technology platform is critical to be able to then deliver that really good customer experience that we talk about, right? You can't have one without the other. Sometimes it might be about scaling up, you know, if the organization is in that phase, it might be about scaling up. So all of these are situations that I've been in and I recognize and they are important and there's a part of the challenges that any enterprise will always face. However, I think by adopting more of a design mindset, those things don't have to come at the cost of a better experience. So ultimately for them, even as a business, you know, to be more successful, whatever successful means, it could be the bottom line, it could be for an NGO type organization, it could be something else, media company could be something else. But whatever success looks like for that business could be overcome to some extent if they're thinking was more customer centered and if it was more holistic rather than thinking that they have to focus on something for the next financial year. And that's it's all it's that nothing else. I feel also that we've come to a place where you just you just just cannot ignore customer experience regarding your products, your garden, your services, like we might have been in an era where cost would have been your ultimate differentiator or feature cell abilities. But those kind of advantages are diminishing and sort of the only safe haven right now, at least that's how I feel, is focusing on the experience, at least not ignoring the experience. Like you said, all the other parts are important as well and you need to get them right. But you cannot ignore at this point, how your customers experience the things that you put into the world, whether you're an NGO or an enterprise. Absolutely, because the we live in this really, really cluttered environment, right? I mean, consumers have so much choice, we know that. And what tended to happen in the past was the enterprise, they had the big brands, they had the trust, they had the loyalty, they had the resources to be able to do innovation or scale their product to market their product and those sorts of things. But obviously, as technology is so accelerated nowadays, even compared to five years ago, the way we talked about startups and what they meant, it's completely different now. So because the technology is so sophisticated, and technology is not, certain kinds of technology nowadays is not that expensive either. When you're creative about your solutions, things can be quite cheap, there's a lot of stuff out there that's free as well. So for the small disruptors that are coming in and upsetting the apple cart for the bigger brands, they are moving at a much, much faster pace. So what it means that they can catch up to where an organization that has been around for 20, 25 years, these disruptors can catch up to them very, very fast. And then obviously, not only do they catch up, but then they can surpass them because then they've got that sort of the ability to be nimble and agile and move really fast. So I guess the two points there is that, yeah, the market's very cluttered and people will have that choice. And apart from the obvious disruptors we have in the market, the product offering out there is not that different. The products are the same, the services are pretty much the same, and the difference does come into how brands manage their customer's expectations. You know, when I talked to a lot of people who are selecting new foreign plans or data plans, because that's a really classic example of how products can be structured and marketed in a very kind of segmented marketing segmentation way that doesn't necessarily speak to users nowadays. And one of the first things when I asked them, what are they thinking about when it comes to their selection is the customer service because they want that follow-up. Plans are now here and there, more or less the same, you get X number of gig data and you get X amount of free calls and it costs so much a month and it's about that customer service. Yeah. And we talked about this a few episodes ago with Peter Merholds where we eventually it breaks down to this customer experience or experience is the ultimate differentiator if you're in a service business and every organization nowadays is in a service business. Like if you break it all the way down to the core, that's the reason why. And then design is the way to manage or craft or stage specific experiences. So now that we've set the stage for this, and I hope everybody was able to follow, I think it's really important to get to connect these dots. Now let's dig into sort of the details and the nuances because I think, again, we all understand this, we feel this and then we get, we wake up, we go to our offices when the pandemic is over and then we have bosses, managers, teams, layers in the organizations who come from a different background have a different mindset. And here we are preaching that this is important. Where do we start to build our influence? How do we gain more respect and credibility within the organization? It's look at the typical designer answer to give. But for me, really, everything is about context. And I think that's why this topic that we're talking about today, which is design in the boardroom, is so important. Because when you're in perhaps a smaller organization, or when you're in an organization that is not at a complex enterprise level dealing with enterprise problems, it's probably a lot easier to get traction on what you're trying to do. Unless you've got a real detractor or blocker that you're trying to work with, but it's a lot easier to get that. In the enterprise, for me, I think the starting point is knowing your environment and doing some evaluation there. Because as an enterprise, as I said, that you could be going through so many different phases of what is your focus for the next horizon, whatever that horizon that might be. And what I've found, I've probably got about 10 plus years in working in corporate, probably about half my career has been consulting and half my career has been working inside enterprise and corporate. And I would say every single time, what has been more successful for me, I won't say I've been successful every single time, I've definitely had like, I just don't know how to break through this situation. It's been understanding the executive areas focus. So whatever the business is aiming to achieve in the next horizons, whatever the business's focus is at, the best chance I find of making any kind of traction around design thinking and bringing design closer to the boardroom, if not in it, is understanding that and acknowledging it and then developing a strategy that kind of aligns to it. So if you start to align with whatever the business is doing. So as an example, if the business is very much in a zone of re-platforming and scaling, so there could be a business that's merged with another and you're bringing two sets of teams together, you're bringing two sets of products, platforms, technology, there's a ton of stuff you're dealing with there. The focus for the business is to bring those platforms together, unify them, improve the technology and unify the products so that you're building one platform. Then it's a lot easier to build on it and deliver that better customer experience. You can do it faster, you can do it better and you can do it one time and it applies to a much larger market segment of yours. If that's the case, then what I think is really important is not to go in guns blazing, talking about that top of the pyramid, which is those little delightful points that you want to work on. What you've got to actually get better at doing is finding the language that aligns with whatever cycle and rhythm the business is working to. For example, in my current role, we work to quarterly OKRs. Now that is quite the tactical kind of execution. But what we also do is we've got people in our team that focus very much on those OKRs and we're making sure that whatever we're advocating, whatever design direction or improvement we're working for, we make sure that it's aligned with those OKRs. Now I'm very much an opportunist as well about this. As much as I can push the boundaries and I coach my team to do the same, it's like you've got to know and understand how far to push before you realize you're going to just become a noise in somebody's ear and that's probably the worst thing that can happen. So if we work to an OKR cycle, then the key factor at a more tactical level right now is to think about what are the OKRs coming up for the next quarter and the quarter after that? How can we look at our design backlog and then align them with whatever the key areas are in the quarters coming up? At the same time, though, we carve off some resources who are working at a more strategic level because we don't want to just be working a quarter ahead. So we end up to having conversations, workshops, research. We follow through with that research and working with our strategy teams to make sure that we've also got that long tail view in helping to really shape the future value proposition, the roadmap. But in that instance, we don't try and do it alone because we understand that the business at the moment, their focus may not necessarily be on that. However, we have a very, very strong, capable strategy team. So for us as an organization, our strategy team works with many insights. They've got many, there's always showcases and things happening with strategy. So we have one or two resources from our team that work. They basically build a partnership model with strategy. And so what we make sure we do is when strategy do their thing, we kind of step in, we work very closely with them, and then we help identify how can we take the work that they are coming out with, the vision that they are shaping, the ambitions that we are developing. How can we take that and then connect it to the next level of clarity? How can we take it and do some deep qual to understand what that actually means? The next process will be to take that and put some data around it and start to dig into it. And then so we kind of connect in the dots between that whole strategy level right down to execution OKRs. But sorry, that was a very rambling answer. But I guess the point there for me is to understand your business and their focus, and then find creative ways of how you can start to share and embed that design mindset based on what the business is trying to do, not to try and go against it guns blazing. To me, that approach doesn't work. And there's a lot to unpack here. One of the things that I'd like to know from you is often whether you're a design team of one or a small design team internally, you're really dependent on other departments in the organizations to actually get things done. And I've heard a lot of situations where design is seen like an add on or feels like additional work. How do you deal with that, like that cross functional holistic approach to get that to work? What's the magic sauce? What's the secret sauce there? Yeah, I don't think there's any secret sauce. There's no silver bullet to any of this. It's hard work and you do have to be persistent. You need tenacity. You don't necessarily get the breakthrough you want. And then you have to try it again and again and find a different person and a different situation to attach to. But if it's a company that's working in, if we're talking digital, and if it's a company that's working in agile teams, then you've already got an opportunity there because the team should be multifunctional. The problem that often exists and I know sort of in a past job I was working in a team where there was something kind of like 12 to 15 developers and one designer. There would be two, three BAs, 12, 15 developers and one designer. So that ratio is obviously not ideal. It puts a lot of pressure on design and all that that designer is going to get to do is literally do pixel pushing and just churn out wireframes. Exactly, exactly. So the situation there would be then to try and neutralize that balance a little bit. So it comes down to resourcing. It comes down to investment by the business for sure. But I think this is where in enterprise you would usually find a larger team. And that's where I think the role of leads or seniors pairing and partnering with their designers to understand what they're working through becomes really important. Because I think as a leader, it's typically your role to get put basically shine a light on that situation. Right? So that conversation that you're having with with the executives around budget and headcount and so on starts to become really important. We did do sneaky things in, as I keep saying, I'm an opportunist. I remember in this last role, we did some sneaky things, you know, like at the basic level, when it came to, for example, in that agile team, when it came to voting on things, you know, the agile manifesto, there's a lot of sort of structure around things. And anytime it came to a vote on anything, obviously, whatever the designer was advocating, or whatever the designer was trying to get pushed through the backlog, never actually got a time because you've got 15 developers voting on something in one designer. So again, you know, I stepped in and it was a matter of having the conversation, exposing how this was affecting the opportunities of the future product, how it was also affecting the employee satisfaction. I find that is a really important one because businesses do understand the value of designers. They do understand the value of design. Often, they're not just understanding of at what level it should play a role. So, you know, that's the kind of conversation I had. And ultimately, we just did this very tactical sort of thing, but we essentially got the designer a super vote. You know, so it was like, okay, well, the numbers are not balancing up. So we have to somehow neutralize the numbers and balance that situation out. Yeah, I like those technical things because those are the things that do make a difference on a day to day basis. And I think we get stuck a lot in that. What I'm hearing you say a lot is have the conversations with the strategic partners on the executive level. Find those partnerships. That's great if you can do that. Often in when you're not at that level yet as a service designer, you're usually somewhere down in the organizational pyramid. And then there's a whole thick layer of middle management. And what I hear a lot is that people get stuck on middle management being focused on short-term outcomes where like the strategy conversation isn't, they understand it, they hear it, but it's not their driving force. And a lot of designers get stuck there because usually design isn't something that delivers short quantifiable short-term results. I do think it delivers short-term results, but often we don't measure them. How do we navigate that swamp? How do we navigate through that middle management layer, which is focused on short-term wins? Yeah, that's a really, really interesting. And it's a very common problem, I think, that many, many teams face. I would say that for the middle management, again, it comes back to that, like I said before, we work in OKRs. But whatever the KPIs, whatever the targets are, and whatever framework is being used, I do think that to be able to get to that whole design at a higher level of strategy and contributing to the overall vision and so on, you can't get there without first building the trust and demonstrating the value at that more tactical level. And there are a number of different frameworks of design maturity out there, right? Forrester's got one in vision and so on and so forth. But there's definitely, if you're still at level one or two, you can't get to level five unless you kind of work through each of those levels and start chipping away at smaller things. One of the key things there for me, and this is a lesson that I actually kind of came across fairly recently, actually, because I'm very much a relationship builder. So when I'm talking about these things, and as you picked up, a lot of it is about relationship, its reputation, its trust, and its conversation, and so on. What I also do find, especially when you're talking in enterprise, quite often there is a cycle, well, there is a cycle of attrition, right? So you build a whole lot of this kind of, hey, we can work together, you understand the value of this, and then potentially somebody leaves or they change their role and then you're back to square one. So I think working through those levels and embedding systemic changes is really, really critical. So not working organically, but as you work through organically, and I'll come back to that in a second to your actual original question, but as you work through things organically, I think a big tip that I would give people is make sure that things are formalized and structured and documented and embedded, and that doesn't mean that of course we have to over document, but think of them as systemic changes rather than more organic changes that you're building, whatever the culture of the organization is at any given point, because then as things change, at least there is a systemic approach, it's almost like a step ladder that you're, you know, working through more confidently rather than kind of skipping along those ladders is the vision I have in my mind. But as for your question about the middle management, again reflecting back to that step sort of micro changes, I would take it back to the tactical stuff, you know, to understand what, how can you make tactical differences at the moment. Now there is also a subtle shift in that, right, because if your organization is very product driven, and whoever is driving the decisions, it could be a product manager and usually with design, it's usually design and product. And something that I tell my team is that look, it makes sense in pretty much every most organizations, it is the PM that's going to own the decisions, the designer isn't going to. So battling against that, and kind of saying why aren't we making getting to make the decision, why are we getting to prioritize the backlog, again, is just going to be seen as noise. So what I would suggest is actually partner with the PM or whoever is the person making that sort of tactical quarterly decision or sprint by sprint, and partner with them. And just it's kind of like attaching to whatever their goal and their target is, because they have to meet that, right, if they have to scale to a certain amounts of the market segment by the end of the quarter, that's all they're going to do. If you can find a way to bring something out of your design backlog, you know, and be a tactical, or be it something slightly more sophisticated, I think either way, if you can help them achieve that goal, they're going to slowly start to understand the role you can play. And then once they understand the role you can play in helping them achieve their targets and helping the business achieve the target, it kind of opens that door for more conversations. That's when that systemic thing needs to start stepping in. It's like how about we start to embed a conversation around design before we prioritize all of our stories or our cards for the next sprint, right? And then that's how you can actually start to do it. But unfortunately, you do have to start with the tactical stuff. You do have to start with the unsexy stuff. Yeah, and I know it's sure if it's unsexy, it's just doing the work where a lot of people also struggle with is demonstrating that value on a tactical level, because I don't know, we feel uncertain, because it's not quantifiable, it's harder to make tangible. And then we become uncertain about the value that we have. So do you recognize that? That same when you're sitting with a PM and trying to help them to achieve their goals? It will probably be very hard at the end to sort of say, well, this is due to the contribution of the design approach. And then sort of the system holds to a grind. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. I think sometimes it comes to showcasing the work that you've done as well, right? So there is always this opportunity once something is live or in production to then actually go back and get the data on it. So in terms of the whoever the designer or the design team, whoever they are, they also need to be multi skilled, right? We often in our industry, we talk about soft skills being just as important, if not more important than the technical skills that we bring. So the role that every designer plays has to also be the role of agitator, educator. We talk about advocacy a lot. And I think if the designers and the design team and everybody who can potentially play that role is getting the right level of investment and coaching and upskilling to become a high performing team, that is a key part of understanding. How do you then continue to demonstrate that that was actually something that was brought in by design, a design approach to product solution. Data is often the best one. So it's very easy to kind of go, okay, well, before we made this change, here's what was happening with the funnel or the sign up or whatever that might happen. But what do you do in a situation where that data is not available? Because that's what's often the reality. I do believe that design adds value on really short term, but it's often not the value that's being measured by the organization. And then you're sort of stuck with the data that is being measured, which doesn't necessarily align with the design goals. Yeah, tricky one. I guess if your system, the platform is not actually capturing that data that you need. And I do hear that quite a lot. You're right, that becomes a problem. Then I would suggest turning into whatever you have control of. And as a designer, and again, there's going to be blockers of time and so on and so forth. But as a designer, if you can even get human stories through some qualitative research, then do the quoll, talk to five, 10 customers, make sure you capture the really compelling quotes and the stories. And what I would actually do look nowadays, it's really hard with kind of, you know, COVID and we're all working asynchronously and so on. But even in a digital platform, or if you're in a physical office, I love using the wall. And what I would be doing is just taking those quoll stories, taking the quoll data. I mean, you can't turn eight out of 10 people into 80%. But there's creative ways that you can tell the story. But make them into really compelling human stories that show the impact of your product and how you've actually adjusted the design on that human person. And I would actually be just doing some really bright hand drawn kind of with textures and so on posters and just putting them right up on the wall. And it's just getting eyeballs on it, getting eyeballs on it constantly and creating enough interest in it for people to come and ask, what is that about? How did that happen? How do you know that? I love it because the sort of the main message that I'm getting out of this and I really like that is when the appropriate systems for measurement and capturing data aren't in place, don't complain, build those or put those systems in place yourself. And that could be like qualitative data through quotes and interviews. That's a way to measure progress. So I think that's a really good tip. That's a really practical and useful tip, build those measurement systems yourself. Right? Yeah, absolutely. And I can just couple of other thoughts are coming to mind as well. It's basically as a person who understands design as a person who understands the experience of the competitor landscape, you know, use those resources. So another thing we can use is something very simple, like a heuristic evaluation. Right? And again, I would be converting whatever I can from a heuristic eval. Again, I'm talking about digital, obviously, but again, not turning it into some spreadsheet of data and numbers and things that people going to go don't have time for that, because we're focused on replatforming, pull out just a couple of really compelling things that you might have found. Right? Nothing speaks often to businesses like comparing what they do to what a competitor is doing, especially a competitor who we know for whatever data or whatever reason is, you know, it's a threat. So you can again, use your design resources, pull out those couple of key compelling things to show this is where we're way behind. Look at what our competitors are doing. Look at what everybody else is doing in the landscape and look at us and here's an opportunity. But again, I would turn it into something that's very interesting and captures the attention of people. And what I would say to your listeners also is not to underestimate the power of a human story. You know, we know businesses like figures and numbers, but every time we've managed to take a good story into the boardroom, you can see the reaction, the physical reaction on an executive's basis. And I think that's even though we do believe in qualitative data, we sort of get discouraged by the need for quantitative data, even though we know when we present those human stories, people engage with them and they aren't less valuable than qualitative data. I really like that. And the other thing that I'm hearing you say, which I think is really important is that we need to help the people around us understand where we are in the current situation. So the example you gave was the design letter or the design maturity, like literally showing that and helping people to understand, well, we can make progress. We're here right now. We can go there. What is our ambition? What is our goal? We'll tremendously help you to sort of build the appreciation for design and build your understanding of what you do. So charting that landscape, helping people to understand what's capable, what's possible is also super important. Yeah, absolutely. And there's plenty of frameworks out there. And it's never the nicest feeling to have to bring in comparison points or benchmarks. But it is also the most compelling way to make a case for anything, pretty much. Yeah. And it helps to set your own expectations as well. Like, listen, we're here. We cannot get to step five, like you said, without going through the other steps. So it will help you as a practitioner to prevent a lot of disappointments and have the right expectations where what you can achieve within a certain timeframe. One question that's left on my mind is I've experienced that design is often perceived as a risky endeavor. There are a lot of uncertainties. Even though I think design is the ultimate way of mitigating risk, it's not as predictable or it's not, there aren't the same guarantees as in things like engineering or coding. How do you deal with those kind of objections, like the perceived risk and the guarantees around design? So I think design is actually the toolkit we have as designers. It has shifted very much to be science-based as well. And this is, again, I think a big part of leadership and coaching people and bringing up teams. It's helping them to kind of find that gut feeling that all designers have. You just instinctively know sometimes what is right or what is wrong or what should be done or what should be done. But you're right because people are often not feeling confident enough to be able to just voice what is in their gut. And I think that's important. I know definitely with my designers, I kind of coach them to not completely squash whatever is their gut feeling because it's coming from experience, it's coming from a good place. And they just need to finesse it and know when to respond to it and when not to. But I think that's a really important dimension of design, instinct and gut. But also our toolkit now has so many science-based aspects to it. Of course, we've got research, research, research, research. There are so many methodologies and there are so many different ways of gathering that data. If we look at research, and this is something that at an enterprise level, you're right. You do get that aversion to risk or that skepticism comes in. It's like, well, I'm not looking at the numbers. Doing qual with 12 people is not really giving me the confidence to do X, Y and Z. I would say in some instances, if your client or internal client, if it's an enterprise, is looking for a particular level of statistical confidence. Now, that is often in commercial product decisions, in product modeling, those sorts of things. I think then you need to be able to speak that language and you need to understand that this is high risk. We're talking about a significant investment and a significant expectation here. And qual is not the best. We know that as designers. So I think knowing and understanding your toolkit of when and how to pull out something that deals with the more human or dare I say the fuzzier sides of design thinking, informing your design and direction and so on, that's a real skill and art as well. Because it's when your client, who's a bit skeptical, and by client, I mean internal client as well, when they hear you say that actually this is not the right tool. It's not just about a design thinking approach. We need to actually couple this. We need to build a program around this. And here's what we need to do. And for research that might be kind of top and tailing with qual and supplementing with quant. You know, for design, it could be about not so much about just running with some kind of organic design structure. But again, using the tools and referring to them as tools that are used by other big organizations, it starts to instill confidence. So whether you're talking about the Google's design sprint methodology, or the heart framework, or whatever it might be, I found, and I don't really like saying this, but those things do make a difference. You know, demonstrating that we're using tools that are based in science that are being used by many corporations that have shown success, I find that starts to make people who might be a little bit doubtful, feel a little bit more comfortable. And also calling out when designing, just design alone is not the right situation that builds that trust. Yeah, exactly. And I'm not seeing that enough, like embedding design in the bigger picture and showing where our weaknesses are and what other fields need to take over. So I think when you're dealing with somebody who's risk averse, which happens a lot in corporate environments, and are looking for a certain type of certainty, explain and literally show to them, well, that type of certainty that you're looking for design won't give it to you. But what we're going to give is this specific part. And like, you need to have a more holistic conversation that also includes other disciplines and helps somebody to understand what the problem is that we're solving through design and what's not the problem that we're solving through design. That's right. I think you talked about the secret source before. I think the secret source here is to get design at the table, right into that bottom, get it into the conversation and get it into the conversation early. It's not about making design the only part of the conversation or making design the only thing. Yeah. Yeah. And so the conversation and the awareness of like if HR is at the table of marketing is at the table is if when sales is at the table when it is at the table, you have to be able to verbalize how do we connect with those other disciplines and what can we add and again, what do we need to have from them to try rather than talking about the value of design in a silo in a bubble, which I think still often happens a lot. And that's maybe sort of the main challenge here for us as a community. Absolutely. And that really resonates. That's actually a big part of my focus and my current role for the next, I don't know, I need to sit down and work out a strategy around maybe the next six, it's going to take like 12 months for us to really get this humming along. But as a design team, we obviously have a lot of designers and we also have a very robust research team and we're doing research across Asia Pacific, multiple brands, multiple markets and we do it really well. And obviously the design goes really, the research goes really well into design at different levels of design sort of clarity, if you like. We're working now quite well to get design working up with strategy a little bit more. So as I said before, when strategy is thinking about where is our roadmap, where is our vision, we're helping them to validate and explore some of those opportunities. But still as an organization, we aren't really coordinating all of these wonderful insights and the design opportunities across the different teams. So with marketing, with strategy, the research that the designers themselves do who work on specific domains and subdomains and parts of the journey. And then we've got our research team. So what I need to work on really hard and it's going to take all of us from all the teams is to come together and really think about how do we coordinate all of this wonderful information that we're getting at different strategy works at 50,000 feet. We're working at 20,000. The designers might be working at 10,000. How do we pull all of this together to make sure we've got a nice coordinated approach of what are the insights? What are we working with? How can we take that into whatever is going on with the business or the vision or the product? And yeah, that's a huge opportunity and certainly it's going to take up my next 12 months. What would you say to the designers who maybe feel a little bit demotivated, feel lonely, are losing their passion and energy for the change they want to create in the world because the organization, it feels like the organization is working against them. Yeah, I think that's a huge part of my role and it sounds simple and it sounds kind of fuzzy, but what I have, my main messaging to them is it kind of has two sides to it. One side is about sharpening their skills in terms of how they are trying to embed whatever it is they're trying to do with their design recommendations or whatever. And by sharpening their skills, it's the stuff we've just talked about. What is the storytelling? What data are they taking into the conversation? I also kind of would suggest to them to take some degree of passion and subjectivity away from it because as designers, and I know I'm stereotyping here, but most designers, they do have quite a lot of passion in the way they speak. It's just a part of the nature of the types of people that are in research or design. So sometimes what I'm asking them to do is actually curtail some of that, what ends up coming across as frustration or subjectivity. So subjectivity and passion can sometimes be misconstrued or mixed up. So I kind of ask them to be a little bit more objective about what it is they're trying to do. And being objective then means speak the business, the language of the business, take your advocacy, whatever you're trying to get through, align it to the business system, align it to the business models. And as I said before, if it's okay ours, align it to the okay ours. If the business is focused on scaling, align it to how the design you're trying to get through is going to help the scaling of it. So there is that kind of sharpening their skills, storytelling, delivery, all that kind of stuff. The other thing which I think people do underestimate is building the confidence in the designers that are trying to kind of get out there and be the army and at scale. And that is just to make sure that they know that their leader has their back. So whatever their manager, the design leader, whoever it is, hierarchically has their back. And that way when they go into conversations and they're pushing for something and they're advocating for something, even when it does lead to some kind of conflict or lack of resolution, I think they need to know that somebody else is going to be able to step in and support them on that as well. I think those two things are actually quite important for that. Yeah. Yeah. And I hope people who are listening really take this too hard. Also, based on what we've just discussed, you know, I feel that if you're working in-house as a designer, you should already be proud of yourself because most organizations aren't that far off the design maturity ladder. And sort of we're all struggling. It's not like you said, it's maybe not hard, but it's not simple either. We all have to go through the struggle and don't get demotivated. See, it is part of your work. It's your job to build that design maturity, build that understanding. And I think that's something that a lot of people overlook and therefore maybe get demotivated about. Yeah. Yeah. And another thing I think designers in my team are sick of hearing this from me, but I always tell them years ago, and I can't remember unfortunately who it was. I wish I could, but somebody had said to me, be the trim tab. And I don't know if you know what a trim tab is, but, and I'd never heard of it, but in a huge ship, when you kind of, this is my layman's way, but when you turn the wheel, there's actually this tiny little device at the end of the ship called the trim tab. And so when you turn the wheel, it's this tiny little thing that actually pivots in the direction that you're turning the wheel, that ultimately re-steers this whole huge ship, right? And I just love that analogy because what I'm always saying is that it's like you said, you know, you have the opportunity to reshape the environment you're in. And yes, it's demotivating, it's frustrating, you have to persist. It's all of those things for sure. But I think those things are also building muscles in you that then you can utilize in any environment you're in, right? Whether you move into startup, consultancy, corporate, your freelance on your own, you're going to need those skills of what you've just achieved. So be that trim tab, you know, and be the person that affects the change. And that is hugely rewarding because when you see the smallest bit of change, you know, that is very, very rewarding. And then that's just the first step and the first step. And the other thing I say to them is there's, you know, two more things I would say to them. One is that be an opportunist, like I said, and you know, very much in terms of how I've navigated corporate culture is sometimes it feels like going rogue, but it's not quite going rogue, I'll call it being an opportunist. But you have to find those moments and you have to grab them. One example I can talk about is when we're doing research. And sometimes the research is very much conducted by us. So we've got scope, you know, capacity, we can approach it however we want. But sometimes the research that we need to do is very closely steered and scoped by a stakeholder within the business. And that happens quite often. And so the scope will be like, okay, you've got your 90 minute session. This is what we want to know. This is the priority of things. This is what we want to come out with. Really, and we do this all the time to be honest, you know, there is nothing stopping you from spending five minutes, seven minutes of a 90 minute research session, just exploring something else that you might have a very strong hypothesis about. Or your gut might be telling you something, you know, and your stakeholder is not quite happy that you want to spend X percent of your 90 minutes following a gut. But honestly, there is nothing stopping you and you can be creative about it. Because if you really are short, that short of time, and no research session should be ever be that tight that you can't, you know, buffer out seven minutes, because that's a badly planned session. But you can weave it into the warmup, you know, typically the first seven-ish minutes you've got your warmup anyway, where you're getting to know the participant. And you can be clever and weave it into that. So there's plenty of opportunities to just grab it little things. And honestly, when all else fails, Mark, what I, you know, say to, what I would say to designers is, find your shiny thing somewhere else. So what we do in terms of helping organizations of any type think broadly, you know, understand their customers, understand what that means for an opportunity. There are so many NGOs, for example, out there who are really hungry for somebody to come in and run a workshop with them. You know, let's stop and really let's think about what our next 12 months mean, because they're running on this fuel. And they would just love somebody to come in and do that pro bono, you know. So it's rewarding. You're getting to do something amazing. You've kind of got carte blanche to take things in the direction you want to help this organization. That's probably the other thing. When all else fails, find your shiny thing somewhere else and, you know, keep doing your job. Yeah. And again, I love your advice being an opportunist. It also feels like just being very pragmatic. So rather than trying to follow the textbooks and being a purist about our job, like sometimes you have to be scrappy, cut corners and accept and embrace the progress, the small steps, the small progress you can make and know that you're chasing a bigger dream, but you need these small wins. And yeah, again, I like that. It's almost an entrepreneurial mindset, like seeing an opportunity and just going for it and seeing where you end up. Yeah, I feel, you know, pragmatic is a good word that you've used. I feel like often in technology, in the digital world, pragmatism is seen as a dirty word. You know, people don't like that, because there is this mindset that you're working in digital and you're working with fast paced technology and, you know, everything should be again, I'm generalizing, but you know, there's innovation and move fast and break things. You know, we talk in that language, right? It's like, fail fast and move fast and break things. Yes, if the organization, the culture, the org structure, the team, the hierarchy, the skills, the scale of your team, if those things allow for that mindset and that way of working, then sure, that's, as I said at the start, you know, we have to do that. We have to move fast because lots of really smart people are nipping away then at our heels. But if the company is not set up for that in these number of different ways, right, mindset, resources, etc., etc., then it's actually, you know, trying to kind of think outside the box and push it around those boundaries is not going to work. And I think it's only going to make people block the design voices or whatever voices are trying to push that. And I have seen that in the past, all things are going to fail. You're going to push people to breaking point. And instead of actually winning people over and getting success stories, it's potentially going to go the other direction. So I actually, when I'm working in a very big complex product environment or a corporate environment, these are the things that I think are very important to pay a lot of attention to. And some degree of being pragmatic, being systemic about what you're doing, you know, it's almost like you've got to do 60% of this really pragmatic think within the box. And it's think how you can be effective within that box. And that in itself is a challenge, right? I mean, if we're talking about what keeps designers interested and motivated, it's like figure that out. Because if you figure that out, then that's a big feather in your cap, you know, that's going to give you multiple skills. So use all of these things we've talked about, use data, use science, you know, use pair up with the people who are the decision makers, use the organizational life cycles and rhythm and align to it. That's your 60, 70, whatever percent be pragmatic. And then find that 30, 20% where you can be that opportunist and where you can push the boundaries, where you can take a chance with risk, where you might find an awesome champion up at executive level. And then, you know, you tap into them and try to kind of get some access to what it is that you're trying to do. There's this awesome quote by a guy called John Maxwell, and I won't be able to remember the quote exactly, but he says something like, opesimists complains that there's no wind. An optimist waits for the wind to pick up. And the opportunist just adjusts the sales, something to that effect. And I think that that to me says it says it all. I like it. A lot of good pieces of advice, a lot of practical and pragmatic things we can take away from this. This isn't a topic that's going to be solved overnight. I don't think this is a topic that will ever be solved. It's an ongoing effort that is just part of our field and what we do. Homaxi, if people want to continue this conversation with you, what's the best way to get in touch? Look, probably find me on LinkedIn. And yeah, just message me on LinkedIn is probably the best way. The link will be in the show notes. Thanks for sharing your battle stories. That's what I was looking for. Really useful. And I hope people got inspired through this. So thanks again for making time to share. Absolutely pleasure. And yeah, great conversation to be talking about this stuff because it is hard and there is no easy, quick solution. So I think the more we talk about this, the more we share our stories of how we can actually navigate this environment, then it's better for the industry all around, better for consumers as well. And that's where we started at and that's where we're going to end this episode with. Thanks, Homaxi. What's your biggest takeaway from this conversation with Homaxi? Leave a comment down below and let us know. 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