 In this video, you'll learn how you can become a more effective service design professional by leaning into your design leadership qualities. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Sarah. This is the service design show. Welcome to episode 175. Hi, my name is Mark 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 the things that make the difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business, and of course, our planet. Our guest in this episode is Sarah Clearwater, a service design professional from New Zealand. Sarah recently published a report based on the research she conducted around the intersection of design and leadership. Being a service design professional requires a lot of patience and perseverance. Yes, it's easy to get frustrated when you're the last one to be invited in the room again, when you fail to secure the funds that you've been advocating for or when progress slows down because people fail to align priorities. According to Sarah, these are all symptoms of a bigger underlying program. You won't solve these challenges by becoming better at the craft of service design. We have to take a step back and zoom out to see what's really happening here. Through her research, Sarah has found that these challenges can often be tied back to a lack of leadership. We often confuse management for leadership, but it might sound obvious these two things couldn't be more far apart. It might sound a bit harsh that we lack leadership, but the good news is that leadership is up for grabs for anyone who wants to. You don't have to wait till your official job title permits you to lead. So in this episode, we explore what leadership looks like in the context of service design, how you can grow your leadership qualities, even when you don't see yourself as a leader right now and how you can overcome the biggest roadblock to being an effective leader. If you stick around for the entire conversation, you'll hopefully walk away with a renewed insight that you have the power, the opportunity, the responsibility to lead, to keep raising the bar and pushing the boundaries of our practice. Don't wait for others to show the way. Your time is truly now. So I hope you're ready and excited because we're going to jump straight into the conversation with Sarah Clearwater. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Hi Mark, nice to be here. Yeah, awesome to have you on all the way on the other side of the world compared to me, right? Where are you right now? Yeah, I think we might be at polar opposites. I'm in Auckland in New Zealand. Yeah, I think we're really the opposite. If we drill a hole from the Netherlands, we'll probably end up somewhere around Auckland. Thank you for making the time and jumping on this conversation on the Serbs Design Show with me. I'm really excited to talk about the topic. Before we do that, we obviously want to know a bit more about you and who you are, what you do. So tell us a bit more about Sarah. Sure. So I guess my little 30 second spiel is that I was born in West Berlin to East German and Egyptian parents. And just before the end of the Cold War, I moved to the Netherlands to get a humanities degree because your education system is quite spectacular. And then I started my career in the United Kingdom, I guess in public policy and public advocacy. And in 2011, I moved to New Zealand, which is where I called myself a designer for the very first time. And now 12 years later, I divide my time through three different activity areas. I'm a strategic design consultant for organisations who are looking to start or scale their design functions. I also mentor and coach design teams who want to take more of a leadership role inside their organisation. And then I also convene the Custom Experience Collective, which is one of New Zealand's largest design communities. Awesome. Sounds like you're busy. Cool. Sarah, next to this brief introduction, we always do our lightning round. Five questions to get to know you even better as a person next to a professional. You haven't prepared for these questions because that makes it way more fun. Just answer the first thing that comes to your mind and we won't dive any deeper into these answers. But are you ready? Yeah, let's go. Well, let's go. If you could be an animal, which animal would you like to be? Great question. I think I would love to be a panther. Nice. What is your favourite holiday destination? You know, the things I love to do is actually spend a lot of time in libraries. So my dream holiday would be a world library tour. I think that would be wicked. Sounds awesome. Next question is if you could have a dinner with one person and you won a live dad, who would you pick? Who would you like to have dinner with? Oh, I'd love to have dinner with Brony Brown. Yes, noted. We'll send the invitation. If you could recommend one book to all of us to read, which book would you recommend? A book I keep coming back to as Mike Montero's Run by Design, which I think gives a really nice perspective on design ethics and I guess responsibility and ownership of what it means to design. Final question tradition is when did you first learn or hear about service design? I first heard about the term service design probably in 2014 or 15 and it was a distant thing that came, I think, out of North America or Europe. But I would say my first introduction to design was actually more around design thinking and human-centered design. I think service design was a much later evolution of, I guess, a much more mature and refined practice. Hmm. Thank you. Those were good. That was a good lightning round. Let's jump into today's topic and you framed it. At least that's my interpretation as design leadership beyond the status quo. Did I get that right? Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely spot on. Let's start by setting the stage and the context. I want to learn from you about two elements of this design leadership beyond the status quo. Let's dive into design leadership and status quo. What is your definition? Your definition of design leadership if you could give a 30-second pitch. The way that I would, I guess, define design leadership is to say that actually different ways to lead in design there is leading our practice which is around our ability, I guess, to be self-aware and context responsive with the work that we do and leading in that means showing up intentionally and purposefully wanting to go into a different, in a certain direction. If I think about functional leadership which is another element of design or how design leadership can show up, it's to say these are people in functions such as head-off or manager or director and which lead design teams inside organizations. From my perspective, they're two different ways to talk about design leadership. Okay, and I'm sure we'll explore both of them a bit later. The second part of our title is status quo. What is the status quo? Great question. I actually did a bit of research around that last year where I interviewed about 28 so-called design leaders here in New Zealand to better understand what design leadership might be. The strong perception that I guess came through the research was that when we talk about design leadership, we talk about in fact functional leaders. We talk about designers who've moved into a managerial position and now lead other designers and practice within an organization. And I guess the status quo element around that is that design leadership as we tie it to a function becomes limited to someone who does design, moves in the leadership into a leadership function and then manages designers. Yeah, so the status quo is leadership has turned into management or leadership equals management. Is that the status quo? That is the status quo. Leadership equals managing a practice or a group of other designers. Yes. And you feel that there's an opportunity to do better. I think there's an opportunity to go wider. Yes. Okay. Now, thank you for this. This is already very helpful. You mentioned something about a research that you did. Can you explain a bit more? Sure. So the research I guess was grounded in an understanding or curiosity around some of the conversations that keep happening in the design community here in New Zealand, but also things that I observe, I guess online through social media. And a lot of the conversation was around should we do human-centered design or planet-centered design? Should we do co-design? You know, we all have to move to participatory design. Like there was all this bickering almost among the design community around what is good design, what is better design, and felt really competitive. And it didn't feel very nurturing or very informing of our practice. And so that was the motivation behind, I guess, better understanding what good design or mature design looks like. And the assumption that I've made in the research is that leadership is a proxy for maturity. And so that's where, I guess, conversations or interests around leadership came into play. And what that ended up being was sort of 28 qualitative conversations with people in or near formal design leadership functions who helped me better understand what their world really looks like. And out of that came a definition of design practice, a definition of design leadership, and an understanding of how else we might grow our practice for it to be more mature, but also more impactful and more relevant to the times and places that we practice. And if anyone is curious, the report is publicly available, right? The report is publicly available. Anybody can download that from my website, which is seraclaywater.com. We'll make sure to add the link. Okay, so you have spoken to quite a few people. You have done a lot of thinking and reflection about this, which puts you in a very good position to have this conversation and maybe provoke some ideas here. Now, the perspective on leadership as a role where we envision a future and work towards the future versus leadership as in managing. I'm sort of curious, what have you learned about the sort of symptoms or how do we notice the lack of the lack of the other type of leadership? Maybe I don't know if we have two words for these two different types of leadership, but sort of the future envisioning leadership? How do we feel, see, experience the lack of it? That's a really good question. I think that I can see two answers to your question, so I might offer both of these. So if I think of the lack of, so the two leaderships I talked about was practice leadership and functional leadership. And what we observe is that functional leadership often takes place, but practice leadership is lacking. Well, how that shows up is that we put a lot of responsibility on the design leader to advocate at executive level, to drive change, to envision the design future, to bring customer into the executive. But the design team is almost stuck in its inability to translate that vision into their own work, right? So it's one thing to go, you know, be part of an organization and be part of a squad or a tribe and go, oh, I'm the designer here, I can help you do research. It's a very different thing to understand the value connection between design activity and organizational strategy. And practice leadership, no matter where you are in the organizational hierarchy, shows up in your ability to drive change through your practice in an agreed direction that your leader and your team are set. That's one way of looking at that. Where I see leadership being absent in like a functional context, for example, is when the head of the organization, sorry, the head of the function isn't able to bridge, I guess, humanity-centered ways of thinking and working with commercial realities. And ultimately, it's up to the function head to create the structures and the conditions for the design team to succeed. And so when we see what we see here, or have seen quite frequently, it might seem more of, is continued restructures, you know, teams being resized, being renamed, being reallocated, needing to do a lot with very little, they are often symptoms of teams' inability to communicate their value and to find a way to negotiate and navigate the obvious tension between being human-centered and being profit-focused. And it's not just that we have to navigate this tension, we also have to find a way to obviously start realizing a more human-centered way of doing business, which is what our mandate ultimately is. So, yeah, the struggle we have is to connect the human-centered way of working with doing business. Is that the bigger problem? Like, if the other things are the symptoms, is that sort of the key that you have found, the key struggle, the key challenge? In simple terms, I think you're right, because we have to be part of the system in order to change the system. And as designers, our mandate is for change. I'm very curious. How did we get here? Is it by chance that we didn't take up this leadership role? Is it a lack of training? Is it that we want to avoid this responsibility? Maybe, I don't know. What have you heard and seen? How did we get here as a community? So, I think one thing that is both design's greatest asset and its greatest fallacy is our idealism and our desire to do good in the world, right? And that's, in a way, makes us resilient and strong in the face of adversity, but also can bring us down because we're constantly being told, no, you know, you need to be more realistic or how this is going to make me money or we're constantly running into doors. And if we don't have support from a community or wider team or strong leader to sustain, I guess, our vision, our hope, our intent while navigating the current reality, I think it's just simply, it wears down. It's really, really hard work. So, we're looking for practical idealism or pragmatism and idealism. Is that? I think we're looking for reassurance that the belief that there's a better or different way to do business is not just necessary, but also valid. And then we're needing the tools and the mindsets to start acting on that belief, even if we get not back. So, I think as a discipline, what we're looking for is resilience. How, in which sense, resilience? How are we looking for that? I think, or that is something that we, that would really support us and make us stronger because of the tension and the challenge we bring to the status quo of business. If we can find a way to build our resilience in our beliefs and our practices and tools while working on changing the businesses that we are part of, they can set us up for better success. What happens if we don't build that resilience? I think we burn out. Which is already happening. I don't know if it's on a large scale, but from the conversations I've been having with the service design community, there are already many people who sort of get fed up and start questioning and doubting if they want to put in the effort to fight for the quote-unquote right cause. The typical quote here is that an organization doesn't even let you do the job that they hired you for. I don't know. Do you recognize something like that? I see that a lot. I see that a lot and it goes as far as like some designers have basically said I'm no longer going to be a designer. I'm going to go into product or I'm going to become a business analyst or I'm going to, I need to step into a function where the values are understood that I continuously battle just to do my job. So yeah, if we maybe can transition into some stories and examples to make this a bit more tangible, maybe tapping into your own experience and focusing on that practice leadership area, have you encountered situations in your own practice where sort of this the lack of it or maybe a scenario where this manifested very clearly that can help us make this a bit more tangible? Sure. So I guess a bit of context as part of the report findings, a lot of the sources of leadership where our practice matures sits in our ability to be self-aware and context-aware and that's something that's continuously evolving. And so if I think about a time where my leadership was lacking, it was in a project I was running with a not-for-profit, with an international not-for-profit a few years ago and most of my work sits in the commercial or large government organization space and so not-for-profit international development was a really new field. They're really keen on co-design and it was during COVID and I was up for the challenge. I was really excited by it and I sort of went in all guns blazing and I had my toolkit full of co-design tools and had my sort of everything mapped out like the research plan and the project plan and I was ready to go. And something that I became evident really, really quickly is that I didn't fully understand how my existing mental models around you know business commercials, around power structures, around privilege were showing up not necessarily in the way I was thinking or trying to work but in the tools and the processes I was applying. So to give you a really tangible example, Miro is not a tool that works well with I guess groups of people who don't use it as their everyday platform but as designers through COVID we became literate in them and most businesses use Miro as a as a foundational tool in their creative and collaborative practice right and I just took that and dumped that into a community in South Asia and then and so what happened there's a result and they were very kind and very generous with their feedback and their space to let me learn. But what happened was that I effectively alienated part of the project team. I like reduced the speed of the project like I slowed everything down. I created frictions and silos among the different groups who were trying to collaborate together because the tool I was applying was not fit for purpose. Very fascinating story and can you maybe zoom into the moment where you realize that this was happening and sort of that this was the root cause? Like when did you have an epiphany or like how did this go? The epiphany of course happens in the middle of the half-day workshop that you've been preparing for for four weeks and then you know the Miro board was set up it was beautiful. I thought I'd briefed my collaborators here in New Zealand really well for part of the client organization and yeah the sort of I started the workshop we did introductions and I was like right let's you know let's get to work and we broke into groups and we only had three facilitators for three groups so I couldn't hear what the others were doing but I was taking my groups through my part of the workshop and the responses only came from one or two people which I thought was odd because we've done so much in you know building connections and relationships and safety and then looked across the Miro board and those spaces were also empty and so what I did was to cut the workshop short well to stop the activity and to bring everybody together and basically have a reflective conversation around what just happened and so that was the first conversation that happened with everybody in the room where people just said oh this is a bit hard to use we really love the idea but we just can't execute on this really well and then the second conversation happened with the in a project team my client team and they sort of said oh you know we really struggled to use it we didn't really know how to navigate the space and I then approached key stakeholders stakeholders individually and had one-on-one conversation and that's when the inside around sort of power and privilege really emerged and when I had to go or shoot I think I just you know stepped into it so which question did you ask yourself that made you reflect that this wasn't a matter of I need to educate these people about how to use this tool I need to better structure this workshop because I can imagine a lot of people like that's the initial response okay so we need to use a different tool or we need to have a different agenda again which would what caused you to take a step back and reflect a reflection is a key leadership practice and a reflection is an intentional part of my practice and so I encourage that to be part of I guess others too but to come back to a very good question around what is the question that I asked that led me not to believe that it was someone else's fault or that I just had to be a better designer was the I guess the the understanding that whatever I bring to a conversation comes with a set of my own biases and beliefs and mindsets so I know that whatever I bring to this conversation to every workshop I bring with me a set of unsurface beliefs and so what I started to do was to I guess interrogate the tool that I was using and to go why is this not working for me why is it not working for other people where did we get hung up and why did this conversation become a two-way conversation between me and the project lead not everybody in the room so I just started drilling down into why things were happening and then I'm trying to go what would happen so I already have a mental model around whatever I bring to a project is around philosophies principles and processes and I go which of my processes here show up how do they show up which of my principles show up how which of my philosophies show up and why do they show up and in going through these almost three I guess levels of resolution of inquiry that's what brought out the power and privilege because it was one of my philosophies that showed up in the tool of mural you know and what was the philosophy to be specific so the philosophy you know I was like oh collaboration is really important in this you know distributed world mural is the way to collaborate but collaboration wasn't the important philosophy it was participation right and it was enabling of voices to be heard and surfaced the philosophy that I needed to bring was not about design thinking or human-centered design the philosophy was about how can I help those who are least often heard and least often acted upon how can I bring them to the surface and so the reframe that happened was around saying okay I think I've stipulated too much of how we will work and what we will use and so I went back to the team and said this is what I think we have to achieve next how might we get there and that is when they came up with their own way of working and approaching which was totally different very interesting there is a lot of personal self-reflection self-reflection is always personal I guess and understanding your biases like you said the mental models that you bring and being aware of that and conscious of that do you also make those things explicit do you communicate those things with the people around you or is it something that you try to incorporate in just in your work it's a really really good question and I'd say that I haven't been consistent my aspiration is to be more explicit but I find that I I tend to limit that to my immediate collaborators and that isn't always helpful I would not always sufficient I suppose I think it's I think it's a really good starting point so people who you work closely with who support you for them to understand your defaults it's life-changing but in this scenario yeah maybe I think I'm probably just now reflecting on this with you live on the show I think I actually haven't been explicit about that particular mental model and that do you think that would be helpful I think so so to give you another example if you want to yeah sure so one one bias I have is around finding commonality and patterns because of my upbringing and the way I guess I was raised I was always I grew up at intersections so my desire is always to build bridges and bring things together but what can happen is if I overuse that lens I tend to I can bring things together that shouldn't be going together it's easy for me to go oh it's all the same oh these are the things that go together they are the things that you have in common okay this is easy next right sometimes more delineation is required and so with my closest collaborators I purposefully seek people who are less inclined to find commonalities for example so when I assemble project teams around certain challenges I try to do so in ways where we all bring a complementary not just skills but most importantly mindsets and experiences yeah and we're focusing right now on maybe personal leadership and understanding who you are to a certain extent what are you bringing what are you lacking what are your strengths and weaknesses how does this connect to the practice lead that we talked about yes so the practice design practice as I define it is the interplay of my craft and my context yeah so my practice emerges when what I know shows up in the real world and the leadership element around that is to to constantly navigate that there is an exchange so for example if I have a set of corporate tools around human-centered design and service design and I bring that into a not-for-profit context my craft my tools have to change but as a result this new context has altered my craft right so my practice constantly does this if you will constantly I'm going through an infinity loop the leadership is to be aware of that and drive the evolution of my practice intentionally as to achieve a certain outcome for example could be something as simple as you know I want a certain organization to progress the development of of an app or a website yeah my goal as a designer is to ensure that there are certain needs of the user that have been met in order to achieve that I can't just focus on the app or the website I have to think about the wider context that this interaction takes place in and influence and drive change around all the conditions that that are responsible for bringing that app or that website to life so my leadership sits in seeing what needs to be done and like driving into that direction but also allowing others to come on that journey with me yeah and I made the false it's not an assumption but I focused on on just a tiny bit because I said it's a it's a self-reflection of personal but of course you're reflecting on your actions in the bigger context you're seeing how you how you show up in culturally different contexts what happens so you need to be aware of those all those other things and how they influence your response your the tools that you use the processes that you apply so that's that's the interplay right that's that's correct that's 100 right yeah and you know that this interplay is not working when certain things happen right so a lot of the teams that I I work with tend to say things like we we're stuck in research I can't get to deliver anything because all I get asked for is customer research teams might say well I'm always the last one to be invited as the designer when all the important decisions have already been made yeah or they go we like everybody says customer is important but I can't get budget for more research or another designer or I can't get onto this big project I can't unlock attention or funds or resources for my work and all of these are symptoms in our unawareness of the context conditions that we have to lead into with our practice it's a it's a big question but how do we then lead into into death I don't know have you found a few key characteristics that allow us to go beyond just being very good at our craft to being good very good at our craft and making it fit better fit and align to the context that we're operating in yeah it's it's a huge question and I think that is you've nailed you know that you've nailed it this is the big question and I guess a couple of things I can share that I know have worked for me or that I've seen work fathers sit around being able to read your context so they're always and so this is borrowed from a navigational leadership or sorry wayfinding leadership which is an indigenous concept here out of New Zealand that is a great book by the way wayfinding leadership I recommend it and there is a there is a notion of what they call signs and so wayfinding I guess as I understand it is the practice of of crossing the oceans using you know the stars and the sea and the land around you and if we translate that metaphor to our context what this suggests is that every journey we go on to into every journey that we lead that we participate in is surrounded by signs that allow us to make the decision of where to go next so one thing that is fundamentally helpful in showing up in a literally way and also I guess driving change within our organizations is to be cognizant of those signs perfect as what examples of these signs would be strategy documents all hands CEO presentations things you uncover in conversation with your colleagues you know I think one thing that we sometimes forget as designers is to eat our own dog food when it comes to who's our user yes they are customers but everybody we're working with are also our users how do we empathize with them you know what are the key themes and insights that are emerging from your conversations with your colleagues and how might you use them to better direct your design activity to bring them on the journey because I think the key fallacy I want to point out that this is not about becoming a business-centered designer this is not about giving up your values or your beliefs around what's right for the customer this is about working with the conditions that you've been given and finding a way to to still embed the customer into the business environment I know you said there are a few things but I I love this one and I would love to zoom into it way finding leadership I'm definitely going to add that book to my reading list I love that and I love analogies and metaphors so navigating through just using stars and I don't know wind and landmarks makes a lot of sense and usets using signs I added the word clues here and there are tons of them is when you're inside an organization or working with an external client there are tons of signs there are tons of clues that show you what's happening it's just a matter of developing and awareness and and being able to notice them and and taking the time and having the patience and and being open to these clues and signs which are already out there you you you don't even have to do any additional effort they are already there and like it's bringing those clues signs into your practice and how you show up on a day-to-day basis that doesn't make any sense 100 percent that is spot on exactly was there anything else because you mentioned way finding leadership I felt that you had a few more things you wanted to share so I think the other thing that pops into mind and someone else said this and they said you know got I go where the energy is and I think it relates to the previous point but we shouldn't forget the power of our intuition in our gut when it comes to doing our work and every environment every room you step into there is energy right are you riding the wave or are you trying to fight against it and I think it's it's important for us to be deliberate really deliberate in our ability to choose our battles and find the waves you want to ride and then ride them and then again the balance is always how do I work with what's in front of me and how do I bring to it what I know to be true and important and how might we together work towards an outcome that ultimately achieves what I want to achieve without neglecting or alienating those who might think or work differently from me so if we try to bring this into a difficult service design project or design project how would this manifest feeling where the energy is and riding the way yeah really good question so I think sometimes we can get really frustrated or almost offended when someone goes when someone doesn't want to start at the beginning of the project right when some of the process when someone goes oh we don't need research I just wanted to do a journey map with fictional personas and go with it or I just want to do some customer testing right we've got the prototype it's going to be released next week and all we need is to take the box for the buttons and you know that sort of stuff and as designers we can go oh I don't want to be involved in that because we haven't done it right you know but what if instead we go hey you've done all of this without involving the customer or you're currently not ready to involve the customer I want to flag that this is a risk and this is what could happen for you but here's how I can help you so design I think is also a learning practice more so in some instances than a makership practice and so how might we learn with our collaborators and our colleagues in ways that help us evolve our understanding and connection with customers and each other so this is adopting a yes and mentality I can imagine that there will be friction where you feel okay this is not living up to my personal and professional standards like is that is that a matter of experience and sort of personal boundaries or are there any guides I guess again I'd say there are two answers to that so we all have boundaries we all must have boundaries and there are points at which we should not we should not cross our boundaries these boundaries relate to ethics to values and beliefs they relate around how we might cause harm you know they relate around how we believe or to interact or not interact with other humans like they are baseline boundaries that we do not cross these boundaries relate to things like you know I was working with a to give you an example I was working with a company several several years ago on a technology transformation project and they were developing a mobile phone application to try and automate some of their customer acquisition and they had a really high I guess risk profile and that the appetite for risk was very low the algorithm that underpin customer acquisition was fundamentally discriminatory against minorities and I don't mind just testing a thing if that's important to you I don't mind building a journey for you if that is your starting point but what I won't do as a designer is support a piece of work that I know will harm others that's a boundary I have and that is a boundary I will not cross so I will not continue to work on this project right that's a hard boundary but to go I'd love to do some research but you won't let me it's more of a that's what a toddler does so there yeah the boundary is between or the distinction is between intent like what's the intent what is the goal that we're striving towards and that's almost non-negotiable versus your craft and how do you bend and tweak and modify and contextualize your process your tools to achieve that goal like how fluid or flexible are you with that yes and I think the question is also we might not be able to get a perfect project going here but what we might do is move an increments towards a better way of doing things so if I can build excitement around a customer journey or if I know that the organization has an appetite for journey frameworks why not go with it even if there is very limited research or all of it is is just quant research or you know even if it's just a little bit it's it's about perspective how much time have we got here to drive change can I can is it palatable for me yes based on my values very very important can my tools make it a little bit better you know can I modify something that I know to help someone else understand the customer this is the navigation activity this is the leadership this is the moments of tension I think the trap or pitfall is that as service designers we already see what's possible we envision the future we know like if we all do it in the ideal or perfect way what's what's possible like and and we want to get there and when we need to take smaller steps it almost feels like we're compromising like this is not good enough we like if we just change these five things we can deliver so much more value I have some thoughts about about this but how do you marry these two things like knowing what's in store and and challenging your clients maybe to come on let's change a few things and then this will be so much better versus okay let's take some baby steps so I think it depends also on our positioning right so if we're external contractors or consultants there's a massive expectation around short-term deliverables right if I'm hired for 12 weeks to deliver a thing my ability to drive long-term change is small if I'm in the house I have the ability to pursue long-term changes while delivering short-term wins it's understanding our position in that system well enough to make a judgment call around what's possible for us not just what's possible for the system we're trying to change but what is possible realistically for me as a service designer at this moment in time under these conditions and that I think is what the what the leadership vision has to be and it's not to say that that vision can't change in three weeks or three months or three years but I think we're setting ourselves up for failure when we think we can turn around an organization to become a design-led or custom-led organization in 12 weeks or even 12 months yeah that's one of those perspective of or accesses of leadership that you understand your limitations and your abilities and being able to align those things with what you could potentially achieve that's the at least that's how I'm hearing and reading your story that that's where leadership sort of shows up that you're able to connect what's possible with what what might be uh I hope I'm making sense here yes you are see I think the other thing to remember is that our ability to drive change is only ever as um as great as the quality of our stories that that tell people what that future is going to be like right so if if I have a vision in my mind around what an organization could be but I can't tell a story around that vision in a way that is compelling for others there is no way that I'm ever going to get there or the organization so I think when we think about leadership we often think it's just about the actions that we take but the second part of that is our ability to bring others on a journey and that requires two things an explicit invitation to go on that journey and then at least an initial framework for participating in that journey and if we can't communicate that through our stories we can't we're not going to get wherever we want to go I don't know the exact quote so I'm not going to use it here but there is a beautiful quote by a philosopher uh about that if you want to inspire people to travel and explore foreign lands you don't tell them about the features of your boat you tell them about the future that awaits right and I think that's something similar here like we shouldn't yeah we shouldn't be telling about how how great our process is or how beautiful the tools are that we use we should be telling a compelling story about the future that we want to create and give people the confidence to take that first step with us a hundred percent and that future has to be painted in words and in language and in concepts that the audience understand right so if I talk about custom-made organizations to an organization that hasn't bought into the value of customer I'm telling an irrelevant story yeah so I might start my story of a bright future around an organization that can make evidence-based decisions that can respond to market needs and trends quickly and informed in an informed way in 12 months time that story might change to something you know an organization that you know is seen in the market as being relevant and meaningful and collaborative and then in 24 months time I might talk about their customer vision so the same story the same vision that I have today has to sound different today than tomorrow and then the day after we don't evolve our stories as well as we like to but just as our practice has to evolve with the ever-changing conditions that we find ourselves in so have our stories what what would you say to someone who isn't in a functional leadership position right now and feels that the practice leadership role or responsibility lies in that functional leadership position not within them within themselves I would ask them if that where that question comes from in that is that a question born from fear that you are unable to lead or is that question born from fear that you were being rejected if you do show up to lead is that where does that position come from and so it's an important question I guess and I'm not sure how I hope many people who are listening right now are actively thinking about how they are leading the practice and if there are not I think this is a very good invitation to to start doing some reflection around this sort of heading towards the end of our conversation I'm always curious like which advice you wish you would have gotten five years ago which advice would you give yourself to a five-year younger Sarah I think something that I would have loved to have known five years ago is that we all have the potential to lead and that we can shape our own leadership experience like this I guess the thing about functional leadership is that we see leadership in a particular way and assume that leadership must be this way and so when people go I don't want to lead it might just be I don't want to lead that way and that's totally fine right and so for me knowing five years ago that I have the potential to lead if I so choose would have been really liberating for me I think that's one thing I think the other thing that is really interesting for me or that would have been really helpful is to know that good design is context dependent there is no design best practice at this moment in time there is only responsive design that is respectful and I guess responsive to the people we work with the people we work for and our own values believes needs and boundaries and so when we talk about good design to one another I think would be more helpful for us to go under which conditions have you found this to work rather than this is the best way to do a journey map or this is the best that human-centered design or earth-centered design or co-design or under which conditions is the practice that you advocate for relevant and useful to bring the testament to the conversation yeah and understanding those nuances it requires stories is very hard to do a course around this or to read this in a book because like we it's it's it's alluring and tempting to get recipes and focus on recipes but it's really the context and the nuances that matter I do I want to I want to focus on one more thing because it makes me curious whether you were sharing this and the advice you would get you would given yourself is there such a thing as no leadership because let me explain because I think the the story here might be like you're always leading by example your actions or the lack of your actions is setting an example and if we say you're leading by example then you're always leading in a certain way consciously unconsciously so is there a thing as no leadership I guess the absence of leadership is the absence of direction and the absence of pathways towards a different future I think that another interesting way to look at leadership is to understand that leadership cannot be continuous so when we look at leaders we think that they're a leader at all times but what the research suggests well beyond my research paper is that leadership shows up in the spaces in between people leadership shows up in between through relationships leaderships are moment or events in time so what that means is that I can choose to be a leader at work and not at home I can choose to be a leader in this workshop and not in that one I can choose to be a leader in this team but not in that I can choose to lead in particular scenarios but not in others right and so sometimes the absence of leadership is actually a blessing because it allows for someone else to step into their leadership and sometimes leadership is stepping away for someone else to lead that's better that's I love that one and it makes absolute sense that like the lack of the you have to have if you want to lead you have to have a north star and even if that north star tells you to step to take a step back but without a north star you can't lead you're just you're just busy you're just rowing without having a direction or a goal or a destination maybe in I love metaphor so you can't lead if you don't have a destination yes I but I think I would be I would say that the destination hasn't it doesn't have to be a destination I think it has to be a direction and for me the distinction is important because the destination presumes in a way that we have answers when very often we don't a direction can simply be different to where we are today so we're going north we're heading towards a more human-centered future rather than we're going towards a very specific crystallized we're going to the we're going to Manhattan or we're going to Broadway that's not that's not the destination that we're discussing or referring to we're going north or we're going to a better future right that that's that's the that's the north star 100 that's exactly it if someone has listened to our conversation so far what is the one thing you hope that they will remember I hope that the one thing that they will remember is that they have the ability to lead um and all they need to do is find out what they can bring to their context to show up in a literally way and I hope that they decide that they are ready to give it a try the other thing I would say around this is that you don't have to get it right first time around but without trying you're never going to get there leadership is also a learning journey and so why not start today and find a moment in your work life that you want to start leading and just do it and on that note I want to thank you Sarah for sharing this important topic encouraging topic inspiring topic let's hope people will dig into this do some reflection and read some books read the report uh really thankful that you came on and shared this thank you so much Max for the joy talking to you today what's the single most important quality of an effective leader according to you we'd love to know so please leave a comment down below I want to thank Sarah once again for coming on the show and addressing this important topic with us if you want to learn more check out Sarah's report using the link that's in the show notes of this episode finally if you enjoyed this conversation and you haven't done so already please click that like button this lets me know if we're on the right track addressing topics like this my name is Mark from Tyne and I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me please keep making a positive impact and I look forward to see you very soon in the next video