 Hi guys Thanks for that warm welcome. This is actually my second year at UXSEA. The room is so much more full this year It's really exciting. I'd also like to welcome up Matt, my co-speaker You get a little two-for-one deal Here Tag team So just a quick introduction. My name is Caitlin Robinson, and I'm the head of experience design at MoneySpart And my name is Matt Lambie, and I'm the CTO at MoneySpart So we just wanted to take a bit and explain a little bit about who MoneySpart is because I think this is what sets the stage For what we're about to tell you, right? We're here to empower everybody with the information tools and Ultimately advice they need to make the best financial decisions possible The reality is in today's day and age that task is actually incredibly complicated More so we might argue than it needs to be but I think when we talk to our customers at the end of the day We're trying to help them make incredibly complex decisions So as a part of that our team has been working really hard to develop tools and techniques To ultimately try to make these complex decisions Manageable and for us that's not about simplification and reduction because we really feel like that ignores important components and variables which exist in everybody's day-to-day life and instead we're Hold up go back go back go back roll back that roll back that time clock what we'd like to argue today and what we'd like to talk you through is a Process and some tips and tricks for how to manage that complexity and ultimately embrace it Rather than trying to distill it all down and make it overly simple Okay, why is that important though let's set the stage and and go back and talk a little bit about context, right? As we've heard from our first couple of speakers We have an amazing sort of trajectory and momentum when it comes to innovation and Technology right and as a part of that the types of problems which were able to attack and go after Are increasingly getting bigger and more complicated, right? We've we've gone from little advocates counting machines to quantum computing and that's Phenomenal, but at the end of the day most of us end up getting really overwhelmed by a lot of this complexity And so we become really reactive I don't know about you, but when I am bombarded with information and tasks and Different approaches for how to accomplish those tasks. I become really overwhelmed Right, and I don't know about you, but I also get really exhausted by trying to make these types of decisions So when we're faced with exhaustion and we're asked to make incredibly complex decisions What ultimately happens? Let me run you through a scenario because I know we're the last talk right before lunch, right? And everybody's stomachs are starting to get a little hungry and a little empty Say you're at the end of your day or say you're right before lunch And I give you two options to try to stave off that hanger if I give you the option of a bag of Cheetos or an orange Which are you gonna choose? They're both orange. They both go into your stomach You could argue they have nutritional content, but that's a little bit debatable, right? How many of you are gonna choose the orange? Liars, okay. How many how many of you are gonna choose the Cheetos? Yeah, yeah, and you know what's really unfair is that those Cheetos have been specifically designed and engineered So that when you're in that vulnerable state when you're exhausted when you're hungry It's there to beat out that orange Let me run you through a different example. How many of you guys use Apple pay or Android pay? Ali pay Grab pay something like that. Okay of those of you who use that service How many of you think that those services are here to make you more conscious about the money you spend? Okay, one person way to be the loan dissenter. I like it. I like it. We need somebody to counterbalance I don't think that they try to make you very conscious about your spending I actually think that they try to get you to ignore the fact that you are spending money at all Right and why that becomes important is when okay, say I'm in my afternoon slump I need a cup of coffee It's easier to go to Starbucks. It doesn't really go with my spending goals my saving goals, but that's okay Get out my Apple pay. I'm through. I don't even feel like I've spent a dollar Right now fast forward and you have a few more of those unconscious Purchases and a few more of those afternoon coffees and suddenly you start to rack up a lot of credit card debt and Then perhaps you start to see your credit score go down Would which ultimately impacts what you're able to do in the future now? I know I paid a really bleak picture after a single cup of coffee in the afternoon. I own that But I think it's an important lesson for us to keep in mind I'm like trying to send the signal straight through you right Don't worry. You're not alone in this this sort of reactive decision-making process The business world for better or for worse is also geared towards short-term gains I think all you have to do is dial in to an investor call as an example You hear CEOs talking about some of our biggest public companies and I think that there's a crazy statistic where 80% of those CEOs would say That they would sacrifice long-term economic gains in order to meet their quarterly financial targets Right, that's pretty huge. That means that they're gonna forego spending on crucial infrastructure like employees which each and every one of you should care about an education and In order to drive revenue and sales. I think in the FinTech space We actually saw a really powerful example of that with Wells Fargo. Anybody familiar with this? As a bank they had pretty aggressive revenue and sales targets And so what employees did when they weren't making their quarterly numbers? They opened up accounts without consumer consent right really big deal really big deal This of course telegraphs out when you start to think about The impacts that are driving our industry and decisions and it even ladders out when you think about countries Right, a lot of countries are more concerned about their GDP than they are long-term economic infrastructure building So why is that? Right, what is contributing to this idea of short-term games over long-term goals I think Dan Ariely who's a behavioral economic Economist has a great Perspective on this he talks about two big types of decisions. There are small decisions Like these are the ones that are built on gut reaction, right? Do I choose the orange? Do I choose the Cheetos? Right, and those are pretty easy for each of us to manage Where it gets more complicated is the big decisions Most of us really struggle Making big decisions and that's because they are so complex and we have to take the time to look at them and all of that Complexity we have to assess all of the different variables understand how different Cascading decisions are going to impact us down the road And so we tend to pick up this problem and we start to look at it And then most of us put that problem back down for a bit because it becomes too overwhelming And then maybe we pick it back up again. We add a little bit more research and input And finally finally hopefully at some point in time After a lot of consideration and a lot of care hopefully we finally make that decision But you know the funny thing about it is That most of us make that decision From a point of trying to minimize our loss we as humans are far more likely To make a decision that minimize our loss our losses versus maximizing our gains Right, so to break that down more of us in this room would rather ensure that we don't lose the twenty dollars that are in That's in our wallet Versus make a decision and hope that we're going to get a hundred dollars in gain right pretty impactful pretty powerful and Part of the reason for that is that it's really hard for us to manage Out all of these different scenario trees that happen when we try to make these big decisions If I take you way back and think about times when we were sitting in caves and all we were trying to do was figure out How to make sure that we had food some sort of shelter and Ultimately a modicum of safety the types of decisions that we were making were pretty straightforward and Yes, we started to build some tools to help us make those decisions and then things got a little bit more complex When we started to talk about staying put building agrarian societies more complicated tools fast forward to today where we have all sorts of technologies in these big cities Full of lots of different types of people lots of different types of businesses with lots of different type of competing Objectives and the decision-making is really complicated and the ways in which we can stretch out and think about the future has become even harder The trouble is We can't actually make a decision if we don't have a good way to make a forecast for what the impacts of that decision might look like The good news is that today as communities we are trying to make decisions that far Span out into the future in ways that we never have before the fact that we're talking about AI and the singularity that we're talking about Climate change and what we can ultimately do about it is the type of decision-making process That we haven't actually been engaging with for that long But it shows great evolution that we are starting to try and tackle those problems And so here it is if you take nothing else out of this talk, which hopefully won't be the case But start to think about this right How do we start to create environments that drive positive behavior change that support us when we are tired and exhausted and ultimately overwhelmed So that people don't fail catastrophically So that they can see multiple different outcomes and versions of success Right, and this is important to think about not just in our wider world and day to day But also when we think about the design environments that we're creating how we're setting up our design teams in Order to make sure that we can reach innovation and outcomes that address a diverse population and group of needs For us at Money Smart, we think that one of the pathways to do that to design these environments is Ultimately through collaborative storytelling through scenario planning through narrative development Right, and we think that that's really important because it's not about our Predictions or scenarios being right at the end of the day It's the fact that we are becoming more comfortable with different outcomes that we are becoming more comfortable with different trajectories and that ambiguity and unpredictability are Elements that we really start to embrace as opposed to shy away from and that's ultimately what's been Helping us start to tackle some of these big wicked problems that industry has previously said too big Can't do it change isn't possible Okay, who's familiar with the characters on the screen? Show hands give me a lot of this show of hands nonsense is gonna bear with me Okay, those of you that haven't it's a TV show on Netflix called Stranger Things and I yeah, round of applause well done and I It's going to be a bit of a theme that kind of runs through if you haven't seen this TV show And you have a Netflix subscription then watch it if you don't have a Netflix subscription get one and watch it We're going to talk a little bit about Dungeons and Dragons Which is a theme that runs through the show from the very very beginning literally from the opening scene so no spoilers But the this opening scene that these characters are all playing a board game Dungeons and Dragons or a role-playing game So another show of hands who has any familiarity with with D&D anyone. I know there's a bunch of money smart people here that do Yeah, put your hand up Sam excellent So the best way that I've heard this described or heard Dungeons and Dragons described is that it's collaborative story telling So there's no winning. There's no losing. There's just progressing through a story and as you watch Stranger Things Have an awareness that from the very first scene they set the characters up so that I'm gonna screw this clicker up as well That they set the characters up so they each follow a pathway That's very very familiar to character development within Dungeons and Dragons So there's a great reddit thread Where each of the characters have their their class and their race and their alignment and everything mapped out and and with with that knowledge you get a bit of a deeper understanding about this show and We're gonna talk about some of the aspects of Dungeons and Dragons and why I think it's a really powerful tool on those multiple layers not just For thinking through scenarios and and designing experiences and building products for our users But as Caitlyn said also for building teams that start to think in different ways and start to collaborate in different ways So there's a few different layers to this. It's multi-level And this I'm gonna point it at you now All right That's not it That's not it Yep Yes, that is it That is it So I think one of the things that we are ultimately trying to do right is we're trying to solve different types of problem And when you think about solving complex problems Here are some of the key issues that we think teams ultimately run into right a lot of times you'll get group think So teams will ultimately spend more time trying to find the common ground and talk about what we all believe and Share and have in common as opposed to imagining all of the ways in which we disagree We're all of the different components that we find interesting or the the pathways and scenarios that we could ultimately see our products our Features our innovation paths taking I think the other piece of this too is in any given culture and team You ultimately have a bit of hierarchy and hopefully organizations have been Been able to manage that hierarchy well, but at the same time How do you enable or ensure that every person from your entry-level design team all the way through to your CTO? share and contribute along a common pathway at The other thing that we think Dungeons and Dragons and ultimately collaborative storytelling helps us solve is this idea of reduction and oversimplification the the sort of desire to Take away the variables that we don't want to think about or the components that we ultimately feel like are too hard to manage or tackle And then finally loss aversion right the fact that sometimes as companies and teams we get too focused in on What's made us successful to date that we don't want to let that go and put that behind in order to move forward and evolve Right and so this is where we're starting to play around with Collaborative storytelling as a method to break us out of those types of traps But how do you know when you've reached success? Right, I think that that's a foundation of answering any problem right is acceptance criteria success criteria One of the ways in which we start to define success is Understanding the probability and magnitude of different types of scenarios. So how big or how small and How often or how unlikely are these different scenarios? Different scenarios gonna be in your world moving forward and that's important because that ultimately helps you to rank order your risks and Work to mitigate them. So as a part of scenario planning is that in part of this sort of narrative structure You're gonna start to see many different decision trees branch out in front of you, right? And you need to start to say is it worse for me to avoid hitting the tiny child or the group of adults, right as a self-driving car example and Once you start to order those risks, you're better able to actually start to attack them because things are prioritized But fundamentally you must remember that success can take many different forms That it's not just about a single outcome being defined as your success state But a wide variety right and that's gonna help you ensure that your users and your teams Don't fail catastrophically when they don't meet you at that one single point But that you've provided a range of different outcomes that allow them to be successful at the end of the day I think I'm rocky here. So if you haven't seen rocky by now, that's that's on you. Not on me I think this is a really great Reminder that success can take on many forms because how many how many people remember the outcome of the first or the First film the boxing match This is a young audience. All right. It's a great film Oscar winning So rocky doesn't actually win the fight but not many people remember that outcome because of the jubilation and the sense of Worth and success that rocky had at the end of the match it the outcome doesn't really matter who wins or loses the boxing match The fact was rocky had a bunch of obstacles and he overcame them and so he succeeded even though Everyone watching the match saw him lose split decision Okay into the real nerdy stuff now so We think that in order to solve problems you need a large variety of experiences So when my my party and I are going on adventures I've got some props here when we're going on adventures if Everyone looks the same as me and acts the same as me and thinks the same as me Then we're gonna get the same outcomes, right? It's gonna be hard to find the page with the mic. I Really like a quote here at the very start of this book. So who knows who's seen this before? It's the players handbook, right? If you're gonna play D&D don't worry enough to read the whole thing There's a condensed version that has like two pages of rules But this this tells you all the rules in how to play D&D from a player's perspective But one of the things I really like here is it says every character is different with various strengths and weaknesses So the best party of adventurers is one in which the characters complement each other and cover the weaknesses of their companions So if you're going on an adventure, which all our users are or all our design teams are If you're going on an adventure, you don't want lots of the same ways of thinking right if everyone's a giant barbarian then you've got Really one outcome anything you see you're gonna try and punch right whoever watched He-Man as a kid His solution was just to punch everything right that's that's all he could do but the characters We've got wizards they can cast spells. We might have a bard who's charming. We might have People who are gonna heal you or some people that are better at fighting undead characters It means that if the party is diverse and you have different ways of thinking then you can tackle different problems And you can approach problems in different ways. It just gives you a broader set of opportunities. I think it's really Dangerous for all of us to get into a room and start to think about what our customers want or our users want Because we're all kind of coming from a similar pathway, right? The fact that we ended up working at that company in that role at this time means that we've got a lot of stuff in common So let's mix the party up Let's add some add some barbarians and some wizards And one of the things that you can start to do in your teams is actually assign people different roles When it comes to problem-solving and you can be very intentionable Intentional about making sure that those different roles are sometimes aligned with or sometimes in Opposition of different people or roles on on a team or in a brainstorming Opportunity just to make sure that people are reinforcing different points of view as opposed to running towards What everybody agrees on and has in common? All right, everything we do there's rules, right? If you're building an application There's a certain pathway through that application There's rules that say if you go left and this happens if you go right then that happens, but the the best stories Sometimes unfold and with Dungeons and Dragons the only objective is to build the story You don't win it. You can't really lose at it Even if your character dies you can start another one or someone will raise you from the dead, right? It's not it's an ongoing process, but there are rules what I really like though is so the other the other prop I have for you is this book so if you're going to run the game Everyone's a player except for one person. Who's the dungeon master, right? It's their job to As as this book will tell you it's their job to adjudicate the rules But importantly page four right at the start of the book you adjudicate the rules But you also modify them where it's suitable for your campaign So we've got a set of rules if you stick to them you'll you'll you'll have a very linear Pathway if you start to manipulate those rules and start to tweak them a little bit throw out the ones that don't matter so much Or the ones that are not as applicable to you and your your environment or your situation Then you start to get some of the more unusual outcomes and it's the unusual outcomes that lead to better Experiences better product development better character development So as an example one of the exercises that our team likes to go through is for any given scenario or way that something might unfold We ask ourselves. How does this get better? How does this get worse and How does this ultimately get weird right? How did the dynamics change so drastically that none of the none of what we thought of that none of what we've planned for Actually come to pass and that helps us start to think outside of the box and move move beyond just what our expected outcome might be All right, so this this kind of ties back into the first point a little bit Right, it's very easy for me to behave and act as Matt Lambey. That's who I am That's what I've been doing my whole life But when I when I'm engaged in these kind of narratives and this storytelling I need to remind myself that I'm I'm supposed to behave as my character would So if I have a certain preference or some set some knowledge in the outside Well, but my character doesn't have that then I can't bring that into the game. I need to Be the character not the player and I think that's a really important lesson with this this narrative and Storytelling it's again very easy for me to act as me when I might be trying to represent a Four-year-old autistic child who's using our product or I might be trying to represent An aging businessman who doesn't spend enough time with his family I can't bring either of those to the the table if I'm playing as myself. I need to play as the character and This should feel fairly familiar to you anytime you've picked up a book or a comic Read a newspaper article or a story What the author is ultimately trying to get you to do is to jump into the shoes jump into the world Jump into the emotions and the feelings and the sets of experiences That these characters are actually having and what's beautiful in that experience as a reader is that enough? It enables you to go on that journey It enables you to feel all of those feelings with a bit of remove right So it enables you to talk about the best-case scenario and the worst without actually having to feel like you're going on the roller coaster That one might go on in real life Yeah, and we talk about alignment of characters and it varies between sort of good and bad Is it how you you make sure that the party is not just full of everyone who obeys the law? You know as we do here in Singapore everyone's got a certain type of alignment but the really interesting stuff happens when you throw a few bad guys in the mix as well and so when you're doing your Scenario planning or when you're starting to think about how people can use it Especially those that are coming at it from a security perspective You start thinking about how a bad guy might want to use this product or what they what their intentions might be What pathways are they going to traverse through your product? And so not just thinking about someone who's got good intentions all the time But maybe someone's got bad intentions or someone's trying to work against your intentions. How does that play out? Cool. So again so many ways in which things are not just black and white Again when you when you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, you don't ever really win the game. There's no truth to it There's no there's no failure if you're progressing if you're sort of to use a term You like if you're going to move the ball down the field then you're progressing the story And if you're progressing the story then you're succeeding and so I think that what's true for me and my character and The lens through which I view the world and the lens through which I operate Might not be true for someone else and so we bring these facts to the table But they're only a fact when viewed through the filter of my own lens and my interpretation And what's great is you can often run through exercises I know probably everybody has gone through a postmortem, right? Where after you go through an experience, maybe a sprint you ultimately talk about what worked well and what didn't go Well, so you can learn from it moving forward But if you ever actually try to pre-mortem or before you get into a scenario or before you get into an outcome You actually say let's talk about The time where this failed right and you run through what that might look like before you're even there And you give your person yourself the permission to imagine how these different events might unfold in a way That's not always as planned that might not always achieve the outcomes that you set forward But that also frees you up to think about problems from a different perspective Yeah, we ran through this the exact exercise that the Xcode retreat only a couple of weeks ago And it was jarring for Caitlyn to present us with the idea of okay So it was good while it lasted but now money smarts shut down. It's a failed business What happened and then we had to work backwards from that and and consider scenarios that would lead us down a pathway that nobody In that room wanted to consider It's a really powerful tool and gets you thinking in these different ways Which is ultimately what the storytelling and this narrative creation is supposed to do All right Critical fail critical hit. We're gonna get a little nerdy So chance gets introduced into the game through dice right most of you are familiar with a d6 It's a six-sided dice. It gives you the numbers one two three four five six But in D&D we have a whole variety of different dice. I got something that bag over there I don't know thought they might be useful probably not We have a four-sided dice Which gives you the numbers one through four and then it goes all the way up to a 20-sided dice Which gives you chance between one and 20 and there's a lot of variability in between there So at the very ends of the spectrum, we've got a one which is a critical fail And that means that if you're rolling a one what you tried to do You didn't just miss it by a little bit you didn't just you know trip over you you screwed up big time like big time And there's gonna be a catastrophic failure There's gonna be a catastrophic result Attached to that failure and equally if you hit and that what we call it a natural 20 So it's a 20 without any kind of modifiers to it if you hit a natural 20. That's a critical hit and Equally you get some pretty strong benefits from that. It might be you do additional damage It might be some kind of heroic feat occurs as a result of that but these are the extremes and I think it's important that we look at the extremes not just success and failure or Following a happy path through a product or through a project, but What does it mean to have a critical hit? What does extreme success with the product or with the experience look like and what does it? What's a critical fail? How do we recover from that? If we start to consider these extremes Then all these happy pathways through the middle that we're so used to progressing through and and planning for and designing for Then they become part of the spectrum rather than the the the world traverse path They just become one of 20 different options and why I really love the dice is it's a tool, right? Give yourself and your team's tools in order to explore these different scenarios, right? So say you're running down this narrative path. You're reimagining a different outcome a tool that you might employ could be as simple as saying to your collaborator zoom in Provide me more detail about what's happening in this moment or in this scenario, right? And that forces your collaborator to go one level deeper and to actually provide different levels of Input and output to a given situation or you could say zoom out zoom out and at that point in time You're asking them tell me about the ten thousand foot view What are the trends and conditions that are ultimately coming together in order to make this part of your story come to life, right? Simple tools like that can reframe how people are explaining the different narratives or scenarios that they're imagining All right, and like I said, there's no real end to this. I mean D&D was first created in 1974 People have had games that have been running since 1974 You'll often see it big sort of nerd conferences There's people in the corner playing the game these things It's like that long-running chess match that you sort of see as a bit of a trope. It's the same deal You kind of drop in you drop out. I don't think you ever really stop playing You might just take a pause from the game. We haven't had a session at Money Smart for probably six months now our dungeon master Got himself a girlfriend and now he doesn't have as much time She plays as well, but that's Still doesn't want to DM for us Doesn't really stop though, right? It's a continuous journey And I think when we're when we're looking at building products or experiences We think of it as having a start and a stop Maybe let you start from zero when then you progress through and you achieve you buy you transact you you you play the track Whatever it is, whatever the utilization of that product is But we don't think beyond that and we don't think before that and we don't think sideways of that So instead of viewing time as being this linear kind of you march forward through the product or through the process Start thinking of it as something that's a little bit more elastic something that you can kind of drop in off Drop in and drop out of something that maybe you might put down and pick up a little bit later What does it mean to come back to an application after six months? What does it mean to come back to to an app after ten years of not having used it? We and we see this now. We're at a point where applications like Facebook. I mean, it's been around for 20 years almost right There there are people that have not used it for the last ten years and they're going to come back to it at some point What does the product? What does the experience look like for those people? They've got giant gaps giant holes And I think that this is a really wonderful point that Matt makes because at the end of the day Customer experiences don't happen in isolation But thinking holistically about our consumer experience thinking about what happens before and ultimately after a consumer Engages with our product our service our feature our functionality can ultimately help us design a better Experience in situ Okay, so are you guys with us so far? Have we have we got you on our? Collaboratives storytelling bandwagon Maybe you're coming on an adventure with us. Yeah Okay Yes Awesome, thank you. You said that who is that? Yes. Yes So just to make sure I think we all need to acknowledge that there are layers of complexity that ultimately threaten to overwhelm us and in many Instances that's pushed us into a very reactive decision-making space right a lot of times our environments are actually designed to To take advantage of us in those moments of exhaustion when we're overwhelmed by the complexity But at the end of the day, we really think that collaborative storytelling Can really help us tackle some of those wicked problems that are ultimately threatening to consume our customers And on that just on this image here like this is this is my work colleagues. These are my friends This is something we actually practice like we play Dungeons and Dragons and there's a there's a a real subtle benefit that it took me a little while to kind of pick up on and once I did I really I really enjoyed it and that's During my day-to-day life at work there's a few people on the team that I interact with a lot and there's a lot of people that I don't interact with at all and It's not for any reason other than my job kind of steers me in one way around the table here We've got designers. We've got content writers. We've got technology people We've got a whole variety of different different roles within the organization and everyone's playing a different role in the party I got the opportunity to solve problems, which is ultimately what we're doing build story Bond legitimate real-world bonds with people that Ultimately mean a lot to me and it meant that the next day around the water cooler We were talking about the adventure that we had the previous night So I think Dungeons and Dragons as a tool for building teams and developing teams and growing teams is actually a another aspect that I Didn't want us to finish the speech or finish the talk without kind of highlighting If you get an opportunity to play it or to try it out. I'd really recommend it That's a great point because at the end of the day We think that this type of collaborative storytelling this narrative building and scenario planning is ultimately what helps us create these Environments that design for behavior change. Yes, but designed for behavior change in the positive and enable all of our users Our team members our collaborators to succeed rather than fail Catastrophically when they haven't hit our one designed or ideal outcome Room one. Okay. So then a couple of takeaways for you to leave this talk with one diversify your options Right Whether or not decisions black or white a or b decisions are more likely to end up in failed Outcomes than if you increase multiple different scenarios and versions of what might be true What could be true and what ultimately will come true moving forward? The presence of difference ultimately makes insiders more open to difference, right? And in this instance, I think diversity Trump's ability Diversify your teams diversify your skill sets Diversify the experiences that people come to the table with the expertise that they bring to bear on any given situation Because in doing so you're ultimately opening up the world of outcomes and potentials and you're making the world a lot bigger of a place You're creating more decision trees and pathways forward that your users and your businesses and ultimately your products and services can traverse I Think on that point just before we skip like the previous presentation with the hey Google Google Hey Google Did did any of the Google do you think that that user is represented by anybody that works at Google? And they got tens of thousands of employees, and I bet not one of them Looks or things like that user And our final thought I think is that evolution really happens at the margins, right? Don't constrain yourself to the mainstream Because that is the pathway that is well trodden Really look at the extremes of what's happening. What's out there the different scenarios to the critical fail or critical hit right that allow you to imagine different trajectory is not just incremental or marginal gains Thanks questions All right, where's Ben Bose Ben, where are you? This one's for you. Clap once if you're hungry Let's try that again clap once if you're hungry Clap twice if you really enjoyed that talk clap twice if you're really really hungry Okay, so we'll do an interesting Q&A session we have some great questions lined up The burning question of the room is can you share an example slash case study from your experience? whereby you've got a team to contribute Conflicting ideas avoided group think and built from there who asked this wonderful question Okay, gentlemen at the back So I'll give you a real-world example Matt alluded to a workshop that I held a couple of weeks ago And I think within that workshop what I did was assigned different people roles So that at the end of the day somebody was responsible for coming to the table with a perspective that is driven by their experience in Singapore another person was assigned a role based on their experience in Indonesia another in Hong Kong So you start to set up these in this instance We set up geography as a catalyst for Difference and different decision-making and priorities in order to say this is what's going to be valuable in our marketplace here in Singapore conversely What's here's what's valuable or important for our marketplace in Indonesia and as you might imagine the need states there We're quite conflicting and the Argument for priorities. We're quite conflicting So at the end of the day though it helped us to start to think about what different outcomes must be true in order for us to succeed in a Diverse region and a diverse set of market places given a single product or suite of products as an example Did that answer your question to an extent? Do you want do you want to follow that up if you want clarification? Let's do that Do a few teammates have an opposing view on how to approach a problem? So it's not about different problems. It's the same problem But there are two different approaches and you don't have enough data to substantiate anyone approach Is it more of a marginal call by the leader then or is it a let's go out with both of these test them out? And see where they said so how do you approach that scenario and how do you still keep people from? voicing their opinions when they strongly feel about them So that's a great question. I think at MoneySmart we have a Strongly held belief that we need to engage Disagree and then ultimately commit to the decisions that we make so that Engagement and disagreement is fundamental to our innovation process So is the commitment piece as well though because once you run through that disagreement and you come to a Consensus everybody needs to start sort of moving towards that north star. That's been decided but in your example I think we start to rely on the art of rhetoric bit So everybody is allowed to sort of make their case and make an argument and then vice versa I think what can be really helpful is ultimately asking people to switch sides So you and I have opposing points of view. You're gonna argue point a I'm gonna argue point B And then we're gonna flip and that actually causes you to empathize and walk through what is Valid in somebody else's argument What's helpful where there ultimately might be connectors where you find emotional resonance or where you see a company of strategic? assets contributing to a different solution and outcome and I think what starts to happen there is you Understand how different pathways might be valid or might be true Moving forward so that when you get to that commitment stage You're actually far more willing and ready to embrace somebody else's point of view as a tactic that we use That's a great great approach The next question I first want to give it to the room and then we'll push it to the speakers How many specialists in the room say hell yeah? What? Everybody's a generalist so a specialist would be like a subject matter expert right someone who it has a niche Set of knowledge on on a certain topic or a certain area while a generalist would be who likes to dab into a lot of things I am a very outspoken generalist I like to dab on a lot of things even in product development So who in the room is someone who is a generalist say hell yeah And who are these specialists say oh, yeah One more time generalist yeah And specialists oh Yeah, I will find you specialists And let's put it to Matt and Caitlin. Maybe you can say who you associate more with and why yeah, absolutely So I can even tie back to DND for you Um, I think at this point when I'm putting teams together I do tend to look more for specialists, but I think generalist play a very important role in those teams I think the generalist I often see is the glue that kind of combined a team together and the specialist is it gives you capacity to go deeper on on different different problems. So an example for this In the in the game I play a character. That's a fighter Pretty general term right we've got characters that are barbarians that are way stronger that are way bigger That are way more powerful, but as a fighter. I'm a bit of a generalist I've got some good combat skills. I got a little bit of magic But I'm not as strong in any one of those skills as Other characters or the other other characters in the game So I think again if you bring to the table only specialists then sometimes they can be a bit hard to corral And I think the generalists in my opinion can be really binding and can be the glue that keeps those teams together Again, I think a mix of everything is going to give you more capacity to solve more problems I tend to think about team structures and in the individuals that I'm looking to build out from a t-shaped perspective Does anybody familiar with the idea of t-shaped employees? Yeah So the idea being that when you are new into your career and you are in the process of developing your craft practice and discipline You are in the process of making your tea the long bar in your tea deep It is building out your benchmark or your bench of tools and Process and it is owning those tools and process that makes you very valuable and Sort of all-encompassing in your craft then as you start to get more senior I think you start to build out the horizontal bar in your tea So you start to get cross-discipline experience and understanding so that you start to have crossover with your Technology partners or your content partners or your product partners so that you can empathize and understand and and ultimately Start to contribute to their deliverables along the same sort of horizon again Know your craft practice and your discipline be confident and comfortable in that because that's ultimately The strength of what you bring to the table But also then to Matt's point about becoming glue make sure that you're building in those sticky arms so that you can Jump into and support any of your multidisciplinary team members Okay, so there was a great follow-up question Do you then promote the specialists or generalists to a management role? Who is this wonderful person? Because I think people who ask burning questions in the room are often very successful. Oh, can we can we see your beautiful face? There she is Okay. Yeah, so so my answer this is really simply yes Yes, we do promote specialists or generalists to a management role I don't think they need to be one or the other. I think that management You can have specialists that are capable in managing teams really well And you can have generalists that are capable of managing teams and we see this in technology I think more maybe than other disciplines Some of the the smartest most capable Technologists and not great at management And they might not have the people skills or they might not have the interests They want to just go very very deep. So I think the the The idea that we only promote people that are specialists or people that are generalists is It means you're missing out on on a large large potential for the rest of your team I mean maybe to throw it back. Do you think that only specialists or generalists should be managers? He's a tough presenter. Isn't he? Justify your question I Guess personally, I feel like generous generalists would would more necessarily be Work better in a manager role just because that they can see like the full spectrum of Who and what they're managing? But I could be wrong Yeah, you're not wrong. I'd argue that that's that's an approach and I think if we To sort of make a little matter if we if we only go down one pathway Then we'll get one set of results and one set of possibilities We've got teams at MoneySmart where the managers are Specialists and we've got teams where the managers are generalists and each team has the potential to succeed in different ways and each Each of the team members Get something different from from their managers I don't think it needs to be a cookie cutter approach across every team and different people will find managers in Technologies a great example where you might want someone who's a Specialist because the the management that you're requiring is is very technical You want more mentorship and if someone's got a deep knowledge on a specific topic Then they might be the better better suited to mentor you Amen, okay, let's take one more question from Slido. How can the MoneySmart team truly represent users if it's based on assumption Imagine what X would need I Have an answer to that So I think the the the to kind of lawyer the question here is the assumption so we have a team One person at the moment who who does a lot of great user research So I don't think we're actually having to make the assumptions I think we can we can rely on data to build personas and then you can put the hat of that persona and you can become Ian or Julia or Anna or Whoever whoever the persona is that we've built and so it's not just an assumption of imagine what they would do We've got really good data to support that this is what that that character is This is where they're at at their life. These are the decisions. They're making these are the the the assets and the Factors that are that are contributing to that decision-making process so I think if you are just making assumptions by saying imagine what that user would do then you're You're not doing the process justice You need to really be that that person in order to be that person need to understand the persona. I Couldn't agree with Matt more I think it's really about using data to springboard forward because at the end of the day what we're trying to do is Forecast where our consumer need is ultimately emerging right and we're trying to forecast where the marketplace is headed And what types of new technology will be able to use at our disposal in order to solve the problems that our customers have to Date and so from that perspective we're always anchoring in what's happening right now And what does that tell us in the dotted line of the future about the myriad outcomes or scenarios that we might ultimately face? Moving forward because at the end of the day if you're just too anchored in today Then you're solving the problems that are right in front of your face as opposed to solving the problems that you're gonna see Emerging tomorrow in the day after Awesome, okay on account of three to one. I want to see a hand if there's any question on the floor Otherwise we can all break for lunch three two We love you we love you. Yeah. Hi. My name is way man I play D&D and I have also facilitated the tabletop role-playing games Yeah, and let's give a round of applause for that And as a UX designer I always think about how I can modify the game mechanics to kind of solve product problems So what I want to know is how you have done it if you have done it And yeah, I would like to hear how you've done it. That'd be really interesting So was it how have we modified the game mechanics? Yes to solve a product problem like other players users What is the problem all of them are trying to solve? Yeah, things like that You've got one minute to answer this question Okay, um, so I think The the rules are there to guide you right and I think that the If we if we stick to the rules and we play a very strict game then as a as a dungeon master yourself It's a surefire way to get the players off site I think that there needs to be a real flexibility and there needs to be a sense of Ownership of the problem that that you're tackling with the with the users or with the with the players I think all too often Product teams or technology teams can see the users in this adversarial way And so I think the as in that they're trying to do something with our our products, but they're just too slow Stupid Whatever that whatever the problem is there's some kind of impediment there so I think one of the real things we can do is change this adversarial relationship that we have with our users and Realize that we're kind of sitting on the same side of the table as them right when you're a DM You're not trying to compete against the players. You're not trying to kill them You're not trying to ruin their day You're trying to enjoy a glass of wine and tell some stories together right and so I think the The teams in the real world can start to change their perspective and see that they're part of The users journey and that together they can create that story rather than it being adversarial I think that's a mindset change that I've kind of brought Is that resonating with anyone or am I just saying adversarial too many times? I Think I think that is resonating with everyone with the broad silence that we have everybody's hungry So we have a bunch of great talks lined up after lunch. So let's eat rejuvenate ourselves and be back in this room Thank you everyone