 In this episode, you're going to hear what's getting in the way and limiting how impactful design is in enterprise environments. And most importantly, what do you do about it? Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I am Tricia Wong, and this is the service design show Lucky Episode 123. Hi, I'm Mark, and welcome to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are the hidden things that make a huge difference between success and failure, all to help you design services that make a positive impact on people and business. The guest in this episode is Tricia Wong. She's a tech ethnographer living at the intersection of data design and digital, obsessed with discovering the unknown. She's the co-founder of Southern Compass, where they look for new ways to turn insight into action in a data-driven world. The reason I'm really excited to have Tricia on this show is that we're going to discuss how designers tend to get in their own way in enterprise environments, often without realizing it. We're going to look at anti-patterns and discuss alternative solutions to them. If you stick around until the end of the episode, you'll know why and how you can become more of a guide and less of a guru as a designer. If you've just discovered the service design show, welcome. We're at episode 123, almost five years in. We bring a new episode like this every two weeks. So if you enjoy these conversations, make sure to click that subscribe button and of course that bell icon so you'll be notified when a new episode drops. Before we jump into the chat with Tricia, I want to give you a quick heads up. There is some strong language in this episode. So if you're listening with your kids around, now would be a really good moment to put on those headset. Having said that, it's time to sit back, relax, and let the show begin. Welcome to the show, Tricia. Hey, thank you for inviting me. We finally did it. We finally did it. It took a while, but I'm happy to have you on the show. Tricia, for the people who are watching the video, they see some boxes. What's going on? Yeah, this is my Zoom background. In this Zoom background, what it's saying is that it's the mood for moving. So that's why I put it on. It's not actual real life. It's much better than those virtual backgrounds where you're on a beach. So I prefer this. Tricia, some people might have Googled you already and if they did, they probably came across one thing you're famous for on the internet. Can you give us a hint? What's that? Let me guess. Would it be thick data? Yes, and especially there's one video that got me really excited about also chatting with you. Yeah, would it be the TED Talk? And I just checked today 1.8 million views. So it's awesome. It's a really good talk. I recommend it to a lot of people. Check it out for yourself. I'm not going to give a spoiler. Tricia, I don't know. How long is the TED Talk ago? When did you do it? I think it was a couple of years ago in 2016. I introduced the concept of thick data. I think it was then? Yeah. And what do you do these days? I do the same thing that I was doing back then, which is my company, Set and Compass, we work with our clients to make sure that they're making decisions, using data in the most human-centric way that all of the things they do for building products, making marketing decisions, it starts with the understanding of people. And so we've developed a whole practice called Unlock Sprints that we teach. We've open sourced some of those things on Google, so anyone with Google Design, so anyone can download it. There'll be links in the show. But we're very much committed to open sourcing a lot of the tools that we design so that other people can use it. We don't want to keep that as our secret sauce. A lot of consultants are very protective of what they make. And we're like, no, we're here to open source it. And then what you pay for with us is you're paying for our expertise, our time to guide you through. Awesome. I'm happy that we are going to have this conversation on the show. I'm expecting some firework, as I said, based on the sort of the outline that you shared with me. But before we get into that, I want to do a 60-second rapid fire round with you that you haven't prepared for, because that would take away all the fun. So the goal is to answer these questions as quickly as possible. Are you ready? No. Let's do it. I hate these. Because it's never the answer you want to give, usually. We won't do a take two. So it has to be now, Trisha. So question number one is, what's always in your fridge? What's always in my fridge is oatley milk, because I love oatley. And I fell in love with oatley before anyone else in the world did. It comes from Lund, Skona, Southern part of Sweden, the best kind of oat milk ever. Got it. Noted. Which book are you reading, if any, at this moment? I am reading Barbara Smith's incredible book called Ain't Nobody Going... I forget the exact title. I'm going to butcher it, but you'll find it in the show notes. We'll add it to the show notes. Ain't Nobody Going to Let... Ain't Nobody Turn Me Around. Ain't Going to Let Nobody Turn Me Around. That's it. It's added to my read list. What superpower would you like to have? To melt people. Yeah. Okay. A note to that one. And this one, what did you want to become when you were a kid? What did I want to become when I was a kid? I remember I wanted to become an astronaut. Well, still possible with people like Elon Musk these days. I am an astronaut. I mean, that is the first line in my bio intent is that I use astronaut not eyes. I think that the earth of humans is just as exciting to explore as the surface of Mars. Human beings are the unknown. They are the last in final frontier. So if someone's going to figure out humans, you let me know. That can be a theme that we talk about today is that no machine can figure out human beings. We are truly the last and only frontier that is going to forever remain a mystery. Forget about AI. We have to use honor means. Final question. Do you recall your first encounter or memory of service design? Yes, I do. I remember very, very crisply. I was living in China, living in Wuhan, where I had a research center. And I remember for the first time I read Panthea Lee's incredible post on reboot design, which is one of the first service design firms that were she founded in order to change the way people design, to undo the long procurement process that's bureaucratic. She wrote this incredible blog post that said, what is service design? And I was like, I want to get to know this person. And her work is incredible. Follow her on Twitter. She really is one of the best writers out there on service design and who will talk about the ins and outs of it. And she showed 124. Got it. Well, 124 is already taken, but we've got many more to come in the future. Thanks for the tip. Awesome. I haven't heard this background story often. So Trisha, let's migrate into the theme of our conversation. And that's going to be the way you phrased it, is how to elevate design in an enterprise context, right? Correct. Yeah. And the thing that makes it interesting is that you have a take that service designers get in their own way of actually doing that. Now, we're going to reveal what it is and why you think that that's the case and what we can do about it. But first of all, I'm curious, what do you mean when you say moving design, elevating design in enterprise, and how did you come to value this topic? Well, as someone who didn't study design and as a consultant, what I see, what I saw happening as someone who was not formally trained in design, I think I was freed from all of the pretenses that designers often come in with hang-ups, you know, and like of what a formally trained designer should do. So I had no definition. To me, being a designer was always seeing the world from a new perspective, designing experiences. I didn't have a formal definition to say that design was only UX. Design was wireframing. Design only was mainly prototyping. Design was experimentation. It's like, to me, design is all of these things. Design isn't just innovation. Design is also looking at accounting, you know, and changing design is also the work that a CFO does. And so when I started consulting, you know, I always had a design mindset. Even though I wasn't formally trained, I've always worked around designers with designers to the point where I feel very comfortable saying that I'm a designer myself. And I have a design mindset. And when I started seeing as a consultant that I said, you know, I said, I want to become a consultant because, one, well, first it was very practical. I couldn't find a job. When I was on the job market, I wanted a position that would allow me to work with quantitative and qualitative data. I wanted to, you know, I didn't care about the title, but I was like, at least I want to be accountable for integrating that and making sure that whatever business question that, you know, is trying to be answered, whatever product is being designed, that these two things are being brought together. And I was always offered the position of like, you can be the head UX researcher, but it didn't involve quantitative data. There was no accountability to it. The data scientists were in another room. I didn't have any connections. I was just like, I can't deliver, you know. And so I started consulting and I said, where is the power? Where, if I want to design equality into systems, enterprises are big. And that's where a lot of decisions get made. And I think design has a humongous role in that. So take us back to the moment where you were in those positions and weren't able to make the impact or influence the decisions that you wanted to make. What happened there? So I would say that before I went into consulting, I was, I was working in research and I was at the research lab in Palo Alto for Nokia. And this is part of the theme of my TED Talk. So you'll, when you hear that, it's essentially me recounting what I failed to do, you know. And so I, I remember that I had, as a researcher, as an ethnographer, I essentially surfaced an insight. I surfaced data points and emerging insight about why the very thing that they thought their company would forever sell, which is feature phones and to the clients that they thought they would sell to, which is a low income people around the world. I told them that this would change, that they would want smartphones, that smartphones would be here to stay and that they're, that one day we'll have affordable smartphones. And I took a design mindset to that and that I was like, well, the design mindset means you come at things very openly, you know, and I had said, in order to, to iterate on this insight, I need to work with quantitative data and I want to be able to start prototyping what that future phone would look like, you know, what, what kind of features would serve this community that's not existing in current product right now. So there was a lot of things I wanted to do, but I remember I ran up, there wasn't a value for design within Nokia, it was a very engineering led company. And I remember I just got a lot of pushback from like, I could even find out where the designers were, what department they were in, I could even figure out who had the quantitative data from the marketing or from the analytics side of who I would talk to back then, it wasn't called data science yet. It was, you know, pre data science, but there were people who worked in analytics. And I just remembered that they didn't have, even though I was working in an innovation lab, they didn't have a design mindset to being open to the unknown and to create new realities. And I think that's the responsibility of a designer to always keep the company as close as possible to the people. And I, I failed and that you can say it's like I failed, but they just, they couldn't, they couldn't hear it, you know, and I couldn't find the right people to work with. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the story already resonates with a lot of people. I'm curious. Okay. So you get into the situation where you're not able to get the rest of the organization to follow along or to at least join you on this journey. At which moment did you feel like, okay, it's not them, it's me who's having the issue because that realization has to come in order to look for solutions. I mean, I think it's like, you know, when I say I failed, that's like putting it all on me on the individual. I don't think it's on me. I think it's institutional, it's infrastructural, we are in systems and so they're complicated. I think, but I did have to look at what you said was just like, okay, aside from all the institutional infrastructural problems, what can I do? What could I have done to make it better, right? To make it even easier or to try and do things differently? And I realized one of those things was that there was no shared language for talking about data to value qualitative data because their reaction to me was like, you're just an ethnographer, you were living in China for like 10 years on and off and all of a sudden you say there's a big change and you talked to like 20 people last few months, regardless of how, you know, they associated that number with a very lack, a lack of meaning or lack of understanding. It was just like, but there was no shared language to be like, well, actually I spent hundreds of hours and you can't even translate that to like a data, a quantitative data point because I have really deep understanding and I just didn't even have that language to and then people didn't even know what qualitative data was. They didn't even know what it meant when I was like, let's design with qual and quant or like they just didn't appreciate it. A lot of people didn't know what ethnography was, qualitative interviews, UX research, these are all newer terms. More people do know it now because there's established departments in the field, but you have to imagine 10 years ago, no one, like people still didn't know what UX was, the service design was, totally new fields, right? And so I was just like, I'm not here to invent a new field, qualitative research is the thing, market research is the thing, you know, people who do this work, ethnography, anthropologists within corporations, that's the thing. But what I can do is create new language to make it really easy and make it so sexy so that data scientists and engineers and business decision makers can understand within 30 seconds what I'm talking about when I say you need to integrate qualitative and like just as, and value it just as much as numbers. And so I remember that was a moment where I'm like, I want to introduce new, a new conceptual framework and new language to the world for everybody to use. And that's what I love. It's like I introduced, and that's how I came up with the concept of thick data, you know, because it's like everyone by then was saying like, big data is so big and like they're obsessing over it. So I was like, you know what, if your data is big, then my data is thick, you know, we'll just talk about it. And it's like, and you don't compare it's apples to oranges, we can value it and they they both offer different things. But now it's like I can pitch it and make it sound just as sexy as big data. And that helps that that term has caught on. So and it's caught on where it's disconnected from me. I just want to say like it's really important for people to know that as a movement designer, I am not attached to the term thick data anymore. And that to me was always success. That was what I said from the beginning, KPI is that I will be successful people don't always cite me that there are going to be like jobs for thick data capabilities, thick data scientists. And I see that out there. Now I talk to people and they don't even know I'm the one who came up with the term. And I'm like, that's awesome. So a lot has to do with language about a lot has to do about creating common common ground, building bridges. I think that's what we should be really good at as designers. But the way another sexy phrase or word that you introduced to buy language was anti patterns. Right. And we I didn't make that up. That's like sure. No, okay, that's fair enough. And I'm patterns have been known for quite a while. But anti patterns in the way that service designers or designers in the non traditional design space have developed for themselves to prevent them from actually becoming more impactful within organizations, right? And how did you come to observe these anti patterns before we dive into very specific ones? So, you know, through our consulting practices that encompass we get brought in to coach a lot of designers to elevate their practice, to elevate the work. And it's not that like they're not doing amazing work. It's not we're never usually we're rarely ever teaching people how to do better design or how to teach better research. Actually, I would say 100%. That is not our work. What our job is as consultants, you know, at certain compass is we're teaching people how to communicate the work. That is the problem. Designers are always like, you know, they're stuck in their own heads, because you're, you're designing, you're making stuff, you know, and you're creative. And that's incredible. But when you get put into an enterprise environment, you have to somehow balance your soul as a designer, which is to create things and like live in your mind and like create these new kind of landscapes and features and products to an enterprise setting, you actually have to collaborate and it doesn't work in that old way when you were working as an agency or on your own. Yeah, it all comes down to communication and collaboration. That's a whole different set of skills that I don't think that designers are taught. And that's where I see the anti patterns coming up of getting in their own way. Amen. There's a reason why I started a course called selling service design with confidence to bridge that gap between designers and business people. And I think. Yeah, you know this work more than anyone, right? You've been, you've been teaching this. Yeah. And I guess the, oh, it slipped my mind, but you mentioned something. Gosh, it sometimes happens in these conversations. I think we're going to share a really interesting wake up call because I would like to invite you to share one of those anti patterns, which I think you're deeply passionate about. And yeah, tell us more. So one of the anti patterns, you know, one of our goal is to see that, that I think in order to elevate the role of design with an enterprise, designers have to stop being obsessed with being the gurus and always designing the bridge. What do you mean with being gurus? Let's unpack that. What is that? I mean, I think designers used to being like, I made this thing. What do you think? Like I did it, you know, and I came up with the idea. You told me a problem and I'm here to solve it. That is what designers are trained to do. Give a designer a problem and they will come up with a solution. But I think designers have to move from like, you know, using your metaphor of like, you're not, you're not just building the bridge anymore when you have to work in an enterprise setting. And I'm just talking about enterprise settings. I'm not talking about designers in the wild who work on their own who are agencies and blah, blah. I'm talking about in an enterprise setting, you have to move from being the one who designs the bridge to being the one who helps people conceive of what is that linking point between two gaps? It may not even be a bridge. It may be something else completely. It may be an airplane. It may be a supersonic, you know, atomic zapper. I mean, my point is, is that like in order to get to that idea, though, you would have to sell it in and you have to guide people to that. And so your role becomes more of a guide to get people to imagine the unknown, to imagine new, new futures. And that's why the designer has to be so close to the customer, to reality. And I think there's many anti-patterns that get in the way for designers to do that kind of work. And it's anti-patterns that are created through education, through habits, through the things that we read on medium, right? We're in that bubble and we need outside in perspective to show us that these are actually anti-patterns. Let's dive into one. Do you have an example? What is an anti-pattern? Yeah, so in order, well, before I get into the actual annotator, I want to explain what it means to move from a guru to a guide, because I don't want to obsess over the anti-pattern because it's just like a symptom, you know? But in order to move from being a guru to a guide, I want to give some examples. You're not just designing the product, but you're helping shape and conceive of the product and guiding people to it, right? Whereas traditional design is all about just using qualitative data. And I think to shift in an enterprise setting, because it's so numbers-driven, because it's all about KPIs and metrics, you have to get more comfortable with integrating qualitative and quantitative and working on that from day one. I think designers have to stop being used to always having to give the answers and coming to meetings, asking questions, and guiding their PMs, guiding their business decision makers to what that future bridge or thing would look like. And I think those are the kind of shifts that need to be made, and just the mindset just changes because you're no longer being precious about what you make, you're moving into a more iterative way of working. So let's make an assumption here. The reason why it's not happening is that a lot of the self-identity and ego of designers is tied to the things they create. And though it's really scary to let go of that being in God mode, as you will, to create and come up with the solutions, is that one of the reasons why it's holding us back? I mean, I would say so, being a whole new way of working means that you're no longer the center and it feels like you're giving up power, but actually you're augmenting your power to bring people together to design something better for the customer. And so this is why it's so important that the designer moves to the role of creating new perspectives and not just bringing their perspective. Exactly. Yeah. And it's so scary at first because you start to sort of think, what's my value? What's the thing I'm adding by just asking questions or guiding people or showing the process, but you just have to go through it and experience it. And then that's the only way to get over it, right? That's at least how I've experienced it. But it's super scary at the start. It is. And like, so, like, you know, one example of an opponent, when I really wanted to talk about today that I've like just, it's just been like a thorn, you know, where I'm like, I want to address this in what I've been interviewing people about is the anti-pattern. I'm going to say the word and I'm probably going to get like a million letters of hate mail, you know, of emails, but it's the hell might we, the how might we and you'll see it often spelled. It's so known that it's now just HMW that any designer knows any innovation department function knows what you mean when you write HMW, right? And it's the hell might we and it is, I think is one of the worst anti-patterns. What is your beef with how might we? Okay. I don't, and I want to be clear, I don't have a beef with the how might we itself because I think in its original purpose, it is still very useful. And I still use it sometimes, you know, when appropriate. And its original purpose, it was just to open up people to new ways of thinking so they weren't just stuck and especially to open up non designers. That's a very useful starting question. My beef is how it's used. It's currently used and so misunderstood and so overly used. And by who use, my beef is also with who uses it. So let's just tackle those two things separately. I will go first. First, I will tackle the, the who let's tackle who uses it. No, no, let's talk about, no, no, how it's used first. And then we'll go how it is, how it is often used because in its original use, it was just to open up people to, you know, new ideas. The way I see it used now is that leaders are weaponizing the how might we just to push their ideas through. And for example, you know, I, I also see people just seeing like they end the presentations on how might we like when you have nothing else better to say, they'll just end like what the, what the slide on how might we, and I'm like, are you joking? Like how is a business decision maker or a product, you know, manager supposed to do something with your how might we, you need to give actionable steps, but were you just too lazy to think through or did you just get tired and I get it, you know, and, and, and so that's oftentimes I see that how might we being used, or you see that how might we just being restated, you know, where it's like a group is figuring out how to design an app and you see how might we being like, so how might we design a new app? And it's like, why are you using that? Like it's just like literally a restatement of the question. And, and so I think this gets back down to like, the how might we is just so overused. And part of the issue is I think who is using it? You know, the who is we really have to examine who was the we and the how might we. And typically, when you look at the we, it is usually a bunch of a very homogenous group of people in a room. It's mostly upper class middle upper class, oftentimes white or Asian people in a room and they assume they automatically assume that the we refers to them. So I'm going to interrupt. Yeah, I'm going to interrupt you here because that's one of the things that I realized when preparing for this conversation. The the we doesn't reflect the the end user we're designing for it actually reflects we the people in the room. And in that sense, it's not user centered at all. It's me centered. It is we centered. Yes, the people in the room, not the people outside of the room. Yeah. And what it creates is this fake sense of empathy, right? Because it's like, oh, we asked to how might we so we feel so good, you know, we're actually thinking how might we, you know, like I've seen it be used for like a group literally asked how might we reduce poverty in this part of the country. And it's like, you people who have never experienced poverty, or if you did, you're so disconnected from it, that like, how would you know the assumption and it just creates this narcissistic way of working. You know, I don't want to shame people for it. But I think it's just like, that's why I think it's an anti pattern. I think a lot of people when I talk to them about they're horrified. They're like, you're right. I actually didn't realize I was using how might we that way. It's like a tick for designers, you know. So to which extent is is it just semantics versus if people are doing this from the right perspective or right intention, like, does it really matter how we phrase it? Well, here's the thing. I mean, I talked to a Veta Samson about this, and she was like, a Veta is a black woman. And she was like, I love that out my way. She was like, I use it. And I don't she's like, when I say the we, I don't think it's me, you know, or the people in the room. But you see, she comes at it with that mindset. So it's not just semantics. It's like, how do your what is your interpretation, the context of the we. And I think it's of no surprise or coincidence that Veta being a black woman who has had a diversity of experiences, you know, of racism, of sexism, that she obviously would never be presumptuous enough to think that the we is just her to figure out all solutions. She has a more inclusive sense of the we. And that's the that's sort of the wake up call, I think in this conversation that if you haven't thought about who the we is, then now would be really a good moment to start doing that or to ditch the we in general, in this case. Yeah, I mean, I just think it's like I was saying it's like, it's like a drug addiction, you know, and it's like, it's not your fault. You were taught this drug from a very young age of your design career. And so it's okay. I just want to point it out that it's like, you're participating in something that is a larger project of expression of colonialism of, you know, of of where you assume of like even America's way of like spreading democracy. It's like, we assume in this very Western-centric way that we have the answers and we know better. And we're going to fix your government, we're going to fix your company, we're going to fix your product. I think it's all part of the expression, the same issue that you think you can solve it all without without actually talking and understanding that people who are expecting these things. So let's, let's start this back to the first topic we started with. And that is elevating design in enterprise context. We went from killing the how might we, because we want to be more guides, less gurus, and that that helps us to find a stronger voice in an enterprise context or how would you sort of connect the dots? Well, how I connected dots is, look, you know, in an enterprise context, it's even more complex because you have more users, you and a company, you have a product that serves way more people. So you have to be that more attentive to who is the we in the room and who is the we outside? Who are you addressing? Who has the right to say that they represent the voice of the customer? And what a guide does is they would never say, I am the voice of the customer. A guru would say that they would say, I've talked to the customer, I've done X studies and I'm the guru, you know, you have PMs who say that you have UX researchers who say they fight to represent the voice of the customer. And I get that because after you spend a lot of time with customers, you realize you want to like stand up for them and defend them and be like, no, no, no, what you're doing is all wrong because I talked to the customer. That was real time. I spoke to real humans. But what a guide would say is, let me enable you to understand the voice of the customer as a guide. I'm here to bring all of you on the journey so that we can all understand the voice of the customer because that's going to speed up the design process and the product development, you know, timeline. That's what a guide would say. They don't try to own the voice of the customer. Got it. So what have you found to be a viable alternative for the how might we? Yes. Well, my thing is like every time you want to just use the how might we just be like, what I would advise that you just do is just all you have to ask is who should we, WSW and why are we WAW, you know, and those things will help you like even if you do the how might we then you'll start to answer like, well, why should we do this? You know, why are we taking this approach? I mean, that's why I think you are then using the we explicitly. It's like, we are pointing to the we, why should we take this path when it comes to design? Why should we? Why should we take this path and design? Why should we choose this timeline right or choose this option? And then the why are we it forces you to answer why are we pursuing this? Why are we doing this? And so in these two cases, the we is pointing to the people in the room. Got it. And then and then there's another one where I always say who else, you know, you should ask yourself, who should we talk to? You know, who else should be in these conversations that will force you out of it? So that way, it's not just like, you know, us in the room of the why are we and why should we, but it's like, who else should we be talking to? There's all these like little plays on it. And I'm not like trying to say, you know, if you only if you don't say these things, you're screwed. But my whole point is just to say, I want you to be intentional about when you're thinking about the we and to be intentional about about bringing other people into other customers and users or, you know, cross functional partners process. Yeah, creating awareness around this, because if you don't, like you said, it creates maybe a false sense of empathy that creates when you own the voice of the customer, it's an us, us against them, you as a designer versus the other people in the room. There are a lot of negative consequences of having dead stands. Yeah. So yeah, go ahead. And I think like a lot of people have been wrong about this is not just me who are talking or critiquing about the problems with empathy. You know, Panthea Lee has a really great essay about this. Darren, who's own wrote design thinking is a rebrand for white supremacy. You have Bruce, you know, no spams design thinking is a failed experiment. So and then you also have, you know, design thinking is kind of like syphilis. You have all these critiques, but I think like, and I think that's all important, but I think all of these critiques of what they're, what the hell might we as part of this problem, you know, that they're all trying to point out, which is why is design thinking so not willing to admit that it is lax diversity? Why is it the designers who claim to represent people's voices are so not willing to look at themselves? And I think these kind of anti patterns are, are the things that get in their way. And this is why I'm looking to organizations like project ink block that really talk about diversity and design, or you have Antenoy Carroll's, you know, creative reaction lab where they have their very famous and popular webinar called how traditional design thinking protects white supremacy. We need to have more conversations like this and have real conversations about how the very tools that we thought were near and dear to designers perhaps could be getting in our way and that we have to look at them and use them, use them with more awareness. Wow. A lot of people, I think, will be listening and sort of there will be a voice in their head saying, but I know I'm doing this from the right intentions. I want to do good for the user. It's like, it's coming from a good place, I think, with a lot of service designers, at least the people who I meet. Like, what would you say to them? I would say that good and bad is a false binary and that a lot of murders have been committed in the name of goodness. People spreading democracy, colonialism, hundreds of years of empire building was all done in the name of saving people. So I would advise us to get out of the good and bad binary and say that's like, it's not, I mean, your intention is great that it was good, but what I want you to look at is it's not, this is not about shaming you, you know? Like, I don't think that you should be like getting me to acknowledge that you are a good person and you did this with good intention. That's not that you don't don't search for. I think designers want to be like, did I do a good job? And it's like, don't search for that. It's like, you assess yourself, like, did you do your best? And part of that is developing an awareness and muscle for assessing what kind, you know, something you've talked, you know, I've talked about this slide. It's like, what do your networks look like? Who are you, the people you're inviting in the room? I don't care how good you've tried to be, you know, that's awesome. But now if you want to build together, let's like, let's like plan, like let's fucking do shit together and let's like disrupt the status quo. And you mentioned, let's do shit together. You have some tools, some solutions, some ideas of what doing shit together could mean. Could you share a few of them? Yeah, so we have, there's three things I want to share that I think like to, you know, one is we've developed this, my business partner, Matt LeMay, who is a well known product manager and leader in the space, developed a tool, it came out of, actually, he developed this tool for himself and for us, it's called One Hour One Page. And it's a website, One Hour One Page.com, and you can go sign the One Hour One Page manifesto. But what it means when you sign the manifesto is that you pledged to not, that you promised to spend no more than one hour or one page before you share something out. This is such a simple thing that changes how teams work. And we did it for ourselves, because we were like, I was like, I think, I think one time I was like, Matt, why did you work on this deck for so many hours? And you didn't check it in with me earlier, because now I'm giving you critique, you're going to think that I know you're probably going to be a bit precious and attached to what you did, reasonably so, because you spent like freaking 20 hours on it. And he would give me the same critique and be like, blah, blah, Trisha, I don't think this works. And I'm like, but I spent a week on it. Don't you see? And I designed this deck. And it's like, well, he's like, why don't you just talk to me earlier. So we're like, you know what, we're going to have a tool called One Hour One Page. You can do the work, but you have to share it. You have to be okay with sharing that. And so now we make all of our partners sign this tool called One Hour One Page. Whenever we work with someone, and we say anyone in the world can sign this pledge, and it will, I 100% million promise to you it will change the way you work with yourself, with your life is that when you are forced to share unfinished work, you cannot put yourself at the center. You cannot be precious about it anymore. And you're going to be so much more open to feedback. So it's these little tactical kind of hacks that make it real when I'm like, don't put yourself at the center. Well, what are you going to do with that advice? It's like, how do I fucking un-center myself? So I'm like, you know what, One Hour One Page it, that's how you're going to un-center yourself, you know, just do that and it'll change everything. So that's one thing I hope you can try it, Marc, and like tell your students and everyone in your world about it, because you're, you know, you're so influential and people to you. Well, I wouldn't say that. But what this does for me is we talk a lot about the shitty first draft, but then still people find it really hard to what is a shitty first draft, you know, even after 20 hours, you can say, yeah, this is my shitty first draft, I can spend another 80 hours on this. But forcing somebody to just deliver work in an hour is or in One Page. Awesome. Like you said, it's sort of, we don't talk enough about it in the design space, but it's these small tactical nuances that make a huge difference in practice. And I think we sort of skim over them because, yeah, whatever, it's just one hour, one page. But these are the things that actually make a huge impact. So yeah, you do. And now when you say all you have to do is people send, I did a one hour one page, here it is. It's no more, oh, it's just a draft. I only spent a week on it. So, you know, whatever feedback I'm open to, but really you don't want to hear the fucking feedback. And so now there's no more disclaimers. It's just like, here's a one hour one page. Let me know what you think. Send it back to me after you do your one hour one page. And then we just go back and forth. Got it. That's collaboration. You had two more. So let's go. Oh yeah. So the other tool that we have is called changing the business question to human question. And that's the first step in our unlock sprints, which is teaching people how to communicate insights. And so like I said, any of these tools we create is never about teaching you how to do research or how to learn about customers or how to do design. It's always how do you communicate and collaborate. And all it is, so the business question to human question is, we say every time, make sure before you start a project, you always know for the client or for your team what the business question is and then shift that to a human question so that you never abandoned the business question, but you also never abandoned the human question you have things side by side. For example, one client would be like, one example was like, you know, how do we improve, increase 50% of subscribers to moving from freemium to premium? And I'm like, what the fuck that's not inspiring, but that's a real legitimate business question. You know, the business team needs to fucking make that happen. That's important for their stock prices is more for their shareholders important for their employees. So what are you going to do with that as a designer? It's not very inspiring, right? And so a human question could be like, if you, you know, let's just say the app was about playing like teaching people how to cook, right, from freemium to premium plant. You might just be like the human question is, you know, what makes people want to cook more? What makes people want to pay for a service that they used to, that they'd love was free? What makes people, you know, want to spend time together? It might not even be about cooking or the apps, you know? And so we have this all up online. We've open sourced many of our hacks, our tools, and they're all with Google design. We have a partnership with them where part of their work is featuring a lot of our sprints, a lot of our hacks that we've made up through the unlock sprints. Because again, we believe that we've made this stuff up, but we want people to use it. And if you want to bring us in, we're here to teach you how to do it better so you can communicate better. But we don't want to be the blocker, like use these things, start it, now out of us. Run with them. Yeah, yeah. Run with them. Yeah. And the third thing is it's almost like it's not a tool. It's literally just like, you need to start getting comfortable with coming, showing up with unfinished work. And when I read that, I was immediately thinking about a book by, I think it's Austin Clee and Wright, show your work, who literally says, share everything you do and make the process super transparent. I think we sort of try to communicate that, but it's really hard to live by once you get attached to the stuff you create. Heading towards the end. How would you recap the last, what is it, 45 minutes? What is the summary? Oh, you're putting it back on me. This is very hard. I know. I would say the summary. Let me make it easier for you. If people remember one thing from this conversation, what do you hope it is? You're not the guru. You are the guide. You're not the guru. You are the guide. It's not about you. I think great designers know how to make it not about themselves. They make it about the customer and they enable other people to understand the customer. When people want to send you fan mail or hate mail or learn more about your work and all the things we've mentioned here, how can they reach out? Is there a way to reach out? Yeah. I have a website, trishowong.com. They can DM me on Twitter. My DMs are open as long as I don't get too high of a flood of hate mail and racist mail these days. It's not easy, especially with all the attacks on anti-Asian attacks in the US, but I'm very easy to reach and I would love to know what you're doing, what you're replacing with, how you've iterated on it, on the who else should we bring in or why should we? I want to know what else you're doing to make design more diverse and to de-center yourselves. Awesome. I would love to know as well. It would be good to expand our vocabulary, expand our question vocabulary to, like you said, make design more inclusive. It's definitely a topic that I haven't spent enough time and energy and attention on. I'm happy that people like you are raising awareness to this. Also, for me, I will do my best to have more people on the show around this. That's awesome. I can't wait to give recommendations. Wow. That was quite a conversation. I'm really curious. What is your most important takeaway from this chat? Leave a comment down below, answer Trisha's question. Let's continue the conversation over there. And if you made it all the way here, I'm guessing that you're enjoying chats like this. If you want to stay up to date when new episodes come out, make sure to click that subscribe button if you haven't done so already. Thanks a lot for watching. I'm looking forward to see you in the next video.