 As a service design professional, it's often asked from you to lead the path forward into a better future. But being in a leadership position, whether formal or informal, can bring a lot of pressure and feel very isolated. It doesn't have to be that way. In this episode, you'll learn how you can make leadership more collaborative, effective and fun again. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Kia ora, I'm Amelia Diggle. This is the Service Design Show, episode 188. Hi, my name is Mark Fontijn and welcome back to The Service Design Show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden and invisible things that make all the difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet? Our guest in this episode is Amelia Diggle. As you'll hear, Amelia is a jack of many trades. Amongst being the CX and Service Design Manager at Verizon Connect in New Zealand, she's also an entrepreneur who runs her own jewelry business. The reason I'm excited to have Amelia on the show with us today is because we're going to address a vital topic to service design. How to be better leaders within traditional top-down leadership styles. There's one person who rises above the rest and needs to call all the shots. This creates a lot of pressure on a single individual to make the correct decisions. If you think about it, the challenges our organizations face these days are so complex that it's impossible and unhealthy for a single individual to carry this burden. Now, I have a question for you. What would happen if we took a lesson or two from service design and apply that to leadership? As service design professionals, we create prototypes. We share our work early on after. We create progress through co-creation. Unfortunately, these qualities haven't yet made their way into mainstream leadership. And according to Amelia, that's a shame. They aren't just a way to make smarter decisions in our complex world. They are also a way to make leadership a more collaborative and less lonely endeavor. So in this episode, we're going to explore how you can use the powers of design to drive positive change effectively. If you stick around till the end with us, you'll have learned why listening deeply is a key leadership skill. About the importance of mindfulness and that you already can lead by example, even if you don't have a formal leadership role in your organization. That about wraps it up for my intro. Now it's time to sit back, relax and let's jump into the conversation with Amelia Diggle. Welcome to the show, Amelia. Hi, Mark. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to have you on. I've been on a streak with some New Zealand service design professionals and you're also one of them, which is very exciting. I'm happy that I'm finally able to sort of explore the rich world of service design in the more sudden hemisphere of our planet. Amelia, one of the first questions that I always start with is to understand a little bit about you and what you do these days. So could you give us a brief introduction? So I'm Amelia Diggle and I currently work at Verizon Connect, which is actually a global, well, it's an American based telco. A lot of the American folks will probably know that name, the household name, but for the rest of the world, it's a telco. And Verizon Connect is kind of like a little side experiment, a very big one, where they bought a whole lot of telematics companies that do vehicle tracking software. So I think internet of things and think trucking, long haul driving and any kind of companies that have remote workers, we help them be efficient, be safer, compliant, and also sustainable, I guess. At the end of the day, it's about reducing fuel emissions. And I manage the service design team, which is a global team helping connect the customer and the employee experience and all the systems and tools that we have within the company. So it's great fun. Got a background in industrial design and user experience design. And I've played with startups and all sorts of sizes of businesses over my career. So I feel I've had a little bit of an intrapreneur within the business as well. Cool. That sounds like an interesting context to be in. I'm sure we'll discuss that a bit more in the coming minutes. The other question that I always ask, which has become a tradition on the show, is do you recall your first moment that you learned about service design? I don't think there was a moment. I think it was more like I slowly realized that was what I did and reading the systems design book and reading several books, I realized, oh, this is how I think this is what I do at work. And it was just lovely to have a name for it. Because back when I was studying, there was no degrees for service design, let alone UX down in this part of the world. So I think it was just I was always interested in how the holistic ecosystem of businesses fitted together. Yeah. And then eventually, maybe five, eight years ago, realized there's a name for that, which was pretty cool and handy. So yeah, not that long ago, but I've been working in that way since I left university, I think. Yeah. Well, awesome. I think a lot of people work in a service design way without knowing that there's a label and a community in a field for it. So cool. Well, yeah, we have a rapid fire lightning around five questions. We've spiced them up. There are a bit different. You haven't heard these because I don't think an episode has appeared with these new questions yet. First thing that comes to your mind and we won't dive deeper into it. This is just to get to know you a bit better as a person next to their professional. Are you ready? I'm ready. All right. So the goal is to finish these sentences. The first sentence is sometimes, no, something that always makes me smile. Surfing. And the next one is if I had unlimited resources, I would become Prime Minister of New Zealand and give everybody free therapy and mental health. Okay. Finish the next one. The most important quality in a friend is Oh, openness. The best part of my day is or when Working with my team. And the fifth and final one. The world needs more openness. I'm seeing a pattern recur here or emerge. Thank you for that. There was a very successful lightning round. If you ask me, short and brief answers exactly how we needed. The topic of today and when we were preparing it, you phrased it as or framed it as that design has to lead or has the opportunity to lead a shift in a leadership to be more collaborative. Is that correct? Yeah, I guess it's a spin on the servant leadership, but maybe taking that a little bit more to be more sort of partnership collaborative rather than full servant mode, maybe. So there are two, there are two aspects to this. One is the design part and why design specifically is in a position to do this. According to you. And the other part is your sort of statement, believe that leadership needs to be more collaborative. Let's explore them both. Let's start with the leadership aspect. How does it need, how does it need to be more collaborative compared to the situation it is right now? Well, I think a lot, I've heard a lot of leaders saying, you know, it's lonely at the top or like, we've sort of seen cultures of leadership being about having power over people. Which isn't, I think where the world is going, we can't do things like come up with sustainable environmentally complex solutions without being collaborative. So I think we need it to solve some of the more wicked complex problems that design can help with, well, that businesses can solve. And I think for leaders on a mental health personal level, they still need teams and they still need partners and people to work with. I've heard so many startup leaders saying it's really lonely, it's a lonely road or thinking that leadership has to be lonely. I think it can be a collaborative team effort and probably a lot more fun and bringing a lot more diversity and innovation to leadership as well rather than feeling like they have to follow some old school rulebook. So really loving the need for leadership being with people rather than over people is probably the mindset. Is that the mindset? Like where do you, I'm curious, where are we seeing that style of leadership and isn't leadership already quite collaborative? I think it's getting better, but I think in some of these potentially, I think it's just, there's still a lot of different cultural styles within businesses and we're slowly shaking off some of the older ones that aren't potentially serving us and particularly post COVID with people and working online. A lot of people working remotely now and we've continued to work online, I think. Yeah, I think it's really time and we've sort of created the environment and conditions for leaders to just really work more together and collaborate more to achieve the things we need to and we've had to really, it was a real challenge during COVID and I think we've figured out a lot more how to do it as well. Now let's explore the design aspect. So you feel that design is in a good place to help accelerate this path towards collaboration. What makes you think or feel that design is in that position? Well, I think we're really good at bringing people together and holding space for tough conversations, for alignment, for diverse groups to co-design complex things together. Like we're the ones that have been practicing and figuring that out for many years. I think now with design moving up and having more influence within businesses and getting more CXOs and more design leaders within the C-suite. Keep those skills going. Keep the collaboration happening just because you're moving up in the business. I don't think we have to lose the workshopping and the co-creation. It'll probably look different, but I think we've got this phenomenal set of skills to bring people together and keep playing with what that could look like at a leadership level. I'm hoping that you can take me back to the moment where you sort of started to feel the itch to address this topic because not everybody is probably as excited about leadership and collaboration and design as you are. So what did you experience that put you on this track? I think several of the bigger companies I've worked, the goals always been with design to have more influence. And through working with several coaches and mentors and incredible leaders over the time, I've seen lots of different approaches and techniques. And it feels like that's kind of our underlying mission is to have more influence in the business. But we often tend to come at that with like a frustration rather than a kind of a more open, okay, I'm here, I'll roll up my sleeves, I'll get to know these people, I'll give them a gift, I'll work with them and help them and earn my trust and build relationships. So I think it's been slowly over the last few years. I'm sorry, there isn't these like magical moments. I think it's just so many things add up. And then you eventually realise we've got a huge opportunity to be these leaders and come and approach things differently and bring our design thinking skills, our visual communication skills to help bring people together. And we do and I've seen it happen in several places I've worked. We've got this incredibly powerful set of skills to visualise things and visualise things that the business needs to make decisions on. And it's a real gift. And I think that maybe that's the visualising of critical decisions for businesses. Yeah, we can do that and we can bring these people together to figure out. Okay. So we're in the design process and as design professionals collaborate all the time, we believe in co-creation, that adds value. And if I'm hearing you correctly, you're seeing that as people move up in the organisation of food chain, collaboration becomes the less of a priority and it becomes, like you said, more lonely, correct? So far so good? Yeah, I've seen people be scared to run big workshops because it is costly. And when you're trying to include more senior managers or more senior leaders in workshops, it's even more costly when you look at it as a time cost. But I think that's where it's almost needed even more to have that alignment at that level. It creates the environment for everybody else working on the projects and programmes to know that this leader is explaining it in that way and they're also explaining it in a different way or we are all working towards this future vision or we are all trying to solve this problem or this is the focus area at the moment. Like without that, it creates tensions and not very nice and working environments for everybody to sort of try and navigate through. And everyone's got the best intentions, but without that kind of leadership alignment and leadership, yeah, the debate at that level in a healthy way, it doesn't set a good tone for the debates and discussions that do go on in the teams if they're not aligned. Yeah. Somebody, and I'm going to put on a different hat and sort of challenge your thinking here, maybe for a bit, somebody might say leadership isn't about collaboration, it's about making decisions and having a vision of the future and then inspiring hope and inspiring action in people. Collaboration, like just slows the process down. What would you say to that? I'd say how confident are you in those decisions? Have you lent on your peers to help push your thinking with those decisions? I'd say it's okay to keep working with people as a leader and seek partners and advice and gather as many opinions or use people as sounding boards to hear your thinking. Or it's almost your responsibility as a leader of a business to consider the huge impact of these decisions that you make on not just the business, but wider communities as well. And that's a really tough thing to do and you don't have to do that on your own. What kind of response do you get when you share this story for a lack of a better word, people with a more traditional leadership style? I think there's probably a lot of fear, because it is different. And I see it even in my parents and then a lot of, it's very generalizing, there's a lot of older generation folks who are phenomenal and have taught me a lot. But generalizing for us again, I think a lot of older generation haven't seen this sort of openness and kindness to ourselves because there was other strife and stresses in life. We've evolved a lot over the last few years with mental health and the way we think and a lot of awakenings, I guess, of all sorts of things without getting too spiritual or deep in any of those. But I think there's been a lot of awakenings and openness that maybe the older generation are scared of because it's different. It challenges their potential identity, I guess, because they're so used to this space being like this. And I encourage them to try and stay open and learn and talk to the folks as to why they're being that way. We see a lot of intergenerational judgment and things going on as well. Yeah, I didn't expect to get this deep on this, but it's actually, yeah, it's really interesting. And I think it is, it's a fair, right? There's some fear there and it's probably different for lots of different people as to why that might worry them. And I get that businesses, we need to move things quick, we need to make decisions, we've got stakeholders and shareholders. But there's humans running these businesses at the end of the day and they don't exist without the people. So if you can adopt and learn a more people-centric approach, I think you will enjoy it more. We hear about burnout, we hear about people, you know, like all sorts. So I think if you can be kinder to yourself and the people around you, that's beautiful. Have a go. Be healthier and more fun. We need to unpack this a little bit. And I'm happy to go deep and spiritual into these topics. Yeah, important topics to explore. So first of all, maybe we can get a bit more specific on what is it that you're actually asking leadership to do? So what's the different part? You mentioned something about workshops, but if somebody walks into our conversation right now, we're sitting here in this group around the campfire discussing collaborative leadership, and they walk out of this conversation. We want to know what do you expect me to do differently tomorrow than what I'm doing today? Could you share a few stories where you've seen this sort of behavior being modeled? Yeah, I think I expect leaders to think, if I make, you know what, it's two things, working out loud. I think a lot of leaders might create presentations or strategies within their discipline team, but not necessarily show their partners in other departments, like products to design or engineering to product, you know, the cross-functional leadership, working out loud. I don't see that happening as much in these businesses. So I'm sure there's some fantastic examples. I'd love to hear how people are doing that. And I'm sure there is a lot of hopefully some good examples out there. But I haven't seen a lot of working out loud at a leadership level. They won't share something until it's a lot more done and locked in. And I know that that's probably a respect of people's time. But then I think we lose the opportunity for the leaders at that level to actually share and critique and push each other a little bit further and collaborate closer on some key things. Okay, working out loud. Now, you are yourself in a leadership position. Could you give us an example or again, share a story? How are you doing this? Are you doing this? And so how successful are you? I think we're very successful at it because it's a way of building partnerships. So everything my team does, we share early and often. So working out loud is about sort of sharing. There's a whole community online about it. You can go and learn everything and become a complete nerd in the space. But the gist of it is sharing sort of work early and often and getting that critical feedback a lot earlier. So we'll share everything at first draft with all stakeholders and partners. And I think what that does is allow people to feel like they've got a stake in it earlier and then more bought in. So one example, if we're making a big map or a poster or any kind of visual, we will do a scoping exercise with the key stakeholders who are going to use that map to make a decision. So before any mapping, visualizing, we love to jump straight into the map, you know, we will, no matter what level, even if it's a director or the CEO, we will have a scoping discussion. What is this map going to do? Who's it for? Is it current? Does it need to be current state or future state? What goes into it? Most importantly, what is this map going to do? Is it going to help you make a decision or understand something or inspire something, confirm something, identify gaps? Like, what are you going to use this thing for? I think that's been very successful with the team. And we've not wasted so much time on making some things, and we haven't wasted our leaders' time. And then what they've found by, I think, being involved in that earlier is they know what they're getting, and they're a lot more bought into what you're going to use that for, and they're kind of almost, they understand it more, and they know why we're doing it, and they're able to communicate that, and it creates a ripple effect of influence and impact rather than just getting a brief and jumping straight in or starting on something and sending to them, and it's not even right. So before you even draw, we've had a work out loud kind of discussion with the folks who are going to have to do something with the thing you're making. And how do you do this? So do you invite them on a Zoom call? Do you get into their office? Do you put something on the wall? How do you, how does it, what does it look like working out loud? So we have a lot of, in design, we have a lot of canvases and templates and tools, and I encourage you to sort of know the questions. You don't always have to pull everybody into a big jam, or you can still have an executive conversation with the leader and ask them those questions very quickly, and get quick answers and fill in the rest of the blanks by talking to other folks who are around or near them, but get the key answers by asking the pointed, quick questions of your leaders. So slack messages, if you have to, if they haven't got time, 15 minute meetings, working amongst the team to find out who's got the best relationship with said stakeholder, who can you can jump in on the end of their call, or ask them for help, really partnering with your team to figure out how can we get that person's opinion earlier before getting stuck into the work. Ideally, you'd have a lovely meeting, and you'd have a big jam, and everyone would jump in there and put some post-it notes, but I think in your executives, you've got to have quick, sharp questions to get those answers, and you can still get the answers you need for those canvases to set you up by just being a little bit clever with your slack messaging or your very short, quick emails. I'm going to geek out on this topic and dive even deeper. So you mentioned a few things, and one of the things you mentioned is get the opinion of these leaders. Now, one might say getting opinions isn't really about collaboration, and I'm curious about that. And the other thing that we listening to you would like to know is, so how do you make sure that people can contribute and collaborate on the right level? So I can imagine that when you present something which isn't done, which is still a rough draft or an initial draft, pulling people into the process who aren't familiar with what you're doing, you might get feedback on the font size. Like I'm exaggerating here. So these two questions like opinions and how do you get people to work on the right level? Well, I think you've got to get really good at scaffolding people in to what you're showing them. So that's where knowing your stakeholders and building these relationships, and this is all like a lovely learning space, really. So sometimes you're going to get someone who's pointing out the fonts and then you've got to realize, okay, that's told me where I've got to take a few steps back and tell them the background, history, the context, maybe where this is going, and I've kind of missed out on doing that. I think another really handy thing I've been using a lot is looking at your journeys and your blueprints and your business with the levels of detail. So you can use that analogy, which works really well with folks who are completely green to design. You can go, we are zooming up in a rocket to 10,000 feet above the company, or we're going to zoom back in a little bit now down to 1,000 feet, you can see these things, or we're right down at 100 foot. I really need you to point out which trees are falling over and where the river's blocked, or where the cows have gone loose. I don't know why this has turned into a farming analogy, but I think the levels of granularity helps a lot in finding those analogies. You don't have to educate everybody on design all the time. You can show them and take them through it and through that they learn and then next time you go, okay, quick, we're looking at a high level map. Have we got the right key points here? Is it showing the right themes? Or is this going to help you with that decision that we need to make? Or we're down in the details? Who else needs to give feedback on this? I think yet using the levels and remembering if you need to scaffold someone in. So listening to their response and taking a step back and going, oh look, I'm sorry, I need to pull back a little bit and explain, give you a bit more context on that. And have you seen situations where it backfired and like are there some things we should avoid? And I'm thinking especially here around you're putting yourself in a very vulnerable situation by sharing stuff early. And when people shoot things down, it might discourage you from sharing more in the future. So what have you seen around making sure that that doesn't happen or decreasing the likelihood that that happens? The very, very first time I properly worked out loud early, I remember crying in the bathrooms. I think as designers we put a bit of our soul into a lot of the things we create and it is absolutely painful when someone pokes holes in your baby. That's a strange one. But it's absolutely painful. But then I think once you get that critical feedback, it pushes your work and you see the work being used to a whole another level than any of your work has. When your work has more impact and influence, that pain, you learn that that's just your ego kind of being hurt. And that's not, that's okay. That's not you. And you can work through that. And I think you can talk through that. I think resilience is having a support network of people around you. And I encourage a lot of folks to have conversations and do retros on how conversations went. Yeah. So I think it's really hard. And probably the number one thing would be to if, if it's not going well, how can you practice listening? Maybe you've hit the stakeholder on a really bad day or they're just so caught up in something else. And it's really not about you or your work. They're having a really bad time. So how can you take a step back and meet this person where they are? And no, if now is the right time to get feedback from them as well to kind of also maybe I don't protect, isn't the right word, but just to gauge whether now is the right time to share that thing with them or to push to get the feedback you need. Maybe they've just had the worst meeting ever, or maybe their mum is sick and they're really not focused and tomorrow would be a better day. So I think meeting people where they are before asking for that critical feedback will probably be another tip to sort of get better feedback and maybe not get so hurt in getting feedback. Okay, you're sharing very valuable and helpful things. So to minimize the negative effect of getting critical feedback, I'm hearing you say that it's good to distance yourself from your work, which is hard being a design professional because we identify ourselves often with the work. And there are ways to practice this to distance yourself from the work. I can imagine that critiquing your own work and doing sort of mock trials with your team could be a very effective strategy to sort of say, my work is here, I'm here and my identity is not tied up in something like this. And again, going through the practicing that painful project, the process with people who you trust could be a good way to build that confidence and that confidence. How can you fall in love with the learning and growth instead of the thing? Because we live in an ever-changing world and things are so out of our control. And a lot of these projects have so many factors that are out of our hands. And we're just trying to influence and push these things to be a little bit more human centred or a little bit more conscious or a slightly more diverse made decision, all the good things that design is trying to do. So how can you look at every project as a learning and growth opportunity to get better at that influencing rather than being so attached to the thing you made? Because it's not about the map. It's about the decision or the influence, the impact or the learning that comes from it. So it's bloody hard, as we say down here. But yeah, see if you can fall in love with the learning and growth instead of the thing. And again, creating a bit of distance between yourself and the thing and being able to stand next to the people you're working with. And if somebody says that this is shit, that you can actually agree that this is pretty crappy work without taking that personal and sort of being able to objectively reflect on what's in front of you rather than tying up to, oh, if this is shit, then it means that I'm pretty crappy at my job. You're doing a great job. It's a hard, hard world being a designer because I think we've got the easiest thing for everybody in a business to critique because it's visual, it's in front. But there is a massive gift in that for the business. And a lot of the time they're not critiquing you. It's not about you. I say, even when running a workshop, the workshop's not about you. It's about the people coming together and the work and the decisions that you're talking about. It's not about you. There's going to be a lot of you learning. And I hope you have a lot of people who you can talk to about that learning, but it's not about you. It's about the group and the decisions. Yeah, yeah. So this is, again, you mentioned something very important about we have a very visual way of working often, which is easy to point to. And it's much harder to critique a manager, quote unquote, than it is somebody who creates doodles, puts things out into the world, create maps. It's much easier to do that. So yeah. The other thing you mentioned, which I would love to zoom into and learn more about is you mentioned something about being able to listen. And I'm guessing that you have a whole world of what it means to listen because we are we are all listening, aren't we? Yeah, this has been this, I think, is going to be a forever life thing. I want to get really, really good at listening. And I don't think I was very good at listening for a long time. We're often listening to respond and wanting to show up and do a great job. And we have the best intentions, but we're not actually listening to the people in front of us. And then we're not getting useful information in order to respond better or in order to partner better or in order to just be more, have more information and be better. So I think listening is about not just listening to what they're saying, but looking at them and how they're feeling and what's going on and trying to find like, you know, if you're in a negotiation system, you're looking for that, the back swan, you know, the hidden agenda behind the hidden agenda, or you're looking for cues and emotional energies in the room to see how things are going and if it's going in a good direction or if people need a break. So I think listening is we've got a lot more we can do to listen than just use our ears. And I've been a bit obsessed with that, I think a couple of coaches and mentors helped me realize I wasn't very good at listening, which was such a gift, painful at the time, such a gift. And I've done all sorts of things to practice listening and communicating. So I've been in jazz bands where you're listening to the musicians around you. And you know, if you go off on a tangent in a music group, it'll sound absolutely horrific. And it's beautiful when you see a really skilled band that have played together for ages, like I think everyone knows the beauty that that can sound like. And then the other thing I've had a dabble in is improv comedy, another, you've got to listen to the cues and the jokes and the lines and meet match the group's energy. I'm sure everybody's seen whose line is anyway, or when you're watching one of those stand up improv groups that potentially someone is trying too hard and they don't fit in with the rest of the group or someone's not trying and it looks really awkward. So it's really about reading the cues and listening to the people around you on the spot, really helpful for workshops. The other one, which I know we've talked about Mike is unhurried. So this is a different, really, first time I experienced it, it was quite shocking. I wanted to take notes. So, and we were meant to just listen. And I was quite confronting, I was like, Oh, no, I've still got a lot to learn about listening. So unhurried is a different style of connecting and communicating. I encourage folks to Google it and have a go. It's basically in a nutshell, it's a talking stick. And one person talks at a time. But the way it's set up is that you might have a topic, but you have to kind of let go and let whatever each person says just happen. And maybe you're not interested in what they're saying. So you can just relax and enjoy and maybe listen to other things going on in the room or around you or just have a break. But it's kind of like letting go and surrendering to being committed to this time frame you're unhurried in. And it slows you down, even talking about it, I feel calm. You have to just slow down and you can talk or you cannot talk. Sometimes there can be long silences, which can be quite beautiful. And we've used it in times of crisis in our office. And in community groups, where people need to just be together. But we sometimes don't know how to be and it's a really lovely format. So I really encourage people to have a look at that. Yeah, I think there's a lot of different things you can do to push, to become a better listener. I think design is because we can visualize, if we can listen better, we can make pictures that help people see more. Okay, listening better. We've had this on the show a few times before and we're going to definitely address it a few more times in the future, because we're going to discuss unhurried conversations pretty soon. Now, I'm, we're here listening to the story and listening how to become better listeners. What was the moment for you that you sort of realized? Oh, but wait, there's a whole not a dimension of listening. Did somebody tell you something? Did you experience something? How did that go for you? I think it was reflecting on a really tough stakeholder situation at work where things just weren't going any mild direction that I was hoping anything could possibly go. And I was so focused on the work. I think I'd forgotten about connecting with the people and understanding their other priorities and other pressures and other things pulling them in many dimensions. Like I'm always thinking, I was always thinking, you know, have they got something going on outside of work, but then I think I'd forgotten, you know, they might have different conflicting agendas from their side of the business or some other thing they've seen that's concerned them at work. So it was really when a couple of projects were not going collaboratively, just like the design recommendations were absolutely not being heard at all. And I think it's because I wasn't actually listening to my stakeholders. So I wasn't positioning it in a way that they would then listen to the suggestion. I didn't know. I wasn't really respecting their language and their situations enough. Okay. So there is a very important moment here. And that is your design recommendations weren't sort of being followed up with that still doesn't in many cases, people still don't think like, okay, I need to listening is a problem me. I am the issue. There is something with me, they look at the the other party or they look at the decisions. So there must have been a moment for you where you were like, hold on. It's I need to look in the mirror. Maybe there is something there. Yeah, well, you can't control others. The only thing you can control is your own growth in mindset. So if you can get better at listening and get better at understanding the people in front of you, then the only thing you can do is try communicating in different ways, or showing up in a different way, or having a different mindset to give yourself a break as well. But okay, this this one's just about learning. This is really hard. I'm not going to get this as far down the field as I hoped. But I might get a try and they'll do. So give yourself a break. It's not I think you give yourself a break, take a breath and think what can I control? What what can I do with and go go inside? I think so is my question here would also be, is it should you always be asking the question? Am I listening well enough in this situation versus is my work good enough? Because your work and again, it just can be crappy and it just can be really bad recommendations. And then it doesn't have anything to do with you listening or not. Probably. So what like, we wouldn't make bad recommendations, though, when you are audience, we'd position them in a way that helps them. Yeah, look, there's still going to be times where it's, it's not you, it's them, or it's both of you, and you've still got to figure out like, what is this a me thing or them thing or an us thing, like that, that's always going to be a part of this. And sometimes some people you can step away from for a little bit of time and have a break and come back. Or sometimes you have to have the tough conversations about about why things are and encourage you to read the Brené Brown books on that stuff. But if it is a you thing, then maybe you're not listening. And that's why those things aren't landing. And maybe you're not positioning them in a way for your audience. Like, I think you'd know. I think I think you guys would know if your recommendations or your designs aren't landing, is do you know your audience? Like, we're very good at knowing our customers. But do you know your stakeholder? And always asking the question, what's the thing that I'm not hearing? Because the answer might be nothing. I think I'm hearing everything. But even asking that question is I think sort of puts you on on the edge to always be focused on working with somebody else. I want to thank you for for addressing this. I want to ask one more question about listening. You mentioned jazz, you mentioned improv theater, which I absolutely recommend for people to do as a way to get better at service design. But within improv, and even within jazz, everybody needs to play along. So within, within jazz, if you have somebody going off on a solo, and not respecting listening and sort of the humbleness, it doesn't work. Now, within improv, you're part of a group who sort of understands and has agreed to those rules. Within a corporate environment, most people won't feel that they are part of an improv group, but feel that they need to speak up and have a loud voice. How do you handle that? How do you handle loud people? So if you're listening, and if you sort of are very attentive to listening, but others aren't, I can imagine that that's challenging or is it? Yeah, definitely. I think you get into workshops where there's one loud person who's hyper excited and they're really passionate. I think there'd be nice ways to go. I can see you're really passionate about this. I know there's others in the room who are also passionate. What can you help me get the ideas out of them? Like, you know, you can always use a little bit of humour. Come on, loud dude. Let's see what quiet secret person in the corner might have to say, or maybe you can exemplar it, or maybe you can have a subtle chat with them if it's appropriate, or maybe you can get them to come and help facilitate. If they're that loud and great, like maybe they would benefit from helping, give them a job, keep them busy. I think you'll build up a toolkit of things you can use to handle those complex situations. And again, it's going to be by listening and seeing how those things went. So I tried that last time with that loud person or that didn't work, or I know that person really cares about this thing. Then if you know what that person cares about, you could angle it in a way for, hey, I know you really care about the outcome of this workshop and you're really passionate. We need to make sure we hear from everybody in order to push this to the next level. So can you help me get everybody else's thoughts and ideas out? We're hearing that you're quite reflective on your practice. It seems that you are quite aware of what you do and how you sort of emerge in the world. Has that always been the case? No. And to be honest, I think I got a lot more comfortable reflecting when I started doing more meditation and slowing down and listening to my body. I think I was reflective on what I made and what I said, but not so much the feelings and the overall situation and things until I started meditating more and taking that time and going deeper and listening. There's lots of different types of meditation. Going for a walk can be a form of meditation. I think I love guided visualization ones because we're creative and you can sort of go to all places and reflect in different ways. So I think over the last few years with a lot of meditation through a lot of tough times, it's actually pushed me to be even more reflective. Maybe COVID gave us a bit more time too to be more reflective as well. That's interesting. Meditation is definitely, for me, very helpful how I show up in not just my work, but also in family and life in general. I think it creates balance. It would be interesting to see and maybe you've seen examples of how this reflective attitude can be more integrated into our practice and make it. Of course, we have the retrospectives and I don't know, post-mortem stuff and pre-mortem stuff. Those are pretty functional exercises, but I'm not sure if they hit the same frequencies that you're referring to. So have you seen things like mindfulness meditation being more integrated in our practice? Yeah, I think definitely a lot of mindfulness is designers are bringing in to workshops, starting people off with offering them to take a moment to be in the room and check in with themselves. Yeah, I think because we are facilitating and holding spaces for people, we're the ones that are probably leading this a little bit more. I think workplaces are having well-being week or kindness week and you can bring it in that way and introduce it to people that way. I think these things become more useful when there's crises going on and I hope that we keep using them as we go back to a time of not so much crisis and to not just be there to the ambulance methods but the continuous looking after ourselves. Yeah, I hope so as well. Looking back on your journey to facilitate more collaborative leadership, if you had to pick a moment, what would be the moment that you feel was sort of the most pivotal, like a huge milestone? I think we know that there's like maturity models where we're trying to move a business up a maturity model. But I think the worst thing you can do is tell everybody they're a part of a framework. You're just here, it's like going to school and getting a report. You can tell a few people and the right people who are maybe helping you with the mission. But I think if those people and you know that we're just on a growth journey and we're slowly trying to chip away at this and trying to move to that next thing, I think I realized when I'm always throwing a thousand things at the wall and trying to see what sticks and pushing all the different levels of a maturity model, governance, alignment, collaboration, design quality, journey frameworks, all the all the data research, you know, always trying to bring all these things slowly closer and closer together to have a more human centred journey centred business. And I think I realized we're just chipping away at that. And that is leadership, I think creating all these puzzle pieces. And I've seen other leaders do this and be fascinated by it and absolutely inspired by they've got this IA strategy going on over there, this governance seed planting, this experiment new way of working going on. And it is collaborative and they're having a go and they've got kind of a master plan with all these pieces and how they could come together. But they're also kind of open to seeing it come together in an even more better, beautiful way than they could have imagined. So I think it's been really have been able to have a go at trying to create all these different pieces within a very big complex business and realizing I cannot do it on my own at all. And also, this is more fun. I do this with a lot of people and way more fun. If I look at it as a learning and growth massive opportunity, then I must get here and bedding myself up for not getting there. That's an interesting observation. So how helpful is it to have a vision or vision statement or planting a flag? I'm seeing digital transformation everywhere. But does it help to sort of say to everybody, we are not part of a digital transformation, or should you just do it? Maybe. Does it matter? Do they need to know? I think you've got a gauge. Does this person need to know that they're part of a digital transformation? Will it actually help them? Or is it more important that they're excited about this thing or involved in that thing? I think that's really tough. And I think you can maybe once you're further along and they've seen a few things, you could introduce a reflection to a bigger group and say, look, we've done all these things. Maybe we are becoming more digital. But I think there's probably, you've got to find the people within the business who are comfortable in that more uncomfortable future place of uncertainty. You need a vision. You need people to be excited about where it's going. It doesn't have to be super clear. But I've seen too many visions. I've seen no visions. And both are horrible or frustrating. Let's say horrible, but frustrating. So having a vision is incredibly powerful. It's velocity with lots of teams and ideas towards a shared point. Otherwise, you've just got speed and so many different directions. And we've all experienced companies that you can tell have diverse siloed octopus teams that are connecting to each other. And then we've also experienced companies that clearly have a vision that is aligning them that they're working towards. So vision is so, so key. But it's a tricky one because most businesses don't want to actually pay. That's a little, it's not so much a lovely, we do this vision and we get that. It's not a simple tangible, you've got to have a sponsor who believes in needing that vision. It's a much harder sell to bring people together or create a vision. And there's no point in creating one if it's not really going to be used or maybe it is because you need to do it for yourself. But vision is so key and also one of the hardest things I think we try and do as designers within businesses, but very, very cool. I guess that's also part of collaborative leadership. Embracing that vision, co-creating that vision, updating that vision, keeping it alive, like testing it. Didn't expect that we would spend so much time discussing vision, but there we go. So if we sort of try to summarize what has been discussed, going or using design to make leadership less lonely and more collaborative is about, for instance, working out loud, sharing stuff, detaching yourself from the actual work, being able to have an objective perspective on it, becoming a better listener, practicing through improv and always asking the question, what am I missing? What I'm not hearing in this conversation? Is there anything else? Did we miss anything? Probably just the keeping a growth mindset. Am I more excited about growing and learning in this opportunity that's in front of me that I'm a part of? Then beating yourself up about not achieving a certain outcome that you thought. Yeah, sure, we need goals and we need to try and work towards those, but I think if you can focus on the growth and learning, it'll take you, it'll be a lot more fun and you can have a lot more interesting conversations and life a little bit more than all this pressure and stress that we create in these environments. The business is learning, your learning teams are learning. We're all just learning at the end of the day. One question around that. Again, you're a leader and you have a team. If in their yearly or quarterly or I don't know how often you have performance reviews, they have certain goals that they need to achieve and sort of their careers are on the line by achieving those goals. How are you integrating that with a learning mindset? Probably if you're struggling towards those goals, you'd be having those kind of learning and growth discussions around, okay, maybe we're not setting you up with enough tricky messy opportunities for you to go and learn in order to get closer to that. We're not searching out tougher stretch enough, stretchy enough, complex enough opportunities to go and learn and then I think the other thing is we really love Clifton Strengths, so understanding your particular strengths and how you can either leverage them or work on things that you're not so good at or partner with people. More self-awareness, which is a learning and how therefore can I work further towards my goals by better understanding my strengths than who I am and how I operate. So yeah, I think it would be those kind of are we finding the opportunities and how are we using or not using your strengths in order to learn and grow and get towards those objectives. Thanks for this addition. So growth mindset, workout, loud listening and I'm sure there are other things but those are the three that we covered today. Is there anything you'd like to leave us with before we sort of wrap off this conversation? Is there a call to action or something that you'd recommend us to do? I think I encourage designers who are often maybe a little bit, a bit more sensitive I think because we're aware of the responsibility of designing the future but I encourage you to lead and do it in your way and hopefully a slightly more collaborative way than what we see out there because I think you'll bring a lot of joy and love and growth to these companies. So I encourage you to keep leaning in and stepping up and having a go and learning and exemplaring a collaborative underlying design led leadership style within your communities and organizations and share your learnings with each other and let's talk about it more and be proud of being collaborative leaders. So thank you, yeah. Love that and the thing that came up when you were sharing this is you don't need permission to lead, you don't need a job title, it doesn't need to be in your job title and be the leader you want to see in the world. So set the example regardless of the position you're in in the organization. Do you agree with that? Absolutely and look if you've got imposter syndrome, talk about it, go get some support, build some people up around you but you can lead and you can lead within small groups, you can lead by example, you can lead at an incredibly phenomenal level but you've got to grow towards that so find a support network who can help you as you go on that way. And we have a few. I'll mention them in the show notes. So Amelia, let's wrap this on one off. Thank you so much for making the time and sharing your journey with us and learning about leadership. Yeah, it was very helpful, very interesting. I love the recommendations and I hope a lot of people listening will follow up. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Look, this is my funny learning journey. I don't have all the answers and I've shared some things and I'd love to hear from people about what they're trying and about collaborative leadership is and what they think about that too. So challenge each other together. So let's if people want to connect, what's the best way to reach out? Probably on LinkedIn would be the easiest. Yes, let's do that one. LinkedIn. All right, all the relevant links will be in the show notes. Thanks again. And hopefully we'll get an opportunity to sort of revise your journey in, I don't know, a year or two and see how far you've come. Thank you so much, Mark. And thank you for holding this community and the learnings that you've brought for everybody in the services and community over the past so many years. It's phenomenal and a real gift. So thank you. I hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Amelia as much as I did. It definitely got me thinking about how I show up in the communities which I'm part of, not just at work, but also in my personal life. I'm really curious, what's the one question you have for Amelia after hearing her story? Leave a comment down below and we'll try to get all of them answered. If you've made it all the way here and enjoyed the conversation, please do me a quick favor. Make sure to click that like button on this video. Not to feed a YouTube algorithm. I don't really care about that, but to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this. My name is Mark Fontaine. I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me. It was an absolute honor and pleasure. Please keep making a positive impact and I'll catch you very soon in the next video.