 In this episode, we'll be talking about what can we do to prevent that design becomes the next FED, why critical thinking is one of the most important skills in the new world, and how empathy helps businesses to become more successful. And here is the guest of this episode. Hi, I'm Doreen Lorenzo and this is the Service Design Show. Hi guys, my name is Marc Fontaine and welcome to a new episode of the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to make a positive impact through design. We do this by sharing real-life inspiring stories for people that are currently shaping the service design field. We talk about topics ranging from design thinking and customer experience to organizational change and creative leadership. We bring a new episode every two weeks on Thursday, so if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to subscribe. My guest in this episode is Doreen Lorenzo. Doreen is the former president of Frog Design. She is currently the director at the Center for Integrated Design at the University of Texas in Austin and she told me that one of her greatest passions is gardening, as she loves to see things grow. In the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about what can we do to make sure that design doesn't become the next fat, why critical thinking is one of the most important and maybe underestimated skills in the new world and how empathy helps businesses to become more successful. If you want to fast-forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. And in case you prefer to listen to a podcast version of this episode, head over to our SoundCloud page at soundcloud.com slash service design show where you'll find this episode and all the previous ones. For now, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Doreen. Hey, how are you? I'm doing fine. It's a quite warm day here in Newtrak. You're right now in Austin. I'm in Austin, Texas and it's always a warm day here. Yeah, that's true. It's bright. It's actually going to be a lovely day here too. So, Doreen, you have an amazing background in design and you've been in design for so long. I'm really curious if you can actually remember the very first time, maybe not that you got in touch with design, but things like service design or design thinking. Can you recall that moment? Well, so interesting that you say that. I didn't know what they recalled. In other words, they didn't really have a name. It's just what you did. If you think about the premise of what design thinking is or creating the customer experience or creating something that will make sense, that's just what a designer does. That's how you're taught. That's where your DNA is. Now, I have to tell you, I am not a designer by training. Really, I'm not. Well, I went to film school and I worked in the film industry for several years, but I got involved with design just as the internet was starting to bubble up. Really, for me, I saw, interestingly enough, I saw that, hey, this is going to be a great delivery service for film and video. It'll take 25 years. That being said, I really became interested in the internet and jumped on that bandwagon and that's how I got involved with design. Obviously, then saw the power. Really, it was always about understanding how to deliver something great to whoever was going to use it. That's really design thinking. Is it what you're saying that all the new terms that have emerged are maybe a way to just explain to the rest of the world what we've been doing for quite a long time? Absolutely, and that's great. It's great that we've put a framework around it and it's great that we've now expanded it. Seriously, Mark, I've been one of the people out there pushing design as a core fundamental in business for many, many years. When I first started, you didn't even enter the building. Nobody ever said they worked with a designer. You were like, no way. That's like going to a marriage counselor. We don't talk about it. Today, the fact that designers are in such high demand that people put a value on design thinking or service design, this is really important. This is where we've come. The fact that we've now put these nomenclatures around it, that's good for the business. That's already a bridge, I think, to one of the topics that you've noted. I've got your topics over here. Let me pick the first one and then it's up to you to come up with a question surrounding that topic and it's up to you to make it really hard to make it a really easy question for yourself. Like I said, we have introduced new terms and my topic that I would like to share right now for you is substance. So is there a question around substance and what do you mean with substance? Yeah, there's absolutely a question about substance. So as I said, we've been from the design perspective, this is how designers have been trained. They're very interested in really understanding people, getting insights, prototyping, testing, getting out in the market. That's designer training. That's human-centered design. My concern today is we've now made design almost a fad and I worry about that. I worry that it will become a fad. I worry about all the boot camps that people take in design thinking without really having the knowledge and the depth you need to make big changes because at the end of the day, design is about change and you have to be able to do that. So the question is for me is have we created a fad? Does it have depth? And then what will that mean to the industry? And what will it mean for the industry? Well, if we don't wrap our head around this with a little more depth, we will in fact say, we'll have a whole bunch of people that say, hey, I tried design or I tried this design thinking thing and it didn't work. Let's move on. Let's move on. And so for me, it's like really getting in there and really empowering, really teaching people. You need ninjas. You need ninjas in every organization, every business, every place, you know, whether you're a nonprofit or your government or your business. You need ninjas that really understand when you get to the hard parts because the easy parts are, oh, you know, we've got creative and we came up with ideas. The hard part is how do you match those ideas to the true insights you've gotten from people and oftentimes those ideas and those insights are very different than what people thought, right? And then how do you then get that infiltrated into an organization to make that change? That's the hard part. That's what designers are very, very good at and we need to make sure that we don't lose that. So my question when I was reading through this topic was like, if I look in the mirror, if we look in the mirror, you know, what can we as design community do differently or can we sort of blame ourselves for creating this Fed? And how can we change this? Well, I think we can blame ourselves. I mean, we all got around the excitement of the fact that, hey, everybody was finally, we were, you know, we were finally like the cool kids, you know, like, wow, this is great. Like we're not, you know, we have a seat at the table, right? Designers never had a seat at the table. So we finally had that. That being said, today, we also have to make sure and how do we change this is we have to make sure then that we don't get so caught up in the Fed ourselves that we forget that just has to have a result. And the result is not giving thousands of people, you know, an online course that gives them the overview of what design thinking is, right? The output is really, how do we make sure that people really understand how to accomplish that and really take them through that process and that's harder to do. But I think programs are being started in universities, you know, certainly the university that I'm at as well as even elementary and in high schools are starting to teach this. And I think that's where we as the design community have to go. I was really curious if you've seen similarities in have you seen similarities with other fields that have gone through a similar process maybe? Well, I think we went through this kind of optimization. We went to optimize, optimize, optimize and we optimized ourselves into no innovation. So that was a great example of a whole industry and optimization, right? That all of a sudden we had no innovation. So that went too far. And now we're like, okay, now we've got to get to this innovation. So everybody's like learning design thinking, but are they really going to do it in a way that's going to be impactful and have the desired effect that you wanted to have? And when I hear a company saying, you know, we trained 40,000 of our employees on design thinking, I'm like, no, you didn't. You know, they might have taken a course. It's like Mimi, you know, reading a book or taking a course in, you know, being a rocket scientist. I am by no means a rocket scientist, right? So we have to make sure as an industry that we understand that there's the value still comes in having these experts who they understand how to make this stuff happen. But is one of the challenges that we have as the design industry that we are not so good in articulating the value that we provide? I think that was the case. I think we've gotten a lot better at that. I think the business world has accepted that there is a lot of value. If you start looking at a couple of things, one is the Design Management Institute puts out their, you know, yearly or bi-yearly report on design-led businesses and their success. And then most recently, Forrester put out in conjunction with Adobe also put out a very interesting report about design-led businesses and it's very, very clear that businesses leading with design are far more profitable and far more successful. We have to move on to a topic that you already, again, hinted upon and it has to do with education and learning the design skills, I'd say, at a young age probably. And this topic is about critical thinking. Do we have a question that goes along with this one? You know, why in so many instances have we decided with education, particularly in the younger years, to begin to test children, you know, we want results, we want to understand how children are learning. So we're giving them this kind of rote test and leaving off the idea of problem-solving, true problem-solving. And what's happened is you're, we're creating students and this is and I travel all over the world, I see this all over the world. We're creating students that want to study to get the A because they could pass the multiple choice question and is not really looking at the complex problems we have. So what happens is these students get out of the university and guess what? They're going into situations where that's not valued. What's valued today is solving complex problems because we have created, by our industry and technology, things that we do, very complex problems for people to solve. You know, it's not like build a widget. It's like this widget has like digital and software and it's artificial intelligence, right? And it's got all these, you know, it's all over the world. Like they're complicated and we haven't, we're not putting the emphasis on that. So I really worry and I see it all the time at the university, I worry that we've gotten away from this concept of critical thinking, which is bad. So I kind of gave you the question but also answered the question. So what is the biggest transformation that needs to happen within education to make sure critical thinking isn't left out? Well, I think we have to allow for more problem solving. I think we have to allow for not just the success of the individual. So schools today are very individual based. Like you, Mark, would go to school and get your grades, right? A lot of this should be based on team dynamics. Again, teaching students how to work in cooperation with others because that is the faith. That's where the world is today. That's how the business world, the nonprofit government, that's how it works. And so the education system needs to go back to giving students more problems to solve. I mean, I do remember, I mean, yes, I'm much older, but I do remember so much of it was, these really complex critical thinking and problem solving that we had to do. And we've seen, I know, as I watch my children go through school, we got away from that. There was much more of this multiple choice. So there's a balance, right? It's not like one is better than the other, but we need both. We need both. And I think we swung the pendulum too far. You're working right now with students and you said you see kids going through school. What works for you? What have you seen that stimulates critical thinking? What are the real triggers? Well, it's a great question because what's interesting about it is when you give people a big, wicked, hairy problem to solve, the first thing they do is run away. Oh, Google. That's the first thing you want to do is like, oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm getting my tooth extracted today. Like I can't do this. Like that's more fun than... But if you unpack it for them in bite-sized pieces, in other words, take little chunks of it, you can see the wheel starting to turn and the excitement because they're beginning to make progress and that's much more fulfilling and much more rewarding than answering a multiple choice question, right? And so teaching people methodologies and ways to begin to unpack these problems and to then rely on different people to help you, right? Because you're not never in this complex world that we live in, we're never going to know all the answers. See, I'm a believer that this whole concept of the lone hero and the superstar, you know, that's gone. You may come up with, like the lone hero may come up with the idea, but it takes a village to make stuff happen these days. And so that's where we should be teaching our students in that methodology because that's not going away anytime soon. And what is one of the most important things that you show your students around critical thinking? How do you get them started? You make a big, hairy goal smaller, but... You show success. I mean, everybody rallies around success, right? So when you can get the desired outcome or an outcome that is successful, you can watch the transformation over time. So if you think of college-level courses, university-level courses, they're usually about 15 weeks. You can see the transformation over time, when they start to when they finish and how they are just feeling so good about it. So I guess it has a lot to do with confidence, right? Building confidence. And I see this happening throughout our projects. You know, as soon as you somehow manage to get people on board and let them do stuff for themselves, then you don't have to explain anything after that, right? No. They get excited and it just builds momentum. Right, and they're getting interaction. I mean, part of this whole process, right, is you're constantly out there talking to people, you're interacting with people, and you're getting the feedback, and you're like, whoa, you know, this is great. And the fact that you could think and act on your ideas, because we are, you know, this is what separates us, right? We're humans. We generate ideas constantly. So how do we teach people how to then begin to act on that and know if that idea is better than the other idea? Because we want to. I mean, that's what we do. Otherwise we would be chimps or dogs, right? So we need to really, we have this wonderful ability that we tend to not teach students how to use. We teach them how to memorize, and that's not a good thing. Have you seen, so if this is like critical thinking in the educational field, what is your experience with critical thinking in the business or organizational field? Well, this is where it ends up, right? So what you see in some businesses, and you could probably name them off on your hand because you know them already, is you can see where people are thinking differently. They're expanding what the view of what's accepted is, right? So here's what I have seen, and I've seen this over and over again. The more experienced you are at a particular topic, oftentimes the less you are open to thinking about new ideas. And that's why this methodology and design and critical thinking becomes so important because you have to then disrupt kind of your old ways in what you're doing. And if you allow that in a business to happen, then you can see how businesses begin to change. One of the things we say to our clients is like you have to start asking stupid questions again. Like, you know, you need to adopt the beginner's mind and get away from the 20-year of experience sort of that you have built, right? And don't expect, you know, what you hear. I'm sure you hear it from that. I used to hear it from my clients all the time. Oh, no, I know that. I know what they want. I know what they want. I know what our customers want. I know what our employees want. Well, actually, you don't. That's a classical one, yeah. They went out and spoke to them and really went out and understood them and really went out and really looked into the problems that they had. Then you would really understand them. And I think as designers by practicing this it sort of becomes a second nature and it sort of becomes curiosity. We just want to explore things and learn about them, right? Well, curiosity is exactly every designer, actually every human being should be curious. It's what do you take with that curiosity? How do you take that curiosity and turn that into something that really can make a difference? That to me is what is so important. Let's move on to the third topic. And the third topic is also a skill, I guess, or maybe an attitude, and it's empathy. So do you have a question around this one? Yeah, I have a question is why if that is the most important skill, if you talk to business, the most important skills you can have as a leader, as you can have as a team member, why is it not valued in the world? Why is that still looked at as a soft skill and why is that we have not put the appropriate amount of value on that skill? What have you found? Well, what I found is it's very interesting. Again, when you deconstruct what successful businesses are, so many of them have empathetic leaders. We know for a fact that people work at a business not because of the work and not because of the pay, but because of the environment of the people. We're largely dealing with who your supervisors are, who your coworkers are, and again, creating this empathetic environment. We also know that in healthy business environments, employees succeed at a much greater rate than they do in unhealthy environments, right? So we know all this is a fact, right? Yet, we still think of these because it's not taught in schools. It's more taught in the way that we do as a kind of that soft skill. Now, if you take the medical profession as a maybe a direction we're moving in, Bedside Manor was not taught in medical school up until about 10 years ago. Now it's only one or two medical schools. Now it's becoming part of the medical school education is really how to, and you have two things. Physicians are probably the most empathetic people right now that's being part of the medical school education. I think we'll begin to see that trend and put an emphasis on this because at the end of the day empathy is something you can learn. Some people are more empathetic than others but it's a learned skill. It's theory of the mind and the more you do it, like anything else, the better you get at it. And it's not sympathy. I'm not feeling sorry for you but I'm understanding you at a deep personal level and I'm understanding you what makes you tick. And as a leader, I can help make better decisions that way. It's part of my decision process. So even if my employees don't agree with me, they know that I've taken them into consideration. As a designer, you can make better decisions because you're understanding people. You can work better with people on your team because you have respect and understanding of what they bring to the table. So it's a skill that seems pretty simple, costs no money to develop and embrace. Yet we haven't put enough emphasis on it. So again, the same question probably as with critical thinking. We can apply that on a personal level but if you look at empathy on our organizational level, how do you nurture that? Well, you embrace the fact that you want to think about your employees. You want to get your employees' insights. You want to understand them. What I hear from a lot of leaders is they'll tell me things like they'll bring it back to their boss and say something like, well, this is what I've talked to the employees. They're like, that doesn't matter. Well, it actually does. If you want to reduce turnover and organization and again, happy cows make happy milk. You want employees that, especially in the creative industry, you want employees that want to get up and go there every day. So which or how important is the role of leadership in all of this? Well, leadership is always key, right? Without a great leader. It's funny you say that because I always get a lot of, this is the question I get asked all the time. You know, I'm like, you know, there's this person, like they are just this creative soul they're in this organization and they're like, I can't get it through. Nobody will listen to me. And you go through, you do some prototyping. Have you tried to test it? And yeah, I've done all that. And at the end of the day, sometimes you just have to say, if your leadership is not on board, this is just not going to happen. And this is really hard with all of the great stuff that we do in the design world. That's a really hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. But at the end of the day, if you have somebody who just doesn't want to change, it's just, it's not going to happen. And have you seen business leaders transform into becoming more empathic or embracing empathy? Absolutely. Absolutely. I've seen a lot more. What made them change? You know, I think they, they, you know, look, if you're a good, if you're a smart business leader, you read, you look around, you observe. And so you're starting to see a lot more leadership be a lot more empathic because they're realizing better results from it all. You know, at the end of the day. That's a good KPI. Yeah, exactly. Doreen, as in every episode, I would like to give you the opportunity to ask a question to the people who are watching or listening to this episode. Is there anything you would like to ask them? Yeah, I'd love to know really see, I'm, you know, I like to understand people. So if anybody was going to describe me, I'm certainly an empathic person and I'd like to understand people. And when I look at the design, I mean, people are watching this, wanting to learn tips. It's like, what are some of the things that prevent designers from being successful? What are some of the barriers? Want to send the blocks? Why can't it happen? What do they begin to see? Because I think the more that we understand that in the design communities and more than we can then build frameworks that really help people be more successful. So yeah, what are the big challenges for designers to make impact? Maybe that's the... Yeah. Time flew by, Doreen. This is all we had the time for in this episode. And I'd really like to thank you for taking this time. Thank you so much. It's been a blast. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks, Doreen. So what do you think is the thing that's keeping designers from becoming more successful and creating bigger impact? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments. This show is all about helping you to create a positive impact through design and to make businesses and services more human-centered. If this is your first time here and you'd like to see more interviews, be sure to check out some of the best episodes and don't forget to click that subscribe button. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in two weeks' time with a brand new episode.