 can you hear me okay great so I'm gonna be talking a little bit today about how we organize ourselves within our organizations our businesses to do innovation and when we're organizing for innovation one of the things I think is very helpful and useful is to take a systems perspective on the org so what systems? Systems are basically composed of semi-autonomous parts that look like they're functioning independently but are very interrelated and structures that have a bunch of behaviors and as we can see from this slide there are many systems around us from ecosystems to our own human systems, our cultural systems and of course the business systems in which we work on a daily basis so in terms of analyzing the systems we work in very helpful to take both an inside out and an outside in perspective so we think of our perhaps our user experience teams in which we operate they tend to be fairly self-functioning units but we have a lot of interdependencies of course we don't just do design there's a business context, there's profits must be made for the business to survive, there are business requirements, there are technological requirements and many many different requirements that impact how we can do user experience so in terms of analyzing a system very useful to take in both an inside out and outside in perspective so thinking about how does our group our user experience teams operate in this larger context but also what are the forces from the outside that are impacting us and how do they impact us and how can we influence in both directions and these these these words along the side here are when you look at the systems thinking literature these are the these are the words that the terms that keep coming up thinking about boundaries right the boundaries between things what's happening at the boundary points in a system what frictions and synergies existed those boundary points what overlap and redundancies and as you think through how your UX team operates in this organizational context it makes it makes makes allows you to think more systematically about how you want to do innovation and I'll be talking a little bit later about considering our UX teams is innovation competency centers another thing that's very useful is it when thinking systematically including a lot of different perspectives right so if we're thinking considering mountains mountainous terrain as a project maybe we have to design for or plan for if we include a geologist in in in our in our project they're gonna come to the they're gonna talk to us about mountains in a very different way than we might look at it if we were talking to a cartographer or perhaps someone who actually had to live perhaps fight or do some type of activity in a cold mountainous terrain each of those each of those people is gonna bring a very different perspective a more systematic more holistic perspective that allows us to do innovation more effectively then they're disciplinary blinders right we all operate in these organizational contexts with our teams where we have our own languages our own theories our own jargon our own cultures and these can also function as blinders right and oftentimes even on my team you know we'll talk about those damn product managers and you know the fact that they don't really get the users or maybe the maybe the the fact of the matter is they're thinking about users in a different way than we in UX think about users and those damn technologists they don't understand users because you know they're always thinking about code and systems architecture and how to make things scale and they don't think about users well maybe they think about users in a different way than we do we all bring different perspectives to the mix so organizational blinders can really get in the way it's a less systematic approach just something to keep in mind when you think about how you organize yourself to do innovation so let's think about developing a systems perspective on the outputs of the UX team and and and these are these are sort of common things I think we could probably all agree on maybe you have different outputs in your team different things that you provide your organization different ways of communicating but it's very helpful to think about how all of those outputs impact the others in your team around you for example we also we wanted to use a research right okay so who else who else wants to do research in our organization well marketing people product managers even executives are very very interested in the the products of research so can we look for synergies and ways to do research that bring all of these viewpoints into the mix and allow us to collaborate and build a more robust and shared knowledge base thinking about for example another aspect let's say you're building some prototypes okay those nice prototypes may be well rendered well could those be used to actually help your sales team to sell product before it exists well in fact it can in fact I've done it my team has done it and so if we can think more systematically about the things that the information that's coming into our teams and what's coming out of our teams and how we can synergize that with the rest of the organization and their needs we can actually have more effective UX teams and get involved in earlier stages of discussion and more strategic stages of discussion in business planning so when you're thinking about your team your UX team take a foreign a foreign policy approach think about it from a nation's perspective right your UX team is like a little nation and the other organizations or other nations how do you interact with those teams how do you influence each other perhaps create what's known as an influencing map thinking about in a sort of strategic fashion what are the needs of the other teams and if I have to go to them to ask them for support what might be their objections thinking through these things before you even even go taught to these teams gives you a broader perspective it's actually an interesting exercise to perform within a UX team to use it as a brainstorming team-building activity to think systematically about the whole rest of the org or doing organizational audits where you go around and you interview other teams at the company to find out what are their needs what keeps them awake at night think about it as internal user research you're looking at the target audience that you're working with every day your colleagues the other ones who are gonna help you build product we don't we don't we don't build product as UX people typically we're not engineers some of us are but mostly we don't build products we design we mostly provide research and design and we have requirements coming in from the business side from product managers what are their needs for me as their experience team we shift gears a little bit and and talk about innovation activities and I really like to think about innovation as as kind of an organizational renewal process how does a company refresh itself right a company builds products it ships products it has business models so they can put products out in the world sell those products make profit and live continue to live as an organism right but it has to evolve a business exists in a in a in a broader context of competition of changing market needs of technology changing technologies it's an evolving world right new social needs so businesses continually need to reinvent themselves rethink themselves so what I'm gonna talk about next is a little bit more of a taxonomy and I'm a kind of a taxonomy junkie or a framework junkie I find they sort of help me organize my thinking and and and stood not only that but stretch my thinking and prompt my thinking so we talk about innovation I think there's there's there's sort of three broad categories that are useful to think about the core innovation for those of us that work in product companies this is you know we've got parts where we continually evolving them changing them and I think it's well illustrated by Apple at one point when they started reinventing themselves kind of around core innovation through an industrial design nice colors forms etc and then there's what's known as adjacent innovation this is where you're really kind of trying to expand out into new markets adjacent markets things that are proximal to where you're doing business today I think that's pretty well typified by the by the music player right the iPod so Apple there was a you know well populated space of music digital music devices and Apple came in and they changed the game now they changed it systematically right because not only did they introduce a player they also introduced a system for music delivery and then there's transformational where you're really going after transforming a market sometimes known as disruptive innovation and I think very well typified by the by the iPhone completely disrupted the phone industry changed the game entirely right before we're all using blackberries and Nokia devices and you know incomes this phone that nobody had ever seen before so having this kind of language so we can talk about innovation and what type of innovation are we really doing is it incremental kind of the core stuff or are we really going broad and and trying to disrupt entire markets this is another now we're kind of going down a level looking at an innovation taxonomy this is actually slide is based on the work of the dobbling group they put out a very compelling book 10 types of innovation can't recommend it enough it's a book that's actually designed by designers so it's quite visual and they have a very interesting systematic way of presenting innovation and thinking about innovation that I have found tremendously helpful so if we sort of look at these different categories from configuration through offerings through experience you may not agree on the terminology but they look at things like profit model I won't drain this slide I'll make sure it's up online if you guys want to look at it or you can go by the book they look at things like profit model how we how do we make money and there's different ways of innovating around making money yesterday we had a talk about Bitcoin okay different different ways you can you can charge right there's freemium models there's ad supported models lots of different ways to make money and you can innovate in the same way you can network with other businesses how do you come together to perhaps offer new services that you couldn't do on your own partnering right structure how you align your talents and then processes what's how how can we change our our internal processes as a business for one example is lean startup or lean ux it's quite quite popular now where I come from in California in the Silicon Valley it's all the rage in fact among startups they're all doing lean startup or most of them anyway and that changes how we do things how you approach business product performance and product system these are sort of classics these are things that designers typically focus on and think about when they do innovation and then there's there's some other service and channel brand and customer engagement and one of the things I think that's kind of interesting when I looked at this the first time it started thinking about it I realized that you know UX prior to 2000 I felt was really focused around product and and and systems and then from about 2001 about the time of the dot-com boom and services coming online and websites and more cloud-based models we started to see service channel branding engagement all being discussed more amongst designers in the UX community and then I wonder you know does the future lie ahead for us to design profit models network structures and processes can we innovate can we influence innovation in these areas as UX designers so thinking about building an innovation culture okay it's not just gonna happen it unless you happen into a company where they're that's kind of their founding DNA and they're they're all about innovation you're probably not gonna start over there right on the far right innovation sometimes enters particularly larger organizations that have more established business models as a foreign entity and why is that well because as a business does business it builds supply chains it builds ways of making money they start out innovative right but then in order to do business they lock down into certain systems certain ways of functioning and operating and in order to renew themselves they have to disrupt so sometimes they they get stale and so innovation comes as more of a outside entity it's more sort of a part of or peripheral to the main organizational thrust and then what we're trying to do when we when when we innovate is to get innovation at the core of the organization and then ultimately push it out into basically the core function of the innovation so that it really operates at all levels of an organization so I encourage you guys to think about your UX teams as innovation competency centers right it's at the core of what we do we're all about innovation whether it's it's it's core adjacent or transformational that that's what a UX team is doing we're trying to renew the organizations we operate in and as someone once said the future is here it's just unevenly distributed you'll find the same thing with innovation within organizations right organizations are hierarchical there you've got semi autonomous units they all function a bit differently they all have their own different cultures but they're interrelated and so innovation may operate at different levels across the the company but ultimately it should be informed by feedback coming from your outside world your customers your users whether your product service what not so one thing I'd also like to encourage is this notion of using scenario based design but not considering single scenarios but multiple scenarios so what does that look like if we think about where we are today and some future time that's out there some plausible futures plausible is it likely probably not but you know we can imagine it so plausible but if things kind of keep going as the as they go they're sort of evolving slowly we'll get to what what's a probable future right unless we think about things more disruptively and what I'd like to encourage you to do is to think more broadly about what are preferable futures but not just one preferable future because we can't really know what the future is it's impossible to predict it's dynamic always things are always happening right some pandemic sorry there'll be some sort of pandemic outbreak that changes the future who knows I don't know but when you're doing scenario based planning and I could teach a whole day tutorial on that it's it's it's too deep a topic to go into here but but basically what you're doing is you're considering brainstorming what are what are the social technological environmental economic and competitive political and competitive environments that may possibly constitute a future and then developing scenarios and telling stories around these different possible scenarios and you can use it as a way of planning for different outcomes that might happen in your businesses looks like I'm going to finish early so maybe I'll catch us up a little I could take a question or two so again I you know design thinking I'm trained as a designer it's what I've done my whole career I'm all about experimentation but not just experimentation in our design but experimentation in in our organizations and how we organize ourselves and how we interact and looking at things is looking at everything that we do is a set of experiments right and and seeing what the outcomes are and and having that feedback loop to gauge well what's what's really happening in the system when I try this new initiative does it does it does it get traction does it fall flat what happens and and how do I need to tweak and adjust whatever I'm doing however I'm interacting however my team is interacting however I'm dealing with customers or not dealing with customers treated as an experiment stay open flexible and what that allows you to do is to pivot as necessary so that's that's all that I'm a little bit early I guess I could take a question or two or I can catch catch us up on the speakers whatever the the preference is yeah question sort of yes yes actually so that that slide is is heavily borrowed if not stolen from the design management Institute so they they use it to talk about design I is it to talk about innovation and it definitely maps to a capability maturity model for design so and in fact they have a fourth drawing where the yellow circle is completely outside the gray so it's almost like a foreign entity right so you could even think of it as sort of like a virus invading a cell right it goes in it sort of takes over the cell it's kind of a nice nice diagram I like it a lot questions okay thank you