I would like to design sustainable growth through digital, social, sustainable innovation as an :
INNOVATION MANAGER in a DESIGN agency or INNOVATION LAB
DEVELOPMENT MANAGER in a CONSULTING firm
CHIEF EXPERIENCE OFFICER within the brand communication / marketing team
I leverage game changing consumer insights into :
- useful, desirable, sustainable brands
- valuable products and services
- breakthrough digital acquisition strategies
- engaging prospect and client communications
- relevant research and data analysis enabling decision
The best mechanism to drive growth is a strategically planned ecosystem. To establish a successful ecosystem, I thread the needle between employee experience, customer experience, brand purpose, creative, and technology, imbuing all these crucial areas with customer obsession.
I recently completed a master in INNOVATION & TRANSFORMATION focused on individual and collective engagement to :
- plan projects exploring new business models while reconciling financial, human, techs constraints
- pose complex problems with method, structure and rigor to convince decision makers
- design relevant and creative responses through design thinking to remain connected to consumer reality
- communicate the value proposition and the results effectively to concerned audiences, including Comex
I have clarified my approach in a series of methodological articles:
1- To (re) engage employees digital transformation must rise up to social challenges #socialinnovation #purpose
2 - Experience design to create value and collectively visualize the customer experience to deliver #experiencedesign
3- Brand entertainment the new way to communicate with the -35 years on line and on TV # brandcontent
4- The animation of the collective to envision and deliver an exceptional customer experience #collectiveintelligence
5 - The account planner and the designer, actors of corporate innovation and transformation #goodplanners
My resume + portfolio in French as well as my articles are here : www.pourquoitucours.fr
"The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning. It is happening now." ~Joanna Macy
According to Macy, to accomplish this turning, work needs to be done in three distinct areas. They are as follows:
1) Holding Actions- this is essentially what we normally call activism or direct action. It's getting out there in the streets and saying a "Holy No" to the destructive and unjust practices that are taking place on the planet right now. It's putting bodies in the way of an out of control global system as it marches its sick juggernaut towards some form of deterioration or collapse.
2) Structural Change- this is where we actively work to build new societal forms, new economies, new ways of being together and organizing etc. This is the realm of the famous Buckminster Fuller quote, "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete".
3) Shift in Consciousness- this is where we do the work of inner spiritual and psychological transformation, what Joseph Campbell called the inward journey. Here we intentionally try and develop beyond our "skin encapsulated egos" and open into wider spheres of identity with the earth, cosmos, and the whole of humanity. This can happen through new forms of thought, understanding the Great Story of which we're a-part, and in particular, through the many spiritual traditions that have developed the methods for such transformation over the centuries.
For Macy this is important because, "These structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality--and that shift is happening now, both as cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening"
A year ago we wrote “Sex & Startups.” The premise was this: The current technology and venture capital structure is broken. It rewards quantity over quality, consumption over creation, quick exits over sustainable growth, and shareholder profit over shared prosperity. It chases after “unicorn” companies bent on “disruption” rather than supporting businesses that repair, cultivate, and connect. After publishing the essay, we heard from hundreds of founders, investors, and advocates who agreed: “We cannot win at this game.”
This is an urgent problem. For in this game, far more than money is at stake. When VC firms prize time on site over truth, a lucky few may profit, but civil society suffers. When shareholder return trumps collective well-being, democracy itself is threatened. The reality is that business models breed behavior, and at scale, that behavior can lead to far-reaching, sometimes destructive outcomes.
Many well-reasoned think pieces* have been written about the gaping chasm between the world we need and the world that exists. Today, we want to provide the seeds of a solution — and to encourage founders, investors, foundations, corporations, and their allies to organize around it.
A company’s business model is the first domino in a long chain of consequences. In short: “The business model is the message.” From that business model flows company culture and beliefs, strategies for success, end-user experiences, and, ultimately, the very shape of society.
We believe that developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time. These alternative models will balance profit and purpose, champion democracy, and put a premium on sharing power and resources. Companies that create a more just and responsible society will hear, help, and heal the customers and communities they serve.
Think of our most valuable institutions — journalism, education, healthcare, government, the “third sector” of nonprofits and social enterprises — as houses upon which democracy rests. Unicorn companies are rewarded for disrupting these, for razing them to the ground.
Instead, we ought to support companies that provide extreme home makeovers. We can’t assume these companies will be created by accident. We must intentionally build the infrastructure to nurture them.
ENTER THE ZEBRA
This new movement demands a new symbol, so we’re claiming an animal of our own: the zebra.
Why zebras?
To state the obvious: unlike unicorns, zebras are real.
Zebra companies are both black and white: they are profitable and improve society. They won’t sacrifice one for the other.
Zebras are also mutualistic: by banding together in groups, they protect and preserve one another. Their individual input results in stronger collective output.
Zebra companies are built with peerless stamina and capital efficiency, as long as conditions allow them to survive.
The capital system is failing society in part because it is failing zebra companies: profitable businesses that solve real, meaningful problems and in the process repair existing social systems.
Drawing from the work of many thinkers,** we’ve developed a portrait of what a zebra company is, does, and stands for. This chart outlines how a zebra company compares with its mythical cousin, the unicorn.
For a downloadable, printable version, click here.
WHY IS IT SO HARD TO BUILD ZEBRA COMPANIES?
In the last year we’ve spoken to countless founders, investors, foundations, and thought leaders who believe zebra companies are crucial to our society’s success. Yet zebras struggle for survival because they lack the environment to encourage their birth, let alone to support them through maturity. “I wonder how many change-makers are stuck under the demands of unicorn investors,” said TJ Abood of Access Ventures, who added that he worried about “the opportunity cost to society” under this model.
From our conversations with stakeholders, we distilled the most common challenges facing zebra companies:
1. The problem isn’t product, it’s process. Tech isn’t a silver bullet. Building more won’t solve the biggest challenges we face today. An app won’t address the homelessness crisis in San Francisco or unite bitterly divided partisan politicians. The obstacle is that we are not investing in the process and time it takes to help institutions adopt, deploy, and measure the success of innovation, apps or otherwise.
2. Zebra companies are often started by women and other underrepresented founders. Three percent of venture funding goes to women and less than one percent to people of color. Although women start 30 percent of businesses, they receive only 5 percent of small-business loans and 3 percent of venture capital. Yet when surveyed, women — who perform better overall than founding teams composed exclusively of men — say they are in it for the long haul: to build profitable, sustainable companies.
3. You can’t be it if you can’t see it. Look hard outside of Silicon Valley and you’ll find promising zebra companies. But existing and aspiring business owners haven’t seen enough proof that they’ll have a higher chance of becoming financially successful and socially celebrated if they follow sustainable business practices. They lack heroes to emulate, so they default to the “growth at all costs” model. Imagine if every fund allocated a small percentage for zebra experiments. The investing firm Indie.vc has bravely stepped into this space, but it shouldn’t stand alone.
4. Zebras are stuck between two outdated paradigms, nonprofit and for-profit. For young companies pursuing both profit and purpose, the existing imperfect structures (hybrid for-profit/nonprofit, Public Benefit Corps, B-Corps, L3Cs) can be prohibitively expensive. The expense comes not only in legal fees, but in the consumption of a founder’s most precious commodity: time. Months are lost searching for aligned, strategic investors who are both familiar and comfortable with alternative models. This presents a chicken-and-egg problem for foundations, philanthropists, and investors alike. They are spooked by unproven alternative models, but companies can’t prove their models work without experiments to fund them in the first place. Moreover, the current tax system doesn’t reward — or even acknowledge — anything other than for-profit (tax) or nonprofit (deduction) strategies. From the IRS’s perspective, there is nothing akin to a “50 percent financial return, 50 percent social impact” investment. This leaves many potential investors in a straitjacket.
5. Impact investing’s thesis is detrimentally narrow and risk-averse. Much of the $36 billion in impact investment funding is restricted to verticals like clean technology, microfinance, or global health. This immature market limits innovation in other sectors — like journalism and education — that could desperately use it.
“So how will investors turn a profit and mitigate risks?” you may be asking. Dividends? Equity crowdfunding? We don’t have all the answers. But we’ve seen how a company’s business model and values can negatively affect the bottom line (#deleteuber). So what if the opposite is also true? What if more-enlightened dollars invested in more-enlightened companies led to stronger returns? What if companies that stood for something were in fact more profitable? Patagonia, Warby Parker, Zingerman’s, Etsy, Mailchimp, Basecamp, and Kickstarter are a start — but the world needs so much more.
MAKE ZEBRAS: JOIN US
If you believe technology and capital must do better, if you are building a zebra company or want to help carve out a space for them to thrive: join us
Our goal is to gather zebra founders, philanthropists, investors, thinkers, and advocates to meet in person this year for DazzleCon (November 15–17 in Portland, Oregon)— a group of zebras is called a dazzle! — to learn from one another and pool resources, ideas, and best practices, to collectively advance this set of ambitions. From this gathering, we will capture and share the unique patterns that zebra founders and funders are finding, and we’ll turn a loose network into a powerful, cohesive movement.
DazzleCon is proudly supported by Knight Foundation, Artha Investing for Impact, Social Capital Markets, Portland Incubator Experiment, and Catalyst Law. Interested in sponsoring? Get in touch.
Thanks to Jenn Armbrust, Adam Brault, David Chen, Molly deAguiar, John Dimatos, Lennon Day-Reynolds, Corey Ford, Christie George, Seth Godin, Andrew Haeg, Jason Kunesh, Rachel Hankerson, Jonathan Harris, Jennifer Jordan, Luke Kanies, Duncan Malashock, Kanyi Maqubela, Ellen Mayer, Julie Menter, Douglas Rushkoff, Jake Shapiro, Michael Slaby, Rick Turoczy, Stephanie Pereira, April Rinne, Tom Watson. And to Jen McDonald for editing; and to Arthur Jones for the illustrations.
My experience in strategic planning and project management leads me to manage innovation projets in design consultancies or open innovation hubs. I am also interested to manage brand communications for a company embracing digital, social and environmental changes.
My strengths : 🙋 — Market, consumer, usage & habits research ⚡️ — Experience design applied to brands, products, spaces, campaigns... 🚀 — Innovation & transformation project management 😀 — C suite advisory and satisfaction 👪 — Collective intelligence and Open Innovation (parners / consumers)
🔍 — My articles : 1- To (re) engage employees digital transformation must make sense #socialinnovation #purpose 2 - Social innovation to meet client expectations with a positive impact on society and environment #innovationsociale 3 - Experience design to create value and collectively visualize the customer experience to be delivered #experiencedesign 4 - Brand entertainment the new way to communicate to millennials # brandcontent 5 - The account planner and the designer, actors of corporate innovation and transformation #planner
My book and articles are here : www.pourquoitucours.fr
Over the past years one word kept popping up whenever people talked about advertising and marketing: ‘Storytelling’. And for anyone hoping this trend would one day fade away, we have some bad news. It’s not going anywhere.
We live in an age where traditional advertising is losing its power, where the younger generation is obsessed with sharing personal stories through social media, and all of us are addicted at some level to what the streaming giants have to offer. Obviously brands and companies want in on the action. Brand stories, brand narratives, purpose films, manifests, branded content, branded entertainment, viral marketing. All branches of the same tree, which trunk stems from the fundamental art of storytelling.
Why do we even tell stories?
Most scientists will agree that life is essentially just a sequence of random moments. You are born, random stuff happens and then you die. But ever since the dawn of human intelligence we have tried to make sense of the meaninglessness of our lives. We’ve trained our brains to form patterns that connect random moments and inject meaning into them. That’s what storytelling is. It’s a way for us to get a grip on the endless chaos that would otherwise consume us. If you understand this, then you might also realize why storytelling is so much more than just entertainment. It’s an essential part of our survival, because without the ability to tell stories we would all be lost.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
— Joan Didion
So how does this translate to selling a yoghurt drink?
When Yakult asked us to help share their story to a larger audience they had no idea what that story really was. Neither did we. Because a story is not just a string of facts. We all learn at some point that “And then, and then” stories are boring and tedious. No matter how interesting the origin of your brand might be, that’s not a story in itself. The best way to find where the real gold is would be by reverse-engineering the storytelling mechanism. “Connecting dots gives meaning to life”. Find that “Meaning” and you’ll know where to look for the those dots.
Wait, purpose?
It’s not easy to formulate your company’s or brand’s purpose, because let’s be honest nine out of ten times companies started because someone saw an opportunity to make a buck. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it’s not the stuff of stories. Purpose is often obscured and you’ll need to scrape away the bullshit to get to it.
Almost a hundred years ago a Japanese microbiologist (Minoru Shirota) created a beverage that offered “daily health for an affordable price”. That’s good business, but also purposeful. Because not only did he create the product, he also thought about a way to get it to people who need it the most. Enter the Yakult Ladies. A group of hardworking dedicated women who ride their bikes (nowadays scooters) to clients, offering their daily portion of health in a bottle.
Great story! All we needed to do was to show how the work of Yakult and their ladies helped Japanese people reach old age in health. Wrong. If only it was so simple. In Europe Yakult is not considered a medical product and therefor not allowed to make or even imply any health claims associated with their product. So now what?
We needed a different story
Going back to the Yakult Ladies, we found something even more powerful than the product they offer and that’s the dedication to their clients. Because as much as you want to debate the effectiveness of Yakult, you cannot deny that millions of people swear by it and cannot imagine starting their day without the tiny bottle. You could dismiss this as placebo, but perhaps there’s something more meaningful underneath? A daily ritual, a conscious moment of caring for your digestive system and if that bottle is a part of it, who’s to argue that it doesn’t work? The truth is that Japanese people reach higher ages than any other nationality.
Sadly, old age comes with a down side. A lot of those elderly Japanese people live in solitude and are often lonely. So, you can imagine how this reoccurring visit of the Yakult Lady is of tremendous value to them, because next to suppling their weekly ration of the yoghurt drink, they offer something more valuable: attention. This is meaningful. Going back to connect the dots and this four minute film is the result of our collective search for purpose. It’s the story of Yukie, a Yakult lady who forms a special bond with one of her oldest clients and in the process discovers herself.
What could initially be considered repetitive and insignificant work, now reveals its deeper meaning and purpose. That’s why we love to tell stories: not to make stuff up, but to help people see what was always there.
When brand executives come to us with what they think is a positioning problem these days, we typically have an entirely different diagnosis. Usually, it's a purpose problem.
Positioning around a functional or emotional benefit isn't enough anymore, with purpose instead emerging as the heartbeat of modern brands and as a key ingredient in what makes a brand become — and stay — relevant. Brands with purpose stand for something beyond their product or service, and consumers know it. These are brands that can always answer two questions: What do we believe? And why do we exist
Purpose has become one of the best ways to inspire people, both internally and externally. And it's essential to creating shared value. Brands with purpose don't just transact with people; they deliver something more, an intangible element that becomes part of an ongoing relationship.
By the numbers
Industry research backs this assertion up, including a recent study that found that brands with a strong sense of purpose grow at rate 2x that of those that don't. Our own Prophet Brand Relevance Index shows time and time again that components connected to how consumers interpret brand purpose propel "meaningful" brands to the top, led by the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Apple. Brands like Pinterest are beloved, while others lacking a strategic purpose may be used but lack relevance. Facebook, for instance, doesn't even crack the top 100 in our latest ranking.
Consumers can name many coffee brands, but they know Starbucks. When they lace up their sneakers or use Nike+ to track their morning run, they believe Nike is hoping to inspire the athlete inside them.
This sense of purpose isn't just about winning with customers. It's the No. 1 reason millennials choose to work for a given employer, studies have found — sometimes even trumping salary. It is then through a clear purpose that companies can attract and retain exceptional talent. It's also essential to appeal to potential partners and is the foundation for creating a meaningful experience.
Of course, this is not to say that purpose is the only thing that builds relevance, or that it immediately translates to higher sales. Brands must do many things right to succeed. But it's increasingly clear that the brands that fare the best and are the most differentiated from their competition are those with a crystallized strategic purpose.
How to find true purpose
It's important to point out that brand purpose can, and often should, be different than a corporate mission. Unilever, for example, has staked its claim in sustainability and supported that through its portfolio of brands. But Axe's purpose is to help guys look, feel and smell their best, while Dove strives to turn beauty into a source of confidence, not anxiety.
Some brands are lucky enough to have been based on purpose from the very beginning. Parents can buy many types of toys, but their favorites are likely Fisher-Price, because they share the belief that play is learning, or LEGO, which sees all children as the builders of tomorrow. Others, such as Ford, GE and Bank of America, have reshaped their purpose to hold more meaning for today's audiences.
Centering your brand on a strategic purpose isn't easy, but the intersection of a few lenses can put you well on your way to achieving this goal:
Societal impact — where does the world need help and you can make a difference?
Major capabilities — what are you good at beyond the products and services provided?
Passion point — what is your organization most passionate about?
The first step when examining these issues is to ask the question that goes to the heart of a brand's sense of itself: What do we believe? It's the value closest to the center of an enterprise, one so fiercely held that it sets it apart from peers. Many companies believe in being good corporate citizens. Only State Farm believes in being a good neighbor.
Put in simpler terms, how does your brand see the world? What makes that viewpoint different?
Examining tough questions
The second question marketers need to answer is harder: Why does our brand exist?
This comes bundled with a few other points, such as what tensions do we want to do address? What experiences do our customers love or couldn't live without? What do our employees think we do best? A purpose is only valid if it's known, shared and prized by everyone within and around the enterprise — from potential employees to core customers to investors.
Answering this second question is a logical leap from the first. Bank of America, for example, believes in the power of meaningful connections. Its reason for existing is connecting individuals, families and businesses to make their financial lives better. GE's core belief is that with imagination, anything is possible. It exists to use that imagination to invent the next industrial era, one that will build, move, power and cure.
Answering this second question also delves into the ways your organization delivers on promises. A commitment to purpose, once crystallized and communicated to all parts of the organization, is what inspires a steadily evolving array of services and products.
Following through
Once the answers to those two questions have been synthesized and articulated into a clear and succinct brand purpose, that purpose needs to be infused in several ways throughout the organization. The smallest details matter, but so do high-level strategies. In 2014, CVS stunned many observers with its decision to stop selling tobacco products. It told customers it needed to do this to better deliver on its purpose of striving "to improve the quality of human life."
In hindsight, the retailer had to make that call in order for employees, customers and business partners to take its commitment seriously.
Finally, it's essential to continually validate your brand's purpose. While purpose reflects deep and enduring values that shouldn't change much over time, it's still essential to track the purpose of competitors. Without finding new ways to engage customers through living brand experiences, competitors can hijack your purpose and take customers with them. Is the purpose still clear and evident in every way? Are there new ways it can be conveyed more meaningfully?
Preserving relevance
By the same token, brands need to continually take the pulse of core consumers and stakeholders, monitoring shifts in the way they interpret purpose. Many concerns about sustainability, for example, have evolved to be as much about people as the planet, expanding the purpose to address issues of fair trade and human rights.
Great care must be paid to delivering on brand purpose. Ingredient scandals are destructive for all food brands, for example, but they're crippling for those positioned as especially healthy. And while Volkswagen has bounced back from #dieselgate, the damage was precisely because the fraud involved faked emissions results, negating its purpose of environmentally-sound engines. Consumers virtually always dislike bad corporate behavior, but they're especially fierce in punishing what they perceive as brand hypocrisy.
Is a strong purpose enough to make a brand soar? No. But combined with a commitment to creating living, evolving brand experiences and the recognition that brands must be powered from the inside out through culture, capabilities and engagement, it's an essential ingredient of relevance. And in today's fast-moving world, that's the currency that matters most.
In the Age of Experience, customer expectation has been transformed. It’s not just a good idea for a company or a brand to deliver an experience with their product: it is imperative when you want to have a real impact on the market. This is changing the scope of what it means to Design.
Design has evolved beyond modeling products. Products used to be the direct expression of the design intent, defined under the physical constraints of available technologies, materials, ergonomics and well defined tasks and functions. But in the Age of Experience, products are dematerialized, reduced to “black boxes”, while integrating the realm of our augmented life.
The scope and value of Design is now at a critical place.
Design’s perspective is moving from designing products to designing experiences, engaging final users in a totally new way. It goes beyond aesthetics to genuine social means, investing in a larger scope of actions across a large spectrum of new disciplines. This “transdisciplinarity” of Design impacts business models, creates new offerings and new social engagement, and convokes new uses of science for designing meaningful and sustainable experiences.
We traditionally consider “Design Thinking” as placing the “human” at the center of the project or value proposition and deciphering what people really want, but fail to express. Design Thinking was the first visible step of Design transformation, moving from the individual designer’s subjective concept towards an empathic model of engagement, leveraging a social participative approach and multiple viewpoints.
Businesses use Design Thinking to identify market opportunity and build a solution that delivers customer value. It’s an improvement for designing a better product with clear identity, efficiency, and well-defined utilities. But the world and Design have quickly moved on to broader and more holistic issues, tackling complex systems and considering the full technological and service ecosystem by co-defining with users what makes up a unique and continuous experience.
This broader realm of “Experience Thinking” encompasses a new scope for designers, going beyond functions and harnessing the emotive power of customer experience. They script future scenarios and craft real-time 3D prototypes, use immersive technologies and virtual universes, and develop 3D digital masters with integrated information. Designers are acquiring abilities to access new information, including knowledge gathered from studies, but also a large variety of Data captured from sensors. These combined social and science-based data provide new material for designer creativity.
Digital content is the new nexus for thoughts, interpretation and decision making. The right tools and platform for ideation, virtualization, manufacturability and sustainability enable designers and businesses to view and validate experiential designs at any stage of the development process. Designers can craft the links between products and their interactions, making visible the emotional connections and their use. Data and senses combine for new balanced proposals.
Where we go from here depends on how we use Design to transform companies’ business ecosystems to create designs that captivate users, accelerate technology adoption and deliver ethical and sustainable experiences. Users will “co-design”, modifying deeply our life experiences and changing forever the way people live, travel and interact with technology in the future.
Design professionals across industries (such as architects, industrial designers and transportation specialists) can today transform their processes, methodologies and applications for experience thinking to imagine, design and fabricate innovative proposals.
Collaborating within this new innovation environment, experience thinking can help a business build its brand’s promise and the accompanying emotions it evokes. Then, each customer experience stands on its own as a singular achievement, but also provides a perfect center of gravity that builds brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Discover more about Design in the Age of Experience at our event website.
Find out about Dassault Systèmes’ Design Studiohere.
Over the last three years I’ve been working with Henry Timms – founder of #GivingTuesday – to develop the ideas we first laid out in HBR and in my TED talk. We’ve learned so much from many of you – the activists, entrepreneurs, leaders and philanthropists who are using new forms of participation to shape a better world.
New Power offers a new roadmap to build movements, spread ideas, cultivate communities, lead differently, and shift established organizations in our radically altered world. We’ve had some wonderful early reactions to the book, including from Jane Goodall ("this book will inform and inspire all those wanting to make change”); Alicia Garza ("a must-read ... a gift to our movements"); Reid Hoffman (“essential and extremely insightful”) and Richard Branson (“could not be coming at a better time”).
As a friend of mine and of Purpose, I’d love for you to have New Power in your hands on publication day. But we also know that these pre-orders will make a *huge* difference to the trajectory and reach of this book — a strong opening week has a major impact on how many people ultimately engage with these ideas. Your help now will help New Power take off.
Your support means a lot. And if you pre-order New Powerin the next five days, we’ll send you a chapter you can read right away — and an impossibly cute new power tote bag :)
UK rapper Professor Green's recent documentary on the scourge of male suicide made the headlines for lots of reasons. First and foremost, it shone a light on the shocking statistics: in the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45. And it got people thinking, let’s hope in a long-term way, about stereotypical forms of masculinity – stiff upper lips and the demands of "laddishness" – and the potential harm they can do.
In fact, Pro Green himself came under the spotlight for crying on a Newsnight appearance to promote the show. He used the opportunity to tell people, including men of course, not to be ashamed of showing emotion like this.
It’s not too much to say that the cultural expectations that our society places on men, and that are strongly self-policed, are literally killing them. Men are far less likely than women to admit to or seek help for depression. And even when they do, they risk not being taken seriously, told to get over it, to ‘man up’.
The hope is that seeing mainstream role models like Professor Green speaking out will gradually start to chip away at these stereotypical expectations. Because what’s going on in culture isn’t just an interesting tangent to this debate – it’s a key driver of the appalling facts. In-culture prevention is therefore just as critical as targeted intervention, especially as cuts to mental heath services start to bite.
All of us have a responsibility to reconsider our view of what it means to be a ‘real man’. And this includes brands, which, as we know, can be very powerful forces for shifting the cultural discourse. We’ve seen lots of female-focused brands, from Always to Sport England, taking on stereotypes of femininity. What about products and services targeted at men?
Dove Men Care has taken the lead with its #realstrength campaign, which launched at this year’s Super Bowl. Even the famously laddy Lynx is partnering with CALM, a charity dedicated to preventing male suicide, encouraging men to talk about the #biggerissues. Let’s hope this is just the start of a new wave of stereotype bashing.
After leaving Adaptive Path in 2012, Todd Wilkens has been focused on one of the biggest issues in Service Design: building a Service Design practice on a massive scale. In the past four years, Todd has been a pivotal part of design initiatives at Mayo Clinic, the enormous design transformation initiative at IBM, Atlassian the enterprise software developer, and is now starting a new position as the head of WooCommerce. Todd is speaking at Adaptive Path’s upcoming Service Experience Conference in San Francisco, and is bringing his hard-won expertise to explain why we need to sacrifice Service Design as a unique discipline in order to build great services.
Scott Sullivan (SS): So looking over your recent work history, it seems like it’s focused on building a design practice within massive, massive places.
Todd Wilkens (TW): In the last few years, that’s for sure. I’ve been going to places, trying to help build design practice in big organizations.
SS: The scale of what you were doing at IBM is just — is insane, right? I mean, everybody was just like, “I can’t believe they’re actually attempting to do that there,” but it seems to be working out really well.
TW: Yeah, that was why I originally went to go take that job was because it just, it was crazy. It was crazy what Phil Gilbert and the team he was putting together were trying to do, and it just seemed like, you can’t just not — if you have a chance to try that, you gotta give it a shot, right?
SS: Absolutely! And IBM is doing great now. They’re getting stuff done, consistently publishing really great insights and tools, really useful stuff. Would you consider that, from your current perspective, mission accomplished? Or well on the way?
TW: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. Something that I learned from working at Adaptive Path in the past was, people used to come to Adaptive Path for help transforming their organizations a lot of times. They’re trying to understand how to do design or Service Design or planned thinking or whatever phrase they use — trying to bring that in, make it strategically impactful. How do we do it?
We’ve talked to lots of large organizations about that, and the one thing you always realize is that this is a task that is never completed. You start working on that, but it’s never like “it’s done, okay, we can hang up our hats and it’s going to be fine for the next 10 years.” Transformation almost never just “happens” — it’s always moving in the right direction.
IBM is one of the places where the basic idea for my talk was cemented, which is that you have to stop focusing on being a designer and owning design. You have to recognize that, in order to make great products and services around the world, designers don’t do that by themselves, right? It’s these whole multidisciplinary teams that actually get things out into the world to have impact. That was one of the first places where I realized I had to kind of give up the ownership of design. It couldn’t be this precious thing and this precious identity to myself and the people on our team. We had to prioritize getting good things shipped out the door over ourselves as design people. The output, the impact in the world and the impact on the world was much more important than us continuing to own or even get credit for everything.
SS: So would designers be seen as more of a gatekeeper? When you’re working with multiple lines of businesses on multiple touchpoints, what’s the service designer’s responsibility?
TW: It’s interesting that you say, “the gatekeeper,” that’s a conversation that we had at Atlassian, sometimes people use the word gatekeeper, sometimes they say “Is this some kind of stage-gate that everybody has to get approval before we build a thing?” Sometimes the word ownership gets used in those kinds of conversations as well, asking “Who is the owner that has to make the decisions and has to be consulted before a decision is made.” And, what’s interesting is that, this happened at IBM, and this is one of the lessons I’ve learned at Atlassian, the sort of trite thing to say is that software products and services are never done, right? They’re just in their current state, and you’re trying to make each state of their release better than the last, but they’re never done, and they’re also never perfect. And even if you got something that was “perfect”, the world would change enough that it would stop being perfect as a match for that world within three to six months.
So we’re always evolving everything that we release, whether software or service. I say that because it’s actually an interesting thing when it comes to design, in my experience, and the role of design. If you ask most designers “should we be iterating on things?” they will say, “Of course you’re iterating on things! It’s never perfect, you’re always iterating, always improving, you’re always duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” But most designers talk about that within the studio, “as long as I’m ‘in the prototyping phase’ — yes, of course, it’s iterating. But then there’s a point where I have to feel like it’s done and I’m releasing something to the world. They tend to choose their criteria for success when something is released out into the world. It needs to be better, more perfect. And then there’s this kind of real hesitance, I’ve found, around how you handle iteration once something is out in the world. Designers are really comfortable with that iteration idea, but I find that they get more uncomfortable once it’s released into the world.
I want to change the conversation and start saying, “Well, yes, there are some things we can learn and improve on when it’s kind of in our control in the studio,” and I use the word studio in a sort of generic sense, not out in the world. But there’s this sense that we aren’t really learning if it’s working until we’ve made it and gotten it out in the hands of people that use it. Yes, we can do generative research. Yes, we can do evaluative research before it’s out. But oftentimes, especially with services, which tend to have complex touchpoints — you know, it’s one of those things that we can’t actually completely understand all the implications before it’s out and being used. The sooner you get it out into the world, and the better you are at quickly iterating it once it’s out in the world, it’s actually a better way of reducing risk and getting to success than spending time up front. One of the things I’ve learned is that, in some cases, that skill set is actually more important than all the design thinking that goes on.
So what that means is, designers need to stop seeing themselves as a gatekeeper and more as a conductor. You could say it like a train conductor, or like a music conductor. Both cases are actually accurate in some sense as a metaphor. It’s like being a conductor or a jazz musician with improvisational jazz. You don’t know what the next thing that is going to happen is, and you need to empower your people to respond to things, even when you’re not there telling them what to do.
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