UXA2022 Day 2; Rich Brophy - Death to “best practice”: The journey to cohesive design practice at scale

Governments and organisations around the world pay extortionate fees to consultants and design departments to help define and embed “best practice” design.

But best practice is a myth. Effective practice however, is real and valuable and based on what actually works.

This practical and entertaining presentation delves into how to embed a cohesive design practice at scale simply by tapping into what already works.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.com.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2022 Friday, 26 September 2022 Captioned by: Carmel Downes & Kasey Allen
2. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 60 that is where the conversation, is simple things like language, just language that's conversational. They are in our brand guidelines anyway but constantly doing a sense check and saying if I am a person who is experiencing burn out, any kind of distress, what am I going to respond to. I am probably going to respond to visuals first of all and then I will respond to kind, conversational words on paper. That was a really big thing for us too. I'm not sure whether that answers the question but, yeah. STEVE BATY: We'll accept that as your answers and appreciate it. Thank you very much. Please join me in thanks Kerry and Catherine. Have a great afternoon. (APPLAUSE) Our next talk is going to be here on stage. Rich Brophy will be presenting in person. Hi Rich. Make your way up. Please join me in welcoming Rich. He is from the NSW Department of Customer Service and will talk to us about death is best practice. Take it away. RICH BROPHY: Do you want to stand up and stretch before we talk about this. I don't want to be one of these people that says "Come on, all sing together". We could probably dance. It feels like a nightclub that the Romans designed. I am Rich, G'day. Talking about "Death to best practice". It is pretty cool, pretty edgy, right. When I first submitted the talk it was called improving design practice in medium to large organisations and I thought I am not going to that. "Death to best practice" a bit edgy and kind of fitting that I am dressed like a vicar as well. Ready to put this thing in the ground. I will start with the story because I have seen too many Ted talks. I had a job a couple of years ago, I joined a team whose work was basically
3. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 61 improving CX design capability in a government department and I had done a bunch of that stuff before, it was really good to go in house and do it. I worked as a consultant. I don't know if you have worked for a government department but normally on the first day you get told your computer is not there. The second day you don't have access to anything and that can go on for a long time. What they did is they plonked me down in front of the playbook, the CX design playbook. I read this thing cover to cover and it was massive. I have seen religious tones that aren't this heavy weight. It had their own triple quadruple diamond and there was a glossary, behaviours, mindsets, activities and it was good seeing, all that stuff brought together was pretty amazing. So basically I sat down and I read this thing and I was like cool, I got the gist of it and after a week I got access to stuff and we started to do work. I was like right, how are we going to embed best practice? I looked around the organisation. We have a lot of people who don't think like designers, what are we going to do to change them and my manager was like "Relationship, page 8-19, mindsets". I was like "All right but how are they going to actually do the kinds of things that we need them to do?" "Rich, page 22-35, behaviours". I think I know how you are going to answer this but "How are we actually going to redesign our customer experience?" And it was like "Mate, that is what the other 160 pages were for, right". This thing was the answer. I found out there was videos to go with it and it was classic, cut price versions of those Atlassian - you know the plays that used to have the videos. It was like that but on a serious budget. One day I found in this locked cabinet were all these playing cards with different activities on them, it was way more lightweight than the 160 page Bible of design. I was like "Why aren't we putting these out there? We have got these cards, videos and this playbook, has anyone actually seen this stuff?" And
4. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 62 the person I was working for was like "No, they haven't given it to anyone, they can't be trusted". I was like "What do you mean?" "If we give this stuff out, people won't do it properly, they will just do it in the best way they can. If I release this pay playbook, other managers will take ownership of that and pretend it came from them". I have done a bit of this uplift stuff before and I was like surely people taking ownership and adapting these things is what we want? But it wasn't, right. I realised what had happened is the executive had decided that best practice was the way forward. We need to embed best practice to improve our organisation so they went and spoke to a consultant who Googled "Best practice" and put in a playbook for lots of money and then created a team who was also going to embed best practice. It was like a top down mindset that was happening in the organisation. All the while, the people who actually do the work, who are delivering the experience to customers, they are sitting there wondering what is going on upstairs. It was like - you know that scene in Independence Day where the shadow looms over the city. That is how best practice was coming into the organisation, or at least threatening too, right. Zoom, a better experience! I worked there for 11 months. I did not embed best practise but I did learn one important thing and that is that best practice needs to die. I work for NSW government. I work on a product called the digital service toolkit. I am like a service design sort of person. The toolkit is really about this resources guide, templates and tools to help people design and deliver better services to NSW citizens. I work with some super smart people and a lot of the stuff I will talk about today is based on conversations we have had together. I run a legal and design studio called Pickle Inc. It is interesting that both these things, I am trying to find a way to get design to meld the culture in the organisation that it is
5. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 63 maybe not part of yet. I will be talking about that. So I do designing design. I have spent a lot of time designing design. I design stuff, that is half my work. The other half is actually designing design. Thinking about how do we meld this world of design, these practices, mindsets, behaviours with what an organisation needs to improve. I am pretty sure that we all have that. Hands up if it is in your job description somewhere that you have to uplift the capability of the organisation? Keep your hand up if you're actually doing it. Old mate at the back, good on you. Are you nailing it? You can leave, you got an early mark. I have done heaps. I have worked as an external trying to uplift design and internally, in public, in private in the community doing this stuff. I have written playbooks, created tool kits, designed design programs and all that kind of stuff. Some of them worked reasonably well. Some of them were shit - right I will stop swearing - haven't worked really and by doing all this testing and learning, I have learnt something - I don't think it is that profound but I think it is important when we are trying to uplift capability and that's that - the way we think about improving design practice is broken. I am not going to poo poo playbooks or tool kits or whatever, because they work but the way that we think when we are coming up with these things, I think that is broken and that is what this talk today is about. I think if we can change the way we approach this kind of stuff, that fundamentally changes the things that we deliver and the way we go about our day to day work. This might not be for everyone. Hopefully there is some interesting stuff but there is no other talks on so you are stuck with me. I will quickly talk about where we are at in terms of improving design practice. I will talk about this phrase "Embed best practice" which I'm sure we're familiar with and I will give you a framework for change, so if you are working in
6. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 64 this space, there is something that you can apply. I will use this as a proxy for - in my chat we had a lot of discussions when we work odd this brief and delivered its output. A pretty open brief. I was working with different people, improving the confidence and capability of research in NSW Government. A decent remit. We built this thing, the activities and templates hub, it is a collection of effective activities and templates, gathered from practitioners across the NSW Government. You know when you do a project and you have I have so much smart stuff in my head, can I make it manifest in this simple little product? I can't and that is why I am talking about it. This is not perfect, by the way if you look at it, you will be like that is shit, why did you do that? I know that, there is a long backlog of stuff I want to do to it but it is a good start and it is moving in the right direction. We are talking about not changing everything. I won't give you the answer because that would be best practice, but I am going to point to this and talk about it and some of the stuff we have the learnt and delivered as a result. Where are we at? When it comes to improving design practice in the organisation, there is always forces at play. Some of the things work for us and some of the things work against us. Something that has been interesting, this happens more in private but it happens in the public too, in the board rooms or upper echelons of these organisations, design is becoming part of the discussion. People are actually talking about problems, actually thinking and working in ways that can enable design in an organisation. We have a bunch of practitioners that actually care. Maybe we don't get to act on that care every day but everyone in this room, I'm sure really cares about delivering great outcomes. That is a huge thing to be working with. And if you are lucky, you have opposite people in your organisation who take all that boring low value task and make it something that you can do at the click of a button. It is amazing if
7. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 65 you work with opposite people, pick them up because they are doing great work. You're an ops person, in the audience, yeah? There is also challenges. We're understaffed. You guys are in the room, the rest of your team is struggling right now. There is not enough of us when we sit at our desks, right. What else, people kind of get design but don't really. Some of us might have done the six month design course and you get told that "This is the way that you do design" and you get out in the real world and people are like "No, that is not the way to do design". It is dismaying but when you go into an organisation it is time to deliver. A lot of our organisations are being run by people from accounting or finance backgrounds, logical, linear people looking for efficiencies and that is a blocker to improving design practice. They are the forces at play, I will talk a little bit about how we work with them in a second. What is important to talk about is the idea of improving design practice. It is different to the idea of embedding best practice. That is how we talk about it in organisations, consultants will say "You need to embed best practice" and leaders will then tell their managers "You need to embed best practice". Managers tell their teams "You need to do best practice" and doers go "What the hell is best practice?" And it is this - whatever it is that we are meant to be doing, we are kind of aligned on the outcomes, right? Clear shared expectations of what we are all doing, no matter who is involved in the design process. We should have empowered capable people if we can actually do what we are trying to do and there should be accessible reliable pathways to delivering quality outcomes. Those are the things that, regardless of what we are trying to do, these are the things we are aiming for, I believe. Let's talk about embedding best practice. The three words and hopefully give you some better ways to think about it. Firstly, embed. A microchip gets embedded in a dog, or a journalist gets embedded with a
8. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 66 platoon, or a missile gets embedded in a playground. All of these things are foreign bodies introduced into an environment that they're not meant to be in, or they're not naturally a part of. I think when we talk about embedding best practice, it is really taking this - it is the language of the upper, right, it is an external putting it on the people who are trying to do the thing, right. We are trying our best to do the thing, regardless of who these people are telling us to embed whatever it is they want us to do. That is fundamentally flawed and there's a great quote that captures why. I don't know if you have seen it "People don't resist change, they resist being changed". It is really easy, when you are working in some kind of change capacity, to look at people and think they're a problem, they're an issue that I need to overcome but I think that is the wrong mindset and so does the clever Peter Senge. It is about learning organisations, it is like crazy that book, you should definitely read it. This is really important. Our job as designers, as researchers, we are literally paid and we come and learn these things and we get up in the morning because we engage. We empower, we enable people. That is what we're here to do. Enable is a really nice framing of what we're trying to achieve, instead of the embed mindset, enable is a better way to frame it. When we embed, we are talking about resistance, people will be up against this. Uptake, how are we going to measure that people are actually changing in the way we want to? Talk about changing behaviours, people are currently doing this but we need them to behave like that. I reckon that is not good design. It is not human centric design. I don't think it is good design. I think smart design works with the constraint that we have got, works with the resources that we have. When we enable, we look at motivations, what are people already motivated to do? Not just in their day to day but ultimately, I want to make a better impact on the world. I want to improve my ability to - like that ratio of impact to effort, or I want my
9. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 67 next job or I want to feel more confident, whatever it is. Blockers and drivers, we talk about pains and gains a lot in design. Blockers and drivers are better. Pains and gains feel like things that we can endure as we continue through a journey. Blockers and drivers capture it better. Blockers block us from moving forward, drivers drive us forward. I think sometimes we forget that if we block, if people are blocked at this point in the journey, they are not actually moving to the next point in the journey. It is not just a pain point that we should get to at some point. Literally, unless the drivers outweigh the blockers at each phase of the journey, then people aren't moving forward. I think we need to take that same journey mindset when we are trying to change, or improve design practice. Let's just leverage the behaviours we have got. Yes, they might not be perfect but people are already behaving in that way for a reason. Why don't we look at how they are behaving and see what we can work with. When we work on this project, some of the things - damn it, this is what we did and soon I will tell you what we learnt. What a reveal. What do we do? We are trying to uplift research, so there is a will to do research and people wanted to do research but weren't supported by leaders. Leaders are motivated by delivering. They want something to show for the efforts and the time. Leaders were motivated by delivering. They wanted to get to the next thing and if people weren't doing that with research, getting blocked by something, they weren't delivering and it wasn't valued by leaders and people didn't have the confidence to try new things. We wanted to align with leader motivations. Make sure every activity and template you give people produces a thing that feels like we are delivering. How can we be clear on the value and outputs? What do we need to tell people and show them up-front before they engage with the thing. This is what you will be able to do with it.
10. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 68 We focused on the beginning of the journey because that is the hardest bit. If you can start research, you are in a better place than if it just gets waved through and you start building what the idea was to begin with. Starting is the hardest part. That is good. I think enable is better than embed. I have got some nifty tricks that I was going to talk about but we can talk about that over lunch. Let's talk about best. You can probably understand my beef with best. Best is appealist, there is nothing higher than the best, right, which is a great thing to aspire to but we work in this wonky, weird, evolving industry and every project is different. The constraints of our organisation, the culture we work in, all these things are different. We are also still feeling our way forward, we are always trying, experimenting and doing new things. There is no best when it is this body of practice that we work in. If we but that paradox to the side, the other thing is you have got to ask best for whom? Who's deciding what is best for us? If you have your kind of branch of the organisation being run by someone with a logical, linear mindset, what's best for them is maybe efficiency but that is not necessarily what is best for you, sitting at your desk trying to actually get stuff done. It says what is best practice at the bottom but that is a good definition I won't read it but it comes from industry. It is about efficiency and getting rid of the variables so we can do stuff in a predictable way. Last week we got to speak to a bunch of people at my open space workshop. People talked about what best practice meant for them, build on a yardstick for the organisation, basically. Something that is retrospectively recognised, when something succeeds, that is - someone very smart was in that thing, right? Common denominator for involving problems. This one of a means to improve the efficiency of human capital is what I have heard a lot when I get tasked to build a design program. The outcomes are all the same. The ones we talked about before. I
11. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 69 want to talk about this perspective, this improving the efficiency of human capital because if that is a common mindset and that common mindset lives where the money is, then that is how these programs get spun up and it is important to be aware of the environment that we're trying to improve practice in. This is where best practice lives - the ideal. You might have been there. It lives in strategy decks, in recommendations, in away days. It is collaborative, agile, it is seamless, we are trusted, we move forward and we deliver outcomes, the ideal is awesome, right. That is where best practice lives. But that is not where we work. We work over here, where it is siloed, where knowledge is power, so we hold onto it. Where solutions are cooked up well before a problem is even thought about, right. (LAUGHTER) In this world, we are kind of anchored. There is processes, practices, structures, mindsets that keep us in reality and away from ideals. When we talk about uplifting practice, when we talk about best practice, it is very different from actual practice. The thing that is interesting is that there is an overlap. I wish there was a smoother transition there but I was on Google slides. There is an overlap between reality and ideal where best practice actually works in the reality that we work in. When I am thinking about how are we going to improve practice? This is the space that I want to play in. This is our role. I call this effective practice. This is the thing that is actually going to improve practice in the organisation, I believe. We came to this by playbooks weren't fit for purpose, people weren't using them, they didn't match their needs. People look for what works and you are trying to do something like start doing research in your team, understanding what is a proven practice is really important. Something that looks and feels like it does work around here or it has been proven to work. People are acutely aware of the challenges they are
12. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 70 facing in their team, in their organisation and so they want to make sure if they are doing something for the first time, it actually works for them. We leverage the people who were excelling in NSW Government. We looked at the practices, the processes and the activities and templates that they had. What are the ones unique to NSW? We weren't trying to create a content library, we looked at what are the actual things that have been adapted or developed within this organisation to work? We tried to make it accessible because people were doing it for the first time and it is also framework agnostic. If you look on this hub, it is about planning research, doing research, using research. That doesn't need to fit into any diamond framework. It is here is a bunch of stuff, you are smart, you get it. I think effective is a far better way to think about what we are trying to propagate in an organisation and the best. I will talk about practice, which is my favourite word of the three. Practice is a great word. That means it is actually being applied. That is a healthy way to think about it. Practice is good. But the problem that I have with it is it is not actually that compelling. No-one wakes up in the morning, makes a coffee and opens up our playbook to just peruse through, right? We like to think that is what we do when we publish these things but that is not what happens. I want to talk quickly about what practice is - what I reckon it is. I saw this in a workshop years ago. I don't know where it is from. This is a nice way to think about practice, it is what you do and how you do it. Very simple. I kind of think that the longer that you have been in design, you realise what you do is a very small part of it. That is what lives in the playbooks. This is what you do and everything below the surface is the mindsets and behaviours. There is all these variables about how you do, why you do it, who you do it with and when you do it? And these are complexities that are hard to document. Hands up if you have ever used the five "Whys" to explain the
13. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 71 simplicity of design to people? Maybe just nod. Have you ever done the five whys? It is hard. This process takes a grand master of chess to understand where it is going and which angle we should take, right. It is simple but it is hard. I worked in this place for some smart designers and we tried to document our best practice. Someone came in and actually worked with the designers to understand what we were doing and how we were doing it. They created a nice, clean, lightweight accessible set of activities. One of them - the designer that I worked with got jack of it and he embarked on creating his own. He got to 40 pages with three activities in it, trying to explain the variables. Actually neither of those approaches were right because if we are too flippant, not enough for people to actually do it. If we go too deep, it lacks accessibility that people need when they do it for the first time. I think that what we need is just enough. We need to give people enough confidence, enough structure, we need to give them a taste of the how, the stuff below the surface but we don't need to give it all to them. If are you documenting something like this, I feel like I might be talking in an abstract here but basically, if you give enough, you put the emphasis back on the user to do some of their own work. That will be problematic if you are trying to get them to improve practice but if, instead of focusing on practice, we actually focus on problems and progress in the moment, what are the challenges people are facing, then you have people who are very motivated to make this thing work. You don't need to give them an encyclopaedic version of how to do crazy eights. You need to give them enough and whichever way works in your organisation, so they can do the thing and fill in all this stuff that sits below the surface. All that how, they know what their team needs, what their capabilities are, what the constraints are. If you give them enough and focus on a problem, you don't need to do all this other stuff, of documenting the whole entire process, of running training of
14. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 72 having coaching sessions, or initiatives or fun collaborative projects where we redesign the mobile phone, whatever it is. If we focus on problems and progress that our users have, we actually get to design less, not more, which I think is an aspiration we should all have. You can make up your own mind, though. What do we do? People are proactive when faced with a problem, that is what we found. No-one is looking for our web site, they are looking for a solution. When we overpromised, we did concept testing and we get research recipes and you "Transformed this" and when they looked at the concept, they were like "This won't work" and then covering all bases is too heavy weight and "That is not for me". People were motivated by progress not practice, that is nice framing. What do we do about that? This is my favourite thing, high value slices of the design process. What is the point that people get to where they can't go any further? We have synthesized our research but how do we nudge it over the edge to insights. We found our opportunities but how do we confidently prioritise these things? We have questions but how do we document that in the discussion decide that is fit for purpose in the place we work? We had outcome-based steps in our activities, that helped people understand why they would do each thing and how it would contribute to the ultimate goal. We made them highly adaptable because people know what works in their organisation. If you are trying to give someone an activity or template, you don't need to put it in every single format it that it can come in. When they are motivated, if it is a real problem and they want to solve it, find out what the threshold it and they will be able to do it for themselves. They are smart people. Progress over practice. And something else I won't tell you about. I think enable is better than embed, effective is better than best and progress is better than practice. Don't go to your boss and say "We
15. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 73 want to enable effective progress" because that sounds even less useful than embedding best practice. Keep it in your mind because the way you think will influence everything that you do as a result. Theory of change. We thought if we can get someone to do an activity once at the beginning of research, help them make progress, it would change the way that their project works. When they see the value, they will change the way they think about design. This is something that we can use again. This is actually improved process. If we can get to that point, we talk about the theory of change, we have inputs, activities, these different layers of outcomes. Ultimately, if you can start to get people - even just choose one activity to improve their research a bit and ask slightly better questions in research, the intermediary outcome is they are creating a better project and if people see this value and experience it for themselves that is when we create the conditions where design practice can actually improve. I want to talk about what that looks like in real life. I spoke to someone a couple of weeks ago - someone who contributed a theory of change, but they chaired a theory of change in this hub and someone was having trouble, they were working in this project on multiple teams who weren't seeing eye to eye and weren't getting on board. It was early on in the project so that is an issue and they didn't have enough resources to deliver the outcomes they were told they had to deliver. What would normally happen is this person would have pushed through and tried to get people to get on board. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't. They would limp through the project with minimum resources because they have been told "This is all you have got so do what you can", but this person got the theory of change activity, got these teams together, went through this thing where they talked about what are the outcomes we are trying to achieve? What are the things that we need to do in order to achieve it?
16. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 74 What are the different things that we bring to the table to help us do these things to achieve these outcomes? It is basic theory of change but by using this as a discussion tool and helping everyone see how the work they did mapped to the ultimate outcomes is a really effective tool for this person to create alignment amongst these teams that weren't seeing eye to eye, that weren't opening up to working together. Then they used that map, that theory of change and took it to stakeholders, used it as a discussion tool, showed them this is what you want us to do, this is what we're capable of doing, these things over here, these resources are what we are missing in order to achieve these outcomes and then it became a collaborative exercise, stakeholders are leaning in and giving advice about how we can achieve more with less or if you need it at this point, we can start to talk about it. As a result, you end up with a bunch of people working in a better way. We end up with people who are going to start to see the value of this kind of activity as they start to work together and ultimately, it will set the project, I believe, on a far more likely path to deliver the outcomes that they set out to achieve. For me that was a really nice example of this theory of change actually working. We have had 15,000 visits to this site since we started. There is not 15,000 designers in the NSW Government but what is interesting is there has been 5,000 downloads of the activities and template. A third of those visits are resulting in people downloading this stuff. Even if 10% of those people are actually using these things, that is like 500 projects that have been set on a better path. More teams coming together - it is just an incremental change but because it is early on in the process, that results in a much bigger change, better outcomes just because you have got the five whys documented. That is how we get to outcomes. Let's quickly talk about how we are going to do it? I don't know if it
17. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 75 is a framework, I think it is a model. There is two easy groups we need to look at those people who excel in an organisation, and those who want to excel. They don't have to be designers or strategists or researchers or anything, just the people who know how to get stuff done in a quality way and people who want to do stuff better. You also have the Harvey Norman, the people with no interest in engaging. That is not where change happens, we don't need to worry about them. With these two groups, we have effective practice on the right and problems and motivations on the left. We just bring those two together. What we need to create is this almost a symbiotic relationship between these two groups and our role - this is the cool bit - you are no longer a change manager, you are no longer spending your weeks researching what best practice is, interviewing people, all you need to do is about the conduit between these two groups. I believe. If you want to do that well, there is three things that I think we need to do. The first one is - you have to get this right - nail the value exchange. We have already talked about what is in it for the who want to do better. They have problems and they want to make progress. Those who do excel, you need to find a way to engage these people, to get them to contribute best practice, because when we researched it, spoke to these people who excelled "I just want to make the organisation better". As a design leader, I see myself up in this organisation" and "When can we have a meeting and talk about these things?" And "I am very busy and it won't happen for a few weeks". These people have other priorities. You need to find a way to pull stuff in. One of the things we did on the notes was we made a nice clean looking hub. It didn't feel like a government look, it felt like a lightweight platform that maybe people were interested in doing. We brute forced the first bunch of activities, twisted the arms of people that we know to deliver quality stuff, so you have stuff to point to "Do you want to be in a
18. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 76 resource hub like this?" We did design as a service and made their stuff look nice, sound nice, feel nice, be adaptable. Then we gave them feedback. This is what people are saying and this is what people have asked for. The value exchange became clearer. Still haven't nailed it but you do need to nail it. Diversify the means of exchange. Yes, you can create a place where all these things live but you are literally - there is a page on a web site and you can competing with the sum of human information, trying to get people to yours. We started a newsletter. Lame, boring, right but every month we sent out "Here is an activity, insight from a leader and someone who excels about how to do it, here is the template so you can do it yourself". We started pulling in smaller problems and asking this group of people who excel "Have you got solutions for this?" And we started having conversations on our community forum, trying to connect the two different groups and published those. The value exchange is fairly similar and one of the things we did was go around and trying and onboard people. That was a terrible idea. No-one gives a shit about your product. This is what we learned and this is what we did. You guys are design nerds, so maybe you do but everyone wants to solve their problems. A massive effort from us so we ended up finding people through the funding people who started the research. What is the common problem that we have? Then we take through one step of one activity so they could make this teeny bit of progress of turning a solution that their leader had come up with into assumptions that would create questions for a discussion guide. Simple and helped people understand that value. The last thing you do reduce the friction and increase momentum. Speak to the users and see what is stopping them from using this thing. See whether they are being held back and see how you can change that.
19. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 77 Doing an audience jacking thing where we get experts who have contributed into a human centre design community practice to do live expert demos and talk through it. It wasn't that people couldn't do the thing already but it lowered the anxiety. That was one small thing that we did but what you end up with is a lot of people feeling more confident and taking away a barrier to actually improving their practice. That is it. This is cool because it is simple, circularish and it is people-powered. It replaces the outsider perspective. Simple applies your role and it is organic, as effective change, effective practice changes or as conditions change, the practice will change and if you have got a nice to and fro going here, then whatever effective practice is in your organisation can change for the times. Ultimately, I think it will give you clear shared expectations for everyone in the design process. It empowers people, makes them more capable and creates accessible, reliable pathways to achieving good outcomes. A final thought. If you are doing this stuff, we all know change is hard, right, it is super, super hard. It is like whatever those - I can't remember what they are called - basically, no-one wants to change, no-one wants to be changed. No-one has nailed this stuff. There is three things that you can do if you are trying to change an organisation for the better. You have got to think deep. Think about design, don't just think about the activity, think about why the activity works. What is the rationale behind it? Use those building blocks, instead of I have 10 plays I want to get out, what is actually going on here and look at the culture. Not just where do people turn to for these resources? Why do they turn to them, what is the situation and what are they motivated by? Have fun. Give a shit. We all do. Don't do this if you are not invested because it is hard, boring and slow and you really need resilience to actually change an organisation but have fun because no-one else has nailed this. I have
20. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 78 given you my approach but if you are actually trying to change design practices, there is a million ways to do it. Don't take it seriously just try stuff out and see what happens. That is it. (APPLAUSE) STEVE BATY: We have a question sent through and I will bring the microphone over. Kristy sent through a question: "What do you measure in order to be able to go back to the business and saying we're improving?" RICH BROPHY: The slide I skipped at the end, I get to talk and work with very smart people. I spoke to someone who was uplifting design capability in a really impressive way a little while ago and they said their team got defunded, in spite of actually changing the way that people were working and having them outcome-focused. She said "The problem was I realised we weren't connected to the needs of the business and to the priorities of the organisation" they had spent the last six months of their work trying to develop a capability framework. Meld has a sick capability framework if you are looking for one. But, it is a mission to try and do that stuff, especially when you are at work - you are one influence in a sea of influencers. The advice I got, which is really good advice, is don't worry about measuring capability uplift. Find a metric that suggests that your thing is being used or taken up, for us it is business and downloads, right, then go and source the stories of people who are actually using the thing because if you can give someone the emotional reason to say yes, we should keep funding this, yes, this is working and tell them the story and if they need to back it up for other people, give them the data. That is the magic combination. That is my advice, don't measure it, find your own way to measure it. Make sure it aligns with those people who said "I'm here for efficiency outcomes".