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

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UX Australia
UX Australia 2022
Friday, 26 September 2022
Captioned by: Carmel Downes & Kasey Allen

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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".

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

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

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

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

uxaustralia PRO

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uxaustralia
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