Lost In Transformation

Leading By Design: Kickstarting Innovation With Empathy As A Weapon

October 29, 2020 MING Labs Season 1 Episode 26
Lost In Transformation
Leading By Design: Kickstarting Innovation With Empathy As A Weapon
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

"Empathy for designers in general is the biggest weapon. This has fundamentally shaped how we work.” 
Pete Overy, Director at Agency in Singapore, talks about his journey from IDEO to founding Agency as a human-centered design practice, focusing on creating impact and transforming structures, processes and people. Tune into this episode for Pete’s definition of design, what it means to be leading by design, and how to actually make Design Thinking work.

Pete: (00:02)

Empathy for designers in general is the biggest weapon, greatest weapon. This has fundamentally shaped how we work. We're incredibly intentional and rigorous around the type of research. We spend a fair amount of time shaping the brief with the client, getting them comfortable with the sandbox that we're going to explore.

Christine: (00:23)

Welcome to the Lost in Transformation podcast series dedicated to the complex world of Digital Transformation. We feature guests from large corporations, start-ups, consultancies and more, to shed light on the success factors around Innovation, Transformation, and adjacent topics.
We share first-hand insights and inspiration from experts for all the intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs and anyone curious about Digital Transformation.


Christine: (00:51)

Pete Overy is the Co-founder and Director of Agency in Singapore, a human-centred design practice that aims to create impact and transform structures, processes and people, by using a strong design strategy approach. Pete talks about his journey from IDEO to Agency and more of his work between innovation and design. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Christine: (01:15)

Hi, Pete, it's great to have you on the show today and thank you for taking the time. So you are the director of Agency in Singapore, which is a human centered design practice that brings solutions to market and also transforms by design. And today we want to know more about agency's journey and around working on design and innovation in Singapore. So to start off, maybe you can tell us a bit more about agency in general. How did it come about? Like, how did things work before that led you to start your journey with Agency?

Pete: (01:46)

So, hi everyone. My name's Pete I'm originally from the UK, moved to Asia about 12 years ago, first to China then to Singapore. At that time when I first moved, I was working for IDEO. And then about four years ago, I sat in a room in Singapore and started to talk about what it meant to actually create agency. We spent a fair amount of time, not only thinking about all of the normal stuff that you do when you set up a business, your offer your price point and all that sort of stuff. But, some more fundamental questions. Some of it is, because as a British person, who's moved around the planet, and now in Asia, you recognize that there are differences, not differences that are bad or good, they're just different. So because of that, the fundamental questions we started to ask ourselves, one of them was why does design thinking not work in Asia?

Pete: (02:38)

It's not because it can't, but the way I was taught it, the optimism or the manner in which we do it, didn't quite gel or felt difficult. And so in asking that question, what we were trying to do is think about why, what was it about the intention of what we were trying to do that didn't quite fit? And a lot of that's to do with some of the cultural norms, in terms of how family is set up, what that actually means to society, and how people behave in those constructs. Then cascades into organizations, organizations are very, what's called command and control, hierarchical that has an impact on any form of decision making in an agile or nimble way. Right? And so what we end up doing is making some of the management of things very uncomfortable by the nature of the way in which we're zickzacking around and, and often exploring things beyond the boundary of what is the norm of that given business, all of which means that we make people uncomfortable. 

Pete: (03:45)

So part of the question of why does, I think it doesn't work in Asia is trying to think through, what does it mean for us to create the entry model, prepare people for these things, structure the conversation around what it will mean and why, why it will feel that way and what to do about it when you do get there. And, we kind of coach leadership,  also embed teams. So from that very beginning, we've been experimenting with how we behave to be able to do our best work, because otherwise what we find is, you're not quite able to, or it becomes very hard to actually navigate any given system or organization.

Pete: (04:22)

So being very deliberate and intentional about that set up. So that we can help something become a worthy vision and turn it into somewhat of a practical reality. Otherwise the chasm or the gap that comes too hard to bridge. Second question we asked ourselves is we're designers at heart, but we also act as entrepreneurs. We act in a very agile manner. We use strategy as a core tool to support that conversation. We also a core value is design, but the problem of that word is a very misunderstood word. There are many different definitions, over the years. Many people have asked me, heard me ask the question: What did you mean? What's your definition of design? And often it's very, very different than what we mean when we walk into a room and talk about it. So we've had to work very hard to make sure that people understood what we meant and what we were doing at various different points.

Pete: (05:21)

So I'll give you a good example yesterday. I was having a conversation. Someone asked me, we have a CEO, who's wanting to launch a company. He's part of a bigger business. There's a new venture that they want to launch in Southeast Asia. He wants to be design led. You know, he has a very strong point of view to be design led. So we asked this person to go and ask some questions, cause when I haven't met the CEO and we'll meet him soon. And then those questions that he asked, the response from the CRM, what was designed led is his reason for that is, because historically when he ran his last business, the things that he thought were important for the design of the product were not fulfilled by the designers. And there was lots of back and forth. And so what I actually want is someone who can work with me as a CEO to figure out what the designer is. And my response to this guy was okay, what you need to help the CEO currently understand is that that's not designed yet.

Pete: (06:24)

And there was a best way I was trying to describe, it was okay. What we do need to do is download from him all of the knowledge, practical, technical stuff that he knows that he really cares about. We need to configure and create some form of exercise around acknowledging that, and then using that as a way to create the sandbox that goes out in the research that we will do to meet the customers that he wants to connect to and figure out what are the commonalities and what are the differences and playing that back to him in a way that helps him shift towards understanding what he's actually trying to build. At the same time, or that does mean is he needs a certain type of designer to help him frame and structure that it's more strategy, it's less executional. And so if he is interested in shaping his business and the future of where it's heading in that way, then that's how we would do it. Right. And so I think the challenge with the term design is it's kind of lumped together in many other things, like innovation or all of these other words that get founded around and people misinterpret them and misunderstood.

Pete: (07:36)

So we've spent a lot of time channeling our energy to try and help our clients or the people that we're talking to understand what we are, what mode we're in and why we're in that mode. We use language like more recently, I've been talking about we're at the intersection of design, business and entrepreneurial-ism. We also talk about how we care about making them rehearsing the future, because we believe that by doing so we can show people things that, enable them to respond in a way that supports us, figuring out what value we can create for them, like trying to get to that kind of rehearsal as quickly as possible. It helps us have a much better conversation about what their future could realistically and practically be so that they can build that for themselves.

Pete: (08:27)

Very important to have that conversation as a way in which to describe the types of work that we will do, because if we say we're designers, they think we're a certain thing. And so shaping that conversation earlier is very important. So we've got pretty good at that. And then the last piece I often talk about is that, empathy for designers in general is the biggest weapon, greatest weapon. This has fundamentally shaped how we work. We're incredibly intentional and rigorous around the type of research. We spend a fair amount of time shaping the brief with the client, getting them comfortable with the sandbox that we're going to explore. That's bigger than the thing they asked generally, in the first instance, please help us make this digital sense sound. So all this stuff now, right? And, so there's a certain need in terms of what they perceive their value that they can create is, and that's great.

Pete: (09:16)

It's more, how do we structure? What are the activities you actually want that digital tool, product, service to provide, enable, amplify and having that conversation first, cause often the existing stuff that they do today and the question of can we innovate in that space? The logic prevails that, if you keep looking at the same thing over and over again, it's very hard to come up with something new. You have to look outside of some of that thing, bring in new data, slam those pieces of data together. And that creates a lot more value, but I think the empathy aspect to that is on every level, right? We have empathy for the client's context, business level, the org level. We have empathy for the customer and their life and their context. And when we use that, we create insight and opportunity for change, for design to help people flourish or thrive in some way and that's what drives us, I think. And, we haven't necessarily set out our values in a more deliberate sense yet. It's something that we are looking to do. So in 2021, it's definitely something on the table, but inside of all of the pieces I just described is a set of values. I think that's driving the way, the culture of our business travails at this point in time.

Christine: (10:39)

Right, and you mentioned that there’s already a lot of different definitions of design out there. What does it actually mean to you to be leading by design?

Pete: (10:50)

So design led to me, is any given organization that is looking to do something new or create value, needs to think about, what it does today and whether or not what it does today can support that new kind of vision. So our behavior at the very beginning of any given piece of work that says we want to be designed, that is to structure a business strategy that is led by us understanding the customer experience or the external experience that will support the value that business is trying to make. Then from there, it's much easier to say, okay, structurally process-wise governance wise, the way in which we make decisions and the way we organize ourselves and the way we measure ourselves, all of those things become much easier to have a conversation around. And design and create doesn't have to be designed because the, I used the term design all the time, but for the business side, the development of those things necessarily design oriented, but the conversations are much easier to have, when you have that very clear direction that is set.

Pete: (12:00)

At some point, when a business is shifting from that kind of all startup orientation to a more sustaining orientation, I think that's where one might argue at this minute, the notion of design and development, or design and engineering, or design and operations. There are gaps that occur in what would I call it? The clique's or the teams, because the organizational design is structured in such a way that the ops guys hire the ops guys, the design guys hire the design guys, right? I think one of the things around being design led is also what happens when we share in a way that supports a much more deliberate understanding of what types of designers that we're bringing on board, what types of ops guys and the leadership of those things need to be, have share accountabilities around.

Pete: (12:53)

Cause the more you can understand how ops guys work and what's important to them at the more the ops guys can understand how the design guys work, then you have more than a fighting chance of constructing teams. It's a lot more flat and sometimes that occurs, but I think it's serendipitous based on the characters, not necessarily the design of the org. I also think that in years to come, our kids were really looking at us going, what were you doing? Cause I don't think anyone's nailed the design of the org yet. There isn't one that says, this is the working pattern of it all. It's a bit like the Star Trek version of everything, is just flat and then there's the human version. And then there's the the reverse of the hub and spoke to a kind of network model. All of those pieces have valid elements to them, but not one of them, can be applied to all contexts of business, like domain of business. 

Pete: (13:50)

I think that's where the challenge lies, that we need to be able to look at the business that says, okay, we are a technology business. And so technology plays an incredibly important role, but designers are not one single flavor. And nor are we within a design discipline, are they one type of designer in the same way that engineers are not the same? And at the minute we're losing the ability to label. We're losing the ability to support the crosspollination or the handoff between the value chain, because we're labeling people in a very strange manner and structured them in a not so useful manner either. So then the consequences that we may be design led, but it doesn't feel that way to the designers, which is ironic, right? The fiefdoms that occur between dev and design and the tension that is created is unhealthy tension. 

Pete: (14:46)

So the true nature of that is about, to me, what the business is trying to do. Like, so if you look at something like Apple, I think it is somewhat designed led in the sense that it's lucky, right? It's product based. And over the years, it's been able to expand from product into other aspects, but its core legacy was in the product side. So then the design orientation is different than say Google's, that's legacy was dev. And so as that adjusts and evolves, the product side of Google has some very interesting stuff coming out of it, but that doesn't mean Google's culture is designed.

Pete: (15:29)

And I'm not sure, if any culture can be solely one thing or the other as well, that's something I grapple with. I don't have the answer to that necessarily. I think as we experiment in the worlds that we're in designing this stuff, we have to think through, design is not the only weapon of choice. There are multiple weapons of choice. They just happen to say the design is weapon, empathy. By saying we don't want silos and then describing, I want to be designed led immediately creates a silo, which is somewhat ironic, but I get why we wanted to do it, and I get why it's important. Describe it as a starting philosophy, but at some point it can't remain, there has to be imbalanced with other aspects of the business and its value.

Christine: (16:10)

Interesting. So you want to make people uncomfortable, you want to make design thinking work. You want to make people understand. Did you have like an actual purpose from the very beginning when you started Agency or like a bigger vision that you're working towards?

Pete: (16:26)

So, one of the reasons that, we stayed is, because I do really believe that Singapore is this very, very interesting inflection point. It has been able to do very successfully a raft of different things. Many of them are designed. They just don't feel, like good design stories. So let's take the MRT, right? It's incredibly well designed. And yet it is not seen as this kind of loved thing here. Whereas I come from England and the Tube, as it's endearingly chord, which is the London underground is something that is a part of the kind of cultural identity of the city. And so those pieces, there is obviously a time play to that, right?

Pete: (17:12)

This tube is like a hundred years old, but beyond that piece, I think the interesting opportunity for things like the MRT is stuff, that's starting to happen, better signage, more character that's driving the inside, the outside, into the station. The way in which the stations themselves are expressing progress for this Island, those things are starting to appear. And that's great to see. And I think that's the value, that design plays in an Island like Singapore, is the stuff that keeps us here. But also beyond that, I think the idea of a fair amount of work in health care to us it's very meaningful. And so because of that, the idea that this Island could bring together things like hospitality, architecture, service, design, great product design, even the public sector site, right?

Pete: (18:09)

The guys who create the policies working together to create, put together things that say, okay, how do we put care back into healthcare? And one of the great things I think in the work that we've been able to do here, both as IDEO and as Agency, is the ability to actually do that here. In the UK, that would be very hard in the US it's very complicated as well. So the springboard, the amount of time to market the appetite for the change is very compelling to stay here and use this as a kind of test bed to drive that work. So I also believe as a vision, that Singapore's resilience for the next 50 years, right? If it can pull together stories that show how it has been able to create a great impact and things like healthcare that the really gnarly, complicated, complex things the world is grappling with, then that can be an exportable story, that becomes how a small city state can help other cities think through its policies is architectural design, it's service design, it's training for staff.

Pete: (19:22)

It's reframed the model of care. It's incentive structures, it's financial models for insurance, all of which are things that it's trying to grapple with right now. And I think it could get to the head of the pack. So our part of our vision is to play a role in accelerating and enabling that across things like healthcare, education, maybe even climate change, with the work that we do in infrastructure. Our purpose I think, is to support a kind of creative energy to something that has a very, very practical and converting energy to it.

Pete: (19:59)

So if you think of the divergence convergence diagram, which has the two arrows pointing outwards, and then the line or two areas pointing inwards, I think that Singapore's probably the best place on the planet to receive a brief and execute upon it on time and on budget. I mean, it's exceptional at it. So that's a very engineery behavior, but it's amazing at it. 
When you come to ask, why are you doing something or how can it be different? And in what way, should it be the way to explore that and the way to unlock insight and drive new ideas, it's very difficult. It's not how this Island has been taught to behave. So adding that piece is part of our role. 
We are here to unlock that, and we have seen the evidence of that in the work that we've been able to do in small scale. And we're looking to figure out how we scale that as quickly as possible. Cause that's also another piece. I think that earlier aspect I just described of the resilience of this Island, being able to export this stuff, like once it nails a bunch of these ways of thinking, creating the process and structure around that, I think that's something that will make this place very quickly and distinctly become the Lionel Messi of governance.

Pete: (21:21)

Right. We'll be very clear. In some form it does already, I mean, people look at things like Jewel and then kind of go, how did you do that? Why did you do, right. So there's some questions as to what it is, why it is. But you have to Marvel at some of the geometry of those things. And so how do you take that level of ingenuity and support and help creativity become things in stuff, that's really complex and hard to do at the people level too, not just at the infrastructural level and that's a role that we want to play.

Christine: (21:54)

It's interesting how you try to unlock that different way of thinking also across various industries. And now, if we look at the current situation we're in now with COVID and with everything that's going on in the world, what does the new normal look like for Agency?

Pete: (22:10)

So, I mean, we probably had the same struggles as everyone else from the beginning, which was like, more of the uncertainty of the switch, right. You just kind of had to get on with stuff. But I think, we're somewhat blessed and somewhat lucky as designers, because inherently the behavior that we have around, how we work is to constantly look at the things that are working well and the things that aren't working well and questioning both and adapting and adjusting and figuring out how we might improve given process or way of being, or working. So when this thing hit, the most complicated thing was where we would be, are we home? Are we office? Prior to COVID, if you'd had asked me, what would it mean to be fully remote?

Pete: (22:59)

I would have said it would be extremely detrimental to the process of what we do, because we're highly collaborative and highly immersive. So even back in February, March, I was struggling with the idea of sending my guys out into, say, for instance, a hospital, to talk to patients or to observe a given scenario. And that's because we're putting potentially putting them in danger. So we started to say, we're not doing that. So at that point, we started to experiment with ways of having others capture enough information for us to learn and gather the insight that we would have ordinarily gathered. So there were distinct ways we asked clients to behave and collect video film, photography footage of given scenarios, useful these days, because everyone has an iPhone. Everyone has a smartphone. So it's not a complicated thing to ask somebody to do that.

Pete: (23:54)

It's not as ideal as being there yourself, but it does support still the notions of the types of things and distinctions that we're trying to pull out a bit, any given context to support why we would design or change some aspect of that experiment. The other thing we did, I think, was when we started to switch online, we deliberately had different teams use different pieces of software. The guys were already already using things like Figma and we have the Google drive stuff, which allows for collaboration online anyway. But Miro became a thing we started to experiment with very deliberately, because of the workshop nature of the way we behave.

Pete: (24:39)

So, the principles of how we frame or build a workshop didn't change. So the notion of, when I talked earlier about onboarding people to information, giving them time to digest, often in a workshop setting, we bombard a bunch of people with an inordinate amount of information, then go right. Let's design and they're not designers. And that's hard enough for a designer to do, so why do we expect non-designers to do? So, we don't do that. We deliberately construct information in a way that's supporting enough to be able to get a given construct. We then, apply a certain type of brainstorm. It's a little bit more guided and narrow to help those who don't necessarily use the creative juices on a daily basis, or feel like they're not then reignite them and, and get going in a given workshop.

Pete: (25:32)

So those principles have been reapplied. I mean, we don't just kind of dive into a massive board of MIRO, you're still driving certain smaller exercises or you're guiding their thinking in a way, that supports the unlock of their own creative version of the world. The other piece I think that we did was, in learning that the eight hours sitting in this box doesn't help for focus and mental health. We constructed things, into 19 minute blocks of time with very distinct half an hour breaks. And half an hour feels like a lot. [...]
One thing we are doing is we've slowed the pace, even though I don't think my team will say this, but we have slowed down the pace of how we're working, even though it feels like we're working faster, I think. But that's a deliberate move to try and redesign the way we were doing the projects, because now it's remote, now we're using these different tools. It's not as fast and therefore we can't be as fast.

Pete: (26:38)

 Whether or not we have to remain in this, then we have to have conversations with clients and everyone else about what that means for everything that we do and how we work and how it costs. Then we'll get there when we get there. But right now we're all hoping we get to some form of next normal, which is a phrase we're using, which is how do we, have we come out this in a more blended fashion? There have been some advantages. We have been able to connect to some of the guys that we used to know from our IDEO days in the US, who are great designers too. We'd ordinarily have flown out maybe, but that's a costly exercise sometimes for clients. So having them as remote access, senior level designers has been very impactful for our work. And some of them are in Australia, some of them in America, some in India, and that's been very cool.

Pete: (27:25)

So figuring out ways to continue to do that in a much more deliberate sense, feels like the old global network that we used to have. But working in a way that actually supports the cadence and pace of the project with those guys on board to remotely has been very, very cool. So we want to be able to keep that and figure out, what that means for the kind of blended approach to the way in which we work, cause in some form we all want to get back to the office.

Christine: (27:51)

But interesting to hear that also, you know, the principles themselves, they haven't changed. It's more like, you know, the surrounding, the environment. And also you've mentioned earlier, a lot of the work you do across industries, across healthcare, and so forth. And you've had a lot of successful work, but we'd also like to learn more about what maybe didn't go so well from the start. Any mistakes you made, any experiments that failed, maybe any first approaches to the problems that you can share with us?

Pete: (28:21)

Yes. One in particular that was always very profound was, in a lot of the work that we do, there is some level of transformation that occurs at the personal level. What I mean by that is the way in which we design the project. There's generally a kind of venture like or bubble like behavior to it, which means that the normal SOP is the normal ways that business might be working at that time change for the work that we're doing, because we've asked them to. By doing that, what that means is people go through a process sometimes in, well actually when it failed the first few times when we did this, we embedded the client with us in a very deliberate way. So, people would come on between 8 to 16 weeks of work throughout the whole process and be in our office or in a client office, that's outside the normal parts of their office.

Pete: (29:15)

And we have a room or space that's kind of dressed and created with us deliberately by doing so. What we failed to realize was when you think about that more for more than a little while you set yourself, but at the end of the first set of projects, what we found is that people, because there was no reentry model designed back into the organization, they just left the organization. Because they had this new passion process where thinking excitement, rigor, and the organization's sort of projected it, because the two different systems are not in sync. There was no clutch, there was no way of reentering that, that there was no way for that person or team to reenter that model and say, this we're going to continue to do this and this way. And for that system to not spit them out, because systems are inherently designed perfectly the way that they are.

Pete: (30:08)

So we somewhat forgot to do that. And pretty much the first few times we did it, everybody left, which was an error, because in terms of helping the client actually drive change or create the champions, which is why they're also embedded with us of the type of methodologies and tools, you want them to build those out and stay. So that was a huge mistake. Something that we have, very much an intentionally designed differently. Other things that I think we made errors on is, we're in hugely optimistic, like ridiculously. So, the challenge with that is, and as I've got older, I've gotten much better at this, but I was guilty of this too. A client would come with a really interesting kind of ask, in terms of where it lives in the world of being purposeful or meaningful.

Pete: (30:58)

And we would latch onto that piece of it, but we'd have to do it without really thinking through the contextual stuff that I was describing earlier, that we've got pretty good at. We would run at something a hundred miles an hour, get very excited about its purpose and meaning, drive a project that says, this is how we should do it. And then the realities of that fitting in any form within that given organization just doesn't work. And most of those things died there immediately. Cause you're asking a, a business to make very fundamental decisions of its future that might cannibalize itself. So, without that supporting structure, without reframing, without the thinking through how the thing lands, how the thing gets lived through any given system. After we leave the building, it generally dies a death.

Pete: (31:50)

So the amount of times we did that was quite shocking and repeating that over and over again. And, when we sat in the room at the beginning of Agency room, really tried to think through some of those things and go, we shouldn't do that. And then, you know, the first couple of years you meet certain clients with very lofty goals and you get very excited by them again, right. And you see that bias kicks in and you're like, okay, let's just do it. And we made the same errors. And, in the last, I would say 24 months, we are getting much, much better figuring out. And I've created some internal tools to help us have that conversation between ourselves about what we should do, this business fit.

Pete: (32:32)

What is stuff that we actually care about. And then what are the things that are very important in terms of the impact that you think you can create, based on the business fit. The question being asked, the organizational context, et cetera. So by doing those, having those types of parameters in place, it helps for us to say "no" earlier or change the way we're behaving. It makes something smaller. Even though it might end up many, many times later being a lofty goal, you don't reach that goal. And the first time that you actually do the work at the time, so that's become a lot better in terms of our behavior.

Christine: (33:11)

But you sometimes need to make those mistakes first in order to learn from them. And now with the Agency being around four years old, along the road, what would you say is your biggest learning so far?

Pete: (33:23)

So number one, as a designer, I genuinely believe we are an incredibly important bridge between the business world and the customer, that they are looking to serve, or the people they're looking to serve, or the thing that they support or amplify. And, there's a lot been said over the years about the value and the unintended consequences of some of that value that we create. So we are trying to be a lot more and I am trying to be a lot more deliberate around, what work we focus on, that we think can really move the needle in terms of having designers really at the board level table. And have a voice at that table that is strong enough to support, what I think is the role of the designer in terms of really helping to shape the conversation about what we're doing and why we're doing it, how we do it, in terms of the business value you're creating for any given organization. 

Pete: (34:29)

Time and time again, I know this term transformation is important, right? That, which see this word, but the reality is, any organization has to continually evolve and the organism continually evolves. So to think that it's static was always something that was not necessarily a true, kind of philosophical stance stance, right? So I think my biggest learning is, trying to make sure that the things I was taught as a designer and the craft that I have, the way it taught me to think to create distinctions in the world that others do not. So the simple act of observation, without judgment, a designer can see distinctions in the stuff in front of them, the untrained eyes cannot. And that's a huge, huge, powerful thing.

Pete: (35:19)

And being able to describe that well to the business side or the policy side, the government side is something that I think any of us as designers can do. We just need to find our own kind of confidence and our own frames and our way of expressing our value. And that's an important part of my learning. So I try and instill that in other designers, wherever that's in Agency or elsewhere, often we get lost in our own self-fulfilling, identity that we're in a certain position. There is an ability for us to actually play a role that's very, very different. And, that's something we'll continue to, I will continue to push.

Christine: (35:57)

Those are super interesting learnings. And, thank you so much for sharing Agency's journey with us as well, of the meaning of design and what it means to be design led. It's been a super nice chat with you and thanks again.

Pete: (36:09)

Thank you very much for having me. 

Christine: (36:12)

Thank you for listening to this episode of “Lost in Transformation”. If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a review on iTunes. Join us next time for another episode of our podcast.

How did Agency start its journey?
How to make Design Thinking work in Asia - differences in culture and people's behavior
Empathy as a designer's greatest weapon: Shaping how they work on every level
The meaning of "leading by design"
How Singapore's successful design implementations can help other cities
How did Agency adjust to the 'new normal' caused by COVID-19?
Why you need to ensure that fundamental changes are conform with the organization
Seeing the world's distinctions through the eyes of a designer