E39 Kris Washusen - Leaning into Lean: Navigating methodology vs creativity

“Design's not in its infancy anymore but we can still find it hard to communicate our value.”

Kris Washusen

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• Adopting a Lean-UX approach: Why you should value rapid prototyping over extensive upfront discovery and what you can do to implement quick and experimental change cycles.
• The stickiness of design work: Addressing the challenges in implementing and achieving longevity in design work… and how to avoid design projects going nowhere.
• Impact of the ‘pandemic tools’: The way tools and technologies developed during the pandemic have continued to accelerate and impact design processes, enabling faster synthesis of data and more efficient collaboration among design teams.
• Role of stakeholder engagement: How to ensure the successful implementation of design recommendations and strategies through ongoing stakeholder engagement and consultation.
• Balancing creativity and methodology: Exploring the tension between structured design methodologies like the double diamond approach and the need and value in creative spontaneity and quick decision-making in design processes.

Key links

Gareth Rydon interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMp6qbgTtu4

Dovetail AI https://dovetail.com/launch/magic/

Otter AI https://otter.ai/

NAB https://www.nab.com.au/

FigJam https://www.figma.com/figjam/

Swaggle https://swaggle.com.au/

About our guest

Kris Washusen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kris-washusen/) is a Strategic Designer and Design & Product Practitioner based in Melbourne, Australia. Along with his UX, CX, product and strategic design roles, Kris's career in advertising and as an entrepreneur building, running and exiting successful businesses has allowed him to develop a unique problem-solving skill set.

From research, strategy and transformational change design for both the private and public sectors through to product strategy and design for tech and startups, Kris has helped some of Australia's most respected organisations navigate some choppy seas.

Kris's passion lies in implementing human-centred and Lean-UX principles to navigate ambiguity, explore the behaviours and motivations of the users of products or services and create delightful, intuitive, and accessible experiences that solve complex organisational problems.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-hudson-7464254/), is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching & consultancy Company Road (www.companyroad.co)

Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with University of Melbourne in Innovation, and Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally. 

For weekly updates and to hear about the latest episodes, please subscribe to The Company Road Podcast at https://companyroad.co/podcast/

Transcript

[00:00:07] Chris Hudson: Hello everyone and thanks so much again for joining us on the Company Road podcast and we're continuing to get really amazing feedback on the stories that we've been able to share. So massive thank you to all of you for listening and for spending your valuable time with us and also for feeding back.

And it's been super handy fine tuning the format of this show. And it's also allowed me to steer some of the conversations that we're having in a way so that we're getting even more out of it, out of this social experiment, really. So relating to what it takes to change a company in one way or another.

And if there's anything you'd like to ask me, or if you have an idea about something you'd like to cover on the show, feel free to shoot me an email on chris@companyroad.co 

 So with that out of the way my next amazing guest is one of those enigmatic and elusive unicorns. A rare talent who has navigated some pretty choppy seas and has fine tuned his strategic and design craft to sell many a high profile project through smoothly.

Along with his UX, CX products and strategic design roles, Chris's career in advertising and as an entrepreneur building, running, and exiting successful businesses has allowed him to develop a really unique problem solving skillset. He's pretty much your end to end strategic designer and all in one from research and strategy through to transformation work and change both in private and public sectors.

So I'm really happy to have you on the show, Chris. Thanks so much for coming on. 

[00:01:21] Kris: Thanks Chris, lovely introduction. I'm not

feeling particularly enigmatic for those who are maybe watching. I've got my vacuum cleaner in the background and my kid's stuff on the wall. But thank you. Lovely to be called enigmatic to some degree.

[00:01:32] Chris Hudson: That's the backdrop of a man of mystery .

[00:01:34] Kris: Yeah, that's true. That's very much so. Yep.

[00:01:36] Chris Hudson: But maybe we could start with just a quick rundown of, talk us through some of the things that you do and the types of organizations that you've helped and a bit about your journey so far.

[00:01:44] Kris: I started off as a product designer working at a startup, did that for a couple of years. And pretty quickly realized I quite loved the research and strategic sort of side of things. I then went off on to do, various roles within design, but more within the agency space.

So I did work as a UX designer. And then after that role, did contracting and went progressively more and more strategic and the kind of roles I was doing, but always kept quite close to being on the design tools and those kind of things, just because I have a love for the sort of practical side of things. Did a bit of work for Dulux and services I'm work on the Dulux account, which I think you did as well, Chris, you did some work for Dulux.

Yeah a little bit of transformation stuff there. Yep. And did some research for the fairwork commission.

Worked at NAB for a little bit doing some work, some compliance stuff for APRA for the business bank there.

On the back of that, I got headhunted by a consultancy up in Canberra and came on board to be the design director. And that's basically what I've been doing for the last few years brings me a little bit about what I was wanting to talk a little bit with you today.

I think my background before design really was in advertising and photography specifically. So I was an advertising photographer for the better part of 15 years and I had a content agency as well. And I think within those roles and then within my roles within design, through the pandemic and the sort of recent sort of tech downturn, I've noticed some patterns you might say.

Working as a photographer, I was doing above the line campaigns. I had great clients. I was doing really good work there. I did find within that business and also my content agency that I had at the time, during the boom times, everything was fantastic.

And then I went through the GFC and it was really interesting to see what happened to businesses at that time. As I mentioned, I worked on that strategy work for Dulux. And around about that time is when the pandemic hit and there was a pretty significant downturn.

I'm sure everyone remembers. And it really was that at that time, that sort of knee jerk reaction of organizations dropping sort of strategic digital transformation and Greenfield's work. After that I worked in the role I was talking about the design director role for the consultancy.

We had a lot of sort of tech clients and we had federal government clients as well. So we had this kind of interesting mix of clients. And after the pandemic, we saw pretty amazing growth within the consultancy. And it was just a really interesting place to be from that perspective working on the pointy end of really interesting projects of and doing some really interesting product strategy work and doing some product development and doing some really nice service delivery services line work for government agencies.

So yeah, really interesting. And then end of 2022, we saw that sort of tech downturn. So I kind of got really interested in this. I took a voluntary redundancy from the role I was in. I think a lot of agencies and consultancies have been struggling since then. And it made me start to ponder a little bit about where that had been.

I've since gone back to contracting and that's been work that I really love doing. I have been essentially been a freelancer or self employed my whole life. So I did really enjoy doing that, but I kind of, I, went off and did a little bit of thinking on I guess how we as intrapreneurs and as designers and that kind of thing, how we can flourish within kind of the economic hard times really, when those sort of strategic budgets are cut and those kinds of things.

So, yeah, I think it's a really interesting space. 

[00:04:53] Chris Hudson: So about your transitioning, so one day you're a photographer and you're doing the above line stuff and presumably you're flying to the Caribbean and you're going to wonderful places

[00:05:01] Kris: How did you know? 

[00:05:01] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that's what every art director or photographer, insists upon, right? They've got a certain, bucket list and you're in the South America one day and then you're over in Bali or wherever you go, was it like that?

[00:05:12] Kris: I did make it to Thailand once. I got to New Zealand. Most of my work was in between here and Sydney. I had the state theater company of South Australia as well as a regular client. So I went over to Adelaide once a year. So that was

pretty exciting. 

[00:05:24] Chris Hudson: Shout out to Radelaide. There's a bit of a switch there and you were kind of talking about that and then you went into started talking about strategy and the work that you were doing there. I'm always interested in, this perspective because I've basically gone from strategy more into design or a lot of people go from design more into strategy.

But how was that transition for you? And what was some of the deliberate moves in that sense to kind of get a bit more strategic with the work that you were doing?

[00:05:45] Kris: Well, I think if I can back it up a little bit and go back to the photography, like I think photography is perceived to be quite a hand on the tools craft. It's not perceived to be particularly strategic, but essentially running a business is very strategic. So I kind of liked, running the content agency and then also, doing the photography itself.

It's kind of a really nice kind of juxtaposition of being on the tools and also running the business and kind of trying to craft how we grow and how we maintain the business and that kind of thing. So I really liked that kind of balance, like healthy balance between strategy and tactics.

Moving into design, I think just for me, I'm a naturally curious person. I'm kind of really interested in the sort of the more, the bigger picture of how solve problems and why those problems exist. So, I just naturally move from the micro to the macro and kind of, I like that transition.

It feels very natural to me. We were talking offline about what I'm doing in my personal life. And I think, well, I talked about making I've just started furniture making in the pandemic. One of the joys of getting made redundant from the Dulux job during that pandemic era was that I had six weeks or so to kill while I was looking for other work.

And I spent time with my kids, which was amazing. But I also started to teach myself cabinet making and furniture making. And so it's kind of similar because it's strategically, you've got to think about how going to build it and how it's going to look, what are you going to make it from kind of like understand that and then getting on the tools and actually building it out.

So I think for me, like from a design perspective, I started very much in that product design space, otherwise known as sort of UX UI space and was a natural progression for me for visual having been. visual practitioner through to I guess just being more and more curious about the why, what we, why we were working on and what the impact we could have in the future if we made certain decisions.

So that's kind of how I progressed from a mental standpoint on the kind of work I was doing.

[00:07:30] Chris Hudson: How did you find the switch between the executional elements to the strategic from the point of view once you've got, I mean, you've run places and departments and teams and you've been in senior roles, but when you're in that position and you're basically working with the work that you used to do from a design point of view, from a UX point of view, from a photography point of view, potentially, how do you kind of temper that, involvement a little bit and what's your style around directing it in a way that, how much do you get involved or how much do you let it just be and for things to be presented to you? 

[00:07:59] Kris: A part of what I've been kind of going through on this kind of rationalization of design on within this sort of economic downturn kind of vibe is to this role of being in a director level of being at a senior leadership level and how you kind of step back from being a designer being on the tools to kind of allowing your team to flourish.

And I think number one is autonomy is key and giving your people the respect and autonomy to kind of do what they need to do and solve the problems for themselves always fosters better results from everybody, because if people are allowed to make their own decisions and solve their own problems, generally, they have more ownership of the problem.

They take more pride and they want to kind of progress further in doing that. As far as, interesting kind of, point where we are now with those kind of roles at the moment, they still definitely exist and there are great design leaders out there at the moment, but there has also been, quite a lot of redundancies within that senior leadership space.

And I think it's interesting that whole concept of the player coach kind of concept. I'm not sure if you've heard that term, but essentially just as leaders still being on the tools and kind of doing that because essentially we are being presented with a landscape that requires design teams to do more with less.

So it kind of brings it to a point where you as a practitioner and a leader kind of are one in the same to an extent. So walking that line with a team that work under you as an interesting one, because you don't want to step on the toes, but at the same time, I also think it's really good as a leader to still keep quite close to the work and to do that stuff.

As long as maintain that autonomy for your people.

[00:09:27] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I think you see it working pretty well, from an engineering point of view, if you're thinking about code and, it all feels a little bit flatter in that sense, like they don't always insist on there being this like massive hierarchy and big team leaders who basically don't roll up their sleeves at any point, which you see so much elsewhere.

So I think that's good. But the dynamics are also dynamics that the teams have to figure out, particularly if they're not expecting it in some way. Like the boss just comes in one day and starts doing the work. Dust off the best dancing shoes and crack, but,

[00:09:58] Kris: Yeah. Absolutely. 

[00:10:00] Chris Hudson: But yeah no, it's interesting and the other one that I was just going to ask you about was the switch, because you were going from freelance to probably, different more permanent in house roles essentially. A lot of people ask about the transition or want to make the leap from a more in house role where they get their training and formative years and all of that.

And they want to go freelancing. They're almost worried about taking the first step. So I've got two questions on that one, which is, how easy do you think the switch is between one and the other? And the second is probably, if you are a freelancer, how useful is that skillset kind of going back into an in house role?

[00:10:31] Kris: I kind of come at it from the point of view is that freelance has been what I know best. So it's a really interesting position to be in because essentially most of my roles I've had, including myself in back in my advertising days, I was freelance predominately then. I mean, I had an agent and stuff. I think I was inherently really comfortable with freelance.

I really kind of enjoy the transition from in house to, or, having full time. I mean, I was, I'm in house now, but I'm in house contracting freelance right now. I think the transition for me of going, having a full time sort of director level position for almost three years and then going back to freelance was really interesting.

I think you and I did a job together and that was the first job I had out of being a perm and that, you know, it was like, mean, I think being within the agency context or the consultancy context is good for freelancers naturally because essentially you are working, you're switching contexts, you're working on lots of different projects, you're getting really good at stakeholder engagement and kind of understanding briefs and kind of working to solve a problem within a short time frame.

And you're used to those quite, just getting, basically short time timelines of delivery, which is kind of necessary often within a freelance context. But it was interesting. I think, I guess for people who are in house, who are then wanting to move more into the freelancing world, I think it takes a bit of a leap of faith.

I think you really have to trust that the work's going to be there for you. And understand that, a lot of it is around networking and a lot of it's around making connections, reaching out, having phone calls, having coffees and building your network.

Even when you're in roles, it's just, you need to constantly kind of be developing your business networks. So it's more like running a small business in that way.

[00:12:05] Chris Hudson: Because there are plenty of people that you see that are in, long held positions within these, big corporates and other organizations too. And they feel like they get to a point where they want to move out and spread their wings and, and do something else.

But actually it's at that point that they start the kind of networking aspect because, and that it might be that they call a recruiter that seems to be the fastest way out. I think you see a split between those people that you never see in the public eye or in social media or on the coffee scene or at the events.

And then there are the others that are just always doing that it feels like. Which camp do you fall in? If I could ask

[00:12:39] Kris: I think I'm more the coffee and events guy. I don't know if it's exactly natural to me. I wouldn't say I enjoy it, but I do. I like if it's good people and it's a natural connection and you kind of have that, it's not like. I don't know something really constructed and difficult.

If it's just like, Hey, let's have a coffee with no real agenda to it. And it's just, if something falls out of that, great. Like I love that stuff. Cause it's just, let's just have a chat about the industry. I mean, essentially what we're doing now, you and I, it's just having a bit of a, have a bit of a

chinwag. Just getting to know people, so I like that kind of interaction. I struggle a little bit on that more cold cally side of networking which to be honest, I don't think it's authentic. And I don't think the real connections and the real work comes out of that kind of networking anyway.

[00:13:20] Chris Hudson: What does it take for it to be an authentic connection or discussion in your view?

[00:13:25] Kris: Well, I think sort of a shared worldview to an extent on an understanding of the kind of areas you work in, you don't have to be within design, but I think just having kind of it not really being, having an agenda, I don't know, I had somebody reach out to me recently and they just hit me up on LinkedIn and were like, hey you want to have a coffee?

And I was like, yeah, of course. Yeah, let's do it. And ended up having a chat with them and it turned out it was a sales chat and I was just if I felt about hoodwinked, I think I was like, let's just have a chat. But it was really was kind of a sales thing. And I think if you're going to be really salesy, just put it out there and be like, Hey, I'm looking for work or I work for an agency.

Let's have a, I need to get some work coming in the door for them or whatever, like just say what it is and allow that person to either say yes or no. But I think the good connections are just like, Hey, you want a coffee? It's yeah, cool. We'll have a chat. And, you might have something in the back of your mind that you want to achieve, or you also might have something that, the other person might have that dynamic with you.

But at the same time, if you kind of get to a point where you're like, Hey, this is actually kind of cool. We could kind of move forward with it, something I mean, that's great. And generally I think they're where the really good interactions come from.

[00:14:29] Chris Hudson: So it sounds like your expectation going in is fairly low you know when you're going into a coffee meeting? Is there a particular approach that you take because a coffee meeting is a big thing over here. In London, I was saying to other people, I could never get a coffee with anybody because people just say too busy or they want to, they want to know basically the whole thing that they're going to get out of it before they had agreed to just a coffee.

Whereas in Melbourne, it feels like really easy. How do you feel going into a coffee meeting? Is it always pretty casual? Have you got expectations? Have you got points to discuss? What prep are you doing? This is like the basics of running a coffee with somebody.

[00:15:01] Kris: Yeah, not really. I think I generally walk in- I rarely prep for meetings. I think if it's a, if I'm doing it in a professional thing, I will prepare and you sometimes you have slide decks and all the rest, but generally you're going in there with a agenda and the other party is very aware of that agenda. As far as just the networking coffee, nah, just catch up. Have a good chat. If you're after work or you're like, Hey, my freelancing contracts ending up, have you got anything on? You say that and you say, do you want to have a coffee and have a chat about it? No worries if there isn't anything end of it.

[00:15:29] Chris Hudson: Yeah, there's always that bit towards the last 10 to 15 minutes where you're thinking about, how are you going to end it basically? Like what is a nice exit from this conversation look like? Maybe I'm just overanalyzing, but do you get that?

[00:15:40] Kris: No, I get that. Sometimes you've had polite conversation for long enough and it's like, how do I extricate myself from

[00:15:46] Chris Hudson: this? 

Yeah, without being rude, because you've been so polite at the beginning of the chat and then you've got to, then you've got to leave.

[00:15:51] Kris: Very much so.

[00:15:52] Chris Hudson: No, but that's cool. Hey, let's come back to the points you were making about scarcity and running lean and particularly with the economic downturn, some of the things that you were starting to think about 

[00:16:01] Kris: Yeah, so look, I think, it just begged my curiosity. I sort of talked at the top about having a strategic mindset I think is really about being curious. Part of this is just I've seen this downturn thing a few times now and every time the kind of work I have been doing has been impacting quite greatly.

I kind of started to look at the sort of macroeconomic position of things. I'm not an economist. I'm a designer and I really just started looking at kind of what's been happening and I think, if you think about October last year is when I took my voluntary redundancy and then I was just back out in the market.

I was like, the last time I looked for a role was in 20 you know, 20. It was just during the pandemic. That's your last thing, right? So, it was just like designers, everybody was in such demand. It was like, it was a a seller's market, so to speak, you know, designers and BA's, producers developers, everybody was in really in high demand.

So I kind of had this expectation that are rolling off my voluntary redundancy. I take my redundancy and I'd walk out there and, a week later I'd have a role. And it was just, it was a different thing. And I was just like, whoa, okay, this is different. And somebody who's used to freelance, it was just like, okay, cool.

This is really interesting. I started trying to think about this and I did end up landing a role thanks to Yuyugalt Self. And we did some great work for Swaggle, which is awesome. But apart from that, I started investigating this a little bit, just cause I thought it was kind of, it piqued my interest.

And I, thinking about what really happened in that period between the pandemic and I guess the tech downturn, so to speak, was kind of interesting. If you think about it, economies were kind of responding to the pandemic. They injected a lot of money into their economies.

There was cheap capital, low interest rates, all that kind of stuff, and consumers had more money to spend. Really, I think the pandemic was really interesting. That digital transformation that we had been going through kind of exploded. I saw some research saying it was like 15 years ahead of schedule.

It's like how we transformed digitally, which I thought was really interesting. In conjunction with that, we saw, the war in Ukraine and we saw, disrupted supply chains and we had inflation starting to kick off and I think we all recognize this from the last 18 months of our lives that, what happens in inflation?

World banks, the monetary policy tightens and governments and central banks around the world start tightening monetary policy and they basically raise interest rates. So that era of cheap money we've had since 2007 is kind of officially over. And as a result, consumers are cutting money.

So if you think about that, the macroeconomic context, it's kind of interesting. It's this is kind of what's happening. So what happened for us as designers and us as strategists and us as devs and the kind of people involved in digital, the ICT people. We saw the stock market plunging in late 2022.

We saw tech layoffs. We saw investors looking for sort of value over growth stocks. So that sort of 10, 15 year period where we had seen amazing growth in technology companies, it really contracted venture capital funds, avoided funding new businesses. So in that we saw big tech layoffs in 2022 at the end of 2022 in the States, and then that started happening over here as well within the tech sector.

 In the consultancy I was with, we saw it coming, we had a few tech clients and we just saw that kind of coming down the pipeline and then we saw the kind of conversations we were having. It was like watching an avalanche in slow motion and kind of what was coming towards us. And we were very optimistic, we'd had a really good pipeline of work. The other side of that we had was we were exposed to government work. So, we were like, ah, we'll be fine because, government's consultancies. We're all good. No worries. Like we've been in such a good place. So I guess, as a result of that, we saw just businesses and organizations generally just going really defensive, we saw some businesses are still investing in innovation strategy to kind of get ahead.

But ultimately I think more and more we've seen that as being edge cases and not really the norm. I think that sort of decreased appetite for risk has been really interesting as well. And you know, you think about it in the banks, we've got, some of the big four banks here, they're making hand of it, money hand over fist, but they're laying off staff last year.

And NAB I think last year cut a few hundred jobs from their back office jobs. And that include a lot of design and ICT roles. Businesses are being prudent, they're being defensive. And I think that's a really interesting place to be. And so it kind of begs the question where to for design within these kind of constraints.

And then the other side of that was me as a consultant, right? I was working in a consultancy. But then we were thinking, okay, tech's a bit screwed, but we've got government, it's all good. Cause government's stable and all that kind of stuff. And then the PWC leak happened and the McKinsey breach of conflict happened overseas.

Do you remember what happened with that McKinsey one? They were at this conflict of interest. They were advising opioid producers, how to boost sales while also working with US health regulators

[00:20:28] Chris Hudson: Yeah, Yeah, that was it.

[00:20:29] Kris: I think there's this all of a sudden this souring of consultancies generally, and that started to really, I think the procurement rules for government getting consultants in and design agencies and that kind of thing started to really affect that business model. That was like kind of what happened then I started to think about, all right, well, if you've got businesses that are on the defensive, what does that actually mean?

I guess in theory it means that organizations are really prioritizing less risky projects. They're really choosing BAU projects over in a digital transformation. They're looking to increase operational efficiency over innovation. And I think we also saw that hiring speed spread during the pandemic as well.

So we saw a lot of people within our industry taken up. A lot of people were doing hoarding of stuff, even if they didn't have the workload necessarily, they hoarded them because it was so hard to get. So I really saw that kind of reaction to that as well, where people started to let them go and all of a sudden there was a lot more people on the market kind of looking and it was a lot. So I guess if you think about that, what is that? Why is it the kind of roles that we're talking about? Why is it delivery management and BAs and designers and strategists and products people, and what is it about them? I think really, if you think about back to my days as a photographer as well, what was really interesting about is similar kind of thing, right?

So if you think about when the cost is on, what are the departments that really get cut? it's the cost centers, right? So it's like marketing and advertising. It's new initiative centers. It's research and development, software investment, it's consultancies and agencies and designers, funnily enough, and strategists they play in those spaces.

That's where we play. I mean, I'm maybe not advertising and marketing. That was me as a photographer, but me is everything else. That's where design is strong, when there's money to explore what's out there and do it in a human centered way. That's when, we really do.

I guess it's more difficult for CFOs to kind of justify keeping on board these kind of things in defensive time. So they lay them off. So I kind of went through that process of kind of went all right well, interesting from a macroeconomic point of view, kind of interesting.

That's the implication. So I guess I kind of started thinking about how can design and strategy strategic design specifically flourish in these times. Keep in mind that with no doubt, this is cyclical and things will heat back up again. I mean, if you out there and you talk to recruiters, they're like, yeah, we're going to, it's going to be great this year.

People are going to start hiring again. But inevitably organizations are going to start spending on new initiatives and software investment, R& D, and consultants and stuff going forward. So yeah, look, it's an interesting, it's an interesting place to be. I looked at innovation within an organization context. Have you heard of this Harvard business review study that they did on innovation and businesses? 

[00:23:05] Chris Hudson: Was it a recent one, or going back a few years?

[00:23:07] Kris: It was sort of post GFC study. Anyway, they did this study, it was like 5000 companies looking at different recessions, so the 1980, 1990 and 2000 recession, they kind of had a look at it and they looked at who did well after recessions, like what companies succeeded after recessions, and I think the figure was like, they got around 9 percent of organizations flourished after recession, they kind of looked at why, and ultimately they looked at kind of companies who had different strategic positions on how they invested in investment and research and development, those kinds of things. and they found really, they know, it's super defensive country companies who cut all their staff and don't invest in anything. And, basically just close up like a clamshell. They didn't do well. And then they, on the other end of the spectrum, they looked at those countries that went companies, I keep saying countries, companies that invest heavily and don't lay off the people, but instead think, Oh, well, it'd be a strategic play for us to kind of go, well, we'll just go off and own the industry we're in by investing when everybody else is closing up, which sounds sensible, right?

In a way, I mean, it sounds scary, but sensible, but apparently it was these companies that essentially played defensively. They laid off people. Like the cost center people, but they also invested judiciously in investment. So I think it's that play. And if you look at most companies, like I mentioned NAB before, I'm like, I'm sure, I don't know, but I'm sure that they're playing that game to an extent they're like, well, okay, we'll need to be judicious about spending, but we can still invest in some areas and all that kind of stuff. So I think, if designers can be seen as expendable with other cost centers, and if teams have been reduced and basically expected to do more with less and there's lower risk appetite for risk in innovation and digital transformation and stuff.

I mean, how does design kind of flourish in these times? I keep talking about that, but I kind of started thinking about, me within that context of being a consultant or, within the agency context, and then also within BA, with an in house instead of working more BAU projects.

How do we do it? I came up with, I guess, a couple of different tenants. It might be interesting to listeners that I could share.

[00:25:06] Chris Hudson: I mean, there's so many interesting points in that. I think there's a, there's an interesting one around, just the context and understanding the context and the dynamics of the world of work, basically, that are starting to unfold.

If you can see the signs, then you can almost understand how to react to them, or you can look at the behaviors that like, as you were explaining, you're looking back to the last time there was that downturn and figuring out whether there's anything that we could learn from that.

If you're a business leader, how would you learn from the way in which people responded to it last time? What would you definitely not do? And that kind of, I suppose sudden change, I don't know, it feels like a relatively sudden change, although it's probably over two or three years or four years, people are just starting to get used to it.

And, something like COVID will probably happen. And all of a sudden it's like an accelerator environment where people are taking on new skill sets and actually adopting fairly quickly. And if 15 years worth of transformation work is done in six months or a year, then all of a sudden that's a different business really.

And that, that has massive implications for the workforce really. And I think the speed at which the organization travels in that moment is interesting to see, but also the ones that hold back a little bit and almost resist the change. 

[00:26:11] Kris: I was listening to a chat with Gareth Ryden on AI 

And it was sort of similar sentiments about organisational change aand how, you know, the pace at which things are changing at the moment is so, accelerated. And whether it's as a result of the pandemic or whether it's, something more to do with the fact that AI and technology and I guess, customer expectations are changing so quickly as well.

It was a really interesting podcast, by the way.

[00:26:33] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, no, it was a good chat. I mean, I think we got to a chat, we were having the conversation around probably the split speed of organizations and the fact that some things are going to go fast and for everything that's going to go fast, there's going to be another side that's going to be going slower and there's going to be a weird sort of adoption need in the middle somewhere where the people that are going slow are going to have to wake up to the fact that there are people that are going fast and then they're going to have to start to learn.

So it's from an adoption curve point of view, I think that's super interesting for businesses, particularly where they always want to be seen to be traveling as one, but obviously, as we know, within these organizations, there are so many different pockets of either fast or slower incremental change or radical change, transformation that there's like the foundational work that happens.

And then there's usually a number of people that are trying to push it forward as well. 

[00:27:20] Kris: That reminds me of another one of your, I can't remember the person you interviewed a few weeks ago, but it was on innovation within businesses, but you were talking about that to speed and how you can have innovation teams and basically they kind of need to be removed.

And

[00:27:32] Chris Hudson: So is it a part of culture or is it separate? 

[00:27:34] Kris: That was really good chat. I enjoyed that. 

[00:27:38] Chris Hudson: So I think there's stuff in that should everyone not be an innovator? Should everyone be a designer? I think we saw there was a massive amount of democratization of basically the tools and what designers or strategic designers will think is or were perceived to be doing.

In that time that you were describing, that you were looking for work and all of a sudden market had a ton of designers out there and they were much lower value. And I think the notion of perceived value comes up for me in my head. It's a bit like the property market where I think my house is worth, 2 million or whatever, which it isn't.

And I'm going to, I'm going to make sure that I get that price, but it's just a kind of a ramshackle, property somewhere in sunshine or wherever it is like that to somebody, like to somebody would be incredibly valuable if it had certain features or whatever.

I think it's valuable. So I'm going to pass that on. And I think that we as workers or practitioners, if we're designers or anyone really, we're trying to get as much value from ourselves when we put ourselves out into the market. So it's interesting when that doesn't work out.

[00:28:33] Kris: I think it's a really good opportunity for design. I have this little mantra, I always think that good things come out of bad things. And if you look at the downturn as being bad and you have that worldview and lots of people do, and I'd probably agree with them.

Ultimately, I think, this is good for design in so many ways. If you think about the way we design wallets, especially within that double diamond context, where it's like really long length, and you and I have talked about this, right? It's big discovery efforts, 150 grand for an agency, three months, three - six months, and you're doing a lot of work.

There's still a lot of value for people to do that, especially when you're working, maybe with at risk groups or for accessibility point of view, or you need to basically get the data to inform the decision going forward through, within government. I can see it really working really well. But at the same time, I think the fact that all these kind of things mean that we have to do more with less and design is expected to do more with less and the pandemic tools and AI and all these things are kind of leading to a fact that we can do more with less. It's kind of great because it allows us to kind of work in a more lean way and I just love the thought of lean because as a practitioner, it allows you to do more stuff like you can do more unless it's less specialized. Now, it's kind of everybody wants for unicorns again, like everyone wants product designers, which is kind of like another word for UX UI designers.

And remember, three years ago, that was such a dirty word. And all of a sudden, it's like everyone wants product designers. And I think because people want generalists, they want their people to be able to kind of do end to end, because there's not the money to go around. And I think we've kind of got this to this point.

I know there are people who are really struggling out there at the moment trying to find work and stuff. And I feel for them and I am, well, I was one of them, right?

It's a hard market and we went from being really valued to, not valued, but it's just, we're less valued. It's like your house, right? It's I want to sell 2 million, but it might be worth 1.5 or whatever. It's a bit of an awakening really for that.

So I really, I think for me, it's really around I think we need to show a straighter line from design effort to business value. Design's not in its infancy anymore but we can still find it hard to communicate our value.

And especially when you're in large organizational contexts, it's really hard for design to have an impact, especially if the maturity of the organization isn't there. And it sort of doesn't have, I'm going to say a seat at the table. I think if you haven't kind of got that, it can be really hard for design to show impact.

So I think we really need to do that. I think there's a couple of different ways that I think we can do it. And, I guess the ways I've been trying to work this out is really, I think, number one, it's aligning yourself with, if it's product organization with your product manager or your service leaders or whatever you might be.

And I think it's really around those people, they're really the connection between what we're designing and the business impact. And I think ultimately they get to have a lot of impact within the kind of work that we need to be doing. Whereas design, we traditionally represent the user, which means we're often having to justify ourselves and kind of why we do that.

So I think having a really good partnership with product management or the key service delivery leaders is really

important. So that's kind of just a way of having a good communication with them. The next thing I think, is around ROI and metrics. And if you can, and I know sometimes design can be a little bit silo within organizations and we might not have direct lines of data, but if you can and it can also be really hard for design strategists, right?

Cause we're normally working. We can be working two, five years in advance to something where you don't have our way 

to point.

[00:31:42] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:31:42] Kris: So how do you do it? Being removed from implementation. I just think, ultimately we need still need to be doing it. Right. So if you can rely on analytics or conversion or retention rates or customer satisfaction metrics or NPS or whatever, or point to ROI in some way, I think it's really important to bring that home and bring that home to your product manager or the person who can have impact and kind of help you to get what you are doing through. Right. So I think that's number one. And I think then it's just really like, that's how you showcase value of design to use a broader organization. And that's how you basically flourish.

Right. If you can show impact. I think especially within constrained times, if you can show impact, you're even more valuable and you become that sort of people go to solve their problems, which is really where we want to be. That other thing around that balance between being that design leader or being on the tools, I think is really interesting.

I mean, for me and the way I'm reading it is at the moment, like having those design directors to kind of live up the level and I don't really do anything. I think it doesn't seem feasible to me at the moment. I think we kind of need to be on the tools and that's that player coach thing, right?

I think ultimately, obviously you have to make sure if you have a team and they're reporting to you or you're working with them, you're not stepping on their toes, but ultimately getting in there and doing work, I think is ultimately not such a bad thing at the moment anyway.

[00:32:57] Chris Hudson: Interesting one for consultancies, isn't it? Because there's usually a utilization figure of some sort that you're having to kind of stick to. And even if you're a team leader. It might be like you're 20 percent billable or you're 10 percent or more often than not, it's 60, 70 percent still, but they don't know how to do that.

They don't know how to kind of get the work, find the work, get the teams working on it, still be on the tools, manage the whole team. It's one to fix for them too. Right.

[00:33:22] Kris: Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. We used to have utilization figures or the consultancy I was at and I had utilization figures that I set for myself. And ultimately I think it should have been higher.

In retrospect, I think I should have been doing more. Because I think again as long as you don't piss off your team by being there, I think it's really good. If nothing else, you understand the work better and you're more visible to clients and all those other

things. I kind of touched on it. Like the double diamond, I think is great in certain contexts, but I just don't think it's actually, I don't think it's the right way at the moment. I think it's great for certain things as discussed.

But honestly, I if you think about the negatives, the double diamond it's linear, it's focused on, especially within the consultancy context that focus on deliverables and in house as well.

Right. I know you're big on this, Chris, it's like less focus on deliverables is fine, but if it's too much of a focus on deliverables and less on what the creating of the value or the impact that you can have within a certain time frame. I think- 

[00:34:10] Chris Hudson: well you sell a method, don't you, for people to understand what you're doing, because they don't know, they don't understand it.

[00:34:15] Kris: Yeah exactly. And I just think that works when you're selling something, oh we're going to do this thing. And it's double diamonding. We'll do, six weeks of discovery and then we'll do ideation and we'll have design sprints and, it's great. Sounds great. But ultimately when it comes down to it, I think what we need to be doing as designers is being far more lean.

And I think it's really, that's really around finding where has the most impact. And I think, you and I have chat about this and I had a chat to you earlier. I think your advice was really around focusing on where you can find the most impact, which I think you said really fits how organizations work, which I really liked because it's you're going into an organization, you're finding where the biggest pain point is, or how can we as designers provide the most amount of impact? So it's less around process. It's more around impact. How can you do that? And I think that's a really, I think I love that advice. I think it's really good.

[00:35:02] Chris Hudson: The fastest way. I mean, I was thinking like, as you were telling me about the dynamics of the designer's world, basically, because there is that blurriness between, strategist and designer now, and, everyone feels that they're part of the same discussion to some extent.

So who's proving the value and who's accountable for that is, it's kind of a hard one, particularly in the team context, but I was thinking about usually with this stuff there's somewhere else in the world, in another industry or in another world, another place where you can find evidence of where, a similar model is, of what you need to get to is actually, it's either been happening or it's in place.

And the one that jumped into my mind immediately was because you were a photographer at the beginning, and then I was thinking about advertising and actually in an advertising agency, the creative product is sacred, obviously. And that's what you're pitching and that's what you're making your money off and if it goes into production, that's even better.

But a lot of it just ends up getting thrown away. In any case they're basically in the process of getting a very tightly defined brief agreed. And then basically the person who's most skilled to basically respond to that, a team, art director, copywriter, photographer, potentially, they basically say, well, what can I come up with?

And that feels like a very kind of fast way to get to the creative output and you're actually delivering something, from that very early conceptual stage in a sense that a client can actually buy into in one way or another. So yeah, I was wondering like from that world or from the world of photography, because you're basically understanding what the need is and then you go and take the photos, right?

Then you've done the work. Is there a way that we can learn from that and bring that into the world of design? Because I feel like design has become inflated with other agendas. Everyone's involved as collaborations, co design there's lots going on and it's a big party, but when's it time to kind of bring it back to the actual thing that you need to deliver and just do that?

[00:36:46] Kris: I think the answer to this, it's a process that I love.

Lean UX it's kind of that, it's just like, as opposed to going off and doing all this discovery, be deductive as opposed to inductive, just kind of go and build a thing straight away with an idea you have. So you're talking about having a brief, right? So inevitably a business will give you our brief. It might be really, it might not be a tight brief like you described in advertising, but it might be like, hey we need to go solve this service problem or build this, product or build this feature and you might get some loose requirements from a BA or you might just have the product owner saying, Hey, I need this or whatever, or it might be like a really long list of waterfalls, requirements, whatever it is, ultimately, whatever you get there.

I think the quickest way to do it is not necessarily do a huge amount of upfront discovery. If you can be doing discovery while you're waiting or doing other things that's always really nice. But I think ultimately, if you can get it out and do a prototype and have it tested and show value.

I mean, we talked about ROI metrics, right? So if you don't have those long tail metrics like analytics and, retention data and all that kind of stuff, you've got usability testing, right? You've got time on task, you've got task completion, right? You've got system usability scores, whatever you want, you would develop the metrics yourself.

You as a designer, you then go in and go, cool, I'm going to just do loops of testing and build some stuff out and show value straight away because we've shown improvement over these three sprints. And I love that, it's kind of in that what you're kind of describing with a photographer going off and doing, shooting a brief or a creative or writing copyright. Where you're creating an artifact, you're creating impact, you're creating a thing and you're showing the value by showing metrics. It's so beautiful. And I think as opposed to the double diamond, which that approach that they teach in the design schools, I think it's great.

And I love it. I'd still love double diamond, but at the same time, I think the value isn't created quickly enough. And I think within this context. Within, tech downturn context, I think being lane and showing that value really quickly is awesome. And you know what, I don't think we should stop when there's money again.

I think we should keep going with it because we don't need 150 page reports necessarily. We don't need endless discovery. We don't need all that stuff. I think we can kind of, know enough now to kind of understand some things, we can build something and test it and see if that works.

And if it does great, we've proven something.

[00:38:59] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I do feel like things have become a little bit stuck. And, there needs to be, a bit of oil in the cogs, basically, to try and free up design and the creativity within these organizations a little bit. Because the process has been there to justify it and to business case things a little bit and to provide confidence and appeal to trust in it and also feel part of it to some extent.

I think it's been inflated for a number of reasons. Obviously, there's for the people that are working on those roles, there's a commercial interest, obviously, in running it at scale and involving as many people as possible for it to be justifiable. And it just feels that that would be the safest way to do it, would somebody buy a two year program of transformation or two day one, they'd probably go for the two year because they'd be a bit worried that two day one wouldn't give them the answers.

But I think the interesting thing is the sort of it's like an accordion basically. You can stretch a double diamond out and you can run it over several months. But actually if you think about, even if you're picking up the brief as a photographer, like the steps that you would go through is that, okay, well, what could I possibly do?

What's the best thing I should do? How many ways could I treat that? And then what am I going to do? You might do that within 30 minutes or two hours or something, but it's still the same, it's kind of a nice way of making a logical pattern out of basically a creative process.

So that might be one way of looking at it. But obviously sometimes random ideas pop into people's heads and you get amazing work that's just done because it's there and it's done in the moment. I don't think you can always plan for genius. Double diamonds, at least helping a lot of more people think that they can become geniuses. 

[00:40:29] Kris: One of the things with double diamond, I think those longer tail things is it does allow for those moments of genius to pop up. And I'm talking about those moments of genius of just kind of going, oh something's just clicked for me, and it took me a while to do that.

Right. It's the same when you're doing synthesis and research, I've been using dovetail and other sort of tools that allow you to use AI Large language model stuff. And they basically synthesize it all down, like pop out results. And you can do in a day or it used to take two weeks or whatever it is.

I think that's great. think it's really awesome, but it's also the human brain is a little bit slower. And sometimes it takes you a little while to kind of, get those insights going off. I was, it was interesting, talking about that Gareth Rydon interview you were doing and he was using a company, Otter, I think it was called. For the meetings he didn't go to, he was using that.

And I love that. I love that. But I often think that I'd do that. I reckon I'd do it and I'd send an email and then I'd be like, two days later, I'd be like, ah, I should have said that as well. You know what I mean? Like that whole thing about like the brain works in mysterious ways. But I mean, just, moving back onto on a more pragmatic sense, I think the AI and I think the tools that the pandemic tools that have come out are just so good for design

[00:41:35] Chris Hudson: them that the pandemic tools? 

[00:41:37] Kris: The pandemic tools, 

[00:41:38] Chris Hudson: Everyone's invited to that party. Everyone should have a go on the tools that we all know how to do it. And now we knew we all need to find other jobs because everyone's doing it.

 I mean the thing I think we can tell, you know, what used to take two weeks and kind of grueling synthesis to kind of, we can literally pump it out in a day now. And yes, it reduces the need to have more designers on a team. But ultimately, you as a designer who is more of a end to end designer, say, for argument's sake.

[00:42:03] Kris: You can kind of do that and kind of still get those really interesting insights using those tools. And you can whip up a board in FigJam or whatever using, it'll just like lay it out for me. And it does it for you stuff that you, have a designer doing for half a day to prep for a meeting.

You can literally just push a button. And for the most part, it's there. Yes. It's never going to be perfect, but it's awesome. I mean, I love it. It does create some issues about where do we all go as designers when our roles are kind of being not made redundant, but with the impact we can have as a single designer, using these tools is a really interesting place to be.

So,

[00:42:32] Chris Hudson: I think if you've got the eye for knowing whether the output is right or wrong, then it's okay and it's helpful. But a lot of people just obviously use that as a quick way to get to the answer without knowing whether the output was any good and it seems like better that they would come out with themselves and they just pop it out and that's their delivered work.

So I don't know if Banksy was doing like an art exam and he had to sit in a room and do it for eight hours or whatever. Would he do it in eight minutes? Or would he do it eight hours I don'ta know. You're basically trying to figure out, what's good enough and what's okay and what's better than okay.

And I think I don't know whether people consciously place themselves. But if you're, if you take pride in your work and you're into your craft like you and I tend to work, we want to take the first stance as not being the sole thing, it's not the final piece.

You actually want to evolve it a little bit, work with the ideas. Often just trying to break it, trying to find absences of patterns to see whether other things are possible. But that process from seeing the wrong thing to getting to the right thing, it feels like it gets quicker with the experience that you have which is good.

But it's not something that everyone sees in the beginning, I don't think.

[00:43:34] Kris: I agree and I think that's, I mean, it's part of the things, I guess the barrier to entry to design is relatively low. I tend to think get good mentoring and get in on the ground floor, you can still get the experience.

But experience is really invaluable within design. 'cause it just gives you you start to recognize patterns and you can understand the shortcuts to do those things. And the toolkit that you have, which tool to draw out when you're not just using methodology from end-to-end like you would do for a double diamond just because you do and that's all you know.

[00:44:00] Chris Hudson: It's also insights. Insights are so variable from basically just being raw data or information passed off in a group, it's like the inside is not, it's just called, interests or pain points or something. And that's just what information is being clustered and kind of analyze them that way.

But actually you can elevate that to a much greater extent. And I think that is often a missed opportunity. You're doing all this hard work to collect the data, to run your discovery, to run your research, to validate a lot of things, but you're not actually using the things that you find out to the extent that they could be used. 

[00:44:31] Kris: I'd take that one step further, Chris. And I think I'm sure you'll agree with me on this. I think one of the other big things I reckon for design generally not necessarily just now, but forever it's really around making strategy stick, or making your work stick, whatever that is, right?

So you're talking about doing research and understanding insights and stuff. How do you then take those insights and make them into something that's consumable for stakeholders? Like your audience technically is stakeholders, right? Like generally us as designers, our audiences and our users necessarily it is sometimes, but more often than not, it's the stakeholders within an organization that we need to convince to do or, if you're on the agency side, you might go off and do some work, right? So you go off and do a whole bunch of work and then you inevitably have a presentation. It might be a presentation for your internal stakeholders or a report or whatever you're doing. I just think whatever you do, it's so important.

I think for us as strategic designers or just designers or anybody within an organization, I think it's just making sure you don't just deliver the report and then it lives in the bottom of a drawer and no one ever sees it again. Cause I just worked on so many projects where so much effort goes into it, right?

So you were talking about research and then just not really seeing it through on getting the insights, but I think take that further. It's what are the insights and how does that apply for the business or the organization? How is that going to provide impact for them in the future?

What are you advising them on? How can you do that? But then taking that to stakeholders, but not just stopping there. You really have to sell that in, you have to, sell it to stakeholders. I mean, I did the, I was working for an ASX listed tech company. I did product strategy for them and I worked on it for about eight to nine months.

And in that I did human centered research, usability testing. We created prototypes. We kind of did all this stuff. We went off and did surveys, we've got all the data really. And we did competitive analysis. And looked at market trends and all that kind of stuff.

We brought that into this beautiful report. It was amazing. It was great. And we're like, you guys should go do this. The cool thing with, like with that particular project is I didn't stop there, like a lot of the time, especially with the agency context, the consultancy context, you just give it to them and you're like, cool, we're done by, but I think it's just really important to kind of keep going.

And that's hard to build in if you are a consultancy. It's easier if you're in house because you have a thing and you have engagement. It's an ongoing thing. And I love that about in house work. But I think for consultancies, it's so important that if you're doing the thing, you need to keep going.

And that might mean you just have to build in, you might go, cool, we'll deliver, but we're also building out another month or six weeks after that of just consultation, going and talking to stakeholder groups. Educating them on what this means, if you're doing important work making sure you have buy in across the organization because often you'll have, you'll deliver a report.

You're like, everyone loved it. We were great, but ultimately you get it. And some stakeholder goes, yeah, but I haven't considered this or, this isn't going to work because of this. And, there's agendas and all that stuff. That is the reason why it's sometimes so hard to make decisions and make progress internally in organizations.

You need to make sure you're taking that into consideration as well. So I think that sort of making your work stick is really important regardless of what you're doing. And it's only ever good for you as a designer anyway, because if you're getting to known to that level of stakeholder engagement, whether you're in house or external, I think it's still a really good thing from a business development perspective or just you as you're raising your political clout within an organization.

[00:47:43] Chris Hudson: Yeah, it's a really good point. I think the one around basically designers, researchers, anyone drinking their own Kool Aid and abasically attaching importance to the thing that they feel most passionately about in whichever way that may be the right thing for somebody else to see and take on value from, they're basically taking ownership on it, of it from you when you pass over that information, but in most cases, there's a massive gap between that area of passion and the thing that the stakeholder then has to.

basically take forward and implement in some way or another. So, research if you're talking about insights, yeah, great. I mean, that's the thing that researchers will pour over and spend hours and hours just kind of thinking about what different combinations of inputs could lead to this constellation of ideas and patterns and everything else.

And then you prioritize them. You think you've done a great job, but actually it's only a part of the puzzle and it's probably for a stakeholder it's more of a justification for things to evolve a little bit, but the kind of how they do it and what they do with it and the plan and the actionable things from it don't actually come with the insights report that's given usually, so you have to bake it into a bigger program or work.

And if you're expecting the, somebody else to do that and think about that, then- 

[00:48:48] Kris: Yeah. I mean, you're ultimately, you're just one data point of many other data points that a business is considering. I guess you want to just make sure your data point is up the top somewhere. And I think they only do that by engagement.

[00:48:57] Chris Hudson: Well, yeah, you're right. Selling it is the right way to describe it. I think you've got to package it It's as if it's a product that somebody else has to buy. In that 30 minute meeting, they have to walk away with it and feel comfortable that new coat they're wearing whether it's the right analogy or whether it's the 

right purchase, but I'm going with it. I'm going with it.

[00:49:14] Kris: We should have had more clothing analogies going through. If you just needed to make it a house analogy, it probably would have fit

[00:49:19] Chris Hudson: House analogy. What about woodwork? 

[00:49:20] Kris: Oh yeah, woodwork. Oh yeah, good one. Oh that's, that's a good segue too, for those watching at home. This is not my work, we're selling a house.

I'm living in a rental at the moment, but we're in the process of selling a house. And as part of that, I've been doing the woodworking and the furniture when that's, it's been so much fun. I'm really enjoying it. That's 

[00:49:35] Chris Hudson: a messy job, isn't it? I mean, where do you do that?

[00:49:37] Kris: Yeah, in the backyard. It's so messy, but I've bought myself a HEPA extractor vacuum thing.

I'm feeling like semi, not professional, semi amateurish about it all, but at least I'm doing it the right way now.

[00:49:48] Chris Hudson: So the analogy coming back to the previous thing if you went into the boardroom, basically gave someone the chair leg. Would it be like that? So what are you going to do with that? It's the best chair leg you've ever seen. 

I think that's 

[00:49:57] Kris: great. 

[00:49:57] Chris Hudson: How about delivering a full chair? 

Or a cushion, like a chair seat, like a cushion bit without the legs. Nice cushion.

[00:50:03] Kris: Could still be good. It just depends on the use case.

[00:50:05] Chris Hudson: All right. We'll send if there's a link to any of your work that you want to show and furniture, then

[00:50:09] Kris: You can come by my house when it's on sale in October if you want to, 

[00:50:12] Chris Hudson: Open house. Thank you.

[00:50:16] Chris Hudson: I think we might wrap there. There's a tonne of stuff in there that's super interesting from a macroeconomic point of view, but all the way down to what we should be thinking about, within our day to day, and I think some of those patterns that you were describing were just super interesting and really worth thinking about where can we learn from other places, what from the past can we learn from in the way that people and companies and organizations are responding to change and just like some good times and good chats in between.

So thanks so much, Chris. We really appreciate you coming onto the show. And if people want to get in touch how would they find you? Do you want people to get in touch? Ask a question. 

 Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. So Kris, K R

[00:50:49] Kris: I S. Washusen, W A S H U S E N. Yeah, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. I have a website as well. Just hit me up if you want to see my portfolio. Apart from that, that's pretty much the only social channels. I'm not like you, Chris. I'm not all over the joint, but

[00:51:02] Chris Hudson: so that, that was good. That was a plug. That was a bit of networking. 

[00:51:05] Kris: check out Company Road, because they're great. And the boss of Company Road is a really nice guy. 

[00:51:09] Chris Hudson: You'd be surprised how many people say you saying company and country and interchangeably, like how many people say country

Road.

to me all the time, 

I might brand myself up actually in that gear at some future point, but

[00:51:20] Kris: we could go back to our segue about clothing, Chris, and then we could somehow work in the country roads thing, but let's not do that because it's Company Road and let's just stick with what it's going to be. 

[00:51:28] Chris Hudson: That sounds sensible. Thank you. All right, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much. Yeah, we'll see you next time.

Okay, so that's it for this episode. If you're hearing this message, you've listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We'd love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it'll make a difference.

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