Is Design Thinking Still Relevant?

In this episode, Chris Rockwell and the talented Carly Price discuss the importance of creative practice with a business mindset for effective Design Thinking. Spoiler: Design Thinking isn't dead. 

Transcript

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Welcome back everyone, to Seriously Curious, a podcast about all things experience for business strategy and design. I'm Chris Rockwell, I'm president and founder of Lextant, where we put all things human at the center of innovation and design. I'm super excited today to have Carly Price with us. Carly is an industrial designer by training, has her MBA from Wharton, and she's a strategic thought leader and entrepreneur who's led the UX in all different kinds of companies, including IDO, JP Morgan Chase, Walmart, and Ford Motor Company. And I'm super excited today because Carly recently penned a paper on design thinking. And really, what makes it effective in businesses and especially from a practitioning standpoint. So I'm super excited to get into it today and really answer the question, is design thinking still relevant? You know, there's word on the street that design thinking is dead. Is that really true? So I'm super excited to have Carly here today to help us discuss that. Carly, welcome to Seriously Curious. Thank you so much for having me. Let's start with you. Like how did you what was your professional career like? How did you get here? Wonderful. So I started out as an industrial designer in New York. I landed an internship at Smart Design while I was still in school at Pratt Institute. And that really paved the path for my career. After about ten years at Smart, I moved to IDO And between Smart and IDO you know, the design world was evolving quite a bit. The beginning of my career, it was pretty straightforward, like we would get a brief from a client to design a product. We thought a lot about ergonomics and human factors, especially with products like OXO, Good Grips kitchen tools. So that was really the training I had, developing, you know, the perfect physical object that really met human needs from a usability point of view. What was wonderful in that first part of my career is that design was evolving. We started focusing on ergonomics, but we really shifted to focus on behavior in addition to ergonomics with in context, ethnographic research. And that really changed my career trajectory from really thinking about atoms and designing, you know, perfect, beautiful forms to thinking about human needs and how the products we're developing can suit human needs and address unmet needs, but also embody and express a brand for our clients. So that's when I started to see the intersection of design and business and became really excited about that. After consulting for a number of years, I wanted to move in-house to have more accountability to deliver. We did a lot of beautiful, thoughtful work in IDO but so much of it was front end and conceptual and didn't always make it to market. So by moving in-house, I wanted to see that impact and have that accountability all the way through. So my first step after consulting was to join a startup. I was an early employee with Casper. We launched five products in two years, built a team there from scratch with one of the co-founders, so learned a ton during that time. And that really gave me the confidence to launch my own startup, which I worked on full time for a year. Still working on it. Were planning to launch our Kickstarter soon. And at that point after the year in the startup, I wanted to go back into the into the design world, with a full time role. And that's when I went in-house on the corporate side, first with Chase, followed by Ford, and most recently, Walmart. Wow. That's a that's an amazing career arc. It's interesting that you gained all that experience kind of, as a consultant with the outside kind of looking in and then were able to also impact it on the inside. Tell me a little bit about, I noticed that you got your MBA from Wharton somewhere in the, in this journey, which I think is a really important, path for many of us that are trying to understand business better. Tell me about why you made that decision to get your MBA and how it impacted your career trajectory. Yeah. So I, I've received my MBA fairly recently. So later in my career I'd thought about it since, you know, my early 20s, since my first couple of years of working, I realized that we could put forth the most compelling, beautiful, you know, human centered solutions, but the business wouldn't necessarily adopt them. And that many of the people making decisions about my work had a business background. So I thought, you know, periodically I thought about moving to the product side, or the brand side. And getting an MBA was something I always wanted to do. But the timing was difficult. It was either, you know, expensive when we were trying to buy a home or I'd had small children. And when I joined Ford Motor Company, they were supportive of me earning my MBA while working full time. I had the support of my manager and my manager's manager, so that's what made it all possible. And it was an incredible amount of work. It really stretched me outside my comfort zone. I had to learn math all over again, learned calculus. But it was incredible. And I'm I'm really thankful that I did it. Yeah. What kind of doors did it open for you? I noticed in your recent article on design Thinking, you talk a lot about being able to speak the language of business and business sensitivity in general, I think is a huge opportunity for folks in our space, you know, career professionals and peers in this user experience or human centered space. How how did it change your, ability to operate in a large company like Ford? So I, I feel I was always a business oriented designer. So I had I think I had a pretty good grasp of speaking business language, but I what I lacked with some of that sort of intrinsic confidence and knowledge, like I, I learned kind of on the job and I really wanted the sort of credentials so that I felt, I think, more confident and just embodying it. It also, it also really helped me understand what drives business, taking courses around, like I'd never taken an economics course, so I had to take macroeconomics and microeconomics. We had to take accounting. And, you know, I, I didn't really know how to read a 10-K document before, but going through business school, that was part of that process. A lot of, courses on strategy marketing I was always interested in so really learned about all of these different areas of business in a much deeper way. So then when I was, you know, in those large corporate environments, I just understood the language more and really started to see my peers. I mean, I've always seen my cross-functional colleagues as people. I think that's essential. There shouldn't be a creative community and then the business or engineering or product community, being being at business school with people from all different backgrounds, we all did so much collaborative work together. It just even reinforced for me more that we're all one team working together to benefit the customer, to benefit the business. So I felt a little bit less like I didn't understand or I was outside of the business side, and just felt like, you know, a full member with a seat at the table. Yeah, yeah. I'd like to circle back to that. That idea of sort of business sensitivity and the ability to align, you know, organizations with a better understanding of business when we kind of get into your, your new article. But maybe before we do that, I was thinking about all the varied experiences you've had across different kinds of companies. I mean, service design companies, retail companies, product companies. You've seen UX and human centered design, outside and inside in all these different environments. What's unique and different about, you know, the way that human centered design is practiced in those areas, or is it more common than different or more alike than different in those different kind of contexts. So I see more similarities than differences. I feel that the design process or, you know, human centered design is one approach, it's not the only approach, but that process can be applied to all different types of challenges. It's really about, you know, we often start with a hypothesis, or a problem we want to solve. Often there's a business oriented problem. We try to reframe it as something around what is consumer focused so that we're solving a real human need and not just, hey, the business wants to grow in this way. Started to understand people, people's needs, ideating new solutions, prototyping those processes or tools can be applied to consumer physical products. They can be applied to operational processes in a service environment. They can be applied to designing a website or an app that's more of the output, which you know, most of the design teams I've worked with are multi-disciplinary, so not exclusively digital product or UX, or not exclusively physical product. And frequently when we're working on experiences that includes multiple types of design. So we might be, for example, some of the work I did at Walmart was looking at omnichannel service experiences. So someone might be starting their journey on their phone, browsing a product selection, purchasing a product, booking a service, going into the store and fulfilling that service. So that involves both physical design and digital design, similar with Chase and Ford, where there was always an element of a digital component and physical. So I see whether you're working on enterprise software or consumer facing apps, the same process would apply. Yeah, yeah, yeah, B2B or B2C. I think that's one of the things I, I feel most grateful about in my career is we can work in all different types of domains, all different, whether you know, business to business or business to consumer. It's really a set of principles. When I teach, sometimes I talk about big D design. You know, it's like everything is a design problem, you know? And you never need, like, really human, real human centered design unless you have a design problem and everything's a design problem. So I think too that a certain principles or the way that, human centered designers talk, using experience as a language is a common language that everybody can understand. Everybody. We're natural storytellers, right? So we can tell stories about today's experience and what people need from tomorrow's experiences and, and align a multidisciplinary team, regardless of the kind of backgrounds or contexts we're, we're working in. And I think it's it's one of the, one of the I think, most surprising and, and unique things about, you know, being in this human centered design business. So tell me about some of the pivotal, maybe moments in your career. I think you mentioned some of the work that you did at JPMorgan Chase, really, really kind of transformed the way you thought about your work and how you interface with leadership teams. Yeah. So, at you know, in a consultancy like IDO we would have a brief and we would sort of go off on our own and do the work and have presentations and hand-offs. Sometimes we would have our clients more involved in their work. And I felt like those were really the most impactful, engagements that we had because we were bringing we were all going along the same journey. And our partners, you know, on the client side, really internalized and believed in the work and could champion it inside the company. When I joined Chase, I joined the digital design team, and I was asked to focus on innovating the branch experience. And I realized pretty quickly that, you know, as a sort of senior individual contributor, there was only so much impact I could make working from, you know, San Francisco when all of the decision makers on what happened in a branch were based in New York or Columbus, Ohio. So I, I spent the first few months of that job really on a listening tour, getting to know all the leaders in the space, the challenges, the current work, the projects that were in flight. The business at that time was undergoing a transformation. They were had a big initiative around transforming the branch experience. And I could see that there were a lot of ideas that we were pushing forward, but there was a disconnect between some elements of the strategy and the ideas that were being executed. So in a in a sort of skunkworks way, I introduced human centered design into the process where I put together some materials and documents and workshops to say, like, hey, if we if we do truly want to innovate the experience, let's think about the physical environment a new way. Let's think about the digital tools in a new way. Let's think about how we bring the customer's experience with, you know, the online experience with Chase or the app into the branch, because at the time they were quite disconnected. I organized ethnographic research in a few cities around the country and we didn't, you know, we tried to do this in a scrappy way. And this gave us, not only the quantitative insights that we had from past work with in Chase, but it supplemented it with some, real quotes, real insights and real examples. We also did some facilitated sort of co-creation tools, where we got the customer's input into what a solution might be. Yeah. And so working through that process and workshopping with those executives, ultimately I was offered a new role in the company as head of Branch Innovation, where we took all of the the ideas generated from our human centered design process, and we set out to build what we called a beta branch, where we could test and learn with customers and bankers. So you moved from the design practice to the business delivery practice? Yes. So I when I started my time at Chase in the digital customer Experience team, as a designer, I moved over to be head of Branch Innovation in what was called the chief administrative office. Okay, so that role had been in the past, led by someone with, you know, either a product or market research or technical background. They had not had a designer in that role before. So tell me then the the branch that you developed, the pilot branch, tell me about, you know, at the time, I think, there was a lot of, I would say kind of superficial, treatments about way people were handling branch banking. It was like, well, you know, we'll put it in a coffee shop and we'll make lattes or, you know, and it was like this way to try to transform banking in this, you know, this kind of place you would hang out. But in your case, it was really quite different. How did you use the ethnography and the co-creation to stand up a branch that could really move the needle for the community? Yeah. So a few things that we had done early on. I had organized some co-creation sessions with some students from CCA, California College of Art, and we began with having them bring like bring their pain points. So I had asked them all to go to a bank, document the experience, come back, debrief on it. They shared experiences that they had had. Many were international students. So like authentication and bringing their identification was a major pain point. Just the environments themselves weren't always conducive to a place you would want to spend time. They could be intimidating. They could be overly formal. And then, you know, on the other hand, there were, spaces like the Capital One cafe, which were kind of a gathering place where you could get great coffee. And they had some financial wellness classes, but those were not full service branches. They had brand ambassadors, and you can get information on opening an account, but you couldn't actually do any transactions in those spaces. Yeah. And so what we wanted to do in innovating the branch experience was how do we take what we offer in a full service branch and bring it, you know, modernize it with all of the tools and experiences that would really help people on their financial journeys. Because I know many of us growing up in the US, we weren't really educated on financial wellness when we were young, so we've had to sort of learn it on our own and through our research, we learned that people are often asking a friend or family member for advice or going to like a mom and pop financial advisor and major institutions really are only serving people with a higher net worth. You need a certain amount to invest to get the attention and time from a financial advisor. So there is a whole underserved community of people who were just starting out or lower net worth that weren't didn't have a place to go for financial advice. Yet. Chase had 5000 branches and wanted those branches to be advice centers. So there was a real opportunity I saw to connect those and do it in a way where we could offer those banking services and create that welcoming third place. Yeah, so many of the ideas that we had coming out of our work together, we could test out in this beta branch. So one of the things that was impactful for me, moving from the design team to the business team, was I was reporting to a decision maker who could decide, like, we're going to open this beta branch. Here's what we're going to build it. So since I moved over to the business team, I had much more agency and ability to make those ideas real, including working with the real estate team to scout out a location. We decided to build this beta branch in New York. There were a number of sites that we could have chosen. We looked in some places like Lower Manhattan, close to NYU. You could make a case, but that would have been a great location to test new technologies. Ultimately, we decided to build this beta branch in Harlem so that we could really meet underserved communities. At the time, Chase had an initiative called Advancing Black Pathways. There was a lot of interest within within the bank, with our CEO, with my leader, to really address those underserved needs. So we felt that building this test branch in Harlem would give us an opportunity to really connect and do that. So in addition to finding a space and revamping it, we worked with Google. We had courses at Google provided we had small business pop ups. So we had a new role called a community manager, and we tested all of those things in a real space. And to me, that is like true prototyping. It wasn't purely a simulation. It was real new services interacting with real customers. Yeah, I love the blending of, design practice, like in-situ prototyping with real listening to what the bank, cares about, not only from a business standpoint and the need to reach the underbanked, for example, but but to provide really communal value. And then also, I think one of the things I thought was really powerful in our work with, Chase in the past was this idea, of more consultative types of relationships. You know, money's a highly emotional thing for people, right? And it's, a scary and intimidating space, and people don't want to make mistakes. So the idea of sort of a more professional, consultative relationship with, with bankers, I think, puts humans in the right spot to help customers. I think the other the other pressure that of course, branch banks have faced forever is how do we do it with fewer people and more technology. So how did you sort of blend the the, you know, need for the business to have less expense related to branch banking but still be able to add, sort of the the key touch points for, for humans in the, in the community when you were doing this pilot program. So the branch that we renovated and had it had not been touched in decades. So it was quite antiquated and had many, many teller stations that were under utilized. Yeah. So we didn't replace human labor with a lot of ATMs. We did have some of our newer, more modern ATMs in the space. We rightsize the number of teller stations, but we also added different types of, you know, interaction zones. We had booths, we had comfortable couches. We actually had to we converted what was the safe deposit box room into a community room that anyone in the community could use for a meeting. You know, our bankers were more casually dressed. We had, new services and new types of checking accounts that were being offered. And this community manager role was also essential. So part of opening up this beta branch site was making a case for this new role. And to me, one of the the great successes of this, you know, Chase published a paper last year on the five year anniversary of opening our beta branch around, you know, the increase in number of checking accounts, in the community branches relative to traditional branches, the increase in savings account balances in these community branches, and then, The number of courses or financial health classes that have been hosted on these sites. That's great. That's amazing. Carly. Congratulations on that. I think, you know, it's it's a great case study. I hope that it gets, you know, written up and shared more broadly because I think it's a great example of how you can bring design thinking, types of approach, business sensitivity, looking at the customer journey and putting the right touchpoint in at the right place, you know, whether that's the technology implementation or human type of touchpoint can really kind of maximize, the opportunity for both the community and for the and for the business, right. For, for the bank in this case. If I think about the the success of our test site and our beta branch, what we were really building there was our first, community center branch. So while initially we thought about it as the Harlem Innovation Branch, where we would test and learn on all of our new products and services, we quickly landed on this idea of this is a the first community center branch, which has since been scaled across the country. So now there are 19 of these community centers. And that role to, to me, like establishing a new role in the branch environment, which was a huge win. Yeah. So not only do we have community managers at all of those branches across the country, we have community managers and traditional bank branches too. And the goal by 2030 is to have 75 hired across the US. Nice. That's that's amazing. And this, branch concept has won some awards as well. Right. And recognized nationally or internationally. Yes. In 2021 we want to fast Company Innovation by Design award Fantastic that's great. I mean all of us think about that. You know, the ability to, say that you, you know, contributed to that is amazing. I love the idea, you know, everything that you've been talking about, this is, I think, what most would consider design thinking. And you and I know design thinking isn't a new concept. It's the idea of, of of blending sort of creative practices and behavioral, understanding of people and design and business processes and strategy into really create something of value to identify what that value is and bring it to life and new products and services. So it's not a new idea, but design thinking, brought those concepts to a much wider audience beyond sort of, you know, typical, folks who are using those in professional practice. Right? So that was a good thing, right? That, now, more people knew about design thinking, but but what's what's kind of happened, since the advent of design thinking and the popularization of it in your mind, what have you seen happen? You know, I think when we were doing it in the agency setting, often clients would bring, you know, us as an expert team to facilitate and lead through this process. And I think in many instances, teams could be quite dogmatic that we had to follow a specific process or specific people had to do it in a certain way. Somewhere along the journey, it became very democratized so that it almost became too much of a like an easy paint by numbers where people felt like, oh, if I go talk to somebody, then I'm doing human centered design, and there is a lot of work that we would do as designers. You know, it wasn't just around talking to a person, having an insight and then making that into an idea. We would do a lot of rigorous. So synthesis and develop insights and translate those insights into opportunity spaces and do broad ideation and prototyping before narrowing in on the best solution. So I feel that the process was quite simplified. And, you know, in that article I wrote, I use the term design thinking. I mean, somewhat reluctantly. I'd never been a super fan of that term. To me, it's human centered design, design thinking kind of. It feels a little bit pithy. And it feels like. I don't want to say that, it's wrong to think that anyone can do human centered design or design thinking. It just is a very, very diluted version of the robust and rigorous process we would do as designers. So the reason I'm not giving up on it is I still think there's true value in the rigorous, true work that we would do. And what I see since especially going from different within different organizations, I mean, I think my experience at Chase, when I was sort of, you know, in the business team as a designer, we did human centered design, but we we kind of did it in our scrappy way because we, we really wanted to see through some business impact. You know, at Ford, I led a human centered design team called D-Ford in Palo Alto, which was really borne more out of the consultancy model, where, we did more independent projects. The issue that we would have there is that sometimes we were too isolated and there wasn't necessarily a clear line between our, our concepts and our prototypes to production. Sometimes these internal design teams are given like quite pie in the sky briefs, things that might not ever see the light of day. And then there were more questions around what value is this team providing? I feel that, you know, there was a pretty successful version of this with Walmart, where the design team was responsible for both the North Star Vision and the delivery. I think that's a good balance of designers being able to foresee, you know, or not foresee. Designers are able to put pen to paper and really articulate what a future great customer experience can be and have the responsibility to deliver that. Where I've seen design thinking fall short is almost when there's a team doing ideation and then a separate team doing delivering, and there's often like a valley or gap in between those where things can either fall apart or end up not actually getting through to production. Yeah. So I guess I'm hearing a couple things. One is the the democratization of the idea wasn't a bad thing. I remember, you know, we used to have to go up on the mountain and shout, hey, this is really, you know, this experience centers stuff is important. You know, we should do it and it'll deliver great results. And we could demonstrate how it would deliver results. Well, then that idea caught on and somehow got watered down in the process. And in the meanwhile, we found ourselves in positions where maybe we were doing really far out upfront stuff that was kind of disconnected from the business pipeline and business delivery. So we sort of, found ourselves doing work that wasn't directly impacting the business and kind of put us in maybe, a bit of a rear seat. I'm generalizing, of course, but but, but the idea is that there were a couple of things. I think that kind of put us in a position where we weren't being as impactful, and we were letting some of the core kinds of work, the idea, identifying and delivering value. We were kind of leaving it maybe to other parts of the business, and we kind of lost a seat at the table, I think is some of what I've seen happen in an industry. Now, that pendulum, I think, is swinging back because they're realizing you need insights and you need people who are skilled at this to do the work as part of the team. It doesn't mean that any, you know, you know, you or I don't own customer experience. Everybody owns customer experience, everybody owns human centricity and whatever role ours is to play in that process. But it it does require some expertise to do it well, to translate insights, to build strategy. But there are ways that we can be way more effective. One of the things I think I liked in your article is you, you talked about sort of three key focal areas, users, which of course is something that we would be focused on, and technologies how we apply technologies, but also business sort of back to where we started the conversation about business sensitivity. I think your example of the branch banking to me is a great example of, a clear business sensitivity. A clear, human centered design process. It's really design thinking, which, you know, we've talked about is not a new idea, but in, in the democratization of design thinking, you know, the fact that that we don't have to now sort of preach the importance of human centered design, but that organizations know about it. Has it been diluted in some way? I mean, what have designers missed along the way? As more and more people have become to know about design thinking, but somehow we've gotten less effective as practitioners, maybe. How how is that happened, do you think? Yes. So back in, you know, my earlier days, an IDO. That's when we started talking about design thinking. And I think the term is a it's like an elevated or diluted version of what we actually did in practice. So design designers going through that process of research of, you know, defining insights and opportunities, developing the strategy to lead to the best, you know, concepts. It would take time, and it does take some level of expertise and creativity. And one of the most important parts of it is going from insight to concept and tying those really closely together. I think as design thinking proliferated and became a little bit pithier and more lightweight, taught in a day in a workshop, it almost felt like something that would be kind of like just a checklist that someone could go through. Oh, I talked to a person. I had an idea. I made a concept that's such a like a, a watered down version of the rigorous work we would do. I feel like that's one of the one of the pieces. Also, the just the naming of design thinking to me never really felt quite right because it's only part of the process. Right? I mean, as designers, you need to do the thinking part and the doing part. In four years of thinking, even going a few years back, I'd see debates on LinkedIn. It's not about design thinking, it's about design doing, and it's not an either or. It's really a both. You need to put the thought into it and you need to build like without the prototyping, without making it real. It's just ideas. And that's that's where I've seen some of the shortcomings in these embedded teams and companies, where they become more like idea factories or teams. They come up with a bunch of concepts, and there's such a disconnect between having that idea and making it real. Like ideas are actually relatively cheap. Making things real is the hard part. Yeah. I mean, even if I think about my startup, I had an idea. I percolated on it for about six months. I spent a year on it full time, and there were still many years to go to bring that idea to market and make it real. It's really where the rubber hits the road. So as I was putting together that that article I wrote on LinkedIn, you know, I thought about, you know what, What are the areas where I'm seeing us fall short internally in some of these large companies because we need to move quickly. You know, we don't have the luxury of time that we had back in my consulting days, or we'd have, you know, dedicated teams for ten, 12, 16 weeks on a single problem, sort of working in a bubble, like working in a close knit environment. We were totally focused on that challenge. You know, the teams I've been working on in-house, we don't have everyone working on one project at a time, right? Everyone struggling multiple things, and we don't necessarily have as much time to do research, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Like, for example, with Casper, we were quite scrappy and getting our insights, learning quickly and combining qual and quant and then making things real in a relatively quick way as well. Yeah, yeah, well, I love that idea, that, ideas aren't the problem. I agree with that. Ideas are kind of. Every organization has hundreds or thousands of ideas that they could move with, you know, forward with. But the question is which ideas really meet needs of the customers which add value? And as you say, you know, we all own responsibility for delivering a great experience, but there's real, you know, skill in identifying the right insights and then activating those in strategy and design and then working to align a large organization around that, I think I do think, the, the sort of design thinking idea and companies were doing training, right, where everybody could get design thinking in a day. And in one on one hand, it provided the principles to a wider audience, which was a good thing. What it misled people in is that they were able to do it, with, you know, with one day of training without any support or help. So I think it's good that that, you know, everyone understands the principles around human centered design or why they should be doing it, but hopefully it arms designers to be more effective in the work that they do. The other the other thing that was happening, I think, at the same time is if you remember, maybe 5 or 7 years ago, every large organization was standing up an innovation center. And the innovation center was going to go think about big ideas, and, explore potential directions that it was very far out looking and it was very design thinking, but it wasn't a lot of design doing. And I think business leaders, tired of that because they couldn't connect the ideas and the millions and millions of dollars that were being spent, you know, to explore this stuff. They couldn't connect it to the products and services that they had to get to market to stay alive and add shareholder value and all the things that are important for businesses to do. So they consequently all kind of went away. There aren't many of those innovation centers around anymore. So I really like your idea too of you have to be design doing as well as design thinking or you will not be. We, we won't be seen as relevant in an organizations you know. Yeah. To add to that. So I've led two of those kind of innovation teams. One was at Chase and one was at Ford. And in both instances I had embedded software engineers on the team. In some case a Chase, they reported into engineering, at Ford, they were part of my direct team. And with those software engineers, we could help convert and make things real relatively quickly. Like one example, there was a pain point in some of the new branches that Chase was opening of wait time, where there was no way to manage the queue. And we had it was to me like a relatively low hanging fruit idea. We should digitize this queue so people are in the line and not have it just like, we literally had a piece of paper on a clipboard. So with our design technologists or our software engineers on our team, we built a standalone app where we could check people in, and we put this in a few of the branches where that pain point was particularly high. And we had an improvement in NPS or what we called at chase, our OSat score, overall satisfaction. And when it went up by 10% relatively quickly. So that that proved to us that this was a product or feature that we needed to incorporate into the roadmap quickly. Right. Similarly, at Ford, we had ideas around in-vehicle experiences, and our software engineers made those like prototype in a tangible way so that we actually tested some services, we tested experiences in drivable vehicles. That to me really helped bridge the divide between just the idea, like in a deck or in a video or some illustrative format and something that people could actually interact with to me, like design thinking in isolation is really only a portion of it. It's really the making it real, being in in situ with customers and experiencing it with them, or having them do it on their own. And that's when we really that's the that's the really the design part. Yeah. Yeah. I think organizations I found throughout my whole career, organizations are very impatient for the thing they want to see the thing, quickly. And so the more that we can paint the picture of the future or show them how the, insights will be embodied in New products and services, then the organization can rally around that. Remember the Doblin group? Used to talk about business concept illustration, which I love. That idea was a way to align a large organization around what a future could be like. And, and I think the more we can show the organization what problem needs to be solved and what success looks like in the future, then everybody can march towards that with their respective responsibilities, whether it be manufacturing or design or marketing or whatever it is. But I think organizations are businesses are impatient, to see the results. You know, they don't want to they don't want to spend two years doing research. They want they know they need to be making things, you know. So I think that's something. So you mentioned in your article, I like that you had sort of three, foundational pillars, you know, including users, which we've talked about technology, the technology sensitivity and business sensitivity to in order to be effective practitioners. So you mentioned sort of the first the business go go beyond business or design thinking to design, doing right, making, making sure we're always doing we're always delivering a value. And and in your JPMorgan Chase, banking branch example being very sensitive to the goals of the business, being able to speak the language of the business so that all of the ways that we activate insights and ideas resonate with business leadership. I think that's one of the ways we can get out of this sort of order taking role. Many, many of the designers that I talk to in design organizations, big companies, big design organizations, they're relegated to like, order taking, you know, they're going to be told what the next feature is and not even where that, what matters about that feature, but they have to just execute it. So you say, say more if you can about what makes us more effective from a business standpoint. And then I want to talk about technology and the user standpoint as well. Sure, sure. So yes. In that article I pointed out three things. One was designer speaking the language of the business, having a point of view and expressing it the second most like walking the walk of being really user centered. And the third was thinking about the whole customer journey and experience and not just slicing it into a small, feature driven, approach to product development. For the first one. I think this is part of what I really gained in business school was when we're working cross-functionally, we're all as one team. So I think sometimes designers don't necessarily understand everything that's factoring into decisions. Maybe not as tuned into data and looking at, you know, big data sets or even, you know, understanding some of the diagrams or the language that's used. I think the more that we as designers can ask questions like integrate ourselves into the team, not seeing ourselves as just like having our role like having a specific role that's just around the creative side. Like designers really need to actually understand the full context and be a part of it. And if they don't understand like ask questions and be comfortable doing that, you know, around understanding users, you know, you mentioned time for research. I mean, in house, I've been in projects where we don't have even a month for research. And I would I would just, you know, try to encourage all of my teams to, you know, we can put forth concepts. We do have some tacit knowledge of the customer. We do have a starting point. So we can certainly begin with ideas, but we should really test our hypotheses. And I've seen all too often where we just get really, really far down a path because we think we already know what the user needs. And it's always good. Sometimes, you know, we we, we, we do a lot of testing on our feature level, like, oh, this one moment in our UX journey, we see a drop off. So let's like redesign this moment or this page. But if you're just looking at that out of the full context or sort of missing, what is the reason why we're getting drop off there, and is there another way we can approach it? I think more than just being an order taker, designers can develop multiple approaches are present, multiple options, and not just kind of do as they're asked, but think beyond like, well, what's the reason why we're experiencing this? How do we address that? What are other creative solutions to instead of just sort of doing what we're asked? Yeah, I think, you know, we always try to ladder up to the emotional and functional benefits, and then ladder down from a feature into sort of the way you might bring it to life from a experience standpoint. But if we don't aren't speaking the language of value, I think that's one of the mistakes. I think we made with design thinking is this idea that it starts with empathy, like empathy is not really the right word from a business standpoint. I think it's about value. It's like what? Where is what's the value proposition from a customer standpoint? What are the emotional and functional benefits that they seek from experiences? And then how do those translate to the ways we might deliver those with new kinds of features, for example? And then how might we bring those to life in a multisensory way with how those experiences look, feel, speak and act? I think you need to have all of that to have it really make sense. So whenever I am in a meeting and somebody is talking about a feature, I immediately try to get the conversation to the the, emotional and functional benefit level, right? So we can make sure we're aligned on that, because there might be all different ways we can deliver that through different kinds of features. So you're right. But the I mean, there's time for all these things within the development process. For me, it starts with the questions, what do we need to learn to take the next step? And then we use our our ability to be curious and to and to get structured information in a way that's valid. We use that as a way then to focus our creativity, to focus our, against business results. I think the other thing we miss is the opportunity to connect our work in a measurable way to business KPIs and to business outcomes. You mentioned, you know, OSat or CSat or Net Promoter Score, which I think is something that almost all organizations I know are using. And the challenge I have with that is that if you're a 40 on Net Promoter Score and you want to be an 80, you have no information about how to get there. But I think as as human centered designers, we know the value drivers and we know the levers and dials we can move in order to to move the needle for a higher net promoter score. So I think measurability, we've been doing a lot of work in this area of experience metrics, which I think is really critical to the success, or the continued leadership of, of, human centered design in business processes. We have to be able to show measurable results or we'll lose or see that the table, you know, again. Yes. Agreed. I've been in organizations where there's a lot of emphasis on NPS, and it's it's more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator. And very true that we don't know what caused that. And sometimes there's things that are actually out of our control. Like for example, with Casper, we had a lot of focus on NPS, but someone might give us a low score because the box arrived damaged from UPS. And it wasn't really something that we I mean, we worked on improving our boxes. In that case, I think it's important for designers to understand why this metric is important to the business, not to sort of discount it, but really, really understand why. And, you know, embrace that and add to it. So it's more of a yes. And yeah. I think understanding what metrics are important to the business is essential. And then thinking about creative ways we can help address that. So in an organization it might there might be a focus on NPS. Are there other things that we can bring in and demonstrate that those are also important? Like, yeah. You know, in digital product development, we think about can like conversion and click through rate and overall sales. So is someone I think I've seen too often that we're doing usability testing. You know can somebody complete a task to get them to do what we want them to do? It's really important to understand, like what the customer is trying to get out of it. And are we enabling them to get what they want or what they need out of it? Not? Are they simply making the purchase or clicking through the whole flow? Yeah, there was a, a company we were working with that did, sort of ambient climate control, like thermostats for in-home residential experiences. And, and one of the things that they mentioned in the brief was that they had a very high return, not defective rate. So, in other words, products were bought from Lowe's and they were returned like eight out of ten times. These products would come back not defective. I've just returned. And when we did the research, we found that people didn't know how to program. The thermostat couldn't do simple things like hang it on their wall square, right? These were like basic things that the product needed to provide in order to be effective and to be adopted and used and through, just some simple observation and co-creation research, we were able to help them design not only simple things like add a level to the mounting bracket so you could mount at square or easy ways to quick program, but some new advanced energy features that resulted in, a way lower return, not defective rate, which was huge for them because that was all cost. But then they were able to get, store exclusives in a really crowded, commoditized kind of market, for replacement thermostats. So it's an it's exactly what you're saying, which is if we can connect our work to business KPIs, where the pain is from a business standpoint, you know, KPIs, key performance indicators, then then we know that we're moving the needle for the business. I think sometimes, this is what I'm calling experience value management, which we're not going to get into too much today. But the idea here is that not every designers can't fall on their sword for every idea, you know, like, you know, they we have to decide where it's important for us to really, you know, insist on, design innovation from a human standpoint and where tradeoffs can be made because businesses there always be trade offs and there may be lower cost ways to implement ideas in equally effective ways. So I think back to your point about business sensitivity and speaking the language of the business. That's part of the business, right? Where's the cost? Where's the cost to deliver this product or service, and how do we lower it? You know, businesses are profitable in one of two ways, right? They either can charge more or they can take costs off the off the bottom line. So how do we, as designers help businesses do that in ways that still deliver on the promise of the value for and the brands for consumers or communities in your case. So, JP Morgan Chase, yeah. The other thing that, resonates just around this whole topic is the, you know, focusing energy on the most important things. Yeah, that I've seen in innovation teams, sometimes we have many ideas that can be pursued and we try to make everyone happy. Like throw spaghetti at the wall, like one of these will hit, right. There was a leader I worked for who talked about having the to do list and the not to do list, and I thought that was quite inspiring. You know, we should really focus our talent and energies on the things that could make the biggest impact. Yeah. There was a moment where we reorganized our team and in one of my roles to focus on key business areas and just allow those teams to go really deep and focus on the specific business problems in those areas. And they also built deeper relationships with those partners and delivered more like meatier, more meaningful, more tangible results. I think that also helped. Like not just on a project basis, aligning to the business needs, but really orienting the team around them so that they have those deep relationships, they have those longer term engagements, and they're building more like a thoughtful and meaningful solutions as opposed to thinking about it as sort of on a project basis. Yeah, yeah, I love that. You know, aspirations, customer aspirations don't change right? On a dime. So the more we can build a foundational understanding of the customers that we serve and, and the things that they value, the more we can build a portfolio, right of services, a long lived ability to deliver, which I think is another thing that many organizations are struggling with. Where designers can help is how do we create a practice or an ethos or, a habit of of delivering on customer needs all the time. Design thinking, promise that, you know, we're oh, now we all know We all know design thinking so we can just do it right. So it it kind of promise that it lulled us into this idea that it was easy when really, it was about learning a language to create a habit or a discipline around how to do this, which I think is still, a big opportunity for designers to lead help organizations, you know, reach the promise of design thinking. So I don't think it's dead. Design thinking isn't dead. It's a great idea. It, we still practice it every day. You do an idea, whether you call it human centered design or whatever we want to call it. It's, It's such an important part of the future of, business. The future of adding, you know, meaning to people's lives through new products and service innovation, which I think is part of what motivates us, gets us up in the morning. So it's not dead, but we have to be better at how we do it, for sure. 100%. So what I would I guess my advice to anyone who's a designer in whether you're in a large team, small team, start up, large company, or think about how you can implement the process in the way of working in, you know, the most scrappy, efficient, but thoughtful way for your context. So there was an initiative that I was working on at Walmart around driving digital adoption, and we just did this really scrappy in-store test to understand the users mindset. So we picked a few really busy days in a store. I went there with a few of my design colleagues and we we talked to people and we we set it up in a way so that we could gather some data around, like app downloads and app usage. And we just really wanted to understand, like what's holding people back from digitally engaging while they're shopping. We organize this in a relatively short amount of time. We spent three days there. We got some data. The whole thing end to end, was maybe 4 to 6 weeks, and it was incredibly enlightening because we were just in the world with people talking to them and really understanding, that was a scrappy approach. I think a lot of the things that we did at Chase, like with our self check in, that was also scrappy. Is there a way where you can impart some of that way of working in a nimble, thoughtful way? So whether it's around understanding the user, whether it's around like digging in and understanding the business context more, or is it prototyping? Is there a way to test and learn from our prototype beyond just sort of online click through panel based research? How do we how do we keep those aspects of the process alive, like take the time to really synthesize and understand? It doesn't have to be a long, exhaustive, luxurious process. We can bring these these bits and ways of working, you know, into what we're doing day to day to make sure that we're actually, you know, truly, authentically understanding users, creating really human centered solutions and things like that. Yeah, I agree, I think, you know, a we have to do it. We have to do it well. But I also think the way we communicate those insights to the organization, the way we bring those stories back to the organization, I sometimes the people who get most excited about design research that I've found, are the marketing people and the executives, they finally are hearing the stories of what customers are actually experiencing or want to experience. And it's incredibly empowering for an organization and, and we can be the catalyst for that, right, by immersing ourselves in current experiences or or co-creating with them to understand desired experiences, bring that information back and activate that in an organization. Use that to align a team and translate it into new kind of products and services, and that those are, I think, ways that the organization can go fast. The things that I see, what keeps an organization from going fast is guessing because you you wind up being uncertain at all points in the process about whether you're doing the right thing. Right. And that trips organizations up. So just getting these insights and built and starting with a foundation is a great it's a great design thinking principle. Right? It's a design doing principle. How would you ever solve a problem if you don't even have any idea of what it is? You know, it's times like when we teach, we talk about designing as being problem solving or innovation being problem solving. Well, this kind of work that we're talking about here is like problem seeking or opportunity seeking. And if you're not, dialed in on the right kinds of things to go solve, then are you really adding value? And the problem sometimes with features is, first of all, we may have made them up, and then you wind up designing just around that feature, right? It's like staring at your shoelaces, walking around the room like, you know, you only kind of are innovating whatever is right there in front of your toes rather than maybe finding the true opportunity to transform the business. And so, I, you know, this is thing I know this gets you up in the morning and gets you excited about the kind of work you do, and it does us as well. I think there are tremendous opportunities for designers. I think design thinking is something that's really, required. It's mandatory. We need to be better at it. And I think to do that, we need to be more sensitive, as you say, to businesses, we need to be, understanding going beyond the feature to really the value that it provides and how to deliver it in a way that people will adopt and use it, and then ultimately understanding all the points on the journey, as you mentioned. So I thought your article is really well done, So, maybe just to wrap up, if, if there's any want, you know, one thing you can provide to practitioners that you would give them, like, what do you think? Or maybe let's do this. What do you think the biggest challenge is facing, UX and CX and human centered design leaders in an industry today that we can now take and go work on. Well, what I've seen is, you know, there's been a lot of just evolution in the space. There have been some teams are growing, some teams are shrinking. They're more people who are practitioners. And there are roles available right now. So I think understanding like really understanding like what what the world needs from design. And I think we need to potentially recalibrate a bit. I think the more we understand, like design is different than art and that it is part of, it's part of our business world. Like we're, we're creating solutions that can be monetized as can be sold, can be used by customers. So we really need to understand that part of it, like what is best for working for any company, like what is what is that company aiming to do. how did we get to this point where we have more practitioners than we do have positions? There was a, you know, during Covid, there was a a huge, swing towards digital transformation and how human centered designers or designers needed to participate in that. And there was a, you know, everybody made a large design organization. And now five years from that, we're seeing them pare those organizations down like something didn't work. You know, what was it that didn't work? I think it it, goes to your point about recalibrating, like, okay, you know, if people are passing on designers, it means we haven't been as effective, as we could have been. How do we become more effective? You know? Yeah, I think for recalibration, some organizations are right sizing where maybe they had grown beyond what they needed to be. And, you know, I guess design has has always evolved. I think about my, my whole career arc and how, you know, there used to be many more jobs for industrial designers and other, you know, other types of practices. And we've really there's so much work now in the digital space. I think the more that designers in digital understand the business context can work really well with product, can wear multiple hats, can be scrappy, can make things real. Essentially, the more tools you have in your toolbox, the greater, you know, greater resource you can be to any organization. So I'm a strong believer in designers being capable of doing research as well, being able to prototype, being able to speak the language of business. The more that designers can bridge all of those things, the more value they can provide to a business. And, the that will just enhance their career longevity. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree, so let's talk about, how AI is impacting our ability to be effective, as I think we're making some mistakes with AI. You know, when we hear about people substituting or using AI for research. Oh, yes. Or instead of research, maybe. But tell me a little bit about how things like I can impact our ability to be effective as designers. And so I think we, we as designers can use AI to speed up some of our processes. I know we used to spend many, many hours and days on synthesizing insights from research. AI tools can certainly help speed up those steps in the process. I think there's a future where AI can take some work off designers plates by doing some more of the repetitive, sort of production oriented tasks. Yeah. I think there is a potential, there's definitely an upside to that. And speeding up our ability to design quickly and bring things to market faster. One of the drawbacks I potentially see is that those are often the tasks that younger designers are trained on, and we want to make sure that as people are entering the profession, they are building those those hard skills as well as the the higher level, you know, strategic skills and soft skills. I've heard about some AI engines being used instead of user research recently, which has made me just pause and reflect a bit. In one case, I had heard about a certain user group being sort of difficult to access or difficult to schedule. So there was an offering where they could take past knowledge of this user group and use it, as a basically large language model with machine learning to, you know, input questions to that group about a particular solution. And it would kind of come up with AI driven answers. I think that is risky and that that is giving us information about what people might have said in the past, but isn't necessarily helping us understand what people will want in the future. Yeah. So AI can certainly speed up and make many of our day to day tasks more efficient. I know I certainly use it to support, many of my workflows in the day to day. I think we want to balance making sure that we're not losing out on like the skills that young practitioners need to build, because a machine can do it faster or easier. Yeah, I see it as a copilot, you know, it's something that that can work with us, can accelerate our work, but it can't replace our work. I think about when I see young designers using AI, instead of novel research, to me it reminds me of, like, big data or things like that where it might feel good. In the short term, you know, it's like fast food. It might like, might taste good in the short term, but in the long term, you're going to pay for it, you know? So I see that there's real value in using AI as a sort of an assistive tool. And I also think the same way on the design side, you know, I can't design for us, right? It can it can help us consider possibilities. It can help us shape our ideas, maybe in a rapid way, but but it can't design for us. You know, I do like it. I think I can be an incredible workflow tool. And so we've seen value and just, you know, more effective writing, for example, or something. I think that, you know, I can help, help us with, you know. Yeah. Not to write not to write the ideas, find the ideas for us, but to help us express the ideas, you know? Yes, I think it can certainly help. Help be an editor and copilot in the writing process. Actually, one of my friends who's an industrial designer uses AI in very creative ways. Actually, a few of the industrial designers I know, they help speed up their concept generation process, using AI prompts to basically build quick iterations that might take them many hours to sort of sketch or render. Yeah. Which is to me, fascinating, a little, a little bit scary because it takes some of that, again, the human element out of it. Yeah. But every time that there's been a new emerging technology that people have sort of scared and questioned, we've ultimately found that there are more high value things that humans can add. So I like to embrace it and think about all the potential for what it could do for us more than, more than stepping back from it. Certainly, in terms of the I've my teams, I've worked on many AI driven, personalized experiences and e-commerce shopping flows, which can be extremely impactful, like making sure that the the user sees the right next product for them. They can take the next best action very easily. Where I can take some of the drudgery out of things like customer service experiences. I mean, that's phenomenal. We can we can take some jobs that are fairly mundane and automate them so that we can have humans do higher value things. I think we're still figuring out in design, like what actually that will mean. And as much as we can, I think all designers should go along for this learning journey. Like learn about the visualization prompts, understand what design tools, how they're integrating AI, and how we can use them to our benefit. Yeah, yeah, I love that idea of thinking about it. In a lot of ways, AI is just another technology. And we've we you know, we've experienced all types of new technology in our career. And it was about sort of like what are the attributes of the technology and how can they be leveraged. You know, I think about AI can help us create knowledge or mass personalization or all these sort of things. Think about how we can use the attributes to either improve our service design or product delivery, or how we can structure insights and tell stories and align the organization, you know, the things that we need to do, as designers in, in organizations to be effective. So, yeah, I love that perspective. Yeah. One more thing to just to think about, you know, we've had expertise and human computer interaction for decades. Just one thing designers have brought. So AI is just another form of human computer interaction. So I see design playing an essential role in helping to make the human interface with all of these new technologies more seamless, understandable, delightful. Yeah, yeah. What's the design language of AI? That's a great problem to go solve, you know, with the design principles. For AI think is another one, you know, how do you deliver it in a way that, people can trust it and be confident with it and use it? It is interesting how fast humans will, cede control to automation so that there's, I think also a certain amount of ethical practice that we need to be aware of when we're using it as well. But so great discussion. Carly, I really appreciate the time you spent with us today. I know you're super busy, so thank you for that. And thanks for bringing your insights to the Seriously Curious audience. Thanks again for being here and I hope you will come back. Yes, I'd be happy to. Thank you. Great, everyone. Thanks for joining us again today for Seriously Curious podcast on all things the experience for business strategy and design. We've got more great speakers lined up and coming, so stay tuned for future episodes. We'll be talking about, the future of connected and autonomous vehicles, the future of, mobility in general for air mobility, and AG super excited about what we have on store for, seriously curious. Again, if you want to reach Carly, you can reach her, on LinkedIn. That's probably the best way. Definitely check out her most recent, work and comment and and share that out. And, I know she would love to hear from you on LinkedIn. So again, Carly, thanks for being here today and we look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody.