Innovating through design thinking with Jason Grant

In this episode of Delivered, you can learn about the innovative problem-solving approach of design thinking and its role in building human-centric products and companies.

We sat down with Jason Grant, a UX designer and design coach with over 15 years of experience whose expertise lies at the intersection of business, design, psychology, and technology.

Key learnings:

• Find out what design thinking is and which business areas it can improve
• Get inspired by real-life examples of businesses transformed with design thinking
• Learn about the concept of Designed Companies

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Transcript

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Hello there Jason. How are you? 

I'm doing fantastically well and I'm slightly insulted actually. That you described me as design hero as opposed to design god, but I'll just work with the hero. 

Well, welcome to Delivered, design god, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. And hey, look, I tried to set the scene for the people watching the show and I tried to get it short and sweet, but of course I can do only so much. I feel like we should come from the man himself. Let's talk about you because I know you've done quite a varied background and you've got an amazing CV in design, and I would just love to hear a bit about yourself and where you come from. Really first and foremost, let's just set the scene for the audience. 

So that question of where I come from is multifaceted. So I'm originally from ex-Yugoslavia geographically, and that's significant in the sense that in Yugoslavia where I was growing up until the age of 11, before the war kicked off, there was very big dominance of mathematics and sciences and even computer science. So I actually ended up in a computer science class at the age of eight or nine and started coding at the age of nine because they had actually computer labs back then. And that's where I caught the bug for technology stuff and basically coding games and stuff like that. And then I spent three years in the war in Bosnia and ended up in UK as a refugee in 95, but continued that passion and hunger for it and making things digitally, let's say. And then that led me to studying maths, chemistry and music at A levels then a computer science degree at Goldsmiths College, which is arts college. 

So I was exposed to computer science at a arts college and you can describe design as mixture of art and engineering and the fine middle fold of that. And then I did a master's degree at Royal Holloway in business information Systems, which was early predecessor to basically user experience design and systems design, systems thinking and that kind of stuff, modeling systems for businesses. And then I started my company back in 2005, which at the time was called Flexi Webs, which stood for flexible electronic web-based systems. And over time that evolved into such a, it was building full stack systems solutions for web, but design and UX design became such a dominant thing that I ended up doing lots and lots of more UX design and less development. Although nowadays I find myself going almost full circle because I'm reintegrating my development and full stack development skills into design processes to make more real things. So nowadays my company's called Integral - Redesigning Humanity to remind me and everyone else that we're here to basically really make a humanity wide impact and we can with everything that we've got access to. 

Yeah, I love that. And also I feel like having that kind of why statement as well redesigning humanity, I think that's such a great aspirational thing as well because I feel like it's an ever-changing facet of what we do in our business that is always changing. Technology is always changing, I guess people are always changing as well. And it sounds like you've got such a rich, solid background of different skill sets I suppose, really. What was the kind of thing that made you switch more into the UX design aspect of it? Was it the human humanity part of the equation? 

Well, I come from hardcore sciences. Mathematics to me is still close to my heart. I love maths basically. I love numbers. I love music. Music is a mathematical creation, believe it or not. So I'm a musician as well, and as a musician, I see myself more as a math magician, let's say something like that. And that's actually a term math magic. It's actually a real term. So what I realized is that when I was building things originally, I was building them for the sake of being gratified by the process of making something. So that was gratifying. But then I realized, okay, I would make something and I would like it, and then I would give it to someone else and they're like, nah, whatever. Or they would really love it. And then it was like, wow, I want to serve them even more. But really the switchover happened to UX design happened when I was working actually originally with a national lottery here in UK, which is actually one of the biggest brands in UK. 

And I was building the front end for the new website there, and I was being given this kind of really bad blueprints, basically what could be loosely called wireframes, but they weren't having any details in them. And the guys were saying they would just have header side nav content here and then footer and I would say, what's in the header? And the guys would say, just work it out and just code something in. I was like, what's in the hero block here? It's like, can you just work something up? And it's like, okay, well I'm doing everything here. So I realized, okay, this needs to be done a lot better. Basically the way I was taught in my master's degree, but I thought I was more like fiction really when you were studying it back in 2002. But I realized, oh, this is no longer fiction. 

We need to actually apply it to real businesses. So I basically took it on me to start doing UX design, and then my next project was working on what at the time was direct.gov. And I thought, well, okay, what is this thing? Was basically the first ever e-government movement here in UK, which is a previous what is now gov.uk. And what we were doing is we were setting out the standards for how the e-government was going to run in UK. Now, again, at the time when I was doing this, I thought, well, it's never going to happen is this is kind of pie in the sky type thing. Now gov.uk is talking about rolling AI into everything and as the next phase is automated government, et cetera, et cetera. So the direct gov standards that we set for UX back in the day are now the standards that are guiding the automation of government, and that could be the next phase. So all this very long-term impact on redesigning humanity.

It's interesting, isn't it? I always think for me UX is about that connection between person and products and that human connection, so they understand it. It's intuitive. You couldn't talk about UX without dropping in an Apple reference, of course, like everyone does. But it sounds as if what you're talking about is it also provides almost like a framework to keep evolving products the right way going forward, whatever the technology changes. So I suppose really the question I'd post to you is from a design point of view, how important is this in new digital products, new technologies? Because I feel like what you're saying there is it could be pivotal to make it usable and intuitive, but actually it's kind of build a framework for the product to evolve organically as it needs to around changes in the world. 

So for those listening, basically often a time we would have a reference of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which are shown as a pyramid of self-actualization and blah blah. Now Maslow never created that. So that should be just completely, if you have those slides, scratch them, delete them, move them out of your way. What you should be using is something known as spiral dynamics, which is evolution of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in Maslow theory of needs. And it talks about eight stages of human development and values, and it correlates to stages of consciousness. So we have initially instinctive values that humans live to that go up to the holistic values of basically making me one with everything that jokes as a Buddhist walks into a hot dog bar and says, make me one with everything. And that would be basically a thing where we are one with technology and working in complete coherence with technology, but the technology that is dumb at the stage one of instinctive. 

So for example, when I started working on the web stuff, you had HTML and the HTML didn't even have images, so all you could do is static textual web pages, you couldn't connect them to databases. And then images came, it was like, wow, I can make this look a bit more real. But then the CSS came and you could style that text and images and I was like, wow, that's great. And then you're making copy and paste a lot of static pages and then you could connect that to a database and you could inject some data, but you couldn't really query it too much or connect this with that. And then things became more smarter and smarter. So the technology goes through the same stages of value and evolution and consciousness. So the next phase of digital stuff that we're making is stuff that's a lot more actually sentient, right? So you say is chat GPT sentient, this is kind of conversations that people have and it's like, well, I'm not sure. The answer is absolutely it is sentient, but it's sentient to a certain level that it will then evolve into next level of sentience. And the way we work with that is to integrate it in the way that that level of sentience is useful and usable for the higher level of sentience, which let's say we are to make our lives better. So that's how I look at it. 

And I suppose a lot of these things come down to, I think what we need to unpack a little bit is design thinking at the core of all this, because I feel like at Infinum, everything we do has design thinking from day one. We always start with the strategy, the why, the human connection, what does the user need, how do we solve that with a product, all that good stuff. And I suppose design thinking is something that people may have heard of, I suppose. Really? Yes, it exists in products. And I think as products evolve, like you are saying, it will continue to be at the core of everything we do, or at least we hope it is from someone listening to this. Now, what is design thinking in principle and how could they apply that into something that they're doing for their business to help it progress? It could be a product, it could be a solution, it could just be, look, we need to connect our audience better. What is those two things, design thinking and then how that helps enable a business with it? 

So design thinking is a process that's led by empathy first, unlike most other types of thinking like business thinking and systems thinking that are led by what do we need to do? What are kind of the jobs to be done here? Because let's say if I go to the kitchen and I need to wash the dishes, that's my job to be done. And usually most people just feel like, oh God, it was like I want to do anything but wash the dishes. However, if I apply a modicum of design thinking, I could see that washing the dishes as a way to just decompress from heavy meetings and lots of kind of pressure that might have from daily work. And I can actually see that washing the dishes as a meditative activity that basically just relaxes my mind. I could put some music on, I could do some wiggling with my hips because I've been sitting all day and it's good for my lower back and so on. 

So it becomes a health and wellness activity that also helps me have clean dishes at the end. So with design thinking that would then feel a lot better than just the chore of washing the dishes. And so in design thinking, usually the outcome is experience as the product. That's what I find. And because we're now living in an experiential economy, and maybe we could even argue that we're going beyond that, that it's actually economy of self transformation, let's say experience is the product and the future self is the product. And in design thinking, we're integrating a lot more of the emotional intelligence as an integrative valuable aspect. Because if I'm driving a car, if that car is just like an everyday fiat, I might pay, I dunno, 20 grand for it, but if it's a Ferrari, I'll pay a hundred grand for it. And it make me feel like I am in a 300 grand car and my personal value feels like a million bucks. 

So experience pays as a product and it's essential. And we can really only design the experience using design thinking, not business and systems thinking. So often the time I find myself in situations where a lot of business and systems thinkers have designed processes and I get brought in as an service experience expert to then say, right, that process does work, but it feels absolutely rubbish, which is no good. It has to feel great. So how do we feel great? We might have to change the process, maybe add some steps to it, maybe change the way that works so that it feels much better because only when it feels great is it valuable. And that applies to absolutely everything from washing the dishes to what car I'm driving to, which furniture might be buying for my house, et cetera, et cetera. Experience is the product. 

Yeah, that makes sense. I suppose in terms of leveraging that into say digital products for example, is it a fact that like you say about experience, is it a way in which you can bolster the connectivity of it? And when I say that, I mean, is design thinking really there just to go, it's about evolution of a product, but equally it's about making sure it's connecting with the right audience at the right time from what it delivers to the world. Is that a fair assumption or is that kind of something that's a bit too textbook? How do you see that as a practical step for digital product? 

Yeah, I think in my experience I've found that design thinking can also be applied and practiced at any level of values of the spiral dynamics. So you could have instinctive design thinking where it's just like, how can I make my table that I work on desk space for example, more enjoyable to work at? And some sort of extreme opposite or highest level of design thinking would be holistic design thinking where you're looking to design for a life ecosystem and everyone involved in the process of the products and services. So it's not even just human-centered, it's life-centered design, it's planetary-centered design where you might say, well, where does that apply? It's like if you're working with a company like BP that's doing oil and gas rigs around the world, then it has huge impact on the planet, both potentially positive and often very negative. 

And the positive is what we're looking for usually. So design products and services there is much different than maybe there is some sort of startup that does an app that the app is the product. That's it, okay. It's a much smaller context, but you realize that behind usually a simple app, there's a very complex system that powers it and taps into lots of data centers and resources that need to be run and need to be optimized and can be done faster, better, more enjoyably. So it depends on what level of design thinking you are operating at that you could be transcending and including a lot more or very purposely focusing in on a simple and a smaller narrower context because that's your target intent that you want to impact on. 

Makes sense. And I guess from a very, if I'm Chris, entrepreneur, I have a business, I have some products potentially to run that business. I suppose what I'm curious about from a, and maybe it's from the audience point of view as well, how can design thinking really help my business or what areas could that improve? I think product's important, but we're talking about here, design thinking can probably be beyond just the actual product itself. It could be the business as a whole. How would you feel about that? Does it impact business at that level? 

Yeah, so as a practitioner of what's called integral meta theory of everything, one of the aspects of that integral meta theory is four types of reality we're dealing with. One is I, which is singular, internal, what's happening in my internal space. The second type is we, which is intersubjective reality. What's happening between us two internally, then there is the IT reality, which is objective reality, what's happening with a product individually and the it's reality, reality, inter objective reality, what's happening with systems and ecosystems in something that I'm evolving at the moment, which I'm calling integral design, which is shortened to id. So identity is the key of all of this. We're looking at all these four areas of reality and when you're designing company, a company is sitting somewhere in the WE space and its space, and I've actually, so whenever someone's designing a business or a venture, that's really what they're looking to impact on the most. 

And because like I said, I studied business management way back in 2002 and back in the day, if you read even some of the best business management books, they would at best give you a small headache and at worst they would make you depressed and want to curl up under the table in a fetal position and just go like, what did I just read? Man, I don't understand anything of this. So one of my goals in the last bunch of years has been to redesign management and business design into a very simple and understandable and accessible, we're applying all the rules of UX design to make it accessible and understandable and easy to comprehend by basically a 12-year-old to design a company. So I call it designed company, and I'm writing a book about this, but it's not just a book. It's a set of methodologies and processes and frameworks to enable a 12-year-old to design a company that makes sense that they can pitch to, that they can design and so on. And then design thinking applies to each one of the areas of design company, which is purpose, people, systems, innovation, products, money and growth. And it's really easy to talk about those things. So that's how I approach it. And I've tested it with my 12-year-old daughter, 70-year-old son, and they're like, I get it. It's easy. 

Interesting. I love that actually. I think maybe it's just me being biased working product. I think design thinking is always applied to, okay, it's got to be a thing that connects with people and it makes it customer-centric. And it is that for sure. But from what I'm hearing as well, design thinking is so much broader than that. It's about simplicity of anything. It could be a product, it could be a business, it could be innovation. It's about connection as well. It's about do people understand it? Is it easy to pick up and use? Can I take forward something with design thinking principles already baked into it because I understand what to do next. And I love that kind universal mix of it as well. So much broader than I thought as well, which is super interesting. And I guess just to keep it in context, to help people relate to this, could you speak maybe to some of your own work? Perhaps you've applied design thinking for some form of transformational change or significant upgrade to a company. Do you have a past company in mind perhaps that you can relate to? 

So one of the most significant clients that I've ever worked with and significant because of the transformation levels and amounts let's say that have happened is a company called ROLI that makes musical instruments a silicon surface keyboard called Seaboard. And that's where I came up with the concept of designed company, because when I originally joined them, they wanted me to just streamline their software look and feel so standardize and systematize the creation of software. And I said after a couple of weeks, I said, I can't really justify working here just to do that because it breaks my heart to think that that's the small level of aim that we're going for. So I said to the CEO, just turned around to him and said, I can't be working here just doing the software. And he said, what do you mean? 

I said, we've got a huge opportunity to redesign the whole company here. And I thought, well, God, I just voted myself out of one of the most exciting startups in UK and he turned to me and said, can you help us with that? I said, absolutely. He said, alright, go ahead. So I basically took up this role of redesigning ROLI as a company, and that was my intent, which I decided on and with Roland's kind of blessing, took a course to do that. And one of the exercises we did was to write a future Wikipedia page about ROLI, where ROLI was going to be in sort of five years time. And I remember I was working with the product designer there and he was saying something like, in five years we have launched this product. And I said, you think you're too small? It's way too small. 

I said, what do you mean? I said, in five years time, we're global partners with Apple selling online and in store in ROLI design booths and Apple point of sale. It's like, dude, that's crazy. You're diluted officially gone crazy. I said, no, no, just write. It's a Wikipedia page. We can write whatever we want. He was with hesitation, he wrote it and so on. Within a year from that writing that Wikipedia page, ROLI was Apple partners worldwide, online and in stores, and we had a point of sale systems in Apple stores and Apple was talking about ROLI as a music partner in the launches of iPhone, et cetera, et cetera. So that was all done through designing the company using design thinking at all these seven areas that I spoke about. 

Nice. And again, I feel like it's almost like a revelation of what design thinking could actually bring to companies. It's so much more than just products now, isn't it? It's actually talking about the saying there, it's actually helping you forge a north star of the business when applied correctly. And is it possible to even measure, and don't hate me for saying this because all these things in business has to be quantified, okay, ROI, KPI, whatever it is always to even measure the success of a design thinking initiative in the context of innovation or building companies, is that even possible? 

Everything. No, everything the statement goes, everything is possible. Not everything is highly probable. So one of the actual around designed company framework, and I was saying I'm writing this as a book, but then I realized kind of book is okay, but I like the idea that book comes with a framework, a way of thinking, some practices, methodologies, et cetera. One of the things that we started doing, and then it was started as a startup, it was too much of a pushing hard to do this, but we started actually creating a piece of software which was going to quantify all of these things, purpose people, systems, innovation products, money and growth for a given company based on votes from each individual employee every single day. So every employee at a company would get question from each area, which they would answer both quantitatively and qualitatively as well as with their emotional resonance, what they're thinking and feeling. And that would all roll up into a daily report board for the executives to look at and evolve and so on. And then that could roll back down to improvements, et cetera. So the answer as far as I'm concerned, and this is where we're going to end up sooner or later, just give enough chat GPT queries and will be there. 

Basically every designed company is going to be in real time completely and utterly quantified and qualified as to how well it's doing. And that is the North Star not to aim for, but that will become a starting point. I'll go as a consultant, I want to go in and say, I don't know what's going on here. I want to run this thing for a week or two, see what the employees are thinking, gather that real world insight and research and then say, well, the dashboards, the computer says five out of 10 and so much out in each one of these areas, and our product thing is one out of 10. So if I were saying logical person, which I think I am last time I checked, I would start with improving the product to get at least seven out 10, and then we can look at the other areas. That's the idea here. 

It's super interesting. I love the fact this is all the weighted importance of research as well. Like you're saying there, that quantitative and qualitative data, and I can't even count the amount of times when if we're building a client, for example, when we're going for new engagement with Infinum to a new client, we're in discovery and we're going, okay, we're helping you build a business strategy. It could be a validation of your product, it could be actual product strategy. The whole thing really sits in that weighted, there needs to be research continuously just to not just almost validate the need for it, but you're saying there around how to measure success just to make sure it's continually being researched and checked because actually without that, it's almost like you're flying blind or worst using assumption is your way to deem success, where I love the fact that this actually, it's like an unlock for not just North Star, but also weighted in research as well. So I think that's a great thing. And you mentioned in your book as well about designing companies. I'd love to maybe dig into that a little bit more and just that concept because when it's ready, I'd love a copy of course. But yeah, just to maybe unlock a bit more about that in terms of how it's helping people to design companies or at least guide them for a bit. 

So what I've done over the years is I'm a little bit of a startup investor and have been investing in startups both through my own sweat equity, trying my own things as well as actually putting my hard earned cash into other startups and quite often seeing it fail. And it's like the feeling, oh my God, if you want to feel the worst feeling in the world on some level, let's say on the financial intelligence front is like you give somebody else money and then watch them do all the wrong things with your own money and then the company goes bankrupt, and then you're like, but I knew how to fix this, but I didn't necessarily know how to tell them. Really, people want this little TikTok of like do this, do that, do that, do that. And then you'll see it flourish. They don't want big war and peace kind of essays about it. 

So what this is about is distilling all those years of working with startups, investing in startups, building my own startups that started working and then couldn't get 'em to next level and so on, and saying, how can I just kind of normalize this into a model that I myself can use actually again on every level of value. So I can use design company model just to organize my next task, what I need to do, what's the purpose of this task? I want to get the dishes washed. Who are the people who are going to do this? Well, it's me who's doing it, but it's my wife who's going to be beneficiary, she's going to really love me when I wash the dishes. What's the system for this? I'm going to go to the kitchen and just wash it. But while I'm doing that, I'm going to put some music on, what's the innovation music thing, what's the product, clean dishes, and actually a happy wife, which is happy life. 

How much money does that take? Well, maybe it's going to take me half an hour, but really it's going to pay off so many other ways. Who knows? I might even get a hug afterwards. And what's the growth of that? Well, I feel much better, my wife will feel better, she won't have to do it herself. And actually our family is going to benefit because now I've contributed not just through my regular work, but also through participating in the housework. So there's the application of design company model to just think of washing the dishes, but you can see that every company has a purpose, people that serves, serve the customers systems that it goes through. What's the innovation, some unique selling point, what's the final product, which is usually some sort of distilled artifact or a service. How much money does it take to make that and how much money does it make off the back of it and how does it grow? So that's basically design company in a nutshell. And if it's not pitchable in this sort of TikTok way, it's failed. So that's why I've been refining this for so long because it has to work this super simple stories basically, which I have a trademark on. 

Wow. Okay, so you're going all in on this. I love it. Yeah. And do you have an example, I'm just thinking for people at home as well, do you have an example of maybe a design company that could relate to, and I know obviously Apple isn't probably an obvious one, so we take Apple out the equation. Is there another design company that you would 

Lean into? So I'd say the things that come to mind are things like Airbnb is very designed and you'll find that design companies are usually created by design founders. So Airbnb is a great example. I was recently stayed in Slovenia at Airbnb, and during the process there, it showed me everything. What's the wifi password? Where do I need to drop the key off after I leave the room? Who do I speak to? All these kind of little small things that most people are just like, well work it out there. It's like first time in Slovenia, I've never been here. I feel kind of freaked out. I'm having to ad hoc stay somewhere. I dunno where I'm going. Is it a bad area is it a good area? How long is the walk where it's like it's really kind of freaking me out, but Airbnb makes you feel comfortable going through that kind of what feels like just a process, but it's not a process because that process can become a nice experience. 

And if it is nice experience, then I'm going to talk about it. I'm talking right now. So this is very big value for Airbnb in terms of Apple, yes. I mean basically a design company is any company where you look at the products and services and systems and the brand and so on, and you kind of scratch your head and go like, I'm not really immediately sure how I would improve this or make it better. Now where Apple is, for example, falling, dropping off since the death of, peace be upon him, Steve Jobs, where Apple is no longer an experience company, Apple is now a product company that's interested in making more and more money for itself, and the stakeholders, shareholders and the Apple Vision Pro whatever it's called, has failed at creating a consumable product that gives good experience because people are having backache and falling over with their heads with a heavy thing on their head. That's not good enough. If you asked me this before Apple Vision Pro was released is Apple Design company, I'd say yes. Now I've got a question design company question mark. 

Love it, right? Actually, yeah. How different now is Apple? And you're right. I guess what I'm taking away from all of this actually is anyone that has a design company or they're injecting design thinking into their business products or innovations, ultimately the outcome of it is creating, I guess it's more of a feeling, isn't it? I mean, I know it's quite fluffy and there's bits in between that are more practical. Like we were saying before, research and connection with people and products working better for people to you. But the end result really is you want to build affinity with your audience and create a feeling of trust and simplicity. And I guess what you're saying about Airbnb is it just makes things easier for people, so therefore they're already feeling safe and you don't have to think about it too much. And I think it's just, yeah, maybe that's the underlying thing about this design thinking. It means you have to think that much because you're actually feeling quite safe and happy with the service or product. It's interesting. Feeling is the product, and this actually correlates to something like music. If anyone of your listeners is kind of done any music performance, sometimes there's a famous kind of meme in music where a guy plays a one stringed guitar is some sort of a homeless beggar and he's just playing one string guitar. But it sounds great because it's creating a great feeling and people love it. And sometimes you have this virtuosos, we're playing all the right notes fast and correctly and in time, but it sounds like a machine is playing, there's no real feeling there, and people tune out, I don't care. So music is a good correlate here to actually understand why do you like something where someone's singing slightly off key and so on, but they're bringing their heart and soul into it. They care about what they're doing with the song and performing it versus someone who's just kind of on the job and just playing the notes and so on. So that's a kind of correlate there. 

Yeah, absolutely. And this wide spectrum here, we could delving into, I mean, I'm trying to resist going down more questions and more things to get into. I suppose really just for the listeners as well, do you have any being the design, well, God, we said at the start in terms of just final advice for the viewers, words of wisdom around this. How would you express something quite concise and meaningful they could take away to using their business around the business being designed better innovations being designed better, just essentially how can you apply that design thinking and design to create better ecosystems with people? What is that final thought you could give someone? And I appreciate that's a lot to condense into one final. 

It's very simple advice to go in line and with integrity of what I've been speaking throughout this conversation that we've had is maybe in the next session or workshop or whatever you're doing, start with a feeling, what is the intended feeling I want to have or create when I make this thing or produce this, whatever it is. Okay, what is the intended feeling I'm having? And actually for bonus points, how can I bring that feeling through the process of making this thing as well? Sometimes you see the notion of soul food is that a mother with decades of experience of making something, she puts her heart and soul into making this bread. And then when you're eating that bread, you are eating part of her soul and her heart. It doesn't sound that great, but she's brought the emotions into the food and that food tastes better because it's been made with heart and soul. That's an ingredient. So that's a feeling. And then so you want to create a feeling, use the feeling while you're creating it, and then at the end, the intent is to create the feeling, use that feeling throughout the creation process and then test that is the feeling that you are giving your audience and your consumers people, let's just call them people. I don't like the word consumers, right? Sure, 

Yeah. It feels like feeling is the underlying, and I never expected this from the conversation actually. So feeling is almost like the most critical slash the outcome that you deliver with the right design thinking. 

Love that. Yeah. And that's why beforehand I was saying it said, let's not talk about spirituality, but this does connect to spirituality in the sense that a lot of the time the system that we live in has made us kind of productivity freaks for forgetting the feeling and spirituality to some extent. This is like, okay, sit down on a yoga thing and just sit with a feeling, how is this making me feel? If I'm feeling upset and tired and worked up and stressed? That's not a feeling from which you create good-feeling products. So it's important for us to internally feel as good and as motivated and passionate about this to create products that others will consume. 

Yeah, love that. So Jason, we have many questions. I'm just trying to find the right one to start with here, based off that kind of epic kind of synopsis and wrap up around design thinking, I suppose. Actually this is a good one here. So let's jump to a Q&A. We have quite a few to get through, so I'll get through as many as we can by the time we have. But just on the, and this is a great one to start with actually from Georgia, and this is everything we've talked about. How do you overcome resistance to change or skepticism about adopting design thinking methodologies within an organization? Big question. 

Yeah. So I mean, this is a hundred billion question quite literally, because a lot of the companies that we end up working with are worth trillions. Now the top companies in the world are worth trillions. So the change that you make is often worth hundreds of billions. So that is literally hundreds of billions dollars worth question. And it does come to that notion of quantification, but quantification that includes the feelings and the so-called immaterial as valuable thing. So you got to, and sometimes you might illustrate this to stakeholders to say, what happens if we just continue as we are? Because there's basically three types of companies that think of, there's companies that are going down and they're usually in desperation to just go anywhere but down the companies that are flatlining, which are like, oh, this is boring, or if we continue longer like this, we're going to start going down. 

So their motivation is to somehow start going up, what do we need to do, change, improve somehow. And then there's companies who are going up and you might think, well, it's going up. What's wrong? It's like, well, now they want to go even up higher, up faster. And so sometimes those are the ones that need the most kind of transformational conviction because it's like we're already doing well, what else do you have in mind? But the argument is always, if we continue this way, where are we going to be in, let's say five years time? And what kind of change do we need to make in order to be in the opposite of going down or upping the flatlining or making more of a hockey stick from a linear growth? So that's the argument that needs to be made. 

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And actually as you were educating on that answer, we've had a great comment in from Steve Morris actually, and I love what he's referenced here. He is talked about a famous quote from Tim Brown, which is rather than thinking to build, build to think, and actually it's short and sweet, but the theory behind this obviously is like, let's just deliver some assets because people like assets and deliverables of course, but actually what it's doing is it's about doing the work to learn from the work then this kind of agonizingly theorizing over and over before you even do anything. So I do love that concept as well. So thank you Steve, on the Q&A for that little bit of insight as well. So yeah, I mean I just love that idea, and I think that's something I'm always passionate about. It's like it's just about doing the work. Ideas are great, talking's great to a point, but actually does it get anything done or do you learn from it just doing that work is the way to go. Yeah, 

And this actually brings me about to what I was saying at the very beginning of the podcast, which is that I started as a full stack developer, and then over the years I stopped doing development because it was, the UX design is basically producing static pictures of things and maybe a clickable prototype and stuff. But now I've gone all the way back to actually developing again, and I'm building my own tool, which helps me with my own productivity. But the way I'm building it now and designing basically through code and now with chat GPT, it can help me get unstuck where I'm not very good with advanced SQL queries, join this with that. It's like always hated that chatGPT does it like this, let's go chat. So I'm always feeling good about that, but the way I'm doing this is I'm building every single mini-story that I'm building is judged on whether it feels good at the end, and if it's creating me a better feeling of productivity, then it's working. 

If not, I remove it. Okay. And by design and through design thinking, I can pre-think what's going to make me feel better, but ultimately I'm the judge of whether it really does that. And I'm open to going, I thought this was going to work, but maybe it doesn't. Usually so far it's getting 75%, it works. But that's a kind of practice of just really making something that you can really judge based on not just dummy data, but actually working yourself every day and going, can I continue doing this for yes, to come and still feel enthused about it? And if the answer is no, then it's kind of not feeling that great. It needs to be improved somehow. 

Yeah. You mentioned before actually a spiritual thing. What we're talking about here is does that work in a business context? But there's also a message there about yourself, isn't it? About your life, how you do things too. And I have another question here actually that's quite interesting because it bounced off the back of that, another one from Susan, thanks for this. Can design thinking be applied into a service industry as well? Not just products, because I only know a product myself. So can this be applied into a service industry? 

So after many, many years of contemplation, I've come to a conclusion that there's no such thing as product alone. And there's no such thing as service alone. Every product comes with some element of service, and every service delivers some sort of product, even if that product at the end is the experience, the feeling. So for example, what you might think of if you go to a spiritual retreat, okay, there's lots of products there. Actually, it's not even a great example, but let's say if the spiritual retreat was just you and I walking together down the park, well, at the end of that walk, if you were to tell me how to change my life, blah, blah, blah, the product would be that one, I'm feeling better about myself. And second that I'm somehow transformed even by self transformation. 

I'm better off after that talk than when we started. So there's always a product at the end of a service. And with products, you always have to kind of use it somehow. So there is an element of process. Service is basically just a process around using the product. How do I charge it? How do I maybe recycle it? How do I use it day to day? What happens if the battery goes out altogether? All this kind of thing. There's lots of services usually associated with every product, especially if it's got software in it, et cetera, software as a service, remember? So these things are very intertwined, have always been intertwined, and they're actually almost interchangeable. I used to struggle with this when I was working with a company like Bupa where there would be just an insurance health insurance company, and what's their product? It's a health insurance, which I'm always thinking as a service, okay, I'm signing up for the service of health insurance, but they internally call it a product. That's their product. It took me years to get my head around this idea that a service is a product. Oh my God. But it's just the very weird thing about English language. But that's why in design company, I just call this products because even based company is delivering a product because the customer at the end, they're kind of thinking, I'm consuming a product. 

I love that. I love that. And I suppose on the riff of self as much as business, let's kind of wrap up with a final question from Marci,I believe, if you could go back to the beginning of your career with design, thinking of all the knowledge that you have now, what advice would you give yourself? 

My advice to myself would be to understand the idea that humans are emotional creatures and to never try and amputate emotions out of my being and to never disregard emotions from the communication from other people. And again, English language here is that there's many ways in which English people will say thank you. I'm originally from Bosnia and Bosnians. They don't, famously don't say thank you or please people just do for you. It's like, here's the food, right, because I'm doing you. I don't need to say, please eat it or thank you for consuming it. That's the food I trust. It's good. Just eat it. Right? But in English, thank you. So you could say thank you in many different ways depending on the emotion behind it. Sometimes people are like, thank you, meaning I'm pissed off with you and there is a swearing word, or thank you so much. It could be emotionally really lovingly said, and that's an honest thank you. Or it could be like a diplomatic thank you as in thank you for all your service, goodbye. It's basically a thank you saying we don't need you anymore. So there's very different ways, and it all depends on the emotion behind that word. What is the actual true meaning? So don't disregard emotion, don't try and amputate it out yourself and understand the emotions from the other people are the true information that you're looking to utilize as opposed to words. 

Yeah, love that. I feel like I'm walking away from this not necessarily thinking much about design per se, or invitations, I'm just thinking more about feelings myself, emotions of other people. So I thank you for that, Jason. Look, I think that's been great. Just a deep dive into all of that and learn everything. And hey, look, thank you for the time today. Thank you for the insight. I really do appreciate everything you've been sharing and best of luck with the book as well. It looks like it's going to be a great one. Thank you 

So much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me, and thanks for everyone for beautiful questions. And just one more reminder, we're basically entering this age of self transformation as a thing. That's one other thing that I didn't mention here, but I have a program called Fresh Mind, which you can check out on Fresh Mind Life, which is about transforming itself through desire thinking. So that's also very, very funky thing to do. 

Love that. Great stuff. Thank you, Jason. That's great to see you.