Ep 49 Conference talk: ‘In-house powerhouse' from Adobe MAX 2017

In this replay of his sold-out Adobe MAX 2017 session, In-house Powerhouse: Building and Managing an Empowered Internal Creative Team, Stephen Gates shares proven strategies for leading high-performing client-side creative teams. As demand for creativity and design grows, many internal teams lack the empowerment to fully leverage their potential. Tune in to discover how to build, manage, and inspire an in-house creative powerhouse that thrives in today’s business landscape.

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What's going on everybody, and welcome into the 49th episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and all kinds of things that matter to creative people. Now, if you're somebody that likes the show, make sure that you hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform. So you're sure that you get the latest episode whenever they come out. And also, if you're somebody that likes the show, if you get anything useful out of any of this, do me a quick favor, leave a review. It does a lot to bring new people into the show lets me know when people like what they don't. And it also just lets me know that people are out there and they're listening. Now, as you can probably tell by the state of my voice, I have been in Las Vegas for the past week, attending and speaking at Adobe max. This is a conference I've done for a lot of years and the reason why I do it every single year is because it's a great conference. It brings together some of the world's best speakers some fantastic talent. I get to see A bunch of old friends and make a bunch of new ones. So for the past week, I've been at max, it was at the Venetian and I did two different sessions whenever I was there. And what I wanted to do today was to share one of those sessions with you. It was a session that I did that was called in house power house, building and managing an empowered in house creative team. Now, if you want to, you do have the option where you actually can watch the video for this, Adobe actually had recorded the whole session, you can just head to max.adobe.com. Whenever you're there, go up into sessions, and then go to max online, scroll down until you see the sessions part of the page, there'll be a part called creative careers. Click on the second page of that and you will see a thumbnail of me in the upper left hand corner and you can actually watch the video on the slides for this whole thing. I wish there was a link that I could send to make it easier than having to be that whole habitrail there should be a piece of cheese at the end of it, but that's the way it goes. So anyway, this is a session that I honestly worked on for probably the best Part of eight months, it really is meant to be a crash course in everything that I have learned and all the things that I know that work. Whenever you need to run an in house creative team, more and more of us are having to do it. And it is just simply a different animal than having to run an agency team or something like that. So this is a replay of that session. It was given in front of a packed packed out House of about eight or 900 people. It's a session that I'm really proud of. And hopefully you like it too. How's everybody doing? That is an admirable amount of energy considering it is day two in Vegas. My Apple Watch is about to like just give up because the rings have gone around so many times that it just like I don't know what I've walked away too damn much. We will start with the slide that will make you the happiest. This is the one that usually gets the most tears out of all of my decks. And that is the fact that you can download everything that I'm about To talk about from my website, so just go to Stephen Gates comm slash Max is a PDF of this deck in its entirety, there are links to everything that I'm going to talk about just so that everything that is here, you guys can easily get ahold of, because I know that there is nothing worse, at least for me than to speak to this many people. And I'm talking to the top of their heads because they're all trying to scribble furiously because they think they're gonna miss something. So my name is Steve gates. I am currently the head of design at Citibank. And I know what it is that you're thinking whenever you hear want to hear about design and innovation and leadership and this sort of stuff. You want to hear from a guy that works at a bank. For those of you who have been through my other sessions, just lip sync through the early jokes, it'll get better as we go on. So I'm one of these people who literally was a creative director by birth. I know that a lot of people will talk about how they were born to be a designer. That is literally true. In my case. This is me at 40 years old standing on the feed tray of the 700 pound cast iron letterpress that was in my parents basement. My father and I used to write all of our own stories and then would go downstairs and I would have to typeset them so that we could actually print them, which effectively made me hipster by the time I was in kindergarten. Because what that means is whenever I got to kindergarten, I had been self publishing for years, and was very confused why other kids had been buying their books. I was unaware that Brooklyn existed at that point, but that's where it went. Over the course of my career. I've been very fortunate because of the work that I've done. It's one a lot of a lot of different awards. I've done a lot of work with companies like Google and Facebook, apple, very notably, was one of the people behind the launch of the Apple Watch for the SPG app. I've been quote quoted in keynotes, lots of stuff like that. The big passion project for me, as you can tell by the shirt, the tattoo and everything else in between, is a podcast that I do called the crazy one. And this is literally something that I started a year and a half ago because I think that as an industry, as you can tell by the fact that there is barely an empty seat in this room, there is a lot of stuff that we don't talk about. We are a generation that needs leadership, desperately, we are a generation that needs honestly, desperately. So over the past year and a half, it's up to about 48 episodes of talking about a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about today. Now, one of the things that I'm going to do as we go through this is that I am going to reference certain episodes of my podcast, I am not doing this because it is a shameless self promotion, I do not get paid a single dime for doing this is because we have an hour to talk about an incredibly complicated problem. And some of this stuff is just going to need more attention than what I'm able to do here. So if it's something I've talked about in more depth, I want to go ahead and reference that. So I literally, like I said, grew up in design. I have been a paid designer since I was 12 years old, other kids got a paper route. I actually was doing like paste up keys and cutting Ruby lifts and a lot of stuff that you guys need to do. To figure out what the hell it is that I'm talking about. I watched computers come into the industry. And I spent the first half of my career in ad agencies. And then a funny thing happened. I had one client that changed my life. Because for me at the time whenever I was in advertising in houses where you went to die in houses where you went whenever you wanted to retire and kind of coast into the sunset in house was not where serious creatives went. But the thing that happened was that I got to work on this company, I got to work on American Airlines. And I got to work on it an incredibly difficult day. I got to work on it on September 12. Whenever we had to sit down as an organization with that company and try to figure out what the hell do you do? Whenever something like that happens to your brand? How do you keep them for the years afterwards out of bankruptcy? How do you convince an entire company that you can no longer be in the big metal tube flying through the sky business, because of what that now means for your company. But what it did for me was that it made me realize that building a brand was a much more significant challenge, a much more interesting challenge for me than building an ad for a brand. And it really changed something in me. And so I decided that I wanted to leave the advertising world and go in house, much to the complete bewilderment of every one of my friends in the agency world. So for the past 11 years, I've worked for two different companies. I spent nine years helping to build the global brand design team at Starwood Hotels and Resorts. That is a body of work I am insanely proud of because it was coming in and taking over a team that really had been overlooked. It was a team that was very much of a service organization. And that by the time I left, we were one of the top teams that worked with Apple. We were invited to work on things months before it was available to the public and the leadership of that team. The day I left was the exact same leadership today I got there. So I am not somebody who believes that in house teams are these ones wants you to come in and be able to reshape everybody and bring in new people. That is not the case. What you need are leaders who actually understand what it is they're doing, who have a plan and a vision and actually give a damn about what's going on there. Now, for the past two years, I did something where apparently I have I don't know what an interesting streak for a challenge. I've taken over the head of design, the first head of design and the 210 year history of Citibank. So that's kind of like trying to be the speedboat in front of the Queen Mary. But what I'm coming in to do is to literally, how do we figure out how do we bring design and creativity into an industry that desperately needs it? And to be able to kind of go through and do that work. So it's a little bit hard to ignore how many people are here today. So just out of curiosity, a quick poll, how many of you work for in house teams today? So pretty much everybody thinking right now, maybe that was a bit of a dumb poll question. I'll admit it, okay. But look, but this is the thing, right is that we're in an era where we are seeing the rise of in house design like we have never seen before. We can thank the big agency holding companies and the conglomerates who continue to put pressure on their agencies to increase their billing rates while the quality of their work drops. And this is the thing is that we are in a spectacular time to be in this position. But here's the thing and everybody can feel free to not along cheer, clap, do whatever you want, if these are problems that you currently encounter. One is that you feel in many cases your team is disrespected or underfunded, because design is just sort of that thing. I put that one for a first for a reason. Agencies are seen as the only people who can possibly be thought leaders. Your company is afraid of doing any kind of change. If you are trying to lead a team, who is not necessarily convinced that anything is ever going to change. I'm glad that that got smaller applause. And finally, you understand that corporate structures are definitely places that do not encourage creativity. Okay, so now that we all know that we're, thankfully all in the same boat, let's talk about exactly why does in house creative matters. And because one of the things that people always respect is they respect numbers and they respect dollars. So there's an interesting study that happened from 2004 to 2014. What they did was they went through and looked at the top companies who actually invested in in house design. These are companies that valued design, these were Apple, Coca Cola, Herman Miller, the team at Starwood that I was a part of was a part of this study. And what they did was that they just tracked all the rest of the companies in the s&p 500 to see how did they perform over that 10 year span. And they noticed a very, very funny trend, that the companies who invested in design, on average performed 219% better than the companies who didn't. So if you want to feel free to take a photo of this and show it to your boss, whenever they ask you what is the value of design? But look, here's the reality. And this is why I'd like to be able to give this talk is because I firmly believe that we're in an era where as creatives we have the ability to influence our companies, we have a seat at the table that we have not seen since the Industrial Revolution. companies want creativity like they have never wanted it before. But here's the challenge. Like I said before, as a generation that has been a little bit late on leadership on the generation, it's been a little bit late on understanding business. The problem is that most of us are wasting this opportunity. And this is what I want to talk about today is how do we start to fix this. So What do we actually need to empower and then house creative team? What are the things that you need to be able to start to bring about change? So there are five basic things if you think about it that you have to have in place if you want to bring about change, and then what those are going to be our vision, creativity, incentives, resources, and a plan. Now, the problem is that you need all five of them, because only whenever you have all five of them, do you actually get things to change? If there isn't a vision than what you get is a hell of a lot of confusion. If there is no creativity, and this is something that I'm sure we all struggle with, what you get is the status quo. Things are going to be the way that they always are. Because the reality is, is that comfort is the enemy of greatness. We would much rather just say the way things are even if we know that it's to our detriment, because it's easier. If there are no incentives, then there's going to be resistance to that because what's the incentive for me to actually do anything differently. If I don't have resources, which is, again, probably most everybody in this room, you end up with a massive amount of frustration. Now, if I don't have a plan, a whole lot of false starts, a whole lot of times, I'm going to try to do something, and then that's not necessarily going to work out. So what I want to do is I want to concentrate on just a couple of these today. And what I really want to look at is I want to look at the piece around vision, around creativity, around incentives in the hope that that is going to then yield a plan for you guys, because again, the resource piece is something there's no slide in the world I'll be able to put up here, that's probably gonna be able to help you with resources that may be like the one on one conversation afterwards. So let's start talking about vision. And the problem that we all have is as we talked about before, many companies just simply don't understand and that they don't really know what to do with creative teams because we are so different. One of the things that I take a massive amount of pride Is that my team sits on the 10th floor in New York City. And I get on the elevator and at least once a week somebody in a Brooks Brothers suit looks at me up and down as I'm standing in jeans and a T shirt and they go, you work on 10? Don't you? Damn right. But here's the thing is that there's a cold reality here that I think a lot of us need to think about is that in many cases, your team is going to be seen inside of your company in one of two ways. And what those are going to be is that you're either going to be seen as a commodity, or a critical asset. The commodities are the ones that are who are just simply told what to do. The commodities are the ones that can be outsourced. They can be laid off, they can be replaced. They're the ones who aren't valued. They're the ones that are given problems to just simply color in. They're not asked to actually come up with original thinking. The trick here is how do we move them into a critical assets? And a lot of this really has to do with again, what is your group known for? The ones that are about the commodities they tend to be much more about dilution? verbals about deadlines about we can go from A to B and do exactly what you want. We're a service organization, I get a incredible allergy to any creative team that has the word service in its title. Somebody actually said that about my group once I sent him the this one 800 number and they said, Well, what is this, I said, if you want a service organization, there's a kinkos down the road. But here's the thing is that for us, it has to be about creativity. It has to be about ideas, it has to be about value. And this is the thing that we're going to talk about a lot is how do you actually position your team to be able to have that impact, to be able to have the most value and do the best work because that's what so much of this needs to be about. Now, here's the thing. How do you actually get people to invest in any of this? And the one thing that I will tell you time and time again and having done this is that the difference between if you're in an agency and the difference between when you're in house, is that you have to be a team player. You have to find support, you have to find ways of being able to rally people around you one of the things that I've found irrefutably and one of the things whenever I talk to people who do consulting at IDEO and other companies, is that the ability for you to build strategic relationships, especially with if you can find an executive, we'll call him a godfather. But as somebody who will give you the time, and the space to actually be able to do this work is imperative. The reason why this is is because we all know that most companies are escalation cultures. So what does that mean? I want to go through and I want to make a change. Trust me whenever I got to city, I had 40 arguments about button color. I love everybody who nods because they've had like 67. But here's the thing is that so if I'm going to say, Okay, look, city is about blue, all the buttons need to be blue. We have research, we have testing, it needs to be pink, it needs to be green, it needs to be all these other things. And it's like, Look, dude, if it's a pink Starburst, it's going to test better than blue but we're not going to do that. But the reason why getting buy in at a senior Level becomes so important is because I know that if they want to get into the fight that they all want to have, they've got to go to their boss, and he's gonna go to their boss and this is attorney gonna turn into this whole big thing and there's hold this big fight. You know what, dude, I'm just gonna meet you at the top? Because I know what the answer is up there. And so this is really a challenge. Because if you can't find that person, because there's a lot of times when people come to me, and they asked me about advice about what should I do, I don't have the senior leadership, I don't have that buy in. I don't know what it is to do. In a lot of cases, what I may tell you is to go find a company that does have that, because this is something that there has to be a dedication to this. And the reason why is because there is just a fundamental change in structure. And this was something that I had to realize that I came from the agency world. Whenever you're in the agency world, and you look at the creative team, it is absolutely the heart of the house. It is the reason for being is the fuel that drives the engine. That is the entire product of that team. The challenge that they have is that their clients come and go. So it tends to be a variable transient way of looking at things. Now on the in house side, what we have is we have more permanence, we have a client that is there all the time. But the challenge that we have is that the design team, the creative team is not the center of the universe. We have to go up against other teams with other resources that are also asking for headcount and budget and a lot of those other things. So this is the challenges that we have to balance this we have to be able to look at how do we position our team inside of this so that we still find value, and that that can really be the trick. Now, here again, this is the first semi shameless self promotion and so the episode 16 I did was really all about what are the secrets about how do you just become a successful client side creative director, I've had a front row seat to far too many incredibly talented people who came in from agency side who came from other places, and did not last a year. Because there's a lot of this about the way you build relationships. There's a lot a bit about where you are building a product, you're not building pitch where and there's a lot of these definite things that you need to be able Think about. But the other big thing and I think this is the number one biggest mistake that I see a lot of in house teams make is that they confuse the difference between creativity and design. So hopefully this poll got a little bit better than the last one. So how many people who are in here think that the product of your team is designed? I don't believe that. So it's like three people. How many people think that the product is creativity? A lot of people who really aren't sure, okay. But here's the thing, the product of your team has got to be creativity. Because the way that I look at this is that every team has the ability to have a massive impact on their company, if they are able to make it about creativity, because every single company that is out there wants to be more creative. Every single company that is out there wants to figure out how do they get more ideas out the door, so that if I can bring in a team that can help them do that if I can bring in a team that can help bring creativity, that is a massive, massive move towards becoming a critical assets. And that the way that I would look at it, and the thing that I would argue is that design is then a byproduct. Because if it is about creativity, and it's about problem solving, design is then the visual expression of that problem solving. Because if all it is that you're focusing on is just simply the visual expression of that we're back in the commodity space. It can be the most beautiful looking system in the world. It can be the greatest looking system in the world, but then it becomes about aesthetics, and it becomes about opinions. And we're going to talk a little bit later about why is that so hard? Because that's what I said is that every company sees value in creativity. Very, very few companies see value in design. And so again, I think this is one of those things where as we just think about how do you position the foundation of your team, that becomes incredibly important. So now at the end of these sections, I like to do these takeaways. I try to make them very big. I try to make them very read. They look fantastic on Twitter. I know what I'm dealing with. But look, a big part of this and a very honest part of this conversation. Is that for you to bring about this change, you're going to have to think about, really, how determined Are you going to be to be able to do this? Because you are going to meet resistance, you're going to meet pushback, and there's, this is not going to be an easy thing. This is why most of the time, whenever I come into city, people ask me like, well, how long do you think it's going to be for you to really be able to change this? My honest answer was probably two to three years, at which point most people's eyes roll into the back of their head. But this is the thing is that the end of the day, for us to be successful, my determination has got to be stronger than the excuses. It's got to be stronger than the pushback just because we have to be able to have somebody who believes this thing. And the other thing for your team is the fact that the end of the day, your two biggest products for your team to become more successful are trust and confidence. Because those are the two things more than the work more than anything else. That are going to allow you to do better work, they're going to allow your team to continue to grow to get headcount. So do things like that, because the reality is, at the end of the day, my boss needs to know that she's still gonna have a job, her kids are still going to go to college, that it may be one of those things where I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid. And so the ability to actually think about that, to be able to help with your team that that is what we want to reinforce. That's where so much of the freedom and so much of what we want to do comes from is to be able to do that. But it really is starting to think about what is that vision? How do you start to put that together? And now the challenge here is going to be for you. And this happens in a lot of my talks. Is that what that vision is and the way that it comes to life is going to be different for everybody here. The foundational things that I've talked about, I think apply the politics, the leadership, the size, the scale, the budget, and the everything else that is up to your individual companies. That's the part where you have to think about how do you apply it This to your team, there's not going to be a magic bullet here. I really wish there was. But as far as I know, there definitely isn't. So let's talk a little about about the second piece. And let's talk about creativity. Because I think that the other thing that I see most internal teams really struggle with is that they don't know how to define what they need to be successful. So many times whenever I come in, and I start to work with these teams, what they're doing is they're accepting the process that they're given. They're accepting the inputs that they are given, but then somehow they're mystified about why the work isn't better. And you'll sit down with them and you'll say, Well, are you getting what you need to do your best work? Know? Are your clients giving you what you really need? No. Why are you then somehow confused about why you're not doing your best work? And so this is the thing is that to get better at this, you're gonna have to spend some time and focus on something that is incredibly sexy for every creative in this room. Process You need to be like a consultant or something just for that. There's always one, right? There's always one. But here's the thing is that whenever I start to work on a team, the first thing that I want to start to look at is unsexy as it is his process, everybody immediately wants to run and start to look at the work of the design about how do we make that better. But the process is what underpins that the process is what is going to make so much of that better. And so this is the thing is that so many teams, they've got the raw talent. I talked about the team that I had at Star when I talked about some of these other things, they have the raw talent they need to be successful. But if you don't have a process, and if you cannot define what you need to be successful, you cannot capitalize on it. And that is a massive problem. Now as a part of this, you really need to split this into two parts, an internal and an external process. Now the internal part really Should be a methodology. And because what that methodology should be is that it should set for my team, how are we going to work? And really what are the quality levels that we want to go through to be able to do this? Because again, if you have a team in one location, that's fantastic. If you start to get them a little bit more distributed, that becomes a much bigger problem. But the other thing that you need to do is to think about how can you make your process inclusive. This is a major war that is going on right now inside of our industry is whether we do inclusive or exclusive creativity. So many agencies want to cling on to the exclusive model. You give us the problem, we go away, we think about it, we come back, we tell you what you want. For me that's still a little bit of like the like wearing a beret, doing a watercolor of your spirit animal in the corner telling you how much you don't understand creativity. It is a luxury that in house teams simply do not have. Because if you're going to be exclusive about these things, if you're going to shut your clients out, it is not something that is going to bring about change. This is why I firmly believe that the greatest Trojan horse for change is design thinking I know this has become very in vogue lately. I know this is something a lot of people want to talk about. This is something that has been around since the 1960s. So I kind of find it funny that now all of a sudden, this is the new thing that everybody wants to do. But the reason why design thinking works so well, really is for two different reasons. The one is because whenever you Institute design thinking, what it's going to do is it immediately empowers your team to be in the driver's seat and immediately empowers your team to be the ones that drive the conversation. Because what that allows you to do is that you are the shepherd that takes them through that process, the sharper that gets them up the mountain. And that what that can do is then you can then bring everybody into that conversation, but it sets you up to be the authority. But the other part of it is just what I said it brings everybody into the conversation, because this is why it's so fantastic at reshaping culture and everything else. Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to tap into the basic human psychology that people will support whatever Part of too many times, especially coming into financial institutions and things like that, they will tell you how legal and regulators and all these other people are impossible to work with. But if you back out the process and look at it, what you find is that you had a team that got to brief did a whole bunch of work finished what that was, gave a finished product to their legal team or to their regulators, which then led them to this very black and white decision, yes or no, as opposed to doing it with design thinking how to bring that person in. And instead of doing something like just giving you a finished product, what I wanted to be able to do now is I actually want to bring you on that process and say instead of this as the solution, this is what I want to accomplish, how do we get there, it doesn't mean that you're going to get there 100% but it means you can bring about massive, massive change and do things you never thought possible. One of the examples, it's a very bank example, but that there was one particular flow that my team worked on last year. It was a mobile flow that had 58 form fields. I'll let that sink in. All of you who worked with the bank did not find that the least bit shocking. But so what we did is we actually sat down with the regulators, we sat down the lawyers, we pushed back about this, we brought them into this process. And where we launched it, all of a sudden, it had six formfields. That miracle had happened. But this is the thing is by bringing them into this process by making it inclusive, as opposed to XClusive. Now, the sudden you can bring about change, but here's the thing is that it does require your team to have confidence. It requires them to be okay to be able to bring people in and to have that conversation. And it lets you kind of need to be able to set up some of those ground rules. Now for those of you who do not know what design thinking is for those of you who have not done it before, I did three whole episodes on somebody who has actually been trained by IDEO. I've actually like gone through their training, they've watched me teach. These are three episodes that will walk you through the entire process, which is always a little bit hard to do over a podcast. But to show you how do you actually do design thinking to become more inclusive with your teams. Now the next thing You're gonna need is an external process because design thinking really helps my team empower them. It helps them to be able to do that work. Now the external process really defines for me, how are my clients and partners going to work with me? What do I need to be successful gone needs to be the days where we're just simply going to accept whenever anybody gives us. And so in this case, these are going to be things like a creative brief or project calendars, design reviews, delivery standards with tech, you know, a lot of these things that tend to come up. Because this is the other problem where because design does not live in a vacuum, from good work to go out the door, I need my clients for to go out in shape that I actually need. I need tech to execute it the right way. I spent 11 years railing on developers that my team does not do what they do for it to be a frickin suggestion that this is the thing is that we have to set these standards and we have to hold people accountable to them. And so again, the whole nother episode that I did on how to To build strong relationships with your clients. And here again, these are things that are purposely left sort of open ended. There are a lot of other people that can talk about process and creative teams, there's a lot of other things that you can look up, I'd rather spend the time like, Go look that up. Let's talk about other stuff. But a big part of what this is or creating what I call tent poles. And this is true whether you work with a single team, this is true if you work with multiple teams, that is true if you work with agencies, but 10 poles are really these things of what are the core resources that everybody needs to work together to be consistent? Because the problem is that so often, again, we're the victim of agency, one has one process, agency two has another process, we're going to get certain things from one people in another way, by design teams are going to design differently. All of a sudden, the agency is going to take some Liberty because they think it looks better. You have to be able to stop all that. So these are going to be things again, your methodology, your process, your design, language, all of these sort of assets. Now there is a balance that you have to strike here, especially around things with like a design language. So one of the things I did was, whenever I came in was to build an atomic design language, from the pieces all the way up to the components. And again, it's my responsibility to balance consistency with creativity, because the systems in the past had just been these big block modules that were very easy to work with, but effectively killed creativity and very, very quickly became an excuse. They were the reason why all of our clients and everybody else couldn't use them, because there was never a perfect use case for them. There was never the template that was for them. And because of that Batman, they could go do whatever the hell it was they wanted. And that doesn't work. But the other part of this, then is to talk about the part that also does really matter to us the part that is more personal and that's the creative process. And to talk about some of the things that I think you can do, very simply to make sure that you're setting yourself up for success and that your work gets better. The number one thing that I see the number one thing whenever I come in that I want To make sure that we change is that you are making sure that you are starting with a problem to be solved, not a solution to be vetted. There are too many times whenever I will sit in on meetings where a client will walk in, they'll have done a sketch, God forbid they do something in PowerPoint and mock it up. Or like, their kid who's in college has like a, you know, access to a license to Photoshop Elements or something. It's just, but that's the thing. And they're like, Oh, this is what I want. Okay, that's fine. But what I want to do is I want to back that out, and to try to figure out what is the problem that we're trying to solve here? Because the reality is, is that if you want to find any sort of innovation, if you don't have design thinking and do it the right way, if you want to give your power to your team, and if you want to respect their process, you don't know where you're going to end up whenever you start these problems. That is going to scare the hell out of your clients. It is gonna scare the hell out of all of your business because this is why agile methodologies and design thinking all these variations Things are having so much trouble whenever they're adopted. Because it means that I'm going to start at a and I don't know what B is going to be quite yet. And a lot of people really want to understand what that is. But this is the thing is this, just simply make sure that your team is getting a problem to be solved. And that this can be something where you're gonna need to retrain your clients, you're gonna need to push back on them. And again, it doesn't mean that I can't understand that there is validity that there is an opinion that that person who did that sketch can be able to do that. But trust me, I can tell you with my teams right now, that has been a massive change, the most difficult product owners that we have now are very much into coming with the problem, not that sketch anymore. Because this is the thing is we have to be able to take this power back so that we can have these conversations. There's another thing that we do that I call Northstar thinking and this is based on the fact that for most companies, doing a big bang or doing a big idea is just simply not possible or plausible because of the time because of the number of Pages because of the budget, because of fear, there are a lot of different things. And it's very hard to execute a big idea all at once. But that doesn't mean that what you need to do is to give up on that. One of the things that I found one of the most fascinating was that if you look whenever Apple and Samsung are having their big fight, and their big lawsuit is that Johnny, Ive who runs design for Apple in his office has the next five generations of every product in his office, it does not mean that the iPhone 15 is going to look that way. But what it means is that they are thinking about it. And that too often what we all do is we get into this trap where we're going to innovate just as far as the project in front of us. So it leads to this very happenstance sort of approach to creativity, this very happenstance sort of approach to innovation, where we're just gonna jump and take whatever it is we can get. Now Northstar thinking really is about the fact of I want you to come up where do we ultimately want to end up it does not mean that that is where exactly, we're going to end up. But I want to put a place out there that is going to define what we want the ultimate experience to be. And then what I'm going to then start to do is to break that back into pieces. So that now I can work with what are we going to do this year, but also what are we going to do tomorrow? So that again, I can put people on a road as we start to do budget planning as we start to do roadmaps as we start to do these sorts of things. There is an aligned direction that we can go in. The other thing is that if you're working in Agile, the ability to do this really gives you the ability to then calm down the executive so that they understand what the vision is. A lot of cases, what we do is we'll do this or what we call like a sprint zero or a design sprint, where it's a time before we actually get into agile, where we can come up with just what is the basic concept of what we want to do, because then it calms everybody down. That gives us the ability to do that sort of thinking because we all know that everybody loves agile, but nobody's kind of remembered that it's a software methodology and that you cannot do concept work whenever you are heads down in Sprint's because you're on a deliverable you have pointed what it is you need to work at. Thank you to whoever just clapped. But this is the thing is that here again, I did a whole episode on just really like trying to figure out how do you find these opportunities? How do you go through and look at this process and find these insights to be able to do this stuff. Because again, there is some part of this where you're gonna need to figure out what Hill is worth dying on, because they're not all worth dying on, you're not gonna be able to get all the change done at once. But if there is some of these things where Yes, we'll take the big leap where we can get it. But I also want to look at where are the places where I can make smaller, sustained incremental changes. Another big one seems very obvious. Put the consumer at the center of what you do. And the reason why I do this is not because I know that a lot of strategy, a lot of research and again, these are things that everybody wants to get into. This is not saying that to do everything about co creation, co creation kind of drives me bananas. Because here again, we're talking about incremental, we're talking about incremental innovation, if I'm going to do is to sit around and listen to exactly what consumers tell me to do, I'm going to be in a fantastic feature war with all my consumers. This is the famous Henry Ford quote that if he had asked people what they wanted, we built the car, he'd have made a faster horse. But this is the thing. What we are dealing in is a highly debatable medium. And so like this was one of the things where we started doing the work at Citi, then what we did was we said, as we're going to go through, and we're going to do this work, we're actually going to test whatever it is we're working on once a week. Because that's the thing is that creativity is highly debatable. consumer research isn't because of all of a sudden, I'm having a debate about where should a button be, which should color be which a sentence be all those sorts of things that can become about opinion, a consumer as an absolute, it grounds it in something real, it keeps it as consumer centric design, but it still keeps our group in the place where we can continue to work and do that thinking so that again, it doesn't become Just simply blind co creation. But the ability to ground it in something like this can be a massive, massive thing for you to be able to do this. The other thing that I will tell you that I do on a lot of cases, because people will always tell you if they've been there for any amount of time. Oh, we did that, oh, you can't do that, oh, there's this all you know, now we try that or there's some excuse. Ask them if that isn't a factor and opinion. Because the funny thing that you're gonna find is that so many of those facts turn out to be opinions, their opinions by people who are afraid of change their opinions of people who would rather take the easy route and actually have to question and do something different. And so the ability for you to actually challenge these things, makes a huge difference. And especially the more you do it, the more you find things are willing to change. Because that's what it is that you want is that if you are going to do something done with design, if you're going to do something and that is gonna stand in the way of what this is know that we're coming. We're going to ask these questions. We're going to push on this stuff. We're going to try to go out and break the law. To figure out how we do this, which leads to another probably decent controversial point here is to fight executive lead creative direction and the resulting hysteria that comes from it. By the applause, I can tell that none of you know what it is that I'm talking about. For those of you who might not be sure it goes something like this. There is a meeting between a bunch of different executives, somebody a CMO or CEO, thinks, hey, we have a marketing campaign, and they say something like we should do a T shirt. All of a sudden minions are set in motion agencies are briefed and they are running around going, Oh my God, we just need to do a T shirt. We need to do a T shirt. hysteria ensues. Weekends are worked. Things are done all sorts of zaniness so that we can make a T shirt. Funny thing, nobody ever stopped to say why the hell are we making a T shirt This is the thing is the ability to actually stop and think and ask why. Because the thing that I have found time and time again, is that rarely did that executive mean that they wanted a T shirt. What it meant was that they wanted something that was going to communicate to their audience. They wanted a tangible takeaway, they wanted something else. But this is the thing is to fight this executive lead hysteria, this design blindness, that we're just literally going to take whatever it is, that is said, this can cause a lot of waves. This can cause a lot of people to have a whole lot of anxiety. But the other thing that it can cause is executives to know that the creative team can actually think for themselves, that there is sincere value in what it is that they do, that they actually can come up with solutions that are better, and that again, they need to be thought of and that they need to be thinking about how do they bring a problem not a solution, because that's the problem is that so many times I will argue is that instead By these internal companies, this behavior is a monster of our own making. We accept it, we take it, we don't actually push back against it. And whenever we do that, all that we're doing is telling them that they should be doing more of it. So again, trust me whole episode, based on just simply nothing but how do you fight executive lead design hysteria? embracing failure. This is another one that I think for a lot of companies gets really kind of iffy. Because, look, the reality is, is that at the end of the day failing does not make you a failure. Creativity at its heart, at its best is about getting it wrong a whole lot of times before you get it right. But the problem is, is that most companies do not begin to understand that we have an entire generation now that has been trained that there's a right answer to everything. This is why honestly for the first time ever, there's a decline in creativity and children and for the first time as long as they've been measuring it before Because of the fact that people are afraid to fail, it's taboo. It's bad. You can't be wrong. I can't be wrong. I have to have the right answer all the time. But here's the thing. Failing only comes from if you don't learn from what you did wrong. Because that is the thing is that for what we do, it's about finding a whole lot of bad ideas on the way to a good one. This is again, is why something like design thinking I think, is incredibly important because it's about failing fast. This is something that we actually do on our team is that we celebrate failure. every single week our entire team gets together and we have a belly flop of the week. The person who screws up the biggest gets a bottle of champagne institutionalizing failure institutionalizing that it is okay to be able to do that is a massive thing to be able to say look, I really screwed this up, and I got this wrong. I had a great one a couple years a couple weeks ago whenever I completely renamed our CTO. No idea why His name is Gavin called him Andrew for a whole meeting. I couldn't figure out why all the executives around the table kept panicking and trying to slip me notes and said, Gavin, I'm like I don't. It's like, what is this a singer like I don't anyway. But here's the other part of this. And this is the reason why I think you need to bring this up, is that if you are not prepared to fail, you are never going to come up with anything original. All that you're going to do, again, is to be in a feature war with your competitors, you're never going to find any differentiation, you're never going to find an original idea. Because that's the thing is that you have to be able to go out and get it wrong, but be smart about it. Again, whenever we were at Starwood and we launched the whole keyless entry thing. We didn't start with 1500 hotels, we started with two, then 10, then 150. And it was really teaching that company that it was about agile is the new smart, not agile as a methodology, but the ability to actually be smaller, to be more reactive to try things on a smaller scale. That was going to be something that was so much more impactful than having to think that every time time we do something has to be this big Leviathan home run. Because the problem is if it's not, we've invested too much time, too much money, too much political capital for anybody to stand up and go, we're about to want something that really sucks. And that that's a huge problem. And the other thing I'll tell you is this as well, is that if you lead a team, you need to take the time to understand to value and to grow, that everybody on your team has a different creative process, and that they do things differently. Can anybody tell me who this is? I love everybody. The Spanish accent just said Ferran Adria. So Ferran Adria is the chef from Spain, who completely revolutionized the world of gastronomy. The last 180 of the last 200 inventions in food came from this man. He's the only one who ever won the number one restaurant in the world five times running for a very, very small restaurant called El Bulli that was located about an hour hour and a half northeast of Barcelona in a small town of Ross us. So I've been incredibly lucky over the years to have met for on a number of times, and a few months ago had a fascinating opportunity where I got to go to this secret lab that he has in Barcelona. He has closed the restaurant now really in the pursuit of studying creativity and studying food. And whenever I say secret, I'm not making this up. It is literally hidden in a parking garage in the outskirts of Barcelona. This is my wife, and our friend from them walking up the parking garage. This is the really sexy entrance to his studio. This is the obligatory shot of me in foreign but look, this is literally a trip into the mind of one of the most creative people who is currently living. For me this is if you got to spend the day with Michelangelo or Picasso. What would you do and what would you ask? Now there's not much of this studio that I can show but for Ron was nice enough to say that there was one thing there that I could share because whenever I saw it, I thought it was genius. I saw this board sitting in his To Do With all these different kinds of different string on it, and unless you read Connell on, you probably have no idea what the hell it says. But what this is that he asks every member of his team to actually go through and to take a string, starting with their role at the bottom. And to go through the different parts of the creative process and actually map out how do they have ideas, because it gives him an aggregate look at how his team works. For those of you who actually want to be able to try this out, I went through and worked with an interpreter. This is the English version of that, which again, is in this deck. So if you want to recreate it is probably the most brilliant thing I've ever seen, and actually looking at how do you start to figure out the way that your team works together? Because the other thing is that you want diverse perspectives. You want people who are going to think in different ways, and the ability to actually map this out and have this be an artifact that sits in your studio, I think is absolutely fascinating. Here again, I did an entire episode just talking about what I did learning from neuron I think that the takeaways here are a few different things. It isn't sexy. But you need a clear and strong process or for your creativity to flourish, you have to set it up to be successful. The thought that we were just simply going to run to the process and run to the output is not realistic. You need to be able to do more for this. You have to embrace failure as an incredibly critical part of creativity. And this is the biggest thing is that for the work that you do, you have to change the way your company thinks, not the way it behaves. Too many people try to triage behavior. They try to triage it and the way that people in their group act, they try to triage it and the way their company is, but the problem is that new behavior on old thinking doesn't change anything. Doing things like design thinking, doing things like pushing back to make sure you're getting problems, not solutions. These are ways where you can start to be able to change the way that people think. And so I think it's a good kind of transition to start to talk about incentives. And I think one of The biggest incentives for creatives is culture. And that the reality is, is that you know what culture is what merges this group of kind of individually talented people into one solid group. Because the reality is, is that your team needs their own identity inside of this company, it doesn't mean that you're starting a separate agency. But what it does mean is that they need something they can rally around something that they can believe in. And so the thing here really is the fact that the problem is that culture too often happens by default, instead of design. We just simply take the larger culture we take the larger things that HR are doing, we take too many of these other things and accept them, that's where our culture is going to be. And then we just kind of get whatever happens. So how do you actually start to add culture on your team? This is part of if you've ever heard me talk, I talked about this a lot, because I really believe in it. It is about crafting a set of beliefs. These are the things that What does your team believe in? What do you stand for? If you had to stand up and explain to somebody what your team is about what would that be? Now the way that I do this is that I'll usually take about three 60 to 75 days to lead with my mouth shut, to actually go through and figure out what is going on with this team, where are the problems? What are the things that they need to be able to work on. And the reality is that these things, they need to be deep seated problems. They need to be problems in the way that the theme of the team is thinking and the way that they are acting. And what I'm going to do is I'm every day I'm going to write down some of these things. And after a few weeks, you can generally start to group these into observations. The one that I have for my team right now is made up of five parts, learn, collaborate, ideate, craft and lead, learn because of the fact that we can never stop learning we never are truly the masters of what it is that we do collaborate in the fact that creativity is a team sport, again, inclusive creativity ideate in the fact that ideas are our stocking property craft in the fact that the way that we actually execute what we do really matters, and finally lead in the fact that my expectation is that every single person on my team steps up to Take some part of responsibility in changing this team. It is not realistic, and it is not going to happen, that I can be the only one that brings the change. It's not going to happen, there's gonna be a lot of really disappointed people that everybody has to be responsible for this. Now what I want to then do is to start to craft these issues into aspirational statements into things that I think that we can use to be able to start to define our culture. I'll give you two examples. One that I talk about a lot is that creativity is a blue collar profession. I grew up in Pittsburgh, I grew up in a blue collar culture, this idea that creativity is a light bulb is BS. A light bulb is inspiration. Creativity is a hell of a lot of hard work. And if you want to go from good to great creativity, it's a hell of a lot of more hard work. And that that is what it is that we need to do. And to do things about attitude. If you ever been around me, you know, this is one of those things that is true that we are respectful and confident that we are not delicate. I'm not going to spend three weeks tiptoeing around Round an issue, I'd much rather take it on head on, I'd much rather be honest about what's going on. We're not going to play politics all the time, we're not going to do this sort of thing. The only way we're going to get to get anything done is to be able to get this stuff out there. Now, how do you get this adopted? Got this list sounds great, dude, all these things, they sound really great. Put them on a poster, whoo. That's not how you get culture. Because what you need to do and the reason why I like this is because the beliefs create it, what I call a scalable coaching system. And what that means is that I can actually go through and look at different levels of an organization about how do I want to apply these, I can say that maybe there are two of these or three of these different beliefs that I think apply to my entire team, that this year, these are the things that we want to work on. Maybe I haven't individual location or a studio, maybe there are two or three different things that they need to work on. As a particular team, maybe one or two that this team needs or as an individual, there's one or two things that individual needs to work on. The reason why this works is because it is a shared vocabulary across the entire team. It is something where everybody can hold each other accountable for this. And so that allows us to be able to do this. And again, it empowers the team to be accountable for the change. Because again, this cannot just be one individual and everybody else sitting around waiting for that to happen. That is a fantastic way to get a lot of people who are going to be really frustrated. Because the reality is, is that leadership comes from a lot of little moments. Change comes from a lot of little moments. Simon Sinek, I thought described to the absolute best way where he said, design leadership is a lot like falling in love. You cannot tell me the one single moment that you fell in love with your significant other. It was a lot of little moments, a lot of little things that added up to something big change leadership, the things that we were talking about are about a lot of those little moments that add up to something that's much bigger, that's much more significant. I will often say that this comes through coaching You need to lean in, you need to be able to work with your people, you need to be able to do these sorts of things to help them grow. I'll often kind of break this down into three different parts. The first part really is that I need to define what is it that we need to work on? What's the problem, this could be anything big or small. It can be anything that isn't working as a team, it can be anything that doesn't work in individual. It is anything that I see that as a problem. And as a leader, what I want to do is I want to be able to get to that person as quickly as I can to have this conversation. Doing it a week later A month later, is meaningless. And that that's the thing is that a problem? It's just anything that's not working. Now what I then want to do, and this is the part where it becomes the burden on leadership is that I want to define what do I want to change. And this is where your leadership really comes into play because you have to define an outcome. This is a daunting thing you are messing with people's lives do not begin to take this the slightest bit lightly because this is something thing where we are helping to guide people's careers. There's a profound responsibility in that. But what I want to do is I want to be able to pick an outcome that I think is achievable for that person, I want to set them up for success, I want to pick a timeframe in which I think that they can reasonably do it. Now, the change comes from stringing a lot of these different things together, because again, a lot of these small incremental changes can lead to something big. And then last thing that I want to do is to define what I call an RLS. And an or else is really what spells out what's going to happen. If this doesn't happen. It doesn't need to be threatening. It doesn't need to be mean. But what it does do is it creates a sense of urgency, because the thing that we all know is that whenever it comes to change when it comes to creativity, fear is a fantastic motivator. I like the nervous laughter but you all know it's true. That's the thing we all have three weeks for a project the night before you freak out all of a sudden you start working like crazy. Again, I did a whole episode. Just looking at how do you do this sort of coaching thing to really dive into this. So I think the couple takeaways here for me are really that, you know, it look as a strong culture is going to create that sense of purpose. At the end of the day, I always like to think about this is that my team is the center of a hurricane. We need some place where we can be honest, we need someplace where there are other people that we know we can work with, there is some place that is safe to be able to have these conversations. Because whenever in the center of a hurricane, it's completely calm. If you take one step anywhere outside of your team. There's like farm animals flying around, like houses are blown over and like a tractor went down the road and like all kinds of craziness that each team's beliefs need to be unique to their personality and their challenges. This is why I don't take just the ones that I did take the time to invest and think about this and to invest in the coaching so that you know really what needs to go on here. Now then, the last part is Sort of like a kid apart. So a bunch of other things that I've found that are really important that I just want to run through and share really fast. The first one that I think is good is to establish some sort of rituals inside of your team. What are the things that are unique to your team? What are the things that really helped them? There are a few of these things that I've done in the past that I find successful one or what we call GSD days, get shit done. It can be days where there are no meetings, as leadership, have office hours where people can come and talk to you to be able to do inspiration meetings where you can actually start to account for your team so that there can be a non project based discussion of creativity someplace where people can come together and actually just talk about what inspires them. How about if you actually start to take hiring seriously, one of the things that drives me the craziest is when creativity becomes a popularity contest. We bring somebody and you think they're a great talent, you love their book. They go through and the team meets with them. They come back and you say, what do you think? Oh, they're really nice. I don't need more friends. I need people who can work. I need people who can think one of the things that we do, which oddly I find to be an incredibly controversial thing is that we will actually give candidates a test to see how they think. Because one of the things that I have discovered is that there is too many talented people out there who are talented because of their last leadership. There are too many talented people out there who are talented because they spawn their career in a certain way. I look at this that I'm not going to hire a chef unless I try their food. And the other thing that I will quite candidly say is that I also do not want to hire somebody who is too big of a prima donna to go through this because I have had to do this for every single job that I have. And it ain't bragging if you can do it. If you've got the skills, you should have no problem with this. And the people who will tell me that this is just a ploy to get free work. This is just a ploy for us to be able to get talent to come in so that we can steal their ideas. You know what the last test was that we gave them was that we asked them to redesign the city app using only emojis. If You think we're launching that anytime soon? Have at it. Here again, Episode 17. This was all that this was about was about how do you actually hire better people? How do you take this seriously, and really make sure that you are putting these people through the test to make sure you're putting the best people on your team, to make sure that there are ways for you to give and get candid feedback. 84% of people if you were a leader who worked for you will not tell you the truth 84% that means eight and a half people, I don't know how you get to a half person, but we'll figure that out later. Eight and a half people are afraid to really tell you the truth about what is going on with your team. As a leader that makes a massive blind spot and a massive thing that you need to try to figure out how to overcome. The best way that I know to deal with this is to do a three step process. And what this feedback is just simply asking people very directly, what do you want me to start doing? What do you want me to stop doing doing and what you want me to continue doing? Because these are things that do that get rid of the like, oh, you're good. Everything's fine. It's great. The easy cop out answers. I actually want real answers to this. And again, I'm incredibly aware like when it's my position, I get the whitewashed answer I get like then oh, everything's fine. Everything's great. We're all good. Rome is burning in the background. But somehow we need to get to these answers. And the other big one, especially if you're a leader is to empower your people. You need self managing teams, let them use their talent. You hire talented people, how about if you actually trust them to do some real work? Because the thing that I can tell you is if you want to be that leader that just simply Has everybody do what you say. You're gonna have a fantastic turnover. Nobody wants to work for that. I don't want to I don't want little versions of me partially because it's creepy, but also because it's fascist. This is the thing is I'm going to give you that responsibility. But the thing is, is that I'm also going to give you the accountability for that those results, because the two have to go hand in hand. Because that is the part of what it is that we're doing. That is the accountability that I need for people. And so want to make sure that we have some time for questions. So there's just a few things that I want to leave you guys with, is that the approach that I use for my internal team, having spent equal time on the agency side and equal part on the in house side, is to think about how do you build a team that has that aggressive agency mentality, but it is grounded in an in house authority, because the thing that an agency does really well is that there is an inherent threat, that if you do bad work, you're going to get fired. It keeps the knife sharp, it keeps you really focused on what matters. The in house side can let that knife go doll, you can start to get too comfortable. You get very comfortable with the excuses and the reasons and all the reasons why things can't be done. And then before you know You can't figure out why you're not doing better work. I talked about this a little bit before, have patience. Change takes time, you are going to make mistakes, make no doubt about it. That just because I have put this plan together does not mean that I have anything close to a perfect team. It does not mean that we are doing all of these things because this stuff takes time. Trust me, I'm a spectacular failure to my team on a very regular basis. But it's part of what's got to happen. All of us learn, all of us have to figure this stuff out. And we try to do the best that we can with it. But here's the biggest thing in the end. You're going to think about all this stuff. You're going to take a bunch of notes, you're going to go back to work next week. And the thing that I told my team in the very first big meeting that we had, is that you're going to come to a fork in the road. And one of two things is going to happen. And this is why I think more of the in house teams need to be able to take more pride, and they need to be able to be harder about their work. Because like I said, one of two things is going to happen. You're going to go back, and you're either going to get busy making changes, or you're going to get busy making excuses. And it is up to everybody who is in here to decide that if the excuses outnumber the changes, what are you going to do about that? What are you going to do to be able to affect that change? What are you going to do to be able to turn that ship in the right direction? Because that's the thing. It's very easy to just kind of go like, yeah, we'll go along with it. Then don't sit here and complain about why you don't get respect. Don't complain about why your work isn't better. Because it's up to all of us that are in this room to bring this change. Our companies want it. They need it. It is up to us to figure out how do we bring it to them? How do we every day, fall in love with that every day make that little decision that's going to add up to that big difference? And it's hard. It's hard in many times. often say like I'm the guy that's gonna run up the hill and be the first one that gets shot, not killed shot, very important difference. But the thing that you will see is that initially, while you will be vilified for being the crazy one, you will be vilified for that one who wants to do things differently. As soon as you start to find any amount of success, and amazing thing happens, those same people will seek you out, because they know of the thinking that you'll bring because they know that you will challenge the status quo because they know that you're not going to just go along with what everybody says. It takes time. But when it happens, the ability to have that effect, to be able to be the creative team that can change a company. That's the craziest thing in the world. So like I said before, for those of you who want this deck, that's where you can find it. This is what the page looks like. All the podcasts that I mentioned are right there, you'll see the big blue button where you can download the PDF. The other thing that I do in maintenance Is this which is called the essentials. These are all of the apps, the books, the people, the videos, anything that I've come across in my career that I think is worth checking out, is on this list. Then I would ask you, if you love the session, or if you hated it, please take a minute and fill out that survey. Because for me, a lot of work goes into this and I really love to find out what people think about it. The other big thing is that you have the chance to win some big prizes, you have the ability to win four different Adobe books. So that's right ladies and gentlemen. It also could be a Wakeham tablet for easy payments. They make me say that, but that's it. And so, who's got questions can start over here and I'm gonna have to ask you if you can either if you're loud shout if not a little Get closer because we don't have mics. And I'll repeat the question for everybody. So the question was, what do you say to the designer who says that I've worked here for 10 years, they're never going to let me do that. I think that one of the biggest challenges to leadership is apathy. And I think that the thing that you need to do one is to lead by example, and two is that you need to put the structures in place, you need to redefine the norms of your team, so that that attitude is no longer accepted. Because the reality is, is that that's the thing that you're going to see. And that's why for me, it's very much about making changes or making excuses is because I have to redefine the norm of my team, that at the end of the day, if you are not somebody who's going to get on board with this, your time here is going to be limited. Also because of the fact that I know that as that my team gets better. And for like the team at Citi, it was about the year and a half mark, it starts to change because it no longer is about how do we just get the basic tools that we need the process that we need, because now all of a sudden we're doing better work. Now it becomes about how do you then encourage that Those a players because the A players will actually then start to reject the people who think that way. So I think that a lot of it is just really going in and saying like, Look, and that's why I give it as a warning is that this is what the expectation is going to be, this is what we're going to be about. If you aren't about that, that's fine. maybe find the exit sometime soon. Or the fact that know that this is going to be what we're going to reset the standard to, and that that's what it is we're going to do going forward because it is it's a huge problem. Because for all of us, there's been some leader who looked like me who sounded like me who came in before who said something like this, and it didn't go anywhere. Why the hell is this time going to be any different? But I think again, it's up to that determination and the follow through that you really are going to invest in that that's gonna make the difference. I know there's a young lady right there that had a question. Okay. I'm sorry, you just said you have four bosses. You've seen office space, right. Sorry. Keep going. So the question was about being a woman establishing yourself in a leadership position. I have thoughts. I mean, look, I am not. And I'll tell you this, right? This is a very place where I try to tread very carefully. The leadership team that I had whenever I was at Starwood was all female. I've seen firsthand where if I said something, and my head of design said something, it was heard very differently. And it had to be coached and it had to be working with her about the fact that she couldn't be herself because she was far too easily dismissed. It is infuriating. It is a cultural bias that I think that we all have to fight against. But for me, at the end of the day, the thing that is irrefutable are the work, the numbers, the proof in the research, because I think those are the things at the end of the day that aren't about gender, they aren't about anything else. I don't have advice on how to be able to fight that or be able to fight the boys club. I think that it is. It is an unfortunate part of this industry. I think to kind of humiliate her, there's a woman who is putting her hand up right over there, whose name is Trina Cintron. Trina was that woman who worked for me for nine years. She's one of the strongest women I've ever worked with. And I think she went through an incredibly unfair time at our company. Because of that. And it took a lot of time for her to find the respect that she needed. I would highly encourage you to talk to her because I think she can speak about it with far more authority than I can. But the only thing that I would be able to tell you is like I said, is that how do you put it into the place that is irrefutable. The numbers, the research, the work where it's not an opinion about those things? And the other thing that I would tell you is that if that continues, get the hell out of there. Because I think your talent needs to be someplace better. I know that a lot of people want advice that there's some magic bullet, but at the end of the day, they don't deserve you'd screw them go someplace better. How do you reach close people? Yeah, for CEOs and CFOs? I think a lot of it is that it is really challenging. And I think that in a lot of cases, again, it's not making the case about design. Because again, design is just pretty design is something that can be very easily dismissed. I think that for me the ability to talk about creativity to talk about the way that design can influence a customer experience, the way that we can talk about like in banking, how do we go from servicing to a relationship? How do I actually speak in business terms that they can understand? This is why so often whenever I'm asked, should young designer study like coding, I would argue study business, because again, the first to bring about the change that we're talking about in these in house teams, you have to be able to have a seat at the table and talk in a way that they can understand. And the problem is that too many of our design terms of the things that we've done They do not. And so again, if I can translate it into consumer engagement, if I can translate it into a lot of those sorts of things, as we talk about retention, as we talked about, a lot of the benefits that come off of that is I can start to so research and be able to actually like re educate them about who is even their consumer. Because this is the problem is that too many of us have this arrogance to think that we're the consumer, we're not, you have to be able to get them past that and be able to get them over that. And to be able to show them that it isn't scary. It isn't fleeting, that here again, this is a process that we all can go through together to be able to figure this stuff out. But also the thing that I do, and again, this is just in my situation, is to also go through and challenge them on that statements. Because so many leadership, it's so many companies Trust me. I've interviewed with a ton of them, who will talk about innovation, and design and all these other things like they understand what the hell those terms mean. But then you sit down with them and you say, and I actually had a CEO conversation a couple years ago. He's like, oh, Robert innovation and we want to do all this great stuff. And I said, Great. Can you tell me exactly what is Innovation mean to you? He said, it'd be great if our point of sale system looked better. Thanks so much. Thanks for your time. I'm not your guy. Right. But that's the thing is that a lot of it is also for the fact that what they're saying is authentic? Because again, a lot of them say it, money tells the truth. Are they investing in it? are they putting money in it? are they putting money into those projects? Or again, is it a screenshot in a press release about something that we might do someday? That doesn't impress me ship something, then I'll be impressed. Yes, sir. So how do you comment on work without depleting them? I this is a rule that I always kind of talk about about a 10 8010 rule 10% of the time, what I want to do is just leave the team alone. Because what I want to do is be able to say look like they need to work through whatever this problem is. And so I think that I need to leave them alone and let them do that. 80% of the time, what I want to do is to try to provide insight and try to provide guidance, because I need to respect them. I need to respect their thought process. But again, maybe there's an insight, maybe there's a road that I can set them down that will help them work through problem, the last 10% is the nuclear option. And this is that I am out of time I'm out of budget, or I'm out of political capital. And that at that point, I need to be able to just simply say, this is what the answer is gonna be. The first, you know, on either end of that, I think need to be extremes. Because again, this is about for me empowering them that they need to be the ones who push through this, but I'm going to hold them accountable for what that is. And then again, we're that slides is going to move around a ton. So I think Unfortunately, that's all the time we've got. For anybody who has questions still, I'll be happy to hang out and answer all of them for anything that you have. And hey, thank you so much for your time. Well, that was it. That was a big session. It was a ton of work. It was a thrill and a lot of fun to be able to present. Hopefully you liked it. Like I said before, if you like anything that you're hearing in this show, do me a quick favor, head over and leave a review, click a couple stars right away. couple of words, do something, it makes a big difference. Make sure you subscribe to the show so you know whenever the latest episodes come out. As always, you can find out more about this podcast related articles get the Show Notes for this episode and all the others. Just head over to podcast, Stephen Gates calm. Stephen as always is STP HEN. You can find all of that there. If you have any questions about anything if you want to be CLS what it is that I'm up to head over to Facebook, type in The Crazy One podcast and do a search. And then like the page that you find there. I'm posting articles whenever I can, answering questions, doing all sorts of stuff there. As always, the boys down legal want me to remind you that all of us here are my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. These are all just my own opinions. And finally, I say it every time because I mean it every time but thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only real luxury that any of us have. And I'm always incredibly humbled that you want to spend any of it with mean. So until next time whenever I'll be back and we can listen to the second session that I did at Adobe max. Stay crazy.