The LX: Leading Experience 2018 Recap

When is the last time you checked in with your leaders? Or yourself?

LX developed when our focus was changing—not just in our organization, but across all organizations—for leaders to focus on their people and the design practice. Leaders have to focus on so many things, so our hosts Anel Muller and Dianne Que challenged us to slow down and check in.

Our programming team pulled from a variety of industries, acknowledging that inspiration is everywhere. We wanted to bring in diverse ideas, perspectives, and abilities—not from just managers, but from leaders.

“Leadership comes in different shapes and sizes,” says Dianne. “We may not have written books (yet), but we’re holding things together.”

Themes emerged of elevating your cause to rally people around it; building diverse, inclusive teams; and making it all happen by turning visions into plans while creating safe space for learning and evolution.

Our hopes for you are that you can find the fun in leadership, and that you were able to take one thing away to implement immediately. Many of you shared these in the event app or on Twitter at #LXconf18. Even if you didn’t attend, feel free to tell us what speaks to you from the below takeaways.

Design + Equity: Design Leadership for Community Change

Antionette Carroll, Founder, President, and CEO, Creative Reaction Lab

“We’re changing the world every single day. We’re the creators of culture, the creators of society, and yet we don’t understand the power we have. Are you changing it for the better? If not, what are you going to do about that?” Antionette asks.

When Antionette moved to St. Louis, she discovered a segregated community of mansions in one part of town, while another part of the same town doesn’t receive the same opportunities. That was a week before the unrest in August of 2014.

“Someone lost their life,” she says. “Take away all the politics. Take away anything you may have heard. A person lost their life. Imagine if you came back to your table right now and someone was gone.”

In response to this, she got a group together in St. Louis to do a 24-hour challenge. Several viable ideas came about, and some continue to function. But this model was not sustainable. To create equity-centered community design, Antionette founded Creative Reaction Lab.

Creative Reaction Lab provides diversity, equity, and inclusion training. The training focuses especially on Black and Latinx youth, as they are the investment in longterm community change, she says.

“You have your craft, talent, expertise, but you have to determine your mission. Unfortunately, there are enough problems to go around. This work is hard. It’s not something that’s going to be transformed overnight,” she says.

Plant the seeds of community change:

• Antionette highly encourages dissent. She says if you’re in a room where everyone agrees with you, you’re in the wrong room.
• Because there is no such thing as perfection, embrace the spectrum of failure. Bring failure into the process.
• Invite yourself to social justice issues. Consider diversity, equity, and inclusion in your process. Engage people and create the call for action as many times as it takes.
• Join the Creative Reaction Lab Slack channel, buy or download the Field Guide, or become a member.

The Humanity of Creativity

Lauren D. Russo, Managing Director, Executive Coach, The Creative Executive

We all have our own hardwired mindsets based on repeated processes. Lauren compares these to country roads.

Country roads can be crappy routes that get you from Point A to Point B, she says. Eventually the city paves the road because it’s used a lot. Then the city realizes it needs to expand to become a freeway. The route hasn’t changed, it’s just the memorized route. Your brain hardwires the same way, creating mental models for whatever gets the most attention and repetition.

“As the leader of your organization, you are the catalyst,” says Lauren. “Are you connecting with yourself to what inspires you? Are you giving people what they need? Are you creating space for their creative process that is functional and creative? Tap into the creative human potential that you can be proud of.”

Some routes to take while navigating toward creative humanity:

• Get a coach. We all have mental models and habits we fall back on. Being coached through changing territory helps keep you on track while building that new mindset.
• Really great leaders are invested in building power in others. Effective accountability is checking in more that you probably want to, and your reports should notice how much you check in with them while providing space and giving them recognition.
• Create space for yourself! Conferences like this allow you to take space to look at the big picture of your team and industry. Think about what inspires and motivates you.

How to VP

Cap Watkins, VP of Design, BuzzFeed

There’s one thing that never makes it into the process docs or the workflow charts or the calendar, but every leader experiences it—The Fear.

Cap took note of all the fearful thoughts that arise: Am I doing a good job? Are people on my team happy? What if someone quits? What would we do until we hire someone? Did I choose the right meeting to go to? Am I evaluating people fairly? I feel like I’m forgetting something. What am I forgetting? Am I even being helpful? Am I useful? DO I EVEN MATTER?!

The good news is every successful person has The Fear. It means you check your work. You have other people check your work. It makes you seek feedback. Ultimately, it makes you better at your job.

So, how do you VP?

• As a leader, you have to be who you really, really are. Authenticity is key.
• Ask yourself the questions The Fear brings, but don’t let them derail you. Check back in with your team. Tell them what you’re doing, and ask if your work is useful to them.
• It is more dangerous to be overly confident than it is to dance with The Fear. It’s actually good for you, and it could save you from velociraptors, says Cap.

Design Without Limits: Expanding the Boundaries

Patricia Moore, President, Moore Design Associates

Designers have a duty to be political, and to think of those least represented.

“I design with the hierarchy of the people with the greatest need first, so we end up thriving—not just surviving—by design,” Patricia says.

As a young female designer, she would raise her hand in a room full of men, and be told, “We don’t design for those people.”

It was a refrain she wasn’t ready to accept, and instead decided that if she wasn’t designing for those people, who was? At the age of 26, she took on a brave project to become 85. Over 4 years, she dressed as 5 different elder women at different levels of health and wealth.

Patricia is named one of The Most Notable American Industrial Designers in the history of the field and one of The 40 Most Socially Conscious Designers in the world.

A few tips to become limitless:

• Design for autonomy. Consider ability rather than age.
• One day we will all grow old, our eyesight will worsen, and the best products will be those that serve us. Machines can become our helpers, and technology could help usher in an era in which our last breaths are as welcomed as our first.
• Some of us are the lucky ones, but many others will find themselves at risk. What about them? Take care of them.

Imagining the Future of Shared Urban Spaces

Corinne Okada Takara, Artist and Arts Educator

Silicon Valley’s innovation is known around the world, thanks to the technologies that continue to release from our offices. And yet, as in many cities, there exists a discrepancy of access to technology for residents. Corinne decided to bring 3D printing and CAD tools to the streets to make San Jose residents feel like they’re part of the innovation in their town.

“Public space is not the space that we build. It’s what happens in that space,” says Corinne.

How to create space for co-creation:

• With lower government funding coming in to our cities, we need to share. Connect with industries and suppliers to share process, resources, and skills.
• Community art needs to come from the community. Invite participation across silos and provide multiple ways to participate. Clip boards, Play-Doh, 3D printing, quilting, painting, conversations…be playful!

Small Acts of Service Make Big Differences

Cori Schauer, Service Designer, City & County of San Francisco Digital Services

When Cori transitioned from research to service design, specifically with the government, the intersection of service and leadership clicked. Like many designers, she enjoys working on big, gnarly problems, and there are plenty of those in the public space.

Her principles below seem simple enough when we’re talking about products for the masses, and we expect these things. But imagine if none of this was given to you automatically, Cori says. What if people were dismissive, afraid of you, or didn’t speak your language? What if you didn’t have the right tools to complete a task? The most vulnerable populations in San Francisco are dealing with this everyday. Cori challenges herself as a design leader to be these things for people.

“When you are of service, it’s not about losing power, it’s about gaining perspective,” says Cori. “These are qualities that good leaders have. Service is not a perspective of giving up power, it’s distributing and sharing the load. It’s about gaining voice.”

Principles to guide small acts of service:

• Be kind.
• Make things easy.
• Make things actionable.
• Help people stay in control.

Design Leadership Lessons from Michelin Starred Kitchens

Stephen Goldmann, Consultant and Entrepreneur, The Culinary Edge

The production of food in a Michelin Starred kitchen is not too different from launching a product. Food is just a bunch of inputs being synthesized and then meeting with great timing on your plate.

“Great design is creating change in an organization,” Stephen says. “It starts as soon as you tell somebody what you’re doing.”

Recipes for success:

• Define your progress and review it everyday. Whiteboards and sticky notes are great, but if the team can’t pick up the latest thinking, you’re wasting time.
• Ask “Why?” 5 times to get to the underlying truth and build the strategy.
• Share with purpose. Surprises will emerge, but people need to know where they’re going. Leave breadcrumbs to seed ideas and lead people to the outcomes.
• And of course, Stephen had some food tips: Hot food should go on hot plates, cold food on cold plates. Use more salt. Practice restraint.

Designing for a Distributed Work Experience

Jaymar Cabebe, Network Operations Lead, Gigster

Distributed teams are becoming the norm, often including many remote employees, agency consultants, freelancers, and other independent workers. Gigster coordinates thousands of teams of remote freelancers to make software together. While trying to deliver the best talent and create the best experience for the talent, Jaymar’s team has created a framework for their own operations to understand pain points.

Remote freelancers face misconceptions that they’re always working, or alternatively that they’re always not working. There are nuances in team dynamics that they miss because they’re not available to grab coffee with teammates, which creates room for misinterpretation. Of course, the benefits of working as or with freelance remote talent includes flexibility and specialization, among others.

Create a culture optimized for distributed work:

• Focus on motivation and incentives. How can you get your team motivated to reach the mission? Are there completion incentives in pay or perks you could offer?
• Create an empathetic culture. Gigster’s ops team seems to have some great Slack practices—they post project missions, have a channel specifically for celebrating wins, they over-communicate, and assume positive intent.
• Practice smart collaboration by valuing meeting time. If anything can be done asynchronously, don’t force everyone to hold the same time on their calendars. Be clear about expectations of availability, responsiveness, and ground rules for feedback.
• When you have teammates on camera or on the phone, make sure to check in with them during the meeting as if they were right there in the room. It takes practice, but acknowledging virtual presence shows you value their time.

Introducing Mindfulness for Emotional Intelligence in Leadership

Peter Weng, Chief Business Officer, Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute

Have you ever thought of a response to something two hours after the meeting has ended? Turns out that’s your rational brain returning to normalcy after a fight/flight response to something it perceived as a threat.

From an evolutionary perspective, if a bear is attacking you, it’s bad to have rational thoughts about its foraging techniques. You need to fight or flee immediately. Psychological threats, like when a colleague says something that undercuts you in a meeting, or when your boss says something in front of your peers, those things are perceived with the same threat level and shut down your brain.

A few practices to befriend the bears in your brain and think clearly:

• Foster a culture of mindfulness by modeling. Peter says that if you begin by practicing meditation, slowly mindfulness may creep in, eventually spurring questions of how you stay so calm under pressure.
• Try starting a meeting with a couple moments of silence, maybe only 30 seconds, and ask participants to think about their intentions for the meeting.

Starting a New Immigration Conversation

Michael Conti, Creative Manager, Define American

11 million people in the United States are undocumented. That’s a quarter of all living immigrants, and two-thirds of this population have lived in the US for over a decade. Define American provides a platform to tell the stories of undocumented Americans.

“Put the person first, and put their immigration status second,” says Michael.

Conversation starters:

• Ensure trust and be a respectful partner. Make people feel secure with open lines of communication. Be clear with people if you know there will be adversity and outline how you’ll be there to support them.
• Allow the community to inspire from within. Provide frameworks for mentorship and celebrate their stories.
• Visuals are mandatory. Make forms as easy as possible.
• Provide training if you’re asking people to make public statements.

The Game is Never Done: Design Leadership Lessons from Massive Multiplayer Game Design

Erin Hoffman-John, Designer & CEO, Sense of Wonder

What is the fairytale of your organization?

“Video games are not embarrassed to talk about elves and dragons and that sort of thing, and that allows us access to storytelling, an abstract connection, and an emotional construct,” says Erin.

How to play:

• Make people know what groups they’re a part of.
• Pull back and look at the whole system. Start with the idea that we are living our values, and distill that into a process to continuously refocus.
• When tuning the points of leverage in your organization, make them at low-leverage points. A massive shift might take new values and have unintended consequences. If you’re making a lot of change and nothing’s happening, you’re working with points of leverage that may be too small, but too big could have cascading effects.

Don’t Be a Robot: How to Be Human in the Future

Alida Draudt, Futurist, Capital One

Our coworkers will one day include humans and machines, and we need to shift our mindsets to prepare for it. By giving away some tasks to robots, humans can be left to the particularly human skills like creativity, discussion, and humor.

“How do we champion the human?” asks Alida. “We need to figure out how to live in tandem with unique human capabilities.”

Looking ahead:

• Add “curiosity time” into our workplaces.
• Think beyond the next quarter and ask what human behavior might be in 3–5 years, then work backwards.
• Let go of mental models that do not serve progress. Have a flexible mindset about impacts of emerging technologies on work styles, business environments, and customer behaviors.

Pay Attention

Chas Edwards, Co-Founder, President, and Publisher, Pop-Up Magazine Productions

Pop-Up Magazine is live, branded storytelling, experienced in giant theaters with thousands of other people. It’s put on by the creators of California Sunday Magazine, and brings editorial stories to the stage. These stories are all original, true, and have never been seen, published, or screened before.

“The most important piece of our work is convincing an audience to pay attention to us,” says Chas.

Mind these strategies to capture attention:

• Tell a story. If you think about media, there are different narrative structures. News gives you everything upfront. Magazines and TV shows tease the plot to pull you in and reward you for getting to the end. Know whether your audience is being informed or entertained.
• Tap into tribal urgency by understanding your audience at the human level. What might delight them? What would they be really upset about missing? What can’t they live without?
• Timing is everything. When are they most receptive?

Leaders aren’t always managers, but for anyone who’s leading, we see you. We also want to work with you.

Thanks again to everyone who spoke, facilitated workshops, attended, and co-created.

For more design talks, check out our upcoming evening of design for social good at Social Table, or come see us at UX Week.