Principles of Work: 2020
A personal reflection of my design practice
What an eventful year 2020 was. Of all the tumultuous Earthly events, from the Australian wildfires to BLM protests, Chadwick Boseman’s death to the (rather inconsequential) impeachment, the pandemic no doubt took the crown. COVID-19 upended our personal and professional lives and brought them together like two gravitationally attractive stars, creating nothing short of a supernova in our living room.
Like a true Millennial, I moved back into my parents 2-BR apartment at the start of the lockdown here in Thailand, complete with a comfort couch for dozing off as my office. Armed with mostly research-based work and flexible hours, every day I would move all of 10 meters from my bedroom to the family’s living room to work (the more ergonomically appropriate kitchen table is in a common area where the TV is on ad infinitum).
I would sit and write. And read. And write. And look out the window to stare at the ever-growing garden of edible vegetables (it never became that really). By the time the lockdown loosened up in the second half of the year, we’re free to roam the public again, I was pretty good at spending time with myself.
This setup, in all its inconvenience, gave me plenty of mental headspace to reflect on how i work, what distracted me, how i make decisions, who i speak to to give me energy, and all the things related to, well, making dough in this life. By the time new year’s rolled around and we were on a second lockdown, albeit a less stringent one without curfew, I had crystallized three pretty clear principles on what makes me “tick” at work* (or, what “tick” my boxes for professional work).
*As a design strategist, I currently apply human-centered design to help clients build organizational capacity and processes for innovation and discover customer insights for new business.
Always work with friends.
I can trace this idea back to my dad, who often says to my younger self, “our client’s problem is our problem”. I’ve written about this mindset prior, and with my own business, the advice is more relevant than ever. For me, this piece of wisdom manifests itself in the extra weighted blanket of empathy in my interactions with client.
I can name many friends over the past year or so who I’ve worked with. One client that stood out is RISE Academy (now University), a leading corporate innovation learning hub in Thailand, who took a chance on me when I first started out as a young, hot-headed design strategist looking to share with the world what I knew. I connected with the top management team for a casual conversation, over which we discussed the future of design thinking training, and left with a surprise brief to pitch a new public workshop.
I dug into my old materials, attended their core design thinking workshop, prepared a curriculum. I framed the proposal as part of a larger effort to build depth in innovation skills and to engage existing clients in long-term innovation work, in line with their vision. Without much Q&A, they jumped on board and dedicated a whole team to help give me feedback, organize the venue, reach out to clients, and everything else in between.
Five workshops and over a hundred participants later, here I am, still on their shortlist for workshop facilitators and grateful for their trust. They knew that I could use the support to get started in a field where I was (by reputation) an amateur, and I, as best I could, shared what I knew to help grow their business. I’m proud to call the team at Rise my friends; I recently stopped by with a gift (a book by a former professor who admire very much) and got this awesome innovation socks!
I wanted to pay RISE’s warmth forward, to think first about people and business after.
I have since volunteered to help with student-run startup programs and hackathons, gave feedback to my friends pitch decks or projects, and made introductions to the right people where I can. These days, with each new opportunity or project, I try to think about the friendships that I can build and the people that I can help around me through my actions.
Don’t tear down their Legos
The first few months after incorporating Amplifi Design with my co-founder, I was pretty easily excited by any and all opportunities that came my way (most were warm leads from my network of friends). I took phone calls or emails asking to meet as small tokens of personal validation that I chose the right path. People need me!
I thought that with good intentions and good experiences under my belt, I was ready to help teams innovate with design thinking.
I learnt the hard way that not everyone responds to the same message the same way. Sometimes, the client is going to call you the evening of your first day and cancel.
So, here’s what happened (the industry, nature of work, and other unique details have been changed for privacy). A friend in the tourism/hospitality sector reached out to me about helping his innovation teams scale up their ideas that addressed the companies strategic vision. Specifically, he was concerned that the problems weren’t clear enough and that the teams were jumping to conclusions — one that were neither desirable for their customers nor innovative. We agreed to host a “design clinic” where I could review the work and give feedback to the team, live.
My contact sent me the strategy deck and the first team’s action plan in a presentation format. I reviewed them both, annotating extensively and with red text my questions, concerns, confusions, suggestions.
The clinic day arrived and after a few pleasantries, I led a facilitated discussion of (read: tore into) the team’s point of view statement (“do you like it?”), their user personas (“what do they value in your business, really?”), their ideas (“this requires a lot of investment… how can we validate this first?”), and everything I thought was helpful to dive into. I truly wanted to help them succeed.
By the end of the session, the teams were shook.
Stuck in my head to this day is an image of my contact and the team’s lead, locked in a defensive stance, both leaning forward with their hands on the meeting table and debating the cost / benefits of prototyping. It turned out the teams were strapped for time, pressured to execute rather than take small validating steps, because their KPIs called for measurable results, now. So they stuck to what is trendy (Instagram-able decors! Red carpet welcome! Farmers markets! Celebrity chefs!) to attract their clients, without much attention to strategy or even innovation for that matter.
As hinted above, my contact called that night and said that his other team “didn’t want to change anything about their plan”, and called off my second clinic. I wanted the team to prototype to success. And I had delivered that message… poorly.
This experience reminded me of behaviourial economist Dan Ariely’s study on people’s motivation at work where he asked them to build Lego sets under different circumstances. Here’s a short summary from TED.com:
The Study: In Man’s search for meaning: The case of Legos, Ariely asked participants to build characters from Lego’s Bionicles series. In both conditions, participants were paid decreasing amounts for each subsequent Bionicle: $3 for the first one, $2.70 for the next one, and so on. But while one group’s creations were stored under the table, to be disassembled at the end of the experiment, the other group’s Bionicles were disassembled as soon as they’d been built. “This was an endless cycle of them building and we destroying in front of their eyes,” Ariely says.
The Results: The first group made 11 Bionicles, on average, while the second group made only seven before they quit.
In other words, people whose work goes unappreciated — or even dismissed — will feel less motivated to perform on the job (and vice versa). I had dismantled my client team’s Legos before their eyes, when I thought I was strengthening their Bionicle.
They way I see it, they refused to try a new way of executing because I didn’t respect where they are coming from. My good intentions became a scapel that attempted to cut out unnecessary risks in project but I ended up nicking old wounds and maybe a vessel or two.
So now, when I go into meetings, I would ask myself: Am I picking up the Lego that they’re putting down?
End well
Last but not least, I have learnt to end things well, with respect to projects as much as professional relationships. My co-founder and I had worked with this consultant who we thought shared our workview and worldview so we invited her to invest a small amount in the company for equity. We had worked on our biggest project to date and the results were great. And then the pandemic hit, and projects became intermittent and I lost touch. There was no work that needed help after all.
One month became two, three, and before I knew it, almost a year had passed without much interaction. It seems that we were both able to support ourselves with work and it became very clear that we’re amicably going our separate ways. Nevertheless, it took me a long time to muster up the courage to meet and have “the talk”.
We sat down for drinks one “winter” afternoon (it doesn’t get cold here), at this minimalist, speakeasy-esque tea shop embedded in a home decor and trinkets shop embedded in a house that is hosting a market with vendors selling french fries, ice cream, burgers, and, I believe, some healthy snacks. After some chit-chat, I broached the subject of equity by way of asking about her situation with work (see: Always work with friends on putting the person before the company). She happily shared that she found stable job working on social impact initiatives that she loves, which she satisfied her financial needs at this time.
She understood where we were as a company, what we needed to do, and of course, she was fine with whatever arrangement of partnership me and my co-founder agreed to (“just let me know what I need to sign!”). She also wanted to see us succeed and has continued to send us leads for new projects to this day.
Looking back, I can honestly say that I was happy for her, truly, and I wondered why I was nervous to talk to her in the first place.
I learned that it’s best to be honest with myself (and if I can’t do this, I should seek counsel from someone who knows me well professionally) and to conduct any hard conversations with authenticity and heart. There were other instances that I had to prematurely end things as well, from starting student-run design club to a series of foresight workshops for executives to a community for futurists. I didn’t quite have the room to “talk it out” with the friends involved in these initiatives but it was plenty clear to everyone what was happening.
I like to think that the end of things isn’t a failure on my or anyone’s part, but rather that the timing is not quite right. This reframing gives me hope and courage to put in the work again, some time in the future… when I’m ready.
At the ripe age of 30, it is borderline for me embarrassing to admit that 2020 was the calendar year that I spent working on one thing a.k.a. growing my company (before this I’ve been in school, internships, more school, and short-term jobs). I had many doubts about my professional aptitude and capabilities in the “innovation” space going into last year, not least because I was trained and worked briefly as a chemical engineer in research.
While, yes, I have much to learn in terms of technical depth, I felt like I’ve grown as a professional person through many fun and not-so-funny experiences thus far. In my founder/design strategist role, I got to meet, collaborate, and debate with many fascinating characters — some of whom spark rainbows while others bouts of migraine — who taught me these three lessons about work. They made me realize that a good designer relies on more than just good technique; it’s about the intention that you bring to your every conversations and interactions with others.
