Leading Design Conference 2017 (Day 1 Summary)
How come to terms with yourself and be authentic help you being a better leader
Our design team is still a baby compared to other teams out there (even our company too, arguably). So many challenges to face and fires to put out everyday.
As an accidental design lead, I need to catch up. Fast. But with whom should I consult? I rarely find experienced designers or even design leaders in Jakarta. So, I usually read lots of books and articles or listen to podcasts (I think Intercom has good contents). Lots of reflections help too. Or, on a rare occasion, I go to conferences.
In late October, my colleague and I were quite lucky to represent our team to attend the Leading Design Conference and Workshop 2017 in London.
We found the speakers and topics fascinating, so I would like to share our learning with you in a series of articles.
It’s worth noting that each topic deserved their own articles. At the end of the first day, we’re quite exhausted with loads of topics and ideas. My brain somewhat couldn’t process any more information at the end of the day 😂.
I’ll share my notes, hoping that you’ll be interested in the topics, explore more, and change your way of doing. Topics in this article are:
How to hire hundreds of designers and scale design culture?
Imagine that your boss tells you that the company wants to hire hundreds of designers A.S.A.P. What would you do?
Adam Cutler of IBM shared his story on how hiring 300+ designers and scale the design culture. He listed traits that make successful designer (at least in IBM) that I think quite relevant for us too such as humility and integrity. You can find all the traits, plus the full talk, that he mentioned on this video.
What’s more interesting for me is, in the Q&A Adam responded to retention and churn topic with “What kind of crap flavor do you want?”. We have to admit that there might not be a perfect organization for everyone — we make compromises all the time. When that moment comes, as a lead or a team member, we can have better discussion about the flavor we want. 🍨
Then, when asked about hiring and attracting talent, he mentioned about outreach activities; things that our organization is lacking right now.
Reflection: somehow our design team are too focused on our organization without really blending or giving back to the community.
From another angle, sometimes I personally feel that we’re not good enough and don’t want to share half-baked practices or things that we don’t understand; thus steer the growing Design Community in Indonesia in the wrong direction. However, we can share things that work and didn’t really work for us plus our learning and perspective to the community. I hope we can start with this post as a way of paying forward.
That not-good-enough feeling might be shared with other teammates. Other members in our team could happily share their perspectives — it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
We have different ways of seeing things because we have different backgrounds, values, skill-sets, and aspirations. Mainly because we are, well, human.
What kind of crap flavor do you want? — Adam Cutler
On one hand, we need to be professional.
But our job as a leader is to empower the people that work with us, remove roadblocks, and set the environment — so that they are able to be professional. Don’t be lazy and blame your team members when we haven’t done our homework.
Which brings me to the next talk by Julia Whitney, a leadership coach, about the human blueprint. She also held a practical workshop in the conference for stakeholders management (more on that later).
People, not resources.
Sometimes I heard that employees are being referred as resources during a discussion with stakeholders or when I read articles. Depending on the nuance of the word “resource” itself, remember that they are people. We can’t treat them as objects that can be moved around. We, especially as leaders, should understand and treat them as human.
Julia gave that kind of reminder in her talk. Using David Rock’s SCARF Model, she convinced us that people react to social threat/reward and physical threat/reward the same way. The model includes five domains of human social experience: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.
Reflection: it’s a good idea to constantly remind ourselves that we are working with humans. And when we add humans into equation, things become a little bit complex. It’s not as simple as if we do-this-then-that-will-happen kind of thing.
The topic is also applicable not only for design leaders, but for leadership team in other departments as well. She also shared on how we can take action by expanding our empathy, volunteering our vulnerability, and staying curious in terms of social interaction among people in our organization.
When organization structure hinders end-to-end service.
Navigating social complexity to build product portfolios in a corporate or startup is a challenging one, let alone orchestrating product and services in government side. If you have handled a project for government, then you might have a better picture, albeit it would be slightly different cases between countries and government bureaus.
Kate Tarling shared her firsthand experience as a design agency to work with government initiatives. It made me realize the complexity once she shared that many overlapping initiatives might be done by multiple teams (might be outsourced too) with a possibility of competing KPI. Not to forget the silos between departments, might be worst in government. Plus, how the government plans and allocates their budget might not be as flexible as private company.
Customers might not really care how we structure our departments (e.g. Policy & Strategy, Operations, Technology, and Finance). Rather, I’d argue, customers more likely care about their goals and how can they achieve them; We can also use the “jobs” term if we prefer.
On a positive note, she shared the optimism with us about the UK’s Government Transformation Strategy (more on that here). One of the things that they will do is to “design and deliver joined-up, end-to-end services”.
What a challenging task. However, as a user, I’m quite satisfied with the service that is being provided by them — for my case the job is about visiting UK.
So, how might we deliver end-to-end services that meet user needs despite the fact the structures of government (and many other organizations) aren’t designed to operate this way?
Tough one.
If she faced this kind of challenge in UK where the government started to realize and took action to joined-up, I wonder what other practitioners in Indonesia says about projects in our government. Most likely it will be harder.
How about delivering end-to-end service in a startup or company? Depending on how you organize the organization, I’d say it’s as hard as government environment, with different crap flavor (if we want to refer to Adam’s point above).
Nevertheless, she provided compelling examples and tips to align stakeholders from different part of organization — you can adopt her approach with your team too. I’ll throw out some examples:
- How to work across organizational boundaries?
(1) Work together more. (2) Don’t let the “department boundaries” come into our way. (3) Create communities. (4) Frame the work. - How to navigate a large organization?
(1) Understand the organizational hierarchy, even the “flat” one has dynamic of power. (2) People fear you will undo all their hard work and efforts to “land” their own thing in an organization. (3) Ideas to learn: organization design, business architecture, enterprise architecture, traditional management practice, a strategic theme, and others. (4) Don’t add to the confusion with another process, list of artifacts, or way of working. - How to manage services and performance in the future?
(1) Align on the service vision. (2) Set top outcomes and define metrics based on the outcomes. (3) Design leadership training: hostage negotiation, non-judgemental communication, assertiveness, boundary setting, conflict resolution, playing chess, the power play.
Reflection: understand the power dynamic within the organization. Learn and leverage “traditional” management practices. Speak and act on common language — avoid introduce another jargon. Demystify service design throughout the organization. Invest on leadership training.
It’s about designing good services. And a way of framing things that makes sense for everyone, so we get on and actually do it. Not service design™ carried out by service designers™. — Kate Tarling
Another challenge in Traveloka is finding design leaders or senior designers that match our needs.
A funny thing happened when we had a short chat with design leaders from a bank in Singapore at the conference. I honestly think that it might be easier to find good designers in Singapore compared to Indonesia. Turned out that’s not the case.
Design leaders from the inside.
I personally prefer leaders that has been groomed within the company, mainly because they already embrace our values, especially design values. However, senior leadership, say VP or Director of design level, is a different beast.
It’s quite a long journey to grow someone to be on that position. Plus, who will grow them? If the company can wait and have capabilities to grow them, then I might take this route — but often, we don’t have all the time in the world.
Samantha Soma’s talk tapped right on this topic. She shared on how GE builds their design leadership form within by using their UX Leadership Program.
It’s a 2-years rotation program with four different assignments (6 month each) in different teams and different roles. For example, a designer starts as an interaction designer in one business unit for 6 months, then move to another business unit as a user interface designer for the next six month.
Not all company can afford rotating designers from one place to another, especially with talent shortage and challenge in context transfer. But it’s a good idea nonetheless. We’ve been thinking about how designers can think beyond their current mission and for the whole organization perspective. The variation of this solution might be the solution.
Samantha also went trough with GE capabilities model that has four attributes: personal attributes, technical expertise, leadership, and business acumen. It’s a good talk that inspired me to experiment things in our organization.
Reflection: it’s interesting to see how larger organization hire and grow designers. One thing that she mentioned about hiring is to look for candidates with traits or skills that are hard to install or teach; things like proactiveness, reflective, humility, and resilience. It rings true to my hiring experience, at least in Traveloka, that successful designers mainly have that kind of traits. They can catch up gaps on technical skills in short amount of time.
Of course each designers have their own pace and journey. I cannot blindly compare my journey with others because our challenges and circumstances are different. However, there might be patterns or milestones that we can use to reflect on our own journey.
Know yourself, know your audience, know you’re not alone.
Stanley Wood shared lessons during his design leadership journey. He used medieval guild’s path to mastery as a reference. A person starts as an apprentice, grows a journeyman, and finally becomes a master. He shared lessons he learned for each phase.
Started as an accidental design leader in a startup, without other senior designer, he needs to learn fast. Like some of us do, and I did, we turned to books. He shared his collection here bit.ly/stanley-books. Interestingly, I also have read most of the books — don’t know whether I should be relieved or not.
But we need to understand that knowing something and put that into practice are different. I personally use books as sparks for inspiration or reflection of other’s journey. Then use the inspiration to try out things.
In the apprentice phase he also urged us to reflect back, understand ourselves, and play to our strength. What kind of a leader are we? What are our weaknesses?
Move to the journeyman, he shared his experience in scaling design on Spotify. Sometimes we already know what we want and have wonderful plan ahead of us: this is how our customers should use our service and get better value. This is how we should differentiate our offerings. This is how our team should collaborate with engineers and product management. This is how we should scale our design system.
Yes, that perfect plan.
Yet, despite good intentions from design team and stakeholders, that plan stays in our document. Why?
One of the reasons, he said, because we haven’t done our homework to demystify design.
I totally agree.
What is design in your company? What design team does? What design means? What kind of value that design can provide to customers and stakeholders? How do we measure design?
As design leaders, we need to speak the same language with stakeholders so that we can avoid the condition where our plan don’t see the light due to lost of translation.
Finally, moving to mastery, he visited other design teams (mostly on the US or Europe) to learn about three things: people, process, and tools. And things that he learn are:
- Org chart matter
- Design reviews matter
- Offices matter
- Grass isn’t greener (again, same tone with previous speakers)
Reflection: I’ll just rephrase points above. Know yourself, know audience, and know you’re not alone. I should pay more attention to the latter.
Transition to leadership.
Leadership or management is not for everyone. Some people are excellent with their craft and not really enjoy interaction with or to empower other designers. I once saw this kind of specialist, hybrid, or people managerial track during my early days as designer.
I often joke with my colleagues that the people-related focused task is undeniably challenging (physically and mentally) compared to a specialist. Specialist has their own challenges and circumstances, of course.
Some design leaders or managers started as an individual contributor, a specialist. And when the change happened, they forgot to shift their gears.
Russ Maschmeyer shared his experience from being a design leader and back again to individual contributor. Check his story here.
Being a leader means you are not working for yourself anymore. It’s not just about crafting, but thinking about other people. And it’s difficult. — Russ Maschmeyer
Reflection: I’ve been on that transition too, from individual contributor to design leadership assignment. That time was quite strange if not uncomfortable. The challenge was mostly about managing expectation of stakeholders and myself. While I want to be a specialist and focus on product strategy, now I can say that I fully enjoy and grateful for the people-related focus opportunities.
Your worth is not measured by how many direct reports you have.
It’s about how meaningful your work and how much impact you can create. I wholeheartedly agree with the point in this interview here about scaling the team culture.
We hear the word “scale” all the time. If you are part of a growing team, most likely you will encounter scaling problems in your organization. Well, you are not alone.
Simon Dogget of Farfetch shared his scaling story and how they structure their leadership team in talks titled Scale, Fail, or Bail.
He listed tips and reflection for each parts: scale, fail, or bail. Interestingly, they split responsibility of design leaders in some areas such as hiring and retention, creative direction, operations, etc. It’s quite of a luxury to have design leadership team to handle that.
Then, he mentioned that we set up the design leaders for failures, from the start, as early as on the job description. When the design leaders are expected to managing up (huge responsibility) and still crafting when they got a chance while it should be handled by someone else.
As a lead, we have to find the highest leverage task. Clue: most of the time it’s not about crafting.
He ended with list of questions to decide whether we have to bail from design leadership or not:
- Do you have the ability to hire the team you need to handle all the work you’re accountable for?
- Can you redefine that hiring process and refresh it based on your needs?
- Are you able to set objectives and measures that make sense to designers?
- Do you have ownership of your own budget?
- Do you have the power to set your own policies on things like remote working, software, hardware, and travel?
- Is the company commercially viable in the long term? Are they anywhere near those numbers?
It’s late afternoon and we had two talks left. We’re quite exhausted but had to stay strong. The next two were as interesting and important as the previous talks.
Women in leadership.
We moved on to a quite interesting topic and different from other topics on that conference: about leadership pipeline for women.
Janice Fraser gave eye-opening session by bringing the talk titled “The Leadership Pipeline: Why Women Don’t Advance Into Senior Leadership and What To Do About It.”
She’s one of a few women that has experienced senior leadership position and frustrated enough to leave. However, she is not giving up to find out more about this phenomena, give awareness, and share possible actions for us.
The takeaway: there is a bias towards women in leadership pipelines.
In the talk she shared her literature review, synthesize results, and strategy to tackle this issue.
Reflection: gain and create more awareness of the situation in our workplace. Be aware of the sidelines, laterals, and staff role assignment. Mind the glass cliff. Be proactive. If you are in that position, reach out to your peers or leads, find a sponsor.
Nothing compares to the original talk, watch it here.
Be true to yourself.
The last talk for Day 1 was about reflection.
On “Eat Only Elk: Authenticity, Transformation, and the Business of Design”, Andrea Mignolo emphasized on the importance of being present and how we can strengthen our capabilities to be present.
She started the rather poetic talk by presenting a pluriverse concept in which there are different ways of knowing, being, and doing. Then, she encouraged the audience to dive and discuss our belief systems.
It’s an amazing talk. I love how she delivered the presentation.
I just wished it’s not scheduled at the end of the day or I wished I still have more energy to concentrate on that afternoon. My words can’t do justice to the talk, you should really watch the video by Andrea here.
Reflection: reflective practice is fundamental. Be present, not autopilot. The pluriverse, many ways of doing and thinking. How might we create belief systems that support more powerful, more meaningful, and more soulful ways of working together?
BONUS: List of videos.
- Becoming an Egoless, Collaborative Designer — ADAM CUTLER
- The Human Blueprint — JULIA WHITNEY
- Orienting Organisations to Deliver Good Services — KATE TARLING
- Hire Once, Grow Twice — Building Design Leadership From Within — SAMANTHA SOMA
- Before Mastery: Lessons Learned Trying to Master Design Leadership — STANLEY WOOD
- There and Back Again — RUSS MASCHMEYER
- Scale, Fail, or Bail — SIMON DOGGETT
- IRENE AU in conversation with Andy Budd
- The Leadership Pipeline: Why Women Don’t Advance Into Senior Leadership and What To Do About It — JANICE FRASER
- Eat Only Elk: Authenticity, Transformation, and the Business of Design ANDREA MIGNOLO
That’s a wrap for Day 1. I find the conference useful for me and Traveloka Design team. I hope you can benefit from things that I learned too.
Nothing beats coming to the conference and see it the firsthand of course. So go to the 2018 conference if you can, go check it on their website. Meanwhile, you can watch all this year’s talks on Clearleft’s Vimeo page here. Yes, all. I know. They are quite generous aren’t they?
