Accidentally in Code

Tag: talk

  • Coachability++

    Coachability++

    Slides and commentary for a talk I gave (internally) to Qz in Q4 20202.

    When I think about growth, I think about drowning rats and boiling frogs. Because this is what growth often feels like – or looks like  – especially when it’s hard and not going particularly well. The rat drowning school of growth is to throw someone in the deep end and let them figure it out. If they do, they’ll be a good swimmer. The frog boiling school of growth is to gradually turn the heat up so the frog doesn’t notice, and if they survive they’ll be heat resistant…

    This metaphor sounds violent, and yeah, it’s less than ideal. But what I like about it is that hard periods of growth feel difficult. These metaphors capture the feeling of “can I do this?” and “can I sustain this?”

    For all I like to write about – and practice – what good management looks like, the reality is that most managers aren’t that good, and even good managers, operating under their own set of pressures, aren’t good for everyone all of the time. Very few people get everything they need to be successful, when they need it. Everyone has their moments where they are struggling. If we’re lucky, these are the moments where we learn most of all. If we’re not, they are moments where the best thing we can say about them is “I survived”. 

    The question is – particularly right now, when almost everyone is finding life harder than it used to be – how do make it more likely that we learn and grow as much as possible? What resources can we draw on?

    Professionally, whether we are growing or stagnating is the gap between our Capability vs what is required of us.

    Capability smaller than requirements = hard growth

    Capability bigger than requirements = stagnation

    Requirements a bit bigger, but with help = sweet spot

    Hard to find the sweet spot of growth, let alone sustain it. Can also go between periods of hard growth and recharging periods closer to our comfort zone. Don’t necessarily see real growth even month on month, but year on year. Also, might be growing in different ways – e.g. in depth rather than breadth.

    Growing through necessity – stretching. Adding necessary capability to succeed at what we’re currently doing.

    Growing from comfort zone – courses, side projects. Growing in the ways that interest us, laying groundwork for what’s next.

    There’s a great book by Marcus Buckingham, called Now, Discover Your Strengths (Amazon). In it, it has the concepts of strengths and controlling weaknesses. The idea is that everyone has weaknesses, and often those weaknesses are the flipside of people’s strengths. They are only a problem if they are limiting factors for someone’s growth, a “controlling weakness”.

    Great managers: focus on developing strengths, and when they work on weaknesses it’s just to build them up so they are no longer controlling.

    Coming back to growth is being out of your comfort zone with help, what kinds of help are available?

    • Mentoring – teach to swim (maybe in swimming pool)
    • Active help – give a life raft
    • Coaching – view from the bridge – what can you see? What can you find? What can you make? (Get to small rock, build a makeshift boat, sail off to sea)
    • Therapy – in a puddle but think you’re drowning

    Management, go between all of these (except for therapy!)

    The problem people have when they start with coaching is that it requires patience, and seems inefficient.

    • Why don’t you tell me what to do?
    • Why don’t you help?

    Co-active model of coaching says: client is capable, whole, and resourceful.

    I can’t tell you what to do – you know better.

    I can’t help – I’m not there.

    At the start of any coaching relationship, we talk about “designing the alliance” – setting the parameters of the relationship. This comes up, along with confidentiality, and how to work with someone effectively. Designing the alliance is a really powerful concept in coaching that personally I use to define a lot of my professional relationships. It’s the agreement for how you plan to operate together.

    The first step of being more coachable is being open to the process. Someone is trying to help you figure out how to be your best self. It’s not about helping you, but about growing your capability. This is inherently uncomfortable.
    Sometimes the people who are the best at coaching others are the hardest to coach. They understand the process well enough to evade it. The best book I’ve read about this is Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Amazon) – it’s about doing this in therapy, but similar things apply.

    In terms of approaching growth, coachability is made up of two factors: receptiveness to feedback, and how highly actionable you are (what you do with it).

    What makes someone highly receptive to feedback? We can easily identify people who aren’t receptive to feedback. They:

    • Respond defensively.
    • Blame others, and are reluctant to take any responsibility (everything is someone else’s fault).
    • Discount the value of the input or person giving it.

    In contrast, people with high receptiveness to feedback:

    • Listen and work through what the feedback is.
    • Are self-aware and prepared. They can fit the feedback into their mental model and adjust it accordingly.
    • Believe they can learn from everyone.

    Similarly, we know exactly what people not acting on feedback looks like. People who are low actionable in response to feedback:

    • Make minimal changes or adjustments.
    • Make any changes they do make slowly.
    • Are very literal (apply same feedback to other situations without nuance).

    But what does highly actionable look like? People who are highly actionable in response to feedback:

    • Experiment, iterate, and change behavior (both in response to explicit feedback, and implicit feedback, and also because they are continually looking to try things and improve).
    • Return to those interested with things they are trying / have tried and solicit input on how it’s working.
    • Seek out other perspectives and information to learn more.

    You can think of these two dimensions as a quadrant.

    It’s worth noting that we should be in different quadrants with different people high-trust-high-respect relationships will be further up and to the right and low-trust-low-respect relationships will be down on the left. This is understandable, and to a certain extent healthy. Whilst we can always learn from feedback, even that given in bad faith or with an agenda, we need to consider some input (from low trust sources) more carefully than we do from people who we know care about us and want us to be successful.

    Let’s talk about coaching in each quadrant of how people take feedback.

    Highly actionable && highly receptiveness: This might seem like the ideal, and on some level it is, but taken too far these things can lead to someone over-indexing on what everyone else is thinking, which can make them too reactive and appear a bit chaotic or inauthentic. This is the quadrant with least friction, so giving feedback in this quadrant should feel – and be – really minor and contain a lot of affirming or validating feedback that what the person is doing is working. Take a curious mindset and encourage self reflection, support them in thinking critically about what feedback means and what they want to do with it.

    If you’re the person in this quadrant everything feels very clear. It’s easy to fit feedback into your mental model, and adjustments feel natural and build on what you’re currently working on. This comes from having a good idea yourself about what is happening and how you think you can improve.

    Highly actionable && low receptiveness: You have to really work to get this person to take feedback, but when you do they do so much with it that it makes it worthwhile. Work on understanding why this is – are they scarred by too much bad feedback in the past? Do they struggle to trust your opinion (or that you have their best interests at heart?) – work on building that trust with them. Try asking for their opinion and show you value it, in return. 

    In this quadrant it can feel like the feedback doesn’t fit into your mental model, often your self-identity. If it did, you’d act on it, but it conflicts with the other information you have. The first step to moving forward is to reconcile that conflict.

    Low actionable && highly receptiveness: This can be frustrating – it seems like they’ve taken the feedback well, but then… nothing happens. Dig into why that is. Are they overwhelmed? Do they not know what to do? Make sure you set time to follow up post feedback and agree on concrete steps, and follow up on them regularly.

    If you’re in this quadrant you feel a bit stuck. The feedback you’re getting makes sense and feels clear but… you you can’t act on it for whatever reason. The first step is figuring out what’s stopping you.

    Low actionability && low receptiveness: Coaching people in this quadrant is like banging your head against a brick wall. Generally it’s a place where I try not to spend my time. In this quadrant, you need to  be very direct and concrete in what you want to see. Focus on getting a single concrete change, and accept that you may never do more than that.

    This quadrant is a miserable place to be. How does someone get there? The two ways I’ve seen (nice, capable) people end up in this quadrant are:

    • Being completely over their head, maybe because they are so lacking in capability for whatever situation they’re in
    • Or they’ve been bullied.

    If you recognize you’re in this quadrant, and I really hope none of you are, then it’s time to consider how that is situational – and how to change the situation.

    If you’re being coached, consider how you’re likely to hold yourself back and what you can ask for to get the most out of the relationship. If you think the feedback is fair, but don’t know what to do with it, ask for concrete suggestions and hold yourself accountable to them. If you’re struggling with the feedback, consider if you can take that struggle elsewhere, or be open about why that is.

    There’s a great book called Thanks for the Feedback (Amazon) that I really recommend, and one of the things there is that it talks about your first score – the feedback – and then your second score – what you do with that. People who do well at the second score, will get better and better over time. This is the core of the growth mindset.

    Like everything else, we can work on becoming more coachable. This is a really powerful catalyst for individual growth, with really strong long-lasting effects—because coachable people are easier and more rewarding to help, they get more help and do more with it.

    So how do we do that? Five ideas.

    1. Build your self-awareness

    The most exhausting people to give feedback to are those who are so invested in some image of themselves that you can never really talk to them—only their ego. The easiest people to give feedback to are those with few self-illusions, and a level of self-worth such that they don’t find it threatening to know what they can improve.

    In short, the more self-aware you are, the more people can connect with you and not the story you need to tell about yourself. Self-awareness is often hard won, but professional coaching can help, as can therapy and good friends who are willing to call you on your bullshit.

    2. Broaden your perspective

    Broadening your perspective helps you see things in different ways, to be more open to possibilities outside your world view. Three good ways to help with this:

    • Read a broad array of fiction. Reading fiction makes people more empathetic, especially if it involves a broad variety, written by people who are not like you. Memoirs can also be good for this (two I read recently and loved: Becoming by Michelle Obama and How to Be Alone by Lane Moore – both links Amazon).
    • Cultivate a broader network of people. Start by expanding the choices of voices you listen to on social media; over time, try and broaden your friendship circle. It’s worth noting you probably have to make more effort to become friends with people who are less like you, and do more of the emotional labor. 
    • In other times I suggest travelling outside your comfort zone, but maybe that’s just life in 2020 now.

    3. Shed your defensiveness

    As a rule, I try to never defend myself when someone gives me feedback. Defensiveness either shuts the conversation down or makes it about your feelings rather than what the person is trying to tell you. Try and accept that anyone who cares enough to try and give you feedback is not setting out to upset you; offer context they might be missing, yes, but remember that too much context is just a nice way to defend yourself. You will learn a lot more from the conversation if you ask questions and “get curious” instead.

    Importantly, you don’t have to respond in the moment. You can take time to process—maybe work through your defensiveness with someone else—and come back to the person to continue the discussion. Removing pressure to respond in the moment can help you avoid being defensive, and give you space to decide what part of the feedback is useful to take. Remember, the second score is the most important one.

    4. Own up

    If you can admit what you’re bad at, the conversation starts with what you want to get better at, rather than forcing the feedback provider to convince you this is a thing you need to work on. When you start with a self-assessment that demonstrates self-awareness, a lack of defensiveness, and empathy for how your actions and stress fall on others, people are much more inclined to believe that their feedback will be heard and acted on constructively.

    5. Ask for advice

    Often people are afraid to give feedback for fear of upsetting us, and are particularly unwilling to risk this if they think we are doing well overall. Their assumption can also be that they have nothing to add, or that they are missing too much context to be useful.)

    For most people, it’s easier to give advice than feedback, so try asking for that instead. This can be as simple as, “what would you try?”

    This is a great topic for this timeline, if we come back to drowning rats, the water is rising, there are fewer life rafts around. There may be nothing we can do about the practical realities – we’re still working from a place unsuited to it, with various distractions and a deep underlying current of existential dread. The purpose of coaching or mentorship is not to ignore these things, but to expand our capacity even as we carry those weights.

    I want to end this talk with a story, about someone I know, he’s a software engineer at Apple now.

    He moved to the US from Jamaica, and he taught himself to code. As he was looking for entry level developer jobs, he saw something I tweeted about calls with under-indexed folk in mobile, and he booked one with me. He asked me for help on technical interviews, and I did a couple of things. Firstly, I bought him a book. Secondly, I did a couple of practice interviews with him and gave him feedback. Thirdly, I made an introduction to Glowforge, the company where I’m an advisor, and got him an interview.

    I gave him practical help – a life raft. Because that’s really what most under-indexed people need when they try to break into this industry. But here’s the thing – I did a lot of those calls, and he’s the only person I heard from again after the first one. The only person who ever came back around and followed up. So each time he came back, I gave him a little more, and each time he multiplied it. He went to work at Glowforge, learned a ton there, and now he works at Apple. I really could not be prouder of him and everything he’s done.

    He makes a point to tell me that I changed his life, which is, of course, really cool. But he is the person who showed me what it looks like to maximize what you get out of every such interaction, how to do the most with the life raft, the swimming lesson, and the view from the bridge. When I think about who I want to spend my time on, I look for people like him who will multiply whatever I give them and really make the most of it, and that’s the kind of person I try to be in turn.

    I covered a lot of things today, the framework of coachability, the different things we can do to improve. Here’s the one thing I want you to take from this time together: as you go into any mentoring, coaching situation, your next 1:1 with your manager, consider, how can you get the most value out of these interaction? What do you need to ask for? And how can you get out of your own way?

    Slides by Jolie Zinn

  • Speaker Notes: How To Be Invisible

    Speaker Notes: How To Be Invisible

    Speaker notes from a talk I gave earlier this year at Try!Swift, and 360iDev.

    There was an article I read last September that profoundly affected my thinking. It was by Sarah Tavel, and is called “Times have changed — going after dollars vs minutes”. She breaks products down into minutes – which I think of as attention as a metric, and dollars – which are things people pay for, and compares two periods, noting that the earlier one (2008-2012) had mostly minutes raising Series A funding, and in the later one (2012-2015) it was a balance between minutes and dollars.

    She writes from a VC perspective, but from an engineer, from a design perspective, these things are also entirely different problems. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend a long time ago – she was contemplating a job at Zynga (remember Zynga? I told you it was a long time ago) and our conversation was around how we would feel, whether we could actually do a job… where what we were building was a form of digital crack.

    Addictive games. Digital crack. But what this article did was expand my view of what digital crack is. How many jobs in tech involve building it. Not just games, which have never appealed to me, but any kind of social media. A long time ago I worked on G+ and perhaps the problem there was that instead of digital crack it was more like a digital multivitamin.

    Digital crack is about the thrill of unpredictable reward. It’s creating a place where hours pass – with user attention spans on mobile being short we’ve cut it to minutes pass. It’s about pulling people back in with notifications. It’s about a careful balance between sucking people in, but not being too annoying, because we’ll drive them away.

    Digital crack is a pejorative phrase, but digital crack is not inherently bad. I love Twitter as much as the next person, and my current digital crack is actually Duolingo. I spent a lot of time this year in South America and I’m working on hablando más español.

    And I realised I don’t want to build digital crack. And I’ve always known this, if I look at the things I’ve worked on – I built most of the first Google presentations experience on iOS, I ran a team that built a location based B2B app. Most recently I was working at Ride where we built something to help people car pool. My passion project for a long time has been an image processing app – note processing not sharing. I look at my career choices, and that brief lapse in judgement when it comes to G+ aside, I have chosen to build things that help humans achieve things. Tools rather than experiences.

    But I think it’s hard because in this industry we laud the digital crack. Attention is the foundation of the business model. This analysis aside, we have the impression that it’s what the VCs are funding. It’s what we’re talking about. Like right now, when everyone has been talking about Pokemon Go. Yes, that second list was balanced, but I’d heard of more of the “minutes” apps.

    But if we’re not building digital crack, if our metric is not minutes spent, if it’s actual human effectiveness, what matters? What are we even doing?

    Make Complex Processes Simple

    Show and Hide

    How to be Invisible.006

    This is my passion project, it’s called Show & Hide. So like I said, it’s an image processing app but what does that mean vs something like Instagram, which is an app that filters images and a platform for sharing them? A process means that we analyse the image and change it based on that analysis. So what Show & Hide does, is it analyses the dominant color of an image and then makes two partially coloured images based on that. The first one showing the dominant color, the second hiding it. The idea is, that it creates those postcard images – you know like the ones of London, the bus is red and the background is black and white, but you don’t need, you know, actual artistic talent.

    Anyway, an image is just an array of colours, which we might think of as a grid of numbers. And a filter is just another grid of numbers, so to apply a filter all we need is a little Matrix multiplication. Not only is this a solved problem, it’s one that is done for us by the platform.

    But processing an image is not a solved problem, and it’s vastly different based on what we are processing that image for. So my first functional go at this on iOS scaled down the image a lot and took ~10 seconds to run. But the version that shipped, you move the slider and the image changes in real time, and on iOS at least, that’s pretty much the full-sized image.

    On a practical level, what did I do? I optimised the hell out of it and wrote it all in C.

    On a user-experience level, what did I do? I made the distinction between a process and a filter invisible. It’s a process, but it feels like a filter, which is what users are used to – and what they expect.

    Location

    When I think about location, I think about Harry Potter and the Marauder’s Map map. Harry is invisible, but he still shows up on the map. This is often when he is being most effective. He – or pretty often Hermione (we all know she does most of the work) – are doing stuff that they can only do when they are invisible.

    It’s often clear as developers how location will help us, but if we’re not careful we are too visible. Either by draining the battery, or just being annoying.

    I worked on this B2B app called Coordinate. It was an app for tracking your mobile workforce, like they would have jobs and you could route them to nearby jobs.

    We needed to do continual background location updates with varying levels of accuracy. For high location accuracy we needed 8 hours and like, ~15m 5minute data.

    We came in to do this on iOS when it had already been done on Android, and so people didn’t really understand how different it was. But the iOS location API wasn’t designed to work that way. When we just turned it on with that level of accuracy, the battery burnt down in an hour, especially if you were say, riding a motorbike on the highway.

    We weren’t exactly invisible there.

    So we figured out thresholds for turning the GPS on and off, tried to be smart about when we would send a location and when we wouldn’t, cached locations, and eventually when caching wasn’t enough – if say, you were on an island with poor cell service, taking pictures of adorable koalas – implemented offline.

    Eventually we got to ~12 hours of battery life on high, and for low accuracy our battery usage was barely noticeable. We were actually doing better than the Android app.

    We had become invisible.

    Glowforge

    How to be Invisible.008

    This is my friend Dan. He’s taking selfies with an owl in Tokyo.

    Dan made this game called Robot Turtles with his kids, it was the most backed boardgame on Kickstarter. As part of doing this, he acquired a 10,000 USD laser CNC machine that had to be delivered on a forklift truck.

    How to be Invisible.009Here’s the CNC machine, with some children for scale. And on the right are the custom pieces, and a key. Pretty cool, right?

    Anyway, Dan’s now CEO of this startup called Glowforge. They make a desktop laser cutter – they call it a 3D laser printer. It’s pretty amazing. Pre-sale right now and shipping later this year. Full disclosure: I’m an advisor, and one of the many benefits of that is that when I go to Seattle they let me play with it.

    How to be Invisible.010

    Here’s some stuff I made on it. It’s really cool, you see the bed, and you move your design over it, and then you press go. So first – because I’m such a programmer – I made a hello world. I printed out a logo for my then-boss. More ambitiously, these are the pieces for a Technically Speaking keychain, and the necklace is the Show & Hide logo, engraved and cut away.

    How to be Invisible.011

    I also made this thing. So this is a picture of my shadow, which I took in Venice. Then Tony and I turned it into a cut, and printed it on clear acrylic. Now when I hold it up to the light, and shine a light on it, I can project my shadow all over again.

    I’m not really a physically creative person, so this whole experience was pretty revelatory for me. I was so intimidated at first, but then I discovered that it’s super easy! And super fun!

    So you might think the achievement here is getting it on a desktop – no more need for a forklift truck on delivery. And that’s true.

    Or maybe that it’s now less than half as expensive. That’s pretty cool too.

    But from a software – user experience – perspective – here’s something I think is really, really awesome. Because that old laser printer? Not only is it large, and expensive, and terrifying, to make it cut in the right place requires the user to position the material very exactly.

    But Glowforge users won’t need to do that. Probably many of them will never know that’s how it used to be. The challenges of positioning have disappeared. It’s all done using image recognition.

    Show Decisions not Data

    What Should I Wear?

    How to be Invisible.013

    Weather is the canonical example of this, because how many of us have ever even seen a meteorological report? Well now we have. But with weather we care about the the conclusion – what are we going to wear? What is a good day for that hike?

    How to be Invisible.014

    And so we look at something like this which gives us the conclusion, not the data it’s based on.

    When Should I Leave?

    Another example is traffic. I have a smart watch, and it tells me when I need to leave. It’s not super accurate, and often it tells me when I’m already on my way, but it’s getting there.

    How to be Invisible.015

    The interim step to getting there was this traffic view – notice the subtle color coding on the map about the severity of the traffic. A really subtle visualization of a lot of data.

    What Should I Do?

    The first two of these are kinda boring, and predictable – stuff that we’ve all known was coming for a while. But what should I do is an interesting one. This is the problem with FourSquare. They are evaluated like they are building Digital Crack because it’s considered to be a social network, but they are actually trying to drive behavior – dollars in the real world. If I use FourSquare, and I take 5 friends with me, that’s not tracked on the app but it’s a change of behavior way beyond the metrics we see in usage. I found my favourite tea place in Medellin on Foursquare, and now I go there several times a week. That’s a significant behavior change.

    FourSquare tries to help me make decisions. It tells me where people go after the art gallery. It tells me where people go who like the things I like. It’s the app that I use that comes closest to making decisions for me. My usage doesn’t demonstrate addiction – it’s not digital crack – it does drives dollars in the real world.

    Eliminate Compromises

    The UI has always been a compromise. Programmers thought the terminal was fine. Humans wanted other humans.  The UI was this thing in the middle. It was a hack that pleased no-one because humans found it so foreign and programmers have generally despised building it. So now we see the rise of Slack as a platform, the increasing popularity of chat based interaction – the idea that no UI is the new UI.

    Go Where People Are

    This is why I find bots and integration interesting, because they come to where you are and don’t ask you to add another (digital) place that you “visit”. The interaction comes to you. the behavior change seems minimal.

    I think this relates to bots being so effective at causing significant behavior change. Who uses Slack? Who has the bot that corrects you when you say “guys”? We had that at Ride, and I saw it changing people’s behavior. They don’t have to seek out this awareness of language, and how it matters, it comes to them. Now most of us have left, we have a new Slack, and we haven’t set up the bot – but I don’t see anyone using “guys”.

    Speak Human

    This is about meeting the user where they are. And when we think about language here we think about error messages. The worst culprit of inflicting tech speak on humans, we give people this terrifying experience – something has gone wrong! Did they do something to cause it? And we communicate this with an incomprehensible message. More subtly we fall down on this when we focus on what the user does, rather than what they achieve. Kathy Sierra talks about this. She talks about making users badass and isn’t that… well that’s what I want to be doing.

    But really what it means is you don’t ask them to learn anything, because you are communicating with them in a way that they already know. This is not just human language, but conceptual language – it’s dragging an image over your material and pressing “print”, rather than trying to figure out an opaque calibration system.

    Listen

    Human communication is only around 7% vocal content. Some of it is vocal elements, but 55% is non-verbal. Body language, tone, these are all clues to our real meaning.

    Digitally we have the interaction, but we also, especially on mobile, have things that we might know, like location, calendar, social media. These are all signals of what is going on with a user, and when we can use them it’s transformative of the UX. When a product appears to learn and get better based on this data, then it requires less and less interaction because the conclusions from that data have got better and better.

    …

    Here’s the thing…

    User experience has been the bridge we built between the way that machines operate and how humans do. It is how we have allowed humans to create and manipulate data digitally.

    But really it’s been a hack. This is why movies had talking, humanoid, robots. Because that was the dream – a computer wasn’t a computer, it was a cool sidekick with a super-power – machine intelligence and computational power.

    We’re not there yet. Anything that begins to look like the dream has typically been so much of a disappointment that it just makes it seem that we are further away. But putting together this talk encouraged me that we are making progress on this – it’s just different, and so gradual, that until I took the time to think about it, I didn’t fully realize.

    Because the experiences we’ve seen in the movies have always been so ostentatious and shiney.

    But real progress, it turns out, sometimes looks like nothing at all.

  • Girl Geek Dinner Sydney: Pixels, Post-its, and Unicorns

    Girl Geek Dinner Sydney: Pixels, Post-its, and Unicorns

    All I want to be is someone that makes new things and thinks about them

    I’ve known Tammy a long time (we worked together in Minnesota!) so I know how amazing she is – and I was really happy she agreed to speak at the Girl Geek Dinner we hosted. I thought it was a really interesting talk, about how to support and create innovation.

    Tammy’s been in UX for a long time, but it has not always been called that. Had had lots of different names, but it hasn’t got much clearer. One interview said they were looking for someone who could build the Death Star.

    Lots of engineers don’t talk to users. They build systems that don’t talk to each other. Doing great science, but understanding basic typography would serve them well.

    Made some basic aesthetic changes to a website (“drained the color”) – and users thought it had increased speed by 80%. It had not.

    Studied engineering and psychology at university. Asked – what if we talked to users? Could they create what they need? This didn’t work. Possibly because she was a beginner researcher.

    Wanted agency to get things done, so worked with non-profits. Non-profits always need things. Worked on helping increase access to water; the water user of one American is equivalent to 32 South Africans. It turned out, designing a better water carrier better than digging a new well. Then men would help carry water – because they would race things.

    Helping people build things after Katrina. People who couldn’t afford to flee wanted to build things for themselves.

    Banks in Australia were guarded from the Global Financial Crisis because of the way they process lending. Banks in Australia face a different challenge – innovation.

    She did not want to work in a bank – not compelled to swim with sharks. Prior was literally helping to cure cancer (selling DNA).

    Design Maturity Continuum – design for function and form.

    Innovation is… doing something different that delivers value.

    New perspective + right idea + flawless execution = delivers value.

    Can innovate on: Business Model. Process. Offering. Delivery.

    Tagline – “Prepare for the best”

    Now @ BT group in Westpac. Has drank the cool aid. Gets it. Believes in what they are doing.

    Better decisions on financials, have greater wealth in super account. Supers work in Australia, because financial literacy is better.

    “Design thinking: – isn’t more complicated. Balance customer want, business case, and what you can deliver. Makes for a great business model.

    Financial services are not transactional, they are commoditized. Business only has a future if it helps people manage money most efficiently.

    What are unicorns doing? Most places do some. All three, is transformational

    1. Insight through empathy.

    Henry Ford – people said they wanted a faster horse. Ask people, but what they say/think/do has a cultural context. The Bank of America “Keep the Change” campaign uses it – so many people save their coins, allows customers to save the change on their transactions.

    2. Collaboration.

    Not everyone has all three, so have to talk to each other. Bring in people early. Use postits on a wall to brainstorm/communicate.

    3. Experiment.

    Something isn’t the right answer, because it is true for us. Users are different – we are not designing for ourselves. Need to be broader, prototype.

    Sometimes these will fail. Need to be able to fail without costing careers. Make small bets. Uses idea of business case on a page, and mocking up ideas.

    This is a cultural mindset, not just a process.

    • Optimistic.
    • Intuitive.
    • Empathetic.
    • Inspirational.
    • Insight-driven.
    • Narrative.
    • Experimental.
    • Collaborative.

     

    Look inside, and outside. Learn in UX classes.

    Need to bring your whole self for transformational, it requires all the things.

    Innovation is not the designer – it is everyone’s responsibility.