A Transcript of the talk…

Design is a Team Sport

Design Leadership Summit | September 2018

Preet Arjun Singh: Let's get started. Lot of people were initially complaining that who starts a conference at 8 A.M. on a Saturday. Or many people might not come, but I was like, "If Jared Spool is coming, people are going to show up." Right? And really, really stoked about that. Last year, Jared wrote an article how designers turn into design leaders, which was shared quite across the community in our Slack group. So that's why I'm really excited to welcome Jared Spool to speak today at the summit on this topic of design leadership. So let's have a big round of applause for Jared Spool.

Jared Spool: Thank you. Thank you. I am teen heartthrob and internet sensation Jared Spool. Putting on an event like this takes a tremendous amount of work. There's a huge team behind what Preet has been doing. I think they deserve a round of applause. Let's make some noise for them.

Okay. I'd like to go back to 2010. On a particular day when a designer named Tyler Thompson walked up to a kiosk at JFK International Airport, entered his particulars, and was delivered a boarding pass. That boarding pass in particular. Tyler looked at that boarding pass. And like many designers, his designer brain kicked in. And he'd wondered, "What the hell."

In fact, he later wrote what he thought that boarding pass was trying to tell him at that moment. Said, "Hello there. Thanks for flying Delta. I'm sure you are no doubt trying to figure out what the fuck to do with this piece of paper you have in your hand right now. You are confused, lost, and just want to get on your flight. It's cool. We don't really care, and we sure as hell don't want to make this process easy and enjoyable for you. Instead, we hired a small blind parakeet to lay out your boarding pass. You know, just to keep you guessing. Have fun."

Tyler couldn't stop thinking about this boarding pass. And when he got back to his machine, he started to work on what that pass could be. And he came up with this. This is a beautiful boarding pass, right? It is thoughtfully designed. It is very clear in what you're supposed to look at first. The information priority is beautiful and well thought out. It's much better, much improved. Anyone would agree that this is much improved over the original pass.

Around the same time, another designer in Texas, a guy named Dustin Curtis, found himself looking at this. Not this. The American Airlines homepage. And like Tyler, Dustin had us similar visceral response to what he was doing. And similar to Tyler, he decided to write up his feelings about this, this time in the form of an open letter to the CEO of American. Where he wrote, oops, go back. Let's try this again. Hello.

"If I was running a company with the distinction and history of American Airlines, I would be embarrassed, no ashamed, to have a website with a customer experience as terrible as the one you have now."

And like Tyler, he decided to take his hand and craft his own version, this time of the American Airlines website. And again, it's pretty clear this is an improvement. The information architecture on the page is better. The visual design is better. It's clear, it's crisp, it's distinct. All the things that we think of good design are embodied in this work.

Design. That's a word we use a lot. And we struggle to figure out what it is. What is design? What is it that we're talking about? I've come up with a definition that I really love, which is design is the rendering of intent. We have an intention. As a designer, we have an intention to make in the world. And then we render that intention. We make it real. We make what we think the world needs.

So that's what Tyler and Dustin did. They had an intention to make those boarding passes and websites better, and they rendered them that way. They rendered them differently than the original creators of those things.

Dustin's story doesn't end at his redesigned site. He posted it. And within a few days, had received a fairly lengthy detailed from someone who said he was a member of the American Airlines design team. And in that email was detailed all the reasons why that website could not be built the way Dustin thought. I mean, the organization is complicated. There are many stakeholders. The story is the story you all know. Right? The realities of the world set in. That website that Dustin came up with, that's never going to happen. Dustin thought that this person's arguments were great. So with permission, he posted that email anonymously. The problem is the American Airlines design team isn't that big. It wasn't hard to figure out who wrote the email. And that person got fired.

Design is the rendering of intent. What was Dustin's intention? It probably wasn't to get someone fired. But that's what happened. We have to be fully cognizant of all the outcomes. Not just the one that results in a pretty artifact. What Dustin did not take into account, what he needed to take into account. Was not just design, but context. Context is where design happens. And Dustin was not thinking about context. Dustin was thinking about something else. He was thinking about just his perspective of what good design is. Not really what happens in the world.

Now let's take a moment and go back to Tyler's boarding pass, because Tyler's boarding pass was really interesting. Now, Tyler wanted to tell the world that he thinks he's a designer. And I completely believe him, because everyone thinks they're a designer. So Tyler's boarding pass is interesting in a lot of ways. In particular, how it's actually produced is fascinating to me.

You see, in order to produce this boarding pass, you would have to have a four color printer. Because this uses a combination of four inks to produce all the colors that are on there. You would also have to make sure that you could do bleed edging. Now those of you who've never worked in print, bleed edging is printing all the way up to the edge of the paper. You can't do that in most printers because you need a place for the rollers to move the paper through. So in order to get bleed edging, you either have to have pre-printed stock. Or, you have to have some sort of dye cut that allows you to cut the page out from the white edges.

It would also require a 300 dot per inch printer. Now that doesn't seem like a lot. Many printers you can buy are 300 dot per inch. But they are far more expensive than the thermal printers that Delta currently uses, which only print at 75 dots per inch.

The other part of this is that it would have to be on a white stock. That means we can't use a pre-printed page. The reason we need a white stock is there is no printer in the world that prints white ink. So in order to get those nice, beautiful, white characters, the paper would have to be white. Which means we can't use a pre-printed stock, which means we'd have to have dye cut for the bleed edge.

The problem is, is that Delta at the time had more than 10,000 printers in the world. And in order to upgrade all of those printers to be able to print these particular designs, they would need to handle a completely different size of paper, and have some sort of cutting mechanism. And the ink would require a complete change in the supply chain that Delta has. Because thermal paper does not use ink. It uses heat to change color. Therefore, they have no system in place to make sure that every boarding pass printer has ink in it. They'd have to create an entire inventory and supply chain system to constantly make sure that no printer runs out of ink. And anyone who has a four color printer knows that your inks don't run out equally. So it's a very complicated process to always make sure the printer has ink in it.

So given all those constraints, which design is better? I mean it's clear that the new boarding pass is a prettier design. That's indisputable. But is it a better design for Delta? Is it a better design for Delta's customers, who might someday walk up to a printer and be missing key information because one of the ink cartridges ran short? Which is a better design? Which is a worse design? What is good design? These are the questions that start to come up. We have to be honest with ourselves about them. Just being pretty isn't necessarily the best design.

But we know that there are bad designs out there. We can tell when a design isn't good. So the poor design happened. Poor design happens when we have the right intention, but we execute it poorly. Which I think we could say the original Delta pass probably counts as. But it also could be that we have a poor intention that gets rendered right. And I think Tyler and Dustin's designs might come under that category.

If we really want to get better designs out of our organizations, we need to make sure that we are thinking about both the intention and the skills that we have at rendering that intention. We have to pay attention to both of these things.

This is a map of Six Flags Magic Mountain, a theme park in Southern California. And Six Flags from this map, one really gets a sense as to what Six Flags thinks about their park. If you look real close, you'll see that there are 84 attractions. Each of them are numbered such that you are supposed to not only come in and do them in order, but they want to make sure you don't miss a single one. After all, you paid a lot of money to come to the park. And they want to make sure you get to it.

And the way you're supposed to use this map is you come into the park at the bottom, and you veer off to the left, and you get in line for one of the amazing rides. And it's probably a long line. And then you get on the ride, which is probably a short ride. And then you get off the ride and you throw up, and you get in line for another ride. And that's how your your day of the park is supposed to be, is this sort of repeat process. And the goal is to get through the entire park and see everything in your day, and not miss a thing. They want you to get every moment you can have of having fun, and throwing up, and all the things. That's how Six Flags thinks about their park.

Now contrast that to Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom. The map for the Magic Kingdom does not call out each of the rides. In fact, many of the rides are not drawn in. In fact, there are really no rides here. All there are at best are sort of architectural things that if you know what those things are, you would recognize them. But if you don't, they're just symbols on a map that have no key, no edge, and no label.

And that's because Disney doesn't think in terms of rides. Disney thinks in terms of an adventure. It's not that they don't have rides, they have as many rides as Six Flags does. They have amazing rides. They're really quite fun. But in Disney, it is very much about the adventure.

So say you go to Disney and you bring a six year old. There's a very good chance that one of the days that you are there starts with a phenomena known as the character breakfast. And the character breakfast is a time when you and your six year old can get up close and personal with what is in essence a creepy guy in an animal suit.

And together, the three of you will make breakfast. And it will be the most expensive breakfast you have ever paid for. And yet, you will love it because your six year old loves it. And even the creepy guy in the animal suit seems to enjoy it.

And that's how your day at Disney starts. It starts with all this stuff. And then, you go out of the breakfast into the park, and you wander from one place to another with no real aim, no real goal. And your entire purpose is to just have one adventure after the other. And the park is seamless that way. As you move from one section to the next, you don't even realize that you've gone from this place to that place. Because everything has been thoughtful. Everything is designed in this seamless sort of way. And all the things in between are thought about.

And suddenly, you find yourself at the end of the day. And the skies suddenly erupt into a fireworks display. And when you get back to your hotel room, you find that someone has gone and taken your towels and turned them into little origami animals, and placed them around the room. And if your six year old had left their toys in the morning before they left, the toys are all sitting around the animals as if they were playing together until the humans came in the room. And then they all lie flat like in the movie. That's how Disney thinks. Disney thinks in terms of the experience.

And that's how we can sort of break this down. We can say okay, Six Flags is about activities. Six Flags is very discreet activities. That's how they approach things. Disney on the other hand, thinks in terms of a seamless experience. They design not only the activities, but the things that happen in and around the activities. Everything is connected.

And if we're going to create a process within our organization to do design, do we want to do it in terms of activities? Or do we want to make it a seamless experience? Design should be designed. It needs to be rendered intentionally. And our design process has to be designed as an experience.

So, we focus a lot on design process. It is the thing that I talk to design leaders about practically the most these days is design process. What should our process be? What is our process? And when we start talking about it, we often see things like this. All right, this is the, oops. I am having a little trouble with my clicker today. Let's try this again. Hello. There we go.

This is the double diamond process, put together by the Design Management Institute. These days, most of representations of processes I see are either diamonds or loops. We have entered the jewelry phase of design.

And this one has a message of divergence, then convergence. And it has a message of thinking about are we designing the right thing before we design the thing right? And it's got lots of good thoughtful elements to it. All design processes tend to have lots of good thoughtful elements to it. And there are lots of processes to choose from. And we fetish over processes, we talk about them all the time. We ask candidates in interviews, "What is your design process?" As if we care about their answer. Even though there's no way we will ever let them use their design process. Hell, we will barely let them use our design process. Because we never use it.

But we have lots of choices. Tyler Thompson and Dustin Curtis had their own design process. Their process was called, "I'm pissed off and I'm going to show you how to do this right." Theirs was a process of arrogance. They didn't diverge and then converge. They didn't base it on research. They didn't figure out if they were building the right thing. They just crafted something.

And this too is a process. We have to design our process intentionally. And to do that, we have to take a whole bunch of questions into account. Not just what are the activities. But questions like who is going to be on that team? Is it just people who are qualified designers, or is it anybody who actually is going to help us make a decision that will affect the design? Does it include influencers, people who in fact might have a say like a general manager or someone from legal who tells us when the disclosures have to appear? Those people are making design decisions. Do we consider them part of the design team?

And if we consider all these people to be part of the design team, how do we make sure that every single one of them adds value to the process? How do we make that process inclusive? And how do we make sure that they have the support need? Because they are not as design literate as we are. They are not as design fluent as we are. So as a result, how do we give them the support to understand what their design decisions mean? How are we going to introduce the process to them? And when the process is successful, who's going to take the credit? Are we going to make sure that everybody involved gets credit for the best experience? And when the design process isn't successful, who's going to fall on their sword? Who's going to take the blame for the process not producing the outcome it needed to produce?

This is part of the design of a design process, but I don't hear us talking about this very often. These are important intentions we have to settle on. And if we do this right, we get to a point where our design process is inclusive. And when we get inclusive design, we get far better outcomes.

Back in the '60's, a pair of researchers conducted an experiment, which at the time they didn't think was a big deal, but turned out to be really critically informative. So a couple of folks named Robert Rosenthal and Klaus Fode. And they ran this little experiment, which was similar to many experiments they'd done before, but they slightly modified it. Rosenthal started with what he always does. He went down to his local psychology testing supply store, and he bought himself a cart full of laboratory rats. And he brought his rats home and put them in his office, and put them into two cages. Just distributing them evenly across the two cages. And after he put them in the two cages, he ended up labeling those cages. And that's where the experiment began. The results that they wrote about was this really innocuous, boring title. The effects of experimenter bias on the albino rat. But it's how this experiment worked out that sort of changed the way lots of us think about how we work with other people. Because what Rosenthal and Fode did was they labeled the cages with two signs. One sign on one cage said smart rats, and the sign on the other cage said dull rats.

The next thing they did was they brought in the real subjects of the experiment. Their grad students. And they asked their grad students to just grab a rat out of a cage, and run tests on that rat like they had done many times before to figure out that rat's capabilities. And the grad students came in, they randomly chose a cage, picked a rat out of it, and went and ran their tests. And the grad students conclusively found that in every test they ran, the smart rats outperformed the dull rats by a lot.

And it was so astonishing, that Rosenthal and Fode did this again with different grad students and got the same results. And they repeated it multiple times, every time getting the same results.

Now, there are lots of theories as to why the smart rats always perform better than the dull rats. Remember, the rats were not tested before they were put in the cages. They were just put in cages and the signs were just put up, right? So there is nothing that we know about the rats, yet the smart rats always outperformed the dull rats. One theory was that the way the students handled it was somehow different. That the students were more precious with the smart rats and more rough with the dull rats. And somehow that affected their performance. Or maybe they were standing closer or farther away from the test. Or maybe this grad students were admitting some sort of pheromones that would signal the rats as to how they should perform. But for some reason, the rats were outperforming based on those signs.

Rosenthal and Fode extended this. They went into schools, and they talked to teachers. And they told teachers that they had figured out that students who have light colored eyes, blue eyes and things like that, would outperform students who had brown eyes. And sure enough, at the end of the year, brown eyed students were performing worse on standardized tests and having more disciplinary issues than blue eyed students across the teacher population they talked to. Rosenthal and Fode went into factories, into businesses. And they would talk to warehouse foreman and folks. And they would say that people who had dark hair were more capable than people who had red hair or light hair. And sure enough, at the end of the year, the dark haired people were getting more promotions and having better performance reviews than the light haired people.

And they named this expectancy bias. Expectancy bias is when we have an expectation of performance, we will see that person or thing performing in that way. We bring this ourselves to the table.

So what happens when we walk into a conference room? And in that conference room, there are people who we label as expert designer and people who we label as not a designer? Does that affect how those people will perform? Will our expectancy bias kick in and make that happen?

That's the key thing here is that we have to make sure that we are cognizant that our expectations will change the outcomes. And because of that, we have to make sure that we are setting our expectations right. Can we use our expectations to actually get better outcomes? If we expect more of the people we work with, we will see better outcomes from them. That's what expectancy bias tells us.

I spent a year working in the Obama White House, and I had the grand opportunity to work with this person. This is Dana Chisnell. And we worked for a group called the U.S. Digital Service. This is her standing in front of our office. And our boss was this guy, Mikey Dickerson. A fantastic guy to work for. And his boss was this guy. We called him Barry. I miss him.

At the time, Dana's project was an interesting project. It was what we would call a digital transformation project. Which is a fancy way of saying we're going to take a lot of stuff that's on paper, and we're going to put it online. Her project was about the citizenship and immigration application process. So she was focused on getting those applications online. And this doesn't seem like a big deal, right? You've got a bunch of forms, you just code them up in HTML and you're done. Right? Well turns out it's a bit more than that. Because they basically process 6 million applications every year. And any given application can be up to 1,000 pages in length. And there are 3,000 field agents in the Citizenship and Immigration Services group. That process those applications, know exactly what to look for, know exactly how they work. And how do you make sure that all of that gets transferred into a digital experience that does not slow down the process? Because there's already a backlog. How do we in fact speed things up, not slow things down.

To pull this off, Dana had a team. The team involved 100 developers. 100 developers. It had also 12 technical leads, and 10 business analysts. Six product managers, two product owners, and one designer. Her name was Dana.

So there was no way Dana was going to all the design work for this huge project that was going on for multiple years. So, she had to work with the team. The design team is everybody who is involved in influencing the rendering of intent. The business owners, the business managers, the technical leads. Every developer is going to have an influence on this. So we can no longer think about designers as being just the people who have trained in design. Designers are now all of these folks, and that was Dana's issue. So how does she deal with this?

Well to understand that, we have to understand how we understand. It turns out that whenever we're learning something new. Whether it's a foreign language, or a musical instrument, or how to cook, or how to design, we each go through four stages. The first stage is called unconscious incompetence. And unconscious incompetence is when we approach a problem. And we are not very good at it. It makes sense that we're not very good at it. It's the first time we're doing it. We've never thought about it before. Of course we're not going to be very good at it. But the other part of the unconscious incompetence stage is that we don't know we're not good at it. We're paying attention to this thing for the very first time. From our perspective, we're actually rocking this. It seems awesome.

We've all seen this happen, right? You've all been around someone who thought they could cook but couldn't. Who thought they could play a musical instrument, but couldn't. Who thought they could speak a foreign language. But no, they can't. Right? And it's a very frustrating experience for anyone who can see the difference. But the folks who are unconsciously incompetent, they can't tell the difference between good and bad. So from their perspective, everything seems good. If you don't know what makes something good or bad, you can't possibly know the difference.

Now this stage ends usually when a close friend takes you aside and says, "Please stop. Don't do this anymore. It's not good." And at that moment, the person realizes that they are now consciously incompetent. They now have a sense as to what the difference between good and bad is. They can't make good intentionally. So they're still bad at what they do. But now they at least know that they're bad at what they do.

And this is where a lot of people stop. Right? All of us were amazing artists until the age of six or seven. Every piece of art we did went into the gallery, known as the refrigerator. And went up on the wall there. And we thought this was awesome. And then somewhere around six and seven, we start saying it's not really that great. And most of us stop, right? Most people give up at this stage.

But a few persist, and they start to practice. They start to understand the rudiments. They start to understand how the work is done. And those people then enter the stage of conscious competence. Conscious competence is when you're cooking, and you have to follow the recipe exactly. If you deviate, something will go wrong. It will be awful. So you just do it exactly as it says. Conscious competence is when you're playing a musical instrument and you pay attention to where every finger goes and every motion happens. And you're thinking about it the entire time. Conscious competence is when we follow the procedure exactly. Because that's how we were taught. And we can't step off those rails, because something bad will happen.

But at some point, we do step off those rails. And at some point, we realize that we weren't thinking about it while we were doing it. And we got good at it. And that is when we become unconsciously competent. Unconscious competence is when we have mastered the craft. We have learned what it takes to do something.

My wife and I play this game where we'll be on our way home after work. And one of us will mention a food ingredient that we're interested in. We have a hankering for at that moment. And the other one's job is to craft a meal spontaneously using that food ingredient. It's our own home version of Iron Chef. So one will say, "I really like broccoli." "Okay, I'll come up with something with broccoli." And it's a matter of throwing the ingredients together. And there was no planning, no recipe, nothing. It was just make it happen. That's mastery. Being able to walk into the situation and even though you've never done this before, know exactly what you need to get it done and to produce a good outcome.

So let's go back to Dana's team. Dana had to succeed. And in order to succeed, she had to focus on just one thing. To make 130 people be consciously competent at design. That was her job. She had 130 unconsciously incompetent designers that were going to make the bulk of the decisions on this. How does she get them to be consciously competent? And to do this, she had to think in terms of what it would take to get all these people through these stages.

Now it turns out that there are different plays that we can use. And we can label these in terms of the transitions. So the transition for example, from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, is about literacy. Making someone design literate. Understanding the difference between bad design and good design. They don't have to be able to create good design. They just have to be able to look at the two things, right? If you have a product manager and that product manager is making a decision, and they can't tell the difference between good design and bad design. And they're given two possibilities. One is really fast and easy. The other one is really slow and expensive. But they can't see the difference in the design. Of course they're going to pick the fast and easy one. Who wouldn't? Design often is more expensive than a little slower, so you have to understand the difference between good design and bad design in order to ever pick that one.

And we can sit there and be angry at our product managers for not understanding design, or we can help them understand the difference between good design and bad design. We can help them understand that good design doesn't frustrate the users as much as bad design. So let's look at frustration as the indicator.

Now to get from conscious incompetence to conscious competence, that's different. We need to do different things. That's about fluency. Because that's about practice and repetition. It's about having those recipes, having those distinct steps. When we are asking people, "What is your design process?" We are basically asking them what do they use for fluency. But what we really need is for them to do the process our way. So we need a way to bring people in, and introduce them to our process, and help them understand how they're going to be able to produce outcomes that are good most of the time. And we can do this with tools, right? We can do this with design systems and frameworks. Those are tools that allow us to keep them on the rails.

And then eventually, we'll have some people who can get to mastery. We don't need everyone to be at mastery. But if we have a few people who are here, we can handle the more difficult situations. This is what we mean when we talk about being masters of our craft.

So for each of these things, we need to do different things. So we've collected about 130 or so strategic plays, things that organizations have done to help their teams move through this process. And we can divide them into whether they help with literacy, whether they help with fluency, whether they help with mastery. And this is just a small set of the 130 some odd plays that we have.

And Dana picked one of these plays. She picked a play called creating immersive exposure. And what she did was she focused her team by getting them into the field. She got them out to the field officers. She brought developers, product managers, product owners. Had them sit and watch field officers actually do their work. Nobody in those 130 people that she worked with had ever met a user. Let alone sat and watched them conduct interviews and do their work. And in that process, they learned a ton about how their app needed to work. They could see the places the app worked, the places that didn't work today. Because they were using some digital tools. And they could see where it got clumsy, and they could see how different aspects were going.

And every person, she would bring these out a few people at a time. And the first people she had to really beg to get out there. In fact, because a lot of these are government contractors. She had to go work with the government procurement office to rejigger their contracts to allow them to go visit field offices. Because originally that wasn't in their contracts. So we had to renegotiate the contractors' contracts to get them out into the field. And then she got them out, and they spent a day. And as they would come back, she would do exercises where they'd all present their designs and work in progress to her so she could give them critique. And she noticed a huge difference in the people who'd been in the field. They were being able to make that the ones who hadn't been in the field weren't making. And she would point those out, which would make the ones who weren't in the field want to go into the field.

So she got more and more interest and more and more effort. And it got to the point where she actually had to stop using the field offices that were in Washington D.C. because they were asking for no more people, and we had to expand into other regions to get into the field. But now we have the support of management, because they were seeing the improvement. And the field officers were calling in to management and saying, "We like what your team is doing, keep this up." So there was a tremendous amount of support. And she was able to get those 130 folks. They just last year deployed the system that she had started working on in 2014. And it's now in the field, and the field officers love it.

This is Sid Harold. Sid Harold came to 18F and became the executive director of 18F, which is the U.S. government's internal design agency. But before that, she worked for an organization called Code of America. And she had a similar job to Dana's in that she was trying to help people at this town and state level get more design mature. One of the people she was working with was this guy. This is Jonathan Feldman, and he is the CIO of the city of Asheville, North Carolina. And he sat in Sid's workshop at Code for America, a little half day workshop that she taught on usability testing. She had four hours to teach CEO's and their staff everything to know about usability testing. And she did this really sort of guerrilla approach to this, where she had them just, she uses origami instructions. Because it turns out a great way to teach people how to moderate a usability test is to have them conduct a test of someone trying to make something out of origami.

The beauty of origami is that there are all these instructions on the web. Most of them are completely incomprehensible to someone who doesn't do it all the time. So sitting down and trying to make a little origami giraffe is actually really hard if you don't do origami a lot. So it's a perfect thing to do a usability test on, because you could ask people why they're frustrated, and what's causing the problem, and really sort of get to the core of the issue.

So she did this in half a day with Jonathan and his team. And Jonathan fell so much in love with this that he went back and he did what you're not supposed to do. Right? He started doing usability tests on the people he worked with. The people whose cubes were right next to his office. He would say, "Come look at this thing." And the team ended up building this thing they called simplicity. Oops, where'd Simplicity go? Hello, come back. There we go. There's Simplicity. This thing called Simplicity. Simplicity is an app where you type in your address, and it tells you every piece of data that the city of Asheville knows about that address, right? It tells you where the sewer lines are and how much they paid for their sewer bills, and it tells you when garbage pickup is. It tells you where their nearest fire department is. It tells you what the crime in that area is. Any piece of data that the city has collected is stored in this database, and it all can be revealed in this thing.

And they built it through iterative usability testing, the process you should. Which they found out about in a half day workshop at a summit. That was their only exposure. Sid was able to get that success story by just teaching basic usability testing techniques in a half a day. That's all it took.

This is Bill Scott. And Bill is, no this is Bill Scott. Let's try that. Bill is vice president, senior vice president of user interface engineering at Venmo. PayPal/Venmo. And they have the challenge of PayPal running on this incredibly old architecture. Even though PayPal had only been around for 10 years, 10 years is a long time in the tech world. And all of their processing technology was this old, rusty architecture. And it was creating all sorts of user experience issues for them. So Bill convinced the CEO that he could rejigger the architecture and make them much more agile, much more lean. And to do that, what he wanted to do was take 10 people and sequester them in a room for four months, and have them build something.

Now any of you who work in large organizations know that space is the final frontier. Getting a room for 10 months is really hard. And this turned out to be the biggest challenge that Bill had. And finally, after struggling with this, he went to the CEO and said, "Look, I can't do this project if I don't have a room." The CEO said, "I will get you a room." And sure enough, the CEO got him a conference room that they could take over for 10 months. It was the CEO's own conference room.

So that's a sign of commitment from the organization. And what Bill did was he brought Jeff Gothelf in, who teaches Lean UX. He taught the team some basics of Lean UX, and they went off and they built what turned out to be the new checkout experience. And revenue through this experience has quadrupled since they released it. And the basic process that they went through really was just introducing Lean UX techniques. That's what he did.

Each of these efforts were about helping every team member become consciously competent. So if we want to think about what our design process needs to be, it's not about product delivery. It's not about coming up with beautifully looking designs. It's about making everybody on the team consciously competent. If we can get them all understanding the difference between good design and bad design, understanding the processes that can get consistently good designs. We can build the tools to help them get there. Like our design systems, like our frameworks. We can get to this point where we are delivering great designs. But in order to do this, we have to start with the expectation that they can produce good design. We have to deal with our expectancy bias, and make sure we are not what's preventing them from producing the good work they are capable of.

As I was putting this presentation together and thinking about this, I went and looked at the curriculum we have. Some of you may know, we have a school that we started in Chattanooga, Tennessee called Center Centre. And it's a two year program for creating designers. And we take folks who come from other careers, who have no design experience. They don't have to have a portfolio to get in. We don't even ask for one. They just have to have the right elements to become a great designer. And we set the expectation from the beginning that they will be great designers when they graduate.

And I looked at the courses that we came up with to teach them to be great designers over the two years. And I realized that more than half of them involve working on a team. Being a team member. Design is a team sport. It's not an individual sport.

So everybody thinks they're a designer. That's because they are one. It's us who have the issue, not them. We have to help every designer become a better designer. That's what I came to talk to you about. Everybody on the team is contributing and influencing the design. We have to start treating them as a peer. Our processes have to be designed experiences. Not just the activities, but the things that happen before and during, in between, and after the activities. We have to understand that the expectations we walk in the room with will change the outcomes. And use that to our advantage.

Skills like facilitated leadership. Being able to run a meeting. Being able to just take over a conversation by grabbing a pen and going to the whiteboard and drawing what you think you just heard. Those are basic team skills. We need to teach everyone to be comfortable at that. It's horrible to be in a room where people are sitting around a table staring at each other, talking about design. Design needs to be seen. Design architecture needs to be visualized. We should always be drawing.

And finally, we have to take it as our mission to bring everybody to being consciously competent. If we can do that, the outcomes we will see will be amazing. So that's what I came to talk to you about. I mentioned our school center center. You can get more information of that centercentre.com. Our first cohort of students are just graduating next week. We are very excited. Two full years they've been at this. None of them want to leave. We want them to leave desperately. If you have a place they could go, we want to introduce you to them. If you want to talk to our students and explore it, we would like you to come do that.

The 130 plays that I mentioned are part of a workshop that we teach called Creating a UX Strategy Playbook, where each team that shows up at this workshop walks out with their own playbook of plays for where their team is at. So if you want to attend that, you can do so. And here's a promotion code that will get you some money off. And finally, if you are interested in any of this, you can find a wealth of articles and podcasts, and other things uie.com. Please if you find this interesting, go to uie.com, scroll down to the bottom of the page. There's a place for you to sign up for a newsletter. Every week, you'll get an article about design and design strategy delivered into your inbox. You can also reach me at jspooluie.com. Similarly, connect to me on LinkedIn. Linkedin turns out to be a way better place for me to have professional conversations. So connect, say hi. Tell me what you think. Ask me about a challenge. I'll get back to you.

And finally, you can follow me on the Twitters at @jmspool where I tweet about design, design strategy, design education, and the amazing customer service habits of the airline industry. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for encouraging my behavior.

Preet Arjun Singh: Thank you so much Jared.

Jared Spool: Thank you.

Preet Arjun Singh: That was amazing. How many folks are already subscribed to the newsletter? Quite a few folks. Yeah.

Jared Spool: Just out of curiosity. How many people hate raising their hands in little surveys? Okay. That's our margin of error.

Preet Arjun Singh: Okay. So we do have some time for questions. Cindy, do we have any questions on Slack? No. Okay. So everyone was paying attention to the talk. We have time for two questions. Are there any questions for Jared? We have one there.

Jared Spool: Right here?

Preet Arjun Singh: Yeah.

Speaker 3: What is the single biggest thing that has impacted your career?

Jared Spool: The question was what is the single biggest thing that has impacted my career. The first thing that came to my mind is my wife, who studied as a linguist has taught me that only meteors and molars have impact. Bowels I guess. So what is, I think the thing that I keep coming back to is I've been doing this now since the '70's. I was giving a talk the other day. The person said, "When did you start in doing your work?" I'm like, "In 1976, what were you doing in 1976?" And he was like, "I wasn't born yet."

I'm at that point in my career where not only am I usually talking to people who weren't born when I started. But I have projects that are older than them. That's a thing. I think that's the single most thing that has influenced me has always been spending time with people, spending time with users. Spending time with the folks we're trying to design. Because no matter how great I think we've done, I always learn that there is improvement. A colleague of mine used to always say that the largest room in the world is the room for improvement. He could have improved by not saying it as frequently as he did. But that's probably the thing. I tell people if you can only do one thing, it's go spend time with users. Just go watch. Yogi Berra once said that you can observe a lot just by watching. And I think that's brilliant. He also said that when you come to a fork in the road, you should take it. I'm still working on that.

Preet Arjun Singh: Amazing. We have time for one more question. Right here.

Speaker 4: What about for team members that are unconsciously competent, and yet there is always room for improvement? So what kind of techniques would you suggest to try to help those who are already, they almost think they've done it.

Jared Spool: So the question is how do people who are unconsciously competent continue to grow is basically the question. We didn't invent that scale. That scale came from John Hopkins University, a couple of researchers who are actually trying to answer the question. Why is it that the world's best surgeons make horrible instructors on surgery? Turns out that it's uniformly true that if you are an amazing surgeon, when you have students in front of you, you are a complete asshole. And they were trying to figure this out, because they want to train folks.

And what they learned was that it has to do with not being able to see that other people don't see what you see. Right? Someone who's an amazing surgeon walks in and looks at the patient, and can immediately see things. But if you're a new doctor, you look at that patient, you just see a wound. You don't know what you're looking at. You don't know that this little thing here is going to mean big trouble down the road. And those surgeons who'd been in the field too long, forgot that there were people who weren't just like them. And couldn't relate to those people. And it turns out the best instructors for surgery are people who are just at the moment of getting into unconscious competence. Or they're just at the high end of conscious competence, because they remember what it was like to be unconsciously competent. Right? Or I'm sorry, whichever one it is. Consciously incompetent. Yes, thank you. Consciously incompetent. That's what it is. So they remember those people.

So the doctors have a method that they call watch one, do one, teach one. And that method helps counter this. The idea is that if you're learning a new procedure, you first watch, you'll watch me do it. And then the next time that procedure happens, I'll watch you do it. And then the next time the procedure needs to happen, you'll watch someone who watched you do it. And that moment of watching and teaching that person who's doing it for the first time, you learn a ton by teaching. So the best thing that you can do when you become unconsciously competent is to teach what you know. And if you do that, you will get better. We always learn something when we teach. Thank you very much.

Preet Arjun Singh: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.