Becoming a changemaker: 3 takeaways from 3 designers of change
In an increasingly complicated environment filled with volatile dilemmas, how do we engender change? According to Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland, authors of Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World, this requires leading with design.
In their invaluable book, Giudice and Ireland speak with changemakers across different disciplines to gain insight into the interplay between design and leadership. Here are three takeaways about creating change—each from one of the design world’s most influential leaders:
John Maeda, VP of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft, says to lead with clarity
“I’ve always tried to build a culture based on Kim Scott’s concept of radical candor. This doesn’t just mean being transparent. There’s transparency and then there’s clarity. I’m always driving toward clarity in roles and relationships and accountabilities.” Read more
Liz Ogbu, Founder + Principal of Studio O, argues that sometimes you may need to be the one who changes the system
“[Changemaking is] not accepting the status quo as the complete answer. My job is never to come in and say, ‘I’m going to do it the way it has always been done.’ I often come in with the premise that the way it has been done has not been good for everybody, and part of my mission is to make sure that everybody is done right by whatever we accomplish. So basically, that means that I’m often in a position of having to make change, and of having to adapt the system to achieve that goal.” Read more
Doug Powell, Former VP of Design at IBM, emphasizes that temporary setbacks are just that—temporary
“It might slow a team down when they are initially adopting and developing the behaviors and practices. That middle manager who is so resistant early on is thinking ‘Oh my god, it’s going to take two months for my team to really figure out how to do this well.’ But then once everything’s in place, then you’re going to be on a glide path and you’re going to be flying.” Read more
Want to learn more about becoming a changemaker and leading with design? Dive into Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World, available in paperback and all common ebook formats. You can also listen to authors Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland interviewed on The Rosenfeld Review podcast here.
The DesignOps Summit Conference Program is Now Live!
The DesignOps Summit’s three-day main program (October 2-24) is now available. Don’t miss out on the premier annual event for people who lead design operations and teams. We’ve selected a lineup of diverse, talented speakers, and a variety of talks centered on our three themes.
- DesignOps is Changing: The pandemic, the war in Ukraine, layoffs, and now the explosion of AI… These global trends are directly impacting design organizations; we’ll cover what they mean and how they change the way you’ll practice DesignOps in the months and years to come.
- DesignOps is Practical: From design systems and documentation to AI tools and DE&I practices, we’ll address the approaches and techniques that you can and should adopt to impact your organization right away.
- DesignOps+: DesignOps is more than scaling and maximizing efficiency. We’ll dig into the human side of DesignOps, from nurturing your career and lifting up your team, to improving collaboration and growing a more inclusive DesignOps profession.
If you’re thinking of attending, keep in mind that our early bird registration deadline is August 15. Groups of three or more get 25% discount when registering concurrently (enter code GROUP).
Enterprise UX 2023 Conference Materials are Available
If you attended our recent conference, Enterprise UX 2023, head over to the program page to view the videos, sketchnotes, slides, resources, and session notes! If you didn’t attend, you can also get access to these materials by purchasing the recordings.
Podcast: Changemakers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland discuss their new book
Authors Maria Giudice & Christopher Ireland join Lou to discuss their new book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World, which comes out on January 17.
Get a taste of what they cover in the book, from systems thinking to navigating change, and how to look broadly at patterns to understand the context in which you are establishing change. The authors explain the wide range of industries they drew from in their research and interviews, as well as the highly emotional aspect of changemaking in society today. Bonus: they share some tools you can use to become a changemaker.
Maria recommends: The Knowledge Project podcast – interviews with an eclectic range of people. Host Shane Parrish is one of the best interviewers Maria has ever heard!
Christopher recommends: Non-profit Interact Project, which provides free design education to kids in underserved communities.
This week: What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering
Bill Scott, veteran of Yahoo! and Netflix and author of O’Reilly’s Designing Web Interfaces, tackles interface engineering in our next live webinar, scheduled for 1-2pm EST this Thursday, February 26.
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Mobile Design Strategy: Don’t Make This Mistake
On September 12, our next event, The Mobile UX Summit, is coming to your virtual office! We’ve asked Josh Clark, Brad Frost, Theresa Neil, Greg Nudelman, Jason CranfordTeague, and Mike Fisher for 27 tips and 2 case studies on designing mobile experiences. You’ll walk away with new mobile UX insight and skills, get some questions answered—and the session recordings are included with your registration.
This week we talked to Greg Nudelman about an important mistake to avoid in mobile design strategy:
Greg Nudelman: I think one huge mistake people make is to assume that by using a simple app porting service they can turn an iOS app into an Android app. While this may work for some games (well… sometimes… and sort of), the same assumption FAILS for any content or search-driven apps in most other categories. The truth is there are about one million apps in each of the app stores (Android and Apple) so the competition is fierce in every category.
There is simply no substitute for knowing the OS conventions and using some of the basics as the anchor to start your mobile design. And OS formats are changing rapidly—witness nothing less than fundamental changes in both leading mobile platforms from Android 2.x to 4.x and Apple iOS 6 to iOS 7. And if you do decide to break the app conventions, it helps to know them first—that’s where design pattern books can be of help; books like Theresa Neil’s Mobile Design Patterns Gallery (O’Reilly Media, 2012) and my own Android Design Patterns (Wiley, 2013) are great resources. So to succeed with your mobile app, you will need to:
- Understand the conventions of the OS you are building for
- Start with a simple paper or sticky notes prototype to allow yourself to explore various design directions, fail quickly and cheaply and iterate rapidly
- Test early and test often to make sure the app uses the appropriate patterns and meets your customers’ needs and does so in an original, intuitive and delightful way
Good luck and see you at the Summit!
Sign up now to reserve your virtual seat at our Mobile UX Summit on September 12!
Podcast: Design Beyond Devices—Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences with Cheryl Platz
Cheryl Platz—Rosenfeld Media author, emcee of our Advancing Research and Enterprise Experience conferences, puppeteer, and Principal UX Designer at Gates Foundation—shares the inspiration that drove her new book Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences (due out in late 2020). If you’re an interaction designer, you’ll want to listen as Cheryl dramatically expands our understanding of one of interaction design’s final frontiers.
Cheryl recommends:
- Wired for Speech by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave
- Follow Cheryl on Twitter
- Get updates on her new book
Podcast: Making Conferences More Accessible with Darryl Adams, Intel’s Director of Accessibility
With the surge in popularity of, and need for, hybrid and virtual events, Lou sits down with Intel’s Director of Accessibility, Darryl Adams, to discuss how technology can make in-person and virtual conferences more accessible and inclusive to speakers and audience members with disabilities. He also speaks to how accessible conference design can be improved and fine-tuned for speakers with disabilities, and help those without disabilities feel more comfortable presenting. What kind of accessibility principles and design factors should conference hosts consider for audience members with disabilities and those without disabilities when setting up for in-person and virtual events? How does this technology increase engagement and diversity in attendance? Listen as Darryl and Lou touch on all these topics, and more.
Darryl recommends: Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau
Darryl Adams is the Director of Accessibility at Intel.?Darryl leads a team that works at the intersection of technology and human experience helping discover new ways for people with disabilities to work, interact, and thrive. Darryl’s mission is to connect his passion for technology innovation with Intel’s disability inclusion efforts to help make computing and access to digital information more accessible for everyone and to make Intel an employer of choice for employees with disabilities.
Community Videoconference: Leading through the long tail of trauma
Please join our free Advancing Research community or Enterprise Experience community for access to the recording. You’ll receive a welcome email with a Dropbox link to our archive of past calls.
The fatigue and trauma from events of the past few years has affected many of us – not just personally, but also professionally, and at the organizational level as well. For the most part, the corporate world has recognized the impact these past years have had on employees and teams. However, many organizations have only recently become aware of the longer-term effects and are struggling to support their people as they work through the long tail of trauma
In this special community call, produced in partnership by Rosenfeld Media’s Advancing Research and Enterprise Experience curation teams, Uday Gajendar will facilitate a discussion about the long tail of trauma, with Rachael Dietkus, LCSW, Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSW, and Dr. Dawn Emerick.
They will cover:
• What it means to be a “trauma-informed leader”
• Ideas to keep in mind when handling stressful/anxious events or circumstances with your team
• Differences in supporting people during an event and its immediate aftermath, vs in the long tail of trauma
• Specific actions you can take with your team
Please register to join us via Zoom on July 13th at 11am ET and learn more about the long tail of trauma, how it can affect your organization, and what steps you can take toward a sustained and intentional strategy for leading your team through long-term, post-pandemic challenges. The panel will be recorded, but we will turn off the recording for audience Q&A.
The speakers:
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Rachael is a macro-focused clinical social worker focusing on trauma-conscious practices in design. She is the founder and Chief Compassion Officer for Social Workers Who Design, a consultancy focused on integrating ethical understanding and trauma-conscious approaches in design. She is a two-time alumna of UIUC, where she studied Sociology and Social Work.
Dr. Dawn Emerick
Dr. Dawn Emerick is a speaker, trainer, and coach, focused on trauma-informed leadership. She’s a LinkedIn Learning instructor, a 2021 TEDx Jacksonville speaker, and host of the Leadership Uncensored podcast. Over a span of 30 years, she crafted her leadership, organizational development, and engagement skills at various private, government, and non-profit organizations in Florida, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, and Texas.
Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSW
Dawn Shedrick, LCSW-R, is the founder and CEO of JenTex Training & Consulting, a professional development company that offers continuing education training; leadership development training and coaching; and consulting to the human services, healthcare, and social justice sectors. Dawn has also designed and delivered mental and emotional wellness and LGBTQ inclusion seminars in corporate workplaces including Travelers Insurance, JP Morgan Chase, GE, The NY Mets, Office Depot, GlaxoSmithKline, National Grid, Columbia University, and Canon USA North American Headquarters. She has delivered trainings to in-person audiences throughout the United States and abroad in Canada, Puerto Rico, Tanzania, and China and has created interactive virtual learning events for global audiences.
Uday Gajendar (Co-curator, Enterprise Experience Community)
Uday is a Design Manager for Aurora Solar who specializes in next-gen innovation projects and “three-in-a-box” product development with business and engineering leads. He also regularly writes for ACM Interactions and speaks worldwide on design topics at SXSW, UX Australia, IxDA, Midwest UX, and other venues. You can read Uday’s thoughts on design at his blog and on Medium.
Excerpt: Chapter One of our Newest Title, From Solo to Scaled by Natalie M. Dunbar
Chapter 1
The Content Strategy Practice Blueprint
I’m fascinated by buildings: single family structures, high-rise dwellings, and especially office towers. As such, I’ve always had a healthy curiosity about the construction process. For example, Figure 1.1 shows a Habitat for Humanity building that I worked on. From the initial breaking of ground to the completion of a building’s façade, I find comfort in both the art and order of construction—how foundations support columns, columns support beams, and beams support floors. When the building plans are followed as written, every element comes together perfectly to create a strong structure that is capable of withstanding natural elements like wind and earthquakes.
In my career as a content strategist, I’ve heard colleagues speak about “standing up a team,” or “standing up a practice.” There was familiarity in the concept of building a figurative structure that had a specific function or purpose. And, of course, that familiarity stemmed from my fascination with buildings, so the construction metaphor made sense to me.
That metaphor also reminded me of one of my favorite books, Why Buildings Stand Up, by Mario Salvadori. Before writing and content strategy became my full-time job, I worked in various roles in residential and commercial real estate. All of those roles exposed me to various phases of building construction and tenant improvements, and reading Salvadori’s book helped me understand construction and architecture in an engaging way.
The familiarity I felt when hearing the phrase “stand up a practice” in the digital experience world often stopped short of the idea of the building metaphor. For example, practices were “stood up” with no attention to order. Foundations were poured before soil tests were completed, often resulting in skipping the addition of the footings that might be needed to support the foundation, or in the case of the practice, doing the work to ensure that the practice followed the necessary processes to create digital experiences that met the needs of users as well as the goal of the client or business. And inevitably, the structure—or the practice—began to crumble.
And sometimes those practices failed completely.
From the Ground Up
Having had the opportunity to build an agency-based content strategy practice from the ground up, and later expanding and maintaining an existing practice within a mid-to-large sized organization, I began to see that failures often happened because steps crucial to supporting the structure had been skipped. Or perhaps the structure had been compromised because the framework used to build it—if one was used at all—couldn’t withstand the constant stress of tension and compression.
When I started to think about what caused these seemingly strong practices to crumble—I returned to the building and construction metaphor to look for possible answers. That’s because it’s sometimes easier to, er, construct a mental model that’s more tangible than the nebulousness nature of digital information spaces.
If the building metaphor still feels a bit weird to you, then try this: think of the last time someone asked what you did for a living. If you’re a UX practitioner, or if you collaborate with members of a UX team, you’ve likely experienced the feeling of the listener’s eyes glazing over as you tried to explain the concept of user experience—or as I once saw it described, “making websites and apps stink less.” Then think of what might happen if you described the user experience using a more relatable metaphor, such as one of the following:
- The internet is a space.
- A website or mobile app is a destination within that space (and in the case of websites, a space complete with its own address).
- The work you do helps people avoid getting lost in that space.
In keeping with this theme, now imagine that the opportunity that’s immediately in front of you—that of building a UX-focused content strategy practice—is a pristine plot of land. Provided you have a solid plan and the right materials and tools, this untilled soil is ready for you to break ground and to stand up a healthy content strategy practice.
So this figurative plot of land you’ve been given needs someone—you—to till the soil and prepare the space for a structure to be built. And the creation of the plans for that structure, as well as sourcing the building materials and the tools you’ll need to build it, has also fallen to you.
Lucky for you, this book is your blueprint.
To continue reading, order your copy of From Solo to Scaled!
