Design at Scale 2021-Unleashing Swarm Creativity to Solve Enterprise Challenges (Surya Vanka)

—> Hello, and what a fantastic conference and thank you to all the organizers and speakers

 

—> In the next 25 minutes I want to share with you what I think is something new in world of design
  • It’s the coming together of design thinking and swarm behaviors, into swarm creativity
—> I will take you through a method called design swarms
  • The purpose of design is to create just world for all and there are  severe societal changes that benefit from designers
  • There are eight billion on planet earth and I’m amazed by the creative talent available
  • Key to this is bringing together swarm behaviors and design thinking, by having people swarm together to build design solutions such as:
    • Reducing homelessness
    • Empowering refugees
    • Distributing vaccines
  • We will help communities come up with co-creation techniques, and designing a future for us all

 

—> What I shared was design swarm approaches used for social impact purposes, so let’s now discuss the impact on enterprise

 

—> Goal to have learned from lessons I’ve taken from social impact swarms and applying them to the enterprise level

 

—> Here’s the roadmap
  • I’ll explain the concept of design swarms
  • 12 learnings from 100+ swarms
  • I’ll list 5 tips to adopt swarm creativity, with a few minutes left for conversation

 

—> Already used in several enterprise sized orgs
  • When solving problems in enterprise, sensitive IP, so won’t share that work
  • Will share work from social impact and education
—> Social impact is more relevant, since minimal resources encourage us to be inventive

 

—> But I’ll begin with a bit of enterprise context
  • I used to be the director of UX at Microsoft

—> Initial the design capacity at Microsoft was immature
  • There was a super-powerful Windows mobile phone, but had poor design impact
  • Microsoft was focused on technology/business but not the experience

—> Ten years later, Microsoft became a design leader, and I saw the change happen

 

—> I had opportunity to drive transformation, and what was core to transformation was really embedding design thinking process at scale within the company

 

—> An example of design thinking is the Double Diamond process, but challenge was how do you scale design thinking in massive company that has 120,000 people

 

—> And within that company, the designers are a minority, with one 1 designer for 43 developers

 

—> Key learning was that we needed to understand design fluency vs design literates who could participate in the process, and making sure people had working knowledge of design

 

—> This would allow the design work to move forward

 

 

—> Through ten year process, we were able to capture creativity within company employees and aligning it with a design scaffold,  scaling empathy and design practices across the company itself

 

—> This was a successful story, and there are two parts in building products
  1. Empathy and Going Deep
  2. Moving Fast
—> Now important to take this method and move fast

 

—> A shift happened with the change of CEO to Satya Nadella, who wanted to focus on building the design muscle of the company

—> Our group was asked to build a company wide hackathons were anyone from any division in Microsoft could participate in Hackathons
  • Everyone could participate
—> Transformational moment for me as a designer, with 11,000 employees working together on big challenges
  • As of last year 24,000 employees worked on these Hackathons
—> Transformation he saw in bringing new behaviors as people began to swarm on problems

 

—> Many exemplary projects like iGaze, where team worked to provide dignity for someone who had ALS
  • In short time, created a working solution by swarming on the problem
—> Found that things that came together had autonomy, creativity, clarity, and a sense of self-organization
  • Emergence of hidden leaders happened
  • There was an ability to go really deep into an issue, while moving fast at the same time
—> I saw the power of swarm behaviors and design thinking coming together

 

—> But would the work at the Hackathons be applied to the VUCA world that we live in, and its complexity?

 

—> Many things are happening with many local and global problems

 

—> All need urgency and demand creativity, with little design capability going around
  • So how do we make it available?

 

—> Can we tap into creativity across all humans and to make a dent

 

—> I had a hypothesis: Can we activate billions of minds, and apply them to thousands of wicked problems and activate humans creativity at scale

 

—> But how to do this?
  • As designer, it took me seven years of training, so how do you train people across the world in design thinking?
—> Traveling in Australia, I came across a solution
  • I was viewing the oldest civilization on planet earth, around the Sacred Rock Uluru
  • This civilization didn’t have a written language, only a visual and spoken language

 

—> The surface of Uluru is covered in graphics, and these graphics served as narratives to perpetuate and negotiate culture
  • So I thought about turning design into process graphics

—> I developed shared process maps that people could go through process by stepping through the stpes

 

—> People with zero design experience could use the maps to solve problems in their own lives

 

—> Validated this process in Seattle, in the context of relieving the homelessness crisis there

 

—> Worked with women’s shelter to work on the issue with designers and the process maps

 

—> Ran the process in many different places in context ranging from water scarcity to ocean health

 

—> With that background let’s jump into the 12 learnings I gained from the experience

 

—> Learning 1: We learn design through complex maps, but we can also step through a problem by focusing on what’s next

 

—> I found the process maps turned rich design knowledge and externalize it
  •  Power was given to the maps
—> People can move through process without being experts

 

—> At beginning when creating maps, we found we had to keep adapting maps to each process, but realized single map couldn’t apply to different problems

 

—> So we turned maps into a lego kit of maps to allow
  • Experimentation in the middle
  • Can work with just as few as three maps
—> This was a modular process that could be used by someone with no background in design

 

—> Maps with consistent structure increased clarity and velocity

 

—> Maps needed entry and exit points
  • Predictable activity length (10-30 minutes)
  • They needed to embody the designer mindset
  • Advantage of being able to  “learn, do, and share”

 

—> We fond having multiple teams working together, raised each other up while doing the work

 

—> This happened in physical spaces, as well as digitally with digital whiteboards and breakout rooms

 

—> Different ages, experiences, roles, makes a huge difference in how quickly solutions can be applied

 

—> Good problem statements lead to good results

 

—> Framework involved with
  • Aspirational mindset
  • Backcasting approach to move into preferred approach
  • Defining team challenges and deliverables
—> This makes all the difference

 

—> We found it useful to consistently enforce swam behavior information

 

—> Flexible systems could drive better design outcomes

 

—> Example of Mexican City Earthquake, where we found that tapping into visual skill could happen quickly, and language didn’t pose a barrier

 

—> We used the primacy of visual results to drive our work
  • Also applied techniques in India with similar success

 

—> A flexible scaffold unleashed people’s power

 

—> Example of combining hybrid of physical and digital spaces in Sierra Leone that made the most of limited digital resources, provided both scale and reach

 

—> We use a lot of templating in design, from an idea page, to moving from creation to selection tasks

 

—> Embedding knowledge in conversation design is another way to empower participants

 

—> We used to embed research with things like empathy walls, and have started mimicing the approach with digital process maps

 

—> Knowledge embedded in working surface lets teams unpack the knowledge

 

—> Online swarms have surprising intimacy,
  • Initially I thought it would be hard
  • But online, I can look into everyone’s eyes in way that I can’t with limited physical rooms that can’t dynamically change
    • Bodies are also fully transparent

—> I don’t expect you to learn all these things, but I want you to grasp the main points of these tips

 

—> For enterprise frame you also, have lots of creative capacity not tapped by the organization
  • Only 15% of people in orgs are involved in creative work
  • We can tap into creative swarms behaviors

 

 

—> So here are five pieces of advice to follow:

 

  1. Embrace Diversity inside and outside the org firewall
  2. Lean into the hardest problems the enterprise is facing
  3. Use multiple concurrent teams, to activate power of swarms
  4. Empower self-organization, and boosting leaders in the organization
  5. If you think in systems, you can scale up and down

 

—> Anyone interested in facilitating swarm can go to a workshop on July or August 2021

 

Q&A
  1. What’s the role of a professional designer for teams using these maps?

 

—> Key when thinking of facilitator is the new role for designer, as being those who unleash broad human creativity

 

—> Sweet spot is between 24 and 36 participant, with skilled participants going further up
  • Assistant facilitators for every 40 people, and can go up to 200 popes