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
—> I will take you through a method called design swarms
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The purpose of design is to create just world for all and there are severe societal changes that benefit from designers
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There are eight billion on planet earth and I’m amazed by the creative talent available
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Key to this is bringing together swarm behaviors and design thinking, by having people swarm together to build design solutions such as:
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Reducing homelessness
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Empowering refugees
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Distributing vaccines
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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
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I’ll explain the concept of design swarms
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12 learnings from 100+ swarms
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I’ll list 5 tips to adopt swarm creativity, with a few minutes left for conversation
—> Already used in several enterprise sized orgs
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When solving problems in enterprise, sensitive IP, so won’t share that work
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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
—> Initial the design capacity at Microsoft was immature
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There was a super-powerful Windows mobile phone, but had poor design impact
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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
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Empathy and Going Deep
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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
—> Transformational moment for me as a designer, with 11,000 employees working together on big challenges
—> 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
—> Found that things that came together had autonomy, creativity, clarity, and a sense of self-organization
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Emergence of hidden leaders happened
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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
—> 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?
—> Traveling in Australia, I came across a solution
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I was viewing the oldest civilization on planet earth, around the Sacred Rock Uluru
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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
—> 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
—> 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
—> 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
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Predictable activity length (10-30 minutes)
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They needed to embody the designer mindset
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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
—> 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
—> 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,
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Initially I thought it would be hard
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But online, I can look into everyone’s eyes in way that I can’t with limited physical rooms that can’t dynamically change
—> 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
—> So here are five pieces of advice to follow:
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Embrace Diversity inside and outside the org firewall
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Lean into the hardest problems the enterprise is facing
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Use multiple concurrent teams, to activate power of swarms
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Empower self-organization, and boosting leaders in the organization
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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
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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