DesignOps 2020-Theme 3: Introduction and Provocation (Session Notes)

Speaker: Dave Malouf, Sr. Director of Strategy & Operations Design, Northwestern Mutual

— Good morning everyone, the theme for conference for the past three days has been resilience and we need to talk about it.

 

— We will all hit obstacles, walls, challenges. It is not necessarily how we react to challenge, but how we move beyond is what makes us resilient

 

— You need to be resilient force for everyone on behalf of DesignOps, acting as the shield for the rest of the design organization:

 

— Day 1 dealt with how to build resilience  as an individual
— Day 2 dealt with how to build resilience as a DesignOps team
— Day 3, deals with how to build resilience as an organization

 

— What is the difference between a team and an organization
  • Simplest is scale
  • It is when design org moves from being a team, to an enterprise in of itself

 

— This transition happens with certain number of people.
  • When DesignOps become its own business unit within a larger org (i.e. they have own budget and are seen as org that is responsible, not as a cost center, but as an income provider)

 

— As you start scaling, you hit that point of responsibility.

 

— Dave brings up the metaphor of nature, and how it starts with the unit of the cell:
  • As we move forward from cell, organ, to an  organism. An organism must relate with surrounding environment with groups and communities
  • Eventually we have an entire ecosystem (think of this as similar to zooming out on an image on a map)
  • A similar logic applies to DesignOps, as you zoom out, you change lens from an organization to an system

 

— With that, let’s begin our provocations:
  • First, think about what’s the natural path you can take in your life, with least resistance towards achieving our goals, our businesses goals, our business leaders goals?

 

  • How can this be done with least amount of friction, so your energies don’t get depleted as much?

 

  • How can I find a path that connects myself, my team’s intention, and businesses intention?

 

  • Who is missing and who could be with us to make our paths more frictionless? Who do we need to be better and finding paths to connect ourselves with our intention?

 

  • Finally, who are we leaving behind? Where are our blind-spots? What parts of our spectrum of visibility is causing us to forget/ignore/not include someone in our journey, because we are not responding to them?

 

  • When we work through nature, our paths aren’t always visible. Do we have feedback loops to move through paths of emergence as opposed to paths that are pre-carved? How are you ready to sense and respond patterns of emergence?

 

With that, we begin Day 3.