Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Hacking Kaizen. I'm Graeme Newman. We start this series of programs talking to Gordon Candelin, an award winning designer in interaction, branding, customer and product experience, and former leader at McKinsey Design Southeast Asia. The title of this program, time for a revolution in design, draws inspiration from a series of seminars given by Professor Bruce Archer at the Royal College of Art. In 1976, Archer proposed a third area of human knowledge, rorting and writing. Rorting the making refers to the hands on process of crafting and shaping materials while writing. The doing involves the intellectual and conceptual activities of design, such as planning, problem solving. Much has changed since then, but there's a strong case that these two principles are even more relevant now than ever, as design has transitioned from merely making things to enabling possibilities.
Recorded at home in Bangkok, Gordon shares his perspective on how this applies today, how the role of design has evolved, the impact of generative AI, and positioning design as a key value proposition for addressing organizational challenges.
We begin by asking Gordon about big D design and why design thinking is not succeeding in digital product transformation.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: I think that some of the things I mentioned around digital product, I feel like it's really fundamentally broken. I think this is to some degree the responsibility of designers as well as anybody else.
I think that this idea, big D design, design thinking, five step approach, whatever you call it, I think the shine is rubbed off a little bit and it's a little bit troubling.
But I think there's an opportunity as a designer, I think one thing, any designer don't care what kind of designer you are, whatever you call yourself, a designer of any kind of maturity should be able to look at what they've done before and say, do you know what I could have done better if I'd done this a little bit differently? I've done that. I could have done better because it never ends. It's about creating the right thing for the right outcome.
And the more we know, the better the outcome fact of life. We don't always have the time we want the budget we want the space we want.
There's always an opportunity to look back and say, you know, how could we have done this better? And I think that maybe this is what we need to do with design thinking and this type of design that was so fetid and had such great opportunities in management consultancies, McKinsey's and others. Right.
I think it's a time to reflect on, okay, well, interesting, given the time and space we had and the lifetime of that in those organizations, because I do think it's fundamentally changing.
How do we need to do it better and differently? So I think what I'm interested in seeing is how designers of all stripes who have been in those environments, working for management consultancies, working for large organizations, can really take that learning and do something new with it. You know, create something new. This is the opportunity, and I think some very cool things are going to come out of it.
[00:03:42] Speaker C: Let's talk about the role of design, the fastlane statement.
It's all about being curious.
What's your take on this?
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Well, it really depends on what you mean by design. And I think this is a really challenging question that I've thought a lot about for many years, and I've got an answer that works for me.
But I think if we're looking at design as sort of a problem solving approach, which I think over the last decade or so, it's pretty well established that there is an aspect of design which is about problem solving, then, yeah, curiosity is a hugely valuable skill. And I think if there's one thing that I would like people to understand about this type of design, design is problem solving, is that it's not an inherent gift that people are born with. This is a skill that you can develop, you can practice over time. And the curiosity aspect, it's really just about, there's some practical things you do about understanding human bias and how that plays out in different, different ways in digital and service design, et cetera, but then also practicing being curious to really understand the why of things. Right. And I think that's what design is, a problem solving approach. Service design, those sort of more systems related design approaches.
Curiosity and really understanding the reality of things is hugely important. And usually that's about recognizing that not everybody's like you. We have inherent human biases that we often bring to the table. I think consultancy is a management consultancy, sort of leverages this quite heavily. Right. Management consultants, we know the answer already, don't even need to ask. But I think that the value of the design approach towards all sorts of problems, not just visual problems or digital problems, comes in really pushing past that initial, hey, I get it, it's easy, I understand this. And really questioning. Right. And that's where a lot of these other design centric methodologies come in. Research, et cetera. It's to really help us as individuals, as organizations push past those biases, especially when the context is such that we really want and desperately need quick answers. That's what we think. An organization's in trouble. We need to do something fast.
And so it's very reassuring. If there's an answer that's ready made, don't have to think about it. You just, we do it. Here's the answer. But I think that's even more important to question and take a step back and really take some time to understand. Because if it were that easy, you probably wouldn't be in that situation in the first place. Right. You'd be in a much different place.
[00:06:52] Speaker C: There's a case that design has moved from making things to making things possible. And you mentioned systems earlier. It's not necessarily designed for artifact anymore.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Understanding the system at play. And you can break down that in almost any sector, any domain, whether it's digital, whether it's manufacturing, whether it's aviation, there's systems at play, there's human systems, there's product systems, service systems.
All of those systems are designed or not.
So there's an inherent reach and relevance of design.
Big D design. Not little D, little D design. Execution, also very important. But this broader, maybe more conceptual idea of, has somebody really thought about this deeply and tried to arrange the pieces of this system intelligently, with intent?
And often the answer is no. Right? I think that's. And it's a really fascinating space to think about, because for me, I love execution. I've been to execute. I'm a great executor. I've been doing it for many years, more than two decades. I love making the artifacts, making the things, and in making the things, I've learned about the things and how they relate to each other and how they are organized in larger and larger systems. So for me, it just makes a lot of sense.
I think the challenge is, again, there's this very deep, I don't want to say bias, but maybe misunderstanding, but a really important misunderstanding about design.
Because if the perception is that design is the output, it's the execution.
And if you're not really thinking about design as systems building and systems arranging or rearranging, then who's responsible for that structure? And if you look at it, if you just look at digital design, digital product design, perfect example.
I think it's really broken these days. It's amazing how the more deeply I look at digital product design, people are making apps and digital products and services, from huge tech companies down to small design firms. It's just completely broken. And the reason I say that is because we've organized design and product. In a way, I'm just using digital as an example, but more broadly accelerated by this idea that agile and scrum is appropriate for all scenarios, all situations. It's not, but it's been heavily leveraged as such. Right.
So now you have these very siloed, very. I mean, you know, it's kind of interesting. This should be the opposite of what agile is, but you end up with these very siloed groups of people working.
And designers, to a large part, in this digital context, they're the screen makers, developers are the ones creating the interaction, right? Creating the product, taking the screens. Designers give me those screens and then the product people are the ones just managing all the requests. We need this, we need this, we need this.
And this is often organized into very specific, very narrow journeys. So you have a squad or a team that's just focused on onboarding or just focused on payments, or just focused on XYZ. So my question is, if everybody's organized that way, who's designing the system, who's designing the experience, who's designing the end to end overall experience that a customer is actually going through? And the answer in most cases is nobody. Nobody's doing it. And I think that's a huge problem.
[00:11:10] Speaker C: I still believe the practice is based around making and doing. This is a very royal College of Art approach to problem solving. It's experiential and it builds this intimate understanding of how things work and how we behave and how design decisions impact the final outcome. Is that applicable now?
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Still?
[00:11:37] Speaker B: I think it's even more relevant now. You learn a hell of a lot about what it is you're actually doing, who you're doing it for, what you're trying to achieve.
I think there's a.
And this is what's missing, right?
Best in class.
You know, you look outside and you say, company X is doing that and it's best in class, and we want to do that, guaranteed. If something really is best in class, guaranteed they didn't just make a plan and say we're going to do that and then they do it. It's not how it works.
So I'd love to see more of that happen. But this is exactly what I mean when I say, for example, digital product is broken. That doesn't happen anymore.
[00:12:28] Speaker C: So you're now going back to making, and I know that you're very embedded in the conversation regarding machine learning and Genai and this continues to evolve. You know, it is here with us now. I guess my question is, how do you maintain a balance between technological advancements and the human centered aspects of design?
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Oh, it's a great question. I don't know that I've got a great answer, though, I think.
I mean, the allure of technology is always that you can do cool stuff. I mean, it's cool in the broadest sense. You know, Gen AI feels like magic sometimes. And I've been very deeply involved with it now for close to six months, and I'm still amazed.
And I guess the way I try to manage what this all means is that I'm trying to remind myself what it's for. I could very easily spend all my days just experimenting and playing and trying to figure out. I guess it's just a type of discipline, particularly as I'm kind of working on my own now, that I'm sense checking what I'm doing, what I'm trying to get to. What's the overall goal here?
Is it for play or is it for something serious?
And this is just practice. This is something that I don't have the luxury of just playing around for no good reason. So I'm trying to, you know, keep a sense of what it's for and where it could lead, and I think it's giving me a sense of the particular problems or challenges with genai in particular that I'm interested in solving.
A big part of that right now is that a lot of what we're seeing and hearing, I mean, it's moving so quickly every week to something new.
And what I'm kind of interested in, what I'm realizing is that there's a big gap between all the cool stuff you hear about, or a lot of it, and its utility for people in reality. And what I mean by that is, it's a challenge. I'm currently experiencing a lot of the experimentation or use cases, sort of the demos and things we're seeing. These are happening in very isolated environments. These are really smart people, engineers, technologists, and they're doing things on a single computer in a particular way just kind of works right. And they're doing amazing things. It's a very far way away from regular people interacting with it in the ways that they need to interact.
And so that's what I'm interested in. How do you bridge that gap? Because right now, a lot of the Jennai experience is constrained to chat, and.
[00:15:32] Speaker C: I think we have to have a balance. I think it's still about interacting with people, asking questions, and capturing the qualitative as well.
That said, what measures do you think can be taken to prevent the misuse of this? This is a question that perhaps hasn't been fully addressed.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: It really depends on how you're defining design, right. If you're designing for utility, for experience, for outcomes versus execution, I'm just making a thing.
There's an inherent sort of questioning or consideration that you go through. What am I trying to achieve with this? And there are people who will think that way. And I mean, we're seeing it with some of the apps, face swapping apps and really terrible misuses of AI. And there are people designing these things, explicitly designing these types of experiences, which is why it's not really just a design question. I mean, it's a much more structural question, right. And that's why organizations like OpenAI and Google, they have these or had them in some cases, people, very smart people, explicitly tasked with trying to understand and manage the ethics of Chen AI.
And you know, there's always, unfortunately or fortunately, there's human beings are very good at gaming the system. Almost as soon as there's a system, there's somebody trying to break it, right? And Genei is no exception. And this is, it's a really interesting question because the implications, I mean, they really cannot be understated, overstated government's implications on things like war and media. I mean, it's just absolutely huge.
[00:17:34] Speaker C: I was considering this about asking you, how do you feel about a set of industry standards? Should they potentially ensure ethical AI integration with design?
And how could designers actively contribute to shaping these guidelines? If we take the design council in London or Aiga Design Council Singapore, I'd love to see something like that.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: Well, I'm sure some of this is already happening.
I think the management consultant in me would say there's nothing stopping anybody from doing it right, just stepping up and doing it.
Some of these organizations absolutely are thinking about this. I think the broader implication is then going to be how does this become more structured in terms of, let's say, GDPR, for example. It took a long time to get there, but these sorts of initiatives can see the light of day at some point. But what's happening in the background is hugely complex. I mean, there's a lot of aligning and organizing that needs to happen. So I think in the short term, I think there's some opportunity in the design space for somebody or some group or collective to step up and say, look, you know, we're seeing a gap and we believe that there's a particular way we should be approaching things like this. And I think there are some individuals and organizations already doing that. But for it to become anything more than sort of, we think it should be done like this, something more explicit. It'll be some time.
[00:19:17] Speaker C: I want to talk to you about transformation at the enterprise level.
What are some of the misconceptions businesses have about design that leads to missed opportunities?
[00:19:31] Speaker B: So, I mean, there's different types of transformation.
There's organizational transformation, digital transformation, people transformation.
And nowadays, though, I think transformation is often implied to mean digital to some degree, if not largely. And digital will always play a role. But I think the, and this is the crux of the matter. I think that design is still perceived by the vast majority of organizations to relate, if to relate to anything, to relate to digital, and if related to digital, related to some kind of digital app or product or service. Right. So there's this very strong gravitational pull that's pulling design out of the reach of its real value.
When design is embedded in transformation, I think it's, again, all of the critical, well known aspects of a design approach to problem solving are there to see right. Are we solving the right problem? Are we thinking about it in the right way?
[00:20:43] Speaker C: Are we asking the right questions?
[00:20:45] Speaker B: We're asking the right questions. Are we talking to the right people?
There's a huge opportunity space in organizational transformation, HR transformation, people transformation, where design plays a role. And I've done this many times, I've done this in my role at McKinsey, both internally and externally for clients.
And the value is tremendous. And often, you know, in that respect, I'm much more of a facilitator than anything else, and I'm more like a stopgap to just say, stop, stop what you're doing. Let's look at it like this.
When I've got the opportunity to play that role, it can be very powerful. But I think there's a lot of things that need to happen for someone like me to step in and play that role. And there's a lot of forces, a lot of gravity pulling that opportunity away. So it takes a lot of things to get that right. For design to play that role, it takes the right relationships, the right discussions, the right understanding. So there's a lot of setup that needs to happen.
And then once the opportunity is created, I think in almost all cases, you'll see the value, but it's not immediately clear how to get to that point. And I think this is the. Maybe the frustration or maybe also the opportunity for organizations that if they're able to create that opportunity, if they're able to recognize that value, and they can do that by talking to people who have experience. They've probably got some trusted advisors, external advisors, who understand this, and then obviously bring the right people in again, this is where design becomes a little bit tricky. What type of design do I need?
[00:22:38] Speaker C: And I think designers, we're always going to be outliers in this enterprise level space, but I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing to have a different perspective.
So what steps should leaders take to overcome these misconceptions about design and fully leverage design as a strategic tool?
[00:22:58] Speaker B: I think there's a. I mean, obviously, organizations like McKinsey Accenture, they've had design embedded for well over a decade now.
And if you go to the McKinsey.com website and look at the design function, I mean, you'll learn exactly the opportunity.
But in practice, though, it's much more relationship based. It's much more trust based. CEO of an organization and chairwoman. Chairperson, they need to get it right. And so they're going to turn to the people that they know and trust, and they're going to say, you know, how do we get it right now? Whether it's design that's delivering that answer or part of that answer or something else, they don't care. They don't care. They just want the right answer. They want somebody to say, you need to do this. So immediately, the challenge is that the person who's making that decision is not necessarily aware or they don't necessarily understand what they need.
So it's really dependent on that trusted advisor that they're turning to, to present that value. So that's really the crux, right? That if that advisor, if that person, if that group of people doesn't know, then the CEO will never know, right. Unless they talk to other people they trust. So it's a. I think it's a pretty slow, hard slog, basically. I don't think there's anything that any individual can say or show that will immediately get a senior leader or an organization. Wow. Okay, great. Let's do that.
So it's really case by case, each.
[00:24:45] Speaker C: Individual, and I think looking at client side and the larger enterprises here in Southeast Asia, I think it's fair to say we're a little bit behind the curve on effectively embedding design into the core operational processes of an organization.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: But that will come, I think, eventually, yes. I think Asia, Southeast Asia, and Asia more broadly to a large degree, is very focused on differentiation based on price, and that's why promotions and deals and are so ubiquitous here. Very few organizations who are trying to differentiate in other ways, brand vision, value proposition, product and service experience. Right. It's price.
And I think it's a huge mistake. I think if you just take the chinese brand, Xiaomi, for example, I've got a bunch of you just look around my living room. I've got.
[00:25:50] Speaker C: I'm a huge Xiaomi fan. It's the best thing that's ever come out of Shenzhen.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: It's amazing. They look good. So they tick that box of, like, you know, looks good, they work well, they talk to each other. The digital experience is great. So there's a lot of great things, and I've spent a lot of money buying it because I think it's a great product, great service.
Very few other brands that I can really think of like that at scale, in Southeast Asia in particular.
[00:26:23] Speaker C: So given what we talked about, you have this incredible rhetoric of blending pathos, logos and ethos to a non specialist audience. And I'm thinking specifically about senior executives inside of the organization and their clients and customers. What advice would you give designers to build that narrative and be able to effectively communicate with decision makers at senior exec level?
[00:26:50] Speaker B: Yeah, it's going to depend on your path, right? I think my path has been very much starting at the pointy end execution, taking me a long time, couple decades to get to that point.
And I guess the one piece of advice is, regardless of how much time, how much thinking, how much effort you're spending on that design part, whatever part that is, whether it's interface, interaction, or structure or ux or brand, whatever, it's a tiny piece of the overall problem, super important piece. Definitely a lot of value to be extracted from that in terms of differentiation.
But it's not the piece that these senior executives are really focused on. They're focused on very different things, and they don't really need to know how those things are related.
So I think the advice is to really try to understand, start practicing now to understand what is what you're doing connected to in terms of business value, how does it relate to customer acquisition, to conversion, to profit, to lead generation? I mean, all of these things that, you know, as a young designer, I didn't want to know about that. I didn't care. I was a designer. I was going to make this amazing thing, and it's a mistake. It really is a mistake. Designers should know about this. They should know how they're doing is related to these larger questions, and they don't need to have answers to those things just yet. They don't need to, like, have it necessarily as part of the brief and be thinking deeply about it, but understanding that the output is not really the thing these people are thinking about. I think it's a good first step. Now, if you're studying service design or design strategy, and these are real things you can study, as you know, these are actual degrees, I'm hoping that there's a much more holistic education in terms of understanding big D design and its relationship to business.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: My thanks to our guest, Gordon Candel. In there. On our website you can find the program notes and a reading list for this episode. Hacking Kaizen is produced by DSA. We'll be back at the same time next week week. But until then, from me, Graham Newman. Many thanks for listening.
