New from Sound-Up Governance: Are design and good governance the same thing?

Bonus Crossover Episode from Sound-Up Governance. For more info, visit http://www.groundupgovernance.com

 

TRANSCRIPT

Matt Intro

Hi everyone! This is Matt Fullbrook. It’s been a LOOOONG time since I posted anything here on the OMG channel, and…actually I don’t have any real updates for you. Sorry! I just wanted to let you know that there’s some new content on the Sound-Up Governance podcast. I’ve just launched a short series of episodes based around a cool webinar I did last year with some experts in business design where we explored the connection between design thinking and good governance. Here’s the first instalment. If you like what you hear, be sure to follow along at groundupgovernance.com 

 

Matt Voiceover

Welcome back to Sound-Up Governance. My name is Matt Fullbrook, and today we have the first in a short series of episodes that come from a webinar that I co hosted a few months back with my old friend Michael Hartmann, who's the Principal of the Directors College at McMaster University. He invited a couple of his friends to join us. Karel Vredenburg, who was the global VP of UX Research at IBM, and Tara Safaie, who's the executive Director of Health and Organizational Innovation at the design firm, IDEO. I've become increasingly convinced over the past few years that good governance is a design challenge. If you're familiar with my framing of good governance as intentionally cultivating effective conditions for making decisions and also familiar with design thinking, then you already know what I'm talking about. I honestly had no idea at first that I was talking like a design guy, but now I'm all the way bought in. Tara, Karel and Michael further reinforced this perspective in our discussion. But we'll get to that a bit later. Let's start first with some definitions. The first voice you'll hear is Michael, followed by Karel.

Michael Hartmann

I remember going out trying to introduce companies to this thing called design, and a lot of eyes would be like, blank, saying, what is this? 25 years later, 24 years later, it's ubiquitous. Design is everywhere. But as my colleagues will say, it's everywhere. Not done well. More often than not, we brought it into Directors College and for a couple of reasons. And we're going to explore those reasons. One, if you think about the core roles, responsibilities of board, CEO, selection, talent. Well, of course, strategy is a critical one. You know, setting the lanes for management, sometimes moving the lanes with management as well. But design is a really interesting way to think about strategy development and execution. I wanted Karel to maybe introduce some of the design. What do we mean by design? And for my colleagues around the table here, how can boards leverage design principles for better strategy? So that's a starting point, Karel, and maybe a question over to you.

Karel Vredenberg

Yeah, let's let me start. And some of the people that are listening, I'm sure have heard this story. If you were in my. In my session. But I love to share that I talked about design thinking at a university was an interdisciplinary lecture. The Dean of the business school said as a question later, said, we're all learning design thinking now. This is really, really good. Do we still need designers? I said, yeah, there's a difference between design and design thinking. And so the notion of design, that intentional process to research, ideate, and then actually create and then iterate on things that you're creating, whether it's websites, apps, products or services. That's sort of design and design thinking is really the, as it states the thinking, the, the way to actually take a perspective on a particular problem, to solve a problem in a, in a more intentional empathic, looking at all stakeholders and alike, more holistic sort of approach. And so that's how I see them being different. And the way that I've used design thinking in companies, both for typically the C suite I've worked with and, and then with boards, is really to open the aperture in ways that they've never thought before. There were a couple of instances where after I spent like a day and a half with, with them, they came up with a set of directions strategically where they realized that there were things that they came up with through this way of thinking that they realized there were certain things that were on their five year plan that were absolutely things they shouldn't be doing. And there were other things that were really simple to do but they'd never thought of them because they'd never used this design lens that now became their number one priority. So I think it's an incredibly powerful tool to be able to set strategy for an organization.

Matt Voiceover

Before getting to Tara's perspective, you'll hear her and eventually Karel refer to Agile. Now I'm no expert in Agile, so please forgive me if any of you listeners are experts and I'm messing something up. In short, it's a set of frameworks and practices originally designed for project management in software development that are rooted in certain priorities and principles. For example, it's more important to prototype, iterate and respond to change than it is to adhere dogmatically to a preset plan. Anyway, here's Tara's perspective on what human-centered design means for organizations.

Tara Safaie

Many of these approaches are a combination of pedagogy and methods and you know, certain steps that you're supposed to take. But they also introduce mindsets or ways of looking at and thinking about problems or context in a way that is different from how many organizations traditionally look at problems. So I think what's useful about design as a methodology, and you alluded to it, Karel, is that it often forces many organizations to think about their problems in a more human-centered way because you have to find a case for a desirable solution before you go on to actually making that solution a reality using more agile methods. Agile and design both have as part of their methodology iterative processes. So where you start in lower fidelity and progressively build your fidelity and an investment and things like that as you learn and as you fail and things like that. And so I think it's worth noting that while the methods themselves often yield great results and they are worth in many cases implementing in the right corners of an organization to yield the outcomes and the products that they can yield. And it's also worth noting where those mindsets that they're bringing to the table are most impactful so the two can be treated in conjunction with one another. And then to make them a more sustainable part of an organization's being, to make them really course through the bloodstream of an organization that requires much more kind of long tail change and a different type of approach integrating it into organizations where they're, where it's not present at the moment.

Karel Vredenberg

Hey, Tara, I want to just add one other thought to that and that is that of course, yeah, I always imagine it as if you think that you have this big canvas of what the solution was going to end up being. If you just do Agile, you'll start so say on the top right of that campus that solutions space. Right. And yes, you'll be able to iterate, but you're going to be roughly still in that top right quadrant of the canvas. Design thinking right at the front of it may well tell you that you really need to be in the bottom left to really serve the market. And that's whether products or services or work of a board where you want to think more deeply about what's the bigger picture view of where this company should go.

Matt Voiceover

So you'll already see an important intersection here with my framing of corporate governance as people making decisions in corporations, I the first and most important step in effective decision making is a clear definition of the problem we're trying to solve. As Tara and Karel are defining it, that's where design starts too. Okay, so let's start moving into some useful insights for boards. I mean the design world has in my opinion generally done a pretty poor job at helping boards to do their jobs well. With this in mind, Michael prompted our guests with a reminder that boards tend to be, well, risk avoidant. So how do we embrace design when that's our starting point?

Michael Hartmann

Board directors, when we query about innovation, one of the common feedbacks we get is we wish we could be more open to risk as opposed to de risking embracing innovation design. I also see that it's a really interesting way to kind of, you know, stress test and build a capacity for risk taking. And I don't know Tara, if you've got some thoughts on that.

Tara Safaie

Yeah, absolutely. A couple of anecdotes. One is that I think organizations that have really adopted design in a powerful way in their organization, have adopted the mindset that ideas are disposable.

Matt Voiceover

I just want to interject here. Imagine a world where we approached governance ideas as disposable instead of embracing them as orthodoxy. OMG, it's like a dream come true. Sorry Tara, you were saying...

Tara Safaie

They have right sized the investment that they put into an idea to the maturity of that idea. So what I see many organizations do, particularly my, my clients in the healthcare space, is that they are very quick to jump on the first couple of ideas that they come up with because they are so deeply expert in the area that they're working in. Like many of them have spent decades learning to be the professional that they are. That expertise gets translated into these ideas that when, when thrown into the thunderdome of the real world or of a patient's world, let's say, just don't survive the key shift that occurs with organizations that are able to adopt design mindsets, you know, kind of deeply in their organization and adopt the level of risk that it requires. Have learned how to test their ideas in low fidelity ways. And so where they are able to identify the most core assumptions that they're holding, maybe because their expertise has kind of put blinders on them, or they only work with a particular type of customer and they want to expand to a new type, they don't know that customer as well, whatever it might be, that they're a western organization designing for a non western customer base or a global south customer base, whatever it might be. And so they're able to understand what the most deeply held assumptions in their solutions are and then design tests to test those assumptions in low fidelity ways. You can't build certainty in any of the paths that you're taking, but you can build confidence. So your goal in any type of design exercise, and again, organizations that have internalized this, know this deeply, your goal is not to be certain. Your goal is to gain confidence. And so organizations that are testing their ideas in low fidelity ways are testing whether their assumptions hold. And as they build confidence, then build the confidence to slowly invest more and more as the stakes get, you know, the stakes get higher. They've invested more in the, in the back as well. And that allows them some of the agility, as we were talking about before, to then respond to a change in market context or a change in the competitive landscape or something else that might shift where those assumptions were tested initially. The risk profile that most organizations have does not necessarily preclude them from having low fidelity and therefore small investment, high risk things on the side. What they are not seasoned in doing is then transversing the space between that low fidelity and very low investment idea to the full fledged one. That's really going to require a lot of money.

Karel Vredenberg

Yeah, I would just add, I want to amplify something you said too, like the low fidelity idea. That's really a prototype, right. And what is a prototype precisely? It's, it's really a low risk way of exploring something. So people talk about, oh, you really should be increasing your, your, your failure rate. You learn from failure. And everybody, you know Silicon Valley loves to say that, right? Yeah, they love to say it because 90% of them fail. But in fact, if they did the kind of things that Tara and I are talking about here, doing just a small prototype, it might be a new way of working as a, as a board, let's say. And you want to just try that out? Well, you can just try it out in your meetings. That's a prototype. And then after, let's say you do, you know, sort of an off site or whatever, let's, let's see what that was like, get some feedback on it and the like as well. So it's this whole mindset of, of doing small prototypes that can fail. But you're not failing big, you're testing first, seeing if something's going to work. And then if it's going to work, then you can scale it up and do it across a whole organizational like as well. It's a fantastic, phenomenal way to de risk by taking risks.

Matt Voiceover

That's a wrap on the first episode in this series. Let me just say that this prototyping approach really works in boardrooms. I like to think of it as crafting a 1% intervention rather than a revolution. An intervention designed intentionally and specifically to increase the probability that we'll get a, a better result in some small part of our work together. Maybe it's a change to reporting or a shift in our agendas, or a new conversation prompt after a presentation or a different lunch caterer. Whatever it is, the consequence of failure is essentially zero and the potential for learning is high. Stay tuned for the next episode in the series coming up soon. And drop me a note to let me know what you thought of this episode. If you liked it, please consider spreading the word. Oh, and as usual, I've provided some notes on today's music on the episode post at groundupgovernance.com Catch you next time.