Design Thinkers Academy with Arne Van Oosterom

Experience Designers Ep 1

(Edited for readability)

Steve: Hi my name's Steve Usher and welcome to the experience designers podcast.

Steve: Over the course of this podcast series, I'm really excited to meet and interview people from a diverse range of industries and backgrounds. However, they will all have one thing in common, and that is design thinking and human centered design. And I hope that by sharing their stories, together we can create our own movement in the H.R. and talent acquisition community. And this is where I genuinely believe design thinking can play a massive part in improving the experience during the hiring, onboarding and employee experience.

Steve: So for my first episode I thought it would be really fitting to go back to a place that really inspired me this year. And that was the Design Thinkers Academy in Amsterdam

Steve: And I got the opportunity to spend more time with Arne, who is one of the co-founders, and we talked about a huge variety of topics – ranging from artificial intelligence and machine learning through to an amazing segment on empathy. And of course we talked design thinking as well. So, strap yourselves in. Enjoy the show. And here we go.

Steve: So Arne. Welcome to the Experience Design show. Thank you so much for agreeing to be part of my first ever podcast today.

Arne: My pleasure. 

Steve: Excellent. So we are here in Amsterdam at the Design Thinkers Academy HQ. This is such a wonderful space. So any excuse to come back here, I always take it. Definitely. So, today I'd like to cover off quite a few things, if possible, and just have a good conversation about Design Thinking (DT) and get your views on how you see certain things in the world from a DT point of view.

Steve: So, for the listeners – from your perspective – just a little bit about yourself and intro into your background. 

Arne: Well, I'm the founder of Design Thinkers Group/Academy. It’s now 11 years ago, so I'm getting old. I can tell, seriously, because there are pictures of me in the videos that we still show in training sessions… Just now, downstairs, there was a video of me doing a project, and I thought to myself ‘Wait a minute! I'm getting old… Oh my god. What's happening?’.

Arne: So, you know, we went through a huge evolution. My company/organization, our network, community… So there's so much stuff to talk about. But I think mainly what kind of happened to us over the decade is that we've been busy with design thinking and service design.

Arne: What we went from, here in Amsterdam and in the Netherlands, we went from sort of a more consultancy mindset to a facilitation training/coaching kind of organisation to where we felt that it's actually  about teaching. You know, be a teacher. And for me personally, you know, both being a teacher and creating a platform for knowledge to be shared. Those are the things that are to us the most important things that have happened.

Steve: How would you say, from your own perspective, how has the business kind of evolved from where it was? From its first day one to where it is now.

Arne: When I started being interested in service design, really in design thinking as well but mainly service design… That's probably like 15 years ago or so, when I was with my previous agency. I fell in love with this openness and this collaborative spirit and… Everyone was kind of active in that space and shared their methodology. I love that. And I was in an agency where it was very competitive and – as my customer, I don’t know your customer. Totally not sharing. In the Netherlands alone, this tiny little country, we had like thousands of agencies just like us. So there was so much stuff – and there was also a lot of work obviously. It was a healthy market.

Arne: But I was kind of fed up with both this attitude of non-collaborative attitude. You know, the closed doors and working isolated from other people. And I met so many inspirational people, and I though ‘Wow, I'd love to work with these people.’. But I couldn't because they weren’t at my agency – and it wasn’t MY agency – etc., etc. and I really, really, really wanted to work with clients on the questions they had – and not only work with the solutions they already came up with, because usually they were crappy solutions. And as an agency you were given sort of the task to put a nice ribbon on a nice box and a nice colour on it. But you can't really change the solution, and I wanted to kind of be part of where this was still the question. So that was one of the things I loved. That it’s so open and I love this kind of… I love this promise of being part of the question. 

Arne: When we started, there was sort of a thing… Because it's a very traditional thought, just saying: ‘Oh, so we're going to design a service’, for instance. But I personally never made a difference between products and services, because it's really about the value you create. So basically, it’s the same thing. But I did kind of think ‘Okay, so we're going to design a service, together with our client and they're going to implement that.’. Right? I'd been in the business for quite a while, had worked with corporates kind, but that was still really what was in my mind.

Arne: So that's what we would do, because that's a service that we would provide to our clients: Help them create a beautiful service and a beautiful service experience. Obviously, that's not how things turn out, because they cannot implement it. It's not really about ideas. They had lots of ideas, you know, and what we found out quite quickly is that you can do lots of workshops – one day workshop two day workshops – and everybody loves you. It's fantastic and they go home, giving each other high fives, and the next day, it's like… Nothing. Silence. Absolutely nothing happens. It’s business as usual. Nothing is or will be implemented. In other words, it’s obvious that nothing will be changed, because it is not about that. And the whole mantra of service design and design thinking, is that it starts with the end user. It's nonsense. It doesn't start with the end user. It starts with understanding the system. It starts with understanding all the players and usually the first the hairy challenge, the big problem, is internal. It is about the mess businesses really are, the total chaos and all the emotional stuff that goes on within organisations and then to get stuff done that is beautiful…? No way!

Steve: So, Arne, say someone has just listened to this section, just now, and suddenly had an epiphany or has been inspired and wants to make a change in their organization or create a movement… From your perspective how does Design Thinking play a part in that? For those that perhaps hasn't been exposed to this way of thinking or this way of working.

Arne: So first of all, a little bit about Design Thinking. Design Thinking – these are words like lean start-up, service design, UX, agile and so on, you know. These words, what they mean is that we're actually looking for a solution. So different people with different backgrounds came up with ideas and they gave it a name. But the underlying problem is the same. We are all trying to solve the same problem. We all try to, kind of, find a methodology or a system or a way of thinking that helps us out of this problem. Out of this this systemic problem. To become really human centred, to be able to experiment, to be able to be free… Basical...