The Experience Designers

Want to connect with Morten?www.linkedin.com/in/morten-raahauge-9823368/Books we discussed:The Experience Economy - Review hereExponential Organisations - Review hereExperience Designers Ep 2(We use a mix of automated transcript software and editing for readability)Steve (Host): [00:00:14] Hi Morten, thank you very much for joining me for this episode.Morten: [00:00:20] My pleasure.Steve (Host): [00:00:20] Good stuff. So we've got a few things we wanted to cover off today as part of this interview or discussion. A lot will be centered around the employee experience and the evolution and where we think this could be heading and how H.R. departments could be developing the employee experience and playing a big part in this. Steve (Host): [00:00:48] I think one of the things for me just to give some context is that I think generally right now the employee experiences is a really hot topic. I think we've gone from a period probably in the last ten years where there's always been a focus on employee engagement and certainly in the UK there was lots of research undertaken by a chap called David McCleod. He did some work under the previous UK government Labour government and latterly into the Conservative government which is around employee engagement and looking at it from a kind of top down perspective and more recently with the evolution on employee experience, it tends to be that kind of bottom up approach, looking at shaping and creating experiences for employees. Steve (Host): [00:01:41] So I guess this falls in line with some of the experience economy stuff, which I'm sure we'll cover. What's your view around around this, where do you think we are around the topic of employee experience right now? What driving this? Morten: [00:02:00] Well I think there's a lot of discussion on the topic and what I've been noticing is that people seem to have a little bit of unnecessary difficulties. You can sort of attack this from an array of different angles. And for me it's pretty simple because I'm a fully certified experience economy expert. So for me the whole methodology is there but it's really just applying experience design to this new area. Just as you would with any other business or business area. It's just another business area that needs to go through the same sort of change. Morten: [00:02:53] So the methodology is there and there's a lot of models. And I think if this is something you want to work with. Then all the models all the ways of viewing things that's in the experience economy can be applied in a pretty straightforward way and easily implemented. So for me it's easy, but it seems to be there's a big discussion also, the different parts you know. Okay so what's the employee experience here? What's the employee experience there? And one other thing when you talk about experience, it usually centers on things that are sort of experiences by themselves. So in the experience economy you often speak about concerts or festivals or you know tourism stuff like that. But this is really a way of looking at things that could be applied to anything and especially in business and still make a lot of sense. So it doesn't have to be sort of above the experience you've just got to work in the morning. I mean you can you can even work on that if you want to. Steve (Host): [00:04:05] So just taking from the other functions or other business areas that have gone through this change. I mean H.R. and I think learning and development tend to be the ones that kind of lag behind I think, is my view within organisations. Which is crazy because it's the most people focussed areas. For the listeners out there that are sitting in a human resource department or talent department what kind of symptoms do you think that they will be seeing within the organization that would I guess lean well to kind of say we need to look at adopting or engaging some kind of experience design. Morten: [00:04:48] Well, when I worked with experience design in other areas the first thing you really need. Well first you have to decide that this is what you want to do. I mean you can't just. Well I'll do some of it. So if it gets to be a strategic approach I think that's good. And I think the way H.R. could look at it is that if you want to step up the H.R. Then this is definitely a way to go. Morten: [00:05:16] There's something about the name, I mean H.R. human resources and if you if you look at resources as a word in itself it's like people are being dug up from the ground or picked off trees and they're really not because they're they're actually human. So, in the commodities industry, which would be all the other kinds of resources, metals and crops etc... In this economy the business imperative is to supply availability. So what H.R. is doing right now is they have this commodities approach to people. So what they do is they supply availability, so they have a steady influx of people to the organization. Morten: [00:06:03] The other thing they're doing is linked to the product economy where they where they control the costs. So that would be sort of negotiating your salary or bonus programs and stuff like that. So really right now what they do in H.R. is that they're stuck in a sort of a narrative that is linked to the commodities and to the goods economy. And in the progression of economic value, the next economy is a service economy then it's an experience economy and then it's a transformation economy. Morten: [00:06:35] But what does H.R. and you probably have to change the name, but what does HR look like if it's a service. What does it look like if it's an experience and that would be employee experience and what does it look like if it's the transformation economy. Morten: [00:06:50] So a lot of things are linked to the way they speak about things so. So we we discussed this briefly, so you had this is where talent acquisition, so the notion that you acquire talent just as you would acquire buildings, machinery or physical assets, I can't get my head around that, why would talk about people in a way that sort of puts them on the same level as a piece of machinery. I don't get that. It's very much this industrial mindset about what work is and what people is. I think in many ways, this is a bit harsh but I think in many ways H.R. is dehumanizing humans because they speak about them in ways that makes them not human. Morten: [00:07:41] There's this big Danish company the other day a novel, you probably heard of them. They had to lay off 1300 people. And they way they speak about it is not that they destroy, I mean at least momentarily the lives of 1300 people. No they're just cutting back. I mean, what's that about? Morten: [00:08:03] So there's this lack of empathy, there's this lack of understanding that people wake up in the morning with with real aspirations about themselves and what they want to do in a workplace or in their private life. So how can you sort of ta...

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 AmsterdamSteve: 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...