The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

Matt Sheehan is a passionate guy. As the President and CEO of Primo Water—North America’s leading single source provider of water dispensers, multi-gallon purified bottled water, and self-service refill water—he brings an undeniable sense of mission to his company culture, the retailers he works with, and thirsty customers. “I don’t care about being right, I care about getting it right,” he says, adding: “It doesn’t matter where the ideas come from.” That passion electrified his recent *Resonance Test* conversation with Kenji Ross, Senior Design Strategist at EPAM Continuum. Sheehan has strong opinions on many topics, among them: corporate values, Primo’s culture, (“If you have a big ego, Primo’s not a great place for you because we aren’t shy to tear apart some ideas,”) being a public company, and the hiring process (“We’re pretty picky about the people who get to carry our flag,”). Sheehan gets particularly jazzed about getting out and talking with customers—“Let’s really go to talk to Nancy Jones at the Walmart on 2 Main Street”—to find out what really motivates them. The insight from this customer experience work, he says, “has been a thousand light bulbs for us."

Sunandini Chopra spends her days working for IBM Watson Health (genomics and oncology). Her free time, however, belongs to AI for the Rest of Us, “a platform that facilitates discussion, problem identification and problem solving to create a positive impact on public health by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence.” Platform? It’s a community. A discussion group. A gaggle of brainy AI brainstormers. We know because we hosted one of their events, at which Toby Bottorf, VP of Service & Experience Design, gave a sterling talk on AI and human augmentation in healthcare. Chopra visited *The Resonance Test* to report to Bottorf on chatbots, the power of Alexa (“Linked with your phone, with your television, with the speaker in your house, it can take you through the whole route of a digital visual experience, a texting experience, and an audio experience,”) the predictive similarities between meteorology and healthcare, the direction healthcare is heading (“There’re two futures: one that’s the future for cutting-edge technology and one the future for all the other people in the world to get access to basic care,”) and the adorable nature of RD-D2. *Beep Boop.*

You can call Gary David all kinds of things. Sociology professor. Ethnographer. Professional noticer. Professional outsider. A *Storage Wars* guy. He is, in short, someone with a very particular view of social science and how it translates into organizational behavior. In a recent *Resonance Test* chin wag with our Toby Bottorf, David offers up a collection of smart, tart *bon mots.* In the course of the conversation he explains the formula “Data + Context = Information” by calling in the cops: “You can’t understand what crime stats mean, unless you understand police practice.” He talks about how his CX analysis focuses on the interactions customers have with a company, rather than on perceptions. “By looking at the interactions, we can see what is actually going *on* in the encounter.” As for *Storage Wars,* he’s fascinated by the way the show puts a price tag on contestants' pickings: “[R]ight now you just got a bunch of stuff in your trunk, that you bought. So you’re actually *down* money,” he says, adding, professorially, that the show “con*structs* the notion that these numbers are an accurate reflection of some concrete state—and they’re not. They’re approximations.” But maybe the best moment of all is when David gets earnest and describes his efforts this way: “You’re trying to help workers actually leverage their expertise and their knowhow and become more self-actualized, in almost a Maslow sense, in their work.” Host: Jen Ashman Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Legendary business author Tom Peters has long insisted on putting people first. Be excellent with customers and employees, and you’ll be reap the rewards. In an insightful and rollicking conversation with Jon Campbell, EPAM Continuum’s Head of Experience & Service Design, Peters sounds off on a variety of (always human-centered) topics. “I am an arch enemy of agile, if you capitalize the A, because then it becomes a religion,” he says. Turn in and hear him get a little choked up about Eisenhower’s leadership and heated about the idea of Management By Wandering Around, or MBWA: “If it’s not a *kick* to be out with your team in the distribution center at 1 a.m…. You. Are. In. The Wrong. Job.” There's plenty to ponder here as well. Numerous times, Peters calls up an extremely apt and memorable line, such as: “The best way to persuade someone is with your ears” (from former Secretary of State Dean Rusk), and you’ll think about it for days and days. A most resonant episode of *The Resonance Test*… Host: Jen Ashman Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

If you want to study service design, you just might want to learn from Maurício Manhães. Manhães is both a professor of service design at the Savannah College of Art and Design—SCAD to its friends—and a truly affable human being. His friendly, informed approach leaps out from the first second of this dialogue with his long-time service design buddy, EPAM Continuum’s Jon Campbell. These two vets cover much territory in 30 minutes: Maurício’s professional and intellectual journey; the employability of SCAD grads; the function of luck and hard work in design careers; the Service Design Network and its president Birgit Mager (“she way very kind to pay attention to this crazy Brazilian guy”); bringing service design into companies; the way practice and professorship inform each other; the effects of Amazing Grace Syndrome, and, of course, more. Listen and learn! Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

And now for a Very Special Episode of *The Resonance Test.* This particular conversation, straight from our archives, has our Toby Bottorf chatting up Thomas Thwaites, author of two thoughtfully bizarre books: *GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human* (you read right!) and *The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch* (sounds awesome, no?). It’s jolly great fun to hear Thwaites say things like: “I was really keen on learning to gallop and, you know, kind of chewing grass,” and: “If technology is about kind-of-letting-us fulfill-our-dreams-kind-of-thing, then I suppose it’s like: 'Which dreams do we try and fulfill?'” We think this is a great way to wind up the *Resonance Test* year. Thanks so much for listening—and please enjoy the goatish, toasty conversation between Thomas and Toby! Host: Jen Ashman Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Heather Figallo, the Head of Design, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Southwest Airlines, wants to “raise the expectations of the type of experience you should have when you’re traveling in commercial aviation.” So do we. The digital wayfinding project EPAM Continuum did with Figallo and her crew was very successful and we learned a lot from it. “I’ve never had something with 96% customer satisfaction, 94% employee satisfaction,” Figallo says, adding: “I’ve never seen something like that.” In the latest episode of The Resonance Test, Figallo and Lee Moreau, our VP of Design, take a payload of project insights and launch them into the world. The conversation has stops in a number of fascinating places: human-centered data, innovating in the highly regulated airline industry, responsible prototyping, and Southwest’s sui generis culture. Moreau and Figallo make it clear both Southwest and EPAM Continuum put their whole hearts into the digital wayfinding project, and the result was a very human outcome: “The real magic was turning data into knowledge and turning data into something personal.” Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Jon Stolk is in the midst of an experiment. But then, so is everyone at Olin College(http://www.olin.edu/), in Needham, Massachusetts. This project-based engineering school is trying to find a way to do higher education differently. They are, in many respects, succeeding, as we learned when EPAM Continuum’s Toby Bottorf, VP of Service and Experience Design, recorded an electric conversation with Stolk, who serves as Olin’s professor of materials science and engineering education. Listen and learn what it’s like to provide “just enough scaffold for teams of students or for individuals to dig into questions or problems that are exciting and interesting to them.” Stolk admits he and the school have quite a task in front of them: “It’s scary as hell sometimes.” What causes such fear? Could well be, as Stolk says, that a school that was “created to transform education” can’t “get stuck with one curriculum.” Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Data, data, everywhere. We grow more and more digitized every moment, and as humanity makes its digital transformation, we need people to help us understand what it means and how we can retain our own sense of values. We speak with two such people this time on *The Resonance Test.* Lily Tsai and Sarah Williams are professors at MIT. Tsai is a political scientist and the founder and faculty director of the MIT Governance Lab or GOV/LAB; Williams is the Director of the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. Together they spoke with our Lee Moreau about data, analytics, human-centered design, and civics. Listen, and you’ll hear our professors profess the following: Tsai: “On social media or other new media digital platforms, we don’t where the information necessarily comes from, but we think we know. And that’s the problem. We think of them as the same as the newspaper, but they are not.” Tsai: “Those who study the United States haven’t fully realized that the dynamics in the United States are very similar to the dynamics elsewhere.” Williams: “In all the data analytic models I do, I really try to make them human-centered…. I’ll develop a model and then I ask those who the model describes whether they think it describes them accurately or, and then ask them to co-develop or change the model with me.” Williams: “Missing data tells you a lot more than you might think.” Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

There is so much fear in healthcare. Fear for patients, for the surgeons who treat them, for the families who have to stand by and watch anxiously as a loved one goes under the knife. But for Melissa Burke and her colleagues, fear is to be cut down to size by simulation. Rehearsal. Practice. As the Director of Operations of SIMPeds, Boston Children’s Simulator Program, Burke is obsessed with how simulation can help the players in our #healthcare drama to master their fear. In this excellent conversation with our Lee Moreau, she delves into the tactics, the meaning, and power of #medicalsimulation—and the hope it holds for the future. • “The hospital’s a really emotional place and being able to quantify emotion in the healthcare setting enables a whole host of new opportunity.” • “The single thread that joins everything we do at the simulator program is fear.” • “The whole point of the simulator program is to enable rehearsal, opportunities to reduce fear and anxiety, to create confidence, and to create clinical teams that operate from a very mature state of confidence, and to increase the confidence of parents going home with children who maybe have new lifesaving medical equipment that they need to take with them. Or even to empower the children that we care for in making decisions about their own care or contributing to their care.” • “We’re creating synthetic patients that look real and feel real, for our clinical teams to learn from. We’re creating psychologically safe environments for clinical teams to be able to make mistakes, admit mistakes, talk about their mistakes. We have human factors experts that use these medical simulations as the reason to have conversations around how to improve a team.” • “I like to think of us as the nexus of medicine and theatre because we’re creating very lifelike environments, replicas of exact operating rooms or exact ICUs where these teams natively work. And we bring them in and we have them work on synthetic patients that look real and feel real, so their head is in the game.” • “We also have patients’ families represented, so the mom who spent three months in an ICU can say: ‘Hey, if the headwall isn’t over by the window, my child wouldn’t see the light of day for three months.’” • “When simulation is done wrong, people feel beaten down. They feel demoralized. But when simulation is done right, the entire team feels like they’re *that much better.*” • “In our simulation center, we go to Disneyesque length to make things real. So our simulated patients bleed and urinate and speak. And sometimes we use actors, and the level of realism that is elicited when you have an actor playing a patient or an actor playing a parent is so real, I have to look away.” Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon