DesignOps: Infinity War
A summary of my ‘Avengers’ themed keynote at the inaugural DesignOps Global Conference in Manchester, UK.
You can also read my takeaways from the rest of the event.
Thanks to the organisers David Iball and my old pal Peter Fossick for inviting me and putting on an absolutely brilliant event; packed full of wonderful speakers, workshops, entertainment and networking. Looking forward to the ongoing debate as a community and future meetups on this emerging discipline.
Why Design for Scale?
For my sins, I work in Tier 1 management consulting. This means I’m now hard-wired to think of things with an outcome-focus. And I see the ability to scale design as one of the principal outcomes, or benefits of DesignOps. So rather than focusing on the what and how, which was well covered by my co-speakers, I wanted to talk about the why of DesignOps (yes, I’m also influenced by working with EY-Sinek).
Design, as with development, research and other parts of the production ‘ops’ value-chain is under increasing pressure to be able to scale. We hear it all the time, as both demand from organisations/industry and from the supply side of design skills/services. But just what does it mean?
Over my career, I’ve encountered multiple ways to ‘scale design’ and I have been analysing them; individually but more importantly as a holistic concept.
Based on this experience, these are six dimensions of design scale:
Let’s take a look at each one in a bit more detail…
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe (aka MCU), Captain America: Civil War marked a major pivot and breaking of the conventional script. There was a split in the camp — Tony/Ironman understood the push for more oversight and governance of the Avengers as a task force, whilst Steve Rogers/Cap stood for doing the right thing, no matter what. The fictional Sokovia accords created a rift between these polarised heroes and the conventional playbook was out of the window.
For a long time, design was a black art that existed in creative studios, private freelancers and the minds of mavericks like Tony Stark who initially seek to own their skills as they don’t trust others to take on custodianship. But over the last decade or so in particular, design has grown to become commonplace in how we do business and even how c-suite executives understand and manage their organisations. To earn this place the table, the right thing to do was for design to democratise itself.
Example: Design Codification
About a decade ago, my team and I used the periodic table as a way to codify the capabilities of our agency. Years later, that same team extended this metaphor to create the global Design Thinking Playbook at EY and created tailored versions of this for clients. What this enabled was teams who were not designers to understand the key concepts, tools, methods and value of the profession and begin to adopt it in their own work to create new ways of working from their training in traditional management consultancy.
This and other ways to codify design activities help our over-stretched team in a big4 to reduce the amount of time and energy we had to invest educating others to take on key roles such as design-thinking facilitation, train the trainer and development of project proposals; all of which are activities that can fall into the scope of DesignOps as opposed to actual Design craft.
Just like Ant-man and The WASP can shrink down to sub-atomic levels, we also need to be able to design the fine details. The ability to zoom-in to the intricacies of a design is what creates the most fun, engaging and meaningful moments. The little animations and transitions on our apps. The beautiful details of interior design and materials. The care and attention that goes into a brands order-to-fulfilment experience.
Example: Design Magnification
When my good friend (and former boss) Mike Camerling asked my agency to pitch for his new venture, it had been 15 years since he was my boss at a Retail Technology firm. Although we remained good friends during that gap, it was humbling that he still turned to me for this new challenge. It felt even better to beat WPP agencies to win the contract on merit.
Mike and his team had asked us to help them launch a new Fintech that will pioneer cashless payment technology. The result was Aevi. My team and I created everything from the company name (I came up with it at a creative workshop we held in Hyde Park London playing Scrabble!), the logo and identity, the brand system, the UX on the IDEO designed smartPOS, an app marketplace and the go-to-market for the new business; which launched with Commbank in Australia. We had to focus on getting the details right for the brand to stand up to it’s potential.
Design without magnification would suck, but unless we have the capacity to work on the details, afforded to us through DesignOps, the reality is that many teams are mass producing sucky products and MVPs. There, I said it.
This one is slightly more controversial amongst purists, as why would we ever want to think of design as a commodity?? Well we don’t. But we do need to recognise that if we can turn the inner workings of DesignOps into a commodity, we can socialise it for scale.
Example: DesignOps Commodity
After we joined EY, it quickly became apparent that our colleagues had started to pigeon-hole us as ‘those guys who make things look pretty’. This is very common at large consultancies who have been buying up design teams.
In this situation, you have a few choices:
a. You give up fighting, make things look pretty and eventually commoditise design to the point where it has no value (people leave, design is expected to be a free service/capability etc).
b. You fight to keep design as a premium asset that is owned and used only by those considered to be worthy of being in the creative elite. This typically leads to design being excluded from the key opportunities, collaborative design failing to take place and design being outsourced to external parties.
c. You protect the integrity of Design craft by commoditising DesignOps; which is typically not a directly re-sellable service (in agency/consulting) and allowing everybody to use DesignOps as a platform through which they can trade in Design craft. This creates a valuable marketplace for Design services, where anybody can be a trader, play short, long, take risks or bank on a sure thing; because DesignOps creates a common ground to access and commission design.
As you can expect, I chose to deploy option c. To make this real, I wanted to showcase what our Design practice was capable of, by applying a wider range of skills to major internal initiatives; saving the firm money, getting things done quicker and even productising the offering.
We chose the Digital Cyber Security Operations Centre (DSOC) in Oman as the showcase through which we could do this. By using an elevated mix of design-thinking, spatial-design, business-design etc, we re-positioned ourselves as the authority on all things design related - not just UX and Service Designers that the EY-Seren brand was becoming stigmatised with to post-acquisition. This repositioning ultimately led to the EY Wavespace design in Dubai being entrusted within the competency group as opposed to global or business services teams who had designed the others in the network. It also catalysed the need for Design to play a leading role in the tri-regional integration of emerging market in Africa, India and Middle East. We could not have done that if we had remained protective of design capability and restricted Cyber, Innovation and Leadership teams from accessing design-thinking and doing to deliver their ambitions.
This is different to codification, which focuses on design practitioners. DesignOps as a commodity allows business teams and executives that are potentially far from design talent to utilise design capacity in a way they would any other commodity at their disposal. It’s time to stop being precious about design as a craft and allow it to be used by all as an enabler and accelerator to deliver results.
Just as Tony Stark continues to tweak his Ironman suit from MK1 to Mk42, with each sprint and release we look to DesignOps to enable us to deliver incremental improvement through learning, without having to reinvent/design each time. By industrialising graphics, guidelines, patterns and interactions to allow new features to be designed faster and with more consistency, we can amplify our products to new levels of quality and performance.
Most of the audience at the conference had come from some sort of product and/or UX background, so their primary understanding of DesignOps comes from the common usage of Design Systems and Toolkits. Now DesignOps is MORE than just Design Systems, but this is the lowest hanging fruit and is sitll a key part that deserves special mention.
Example: Design Amplification
Rubix was a design system we we created to address the issue of having too many features and low levels of usage from customers at an otherwise well-performing bank in the GCC. Rubix allowed the team to introduce a new set of navigation patterns to access features and functions and provide an ongoing ability to introduce even more over time. We developed the system in parallel to sprint delivery and eventually handed it over fully to the in-house team at the bank, who are still curating it and deploying features through its framework.
Diversification focuses on extending to more types of design to create a wider selection of solutions.
Example: Design Diversity
The most extreme (and fun) programme of work where I have had to do this was on project Amaala, which is the new luxury tourism destination being touted as the ‘Riviera of the Red Sea’, along the coast of undiscovered Saudi Arabia. Just how to do even begin to design an Island?? We had to form a consortium of almost every design discipline there is! The EY team and I took on the strategy and experience design. We cherry-picked a collection of the worlds best architects for the master planning and signature building design (Fosters, Zaha Hadid, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, HKS, Pei Partners etc). We had brand design, business design, visual design, the list goes on.
In this high stakes scenario, effective DesignOps creates a common platform that allows each team to flourish, but also work as a collective unit towards a common goal — reducing inefficiencies that can result from things like inconsistent and unaccessible file-transfers between teams, inability of stakeholders to access, open and use extremely high-resolution renderings and printouts. Differences in terminology, especially when dealing with service, hospitality and experience design, which all have overlapping jargon and ideologies.
In my new role at Accenture Interactive, I’m dealing with a different type of design scale. Our agency is unique in that rather than trying to achieve scale like most design teams, we have already done that — big time! I think we are one of the biggest and most diverse design business in the world, if not the biggest.
Accenture has scaled design beyond what anybody else has, so what now?
Example: Design Unity
We have an absolutely amazing portfolio of agencies, teams and studios in our network (such as Fjord, Droga5, Karmarama, The Monkeys, Matter, Mackevision etc). In working to bring this diversity to our clients, our DesignOps journey will be like no other. I am super excited to be part of that next frontier…
Extended (Marvel) Universe
Better understanding of how to navigate and operate within each scale dimension is not enough. In today's design teams, whether in-house or agency, we need to have the ability and agility to pivot in all dimensions; including simultaneously.
My thematic Marvel metaphor for the key elements that bind all these dimensions together was the Infinity Stones, as their simplicity and co-existence is very much aligned to the macro-level insights I have from my experience in working across the scale dimensions.
Having the power of these elements/stones does not result in a good DesignOps or Scale in itself. And just like Avengers Infinity War, not every story has a happy ending.
When I took on the role as Chief Design Officer at EY for Africa, India and Middle East, it was to work with the leadership to realise a grand ambition to scale and consolidate our consulting practices across these emerging mega-markets. This required ‘giving up the baby’ of EY-Seren that I had exported from London and worked hard to establish in MENA over 3 years — with the intention of opening up the career ceiling for my team to rise to their opportunity to assume leadership of the hub studio in Dubai. The plan was to build on the key elements of DesignOps and Design-Scale we had put in place, whilst new studios, teams and markets were integrated with the hub.
As my focus shifted towards Johannesburg and we added scale capacity through the acquisition of FCUX in Pune India, the hub team handover became a political football and the resulting power plays resulted in some Thanos-esque approaches to using the Infinity Stones to lead DesignOps. Now I won’t go any deeper into that drama here, but below is a short summary of some of the key learnings of what happens when DesignOps goes wrong.
On the right is the approach I have taken to building, growing and sustaining each design team I have built over the years.
On the left is how each core element was used inappropriately post-transition to corode the landscape enough to set the DesignOps movement back to square one.
Vision
Having focal points (dimensions, elements etc) is useful to help understand issues, opportunities and actions, but knowing how to navigate them ALL and in a holistic way is not so easy. It is this more holistic thinking that interests me personally, more so than the deep-dive into any individual dimension or element. The interconnectivity within a subject area (in this case Design Scale) and then how that connects to related topics (such as Studio Management, DesOps, Services etc) is where I have been investing more of my time; researching, mapping and refining through doing.
One such visualisation is this star, which aligns the different dimensions in which we can scale design, with the fundamental elements needed to make this work effectively. There is a system of triangulation here that allows us to create focus; either around any given corner of the star, or through wider alignment to points on the opposite sides. This tool gives us a more holistic overview of the key concepts and allows us to understand the dynamics between each one and ideally work towards balance across all areas.
Endgame
To wrap up, I shared a preview of some of the wider design language and system I have been curating for the last 10 years; the last five of which has been much more accelerated in development and sophistication.
You’ll see from these pictures that I chose to use the Polygon as the construct for Design Scale, but there are multiple other assets in the toolkit that allow us to define, navigate and connect extended concepts to create recognisable and accessible ‘constellations’.
The Sinek Golden Circle of Purpose.
The Maslow inspired pyramid of needs, infused with level-up gamification.
The classic Golden Ratio, Double-Diamond and Venn.
These well-known models, plus more (not all are shown below either), have all been infused into the system and extended to ensure there is a combination of robust thinking from thought-leaders and science, along with innovation, control and flexibility to push ourselves to design across a wider galaxy of opportunities and not just within a fixed domain.
Recently I have been using Penrose inspired frameworks to address perception at the heart of an experience transformation plan for one of the worlds largest organisations. And last year I positioned the Mobius Strip as the basis for a truly unique journey flow in luxury tourism (before Tony Stark use it ‘solve’ Time-Travel I might add). The humble Honeycomb has become my go-to tool for building customer/user ecosystems that go beyond conventional personas and mindsets. It’s a fun, exciting and easy to grasp system that give you an acceltered way to get stuff done, whilst learning the ideology and theory within it to empower you to tailor it to your context.
What has been hugely rewarding so far is developing, using and therefore refining the system over many years — first in my own practice, then at Seren, EY and now Accenture. Seeing it play an important part in design, teaming or client communications in real projects has allowed me to make it as robust as possible and not just a theory and I can’t wait to share more of it with the world. Over the next year, I’ll be introducing it to a select group of live teams to stress test. The DesignOps Global Conference was a great place to onboard some great teams to this beta program.
I will be publishing the first book series of the ‘Constellation’ system in 2020; coinciding with Expo2020 in Dubai, which is all about futurism. This mini-series will focus on real-world usage of the framework and later on I will publish the science/theory within it all for those wanting to know more.
Disclaimer
On the whole, I was happy with my talk. Usually, I’m more critical of myself, but this time was different. Not because I had actually prepared my deck a week in advance (rather than the usual night before), but because I was actually suffering from a really bad case of Laryngitis. For the days before I could barely talk and that threw my whole game off. Typically I’m a loud person (mic not needed thanks), risk overrunning due to my talkative nature and put on a bit more of a show. So my only real objective this time was to deliver the main content at a clear and manageable pace — and I did that. I think it was the boost of adrenaline from being back on stage after a while, but either way, it felt good to deliver my message and get a good response from the audience. Thanks everybody for bearing with me during the periods of voice loss in the rest of the event/networking.
What did you think of the story and summary? I’d love to hear your comments and feedback.
