Design Thinking with Ian Bower

Ryan Purvis  0:00  
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face, how they solve them. The years they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took, they'll help you to get to the scripts for the digital Express inner workings.

Ian Bower  0:31  
I'm Ian Bower. I am a consultants in a very large Japanese consulting firm based in London, and I specialize in predominantly agile transformation and ways of working for organizations ranging from telco media through to automotive and manufacturing and financial services. I have a serious passion for design thinking service design, and also

I'm in product development, where I make use of a lot of Agile ways of working to actually iterate through product development, life cycles and innovation. So I help a lot of clients do that, as well as helping them to think outside of the box from what they normally actually do in their day to day business lives to help them actually truly transform transform from an organization that could be potentially quite sluggish to something that is able to respond to a lot of market demands and market needs very, very quickly, especially in today's world of serious disruption from competitors busy chipping away at incumbents markets is becoming more and more of a need to to be able to do that. So we call that business agility. And I am quite passionate about creating that agility. I'm also a bit of an entrepreneur by heart having started

up one or two little companies on the side simply for the passion of it.

I'm currently doing well starting up another one as we speak simply because I found a bit of a bugbear in the market, which I thought could be done a bit better. So, you know, I always go out there and get my hands dirty exercise and flex that design thinking and service design brain, as well as the agile and digital passions that I have in trying to solve problems, everyday problems that I might be facing. And my assumption with a lot of that is if I'm facing it, there must be other people that face it. So I'll start off with those kinds of premise premises and then test that out with other people and try and build things out. So I do do my personal life, and I do my professional life.

So yeah, so that's a little bit about me from a professional perspective. But other than that, I'm happily married man.

Living as I say, in London with my wife, and soon to be a little boy, that's on the way

So I actually feel that things like little discussions like this one, around the digital workplace are becoming even more important in what will eventually be a very change lifestyle for both my wife and I, and having to be able to manage a household as well as outputs in the workplace to a level that I've been that I've been used to, as well as potentially creating alternate revenue streams for our household in a digital sphere. So that's basically me. And yeah, I'm just very happy to be part of this podcast. So thank you very much. Oh, thanks for joining again.

Ryan Purvis  3:41  
Essentially, you mentioned the the child on the way and I don't want to steal your thunder from when it happens because what you what you're used to is your output will never be the same.

And the other is no way to ever prepare for it either or least in my opinion on our channel.

Others might disagree

because it's it does change your life completely. And then ability to work anytime anywhere, on any device is hugely useful

and also in an in an ecosystem or a working environment where that's a done thing as opposed to a

you know, a sort of frowned upon. That's a new thing. We don't do it that way we do it the old way, nine to five at your desk.

Where as often as you know, you can be sending email on your phone or on a tube or you're on holiday but you just need some work because you're the inspiration that struck in such a device with you to do this work.

What did you want to talk about the Coronavirus and people working remotely? What are your thoughts and and what have you seen your customers in that regard? 

Ian Bower  4:51  
Yeah, so it's been very interesting. Couple of weeks actually, you know, as, as we started to see this career

Buyers COVID-19 pop up. Obviously, there's been a lot of

I daresay panic in the market, where people simply don't want to contract the buyers. They also don't want to pass it on. And

our firm and in fact, just the nature of what I do,

actually requires us to have a lot of face time potentially, with various clients,

multitude of different demographics and user types, as well as requiring quite a significant amount of travel. So you can imagine we often putting ourselves in quite a lot of risk, simply being the management consultants that we are.

Now with this particular outbreak, what we've actually come to realize is that yes, we're a technology company with somewhat human touch and meaning

To try and figure out how we maintain that human touch, but to keep our people safe. So, we've instituted a discretionary work from home policy, which is across the board, regardless of which client you're at. Obviously, we communicate to our clients on the way we like to look after our people. But we've equipped every single person in the organization with complete remote access to all of our domains. We have ensured that our technology is some of the best in the world with virtual private networks. So providing that secure access with state of the art teleconferencing software,

as well as ensuring that, you know, we have online collaborative collaboration tools, so that, you know, we truly are not hampered, regardless of where we might work. And that's actually been really refreshing given that

have the choice truly, to decide to work from home where I feel safe,

be able to even flex the hours in which I work because then I don't have that commute time. So I can, you know, chunk my day up slightly differently.

I can still also collaborate significantly better in some instances because instead of relying on people to all be in the same physical space, it's much easier for everyone to be present in a digital space when it is suitable to them. So using online ordering tools such as Confluence, for example, is something that we use on a day by day basis. And, you know, it's proven to be super powerful, because, you know, people just go in, come in to add updates, etc, etc, as they need to. And when we do want to do online collaboration, we simply spin up a call

And we do that. And we've become actually really attuned to it to the point that it's quite funny. I came into the office today expecting to see a bunch of people. And it feels almost like a ghost town because everyone's taken to the digital workplace. Oh, well. And we are, we aren't actually seeing any decline in productivity to our clients and the delivery that we give to our clients, which is also a testament to number one, the toolset number two, the maturity of the individual, both from wanting to perform, as well as wanting to be responsible. So I found that quite refreshing. 

Ryan Purvis  8:38  
Do you think that's because you work in a sane, modern working culture?

where technology is part of the fabric? And in the same way, would you if you go into some customers as well, is that a foreign concept or that kind of the norm as well?

Ian Bower  8:57  
Yeah, no, I think I think I am quite fortunate.

In the culture that we have,

we we do live the culture of being take forward, because if we didn't, how could we sell it? And it's one of the things that we do definitely sell as a consulting and advisory firm.

Some of our clients are a little bit less on board with this. So I do know that one of our clients, for example, has decided to split their team half in half. So half the team will be in the office while the other half is working from home. And then the following week, they switch around as an example. So it's quasi working from home, so to speak, where they still feel it's justified to have people in the office and I do feel like that's an interesting concept because the cabin fever is a real thing. I don't think we can always just work from home. I think human interaction is important.

And I think this period will have

helped a lot of people shape what is a happy medium between pure online and pure digital workplace versus an augmented workplace versus a non digital workplace? And I think all of these things do right and continues. 

Ryan Purvis  10:15  
Yeah, I mean, I think so that example of alternating very quick. I mean, the first thought that I had on that was that while those people only recruit each other, because they in the office together, so they put their bond together. And then we see the other team as the not necessarily opposition, but but the other team.

And if they elicit some sort of randomization where you looking up on time, I don't know specialist those teams are.

It's an interesting thought. I mean, you know, we were having this discussion in our team meeting at the moment around Coronavirus, and how do we handle business, what kind of stuff and we're saying actually, if we look at the work, we do

Even though we are mostly office in the office, office bound, and most of our time is spent on calls, or

because our team is in different countries anyway, so we are always dialing into a call to talk to them and brainstorm with them remotely. Where only some context that you really need a whiteboard and using the digital whiteboards aren't that useful? Yeah. And we're going to work the same, you know, think of the same flow as running with that cross. All thing weeks and, and brainstorm we do need to do that with all sorts of teams.

Ian Bower  11:38  
Yes, so I'm fully on board with what you're saying. And there is there is something special about having some of that that physical time that you simply cannot recreate sometimes in the digital world

with these particular teams that I referenced earlier, they they are

Often more specialist teams in the sense that they aren't deriving strategies or creating specific types of architecture that needs to be discussed over or whiteboard. I think these particular teams are more specialized in the development sphere. So where these teams are often used to, you know, collaborating over online gets how type of tools or, you know, being able to understand particular code to code areas and develop accordingly in their time. That's what they're doing. So the the on prim, kind of piece is simply there to stay connected and feel like you have a sense of belonging

and a sense of sense of place, as opposed to necessarily saying, well, you have to be here to do a particular whiteboard session. And I think that's that's really important.

thing to think about because, you know, different role types, even, I suppose would demand different types of digital workplaces. You know, strategist would probably need a little bit more stand up, collaborate in person potentially, at certain times, I know definitely from a design thinking perspective and a service design perspective, more in in room present interaction is far, far more beneficial than trying to do that remotely. You've tried that it doesn't work.

So, you know, it really does depend. So I think, from digital workplace perspective, what is really, really useful is, you know, I like to call them admin days where you're able to just crunch through a ton of work

without having too many distractions and the digital

workplace really enables you to have those catch up calls have the quick meetings to discuss particular topics but not necessarily did a brainstorming element.

And then you're able to offer off the back of those. And then that collaborative authoring is made for the possible right through through specific tools.

Also be you'd have made mention earlier or being able to pick things up and be very mobile. I think that's also really, really important. And it's a good point that you raise because once again, being a management consultant and constantly being on the road, you don't want to feel like you can only do your work in one place. So they're offering that

that collaboration that online collaboration must be enabled through this digital workplace and completes remotes and

sort of mobile way of working and it does help once again

Time in place, right? And I think that time changing, how have you handled your sort of discussion with customers or security factor the information security pieces that are appropriate

biases bring into bias, that sort of thing. So different sectors have very different laws or rules around that.

At least within our organization, we are pretty open. To be honest, we we run by a serious trust, a lot of run on the trust basis. We don't necessarily have bring your own device. We do get company issued devices.

And we're able to choose practically any device we would like to work on. Both from a PC Mac perspective or a mobile phone. We can choose those. Or if we would like to work on a tablet, we can choose that. So

The organization would rather provide all that because they do encrypts all of the devices with the corporate encryption software in case something does happen, however, they don't want to restrict us. So that's okay. from our side. When we go on client sites, though, often clients issue us with their own devices. So we work off of their encrypted machines, and they often use virtual private networks, and complete secure security tokens to access their particular servers, with the clients that we don't and we do have some clients where they don't provide us with their own equipment.

They they trust us to have security in place. But then again, we wouldn't necessarily working with

hugely sensitive data. So once again, different role types if you're a data data scientist

You'll probably be working with a client machine. If you're a strategist, you probably wouldn't be working off a consulting machine. Does that make sense?

It does. 

Ryan Purvis  17:12  
I mean, how do you blend? What you need to do with

what the customer has potentially locked down?

Ian Bower  17:21  
You basically have like different freedoms. Yeah, it does become quite challenging. That's the reality. So what we do find ourselves doing is because of these online portals, we're able to access some of those online portals.

And we can still collaborate but what it also does sometimes, which is very actually sometimes quite important, is it creates that clear, almost physical divide between a client piece of work and a firm piece of work. So you know, keep the peace

The IP needs to be.

It's almost like seeing different domains, hosting different pieces of software, different logins.

To access that software.

Sometimes the clients just want that that physical separation from, from a consultant perspective, it does become quite challenging sometimes because you want to move information from one thing to the next, obviously, responsibly,

that is relevant to the job that you're doing.

And sometimes you can't do it. So you have to recreate things. And that's not efficient. And I can only imagine that in time to come, that will all start changing. And I think even with the situation that we're in at the moment, people are starting to wake up to a lot of that.

And it is starting to change slowly but surely. So, yes, time, I think give it time, another year or two and it will start breaking down

But once again, it depends on the sector. Financial Services a lot more strict then telco media for example.

Ryan Purvis  19:08  
Yeah, that's true. I mean that that is and having neutron in different industries. Yes, I remember when I when I moved to the UK and I spent

time with one of the banks when I moved to real estate company, and I got so used to having a non persistent VDI and a laptop and a persistent VR. I tuned in to my my stuff.

And when I rocked up at this really company, I caught this laptop and I was like this after plenty of encrypted like seriously

the UCC

Yeah, all that like all those things, all those things that I'd sort of, even even when I joined the bank kind of it this was crazy. How can we lock all this stuff down

to the point that I've turned option A with that even now as they go, you know, if you plug it in

USB port can be encrypted. Sorry.

So don't plug in anything that you that you want to keep, because I'm going to give a program it's called Murphy's encrypted.

It's that mindset that is so different.

And

so the price ranges that that those mindsets become so key

to to to digital workspace in the future because of what's in the banks has almost become the proliferation into every other industry. Much like Formula One racing is the proliferation the consumer vehicle.

You know, the improvements like

charging

Unknown Speaker  20:42  
the batteries off the braking,

Ryan Purvis  20:45  
to give you more fuel efficiency.

Most of the things you know those were in Formula One for years before they got to consumer vehicles. 

Ian Bower  20:53  
Absolutely.

I think even you know, as we start to look forward into the future, and

starting to see more devices, leveraging cloud services, even even financial services, firms are starting to trust the cloud a lot more, you know, with full challenge of banks being based in the cloud. Now, you know, when that was probably two, boom, not even five years ago, right?

I think we're gonna start seeing a lot more of that ability to transport large data sets, as well as large data files, you know, be them, you know, high definition video or imagery or, you know, presentations, etc, etc. I think the cloud is starting to enable a lot of that cross platform kind of movement, and using smart domain management, and smart enterprise kind of rules. I think we got to start seeing a little bit more freedom in

Being able to move things around because of known identity, pre screen content, etc, etc. I mean, that's just that's the way I feel things are going to go.

Have you noticed that with with so blending of the corporate to the personal device

and having if you work with customers and how much time they spend on some type of customer and need to overlap, so monitoring tools, for example, which affects your experience, or if you do a device for your corporate job, and then you go to a customer and then you got to plug it in, you have to almost a completely different device. And

so, yes, had a couple of those scenarios in the past. However, that's becoming less and less to be honest.

People are starting to

You know, secure things, especially when it comes to mobile phones, at least and email clients.

I think the ability to containerize things on a mobile phone, obviously, we just have that mobile phone with the domain and be able to then access client emails on on your device within that container is becoming a lot more prevalent.

Which does does help things quite a lot.

Obviously, when you're talking about a larger device, such as you know, a laptop PC, or whatever it may be, it's a bit harder to do that. Because then containerization isn't isn't as good. I suppose it's not part of the fabric.

And that's when you know, unfortunately, I've had to carry a laptop for a client and a laptop for my for my firm. While

Ryan Purvis  23:55  
you've asked the question, I do want to ask those to eat. Do you have to carry different devices?

Ian Bower  24:00  
Different companies. Yes.

Ryan Purvis  24:03  
And that's what I was wondering because I remember the you know, the goal days, that's, that's exactly what used to happen is used to either have a workstation that was set up for you in the building. In fact, there used to be next next door to the Microsoft building. And we worked for them. We had a dedicated desktop that was literally on our side of the wall, plugged into an ethernet cable into the environment.

So that we do the following walking outside into the front door in Microsoft,

because they would not allow any of our devices on the network at all.

I think while we didn't have to come up with laptops.

Today, I wanted to ask you about that you talk about design thinking. And I was wondering if you might want to talk through what that means.

You know, from a last time point of view, as early on as to why personas and gamification a few if those are covered in your approach. Oh, absolutely.

Ian Bower  25:01  
So, first and foremost on the design thinking component.

They there's obviously a lot of layers to sort of service design, design thinking,

design principles, etc, etc. And the area which I'm becoming more and more specialized in, I suppose, or getting a lot more skilling is in an area called business design. Now, to many people that could seem as common sense, and really it is because what it does is it takes the actual design thinking practices of you know, divergent and convergent thinking where you have a problem or a hypothesis, you start to diverge from that in as many ways as possible throwing crazy ideas debunking ideas, throwing up even more crazy

The idea is etc. And then you start converging into what the actual problem is we're getting to the root cause of that particular piece. And then you start diverging again into whatever potential solutions they could be and what gadgets and widgets you could develop to create that. And then you start converging into what is actually realistic. Now, that's called a Double Diamond. It's a very, very common used

practice or methodology. And that's just one element. Because what happens often is a lot of people go away and they do these amazing hackathons or design jams or

design Sprint's or whatever it may be. And they come up with crazy, crazy ideas.

And then they say, well, we just need to make that. Right, but they don't necessarily test that with anybody.

Now that brings a next layer, which is what you mentioned the personas. So so important to say, Okay, well, who are we making this for? What do these

personas or these potential people actually look like what are they interested in? What do they what do they do? How do they interact? And let's get into their mind is really, really important when creating personas not to just create them on their own personal bias because often, and I've fallen into this trap before you you've kind of in a rush and you create a bunch of personas on what your perception on that persona is, without even going and speaking to that kind of persona. So there are levels of persona that you can actually create some which are completely unvalidated, all the way through to fully validated and interrogated, so to speak, where you can say, Well, yes, I have met a Mr. Smith. And Mr. Smith is 45 years old and Mr. Smith, you know, actually has a house in the countryside and two dogs and two children and lovely wife

And he loves to drive electric cars, etc, etc, right? So those are very important that helps people get into the minds of those different people, those different potential customers. Now that's also very well in good but what, once I've created a product, a potential product with those people in mind, I need to actually taste that. And that's where we come into this thing called desirability. Now, when we talk about desirability, it's sort of starting to say, Well, okay, you think you've solved the problem through this divergent and convergent thinking based on a hypothesis. But when I actually buy it, is this thing that is this thing that you'd creating something that would actually solve a pain point in my life? So it's testing that desirability with real customers, those personas you created? It's going back to the real people and saying, does this thing actually make sense when you put your own hot or cold hard cash behind it and buy it

if they get rejected?

sited about it. Well, that's great. So that's a second piece of the main puzzle.

The third piece is to say, Okay, well, what is this thing that we build in? And is it actually feasible to build this thing? Right? So do I have the systems and processes in place to do this thing? Can it scale?

Is it rational?

All of those kinds of components, right? And also, is this thing too expensive, isn't too cheap, all the materials, right? There's no point in gilding everything, you know, sometimes something has plastic is just fine.

So it's adding a layer of sense to these kinds of things. And then the last thing is all about sustainability. So not just sustainability from an environmental perspective, because obviously we need to do that and we need to understand the impact on our community, our environment.

etc, but from a business perspective, are the margins that you expect to generate on this decent? Can this thing actually be ramped up to some kind of full scale production?

And or if it's a digital potential service, can this thing actually be proliferated in a digital manner and actually still be maintained effectively is the uptime good? What's the cost of doing that? Etc, etc. So it brings in the business case and the business rationale behind something. So by the time you look at it, you've got these three primary components. Number one is the problem and the product. The second thing is Do people really like it?

And then the third thing is, well, is this thing actually realistic? Can we make money off of it and can it scale to the point that it is sustainable and you know, a money making business, business idea right or product. So that's business design, as a whole

And where I really come into it is creating the layer over each of those elements. So I delve into each of those and say, Okay, well let's start with creating something and let's go off the wall, let's intemperate by understanding what people what features customers really like, what they don't like, what's useful, what's not useful, and then it stripped it down to the bare bones and what's actually necessary. And then also, this potentially changed things so that it is something that is rational and makes business sense. Does that answer your question?

Ryan Purvis  31:31  
 It does. Sorry, I was just putting us on mute.

So that and that person is a long process is

a month long. I mean, how long do you spend going through

the steps of this? 

Wow, it all depends, right? As many things so if you are a startup,

Ian Bower  31:56  
the quicker the better, because it can start to become quite expensive.

If you are a large organization trying to make massive changes, it'll probably be I'll probably spend a bit more time and go through a little bit more in depth analysis.

Generally speaking, though,

it's sort of a six week process, six to eight weeks, where you'd want to at least come up with a concept that is somewhat testable, that has some kind of business backing. And this is talking about some kind of physical process or an MVP as code or something. So that you can actually validate things with end users and then substantiate the business case. Obviously, after that. You go into your actual building and finalization of design and marketing and rollout and all those kinds of things and with all of that, it

could sorry

Someone was having a bit of fun.

Obviously, after all of that, you can decide on what your approach for guerilla marketing or traditional marketing or whatever it may be, you know, on your actual go to market strategies. So all of those have varying timings to

Ryan Purvis  33:23  
the book sprint

by net k in a PP

planning, they do a whole exercise in a week. Now, obviously, it's

a cheap

you know, market analysis or anything like that, but but it's about

like the structure and it's worth looking at it if you if you're interested. Where you breaking up your day, like the first morning is that piece about what is the goal we're trying to achieve and, you know, X to two years, five years, one month, whatever it is,

Then you've been the experts in the afternoon, to share the knowledge around achieving that both good and bad. And then you go through the cycle and on a scale, the whole ponder on an emotional day has got something that's been targeted, targeted towards that goal. And then keeps building a mock up or screen, you know, whatever that market is screenshots, etc. and interviewing people. That that would be key

influences or contributors to what the end product would be. And that sort of gives you the stage to take it forward into maybe their longest cycle, which is okay, we this is a really good idea.

We pass muster. Now let's go spend six weeks or two months, going a bit further.

The reason why I sort of bring it up but that, you know, six weeks is a long time today.

Ian Bower  34:55  
You're stuck, you want something to repeat in six weeks. So don't make it

Throughout this period, you are still testing things, you are still validating things, right? It's not run into an interview room and six weeks later you come up with something.

This is the process of formulating a pretty solid business case with a whole bunch of elements that have been validated, builds, confirmed, researched, etc, etc. So by then you probably have some kind of MVP, a very, very low fidelity, or even MVP, it's a it's definitely a bita

on something that you're wanting to pursue, but has got some kind of customer feedback. And customer doesn't necessarily always mean external, right. So customer is external, but also internal, so internal stakeholders, so you will bring you know marketing and finance and production and all those things.

kinds of people along on the journey because they're probably going to be contributing to this along the way. So the six weeks will actually run really quickly.

But by the end of it, you have a significant amount of material that is not just, you know, slide decks,

you've got a ton of institutional knowledge

with an actual validated product that you can then decide to ramp up, iterate further on or whatever it may be. And naturally, you know, all of these things would then go into, you know, further agile, ideally, agile development product development processes.

And the traditional agile sprint, of course, is a two week sprint. So this is in three sprints, right? Hmm.

And who would you have involved in this process

as many people from different parts of business as possible and potentially customers

So it's really important to not develop these things in silos.

What's often really, really useful is having a core team, that's kind of own solution. And they're probably going to be a product development team. And within that product development team, you'll probably have someone representing something commercial, someone representing something that is the the actual output skill sets. So be at a developer or someone that's involved in manufacturing or whatever, maybe

you'll probably have someone that's a marketer, someone that's maybe a bit of a designer, and one or two other potential skill sets. But then what you do is through different workshops and different interventions, you're going to bring in a whole raft of other people and opinions and views. So that you get as many views and opinions really, on the particular point that you're at. So you know, when you when you creating

You know, your devoted divergent thinking on what is the problem. It's great to have young people, middle aged people, older people, you know, people from different demographics,

you know, living in different areas, potentially all those kinds of things definitely contribute to coming up with solutions that are actually a lot better thought through. Because often we have a lot of bias based on our personal situations. And the more diverse you you have the patient sessions, the better and then you you bring that back. So once again, think of that Double Diamond, you break open and get as many people as you want, as you can in the group, maybe running different sessions, collecting all of that synthesizing that information. And then as a smaller core team, understanding what that synthesized information looks like and then potentially distilling it into a couple of

different features, stories, topics, whatever you want to call them. And then once again, breaking that open and diverging into, let's get ideas on how we solve these discrete pieces. And then converging once again and synthesizing as a team into something that is the end deliverable. So that's quite a quite important, you know, it's it's a broad spectrum and people that are potentially

a core team with a lot of periphery as well peripheral individuals that will come in and out of the process. Yes, it sounds very similar to the sprint process. It's the same thing. You have a core team, let's say between five and eight people that are the same sort of mix.

And then you bring in the the SMEs or the

well, your end user customers, whatever you want to call them

down the road, and that don't say thursday friday in this process.

In order to validate your prototype, which has been built by the core team.

Ryan Purvis  40:05  
We're gonna have to tie it up here.

Do you want to share any sort of social media Connect connection options and a Twitter, Facebook? LinkedIn?

Ian Bower  40:18  
Yeah, you can use my LinkedIn, the other ones I don't really use.

So if you search for me and Bower

in London, the London area, you will see me as a senior principal consultant.

Ryan Purvis  40:32  
Great. Well, thank you very much, and appreciate you giving us some of your time today. Yeah, absolutely. Really. Thank you for giving me the time and it's been a really interesting discussion. So thank you.

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