Intro This presentation is from UX Australia 2015, held in Sydney. For more presentations from this, and other conferences, please visit UXAustralia.com.au.
Intro Let’s begin. Our next speaker is someone who will be familiar to many, but if not, he’s a good friend of ours and a good friend of UX Australia. Please welcome, all the way from Hong Kong, Mr Dan Szuc.
Dan It’s very interesting. Oh, hello. It’s very interesting. I flew into Australia two weeks ago, flew into Melbourne. And when I flew into Melbourne, I didn’t have a beard. Some people are getting it. It’s still warming up. So under the title of this slide, note there’s no trick questions, just answer the obvious. Can anybody tell me what that’s a photo of?
It’s Starbucks, yes. Who said that? Well done, Joe. It’s Starbucks. We’re going to come back to this, but just to seed: Starbucks. Had a couple of people talk about this idea of challenging your worldview. So Dave Gray spoke about that and I really enjoyed… Is Anthony Quinn here? There he is. And Anthony mentioned it this morning.
So I want to extend on that a little bit, and I’ll do an exercise with you. Does anybody recognise this? Yes? It’s like being back at school. Yes, yes it is. It is Hong Kong. Have you been to Hong Kong before? You live in Hong Kong? So do I. Let’s go for dim sum. So see you.
Yes, this is Hong Kong harbour. So I want you all to imagine that on one side of the harbour, there’s a district called Tsim Sha Tsui, apologies for my Cantonese. So that’s one side of the harbour. And on the other side of the harbour, you have Hong Kong Island. Just put up your hand if you have been to Hong Kong before. Oh good. So you’ll picture what I mean. When you’re on the Tsim Sha Tsui side, you’re looking across the harbour and you’ll see Hong Kong island. You’ll see the cityscape.
And I want you to imagine that, on the side you’re standing on, and this will be that… this will be this side of the room, I’m going to describe that side… the side that you’re standing on, this side of the room, not this side of the room, this side of the room as sleepwalking. And the way that I want you to vocalise sleepwalking is ah. Okay?
So practice with me: look, it’s ah. So one, two… wait a minute! Fuck. One, two, three:
Audience Ah.
Dan Okay. And across the water, the other side, Hong Kong island… actually, this has got nothing to do with Hong Kong island or Tsim Sha Tsui, they’re both great. But on the Hong Kong island side, it’s yay. So one, two, three:
Audience Yay.
Dan So sleepwalking is:
Audience Ah.
Dan and what I’ve described… wait. What as I described as sparkle is:
AUDIENCE Yay.
DAN One more time. Sleepwalking?
AUDIENCE Ah.
DAN Well, that’s really depressing. And sparkle is?
AUDIENCE Yay.
DAN Okay. So close your eyes. And imagine you’re standing on… we’re all standing, now, on the side of sleepwalking, all of us. So we described all of that… we’re feeling… what are we feeling on the sleepwalking state? We’re feeling, ah. And you’re about to get on a ferry, and you’re going to cross the harbour. And that ferry crossing across the harbour is going to be about all the things that you need to do and you need to practice and you need to think about, and in some respects, some of the really good stuff that you’ve got out of UX Australia, that you need to take back into your practice, that’s going to move you across the water towards sparkle. And the sparkle is described as?
AUDIENCE Yay.
DAN Yay. So everybody?
AUDIENCE Yay.
DAN The yay. Some people are saying yay like they’re still depressed. So keep your eyes closed. So you’re on the sleepwalking state, you’re in the sleepwalking side, you’ve got on the ferry, gone through the turnstile, got onto the ferry, and you’re taking the ferry across the water. It’s about a five-minute ride, and it’s taking you to Hong Kong Island, which is the side of sparkle.
AUDIENCE [One voice] yay.
[General laughter]
DAN Okay. So open your eyes. Some of you’ve already opened your eyes. So this is the
way I want to frame the talk today about stories. And that’s the way… and I did want to give some credit here to Optimal Workshop, because I did a similar presentation in Wellington earlier in the year, to talk about sleepwalking, which is…
AUDIENCE Ah.
DAN And the move towards Sparkle, which is?
AUDIENCE Yay.
DAN And they very kindly put together this e-book. End of plug. So here’s the problem, I think, today in work. And then we’ll get to how stories can help. So this is taken on the maglev in Shanghai. It takes you from the airport, basically into downtown. And you can see it goes really, really fast: 431 km. So when you’re on the maglev, if another maglev passes you, it basically goes whoosh. Whoosh. When you’re sitting there. It’s really quick.
And I wanted to read you this. This is called the Great Tragedy of Speed. So think about work today. You think about how, when you ask someone, for example, how are you? The common response that I often get, independent of where I travel, I say how are you, the common response I usually get is, I’m busy.
So people have really got caught up with busy, and I think part of the contributor to that is speed. Think about the language we use: lean and fast and agile and… so the Great Tragedy of Speed: The great tragedy of speed as an answer to the complexities and responsibilities of existence is that very soon we cannot recognise anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity as we are.
Business as usual? Innovation!
AUDIENCE Yay!
DAN We see only those moving in the same whirling orbit and only those moving with the same urgency. Soon we begin to suffer a form of amnesia, caused by the blurred vision of velocity itself, where those germane to our humanity are dropped from our minds one by one. We start to lose sight of any colleagues who are moving at a slower pace, and we start to lose sight of the bigger, slower cycles that underlie our work. I’ll repeat: we start to lose sight of the bigger, slower cycles that underlie our work. We especially lose sight of the big, unfolding wave form passing through our lives that is indicative of our central character.
So what I would like you to think about is, as we think about… because it’s been in between the lines, and sometimes not in between the lines of the presentations. I want us to think about, not just about the human skills or how the human skills connect to our toolkits, but I want us to think about the different routines that are inherent in our practice which may not always have to do with speed, and speed as a contributor to deliverables.
So what I’m suggesting is, I’m saying maybe there are other routines at play that talk to the types of practices that we should be thinking about towards the sparkle state, that relates to the design of the places that we want to work.
So how do stories help?
Let’s come back to Starbucks. So again, what is this? Anybody? Starbucks, thank you, Joe. You seem to be the only one who knows what this is. It is Starbucks. The second question is: where is this?
AUDIENCE Anywhere.
DAN Anywhere. Who said that? Why anywhere?
AUDIENCE [Inaudible].
DAN Yes, they’ve sort of got a common template going on. Is there… are there any clues as to where this could be? Someone said Hong Kong. Any clues as to the confidence that it’s Hong Kong?
AUDIENCE [Inaudible].
DAN Sorry? Traditional Chinese, and you know that because?
AUDIENCE [Inaudible].
DAN Right. It seems like I’m asking that question in jest, but you are Chinese, therefore you can recognise the difference between traditional and simplified Chinese. Did you grow up in Hong Kong? Where did you grow up?
AUDIENCE [Inaudible].
DAN Okay. But think about this exercise, not about… it’s not about whether it’s Starbucks. This is an exercise in perspective, because that’s been one of the strong themes, for me, out of these presentations, is perspective. If we think about this in terms of design, and we think about this as it relates to words like, and we’ve heard these words throughout presentations, words like evidence, and evidence that contributes towards challenging our assumptions. What’s interesting about this, in terms of framing, is that it’s very difficult for us to know, unless you can recognise certain cues in this framing that it’s Hong Kong, because we don’t have enough evidence to give us the confidence that it is, in fact, Hong Kong.
I mean, I’ve done this exercise for years, and I’ve even had some people say, it has to be in Asia. Why is it in Asia? Because there’s a Chinese person in the Starbucks. But this happens, right? This happens with the work that we do. If we grow the frame, if we gain more perspective, get a little bit more context, gather more data, it starts to contribute towards making more confident decisions about either business direction or business strategy or product strategy or design and so on and so forth, and if we grow the frame even a little bit more, introduce more objects, like, for example, the Hong Kong taxi, it’s very obvious now that it’s Hong Kong, because there’s all these different data points contributing to having confidence that that’s where it is.
I think we’ve got a problem on projects and in product teams, because I still think that product teams are very much stuck at the bottom layer. They have the first slide of Starbucks. They’re very much about features and functions, features and functions, that actually, in a way, come from sleepwalking states, because they come from business requirements that often have a hell of a lot of assumptions that are baked into them that contribute to us working on products that result in busy and then result in, I hate my job because I’m working on meaningless crap.
So it’s really not about sparkle.
AUDIENCE Yay!
DAN Really, I’ve found that for most people, it’s really about sleepwalking.
AUDIENCE Ah.
DAN Design problem. Let’s talk about the power of stories, how that can help. So through a minute or so, I’d like you to turn to your partner, and I’d like you to just tell a story about a wedding. Go.
Tell a story about a wedding.
Shout out things that you learned, just from that, like, 45 seconds about weddings. Shout out words.
AUDIENCE [Inaudible].
DAN Sorry? Dodgy? Watching? Botchy? Okay. Botchy. Alcohol. Sex? Yes. Nice. At the wedding?
Anything else?
Expensive. Food. Okay.
So, like, it’s really through 30, 45-second exercise, but already we’re uncovering some interesting attributes of weddings in a very short amount of time. Dave spoke a little bit about this. If you look rather… look at the picture on the right, where he started to… You were scribbling over it, Dave. You were scribbling over it because… was it to represent like a messiness? Or a?
SP5 [Inaudible].
DAN Okay, yes. That’s what it was. I kind of also looked at it as what stories could do, although… That’s what it is for Dave! But the way I look at this, too, is it could be that, if we want to help traverse across. If part of what we do… we’ve heard things like connecting, linking, mapping, synergy. If we want to help traverse, the idea of traversing across organisations becomes important. To do that, perhaps what we need to do… and this is, this is getting towards the end of the presentation, is really about things that we’ve already heard.
So we heard about how we create empathy with the people that we work with. Standby talks about this as empathic conversations, as a way of getting to a deeper level of behavioural insight. If you think about what we do as: we frame a problem, we observe, we interview, blah blah blah, we deconstruct, blah blah blah, we synthesise, we story-tell, blah blah blah, and then we get to a sense of modelling. What this is really about for me is a sense of a shared experience. Now Dave spoke about that, right? That bottom bit was about those shared experiences, and Dave’s spoken about it and other people, Ash, and who was the chap you presented with, Ash? Mick. You guys spoke about that as a… you presented it as a shared experience.
This is important.
But in order to have shared experiences, we also need shared artefacts. If you think about filmmaking or theatre and you’re moving towards a production, everybody that works on that has a clear idea of the artefacts that you’re using to communicate a sense of a common narrative towards the thing that you’re producing. And I think we’re still experiencing some friction with that, because different roles and disciplines have different things that they use that talk to what we accept as a common narrative.
Ash spoke about that in terms of sharing the stories and Nova spoke a little bit about that. Where’s Nova? In terms of staff.
So coming towards the end, what does this mean?
So I think stories are about creating a sense of a gluing effect or a binding evidence or a way to sort of glue bits together, map, connect, synergise things together, that create that shared sense of purpose in the work that we do.
Now I think stories are not the only way to do that, but they’ve been very, very powerful for me and my wife, Josephine, in our practice. But I hope together, as a community of practice, we can discover more.
I think what you discovered, perhaps, in the 45 seconds that you had to talk about weddings, is that you saw in my picture there was a technology problem on the screen, the earlier slide, but what’s interesting within stories is, here’s the thing: it’s not all about digital.
Getting a little bit fascinated, perhaps over-fascinated, with digital. It’s important. It’s an important thread, but it’s not all about digital. There are emotions at play. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into sex at weddings. But there’s emotion at play, and we should… Dave had that as a heart in his last part of his presentation. Let’s stop avoiding emotion. Let’s start bringing emotion into our work. Let’s see how that… let’s just try out how that adjusts the language that we use. Let’s… for a moment, let’s all try and stop being so rational.
Try it. See it what it means for the intent of our work. Lives are messy. That’s what you discover through stories. In other words, moving beyond the discussion guide, allowing yourself to look at things that we don’t know. And I think every output, every deliverable, has an underlying intention. So I think that’s why journey maps have become very popular, because journey maps connect a larger narrative that the siloed parts of organisations don’t know, and it promotes a curiosity.
So last couple of slides. I believe, certainly for me and Jo, in terms of… as a bigger story from our practice, in terms of sleepwalking.
AUDIENCE [One voice] Ah.
DAN Nice one, John. Did you vibrate a little bit when you…? And towards sparkle.
AUDIENCE Yay.
DAN I think we need to address, and call it out, that as a unit of analysis, that projects are a design problem. Let’s just work on that and say, stated clearly, projects are a design problem. They exist within an organisational context that is old. Let’s just accept that. Everyone nodding? Good, because that’s sleepwalking. We’re working in places that are not helping. And really what we want to move it more towards, which is what I’ve been hearing, is we want to move it to stuff that’s hard to explain. We describe it as the magic between the circles, but we’ve heard it described over the last few days in other ways. But we need to get better at articulating what that magic between the circles is, because that’s the magic of sparkle.
AUDIENCE Yay.
DAN That you get through productions like theatre and filmmaking that I want everybody to feel more through projects. And that’s what stories can provide. But I think that it’s lots and lots and lots and lots of circles and magic.
So what are those bits in between, that sound… when people say, for example, let’s collaborate, what’s happening in that collaboration that we need to articulate better towards the maturity of our practice so that we understand what’s happening in the experience of what we do, with stories being a trigger for that?
Because what I really want, that they’re finishing up next door, what I really want is, I want everybody to sparkle.
AUDIENCE Yay.
DAN Louder.
AUDIENCE Yay!
DAN Okay. Yay!
SP1 We hope you liked this presentation from UX Australia, 2015. For more presentations from this, and other, conferences, please visit UXAustralia.com.au.
