Speaking
Topics
I speak on the various elements of Decision IQ™ and how they impact leadership, product direction, innovation, design and digital transformation.
Decision IQ and dealing with bias
Engineering is a complex discipline, which requires 1000s of interlinked decisions for every project. Before engineers embark on a civil, mechanical, aeronautical, electrical or industrial engineering project requiring those decisions they agree how they will be made. So rather than rush into them, they pause, identify the biases, incorrect assumptions and other factors which get in their way, and together agree how they will make decisions. This approach is at the heart of effective design and innovation.
Winning in the experience economy
‘I will give you my attention if you don’t waste my time’ is the unspoken emotional contract your users make with you. Your users are also remote (separated from you by distance), engaging via technology (human to computer, not human to human) and powerful (they can access your competitor’s offering, or your current customer feedback at the click of a button). You win in this environment by incorporating your customer to the heart of your design processes.
Why is design so broken?
Digital design is broken, particularly in large organisations. What’s more it is predictably broken, that is broken for a regularly occurring set of reasons – it gets buried with bureaucracy, it is siloed to a single department, it pays lip service to strategy, to research, to data, it forgets about competitive advantage and it is still too often driven by ego and career advancement. It affects millions every day, whether customers, users or employees and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Innovation and design thinking in the enterprise
Innovation doesn’t emerge from the ether, as a somehow mystical combination of contemplation and genius. It is not something which happens to people, rather it is something people do. There are lots of ways organisations can get better at innovation, by improving culture (encouraging people to think differently, avoid a culture of blame) and process (separating problem from solution, allowing time for ideation and fresh thinking). This in turn helps avoid group-think and ‘right answers’ freeing people to drive themselves and their organisations confidently towards new and better solutions.
Using design thinking to get s**t done
Design thinking provides us with a lens through which we can more clearly see the world. It provides a compass for decision-making and a framework for innovation and managed risk taking. It provides busy and ambitious executives with tools to better collaborate, to make decisions based on data and insight and to focus on problem solving. Design Thinking identifies the reasons that organisations make poor decisions and mitigates against them.
The first 10,000 days the next 10,000 days
The world wide web is just older than 10,000 days (27.39 years in old money) and has been through Web 0.0 (hasn’t emerged from academia), 1.0 (reaches into the commercial world), 2.0 (interactivity and social media), 3.0 (AI and big data) and 4.0 is doubtless on its way. Despite the rate of change and pursuit of innovation some market forces have remained constant. This talk explores not what’s new, but rather what’s not – what are the constants that have got us this far and what does that mean for the road ahead.
Don’t be data driven
Data is brilliant at telling us the what, but less good at telling us the why. Data tells us where to look (it allows us to spot curious user patterns of behaviour) and it tells us if we’re wrong or right (it’s perfect for testing hypotheses), but to really understand our users we need to dig deeper. And to do that we need to get outside the safety of our data dashboard, by marrying quantitative data with qualitative insights. We do that by getting our hands dirty by engaging with actual users in the real world.
Something else
If I’ve written about a topic on my own blog or on another publication, I can speak about it. My areas of interest span behavioural economics, decision intelligence and bias, content and conversion, technology and society, process and culture. If you’d like me to speak and the topic isn’t specifically outlined above, get in touch and we can explore if I can help.
