Design for Tomorrow vs. Design for Today

Jod Kaftan, Alex Burke at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/V5xziSx7NjA

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Futures thinking versus strategic foresight

[00:00:08] Alex: Hello everyone. Jod is from Southern California and I'm based in New Zealand, and we're going to talk about future thinking. I can confirm that we are actual people, we are not a hologram that's come here and appeared. We have traveled all this way to see you. I'm super excited about this topic. Jod is a real leader in this space, so we're going to take you on a bit of a journey. I think we'll kick off, Jod, with a bit of an intro to what is futurist thinking, what does it mean, and what's your background and your starting point for this area.

[00:00:53] Jod: As you progress in your career, sometimes things get a little flat, and then you find something that just inspires you and it keeps you going. I started as a UX designer and then I got into service design and my mind got blown. As the years passed, I started to get quite inspired by what's called strategic foresight, as well as futures thinking. One of the first things that I learned was there's a difference, which I can talk about briefly.

[00:01:31] Futures thinking is really about exploring possibilities. It uses what would be described as evidence-based imagination, which is a term I love. You could argue all designers are using evidence-based imagination if you are doing UX research. The futures thinker would be looking more at what we call weak signals, or things that are existing today that the futurist would define as a specific example of the future in the present. This is how they define signals. So looking at those signals and then generatively exploring those possibilities.

[00:02:23] Foresight is really like applied futures thinking, and it's much closer to strategy. In fact, strategy and foresight were once inseparable, and if you think about it, it makes a lot of common sense. Strategy without foresight is prone to disruption. Foresight without strategy is inactionable. So they need each other. But the main difference is that foresight doesn't strictly focus on possibility. There's a very deliberate workflow. It starts with probabilities, things that are likely to happen; possibilities, things that could happen; and then, if I had a little triangle in front of me, it would move up to the top where there exist preferred futures. These are the things that we want to happen, and they're usually informed by values, the values that we want to see prevail. One amendment to that in the recent years of foresight practice is they've added a fourth P called preventable futures. So if you go from probable, possible, to preferred, and then finally preventable, you have gone through the whole foresight cycle.

Bringing foresight to an organization focused on today

[00:03:47] Alex: Now, Jod, okay, give me $100 million and I'm going to shoot for the stars. I'm going to build a big team and create a new product and we're going to go on a rocket ship somewhere. The reality is, though, my current business, we're a bit worried about our competitors. We've got to think about consolidating tools and technology that we're using. We've got to try and deliver some ROI in the next quarter. How do you bring this thinking to an organization where that focus is today?

[00:04:20] Jod: Well, there's all sorts of strategies, but one technique I call backcasting, essentially. We recently did a vision sprint at Oracle, where I work, and typically what they would do in the past is the vision would just be about things you can build in the next quarter or the next three or four. But what gets sacrificed is challenging orthodoxy, challenging power dynamics, and that's really what building in foresight is: extending that timeline a little bit, extending beyond your tech stack, extending beyond what your understanding of users' expectations are, which we know are going to change, especially with a transformational technology like AI.

[00:05:16] So what we would do is we'd say here's a long-term chapter, here's a midterm chapter, and here's a short-term chapter, and really deliver that vision. And by the way, you can do a vision without doing foresight, but why I would often sell it internally as a vision is because that vision can be the Trojan horse, and it allows you to stretch beyond what we think we can do. Otherwise we're dealing in the realm of business where, in America at least, everyone gets an MBA and is taught how to manage risk. And that's not the designer's job. We certainly have to be respectful of it, we certainly have to have empathy even for executives, but our job is to challenge that a little bit, and I think that's what foresight allows us to do.

[00:06:17] Alex: You mentioned executives. I need to think about long-term vision, investment in vision. Many corporates change CEOs, many businesses change execs over time. How does that impact, again, thinking a bit further afield? Do you then have to reset and scratch again and try something else?

[00:06:41] Jod: Well, that's the problem. That's exactly why we need to start doing this more and more. These short-term CEO tenures are strictly focused on down revenue and yields of down revenue, and they don't think about the world they're leaving behind. They don't even think about the world that they're leaving to their successor, and they don't care in most cases. So the problem with that, of course, is the short-sightedness of it. And that's why you have the Kodaks of the world and the Blockbusters of the world, which of course are famous case studies of market leaders squandering and not having enough vision and not understanding the forces of change fast enough. Or I like to think of it as courage, really. That's really what's the missing ingredient often. So I think it's a huge factor and it's a huge obstacle to trying to get buy-in for foresight.

[00:07:49] Now there's the strict interpretation of foresight in terms of a timeline. Often they talk about 10-year horizons, which, to your point, if I have an earnings call in six months, I really don't care about what happens in 10 years if I'm the CEO. But I probably should, not because I'm being judged on that today, but my legacy, the company, the people I'm leaving behind. I don't know if anyone's read Simon Sinek's The Long Game, but we're missing that today. We're missing that completely.

[00:08:30] So the reason that they think in 10-year horizons, and again I don't follow that religiously, I think you can do a five-year foresight cycle and have just as much impact, but the argument for 10-year horizons is that is the typical amount of time you see for a major transformational event to happen. Facebook took 10 years. It was an academic social site, and then everyone was using it to connect. iPhones, there was a million in 2008. 10 years later everyone had them, billions and billions. The internet is another classic, 10 years. So it's actually not unreasonable if you think about it, if you are in the business of transformation.

Tech debt, backlogs and finding allies

[00:09:22] Alex: If you start from scratch, you've got a journey, you create your vision, you're going to move that, you're a design-led organization, you're moving on. What if you're an organization where you've been around for a little while? You create a vision, you bring a design leader in at exec team level, you've started to get the right foundations for a good future vision. And then the engineering team's like, hey, that's great, mate, but we've got this debt management here. You've come up with this future idea and I've got tech debt to manage. How do you work with that, and how do you then work with different teams to get them to buy into that vision, particularly if it's so far afield and their concern and their worry is, well, hey, I need 30%, 40% capacity to just manage this codebase that we built five years ago or 10 years ago?

[00:10:18] Jod: That's a good question. Often I see tech debt as a rationalization for inertia. We've got all this tech debt, oh, we can't do anything about it. It's excuses in many cases. I don't mean to demean it or belittle that, but all too often it's a way to stay complacent. And even just looking at product management debt and looking at backlogs: recently I had a conversation with a PM where we wanted to do a sprint around rethinking the concept of a dashboard. Well, I have all these backlog requests from customers, which I understand from a business point of view. He's right. Customers are expecting it and they want to see those features rolled out. But there is a time to challenge these things, and if you just stop at where all the constraints are, it's just going to be a cycle of repetition and more of what you have now.

[00:11:30] I think you have to be a good listener, and you can't be this quixotic vision guy all the time, of course. But what I see most often is just complacency. And the way that I'd also address some of that tech debt: there are engineers that want to make cool stuff. Engineers are like designers, they want to make something of magnitude, something you're proud of. This is about us again challenging those who want to simply constrain risk, and there are engineers out there. So what I like to say is find those people that have the same ambition as you. Work cross party lines. I always tell my team, designers do nothing by themselves. When we're really at our best, it's because we form these cross-functional alliances. But even deeper than that, we found people with a kind of mindset of boldness, of courage, that get intrinsic joy from making something wonderful.

[00:12:43] It is interesting. I was talking to someone the other day, a design peer of mine, and I was looking back in my career and the world of software and digital design. I've done it all. I've worked at agencies and other places. I can't look back and say, whoa, I really changed the world when I released that product. And I actually think most of us probably realize we're dealing in a very ephemeral medium. But the joy, when I look back at the most fulfilling moments of my career, it's those moments with those people, the people that have the same mindset, that same level of courage and creativity. Those are the things you're going to remember more than the products that you make, more than the services that you design.

Weaving foresight into an opportunity

[00:13:38] Alex: So give some practical examples of how you get these things moving. You say you're going to pick up different members of the team, a cross-disciplinary team, start thinking in the future. How do you get that stuff moving, and then how do you play the game of reporting back to the business about how you're tracking and ultimately then what kind of impact you're having? How do you take that journey from start and then trying to push that through an organization?

[00:14:13] Jod: Usually I try to weave foresight into an opportunity. I wouldn't call it, hey everyone, we're doing a foresight project. Like I say, I use opportunities as a Trojan horse to build in some of that stretch thinking that foresight provides. There are futures teams actually out there. Amazon has a futures team and their whole remit is to think a generation ahead, anticipate the next wave of disruption. But I think arguably we should all be doing that on a typical project, because roadmaps increasingly get longer and longer, backlogs get longer and longer, and like you said, tech debt, there's backlog debt, and you're competing against that backlog. If you don't like what's in the roadmap, building in some foresight tactics can help get that idea to the top of the surface.

[00:15:19] Alex: It's almost like trying to bring it into your operating model. So you're doing your work, you're running your current roadmap, and then with that you're trying to take that team out. It's almost like that concept: okay, we run an internal workshop, but then let's spend some time out in a different location and think much further, and you do those in parallel. Is that what you mean?

[00:15:41] Jod: That's right. I can give you an example. We're a big database company that loves dashboards. But with the advent of AI, and assuming that AI is trustworthy and safe and reliable and transparent, how does that change the mental model of what people expect a system to do? Too often we've had these dashboards that are just systems of record, when they should really be a system of insight. So they had this backlog of, well, we'll put out this infolet and this, and it just needed to be challenged. So we did a vision sprint that said, well, what if people could generate dashboards on the fly? What if I'm having a conversation with a bot and the data gets too complex, and the bot's aware of it, whether it's context-based or rule-based, and says, would you like me to generate a dashboard for this? They would never have considered that if we didn't try to show that could be dynamic. Now that might sound a little bit cool today, I don't know, but it won't be in six months. The shelf life of these ideas is incredibly short. That's why we have to do this.

Storytelling for the right brain and the left brain

[00:17:04] Alex: Okay, so you're Oracle, big organization, complex beast in terms of product. You're trying to get these ideas, get these ways of thinking. How are you storytelling, how are you reporting back, how are you showing the progress of what you're doing?

[00:17:23] Jod: Well, whether or not I'm doing foresight, I have a pretty formulaic approach to that, and it's not going to be earth-shattering here, but it's the right brain, left brain approach. So first, tell the story. Tell the story without any jargon, without any industry expertise even. It's really told from the point of view of the people you're designing for, so your personas, your mindsets, whoever that might be. Tell a story and how it's really impacting their lives. We've all done this with storyboards, or it could be a clickable prototype. So always tell that story first. That wins the heart.

[00:18:21] And then you bookend it with the left brain and the backstage. Because, and I've made all the mistakes by the way, if you just tell the story from the right brain perspective, or the human-centered story, remember who's sitting across the table from you is someone who's managing risk. I have to hit a number this quarter, how the hell is this going to help me, how are we going to build this? While they're excited, they're also anxious. The more excitement, the anxiety goes right there with it. So you have to have that whole backstage story: this is how this is going to work, this is how this is going to conform to our current technology stack, here's where there are gaps. And there should be gaps. If there aren't gaps, your organization doesn't have much of a future, ultimately.

[00:19:23] So it's highly political. In fact, I've really started to just embrace politics as a necessary evil, because there's this book, if anyone's interested in foresight or futures thinking, by Alvin Toffler. It's called Future Shock. I think he wrote it in the 70s, 60s. And he says all preferred futures are political. So we have to play that game. If we don't engage with the conventions of power, we're going to be relegated to production. In fact, one of my favorite design thinkers, this guy Mike Monteiro, says if you're not doing strategy and you're a designer, you're doing production. Nothing wrong with craft and there's nothing wrong with production, it's not a demeaning thing, but you will ultimately be relegated to the how and not the why.

Silos, sales and who to bring into the process

[00:20:24] Alex: So he's saying that it needs to be embedded in your culture. Because it's interesting, over the years there's been many innovation teams, R&D teams, and often they're almost separated, and they might even have external consultants being in there because they want outside thinking. What's the best path there, and is that holy grail of it being embedded in culture, is that easy?

[00:20:55] Jod: It's very difficult, certainly where I am. We have the same silos, even within R&D. In a big SaaS organization like ours, sales has tremendous power, and you'd be horrified if I told you how some things end up on the roadmap, especially if anyone has a user research background. Oh well, so-and-so had a meeting with the C-suite and he said the product doesn't work, blah blah blah, and all it took was one conversation. So we have to manage against that and realize things that are on the roadmap should be challenged. We don't know the source at all times.

[00:21:42] But that being said, if you're asking me what would my ideal be, it would be to bring them into the conversation. Inclusion is always the answer, as long as you include the right people. So if there's someone in sales that sees R&D as a nuisance, I'm not going to go after them. But if there's someone in sales that again has that mindset of wanting to do something of magnitude and ambition, and realizes they need me as much as I need them, that's who I will bring into the process.

[00:22:14] Alex: So then in terms of communication, is it full transparency, we're on this amazing journey and this is where the future of the company's going? Or is it a closed, hey look, hide away, we've got this project and it's a secret project, I'm going to give it a secret code and you may understand or hear about that in a couple of years? What's that dynamic, particularly if you think corporate wants some impact, some result? Where are you going on that, and how much transparency can you provide on these types of initiatives?

[00:22:49] Jod: Transparency in general is a good idea. Again, like most of the people on stage will say, it depends. But if someone has some sort of agenda, they're on a need-to-know basis, and they potentially could disrupt the spirit of what we're doing. You have to expect that. In fact, I always tell our designers when they're leading a sprint or they're leading an initiative, anticipate the resistance. Know where it's going to be, know where the landmines are. It's not to create adversity, it's not to create some sort of us against them, but just know who's not bought in and who could potentially constrain what we're doing. But I find that to be very rare, even where I work, which is a pretty highly politicized place.

Where it ends: discovery, services and expanding the perception of design

[00:23:48] Alex: Where's this end? Where's the point where you know you've delivered? Or is it continuous improvement and ever-evolving thinking? Is this more a way of working and a way of thinking, constantly? What's the point where you're going to celebrate, or is this just a thing that you have to continue?

[00:24:09] Jod: Well, I can only speak to the context in which I'm in now, and I can say that bringing in foresight as a toolkit allows us to, in some ways, incorporate true product discovery. Product discovery of course has its classic definition, but if you really think about it, it's a time to explore, it's a time to learn, it's a time to think and question: is this the right thing to do? The way that it had been run before I got there was they want to bring a new product to market, and you have organizations that I was in basically being led by a salesperson who doesn't understand the product development process that well, and they think of innovation as a manufacturing process, like you're making a Toyota on an assembly line. Well, it doesn't work that way.

[00:25:13] So utilizing foresight, utilizing short sprints and constraining those decision cycles makes the organization uncomfortable in a healthy way, and they know they have to do it. Oracle, as you can see, the CEO has even said this, they're in the middle of a transformation from a product organization with a SKU-based mindset to a services organization. And a service is always changing. It's dynamic, it's in real time, it's sensing and responding all the time, and you cannot take these longer-term processes to bear fruit in that model. So I would say it's not always appropriate, of course, but when it's successful, my real goal is to really expand the perception of design as something that isn't just the presentation layer. It's the why we're building it.

Q&A

[00:26:25] Alex: Okay, questions are now open, so any questions to Jod?

[00:26:31] Audience: I'm pretty sure Jod was sent back from the future to save us from our lack of courage. Bravo. Okay, can you tell me how to use future thinking and learn more about it?

[00:26:46] Jod: Absolutely. There's a couple of things you could do right away to get started. There's a wonderful organization called the Institute for the Future. It's a nonprofit in Silicon Valley, and I took their course. I started this by taking their course on Coursera, it's a learning platform, and you can get a specialization in it, and it's really useful. They have activities. I've done futures workshops with energy executives, thinking they're going to think I'm crazy, which I get a lot, but they were so engaged, they loved it. So I encourage you, do a futures workshop, and if anyone has questions, there's some really basic activities you can do. One other quick recommendation: there's a fabulous book by John Smart called Introduction to Foresight. It talks about how our brains are wired to predict the future, with this process called active inference, and that's why we should be practicing foresight, because our brains have been doing it and it's part of the evolutionary process.

[00:27:54] Alex: Nice. Okay, the future of sausage rolls. Did you listen to that before? What is the future of sausage rolls, and is it a pork sausage roll or another flavor?

[00:28:08] Jod: Someone might need to tell me what a sausage roll is. I love all the accents. We don't have very good accents.

[00:28:19] Alex: Pastry with a meat sausage.

[00:28:20] Jod: No, you don't know that. See, I'm not even just from America, I'm from California, where we don't even eat sausage.

[00:28:26] Alex: All right, we'll move on. Where do you think it's beneficial to work in discovery sprints followed by delivery sprints, and how long is too long to spend on each? What time constraints do you recommend when you're trying to build the new sausage roll?

[00:28:44] Jod: I'm going to have one tonight.

[00:28:46] Alex: Yeah, you should.

[00:28:47] Jod: Cross it off my list. I would say, just like a minimum lovable product, what's the most valuable thing you can do in the shortest amount of time? I actually believe the shorter it is, in some ways, it's hard for those of us that love quality or high-fidelity outputs at the end of it, but the shortness of it is where the power lies.

[00:29:19] Alex: What is that? Is it a two-week sprint?

[00:29:23] Jod: If I were bringing a new product to market, again, it could be anywhere from four to eight weeks. It depends if you want to do your research up front, or you want to do it downstream, or you want to do both. It depends how many stakeholders you have to talk to. And if I were reimagining a portion of an existing product, this is splitting hairs, but four to six weeks. So the range would go down according to the proportion of the ambition. Bringing a new product to market is a big deal, especially if you're an incumbent like Oracle and you're looking at a competitive field that everyone wants to take you down. But I think someone was saying this earlier, you have to think like a startup even if you're at a company of this size.

[00:30:24] Alex: Okay, next question. Jod, have you considered a sidekick in voiceover?

[00:30:32] Jod: Is it the Southern Californian? I have heard this before. I might need to give up this design racket at some point. "The white zone is for loading and unloading."

[00:30:48] Alex: How to motivate a client that a vision for the future is important? How do you motivate?

[00:30:56] Jod: With voice. If you had a voice like this, what could stop you? I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I used to be a consultant, and there's a great book called The Art of Client Service, and I remember one line from it. The rest of the book wasn't that good, but this one line was: it takes an emotional investment to create something of beauty or value, and it takes emotional detachment to improve that thing. I would translate that as know when to say yes and know when to say no.

[00:31:37] But I would want to know what keeps them up at night. I want to know what would excite them. It's called listening. One of my heroes is the founder of the Presencing Institute, Otto Scharmer, and he talks about generative listening. This is where you're listening without your own ego. You're listening not because you have something that you're waiting to say so that person can just finish talking, but you're genuinely listening from their perspective. Usually when I do that, I'm able to influence them.

[00:32:16] Alex: It's interesting. I've started to run a couple of types of meetings, where one's where you have an agenda meeting and you're going through things, and then the other one's where it's just a topic and it's a free flow, and you just leave it open until you finish, and that's the end. And a follow-on concept. I'm in the wrong seat here. Are we good? One last question. Okay, here we go. How often do you recommend creating a future vision or revisiting it, and how do you get buy-in from leadership that this is a necessary part of the design process?

[00:32:59] Jod: Well, of course, once you do it and you show them what's possible, it's very hard for them to unsee that. And I think designers take for granted the superpower that we have of translating the intangible into the tangible. That's why I've been trying, probably annoying the crap out of them, but the strategy people, I keep telling them I want to work with you, rather than you handing down strategy from your ivory tower and having me implement it. Let me work alongside, because strategy is a form of design if you really think about it. It's just a prototype of what we think is going to happen or should happen. So if I can work with you, strategist, and translate what your hypothesis is into something that people will be experiencing, I'm also riding, by the way, your coattails, because you have a lot more credibility with the C-suite than I do. Well, what a beautiful world we can make together.

[00:34:11] Alex: That's great. Round of applause for Jod. Thank you.