Design Thinking & Innovation Week March 2019

FLA: Design Thinking & Innovation Week has officially begun! 25 incredible delegates flew from 14 different countries to learn from some of the most innovative organisations in London.

It's also quite a special programme this year. A very dear delegate of ours Chernicova Elena is celebrating her 5th anniversary. Yes, you've heard it right, Elena has been attending our programme for the 5 years in a row and always brings her joyful attitude and energy. Looking forward to celebrating our 10th anniversary together;)

So today we attended talks from Liz LeBlanc from Livework studio and Al Young and Ed Palmer from St Luke's London. Quick highlights from their sessions:

⚫️ Service Design is only one part of becoming a customer-centric organisation. You also Vision, Culture, Measurement and Operational delivery that support this process.

⚫️ Employee Experience is the new black. If you take care of your people they will take care of your clients.

⚫️ Make your teams healthy, wealthy and wise. From having power naps during the day and not allowing to work on the weekends to having profit share schemes – this what creates the true culture of innovation.

⚫️ Run your business like a night club.

See you all tomorrow with more insights!

Day 2 of our FLA: Design Thinking & Innovation Week brought another solid portion of insights about how VCs invest in startups, what helps product innovation happen and how to approach organisational design. 

We learned from Olesya Myakonkaya, Dharmesh Raithatha from Forward Partners, Divya Hughes, John Connolly and Danielle Macdonald from Receipt Bank.

Top highlights from today:
▲ There are 3 types of good founders – with an excellent domain expertise, with deep understanding of technology or just awesome. 
▲ Startups succeeds then they focus. Pick one segment of the customers to focus on first.

▲ Avoid distributed teams for innovation. If you have a 12 
-hour time difference, by the time your team executes, you situation might have changed.
▲ The best way to approach organisational design is through service design. Apply the same human-centered principles, prototype and test.

Can't wait for more learning and exploration tomorrow! 

Our third day at FLA: Design Thinking & Innovation Week was full of inspiration from Hilary Lovie from John Lewis & Partners and Timo Pätiälä and Andreas Pattichis from Hellon

A couple of quick takeaways:
▲ If your product is not taking off, most likely it's not the product that is wrong, but poor research on why this product was needed in the first place.

▲ Not all creativity is good, some creative behaviours can be destructive. For example being eager to jump into a solution, instead of digging into the problem. Being in love with your idea, so you don't value ideas of others. Stopping being curious, because you "are already creative enough".

▲ The best ice breakers are kids games.

▲ By 2020 customer experience will be a more important brand factor than price or product.

▲ AI transforms soft into hard (creativity into data) and will help Design get more respect than ever in the C-suite.

Wow, what a Day 4 at our FLA: Design Thinking & Innovation Week!

The first talk from Catalina Butnaru sparked the most debate about what is ethical in technology and what should guide designers and data scientists. 

Catalina talked about how technology inherits human biases, who should be accountable for system's mistakes and how ethics will evolve in the future. A couple of takeaways:

▲ AI Ethics are a blend of company values, AI standards, moral dictates and industry specific requirements.

▲ You should disclose that when you use an algorithm/robot to talk to your customers, not a real human. Otherwise you will break the trust between your company and consumers.

After this we went to Facebook to learn from Diamond Ho about how and when they use Design Sprints.

▲ Facebook uses 3 main approaches when looking for a solution:
- Workshop: Executing or refining a predetermined solution on a collaborative way – this is about generating executions, not ideas.
- Sprints: Exploring and finding solutions to a well-defined problem. Typically more about generating new ideas than refining solution.
- Pathfinding: multi-week, multi-team efforts to dig deep into complex problems, emerging trends or new product ideas.

▲ Design Sprints can be 1 week, 1.5 week or 3 weeks. Everything that requires more than 3 weeks in not a sprint-type problem.

After we took millions selfies in a very instagrammable Facebook office, we departed to Engine Service Design to hear from Oliver King about how to create a strategy for the 10 years in the future:

- Create future personas
- Think about shifts in behaviours, accessibility and organisations. Define tech principles.

- Create a vision – the central idea of what customers will want in the future and tactics how to get there
- Based on the vision, create concept of experience - how a perfect experience will feel in the future. Sort of a futuristic CJM
- From the concept experience create individual concepts that will enable this experience 
- And put it all together into a system architecture