I'm happy to welcome David Kester, Managing Director and Founder of DK&A Associates, and also long-term Chief Executive Officer of the UK Design Council. Thank you so much for joining us today, David. One of the things that I know that DK&A spends a lot of time on this particular competency around this idea of experimentation and the challenges of bringing an experimental mindset to our projects. We've seen a lot of people struggle with it. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit, David, about your experience watching people who are learning design thinking and beginning to embrace it. What changes for them as they get more comfortable with this experimental approach and what are the obstacles you see them struggling with as they try? Thank you, Jeane. I think to begin with, the whole idea of an experiment is often something a little alien in many company situations. People are comfortable with the idea of a pilot often. We've had this idea for this project, but now let's try it out. But the experiment is always about calling out key elements and trying out those things that really need to be tested. You've got to be able to design the experiment, you've got to know how to call out the right data, how to evaluate that data. Getting people familiar with that whole idea is often one of the biggest challenges. We do that by breaking it down into little sticky steps. We often use this little idea of the iteration model which is almost like the little spiral of an idea that's going to iterate and improve as it goes. You start with building your idea, testing your idea, and then from that learning, building again, testing and learning. As that goes on that journey, everybody feels we found much more comfortable because you've broken it down into bits that they understand; the learning bit, pulling out data, and evidence, and analyzing it, the building, the developing of the idea and so on and so forth. Taking them on that cycle actually builds confidence and they can see why they're doing the steps that are involved. The more they do it, the more comfortable they get. I'm wondering are there particular places you see people stumble? We talk a lot about experiments, but as innovators we have to learn how to learn in action, which challenges some pretty fundamental beliefs often. I'm just wondering what your experience has been of the obstacles to accomplishing that cycle successfully that you've talked about. There are several. Firstly, as someone that's maybe bringing this into an organization, you need to speak the language of business rather than design. If you can talk about the outcomes and actually speak the language of the organization, that's going to be helpful, and then the process can support you. Put the modules at the back, as it were. Secondly, always start small because people are scared. We've always found, start with the small experiment, build confidence, and then as soon as people are seeing that it works, of course they want to do more. Winning the trust of a good sponsor is really key. In any organization, you're going to need senior people who are backing you, backing the team, backing the approach, backing the project. Bringing them on side, working with stakeholders early on, that's really key. Surrounding yourself with a bunch of really good collaborators also got to be key. Finally, what we've always found is documenting what you do and over-communicating. Communicate, communicate, communicate because ultimately you're going to have to win over a diverse group of people that are going to be probably engineers, and marketers, and business development, commercial, all sorts of different parties who are going to be developing the service, the product, whatever it is that you're working on. So communicating really well as you go is incredibly important. As people are going through this cycle, David, we all know we have a tendency, we love our ideas, they are our babies, we don't want to give them up. We're taught to equate making a mistake with something that doesn't turn out the way we'd like it to. So many aspects of this process you've described shake who we are as people. I'm wondering if you have any advice as we go through that often challenging cycle personally. How do you help people let go of ideas, be open to those of others, look for disconfirming data, be willing to be wrong, all of the stuff that at a very individual human level, we need to change our behaviors in order to be successful at? We are told to rely on cognitive faculties as business managers. Then when you're going through an innovation process, you have to be much more intuitive and you have to key into all sorts of behavioral and emotional cues, both to manage the situation internally and with stakeholders, but more boldly try to key in and understand end users. You're exercising different parts of your brain as well. That's actually a big step forward for a lot of people to realize that they're operating in a different way and also embracing a certain amount of messiness as well. We were just talking about how you're moving something through a set of steps. You learn, build, test, learn. But it's not as simple as I've set an experiment and now I'm going to prove whether it's binary. Did the experiment work? Didn't the experiment work? Of course what's going to happen is though, when you test your idea, a bunch of new ideas are going to occur and you're going to have to deal with those new ideas and that new thinking. So it's messy as well. You then have to get people to embrace a lot of that messiness. I think the key to all of this is about creating a safe space for the conversation to take place, for people to gather, to develop their ideas, not to feel that there's too much pressure, too much risk. The first time you do it is often the hardest within the business. The moment that you've got a number of ideas going, the easier it gets. Because the first one always looks rather risky. How do I help myself not feel like a failure when my beloved new idea shows up and users don't love it the way I do? It's very rare actually that something fails in its entirety. There's usually something within a project, or a program, or a process that you've learned which actually is going to inform some new project or some new process. But the key is also to identify the saving that you make by not doing things. In so many instances, if you can test something quickly, you'll find it's not the right idea, there's got to be a better idea or there's something else to do. Actually then you're saving the business money by not investing in that whole project or process. There are some great examples about that I've seen in healthcare and where a lot of public money has been saved by not actually acting, by not taking something forward. If you can reward your teams for testing things well, and then often saving money, that's a huge win. I love that idea. I haven't wasted money on a failed experiment. I've saved a lot of money by not moving forward with a flawed idea. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. It's been terrific. It's a pleasure.
