Good morning. You've all recovered well from last night. That was good. And I wanted to say, oh, what a wonderful thing it is to be here at Lisbon with an amazing community here and the privilege for everybody who's come from outside of Lisbon to be able to share in what we've been able to experience the last couple of days. And thanks to Bruno and everybody on the team at Experience for helping to bring us together. So my name is Jess McMullen. I live in Canada. And I've been doing user experience stuff since the mid-90s. But these days, most of the work that I do is more like management consulting than it is like designing wireframes. And I'm going to talk to you about some of the things that helped me work at a higher level in the organization that I work with. So this is me with no beard and about 10 kilos lighter. You can keep in touch with me on Twitter. And these ideas have developed over the years with my friend Harry Max, who's a friend and mentor and an executive coach himself. So I'm going to tell you a story to start out with. In 2003, I was working on a project at Intuit. And I was working there. And I had a one-on-one meeting with Bruce and Chad, who were the founders of Intuit Canada and the senior vice presidents, the CEOs of Intuit Canada. And they asked me what website I liked. What's the website that you like the best? And I said Amazon. They didn't like Amazon. And so we got in this conversation about why Amazon was a good website. And I was having this conversation about the interaction design of Amazon and how it was laid out. And they didn't agree with me. And in retrospect, I wish I had had a different set of vocabulary and a different set of lenses to really articulate why Amazon was my favorite website. Was not because it was this shining beacon of visual or interaction design, but because it worked really, really well, both for users and for the business. I wish I had had a way to have that conversation better. And so the things I'm gonna talk about today are things that I wish I could have told myself 15 years ago. And I think of these ideas being business fluency. So I don't know how many languages we speak here together. Sadly, I only speak 1.1. My children and wife speak French. But if you've ever been somewhere where you've traveled and you speak the language or you've been somewhere where you didn't speak the language, it's a pretty different experience. The level of fluency you have has a lot to do with the level of comfort you have. And it's not just about the vocabulary. It's also about understanding the culture. If you're going from Portugal to Brazil, that's a pretty different set of things that you need to understand for fluency, not just the vocabulary itself of Portuguese. And so we need to develop this conceptual fluency and cultural fluency in the language of business if we want to affect business outcomes. Because we have a problem, too many of our projects look like this instead of like this. We think we're all like cool innovators, I'm making a rocket and then oh heck, it didn't work. And one of the big reasons for that is the CEO design crit. So you bring your thing to the most senior executive that's responsible for it. And what do they say? They say, I don't like green. That's not the point, that's not the point. So obviously they don't get it, right? That we come here to places like UXLX and we're like complained to each other, like oh, they don't get it. But if I just was able to learn more skills, if I actually knew more things here, then obviously they would get it because I would have this technical base that I could convince them that this is the right idea. However, it's not really about us becoming better practitioners of design. It's actually a 180 degree pivot from like looking at our work in terms of understanding design techniques and pivoting to understand the business. So I had this epiphany where if somebody doesn't get it, it's not really that they don't get it. It's that I don't understand them well enough to communicate in a way that they can understand and see it from their perspective. And if I say they don't get it, I've given up all my power to make a change. So I've abdicated that. And so I think if you're thinking in your own organization, oh, they don't get it, well maybe you don't get it quite yet, that we need to apply those same tools that we have as designers. And that's I think our secret superpower in working in organizations. We can take all of those same tools that we have in understanding users and their needs and designing a solution that meets those needs and we pivot and say, what are the people in my organization need? They're people. We are experts at understanding people and their needs. We shouldn't forget that when we go into a boardroom to talk to people. What are their needs? What's going to be a solution for them that helps them win? You can use all those same skills that make creating a great experience for users to help create a great experience for your stakeholders inside your organization or with your clients. And so those pivot skills are incredibly valuable and I think set designers apart as you're trying to build your influence inside organizations. And when you have that business fluency, it leads to business empathy. You understand, oh, this is why we can't do that. It's not like maybe it would be a better experience but then we'd go out of business that you're able to actually have that understanding of what other people's priorities are and accommodate those inside a bigger sense of the solution not only for saying, oh, this is a great interaction or this is a great experience but this is a great system that creates shared value for both customers and for the business. So to do that, we don't just need better design tools. We don't need a better wireframe or a better journey map. Those things are good. Not saying that we shouldn't be learning those. That's why I taught a workshop earlier this week about some of those kinds of tools. But we need to have better tools to work with business too. And I'm gonna share three of those. This talk actually is a condensed version of a workshop that I teach over half a day or a full day. And so I'm gonna give you a little snippet of what I think are kind of the highlights or skim off the top of that. So I have three tools we're gonna talk about today. And those tools are the grid, the pyramid, and the funnel. First, any time that we talk about tools, whether it's Jamie's cool spreadsheets or some of these worksheets or anything else we see, they're kind of like the exercise machines at the gym. Now, you know this is a hypothetical example looking at me, right?  You'll actually get a better workout though if you went and used free weights because you get a better range of motion. And so these tools are kind of like the machine at the gym, but once you start to exercise and practice with them, you can adapt them and you can get a better workout by maybe changing some of the things. Absolutely do that, because you're gonna know how to use them best in your organization. You shouldn't be like, well, Jess said I have to do this. It doesn't make any sense here, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Don't do that. So these are just structures to help us think. So first one, the priority grid. What keeps senior leaders, what keeps CEOs up at night? What are the things that they worry about? Besides their kids and their dog and their husband. It's like a thing that in the business, what keeps them up at night? Well, there's six things, six big things. First one is money. How do we make and save money? But that's often not really the focus itself. A lot of people are thinking, how do I get the right people in my organization? How do I hire them? How do I retain them? How do I grow them? How do I develop those people? And then thinking about what do we wanna do as our goals? How do I understand that direction that we should be going in? How do I actually track those goals? And how does that help us deliver value? What's valuable to customers? What's valuable to shareholders and employees? You should wait until all six are up before you take a picture. But then I will pause for a photo op at that point. So protecting and building reputation. And then to say, both the company's reputation and more than that. And then finally managing risk. All right, so when we think about these things, there's some things that will shift, right? It's not the same mix of these things in every project or for every person. There's different configurations of this, different amounts and different priorities. But those six things are at the heart of having a successful organization, a successful business. But when you think about making and saving money, one thing I want you to remember is money is like oxygen. You have to have oxygen to live, but that is not the reason you live. If you are working for an organization whose only reason is to make money, go find a different organization. You still need it to be a successful business, but there should be a greater purpose. But it's still the foundation for having a living, breathing business. So money is like oxygen. Hiring, retaining and growing people, we have to give people that sense of purpose beyond money as one of the foundational things for hiring and retaining talent and helping them grow so that they can have a vision that they can buy into. Thinking about developing goals, acting on and reporting on those things, how do we make those clear for people so that they can move in the same direction? And how can we measure those things in a way that doesn't create weird dysfunction because a lot of measurement will then focus people on the measures instead of on the mission? Delivering customer, employee and shareholder value, we need to think about value as a shared experience and value as shared value. Creating value for one of those groups should create value for all of those groups. So when we're thinking about value, it's a Venn diagram rather than either or. And then, oops, reputation. When you're dealing with senior leadership, they're not only thinking far beyond reputation as brand, if you come from the marketing world, you might think of reputation as brand. But they're thinking about, where does the company sit in the world and where do I sit in the world? What's their personal reputation? And then managing risk. This is a deck chair from the Titanic that's in Halifax. How do we get the right amount of risk so that we don't wreck the company but that we can actually innovate? Because if we try to eliminate risk, there's no possibility of innovation. So six big things, how do we apply them? Well, I think of it kind of like this. How does a microscope work? We need that second set of lenses that helps us focus on things. And so I have five objective lenses. So time and tempo, how fast are we working? Confidence and health of the company. If you've ever been in a company that's healthy and feeling confident, you know it. If you're in a company that is bleeding money and is scared, you also know it. Degree and rate of change, how quickly are things changing? I took this photo in 2016. This painting is on my wall and it was painted in 1965. Not a very big degree or rate of change but for what we're doing today in most of our work with things like digital transformation, we have to work at a much higher degree and rate of change. To do that, we have to have different mindsets and ways of working. And then all of these things we've been talking about are in the organization but other people have opinions about that. So in the market, what are our competitors doing? What else is happening in terms of trends and what is going on in the broader world? So we can ask more detailed questions in each of those both in the big six and in those five objective lenses. But when we put them together, we get the grid. So we take those things, we intersect them and we say, hey, what are the questions and what is the topic that comes out if I think about where those things come together? If I'm having a conversation, where on the grid is that conversation? So I can think about those big six things and then asking clarifying questions to focus in on what really matters about what I'm talking about right now and how it's relevant to the business. So that's the priority grid. And if you're off the grid, you're probably not having the right conversation yet. To have that conversation, you have to kind of scout ahead. You have to know what's happening in advance. It's like doing design research, but it's inside your organization to understand what matters. So that's the grid. The pyramid is about understanding levels of abstraction and zoom levels in an organization. So how do you handle the overload of life, especially if you're senior executive? Well, there's a few different things. You have to deal with abstraction. You have to make things more abstract. More that you have to deal with, the more abstract your view has to become to keep your sanity, but that has its own risk. As we kind of move up saying, we have people who are executing the work, managing the work and leading the work, as we go up that pyramid, then the impact of those decisions becomes bigger. So the decision of the CEO versus the decision of the teller at the counter is gonna have different impacts on the company. However, Dave Gray says, the more important the decision is, the less the person is actually gonna know about it. So when the CEO makes the decision, because things are so abstracted, that they don't actually see how things work on the ground day to day like the teller does. And so how can we actually help them, but also how do we understand how we should relate those on the ground truths that we know from our research and our insights so that they're relevant when you're used to operating at these high levels of abstraction. And so different levels in the organization of leadership management execution are using different language. And that's one of the errors we make is we try to use, because most of us are at that execution level. Sometimes we're at the management level for teams, but we try to use our own kind of level of abstraction to talk to leadership and they're dealing with this high level of abstraction. And so the language of getting things done inside organizations follows into three different buckets, in people, projects and money. So we're gonna have a conversation about people, projects and money and we're gonna use that with the grid and work across the scale of the decision. So you can think about lead, manage and execute and those foundations of people, projects and money. Here's a cleaner version of that. And be able to think about what level of abstraction should I be talking about now? So let's just talk about some examples of one of those facets of the pyramid. We don't have time to talk about all of them. So for customers, we talk a lot about customer experience, right? Or client experience or citizen experience, that which is what I've been doing mostly for the last eight years. But really, when you're at a higher level, you're gonna be thinking about segments and markets. When you think about people inside the organization, we're not thinking about just one individual, like Luca, we're thinking, oh, what does this look like in terms of a role or a team? What happens when we think about what are the capabilities those teams give us? Oh, we have a design team that can create things. We have an engineering team that can build things. So that's the capability that's offered by that. And then we have divisions that help us to deliver particular products or services that create value. And then we can think about people as investors from sort of our early supporters, especially in startup land. You can think about angel investors to sponsors, shareholders, and preferred shareholders, people who have special privileges over regular shareholders. And so you can start to think about what's the right level of abstraction when you're having a conversation? And for each of those things, people, projects, and money, there's ladders of abstraction that you need to make sure that you're thinking about, am I using the right kind of language to express what I need? Maybe I need to move up or down the ladder. And so here's three strategies with the pyramid. So one of them, the first one is the triangle strategy. And that just means you need to cover all of those things. You need to think about people and projects and money. And then how does that relate on those levels of the pyramid from execution, management, and leadership? Second one is a slipstream strategy where you're trying to take your project and have it kind of coast in behind some related ideas. So you're gonna say, this is important. I understand you understand that it's important. And this other thing is gonna support it. It's related. So you can actually kind of say, these things, it's like a train, right? We're gonna take one car and I'm gonna link it to another car. It's gonna follow behind. The third one is a tether strategy. So even if there's something you're doing that's very specific on the ground, you kind of jump up a level and say, this specific thing that we're working on relates to this high level strategic direction. It actually is connected here in this way. And so you can have that tether strategy where you're going to connect something on the ground to something that's floating way up here. So those are three ways you can use that pyramid thinking to help you zoom to the right level when you're having a business conversation inside your organization. All right, last tool. It's the hypothesis funnel. And I assume that most of you are familiar with things like the business model canvas. Since then, there's been many, many, many canvas tools. Kevin Hoffman, when I was working on this and showing him earlier edits of it, he's like, oh great, this is just what we need, another canvas tool. So I tricked him and I called it a funnel. But no, the hypothesis funnel works to structure the translation between business and design to say, this is kind of the other way the conversation happens is when businesses come to us and say, I wanna do a thing, how do we actually translate their intent to something that we could actually build and create in the world? How do we create a design hypothesis or a hypothesis around the customer experience that is connected to the business intent that we're getting as far as strategy or product direction? So when we have the opportunity to come together with business, then we need to be able to have a way of translating that. Who knows what this is? It's the Rosetta Stone, yeah. And so when we're thinking about this translation, behavior becomes the Rosetta Stone for working between design and business. So here's the hypothesis funnel. Here's the funnel part. It's there on this one, but it's hard to see on a projector, so.  So I'm just gonna zoom in so you can see it a little bit closer and then we're gonna walk through each section and then I'll have a couple closing thoughts. So thinking about what are these different pieces doing and why? First one is how do we actually talk about the opportunity or the problem that's in play? What actually, somebody says, oh, I want you to solve this problem or we have this opportunity. Then understanding what is it that you actually do today? So what are the current solutions that exist? And so there we get into some of our understanding, our own way of doing that as well as the competitive analysis that Jamie was talking about. And then what kind of sources do we have from the business where they're saying we want to do this, but have they done their own research? Do they have PowerPoint decks? Have you been in meetings? Are there other teams working on something like this? Being able to see what's happening with that. And then what are the assumptions that we bring to the table and what the business brings to the table? So we have these ideas, but all of them are accompanied by assumptions. And then the heart of the funnel is really this opportunity loop, which is a related set of four focuses. So looking at what customer behaviors are mentioned by the business. So they're talking about behavior or experience in this way. And what is it that people do? Are there other things that we understand though as designers? Do we have different insights? What needs do those behaviors relate to? How can we actually say, oh, there's this other need that's related to it that we understand that you might have already talked about. What is the business trying to achieve as far as its outcome? And how do you measure it? And then where can we actually act? Where's the leverage point that we could actually take action to influence behavior? Is it something we're gonna do on mobile? Is it something we're gonna do in person? And how easy is it to change those things? When you go through that conversation and working between those four different areas, you start to be able to see different options and alternatives for design interventions. So you can start to look and say, oh, here are these different things that we could do. That's where your ideation is going to come in to say, we could solve this problem or achieve this opportunity advantage by doing this kind of thing. What are the specific features or functions of products that we could use? And we can think about how we can actually validate those things. What are the sources of truth, both on the business side and on the design side? Are there kinds of research should we do? Can we set up experiments? Are we gonna be able to design a minimum viable product or minimum viable service? And how do we actually grow our evidence base so we can be more confident? And that comes down to coming up with a specific hypothesis about how to work. And when we have hypothesis-driven design, it increases our credibility, not only with the business, but also with other folks who are maybe more quantitative, like engineering. And so we think about for people who are in a particular situation, changing something. So what our design intervention is, which might actually be maybe not a new product or service, maybe it's a different policy, is gonna make this difference in their experience and our business. So what is the customer outcome? What's the business outcome if we make this change? And then how would we measure that? How would we actually know that we're actually creating that outcome? So measured or observed in this way? So quantitative or qualitative data and how would we actually measure if we were successful with that hypothesis? So that funnel helps us move from a business saying we want to create the next iPod of vegetable gardens to actually translating that into a product. So thinking about the canvas helps us to have that conversation better. So the grid, the pyramid, and the funnel. That sets us up for one of the most powerful ideas along with all of these things, there's a number of different levers that are force multipliers that give us more strength. And one of the most important ones is empathic advocacy, which I learned from Harry Maxx. And he says usually when we're trying to advocate for something, we spend about 80% of our time advocating for our idea.  Ha, 70%. Then we spend about 20% of our time talking to the other person and asking, trying to say, oh, what's going on? And then about 10% empathizing with them. We are much, much more successful if we flip those numbers. If we spend 70% of our time empathizing with somebody and 20% of our time asking to discover what's going on with them, then we actually understand what is relevant to them. And our 10% time that we spend advocating is 100 times more effective. So empathic advocacy. You need to empathize first before you can be an effective advocate. So business fluency, pivot our skills to do that Design 180 and look inside the business with all of our great design toolkit. Using tools like the grid, the pyramid and the funnel and empathic advocacy are a start for our own business fluency journeys. I know that as you do that, you're gonna grow your strength, you're gonna move beyond just the tools to be able to influence the organizations you work with. So thank you very much for having me. I look forward to talking with you about these ideas.


I have to like go back to one thing yeah such a funny idea that there's like trust fun kids in improv classes really well I mean it's $400 a class to learn how to be yourself on a certain level and and to get in I mean it's a lot of money yeah I mean I started in my stand-up and I I love improv and it's wonderful but I definitely think it is very expensive to take the classes and I was just guessing I mean I don't know if there are other form you know revenue streams you guys know better than I do about how to make money but you know it is expensive and I did meet people in my classes who were like yeah my parents are letting me do this for a year just explore what I want to know like I would I would say like oh in this industry it's like 90% that or something but like in improv that's like so funny because everybody's such a like a love I didn't say they were investing their money