UXA2022 Day 2; Kerry Matheson and Catherine Gleeson- Slowing down to speed up: The accidental innovation

In a world where we are striving for increased velocity, greater productivity and better efficiency we talk about the unexpected Value we produced through the process of stretching our design sprint over 5 weeks instead of a single day.

We’ll talk about how we seeded a design thinking model which encouraged a deeper understanding of our most vulnerable members while generating a cultural shift into collegial cross-team collaboration.

You’ll not only get an insight into the value pockets we extracted, but also gain insights into a practical format to run your own design thinking sprint.

We’ll share the insights we gained along the way as well as a practical format to run your own design thinking sprint.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.com.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2022 Friday, 26 September 2022 Captioned by: Carmel Downes & Kasey Allen
2. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 47 would like to share yours, we would love to hear them. We are always growing as well. Thank you so much, everyone, for having us here today and have a wonderful rest of the conference. STEVE BATY: Thank you. (APPLAUSE) STEVE BATY: There is a big speaker over there and I should not turn my microphone on standing in front of it. Apologies. That was super interesting, thanks Julie, Jennifer, Rebecca and Nika. That was super interesting. Our next talk is from Kerry and Catherine who will be talking through a case study of their innovation sprints that they have been implementing at their organisation, so without any further ado, I will hand over to Kerry and Catherine. Thank you. (APPLAUSE) CATHERINE GLEESON: Hi everyone. Kerry, how are you going there? KERRY MATHESON: Good. I don't know if you can hear or see me yet? CATHERINE GLEESON: I can hear you. STEVE BATY: We can hear you but we can't see you yet. I think that part is going to get switched over ...now. There we go. CATHERINE GLEESON: Oh, I can see me. KERRY MATHESON: Let's kick off. CATHERINE GLEESON: Today is about slowing down to speed up the Accidental Innovation but before we do that I'd just like to acknowledge
3. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 48 the traditional owners of country. So I'd like to pay my respects to the traditional owners on the land on which Catherine and I are speaking today, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation here in Sydney and pay our republics to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today along with elders, past, present and emerging. KERRY MATHESON: So today Catherine and I are here, my name is Kerry Matheson. I've been in the CX space for about 15 years now working across large telcos, financial services and most recently at Rest in super. But all of those roles I've had it is really the core is about making sure that the member or the customer is at the centre of everything that we do. Super excited to be here today presenting with Catherine Gleeson who is head of human-centred design at Rest Super. Hey Cath. CATHERINE GLEESON: Hey, super stoked to be with you too. I have been in this place a bit longer purely because I am a bit older - by no means better that is for sure. I have been a designer in digital from the 90s onwards and did some very early touch screen work, designed education, co-funded under graduate program, designed gapes and my path has led to super and I have been in the financial insta sector for the past few years but the few things that Kez and I have in common is that desire to tell stories that advocate the change lives that celebrate that are truth telling whether it is a service design or story that is something we are incredibly passionate about. We are incredibly fortunate to be able to do that in our everyday job. I think Kez will now take you through what we did. KERRY MATHESON: In the next 20-25 minutes we will take you through what we did, how we did it and what we learnt from it.
4. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 49 So if we start with what we did, we started off with some very functional objectives and that was to teach some of our newer members in the team about human centred design and design thinking. We wanted to teach them those techniques so they could apply to it be more member centric than Rest is today. And to come up with tangible solutions for creating value for our members. We have a number of vulnerable member groups that we look at within Rest Super but we chose five to focus on and these included First Nations people, members suffering from mental health issues, members with a disability, members in financial distress or non-English speaking members or LOTE speakers in languages other than English. We chose those groups to align 50 par as the pans to so broke then up into 10 individual Banking Groups to start to build out a program where our staff could start to ideate and come up with ideas for those members. Catherine will go into - if you want to go into the next slide on how we tackled and approached this. CATHERINE GLEESON: We thought we have a lot of very busy people, they might be super enthusiastic but they are busy. So why don't we do a hakathony, one-day immersive workshop, a fantastic idea. I'm sure you are familiar with some of these technique, they a human-centred, design thinking and based on design print models. The idea is we dive deep into empathy and walk a mile or kilometre in the shoes of our personas. From that we start to see problems emerge which we convert into opportunities from which we ideate, define and by the end of the day we update the best once. That was a good idea but our good friend COVID came and ruined the party. There were no post-its, Sharpies or lollies for us. We were feeling glum about it. The idea of spending eight hours in front of a screen is not feasible. This is our second lockdown, people are feeling a little bit burnt out already and what we want do is
5. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 50 inspire and uplift them so what we did was we actually got the model and we extended it out to a five-week model. We had concerns about number one this is an opt-in thing, it is not compulsory for people to attend to so would they even come back? We have five weeks of it. We are thinking we will just run it up the flag pole and see. We stuck with the model. In week one we dived deep into empathy. We set up five Slack channels to do this and we also used digital white boards, our whiteboards are the equivalent for Miro familiar with that real time collaboration space, which would be most of you, I imagine. We had a bit of concern of how it would work. Week one, we empathised - we will go into more detail in following slides. Number 2, from that we started to see problems emerge from across the five cohorts and some of them actually we had a lot in common, they had a lot in common with each other and in week 3 we ideated and each of the workshops is about an hour-and-a-half long. It was quite rapid ideation which is why we were concerned. Week four we sketched those ideas, so really, really big into visual storytelling obviously. And then in week five we had a showcase and we've now got some of this work implemented and ongoing, which will also go into a little bit of detail later on. Okay. So week 1. KERRY MATHESON: Week 1 was about empathy mapping. I'm assuming you are all familiar with some of the common empathy mapping tools, think, feel, see. We had our staff broken up into five of the group, about 10 in each group, broken out into the breakout groups within Microsoft Teams. They were all tasked with starting to empathise about their allocated segment that they were looking at and we started to see staff using some of their own knowledge and things like that to add to these empathy models but it was really just starting to scratch the surface. So
6. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 51 it was interesting as we then started to go into week 2 and what we started to see in between and we started to see some magic happen and what we started to see was something that we didn't realise that would happen by stretching out our sprints from being a single day into being over five weeks and I'm wondering if you know what that magic was, but I will reveal it to you now. Cath, if you go to the next slide, it was reflection. What we started to see by having that week in between doing the initial empathy mapping through to week two was the ideas and the content and the information that was being shared on the Slack channel. This whole program was voluntary for people to participate it was over and above their day jobs and we wanted to got give them homework to do after each session because we knew it was over and above their jobs but what we started to see was people sharing all sores of information on Slack relating to their segment and calling on all sores of different information to start to share and empathise. So after the first week we had about 50 articles that had been shared so that is one article per person that had been shared on the Slack groups. Here is an example of what some of the things were. In the top left-hand corner for example someone had popped in a slack chancel that they found this simulator to simulate what it would look like for someone with a vision impairment to be views content and what that would look like. Underneath that we have the we are 15 move. Which started to recognise with Rest's 1.8 million members there are a lot of our members who are actually impacted and actually probably vulnerable at any one point in time. In the bottom right we have played it forward which is a great example of where a very small idea had actually started to get some momentum across the community. And then in the top right - I love this example because this was really our staff putting themselves in the shoes of our non-English speaking members and thinking how would they go about accessing information if
7. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 52 they didn't speak English, so we put our website through Google's itranslate and you can see in Greek what this has come out looking like. It was just a great way to go wow, okay, this is the experience that our members would be having if we put ourselves in those shoes. Cath, do you want to add anything to that? CATHERINE GLEESON: I think what was exciting, and I think part of the reason they kept coming back is because they started to experience the power of building the knowledge base collectively and to actually be doing something bigger than themselves and to be part of a potentially seismic shift in terms of the way we think about the needs of our members and maybe certainly in the way that we work with each other. And in terms of that way we work with each other, in addition to that wonderful deep empathy that was happening, people weren't just dialling it in, they were posting at all hours of the day and night and weekend, were these communities that people started sharing not just the stuff they found but they started sharing lived experience of themselves, their friends, their families, and they got very, very passionate, sometimes really emotional, which is just wonderful because how else can we truly, truly be committed to changing the lives of people even in a small way unless were we are really prepared to feel it. So that was just an amazing, yeah, bonus, by-product. It was more than just forming teams but making communities. Have you got anything to add to that? KERRY MATHESON: Just the reflection, the enablement of time allowed that community to start to grow across the team. If you think we started off being very functional of being let's upskill them and get outcomes we can implement we were starting to see a movement amongst people that was far greater than that.
8. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 53 CATHERINE GLEESON: Deep thinking, time. By contrast, by the time we did week 3 we were ready for rapid ideation. This might seem a real contradiction. What happened was - in this instance I have an example from crazy 8s. If you haven't experienced or used it before, I would highly recommend it. It does seem a bit of a contradiction to do basically eight pictures in eight minutes or eight ideas in eight minutes but because of the deep thinking time, because of the reflection, there was this emergence of many, many strong ideas and it really worked. It was kind of like interval training, similar thing, thinking fast and slow, getting the heart beat up and then calming down and reflecting, getting the heart beat up. That is exactly what happened here. And then in week 4 what happened again was that we certainly we were really wanting to encourage people to visualise the process and the ideas so we had this pool of really, really strong ideas in each of the teams and we started to work individually and get teams to think - this again is something we hadn't really planned. We thought the ideas are so strong why don't we try and do some storytelling, really good storytelling. I come from a film education background so I was thinking let's do a classic structure, introduce the person, the problem, resolve it for them, happy ending. This is something that we had not rehearsed. Where I am thinking of themes where we are upvoting our ideas and put it into a structure Kerry took it upon herself to do a fantastic sketch in the structure and it was just brilliant. If we move on to the final output, which basically here is an example of what would become the cornerstone of the showcase for each keep, there's not really a huge amount of difference in terms of storytelling and content between what Kerry drew in a matter of seconds or minute and this thing that I kind of juched up a little bit. Have you got anything to add to that?
9. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 54 KERRY MATHESON: First of all, I can't draw, that is evidenced by the previous slide. CATHERINE GLEESON: Not true! KERRY MATHESON: So you don't need to draw. Catherine did juche this and the provide that came from each of the teams from seeing it in a more professional format that was presented to our executive leadership team was certainly once again over and above what we expected. I love this example that we have got here and this is from a non-English speaking stream. So we have an example of Shu who is an international student and starts a retail job and she signs up to Rest Super but if we go the Google Translate down on the left-hand corner she doesn't know who Rest is because she is knew to Australia and in our country she doesn't so superannuation. He pops into Google translate what is Rest Super, literally it means lying down and super means wonderful, so essentially a great lie down. I think this was such a aha moment, such a simple thing, because we were like, "Holy cow we need to make sure we are explaining what superannuation is and who Rest is in those first piece of communication that we give to our members because otherwise they will not know who we are." So it was something as simple as that going back to the Slack channel where we were sharing the translate and now we've actually gone to be the service design that we are just like wow, we need to actually add these other components into what we're doing. In we do that the ideal model would be that Shu who start a job and sign up to rest and tick a box that indicates what her first language is and receive that proposition material and explanation in her first piece of communication from us and then that could take her through to a translated page, she
10. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 55 could choose an Avatar that she felt she aligned to and then she would go on to see what is a very simple graph call representation of what the super journey is so that she could therefore feel more comfortable. It was really an ideal state using and calling on some of that deep empathy and sharing that we saw in some of the earlier weeks and then throughout all of the five weeks of the program. CATHERINE GLEESON: Definitely I think the outcomes were vastly different at this end, at this stage, in terms of what we could have achieved if we had just done a one-day model. So keeping in mind it is virtually the same number of hours face to face. But, I guess, the question is we all - I think it is common practice for us to visualise things and I'm sure it's more than just a feel-good thing and I'm sure some of you are going to be familiar with some of the signs I am going to share in the next slide. I will take us through what is the power of visual thinking. So basically, here's some fantastically solid science based on thousands of studies all around the world. So 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual versus the 10% but fascinatingly basically when we process visual material 60,000 times faster than text and we remember at least 80% of what we have seen and done. Here is the real clincher, after three days we retain 10% to 20% written or spoken versus 65%. It enters the long-term memory and tends to stay there whereas written, spoken material tends to evaporate - written in particular - and we can recall that from our long-term memory any time virtually. It stays there for a very long time, if not forever. The act of either receiving or creating visual material means that we remember things for much, much longer. Also when you think about the evolution of our brains and when you also think about the old slipping culture on the earth which is Aboriginal and TI culture in this country there is a reason
11. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 56 why culturally there is basically - it's underpinned by a visual culture because that's the way our brains work. I am really passionate about this and would be happy to talk to anyone about this for any length of time. Have you got anything to add to that, Kez? KERRY MATHESON: No, just that you have done an amazing job of visualising this whole presentation and we have done that so 65% of it will be retained in the next three days so we are hoping that ...the fourth accidental innovation that we found was less about the outputs of the program and more about the workings and the operationalisation of the program. So having the five weeks and the time to reflect in between, it sounds obvious, but it did allow us time to improve how we were delivering each of the sessions. Through a simple surface at the end of each session we get feedback from people which was super important because they were all participating over and above their day jobs. So we will refine with some of the incremental refinements we did was helping with better facilitation prior to the session for the team leaders, helping with some extra sticky notes pre-populated or pre-placed on the digital white board so people didn't have to create them from scratch. So doing that process improvement was also another accidental innovation that fell out of this program. I'm just looking on the chat, if you go to the next slide. What our participants said. So the participants - the questions in the chat, the participants were people from the member engagement team, so essentially the consumer marketing team of which there were 50. We allocated them regularly into the sub-segments because if you remember back to the start it was going to be quite a functional let's just teach them some skills and hopefully we will get some outcomes. I think if we were to do it again we would involve more members earlier in the process. We did involve some Indigenous and vision-impaired members
12. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 57 towards the end so validate some of our thinking but essentially it was quite a functional start to the program of let's just like let's just divide people up into five groups and allocate a team leader. What we saw - I won't go through all the comments here - but even after this finished they wanted to keep going and keep doing. Even still today I have some of the participants coming up to me and asking to be involved in, for example, our Indigenous wrap that we are working on on some of the vision-impaired pieces we are doing. It is amazing that this five-week one-and-a-half hours per week has created this movement of people just wanting to be engaged. I am conscious of time so I will flip to the next slide. This is a great example of where we had some small innovations that came out and some large ones. This is some accessibility features we have just added to our website. This is the first version that's just launched last week. You will see in the first picture there the little wheelchair symbol and that takes you through to a screen where you can then go and start to select committee your vision options. So we have ADHD friendly vision-impaired profile, cognitive disability et cetera. The ADHD ones changes the contrast of the screen so that you're focussed on the right things and then you can see the investment screen on the right changing some of the colour contrast et cetera. So if you go to the rest.com.au website you will see that there and can have a play with some of the features this. Is an example of a big one that has fallen out of the program. CATHERINE GLEESON: Another big one for us is a host of little ones, another big one is that we are incredibly proud to have embarked on our journey to reconciliation and we are on the journey for our first reconciliation action program with reconciliation Australia and partners
13. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 58 that we already had but those - these two things were catalysed by these workshops. So that is something we're incredibly proud of. We went from being, as Kerry said, quite a functional let's train some people up to having real results and a whole backlog of work now that the entire organisation is committed to, which is just fantastic. So just moving on, we only have a couple of minutes left, if we in summary look at the things that we achieved, certainly we were hoping for some empathy but we had empathy in spades and a much deeper connection with our members than we could have anticipated at the start of the program, plus this development of communities and the relationships across our team, people who had never worked together. Because Rest itself is in a process of transformation so to have this de-siloing and these cross-functional teams emerging is just fantastic. And innovation, we hoped for that but we got a really strong foundation for innovation. We also have ways of doing things that we can keep recalibrating on but ways of finding things - you know, ways to do better things and maybe even new things along with the service model which we weren't planning necessarily to do but this culture of visual communication, virtual story telling is something that we are trying to roll out across the board as well and as Kerry mentioned processing and keeping ourselves honest, keeping everybody honest. KERRY MATHESON: So I guess our advice is if you are wanting to do this yourself, what is our advice. You've noticed the theme here which is reflection was the innovation so just keep in mind that innovation is not a linear process, don't under estimate the power of time in billing those relationships but most importantly pivoting to better outcomes. The fact that we injected that element of time meant that we could stop, reflect,
14. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 59 pivot, stop, reflect, pivot and we shimmied our way into a really great outcome by doing that pivoting along the way. So thank you very much for your time and for listening. I can see there are a couple of questions in the Q&A, I'm not sure if we answer them now or answer them online. Just let us know, I think, Steve. STEVE BATY: Thank you both very much. (APPLAUSE) Let me just check. We have one minute, do you want to pick a question and answer it. I think there is one from Jo there about how to start those conversations around burn out, mental health, if you have any advice about how to start or make space for those conversations to take place? KERRY MATHESON: So in terms of work burn out in the virtual world, I don't have any tips on how to do that but I guess in terms of burn out, one of the streams that we did have was around mental health and looking at how we can do different things for our members there and so some of the conversation and some of the finds in there was trying to support this holistically with different programs, it is really hard to identify who our members are who sometimes have a non-visible disability or vulnerability. So how do we start to approach things to be a bit more inclusive across everything. The other thing that we noticed was that things that came up as opportunities in one stream were often opportunities in another stream so trying to see how there were learnings for those different things. I don't think I've answered your question exactly but... CATHERINE GLEESON: I think it all - it depends if you are talking about the burn out of members or burn out of ourselves or our vendors. Certainly in terms of if we are member focussed in this point in time, if
15. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 60 that is where the conversation, is simple things like language, just language that's conversational. They are in our brand guidelines anyway but constantly doing a sense check and saying if I am a person who is experiencing burn out, any kind of distress, what am I going to respond to. I am probably going to respond to visuals first of all and then I will respond to kind, conversational words on paper. That was a really big thing for us too. I'm not sure whether that answers the question but, yeah. STEVE BATY: We'll accept that as your answers and appreciate it. Thank you very much. Please join me in thanks Kerry and Catherine. Have a great afternoon. (APPLAUSE) Our next talk is going to be here on stage. Rich Brophy will be presenting in person. Hi Rich. Make your way up. Please join me in welcoming Rich. He is from the NSW Department of Customer Service and will talk to us about death is best practice. Take it away. RICH BROPHY: Do you want to stand up and stretch before we talk about this. I don't want to be one of these people that says "Come on, all sing together". We could probably dance. It feels like a nightclub that the Romans designed. I am Rich, G'day. Talking about "Death to best practice". It is pretty cool, pretty edgy, right. When I first submitted the talk it was called improving design practice in medium to large organisations and I thought I am not going to that. "Death to best practice" a bit edgy and kind of fitting that I am dressed like a vicar as well. Ready to put this thing in the ground. I will start with the story because I have seen too many Ted talks. I had a job a couple of years ago, I joined a team whose work was basically