0:00:01 Hello and welcome to another episode of Digital Noir presents Humans aren’t Robots. We’ve got another one of those for you today with always very charismatic Dan Levy. He is one of Australia’s leading practitioners of design sprints. We sat down and we dove straight into where his business name came from, More Space for Light, and then went through the process of what design sprints are. So if you’re in any sort of organisation that is looking to innovate, do any sort of change management or build new products, then the whole process of design sprinting is a really, really powerful tool to fast track that process.
0:02:50 So your business is More space for Light? Where did that name come from?
0:02:54 Basically, the name More Space for Light: I come from a design background to give a bit of context, and you know, when you feel you relate to this and when you feel ready to go off and do your thing. So when you started Digital Noir you did freelancing, but you came back and you took that leap. And there were a few things that kind of aligned that made you feel confident that you were ready to do that. Now I was going through that process and I had a young family. And I’d heard all about this, you need a business plan, you need a business model. But bear in mind, I’m more left brained, creative. And one night I was putting my little boy to bed and he said, Mummy, I want more space for light. I kind of stopped. I was like, What does that mean? My wife’s Emily. I was like, Emily, What does that mean? And she shared with me well he said that every night it basically means he wants more time to play. He wants more time to read. He’s not ready to go to bed yet. Now two things beyond that. First up, how profound that was. How simple. So it was from that perspective. It was just so simple, so easy, so relatable, and also it really, really struck me that I wasn’t about to hear that, that was the first time and he said it often.
0:04:44 So for me it was like Well, that’s not just the name of a company that’s a mantra. And that became like the genesis of everything I wanted to bring into the brand, making it a relatable brand, making it super easy, getting rid of all the BS and having some level of accountability. And also not just thinking about the work itself, because once you focus on the work and have that tension, it removes any form of creativity, so enabling people to like try to get to what they’re achieving. So in regards to going back to saying about starting a business, I started with a philosophy and then reverse engineered the business model, which I still continue to revisit to this day.
0:05:26 That’s such a nice place to start from there. I was talking a lot yesterday about people doing the opposite, starting with the business and then trying to reverse engineer the philosophy, and I think that’s really difficult to do.
0:05:36 Also, I think that that kind of separates business owners and again, I’m going to make an assumption here that you are attached to the brand Digital Noir, it’s your brand.
0:05:48 Physically, physically.
0:05:53 Some people run businesses just like their machines, and they’re able to just change and switch from business to business, and I kind of get it, and I kind of envy those people. But because there’s so much emotional attachment now, part of More Space for Light, it’s almost my challenge is almost always to separate myself from the business, and that’s been my biggest goal in terms of what we’re doing at More Space to try and turn it more than from me and actually make it a product or something that’s more scalable.
0:06:29 With that philosophy at its core?
0:06:32 Yes, exactly. That’s our North Star, and also that’s how the people that we work with relate to us because they believe in that North Star, like it’s not just about work it’s about being a person as well.
0:06:47 Do you tell that story and like when you’re out prospecting for buying some things?
0:06:51 No, because it’s kind of a precious story. If somebody asks, I’ll share it even then, it’s kind of like they have to be the right fit. They have to be a More Space type of person that we want to work with and I think as well as a business owner is actually really liberating to be able to have make that decision of knowing upfront and being able to say to organisations, Look, we’re not going to be able to add value to your organisation because you don’t align with our principles, you can’t really see the value of what we’re gonna do, and it’s not going to end well.
0:07:42 Yeah, 100%. We turn down a lot of people now, just because I don’t think I can add value or I don’t think that we align. So it is powerful.
0:08:05 And it’s also brand reputation as well. I mean, you might have the best of intentions, but if you do a shitty job or whatever it might be, that really affects your brand, especially, you just want to give the best possible experience and you want to add as much value and you know and you expect it the people that are on your team to be proactive and and to be on the front foot and represent your brand because they’re representing part of you.
0:08:49 What is it that you guys do and talk about design sprints from a high level? Because I think a lot of people might have heard of design sprints or design thinking and agile or these kind of words, but not really know what a design sprint is.
0:09:03 What’s cool in regards to the way we discovered design thinking and design sprints was that we very much came from the bottom up. And by saying bottom up, what I mean is that we were creating and designing conversations, like workshops, and what occurred to me after about a year of doing it is that we’re actually doing design thinking, even though I didn’t realise. Because you have other consultants and other practises that do it and they have all their fancy names and have all their procedures, etcetera, etcetera. But we’re creating all of these sheets, and these different tools that align with design thinking, which was a massive revelation for us. And so just kind of backing up, so we work in design thinking and the reason we work in that design thinking space, is because what we found for us to add the most impact is to get as far away from the problem solving to the problem seeking as possible, because that’s where we can add real value. And that’s where often people aren’t pointing the laser at the right place. So we found that using the language of design thinking was a really effective means for us to get alignment from stakeholders and be able to go and talk to the big fancy corporates to be able to go in the room and have those conversations because we felt confident that we could tease out the priorities and the things that they were driving and striving towards. Now we discovered design sprints in 2017 and design sprints, basically, I’ll give you a bit of a preview Quick Reader’s Digest of the talk I just gave. Basically a chap called Jack Nape, who worked at Google, created the process in 2010. He used the process at Google basically to hack the discovery process to create a repeatable method for initial project exploration.
0:10:56 He used it across a lot of the Google businesses, whether it would be chrome search, and then he went over to Google Ventures, where he was able to refine that process with other partners. And they created this one week structure called the Design Sprint. Within Google Ventures they had an incubator, and they had different companies such as Slack, such as Medium such as Gimlet, and they were able to use this to bring in early to ensure that they had companies have product market fit, that they were actually building something, they were solving a problem worth solving. From there, he open sourced it, released a book in 2016 and then big companies embraced it. People like NASA, people like Lego, IKEA, Disney, the U. N. Councils. We picked it up in 2017 after reading the book because we were trying to figure out well, if we’re gonna be working in this problem seeking space and this discovery space where we’re not basing our value on outputs, but we’re working in more outcomes to help organisations select the kind of the right area and feel confidence and de risk the decisions they are making. This is a really good programme because it’s repeatable and we can time box it. And also, from a business perspective, it’s a product that we feel we can have a conversation, we know exactly how long it’s gonna last, how many resources we need, and how much it’s gonna cost. And as a business owner, especially working in the more consultancy space everything is very liquid and very fluid, you know, building websites, nailing down expectations and scope. We could scope within a week, and that was awesome.
0:16:17 So then in a practical application, I personally deal with quite a lot of early stage founders who might have an idea, right? And I think, let’s look at it from that application, as opposed to inside of business. So if I’ve got an idea for an Apple app where I’m trying a two tiered marketplace trying to connect businesses with customers. Right. So I’ve got a hypothesis of a business model. I believe there’s a niche in this market, and these X’s are gonna want stuff from Y and I can build a platform to connect them. If they came and spoke to you from a design sprint point of view, what would be the journey that you take them on through that week?
0:16:57 Okay, so first up what we do. So sometimes we’ve been running a thing called problem framing. With a smaller organisation we might not need to, because they’d have a clearer idea of what they’re trying to solve, and they wouldn’t have so many stakeholders. So just as a caveat what we’ve found is that a lot of people that run design sprints go in fresh. They read the book, they think they’ve won, let’s go in, let’s smash it. What ends up happening is that the execs come in and they’re like, What the hell is going on in here? Who are you? Why are you sitting in here for five days on a jolly up, eating square bits of cake every day just because you want to get away from your desk? The big thing what I found with problem framing and the value it adds is, it first up gets the prioritisation of what we want to solve and also ensures we have the right people in the room to solve it. Going back to a smaller start up, the design sprint might not necessarily need problem framing. You can do that very quickly to align with what you need. What we do is, we bring in the team. So generally, what happens with a start up, there will be a small team of like 6 to 8 people. And if they don’t have enough people, we might bring in our design team or our tech team that will be working. We’d also see if there were any people, so say, for instance, if it was shopping, we might look for some external experts to recruit to give an outside perspective because you’ve got to remember founders are very precious about their ideas. Very, very, very. And then what we do is we run through that first phase where we look at that challenge and we’d work out with atomizing it, breaking it down. What does it look like at a meta level and run them through a journey, maps, persona and we try and work out what is the problem they’re solving?
0:18:46 And what is the key thing that will indicate that what they’re going to invest in and get all these other people to come along on this mental journey with, is a problem worth solving. So we’d align on what that key thing is, and then we’d identify some questions that we’d need to answer to determine whether we are on the right path. From there, the team would start ideating, and coming up with all different types of solutions. With ideation we’d not just be looking in that category, we’d be looking in adjacent categories, disruptive categories, things that have happened in the past. You know inspiration can come in many forms. You can look at things that have been accomplished in other industries. Everything follows the same sort of pattern. It’s just the ingredients or the industry that changes the colour. We’d then decide on what the most appropriate solution or a creation could potentially be relating back to the challenge and those questions we’re looking to solve. So that would be the founder. And they’d be able to rationalise to the group whether it, like what the direction is or if they didn’t agree. And then we’d go on to build something. We’d build a prototype, very simple prototype, bring in their customers because sometimes they don’t even know who their customers are.
0:20:13 What does a prototype look like in that sense? So just to step out of it. This process is 4 to 5 day? That’s the time box process.
We run them in four days.
0:20:23 What does a prototype look like? And then I’ll come back to some of the biggest challenges of bringing the design sprint in. So a prototype could literally be anything. It could be something that was paper based if you were looking to get an idea from a sales perspective, so it could be like a catalogue if you’re trying to sell something to different customers. It could be an object, you could print out the object if you’re in engineering. It could be an experience where you transform a space. It could be a service where people assume roles. Or it could be an app.
It’s all about desirability. You’re not looking at feasibility or viability at this stage. You want to ensure it’s a problem worth solving, so you want to be able to invest the minimum to be able to validate that.
0:22:03 Beautiful, and then some of the jumping back to some of the constraints?
0:22:08 Well immediately, as soon as you say to people, it’s going to be like 4 to 5 days. But as soon as you ask them to commit time to that intense environment, they’re reluctant. What we’ve done is we now plan out workshops and let key stakeholders know when they need to be involved. And that’s where the value of problem framing is, to ensure that the right people are in the room to carry this through that journey. Then the project sponsor or stakeholder and major stakeholder can have the confidence that they don’t have to be there the whole time. We also sometimes break apart the design sprint where we do the first part of it, the workshop component with the customer and then we do the build and the testing without, and they come in for the testing part. So our goal, if they wanna go through that programme, is to make sure it’s successful for them.
0:23:11 And what does success? So we’re starting from an assumption. What we’re starting from a place where we’re sort of throwing assumptions out of the window, right? Like we want to come into this design sprint obviously have something that like a new idea on your products or some change you want to create in your business. But then because I think often, especially at that kind of exec level, there’s an assumption. This is what we’re going to do. We’ve already planned it out and we want to execute it to make it happen.
0:23:38 So we ran a design sprint for a big company X. So big Company X was basically taking a platform off of a bigger company and they were taking it over. And their team, their developers basically had the old system on one screen and they were creating the new system on another screen. So they were taking a like for like. Now the programme sponsor all of a sudden realised that this is actually an opportunity here, we’ve got an opportunity here to rebuild something that works for people as opposed to just doing the old system. As a result of running our design sprint, we found out very quickly that nobody used said product. So it was a national product in different states they used it differently. The way information was stored was causing major issues because it was touched by different organisations downstream. So you’ve got from a government level all the way down to a private level and because all the different stakeholders the way the data was collected wasn’t consistently collected, the data was a mess. So we realised very quickly we had to pause progress on the development. We knew we could do development. It’s very binary, you know, like there’s not much people can’t build. However, it’s people that are often the variable. So we needed to implement a change management programme. So we came up with a consistent language. We also needed to come up with some sort of UX UI framework that follows key user journeys and key user needs so people could quickly and efficiently capture the information they need and it could be transferable to different areas, different stakeholders. So things like that are super important.
0:25:29 So did they pivot based off that outlay?
0:25:31 Massively, they paused the progress of the project to be able to incorporate those things into their programme.
0:25:37 Experience Innovation. Right. So you’ve got business, you’ve got technology, and then you’ve got the human element. Right? But essentially everything that you’re talking about is that human focus, because it’s fine there’s already a platform. We’ve got a business case. There’s already a platform. Let’s just copy it. Okay, that might make sense. But if you don’t actually go and ask people about how it works.
0:26:06 This is the thing. There’s so many organisations out there that are in the solutions space, like build a website, build an app. I didn’t want to run a company that was in that space. That’s a red ocean. I see the real value is knowing where to focus. Execution is easy. I’ve been in the business now for over 20 years, execution is easy and it is not a problem to build anything. Developers can build anything. It’s really setting expectations, getting alignment, setting priorities. That’s the real trick. What often happens in businesses is that they start, they have a problem and go straight to a solution. And that’s not a human centred way of working. Our goal is to put abstraction in, and by abstracting the problem, we’re able to look at all of the different elements that have created that initial issue. And once we can start to understand them, as opposed to building a better, faster, larger product service, etcetera, it might be something completely different.
0:28:50 Keep it simple. It’s the hardest thing in the world. So the presentations, the talks we give, there’s so much we could say literally. But there’s only so much people can take in. There’s so much noise out there, you’ve just got to create a clear signal for people. And that’s so true.
0:29:09 So that’s a good segway. So I’ve sat in a couple of your workshops in these types of events.
I think you’re a really good facilitator, and I think actually, coming back to simplicity it’s quite difficult to facilitate a workshop.
So how do you go about doing that?
0:29:53 So first up is to remember everyone’s human. I know that sounds really dumb, and quite a naive thing to say, but what I mean is that everyone has their own challenges. So the first thing you have to do is to set the agenda to respect people’s time and respect people’s voice. You have to provide a space that everyone feels safe, and that sounds kind of wishy washy but that’s super important. When I do these big events, or I run a workshop, my first goal is to demonstrate vulnerability. So my goal is to make myself look stupid as quickly as possible so people buy in and see that I’m not some kind of guru or ninja because that’s the worst thing. Being the smartest person in the room is the loneliest place to be. So you want to come in truly with a beginner’s mind. You provide that format, these are the smartest people, so you want to set expectations earlier. You want to respect people’s time. You want to be able to give everyone a voice and you want people to feel confident that they can speak without being judged.
0:31:27 I think one of the nice things about the design sprint workshops and the way it works is it really does give everybody a voice. So I think often in a team media environment, you’re going to have two or three people that are kind of the dominators. Our experiences with my team, we have quite a lot of introverts that are very smart and love doing well. But in the team environment, it’s just not that place that’s not how they operate. So being able to one, yeah, sort of humanise that room and we’re on a level playing field here. But then through some of the workshop activities, using Post it notes and actually getting people being able to contribute without maybe having to shout the loudest is important.
0:32:14 And you know what? It’s magical to me. It’s magical when were in a workshop and I see everybody else doing the creative process. I get to see people glimpse what that feels like as well, you know, like them being able to demonstrate that creative capability because often people think in their jobs the creative part of it is really just for the creatives, and that’s not true. Everyone is creative. Everyone has creative capability and capacity. I don’t believe people are introverts. I believe it’s all about making them feel confident and comfortable. Because often introverts, once you get them going, you’re just like man, this person just won’t shut up.
0:33:11 That’s right. But I think it’s just your default setting. I think you can be shown a way, because I think it’s fear based a lot of the time.
0:33:41 Going back to what you’re saying as a facilitator. The goal as a facilitator is to get rid of all of the obstacles and make it super easy for people to feel confident and comfortable enough to participate.
0:34:30 How do you deal with an alpha in the room? Especially in a corporate environment you might have a boss executive, who is being domineering within conversation, do you feel like that’s on? Do you as a facilitator try and remove that obstacle somehow?
0:34:48 So you have a couple of tiers in regards to how you deal with it. You don’t go to red alert straight away. You have to softly, softly. You kind of work with them. They want to be heard at the end of the day, they want to be heard, so you have to provide that space for them to be heard. And they want to be acknowledged as well. However, if what they’re saying isn’t relevant, you have to provide that space for them to be able to have that conversation, and it might not be in that environment. If they’re being truly disruptive, you’re able to have a word with them, take them to one side and just say, You know what’s going on? Why? Is this not of value to you? Just find out what’s troubling them from their perspective. Now, if it escalates really and it’s really disruptive for the group, you then go to the programme sponsor. If it’s the decider that’s being truly disruptive, then you’ve got to be able to adapt to treat people like people.
0:37:19 We’re only human, as in the title of these podcasts. You’ve just got to be honest. And that way people come along on that journey and that comes back to the whole premise of More Space for Light, it’s all about being a relatable brand, something that takes away the mystique of getting from A to B. People feel comfortable and confident to work with.
0:38:11 Beautiful. So if people want to find out more about More Space for Light where can they find it?
0:38:23 So we are on Medium. And that’s more space with the number four for light. We’re on instagram More Space for Light, for. We’re on Linkedin More Space for Light, we’ve got our website MoreSpacefor Light.com.au. You can connect with us on instagram and Linkedin, we live a lot on Linkedin. But if people want to get in touch and learn more, we are running workshops all the time.
0:39:38 Design isn’t a craft, it’s a capability. And it’s changing that perception of it. And you start that innovation process and you start it from the customer or the patient or the user, and it opens up new opportunities.
0:39:55 Beautiful thanks so much for having a chat.
