Episode #55: Experience Design at the Pace of Change
GuestS: Braden Kelley, Diane Stover-Hopkins, & Michael Horn
How are business leaders using experience design to keep up with the pace of change? On this episode, host Shawn Nason is joined by a panel of experts to talk about the role that experience design plays when innovation gets accelerated. Guests include Braden Kelley, customer experience and innovation solution director at HCL Technologies; Diane Stover-Hopkins, founder and CEO of ExPeers; and Michael Horn, senior strategist at Guild Education.
About Shawn Nason
shawn@mofi.co | ShawnNason.com | @manonfiresocial
Shawn Nason, founder and CEO of MOFI, best-selling author, and former Walt Disney Imagineer, lives his life with a commitment to create radical relationships with everyone he meets. Armed with the gift of discernment, he has the uncanny ability to walk alongside people and organizations as they struggle to connect with their deepest passions and engage their most debilitating demons. He challenges the world around him to be fully present, get real, and lead with empathy.
Prior to launching MOFI, Shawn was the chief experience & transformation officer for Healthways and served as the chief innovation officer for Xavier University. He also spent six years at The Walt Disney Company in various capacities within Walt Disney Imagineering and Disney Cruise Line. He’s an in-demand speaker and coach, the author of two books, Kiss Your Dragons: Radical Relationships, Bold Heartsets, & Changing the World (2021) and The Power of YES! in Innovation (2017), and the host of The Combustion Chronicles podcast.
About mofi
A human-obsessed, maverick-minded design firm ready to rethink your Experience Ecosystem™.
hello@mofi.co | mofi.co | @mofisocial
Mavericks think differently. They challenge the status quo and speak up when people and systems need attention. They’re not afraid to dream big, stand up for what is right, and take a few risks along the way.
MOFI helps maverick-minded organizations and leaders reap the rewards of thinking bigger and bolder about experiences, innovation, and culture.
Are you ready to fuel new growth by thinking bigger? Let’s talk.
What We Do:
Customer & Employee Experience—Increase your revenue and market share by aligning, equipping, and empowering the people in your Experience Ecosystem to create game-changing experiences.
Consumer-Centered Innovation—Move at the speed of your customers by harnessing the mindsets and processes of human-centered design to dream up, test, and launch fresh ideas into your business model.
Organizational Transformation—Position your organization for long-term sustainability by shifting the strategies, mindsets, and heartsets of the people who represent your brand in the world.
Episode Takeaways
- To be successful in today's business world, companies risk going out of business if they're not thinking like a technology company because it's easier than ever to start a business and scale it than it has been in the past. It's easy for a digital native to disrupt existing businesses.
- And industry research shows that the average lifespan of a company has dropped from 61 years to 18, which is both good and bad. To navigate this new reality, organizations need to make innovation a core component of their organization instead of thinking of it as a project.
- Too often, companies hire people because of what they've done before, instead of what they're best at. Organizations that truly want to be innovative need to create the necessary slack time for people to work on other things and must have the flexibility to allow for redeployment of human resources to new capabilities that the organization needs to build.
- It's not good enough to have leadership create an experience initiative. Instead, companies need to embrace co-creation, where they bring people together from different positions, from executives to frontline staff, and have them share their perspectives and learn from each other.
- Organizations need to approach innovation by empowering all of their employees to serve as chief moment officers.
- The concept of Extreme Listening helps team members focus on their consumers by limiting distractions as they use their ears to hear, minds to think, eyes to see, undivided attention to focus, and hearts to feel.
- If educational institutions don't fundamentally revisit their model, they're not going to be able to survive over the next couple decades.
- To redesign education in an inclusive way that collaborates with people who are often left out of the conversation, requires moving from a zero-sum system to a positive-sum game, intentionally building with communities, and not designing for a one-size-fits-all solution.
- The pandemic has reinforced the social nature of education, which most institutions have lost sight of due to prioritizing content delivery over connecting with students. Almost every classroom in America right now, including K–12 and higher education, has a significant opportunity to remodel itself to create connections between the teacher and the students, and the students and the students. By moving away from a zero-sum game, students can support and have fun with each other.
Overheard on the Podcast
Quotes from Braden Kelley
"It's incredibly important that organizations take innovation as a core component of their organization and don't think of it as a project."
"I think too often we hire people because of what they've done before, not at what they're best at. And organizations that truly want to be innovative need to have ways of having the slack time necessary to allow people to work on other things, to have the flexibility in them to allow for redeployment of human resources to new capabilities that the organization needs to build."
"And usually, most people when they're talking about innovation, they think all about value creation. But if you don't translate the value for people effectively, then your invention will never become an innovation. If you don't build the right experience and ecosystem around your core idea, then you also won't help people access that value, and your invention will never become innovation."
Overheard on the Podcast
Quotes from Diane Stover-Hopkins
"I do focus a lot on refining the innovative problem-solving instinct, the understanding that every person can influence the experience. And by the way, not only does all of that benefit the patient and the family, but the employees... feel more important, they feel that they're heard, and they feel respected, which is an engagement benefit."
"You have to have a commitment to co-creation. The frontline people see what we don't see in the boardroom. They know what we don't know in the boardroom. And they're part of our team, yet very inconsistently do we leverage their knowledge and insights."
"Extreme Listening in our industry, in the healthcare industry, is what we owe the patients."
Overheard on the Podcast
Quotes from Michael Horn
"I do believe that for many institutions, if they don't fundamentally revisit their model, they're going to go off the cliff, and I think it's 25%, at least, maybe over the next couple decades."
"We have to build with communities. We can't do to communities. And that means involving parents and students in the design process from the get-go and building something that works for their lives and that helps them succeed."
"I think there's an opportunity to reposition the majority of classroom environments across the world to put the relationships at the center and then leverage the technology for the knowledge and the skill-building and things of that nature. But, it's really all in a pursuit of freeing up time to make those human connections deeper, more meaningful, and more enduring."
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