Hello, beautiful humans, members of the Design Mavericks Community!
Last Tuesday, we had our second community webinar, which was all about the Crafting Your Journey framework. This is a hot topic for many at the moment. Many of you are in the midst of crafting a journey framework that could serve as a base for effective journey management as well as influence renewed decision-making practices.
Some of you have been using my A.V.O.C. framework as a starting point for this journey. One of these folks is Harriet Wakelam, Director of Design at DBS Bank in Singapore. Harriet was our guest speaker for the webinar, where she shared her working progress reflections, challenges and artefacts related to their emerging journey framework.
I loved her honesty in sharing her journey, as well as how candidly she revealed her challenges. It is rare to witness this level of vulnerability among leaders; that’s one of the reasons why I admire her so much.
A few of my takeaways from her presentation and experience:
As designers, we got so fixated on the tool of the “journey” that we forgot what the tool was actually really about. Journeys are boundary objects that allow unprecedented collaboration between different groups and stakeholders.
There is no one type of journey. All journeys are different; therefore, there is a struggle between balancing standardisation and relevance.
It is hard for designers to claim a “journey architecture.” Technology has enterprise architectures. Business has business architectures. They are power tools. An architecture provides ownership of what happens. Therefore, claiming a journey architecture equals claiming ownership of journeys that historically sit within other areas of the business. The answer is often “This doesn’t belong to you!” making it difficult for designers to influence, if not own, this crucial piece.
It is crucial to differentiate between those things that are stable (Anchor), that need to be right, and those that instead change over time and that, therefore, can be 70% right (Variations). You don’t need the map to be perfect. If the services are right, it doesn’t matter if the rest is not 100% right.
All journeys are prototypes.
To embed this type of work it is paramount for designers to collaborate closely with strategy.
A lot more was shared, but these are my top insights. The conversation that this presentation sparked was equally insightful. Tanya, a design leader in a large global bank, shared how her approach is now to do less but do it better. She asks herself: How can we distil our journey framework to the minimum elements for maximum impact? What’s this minimum? Where can we make an impact? In her experience, the risk is to alienate people when you try to include too much. On the other side, Giulio, an expert operating at the intersection of Ethics, AI Governance, and Design, made us think about how those architectures Harriet referred to are historically a power tool deriving from colonialism practices. Finally, Helene, a CX leader in a security service provider, shared how she is trying to create momentum by starting from a handful of easy metrics to grab the attention of key stakeholders in her organisation.
If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the full recording of the session below. If you aren’t and would like to join the next webinar and access the recordings from the previous ones, upgrade by clicking on the button below.
Thank you to everyone who participated to the event, it was wonderful to hear your stories and share perspectives.