Episodes
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Today, I talk to Katherine Farnon about her pivot from Global Head of Digital Experience Strategy & Operations at Vodafone to becoming a change management consultant.
As anyone with leadership experience knows, simply asking or telling people to adopt a new system, structure, process, or way of working is unlikely to have much success. Change is harder than that. As you will hear, it’s a deeply human endeavour, and systematic change management has lots of parallels with the way we design and innovate.
This conversation follows nicely from the previous two episodes in that it explores a potential career track for some Design and Innovation leaders and, more importantly, a skill set that could integrate into their initiatives.
01:32 Career background
05:30 Change management
10:35 Why is change so hard
15:23 Identifying a change project
22:05 Types of change
30:25 Change leaders
35:39 Juggling change with day-to-day operations
38:39 New skills
42:06 Knowing what you know now…
KATHERINE FARNON
LinkedIn
KEVIN & PLAN
Kevin McCullagh is the founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy based in London, which helps design and innovation leaders with strategic clarity. He writes and speaks on Foresight, Innovation and Leadership.
LinkedIn
Newsletters
Website: www.plan.london
Email: kevin@plan.london
MUSIC
By Nico Delaney
https://www.instagram.com/marksson.music
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Today I talk to three design industry luminaries about the current state of design and potential paths forward. They’re all seasoned hands who have ridden out a few downturns in their time and can take a long view on design from their different vantage points.
Robert Fabricant is a Social impact designer based in NYC who specialises in Healthcare and previously worked at Frog. He wrote two much-discussed articles on FastCo earlier this year, which provocatively asked if Business was breaking up with design, which partly prompted my article on Design in the Doldrums.
Sean Carney has a background in ID, and has held various design leadership roles, including being the Chief Design Officer of Philips for 15 years, so gives a highly authoritative corporate design view on the situation.
Warren Hutchinson has moved from ID to UX to digital transformation design, both in-house and as a consultant, including his current consultancy, which he co-founded.
15:00 Symptoms of the Doldrums
25:15 From product to system design?
35:32 Over specialisation?
39:10 Routes out of the Doldrums
ARTICLES MENTIONED
Robert Fabricant, ‘The big design freak-out: A generation of design leaders grapple with their future’, 15 February 2024, FastCompany
Robert Fabricant, ‘Design leaders are in their reinvention era’, 10 April 2024, FastCompany
Kevin McCullagh, ‘Why design is in the doldrums’, 18 September 2024
Kevin McCullagh, DMI keynote deck, 24 September 2024KEVIN & PLAN
Kevin McCullagh is the founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy based in London, which helps design and innovation leaders with strategic clarity. He writes and speaks on Foresight, Innovation and Leadership.
LinkedIn
Newsletters
Website: www.plan.london
Email: kevin@plan.london
MUSIC
By Nico Delaney
https://www.instagram.com/marksson.music
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Episodes manquant?
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Today, I talk to Christine Ruf and Sebastian Stoddart about their move from design leadership to innovation consulting.
I made contact with them both while writing my article on the same topic, which in turn was prompted by a training programme I developed on what it takes for senior designers or design leaders to make the leap into innovation consulting.
03:37 Christine’s career path
07:03 Sebastian's career path
09:20 Motivations behind the shift to innovation consulting
16:43 Example consulting projects
27:38 Old and new skills
43:31 On the creativity of non-designers
ARTICLE
Designers as in-house innovation consultants (the comments are well worth a read too)
CHRISTINE & SEBASTIAN
Christine Ruf
Sebastian Stoddart
KEVIN & PLAN
Kevin McCullagh is the founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy based in London, which helps design and innovation leaders with strategic clarity. He writes and speaks on Foresight, Innovation and Leadership.
LinkedIn
Newsletter
Website: www.plan.london
Email: kevin@plan.london
MUSIC
By Nico Delaney
https://www.instagram.com/marksson.music
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This is part 2 of my conversation with Don Norman, where we get into some of the big questions around AI.
Don mentions Ben Shneiderman and Salman Khan a few times. Shneiderman is a renowned computer scientist who has focused on Interface design and recently wrote a book called Human-Centered AI. Khan is best known as the founder of the Khan Academy, a free online non-profit educational platform which hosts 6,500+ video lessons teaching a wide spectrum of academic subjects.
03:18 AI agents
10:51 AI devices
16:56 Overtrust in AI
19:33 Human vs Machine strengths
26:08 Intelligent amplification
34:36 AI amplified design
38:55 Examples of HCAI
BOOK MENTIONED
Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), Salman Khan, 2024
DON NORMAN
LinkedIn
Website
Bio
Don Norman Design Award and summit
KEVIN & PLAN
Kevin McCullagh is the founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy based in London, which helps design and innovation leaders with strategic clarity. He writes and speaks on Foresight, Innovation and Leadership.
LinkedIn
Newsletter
Plan website
Email: kevin@plan.london
MUSIC
By Nico Delaney
https://www.instagram.com/marksson.music
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Today, I talk to Don Norman, the godfather of User Experience. It’s a wide-ranging conversation, so I’ve split it into two parts. Part 1 focuses on Don and how the way we’ve interacted with technology has evolved over time.
If you already know lots about Don and UX, want to hear about AI, you might want to skip straight to Part 2.
That said, I thought I knew a lot about him but learned how he was there at the dawn of computing, AI and how to think about human cognition and behaviour – including his beef with B. F. Skinner, one of the godfathers of today’s Behaviour change movement.
04:32 Humanity-Centered Design
13:33 Wide-ranging career
26:45 The evolution of our interaction with machines
34:22 Smartphones
BOOK MENTIONED
Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein, 2019
DON NORMAN
LinkedIn
Website
Bio
Don Norman Design Award and summit
KEVIN & PLAN
Kevin McCullagh is the founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy based in London, which helps design and innovation leaders with strategic clarity. He writes and speaks on Foresight, Innovation and Leadership.
LinkedIn
Newsletter
Plan website
Email: kevin@plan.london
MUSIC
By Nico Delaney
https://www.instagram.com/marksson.music
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Product Powwow is a monthly podcast where I have big-picture conversations with design and innovation leaders.
KEVIN & PLAN
Kevin McCullagh is the founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy based in London, which helps design and innovation leaders with strategic clarity. He writes and speaks on Foresight, Innovation and Leadership.
LinkedIn
Newsletter
Plan website
Email: kevin@plan.london
MUSIC
By Nico Delaney
https://www.instagram.com/marksson.music
