An article by Scott Williams
published on 14 Sep 2023
Summary headline.
In this OPS:Innovator podcast episode, I spoke with Rei Paki about doing design right. “But I thought this show was about ops” might have been the thought that popped into your head. It is, and Rei gave us plenty of reasons why operational teams and functions need to understand what good design looks like. Spoiler alert: It’s not about pretty pictures.
Here’s the tl;dr:
- The focus of good design is external to the designer
- Solving a problem is just the starting point for the next thing
- We should pay people for the value they deliver, not their time
- Try to align people around what we are doing, why we are doing it and who it is for
Rei got us started by clarifying the difference between what we define as art and what we define as design, and it’s an important distinction. While there is a cross-over, art is about the artist and their expression to the world. Design, on the other hand, focuses externally on the user or customer as a human-to-human process – and anyone can do it. We all can apply a designer’s approach to solving real problems simply by understanding the principles of design and how they work.
And when we go about solving important problems, we can’t think of that as the end. It’s not “Okay, we solved that; tools down”. We need to be dynamic and respond to what we are seeing, which involves truly considering the different parameters of what we are looking at. Rei reminds us that those little variations are where innovation occurs because we start to find alternative options we hadn’t previously considered…
…and solving problems in ways they haven’t been solved before, by using solutions in ways they haven’t been used before, is innovation.
Whether it’s a change to a piece of code or a shift in how a process works, we genuinely want to tweak them; improve them; make them better. That desire doesn’t go away.
As leaders, nurturing that desire requires us to treat our colleagues like humans who deliver value, not as things to be paid for over a specific period of time. According to Rei, we need to spend more time worrying about what people are delivering and if they are providing value in a meaningful or measurable way. There’s a long history of buying people and paying them for their time, but how do you define the value of work when the most crucial thing someone does takes one minute every week, but that one minute keeps the lights on for 500,000 people? Is it for the minute they paid, or is it for that value delivered they are paid? It should be the value.
Rei also let us in on a little secret: the book he’s working on, tentatively titled Infinite Roadmap. Shhh; don’t tell anyone. As mentioned earlier, solving problems uncovers more things to do. By the time you get there, you’ll have found 10,000 other things that need to be done. Rather than seeing that as terrifying, we can embrace it as exciting…knowing that we always have the opportunity to alter, adjust, pivot, tweak, and improve. To do that, however, we need to have the right people in the right place at the right time. So please spend some time aligning people around what you’re doing, why, and who it’s for.
Be sure to check out Rei’s podcast, The Changeable, or to learn more, visit thechangeable.co.
To hear more of this conversation or those with any of our other notable guests, check out OPS:Innovator wherever you get your podcasts or find all our shows on YouTube.
For more engaging content on operational innovation and transformation, join the conversation at tenpercentlabs.com.
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