“ Celebrate the banal not just the space stations” Fabio Sergio
In this post, I am gone write a little bit about design leadership and vision.
Till date there were only a few leaders that had a profound impact in my career. Most recently there was Donald Chesnut, ex-PublicisSapient Global Chief Experience Officer now Global Chief Experience Officer for Mastercard, whom I had the privilege of working closely. Donald wasn’t only a re-inventor of experiences but he was able to strengthen in me, fundamental values in leadership - honesty, transparency and kindness towards the people you work with, always pays back in your career, sooner or later, here or there.
And more recent, there is Fabio Sergio from Fjord, from whom I borrow the above quoted tittle. He gave a fantastic talk recently “ Design: past, present and future” at Fjord Equinox Accenture Interactive and I will base this post mostly on his keynote presentation, as it was true inspirational and reviving for me.
Fabio is a passionate speaker and a true evangelist of design thinking. On his talk, I was blown-away with the similarities of subjects presented by him at the end of his presentation, to subjects I discussed recently on a keynote presentation at Nasscom Design4India, in September last year.
He spoke about a societal ring, a humanity ring that overlays the work we do for our clients. Our clients’ businesses shouldn’t just be focus on their customers and employees. That notion of customer-centric design has been around for very long, at least for us designers. We have nothing but done in the past 20 years CX, UX, human-centric design. These terms though, only picked up by businesses and technology companies a few years back - everyone talks about it and everyone wants it.
As referred by Fabio we live the “Golden Age of Design”. As we manoeuvre in an ‘expanding continuum of design’ from aesthetics to ethics. From business value to social value, from design specifications to design processes, from design for customer outcomes to design for organisational outcomes, from problem solving to problem setting.
He spoke about the experience ring that connects customers and businesses through a 'living’ connected field between human, digital and physical touch points. And if we do this well, they become one experience, not fragments experiences or rather solutions on their own but a “Total Experience”, quoting Fabio’s definition, orchestrating an experience in it’s broader possible term.
Overall we want to help our clients to become “Living Businesses” through “Living Services”. This is really ahead of many things I have seen around in technology, business and design- when we speak about digital business transformation. What he means, is that we should give up on control and give “Total Freedom” to the people and stakeholders that engage and re-imagine these experiences- by giving people choices accordingly to their aspirations, needs and curiosity.
If we start talking about them as People (or as I mentioned on my keynote presentation- as Humans) instead of customers or employees, or CX or UX, this will lead us to a fundamental new subject in design and businesses - ethics.
According to Fabio Ethics and Foresight needs to be a practice in our companies, it’s not only about seeing the aspect of ethics but it’s actually about practicing it and making it part of the design thinking process of our companies and how we deliver services. This is actually the future of design. Fabio went on asking the audience- “ Or you want to live in a future of fake news? Or a future where governments use these tools (build by designers and technologists) to spy on us?” It’s a choice. A inevitable choice today - a choice of whom do you work for, and a choice on what are you putting out there in the market.
Fabio spoke about ‘shared value’ and ‘doing good’ and inclusion. But not about the inclusion that all companies are talking about now (like if people just woke up to it), but inclusion in a business term - how can we have the possible largest market? Instead of asking who are we building this product for? We should be asking who are we leaving behind? Who are we missing? Then we really gone start designing for inclusion.
While listening to Fabio, I went back in time to my college years at Philosophy class and my ‘master’ Immanuel Kant, a german philosopher of the XVIII century with his Kantian Ethics and the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), I can’t believe I bought that book, I was 17. I still love pronouncing it - Kritik Der Reinen Vernunft. Oh the Germans! Kant had a very strong influence on my thinking at an early age.
This is very much inline with Fabio’s analogy- it’s not only about the purpose of a company that we need to be concerned but about the relevance of it.
He also mentions how we today glorify the big discoveries, the big technology, the AI and the engineering, and many times we forget the more mundane things that change the world - there goes the sentence quoted on the title of this post.
There are things that take time, others can be done faster. How we build processes that take 10 years to develop, instead of 10 weeks. Can we build MVPs of the future- prototype and test what it could be?
The aspect of doing Good and supporting a Circular Economy, is too close to my heart to be ignored, as a leader.
Fabio is someone I follow closely. I believe that in today’s ambiguity, fake data, distorted information, revenue driven economies and dishonest politics, only good thinkers, honest thinkers, like Donald or Fabio together with everyone else who believe in transforming our worlds through design for good, we will be able to design a future that is transparent and inclusive for ALL. A real trustworthy future.
watch Fabio’s keynote presentation here: https://vimeo.com/335170621
img 1: from Fabio’s keynote presentation at Fjord Equinox Accenture Interactive
img 2: article1000.com Ethics and Politics by Immanuel Kant
