From working in the boom days of UK mobile communication networks in the early nineties to a leadership position with Apple Design Team in the twenty twenties, Colin reflects on the fruits of his work in design and innovation. He unpacks the patterns he’s observed in organisational structure, innovation methods and colleague behaviours over his 40 years career.
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Lead Keynote Turing Fest 2024
From Orange to Apple - Unpacking the Fruits of Four Decades Work in Design and Innovation
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Hello, everyone. How are you doing? It's a real delight for me to be here. I think that this really is a wonderful conference and the intersection of all the people that that come along just make it a fantastic place to to to be.
So, I'm going to talk a bit about, what I've been doing over the last forty years. I was super pleased that Brian asked me to look back in design rather than looking forward. I think that's a whole other thing that we could talk about.
But I just finished five years at Apple. I just tapped out in in January there, and I wanted to talk a bit about something that I kind of resolved for me, in the last five years working there, but really sort of came up for me or surfaced back in the, late nineties when I was working, in the UK mobile phone industry with Orange and, actually, all of the other players in the market at that time.
So as Brian said, I've enjoyed a really, sort of happy, time, in work. I started out as an industrial designer and very quickly discovered that what I wanted to do was interaction design. I'm gonna talk mainly about my experiences at IDEO, the BBC and Apple, but everything I've done through, these last forty years, I think, obviously, have informed where I am today.
The first project I ever did that I got paid for was this. It's a PDA, there's an acronym that we've lost, for a company called Microwiter who had invented a way of entering text using, five keys and a kind of cording mechanism. And that really, if you like, sort of ignited my love of user interface and, in particular, physical user interface, and I've spent a fair bit of time doing that type of work.
But not just that type of work, most designers, and I'm no exception, are horribly insecure. And the way that we kind of deal with that is by showing you a long list of all the clients that we've worked for, and I'm no exception to to that insecurity.
But I've worked across a number of industries, retail, fast moving consumer goods, so I'm in a fair selection, of of stuff. I've never worked for a client whose name begins with said. If there's anyone in the audience at this point, I'll do it for free.
I just really need to get that final final thing on this, on this list. So what I want to talk about is almost a kind of pathology, if you like. I think that there are five things that, are, you know, coming up for me, that I think are super interesting, and I'll go into these in a in a lot more detail in the next half hour.
There's some bonus content you can spot on obscure eighties Scottish reference. I'll talk about about my recent time with the Tartan Army, and the space race in the sixties. Of course, those two things make a lot of sense together, don't they? Any of you that have come here for some Mac rumors, I'm sorry.
You're gonna leave slightly disappointed. I will talk at some length about Apple, but, everything that I'm gonna say will actually be things that you can go and find yourself out on the on public domain. So, obviously, I'll be trying to sort of point to certain things and stitch that together in in a story.
One of the things that you'll hear through this is a theme that, I spoke about when I was here six years ago. I think that what I do is incredibly simple. There's really not that much to design. All design does is help you look at the world in new ways.
It helps make ideas visible and tangible, and it helps you manage risk by trying stuff out in simple ways. It's not much more than that. That's quite a difficult message to sort of talk with, master students that I work with sometimes at the University of Dundee because it seems like it should be more than that, but honestly, there's not much more to it than that.
So these five patterns really are things that I've noticed in terms of the the dynamics of organizations, the dynamics of how people try to apply creativity across different industries, and the way that human beings come together and sometimes manage to actually get some stuff done, but not always.
And I think the underpinning all of that is really what I think I need to do, what I'm still trying to do in terms of my own personal practice. So this story begins in nineteen ninety three. This was, a piece of work that I did with my colleague, Mark Tanner at IDEO, and it was for a company called Mercury one two one.
And we invented the fried egg key, which was something that, essentially, it was taking the eighty percent choice all the way through the user interface and presenting that to the user as a soft option in this big button on the right. It's a reasonably successful product.
It helped Mercury, grow their, one to one mobile phone service. And for me, one of the biggest payoffs of my early career was sitting on a number fifteen bus in London, and someone in the seat in front of me was showing their pal this phone and going, this phone is really easy to use.
Everything just comes up under this key and it always just works. And I remember thinking, maybe I'm doing something right here that's just great. So I suspect that a great many of you in the room have never heard of one to one. And so a quick refresher of the UK mobile industry over the last sort of thirty or forty years.
Clearly, at the beginning of that industry, as it was forming, there was lots of different businesses, they were all combining and different companies were merging. And when I was working with them, there was a time of reasonable stability emerging around about the year two thousand and that we've enjoyed that for most of the last twenty or thirty years.
Obviously, BT have been all over the map here, continue to be there, and we're looking forward to seeing what happens when Vodafone and three get together. And what we were doing at IDEO in two thousand and three, bear in mind, Duncan Kerr at, Apple was coming up with multitouch, we were re reaching the end of the feature phone.
It had become about fashion. It was all about form. It was all about material. It was all about the things that, in retrospect, should have made us realize that we were at the at the end of of the line for that product, but we didn't see it.
I didn't see it. Certainly, most of my clients didn't see it. One of the ones that probably had a little bit more kind of ambition or sort of ability to see that things could be different was Vodafone. We designed an extraordinary, sort of program for them to really design a sort of defeatured feature phone, something called simply, which was launched reasonably successfully, but it didn't really fit with, Vodafone's very kind of performance oriented, feature oriented sort of positioning.
So it was on the market for only a few years. It's been fascinating for me to see Punk to do what they're doing at the moment, because I think that there is genuinely, a huge interest in in the world, for a simpler phoning experience.
And then we were doing crazy things for people like Orange who, at that point, and when I think about this, it seems almost incredible, were sponsoring a nightclub called Manumission in Ibiza that had a reputation for extraordinary levels of hedonism at every event that they ran, and a mobile phone company was sponsoring them.
And they asked us to create, a set of twenty bar tables that allowed you to communicate through this upside down plastic beer glass with the waiting staff. It was fun. And I think that what I began to the thing that sort of began to emerge for me, because at that point we were working for everyone.
We were working for T Mobile, a lot too, Vodafone, Orange and T. They all knew that we were doing it. We weren't doing anything dodgy, but just managing that and juggling that was a really sort of fascinating thing. But it seemed to me that they all sat on some kind of spectrum because they were all extraordinarily different to work with.
It was almost like they had their own kind of character or some sort of pathology, if you like. And so that was something that was left hanging for me how in a marketplace, single market, so a country market that was really just emerging how you have this incredible diversity of the way that people went about what they actually were doing.
And so somewhere in that that sort of spectrum, it sort of felt to me that this that the people like Orange and Three were much more, if you like, sort of creative or intuitive or speculative, and the folks in the left were much more so logical or procedural.
And so I back before this was a largely discredited theory, you know, can companies be left and right brained? What what's going on with that? That sort of felt like something that was definitely of interest. And so the way that I think about this is a sort of sense of balancing art and accountancy.
I think all of these businesses had a sort of varying amount of that, those types of things, going on within the way that they that they did work. Huge generalizations here, caveats, but they are it's a very, very different sort of way of of of doing it.
And I think the thing that I've realized is that I've spent a very long very large part of my career, actually helping clients almost kind of find some kind of balance between those two things. Back at IDEO, back in the day when, we were doing a lot of sort of large scale design thinking work, we worked with Procter and Gamble doing products like this.
And we realized quite early on that we were being massively disruptive in terms of the way that we were helping them find ways to to do to do work. That's a genuine email that went to our client. And at that point, we we panicked frankly and then began to realize that probably meant we were doing something right.
But what we're doing for P and G was essentially helping them sort of move from the left hand side of the spectrum into the middle. And then if you like on the flip side, we're also doing work for people like Prada, where we work with OMA in their retail store in New York in Guggenheim.
And for that, we designed this extraordinary, interactive changing room that used a video screen and a video camera as a mirror. Everyone looks absolutely gorgeous in fancy clothes in slow motion. Trust me on that. And it was a really sort of amazing sort of experience.
We had, a whole bunch of sort of, essentially kiosks, but, enabled in a way that made them look like they were part of a fashion store, and even custom handheld devices back in the day. And I think what we're doing for those guys was essentially taking them from the right hand side of this diagram into the middle.
And the thing that kind of resolved for me when I got to Cupertino is a realization that that was actually at the very core of what Apple was and is. And I think that this is such a fundamental part of why Apple has been able to be successful.
I think Steve Jobs personified that balance. He insisted he demanded that balance from his teams, and that's still very much part of the the ethos of the company. So that kind of sweet spot in the middle. And what's really amazing to me actually is how few businesses seem to naturally be able to inhabit that middle spot.
I think that, so many of us are, working in businesses where what's valued is what can be measured, and almost a kind of the risk of a measured dive to the bottom is somehow more palatable than, the risk of using a sort of creative or intuitive approach to to what what you're doing.
So I think that's been something that's been, a really, really important pattern for me. So, I think the next one I want to talk about is, how tribes are so much part of, the work that anyone does, in in any sort of building.
I was lucky enough to, well, unlucky enough to be at the the the Germany game a few weeks ago with my sons, and there's something extraordinary about being part of that type of tribe, being on maneuvers with the Tartan army is a really kind of life affirming, sort of thing to be to be doing.
But, however, I think that, you know, human nature sometimes shows up in organizations, and for me, if culture eats strategy for breakfast, tribalism gets culture before it's even got out of bed. And as a leader, I think it's not something that we pay attention to usually because we come from a tribe ourselves.
And I think that managing or leading to try and, get people to put their tribal, sort of things to one side to actually sort of realize the goals of the company or the organization they're part of, I think is a real challenge. And for me, they tend to be based on two different things.
There's the economic differences, you know, they've got more than we have, more profit, more resources, or the sort of, well, this is the way we do things. We don't believe in the way that that that you're proceeding. Random, eighties music reference. And I think that these, you know, product groups play each other for resources and profits, and disciplines play each other for methods, tools, and and and process.
That's something that I've tried in my career to really, really try and sort of mitigate in the way that I do things. So I'm gonna refer to, there's a paper in the Harvard Business Review, an article. Many of you may have read it.
If not, that I think is really, really fundamental in trying to understand, how Apple is organized and how it's had this extraordinary track record of innovation over the last twenty years. And from that article, back in nineteen ninety seven when Steve Jobs came back, the business was organized in business units, product business units, each with its own profit and loss.
Steve Jobs came back, and he fired all of the general managers in a single day, and put the whole business under a single P and L and only had functional departments. Now this is kind of about face. This is the way that a lot of start start ups choose to organize themselves, not the way that large organizations with hundreds of thousands of employees are.
This is still the way it is. I still believe this is a fundamental, thing that Apple does, that that makes it who who who it is. By organizing in that way, you actually managed to break something called Conway's Law where essentially you organize the business in a way where the conversations and the communications between people have to be about joining the products together into an ecosystem rather than one product group trying to somehow play or game the, the folks in in other product groups.
And I think that that's something that's wonderful, and you you experience it in a really kind of visceral way when you're working, in in Apple Park. I used to work at the BBC. There was some of that going on there, believe it or not.
And one of the things that we did I'm about to go get some water, I think, which I think is way over here. It's a very large stage, this. One of the things that a couple of my colleagues in, BBC UX did, Paul Sissons and Paul Crowley, big shout out to the two of them, was that we they decided that we needed to print out the BBC online.
Just think about that for a second. Not your BBC online, just the BBC online because that's the way it was organized. So partly, it was to get a conversation about personalization going with, some of the tribes that we were dealing with, but what it did was make a whole raft of things that were essentially hidden visible.
So we had fifty feet of a four printouts, and we didn't capture every single page, but we captured every archetype, every sort of page format that we'd actually created. It was an amazing thing to do, and we then toured this around four cities in the UK and showed it to the top two hundred people in the business including Tony Hall, the director general.
And some extraordinary things happened when we actually pulled all the tribal leaders together. We were able to realize things like we have a number of video players that are doing exactly the same thing, are completely different code bases attached to completely different content management systems with completely different look and feel.
Don't you think we should do something about that? It really was a very, very useful way to try to make visible some of the differences that we had and and find a way to actually sort of tackle them. Being tribal isn't all bad. It really isn't.
I think that sort of modern workplaces, you know, actually mean that we all end up sort of reverting back to that sometimes. In my experience, the functional organization at Apple really makes a difference to that. This this sort of design, discipline, if you like, of making things visible is a great way to start to get different tribes to start talking to each other.
So the third thing I wanted to talk about was, how businesses are really sort of set up to hide things. It's just something that is very, very natural. And I think that the the the modern nature of work, the fact that many of us are not in the same place, in the same building all the time, the digital nature of work, we don't make widgets anymore.
We make these things that are hidden on networks and hard drives. That hiding things becomes a really, really big deal. Interestingly, in Berlin, scientists have, taught rats to play hide and seek, and apparently, they squeal with joy when they find each other. So every scene is something that is deep in most, most mammals, sort of DNA.
So I think that hiding is the flight response. It's what people do if they, you know, they think that what that someone's going to object to what they're doing or going to argue with them or, you know, create some kind of problem. I think that this idea of prototyping, I think, is fundamental to helping to uncover stuff things like that.
This is a prototype. It's a a model of something that people are able to think about in the abstract, but once you actually are standing in a room where every single page in the BBC is up in the wall, it really, really helps you start to see things that you can't see before.
Apple places prototyping at the very heart of everything it does. One of the my first impressions of walking into the Apple design studio is just the sheer number of prototypes. There are literally thousands of them lying around in this huge room. The way that Apple does it, it's been doing this for thirty odd years, and I think it's actually very special and in a funny way as a sort of not so secret weapon that that the business has.
And so I'm gonna talk through sort of four different types of prototyping that that, that that they do. Again, this is captured on a technical paper that Stephanie Hood and Charlie Hill, did in nineteen ninety seven. Isn't that extraordinary? We still refer to that paper.
They still refer to that paper. I'm obviously not used to not being to being out the door yet. And, it's it's a really sort of important thing. So what designers tend to do are these kind of what what I started my career doing as these sort of look and feel prototypes.
This is for a company called Electro Textiles, the founder of which Chris Chapman is somewhere in the room, and this was a company that had invented a way of sensing using fabric. We built a whole series of models. This is one where it was literally a soft pillow that you could use as a fully functioning PC keyboard.
And it didn't work, you know, we didn't even know if it could work. It was just something we did to try and capture something that we thought would feel and look great. It did. The other sort of more common engineering post type is an implementation post type where you don't really care how it looks, you're not really sure what people are going to do with it, but you just want to be able to prove that you can actually build something.
This is one of the first iPhones. It just sits in a big board with huge components that are not integrated or, you know, don't really work in the way that anything would, for the the final product. But, it allowed the engineers to actually sort of figure out, if it was possible to pull this, hardware architecture together.
The type of prototype that I've spent a lot of my career doing and printing out the BBC online is one of them. It's what they call a role prototype, where really you're trying to do something, trying to figure out the value or how it might fit into people's lives.
Typically, ideal, we would do things like this. On the left hand side is a cardboard sandwich outlet, that we built and ran in a London station for a day. It fell apart after a day, but we actually sold sandwiches off it, and it allowed us to understand that it was actually quite a bad idea to try and sell Prette Manger sandwiches from, essentially a garden shed, and so the project didn't go any further.
But we'd only spent a few weeks and a few large sheets of foam core to figure out whether or not this was actually, a useful thing or or a potentially, sort of a good idea. We don't have to, you know, invent or build any any sort of, hard hard structures.
On the right is, some work we were doing, for British Airways. We worked on the, the first lay flat bed in business class, and that's me and some of my colleagues playing in a cardboard fuselage tube with some chairs just trying to figure out exactly how tightly could you pack people before it felt just a little bit too uncomfortable.
That's pretty uncomfortable what we have there. And then I think that what lots of organizations do is that they try to create the perfect prototype by integrating the look and feel, the implementation, and the role right from the beginning. On the whole, I just find that that's a really, really difficult thing to do and certainly doesn't allow, ideas to be explored as fully as as perhaps they could.
So these types of integration prototypes, I think, are really very common in all sorts of different activities. And I think that this may be something controversial, but I think that sort of modern, sort of, front end, sort of, UX builders essentially short circuit that sort of process, if you like, of sort of looking at sort of multiple different parts of of a design space.
And so I think that, integrated prototypes are incredibly valuable, but in my experience are best left to a sort of second or third round of of work. So that's the, Apple, sort of prototyping triangle. And for me, I mean, if I told you about the thousands and thousands of models that, we would make, at at Apple, there really is a one hundred to one ratio here that a hundred ideas maybe yield ten things that you think are worth making, and that might lead you to one one thing.
And And if you think about it, that means that you're running a ninety nine percent failure rate on your process. Right? That doesn't sound like a particularly smart thing to do, but actually, in my experience, that's something that really, really improves the quality of of what you're what you're creating.
And at IDO, we used to talk about this in terms of smart failure and dumb failure. Tom Kelly writes about this in the Art of Innovation book, at some length. I'll I'll talk a little bit about what I mean about spark and dumb failure through, a very sort of interesting day, I had when I was the managing director of, IDEO in London.
I got two phone calls in one day. The first one was from a sweaty banker in New York. He was an English sweaty banker in New York, and the reason that he was so sweaty was that one of my project leaders had taken him and five colleagues on the New York subway in August, and the train had got stuck in a tunnel, and they'd been in there for forty minutes, and they hated it.
So as soon as he got out, he called me and told me that this was a disaster. I should fire my project leader immediately, and it's just, you know, how dare I mess with that. So I talked to her and, you know, I think she was trying to do something really interesting.
They were trying to figure out how to launch, a new consumer financial product in New York. She felt that these folks were a little bit kind of fancy. They didn't have much connection with everyday people in New York, so she thought she'd take them on the subway for ten minutes, which, kind of, went a bit wrong for her.
But honestly, it felt that that was a pretty, sort of, interesting thing to try. A bit later in the day, I got another phone call from, West Coast US tech leader, for a client who we had created a series of prototypes and reference designs for, and he was absolutely overjoyed.
Thank you so much. The stuff that you guys did completely surpassed all of our expectations. Our customers love it. It's best dog and pony show we've ever had. Unfortunately, I was just preparing myself to have a really, really difficult conversation with a colleague.
We'd we'd worked for this client for three years in a row, and every single year we had spent more on materials than we actually had on fees that we got back. So actually, it had been a total disaster from our perspective even though we've made the client really, really happy.
And so this was a bit of dumb failure. My colleague who took the, the bankers on the subway as a piece of smart failure. I think that really, really sort of managing businesses or managing your teams so that people are willing and happy and feel safe enough to try to do something that might not work out, for me has been one of the most important things I've tried to do in the teams that I've been running.
So which one do I reward? I still had the awkward conversation, and I did actually, give a promotion to the project leader, later that year. Our workplaces are hunting grounds. We've still got this sort of primitive instincts. People people get scared, People want to hide things because they think that if anyone finds out about it and it's not quite right, then they're going to be in trouble.
I think trying to create a culture within an organization that affords that, that uses prototypes to bring things out in the opening, To bring something out in the open that embrace, expect, and manage smart failure, is absolutely the way to go. This next part is about, so I've been talking quite a lot about organizational structure.
This part is a slightly some more, granular granular level if you like, where I want to talk a bit about project structure. This is probably one of the most important things that I've ever learned in my entire life. Obviously, I'm making a kind of play on the Orwell Animal Farm for legs good, two legs bad.
And the reason that I'm talking about this is that I believe that all innovation projects are not the same. I believe that there are four key patterns, and they're not just the argument between agile and waterfall. Now I know that there's people in this group, this community that care very deeply about this type of thing, so it'll be interesting to see how you respond to this.
The reason I got into that was that, in two thousand and two, I had two colleagues, two male colleagues, who I found having what might be described as a dust up in the studio. This was absolutely shocking because IDO was a very kind of cool, groovy place.
People were incredibly respectful, just didn't get that kind of thing happening. And, moreover, these two guys were one of my sort of crack teams. They were always working together, and knew each other really very, very deeply. So to see the two of them, you know, at loggerheads in this way was a really, really strange sensation.
I just didn't quite know what was going on. So, you know, how could that high performing team suddenly be so lost? I'm trying to understand that question. That's sort of what I learned by sort of trying to understand that was probably the most amazing thing that that that I've done in terms of, my career.
I learned from this guy. Eddie Obeng is an a professor at Ashish Business School. He has his own business pentacle, and for me, he is the world's leading project management consultant. Eddie worked really, really closely with IDEO. He's one of the reasons that IDEO was able to turn itself from being a sort of jobbing design agency into an innovation management consultancy because he really, really understands how product how projects work.
And what Eddie says is that, he asks two questions. He asked when any new project comes along, ask two questions. Do we know what we want, and do we know how to do it? And you'll get an answer back that's, you know, to a greater or lesser extent.
And if you I am a recovering consultant. There is a two by two in this presentation. I do apologize for that. But if you sort of plot that out, then you get, you know, a sort of series of different kind of project typologies, if you like.
And I'm about to go through these in a bit more detail. This is a slightly controversial thing I'm gonna say. I'm gonna argue that Waterfall and Agile are in these sort of two right hand corners of this, and I'm already anticipating the agile tribe coming after me at the round table.
And so if you're still go what I'm gonna do is this is where I'm gonna use my space race metaphor to explain all of these different, sort of projects. And so, when I was a kid, this is a huge big deal. You know, I sat I remember sitting with my parents, age six years old, watching Neil Armstrong step on the moon.
Many of you will remember that the Americans and the Russians were in this race to, you know, get people into space and how might that have mapped onto Eddie's, sort of project typology. Well, if you want to, put someone on the moon, at some point, you're gonna have to build some kind of vehicle, and you better know what you want and you better know how to do it.
And pretty much any project, anything that makes it out into the world goes through this top right hand box that you have to do projects that allow you to actually sort of build and deliver something. In the top left hand corner is really, about having a very, very clear goal, but maybe not really understanding how you're going to do it.
And I'm imagining at some point in, NASA, somebody said, let's put a person on the moon. Wouldn't that be amazing? How are we gonna do that? Well, let's work on it. Let's figure out what what's the best way to to actually sort of make that happen.
A lot of, typical design projects, a lot of fast moving consumer goods folks, are working in that top left hand corner. We're very, very clear understanding of what customers want often through, deep customer research, but, you know, a a flexibility about the technology or the enablers that you're going to use to make that happen.
Bottom right hand corner where you maybe Eddie calls it a movie, I like to call it a zigzag project, where essentially, you know, maybe back in the day, the guys at NASA figured out they had this rocket motor technology that they stolen from the Germans in the second World War, and then maybe we could use that as a way to somehow, you know, create what could we do with that?
Well, we could put a man on the moon. Wouldn't that be interesting? And I think that the majority of tech industry projects are exactly in this this this sort of quadrant where we have a technology, and we're really trying to find the best way to realize either customer or, monetary value out of it, Which leaves this bottom left hand corner, the projects where we don't know what we want and we don't know what we're doing.
So traditional, so project management would tell you that that's not something you should ever do. In my experience, the organizations that are able to go into that quadrant and trust their hunch, trust intuition are the ones that will do the breakthrough thinking. I mean, think about it.
You know, these are the folks that are willing to do something that just feels completely counterintuitive. And I think this links back to that kind of balancing art and accountancy thing, and that's something that certainly the folks at Apple are very, very adept at.
And who knows? Maybe in my space race metaphor, you know, maybe there was some kind of thing the American government is going, we've gotta find some way to show those dying Russians what's what, and, you know, maybe it's a very kind of, sort of abstract, sort of ambiguous sort of goal.
The guys from NASA said, hey, let's put a man on the moon. We've got this rocket motor from Germany, and sure enough, they eventually sort of make it all happen. So understanding this, and managing teams differently depending on which, quadrant you're in is is what it's all about.
Fog projects are very, very different. It's all about sort of a time boxing it, making sure that you're really looking after the emotions of the team. Teams get lost and that's what was happening to the two guys having a dust up in my studio.
They'd enjoyed a lot of success. They were used to delivering, on on on what they were being asked to do. And inadvertently, we thought it was a paint by numbers project, but it was actually a fog, and they were just falling apart emotionally in terms of their ability to do it.
So that answered that question for me. Obviously, paint by numbers projects are about, you know, rigorously managing your resources, seamless handoffs, you know, charting the sequence of resources and tasks over time. Movie projects or zigzag projects are more of like, sort of pivoting.
You you try one prototype at a time, learn from it, pivot, do something better the next time. And quest projects are a little bit more around, sort of parallel working. You maybe have two or three different teams working together working separately, then you make sure that you bring them together to review and compare who seems to be actually start making progress, and eventually, one way of doing things, actually prevails.
And so for me, there's no one size fits all to project management. I think it's much more than agile. I think that one of my frustrations at my career at the BBC would be that everything was done as an agile sprint. That just doesn't work in my opinion.
I think that it works for a great many things especially in the tech industry, but it's not the the sort of be all and end all of of innovation projects. Arguably, multivariate testing is a short form quest within a movie structure. So what that means, of course, is that any get any given product or project program, you actually end up moving quite dynamically at different levels of granularity through that map.
And understanding that is something that, for me, the the best ninja PMs that I work with really, really understand how to make that work. So I'm gonna finish up in the last couple of minutes just with some things that I have found to underpin this in terms of my personal practice.
This is my guitar. I've been playing it for forty years, and I'm a pretty poor guitar player. Alright? So and finally, when I practice, I get a little bit better, but I'm still never gonna be there. I have a lifetime worth of joy and frustration in this instrument.
This is Brian Leese. He leads the prototyping team, at Apple Industrial Design, and he exemplifies, one of Apple's leadership traits, which is that you must be an expert and immerse yourself in the details of projects even as a leader. The Apple Design Studio, is populated with dozens of these picnic tables, and the way that work gets done is that people lay work on the table, everyone gathers around about it, and you collaboratively debate.
You're not there to pitch. You're not there to sell. You just put the work in the table, and you're expected to engage in an honest and respectful multidisciplinary dialogue about what the best idea is. That's one of the fundamentals, of of why Apple is successful, and you can read all about this in that how Apple is organized for innovation, paper.
The third thing is that, again, this is something that that Apple talks about. And then when you go there as a as a leader, they train you in this. And Joel Podolny, is the head of Apple University, and, you know, he you you actually sort of understand and become indoctrinated in the way that that the company, works.
I'd like to think that they hired me because I was predisposed to work in that way, but this discretionary skill to know when to step back on the sidelines and let other people, be the experts and immersed in the detail is a real, really important part of how this scales at Apple.
This is a really old fashioned diagram from the nineteen twenties. Some of you will be seeing an old lady looking down and out of the image. Others of you will be seeing a young woman looking out and and but look looking to the right and behind.
So being able to live with that type of ambiguity turns out to be something that becomes really important in, leadership, of this type of work. Doing a FOG project doesn't work for everyone. A lot of people just can't do it. They just find that ambiguity too difficult.
This was my senior team, at the BBC, and, we did, a UX workshop at Design Manchester, and the, called Design Circus. And so there's there's something about that culture that we had at the BBC where we just we we figured out how to play, as part of, our our work.
And I think that if you're playful, then you enable creativity and you do something, to sort of pull back from that sort of fear that I think so many people have, in their in their their organizations. I'm a minute over. I promise you. I'm really finished.
And the final thing is, something that that, I think is so fundamental to the way I am as a human being, but preferring to offer ideas and questions over opinion and critique, that sounds country insured for a creative director. But, certainly, that's been my experience in terms of how you actually sort of make make all of this stuff sort of work together.
So I think change happens one colleague at a time, and it has to start with me. It takes repetition. It takes, discipline, just like trying to learn how to play my guitar. It also takes humility. I really like the idea that, I'm still practicing.
I've been doing it for forty years, but I'm still practicing. So just to summarize, what I've talked about today is that the best businesses that I've worked with are able to balance art and accountancy, that they have they hold both of those in equal regard and pull them together.
The leaders I love to work with have done everything they can to mitigate that kind of superhuman, sort of tribal nature and and don't allow that to deflect them from the goals of the business or the culture that they want to create. People love to hide.
Doing things like prototyping, making things visible is a really, really core discipline that design can help with. Project management is complex, and that, there are four key patterns, much more than just the waterfall or agile that most tech businesses use. And it all starts with you.
It's all about your personal practice. Thank you very much.