Ryan Rumsey
Taking Your Design Career to the Next Level
If you’re ready to challenge your assumptions about business, design and your career, then this is the episode for you. Ryan Rumsey gives us his perspective on some of the biggest issues facing design and designers.
Highlights include:
- What crucial question do all designers need to be able to answer?
- Why do designers find it difficult to articulate their value?
- What do successful design leaders do differently?
- Why do designers feel uncomfortable about money?
- What should you do if you feel stuck in your career?
Who is Ryan Rumsey?
Ryan is an experienced designer and has held design leadership roles at Apple, EA, Nestle and USAA.
He is the CEO and Founder of Second Wave Dive, a groundbreaking new design leadership training company that’s helping designers to level up their business skills and transform their careers.
Ryan is also the author of an invaluable new book, published with InVision, called Business Thinking For Designers.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by interviewing world class experts and UX and product management, and they share with us their expert learning stories and advice. My guest today is Ryan Rumsey. Ryan is the CEO and founder of Second Wave Dive, a groundbreaking new design leadership training company that is helping designers around the world to level up their business skills and transform their careers. His company has worked with product design and executive leaders from companies like Google, IBM, Atlassian, Dell, and ANZ, an experienced designer with a career spanning over 20 years and across interaction design, front end development and product management. Ryan has led design teams at Apple, EA, Nestle, and most recently USAA.
- You've probably heard of some of those companies. He's the author of an invaluable new book published with InVision called Business Thinking for Designers. It's been described as a guide that helps designers to gain more trust and build better relationships with business partners, non designers, empowering great work. Ryan's a member of the Design Leadership Forum at InVision. He's spoken at numerous meetups and conferences around the world, including TEDx, FXD and Creative Mornings. He's been an actor, a ski instructor, and a farm worker, and he's a massive fan of the Liverpool Football Club. So I imagine he's pretty happy about how the club is tracking this season, a clear, compassionate, and compelling communicator. Ryan has a great story to tell and a huge heart and mind for helping designers to increase their impact, confidence, and career success. That's a great pleasure to have him here today to speak with us and to share his experiences. Ryan, welcome to the show.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Thank you so much for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it's really great to be here and this is a conversation I've been looking forward to since we put the time in the diary or even before that. And before we get into the sort of more obvious content that you're really passionate about and that I'm sure we can talk for hours on, I wanted to just dive quickly into your backstory. And I understand you were a professional actor and you were living in LA at the time where you landed a role on a music video for a band called stained. What's the story there?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I think there's so, yes, all true. I think most of it is I had lots of interests as a young man and wasn't quite clear on what I wanted to do but I was very intrigued and loved film as a kid loved acting. I did a lot of performing and singing, and though I didn't go to university to do that, it was never kind of an option for me. That attraction was still sort of there. And it was more a matter of circumstance that I moved to LA and decided to do that because I in the late nineties, very late nineties story, I was working for a rave company setting up events all over the world in New York and Beha and whatnot, and that company sounds terrible, sounds terrible. Well, it went terrible because it turned out my bosses were embezzling money and selling securities without a license.
- And so suddenly I was without my lovely sort of cush job. And so what am I gonna do? And I had been designing and making things on the web for a while and doing graphic work, but I just never thought of that as an option for me. I grew up with parents who were in banking and insurance, so I decided to move to la. I got an opportunity to have a roommate and I loved acting and whatnot, so I just thought I'd give it a go. I had a sort of just maybe three months of money to get me started, and I kind of got lucky pretty quickly and started doing commercial work. So I got to be in commercials for Burger King and Pennzoil Motor Oil and EarthLink, if you remember EarthLink. But my first gig was as the lead actor in this music video for Stained.
- And it was a very odd time because this is when MTV still played music videos. The song was number one on mtv. They were on the cover of Rolling Stone but the video came out three weeks before nine 11. And the whole video, the premise was a building collapsing, and so they removed it from the air, just this devastating stuff that happened here in the States with nine 11. And so this weird kind of thing of being on a high professionally where I was getting called in to circumvent a lot of the audition stuff and just kind of get into things, but then go from being on TV every day to like, oh, this could be a big money maker for me to suddenly those events happening. And so I did that for a little while and was making web stuff on the side, but I didn't love it. I wasn't, I was never like, I need to do this. I enjoyed being on set, but I didn't like everything else around it too much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's interesting to hear, talk about the situation with nine 11 and how you were on this high and the next came came to a screeching halt. And it just goes to show that you can't always know what's around the corner, especially from a career point of view. And I've heard you talk on a number of your talks that are online in the past about your journey to design and how you had tried your hand at a number of different things and you strike me and we've only met just now. So this is just an outside in perspective. You strike me as someone that has a very intentional and strong focus now on what you're doing, but that wasn't always the case. What, apart from nine 11, what was it that was sort of driving the unsettled behavior before you found design? Were you wrestling with something? Was there something that you had to realize in yourself?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I mean, sure, obviously and I've spoken about this maybe in one talk I suffered from and still do from a lot of mental health stuff. And this sort of WIC weird mix of having lots of interests, but also dealing with depression oddly gave me focus in some strange ways. I enjoyed doing different things and luckily grew up in an environment where I had parents that would say, go figure it out. My dad would say, welcome home for the summer. You're now going to redo our doors. And the hinges weird stuff like this. But my depression would ultimately play, put me in a place where I would just stay at home. I would not go anywhere, but I would be on the computer for 10 hours and just I would have my job and then I'd come home, whatever my job was, and I'd come home and I would literally just reverse engineer code, learn action script figure something else out. And a lot of my learning early on in the web, early nineties was just breaking html and the view source and all that type of stuff, and how do I combine that with the Photoshop weird stuff that I was doing and the drawing that I was doing. And so when people ask that question, how did you figure this out? I was like, well, it's this weird combination of depression situational circumstance and having lots of interests somehow found me into this place.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And for designers or anybody that might be listening to this who's feeling a bit stuck or that sort of lack of focus as to where to go next, have you got anything from your own experience that you could share with them? Any advice, any sort of practical tips as to how they might be able to stop asking themselves the question, why does this, whatever that is, keep happening to me?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I would certainly advocate if you have the ability to do so, to invest in your own mental health. My wife's a psychotherapist, it's a big deal to be able to have access to those types of resources. And it should be more accessible for me in my own dealings and just the way my brain work is, I love tools. So I would just love to remix tools. I call it weird WL yanking, just how do you take the thing that was meant for this and maybe without the so much satire, but just apply it to this. And so what ended up happening was practically I would just start to make my own rubrics and rating scales and kind of like, well, have I tried to fix this while I haven't? And do I care about this? And I do. I think one of the things that I let other people know is there's a lot more people that are in the same space than you think. And there are a lot of people who feel stuck and it's scary and it can be quite vulnerable to share with people that you are in a space like that. But there's so many people that I have in my life have come out The woodworks who have, because of my own vulnerability we're then vulnerable with me. But I will absolutely advocate for mental health resources of first and foremost.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a really important message, and thank you for sharing with us, Fran. I want change gears now and bring us to something that's really exciting, which is the new point in your career that you've reached and that's leaving the sort of corporate design world to focus on building your own business. I mentioned that in the introduction. It's called Second Wave Dive. That's a really great name, [laugh]. The story behind it
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I am a child of the 1980s through and through one of my favorite films of all time is Flash Gordon the 1980 version of Flash Gordon with Queen as the soundtrack. And so I was only six at the time, but the name Second Wave Dive is a quote from the film. And for me though, the meaning is more about this kind of second wave of me even though I'm in my late forties now of growing into this other point of my life and then diving into more niche things, weird things. And so then the mission is to then help others who may find themselves stuck, helping them find this next wave of themself. And let's go dive in. I am a huge advocate of deliberate practice and that a way to get stuck is to be curious, a little bit uncomfortable, but in a safe space so that you can identify some of your own loops [laugh] and see other perspectives, other ways that they could be addressed. So that's the name, that's an homage to really cheesy but amazing 1980s film and Queen and Brian Blessed, who's a brilliant British actor. And that's it
- Brendan Jarvis:
- For those of you that are keen to check it out, we'll put a link to the clip and the show notes. I'm sure it'll be available somewhere on YouTube.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Yeah, it will is [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So Ryan, you've talked about the sort of purpose of second Wave dive is to help people that are in that period of their career to get to that next step or that level up. What are the ways in which you're doing that through your company? What does it look like? So
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I mean, pragmatically, what we do are courses, coaching and community. The types of courses that I get into are things that were not typically taught either from an instructional standpoint, say out of university or really actively mentored in. Once we become professionals there, these common things where we know that we should develop relationships. We know that we have to earn trust. We know all these things that will help us, that sort will relieve our anxiety, relieve our burden, that curriculum, it's not there. And so a lot of the courses that I lead and continue to put out are all in this weird space. But then how do we take this sort of concept of peer feedback and community and developing stronger relationships and networks other than say a traditional workshop? How do we combine those, remix these in weird ways? And so it's all kind of at a source of some of my own frustrations of when I started building organizations from scratch.
- That was my job being hired to do that. And I spent about 10 years doing that. There was no guidebook. And 10 years ago there wasn't a lot of these conversations around design leadership of or whatever product leadership of how to do these things. And so I completely felt alone. And a lot of the very inspirational presentations and talks that I would see left me with no pragmatic or applicable ways to do anything on Monday. I was like, yes, I hear your principles, but you haven't sort demonstrated how that's been your responsibility or that you've put some of these theories into practice. And so a lot of the material then is these weird, unique situations that I've been in. And then applying things that are not the traditional what you would find in medium or in a typical presentation. And it's not for everybody too I realize that. But yeah, so far going, and I do the same coaching. A lot of executives as soon as you become an executive or you run an organization, you're much more like a small business owner than you are a creative director.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're on your own. There's at the front, people are looking at you, you've got ahead the answers.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- That's right. Totally right. And people are, you're kind of waiting for somebody else to make a decision and somebody, everybody, every, they're all looking at you. And we haven't been taught or we don't necessarily have had those experiences before. We're quite new to this immature in this space. And so my courses and coaching and community is all like, how do we expose some of that in a safe way? How do we then show you how you can apply that to your real world now and then keep that sort of going, keep that kind of conversation going.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. And when you talk about safe space, what comes to mind for me is that often it seems that people inside their own organizations, cause they're the leader or they're aspiring to be, they don't feel safe because of the political nature of the organization to share those fears and anxieties with their colleagues. Is that what you're getting at with this?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- That's a big part of it. I think as well there is a lot of persona and perception about having all the answers. It is really vulnerable to, and it's a wonderful leadership trait that I admire, but it's not readily available. It's quite rare to see leaders who will fully admit when they don't know a thing. And so what I mean by this is space to acknowledge that you may don't have the answers to acknowledge that. You don't want to let your colleagues know that you don't know all the answers. But also I think to talk about not just the happy path, it's difficult to lead people. It's difficult to be responsible for other people, their careers, their aspirations. And there are lots of parts of that where even giving somebody like their first review, if you're a manager for the first time has sitting down with somebody and actually giving somebody a review, even if it's good, gosh, that's a totally different experience than evaluating the effectiveness of a button. And so the spaces that we want to create are then also to acknowledge that we have different backgrounds different perspectives different opportunities that we presented, different privilege. And so how can we ensure that we're doing our best to acknowledge and be direct with those Right
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. And at what point was this the thing you knew you wanted to bring to the world?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I would say I knew I was burning out. And my last role that I had I actually was not leading design, so I decided to take a role in corporate strategy and worked for the chief strategy officer. And so lead a small internal management consulting team where I could be present when designer product management kind of wasn't in the room.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Be present with executive and board members.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sounds like you infiltrated, you're the designer
- Ryan Rumsey:
- [laugh]. Yeah, it was like, but I pretty much knew within 30 days that it was not going to live up to the expectations that I had had. And so for a variety of reasons, variety of inputs that you get [laugh] so often in those 30 days. And so right off the bat I sort of said, what if I can I still do a really good job? Can I still treat people fairly? Can I still bring my best, but can I be a researcher?
- Can I observe some of the things that I've been feeling myself and be a researcher and be a colleague to those other people feeling those things too. Because I think that's kind of at the heart of a lot of these big words that a lot of my experiences in big enterprise companies, not so much agency work, but when you hear all these big words, transformation and innovation and blah, blah, blah, we're just talking about people change. And so then a lot of the same themes of people expecting the company was ready for the change they were going to bring and really almost hit in the face with a brick that, whoa, they were not ready. Now what do I do? And so that's me kind of saying, yeah, I dealt with that quite a bit. If that were just, if that was just the norm, how do we still succeed? How do we again relieve ourselves of these burdens, these anxieties that we feel and let you know the art of letting other people have our way without that being our core identity or where we place our own value. So yeah, it was about 30 days into my last role. I ended up being there about 18 months and took some very intentional decisions to sort of say, how could I set myself with a runway? How can I really plan this out and give it a go and see what happens? And I'm very fortunate that I could do that. I was in a position to plan for that and kind of make it happen, if you will.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. You've touched on this notion of culture where the organization says they want some one thing, but the reality when you brush up against it is that they don't actually either know what they've asked for or they're not ready for what you have to bring. And the more I talk to people in our community as designers, researchers, people in UX and product, the more I realize that this is not an uncommon situation and that it's almost surprising for people to hear very almost scar similar stories from halfway around the world of the same cultural challenge. And I wanted to come to this notion of culture through language, which is also something that you briefly touched on. Language is such a powerful force, something that can build cohesion or it can bring chaos. And it's really telling as to how we look at the world. The words can have more than one meaning. Yes. Yeah. Which it's a curious thing when it comes to interpreting what people are actually saying. And I wanted to ask you about your experience about the alignment that either does or doesn't exist in the language that designers, and I think you call them business partners, and for people that are listening my interpretation of that is non designers.
- How aligned are those vocabularies that they're using when they're working together on solving business challenges?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- My experiences varied. I have been part of core teams where everybody was clearly on the same page when it came to much of the language that was being used. Apple was a pretty unique space where a lot of that language, but Apple is operationally structured far different than anywhere else. Apple only has one business unit. There is no iPhone team. The people who dunno, this blows people's minds. They can't right know how it works. And so you have all these other companies that have seven different business units and then they try to create omnichannel programs and those don't work because the actual balance sheet of each one of those seven business units is kind of in competition with each other. And so I think language, the first thing time I really saw it as being this difference was when I went from Apple to electronic arts I worked for the same boss and there were about eight of us that kind of shifted over. And what worked for me with the same boss at Apple did not work at all at electronic arts. And it took me as very naive to what's going on here. I couldn't sort find the patterns. I think as a designer, that's one. As an interaction designer, a lot of my core background is around finding patterns and I couldn't find the patterns. And I luckily had a wonderful mentor who just said, have you ever noticed if you let that person just keep talking,
- They will talk themselves into a circle. And so is the first kind of thing of a going. Oh, interesting, right? Yeah. But then what I discovered is that largely what was so familiar at Apple was so nascent, was so unknown at all these other companies. Even 2021 we're talking about stuff that I perhaps was doing almost 15 years ago is people think it's from the future, they don't even understand. And so what I began to notice was
- Language is interesting. If you look at English first, French, 60% of the words are the same. They're just pronounced differently. And so one of the first little tricks that I began to find was a lot of teams were making this shift from say, project management to product management, especially at these big companies. They saw everything about Agile and they saw all the hipness and philosophies and let's do all the things and scrums and whatnot. And I was very close with the engineering world. I had spent a lot of time developing as well. But what I noticed was that they were borrowing the language of project management and just assuming that it meant the same thing in product. And so what I began to do was used try to just understand their definitions, borrow them and just say, oh, that's interesting. We have that same word, we use that word.
- And whether we were using it or not, I would just kind of like, oh, we're so close to you. So think of phase gates, old school, project management, design, develop, test build, whatever the gates are, they're essentially, we've done all the things, we throw it over the fence to the next team. So they were entirely structured. Their entire process of how they worked was all around phase gates. Well, when I went into a company and now they were saying they were all product and how do we work with design? I started going, actually, we have phase gates. We think in phase gates too. We just think in different cadence. So we think really around a conception and introduction and decline and things like this, but they're all the same. They're just gates. So I started to play around with the words and the language, and then I would say, oh, usually you have projects that last eight weeks to three months. Well well, we just working three week projects. So that's all the differences is we just have different sized projects. And it was much easier to approach it that way than say, Nope, here's the new language, here's the new dictionary. You got it all wrong. And I think that's a thing that a lot of designers and researchers in particularly are maybe not so of
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What is that thing?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- So think of the word design. [affirmative] engineers have been using that word for a long time, long before designers kind of decided that we were gonna study the art of design and the methodology of design. So walking into, if you walk into an IT environment, they have a clear definition of design already. Do your history of that. When I started at U S A, I led a team called experience strategy. So the team was called experience strategy. They did experience strategy and they provided experience, strategies, nouns, verbs, adjectives, all at once.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh].
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Same with design. We call it design. We do design. We are design. And so one of the basic questions that I start with is, are we even clear with our own language? So one of the first question I asked of my team at usa, I said, what's an experience strategy? And I got different answers from everybody.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a problem.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I said, well, no wonder nobody trusts us. They think we're making it up. And the same could be said with design. When I work with an executive leader, I'll say, well, how do you define design at your organization? And usually they're like, oh, that's impossible. And I'm like, actually, no, you're your job. That's your job. It's okay to have clarity and define it here for your context. That's your job. Because without that, your business partners think you're making it up. If I go to 10 different designers on the team and I get 10 different definitions, there's no way I'm doing anything more than giving you the responsibility of the interface. Cause I think you're just making it up.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this is such a key point of tension that exists for designers and their relationship with the business [affirmative]. And it comes back to what you said about being clear and aligned on what it is that you're actually doing. Because inevitably you're gonna be challenged to articulate your value to the organization. And if you can't do that, then you've hinted at you're in a lot of trouble. What is the reason for the difficulty that we have as designers to align behind what it is that we do and articulate the value of that?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I have my own theories. I don't have any data [laugh]. What I think a lot of it boils down to just in my experience is identity both as an industry but also as individuals. We've done a lot of marketing of design as an industry of being this pivotal impactful thing. And I believe it is [affirmative]. And we've done a lot of, 15 years ago, designers were relatively rare, and now there's what, 250,000 of us in the market. So we've done a good job of elevating the desire for it, but it's also if we want to mature and be involved in other conversations, we may have to wrestle with a lot of that identity we've built up for selves. And it's not easy to let go or adjust one's identity. And so that's a lot of the kind of things. And the only way I've kind of said it or been able to get people to hear it, maybe there's part of this, maybe there's something that we haven't, is I've certainly worked with and discussed with lots of designers over the years who have moved to different roles, moved to different places.
- And what I mentioned to them is, if you're having the same conversations or the same frustrations, if that product manager only wasn't here or that CPO was more mature, everything would be great. If those are the same things that happen from place A to B to C, you're the only constant variable. You're the only one that is the same through all of that. And I think there's this once we kind of understand that, oh, maybe this is about us as well, and if we're, we feel a little bit of comfortable or we even have a little bit of space to be comfortable in moving beyond, okay, say what we had placed up as our identity, we can get there. I think of a lot of things as everything is a prototype, including me, I'm just a prototype and I'm just running series of experiments. And I've never identified solely as UX designer or product designer or developer or strategist. And maybe that's because of my own mental illness and curiosity and lots of interesting things. But I think there's the core that I've seen a lot is one's own identity. And as an industry, our identity,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I mean, it almost sounds like we need to let go of some of the things we hold to be true. And we are so good at using empathy and understanding for who we are designing for. But we seem to be on the whole somewhat terrible, terrible at reflecting that back in the organization at the other people that we're working with.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- And I think we can be quite chaotic in doing it with ourselves. We as designers are quite competitive with each other.
- We don't do a lot of listening, active listening with each other. I mean, certainly that's not a I'm generalizing of course, but I've seen both. I've seen a lot of active listening, but I've also seen a lot of rewarding of those who shame our colleagues. And so that's all really hard stuff. It's not saying it's easy. I certainly wrestle with it all the time. But I think when we talk about identity, how often do we look at our colleagues and other parts and they're always saying they have to change or here are these things that we're pushing at them, we're pushing empathy at them, we're pushing human centeredness. And are we actually living that? Are we embodying that all the time? It's hard to do. And maybe if we do a little self-reflection where we could do better in some circumstances and look, we're young, one of the things that I've been in looking at particularly maybe because I'm a parent, is phases of human development as individuals.
- We've gone through child and adolescence, and most of us are adults now. I say most, right? But as teams of collaborative partners, we're still quite in the child phase and we're often inside of roles or companies where we change teams every 18 months. We don't actually allow that development, that adolescents to go through and actually become mature adults as collaborative partners. And so there's all sorts of things there that I could say are circumstantially getting in the way sometimes, but we're still the new kids on the block. We are still just sort of trying to figure it out. These are part of the growing pains, right?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes. We're the adolescent years just trying to find,
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Oh, who
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We are in the world and how do we work with the other people that exist here,
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Yelling at our parents and slamming doors sometimes, but also walking in with wide eyed curiosity. So it's that lovely Tina, my oldest is 12 [laugh]. So just getting to that point of like, oh wow, I'm discovering all these things and the world is an oyster, and then push and pull in all sorts of ways. And so I agree. I think that's a lovely observation that we're maybe still just in the larger scheme of things just in the teenage years.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So if we hold that to be true, and we're to think about what the ideal way of working with an organization looks like as a designer. And there are examples of people at design lead companies at Apple, Netflix, and others, and I'm sure you actually know these people yourself. What have they realized? Those people that are in design leadership positions and they really are pushing the strategic agenda for those organizations. What have they realized and what are they doing that other designers could do?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I think what they're doing so well is they are really getting to know the context of what they're designing for and with, if we look at companies like Apple or Netflix Airbnb, whatever, we know the narrative story. We often don't know really what's happening day to day. So we know the story that we're told, were told. But what I also know from friends of mine who are leaders and things that are working well is they become not only self-aware, but contextually aware that Apples prime competitive market differentiation is through design. If you look at Apple versus a company like Dell, their business models are largely the same selling computer peripherals to enterprise environments to customers, individuals, but their strategies are completely different. Apple is selling premium priced things through design that integrates systemic effects of software meets hardware, meets whatnot. Dell has chosen a strategy where they essentially win by superior supply chain and lower pricing.
- So when you look at where real mature leaders are is they recognize the context and they may say, well, at Apple it has to be through this, right? Has to be through the software, has to be through the services. Whereas at Dell it might say, we're going to totally double down on a supply chain and just completely redo B2B in a way that nobody can even see. But all we have to do is mimic or just copy what other people put into the market when it comes to consumer software, and we maintain that advantage. And so the mature leaders that I see is they recognize that they are part of a piece, and they recognize that when they are looking to push something forward, they actually know, am I trying to maintain the competitive edge within the current business model, or am I proposing some type of new model? And what are the risks and benefits of each?
- And sort of cognizant of that sort of thing. And I think, look, at the end of the day, we don't really talk about it. This is something that I've been writing and I haven't just shared yet, is that these are systems problems to solve. It's not a design problem. There's systems problem because we have processes, we have products, we have people, and we have balance sheet things to solve and address all at the same time. And so the leaders that I love to work with and I love to be around, they acknowledge that and they sort of say, all right, how can we not just look at it from this angle? How might we approach it where we choose parts of those systems together and work on those together?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like their perspective lifts from the craft and the practice of the design organization, and they almost bring themselves up to the level of the wider company, and they're able to join the dots between what they're doing in their craft and how that's furthering the mission of the organization
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Completely. They are dot connectors, they are overlaps in the ve they're building bridges. And that's a wonderful challenge. A talk about a design challenge to solve. What a wonderful challenge. I was fortunate USA to work with Mariah Garrett, who's the chief design officer there and to see her kind of growing a team from 30 to 300. So first dealing with scale, but then dealing with colleagues who were suddenly moving over to safe, agile and oh, that's a thing. And oh, and reorgs. And suddenly seeing that, and she's been so great at seeing how all these things connect and not hitting a panic button, not continuing to create a and foster a wonderful environment for the people that work in her organization and have that balance of like, oh, we are individuals and we are teams, and we are colleagues, and we are peers, and we are here to serve our customers, and we are here to make money because we're a for profit company. Finding those sort of balances.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about making money, because this is also something that designers not, and I'm speaking in general terms, it's obviously very difficult for us to get into specific examples here, but it's something that comes up where designers somewhat feel uncomfortable about this notion when you're working in an enterprise, a profit enterprise, that what they're doing is contributing to the bottom line. There's almost like a revulsion to that. What is that about? Why do we not get that?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I don't, don't know. I don't know the answer but I think part of it is our own fault as an industry. Again, we've done wonderful things. We've like we have, there's 250,000 on a of us working, what an amazing opportunity. Look how far we've progressed. And at the same time we tell ourselves that we are the be all, end all that companies just absolutely need us. We are the differentiators. That's been some of the narrative as well. And I don't know that we know our histories. Do we really know why design thinking came about? Design thinking came about as this popular narrative and this service and whatnot, because it was a for profit company who needed to find a new revenue model because another revenue model was maybe not working as well, right?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Ideo, you're talking about
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Ideo, right? Yeah. I mean, it was a new revenue model, and there's some of that history too. So I don't know why we're so uncomfortable with it. And I think still to this day, I get a lot of dear end headlight kind of moments. When I say a things like if you work for a for-profit company the company's purpose is to remain in business soluble survivable, survivable, all those types of things. Everything points up to continuing to be able to pay your salary. And it's not just designers. Every employee is expected at that business level, that executive level to contribute to keeping them in business. So you should be aware of whether or not that model is doing the types of things that you can support. That's not to say that you might, as an individual, have different priorities yourself, where you could say, I can live with that. Personally. I couldn't go work at a company that sells cigarettes personally, but I know people that can and do, because they have a different ranking system, also talk about for profits.
- For profits may make decisions where money is the bottom, but money's still part of it. They have to fundraise [laugh], they have to remain in the business of providing that value back to a community in whatever way. So there's always money involved. And I think a lot of this is circumstance of whether universities, whether a lot of our own narratives a lot of privilege, a lot of privilege is all kind of boiled out at this point. And what I just say, it's like, it's okay. That's a thing. Company's there to make money. You buy things as a consumer, you do the, that's a thing, especially here in the States, right? Capitalism is live well. So now if that is a thing, how can I accept that that's a thing and still get what I would like to get as an individual, as a teammate, as a leader, how can I still make it work? And that's that sort of adjustment.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it's almost like you have to accept that that is the cost of continual survival as profit. And the question you need to ask yourself after you've accepted that, and if you want to continue to work in that environment, is what do they use the profits to do? And if there is this sort of ethical, everyone has different ethics, but if you have that concern, I suppose you need to look further into what the activities of that company do. And there are many great examples of companies that are for profit but that are investing back in things that they hold dear and they attract a certain type of person for that reason.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- And I go, right, you mentioned ethics. I think when we talk about ethics, I think some people have this concept that it's just a standard that everybody has. No, it's like anything, right? Ethics is a religion or independence or freedom or whatever you wanna say. Everybody has a different take on what that is. And I think my job and part of my mission is just to allow people to be more aware of those contexts and those situations and those scenarios around them, because it's not just about the company. What if you work for somebody who's unethical as a person or doesn't align with your value system, right? I want you to be able to just more in the business context, not necessarily the therapy context, that's not my expertise, but in the business context, do you see patterns there of where your leader tells you something and then acts a different way? Do you see something where the executive leadership does a presentation about a thing and then you see it show up a different way? Then can you just make the step and say, well, maybe this is what it is. Does that align with my value? Can I fit into that? And then if so, how can I still get the things that I want to get?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah,
- Ryan Rumsey:
- This is all behavior design and looking at motivations and abilities and prompts. You know, could pull up fog, BJ fog's work or other stuff like that. And so it's just about getting exposed to a little bit more than maybe we wanna be. And I know that not everybody wants to, I call it Allison, not everybody wants to go into the rabbit hole. Once you go into the rabbit hole as Alice, you don't come back out the same. And so I acknowledge that. But if you are looking to relieve some of your own, the pressure that maybe you put on yourself or the burden that you are there to fix things, a lot of times, that's then exposing you to maybe things that traditionally you maybe were like, oh, not seeing it. It's okay.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So for those designers that do wanna sort put their head above the parapet and take a look at some of these challenges, or at least consider, how do you become more effective as a designer and in design, was this part of the reason why you wrote business Thinking for designers? What was really the book?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- So I had been involved in these wonderful offsite, if you will, these wonderful sort workshops that were called Design Leadership Camp. So it was sponsored by Envision, but run by a small company called Bureau of Digital, and was fortunate enough to go to the first one. And it was where suddenly you're around, oh, we're not alone. We're all in this safe space. And what I saw there was that my experiences were very different than whatever. I did not come from traditional consumer product design. All of my background was in weird more operational. So when I worked at Apple, I worked for Apple Care, so I worked in tim Cook's org, not in Steve Jobs work. So all the stories about Steve and Design and Johnny, I was nowhere near that. I was building enterprise grade applications internally for the cfo. So my job was getting to play around with standard deviations of 13 KPIs and 25 supporting performance indicators.
- Like, whoa, that's really cool. And then building organizations from scratch and customer experience and r and d. And so when I found myself in these conversations, I just was like, hope has anybody had to deal with OPEX versus CapEx conversations and you see people, what is even that word, [laugh]? And so after going for a few years and seeing these kind of themes, and a lot of my colleagues kind of struggling with that idea that they were now a small business owner, and they were the decision maker, and they then had to negotiate in with other small business owners that's where I approached Aaron, Walter and Willie, who are both at Envision and had been doing these wonderful design better series. And I said, I've had the fortune in my career to have wonderful mentorship get wonderful, wonderful guidance and be in these unique situations, but I've also worked at companies that didn't really want me to say what I was doing didn't really let me share. And so I've been a consumer of everybody else's lessons for a lot of my career.
- I wanna write a book and I wanna write it for free. I want to give it away and just have it is this very different, rather than talking about principles, and this is gonna be an inspiring book, I wanna get, how can we just find little ways that we can help you get unstuck in ways that have helped me others to just get unstuck? And so that's where the book came about. They were great. They were wonderful partners, and timing wasn't great. So it was scheduled to be released originally, March 15th, 2000, 23 days after the US was closed. So I was using it as my funnel [laugh] for my small business [laugh]. I was like, I can create a mail list or I could write a book. So then we released it on April 15th, but at a time where I think I've gotten wonderful feedback I think it's been downloaded like 40,000 times. Wow. Mind boggling, right? Yeah. Just what, and I've gotten messages from people in Brazil just things that I never thought possible, but it's still, it's almost a year old now, and people are just coming out of a little bit of the fog that we've had mostly here in the US and Europe and going, oh, well wait, there's this new book here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I, the content is so practical, and I even, you've gone to the extent of describing what some of those terms CapEx and are, and it seems to people that know that already that seems like, oh, maybe that's not so much of a big deal. But there are so many people that don't understand the language that the company business organization uses to describe what they Oh
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's almost like, that's right. Go on.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- And I look at it as one of the wonderful things that design thinking has done, you could take it for pros and cons. It's not design but what it has done is democratized a lot of the language. Nobody's doing the reverse
- [laugh]. If you go ask an mba, what a business model is, right? You're gonna get the big answer. And if you ask five MBAs what a business model is, you get five answers. But if you just go and say, well, business model is just, it's just three things. The goal of it is just to figure out how you're gonna create value capture value, deliver value, that's it, right? And a business strategy, forget that. If you thought a business model was hard, if you ask everybody what strategy is, oh goodness, it's all over the place. But if you just break it down and say, business strategy is just how you're gonna do that model different than somebody else, that's it. If you just break it down to that, very pragmatic, now I can be more attentive and aware in a meeting, same with Return on Investment, that's an acronym that we all get trapped in. What's the ROI of this? And way I say it is like, that's really four questions that somebody's asking, but they don't answer those four questions. When somebody asks the roi, I want you to think of what do we get? When do we get it, how much will it cost us? That's it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- So when you hear that, just that's the practical side of it. And yeah, that's the book that I wish I had 10 years.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I'm glad you didn't have it because if you did have it, you might not have written it and shared it with everybody else.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Probably true. I have a good friend Greg Story, who yelled at me at we were having dinner gosh, it's almost five years ago now. We were out at dinner and I was sharing a story of how I started building balance scorecards and had a very different approach for OKRs and teaching OKRs. And he looked at me and he's like, wait, when did you start doing this? I was like, oh, in like 2009
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh].
- Ryan Rumsey:
- And he's like, he called me a foul word, but he was basically like, you gotta be kidding me there, like everybody is. That's a contribution. You have to share that you have to provide it. And I'm not saying it's the end all be all, it's just another way. And there's so many other people that have been so generous with me and the industry, and I can I play a part in that? Can I just share? So that's where Second Wave Dive has come to is how can I just help others get unstuck and maybe make a living out of it too, because that's okay as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh], yes. So well, thank you for sharing it, Ryan. It's really great. We'll be linking to that in the show notes so that people can check it out. It's an invaluable resource. So just bringing us to the close of the show today, if there was one thing that you could bestow on all of the people that are in the design community, what would that be and why?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- I think what I would tell them is that they are okay. They're good at what they do. You are good at what you do. You provide amazing contributions, and also your job's not done. We need you to keep pushing and we need you to keep pushing it further than maybe where some of us took it. That's the job, because what design can bring us design can also take away from us too. So use that intent, use that drive to keep doing amazing stuff. And I'm so excited to just be in a world where you all are at.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Amazing. Are you up for playing a quick game before we go?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Yeah, of course. I love games.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's really simple game. It's called, what's the first word that comes to mind? Okay, [laugh]. Okay, so I've got three words or phrases and I'm gonna say one, and then you can just tell me what comes to mind for you. Okay? Okay. Yep. All right. First word design.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Complicated.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Second word business.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Oh overlooked.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And final word, flash. Gordon.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- It's not a word. The song, the Lyric Queen and Freddy going, ah, it, it's just Freddie Mercury at his best.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that will be in the show notes, I can guarantee
- Ryan Rumsey:
- You. Right? Transcriptions, right?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. [laugh]. Hey Ryan, thank you so much. It's been such a great conversation today. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. And once again, thank for so generously sharing your experiences and your insights and your vulnerability with us. It's been a very real conversation. It's been a very important conversation and I know people are gonna get a lot of value out of it. So thank you once again.
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Thanks so much for having me, Brendan. I really appreciate it. I've really enjoyed it. And you're a gracious host. Thank you so much,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Ryan. What's the best way that people can connect with you?
- Ryan Rumsey:
- Pretty easy. There's two ways. There's just @RyanRumsey on all the socials on LinkedIn as well. And then Second Wave Dive. So at Second Wave Dive it's the same for the URLs, ryanrumsey.com, second wave, dive.com, and Ryan is more of the personal stuff kind of neglected these days. And then second wave Dive is all the stuff around courses and communities and coaching. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks Ryan. Everybody check those out. Thank you. We'll be linking to those in the show notes as well. And look, if you've enjoyed today's conversation, give the video alike. Leave us a comment for myself or for Ryan, subscribe to the channel and we'll keep these great conversations with experience leaders sharing their wisdom coming. And until next time, everybody keep being brave.