Doreen Lorenzo
Design is a Craft, Perfected With Practice
In this episode of Brave UX, Doreen Lorenzo shares how to lead creative people well 🎈, what it takes to create innovative products 🚀, and why she’s redefining design education 🧑🏫.
Highlights include:
- Has design education become too expensive and elitist?
- Why did you leave Catholic school for a local public school?
- How did you navigate the needs of frog’s shareholders and its staff?
- Why did you occasionally draw out interviews when hiring people?
- How do we ensure design remains a respected craft-based profession?
Who is Doreen Lorenzo?
Doreen is the Assistant Dean of the School of Design and Creative Technologies, and the Founding Director of the Center for Integrated Design 🖥️, both at the University of Texas. Through these roles, she's helping to prepare the next generation of designers.
Before joining UT, Doreen had a storied career as an executive leader in global design firms, most notably at Frog Design 🐸, which she joined in 1997 as President of Digital.
By 2004 Doreen had become President of Frog Worldwide and during her tenure, the company evolved from a 50-person design boutique, to one of the world's leading global product strategy and design firms, with over 1,100 staff and a high-profile array of Fortune 500 clients 📈.
Doreen writes a column for Fast Company’s Co.Design, where she profiles a diverse mix of world-class women. Additionally, she regularly speaks at industry conferences and private events, and has been featured in ABC News, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Fortune, The New York Times, and many other media outlets 🦉.
Transcript
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Why is a designer coming to you? Designers are still the ninjas. It's years of training. It's a craft, it's a skill and you can't do it in 14 weeks, so I think going forward, for me it's always been, that's great. Let's do those bootcamps, but they're not designers. Whenever we thought, I've been designer, I can do this. Actually, no. You could learn some tricks, but you're not a designer. It's a skill and it takes time and it's a craft.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
- My guest today is Doreen Lorenzo. Doreen is the assistant dean of the School of Design and Creative Technologies and the founding director of the Centre for Integrated Design, both at the University of Texas. Through these roles, she's helping to prepare the next generation of designers.
- Before joining UT, Doreen had a storied career as an executive leader in global design firms, most notably at Frog Design, which she joined in 1997 as president of Digital. By 2004, Doreen had become president of Frog Worldwide and during her tenure, the company evolved from a 50 person design boutique to one of the world's leading global product strategy and design firms with over 1100 staff and a high profile array of Fortune 500 clients.
- After 16 years, Doreen left Frog to become president of Quirky. Then in 2015, she co-founded the Mobile Ethnographic Insights Company, Vidlet with Friend and former Co-CEO of Frog. Patricia Roller.
- An active participant in the business community. Doreen serves as a board member for VIDA & Co and SKU. She's also an advisory board member of Vyntelligence, a digital platform for transforming complex analogue work.
- Doreen writes a column for Fast Company's Co-Design where she profiles a diverse mix of world-class women. Additionally, she regularly speaks at industry conferences and private events and has been featured in ABC News, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Fortune, The New York Times, and many other media outlets. And now she's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Doreen, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Thank you, Brendan. Thank you for that lovely introduction.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's lovely to have you here, Doreen, and I really wanted to start this conversation at the start at the beginning, and I understand that you grew up in Glendale, Queens, New York City and you are the youngest of three having two older brothers. How would you describe your upbringing?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- It was magical. It was wonderful. I really had the most wonderful parents who believed that we could do anything even though we were not wealthy, we didn't have a lot of money. My father was a huge believer in education and he realised that education was the way out and never questioned anything that we did. Never tried to tell us that we had to do something in particular, so I was a mistake. So I was much younger than my two older brothers who were geniuses when it came to science and math and there comes me, I was the artistic kid who kind of came along and my parents were like, that was great. So I didn't realise my fortune with my family until you get older and you go to college and you see what you could have had and I was really lucky. So it was wonderful. It was loving. I grew up in an enormous Italian family, so tonnes of cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents. We lived. It was very gregarious and very fun. It was good. I didn't know what direction I was going to. I just kind of followed my soul and my heart and what I liked.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What do you think your parents would say now if they knew that you were working in higher education given that they placed so much value on education?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Oh yeah. I was fortunate when I took this. My father was still alive. My mother had died, but my father was still alive and he was just beyond excitement. I mean, this was probably the pinnacle to go to higher ed to start a school who does that, right? Who gets that opportunity to start a school and to really make an impact on people's lives? I think reflecting on my upbringing, they made an impact and if I can just do a portion of that to help these students, that's the best. I'm at the part of my life where it's all about giving back.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I heard you reflect once about your father saying that he'd once told you, and I'll quote him now or you quoting him more to the point. Apparently he said, don't ever say no to anything and that made me wonder, I was curious what was it that he experienced in his life that made him believe that?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Well, my father very much, I mean my father was born in 1917, so again, you have to, he was much older when I was born. He was born in 1917 to very poor parents. He was very smart, got a scholarship to college, but his parents wouldn't let him go. It was a school away in Wisconsin and they wouldn't let him go because he had to work and support the family, their family, and so he did. He worked and he supported himself and he supported them and he went to college at night and never quite finished. And so for him, he should have done it and he should have been a little more defiant and he never wanted to set that up for us. He also thought that if you're not doing brain surgery, you could pretty much figure it out. If you're not going to hurt anybody with something, it's usually a problem to be filled. So he was very much around, we call that now creative thinking or critical thinking, but there was a lot of that discourse that went on around the table all the time that we would talk in that world. So taking that into my life, I think from him and learning that the worst that can happen is it doesn't work. That's not failure, that's learning. It's continuous learning.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes. I know you have very strong feelings about the F word there, the failure word. I want to just stay with you briefly if we can, just on your family. You mentioned your brothers that they were very smart with maths and other subjects. I think one of them ended up being a doctor and the other one a lawyer. And you also mentioned that there was a bit of a gap between your youngest older brother and yourself arriving. What did you end up studying in college and how did your parents feel about that choice?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I studied theatre in college, so my two older brothers studied physics and I studied theatre and you know what they did? They came to every play I went to. They just said, Hey, that's great. I had to audition to get into the programme and my father drove me out to the school to audition and I did and I got into the programme and about two years in, it's like I don't really want to be in theatre, but I love creativity and I, at the time I was working at the radio station, I was working on little videos and I decided I wanted to go to graduate school and study film and video, and so that's what I did when I got out of college. But my parents, they never said to me, you're going to live in a dumpster because you're choosing to be in a creative field. They were very supportive and I think that plays played a role. It was they believed that I could do something which made me believe I could do something.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I understand. You also had a rather special creative auntie. What was special about your auntie and what role, if any, do you feel that she may have provided or acted as some sort of an example of someone who can make a wonderful life out of being a creative person?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- She was born before her time. Her name was Ana, and she was born, she was my mother's youngest sister. They were very close, but they couldn't be more opposite, so my aunt was the original beatnik. She was a bohemian living in Greenwich Village, painting, singing. She was a trained opera singer. She sang for a while in the chorus of Metropolitan opera, so you got to be good, but she'd want to do that. Then she decided she wanted to write and then she wanted to paint and she always made a living. She never had a tonne of money. She always made a living doing stuff, but she taught us, she was the first one to take me to a play, the first one to take me to an art museum. She would take me to the, we went to the opera all the time, looking at the world through colours and just beauty. Now, on the flip side of that was also like being an artist sometimes is tough, and so I saw that part of it. She never married, so she had lot because we have this huge family. She had a lot of nieces and nephew and one particular Saturday she had us all come over to her apartment. I was probably nine, it's probably 10 of us, and she had a whole bunch of paint and we finger painted all her furniture.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wonderful.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- That was what she did. So there was a lot of expression of through clothing of just being yourself and being accepted for that. She was really the light that brought that I could see that creativity and what it could possibly be, and I liked it. I loved her free spirit and her joy of life. I loved all that part of it and I think I was very attracted to that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What do you think she saw in you,
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Somebody who would just be her pal? We were very close, and so someone who would just, we did things together. As I got older, I mean unfortunately she died fairly young. She died when I was in college, but we would do stuff together. We would go to museums, we would go to plays. I think it was someone who appreciated her and that made her feel good. She wanted to make an impact on people too.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You talked there about the creative expression that you could embrace when you were spending time with her. I also understand that in contrast to that, you spent the initial part of your formal education in a Catholic school previously. You've described that environment as stifling and you actually convinced your parents to send you to a large public school, so to let you leave the Catholic school. What did you receive at the public school that you weren't receiving at Catholic school?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Just expression and creativity and people that were different from me. Everybody was a lemon. You think about that, you wore a uniform, you went to school. Everybody did the same thing. There was no free expression. You actually couldn't question the doctrine, which I got kind of whacked a few times for questioning the doctrine. Well, that doesn't make sense or that's not a true story. How could they be or how could they live in the desert for 40 years? Just asking those questions and the nun will whack. You can't do that. And the nuns just told my parents that I talk too much all the time. I was constantly in trouble for talking too much and my father years later goes back to some event at the church. My parents were I'm I'm way into my career, and he sees one of the nuns. We thought they were so old, they were probably 10 years, five years older than us. Who knows? They were young and he sees one the nuns and she says, oh yeah, I remember your daughter. She talked a lot. So my father said, yeah, and that mouth has really done her well. She's done really well with that mouth. So that was my dad.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- He sounds like a great guy.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I went to this public school and it was by no means a magnet school, and her brothers went to a magnet school. They went to Brooklyn Tech. I went to the local public high school, Richmond Hill, but I met people I'd never met before. I didn't know people that weren't like me, that didn't look like me, and it was like I was feeding, it was like a frenzy for me. I joined the yearbook club, the photography club, the theatre group. I became English and I did really well. I mean, I was in all the AP classes. I did really well. I thrived in what people would say was a tough high school. I loved it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thinking about that difference in culture between the Catholic school and the public school, and then this may be a long bow to be drawing here, but then thinking about how design has become over the last possibly two decades, more closely enmeshed with the corporate machinery, with the growth of internal design teams, almost at the expense of consultancies where design originally seems to have had its home, do you feel at all design is in danger of becoming more like the Catholic school and less like that energetic private school, a public school that you attended?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Well, Brendan, you just hit my current talking point where I go off, so just sit down and be prepared. This was a really bad experiment that didn't work. So all of these corporations, all of these large consulting companies, they were going to go buy these design firms and they were going to get, so they thought the design that they wanted, they were going to be innovative and they were going to do all this. So for 15 years there was this feeding frenzy of buying these design firms at a premium price. However, they kind of missed a step. The step was nobody internal knew what to do with them. Design leaders didn't have the power to make change. It's not about the ideas. It's about convincing an organisation to trust you enough to begin to implement some of those ideas and when you're internal, much harder to do because they can just say no to you and send you back to your desk and that's it.
- External. They're paying you and they're paying you and they feel like they have to listen to you, and you as a external consultant have less to lose. So if they don't like it, okay, they paid you, you walk away. If they do like it, it's great. And so to me, this giant experiment of buying all these companies and we've just seen what happened in this past year, so many of them laid people off. They overpaid. They paid people too much money and they didn't get what they wanted. So the pendulum is once again swinging and we're back to consultancies and we're back to smaller things because at the end of the day, things still have to be designed. It's not like design's going to go away, but this grand experiment of I'm going to put all these designers in this organisation and they're going to do well, but I'm not going to have anybody who understands how to implement design in the organisation. It just doesn't work. This is where I've been talking about this now for five years, especially when I watch it in school, it's like, this does not work. This does not work. This is just like pink the pig, but true innovation, doing something unique and different.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So thinking about that, if the pendulum is swinging back the other way towards the consultancies, what role should consultancies now be playing given that we've had had it be the other way for the last 15 years or so and things have changed in that time, what role should they be playing in their clients' businesses today?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Well, I think it goes back to what consultancies do is solving the problems for them. Going into an organisation, having the insights to see things. Organisations don't see bringing them solutions and laying the breadcrumbs that they follow those, and I call those success breadcrumbs. Every success leads to the next job. So laying your success breadcrumbs so that people, and that's how change is made. I think going back to what the root of any consultant does, it is you're looking at it with a fresh perspective. You're looking at it at something different. Good design as you know how to find the insights, you know what you're looking for. You can see body language and people and what they're saying and the environment, and you can come up with pretty good solutions and bringing that in and having the organisation trust you to keep making those changes.
- That's why I say it's breadcrumbs. I really believe one of the things we started was this, I'm going to be disruptive and I'm going to come into your organisation. I'm going to change everything. It's like, yeah, don't do that. I don't need anybody to be disruptive. Nobody wants that, but if you come in and you make some great change and I don't even know it and everybody's happier, that's a win for everybody. And that to me is where we need to be. I don't think this is so hard. I think a lot of people cashed in on a lot of money. I mean, I've had people who were just forming design company after design company and selling it. It was great. I was like, what? That's a job.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What would you do different today? Say that you were stepping into a role similar to what you did at Frog as the global president again today. What would you do differently given that time has now moved on a little, if anything?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I think that size was hard to manage. We did it and we were owned by a private equity company, and so growth was everything, but I think that's a large size for a design firm. I do like the fact that we were dispersed, so there wasn't really a headquarters. I was in Austin and the COO was in New York and finance and HR in California. So I liked all of that because I think that actually made it more interesting. I liked having offices at different parts of the world, but being so big, it's hard. That's hard to manage. It's a lot of mouths to feed.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You had a really interesting alternative offer on the table before you joined Frog, and I'm going to take you back now to 1997, and this is the year that Steve Jobs returned to Apple, right? So I believe you had an offer, an offer from Apple, yet Hartwood Eslinger who was the founder and CEOI believe at the time of Frog, called you and he offered you a job. Why did you accept his offer and choose Frog over Apple?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Well, a couple of reasons practical. I was in, I didn't want to go back to California. I was in Austin. So that was one practical. The second part is I had been working with a small team of people, Hartman about a year and a half prior, had purchased a little digital software company called Virtual Studios, and that's Mark Ralston for Margo. Colin Cole and I had been working with these guys on getting the website. We were going to sell computers online, the website, up and running, and we did, and it was integrated into SAP. It was a fabulous experience and I really liked working with them. I liked this digital thing that was happening, and I thought, this is a brave new world. There's nothing, we don't know what's happening, but it's exciting and I think I want to be part of it. And so that was the reason I decided against better judgement . Other people would've said, were telling me take the job at Apples, take the job at Apple. That's a job at Apple, but I don't know. I'll always try something and turned out to be great.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, didn't it, and it wasn't long after you joined Frog that you did become the global president, and you mentioned that the company was owned for a time by a private equity firm, and then I think it changed her hands a couple of times after that and was owned by larger consultancies. You spoke about the challenge. It sounded like a challenge anyway, of that trajectory of growth, of headcount that the firm went through. During that time that you were president, was there some sort of guiding philosophy or set of principles that you used to navigate both? I suppose the relationship with the ownership of the firm and I suppose the needs of the people that make up the firm
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- With any business profitability is freedom. So if you stay profitable, people leave you alone. And so that was my mantra and how we did that was, and this was where it gets hard hire, truly extraordinary people that could do extraordinary things with the client. So they weren't your run of the mill people. I often said it was going into the field of daisies and finding the rose and picking that rose out in this huge field of daisies to find these people because they were going to make a difference. And with all these relationships, it's really about the people you work with, you feel with your clients, you feel that. And so on one hand it was, we stay profitable, but we stay profitable because we are producing phenomenal work and the work was in fact amazing. And so we produced and it was this cycle, and that is how we stayed on that track. Even through the 2008 downturn, I remember going into a board meeting and they said, you haven't lost any clients. And I said, no. And they said, why? And I said, well, I deployed everyone for the last six months to go to see every single client because it's harder to fire somebody if they're sitting in front of you. And that was just my philosophy. It's a people business and we're going to trust each other and we're going to get through this.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is a really interesting story, and I wonder if you can compare and contrast it against what we've seen in the design field recently with a lot of designers being let go. Do you feel that same connection or the difficulty that people face, it's difficult to fire someone who's in front of you. Do you feel that that still exists in the current corporate climate?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- No, and I think it's a different situation because this was then all the businesses taking everybody internal. So these are all the people that were internal and you listen to the stories and they're awful. They're fired by HR people over Zoom. I mean, it's really just impersonal and not how you treat humans. I think, again, it gets back to what we said before, they overhired didn't know what they were hiring for. It was like they just wanted to eat all the candy in the candy store, so they got everybody that they can. And then they were like, now what do we do?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Who is the they? Doreen
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Corporate businesses. I mean people who want, look, if you are in a technology business, let's say, you have to stay ahead and design is a differentiator. So if I get people in my house, but you have to understand how design works best. I mean the companies that everybody admires, right? Everybody, oh, I admire Apple, guess what? They cannibalise every single product they have to get to the next product. So businesses have to understand how this works, how the trajectory works, what you need to do, and that's sometimes hard. It's again, easier to do with the stranger that isn't on your payroll than it is with your employee when the employee comes in. And I've heard so many stories of employees walking out and getting frustrated because they know what the right thing is to do from a design perspective, but the company won't budge. I would say in any job, you can't be afraid to lose. You may lose your job, but if you're standing up for what you believe in a positive way, you usually don't,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of standing up for what you believe in, I understand that when you first became Global president, you made a concerted effort to bring more females into the executive leadership of Frog to have, and I think you've characterised it previously as a better gender balance at the top. If I'm misrepresenting you, please correct me, but what was important to you about doing that when you became the global CEO or global President?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- It wasn't just women, it was all, it was diversity in general, right? Design is about solving problems for the world, and if you have one species with one colour who does everything, you're not really getting in the input that you need, particularly when you're designing large consumer products for what the world needs. And so that's one area. So just from a design perspective, and we can talk a little bit about why I went to a state school to start this programme very similar, but we needed to diversify so that our design would be better. You're bringing different perspectives to it. We also know there's many studies done on this that female led organisations do better, so let's bring 'em in, let's get that. And we did. We had great group of people. It was about 50 50 men, women, but all different ethnic groups and it made a difference. And it was interesting. Everybody got along. So I didn't really deal with infighting our stuff. It was a great team dynamic. Some days were harder than other always, but most of the part, it was a terrific team of people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've heard you talk before about the importance of having confidence in design and more specifically in the business aspects of what it is that people are doing, and you've encouraged in particular women to cultivate more of that confidence. Why have you gone to pains previously to make that message clear?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- A couple of reasons. One, in the design world, designers don't. Creative people in general don't have confidence. There's very few. We see some of it as bravado. So we have to build confidence is a big part of the programme that we have at school is building, helping them build their confidence to believe in their selves. And then you lay on top of this as women, I mean we're getting better, but women of my generation, they weren't praised. They weren't given the confidence they needed to get out there. And so I thought part of our job is to do that and to make people, because if you have confidence when you're giving the client what they may perceive as an off the wall idea, but you're confident about it that you can deliver this and it will change their business, they might just go for it. But if you're like, ah, well, I don't know. I think it's a good idea, but I'm not really sure. This is what I found, that's not going to fly. So part of it is in order to get your project completed, that's something you'd have to do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You gave the negative side of what a lack of confidence might look like when presenting, say design idea or design work, what does the converse of that look like? So what does an appropriate level that's short of bravado but conveys enough confidence to clients, what does that look like? What does that presence feel like?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Excitement and just you believe in it and you believe in it, and you have the insights and the research to back it up. So it's not just me or the team going, yeah, we really think we get a good idea because here's all the reasons. Here's what we found, here's what we saw. But you believe in it and you're not wavering on that belief and people feel that. And so I think you don't want to do something because I think in design, you don't just do something someone pays you. That's never the best to pick up your paycheck. You do something, you really want to make a difference, and you're changing the things for the better. It's a problem solving skill, and if you come in with that kind of confidence that you can do it and belief and excitement, it's infectious.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Doreen was being president of Frog, as glamorous as it sounds,
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- It was fine. It was great. I mean, I love the people I got such, I don't think any job when you're head of anything is glamorous. It's a lot of work. Nobody is. It may seem I travelled the world and I got to meet some great people and great organisations and that was terrific, but I worked seven days a week, all hours. I'd start at four in the morning because I'm working, I'm working east and I'm going west till 11 or night. So they were long days. It was a lot of work, but I love the output and most important, I love the people. I love travelling to studios. I love, I used to just travel the world, going to the studios, going to see clients, and I just love that part. But it's glamorous. Maybe some days you'd go like, I'm at the White House. This is really cool.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about that. What took you to the White House
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Was the Smithsonian has the National Design Awards and Frog at the time had won one. So Mark Ralston and I went to the white and Mark would always wear a T-shirt and jeans, so he got to wear a suit. I got to wear a fancy dress and we went to the White House and Michelle Obama and President Obama were there. It was really kind of wonderful. Those are when you go, wow, this is really fun or those are cool moments.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is it a role that you feel happy or content with the price that you paid to live it?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Yeah, I mean, I have a happy and contented family, so if you ask my family about it, did they, I still seem to be the room mom in both my kids' classes go to all the soccer games. And I remember once flying back from South Africa going to a play that my son was flying back to another part. So you do what you can. So yeah, it was worth it. It was worth it. I get to meet people like you when you lay out the career, you're like, oh, okay, that was all right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, hat's off to you. I honestly don't know how you could do that play with a flight either side. It's what a wild ride. I understand near your end of your tenure at Frog, there was a speech that you gave and a gentleman by the name of Bob Metcalf might've been in the audience, and that culminated with what you've described, I believe, as a year of eating well, which then led to you joining the University of Texas, how things came to be. Tell me how did you end up becoming?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Yeah, I had already left Frog. I had been at Quirky, I had left Quirky, and I decided I was going to take a year off, which I had never done to really kind of say, okay, what do I want to do next? I knew I didn't want to go run another business. I had done that, I had done that at Frog, I had done that at Quirky. I was like, I just need to, I dunno, maybe I'll just sit on boards and give speeches or I wasn't sure, but I thought I'll take a year off. But I had been invited to pop tech, which was in Camden, Maine to give a speech. And my speech was really about how education is not really teaching students the jobs for the jobs of the future, particularly in the creative industries. So I gave that speech and it resonated with a lot of people.
- A lot of people were hiring and they're like, yeah, you're right. And there was a guy in the audience named Bob Metcalf who's the founder of ethernet who was running the innovation school in the engineering department at UT and said, well, why don't you come and talk to us about it? I'm like, okay. So I did and I ended up, yes, eating really well. They all like to eat well and went to a lot of lunches, lot of dinners, and finally the dean in the College of Fine Arts said, I don't know what you can do. I don't really understand it, but I think you're going to do something, so why don't you come and work at ut? And at that point, I had gotten two other job offers, and this was only literally months into my saying, I'm not going to work. I'm like, Ugh.
- So I thought about it and I thought, yeah, this makes no sense. I don't have a PhD. I'm not an academic. I mean I have a master's degree, but I don't have a terminal degree. This makes no sense, but I'm going to do it. And I was excited about it and so I kind of dove in and I said, I'm only going to work. So I started the Centre for Integrated Design because what I wanted to do was to teach undergraduate. So I thought if we can get 'em as puppies when they don't have bad habits yet, and teach them about human-centered design. Not that they would be designers, but they would understand when somebody walked into an, when they went on to work in an organisation, what this process was trying to do, how innovation really came to be, how you would then implement it.
- And so we started this programme. I can't even tell you how it took off. It was scary. We went from one class the first semester to seven classes the next semester to 13 classes, and currently I think we have 37 classes in the centre and a thousand students taking classes. So it's been amazing. Along about a year later, the provost and the dean at the time were like, this design thing is really popular. We should do something. So we started, they had a couple of nascent programmes that were just all hanging out there, and so we just put them under one school because the School of Design and Creative Technologies, I became the assistant dean. That was seven years ago. We have 650 students in that degree programme and has, it's growing. We had a 20% increased applications this year to the programme. I mean, it keeps growing.
- We're actually out of space. So anybody listening who wants to donate a building, we will take it. Why the state university was interesting to me though, why I liked it. I had been asked to go to other universities to start these kind of programmes, but why it was interesting to me to go to a state school is because this is the flagship university in the state. So these are the top 6% are automatically admitted. These are very smart students, but it's also very diverse. And I could get a kid from the Rio Grande Valley, I could get a kid from, there's all sorts of students with different demographics, and to me that's what design needed. And if we wanted to start changing what design looked like, we needed to start at the education process. So I got to say one more thing. The other thing we did about three years in we're realising that we kind of was hard to get.
- These students we're like, what are we doing wrong here? So we realised that every design school has a portfolio requirement, but guess what? If you're in a high school that's underperforming, you're a high performing kid in an underperforming high school, you don't have a design portfolio. Nobody taught you a design. You may have a couple of art projects, but you're not going to apply. So we took away the portfolio requirement and we turned it into a creative prompt. So they get three choices they could choose from, they could make videos, they could photography, they could write poetry. We just want to see creatively how we're thinking. The year that we did that, we had an 80% increase in applications to the programme. And those kids, I was just with a student this morning, she told me she came in and she didn't have a portfolio and she did this film and she said, I never would've gone to this because I didn't know what to do with a portfolio. I didn't know how to make one. This kid's super talented. So that's where you bring in students that will make a difference.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's interesting that you recognised or someone within your organisation recognised the gate that was in the way of these students that come from those less privileged backgrounds. And it's reminded me of something that you've said previously about UT and why you joined it, and I'll quote you now if I may. You've said, I want to make sure that students who by and large cannot afford some of these wonderful private schools that are out there are going to get the same kind of education. My question is, has design education world-class design education become too expensive, too elitist?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Absolutely. A hundred percent of the schools that we know, those private schools, I mean they're wonderful schools, but they're $90,000 a year. I mean, that's a lot of money. So what happens, the tuition at the University of Texas for an in-state student is $11,500. So what happens if I can deliver that education at 11,000? And that's what we've done. We have hired 15 new faculty members from all the schools that you want them to come from with all this diversity and background, and we've just changed. We went in and we totally changed the curriculum both in the MFA and the undergraduate design degree, and we added a brand new programme, which is a master's of design and health where students go to school with third year medical students because we recognise the health situation, particularly in the US is kind of a mess. So we're really trying to look at how do you put design into these organisations?
- So it's been, yeah, I mean for me, these kids are getting phenomenal education and you could see it on the work. I mean the work seriously, Brendan would make you just cry. It's so good. And these kids are so talented and these professors are so dedicated and we're able to give it to students who never would've gotten. 35% of our students are first generation, so they don't have parents that would've sent them to college. They're paying for this, they're working 30 hours a week. This is important. This is how we make great change in the world. We put these designers out there with this diverse background,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And by the time these kids come to you, I mean they're adults, right? They're 18, so they're very young adults when they come to you, they've already been through an education system for 13 years or so by that point, what do you feel is missing in those kids after those 13 years that if they had it earlier, so by the time they came to you would set them up to be more successful, not just in college, but in their careers as designers, after they leave
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Critical thinking, they take multiple choice questions, so really teaching them how to write and how to deconstruct arguments because I mean, you can deconstruct an argument that's part of the design process so that a lot of that is lost. It's winning or losing. It's having the right answer. The first lecture always to a student, there might not be a right answer. Everybody's answer is going to be different. That's really hard at first for them to kind of wrap their head around, but that's what we're trying, that's a missing component that's the schools don't offer right now, unless you're kind of in an elite, like a private school or a more elite school where they have these kind of innovation labs and things, but you're just going to a regular public high school I went to, there's nothing there. They barely have an art class or a music class.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm busy doing it. The moment with my five-year old, I'm using a programme called Math Seeds, which is part of another programme called Reading Eggs. And it was interesting doing this with him, sitting alongside him and noticing behaviours in him that I'm not entirely comfortable with. And it's to do with, he was doing a quiz yesterday and he got too wrong out of 10 and he's like, I did a bad job. And I'm like, where does this come from? I keep reminding him, it's not about whether or not you got them all right, it's about whether or not you are learning from the ones that you didn't get the answers right for. And it's happened so early on this sort of standardised testing that we do of kids. It's very difficult I think, unless you're alongside them to try and unpick that as they go through the education system. But I'm interested in your speculation on what might be a better way seeing a society's deemed standardised valuation as an important thing for assessing attainment in education. What might be a better way to add to that, some more critical thinking alongside that standardised evaluation?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Well, it depends. I mean, if they're lucky enough to have their parents who are there, a lot of parents have to work and they're not there, but are there camps? Are there afterschool programmes that we can offer? I also think just making sure that these schools never lose their music and their art programmes and you give them more, is a way to really help them through that too. They take away or even playtime or creative time, they take that away. I think that's another important, because not all kids have parents that are able, not that the parents don't want to, but they have nine to five jobs or eight to six jobs and they can't. So what can we do at the school in that elementary that it's after school that is clubs that we can form. I know we do summer camps and we have a whole bunch of scholarships we give to kids.
- And the purpose of that is not that we want to run summer camps, but we're trying to bring these kids in. So we go to a lot of schools around the state and we're asking the teachers, who is a kid that you think is creative? A lot of these kids often are, they're the problem children. They run all over. And because they need that outlet. And so we bring those kids into the summer camp and we open their eyes to what is possible, and I think that is what we need to be doing more of.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I want to take a slightly different track here, if we may, which is to come back to your own thoughts on your career. And I've heard you previously say about your career, my goal was not about my ascension. For me, it always has been and it still is the case now how do I build a culture of creativity? How do I make people be creative? I'm only going to be successful if everybody is creative. Now clearly this is what you're doing again in this current chapter of your career at UT and what you were doing at Frog and other organisations. But where does this focus on other people's success come from?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Well, it's the focus on people. It's not take out the success, but I think we need to support each other. I'm very much people driven and when you're people driven, and by the way, Brendan, I only found that out about myself years later when people deconstructed who I was. But so I'm people driven. I like like to have people around me that are successful. I like team dynamics. I like how that all works together. And I feel like what I have seen now, lots of years of experience doing this, when you have a team dynamic like that, the reward is great. The work is terrific, the output is so much better. And so just creating this, I used to call it like a moat, like we create our little, put a moat around it and we create a little world that we can live in and I'll keep all the boogeyman out of there and make sure people can just do their best. And it's surprising what would happen there. We are better together as a society if we work together. And I think I can only do my part and this is what I could do. I could vote and I could do my part, and this is how I contribute.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned building a little moat there, and I wonder what relevance, if any, it has to something else that I've heard you speak about before, which is, and I'll paraphrase here, you were given some good advice by someone at one point, which was to, as a leader, manage your emotions. And I was curious in terms of that management of emotions, what does it look like to manage your emotions? Well, as a leader, I also know that you are very big on an empathetic style of leadership. So I was really keen to get into the specifics of what that looks like for you.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Emotions are great. We need our emotions, absolutely, we need to be emotional. But you do better with your emotions. If you're not hysterical, you're not yelling, you're not bawling, you're not. That is where, how do you take those emotions and focus them and harness them? And I think that's what I learned over many years. I was pretty young when this person told me this, and I thought that was probably the only great advice I got. I know everybody had mentors. I had none. It's probably only a great advice I got, which was how do you just manage those emotions and you'll do really well? Now, empathy is not really emotions. It's really understanding people at a deep personal level. What makes somebody tick? Why are they saying that? And when you can understand that and you take it out of yourself and you can understand what motivates people, you can make better decisions.
- And even if those decisions are not what everybody would want, but they understand where it's coming from and they understand that you're looking at everything, you can make hard choices. You need to make hard decisions, but you still keep that team cohesive together. So for me, the emotions stay rational in a way. But everybody, I mean, I cry at sad movies or with teams sometimes when I'm talking to the team cry at graduation, are you kidding? Those kids walk across the stage, you see me bawling. I mean, it's as exciting for me. Or they come running into my office and tell me they got this cool job. I'm really happy about that. That makes me happy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of those emotional states that could be characterised as unhelpful, perhaps irrational, and it's one that you've been particularly critical on previously is imposter syndrome. And I just want to quote you again now about what you've said about this. You've said, so women need to kind of throw out imposter syndrome because men have it too. It's called fear. And you've got to learn to get over your fears. How has fear shown up for you in your career and how did you end up getting over it?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- God, I'm fearful of all the stuff I have to always do. I mean, you going in, especially because, let's face it, Brendan, I went, I was a theatre major, then I went to film school and I worked in that. And then all of a sudden I'm thrown into marketing and design and I'm running organisations. I don't have an MBA, I'm not a designer. So there's a lot of fear there, but you got to put one foot in front of the other and celebrate your successes and learn from the things that didn't work and a lot of things didn't work. And I think that's what I learned as one of the things about being in a consultancy is you get to talk to a lot of people. And what I learned is everybody loves that, right? Everybody gets thrown into the next job or gets promoted to the next thing and you're like, there's a fearful thing.
- Can I do this? Yeah, that's why they're hiring you. And I think women, what I have seen is it's an easy out to say it's imposter syndrome. So face the fears, it's uncomfortable and walk through the duck tunnel because there really is light at the end of it. And you, again, you're given this role, you're told you can do this because you can. So just embrace it and do your best and you might trip up and things not might go perfect. Chances are you're not going to burn the house down. You'll be fine. And that for me is what, I just have to learn that along the way. And I think it goes back to my dad just saying, just do it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How do you think of your role, the purpose of what you are doing, Doreen right now? What do you see is that role for the people you're interacting with?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- When you read the bio, you go, well, you've lived a long time, Doreen. I've had, I've, I'm very thankful for the opportunities I've had and I've learned a lot along the way. And I just want to impart some of that knowledge so that people don't walk into the same walls, they walk into different walls. But if I can impart some of that knowledge that helps them. And I think that's why this part of my life has been so incredibly fulfilling because I'm getting to do that every day. I was in a class this morning, it's the last day of school. I was in a class this morning with these students and it was the end of their portfolio and interviewing class. That's what this is. And so part of it is they have to learn how to talk to people and just watching them and they have to interview you. And it was just for me so gratifying to see how far these students have come in a semester. So that's kind of where I am in my life. Just, hey, I'm giving back because fun to do and I don't need to have another p and l in my life ever again.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned interviews just a few seconds ago. I understand that. I don't know if this applies today, but I understand why you're at Frog. One of your favourite techniques when you were interviewing people was to purposefully draw out those interviews. What did you find was valuable in doing that with candidates and just how long did you tend to draw these interviews out for?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Over time, you get to learn a lot about people. People are always on their best behaviour, the first or second interview. And then over time you get to see how do they interact. You'd always stay in contact, but if things didn't happen fast or how do they interact if you went out? How do they treat the wait staff at a restaurant, restaurant work with you? I mean, I remember it was some position, we're going to hire this person and we went out to lunch and we're eating lunch and they just lean across the table and start eating my french fries off my plate. You're
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Kidding me.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- No, I'm not. I'm not kidding you. Not kidding you. And I'm watching this and the person I'm with is kicking me under the table because this person obviously felt so comfortable with me that they would reach across the table and just started eating. Never asked, just started eating my french fries. I didn't eat them. I just, I had finished most night meal. I wasn't going to eat the french fries. They were just sitting there. You learn a lot
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If you finger a bad thing for their candidacy. How did that play out? Bad.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I mean, it was bad because that person's not reading people. You're reading somebody's personal space. Think about what they do with their employees. Think about what they do with clients, not a good thing. That's a negative side and a positive side. You find out a lot about people too. The more you get to know them, you find out about their patients, they come up with good ideas, you find out about how they would, like I said, interact with people, their writing style, how they would communicate with you. Those were all really good things. And so I liked that and I would draw it out. So it was like months and months and months, but it wasn't like, okay, you're hired, you have the job. Again, I go back to picking those flowers, right? Those very precious flowers out. You're looking for people who could live in the world, could exist, could do the hard stuff and the easy stuff and get along and work in a team.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is counter to one of those conventional narratives around a higher fast fire, faster. This is not that.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Well, you can treat people any way you want. I mean, I think we're human and I think you have to get to know people and make them feel comfortable about being successful too. I remember I heard a receptionist and she came into my office and she said she had long sleeves on. She said, I have tattoos. And I said, well, I don't have any, but that's okay. And she was really nervous out of her element and she went on to become executive vice president of the company. She was so good, and she was so smart that you just kind of keep drawing. You kept drawing their success out of them and you learn about somebody and what they could do and what they can accomplish and just, she went on to be wildly successful at frog, but she was super nervous and she took the receptionist job.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What made her so good,
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Very smart, insightful, could see problems before they happened. Just that can understand objects, could work really well with a team and had a lot of dynamics and had a life before that. And Brooke kind of brought that to it. But yeah, just somebody who great ideas could work with a team, knew how to get the best out of people and clients loved her.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Coming back to something you said a little earlier about how people treat the weight staff, I think that is an incredibly interesting thing to look at when you're out with somebody. And I also, I dunno if you've found this yourself. When you engage, wait staff, by looking them in the eye, some of them almost seem quite surprised that someone's actually, when they're dropping off your coffee or whatever, is actually looking at them and thanking them for doing that. And that's always struck me as an odd thing, but thinking about it, it probably suggests that it's atypical for people to interact with people in that way.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I believe it is. I'm hoping we're getting better, but I believe it is, and it's always been for me, it doesn't matter who the person is. How do you interact with somebody and should you make somebody stay a little better today? Right? Nobody, anybody's servant, get rid of that. Everybody's out there just doing a job. That might be their job. You're doing your job. Nobody's better or worse. So for me, that's really important because I think humility is one of the best things you could bring to the design world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Maybe I'm getting a little off topic here, but it also seems to be one of the principles that America was founded on was a sort of a revulsion or an aversion to that structured class system that was very prevalent in Europe, but perhaps is coming back in New Zealand. I see it creeping back in,
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I think it's coming back across. Yes, it's coming back. And I am not sure that that's what we want or what we need. We could go into, that's another podcast about the disparity wealth. But
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let me take us back on topic. So thinking about leadership now, and we've been touching on, I suppose empathy more broadly and the role and importance that plays in assessing people for how they might fit within a creative enterprise. Why is it that empathy seems to not be as highly valued, generally speaking as other leadership attributes like confidence?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I think it's getting there, but I think it's a soft skill that isn't taught. I mean, if most people come out of a business programme, they don't teach empathy. But if you come out design programme or if you other, I mean they didn't teach empathy in medical school until five years ago. So not thinking it was important. So I have asked this question for 20 years. I never understood it. People talk about it. I think they're afraid of it. People are afraid to show their emotions too because they think that that's a bad thing. Or if you are let down, if you're good to your people. So maybe that's the place. I think it is getting a little better out there maybe. But it goes back to if your people, the people that are working for you, if you give them the ability to be successful, that's all it takes.
- They're going to be successful. Guess what? You're going to be successful. I mean, so the idea that I got to do everything, I'm as the leader, I have to do everything. I have to tell everybody what to do. I have to throw chairs at people. I have to be hysterical. I have to tell them they have to be here seven days a week. What is the task that has to get done? How is the task going to get done? You lead that. I'm going to help you. I'm going to create the environment so you can make that happen. Some weekends are worse than others, some days are worse than others. And then we're going to do this together and get to it. And it's just such a better way of getting an output. And you don't have burnout and you don't have people that are running out and you don't have people. I mean there was one point where I was like, more people have to quit frog so we can have a turnover. People were so excited about staying there. I remember thinking, wow, people don't leave. People don't leave. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've spoken about before, I think I'm just going to quote you here again. You've said if you're going to manage a business with people, you have to use something more than spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are one point of information. But I've seen too many businesses manage from the bottom up. They manage from the bottom of the spreadsheet, and that's just not the way to make a successful innovation happen. Just tell me more about
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- That. That says it all. That says it all. I mean think about it. If you think of all the innovations are the things we like or the things that we admire, if you put that down in a spreadsheet, you'd lose money. I mean from cars to electronics to theme parks. But what you have to tap into is how is that going to impact a person? How is that going to impact what is from a UN perspective, what is that person going to think? And if you understand the insights and you understand your customers, the three questions tell everybody, right, this is design. What's the problem you're trying to solve? What's the real problem? Because the problem often that somebody tells you is the problem is not the real problem. So first is finding that real problem. Second is understanding who you're really trying to solve that problem for.
- And the third is, is it worth solving? Because so many people will make design for design search. So those three questions answered can get you a lot of insight into understanding the innovation process. And if you do that, then putting it at the bottom of the spreadsheet and going to give you their idea, putting the iPhone at the bottom of the spreadsheet was disastrous. That would've been a disastrous move. Or look what must did with Tesla or, I hate using that one, but I mean there's just so many like that where you got to sometimes look at what's the output, where's this going, what's going to happen? And you take, it's a risk, but it's a calculated risk. And to me, that's how innovation has done. Having a bean counter tell you, you can't do something.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I love that. I love that word.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Yeah, but it's true. I mean, you've been there. I've been there. You're like, really? So that's why having confidence, having belief, understanding the users, having your research and your insights, so you are prepared to say why this is, you believe this is going to work and you're not going to go so far again that you bankrupt the company. So you're going to do your iterative tests, you're going to see where things are going and you're going to get that project to market.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You said a few things in there. I think there's some nuance in here to explore, and this may be just joining some dots together that we've already covered. So one of them was sometimes that sounded like this. You don't try and hit the ball out of the park every time. And coming back to something you said earlier in our conversation, which was around when you're making money, making profits, people leave you alone. And as I've started to wonder in terms of the behind the scenes, what's going on for you? When you were in this position, how much of it was discernment around which balls to hit for home? While I suppose on the other, behind the scenes, you are playing a really good game in terms of keeping those runs up on the board so that people aren't looking too closely at the innovations or the things that you are trying to really hit out of the park.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Sometimes we, it's interesting because it was client facing. It depended how many clients we had that wanted us to do something interesting and then we go do our homework. Sometimes we had an amazing amount of really wild, innovative projects going at once in different studios sometimes for competing clients that you had to keep servers and everything separate. So it really just all depended on what was going on. But you could see the progress to a point where with the client sign up for the next iteration because oftentimes this was done incrementally with the client, sign up for the next iteration. And that's where you begin to see that, okay, this is going to be successful. You're going to be profitable. The market is responding well to what you're putting out there. If it wasn't, you'd pull it back. I remember with one client did, this was years ago, we did a two screen phone. It was beautiful. Market wasn't ready for it. Here we are, whatever, 15 years later, and they have a two screen phone that they're selling wildly. I think Huawei has it or somebody has it. And I was laughing at that. We did. That market wasn't ready for it, even though it was beautiful, it looked great. They weren't ready to take it on
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Timing. Right,
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Timing sometimes. And on the opposite of that is you tell a client, pay attention to what this little upstart competitor is doing to you and they don't. And there's a lot of dead bodies that are laying out there as a result of that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, the arrogance that comes from that successful business model, the undoing of many a business.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of things that have been quite successful, one of the things that's been quite successful, and this ties back into education, has been the field of design over the last 40 years. It's become more and more successful in terms of making its way, I suppose more into, I think I mentioned the corporate machinery earlier. It's become seemed to become an integral part of what it takes to make a successful business. You've been quite critical previously of what you framed I think as design thinking bootcamps of the education of design. And of course now you are in a role as an educator in design, and you've suggested that in particular, that these bootcamps gloss over the hard part of design, which is actually what we were just talking about there, which is taking an idea and making it into an innovation that the market accepts. And you've gone so far as to say, and I'll quote you again here. I've spent 25 plus years pounding on the table about design only to have it become a fad. Is it really that bad? Are we really at the point now where design it's
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Better, I think better. Yeah, I think it's much better. I think at the time that I said that everybody was going to design bootcamp and learning how to be a designer and calling themselves designers. And so that was part of something I wanted to do when I started the centre, which of integrated design was you're not a designer. So here's how I make the analogy. I am really good with a spreadsheet. I'm good with p and ls. I know all this stuff. I had to learn it. I didn't have a finance degree. I had to learn all this stuff, so I'm really good. But you don't want me to be your CFO or your accountant, but I know enough. And so when the CFO or the accountant asked me for stuff, I know enough about it to understand why they're asking me the questions that they're asking and to work closely with them on that.
- I wanted everybody in the world that worked in an organisation that might have touched a designer to understand design principles. Why is a designer coming to you? Designers are still the ninjas. It's years of training. It's a craft, it's a skill. And you can't do it in 14 weeks. You can barely do anything in 14 weeks. So I think going forward, for me, it's always been, that's great. Let's do those bootcamps. But they're not designers. And that's where the world went upside down whenever they thought, I'm a designer, I can do this. And actually, no, no, no, no. You could help. You've learned some tricks to come up with some new ideas, but you're not a designer. And so I think we're right. I think the situation is getting better. I think a lot of those bootcamps people recognised weren't design, but for a while there it was pretty awful. Everybody was going to these 14 week camps and they're coming out trying to get jobs in UX and UI design, and you're like, oh, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. I took a course on LinkedIn and I can do this. No, it is a skill and it takes time and it's a craft.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So thinking about those designers that make up the craft side of the field and the current state of design and how it's perceived by others and organisations or maybe it's clients, if it's a consultancy that we're talking about, how should designers walk the line between say, fostering understanding of design, which early on people felt like those bootcamps around design thinking were doing that, right? They were kind of opening up more people to appreciate an aspect of design. Yet how do they do that, sort of foster that awareness and understanding, yet ensure that it remains a respected profession, a respected craft-based profession in its own right?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I think you to let the designers do their job, it's like the accountants do their job. You have to let the designers, what you want them to do is kind of lay the groundwork of what needs to happen. What's your role as a participant in this workshop that you're going to do? What do you have to do? And do participatory design. But at the end of the day, you got to take that information and it's got to be put and let the designer take it and run with it. So I think part of it is just understanding what it is that the designer, what are the pieces that make great design and how would I as a participant be part of that? And I think that's where, again, teaching people how you get to great design is important. They're just not going to do it. That's where we got a lot of my cousin was decided to do. It got really ugly there for a while.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I'm pleased to hear you feel that it's starting to come back around again. And I
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Think it a lot of those schools and 14, I don't even think they're as prevalent as they once were. So I think that, and they were charging astronomical amounts of money to go do stuff like that. I think that's all stops. I feel a little better about that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you talked about designers getting on and being allowed to do their job, and you've seen inside a lot of client organisations over the years. And now through your role at ut, I imagine you're working closely with a lot of industry as well. Under what conditions have you seen human-centered design thrive the most?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- When the leader believes in it. When the leader believes in it. And if you have a leader at the top who believes in design, they're going to let it thrive. It's not just a department that makes the website look pretty. It's somebody that's truly making things better. That's when it thrives. And so it still comes down to the leader, giving people the freedom to experiment and do interesting things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Did that make it easy when you were working with clients to decide who was going to become a client of frogs?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Well, most of the time you took the clients, but there were a few times we'd have to fire clients because they were just too difficult to work with and it wasn't worth them spending the money on us because they weren't going to get what they wanted from it. But that was rare. Most of the time we had ways of just taking them through the process before they know it, they were indoctrinated and they're like, let's do this again. They liked it. So most of our business was repeat business. We had clients for 20 something years. I mean, it was good in that respect.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How do you fire a client?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- You just say, I don't think this is working for us. I think you want something different. We're not going to be able to give that to you and I think we're the wrong firm for you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you find that in the few times that you've done that surprised people or were they quite pleased that you'd actually raised it with them and they agreed?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- No. Most of the time they surprised them. But at some point, if you can't get anything done for a client and they're blocking everything that you're doing, it's not worth them spending the money on you to do that. So you don't want to do that. You try everything you can, but sometimes it's not going to work.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm just mindful of time. I've got a couple of final questions to ask you, Doreen, and this one in particular, again, I'm really keen on your insights around client behaviour, people more generally, but particularly where money's involved and the types of projects that you've been engaged in. And also, I imagine you're doing some of this navigating the dance that you've got to do with the university. It's a large organisation as well. This particular question is to do with sunk cost and how you've seen and perhaps helped people to see their own sunk costs that they're associating with previous decisions. How have you worked with people to help them not throw good money after bad?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Well, it's about results. Are you getting the results that you want? Are you seeing, we talked earlier about doing the iterations where you're testing, you're prototyping, you're seeing the results that you're getting. Are you getting the results that you want? If you are, keep going. If you're not, go back to the start and let's do something different. And I think no idea should be so precious that you can't let go of it. And so what you would often see is this is the right idea. Clients too. You got to let go of stuff. You have to let the process take hold. Our people responding to what you're bringing to them. If they are move forward. If they're not, we got to start again. And I think that it sounds simple, but you'd be surprised. People get wedded, particularly in any organisation. What I have found is the longer that somebody has been there, the more they think they know, therefore, they're less likely to want to hear outside information.
- And so what you would often get is, I've been here 25 years, I know what needs to happen. Whereas you're going, okay, well watch the market. It's going in a totally different direction. You better pay attention to that. So helping people bridge that gap and seeing that, are you getting that result? But as you have seen, sometimes people don't listen and they just put out products in the market and you're like, what were you thinking? What were you thinking about that? Did anybody do any user testing? I mean, particularly years ago before the smartphones, before iPhones came out, what people would put into phones, they'd put like, you could do 700 things in a phone and all everybody wanted to do was make a phone call. It was very interesting.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'd like to think that things are getting better and I believe that they are. But anyway,
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I think we're cognizant of wanting to make people's lives easier. And so you look at situations that can do that. But Brendan, I will say this, as long as there's engineers, there will be great design.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I won't probe too far into the meaning there.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Throw a lot of stuff in because they can.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Designers have to make sense of that and make it look good.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So true. So true. Doen, alongside being a wife and also a mother, raising two children, as we've heard over this conversation, you've certainly had a pretty intense and very successful career. You've ridden a massive technological wave. You've led one of the world's largest design consultancies, and now you are helping the future generations of designers come to terms with our field. So drawing on these experiences, what would you encourage those of us who are in the midst of building our careers to be mindful of,
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- I'll go back to dad. Don't say no to stuff. Try things, experiment. I think getting comfortable is not a good place for a designer. If you're just comfortable with what you did and you live on your past, it's always looking on how to solve problems. How can I make the world better? And one of the exercises I tell the students is in the first day it's like, okay, I want you to spend a day just writing down everything that doesn't work right in your life. What didn't go right, the line you waited in the plug that didn't work. And I was like, those are your opportunities because we still, our job as designers is to try to make the world a better place. And so how do we do that? And I think as you look at your career right now, as successful as one might be, don't ever get comfortable. Think about how you could make it better and that will be your next thing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's an important point to finish on. Doreen, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today. And also for your 30 years of service to the design community.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- Jesus. Brendan, how did that happen? I don't know. It's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Been a wild ride by the sounds of it.
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- It's been a wild ride. Yeah, I know. And I'm still grateful. It's like people still want to talk to me. I said all this stuff, but it's great.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's been a great conversation, Doreen. If people want to do that to keep talking to you or following along the things that you're putting out there for the design community, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Doreen Lorenzo:
- And I get connected so many people on LinkedIn, and then I just send them my email address to contact me. So yeah, that's the best way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thanks Doreen. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Doreen and all the things that we've spoken about.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe. So the podcast turns up every couple of weeks. And also tell perhaps just one other person about the show if you feel they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. There's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.