Episode 16: Deep Dive - Digital Governance

Follow the Surfacing Podcast: Apple | Spotify | Google | YouTube | Amazon Music | Stitcher | RSS | More

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Surfacing. In this Surfacing deep dive, Andy asks Lisa about digital governance, what it is, what it isn't, and how solid governance practices support the product design and development process.

Andy Vitale:

Lisa, when we were talking to Kristina Podnar, it was fascinating to hear about policies and guidelines. As we've talked, I would really love to talk more about governance and understanding what brings that all together. It's been an area that I feel like I dip a toe in, especially since I know you and I try to be the good steward of who's making these decisions, and what does it look like? But I'd love to really understand it more.

Lisa Welchman:

I think I can talk about that-

Andy Vitale:

Nice.

Lisa Welchman:

... at length.

Andy Vitale:

That's perfect. I'm really like even just the definition of governance, you hear governance thrown around all the time. I don't know that everybody has a clear definition of what it is. It's this blanket statement. I remember I was telling you, I was talking about, hey if we're going to build this brand guideline, we should figure out a way to hold everyone accountable to using it the right way. We should govern it. Some of the reactions are like, "Well, we want to give everybody the freedom to do their own thing with it." My thought was if everyone then has ownership in it, nobody really does. I'm just would love to hear more about did I say the right thing or what does that look like?

Lisa Welchman:

I think a good way for me to start is to just put some context around the different types of governance that I interact with, and then to talk specifically about digital governance, which is my area of expertise. When I first started doing this work, I called it web governance, right? Because mostly, I was talking about organizations that had really, really big websites and really, really big web teams that were scattered all over the world and they weren't organized enough to get the work done. I was also dealing a lot with some infighting between the marketing team and usually IT around who had ownership and control over the online presence, which when I first started that, it was mostly websites.

Lisa Welchman:

There was no social media, there were no mobile apps. As things grew bigger and social media and mobile apps came into the picture, I started to talk about digital governance. I still have folks who say web governance. To me, web governance is governing the World Wide Web. There is such a thing as web governance, and that's things that Tim Berners-Lee, who's one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, has a World Wide Web foundation and they deal with a lot of policy work around web, and also another governance that's out there, which is internet governance, which is governance of the internet.

Lisa Welchman:

If you think about those things, so internet, like feeds and speeds, network compatibility, net neutrality, that's the world of internet governance. Also, things that happen at the national level, how open is the internet? Are you allowed to shut the internet down for citizens or not shut the internet down? Those are all things that happen in different ways around the world. Who has access to the internet? Is it available to everyone? I don't know if it's you who told me or I just know from paying attention from time to time, I think just now we've passed the mark where over 50% of the world population has access to the internet, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Internet governance, and then web governance, which is in my brain, the World Wide Web. That's the world of W3C, right? And web standards, and that interacts with internet governance, right? None of these things are pure lanes, because we're all talking about a set of technologies that work together. Where do I fit in in that, and where does the governance that I'm talking about? That's why I call what I do digital governance, because I'm usually talking about the way that an enterprise uses internet and web technologies to either make money, meet their mission, whatever it is they're trying to do. That's just a frame of what I'm talking about.

Lisa Welchman:

Now, once we've gotten into that swimming pool of stuff that I'm talking about digital governance inside of an organization, what am I trying to help people achieve? I'm trying to help people have a collaboration model for their digital team so that they can get work done intentionally. Right? Not accidentally, not weird off the cuff, but just say, "We have a strategy, right? We're trying to do X," and X might be push people down the sales funnel or save lives or have somebody's medical records retrievable across multiple hospitals, or whatever the case may be. What's the best way to get the team organized and to have certain policies and standards in place so that we can get that work done collaboratively, effectively and safely?

Lisa Welchman:

That's it. Right? What people think it is, often, is workflow. Or when I'm implementing something, is somebody going to be looking over my shoulder and saying I can let it go or not let it go? Workflow's important and standard operating procedures, as we were talking about with Kristina, that's all important. But that's not really what I'm interested in. I'm like, "Are you engineered? Is your digital factory engineered to actually get work done that you need to get done, or are you just working randomly?" Right? The answer is most people are just working randomly or in an accidental way that they've gotten used to. The domain of digital governance is really just getting organized so that you can work with intent. Right? It's surprising how many folks aren't.

Andy Vitale:

Right. That makes total sense, and I love that you brought it from internet to World Wide Web, because then my brain went, "Well, what about the intranet?" Then you went to digital governance, which enables the teams that build those. Because my teams work on external facing, internal facing, mobile, there's a layer like we talked about with Ron Bronson of service design and our communications channels and what that looks like. Really, we've got a series of processes. I can imagine you're probably laughing already on the inside of there's a design process and a product process and an engineering process of how they deliver, and then there's a legal process.

Andy Vitale:

It feels like it's a lot of, all right, here's where we're at, I'm going to go over to you and see if this aligns. If it doesn't align, I'm going to come back. It's a lot of chaotic swirl, maybe because we don't have the right governance, I'm going to say framework, thinking that's the right word. Maybe we don't have the right governance framework in play.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. Well, of course, it's framework. I've written a whole book on how to write a governance framework. I'm smiling, because you said the F word. The right F word. Yeah. Here's the thing, when you do governance where people think you're tight control freak or whatever, and yeah, certain aspects of me are, but honestly, I just want teams to be able to work effectively together and in positive environments, and not doing work that ends up getting shut down at the 11th hour because it's off, but you didn't check to see that. All of these things are important, and all of these internal silos have domain expertise.

Lisa Welchman:

The team that creates online experiences, and let's just stick with online experiences, even though most experiences cut across online, real world, physical world, Internet of Things. But even if we just stick with a pure play online experience, the number of competencies required to get that done appropriately is a lot. Right? When I go inside of an organization, what I see, and I've mentioned this before in the podcast, which is the biggest challenge is that each one of those areas of expertise, whether it's front end design, excuse me, visual design, content strategy, the network server infrastructure folks or the coders, our hardcore coders, they all want to just jump in front and say their part's the most important.

Lisa Welchman:

There's this just submission that needs to happen and this admission that it's all important, and that any one of those pieces being weak isn't going to help the overall outcome of the product or service that you're designing. What I'm really trying to achieve is getting people to understand that and getting the team organized in a way that when it's important for the voices of visual design to dominate, they do, and when it's important for the voice of code or even say privacy or data protection to be dominant, it is. Right? It's really just a more subtle activity.

Lisa Welchman:

I think we've gotten into this superstar mode of the superstar algorithm maker, or the superstar designer, or the superstar content strategist. It's just as bad as when we used to, and some people still do design websites that were based around the organizational structure, right? You go to the homepage, and you basically see the org structure and it doesn't help a customer. Right? But what these teams are doing is really something really similar, which is they're making the user submit to their work dynamic. Right? Right? They're not really user-centered. They're like me and my domain expertise-centered, and so that's never going to create a really good outcome.

Lisa Welchman:

Cutting across that into a certain [inaudible 00:11:03] maturity issue, right? It's we don't really know what these jobs are. We beat our chests and twirl and spray sparkle dust and say that we do, but we really don't know what we're doing. I think there needs to be some kind of admission in that. But I don't know. What do you think about when ... You've been talking to me so long, now I feel like I've indoctrinated you into the world of governance. But before meeting me, what did you think?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. I

Lisa Welchman:

If somebody said governance, what would you've thought?

Andy Vitale:

I would have thought a RACI. We've got to have a RACI so that we understand who's touching what, who's responsible, who's accountable, who's consulted, who's informed. We still do that from time to time. I often see, you mentioned it earlier, this play of design and marketing, because now as design's evolved to where it's split between marketing design and product design, we could go over to something like a client communication or an email. Which content team owns that? Is it in the product?

Andy Vitale:

Is it that product team, or is it that marketing team that does the way the brand communicates externally? There's always this back and forth, and sometimes the RACI is the easiest way to at least understand each other's perspective and who's going to have what roll on what piece of the work. But other than that, and even in large organizations, it felt like it came down from above of here's this governance framework, here's this governance model that we're going to use, and it's always, "Well, can we do things a different way?" Maybe. Who holds us accountable to that? Who owns it?

Andy Vitale:

Well, you can't do that because it affects technology. It always felt like it was a thing we pointed to as a way of working, but everyone always seemed to find a way around that of working, and it was never really enforced until shit went off the rails. It's like, "Hey, we have this governance framework, you have to follow this and that won't happen again." In that world who ... We think autonomous teams, who's the one that's really holding that team accountable for living within that framework?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. You've said a couple of really interesting things that both of which make me smile. One is you said RACI. A governance framework for me, the way that I think about it and work with it, is a very simplified RACI. That's all it is. It's a grid and it says who ... Not who or what part of the organization or what individual, depending on how specific you want to get, is accountable for defining the strategy for getting something done. That's qualitatively what are we trying to achieve, and quantitatively, from a measurement perspective, what are we trying to see who is accountable for making that definition?

Lisa Welchman:

Right? I would say 80% of the time, at least, I'm going at 80-20, but probably higher in real play, that particular aspect is not clear. It's really not clear. Then the other one is policy, and we talked to Kristina Podnar about policy, who is accountable for making sure that you know what policy you should have, and then specifically for each policy that you should have, who's accountable for defining it? Right? Then third, who is responsible for understanding what set of standards do you need to actually make a quality portfolio? Right? Then who writes each of those standards?

Lisa Welchman:

You notice what's not in there. There's nothing in the governance framework that says and you must work like this, and the standard must say that. There's none of that. Right? It's just going to say, if you're picking a color for something, go look over there because it may have already been selected, if it's brand-related color, right? Or if you're not sure if something's right, there's the place that you go to ask that question. Right? Then you have a conversation. It's not saying you have to do this many. It's not even defining necessarily what the portfolio of products and services needs to be.

Lisa Welchman:

It's just saying things like if there's a pattern library, it's defined here, right? And making sure that there are mechanisms in place to make sure that all of those standards and policies are always up to date. Right? It's a separate job, right? I think people push all that governance stuff together with the day-to-day work, and that's why it's definitely like a cluster-F. Honestly, it's like they're making stuff and trying to make things, but they've got this really narrow view. If you just pull it up a level and you have someone whose job it is to go, "What standards do we actually need here right now to make the things we make?" Right?

Lisa Welchman:

That person's job is to look around and say, "Okay, we need this particular thing for front-end development." I'm going to go over there and ask that person that's really an expert, "Can you generally give us a standard of things that we need to do," and it could be very light, and it could be that people who are actually doing the [inaudible 00:16:32] week have a high level of autonomy about how that plays out. Or maybe not. Maybe it's very, very specific because it needs to be because you're dealing with some personally identifiable information and it's super tight, or whatever the case may be.

Lisa Welchman:

I think people think that governance is just about somebody looking over them or holding on to their hand while they're trying to draw and say, "No, you can't do that. You can't." It's not. It's just knowing where those control mechanisms are. That's why we're in trouble, the fact that we don't have those things. The last piece that you said was really about enforcement. If you don't know who's making the decision or who's writing the policy or the standard or the strategy, how do you know if you went off the rails? It's nowhere, right? The accountability mechanism is nowhere.

Lisa Welchman:

In a case like call them out in Facebook, it's just ludicrous. I'm sure if you looked on their books, that their policy reads okay. Right? It probably says most of the right things. But it's poorly implemented and there's no enforcement or accountability mechanisms. It rolls straight up into the top of the organization and it's weak. It's just like the governing mechanisms are weak. Then when they have the chance, right? They do this outside organization, right? We're going to get these people from the outside to make these governance decisions because we don't want to make them. Right? It's just really interesting. But anyhow, that's me blathering on. As you know, I can talk about this stuff a lot. But-

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. That makes me think. Well, I remember when we met and we were talking about governance, I probably told you that one point in my career I worked for a financial services company, and we were involved in creating some digital ... Honestly, now that I think back to it, it was probably some governance document. But the way it worked is there was a centralized organization in the company that once a year would send you this document, and you had to review your piece, your piece of this 90-page document of like, "This is the design piece. Go ahead and make sure that everything makes sense and it hasn't changed, and that the link to your SharePoint document that explains how your team works and the contact person for your organization is there."

Andy Vitale:

But then the other thing that you said of being implemented poorly, so many times we see these documents created almost in a silo, and then what happens is they're stuck somewhere on a SharePoint site. It's like, "If you have a question, go find out where this is and look into it," and it doesn't become part of the way of working. Is that something that you see that's common? How can companies start to really take this governance framework and let it become part of how they naturally work?

Lisa Welchman:

Well, that's ops, right? You know I'm always making fun of design ops all the time because designers doing ops is funny to me for some reason or another. I'm not dissing designers or ops on that front, but it's the same front with governance. Some of the more successful people that we've worked with, they understand that the maintenance of the set of policies and standards, particularly in a heavily evolving digital portfolio, right? Where just stuff changes, that's the job, right? You can't have a designer whose job it is to be designing all day long also be the person responsible for making sure that other designers are trained on design standards, are ... Whatever. That person could do that job of training others, but they can't do that and be a full time designer. This idea of-

Andy Vitale:

Right, exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

... having a governance framework and having policies and standards, also other things related to governance and operations, which is, are you effectively managing your portfolio of vendors who are supporting you? Right? If you have certain standards, are the standards that you have in place part of their contract? The fact that they need to uphold those standards, are they part of the service level agreement? These are all things that are really super important, can create efficiencies, help you save money, drag down the noise level for people on the team, but the organization somehow expects the designers to do it, or the front end developers, or for the ... They don't expect that. Or the content strategy person to do it.

Lisa Welchman:

The part of the organization that actually knows how to do this already, and that often gets dismissed as being slow and a pain in the butt, is IT. Right? IT because they're longer-lived than digital, digital teams often are seated in marketing, which is not the greatest place for my personal opinion. It's because it's so visual, it's just ... It's so visual and there was such a strong marketing push to early digital, early website development, it was largely just talking about the business and the products and services that you provide. It was very sales and marketing focused.

Lisa Welchman:

But as things get embedded deeper and you actually have service design or you're offering services, you're actually talking about the scope of the entire organization. Right? That's why it's so challenging when those things are sitting in marketing because marketing people oftentimes don't really understand the business. Right? I know that might sound harsh, but I don't mean in a harsh way. It's just true. Right? They understand a lot about marketing. Oftentimes, they're at odds with sales even, and those two people are supposed to be walking in lockstep.

Lisa Welchman:

But the IT team is used to servicing the broader organization. They're used to negotiating big contracts with vendors. They're used to having expectations about what those vendors will achieve, and embedding those into a contract. Now they also have some habits that make them sometimes not the fastest, right? They also don't really want to get involved in content, right? There's a line that they've drawn. What that ends up being is there ends up being this gap between what marketing knows how to do and what IT knows how to do. Unfortunately, what's in that gap is most of digital. Right?

Lisa Welchman:

Marketing campaign's on one side, network and server stuff and maybe some coding on the other side, although that's starting to shift out of IT, as well, as front-end development gets more and more contenty and more designy approach to it. You've got this whole pile of stuff in the middle that nobody knows who's running it, nobody knows who's supposed to make the rules, and that's how you create the mess. It's insane. Do you agree with that? It's just ...

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. I think that there's a lot of muddy parts that don't ... It's like an island of misfit toys that somewhere in the middle of all these different disciplines. Then you realize, well, there are front-end developers on the design systems team, there are front-end developers on the product team, there are front-end developers on the engineering team, or maybe the engineering team doesn't use front-end developers anymore because they have full stack developers. Then the design team realizes, hey, these are off. You're not really building the way we intended for this to be.

Andy Vitale:

The grid is off, and now we need to bring in our own front-end developers so that they can communicate the design to code. That's definitely one piece of it that I see. The other thing that's really interesting in this space is ... Now I work in a company that's decently large, number one lender. What we've got is our procurement process, our negotiating contracts, a lot of that currently falls on me, although I do have a design ops person. I have a partner and what we call product strategy ops that handles a lot of the vendor relationships. Our sourcing person has been amazing. I've gotten contracts signed within a week or two, where in other organizations, it's nine months, 10 months.

Andy Vitale:

Seeing that speed is great and having that partner is great. To me, when we talk operations, and I'd love to have a chat with somebody that does design operations all day, it's everything that you mentioned, but through a design lens. Because thinking of how the team can be more efficient in their process, it takes someone that understands how a design team works and how design works to be able to figure out how to make that team hum at the right pace. Then when we get to something like working with talent acquisition, having someone on the design side to help rewrite job descriptions that understands them and can work with the team to do comp analysis.

Andy Vitale:

It's just as design becomes this more ... In a digital company now, if we think about the triad, it's really like product design and engineering. As designs got the seat at the table we've all been asking for, now we need people that understand how we work to make us work better, and look at things through our own eyes for operations, because how many times I've like, "I want to use this design tool," and it's blocked, right? Then you're like, "Hey, what about this? Well, what are you using it for? Is there going to be customer data on it?" All of those decisions, it's easier to have someone that understands design to be part of that, as opposed to taking away from the team that's doing what you said, their day-to-day job because that creates a ton of inefficiency.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, it's also not their competency. To me, that's really what it comes down to. Someone can evolve from being a designer. It's like you're a manager of a large group, right? Or you're leading a large team, or whatever language you want to use. You probably don't do a lot of hands-on designing, right? That's fine. You evolved as an individual. But I'm not talking about that. That can happen and should happen and needs to happen more. We actually need people who are designers and who work in the digital space to evolve into senior leadership positions because a lot of ... Because they'll just be informed, they'll just be better. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

I think that's really important. But I'm also just hearing, and I've mentioned this maybe a couple times already on some of the podcasts, this is just the evolution of the enterprise. We're in this deep belief system that we think we can keep the same basic organizational structure that we had prior to the web and the internet being a large part of what business does, and that we can just keep going with a siloed IT, with a siloed marketing, and the silos that go within that silo. I'm not saying that it's an easy solution, but I'm saying that design now is different than what design was, and IT now is different than what IT was.

Lisa Welchman:

There's this whole new discipline of digital, of enterprise digital, which pulls in odd things like the competencies that were usually associated with things like records management, which involve metadata and taxonomy development, tagging things for storage and retrieval. Right? The fact that people who design do front-end development and product design don't understand that is part of the reason why things that are personalized ended up with data and privacy concern.

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? They're just all of these superficial ways to attack things that when it's only design-focused and you push everything else back is problematic. Yes, you need the support so that you can get the contracts that you need. But also there just needs to be a broader conversation in the digital sphere amongst digital makers about what is it that we're actually trying to do, and what is the right way to organize and support these things, even at an executive level? Right? I have mixed feelings about Chief Digital Officer. I don't know that we need that. But this conversation of what does an enterprise look like when it's heavily impacted by online experiences or when it's managing things that are predominantly online experiences, we've basically taken old models.

Lisa Welchman:

We were talking about this with Ron Bronson, and service design. Taking an old process and put new stuff on it. Right? Well, that's what we've done in the enterprise. We've like, "Okay, we have this business tray. It's got a chief operating officer, a CEO, a chief marketing officer, and a CIO, and maybe some corporate legal and finance, right? We've got these things. We're going to make that model work. Even though this business has been completely disrupted, we're going to keep those same old fashioned stuff." That's the conversation that needs to happen, and there's nothing a designer can do about that.

Andy Vitale:

I think those conversations are starting to happen. They're not happening as often as we probably would like, but I do have faith that those are happening as companies are realizing the old way of doing business just doesn't work today, and to stay ahead and continue to either outpace the competition or figure out how to leapfrog them, we have to figure out how to organize our teams to be more effective in today's world.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and that is the last component of creating a governance framework. There's the RACI chart of decision making and then there's also being very specific about the team. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

If I ask folks, "Who's on your team?" If I'm talking to a design person, they'll literally talk as if design is the sun, and everything else is orbiting it. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

If I talk to IT, they'll speak about it as if IT is the sun, marketing's the sun, product's the sun, or whatever, and none of them are wrong. They're all there and there is this sort of constellation of things happening. But really, the business and what it's trying to achieve is the sun. Right? Thinking about it in that context, and really understanding who is on the team. When I say team, I mean four different levels of team. I mean who's making the rules? Those rules in that RACI that I just described, strategy, policies and standards. Who's doing that? Then who's actually doing the work? Right?

Lisa Welchman:

Sometimes there's some overlap, and that's a huge number of people who are actually deploying stuff. Who are those people? Then the next level of team is, and how do those people collaborate at all levels? How do you make sure there's an alignment at the executive level? How do you make sure there's alignment at the working level? How do you just make sure that everybody who works there broadly understands what you're trying to achieve online, whether you put your hands in it or not? Then the last component, and this is the one that nobody ever thinks of as team are just your vendors. Right?

Lisa Welchman:

Sometimes people have outsourced everything to a strategic vendor of record, and they do very little internally. Making sure that you know who's in that array, as well as who are other people outside of your array, outside of your organization that impact you heavily. You've always talked about how you've always worked in environments that are heavily regulated. Right? There's just things you have to pay attention to, right? To make sure that you're not breaking the law or you're in alignment, or maybe you have really strategic competitors, right? Where you're always paying attention to their stuff, right?

Lisa Welchman:

That's all part of the team mechanism. Really having an understanding of who those folks are so you can either watch them and monitor them or be informed by them, when it's either a competitor or some policy or regulation, or so that you can communicate to them. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

You can tell them, "You know what? We're not doing this anymore." I remember very, very early on, I worked on a project. For two years, I worked with folks and they were all about this Japan website and doing this and making sure we got the international this and that right for Japan. As soon as they got the things content management system deployed, the executive level announced that they were selling off the Japanese component. Right? That's kind of stuff. Yeah, and it wasn't that it was a secret. Sometimes they're strategic and it's a secret and you don't announce them until 11th hour. I get that, right?

Lisa Welchman:

But this was just bad internal communication. Right? Middle management knew, they just hadn't bothered to tell anybody on that team. A lot of times there's just a lot of disconnection amongst that array. If I can leave a team knowing who's on their team and who needs to talk to who and when and knowing who makes decisions, that's most of it. The rest of it will be taken care of by expertise at the product development level, right? People making things, and they can figure out their own workflow. Somebody wants to work in agile because that works, great. If somebody doesn't or they want to do some modified version of agile, that's fine too.

Lisa Welchman:

Governance isn't telling you the speed in which to operate. It's just telling you where the rulemaking mechanisms are, and the rest of it's up to you to figure out what's culturally appropriate for you to do in terms of a collaboration model. Yeah, there's just a lot of stuff going on. I honestly think that it's funny I've been doing this for quite some time, and as I start to sit back a little and do more coaching, coaching of folks and teaching other people to do the work that I do, I think we're at a moment where everyone's like, "Wow, this is really messed up."

Lisa Welchman:

Maybe we actually need to start thinking about this in a more mature manner, and the more strategic work you are alluding to, which is just organizations going, "Wait, wow, the web really is here, and the internet really is here, and it really is embedded in our cars and our dishwashers, and it's in my child's hands, almost from the day they were born. How are we going to get organized and move away from this factory, cookie cutter car making model?" Right? Which is what I think ... Or industrial model that we had, which really informed how enterprises were structured and move into something new. I think with the pandemic it's even more fascinating because now the workers are even more dispersed. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

That scrum, that stand up meeting, what is that when you're not in the same room? Right? There's just a lot of things that are really fun and fascinating. I guess you can do that via video teleconference. But it changes the dynamic.

Andy Vitale:

Right. A lot of companies just, they went digital and didn't put anything in place of how they should work now. We're trying to mimic the office as best as we can, but we're not. That leads me to think about a question without wanting you to give away any secret sauce of how you solve these problems. A lot of it is ... There are people in an organization that identify that something's wrong. What's the best way for them to really raise that awareness wide enough or broad enough or deep enough or high level enough in the organization that they're like, "You know what? We really do need to figure out how to fix this?"

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. Well, the good news on that is I think that ... I think we touched on this with our episode with Mike Montero. The mess is out there now. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

It used to be that there weren't really any big digital messes. That's not entirely true. But how about this? They weren't very big enough for people who were super just push, push, push, push, push to pay much attention. But I think poorly architected and unconsidered big systems that are online have done real harm right to society. I think folks' eyes are open. I think there are some blind spots in that mechanism. A lot of that's happened in the political arena or with news or with social media, and I know from working with folks, particularly in B2B, that there are issues in that as well that are harder to surface and harder to see, but they have the same types of dynamics.

Lisa Welchman:

One way to get people to pay attention is to have a disaster, and that's happened to some people, right? I'm laughing, but that's often what happens. We were talking about safety, we talked about car manufacturing for a long time, and the fact that the harm caused by the lack of seat belt wearing was apparent from day one. It took over 80 years for seat belts to be mandatory at least in the US. Right? It took 70 some years, I might be off on my years a little bit, but something around that for them to be required in cars. Right? There's just this period of time where people just don't get it.

Lisa Welchman:

I think, if you are a maker, right? Day to day, just making things and you're wondering what you can do, I think that's the part where I just have to say you do your best work, right? If you are designing something and you see the opportunity for there to be harm, or if you're on a team and you're saying, "This is the third time we've been wondering about what font we should use," right? Raise those issues, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

And start that conversation where you are. If you're in a management position where you have some influence, you can maybe have that conversation be even broader. Say you're heading up a design team, you can talk about things like a design system, but then don't make the mistake of thinking that that's the only center of the universe or the center.

Andy Vitale:

Or the only solution too.

Lisa Welchman:

Right. Or the only solution. Maybe, if you're in that position, go and look for your other partners in other parts of this mechanism, whether or not it's IT or the business, or whatever area you're in, other aspects of product design and find out where their standards bodies are, right? Because they happen too. They're having the same problems down their silos, and then look and see how much of this stuff is the same? Can we at least put it in a similar repository? Is it written down? Are they in alignment? Right?

Lisa Welchman:

I think one of the most powerful things if you're at the top of an organization, and I'm sure those people probably are listening to this podcast, but I interact with those folks a lot. They really like it when their team comes to them with a solution.

Andy Vitale:

Right. Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

If you can be aligned, and say, "Look, we haven't figured it out completely. But there's an opportunity here for us to create efficiencies and create better products and services if we get in alignment about some of these decisions around standards," or we've got four different standards for the same thing. Right, and they say, "We've got a plan to solve this or to unify this." They're very excited, particularly if you can put numbers to it. Numbers don't always mean necessarily making more money, but if you can just quantify why it's of value to them or why it's of value to the organization, that's really helpful.

Lisa Welchman:

I think that's what can happen at any level in an organization. If you are at the top of the organization, being open to real organizational change and deep organizational change, which is hard. If the business is hopping, you're like, "Why change stuff? The numbers are good." That person's usually accountable to a board of directors that's looking at the profitability of the organization.

Andy Vitale:

Right, exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

That's real. That's not a pretend thing. That's real, and that's how everybody gets paid. Right? I think everybody's got their challenge at various levels. That was a lot, but I hope robust enough.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, no. I think the takeaway from that really, especially for makers, is to get out of your silo because chances are someone else that you engage with and interact with is going through a very similar thing. If there's a way to align or come to a common solution, it's a lot easier to get that done than it is to have all these one-off things that everybody's trying to do. Really the way to change the way the organization works is to figure out how you work with people and start figuring out what you need to be better, and raise those concerns to leadership, to your leaders, and hopefully they can have wider conversations and that influence can continue to grow.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, embody the ... It's a little trite, but be the change. It's an important thing to do. Yeah. That's governance to me.

Andy Vitale:

Awesome. Yeah, this has been great.

Lisa Welchman:

Did you learn anything, or did you already know all the Lisa stuff?

Andy Vitale:

From talking to you, I've known quite a few of these things. But a lot of people don't. I think it's really valuable for people to hear that, especially people that haven't talked to you every week like I have. I got to understand a lot more than most designers already, and I think it's a valuable learning lesson for designers to be aware. Not just designers, anyone in the organization.

Lisa Welchman:

Groovy. Well, coming up soon, it's going to be turnabout is fair play.

Andy Vitale:

Perfect.

Lisa Welchman:

Get your design chops ready. I'm going to ask you some basic questions about design that might seem really super easy for you maybe for the next deep dive, but maybe aren't common knowledge for people, particularly folks on the business side.

Andy Vitale:

Right. Perfect. Looking forward to it.

Lisa Welchman:

Okay. Groovy.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed Surfacing, please rate, review, and follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Also, consider supporting the podcast on Patreon at patreon.com/surfacingpodcast. If you have suggestions for guests or a topic you'd like to hear about on Surfacing, please reach out via the contact form found at surfacingpodcast.com.