Episode 13: Ron Bronson on Service Design
In this episode of Surfacing, Andy and Lisa are joined by Ron Bronson. Ron has deep experience working at the intersection of digital policy, service design, and systems.
They talk about why so many services are poorly designed, and what needs to happen to improve both digital and physical world services for people. Ron also gives Andy some advice on selecting the proper tea, and Lisa asks about Ron's interest in the Finnish sport, Pesäpallo.
Announcer:
Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to Ron Bronson. Ron has deep experience working at the intersection of digital policy, service design, and systems. The conversation is centered around why so many services are poorly designed and what needs to happen to improve both digital and physical world services for users. Ron also gives Andy some advice on selecting the proper tea, and Lisa asks about Ron's interest in the Finnish sport Pesäpallo.
Lisa Welchman:
We were... Your ears were probably burning because we were just obviously beforehand talking about what questions we were going to ask you Ron. It's too many.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
There's a list of things that didn't make the list. One of them is tea, which I have a personal interest about.
Ron Bronson:
Yes.
Lisa Welchman:
If you come on again sometime maybe we can talk about tea, or maybe we can sneak the tea collection, tea in. Mostly because I think I want to know something about tea more than I do. I'm a really big tea drinker right, green tea drinker-
Ron Bronson:
Oh, goodness.
Lisa Welchman:
... in particular.
Ron Bronson:
I can send you all kinds of recommendations or places you can buy from. I don't sell tea anymore because I did for a while. But I love lots of places I sourced from, like retail and that are great depending on what you want for greens or whatever else. Yeah. I love talking about tea and stuff.
Lisa Welchman:
Cool. Andy-
Andy Vitale:
That's kind of awesome though, because my wife loves green tea and I don't. I like all the weird like pumpkin teas, and cherry teas, and-
Ron Bronson:
Oh, see flavor... I can't do anything flavored. I can't do any. I can't talk about herbal things or flavored things. I don't really have a lot of people that come to me and are like, "Oh, I want to buy herbal tea for my mom's birthday." I'm like, "It's not my department. Sorry, you have to talk to someone else."
Lisa Welchman:
I am an equal opportunity teeist if a teeist is... What do you call someone who drinks tea?
Ron Bronson:
A tea drinker.
Andy Vitale:
A teetotaler.
Lisa Welchman:
Tea drinker.
Ron Bronson:
Right. Right.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm a equal opportunity tea drinker and so I love black teas. I love green teas. I love herbal teas. One of my favorite evening habits is to put a couple of dried hibiscus flowers and some mulberry leaves, white mulberry leaves in, and make that. It's a really good before bed non-caffeine thing so I like to do that. Anyhow.
Lisa Welchman:
We're obviously not going to be talking about tea on this podcast as well, and music is another thing. I think that you're one of those people that I maybe, I can't remember, have actually never met in person.
Ron Bronson:
No. Never in person. Uh-huh (affirmative).
Lisa Welchman:
That's exactly right. You're one of those people I only know from Twitter right?
Ron Bronson:
Yeah. That's right.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm like, "Have I actually ever met Ron?"
Ron Bronson:
Hm-mm (negative).
Lisa Welchman:
It's like, no. I don't think I've ever met-
Ron Bronson:
No. No.
Lisa Welchman:
... the dude.
Ron Bronson:
That would have been the coolest conversation but no.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ron Bronson:
No.
Lisa Welchman:
Exactly.
Ron Bronson:
It never happened.
Lisa Welchman:
Exactly. One of the few people including Mike Mintero who we interviewed another time who when you say Alice Coltrane you were like, "She's so underrated." I was like, "Yes, she is-"
Ron Bronson:
Oh, my gosh.
Lisa Welchman:
"... very underrated."
Ron Bronson:
So great. So great.
Lisa Welchman:
Absolutely fabulous.
Ron Bronson:
Oh my gosh.
Lisa Welchman:
But anyhow.
Ron Bronson:
So great.
Lisa Welchman:
We're not going to get to talk about that either.
Ron Bronson:
It's a good thing though because my musical tastes are questionable.
Lisa Welchman:
They're not questionable.
Ron Bronson:
You know what? It's all right.
Lisa Welchman:
Anyhow. Those are all the things we're not going to talk about. I'm going to hand it over to Andy and let him start the conversation about the things that we do want to talk about.
Andy Vitale:
Ron, your first sentence on your website says, "I'm a generalist with deep experience working where policy, services, and digital systems meet." That makes you the perfect guest for our podcast. Can you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and break down what that means?
Ron Bronson:
Yeah. I'm Ron Bronson. We went over that part. I sort of have worked in tech broadly off and on for, I don't know, close to 15 years? Something like that. Counting when you started working on the web depends on what job you count first right? You know? Do I count the job I had in the late '90s working for a internet startup that went bust after a year? I don't know. Do we count that? Do I count the time in the Air Force? I'm not sure.
Ron Bronson:
In any case over the years what I've done though is worked somewhere where there are problems that involve tech that need to be solved, and that usually involve not just understanding what's going on on the presentation layer, or what's going on the scenes, what's also going on with the people that are doing the thing right? What I've been able to do is bring those things together using people skills or just...
Ron Bronson:
I never wanted, I still don't want, tech to be mysterious to people. I don't want them to use things and feel like, "Oh. I can't do that. That's techie stuff." It's like, well no. You can and we're going to help you figure out how you can do it. It's not your fault.
Ron Bronson:
It's not a user error often. It's the way we designed it, or the way we... I think that transition from that old school IT mindset of blame the user still permeates our field right? Going from that to a, "No, someone should have made this work better. Someone should have made this kiosk work for you so you could do the thing you were trying to do." If we're going to foist this experience on your then we should make this work better for you.
Ron Bronson:
Anyway, I guess that summarizes where I've been. I do work in the public sector right now. There are all kinds of government rules on why I can't say where I work on this podcast but if you are good at the internet you can figure that out. Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
Hearing you talk about yourself in that way and what your central interests are really leads naturally into the one big question that I had for you. The words that we've been hearing a lot in the midst of this global pandemic is service design, the failure of service design, in particular the one I know...
Lisa Welchman:
I shouldn't say in particular in the US, but it feels like there are other places in the world where it's happening as well, the rollout of the vaccine signup process. That was really honestly one of the things that put you on the front of my list. I was like, "Who could we talk about and would be so frustrated by how this has worked that we could have a good conversation about that?" Because I don't do service design.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, I've done some hands on work, and I know more than the average person walking down the street about how these things are developed or whatever, but I'm not a service designer. But I'm sitting here and thinking of 72 million different ways it could have been done better?
Ron Bronson:
Right. Right.
Lisa Welchman:
I'd love to hear you riff on that a little bit. Think of this as an opportunity to vent.
Ron Bronson:
Well, I do appreciate that. I will quibble with the fact that you aren't a service designer. I think that... I read that book. I'm going to say this, I'm going to give you your flowers right now. I'm going to tell you that your book changed my life.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh my god. Really?
Ron Bronson:
Your book changed my life. One knowing that like, "Oh, I could do this too? Oh, for real?" That was the first thing. I mean I was doing work in higher ed. I was not speaking in these days. When that book came out I wasn't speaking that much. I don't know. That just wasn't really on my radar necessarily.
Ron Bronson:
But just the way... It was obviously very heft, and really detailed. But having all that and being very much in the morass of managing content in organizations at the time that I was doing that work really transformed my life because I was like, "Oh. This is a job. This is a job. This isn't just a thing I do. This is a job and you can do this at like, large scale."
Ron Bronson:
When I go somewhere I talk to somebody and they say, "Oh." Like a university I went to once to do a talk and they're like, "Oh. We have 100 webmasters on this campus and no central governance." I said, "Um, we should fix that tomorrow. That's not okay.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh, that makes me feel really good. Thanks for those words.
Ron Bronson:
Anyway.
Lisa Welchman:
I appreciate that.
Ron Bronson:
I just had to put that out there because-
Lisa Welchman:
I appreciate that.
Ron Bronson:
... that's... At any case about source design yes, I have many rants. You mentioned America versus the rest of the world. When we talk about source design, I did a talk last year at the source design virtual global conference or whatever and I said that one of the reasons I wanted to do that was because in other parts of the world they've figured this out better than we have, partially because it's not this sort of adversarial relationship, the public services.
Ron Bronson:
In America public services are really about pain and making people extract a pound of flesh if you will to be able to benefit. We think of public services as being on the dole even if it's something that you've paid for. People have paid for this, these services. But when you come to a thing like a very critical service like vaccine distribution or whatever else you have so many...
Ron Bronson:
Here's a good service design example. I think it really drives me crazy. It's not even about the vaccine. It's about something different. I live in the city of Portland, Oregon. The City of Portland has a major trash problem right now, a public trash problem. There are a bevy of reasons for this trash problem, trash everywhere. Strewn all over the city.
Ron Bronson:
The reason is because there's not a centralized sanitation department in the City of Portland, never has been one. There are instead 16 different agencies that have some part of the trash problem. 16.
Andy Vitale:
Wow.
Ron Bronson:
Some are state. Some are local. Some are regional. Some are just offices. There's no coordination among these agencies to figure... One of them includes the prison department who apparently have to do all the trash on the highways. Because of COVID they're not letting prisoners out to pick up trash which I don't agree with.
Ron Bronson:
Anyway. I'm like you're gonna pay them a fair wage. But that's part of the trash distribution in this major American city. It's the 25th largest metropolitan area in the country. That's bad.
Andy Vitale:
That's such an... My brain went to, like I grew up in New York so we had public and private sanitation.
Ron Bronson:
I'm from Jersey. Same deal.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. That was interesting, but nothing like what's going on that you're describing.
Ron Bronson:
Nothing like this. Right. Right. I grew up with that. We had a private trash. People pick our trash at the house. For city stuff they did other things. You're right. It wasn't... But when it come down to like who picks up trash downtown that wasn't my mom and dad. We didn't pay someone to do that. Or the companies downtown would figure out who to get to pick up their trash.
Ron Bronson:
On my own street the businesses pay someone to pick up their trash. What kind of bizzaro land do we live in? We talk about service design. I think in America it's turned into this bizarre sort of Post-It note thing where you put up Post-It notes and you say design thinking three times. Then a witch comes out, or like a... This dude comes out of a genie and decides to give you your wishes. That's not service design right?
Ron Bronson:
Even when you talk about things like service blueprints, or maps it's not just about the artifacts. To me service design is about people, and about bringing the experience... What are real people having experiences with? When you talk about this whole... Last year it occurred to me, and kind of where I really got on this road, deep rant about all this stuff and slowly working on this book and so forth, is I realized that service design was not built for resilience.
Ron Bronson:
It never occurred to anybody that we're going to talk about this in this very authoritative way, service design, and blah, blah, blah. Your company needs it. Hire service designers. We need service designers in government. Without realizing that there's no resiliency built into this whole practice at all. It didn't occur to anybody to think about like, "What does source design look like in crisis?" But more importantly what does service design look like when you talk about equity?
Ron Bronson:
When you talk about your store you presume... There's a presumption that everyone going through the store is having the same experience whether it's you, whether it's me, whether it's Lisa, whether it's Andy. That we're all going to go through the store and have the same experience, and that that experience is going to be some sort of wonderful customer experience.
Ron Bronson:
We all know that that is not true for a multiple of reasons. Maybe financial reasons. It could be other reasons right? We know that, but that's not built into the... That's not built into the models of any service design at all. No one talks about this in this direct way. Maybe they talk about it abstractly, or they talk about edge cases or something.
Ron Bronson:
But I'm like if all of your customers are edge cases maybe you need to think about your customer model a little bit better? When you get into things like vaccines or distribution of vaccines, or this whole era of COVID, things like, "No. We're not going to accept cash anymore because of sanitary reasons." Okay. It's a service design problem to me.
Ron Bronson:
Foisting new UIs on people to push buttons. "Oh, you need a QR code to download our menu if you want to eat here." Okay. Well, there are like five steps in that that are not going to work for people that I know. Now they can't eat at the restaurant because they can't scan a QR code? I'm sure they'll help them right? Maybe they'll give a paper menu. I don't know what the process is like if they don't have a phone. I don't know.
Ron Bronson:
But we're just grafting this UI layer and all these other things onto everyday experiences and helping folks just figure it out. To me that's not great.
Andy Vitale:
Right. Then we go under the guise of we're trying to remove friction by adding multiple layers of friction on top of another.
Ron Bronson:
Right. And the same experience. We didn't redefine the experience. You could almost be okay with it if you said, "All right. We're going to break this experience down in this dramatic way." I can't even think of one right now, but we're going to break down this experience in this way that is going to just remove friction, pay people better, maybe put folks in the middle of the thing. It's going to make everyone's experience better. Then you can demonstrate that.
Ron Bronson:
It's not what happens. We take this exact same experience as before. The line is still there. The services are still there. Now we add-
Lisa Welchman:
Another line.
Ron Bronson:
... new friction to it. You stand here. You can't walk there. Better have your phone out. Nope. You can't taste anything. Sorry. Can't... It's just... Yeah. I think service design has a... I don't blame service design as not a real thing. It's not a person. Bob the service designer, we're going to blame him.
Ron Bronson:
But I do think that there is something that we need to deeply interrogate about a practice that we're purporting to be all these things that can't quite get it done.
Lisa Welchman:
As it relates to the pandemic, and vaccine or anything, I mean the pandemic is so in our face right now and-
Ron Bronson:
Right. Oh, my gosh.
Lisa Welchman:
... while we're recording this the US is what? We're 27% folks have the vaccine, and 40% have one dose or something? I don't know. Maybe I'm making up numbers or something like that. Currently while we're recording this Europe is still struggling to roll out their stuff or whatever.
Lisa Welchman:
Is there any models that you've seen globally, I mean there are some obvious ones in my head but just from your perspective that you think were effective? And being a little US centric in this would those models have worked here given our culture and values?
Ron Bronson:
Unlikely. I know there are a lot of things going on in Asia that I don't have a great read on exactly how they were... I read about in Taiwan how there was a lot of coordination between local and in addition the innovation teams and the local government, and citizens. Part of that was the sort of things that were already baked into the culture and climate of the country and made it a little bit easier to pull that off.
Ron Bronson:
Obviously in Finland, near and dear to my heart, they're having some other issues with some things now related to shutdowns and so forth. They've been very quick to the trigger on that. But one of the things I thought was interesting pretty much from the start is they had a contact tracing app like last summer, like in June.
Ron Bronson:
It didn't take them long to... I mean that was amazing how they rolled that out. They had adoption like... They had a significant... They had half the country adopt that thing like overnight. It wasn't a deal where it was like, "Oh, no one's going to use it. Blah, blah, blah." No. That was super fascinating to me last year seeing some of these rollouts of those things.
Lisa Welchman:
Why do they work there? I mean they're... I'll just say for me part of it, the US has this very independent, "Don't track me," culture to it. I have some superficial opinions and thoughts about that myself, but I haven't really read a lot. I mean I shouldn't say that. I know a lot about online privacy and things like that. Let me just say I don't have a fully formed from a Lisa perspective considered opinion about this. That's a conversation that I'd probably like to have with some super informed people to really come up with my philosophical view on that front.
Ron Bronson:
Right.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm one of those people that actually wants to be informed before I have a strong opinion about stuff. But we do have this kind of thing and for good and for bad. I look at some countries and I'm like, "We're not going to line up like that," right? I think that's an important component of it, but how much of it is that we're just disorganized? Right?
Ron Bronson:
I think that's obviously-
Lisa Welchman:
Some of it is we're not going to line up culturally, but some of it is are we just freaking disorganized?
Ron Bronson:
Well, again like the 16 different agencies example proliferates around the country for so many different things where nobody owns it. We talk about liminality, it's one of my favorite words to talk about in terms of UX and how so many of these things just fall between... It's either two departments, or two people, or nobody owns it because nobody thinks of it as being an important enough experience to hire someone to do.
Ron Bronson:
It's somebody else's job to do it. It's not their main priority. It just never gets done, or it's an office or an agency's job and never gets done. Or it gets half done. I think that we just have so many of these kinds of like... It's like a whack-a-mole of these kinds of issues that exists and they mushroom.
Ron Bronson:
Again because there's not resiliency built into these models when bad things happen... It works fine 80% of the time day to day, but when bad things happen you start to see the fissures. You start to see the cracks all through the dam because it didn't occur to you that you needed to look closer than just looking at it and seeing, "Oh, we built a dam. That dam is amazing. Oh, it's so beautiful."
Ron Bronson:
Get closer. Where are the cracks? How do we seal those cracks? What's the process of sealing the cracks? Is that someone's job? How often do we check them? How often do we do that? Yeah. I think that yeah, we are very disorganized and-
Lisa Welchman:
Well, it also-
Ron Bronson:
... to our own peril.
Lisa Welchman:
It also sounds like from all that you've just described that we also have the opportunity to enter into a golden age of service design. Coming off the tail end of this COVID pandemic, COVID-19 pandemic globally we see where the cracks are.
Ron Bronson:
Right. Absolutely.
Lisa Welchman:
Now it's kind of like when all this crazy stuff started happening with the Facebook in, was it 2016 election? I mean it was prior to that but that's really when it hit pay dirt. Everyone was really going crazy. It was like, "Okay. We kind of knew it was broken already, but now we really know it's broken. Now we have an opportunity to actually behave differently and build things differently." It's really disappointing-
Ron Bronson:
But will we?
Lisa Welchman:
... because people don't always pick up that mantle and move forward on that.
Ron Bronson:
Right.
Andy Vitale:
It's hard to see the cracks when almost every graphic we create is a Venn diagram and there's so many things that overlap. It's like, "Where's the crack," until it's right in front of your face. Then you're like, "I can't believe I missed that."
Ron Bronson:
Right. Right. Or you deny it. That's always fun too.
Andy Vitale:
Right.
Ron Bronson:
Not everyone wants to see the cracks. I think that's part of the problem. But some of us really are invested in fixing the cracks before things break. But a lot of folks are just like, "Do you have to fix that this week? We can get to that next week." It's still functioning. It still works. It's still sitting there.
Andy Vitale:
Right. You know speaking of fixing the cracks, and earlier you touched upon it for a second. You talked about a book that you're working on. I've read about the book that's coming out. It's about consequence design. Can you talk a little bit more about what that is and what that means?
Ron Bronson:
Oh. I don't know what it means but I'm working on it. That's what happens when you take two words and smash them together, and try to make it a thing. Everybody's like, "What..." Last year I gave four talks on it. Every talk they're like, "What does it mean?" I'm like, if you look at all the... You can't see all of them because two of them aren't recorded, but you look at all four of the talks the definition of it changes in all four of the talks-
Lisa Welchman:
That's progress.
Ron Bronson:
... because... I think so personally, but if you were doing a quality control check you'd be like, "I don't know man, about this." But I have given it a lot of thought, and I've read a ton about... I've read a ton of a lot of things about this. Obviously it is sort of an impassioned feeling. Consequence design is a response to service design.
Ron Bronson:
So much of design is about, to me personally is a sort of a offensive posture. I think we need to find that it's a bit more defensive of... If you're talking about a sports guy I think you need a... Not a discipline because I don't think of it as a discipline necessarily. But consequence designer, there's a title for you. Update my LinkedIn.
Ron Bronson:
I think we need to have... I may. That's pretty funny. I think what we need though, and what consequence design tries to do is asks the question basically about resilience. It asks the question like, "Who will you presuppose your audience to be? Why do you presuppose your audience to be that? What kind of harm have you baked into your experiences, whether it's a tool, a platform, a service, a system?"
Ron Bronson:
I think that because so many of these systems now are not just digital things. It's digital layers that we're grafting onto real life experiences. There's so much of that that we're not thinking about. This is my favorite example that I give all the time. Everywhere... It's the supermarket check out lane, or like watching folks use kiosks at transit stations.
Ron Bronson:
You see people fumbling with them all the time. Years ago when I saw folks doing that I used to think it was their fault. I'm like, "It can't be that hard. Come on. Let's go. You can do this. I believe in you," from a distance of course. Not to their face. That's terrible, but in my head I watched them and I think this. Then eventually I see the people fumbling with the thing, the train kiosks. Now I just go do it myself and I'm like, "This is my life. I do this for a living and I'm having a problem with this?"
Ron Bronson:
Then I see all the problems with UI, and I know why it's designed this way. I'm like, "Who tested..." My question every time was... I would tweet about it to no avail. "Who tested this kiosk?" Take a picture of the screen you know like, "This is terrible language. What is this?" Consequence design asks that question about liminality. When there are these fissures, or these cracks between things, spaces between things that we're building whose job is it to fix that? Whose job is it to...
Ron Bronson:
More importantly the question I get when I used to talk about the mis-termed dark patterns, anti patterns and so forth. When I would talk about that previous to this consequence design discussion folks would often ask me, "Well, whose job is it to fix that? Who's job is it to flag that? Who's job is it to stop it?" I'm like, "Well, if you had this team of master designer types, or practitioners, not just designers. PMs. Engineers. Whatever, who kind of had the kill switch to be like, "Huh-uh (negative), we're not doing that here..."
Ron Bronson:
Right now it's all illegal, which I don't think is the best place for... A lot of these big company's have trust and safety. That's just CYA right? That has nothing to do with protecting users. That's protecting the mothership. I think you need that same ideology of protect the mothership but I want to protect the user, almost like an ombudsman but for like UX right? But an ombudsman with the lever to stop the train.
Ron Bronson:
Not stop the company, but stop a feature, or stop a thing. And to answer those questions earlier in the process of when we're designing this stuff. Because we all know we're all a little too online to know how many times a thing gets released, Twitter uproars, and the thing gets shelved, or they change something. I'm thinking, "You all are a multi billion dollar company. You have multiples of hundreds of people working on this thing."
Lisa Welchman:
How'd it get there in the first place?
Ron Bronson:
Dozens of folks approved it. Exactly. Somehow you green lit this. It went public and you waited for the world to be like, "This isn't it you all," as a Twitter meme right? I don't understand that. That's where consequence design comes from. That's where I would hope it would go is a world where you was like, "Who stops it? These folks."
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. That's interesting because Lisa and I met and we started to talk about safety a lot, and started to write a book, Designing for Safety. It's shifted into the podcast but it's a continuous discussion. One of the things that always came up is like, how do you embed these pieces of governance throughout the process so that when you realize something is not right you can stop it? Who makes that decision? Too often it's like everybody is pointing a finger at each other, like that Spider-Man meme where he's pointing at three different versions of himself and nobody knows who to make that call.
Lisa Welchman:
That's why you need a governance framework, she said self serving-ly. But I mean honestly-
Ron Bronson:
So true.
Lisa Welchman:
... people... I've been screaming this for so long. This is one of the more self serving things I have said on this podcast, but honestly I've been screaming, "We need to know who makes the decisions." It's not... Yes it is that people sometimes make not great decisions right? Good. Bad. Whatever. Not great decisions. But more than anything what I see is nobody either knows that there's a decision to be made, or everybody is making the decision because nobody is making the decision.
Lisa Welchman:
Just the lack of clarity of knowing who makes the decision, because then you know who the go-to person is when you have an issue. But people don't want to do that. They just want to build stuff and deploy it, and build stuff and deploy it. They put all the cycles and energy into fixing broken stuff, or legal comes and gets them. It's almost nonsensical to me.
Lisa Welchman:
Why would you work that way? Yes, when you're first starting and you don't really know what you're doing okay. I'll give you a pass. I'll give the internet and the web the first 10 years of the commercial web, maybe 15, of like, "We didn't know what we were doing." But now it's like 30.
Ron Bronson:
Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm just kind of like, at what point do we just stop doing that? But anyhow, end Lisa rant. Why not? I guess I could ask both of you all that question. Why... Because Andy, you work inside of organizations. Is it really that important to build some of the stuff that isn't really even all that great?
Lisa Welchman:
Is it really that important, or what am I missing as an outside management consultant looking in and looking at two people, and talking to two people who build things and have to actually deliver stuff? I don't, so it's easy for me to say, "Make some decisions. You're not doing it right," because I'm standing from the outside. But what is going on?
Andy Vitale:
It can be anything. It's definitely this quest for velocity. Then it's the roadmap that piles up, and piles up. And features get added. We build things and we're like, "Okay. We're not 100% sure of this. We're going to test and we're going to learn. We're going to deploy. We're going to learn from it." What happens is that taste of, "We released 40 features this month."
Andy Vitale:
We're not going to go back and get to those other 12 that we think may not be okay because we have 40 more ready for next month. That velocity that shows like progress to the organization sometimes creates bad habits, and it takes leadership. It takes people to get aligned and say, "You know what? No. We have to go back. You're creating tech debt, design debt," whatever we want to call it.
Andy Vitale:
You're just releasing the wrong things. Maybe that's not the right solution. Maybe we didn't even have the problem that we were trying to solve right? It's an education over time because we've created this move fast and break things. Once that became a buzzword and a phrase that companies are using we're all tech companies now. We're all growth companies now right? That means we have to keep going forward. There's no looking back and going back. It's just a case of reeducating, retraining, and working together differently.
Lisa Welchman:
You're nodding your head Ron. What else?
Ron Bronson:
Well, I mean over the course of certainly the last eight or nine years when I've worked in like state local government and what I'm doing now... Though if you're listening to this legal I'm talking about all my work before the last three years. I doubt they're listening.
Ron Bronson:
I would say that there is that same... Funny a lot of that ethos has permeated, for instance local government talking about innovation and like, "Oh, we're going to..." Even a small town is like, "Oh, we're going to move fast and we're going to do all this stuff." It's like, we don't have the personnel for that. We're not thinking through what that even means.
Ron Bronson:
It goes back to our conversation about friction. I think that it's a... There's a desire to frankly iterate, have the story to tell, so you can level up to the next thing and then leave somebody else to deal with the crust of whatever you left behind, wreckage frankly. I think that's part of... That's another part of the issue right is that in this fast moving environment folks can benefit form creating a thing that they don't have to reckon with. I don't know how you de-centivize that culturally.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. So many people, once it launches they're on to something else. They're on another product. They're on another project so they really don't have to clean up the mess that they created because there's such church and movement in organizations, and people jumping to other companies. It really does take like being invested in the problem and setting out longterm to try to solve that.
Andy Vitale:
It's another thing that we've created. You mentioned speculative UX. I see that a lot. I know what speculative futures are. I know design futures and strategic foresight, but when it comes to UX could you give a few examples of that?
Ron Bronson:
I'll be honest I use that term... It's almost like I would say it's a buzz. I like sci-fi a lot. I love sci-fi. I'm a big Star Trek, I wouldn't say a Star Trek nerd but I like Star Trek a lot. I think when you think about design futures I don't see a whole lot of folks that look like me talking about design futures.
Ron Bronson:
Certainly no... I know they exist, but I'm just saying I don't see it all the time. I certainly don't see them being cited all the time which is a detriment. I wanted to take that same thinking and extend it to this idea of... To user experience in the same ways. In thinking about things like what informs particular kinds of UIs or what do those things look like?
Ron Bronson:
I know we've talked about... It was years ago, it was a podcast that I listened to that talked about how much of science fiction, TV science fiction informed the design of real life tools that we still use today, or informed the design of certain UIs. I'm thinking, what does that look like in a more actual...
Ron Bronson:
When I watch a lot of, like watch television shows I watch sci-fi or something, I'm thinking about like... There was actually an example of this on a show once where the character---the future. It's the 24th century and he's got this voice UI. He tells the voice UI to search this DB, or database rather, to look for this name or whatever.
Ron Bronson:
I tweeted about it and I said, "You mean to tell me in the 24th century we don't have a better way to search queries than that?" You mean to tell me... It took him four voice commands to get the machine to search this thing. It wasn't like it was quick. It took the thing about 30 seconds to find it. I'm like, "Really? We can't do better than that in the 24th century?" That's what I mean. That's what I'm thinking about, but I want that to inform how we design things now.
Ron Bronson:
When we talk about what you all talked about, friction and the removal of friction, but we're not reinventing anything. We're just taking existing systems and structures and building the UI layers on top of them. To me that's not iteration. That's not design. That's not the future right? We should be throwing all the Legos on the floor and figuring out what we can build almost from scratch right?
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. But that almost never happens right? I mean it is-
Ron Bronson:
Of course not.
Lisa Welchman:
That's a shame. I remember... Wow. It may be 10, 15 years ago. I can't remember. Whenever the UK decided to consolidate the UK government decided to consolidate the number of websites and streamline, and start that initiative. I wrote a blog post which is probably not online anymore because it was for my old company just talking about how forward looking that was. We can argue about the execution of it or whatever but just how the US could really do something similar in terms of consolidating.
Lisa Welchman:
At that point I don't even think the Office of Digital Services existed in the government at the time that I was writing that. There was no sort of central hub. I did a lot of work because I live in the DC area, not for much longer but I live in the DC area and did a lot of government work. I really cut my teeth in the early 2000s on that stuff. It was great to see these big, large systems and huge things that had to work: IRS. Social security. These are things that have to work.
Lisa Welchman:
Environmental Protection Agency which had all this data. It's really fascinating to think about that opportunity that governments have to actually throw everything, open everything up, consider what the intention was, what service you were trying to provide to citizens, and then do that gut redesign. I'm wondering if you can speak to, and if you have any opinions about what are some of those barriers, just not only here in the US but just in general behind doing that?
Lisa Welchman:
Is it just this ennui that sets in? Is it bad old system that are just sitting there? Are there data structures that aren't talking to each other? Is it too hard? Is it a lack of empathy by governments towards its citizens? Is it what you talked about at the very beginning, this sort of antagonistic relationship that some citizens have with their governments and others do not? I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about what some of those dynamics might be just in a sense to try and figure out, are those things that we can dismantle, or address, or loosen up so that we can actually get that work done?
Ron Bronson:
Broadly I would say that I think that governments are comprised of the people that work in them right, and that run them. I think that across the board in all of my experiences I found that for the most part the people have pretty good intentions, even if they necessarily... If you're somewhere with folks... I don't know. This is [inaudible 00:36:11] smaller areas where folks may not have all the... They don't know all the things but they have the energy and the care right?
Ron Bronson:
I don't know that it's a care issue. I think there's a tension. This is a global thing. I think there's a tension between whatever the right thing is, I'm putting that in quotation marks. Then there's the prevailing wisdom. There's somewhere along the way there was a decision that just got made I think, again globally that we wanted to mimic whatever was happening in the private sector-
Lisa Welchman:
Ah.
Ron Bronson:
... part and parcel.
Lisa Welchman:
I see.
Ron Bronson:
Trying to bring all this like, "Well, if they're doing it right..." Whatever. This idea that, "Well, they're doing it right. We're not, so we need to copy whatever it is they're doing and that's going to make everything better, or even better let them do it." Personally I think that that can make things challenging for that kind of idea.
Ron Bronson:
Plus the other issue is that a lot of these things you can't... I know you don't have the ability to stop the thing from starting. It's already extant so you have to build the plane while it's flying. That can be difficult to coordinate when you have all these disparate parties working on their own silos right? I think that just as you level up in the various forms of governments across the country, globe, whatever, that becomes more of an issue.
Ron Bronson:
I think it's a complex set of challenges. I don't know that there are neat answers for it. I do think that there are answers but I don't know that they're neat answers. I think you... Unfortunately as you said there are not a lot of people who are trained in this stuff who are working in these spaces right? The web is less new than it used to be, but just when you talk about how many folks have experience with governance who are also like maybe web savvy, who are also maybe can code, or maybe they don't code but they know how to manage big systems, the numbers just start two dwindle every time you add a new variable.
Ron Bronson:
In the 24th century DB it would not take very long for it to find these people because they're just... I think it'd be a really big conference if they came to it, but I do think if you can fit them all in a conference it would be under 25,000 people. I don't think there's hundreds of thousands of people, at least even globally surely, but nationally I don't think there's a million people that are like, "All we need to do is find this million folks and they're going to solve this."
Ron Bronson:
It's like, "I think it's..." But I think that's a training thing, and I think it's also the nomenclature of the work. There are so many different terms for a lot of the same stuff, and so no one knows they're all saying the same things. I think part of that is just a slight of hand to keep people highly paid, but personally that's just a personal-
Lisa Welchman:
Well, yeah. I mean-
Ron Bronson:
... jokey opinion.
Lisa Welchman:
... the stuff you're saying is really resonating with me, and it's really insightful. One of the reasons that Andy and I wanted to do this podcast is because Andy's a quote, unquote designer and I'm a quote, unquote governance consultant, management consultant. But we're trying to do the same thing, coming at it from different angles. I think you're pointing very cleanly to that obvious state that what we're trying to do with all of this technology and with service design is still new.
Lisa Welchman:
We don't really know what we're doing yet and because of that we don't have a lot of people who know how to do that thing. It's not commoditized. It's not like you can go to school for web and internet service design PhD and whatever, so we're just trying to pull in all of these various skillsets and get them aligned. That's really thought provoking for me.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. You know I have a friend that's a service designer and one of the things she talks about is if it's only digital components is it really service design, or is that just a version of UX? I think that's one of the internal questions that I guess everybody's trying to figure out. It's like, "Oh, I'm going to hire a service designer. What are they going to do? Are they going to do facilitation plus service design, plus UX design, plus can they do a UI?
Andy Vitale:
It's like, wait a minute. We've got these specializations that people can go really deep and then we have a lot of T shaped designers, or people with design backgrounds. Then we have generalists like you describe yourself as. I would describe myself as that too because there's so many things that we've learned over time. But now these schools are really going specialized with a lot of the design degrees.
Andy Vitale:
What I see that comes out of that is there's this inability to really understand the psychology behind all of design. It's like I know how to do these things. I can follow this menu, this recipe, to try to solve a problem this way but then when I find you can't solve a problem the same way every time there's this... I'm a little frozen. I don't know what to do. I don't know who to pull in, but everybody now owns that.
Andy Vitale:
I'm just curious. Is that something that you're seeing as well? Especially from as we talk service design what is different about that from other disciplines?
Ron Bronson:
It's not clearly defined. Even if you talk about things sort of like UI design, or whatever a product designer is this week. At least in those situations you kind of have a tangible set of artifacts or things. You can talk about the varieties of developer, or designer, or engineer, or whatever, software engineer. Okay. You can kind of make sense of that most of the time.
Ron Bronson:
With service design because it's so broad, because if you're in Europe frankly, or in Asia, what a service designer does is different than what a service designer does in the States I feel like, like very different. You're going to get very different things, at least in my experience in those places. The conversations are different. I love my conversations that I have with my international friends about service design. In America I have less edifying conversations with service designers. I love you all, but also we need some work.
Lisa Welchman:
Throw money at it.
Ron Bronson:
Right. Well, you know honestly I wouldn't hate that if we throwing money at it meant we were really fixing services. But what we're actually doing instead is is... In my estimation a lot of the effort and focus again is very focused on doing work in companies that other folks are already doing. Like if you're a chain strategist you're not a service designer and that's okay.
Ron Bronson:
You don't need to be both. If you're an organizational designer, which is totally a thing, yeah a service designer. You have those skills but they're not the same thing. I think we have to call it what it is and also be focused on what it is. Really, really narrowing in on a focus of what we're talking about and what we're trying to accomplish, and being okay with that.
Ron Bronson:
In my mind and my definition, maybe this is just some sort of way ecumenical discussion about what service design is and like: I ascribe to a school of service design that is services first, that is probably more public sector focused and framed, or is like tangentially that way. Fine. You're a government.
Ron Bronson:
You're a non-governmental organization that works in the public sector. All right. Great. But I think that the learnings from that can be used to inform other kinds of work, other kinds of systems, other kinds of services. But what I feel like we need to do is really improve the ways that we're delivering, designing, ideating, and interrogating the system so we build for everyday people I say. I don't mean that derisively.
Andy Vitale:
No. I love that. You know the one thing I did want to touch upon too is the work that you have done around organizing communities. While I'd love to hear a little bit about the Indianapolis Design Week, I've spent so much of my younger days in arcades and I'm really curious about the Portland Skeeball League.
Lisa Welchman:
You owe me some skeeball lessons. This was a Twitter promise.
Ron Bronson:
You know what?
Lisa Welchman:
Because I'm telling you I think I know-
Ron Bronson:
One of these days-
Lisa Welchman:
... how to play skeeball. I have no idea what I'm doing but I am at the skeeball thing every time. Santa Cruz.
Ron Bronson:
We're going to be at some conference somewhere. We're going to be at some conference somewhere. It's going to happen. I'm telling you it's going to happen. Be the happiest thing I've done. I love it. It's my favorite thing to do other than drink tea. Where do we start?
Ron Bronson:
Indy Design Week still exists. I do not run it. It's a lovely group of folks who, really good friend of mine Stephanie Poppy who took it over when I left Indiana and has done a fantastic job blowing it up. What I did and what she's doing are two different things in a sense, because what I did was an idea. It was a more centralized event that I put together and we just let every area put their own thing on.
Ron Bronson:
What she's doing is like it's a conference. It's really cool. Now it's been virtual for the last couple of years. The board they have, they're doing just an amazing, amazing job. But the reason for that, I'd run a earlier conference in 2014 in a different place that I lived. Lived all over America. But the real idea was that I've spent a lot of my career living in the non-tech areas of America, living in Wyoming, and Kentucky, and Vermont, and Indiana and places like this.
Ron Bronson:
What I always said about that when I did those things was like, "Look. People everywhere need this stuff too. You can't just have the expertise all coalesced in one place. You got to spread it." It turns out when you get to those places there are a lot of smart people doing interesting things. They're making their communities work. They're doing cool stuff.
Ron Bronson:
Some of them are doing really cool stuff. Now everybody works remote. A lot of them are doing cool stuff for companies you know about. That was a really neat thing to me. I thought, "Well, why can't we do what they're doing somewhere else?" That was what happened a lot. You see that I had friends in a bigger city doing a cooler thing, or at least a cool thing to me.
Ron Bronson:
I was like,, "We can have one of those. Why not?" That's what spawned design week was it just annoyed me that nobody had ever took the domain. All good ideas come from buying a domain and making the idea up later. That's what that was honestly. It was just I bought that at a conference and then it was like, "Well, I guess I have to build a conference now," so that's what we did.
Ron Bronson:
As far as the skeeball league is concerned while I lived in Indiana actually it was a similar deal. A bar had skeeball lanes. I grew up playing skeeball in New Jersey on the shore. If you've spent any time on the Jersey Shore there are a multitude of skeeball lanes because skeeball was invented in south Jersey-
Lisa Welchman:
[crosstalk 00:47:18]-
Ron Bronson:
... in 1900. Well, a Philly guy made it but the game popularized-
Lisa Welchman:
Uh-huh (affirmative). Jersey's stealing-
Ron Bronson:
... on the Jersey Shore.
Lisa Welchman:
... from Philly again. Again.
Ron Bronson:
Right. Right.
Lisa Welchman:
Not Scrabble.
Ron Bronson:
It's a Jersey game. It wasn't made in Philly. He just made it. Oh, gosh. That's so funny. I grew up playing it and kind of forgot about it because you could only play it at Chuck E. Cheese's for a long time as an adult so I never really got to play it. Then this whole bar skeeball thing became a thing.
Ron Bronson:
While living in Indiana I actually started a league mostly out of boredom really. I mean I had like six other things I was volunteering and doing while my job was also happening, but why not add a seventh thing? It took off. Some friends really enjoyed it. People I didn't know joined. That also still exists to this day. There's a core group of folks that are still doing that.
Ron Bronson:
You talk about community. The fun thing for people listening to this who are starters... I don't know that I start things because I like starting things. I start things because I don't see a thing, and I wish it existed. Then I get frustrated that it doesn't exist. After being annoyed that no one else is going to start it I'm like, "Well, fine. I guess I'll just do it then." I'm really good at it now so it's less of an issue, but back in the day that's just how it went down.
Ron Bronson:
But I'll say this. The biggest transition point for me was starting groups, or orbs, or events, or whatever that you want to sustain. If it's a one off that's fine. Was realizing that you needed to build, again resilience into it. You can't do all the things. It can't be a cult of personality. It can't just be about you so that if you do leave, or you do step away, or you need to step away, that that community is still nurtured. It's still being built.
Ron Bronson:
It's still growing, and innovating, and going beyond. It's not about you. That's been cool over the last 10 years is stuff I've started, some of it still exists in many of the places, or the idea still exists. That part is cool. When I was younger that didn't happen. I start a thing. I leave. The thing would go away. That's been really fun, but yes. Anybody listening, if you want skeeball lessons you can hit me up and I'll start a Twitch channel, and we can play some.
Andy Vitale:
Now I do want to talk about tea for a second.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh, uh-huh (affirmative).
Andy Vitale:
You mentioned one of your favorite things to do was tea. I'm a tea... Basically tea doesn't exist for me except for the weird seasonal things but my wife does green tea. We talked about that. I remember hearing like Samovar Tea Lounge, when I followed Kevin Rose's podcast way back in the day. For the people that are listening that don't really know about tea, or they sip it... Boba Tea is a thing everybody's going on. Where's the gateway into-
Lisa Welchman:
That's not tea.
Andy Vitale:
... liking tea, and drinking tea? Where should someone start?
Ron Bronson:
It's actually really funny. I will say this. Tea got me... Liking tea, like Pu'er and like heavy black teas, or aged black teas like oolongs and so forth, that got me into scotch. Then that got me into orange wine. Actually, I've actually morphed to wine actually which is weird. I will talk about tea though, but I just wanted to make everybody know that actually it was--
Lisa Welchman:
You're a beverage connoisseur on the whole-
Ron Bronson:
Now. Now I am. Now I am. Yeah. It was cream soda for a long time. That's all I ever drank.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh my god. Cream soda is the best.
Ron Bronson:
When I was younger. When I was a kid.
Lisa Welchman:
Cream soda, it is really cloyingly sweet but-
Ron Bronson:
It is. It really is.
Lisa Welchman:
It really is. I don't drink sugared drinks anymore but it is... Cream soda is a thing.
Ron Bronson:
Yes. But as far as--
Lisa Welchman:
Cream soda float?
Ron Bronson:
Oh, yeah. But that's more root beer probably floats. I don't like the float... I don't like ice cream in my drink, but yes. Yes. It could be a thing and it would be... You talk about cloyingly sweet. That's a--
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, you grow out of that one, I think.
Ron Bronson:
That's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah. Definitely. The tea thing yeah. As far as a gateway to tea drinkers, depending on what you're into. I get this question. I am definitely your human tea algorithm I guess, for people. I had a tea brand very briefly years ago and it turns out I didn't enjoy supply chain so I didn't do that very long. I think most folks that I talk to about it it's less about...
Ron Bronson:
Some folks it's caffeine, and if that case you can... Rooibos isn't tea but you can drink it. There are also ways to... You can have teas that are, some black teas that are decaffeinated. But you can also do a thing... A trick is if you do a first pour, take your loose leaf tea. Pour hot water in it or whatever, pour it out after it steeps and then repour it. Typically that'll get rid of a lot of the caffeine actually.
Ron Bronson:
It won't all of it, but it'll do a job. Yeah. It's an interesting question. It really depends on what you're into is what I tell people, depending on how to get you into different things. There are white teas. There are green teas. There are blacks. There's yellow teas apparently. Not many. There are a ton of places to source from.
Ron Bronson:
The beauty of tea is is that if you're a person that's, you're not much of a drinker, not much of an alcohol drinker but you want something that's diverse, a diverse beverage that's pretty cheap... You can get expensive tea but there's some just pretty cheap that'll last you a long time. It's like I said, the flavor profiles are diverse. There's so much you can do with tea in a way that coffee is diverse, but it's still coffee at the end of the day, whereas with tea it's like the flavor profiles are so dramatically different depending on where the tea grows.
Ron Bronson:
There's a big, vibrant African tea culture. It's like we don't know that. There's tea places like Vietnam and South Korea that grow tea. It's really fun to... For me it was really fun to really get into nerd out. It's kind of probably the theme of this podcast is Ron's nerding out on something. I would just get into a thing, and then I nerd out about it. And tea was one of those things.
Ron Bronson:
I didn't answer your question explicitly but the answer to the question is depending on what things you like to drink normally I can make a Twitter recommendation of what teas to give you. I can give you a list of things faster than the 24th century voice UI.
Lisa Welchman:
We're almost out of time but we can't get off the podcast without asking you about Pesäpallo. I don't know if I said that correctly. We just can't.
Ron Bronson:
Pesäpallo.
Lisa Welchman:
We can't. Because we can't.
Ron Bronson:
I enjoy... Among many churches I've belonged to I love spreading the good news of Pesäpallo so I have no problem talking about it. Pesäpallo is the Finnish version of baseball. The reason I say it's that is because that's what it is. Pesäpallo was invented over about 20 years in the 1900s. It became... The sport we see now was popularized in the mid 1920s.
Ron Bronson:
The way it basically ideated was they already had a bat and ball game in Finland anyway that was very different. I mean bat and ball game mixed... There was like one base, blah, blah, blah. The guy who invented pesapallo went to America, went to Fenway Park and saw two Red Sox games and said, "I can make this better."
Lisa Welchman:
He was a service designer.
Ron Bronson:
He went home and that's what he did. He was a service designer. Exactly what he was. "I can improve this experience for the user." He went home. He didn't have any Post-It notes. It hadn't been invented yet. He didn't stick anything on the wall and windows. Instead he did iterative design over 20 years.
Ron Bronson:
It's actually a neat... He's got interesting backgrounds. It's a little questionable, but the story as a mixture of how he made the sport is really neat. As a person who invented a sport once it's really neat that it took him... If anybody's ever tried to invent a sport, the deal with inventing a sport is that you need players, and you need them a lot. You need a lot of iteration. You got to play a lot of games to get your rule set down.
Ron Bronson:
You've got to get a lot of... Your game starts to take off when other folks can coach the games and you can just watch. Happened for me over 10 years. It happened for him over 10 years. Similar deal, he... Yeah. Over 20 years he kept iterating on the game, doing different versions of it. He ended up being like the first sports minister of Finland and that's how he had access to people, and also how could get it into the schools.
Ron Bronson:
You kind of need access. You can't just be like, "Oh, I'm going to invent a sport." He didn't copyright it like a lot of folks want to do with their games. Anyway, pesapallo is neat. It's the American version. It's not American baseball at all. There's a bat. There's a ball. There are nine players on the field. There are gloves. Everything else is a little different.
Ron Bronson:
The bases are in a different order. But there is a major league of sorts in Finland. One of the many reasons I love it is there's a major league for men and women in the sport, unlike America where we don't let women play baseball for some reason. We silo them off with softball, one of my many ires about our lovely country.
Ron Bronson:
But in Finland they do not. It's really fun. It's a really fun culture. I got into it, I don't know, a long time ago. 11, 12 years ago. But over the last couple of years my interest as an American in the sport piqued the interest of our friends in Finland. Now the Finnish Embassy follows me on Twitter. That's not a joke.
Ron Bronson:
I go to Finland annually. I hang out, and speak halting Finnish. It's very bad. And watch baseball. Lovely place. Lovely people. Definitely one of the true joys of my life that I was never expecting to have happen.
Lisa Welchman:
That's really kind of fun. That's kind of fun, fun to hear. You're a starter so who knows? We'll keep our eye open for Ron's US Pesäpallo sports league.
Ron Bronson:
Yeah. I don't know. I think what would be more likely to happen is exhibition of the Finnish teams over here. That's what I actually want to have happen. Because I think Americans should see it a high level. It'd be super neat in it true, current thing. That's probably the more likely thing to happen, so maybe in a couple years post-COVID-
Lisa Welchman:
Well, Ron-
Ron Bronson:
... we can make it happen.
Lisa Welchman:
... make it so.
Ron Bronson:
I'm on it.
Andy Vitale:
Ron-
Ron Bronson:
Will do.
Andy Vitale:
... we're at that point in the show that unfortunately we're out of time, which I feel like we could talk for days because there's so many interesting things about you. How can people find out more about you and get in touch with you if they want to, especially for those tea recommendations?
Ron Bronson:
Feel free to follow me on Twitter or just... You don't have to follow me but just, you can feel free to send me an at at Twitter and be like, "What about the tea?" I'm on LinkedIn as well, and of course you can just go to my website at ronbronson.com. I'm happy to... Always love to chat with folks about all the things, even if you didn't agree with what I said. That's even more reason to talk. Feel free.
Andy Vitale:
Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on today.
Ron Bronson:
Thanks for having me. This has bene a blast.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. Yeah. And it was good to finally meet you. Maybe we'll meet in person one day?
Ron Bronson:
It's going to happen.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. There you go. Thanks a lot Ron.
Ron Bronson:
Thank you.
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