#16 Innovation is messy: Navigating chaos & resilience | Sienne Veit

(00:00) Sienne

There are many, many things that AI can do, AI cannot dream, it cannot truly create, and it cannot think. And I just think the random messiness of the human spirit is just so perfect for creativity

this is what people should be doing all of the time. But now it’s going to be more possible. If you’re released from the humdrum and the boring bits, what’s left is human spirit, human creativity, human emotion and messiness.

(00:40) Danny

Sienne, I’m so glad you’re here. I wanted to talk to you, but well, because you were actually one of the people that I originally asked, should I do a podcast? And you said, yes, do it. It’ll be a success. So it’s great to have you here. And I really value your time and just your presence. I’m really interested to spend some time with you to get to know you a little bit. So thank you for coming.

(01:07) Sienne

And thank you, I’m

really looking forward to it.

(01:09) Danny

Excellent. wonder, because we know each other quite well in some respects, but we probably haven’t really had a conversation like this, but perhaps for people that don’t know you, would you like to kind of ground us a bit in your journey? Because I find it much better when people say it themselves than me butchering it.

(01:29) Sienne

Yeah, sure. So ⁓ I’ve been working in product for quite some time, but actually I didn’t start out in product. I started out ⁓ as a lecturer. So I studied linguistics and journalism, worked as a journalist for a few years, but then went back and worked as a lecturer in a very small university in the middle of South Africa. And I think that was a really those

two disciplines I think are very complementary to all of the work we do. So grounding in linguistics and ⁓ making meaning and figuring out how you construct a world for a user using language, using symbols, and also reporting and all of the things that go around it. But since then I’ve worked in language education, so creating mobile.

learning apps for vulnerable users at K-Meets Training and Development. ⁓ I worked in advertising and marketing, doing very large studies. ⁓ And then I moved to the UK and started building learning apps and also then moved on to a whole range of things. I discovered retail when I moved to &S, working in business development, and it became a real love of mine. I think that connection to real

real users, real customers, and the pace of feedback that you can get when you’ve got millions of people using your products is really amazing. I then went on to work for Morrisons and John Lewis, ⁓ took some time out to work on my own stuff and startups, ⁓ and then worked for Kingfisher. And I’m now working at the Ministry of Justice where I’m helping teams across prisons and probation. ⁓

really provide great experiences and deliver justice at scale to our many, many thousands of really vulnerable people, but also ⁓ citizens and the public.

(03:34) Danny

Wow, yeah, that’s such a quite a weavy journey from South Africa and linguistics and coming into &S and then working on startups and then into public sector. know, that’s we’ve quite a way. I was curious, you know, just going back to the start about the linguistics side of it. Like, is that something that continues to happen? Because I think to all those roles that you’ve been in, like, I don’t know about you, but

people say what to do and I sort of say, to be honest, it’s just about people and communication. Like, really, and I imagine that you must have a similar thread through this, that it comes back to sharing ideas, right? That’s what the essence of all this stuff is. Would you agree?

(04:19) Sienne

Yeah,

and I think my early days, actually, I’ve always loved telling stories and narratives. And I think that’s what led me to journalism and linguistics. ⁓ back in the day, and I really am showing my age here. So this is the mid 80s. ⁓ Both journalists and linguists were some of the first people to really start using computers because journalists were in their very early days of digital publishing. ⁓

And that was kind of crossing the boundaries from, we were going from creating really beautiful PDFs to creating websites or web-based publishing. And so our team was probably one of the first set of graduates that had been trained to use those tools and had also studied filmmaking. So those, the very visual side of narrative and then the constructing of a new digital medium where we had like a really rich paint box.

that we could use to tell a story. And at that point it was reported, but ⁓ we soon figured out that there were going to be patterns that you had to follow that made it easy for people to understand the flow of information that were quite different from the way that newspapers had been constructed. But I had this dual world in linguistics where I was lecturing in ⁓ semantics and semiotics and pragmatics.

That was probably the foundation of human computer interaction. That’s where a lot of people who go into user research and service design have a background in linguistics because it’s all about making meaning. And it’s about understanding ethnographic practices. It’s about understanding how culture and context impact how you understand things and just all of the signifiers in different societies that come together.

(05:52) Danny

Yeah.

(06:09) Sienne

⁓ to tell that story. So incredibly complimentary. And I think we were doing things that would be recognised as user research, but they weren’t called that back then. Yeah, really good foundation, I think, for anyone.

(06:14) Danny

Yeah.

No, no. Yeah.

It’s ringing some bells in some of the interactions I’ve had with you and we can get into that in a little bit because I can kind of see now a little bit how some of that shapes your thinking when you’re sort of coming into different environments. Certainly, I’ve seen you arrive in one and have to orientate it. I’m thinking, especially at the beginning, you said about how this like new mediums like

we’ve sort of begun to figure out the medium of the web and you know, I’m thinking that early noughties and then the mobile arrived and there was this you know, it’s embarrassing I can remember at Euro start this is pre iPhone and I was asked to This is just to show the fact that I was asked to do this a lowly web designer I was asked can you just see if this web this mobile thing is it worth us doing a mobile website or anything like that?

And I think I looked at it and I said, because it was all WAP back then, know, like text stuff. And I was like, no one’s going to use WAP. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s an ogre. And they went, right, yeah, we won’t build a mobile website for a little bit. And I think I was on the cusp of the iPhone coming out, you know, and, then it just suddenly was like, you know, this is a completely new world, you know, for us to figure out. And that must have been roughly when you arrived at M &S, is it, is that right? That’s sort of that era.

(07:43) Sienne

No,

I started working in mobile actually a lot earlier. So I started working mobile in 2000. Actually, before I arrived in the UK, South Africa was a very early adopter of mobile technology because we lacked the infrastructure of cables and electricity ⁓ for the internet. And so things like mobile banking using basic text messaging was pretty common.

(08:06) Danny

jump.

(08:10) Sienne

And you find that all through Africa, Africa kind of led on mobile payments. ⁓ When I came to the UK, I was working in sort of creating learning materials for second language learners, but also other types of vulnerable learners. So ⁓ deaf learners. So how do we use sign language? So we were starting to build things that had images and texts.

instead of audio and sometimes we create materials with audio images and text as well as things like sign language. And we discovered we also had a group of vulnerable learners who were completely excluded from ⁓ education or who were not interested. So younger people, troubled teens, ⁓ immigrant teens, people from travelling communities.

who have a very itinerant experience of school. And we were thinking about ways to get them engaged in learning, especially in literacy and numeracy. And we started building small mobile games ⁓ on those horrible WAP phones using really early mobile coding languages that were really horrible. And we had to build them and then download stuff in cab files onto mobile phones.

(09:20) Danny

Yeah.

(09:29) Sienne

And sort of somewhere around 2004, you’ve got flash phones. So some of the very early touch screen phones or tap screen phones were coming out and we were building for those. So with Sony Ericsson and the XDA2 were some of the first phones, the Acer Liquid was another one and had great success because you’ve got really cool technology. So it doesn’t feel like learning and you’ve got

content that you can display as if it’s a game. And these are fantastic ways to engage disengaged learners, especially when they’re young. But it also, we created the mechanism for teachers to create content and download it onto phones. So we had to solve all sorts of problems that were early mobile problems. But we were very much convinced that this was the future. This is how people would do things in small snack sizes that were really engaging.

(10:12) Danny

Yeah.

You saw that, yeah.

(10:23) Sienne

and where as a side effect you gained a critical skill but you didn’t notice because you were having so much fun at the time. I then, when I moved, I had a small hop into Sony Computer Entertainment where I worked on mobile again. So this is once again pre-iPhone. So the iPhone was July 2007. In 2007 I was working at Sony Computer Entertainment.

(10:45) Danny

Yeah.

(10:49) Sienne

and I was working on the PSP Go, which was the handheld gaming device, trying to figure out what else we could put on that device beyond games. So you could have PlayStation games. So Sonic the Hedgehog was like the game that you would play on that. But we started looking at could you download movies? Could you have other services on that handheld? And then I moved to ⁓ &S and it was, and I, you know,

(10:59) Danny

All right.

(11:17) Sienne

I’ve always loved technology and the opportunity of technology. And at that point, everyone was saying, you must build an app because apps were the thing. The phones were so locked down, the networks were locked down. And so everyone had gone down app development. But with the introduction of the iPhone, because that had arrived just before I joined ⁓ &S, I was convinced that the web was for everyone and that the web was going to be where all the fun was.

(11:33) Danny

Yeah.

(11:46) Sienne

and there were still challenges, but what a cool thing to do because we had, we were discovering everything as we went. There was no pattern language. There were no design components. We had to figure out navigation, this whole idea of tap points and burger menus and how you would structure pages or how far people would scroll. None of that existed. And our team…

(11:55) Danny

and

(12:12) Sienne

came up with the idea that we would build ⁓ &S’s first transactional mobile website. And we built a couple of prototypes very early on. And we were convinced that this was going to be the way that people would shop for anything. But at &S, they would shop for clothing, they would shop for shoes, and maybe in the future they would shop for food as well. But we started out with general merchandise.

(12:18) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

What year will be in?

(12:39) Sienne

We’re in the cusp of early 2008. So the iPhone has been around for six months now and everyone else is sitting up and noticing and talking about devices and the mobile web has just started opening up so you didn’t have to go through walled gardens. So early days. And I’ll never forget that I think the thing that really spurred me on because I like a complex, complicated challenge.

(12:44) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(13:06) Sienne

is someone told me, a very senior person on the board told me, but CN people will never buy shoes on their phone and ⁓ &S customers will never buy shoes from us on their mobile devices. And I thought, yes, they will, because we’ve seen that they will do almost anything else given the opportunity and given a great experience. And that was our mission. And I think we were also really lucky that we had a very experimental team.

(13:17) Danny

Yeah. Yeah.

(13:36) Sienne

there was given an absolutely open mandate to go and experiment because I headed up research and development and all of the new technology and new channels. So that you’ve got a real problem, new technology and a mandate, which is a fantastic start to get anything done.

(13:55) Danny

There’s something that strikes me in that, that I heard you mentioned there, you’re saying like, you know, someone on the board said like, no one would ever buy shoes and you’re like, yes, they will. To have that, like, tenacity and confidence and clarity to be able to sort of push back on, you know, the sort of older ways of looking at things and you’re basically at the tip of a change here that some people have seen, some people haven’t.

Like that requires quite a lot of courage to do that because you could have been wrong. I know it’s hard to believe, know, mobile obviously, you know, worked out. How did you?

(14:32) Sienne

But I think the thing

is at that point failure would have been nothing, right? Because there were no established users. There was no real competition either. shareholders weren’t saying, hey, &S, where’s your mobile strategy? Because nobody had a mobile strategy. So we were really lucky that we were very early. ⁓ So failure was like, well, yeah, we might fail a couple of times before we get it right. And we did.

(14:46) Danny

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(15:01) Sienne

We did fail. So in 2008 as well, before we’d even built the mobile website, we put QR codes onto juice bottles to a very basic website to see if people would scan from a newspaper ad or a juice bottle to go and see more information. We also built a Wallace and Gromit with the Ardman Studios. We built a Wallace and Gromit Christmas site on a web

phone. I mean, we did some really cool stuff. Very interesting. Were they massive commercial successes? No, we discovered actually we were way too early. We got engagement, but not enough to justify the cost. But the other thing we’d done, which was wildly successful, which was we had a text based ⁓ interactive menu for dine in for 10 pounds. I don’t know if you remember the famous ⁓ &S dine in.

but it was invented back then in 2007, 2008. And you could see the menu on a basic website and all of our loyalty customers would get a text message. We built one of the UK’s biggest mobile phone databases just from that. And then later on when we built Sparks, we already had this hugely engaged mobile kind of customer base that was used to receiving offers.

and vouchers on their mobile devices. And with Sparks, we can connect it via the app to point of sale in the store. So I suppose all of this is showing that you start with what you’ve got and you experiment wildly, fail. Sometimes you are genuinely too early. But what you’ve learned is that people will engage on their phone. Now the problem is to solve. How do you create that really compelling experience? How do you make it commercially viable?

(16:36) Danny

What’s

(16:56) Sienne

How do you create the long-term feasibility around that? And I think this singular best thing we did when we started mobile is we didn’t start with any kind of wireframes or tech spec. We started with design. On about day three, we were sitting in a room and we said, you know what, this is not a technology problem. This is a design problem. So let’s…

(17:00) Danny

What?

Yeah. Yeah.

(17:25) Sienne

completely abandon what we think we know about the ⁓ &S website and start with what we think it could look like on a mobile device.

(17:36) Danny

There’s something very un-enterprise about this type of, you know, sitting a room, we decided to do this, decisions are being made quickly here, you know, like things are propping up and then they’re propping down and being set up again. This isn’t how things are in enterprises. It sounds like you had, and I guess as you spoke to earlier, there’s almost this permission because they don’t, know, the seedier kind of consensus is like, well, there’s not much

to fail in because there isn’t a mobile site anyway. And if you want to burn a bit of cash, like exploring things, you have that permission. But it sounds like you have that like startup culture within an enterprise, which is quite unusual, like, especially now. I mean, I’ve not seen that as much these days, but it sounds like you had a little kind of wild west period where you could really cultivate that. And I’m guessing that’s why we’ve

(18:17) Sienne

Absolutely.

Yeah, and I…

I think it persists actually. So that team was quite an enduring team and we changed our name regularly. We started off by just making up names for the team. ⁓ We were called business development at first and then we were like, no, that’s not actually what we’re doing. What we’re doing is research and development. And that’s how we paid for some of our work is we had research and development tax credits, which were brilliant. And then we were like, well, actually,

(18:37) Danny

Mayday.

(19:00) Sienne

We’re not really R &D because that makes us sound like a bunch of scientific nerdy people, which to some degree we weren’t, but that’s not really what we were. We were design folk and project folk and, you know, were commercial people, people from shops. So we called ourselves New Channels and our brief was to create new channels or new ways for people to shop. And those new channels then became, they started off with mobile was the first new channel.

but then we took mobile into store and gave it to staff members, so to connect online and stores. Then we put screens in stores and we went through multiple rounds of different types of touch screens and fashion screens where you can put an outfit together and browse through them, touch screen order points. I had a whole room which I’d managed to borrow which was filled with very large screens and body scanners.

any new technology that we could beg, borrow or steal, we would kind of take it and assess it go, would a customer use this? Would they use it in a store? Would they use it in their house? Would they use it anywhere? And does it solve a problem?

(20:11) Danny

there’s a certain type of energy that like listening to you that I kind of comes across of like this excitement and this like passion and a sense of like, like, something kind of lights you up a bit at this idea of like, doing something new doing something that’s not been done before innovating and like there’s something that I sense like you find exciting. Is that is that right?

(20:36) Sienne

I think I do. I’ve always said I really love the unknown. I’ve never done a job that has existed before I did it in any capacity. And so I think that’s followed me all the way through. I think the other thing is complex, complicated problems that require multiple different perspectives and people, creative people, technical people, data people. ⁓

(20:37) Danny

I advise you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

(21:05) Sienne

practitioners at the very kind of front of operations, people who work in warehouses, people who work on the shop floor, real customers, people who work in food technology teams, all of these people have got problems to solve. And if we can bring them together and make something valuable, then that is worth spending time on. And so, and we’re moving experience and we’re moving enterprise and we’re moving

how people engage forwards. We’re kind of pointing into the future rather than trying to recreate the past. And I think that’s amazing. I why wouldn’t you do that?

(21:41) Danny

Yeah. Yeah, it seems to you,

you, I can feel like your passion, like it genuinely excites you, like, like being in that space where you’re like doing things and putting things in front of people that they haven’t seen before. And I think like, you know, the podcast is like deeply human design. And I feel like that’s, that’s probably one of the big drivers of a designer, you know, and I see what you’re doing is designing, you know, it’s like, you’re, you’re putting something that no one has

seen before, maybe they’ve seen a variant of it, but they haven’t seen that before. And there’s something quite precious and special in that, think, that creation and then putting out into the world. I can feel that passion for you. It’s hard to do like what you’re describing. Not everybody is built the way that you are, in the sense that you’re able to take on complex problems, work with multidisciplinary teams, work in environments where

there’s uncertainty and to some degree a bit of chaos, know, in environments that don’t typically like that. And I was thinking about this supertanker kind of space that certainly that’s where you and me came to, you know, sort of cross paths. It’s like working that type of passion and culture when you get kind of buried into this enterprise machine where there’s like programs and processes and

layers of management. it’s sort of how does you sort of keep that passion and you don’t get stifled within that because that could have happened at John Lewis, you could have kind of, know, Kingfisher, I don’t know the journey there, but it’s like those environments that don’t like this type of stuff that you’re doing. They want it, but they don’t necessarily like encourage it. I would suggest.

(23:33) Sienne

Yeah,

I think it’s really interesting. I think in environments like that, two things happen. One, you need enough protection or you need enough gumption to just ignore the bits that are not going to serve you well. The complex governance and everyone who says no, because they’re going to be a million people who will say no to you. No, you can’t have money. No, you can’t have the teams. No, legal won’t allow that. There are always 10 million reasons never to do anything.

(23:47) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

(24:03) Sienne

And I think I have an extremely high tolerance and resilience to the word no. I just see it as a not quite like that, but hang on, wait a minute. We can get around that. So to create enough distance between you and often to be the person that creates the distance that your team can get on. So we always talk about this notion of the shit umbrella. And as a leader, that’s exactly what you have to be, which is the world might be telling you no, and you need to listen enough

(24:13) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(24:34) Sienne

to understand what’s underneath the no. What is the worry that you have to counter to get to yes? And then figure out how you get there, not because that’s the problem you have to solve, but along the way of solving a valuable problem, you’re going to have to turn that no into a yes, or even a maybe would be better. And I think that’s really important that you don’t need to be ⁓ blocked by people who say no, you need to…

(24:55) Danny

.

(25:04) Sienne

have just enough accommodation for them and then move on because I think in large enterprises a lot of those people are in positions where they have to protect their position and so whilst you’re not going to serve them you need to acknowledge them in some way or another.

(25:21) Danny

I think you’re… this is very interesting for me because when I met you there was something where I felt like I was a very… I wasn’t completely doing everything that you’re suggesting. was trying to do the same thing in the spirit of what you’re talking about. I was trying to put change in John Lewis and I was trying to disrupt but I didn’t quite have the chops and the maturity.

to think of it in that terms, I didn’t have like a very big toolbox. My toolbox was wear people down, keep going, keep going until they kind of just say, okay, fine, just give it to him. That was kind of my toolbox. And then when I met you, it was like, I got to witness a few times where you were sort of more articulately doing exactly what you just outlined where you’re like, no, expecting the no.

and then working out how to give them enough so that you can kind of move forward. I think it was a really, really interesting experience for me seeing that and how you navigated that. Because I was a kind of a one-trick pony. And sometimes I had success with it just by wearing people down. But then sometimes the relationships don’t last over time because you get exhausted with it and all this kind of thing. And it’s something that I’m always trying to learn more about. It’s something that I saw that you had cultivated quite well in that space.

of change and disruption because you’re going to brush up against people eventually because you’re going to do something that someone doesn’t like.

(26:52) Sienne

And it can be quite hard in places and I think that’s why you need to figure out firstly, how you build a team that’s really resilient and how you’re gonna, you’re not always gonna be at the pointy front end. You have to sometimes work in a relay where someone else is gonna be the sharp point, ⁓ piercing the wall of no. And then they take on that exhaustion and then they step back and someone else goes in. So.

Really thinking about how you construct a team and you construct a team to be resilient, not just that they’re going to wear themselves down, but you create team processes to protect your creativity, to protect your disruptiveness and to ensure that everyone else who needs to do the doing to go build the thing that’s going to be part of your vision.

isn’t constantly exposed to that negativity because that is just, it absolutely kills creativity. And you need people to constantly think about what’s the art of the possible. Am I really thinking about the most innovative way to solve this problem? And sometimes that means as a leader, you have to say, you know what, just, I’m not sure. I don’t have the conviction that you have.

(27:52) Danny

Yeah.

(28:13) Sienne

but I believe in you and I believe in this team enough, I’m gonna give you, just go and do it and then come back and show me. So I think every now and then you have to extend your belief into other teams as well and know that they create the conditions for them to be successful.

(28:26) Danny

in the future.

When you arrive in these gigs, whether it’s, know, Joel Lewis and Kingfisher and these are quite like high profile and you’re going in, I often think that I’ve often been in the role where I’m trying to create change, but I wasn’t invited to do it. So I’m just a researcher or just UX consultant and stuff. And I end up sort of trying to influence and move the ship. And I see you as awesome being able to position yourself so that you’re actually invited to do that. There’s some degree of expectation that you’re doing that.

Do you feel like what’s your emotional experience when you’re starting a new job and you’re thinking, I’m going to be doing stuff, even if I have the invitation that is going to get notes like do you do you feel anxious? Do you feel like have you had times where you’ve like, it’s you haven’t been able to sleep very well and it’s like bugging you and like, do you have that or is it all just sort of plain sailing?

(29:27) Sienne

It’s never been sailing. And I think I have an enormous capacity to reset and go, that was a disaster. That wasn’t okay. But tomorrow is another day. And so my capacity to just forget things, like just go, okay, that was that and now something else. And I think you have to build that almost like a mechanism.

(29:29) Danny

I’ll be right in the night.

Yeah.

How did you make that?

How did you make this mechanism? Where did this come from? How did you get that?

(30:00) Sienne

I don’t know if it’s something I’ve always had, but I think I have a very high tolerance for chaos, and I have the ability to separate myself from the chaos and not necessarily take too much in. And I don’t think that’s a special emotional trait or a superpower. I think it’s a conscious action to go, this is…

(30:09) Danny

Yeah. ⁓

(30:26) Sienne

This is not me. This is not the everything. This is one person or an organisation’s reaction to this particular event. And that isn’t forever and it’s not going to mark me. And then you go to the next solution which is, okay, so, optimism. How do you solve that? What do they need? What would make that even better? And tomorrow is another day.

(30:42) Danny

you

(30:56) Sienne

And I think you get up and you go and do those things. And I think the important thing is to make sure your team is protected from a lot of that. Cause not everyone has as high a tolerance. Not everyone can reset and carry on. And we all have different ways of doing that. And I think the other thing is to set teams up to have, you know, really…

(31:16) Danny

you

(31:21) Sienne

⁓ safe spaces to talk about how it feels because sometimes it can feel genuinely hard, not just for me, but for everyone in the team. ⁓ And so I think creating safe teams where it’s safe to not be okay, where it’s safe to have a bad day, where it’s safe to fail and I genuinely mean fail. We sometimes really do fail big time, ⁓ you know, at the millions of dollars or millions of pounds level. ⁓

but to reset and then go and have a success. And I think the other thing is to…

to really use that experimental mindset to think about, okay, what information do I need? How do I convince this person? What is the next thing that’s gonna look like this and how do we prevent it? Now that we know what we know, how do we use that learning to prevent it the next time? So I think that capacity for teams to learn by the last terrible thing that happened or good thing that happened ago.

How do we create more of that good thing? So what went really right with this thing? Let’s recreate that. What went really wrong with that thing? And it could be a meeting, it could be a funding decision, it could be we deployed something and it really didn’t work. How do we create the capacity to be continually learning? And that’s actually quite hard. But I think that’s also one of the things that gives you resilience as a team and also as an individual.

(32:24) Danny

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, you’re operating in environments that value certainty. That’s their currency. They’re designed for certainty. And I suppose in some ways, the people, the teams that you’re working with have been told, like, you have to produce certainty. We give you a deadline. This is your requirement. You deliver it. And then when you’re getting into innovation, to some extent, there isn’t always certainty. I think I was once told by someone,

it’s not certainty that people need to feel calm and at ease, it’s clarity. And there’s a real difference between the two. And I think enterprises, in my experience, get that all mixed up and they just get obsessed with certainty. And I think that if you can introduce clarity, and the clarity might be that there’s going to be chaos, and that’s okay. And the clarity might be that we’ll fail and that’s okay. that’s…

It’s really interesting what you say, I guess you have that resilience to wade into that, but maybe some of the people that is in your team don’t and you have to create that conditions so that they’re okay if they built something for three months and it didn’t work. They’re not in trouble.

(34:02) Sienne

Yeah, yeah. But I think the

other thing is that this is not just a function of teams or ⁓ enterprises. There is no real certainty in anything. And if you look back, you you go back to, nobody could have predicted that the iPhone was gonna come out except those people in the iPhone team. And even they probably right up until July, 2007, were not entirely certain that this was gonna be.

(34:15) Danny

Yeah, an illusion.

(34:30) Sienne

the piece of hardware that was going to truly be successful. And so I think you need to find ways to be able to tell stories about how the world really is and how uncertain it is and therefore the mechanisms you use to create ⁓ little lights or little markers of am I on the right path? And this is what experimentation is all about.

(34:42) Danny

Yeah.

today.

(34:59) Sienne

in highly uncertain worlds and we are definitely in that world. AI has brought that back again. COVID did it to us again. If you look back over the last kind of five years, if you look back over 10 years, you’ll see even greater uncertainty. ⁓ Almost everything we do today has changed. Groceries arriving at the front door, banking being, you sign up with your face, you use your Apple Pay, you tap and go everywhere.

10 years ago, none of that existed. So why do we think that we know exactly what’s gonna happen in five or 10 years time? We don’t, but we need to learn to read the signals and then use the right methods to figure out if we’re on the right path. And I think if you can have those kinds of conversations with your stakeholders, with your enterprises that want certainty to talk about there is no certainty, but what I can give you.

is I can break this down and give you little hints along the way that we’re on the right path. But I’m also going to be super honest with you and tell you when we fundamentally take in the wrong path. And we’re to do that as early as possible. So we’re going to stop things. this is, you know, instead of certainty, what we have is we have incrementality, we have data led decisions, we really engage with real people.

because it doesn’t matter how hypothetically wonderful your solution is, it will fail when it hits the real people almost every time.

(36:32) Danny

Yeah, yeah,

yeah, no, I hear that. I guess it’s just something that organisations, I’ve often found that they want change, but they don’t always know how to do it.

And I’ve often been in those situations where it’s like, nobody knows what does that mean on a Monday morning? You know, like, how do like, what do we actually do? I feel like there’s a real, there’s a real gap where people’s roles have been designed to sort of maintain the status quo to keep moving to, to have that Monday morning meeting to, you know, check the metrics that they’ve already got. And it’s just kind of reporting, but it’s not

It’s not like that transition and that change, it can be kind of quite deeply uncomfortable and unfamiliar for because I think organisations are just not designed to do that. And I guess, you know, in this era of change, like, it’s going to be quite uncomfortable. I think of like, how, you know, when I started out in my career, like, nobody got fired. Nobody left jobs, I would be in jobs for three or four years wouldn’t see anyone leave.

(37:22) Sienne

Mm.

(37:43) Danny

And in the last sort of two, three years, almost every job I’ve been on, I’ve seen people get fired. And it’s just like, it’s, it’s, you know, and that’s result of contracting markets and, and, you know, shifting priorities and then CEOs getting ousted and a new CEO comes in and then another one and all this kind of chaos. And I’ve been hearing people have been feeling that a lot in the market. it’s just sort of like,

really what they need is the sort of principles that you’re talking about. But I think sometimes you get these rigid organisations that eventually just snap because they’re getting hammered by the market. Forces change.

(38:25) Sienne

Yeah.

And I think that kind of the commercial basis of success, think, underpins this. But I think it’s also.

going back to that mindset and you know, this is pre-technology. If you can create a product that people genuinely love and you continue to listen to those people and keep on providing things that they genuinely love and you become so much part of their lives, they can’t imagine life without you. And that can be any product, right? That if you’re doing those things right, so those are the, that’s the kind of, you know, the starter. And then behind the scenes,

(38:54) Danny

Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

(39:05) Sienne

You’ve got to have the feasibility. How do you do that in ways that continue to drive profit, that continue to be sustainable? I mean, sustainable in the broader sense of word. ⁓ And that is with the number of people you have, with the materials you have in the kind of socioeconomic environment that you’re in, ⁓ environmentally sustainable, globally sustainable, so that when someone starts a trade war, you can be protected.

(39:34) Danny

Yeah, yeah.

(39:35) Sienne

I think

that that ability to understand how you make successful things, enterprises, products, whatever they may be, ⁓ I think is probably lacking because people take structure for success or ⁓ the past as an indicator of success. And I think it’s flipped. You have to take the future and be able to read the future.

(39:58) Danny

Yeah.

(40:04) Sienne

and then work in ways that allow you to work towards that future and have little markers along the way that tell you that you’re still on track. And that is a very different way of working for most people.

(40:17) Danny

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely that I’ve definitely been at the headwinds of some of that. I’m curious, like, I just want to move the discussion into a slightly different space, which was around, I guess we’re talking about culture, and we’re talking about teams and people, and because they’re all having to be within this chaos, and they’re having to presumably have some degree of harmony and some degree of agency and equality.

something that I just want to make sure that there’s conversations like this happening, especially with with men ⁓ kind of calling it. But I’m curious if, if you wanted to speak to it, but just if if you’ve had any experiences as a woman going through these kind of quite like tech heavy, typically male dominated spaces. And I do remember at John Lewis, when I think it was like International Women’s Day or something.

and you had an invitation for people to come and talk about it. I think I was the only guy there. I was just kind of curious, know, and John Lewis has got a lot of things right. So it’s not to sort of talk them down, but it’s just, it’s an interesting moment. And I do think about that moment sometimes. And I just wonder in your journey, and you’ve clearly been in lots of different environments,

Is that something that’s alive for you? Like, is that something that makes itself known to you that the disparity in the way that you’re treated or that you observe or do you not see that at all?

(41:56) Sienne

I think probably along with my resilience I’ve never really particularly struggled with it but definitely I was often the only woman in the room in my very early days in tech. It was unusual. For a long time I felt like I was the only woman in mobile because I was literally in a room full of men. ⁓ And sometimes people used to assume that I was someone’s secretary so that did happen. But I think…

(42:11) Danny

Yeah.

Really?

(42:24) Sienne

I’m really pleased because what I see now is way more diversity. I’m often in a room where for many years we struggled to get a lot of women interested or young girls. It starts early on, engaged in STEM subjects. And I see so many diverse teams with not just gender diversity, but probably, you know,

socioeconomic diversity, ethnic, you name it, diversity. And that really pleases me. ⁓ But I think the other thing is I think the world of work is becoming much more supportive of people’s needs to have flexibility at work. And that’s around parenting and families. It’s around lifestyle. It’s recognizing, you some people are sort of night owl people. Some people, you know,

(43:01) Danny

Hmm.

Yeah.

(43:22) Sienne

taking information in different ways. And I think there’s just a lot more support and sensitivity for that. ⁓ I think the thing that probably worries me the most is I really love remote working, but I think we still need to crack how we create bonded teams. Because I really do think that teams that eat together and play together fundamentally bond in different ways.

And I’m not sure we’ve totally figured out with remote teams. And I think remote teams are awesome because you can recruit from anywhere. And it’s amazing as a support for people’s kind of lives outside of work. How do we find ways to bring them together in meaningful ways? Not just around the work, but around the important cultural stuff that makes the work work when it’s hard. So when you hit hard times,

(44:10) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(44:19) Sienne

It’s the fact that you’ve joked and laughed and really understand someone and know their grandmother’s cake recipe or understand what they do when they get stressed. I think we need to bring that back into how we work.

(44:33) Danny

Yeah, I something that I really resonate with that. So something I thought and talked about a few times in the podcast is the difference between transactional culture and relational culture. And I do think with remote working that it can kind of make it hyper transactional. So it’s sort of like, you have to put a meeting in someone’s diary and it’s a meeting. And I sort of think of various conversations I had, you know, I’ve used John Lewis as an example.

some of the senior team, I don’t think I could have set a meeting up with them. But I saw them in the corridor and we would end up chatting and then out of that, you know, would come like some interesting insights and maybe it might change how I work. But I don’t think I would necessarily have been able to get like half an hour with them, you know, because their diaries are like blocked out. So it’s those sort of spaces that especially for younger people, like how do they get access and have that off the cuff?

non-agendered space where they can really kind of build relationship with people. I can see that being a problem.

(45:31) Sienne

Yeah.

And I think it’s also about seeing other people’s work or seeing how other people work. So for many years, we would always have stuff up on the walls and anyone could see other stuff and you’d be inspired. You go like, wow, you know, the payments team, wow, just look at the creative way they’ve kind of put their user problem statements together. wow, look, there’s the UX team because we had a UX lab in the middle of the building.

Oh, I wonder what kind of cool research they’re doing. Let me ask them and then I can maybe go and take a look at the kind of outcomes of that research. And so I do think how people serendipitously see other roles, not just their own roles and not just their own team, but how do you kind of colour outside the boundaries of your role? How do you find someone who could mentor you, who would never come into your world?

How do you find someone who’s maybe started at the same time as you, but is in a completely different team and buddy up with them to have a learning journey? And I think those kinds of things, we now have to structure. And so there’s less serendipity and kind of natural synergy that happens between people who just discover stuff because they just happen to be there at the same time.

(46:53) Danny

Yeah, yeah, it’s really important, isn’t it? Because otherwise, yeah, for the younger people, especially, it’s like, how do they learn? How do they develop? And how do they grow? You know, I can really see that. And I think there’s so much of my career has been in that office space of cultivating and learning and seeing. And you can’t get that from a shared drive. It’s not the same thing. ⁓

(47:13) Sienne

Yeah, so serendipitous

interactions are the thing we have to crack or ⁓ find ways to recreate them in sensitive ways.

(47:26) Danny

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that’s really important. I’m thinking then, so and thanks for sharing your reflections on that. So it’s something I just want to make sure there’s space for in these conversations, you know, about diversity and inclusion. Coming back to your journey then, so you have some pictures of you standing next to Obama. And I really want to understand that. Can you tell me why?

(47:53) Sienne

It’s really funny.

I probably only stood next to him for a total of I would say 45 seconds. But he was the keynote speaker at a conference about e-commerce and innovation and marketplaces in Sao Paulo. And I was kindly invited by someone, by Ian Jindal.

to attend and to speak about innovation on stage. And because we were there at the same time, we could apply to meet Barack Obama. ⁓ And he is absolutely one of my heroes. So ⁓ we applied and got in and then it was a very long process. It sounds really boring and actually 99 % of my journey to see Barack was boring.

(48:27) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(48:51) Sienne

We got all of our tech taken away from us. We had to go through umpteen security clearance and then stand in a very long queue, which sort of progressed at snail’s pace. And eventually we were ushered into a room with a whole range of security people and Barack Obama, he was standing there and had probably seen like 99 people before you. And you’d have your photograph taken and your hand shaken and then you were whipped off. ⁓ But of course, me being me, ⁓

(49:11) Danny

Yeah, yeah.

wow.

(49:21) Sienne

I hugged him. ⁓ I was surprised that wasn’t tackled by his security because apparently that was definitely not supposed to happen at all. But he was such a, he was really lovely. He was just like, that’s brilliant. And ⁓ yeah, that was it. 45 seconds later, I was shuffled out the ⁓ Still intact, ⁓ not tackled by security people.

(49:22) Danny

TG.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean.

I’m glad I asked because I was just so curious. Especially coming from, you know, we talked earlier about your journeys like linguists and stuff. mean, he and you said that he’s one of your heroes. He’s a phenomenal communicator. You know, he’s one of the best, isn’t he? And so something that I’ve taken inspiration from of how to tell stories and build a narrative. And he’s just one of the best really, isn’t he? That’s amazing you mentioned.

(50:11) Sienne

Yeah,

I think and it was really, ⁓ it was quite tiny at the conference he was talking about innovation and about really getting young people into innovation because they are our future and helping people regardless of their level of education. It’s not about education at all. It is about that spirit to want to create something new that doesn’t exist and about

creating opportunities for young people to be in environments and to have the support where they can start to understand and create, you know, be real entrepreneurs, because that’s exactly what we need. And I think it was particular, you know, in Sao Paulo, with really extremes of disadvantage and poverty, to have that kind of message go out, which is if you do nothing else, that’s the most important thing to invest in.

(51:02) Danny

Yeah.

(51:09) Sienne

as youth and children. I think it’s just a great message.

(51:11) Danny

⁓

Yeah, yeah, no, it’s really, it’s heartening in this climate to hear that, you know, some people are talking about that. And I suppose with that spirit, like, looking ahead and looking to the future in our sector of design and like, do you, how do you feel about the future of the craft? We’ve got AI and, you know, there’s remote working and uncertainty and…

the world stage and stuff like that. How do you feel about the future of the craft, the design? Where do you see it? Are you optimistic?

(51:45) Sienne

I’m particularly optimistic

because I think when the cost of building things is almost zero and super fast because the hard part has been automated. So the ability to code, the ability to create prototypes, all of that stuff has gotten faster and faster. What’s left is problem solving and humanity. Like where are the real problems to solve?

point to this awesome technology at those things. And we can see it. We’ve got health problems, we’ve got societal problems, we’ve got environmental problems to solve. I mean, these are great things. And we now have the means to do this at scale. So that’s good reason to be optimistic. What we need are people who understand problems and who are at hardwired for problem solving, who can understand data, you know, really bring.

people into the experimentation cycle. I think the other opportunity is humanity. There are many, many things that AI can do, AI cannot dream, it cannot truly create, and it cannot think. And I just think the random messiness of the human spirit is just so perfect for creativity that this is where I think we will, you know.

This is great, this is what people should be doing all of the time. But now it’s going to be more possible. If you’re released from the humdrum and the boring bits, what’s left is human spirit, human creativity, human emotion and messiness. And I just say, it on.

(53:27) Danny

Wow, an optimist. Great. It’s good to hear some optimism. I appreciate that. I don’t know where I sit on it. Yeah, I’m in both camps. I really feel that optimism that you have. I’ve been playing with AI a lot.

I do wonder, I’m like, well, if all this stuff gets automated out, like, what will we do? And I really like that notion that we can then point towards like the big problems that we never have time to solve and often don’t get solved. And I’m also like holding this kind of like anxiety about it all, you know, part of it is the change and the uncertainty. And then there’s also like, you know, won’t it

mean that we don’t have any jobs and is that bad and what will happen then and who will get paid? There’s all this uncertainty like what does my son study at school? You know, like I don’t know, you know.

(54:25) Sienne

Yeah. But that’s where I think,

you know, if we can give something back to younger people, people who really are struggling, it’s find something you love to do. Find problems that might affect you, that might affect lots of people. Figure out, find the people who are like you, who want to go and solve problems. And that creativity and resilience to just keep on going at something, I think is…

is going to be the thing that we’re going to need more and more of. It’s not jobs, it’s entrepreneurs, it’s craftspeople who make things by hand, who explore things. ⁓ And that I think is a wonderful purpose. And I think for, you know, experiment in your own life, experiment with types of jobs you could do, experiment with new things, because I think we’re going to have to be ever more adaptable.

⁓ but it’s not going to be like it was before. I think we’re going to be creating different jobs, brand new jobs, crafts, different skills, but at the heart of it will be this ability to continue to iterate and continue to be creative.

(55:29) Danny

No.

Amazing. Wow. Yeah, I’m, I’m, feeling uplifted. It’s good to hear that. Yeah, I think I needed a different perspective on it. And that’s really positive, because that contrasts with some of what I’ve been reading and hearing. So it’s good to see a different perspective. I think I think that’s probably a good note for us to end on. I feel like that uplifting tone. And so, you know, thank you. Thanks so much for spending time and sharing a bit about your journey and some of your experiences.

Yeah, I’ve really enjoyed listening to you. Thank you. Thanks for coming on.

(56:17) Sienne

Great. Thanks, Danny. It’s been absolute pleasure.